Murder in Pigalle

by Cara Black

  And then Aimée noticed the squared toe of the shoe the figure in the photo was wearing, the loafer shape and crest the unmistakable trademark of Polo by Ralph Lauren. “Look at the shoes, René. The figure in the hoodie’s wearing the same dancing pair as le Weasel.”

  She saw the wheels turning in his head. “Maybe at first to prove to her mother that he was carrying on other affairs,” he said. “Fits with what Tonette told you, that they were trying to prove he wasn’t what he said he was. Classic case of slimeball live-in boyfriend. The daughter wants her mother to dump him.”

  “She’d go to those lengths?”

  René sat up. “What if he hit on her?”

  “But how does that fit with the rapist’s profile? Secretive, single-minded, targeting twelve-year-old blondes after violin lessons?”

  “But that’s it. He hits on her school friends. Specifically the ones who take violin.”

  That only fit if they knew more about le Weasel, sniffed out some musical connection.

  “Like I said, he’s escalating because he’s under some kind of stress.” René nodded to himself. “He steps it up now that Zazie’s onto him.”

  “The flat’s on this street.” She put her phone in her pocket. “Time to ask him.”

  “No one answers, Aimée.”

  “But the concierge will.” She took a last deep breath of the warm, rose-scented sunshine and stood. “Coming?”

  René’s phone trilled. He checked the number. “Saj and I need to go over the hiccup in today’s virus scan.” He pulled out a paper covered with notations. “Takes ten minutes.”

  Ten minutes she didn’t have. “Call me when you finish. You’re the backup.”

  “For what?”

  “I have a weasel to catch.”

  SHE LEFT RENÉ to walk a few doors down rue Chaptal. Pigalle teemed with people. Locals who would normally be packing to head to the train stations and the countryside were staying at home this year, crowding the streets and cafés with World Cup chatter.

  Twenty-one rue Chaptal’s facade of freshly sandblasted limestone, subtle and solid, breathed wealth. A couple paused before the high, green, carved doors in the arched former carriage entrance. Aimée waited, pretending to consult her phone until the couple hit the digicode. A smaller door in the large one clicked, and they pushed it open. She waited until it had almost shut before sliding inside.

  She adjusted her eyes in the cool, paved porte-cochère entrance. Trellised ivy climbed the back of the courtyard, still dripping from a recent watering. The concierge’s loge held a sign: FERMÉ.

  There went that idea.

  She found de Mombert on the nameplate—TROISIÈME ÉTAGE, GAUCHE. They were more security conscious here, with a solid Fichet lock to the glass door, behind which she could see a marble floor and twisting staircase.

  She continued into the courtyard, where the carriage house and stables had been converted into garages. Like everywhere around here. She looked up at the massive backs of the buildings and realized the sixth floor held small windows for the chambres de bonnes, maid’s rooms. From the looks of the ten or so small, dust-colored mailboxes, the former maid quarters were now rented as single rooms. But these buildings had stairs for the help—escaliers de service. So there would be a back door—one likelier to respond to her lock-pick set than the Fichet.

  Inside she saw garbage bins tucked under winding stairs so steep and narrow elves would feel at home. There was no locked door to the stairwell—in fact there was no door at all. She climbed, pausing to catch her breath as she pulled herself up the almost ladder-like stairs.

  On the third-floor landing, jutting off to the left, lay a narrow walkway lined by an old hinge rack with just enough space to store sacks of coal—a common practice. She didn’t envy the help who had to carry up those sacks.

  She hit René’s number. “Try de Mombert’s number again, okay? No need for surprises.”

  Pause.

  “Wait un petit moment, don’t tell me you’re breaking in?” René said. “Think you’ll find le Weasel sleeping it off, Zazie locked in a closet?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Alone? With a dangerous mec who’s—”

  “The reason I asked you for backup, René,” she interrupted. “Make the call.”

  She clicked off, put her ringer on mute. A moment later she heard a phone ringing from deep in the apartment’s bowels, but after ten rings, no answer.

  Her neck damp with perspiration, she reached into her bag. Under her prenatal vitamins she found her mini lock-pick set, which she kept in her Dior sunglasses case. Inserting the pick and switch clip, she toggled up and down until she heard a click. The half-glass-paned back service door yielded, and in less than two minutes she had checked the walk-in pantry, cupboards, and cabinets under the old-style porcelain kitchen sink. No Zazie.

  Not much cooking done here, either, evidenced by the Chinese take-out cartons in the trash. The refrigerator held yogurt and a glass bottle of capers. Nice and pickled, but she resisted the temptation. On the wood trestle kitchen table was half of a stale baguette and a bowl of café au lait. Cold, a beige skin floating on the surface of the milk. She sniffed. Not curdled, so from this morning.

  She needed to work fast. The apartment’s rooms were laid out along a parquet-floored hall. So far all she had heard behind any of the doors was the flushing from the pipes above.

  A loud buzzing disturbed her thoughts.

  She froze.

  In her pocket she felt her phone vibrating. Merde. She’d thought she’d silenced it, but she’d only put it on vibrate. She checked the display.

  René.

  She stepped behind the door to the salon—formal, with period furniture and wall tapestries. Unused, by the look of it.

  “What?” she whispered into the phone.

  “Buzz me in. I’m downstairs. You’re not doing this alone.”

  “Then hurry up.”

  She tiptoed to the front door. Pushed the button for PORTE, waited a few seconds, then pressed the second buzzer, ENTRÉE.

  By the time René came puffing up the stairs, she’d done a cursory check of the whole apartment. “If he was here, he’s long gone, René.”

  “So you’ve checked the armoires, the closets …?”

  “We have to dig deeper. Any information about le Weasel or Marie-Jo … You take the left side, and I’ll do the courtyard side.”

  He rolled up his sleeves.

  The apartment phone rang. René jumped. “Good God, what are we doing here, Aimée, besides getting arrested for breaking and entering?”

  “Shh.”

  After nine rings the answering machine clicked.

  “Monsieur, the dry cleaner on rue de la Rochefoucald won’t give me your suit without the ticket. Pff. So don’t wonder why I’m late to work this afternoon, eh?”

  The housekeeper.

  “That’s two blocks away,” said René. “Sounds like she expects him to be here. Maybe he’s stepped out for cigarettes.”

  Any moment he could appear. If they were going to confront him, it couldn’t be in this flat they’d broken into. They needed some kind of proof first.

  “Quick, René.” She pawed through her bag. Where was her bug? Finally her fingers closed around it. “If you find a computer, use this.”

  “So that’s where my scramble tracer’s gone!” He shook his head. “Concentrate on the girl’s room. Figure we’ve got less than ten minutes.”

  Through the second door she found a teenager’s room—clothes on the floor, photos of boy bands on the walls, a few schoolbooks on a maple-wood rolltop desk. She scanned notebooks—only schoolwork—and then she found the camera. A high-end Nikon with a telescopic lens. No film inside.

  She stepped back and surveyed the cluttered floor.

  “Aimée, let’s go …”

  On the floor by her foot, peeking from below a hoodie, she saw a red tassel. The red tassel she’d last seen on Zazie’s backpack.

/>   Her heart cartwheeled, flipping from relief to fear. Zazie had been here.

  But where was she now?

  “Now, Aimée! Or do you want to get arrested?”

  “Head through the kitchen to the pantry—the service stairs,” she said, scooping the tassel into her pocket. “I’m right behind you.”

  But her feet refused to take her past the foyer. Zazie had been here and gone. There had to be more. Footsteps sounded outside the front door.

  Her palms moistened in a hot sweat.

  The shoes. A pair of scuffed Polo loafers, just like in Zazie’s photo, sat under a coatrack with a man’s linen jacket.

  A key turned in the front door. Perspiration dripped between her shoulder blades. She reached in the linen jacket’s pockets and snatched the contents.

  Moments later, breathing hard, she’d shut the back service door and was padding down the steep, winding stairs. Reaching the courtyard, she took deep breaths, focusing on the breeze blowing over the stone wall and trying to still her thumping heart.

  Men always left things in their pockets. Incriminating things. Le Weasel proved no exception: the dry-cleaning receipt and a coat-check ticket she recognized from the Cercle de Jeux casino below Place Pigalle. There was also a rolled-up twenty-franc note—snort material.

  René waited by the ivy, checking his phone. “Hurry, Aimée.”

  The blurred outlines of le Weasel came into focus: a gambler, careless enough to leave white crystals on the rolled-up note in his pocket.

  “Look what I found in le Weasel’s pocket.”

  René face soured as he scanned the items in her palm. “With pedophiles it’s not unusual for them to have families, professions, even be pillars of the community. It’s about a double life. Power.”

  “Yet gambling wouldn’t necessarily fit the profile of a serial rapist,” she said.

  “Unless the screws tightening up in the quartier stressed him, he’s gambling, amping up. What’s the red tassel?”

  “Proof.” Aimée’s palm shook. “This was on Zazie’s backpack the last time I saw her. But the flics need more for a case.”

  “We don’t,” said René, taking the Cercle de Jeux ticket from her. His jaw set. A single-minded focus in his green eyes. “Now we know Zazie was here. Time le Weasel coughs up her location.”

  A woman’s voice carried over the pavers. The apricot light streaming into the arched carriage entrance sharpened her figure into a dark silhouette—a woman not much taller than René, a chignon atop her head and what appeared to be a long apron tied around her ample waist.

  The voice, not the one she’d heard on the answering machine minutes before, sounded familiar. She knew that woman’s voice. But from where?

  Time to find out.

  “Bonjour, Madame. You’re the concierge?”

  Startled, she fumbled with her shopping bag. Red and white radishes—reminding Aimée of little torpedoes—fell on the cobbles.

  “You’ve no business here,” she said, irritated. “It’s private property.”

  “Excusez-moi, Madame,” said Aimée, bending down with difficulty to recover the radishes. Soon she’d need a crane for such a maneuver.

  The low smoker’s voice was at odds with the woman’s clear complexion and bright grey eyes. “But you’re Leduc’s daughter, non? The big eyes, skinny legs—you’re taller now. Grown up.” Her eyes narrowed. “And a bun in the oven, as they say.”

  Now Aimée remembered Cécile. A Pigalle working girl whose pimp Aimée’s father had put in prison. Instead of turning informer, as he’d counted on, or showing him any gratitude for freeing her from the life, she’d found another macquereau—so named for their sardine-shiny flash suits. Would the woman be friendly to her now or hostile?

  “Cécile.” She smiled, bent down to brush both cheeks. “You’re looking even younger than the last time I saw you, if that’s possible.”

  “I found mon Sauveur,” she said, tugging the gold cross around her neck. “In Saint Rita’s chapel.”

  “You look happy,” Aimée said.

  “I’ve made my peace with the past. How is Leduc now?”

  Aimée looked down at the worn pavers. Almost ten years gone, but the memory seared like it was yesterday.

  “He died in a bomb explosion in Place Vendôme,” she said.

  “Désolée,” she said, glancing at Aimée’s stomach. “He won’t see his grandchild, then. You know, I made my peace with everyone but your father. I always wanted to.” She shrugged. “C’est dommage.”

  “Can you help us, Cécile?” She folded Cécile’s hand in her own. “Marie-Jo’s friend Zazie’s missing. She’d been following the rapist.”

  “That pig who murdered the little girl above the cheese shop?”

  Aimée nodded. “Maybe if you could help me find Zazie … Think of it as some way of making it up to Papa.”

  Cécile glanced at René. Her brow furrowed.

  Impatient, René was tapping his handmade Lobb shoes on the cobbles. She noticed his balled-up fist clutching the detritus from le Weasel’s pocket, the other jingling his car keys. “Cécile, where’s le … I mean, Monsieur von Wessler?”

  “Him? If he didn’t answer the door, some modeling job or out gambling, I expect. Comme d’habitude, these days.”

  René shot her a look. “Excusez-moi, Madame. Talk to you later, Aimée.”

  Gung ho, René headed to his parked Citroën, which glowed dark green in the sun. Where was he going? To try to track down le Weasel? She wished they’d had a chance to discuss a plan, but she would call him when she’d gotten more information from Cécile.

  But before she could, the phone rang in the concierge’s loge. “I’m busy, and with any luck that’s the plumber.”

  Before Aimée could press her, she’d gone into the loge and shut the door.

  Aimée’s bad feeling mounted. She hesitated on narrow rue Chaptal, the afternoon sun melting into dim gold reflections on the mansard windows. Did René believe he could force a confession from le Weasel in a casino? René had taken off like a shot, unprepared and without thinking things through, just like he often accused her of doing. He was tired, too. The purple-tinged rings under his eyes worried her.

  She knew Zazie had been here, that Zazie had trailed le Weasel and was after the rapist—but had she ever found out they were one and the same? Or just assumed?

  In the fog of her pregnancy brain, she’d missed something with Cécile. She couldn’t let this unease in her gut go. Cécile had to know more.

  “Zut alors, I’ve told you all I know,” said Cécile peering out from the concierge’s loge. She made a tsk sound. “But you can’t let things go, eh? Like your father.”

  Her father’s lopsided grin flashed in front of her; his tired, smiling eyes over a bowl of café au lait in the morning, poring through police files at the kitchen table. His bathrobe, the musk and fresh laundry scent it carried, her father’s smell. The ache of missing him never went away.

  But she wouldn’t let Cécile fob her off again. “It’s more than that, Cécile,” she said. “Zazie’s in danger. What more can you remember? There must be something.”

  Cécile glanced at the time. Untied her apron.

  “Red hair?”

  Aimée stepped closer. “Curly and red. You saw her, Cécile?”

  “Marie-Jo and this Zazie went out yesterday afternoon. With this nice man, a friend of her father’s.”

  Alarm flooded Aimée with this new twist. Wasn’t the father in prison?

  “Were the girls struggling? Upset?”

  “Mais non, not at all.”

  Aimée felt a tightening in her chest. Who the hell was this “nice man”?

  “What time was this?”

  She thought. “A bit after five. Something like that.”

  The most recent sighting of Zazie by several hours. “Can you describe him?”

  Cécile shrugged. “Polite.”

  “His clothes, color of his hair?”

 
; “I had to sign for a package. Too much going on to notice.”

  “Can you just look at these and see if you recognize him?” Aimée pulled René’s camera from her bag, showed her the small screen, clicking each photo. “Was the man who took them—the friend of Marie-Jo’s father—was he any of these men?”

  A shake of her head.

  Standing in the heat, feeling her ankles starting to swell and at the end of her rope, she pulled out her last shot, the FotoFit. “What about him?”

  Cécile blinked. “Jean-Michel!”

  Aimée’s heart caught.

  “So you know him. Where does he live?”

  “Live? But he’s in Marseilles. Talked to them this morning. He’s my nephew.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “My sister’s boy. But his eyes are bigger.”

  Great. The generic FotoFit matched half of the French male population.

  “Un moment,” Cécile said. “Show me the ones in the camera again.”

  Had this jogged her memory?

  Aimée clicked forward.

  “Go back. Mais oui, this one, that’s Marie-Jo’s father. Zacharié.”

  Aimée saw a side view of the man’s face, black curly hair.

  “Did he take the girls?”

  Cécile shook her head. “He asked me which way they’d gone. He seemed worried.”

  Aimée filed that away. Now she had to press Cécile while her memory stirred.

  “Did this nice man have an accent? Try to remember. Young or middle-aged?”

  “Didn’t look like a rapist to me,” she said, dismissive.

  “See, you noticed something. Then what did he look like? How did he strike you?”

  “Like I said. Polite.”

  “But you’d seen him before, right?”

  “A long time ago, perhaps. Non, I’m not sure. So many people come through here.”

  All working ladies typed men instantly. That was part of their trade and negotiations.

  “Neighbor, shopkeeper? Lives in the quartier?”

  “Come to think of it, he wore pressed jeans, like some of them do.”

  “Some of who?”

  “Off-duty flics.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. We only spoke a few seconds.”

  She turned the concierge sign to FERMÉ and grabbed her handbag.