Murder Below Montparnasse (14 page)

Marevna nodded.

A
IMÉE KNEW LITTLE
about art, even less about the art world. But she knew who to ask.

“Lieutenant Olivant?” said the receptionist at the
préfecture de police
. “He works out of OCSC now.”

She never remembered the meaning behind those acronyms for various police branches. The terms changed all the time.

“He still works with stolen art,
n’est-ce pas?
”

“Bah ouais,”
came the typical Parisian reply. “That’s what they do there, Mademoiselle.”

“Mind transferring me?”

A click. Another receptionist, who transferred her to the third floor, then another series of clicks. A bland recording of extension numbers. Finally, after punching in Lieutenant Olivant’s extension, she got his voice mail. Didn’t anyone answer their office lines anymore?

She got as far as giving her name and number before the recorded voice came on.
Message box full
.

Great. She’d try later. Right now a big, fat zero.

The old man’s letter hadn’t shed any light on one mystery, though. How did Yuri know her mother? Dead, he couldn’t tell her. But if there was any chance to learn something about her mother, she’d find it.

By now the
flics
would have questioned people on the street, the inhabitants of Villa d’Alésia. The mink-coated neighbor knew something—even if she didn’t know she did. She’d heard
the raised voices. Aimée had to risk going back there to find this Oleg. She didn’t even know his last name.

“Y
OU AGAIN?”

Yuri Volodya’s neighbor, Madame Figuer, whose name Aimée discovered by reading the mailbox, stood in her door in a black jogging suit. Her red-rimmed eyes darted under freshly applied black eyebrows. “The
flics
want to talk to you, Mademoiselle. Ask you why you ran away.”

“Please, Madame, I need your help,” Aimée said. “I’ll explain.”

Madame Figuer gripped a pink cell phone. “May I help?” She punched in a number. “Explain it to them.”

Aimée reached out and hit
END
. “
Pardonnez-moi
, Madame, but no phone calls.
Desolée
, it’s important.”

Alarmed, Madame Figuer stepped back. Started to close her door. “Leave me alone.”

Aimée stuck her foot in the door. “Please, we need to talk.”

“They said you could be an accomplice.” Her voice rose. “Dangerous.”

“Can you keep a secret?” Aimée shouldered her way inside, going with her plan B: on-the-fly improvisation—approaching plausible, she hoped. She needed to keep this woman quiet and glean information.

“Madame, my unit investigates stolen art of national cultural importance,” she said, reaching in her bag. “Not many know of us. We work out of 3 rue de Lutèce.”

At least her contact did. Unless the bureau had moved. Openmouthed, Madame Figuer stared at her.

“Art investigator? In that outfit?”

Aimée noticed a nick on her Prada boots. The pair she’d borrowed from Martine.

“You think we wear uniforms? Forget those crime shows you watch on the
télé
, Madame,” Aimée said. “Nothing exotic. Our
cases involve painstaking investigation. Any detail could lead to recovery.”

Madame Figuer pulled herself ramrod straight. She was about to throw Aimée out the door.

“We work independently, but often in tandem with police,” Aimée said. “Our interest coincides here, but I’m working another angle.”

“Likely story. You ran off.”

Aimée nodded. “I’m undercover. But I shouldn’t have told you.”

“So I should believe that? Show me your credentials, your ID.”

Undercover never carried ID. Too compromising if they were rumbled. But Madame Figuer wouldn’t know that. She pulled a card from her alias collection.

“Ministry of the Interior?” asked Madame Figuer.

“Thefts from cathedrals, state museums. In certain cases we investigate robbery from private collections. But that’s all I can say.” Aimée leaned forward as if in confidence. “I’ve told you more than I should. Yet your brother was an artist. Talented.” She gestured to the watercolors in the hallway. “You of all people will understand. That’s why I came to explain. Enlist your aid.”

Madame Figuer blinked several times. Cheap to use the dead brother? But Aimée had struck a nerve.

“You can’t think old Yuri possessed …”

“A national treasure, Madame Figuer?” she said. “We do.” Suddenly she noticed a wonderfully buttery smell emanating from the kitchen. Her overwhelming hunger, which she’d forgotten in the excitement of the letter, came roaring back.

“Yuri was tortured and murdered for it?” Madame Figueur’s hands shook.

“I’d rather talk here, but we can go to headquarters.”

Madame Figuer adjusted the jacket zipper of her jogging
suit, played with the snap on her coin purse. “But I’m late for the market. The melons. Then the plumber’s coming to repair the water damage.”

“We’ll make this quick.” Aimée gestured to Madame’s kitchen.

By the time Aimée had eaten half the plate of Madame Figuer’s fresh-baked crisp almond
financiers
plus leftover
pain perdu
, she’d gleaned an outline of Yuri’s movements for the past three days.

“The
flics
questioned me,” Madame Figuer said, “but then I didn’t volunteer much. Couldn’t. The shock. I took one of my pink pills.”

“Pills?” The woman was elderly but seemed clear and alert to Aimée.

“For my nerves, you know. When I think of Yuri tortured next door … just like my brother was betrayed and tortured in forty-three … it’s all so.…” Her voice trailed off.

Coincidental
? But Aimée kept that to herself. Perhaps Madame’s retelling over the years had, like such stories steeped in shame, become unspoken common knowledge?

Madame Figuer shuddered. “Do you think
la police
will ask me more questions?”

“Possible.” Aimée needed to work fast. “Let’s go back to when you noticed Yuri got ‘in butter,’ as you said.”

According to Madame Figuer, Yuri had borrowed her wheelbarrow from her garden shed four days earlier to clean up his father’s cellar—that was how she knew his father had died. But when he’d returned it, he’d brought her a bottle of wine. “Soon we’ll be celebrating,” he’d said.

Saturday he’d driven his old Mercedes somewhere with Damien Perret, the young long-haired man from the printing shop on rue de Châtillon. A nice boy, she added, in spite of his radical politics, but then everyone’s young once,
non?
Yuri’s stepson, Oleg, visited in the afternoon.

But of last night’s accident she knew nothing, having stayed at her sister’s. She’d returned this morning to a flood in her apartment and loud voices from his open window across the courtyard wall.

Aimée thought back to earlier that morning; she’d been at the morgue when Yuri had left that message. Not much later, he called to take back his words. After contact with her mother? An acid taste filled her mouth. She took a deep breath. “Did you hear a woman’s voice?”

Madame Figuer shook her head.

“Didn’t you say Russian before?”

She shook her head again. “Thought so at first, but no, that I’d recognize,” she said. “The quartier used to be full of them. Thick with artists, too. Giacometti used to live here. He was like a stick man, the wild hair.…”

More stories of the past?

Madame Figuer gave a little sigh. “Everything’s changed. So different now.”

Aimée compiled a list of everyone Madame Figuer mentioned. Oleg—at the top of the list—wasn’t answering his phone, so she left a message. Damien’s name was next. It was time she spoke with him.

R
UE DE
C
HÂTILLON
, the next narrow street over, paralleled Villa d’Alésia. Earlier, climbing Yuri’s back wall, she’d noticed little of it, except the bit of hay she found clinging to the rosemary.

Now, trying to figure out how the killer escaped, she eyed the
maison de maître
, typical bourgeois townhouse shutters framing its tall windows. Why did it strike her as familiar? It was fronted by what would have been a rose garden in the nineteenth century, now weed-choked patches of grass and wild lilac. The sign at the gate indicated the house’s current function was a youth job training center.

She found Damien’s printing shop further in, beyond an open-gated courtyard. On the cobbles under the chestnut tree, a man in blue overalls loaded the back of a
camionnette
. A few stacks of playbills for theaters, concert posters, and ads for a traveling circus. Posters emblazoned with
STOP THE DEVELOPERS
in red were bundled against the wall on wood pallets.

The pounding of the printing press competed with the chirping of birds in the bushes.

“Monsieur, I’m looking for Damien Perret.”

“Come to pick up the posters, eh? All ready, Damien made sure.”

He mistook her for someone from the demonstration.

She shook her head and smiled. “Where’s the office?”

“Inside and to the left,” he said. “But he’s with his aunt at the hospital.”

Great. “Any idea where he went Saturday?”

“You mean deliveries?” The man rubbed his neck. He was bald and overweight.

She thought quickly. “That’s it, regarding a delivery order we received Saturday.”

“I don’t think so.” His eyes narrowed.

“Can you check?”

“Don’t need to. Today’s our delivery day.”

Stupid to lie when she didn’t know the schedule.

“Damien used the
camionnette
that afternoon,” he said. “Helped the old man.”

Yuri.

He eyed her legs. “Maybe I can help.”

Not the help she needed.

“Florent!” A shout came from inside the glass-roofed printing works.

He dusted off his thick palms. Winked. “Don’t go away.”

Like hell she’d wait for him. But she stared at the inside of the
camionnette
. Stacked full to the roof. She peered through
the open front window. Old newspapers on the floor, Styrofoam cups, candy wrappers, and detritus strewn below the passenger seat. She looked closer at the newspapers; something was unusual. They were copies of
Le Matin
, yellowed, the typeface faded. A newspaper her grandfather had read that didn’t exist anymore. She reached in, unfolded a crumpled portion. The date—February 1920—above an article about horse cart traffic dangers on Boulevard du Montparnasse.

No doubt this came from Yuri’s father’s belongings. What if there was more? She glanced around. No Florent or other workers. She opened the passenger door, went through the trash on the floor again. Nothing else of interest but a parking ticket. She dropped it, then picked it up again. A hefty one hundred francs. She looked at the date. Saturday, issued at 3
P.M
.—the time Damien and Yuri had gone out. The address: 34 rue Marie Rose.

“Guess you’d like to ride on my deliveries with me, eh?”

She felt hot garlic breath in her ear. The texture of Florent’s grease-stained overalls on her arm.

“In your dreams.”

Then a knee was shoved between her legs. Rough arms shoving her onto the seat. Hands pinning her legs. Panic raced through her. The way he had eyed her should have put her on high alert. His thick fingers dug into her skin.

“You know you want it,” Florent said.

How could she be so stupid?

R
ENÉ GRIPPED THE
leather armrest as Bob backed the Cadillac into a narrow-looking spot in the gravel parking lot. “Can’t beat this place. Best burgers in the Valley, René.”

A weathered neon sign read
GROVER’S
above a diner off the Avenue of the Fleas.

“Millionaires eat here?”

“They weren’t always millionaires.” Bob grinned. “You wanted Americana—where real people and geeks eat. Doesn’t get greasier or more authentic than this.”

René noticed the meal portions as they walked by the booths. Gigantic. A single plate looked like it could feed a whole table.

On the wall of their plastic-upholstered booth was a jukebox. Bob slotted in quarters and hit some keys. “Green River” by Creedence Clearwater blasted from speakers overhead.

“The usual, Bob?” asked the waitress, an older woman.

Bob nodded. “And two Buds. For my friend here.…”

“What’ll it be, hon?” she said, slapping down a menu.

René’s chest hit the edge of the Formica table. “What he’s having, Madame. But a smaller portion.”

“Kid’s cheeseburger, all right?”

René nodded.

She winked a blue-shadowed eyelid. Scribbled on her order pad. “Got it. My cousin’s married to a man of your stature, they own a ranch in Morgan Hill.” She gave an approving cluck. “Prize dairy cows.”

He swallowed his embarrassment. “I suppose you have phone books?”

“What you waiting for, Bob? Your friend needs some vertical assistance. Phone booth’s in back.”

Bob stood, all six feet of him, a sheepish look on his face. “Sorry, René, I didn’t think.”

“Just don’t come back with one of those children’s booster seats.”

René finished half of the child’s plate. How did people eat such great quantities, and all in one sitting? And no cheese course to follow. But he kept that to himself.

“How’s it feel after your first day as CTO?” Bob grinned, wiping ketchup off his chin. “Spot any blondes yet?”

René leaned back on the phone books. “I met a programmer who makes a perfect
café au lait
. Two in one, Bob. Legs to forever. I’m in love.”

“Three in one, René. Love, lust, no difference, eh?”

Bob, twice divorced, complained of child support and alimony.

“But tell me,” René said, leaning forward. “I train at dojos, but I’m not into team sports. Am I expected to do
le jogging
with my boss?”

“What?” Bob said. “I don’t follow. Start-ups are all hustle. No one’s got time for team sports.”

“But this front running, it means
faire du sport, non?
”

Bob dropped his fork. “Front running? Explain.”