Murder in the Latin Quarter

by Cara Black

  Still, it didn’t explain his death.

  She made her way out of the storeroom and to the dim, musty older gallery, ringed by a walkway halfway up the walls that gave access to wooden drawers. If only her lockpicking kit hadn’t disappeared with her bag! She passed an old glass case with bone fragments labeled “Rhino pectorus, Euphrates Valley”; then she saw a screwdriver.

  Back at Huby’s office door, she jimmied the lock. She jiggled the screwdriver until she heard the lock tumble, held her breath, and tugged. She worked the screwdriver handle up and down with her shoulder, pushing the door, which finally gave way, ripping her jacket as she stumbled inside a dark office filled with file cabinets and a desk piled with papers.

  She switched on the light and saw a file on the desk. It was stamped RESEARCH GRANT DENIED, dated Wednesday.

  Had Huby counted on using Benoît’s work in hopes of obtaining a research grant? Maybe the test tubes hadn’t arrived in time, so his research grant had been denied. She opened the file, flipping the pages in the folder, but the subject was bovine studies and BSE, as it was in each of the next three folders she thumbed through.

  It didn’t connect. If Huby had had no personal interest in Benoît’s discovery, he’d had no reason to murder him.

  She turned off the light and closed the door. She had to take Benoît’s test tubes before the staff returned.

  She walked down the long corridor, made a left, and reentered the lab. Back in the storeroom, she opened the refrigerator door and slipped several tubes into her jacket pocket.

  Hearing an unexpected sound, Aimée straightened up to see Dr. Severat, the anatomy research doctor, a brown-stained apron over her white lab coat.

  “Nom de Dieu,” Aimée gasped. “You gave me a fright!”

  “But what are you doing here, Mademoiselle?”

  Aimée’s eyes traveled from the door to the test tubes in Dr. Severat’s latex-gloved hands. Something was fishy here.

  “I could ask you that, Dr. Severat,” she said. “Don’t you work in the next building?”

  “Excuse me?” The woman adjusted the volume on the flesh-colored plug in her ear.

  Dr. Severat’s blond hair, silhouetted against the yellow storeroom light, formed a halo. Aimée noticed her frown, her flushed cheeks. An open plastic container of bleach and a few ammonia containers stood on the floor.

  “I don’t understand,” Dr. Severat went on. “You don’t work in Dr. Rady’s department: I checked. Who are you?”

  “Aimée Leduc. But—”

  “You’re snooping. Like the others.”

  Aimée began to perspire. The air was close and stale, and the bleach reeked.

  “Why are you taking Professeur Benoît’s test tubes?” Aimée asked.

  Dr. Severat backed up. “You’re mistaken. I’m doing control. All equipment must meet rigorous standards. We run a clean lab. Sterile.”

  “I thought you worked in a different department.”

  “Professeur Benoît’s materials do not belong here,” Severat said.

  Protecting his work? Aimée didn’t think so. Seeing the tubes in Dr. Severat’s hands was adding to her uneasiness.

  Aimée backed up against the wall and crab-walked her fingers up the fissures until she felt the protruding intercom. Grabbing a bit of braid hanging from her denim jacket, she pressed one of the buttons and lodged the braid to loop around it and keep it in the transmit mode. With luck, one of the workers would have returned and would overhear them.

  “The Hydrolis logo on those tubes in the refrigerator matches those from Haiti.” Aimée pointed to the triangle. But the tube Dr. Severat held contained pinkish tissue. “I think you’re liquidating Professeur Benoît’s tissue samples, destroying the evidence.”

  Dr. Severat’s mouth twitched.

  “Like you destroyed Huby,” Aimée said. “You pushed him from the window because he’d figured it out.”

  “Me? I’m a scientist.”

  No surprise or curiosity. And she hadn’t denied the charges.

  Aimée had to keep her talking, hoping someone would hear. Perspiration dampened her shoulder blades; the jacket clung to her skin. Her bag with her Swiss Army knife was gone. Her only evidence was the tubes in her pocket.

  “After you lost your hearing aid, it took you some time to adjust to a new one, non?” Aimée asked.

  “This is my old one. The stupid cords get in my. . . .” Dr. Severat stopped and stared at Aimée. “What do you mean?”

  “The cellist remembers seeing you with Professeur Benoît at the Cluny concert on Monday,” Aimée said. “That’s why I came here. To ask you why you neglected to inform the authorities.”

  “About attending a concert with my lover? But that’s my private life.”

  “And then you murdered him. That was not ‘private.’”

  “I tried to make Azacca understand,” Dr. Severat said.

  She blocked the lab door. Aimée’s pulse raced.

  “How much did Castaing pay you, Dr. Severat?”

  “Pay me?” Her voice rose in surprise. “But why would he—?”

  “These tubes contain pig tissue tainted with lead and mercury, the proof that Hydrolis is supplying toxic water in Haiti,” she said. “You’re destroying these for Castaing. He counts on World Bank funding to keep Hydrolis running in order to continue to exploit the poorest country in the world.”

  “You’re talking politics,” Dr. Severat said coolly. “Not my metier.”

  “Politics?” Aimée said. Her eye caught on a double door at the rear of the long-narrow storeroom. The ammonia odor from the plastic jugs stung Aimée’s nose. “What I know of politics could be wrapped around my little finger. But Benoît’s evidence of lead and mercury would set off fireworks.

  “As you’re a scientist,” she continued, “you know how much his research mattered to Benoît. Why, you told me your-self that it meant everything to him. For Haiti. A greater good, more important than—”

  “Us,” Severat interrupted.

  The word chilled Aimée. Dr. Severat kicked the door closed behind her. The old wooden shelves rattled. The only light came from the bare hanging bulb. Shadows flickered over the fissured walls. Aimée stepped back.

  The small intercom light blinked green. Weren’t the workers back? Hadn’t they heard? Where was the building’s security?

  “So you’re destroying the evidence,” Aimée said. She tried to keep her voice level. She had to keep this woman talking. “Like you destroyed Benoît and Huby.”

  “Trust you to make it sound pathetic,” Dr. Severat said. “That story, how you were down and out, dependent on Dr. Rady . . . I believed it.”

  “Did you argue with Benoît after the concert?” Aimée prodded. “Was that it?”

  “Look at me when you talk.” Dr. Severat stepped under the hanging bulb. Her mouth pursed. An intermittent buzz issued from the hearing aid.

  “All our plans . . . together at last, the new apartment finally, yet I meant nothing to him,” she said, a catch in her voice. “He’d been seeing another woman. A woman consumed by the ‘cause’ they shared, he said. He was waiting for these ‘important’ samples; they would change everything. After the concert, he showed me his plane ticket to Haiti.” A sob escaped her.

  Benoît had spurned her.

  “You loved him, I understand,” Aimée said, moving toward the door, desperate to get out of this old storeroom. “Men! They never get it, do they? What a relationship means to us, how they get under our skin.”

  “And that Haitian slut, all he could talk about was how he had to help her.” A look that could cut steel shone in her eyes. Her gaze rested somewhere in the distance. “She lied about me. I saw her.”

  “That’s right, you read lips,” Aimée said. “But they spoke Kreyòl. You couldn’t understand that. Mireille didn’t murder Benoît. But you told the flics they’d quarreled to implicate her.”

  “He made a pass at her. She was the one he trusted, that slut,�
� she said, tears brimming in her eyes. ”Why couldn’t he trust me?”

  “He hurt you.”

  “Azacca? Hurt me?” She shook her head, a tear trailing down her cheek. “No one ever made me feel the way he did. I didn’t have to prove myself to him like I do here every day to keep my position. I thought you, of all people, would under-stand.” She gave a short laugh. “Ten years in the lab, and I’m still under contract. Not like the others with tenure for life. Would they do that to a man?”

  Aimée gestured to a wood carton. “You’re trembling. Sit down.”

  Dr. Severat sat, still clutching a test tube. “With Azacca I could just be a woman,” she said, her voice ragged.

  Aimée could almost touch the light switch on the wall above her. If she could just inch closer and switch the light off, she could make a break for the other door. Her foot struck a cobweb-covered bottle near the bleach container.

  “Maybe you didn’t mean to kill him,” Aimée said, her tone soothing. “But after he was dead, you recalled that Benoît had survived Duvalier’s rule; he had spoken of the terror the ton-ton macoutes spread through the countryside and in his village. So you tried to make his death look like a tonton macoute reprisal. For you, it was easy: you’re an anatomy expert. But with that circle of salt, you made a mistake.”

  “Do you think I got to my position by making mistakes?” Her eyes flashed. The woman’s moods seesawed from moment to moment. “I don’t make mistakes,” she insisted.

  But she had. Frantically, Aimée’s fingers traveled higher on the cracked wall.

  “He hurt you to the core, I understand,” Aimée said. “You’d believed him. But he’d lied to you.”

  “It took all my savings to buy the apartment and furnish it with the things he liked,” she said. “Then I took out a loan to pay for our honeymoon cruise. But he pulled away—”

  “You couldn’t have that, could you?” Aimée agreed. “Yet the guard, why kill him?”

  “That meddling fool saw me leave the gatehouse!” Dr. Severat exclaimed. She sighed. “And Huby, who couldn’t get a grant to save his life, hid Azacca’s work.”

  Aimée remembered Severat’s damp hair, her dripping raincoat when they met in the ENS lobby not twenty minutes after she’d found Huby’s body. “So you shoved him from the window—”

  “I couldn’t have him discovering Benoît’s results.”

  “It would raise questions?” Aimée asked. “Eyes might focus on the lab. Or you.”

  “I located these tubes myself,” she said as if Aimée hadn’t spoken. Another little sigh. “You know the saying: give a job to a busy person if you want it to get done.”

  The muffled honk of a horn came from the back of the building. The lab workers, at last. Aimée hit the light switch, plunging the storeroom into darkness. Aimed for the door and kicked it open. And ran out.

  The dim gallery shone in ghost-like light. Dissection instruments and bones littered the long tables. Sprinting forward, her heel caught in a wood slat. And she was falling.

  Not now . . . she couldn’t . . . she had to reach the. . . .

  She stumbled into the glass-fronted wooden cabinets, knocked down the mounted human skeleton. The cabinet crashed, shattering glass. Yellowed bones cracked and skittered across the floor. She reached to pull herself up, but she was wedged between the fallen cabinet and the wall. A rip-ping sound filled her ears. And then her ankles were grabbed and duct tape wrapped around them, tight.

  Dr. Severat shook her head. Shrugged. “Whenever people agree with me, I feel I must be wrong.” Her voice sounded re-moved, vacant. “Oscar Wilde said that, but don’t you agree?”

  Aimée had been caught and trussed like a pig. Her hands scrabbled over the floor. Her fingers came back bleeding, grip-ping shards of glass and bone slivers.

  “What are you doing? The lab workers—”

  “Never enter this area at night,” Dr. Severat interrupted. “Let’s see.” Dr. Severat tapped her finger on her chin, glancing over the long table as if checking out items in a store display. “I think I’ll use these surgical bone-cutting pliers first.” She pointed to a pair of long steel pliers glinting in the light. “I can render you unconscious later.”

  “Stop . . . you’re crazy!”

  “Shhh!” Dr. Severat knelt, holding the pliers mere centimeters from Aimée’s bound ankles.

  So close, she could have spit in her face.

  “Don’t move, please. Just cooperate. Otherwise, if I make a jagged cut through tendons, muscles, and bone, the pain will be excruciating.”

  “Cooperate?”

  Aimée jabbed the pointed glass shards she held straight into Severat’s palm. Severat gasped in pain, her grip loosened, and she fell sideways. Aimée sawed at the duct tape lacing her ankles, frantically trying to break free.

  Then hands, sticky with blood, gripped her throat, choking her from behind. She couldn’t breathe.

  Summoning her last bit of strength, she dropped the glass pieces and jabbed her elbows back as hard as she could.

  Severat sprawled against the lab counter, moaning, clutching her ribs.

  Aimée struggled to pull herself up with her ankles bound. She grabbed the wires of Severat’s hearing aid and knotted them around Severat’s wrists. For the moment it would do.

  Severat struggled, her eyes wild. “I can’t hear!”

  “You’re big on cooperation. Try it,” Aimée said. With the bone pliers she cut through the duct tape around her ankles. She bit her lip as she tore the tape from her skin. Ripping part of Dr. Severat’s apron into strips, she staunched the wound in Severat’s hand, then passed them around Severat’s ankles and tied them across her quivering mouth. That done, Aimée applied a strip to her own fingers to stop their bleeding.

  She took the test tube and the cell phone from her pocket.

  “What’s the matter with Dr. Severat?” A worker in a blue workcoat stood open-mouthed at the door. The sound of the van’s diesel engine came from outside.

  Aimée’s legs shook. Blood trickled from her fingers.

  “Didn’t you hear the intercom?”

  The man ran to the prone woman. “Dr. Severat’s bleeding.”

  “She’s probably broken a rib, maybe two.”

  “I don’t understand.” The man’s breath stank of beer. He reached for the wall-mounted phone. “Who are you?”

  Her hands shaking, she tried to punch in Morbier’s number on her cell phone. But her fingers didn’t work, her legs buck-led, and the floor kept sliding until it came up to meet her face.

  THE QUAI’S STREETLAMPS were reflected by the dark Seine below. A lighted barge passed under the Pont Saint Michel. Aimée blinked, light-headed, as she looked out the ambulance window. The yawning entrance of the Hôtel Dieu’s emergency entrance appeared.

  “Park at the elevator. Log this in for me, eh? I’ll take her to the sixth floor, the police medical facility,” said the attendant beside her.

  Fluorescent light illuminated the barred windows, the scuffed metal benches, the worn linoleum. Stale air laced with antiseptic filled the long hallway. Like any medical facility, Aimée thought; the police wing was no better.

  An hour later, after a medical examination, she sat in the “dépôt” by the holding cells. In the “temporary” prison, under-ground, she awaited interrogation, faced with a twenty-four-hour detention period while the magistrate assembled evidence, based on which he’d either charge her or release her.

  Two uniformed flics had ushered Dr. Severat between them and turned her over to a nun, recognizable by the short blue veil pinned on her head and her blue smock and thick support hose. Since the nineteenth century, les religeuses had staffed the women’s section of “le dépôt.” Aimée waited a long while before the intake officer, a fortyish woman with short black hair under her blue cap, called her.

  “ID?”

  Aimée set Severat’s hearing aid down in the revolving glass window.

  “Some kind of joke?”
>
  “That’s all I have. My bag was stolen. But if you call Com-missaire Morbier—”

  “What’s this?”

  “Dr. Severat’s deaf. It’s her hearing aid.”

  “I can’t accept personal property before she’s processed,” the officer said.

  “She reads lips, but—”

  “I’ll request the sign language officer,” she interrupted. “Regulations, Mademoiselle. You’re to proceed to interrogation at Quai des Orfévres.”

  A sinking feeling hit Aimée in the pit of her stomach.

  “It’s your lucky night,” said the flic who escorted her. “We’re taking the shortcut.” The shortcut consisted of a long dank tunnel running under the Tribunal, a private passage reserved for the Préfecture de Police.

  After being interrogated and giving a statement, Aimée still sat on a metal bench, waiting. It was an hour before the door of an interrogation room opened and Morbier emerged, rubbing his neck.

  “Severat’s pleading that Benoît’s murder was a crime of pas-sion,” he said.

  Alarmed, she shook her head. “Three murders—?”

  “Steal one egg and you end up robbing the henhouse, eh?” Morbier interrupted. “A unit’s searching her apartment and office and the lab. You left a messy trail, Leduc.”

  “I tried to be neat, Morbier,” she said, “but I forgot my gloves.” She stood, glad of the painkillers she’d been given. “Then I can go?”

  “I need to question Mireille,” he said once more.

  She’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. She tried to control the shaking of her bandaged hands, couldn’t, and stuck them in her jean pockets.

  “Dr. Severat confessed. What more do you need?”

  “My Immigration contact is persistent, Leduc.”

  “He wants a feather in his cap, right?” she said. “Two traffickers were rounded up at the rue Saint Victor false fire alarm last night. The traffickers kept a nice collection of false passports, papers, the lot. They’re the kind who talk to save their hide. Squeeze them and they’ll give you info on the trafficking ring.”

  She couldn’t save the illegals, but she could save Mireille.

  “And you’re just telling me now, Leduc?”