Murder in the Marais (Aimee Leduc Investigations, No. 1)

by Cara Black

"What kind of soldier? What do you do for him?"

  "What do you care, Lili? Thanks to me you're eating." She tried not to feel ashamed. "Leave it at that."

  Some clods of dirt fell. Panic-stricken, she saw Helmut descend, blocking the weak light. Lili began screaming and backed into the wall. A black-uniformed Helmut smiled quizzically, staring from one to the other. Then he gently put his hand over Lili's mouth, sat her down, and beckoned to Sarah with his finger.

  "It's all right, Lili, he won't hurt you," she mumbled.

  Lili's terror-stricken expression alternated between accusing glances and a dawning recognition of why this Nazi was visiting Sarah. Helmut pulled some fancy tinned salmon out of his pocket and put it in Lili's hands.

  "Ja, ja, take it, s'il vous plaît," and he put his finger over his mouth. "Shhh. . .ca va?"

  His eyes narrowed. Lili's blotchy red face registered both hunger and fear. She opened her fists and gingerly took the tins of salmon without touching his fingers.

  He shrugged. "Sarah," he said, putting his arm around her waist. "Ja, your guest has few manners."

  Her cheeks were on fire. Lili looked jealously at the two of them. She realized Lili viewed them as lovers.

  "Tell him thank you and leave quietly," Sarah said, averting her eyes from Lili's face.

  "Merci," came out of Lili's mouth in a high-pitched squeak. She quickly scrambled up the ladder rungs.

  Helmut asked, "Who is she?"

  Sarah rolled her eyes. "Just my schoolmate, silly and stupid, she wears a yellow star. Don't worry." She pushed Lili's expression out of her mind.

  Helmut looked at his watch. "I just came to say I've something to pick up then I'll be back." He'd traded his shift because he hated leaving her alone at night.

  He pulled out a string of oily bratwurst from his SS kit bag and winked. "Some butcher in Hanover's contribution to the war effort."

  Later he returned with duck terrine marbled in aspic and herbs. They ate while candle wax dripped lazily across the tea box. She tutored him in French after they ate, as she usually did. Her large wool sweater fell off her shoulders as she corrected his verb conjugations with a thick pencil.

  "Très bien, Helmut, good work." She smiled. "Bravo."

  He set the notebook down and pulled her toward him. Unbuttoning his uniform with one hand, he spread the jacket down as a pillow over the dense earth. She grew alarmed and gripped her fingers in the dirt. She'd had no brothers, never even seen her own father without his shirt. Taut muscles spread above Helmut's lean chest, his skin glistened.

  Torn between gratitude and fear, she was paralyzed. Wasn't he looking for her parents? Giving her food? The Nazis who'd supervised the police roundups in her neighborhood hadn't been like him. Helmut was always so funny and generous with food. Under the flickering candlelight he laid her down and her black hair tangled in the storm trooper insignia glinting off his jacket. She went rigid.

  She shook her head. "Non, Helmut."

  Tracing her features with his finger, he cupped her face in his other hand. As he opened his mouth to speak, she winced. She wanted him to stop.

  "Don't worry, Sarah, I won't h-hurt you." He drew close, rubbing her pearl white cheek with his.

  She inhaled his smoky scent as he burrowed his face in her neck. He gently brushed the side of her neck with his lips, his kisses went down the front of her throat.

  Tears welled in her eyes. Why was he doing this? His lips trailed down her navel and waves of heat passed through her. He kissed under her nipple and up the side of her breast, all the time caressing her face. For a long time he stroked the hollows of her cheeks and kissed behind her ears and her eyes, just holding her. She moaned. Now she didn't want him to stop. Finally their shadows entwined and rocked back and forth on the cavern walls of the old Roman catacomb.

  On her way to school the next morning, she thought everyone would notice the straining seams of her school uniform. Too much rich food. But they only noticed the star. She entered the "synagogue," the last Metro car and the only one Jews were allowed to ride in, feeling so tired. She'd only fallen asleep at dawn when Helmut left. In her classroom there was a new teacher and an empty desk. Madame Pagnol was gone. So was Lili.

  TUESDAY

  Tuesday Morning

  AIMÉE WOKE UP AND pulled on a crumpled T-shirt full of Yves's musky smell. He'd gone. Part of her felt angry with herself for jumping in his bed last night. And part of her purred contentedly. A year had passed since Bertrand, her hacker boyfriend, had waffled on his commitment and moved to Silicon Valley.

  She and Yves had spent a lot of time in the tub again. Things had only gotten better. La relation fluide seemed a good term to describe their involvement. She decided to mop up the tiled bathroom.

  Aimee paused to savor the previous night's pleasure. Yellow sunlight streamed from the street-level windows above the bed. Mentally and physically they'd moved in rhythm, which so seldom happened to her. Something felt right about him. Except for his Nazi affiliations.

  There was no way to get around that.

  Her bare leg scraped something and she reached to move it. Her state-of-the-art tape recorder, out of its plastic bag, came back in her hand.

  How long had this been here? She'd been concentrating on the videos and had forgotten this the other night. She must have been drunker than she'd thought. Had Yves noticed? She clicked the play button and the tape started. The tape had definitely been rewound to the beginning.

  Her heart sank. Yves must know she wasn't who she pretended to be. Had he planned on confronting her but got carried away? Had he told the others? If he'd known, why hadn't he told her? What an idiot I am, she thought.

  Disgusted with herself, she bolted from the bed and pulled on her black jeans and jacket. Whatever game he'd been playing, she quit. Perhaps he'd been about to expose her tape recorder and illustrate his loyalty. Lili's mutilated forehead swam before her eyes. All the way to her office, she wondered how she could have been so wrong.

  Tuesday Afternoon

  RENÉ FOLDED THE CORNER of the page and slammed the paperback down as Aimee entered the office.

  "I've got a bank promissory note from Eurocom. Twenty thousand francs," he said.

  Aimee hugged him. "Superbe!" She picked up the book, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, flipping the pages. "You read too much, Rene."

  "Nom de Dieu!" Rene covered his eyes with his short arms. "This is a classic, Aimee. You might pick up some pointers."

  "Pointers?" She snorted. "I thought I got lucky last night. Turns out I couldn't have been more wrong."

  She chewed her Nicorette gum furiously. "Why don't you badger our overdue Lyon account? Explain it to that nice director, face to face. It would be hard to throw you out of the office," she said.

  "Are you trying to get rid of me?" Rene said.

  She threw his Citroën keys at him. "Go on. You love to drive. Just don't kill yourself. And while you're there, get an advance out of him."

  He grinned. On his way out, he looked back over his shoulder. "Where's your protection?"

  She patted the pistol bulging in her silk pants pocket. "Here."

  BY 3:00 P.M., Aimee had obtained permission from Abraham Stein and the other tenants, a clearance from the MCCHB (Marais Citizens' Council of Historic Buildings), a writ of permission from the 4th Arrondissement Supplemental Housing Federation, and the required demolition permit to expose the wooden staircase. Having a search warrant from Morbier certainly had expedited the process. He was grumbling because he couldn't smoke. Luminol was highly flammable.

  "Where the hell is that crowbar, Leduc?" he said.

  But she couldn't hear. Inside the tent in the darkened courtyard of the Steins' apartment on rue des Rosiers, Aimee and Serge, the middle-aged, bearded criminologist, were busy. Wearing fluorescent Day-Glo jumpsuits to avoid the chemical's being absorbed into their skin, they sprayed Luminol on the old oak boards exposed in the courtyard by the sink. Luminol showed blood and its tra
ces on any porous surface. Despite whatever had been painted or scrubbed over it, traces of blood would remain.

  "An unsolved homicide fifty years ago and you think you'll find the murderer's footprints?" Serge's voice was muffled through his mask. "Seven years is the outside edge, maximum has been shown at eleven years. Why do you think it'll show traces?"

  "If it's worked on a seven-year-old stain, why couldn't it work on a fifty-year-old one as well?" she said. "No one has ever proved it wouldn't."

  Her arguments for using Luminol had been predicated on that assumption. But now she wondered if it would work. And what if it didn't?

  She went outside the tent to look for Morbier and came face to face with a camera crew. Immediately, the bright lights glared on her.

  Reporters shouted, "Are you with the Brigade Criminelle? What do you hope to uncover?"

  Her jumpsuit was already causing her to sweat as if she was in a sauna. The lights made it worse.

  "Official crime recovery scene. Press is not allowed," she said. She whistled to a blue-uniformed flic, who approached the camera crew.

  She hadn't counted on this Luminol test to go public. Wouldn't the killer become suspicious if there was a connection between the two murders?

  Her silence would be the killer's objective. She filed that disturbing thought away. If this caused the rat to surface, all the better, she told herself.

  Back inside the tent, she put on another pair of booties to avoid contamination, and began taping everything with a lowlight-sensor camera. Serge sprayed Luminol on the cobblestones in the courtyard and on the old concrete around the sink to see if anything would show. He continued spraying as he backed away from the old boards in the light well and slowly retreated up the stairs. He saturated the original wood steps, all the way along the wooden planks that stretched to the Steins' door.

  He yelled down at Aimee, "Get Morbier. If it's gonna work, and I said IF, there should be a light show in three minutes."

  Aimee knew the wood should show blood traces in cracks or fissures and hoped that the concrete and stones over it had protected and preserved any remaining evidence. Well, they would find out. After five years, the blood couldn't be typed, but that didn't matter to her. That wasn't what she was looking for.

  Morbier entered the tent, letting in a wide slice of light.

  "Hurry up," Serge shouted, pausing at the Steins' door. He couldn't move until the Luminol took.

  If it did.

  "Secure the panel from the outside," Morbier shouted as he fumbled blindly with his Day-Glo booties.

  Inside the tent it was pitch dark.

  "Jesus, Leduc, this had better work. My ass is in a harness here. We've blocked off half the street, relocated these tenants courtesy of the Parisian taxpayers, who are as tight as ticks, there's some idiot from the 4th arrondissement who thinks we're making a science-fiction movie and tells the press. On top of all that, Agronski, some sharp-eyed inspector from Brigade Criminelle, came because he told me he 'just loves Luminol.'"

  "Keep going, Morbier, I'm getting everything you say on tape even if I can't see you," Aimee told him.

  He was fuming now. "Leduc, I told you. . .Aaah!"

  Aimee shone the portable LumaLite as she and Serge chorused, "Fireworks!"

  The Luminol glowed, displaying a fluorescent scene of fifty-year-old carnage.

  "Oh my God," she said into the camera, which was catching every streak and splatter of blood. Javel had been right. Blood was everywhere. Arcs sprayed up the light well and a jagged stream snaked to the drain and disappeared. Luminol lasted less than a minute but she captured it all on video.

  "It's unbelievable!" Serge inched his way down the stairs beside the trail of bloody footprints. "Blood preserved under concrete and stone for fifty years. I'll get into police bulletins all over the world!" he said.

  "Let's spray the staircase again," she said grimly.

  She prepared her ruler and laid it quickly next to a pair of footprints that fluorescently appeared. The prints led up the stairs and measured nine centimeters. Something else of a muted color was mixed in with the blood.

  "Tissue or organ probably; this area has been remarkably protected," Serge said.

  She looked up at Lili's dirty windowpane above them. Aimee figured it had been quick, brutal, and more messy than even the Luminol showed. Her fast take, from the angle of the arc of the blood spray, indicated an attack from above the victim. Footprints walked out of the light well. They resembled a solid shoe, like boots with splayed heels, worn on one edge as if the wearer was slightly pigeon-toed. The ball of the foot was more pronounced and they stopped at the troughlike concrete sink. Smudged bloodstains were on the chipped concrete. It was creepy to think that she'd walked over this. No one had lived in the concierge's rooms for years; now she realized why they'd been abandoned.

  Morbier stood next to Aimee.

  "Two tracks." She pointed the camera at a path of footprints. "A small person and a slightly larger one." She peered down at the sink, examining it with her magnifying glass. "The smaller ones must be Lili's but whose are the other ones?"

  They stopped.

  Another set of footprints led out from the light well to the sink and stopped.

  Smeared blood and a fine spray of droplets in the sink had been absorbed by the porous stones and concrete. She peered at the cracked porcelain knobs on the faucet.

  "Little bit here, when he turned the water on. He even had time to wash his shoes before going into the street," she said. "Or were they boots?"

  She felt like she was right next to the murderer. Agonizingly close, but so far away. Fifty years too far. What could she prove?

  HOURS LATER, when the criminologist had finished his job and Inspector Agronski was so suitably impressed that he invited Morbier to supper, Aimee still couldn't leave.

  She kept retracing the area where the footsteps had appeared next to the smaller ones, trying to figure out what the murderer had been thinking. Then she carefully mounted the stairs.

  She tried imagining herself as the scared sixteen-year-old Lili Stein. A young Jewish girl, her family gone, living alone and dependent on the concierge. A concierge who, according to Javel, had been dangerously involved in the black market.

  "All recorded now, Leduc," Serge was saying. "I'm packed up, the plasterers are ready to come in, time to go." He tapped his heel impatiently. "This is union time we're talking about here, Leduc."

  Aimee was still not satisfied. "I need one more look. I'll meet you on rue des Rosiers."

  The plasterers, in white-caked coveralls, waited, grumbling, in the courtyard. The Steins' building was getting a reconstructive face-lift long overdue and major renovation, courtesy of the city of Paris and the 4th arrondissement. Records showed that the most recent construction had been done in 1795. She figured it would be that long again before another renovation.

  She had the nagging feeling she was missing something, something that was crying out to her but she couldn't get it. The high-pitched "beep beep beep" of the plasterers' van was deafening as it backed into the courtyard and almost drove over her toe.

  "Hey, watch out!" Frustrated, she kicked at the bumper, pounding the metal.

  That's when she realized the one place she hadn't looked. The one place a killer would pause, maybe grip the sink, to wash his hands. Wash the blood off his hands.

  She ran back into the courtyard and crawled under the sink. Sharp cobblestones dug into her sore shoulder, mildew assailed her nostrils. Shining her flashlight in every crevice and knobby ridge, she strained to reach as far as she could, lying on her back. Then she saw it.

  "Get your Luminol out again, Serge. Tent and cover the sink. See the very faint ridges of a fingerprint in the crack?" she said. "This fingerprint will shine up nicely when you've done your stuff. I've got him!"

  Tuesday Late Afternoon

  RENÉ BUMPED THE CITROËN over the narrow gutter lining rue des Rosiers.

  "I thought you were in Ly
on," she said, surprised.

  "Get in, Aimee," he said.

  Rene's Citroën was customized for his short legs and arms, allowing him to clutch, shift, and zoom like any other speed demon in Paris. And did he ever. The car was adjustable, so Aimee could manipulate the levers to fold her five-foot, eight-inch frame into the marshmallowy interior.

  "I got him, Rene, I knew the answer was here," she said. "Now I just have to figure out who he is or was." Her eyes shone brightly and her cheeks were flushed. "I took a Polaroid of the fingerprint. At the office I'll magnify and scan it into the computer."

  "How does this involve Lili Stein?" Rene asked as they roared around the curb into another medieval one-way street.

  "I'm working on that," she said. "I'll find it."

  "You and Morbier are stars on the evening news. Not worried about undercover anymore, Leduc?" he said.

  "The press weren't there at my invitation, Rene, I tried to stay away from the cameras."

  "Cut the defensiveness, Aimee. I saw your feet in those fluorescent little booties on France 2," he said. "That Luminol might illuminate things you hadn't bargained on. Stay at my place."

  She rubbed her hands at the memory of Herve Vitold's scissor-like grip.

  "When was the last time you cleaned it up? I'm not a snob, Rene, but certain standards of hygiene need to be maintained."

  "Haven't you considered someone doesn't want this Pandora's box opened?"

  Vitold had made that loud and clear.

  "That's why it has to be opened," she said.

  Several horns blared as his Citroën swerved into the oncoming lane of traffic. Grudgingly, she took the spare key to his flat.

  Rene let her off on the corner of rue de Rivoli. "Miles Davis is upstairs." She bounded up the stairs of her office building, anxious to log into FRAPOL 1, the police system, and search for a match with the Luminol fingerprint.

  The muffled bark of Miles Davis didn't sound right as she ran up the last flight of stairs. And the frosted-glass door of her office stood slightly ajar, so she couldn't put her uneasy feeling down to intuition. Rene would never leave the door like that. Someone had been inside and today wasn't the cleaner's day. Instead of entering, she kept on climbing to the next flight. Éditions Photogravure Lapousse had its door open and she could hear the click of computer keys.