AL05 - Murder in Clichy al-5

by Cara Black

He heard honking. And there she was, jumping out of a taxi and running toward him.

  For once in his life the earth and stars aligned: He’d done something he never thought he could do, and with arms opened wide she was running to him.

  Somehow he walked, he didn’t know how.

  “René!” Tears spilled from her eyes as she grabbed him.

  “What took you so long, Aimée?” he said.

  Thursday Afternoon

  GASSOT, PICQ, AND PORTLY Nemours sat in the back of the Laboratoire de Prothèse Dentaire in Passage Geffroy-Didelot, Picq’s nephew’s denture-making shop. Acrid adhesive smells and sounds of running water came from the front.

  “We’ve taken the matter into our own hands,” Picq said.

  Gassot hoped his comrades hadn’t done anything stupid yet, but it sounded like they already had.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Gassot said. “Let’s wait and see.”

  “We didn’t discover anything in the art gallery,” Picq interrupted.

  “What do you mean?” Gassot asked, alarmed “Too cautious, as always, Gassot,” Picq said. “And considering your softness toward natives, dogs, and small children, well, we took care of business.”

  Fools. “You broke into the gallery? Thank your stars you weren’t caught. Did the woman tell you anything?”

  Gassot couldn’t fathom Picq’s steel-blue gaze.

  “We’d have told you,” Picq said.

  They hadn’t told him about anything else.

  “What about Tran?”

  “He’s going to the maison,” Gassot said.

  “It’s time for action!”

  Gassot expelled a breath of disgust and shook his head. “Always the hothead, aren’t you? It’s folly.”

  The telephone rang.

  Picq leaned over the counter next to a sealing machine. His frizzy white hair poked out from his cap. He was there to answer the telephone for his nephew, who’d gone to lunch.

  “Oui, allô?” he said. “The dentures are ready for you, monsieur.”

  He hung up and turned back to them. “The Castorama store off Passage de Clichy had everything we needed,” Picq said. “Fertilizer, plastic plumbers’ pipe,” he said, tapping the counter. “All under here. No one suspects us, even though it’s what they watch for now. Don’t you read the papers?”

  Gassot read the PMU racing forms when he got his monthly pension, but that was it. He shrugged, “Et après?”

  “We now have everything we need to make a simple pipe bomb,” Picq said.

  “I don’t like it. C’est fou. We want the jade in one piece!” Gassot said.

  His comrades had always preferred action to planning. Nothing had changed since Indochina.

  “We have to open the safe in the house,” Picq said. “I was in the demolition unit, remember? I can do this with my eyes closed.”

  “Never.” Gassot stood up. “If the jade’s in there, you’ll ruin it. I won’t have anything to do with this crazy scheme.”

  A buzzer went off.

  “Calm down,” Picq said, “I can coax a newborn from a ton of steel. Tran’s in place, right? He lets us into the house and then—”

  “But we don’t know the jade’s in there,” Gassot interrupted.

  Nemours waved Gassot’s remark aside. “Where else, eh?”

  Picq switched on an industrial dryer for enamelware and slid in a small tray of gleaming teeth. An even heat emanated from it, warming the back of the lab. Comfortable and safe.

  But Gassot shuddered. It reminded him of the false teeth of an old Vietnamese woman at Dien Bien Phu. Her grandson had been caught in a tunnel with French rations. The fire bombing had left her burnt and naked. “Ivory,” she’d said pulling the teeth out and offering them, since she’d had nothing else to barter.

  The corporal had shot the old woman and her grandson anyway. The next day the elite Parachute troops found out they’d been innocent. Years later he’d seen the photo of the Vietnamese girl burnt with napalm with the same expression on her face.

  Gassot knew he had to reason them out of this.

  “Listen, Picq, it’s just a feeling but I think they stashed the jade in a safe place, somewhere. After the old man died, Thadée must have discovered it.”

  “Stands to reason,” Nemours said. “According to Albert, he talked big, but he didn’t deliver.”

  “You think he was killed because he didn’t hand over the jade?” Gassot said. “But that makes no sense. He was the key, the connection.”

  “You don’t kill a connection,” Picq said. “You kill a failure.”

  So why did this ring false, Gassot wondered.

  “Instead of blowing up the man’s safe, we should be searching for Albert’s killer, and the jade.”

  “And you think we’re not? At least, you concede Albert was murdered?”

  Gassot pulled the folded napkin out of his pocket. Showed them the threat scribbled on it: “We’re going to roll your pants leg up, too.”

  Nemours’s face paled. “It’s all connected. Ever since we found out the jade’s in France—”

  “Since it’s in the wrong hands, bad luck has followed it,” Gassot said.

  Picq and Nemours exchanged a look.

  “You’re not going native on us again, eh?”

  Gassot’s eyes flashed. “Remember the officers, they ate the best . . .”

  “And we ate the rest,” finished Picq.

  Gassot walked toward the glassed-in front of the shop, wondering what more he could say to persuade his comrades to hold back. If they lay low they would be led right to it—and avoid whoever meant to kill them.

  He pushed away the thoughts of Bao that crowded his mind. More and more he wondered about Bao. The idealist with soft rounded cheeks, who pared the skin off a mango in deft strokes. Bao, whose laugh had sounded like warm rain.

  Gassot stiffened as a uniformed policeman and plainclothes flic entered the shop. “We’re looking for Monsieur Picq. We have some questions,” said a flic in a windbreaker, pulling out a search warrant. “Concerning some recent purchases he made at Castorama.”

  Gassot shivered. “I’m just a customer,” he said, trying to control the shaking in his voice. “Monsieur Picq’s back there.”

  And with that, Gassot opened the door and slid into the narrow passage.

  Thursday Early Evening

  “WE’RE STAYING IN A hotel,” Aimée said as she cleaned René’s bloodied hands with disinfectant. The taxi pulled up on rue Sauffroy in front of Kinshasa Coiffure, its windows covered with pictures of women with braided cornrows and Afros. HÔTEL BONHEUR read an old sign by a window of the second-story building. Smells of fish and coconut mingled in the dusk.

  “Here?” René asked.

  She tipped the taxi driver.

  “Always four star with you, Aimée,” he said.

  “There’s an elevator and plenty of electrical outlets. I’ll get your car and park it in back, if you want.”

  “Don’t you think we’ll stick out?” he said, observing the African women in bright scarves on the street.

  “No one will think of looking for us in the African music center of Paris,” she said. “And the owner owes my cousin Sebastian a favor.”

  “But we’re still in Clichy.”

  “That’s why it’s perfect. Did you see the faces of the men who were holding you? Could you recognize them?”

  He nodded. “One heavy-set with red hair, the other lean with a ponytail.”

  Like the RG men who had been on the quai outside her apartment.

  “What happened, René?”

  He rubbed his neck. “They threw a net over me on the office stairs, then put a choke hold on my throat. A carotid sleeper special!”

  René reached in his pocket and winced. “Does this help?” he said, pulling out the notebook.

  “I’m proud of you, partner,” she said, scanning the pages.

  One had writing on it, with a phone number. Regnier’s number.


  “This confirms it,” she said. “Regnier, the suspended RG mec, kidnapped you to make sure I handed over the jade. How’s your hip?”

  “I’ve felt worse.” Though he couldn’t remember when. With an effort, he tried not to limp.

  The hotel room’s furniture—two beds, an angular leopard-skin couch and 1960s Formica end tables—seemed out of place under the tall ceilings and ornate nineteenth-century scrollwork moldings. Lemon verbena scents came from the bathroom. She took out her laptop and hooked it up.

  “Saj will bring laptops from the office and we’ll work from here. That’s if the doctor gives you the OK.”

  “I don’t need a doctor,” he said. “I just need to lie down, and to bandage my wrists. What about Miles Davis?”

  “He’s on holiday at the groomer’s. Loves it, according to the groomer.”

  “Is Guy coming?”

  She turned away.

  “What’s the matter, Aimée?”

  “Time to talk about that later. There’s something more important.”

  René’s brow furrowed. She reached for the box of gauze bandages. She wasn’t very good at this but she had to say it. “I know I’m not the easiest person to work with René. But I can’t see myself anywhere but Leduc Detective. And you’re part of that. I do know that with your skills, you could go anywhere. Maybe you’ve received other offers. Was that what you meant the other day?”

  An odd look crossed René’s face.

  “Are you in pain?” she asked. Or was he afraid to tell her he was leaving?

  “You’re my family, René, but I don’t want to stand in your way. I’ll try and talk you out of it, because I’m selfish. But I will respect whatever . . .”

  “Did I say anything like that?” René asked.

  She shook her head. “But I thought. . . .”

  “I’d appreciate a raise when we’re solvent again,” he said, as Aimée bandaged his wrists.

  “Consider it done,” she grinned. She took a deep breath.

  “At this rate I’m going to have to put your name on the door.”

  He looked away but not before she saw a small smile on his face.

  “In the meantime, what I can’t figure out is why didn’t they call you again,” René said, “or make more demands.”

  Was he trying to change the subject? But he’d made a good point. “True, Regnier was waiting for me to find the jade, or else Gassot.” She stood up. “And I haven’t found either. Not yet.”

  She looked out the window to the wet street below. No sign of Regnier or anyone tailing her. The orange-pink neon of Kinshasa Coiffure reflected on the windows opposite. From the resto below, came the beat of the music of Papa Wemba, the King of Congolese Rhumba Rock.

  “I have to find out why Olf wants me to monitor the Chinese and British oil bids,” she said. “You’ll have to help me.”

  “Oil bids?

  René put his feet up on the bed, laid back. His eyes looked heavy.

  “And how the jade’s involved with oil. This smelled from the beginning and it’s reeking now.”

  But she spoke to a sleeping René.

  Friday Morning

  “FIND ANYTHING INTERESTING, LARS? ” Aimée asked over the phone. She hoped he’d thaw out and pass on more concrete details about the so-called Circle Line.

  “That’s some pudding you’re looking into,” he said, then placed his hand over the phone to muffle some background noise.

  “Count on me to stir the lumps in the pudding,” she said.

  The sounds of furniture scraping on the floor, then a loud squeak came over the line. “Sorry, we’re moving out the file cabinets. Rumor has it our office has its new coat of paint and they’re shoveling us upstairs. Room 20.”

  It was an old signal he used when other ears were listening in. Good thing she hadn’t mentioned Pleyet’s name.

  “Can you make some time to have a coffee with me?”

  “We’re worked off our feet. Call me next week; we’ll meet at the nice place under the horse chestnuts.”

  He rang off.

  If she hurried she’d make it to the café on Place Dauphine by the roasted chestnut stand in twenty minutes.

  She crossed rue de Rivoli, passed the Louvre’s imposing Cour Carrée, raced down the small street behind the Art Deco Samaritaine department store, and hurried across the Pont Neuf. The wind whipped at her coat but her vision was crystal clear.

  Figures in overcoats, bent against the wind, formed a dark stream across the bridge. The words of Hubert Juin’s poem about the Pont Neuf came to her:

  I remember those I had no chance to know, the pavement still mumbles . . . the river Seine swirling near the Pont Neuf, Baudelaire slowly goes by, and Verlaine is smiling. Through the sleeping city, passes history.

  Shaped like a ship, the back end of île de la Cité held the Jewish Memorial to the Deported. Aimée turned left into place Dauphine, a triangular-shaped tree-lined oasis. Once the orchard of the king, it was surrounded by the two arms of the Seine. Sixteenth century construction of the Pont Neuf had joined the island and several small îlots to the city.

  Now, the place Dauphine backed up to the king’s old palace, the present site of the courts of the Palais de Justice and the Conciergerie prison, now a museum, with Marie Antoinette’s cell as stark and damp as she’d left it.

  Aimée pushed past the rattan café chairs. She was startled to see Morbier, wearing an old raincoat, under the canvas awning against the wall. He was reading a newspaper. She sucked in her lower lip. Coincidence? She doubted it.

  Flics didn’t patronize this place; it attracted residents—such as Simone Signoret and Yves Montand who had lived in the neighborhood and other patrons who could afford the pricey menu. An occasional judge or prosecutor perhaps. But her godfather?

  “Right on time,” Morbier said, setting down the paper, keeping the rainhat’s brim lowered over his face. “Another fine mess you’ve got me into.”

  “What brings you here, Morbier?” she asked, keeping her tone steady.

  “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”

  “Mademoiselle?” a waiter asked.

  She turned. “An espresso, s’il vous plaît.”

  Morbier puffed on a short, fat cigarillo. Clouds of acrid smoke rose.

  “Where’s Lars?” she asked him.

  “Grow up, Leduc. Time to get out of the sandbox.”

  Did he know she’d fallen into one yesterday? Why was he here in place of Lars? A ring of intrigue surrounded her and she still knew nothing.

  “You’re old enough to know better,” Morbier went on.

  “And young enough to still do it,” she said. “So you’re in league with the Ministry now, Morbier?” She shook her head in disgust. “And you call yourself a socialist?” He might as well take off the socialist party pin in his lapel and grind it in the gravel.

  “Leduc, in case you forgot, we have a socialist government. First you drop off this charming woman for me to guard, then use my code to find an address from a phone number,” he said, with irritation. “Now you’re badgering Lars to access security clearance files. Of course, it tripped off an inquiry. Forced us both into some pretty lies.”

  This was deep. She felt it in her bones.

  “Lars knows the muddy Ministry waters. He navigates well, always has,” she said, reaching for a tissue and wiping beads of rain from her bag. “Inquiry into what?”

  “Files requiring special clearance,” he said. “And you know that could mean anything—from the chief’s girlfriend’s flat rental, to his expense account for a lost weekend in Bordeaux.”

  Morbier seemed intent on passing this inquiry off as trivial. Was it?

  “Since when do you cozy up to Lars?”

  Morbier leaned forward. “His old man, your father, and I, were colleagues. Or did you forget that, too?”

  Of course she hadn’t; she remembered his famous Sunday pot-au-feu lunches. “It bothers me that a man was shot ne
xt to me, died in my arms, and you let his ex-wife leave the country.”

  “Murder and thugs near Place de Clichy, druggies disposing of each other! It illustrates the law of natural selection. Those aren’t my problems! Or yours.”

  ”I remember the thirteen-year-old with tracks on her arm who washed up in your part of the Seine: Then it was your business! You wouldn’t let go of that case.”

  “Still can’t,” Morbier said. “Key point, Leduc, my part of the Seine. Clichy’s landlocked. They can keep their trash there. Plenty to go round.”

  Compartmentalize. Good flics did that. Kept their minds on the business at hand. Yet, she felt there was a lot he wasn’t saying.

  “You got here fast.”

  “Group R’s office is next to Lars’s”

  “You’ve never told me what your group handles.”

  “Need to know basis, Leduc.”

  “Bon.” She smoothed down her black pencil skirt. Rain pattered on the cobbles. “Pleyet’s name came up as part of the Circle Line surveillance and I saw him at the jade museum. How does it tie together? Well, I’m all ears.”

  Silence. Except for the rain pattering on the café awning and the bark of a dog.

  “Morbier, I know Pleyet’s not in the traffic division.”

  “Leduc, people like him, you don’t want to know,” he said.

  True. His hawklike eyes and Special Ops aura were chilling.

  “I’m not looking for a date,” she said. “Just the truth.”

  Morbier stood, shuffled in his pocket, then threw some francs on the round table just as Aimée’s espresso arrived.

  “Article 4 of Code de la Police,” he said. “ ‘By the procedural code, police missions are placed under the authority of the Ministry of Interior.’ ”

  Morbier quoting police procedure?

  “So you’re saying Pleyet’s with the Ministry of Interior? Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know anything.” Morbier bent over and clutched the table. Was that a grimace of pain as he pulled his rainhat down?

  “Ça va, Morbier?” she asked, alarmed. She stood, took his arm, and rubbed his back.

  But when he straightened up, she saw a lopsided grin on his face. “Didn’t want to make eye contact with la Proc’. She’s a ball-breaker that one. Always on my case.”