Murder in the Palais Royal

by Cara Black

  “Did you see anyone running away, Monsieur?”

  He shook his head. “I’m so sorry about your friend.”

  “Not just her. She was pregnant.”

  Turning, she kept to the shadows. She molded herself into a dark stone niche, straining to hear the flics questioning the bystanders. She couldn’t leave the scene until she found out what the woman who’d identified Clémence knew.

  “So you knew her. You can identify her, Madame?” a flic was asking the woman with the odd plastic bag on her head.

  “Terrible, such a sweet girl. Clémence Touvier.” The older woman clutched her purse. “She lives just by Molière’s statue. We’re not safe here. There are thieves everywhere these days.”

  “If you’ll step over here, Madame.” The flic took the woman aside to question her.

  Tires screeched nearby. Orange-red lights bathed the Palais Royal façades. Aimée hid in the shadows, out of sight of the arriving Brigade Criminelle. And then she recognized Melac.

  Merde! A record quick police response. She pressed herself deeper into the shadowed niche.

  Melac leaned over Clémence. Then he signaled to the medical examiner. Not two minutes later, the medical examiner stood and nodded to Melac. The Mylar crinkled as the medics covered Clémence’s face. On the count of three, the medics lifted her onto the stretcher.

  Melac gestured to the arriving crime-scene squad, then to the blue-uniformed flics. “Keep the scene secured.” He scanned the dark columns.

  In a brief moment, she felt his eyes combing the niche in which she was hiding. She covered the silver buckle on her bag, afraid it might catch the light. But no, he’d headed under the colonnade in the other direction, toward La Proc huddled with the medical examiner.

  Moonlight reflected on the leaves. The tree branches cast dark slanting shadows over the bushes. The damp odor of crumbling wet stone clung in the corners.

  She wanted to search Clémence’s apartment for Nicolas’s notebook. Instead of taking it to work, Clémence might have kept it hidden there, she hoped. Unless the killer already had it.

  Aimée waited twenty minutes, shivering in the shadows, her hair damp, her knees knocking from the cold, watching the woman speaking to the Police Judiciaire officer. She kept gesticulating, but Aimée couldn’t catch a word.

  René had been shot, Nicolas had been murdered, and now Clémence. Think like the perp, her father always said. But how could she, without a clue as to how these events were linked? She had to find that damned notebook.

  The conversation over, the woman headed around the corner and entered the first door of the adjoining building. Aimée kept to the shadows, out of the flics’ sight, and pressed the buzzer of the woman’s building.

  The door clicked open.

  Aimée slid inside to see the woman looking down over the sculpted rosettes of the iron banister.

  “Oui? Is that you, Officer?”

  Aimée let the door close behind her before she stepped into view. “Pardon, Madame, but I need to speak with you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Clémence was supposed to meet me, Madame,” Aimée said. “I saw you talking to the flics.”

  “But you were there. I saw you. Why did you leave the scene?” The plastic bag, beaded with moisture, was still on her head, giving her a bizarre look.

  Aimée mounted the stairs two at a time to the landing.

  “Clémence was pregnant,” Aimée said. “You know what that means.”

  “I do?” An unsure look. “Aaah, l’amour, of course.”

  “Et voilà.” Aimée nodded as if that explained everything.

  “Tell the authorities.”

  Aimée wanted to get out of the drafty hallway and out of view from the windows.

  “Madame, I told the officer what I knew.”

  “Eh? I didn’t see you.”

  Aimée shrugged. “Then you missed the officer mesmerized by my cleavage behind the ambulance. Please let me explain. It’s important.”

  “I don’t understand. Who are you?”

  “Clémence’s friend, please.”

  “Just for a moment.” The woman relented and gestured to her apartment door. Aimée found herself in a narrow hallway wallpapered with faded peonies from the thirties. The close air, tinged with the woman’s perfume, tickled her nose. The hallway opened to a small room furnished with spindly gilt chairs and walls covered with oil paintings. A place from another era, Aimée thought. A roll-top desk baring a ledger was prominent.

  A narrow, winding metal staircase led below to what Aimée realized was the military medal shop. Like many in the nineteenth-century covered passages, this woman lived above her business. A cramped life, she remembered from Celine’s description in his scathing novel about growing up over a Passage Choiseul shop run by his parents.

  “Autumn bites with a full set of teeth, non?” the woman said, using an old-country colloquialism as she disappeared behind a lace curtain.

  Aimée stood, afraid to move and send a glass bibelot, one of the many paperweights on the shelf, to shatter on the floor.

  The woman returned and spread plastic produce bags on a chair. She’d removed the bag from her hair to reveal blond-white waves, a hair color unique to Parisiennes of a certain age. “I am Madame Fontenay,” she said. “And you?”

  “Aimée, a friend of Clémence.”

  “And she was pregnant?” Madame Fontenay settled on a chair and leaned forward. “Clémence didn’t let on. But what do you want from me?”

  A gossip. Good. Aimée would use that to her advantage.

  “Will you inform her mother?” Aimée said.

  “Me? But I never met her mother.”

  “Weren’t you close with Clémence, Madame?”

  “It’s a village here.” She gestured toward the semicircular window fronting the Palais Royal. “I wouldn’t say close. But everyone knows everyone else.”

  And their business. Aimée glanced at the escritoire. Thick, off-white stationery, imprinted “Fontenay, established 1885 in the Palais Royal.”

  Of course the woman knew the lives of everyone who lived here and their secrets. Aimée had to appeal to her, coax her to reveal what she knew.

  “Madame, who could have done this to Clémence?”

  “Not that I’d break sugar on someone’s back, but. . . .”

  Aimée hadn’t heard that circumlocution for “gossip” in years.

  Madame Fontenay leaned forward, her small made-up eyes glittering, eager to impart gossip. “Can’t say I didn’t warn her; I told her, ‘Clémence, he’s not your type.’ ”

  “Who?”

  “What do you mean, ‘who’?” Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Wasn’t Clémence your friend?”

  “That’s just it. I haven’t seen her for a few months, then she called saying she was pregnant. We were to meet, but. . . .” Aimée sniffled.

  “Her sometime boyfriend,” the woman said with a self-satisfied smirk. “The chef strangled her. And I told that to the flics. ”

  “The chef at the bistro? But she just quit.”

  “A real miser, that one. He wanted to move in with her and not pay rent.”

  Aimée recalled the angry chef muttering into his cell phone.

  “But wasn’t he busy cooking?” She stopped before she revealed too much.

  Madame Fontenay shrugged. “There’s ways. You don’t even have to come up for air here, if you know what I mean.”

  Aimée didn’t. “What do you mean?”

  “Part of the fountain’s built over an old Roman reservoir. Or what’s left of it.” She smirked. “It’s common knowledge to the residents. Tunnels run under the buildings, crisscross the garden. It’s like a maze underneath.”

  Could the chef have strangled Clémence and used a tunnel to escape? He’d have needed split-second timing. But she filed the possibility away.

  “Mais, Mademoiselle, I’ve already told the flics what I know, done what I can.”

 
“Clémence had a train ticket home tonight.” Aimée shivered and hoped that sounded plausible. “But her poor mother,” Aimée said, making it up as she went along. “I don’t know how to contact her.”

  Madame Fontenay sighed. “Please give her my condolences.”

  Aimée shook her head. “But I don’t remember Clémence’s address, although I know it’s near the Molière fountain.”

  Madame Fontenay stared at her. Her small eyes, like black beads, studied Aimée as she decided. “You don’t know her apartment?”

  Madame had a brain below that waved hair of hers. She liked to gossip but not get involved.

  Aimée wiped her eye. “I lost it. But I lost a lot of things in Geneva at the TB sanitarium. Of course, I don’t blame you if you don’t trust me, Madame. But would you speak to her mother, Madame? Break the news. I don’t know if I can.”

  Madame batted her eyes in shock. “Zut!” She shook her head. “But I told you, we weren’t that close.”

  Madame Fontenay’s perfume, a thick floral scent, was getting to her. She knew standard police procedure required that they contact the family for a formal identification. She had to get to the apartment before the flics did.

  “It’s so tragic, just when we were going to meet. I understand your reservations about me.”

  “Non,” Madame Fontenay said conclusively, “it’s better coming from you or Dita.”

  Who was Dita? “If you say so, Madame.”

  Madame Fontenay stood and glanced out the window at the dark hulk of the Théâtre du Palais Royal roof, a stone’s throw away. “The last act finished an hour ago. Dita should be leaving the makeup room by now. I’ll call her.”

  Aimée’s heart sank. Dita must be Clémence’s roommate. She wouldn’t know Aimée.

  Madame dialed. “No answer.”

  Aimée breathed a sigh of relief.

  “So sad, non? It always comes down to passion or money.”

  Or revenge, Aimée almost added. She didn’t believe the chef had strangled Clémence. This was about the notebook.

  If she didn’t find it, she’d question Dita.

  Aimée moved, and the plastic bags crackled under her. “You’re right, Madame; even though it’s hard to do, it’s better coming from me. And the apartment number, Madame Fon-tenay?”

  “32, rue Molière.”

  * * *

  AIMÉE PASSED THE fountain bathed in moonlight with its elevated bronze statue of Molière sitting in thought. Below him, the muse of drama and comedy carved in marble flanked his statue. Underneath, three lions’ heads gushed water into a semicircular marble trough cornering the fork of the street. Every so often she looked back on the wet cobbled street, but she saw no one. A shudder crossed her shoulders as she stood in a darkened doorway, waiting for someone to enter 32, rue Molière. A taxi pulled up and a couple emerged. Middle-aged, the woman wore high boots and the man sported a leather cowboy vest. They entered #32. Before the door could close, she slipped in after them.

  She found herself in a stone-paved carriage entrance lit by a timed light. To the left a set of stairs spiraled up, and on her right a sign read CLUB EROS.

  She looked back to see a woman paused in the doorway, two flics filling the frame. As they stood there talking, they blocked her exit.

  “The third floor, oui. What, my roommate?” Aimée heard the woman say.

  One flic followed the woman, who must be Dita. The other remained at the door.

  Aimée lowered her head and walked as fast as she could toward the blue light and open door of the Club Eros.

  Cigarette smoke, blue neon light, and the wail of a saxophone greeted her. And a doorman.

  “Club member?” he asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “A thousand francs.”

  “What?”

  A nicotine-stained finger pointed to a sign. “Singles admission, plus membership. One thousand francs.”

  She backed up, casting a glance over her shoulder. Dita still stood in conversation with the flic. Aimée rooted in her wallet and came up with three hundred francs.

  “Alors, Mademoiselle. You pay or you leave.”

  What could she do? She was stuck.

  “You take traveler’s checks?”

  Wednesday Night

  IN THE GREEN languid water, René gasped for breath. He was five years old, caught in the undertow at the beach at Biarritz. Bits of shale and sand stuck between his toes. He fought for air in a slow-motion green world. His arms flailed in the heavy water, battling to rise to the surface; but the current sucked him down deeper in the dense turgid water.

  He saw Aimée’s face. She looked different underwater, all odd angles, and her blue helmet was crusted with silt. Then the blast of the shot rippled the water and pain seared his chest.

  “Monsieur Friant! It’s all right.”

  René grew aware of a hovering green light. He was in a hospital room. And he gasped, trying to breathe. Sweet air. His thick tongue felt acidic, with a bad taste. His throat was on fire, but at least no tube was choking him.

  “You had a bad dream. The nurse says you can communicate now.” Melac, the detective, leaned over him. His breath smelled of Mentos. Dark circles showed under his eyes.

  “W—water, please.” His voice rasped in his raw throat.

  Melac stuck a straw between his lips. Cool and wet, the water swirled in his dry mouth, trickling over his parched tongue.

  “We’ve moved you to a secure clinic. A flic’s posted at your door,” Melac said. “No worries, Monsieur Friant; and, thanks to your physical condition, an excellent prognosis from the surgeon.”

  Every part of René hurt. His head pounded.

  “But I don’t want to tire you.” Melac set the cup down on a dog-eared paperback of de Maupassant short stories. “I only need a positive identification. Witnesses saw your partner, Aimée Leduc, shoot you.”

  Was it a dream? Had Aimée really shot him? Why would she? Something was wrong. And then he remembered the hundred thousand francs in their bank account.

  “More water, Monsieur Friant?”

  He nodded, took a sip, wet his lips.

  “What can you tell me, Monsieur? We need your help to proceed with the investigation. Witnesses heard you calling her name. We identified the Beretta that wounded you as hers. Isn’t there something you want to tell me, Monsieur Friant?” Melac stared at him. “No one can hurt you here. No visitors are allowed. Not even Mademoiselle Leduc.”

  René’s head hurt. His heart hurt. He felt wetness on his cheek.

  Melac looked away. “I’m sorry.” He reached in his jacket pocket for a tissue, dabbed at the tears running down René’s cheeks. “But I have to ask you this. Did you see Aimée Leduc, your partner, shoot you?”

  “Too d-d—dark.” René’s thick tongue got in the way of his words. “Couldn’t see.”

  “Time’s up, Inspector.” The nurse’s brisk tone matched her step as she glanced at Melac. She released the brake on the hospital bed’s wheels. Shot a wink at René. “Late-night MRI special, Monsieur Friant. Our tech’s warmed up the machine especially for you.”

  The rubber wheels ground over the linoleum into the hallway, but not fast enough for René to get away from Melac’s probing look. The paperback in his pocket, Melac stood watching until the bed rounded the corner.

  Wednesday Night

  AIMÉE LOOKED AROUND Club Eros, a sand-blasted stone-arched cavern lit by hundreds of flickering votive candles. Floor to ceiling, red silk panels billowed in the breeze of a fan whirring somewhere. A dense humidity mingled with scents of perfume, peppermint lubricant, and other odors that Aimée didn’t want to explore.

  “First time?”

  And the last, she thought.

  The voice belonged to a balding man in his fifties wearing spandex bicycle shorts and nothing else. His chest glistened with oil.

  This was one membership where she wouldn’t get her money’s worth.

  “I love to show novices the rope
s,” he said.

  She recognized him as a well-known Left Bank literary critic; his picture appeared often in the weekly book review section René read. “I’ve never seen you at a Rouge et Noir night.”

  So they’d adopted Stendhal’s title for a sex-club event. An echangiste, a swingers’ club, with literary pretensions?

  “Use a little huile de coude, elbow grease!” moaned a woman from a cubicle. Aimée shuddered.

  “This might relax you.” He offered her a black-and-white Pierrot face mask. “Join my wife and me.”

  Ménages à trois weren’t on her agenda tonight. Or ever. She had to get out of here as soon as the flics left the courtyard.

  A naked woman on a velvet rope swing hung suspended from the ceiling, dropping rose petals on those below . . . couples, trios, limbs intertwined, from what she could make out in the flickering vanilla-scented candle light, a scent that made her want to sneeze.

  A rank of people watched from the walls as if glued there. Voyeuristic kicks, she assumed, as some watched and some performed. People from the suburbs, or offices, or a smattering of the elite. The age range varied.

  “Call me Xedo. Like to whet your appetite at the buffet?”

  Buffet? He gestured to a banquet spread out on a table piled with food. They ate before they got down to business, as if to store up energy for an athletic event. A do-your-thing kind of club. Food, casual partner-swapping, all lubricated by good bottles of wine, she noticed. Where was the other exit? They had to have one for deliveries: the fire code demanded it.

  Xedo’s glistening bare chest was too close for comfort. Rolls of fat hung over his bicycle shorts.

  “I’m meeting someone,” she told him, handing back the mask.

  He winked. “We all meet someone here.”

  She never thought she’d be nostalgic for a bordello. Compared to this event, a commercial establishment seemed passé. She hoped she wouldn’t run into anyone’s father or cousin from the Sorbonne. It was that kind of place.

  She edged toward the entrance to see if the flics had left yet. Then her gaze fell on Léo Frot.