Murder in the Palais Royal (10 page)

Over tool sets? Not her scene.

Chloë paused on the black-and-white-tiled entry hall outside Aimée’s apartment. “What’s the matter, Aimée?”

Not intending to, she opened up, telling Chloë what had happened as they mounted the stairs. It eased her to confide in someone. She had always confided in Martine, her best friend since the
lycée
.

Too bad Martine was traveling in the Camargue salt marshes in a horse-drawn Gypsy caravan, following the wild horses with her boyfriend Gilles and his children who had taken early leave for the October school holidays. And, for once, Martine had left her cell phone behind.

What Aimée told Chloë was in edited form, since her eyelids were drooping and her shoulders sagging in tiredness.

Chloë hugged Aimée again. “But the
flics
can’t think
you’d
shoot René. What does the doctor say?”

“That’s just it. They moved him.” Aimée pictured René in the hospital bed, the tubes, his wound, and suppressed a shudder.

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

Chloë flicked her thumb up, toward the stairs. “Count on me any time you need help.”

“
Bonsoir,
Chloë.” Aimée picked up her pile of mail and got out her keys. The timed light went out. She stood in thought on the dark landing, the echoes of Chloë’s footsteps trailing up the stairs, wondering what the prison letter meant. But by the time she unlocked the front door to her musty, cold apartment, and Miles Davis’s wet nose nuzzled her legs, her only thought was of sleep.

A
IMÉE BREATHED THE close prison air edged with flaking rust, testosterone, and the perspiration of too many bodies in this narrow visiting room. She hated prisons and flinched at the sight of jumping lice on the jumpsuit of the young man opposite her, visible through the glass partition. No doubt he hated it more.
Maison d’Arrêt de la Santé,
the nineteenth-century prison on the Left Bank, built to house over a thousand, held a population closer to double that now.

She’d talked her way into the warden’s office, showed him the confirmation letter, and with abject apologies explained she’d had a abscessed molar pulled. But could the warden, just this once, allow an exception? Of course, it was all her fault and yet so very painful, this tooth. By the time the warden relented, she’d missed three quarters of the morning visiting time and had to put her bag through the metal detector twice. All that, and then she still had to store it in the locker.

Nicolas Evry leaned into the dirty chrome speaker bolted to the smudged glass cubicle. Older now, his cheeks had hollowed. His dark red hair clumped in greasy tufts behind his ears; rough pinkish scales that he scratched non-stop were visible on his neck. Lice were not the only thing shared among the inmates: drugs, the domination of the strong over the weak, rape. She didn’t like to think about it. Or that it was her testimony that had put Nicolas here.

“Nicolas, do you have something to tell me? We don’t have much time.” She tugged her agnés b. short black pencil skirt to her knees, aware of the looks from the guards. One, stout and sallow-faced, kept his eyes focused on her black-stock-inged legs.

“Rats nibbled my thumb last night,” he said, holding up a bandaged finger.

She frowned. “You must be up for parole by now.”

“My lawyer’s sailing vacation got in the way.”

A sinking feeling hit her stomach. “Look, what’s so vital that we need to talk? What’s put me in danger?”

“Danger?” he said, his dark brown eyes intense, glancing at a notebook under his fist. Then he looked up at the guard, who’d bent to tie his shoelace. Nicolas stuck a piece of paper to the glass reading “Wait at the south wall, 10 A.M.”

Then he stuck the paper in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed.

“At least you came.” A flicker of a smile, an expression that could pass for gratitude, crossed his face.
“
Clémence, my ex, won’t visit me any more.”

“Did she arrange this and send me the note?”

He nodded.

Strange, she thought. “Why?”

“My parole hearing’s been postponed,” he said, shouting so he could be heard over the din of the twenty or so visitors, mostly women with crying infants. “Now it could take months. You’ve got to get me out.”

“So that’s what this is about? Some ploy to speed up your parole?”

Loud buzzing in the mike drowned out the rest of her words. The overhead fluorescent light dimmed. “Visiting hour ends in five minutes,” announced a voice over the loudspeaker.

“I did my time. You’re responsible,” he said.

“Responsible?” she stood up. “You torched the synagogue.” Four years ago in the Marais, Aimée had found the videotape, the proof that had put Nicolas, then eighteen years old, in here. “What does this have to do with me?”

Fear flooded Nicolas’s eyes. And for a moment he looked like the scared, adrift twenty-two-year-old that he was. “I was covering up for the rich
salaud.
This proves it.”

He raised his notebook.

“But it’s a little late, Nicolas,” she said. “The Tribunal convicted you, not me. Now it’s your lawyer’s job to get you out.”

“Don’t you understand? I can’t take any more. These four years have been hell,” he said. “There are fights every day. I’ve got two broken ribs.”

“Deal with your lawyer, Nicolas.”

His eyes swept the visiting room, the women and children at the cubicles, the guards.

“They’re in this together.”

“Who?”

“They’re all against me.”

Paranoid now, too. She’d had enough. This was leading nowhere.

“I tried to send this to you.” Nicolas’s voice faded in and out over the crackling microphone. He lifted the brown notebook again. “Take it. Read it. You’ll know what to do.”

He flipped the notebook open and pressed it against the glass between them. All she could make out were numbers that didn’t make sense.

“‘Know what to do’?” she asked.

Nicolas cast a furtive glance at the guard. What was he trying to tell her?

A deafening alarm sounded, shaking Aimée’s feet on the floor, sending a reverberation up through her high heels, signaling that time for visiting was over.

“Bon,
go ahead push it through,” she said. “Quick.”

But the handle in the small revolving window Aimée reached for didn’t move.

Nicolas was arguing with a guard behind him. “‘Application’?”

The guard shook his head. “Four years here and you don’t know the rules? Go through the proper channels, Evry. You need twenty-four hours to clear personal items.” The guard pushed Nicolas’s hand down.

”Since when did the regulations say I can’t give this to her?”

“Can’t you read?” the guard interrupted, pointing to a sign. “See, it’s all there. Time’s up. Get going, Evry.”

“Mail me your notebook, Nicolas.” That’s all she could offer.

The guard pulled Nicolas to his feet.

“They denied my mail privileges. They know about you.”

Her body went cold.

“Who?”

“They’re watching.”

A horrible fear overtook her.

“Is that why my partner was shot?”

Panicked, he slammed the glass. The guard grabbed his arm.

“They think you know who paid me off.” He stopped. Hesitated, looking at the guard, then back at her and mouthed “wall.”

“Visiting hour’s over.” The sallow-faced guard grabbed her elbow. She flinched. “That means you, Mademoiselle. Time to file out. One by one.”

The last she saw of Nicolas before the guard dragged him away were his intense, pleading eyes.

* * *

A
IMÉE’S HANDS SHOOK as she stood outside the high stone wall of La Santé on tree-lined Boulevard Arago. She didn’t like thinking of the public guillotinings that had taken place here, outside these walls, until the 1930s.

She saw the heads of prisoners, visible at the top of the wall. But no Nicolas. A petite woman on the pavement near her took aim and lobbed a cell phone upward. The phone’s metal case glistened as it sailed in a high arc. A small shout from above signaled the phone’s arrival.

She figured the fracas with the guard was Nicolas’s ruse to deflect him from his intention to toss her the notebook. Again she surveyed the prisoners’ heads. No Nicolas.

Brown-yellow leaves rustled underfoot. A squirrel nibbling the shell of a split chestnut darted up the tree trunk at the rumble of the approaching Number 21 bus. The everyday world surrounded her: an old man held his grandchild’s hand; a woman sat in the bus shelter with a shopping bag on her lap; the autumnal orange light fell on the cinnamon-stone buildings.

After twenty minutes, the prisoners disappeared. She waited ten more minutes. Only black crows strutting on the parapet now. No Nicolas. Frustrated, she caught the next bus.

She wondered who knew about her and what they knew. Nicolas had said “They think you know who paid me off.” How was it all connected? She hadn’t seen Nicolas or heard from him since that day in court four years ago. She tried to shake off a clinging miasma of guilt: first René and now Nicolas. But it didn’t go away.

“
B
ONJOUR,
M
ONSIEUR
R
O B A R D . ” Clémence kissed the antiquarian bookseller on both cheeks. The old man’s sagging skin and his discolored teeth repulsed her, reminding her of her uncle’s grinning yellow teeth and those afternoons when he’d taken her under the pines, the pine resin clinging to her skin. He’d told her to keep it their secret. Older men liked her. And after her uncle, Clémence wised up and used it.

“Aaah,
ma petite fleur,
” Monsieur Robard said, his rheumy red-rimmed eyes lighting up, “you brighten my day.”

Still, she liked his bookstore, a musty place piled with leather-bound volumes and smelling of old paper. Monsieur Robard had jumped at her idea to use his shop for a “letter drop,” something he’d said he’d done during the Resistance, implying danger, passwords, and meetings in dark alleys.

“You appeal to the romantic in me,
ma petite fleur
,” he’d said. Of course, Monsieur Robard thought an affair with a married man was involved. Not blackmail.

Clémence grinned, handing Monsieur Robard his customary demitasse, which she delivered from the bistro to him each morning. A lip of tan foam on his espress, a curled twist of lemon skin, one white sugar cube on the side, just the way he liked it. She smiled. An old man with a faint vetiver scent clinging to his ancient wool suit. And he hadn’t pinched her once.

“Parfait,
as usual.” He downed the espress and with trembling hands patted the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief.

“Did you receive the envelope, Monsieur Robard?”

“
Ma petite fleur
, I hope you’ll forgive me?” he said. A melodramatic tone in his voice, one arm raised in supplication, the other on his heart. “A little chest pain here, so I went to the doctor. I closed early yesterday.”

Clémence’s hopes sank. No fifty thousand francs. She scanned the slanted wood floor in case the envelope had been slid under the door and saw only dustballs.

“But I’m sure he’ll write today.” Monsieur Robard patted the self-addressed stamped envelope she’d provided him with on his desk. “When it arrives, I’ll take no chances and do as we planned.” He winked. “I’ll slip it into your envelope and mail it on rue du Louvre. And tonight you’ll find it at Poste Restante.”

But if she didn’t? She’d left her roommate her share of the rent, packed her bag, and bought a train ticket with the last of her money.

She had to find Aimée Leduc, hoping to God the detective had visited Nicolas in prison and gotten his notebook.

Now she had to leave, in case anyone was watching the bookseller’s shop.

She set Monsieur Robard’s empty demitasse on her tray, slid his two-franc tip into her apron pocket, and left him with a smile. She walked under the shaded canopy of lime trees lining the Palais Royal quarter, looking neither left nor right.

A
YELL ERUPTED near the pots of lamb shanks boiling on the industrial stove in La Santé prison’s underground kitchen. Trays clattered on the stone floor, food spilling everywhere. The rising steam created a fog with the sweltering aroma of bay leaves.

“Not again!” Alphonse, the red-faced cook, wiped the edge of his white apron across his brow. “Can’t you
auxi’s
serve the C-block meal trays right? How simple can it get?”

C block, the VIP wing, held convicted ministers and corporate heads, along with Carlos the Jackal and wealthy terrorists who enjoyed room service and a cognac after supper. An elite group dubbed by the prisoners “the mighty.”

Two
auxiliaires,
prisoners with the coveted job of serving meal trays to C block, backed away from the pantry door.

“Alphonse, look. . . .” said one.

The body of a man was suspended from the meat hook on the old pantry door. His bare toes hung centimeters off the flaking stucco floor.

“
Nom de Dieu.
” Alphonse crossed himself. He batted away the vapors. And gasped.

A cockroach scurried into a hole under the sink.

Socks knotted together formed a noose around the man’s neck. From the deep groove worn in his flesh, it had taken him a long time to die.

“It’s a curse! A curse on my kitchen.” Alphonse’s jowls shook. “Damn him, damn whoever did this.”

By the time the duty guards appeared in the humid, narrow cellblock corridor, hoarse shouts accompanied muffled banging on the thick metal doors. The prisoners in the exercise yard, the one hour in twenty-four that they were let out of their crowded cells, jammed against the windows of the sweating, moisture-clad kitchen walls, trying to see inside. Scummed greasy water, drained from the lamb shanks, trailed over the cracked concrete floor. Laurel and bay leaf smells rose through the steam vents.