Murder in Pigalle

by Cara Black

  “But I heard them arguing,” she said. “He accused her of sending his daughter away.”

  “He’s a lawyer, non? Makes things appear one way, twists them around. We just saw him in action. Blames you—you were getting too close.”

  “I don’t know about that. But I know I got too close.”

  “Of course, he knew about his wife’s big speech last night,” said René, warming up. “What if she’d been about to confront him with his daughter’s message? Where was he last night, did you ask him?”

  “He drives a Merc, not a motorcycle. They both do … did.”

  “But he could have a motorcycle, too. Maybe borrow a friend’s?”

  He raised good questions. She scrolled through her cell-phone call record, searching for the girl’s number at the Swiss clinic. When she found it, she hit dial. Just a message.

  The grinding of a fax came from the machine. René picked up two pages as they rolled out. “From Serge.”

  “More on the ballistics?”

  “Not quite.”

  GET WELL, AIMÉE, OUR SUPERHERO was written in childish scrawl with a crude drawing of her: big belly, arms out and a cape streaming behind her. From Serge’s twin boys, whom she was dreading having to babysit.

  “They sat still long enough to draw this?” René shook his head. “Aimée, the caped crusader.”

  Her heart wrenched. She couldn’t sit here and run corporate scans after all these questions René had raised.

  “This came with it.” He passed her a second sheet of Serge’s scribbled notes under Sylvaine Olivet’s blood panel.

  Post mortem—PHENYTOIN with a level of 2 but normal therapeutic range to be 10–20. Abnormal collection of blood vessels, arteriovenous malformation, in temporal lobe with acute bleeding and herniation of brain. Victim’s doctor had no CT scan on record. No evidence of sexual penetration. Bruising and lacerations to the eye and chest. Bite marks on tongue, surmise bleeding from undiagnosed AVM with an acute seizure and herniation of brain.

  RENÉ TOOK THE paper and read it. “Sylvaine was an epileptic, is that what this means?”

  “Mon Dieu, it means he didn’t rape Sylvaine,” she said. “She had an undiagnosed blood-vessel abnormality that caused seizures. Poor thing. The doctor probably didn’t think her seizures had a specific anatomic cause—but since a CT had never been done, he would never have known. Lazy. But they treat seizures irrespective of the cause with Phenytoin—that’s the generic term for Dilantin. I’d say her seizure thwarted the rape, and that’s why he attacked Nelié the same night. She got away. He’s off his game, and there’s Madame Vasseur about to expose him—”

  “Or he thinks she will,” interrupted René. “He shoots her. His own wife.” René frowned. “I’d say she suspected her husband.”

  “Smart, René. Look at this.”

  She picked up the third faxed sheet, a prelim ballistics report. “The shooter used a German Luger. Wehrmacht issue. How the hell can anyone trace that? But there’s a name at the bottom. Jacques Baleste, vintage arms expert.”

  “Et alors, that Baleste?” said René. “But there can’t be two.” René took a last sip of espresso. His mouth tilted in a small smile as he grabbed his jacket. “We go way back. Baleste owes me a favor. Time I collect, eh?”

  Wednesday, 1 P.M.

  LITTLE DID THE tourists at Notre-Dame Cathedral know what lay behind the unmarked nineteenth-century wood door they passed. The police armory, nestled on Ile de la Cité, a stone’s throw from the préfecture. From time immemorial every flic had checked out and returned their weapon here across the same worn wood counter. Hadn’t Baleste once commented that any coordinated armed insurrection would succeed, given the time it took for the flics to log out their weapons through this narrow, wire-caged counter?

  René stepped into the cloud of familiar odors: oil and stale coffee. He heard the radio tuned to the World Cup quarterfinals. “Jacques Baleste, s’il vous plaît?”

  “Une seconde. He expecting you?” asked a pockmarked young lieutenant. He sniffed, looking down on René, whose chin just reached the counter. Too bad the maître d’armes, old Voudray, had retired.

  He rotated his foot to ease his shooting hip pain. “Tell him it’s about the Luger,” he said. “He’ll understand.”

  “ID?”

  René reached up and shoved his carte d’identité over the grooved wood. His fingers came back greasy.

  The lieutenant pulled out the duty log, consulted it and dialed a number on the old, black rotary phone. By the book, this one.

  “A René Friant to see you, sir.” Pause. “Room one hundred and thirty-two, down the hallway.”

  We go way back, he almost said, former shooting partners … Instead he smiled. “I know.”

  René sucked in his breath as he walked. Their last parting loomed in his mind. But his failure so far to find anything leading to the rapist and Aimée’s shooter drove him on.

  “Come to gloat, have you, Friant?”

  Jacques Baleste, perspiration beading his flushed forehead, sat at a metal desk with his leg in a cast propped on an orange crate.

  “What happened?” said René, surprised.

  “As if you didn’t know,” said Baleste, vibrating with angry energy. Short and stocky, he filled the chair.

  René reached in his pocket. “If it’s about the firing-range club fees I owed you … look, I’m sorry if that got you into trouble.”

  “That? Pheuff.” Baleste waved the francs away. He expelled a gust of air. “You don’t know?”

  René shook his head, perplexed. “A fight?”

  “I plan dinner at Solange’s favorite resto, bring her roses, and she gives me the heave-ho. Literally.” He slammed down his fist. “Down the stairs.”

  Last month René had fixed up Baleste with Solange, a coiffeuse with a passion for astrology and rollerblading.

  René stifled a laugh. “Solange kicked you down the stairs?”

  “Tripping on the damn carpet didn’t help.”

  Clumsy as usual.

  “She blurts out, ‘René introduced us, but I can’t get over him, Jacques!’ and shuts the door in my face, just like that.”

  He hadn’t thought of Solange that way in months. Or ever.

  “C’est ironique. You’re moonfaced over someone else. Women go for you, and you go for the unattainable Aimée.”

  Was it that obvious? Or too much drinking and talking after the shooting range one night? Unattainable—Baleste got that right.

  “Which brings me to the Luger someone shot her with last night,” said René.

  “Remember that song, ‘Love the One You’re With’?” Baleste sighed. “When will you ever learn, Friant?”

  Learn that to Aimée he would never be more than her best friend? He knew that already. Best friend, business partner and godfather to her child. Uncle René, if she’d let him be.

  “Tell me about the Luger, Baleste.”

  The office was piled with files, walls plastered with black-and-white photos of weapons: Uzis, semiautomatics, Sig Sauers. Baleste pointed to a shelf. “There.” Damp, blue sweat rings showed under the arms of his blue uniform. “Get that green binder in the bookcase, the least you can do.”

  René stood on tiptoe to reach the shelf, pulled the binder and set it on Baleste’s messy desk.

  “I’ll show you what I showed the investigating Brigade Criminelle.” Baleste thumbed through the pages. His anger had evaporated now that he had guns to expound on. “But they’re on it already.”

  A wasted trip.

  Still, René sat down, determined to take a load off his feet and learn something.

  After five minutes of viewing photos of German Lugers, he sat back in the chair, his eyes on the shadows of the tourists crossing outside his window like a fretwork.

  “So the shooter ditched the Luger in the Seine, non? It’s gone?”

  “Did I say that?”

  Everyone consulted Jacques “Short-Fuse” Baleste, des
pite his volatile temper, on military arms. His grandfather had worked on the design of the M1909 Benet–Mercie before the First World War, his father on adapting features of the Lee–Enfield in the Second.

  “Then tell me what you didn’t tell the Brigade Criminelle.”

  “How can I? It’s all conjecture.”

  “You must have a theory. Any of these Lugers registered?”

  “You’re kidding, right? No one turned in booty from the occupiers.”

  So the perfect murder weapon, untraceable.

  “The countryside turns these up every so many years—someone finds them in an old trunk or an attic on a farm.”

  René’s mind went back to the count’s château in Amboise where he’d grown up. To that WWI rifle the cook had kept in the pantry, the pheasant her husband hunted with it strung upside down in the shed, its plucked feathers carpeting the dirt floor.

  “Alors, the grandfather dies,” Baleste continued, “his heirs discover a Luger in the cellar or the attic or under the floorboards. They think, ‘He really was in the Resistance?’ Fat chance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look to history,” said Baleste. “Who armed the scattered pockets of the Maquis, the loose networks of the Resistance, with Enfield rifles and Sten submachine guns? The British. Rare to find them with German arms.”

  “Et alors?”

  “Two years ago in the countryside, a jealous husband took his uncle’s old Sten gun and finished off his wife. In the process, the thing jammed—they were notorious for doing that during the war. It recoiled and took half his shoulder off.”

  René wished he’d get to the point. “Try being helpful, Baleste.”

  “When the Wehrmacht retreated in defeat, a lot of these Lugers found their way into closets,” said Baleste. “These pieces withstood the cold of Russian winters and the heat of the North African desert. Tough. Built to withstand extremes. Captured Lugers were prized. Why throw this untraceable workhorse away? Even with the bullet-casing striations identifying the piece,” said Baleste, “it’s impossible to identify the owner.”

  Damn, René thought, careful and methodical. It fitted the rapist’s modus operandi.

  “Have any shootings with matching bullet striations been reported before, Baleste?”

  Baleste’s phone console lit up with red lights. He ignored them and shifted his foot with effort. Grimaced with pain and blew a gust of air from his mouth. “Not in the last five years. I’d remember.”

  “Why’s that, Baleste?” Impatient, René wished he’d cough up some detail, some link to help identify the shooter.

  “Five years ago the Ministry of Defense funded our project: a research database documenting and referencing specific incidents involving military firearms.” Jacques grabbed a copy of L’Équipe, the racing paper, off his desk and swatted at a buzzing fly. He shut the binder. “There’s always the chance Aimée ticked off an old Nazi.”

  “Serge copied you on the ballistics report,” said René. “Don’t you have more to say?”

  Baleste leaned over, winced and eased his cast-bound leg higher on the crate. “I’ll say ten to one this Luger lay forgotten in some old codger’s desk. Now, with a good cleaning and oiling, it’s no fuss to use. And no one’s the wiser.”

  René’d learned little. As he stood, Aimée’s words came back to him—never leave without a name, a place, a referral. He gave it a last shot.

  “This happened in Pigalle. Strike any bells from the past?”

  “Some gangster heyday tie-in? All moot now. Still …” Baleste paused. The tourists’ footsteps shuffled, never ending, outside his window. Spit it out, René wanted to say.

  “Madame Mimi ran Bar Pigalle,” he said. “Years ago she told my grandfather the Nazis left arms in her cellar. ‘Left’ being a loose term. No doubt Mimi sold them years ago at the flea market or to connoisseurs who go for that.” He shrugged. “She’s dead now. Her grandson took over, renamed it the NeoCancan.”

  Could it be? “The Johnny Hallyday wannabee?”

  “So you know him?”

  “Maybe he deals with collectors,” said René.

  For the first time, Baleste smiled. “Or maybe it’s a fart in the wind.”

  But in Baleste-speak that meant René was following the right track.

  “I’ll give him a call. Get back to you.”

  “Better yet, Baleste, tell him I’ll drop by,” said René, checking the time.

  “He’s picking up supplies. Give him two hours. And you can pick up something for me.”

  “D’accord,” René agreed. “Très gentil of you, Baleste.”

  “Not really. He’s my cousin’s husband. Just grab the bottle of Romanée-Conti the little turd owes me.”

  Wednesday, 2 P.M.

  JULES’S DAMN CELL phone vibrated in Zacharié’s shaking hands in the garçonnière above the guitar shop. The same number flashed again.

  The caller was more than impatient, he realized. Downright angry.

  But what else could he do with this file? How could he get away with this? This crazy idea that the Rasta–hippie hacker had?

  Go transparent, give this to the Ministry. And then go straight back to prison?

  Or like that old film—a German spy movie he couldn’t remember the title of. Funny, that was all he could imagine—a cheap-movie scenario—but hell, it was the same thing. His life was a cheap-movie scenario. Big, bad brother coerces little brother into doing his dirty work, then sabotages him to take the fall. In the film, the little brother outwits him in the end … about to do the hand-off to the bad guy, he gives it to the good guys.

  Or tant pis … give it to this insistent caller, pocket the money, take Marie-Jo and head to Gare Saint-Lazare, board the train to a new, free life. Free and fugitive.

  Nothing involving Jules had ever been easy—it could all be another setup.

  He had to think of the big picture, the long term with Marie-Jo. School, stability beyond the scope of his crazy ex and her scum boyfriend.

  The phone vibrated in his sweating palm.

  Marie-Jo stirred on the bed. “Papa?”

  “Oui, ma chérie,” he said, coming to a decision. “Go back to sleep. I’m going out for an hour. Stay here and I’ll bring your favorite tartine. Tu promets?” He kissed her forehead.

  She nodded and gave a sleepy smile. “Don’t be long, Papa.”

  And it tore his heart.

  Wednesday, 2 P.M.

  AIMÉE LOOKED UP from her screen as René entered Leduc Detective. “Any joy from Baleste, René?”

  “I’m working on it,” he said. “The NeoCancan’s owner’s grandmother kept a Nazi cache of arms. Whether any are left … I’ve got to wait till Johnny Hallyday returns.”

  Her fingers paused on the keyboard, her damp tunic sticking to the small of her back.

  “What’s wrong?” René asked, giving her a look she couldn’t fathom. “Does it have to do with Melac?”

  She put her feet up on the recamier, hesitant to dump her non-existent love life on René. Again. She couldn’t help it. “The father of my child appears and just like that expects me to uproot to Brittany. Wants to do the right thing, he says.”

  Doing the right thing, my ass.

  She lifted the damp strands of hair from her neck and sighed in disgust. “Then I sleep with him. But he’s got to rush back because of his high-maintenance ex and poor daughter’s fulltime nursing issues.”

  “But I thought you …” René hesitated, choosing his words.

  “Funny thing, René. Melac’s jealous of you.” She rubbed her ankle, wishing she’d had that pedicure last week.

  “Moi?” René blinked.

  “He can’t understand we’re best friends,” she said. “How involved you’ve been with the baby.”

  Was that disappointment on his face?

  “But you were debating leaving the business? Taking time in Brittany?”

  “Like that will ever happen, René.”

&nb
sp; René brightened. “You mean it?”

  “At least about the going to Brittany part,” she said. Going part-time felt more and more appealing as her stomach expanded and tiredness dogged her every worn marble step to her apartment. But she’d never admit it to René. “You’re more interested than him in the baby, René.”

  René smiled. “Of course, Saj and I will helm the ship when you take maternity leave. We’ll have the crib, too.”

  A stab of guilt hit her. The idea she toyed with of selling the business to Florian at Systex, who’d barraged her with offers to merge. Another thing she’d kept from René.

  “… bring the baby to work …” René was saying. But she listened with half an ear as she pulled up her email. Checked for the deposit Saj had requested from the Luxembourg bank wire transfer. Done. Taxes paid. Relief filled her.

  But René was one step ahead of her.

  “Looks like Saj won the hacker competition and lent us a hundred thousand francs for our taxes,” said René, his voice laced with suspicion. “Or maybe you used your hormonal imbalance, welled up in front of the tax adjuster?”

  Not this. Not now. “It’s complicated, René.”

  “I spotted this a kilometer away,” he said, “not that le fisc would. Want to explain how you paid the taxes?”

  Should she tell him?

  “Working here involves me,” he said. “It’s my skin, too, Aimée.”

  So she told him. The mounting feeling that her mother’s clout worked in mysterious ways. How the financial information had all arrived by diplomatic courier pouch—the last one from Dar Es Salaam, around the time Agence France-Presse reported a coup against the dementia-ridden dictator by a well-funded rebel group.

  René’s eyes went round as demi-tasse saucers. “Your mother’s arming rebel insurgents in Africa?”