Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (30 page)

It was clear as day that the entertainments were over, even without the ghost of Pip Crosby looking over their shoulders.

She leaned against him, inviting him to wrap his arms around her.

“I have an appointment in the morning,” she murmured. “A rental agency.”

“I’ll go in a minute.”

“I don’t want you to. I mean, I do, but …”

“Sweetheart, I’ll see you tomorrow. Dinner, right?”

She turned her face to his, and although it was touch-and-go for a few minutes as to whether their choice would stand, when she began to sag, he sat back, pulling her into his shoulder. She nestled into him with a sigh, a sweet little noise of contentment that twisted his heart into a complicated knot.

The building was silent, not a sound of water in the pipes or a shift of settling walls.

“I had a brother, too,” he said into the stillness. “His name was Tim. Great kid. Bright as can be. Everyone loved him. He used to follow me everywhere, when we were boys. And when I enlisted, so did he, even though he was underage. When I went back to the Bureau, he followed me there, too. Until one day he got caught up in a riot, one I might’ve stopped but didn’t. He fell, and somebody kicked him, hard. Came out with a head injury that took about as long to kill him as your brother’s did.”

She did not react.

“I wasn’t there when he died. It didn’t involve a gun, but it’s hard to go home, to look his widow in the eye. I send her money. Hope that’s enough.”

Nancy slumped against him, completely slack. Just as well. He smiled, kissed the top of her head, then stood and slid his arms underneath her.

She jerked awake, startled, before throwing her arms around his neck and allowing him to carry her to her room. He set her down. She stood, obedient as a child, while he turned back the covers and pushed her gently onto the edge. He took off her shoes, lifted her legs to the bed, and tucked the covers around her.

When he kissed her forehead, her eyes were closed, but she smiled.

He stood in the doorway for a while, listening to her breathing.

Unresponsive roommate, my ass.

He closed her door, and opened the next. Fortier had removed some of Pip’s letters, her checkbook, some papers. But he had shown no interest in the art on the walls.

In five minutes, he let himself out of the apartment. When he came
to the river, he turned left, following the quay to the Île St. Louis. He crossed over onto the little island, wandering through its silence until the Pont Saint-Louis took him to the Île de la Cité. Past the magnificence of Notre Dame, around the Palais de Justice, and across the road to the small park at its prow, the Vert-Galant. Voices came from a moored barge; lights from the shore danced along the placidly flowing water.

He took out his cigarette case, but this time, his fingers sought out the hidden latch. He felt it give, worked his fingernail under the slick paper inside.

He slid the case away, then took out the Ronson.

By its light, he saw Sarah’s face. She studied him as the flames crept up from the corner, gazed out from the blackening paper.

And then she was gone. He dropped the burning ash, letting the light breeze carry it out onto the water.

One good-bye to Pip; another good-bye to Sarah Grey.

Time to start anew.

A
CONVERSATION:

“Lee, where’s my revolver?”

“You have a
revolver
?”

“Sure. Have you seen it?”

“Why do you have a revolver?”

“You never know when you might want to shoot someone.”

“Who is there to shoot? You think the Germans are coming back?”

“Not for a while. But there’s always me. Or you.”

“Yes, sweetheart, I saw your
Suicide
picture. It wasn’t very funny.”

“It wasn’t meant to be funny.”

“Well, it wasn’t beautiful, either. Please, Man, get rid of the gun.”

“Why? Revolvers are beautiful things.”

“With all the drunks who come here, I’d think a loaded weapon was the last thing you’d want lying around.”

“Clearly it isn’t lying around, or you’d have seen it.”

“If I find it, I’m not going to give it to you.”

“Yes, you will.”

“I’ll throw it in the river.”

“You do and I’ll beat you.”

“Please, Man.”

“What, are you afraid I’ll shoot you with it?”

“More likely yourself.”

“Don’t worry, honey. If I shoot you, I’ll take a fantastic picture of your dead body. You’ll be famous forever.”

“What if you shoot yourself?”

“Then I’ll make sure you get blamed for it. You’ll still be famous.”

“Only if there’s a camera around.”

“There is that. Okay, I’ll make sure there is.”

L
ATE
M
ONDAY MORNING
, at a table stacked with half a dozen coffee saucers, Stuyvesant crumpled up yet another sheet of paper. His notebook was up to date, the week’s letter to Uncle Crosby written, but this last writing job was a killer.

He’d spent an hour that morning, cursing his clumsy fingers and Mme. Benoit’s glue pot, piecing together the four photographs—all but one, unfortunately, missing a segment. The results were a little distorted, and the youngest girl had a gap where her eye should have been, but they would be recognizable.

Their emotion was all too recognizable.

How could he possibly inflict these photographs on Bennett Grey? Sarah seemed to think her brother as shaky as ever. It astounded Stuyvesant that the poor bastard hadn’t walked into the ocean long before this. And if he did send them, what could he say?
A friend of mine may be dead, but I have no proof?
Or,
I think a brave little fool named Pip is dead, which is easier than thinking of her alive? Oh and by the way, I have these awful pictures I want you to look at—which may not even have anything to do with my case?

Stuyvesant had to know if the pictures were real. If they were fakes, Grey would simply look at them and laugh. If they weren’t, well, it would be a lousy thing to do to a man like him.

But Stuyvesant had to know. And Bennett was the only one who could tell him.

In the end, he decided not to give Grey any details. There was no need to write him about missing blondes, or suspicions about the men surrounding Sarah, or the complexities that had cropped up in Stuyvesant’s relationship with her. Just ask the man if the photos were fakes, and let it go at that.

But all those unsaid facts didn’t make the morning any easier. As soon as he had a page he could live with, he put it with the photographs into the envelope he’d bought, all the time trying to decide if he was being irresponsible, if he should in fact tell Grey what was going on …

The shoddy post office pen stubbed twice into the rough manila, but at last he had the thing addressed, securely sealed, and in the post.

The instant he handed it over, he wanted to snatch it back.

“I want to start by asking you a favor,” Stuyvesant began. “Let me have my say before you jump in. Okay?”

It’s not like you have any proof
, he told himself for the tenth time. If he did, he’d have handed it over, even if that meant revealing the Moreau break-in.

But the pictures weren’t proof, of anything. He’d have to point the cop at Moreau without them.

Doucet tipped back in his chair, hands folded over his vest.

“First off, I’ve decided to look at Pip Crosby not as a missing person, but as a murder victim. You don’t—”

Doucet’s chair legs thumped to the floor. “Why? What have you learned?”

“Nothing. Not in the sense of evidence. There’s just an accumulation of facts that … Well, okay, it’s a feeling. That if she was out there, I’d have heard. But like I was saying,
you
don’t have to look at it that way. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t, since if you pass the case on to your homicide team, I’ll be out in the cold.

“Secondly, I’m going to figure Pip is one of a series of murders. Why and who I don’t know—like I said, this is how I’m looking at them, and I’m just trying to include you in my thoughts.

“There are three names that have come up time and again in relation to Pip Crosby. Those are Man Ray, Didi Moreau, and Dominic Charmen—”

“Oh, Monsieur, you cannot be serious about—”

“You said you wouldn’t interrupt.”

Doucet raised his hands and sat back again, all but saying aloud how little interest he had in Le Comte.

“I’ll start with the American, Man Ray. He knew Pip Crosby. He took photographs of her. He has pictures with models looking like the victims in brutal murders, and he makes the kind of motion pictures you wouldn’t let your mother go to, although I’m hardly an impartial judge of that kind of shock-art. But both those things mean that he knows actors, and he hires models. He’s friends with Moreau, who uses human bones in his Displays. Ray brings Moreau objects. He likes damaged women. His current one looks like she could be Pip Crosby’s sister.”

What he couldn’t say: Man Ray knows well how to use the kind of flash used in those horror-photographs.

“Then there’s Didi Moreau. An extremely odd egg, lives in a kind of mausoleum—hasn’t changed so much as an antimacassar since his mother died. He has an equally ghoulish imagination and a basement workshop full of bones and body parts. He’s trained in taxidermy, and has boxes filled with carrion beetles that he drops rats and you-name-it into. They’re too small for a person, but he has both the skills and the
tools for taking apart a larger subject. And beyond that, he’s—he’s cold, I guess is how I’d describe it. As if his Displays are the most important thing in the world, and everything else—every
one
else—is only there to provide him with raw material.

“But using his personality as a reason to suspect him runs up against the problem that it works the other way, too. He’s clever enough to do away with a number of people, but doing it without getting caught? That might be more or less accidental.” Personally, he could see Moreau absent-mindedly letting bodies pile up in his sitting room. Perhaps if the maid was in charge of disposal—but that was too far-fetched. He went on, since he could mention none of Moreau’s hidden possessions.

“Then there’s Dominic Char—yes, I’m sorry—Charmentier. Le Comte. He’s worked with both Moreau and Ray, he brings Moreau boxes of whatnot. If Moreau sees the rest of the world as being there to bring him raw material, Charmentier sees the world as being there to serve him. And sure, that’s something that goes along with having fifteen generations of money, but it’s also a thing that I’ve seen in the kind of killers who find morality an inconvenience. You’re a cop, Doucet. You know what I’m talking about.”

Doucet gave a noncommittal bob to his head.

“Look at the man’s house,” Stuyvesant argued. “Have you seen it? The room with the plaster faces?”

“Sarah told me about it.”

“What kind of a person would collect those things? I know the man has paid a heavy price for his country, and he talks about the Grand-Guignol as some kind of psychotherapy for the world, but it seems to me his collection takes things a little far. Those faces, they make you wonder.”

“Plaster masks are a long way from murder.”

“But still, if your face had been destroyed, would you want your image decorating someone’s wall?”

“There’s nothing new about the aristocracy’s lack of sensitivity,” Doucet pointed out. “Both our countries had revolutions because of it.”

“It’s not just lack of sensitivity. He … sometimes he’s like a walking version of that theater, doing things that are just hair-raising.”

“May I respond now?”

“Go ahead.”

“Le Comte is a war hero, from a prominent Parisian family. He single-handedly supports a number of organizations for the indigent, the wounded—and the families of policemen killed in the line of duty. He lectures at the Sorbonne, he is personal friends with half the politicians in France, and if nothing else, he would be recognized wherever he went. I am no particular friend of his class, but this man has earned the right to a quirky hobby like the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol.”

“Don’t you think those could be a clever devil hiding his tracks?”

“M. Stuyvesant, listen to yourself. Do you have any proof for these accusations? Any evidence? Anything other than your dislike for the aristocracy?” The sharp edge to Doucet’s voice was not simply the impatience of a policeman, it was personal. And Stuyvesant knew where it came from: a yellow-haired, one-handed Englishwoman demanded that Doucet act; his job as a cop made action impossible.

“Not a bit. Yet.”

Doucet shook his head. “M. Stuyvesant, if you wish to remain in France, I strongly suggest that you do not pursue your baseless suspicions.”

“Okay, how about Moreau?”

“Why him, and not M. Ray?”

“You should be looking at both of them. But Moreau gives me the creeps. He … I didn’t like the way he tried to get Sarah to take off her hand.”

Doucet grimaced. “He did make the thing. She’d have to take it off for him to look at it, wouldn’t she?”

“I know. It’s just … He seemed more interested in the stump than in the hand itself. And then there’s this.”

He took from his pocket the object that he’d removed from Pip’s bedroom late last night, wrapped in a clean-enough handkerchief. He laid it on Doucet’s desk, folding back the linen. “I got this from one of those Didi Moreau boxes that Pip Crosby had on her bedroom wall. I’m no expert, but that looks to me like a human finger.”

Doucet picked it up between thumb and forefinger, holding it to the
light like a speculating gemcutter. “You could be right. But what of it? It’s no crime to possess human bones.”

“No, but how you get them can be another matter. You know those carrion beetles? Well, this bone seems really … fresh.”

Doucet placed the object back on the handkerchief with the same distaste Stuyvesant had felt at the fossilized feces. However: “His neighbors might not like it, but I would doubt that it’s against the law to feed your beetles pieces of human being. If, for example, you got them from a hospital.”