Murder in the Palais Royal

by Cara Black

  OTHER THAN STRIPS of yellow crime-scene tape on the barricade fronting Madame Fontenay’s medal shop, no evidence remained of Clémence’s murder. A closed sign hung behind the shop’s metal shutters.

  Across from her, a man wearing a blue work coat embroidered with Monuments et Travaux beckoned to a hardhat. “Over here. Major water leak. You know what that means!” he said to the worker.

  “Means my spanner turns off the water valve if you’re lucky.” He grinned. “Depends on the bolt size. And how much water’s in the tunnel.” A moment later, he made his way toward Madame Fontenay’s building, took out a ring of keys, inserted one, and opened the door she’d entered last night. Aimée followed. She stood again on the black-and-white-tiled floor at the foot of the staircase’s metal rosette-ornamented banister.

  A side door in the foyer leading downstairs stood open. Cranking noises and the smell of mildew came from the stairway. She made her way down the dark stone stairs into a subterranean tunnel. Could Clémence’s killer have escaped this way?

  Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket.

  “Oui?”

  “Mademoiselle, concerning the Cours Carnot survey. Would participation be paid for? Is remuneration involved?”

  After all those calls, her first bite. “Hold on a moment. Let me go to a place with better reception.” She ran back up the stairs, into the foyer.

  “Allô, Monsieur. Can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “That depends on which study group you attended,” she said. “Your name, please?”

  “Audric Loubel,” he said. “Our study group met for a year between 1993 and 1994.”

  Promising, she thought. “Un moment, please. I’ll consult my notes.” She took out the first thing in her bag, the Voici magazine, and rustled some pages.

  “Bear with me, please. They’ve made the survey guidelines so specific,” she said. “We provide honorariums yes, to specific groups and students we track.”

  “Like who?”

  “Of course, I’ve left the files at my office. Let’s see, I wrote down a name. Nicolas Evry. Were you in his group?”

  Silence.

  “There’s a mistake,” he said.

  “In what way?”

  “Nicolas didn’t attend any courses,” he said, disappointment in his voice, “although his friends did.”

  She had to draw him out.

  “That could explain a few things.” She gave a little sigh. “Can you help me correct this information then? I’ll need to verify that fact with you and his friends.”

  “But Cours Carnot knows. . . .”

  “Well, they’re the ones who furnished this information. I’d like to take your word, but that involves reconfiguring the survey.”

  “It’s as I told you: Nicolas hung around us.” Audric sounded young. “That’s all.”

  A door slammed. The sound of scraping reached her ears.

  “Actually, Audric, you haven’t settled this to my satisfaction. Let’s talk in person. Then I can get some answers and pay you today.”

  “How much?”

  Greedy, too.

  “Let’s talk. Meanwhile, I’ll check,” she said. “Say in half an hour?”

  “I’m late for class,” he said. “I’ll call you back later.”

  The line went dead.

  She stared at the sheet with his address on rue des Bons Enfants, not five minutes away. And he’d known Nicolas.

  The hardhat emerged from the stairs. “I need more tools to stop that leak. Meanwhile, close tunnel 3 in the south wing in case,” he said into his cell phone.

  The tunnel network under the Palais Royal. For now it would wait. She had to catch Audric.

  Thursday

  “COMPLAINING AGAIN , SICARD ? ”

  The La Santé prison guard handed Sicard his release papers at the last checkout booth before the gate. “Where’s your happy face?”

  “Right here,” he said with an obscene gesture. I’ll be happy never to see a sadist like you again, he thought. His shoes pinched, his old jacket hung from his shoulders. He’d lost weight inside, yet his feet had swelled. Go figure.

  How many years had he waited for this moment, walking out La Santé’s gate a free man? In his dreams, his girlfriend was waiting with open arms. They’d drive away in her car, her red hair trailing in the wind, to a restaurant. Good food, real food, then they’d spend the night and the next day in bed. He’d rediscover and explore every curve in her body, surfacing only to eat. And he’d go to the bank, find money waiting from his last job that his “friends” who put him in here had promised.

  But, of course, the redhead had moved on two years ago, and the mecs he’d done the job with had served time at Clair-vaux, the maximum-security prison up north, and never made good on their promise to put his share in the bank.

  What he found was dust swirling in the warm wind, grit in his eyes, and no one waiting.

  Still, the air tasted sweet. And he was free. Free with the twenty francs he’d had in his pocket years ago when he entered and the five hundred earned from working in the prison kitchen.

  Not the worst, he thought. He could live two, three days?

  At the dock loading job he was qualified for (and that was several years ago), he’d earned less than a living wage. That’s what had gotten him into La Santé in the first place.

  Instead of the bus, he walked. He felt light, walking alone on the wide dusty boulevard, the leaves crackling under his feet, the air warm and enveloping. No walls, no alarms, no damp cell or guards banging on the bars, no fetid breath down his neck. Just a woman and a little girl hand in hand waiting at the bus stop. Real people.

  So what if the woman looked at him curiously, eyeing his outdated jacket, his mincing walk in his too-tight shoes, his prison haircut, and pulled her daughter closer.

  He’d paid his debt to society. Now it owed him. At least one segment of society would pay. He’d worked it all out. In his shirt pocket lay Nicolas Evry’s gold mine that he’d found sewn into his cot’s mattress in their cell.

  Too late for Nicolas to use it now. But he could, with a little help. Sicard smiled as he walked down the boulevard, inhaling the free fresh air.

  Thursday

  AIMÉE WATCHED FOR Audric to emerge from his building, a limestone belle époque affair framed by a sculpted roofline frieze depicting nymphs holding bunches of grapes over long pillars supported by busty caryatids.

  Her skirt stuck to her legs. The variable October weather ran chill one day, then blazing hot like today. But it would not be much longer until autumn arrived, with a cold wind under pewter skies.

  She kept an eye out for Audric, now twenty-three years old, to match him with the blurred Xeroxed photo on his four-year-old Carte d’étudiant. Across the street, whiffs of chlorine came from Gymnastic, a health club, and she longed to get in the pool. Her thighs could use fifty laps.

  Not two feet away from her, an old man sucked on a hand-rolled cigarette, picking a flake of tobacco from his mouth. He gave a hacking cough, hawked, and wiped his mouth on his corduroy jacket sleeve, the whole time giving her the eye.

  “Old pots make the best soup, Mademoiselle,” he said, leering.

  “But I don’t cook, Monsieur,” she said.

  “You go the other way?” He licked his cracked lips, fumbled with his fly.

  A dirty old man, and in this heat. She sighed.

  “Not the time to take out the ‘bishop’.” She pointed to the Commissariat on the corner. “I complain, and the flics will curl your nose hair.”

  He took off down the pavement.

  She fanned herself with the copy of Voici. No Princess Diana photo on the cover, unlike all the others. Instead, a photo collage of former celebrities du jour, now replaced by new ones. The paparazzi ate them up and spit them out faster than the old man now hawking up phlegm down the street. Not a pretty sight.

  She glanced at the pages of the magazine issue which was, she now saw,
dated December 1993. Holidays in Val d’Isere, skiing on the slopes. Stick-like models and starlets in attire involving beaded miniskirts and fur vests at aprés-ski parties, snowmobiles parked in front of exclusive chalets with the aristos and their young throwing snowballs, a Baron and Baronne something in front of roaring walk-in fireplaces.

  But it made some sense, since Nicolas had been awaiting trial in La Santé in 1993. Still, she wondered why he had kept these old magazines. Before she could ponder further, a small door in the large dark green entry opened and a figure pushing a bicycle emerged from Audric’s building.

  She spotted his short brown hair, pockmarked face, and thick black glasses. Audric hadn’t changed much from his photo in four years. He paused on the cracked pavement, then headed up the street, walking his bicycle. He limped, despite a thick-soled shoe; one leg seemed shorter than the other.

  A wide tour bus turned into the narrow street and blocked her way. The taxi behind it hooted its horn; the driver got out shaking his fist. Skirting the fracas and the bus, she saw Audric at the end of the block.

  She broke into a run; but before she could catch up with him, cars blocked her way on rue Croix des Petits Champs. Now in full force, the transport strike had made all traffic grind to a halt.

  She looked up and down the street. No Audric. And then she caught a glimpse of his bike disappearing into Passage Vero-Dodat.

  Desperate, she zigzagged between the cars. The whole street was like a parking lot. Below the two statues in niches over the entrance to the covered Passage Vero-Dodat were dark wood-framed old-fashioned storefronts with gilt sconces and small black diamond tiles under a glass-and-iron vaulted roof.

  Her grandfather had pointed out the commercial origins of the now-elegant passage; Vero had been Montesquieu’s pork butcher, and Dodat a shopkeeper who’d gone bankrupt.

  A bicycle leaned against a storefront in the passage. Audric stood bent over a glass display window of an antique toy store. Didn’t he have school?

  “Excuse me. Audric?”

  He looked up from a collection of tiny Napoleonic lead soldiers. Light reflected off his thick lenses as he looked her over.

  “I get it.” His mouth tightened. “He put you up to this, as usual.”

  “I don’t understand.” She pulled out a card from one of the many she carried.

  “Since when does a looker follow me? Get lost.”

  She imagined him the butt of cruel jokes. The child found in every schoolyard, the beaten-up outcast with scars both outside and inside.

  “But we spoke on the phone.” Her hand paused, holding out the card.

  “Aimée Leduc,” he read. His voice wavered. “Olivier didn’t put you up to this?”

  “Who?” She shook her head. “You don’t seem interested in the Cours Carnot survey. I’ve wasted my time.”

  He bit his lip. “I’ve made a mistake.”

  “I doubt if you can help me,” she said. “From your phone comments, you had little communication with our target student, Nicolas Evry.”

  “Why him?”

  She pointed to the old Napoleonic metal soldiers. “Expensive, eh?”

  “Not for a collector.”

  He seemed the type who still played with toy soldiers in his room.

  He shrugged. “To be honest, Nicolas Evry can’t figure in your study. He never took the prépa course for the École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales concours.”

  She hated doing it, but she pulled out the travelers’ checks she’d intended to use on her trip to New York. It was all the money she had left to live on, with her account frozen.

  “As I mentioned, there’s remuneration, but I need to verify your information. Why don’t you tell me about it?” She pointed toward the Café de l’Epoque.

  Longing shone in his eyes, but he stepped back. “I can’t . . . he won’t understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “I’m late.”

  She’d lost him. “Who? Olivier?”

  From the way his mouth opened in surprise, she’d hit home.

  “What’s his connection to Nicolas?”

  Without a word, Audric backed up. But she remembered seeing Olivier’s name in the files.

  She caught his sleeve as he reached for the bike handlebars. “You’re afraid. Why, Audric?”

  “Nicolas committed suicide, didn’t he? That’s what all this is about.” A muscle twitched in his cheek. “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

  From the street, car horns blared.

  She let go of his sleeve. “I think it was murder, Audric. Can you tell me what changed Nicolas in November 1993?”

  “Changed? You related to him or something?”

  Before she could answer, the alarm on Audric’s watch beeped. In his wire bike basket she saw an École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales calendar. “I’m late for a lecture.”

  “You said he hung around you,” she said. “Why did Nicolas join the skinheads?”

  Audric’s eyes almost popped out from behind his glasses.

  “He wasn’t the only one, was he?”

  Audric grabbed the handlebars, swung his shorter leg over the seat. She stepped in front of the wheel.

  “Maybe your parents should know their son dabbled in the neo-Nazi movement.”

  “It’s not like that. Not that way.”

  She stared at him. “Or maybe you did more than dabble. Maybe you torched a synagogue.” She pulled out the Cours Carnot file. “Your father’s a playwright and your mother . . . they’re divorced, I see; but anxious, I’m sure, to know. . . .”

  He took off his glasses, wiping the perspiration from his brow. “Non, please, you don’t understand.”

  “Then help me understand, Audric,” she said. “Or I talk with your father.”

  “Nine P.M.” He swung his leg over the bike. “Here in the café.” And he pedaled off.

  ***

  ON QUAI D’ANJOU in front of her apartment, she caught sight of a man sitting on the stone wall, legs swinging as he spooned something from a cup. Twilight hovered, and the quay-side lights cast mercury-silver pools on the Seine’s surface.

  She heard a cough. And recognized Melac. She’d never returned his call. Did his appearance mean he’d found a link between her and Clémence?

  He held an ice cream cup from Bertillon’s around the corner.

  “This vanilla bean’s a winner,” he said. “Fantastic.”

  She shook her head, clutching her keys. “Then you haven’t tried their white peach sorbet.”

  “Next time,” Melac said, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

  Nonplussed, she shifted her heels on the gravel. “Don’t tell me this is a social call.”

  He set the empty cup on the stone wall.

  “The GSR test came back negative for gunshot residue on your hands,” Melac said.

  “You sound surprised. But maybe you’re here to inform me of the line of investigation you’re following in René’s shooting.”

  “Sounds like you’re telling me how to do my job.”

  That had gained her no points. She should try tact, as René often suggested. But her stubbed toe throbbed and Melac annoyed her. Especially the way he’d waited in front of her apartment.

  “Liken it to an onion,” he said, pausing as if in thought.

  Handsome in a rough way in his black shirt and jeans. His jacket lay on the stone wall. Was he off duty?

  “Every time you peel a layer, there’s another one.”

  Something about the way his eyes flickered raised the hair on her neck.

  “Who peels onions? I don’t get your point.”

  “The financial police faxed a request for your criminal record, if any,” he said. “That tells me they’re mounting an investigation; it’s kind of what they do.”

  His condescending attitude more than rankled. He knew something. Something she didn’t.

  “So I comply and notice the Interpol flag on your family member. I keep peeling the onion, find
ing cross-references, cross-searches, and my chief tells me to comply with the financial police request because they have reasonable suspicion, et cetera.” He nodded. “But, of course, I’m waiting to hear what you have to say.”

  His false conversational tone, the ominous tone of calm in his voice, panicked her. She couldn’t speak.

  “You wouldn’t want me to get the wrong idea, would you, Mademoiselle Leduc?”

  “Instead of an onion, you could liken it to a second-rate dry cleaners,” she said, pointing to the pink dry-cleaning tag peeking from his jacket pocket.

  He blinked.

  “All the chemicals, but still those stains don’t rub out. Impossible to remove. So you’re stuck with a Sauce Bernaise grease spot for the life of your jacket.”

  Melac lifted his jacket sleeve. “How did you know that’s Bernaise sauce?”

  “Just like I know you mastered simple addition but nothing more complicated.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “Let’s see, a ticket to New York, an American mother who’s a wanted terrorist, and now a financial probe by the big guys,” Melac said. “Add them up and you hit a jackpot.”

  “What?”

  “Money laundering, arms and drug deals. Big-ticket items,” he said. “And a partner who’s shot after discovering discrepancies in your office bank balance. Even with my ‘limited’ math skills, it adds up.”

  Startled, she stepped back into her neighbor walking his dog on the quai. A doddering white-haired man, a former member of the Academie Française, with his Pekinese. “Par-donnez-moi, Monsieur,” she said, trying to recover.

  He snorted and moved away, crunching fallen leaves.

  Now she was ready for him. “But it doesn’t add up, Melac. I’d never hurt René. And my mother left us a long time ago. A very long time ago. She may be dead, for all I know.” Her throat caught, and she turned away. Why did her eyes well up after all this time?

  “Sidonie (aka Sydney) Leduc’s file’s open. Active.”

  “You mean she’s alive?” She turned and looked at him.

  Melac studied her. His demeanor was removed, professional. He folded his arms across his chest. The plane tree branches rustled.

  “You want me to beg, Melac? I will.”

  “It means no one’s reported her dead,” Melac said. “But in that business, they don’t always identify the bodies.”