Murder in the Palais Royal (22 page)

Paul set down the demitasse of espress she had ordered, with a small square of chocolate beside the sugar cube on the saucer.

“Paul, may I talk to your uncle?”

“He’s arranging with the priest at Saint Roch to offer a mass for Clémence and her baby.” His throat caught.

“Do you know anyone who’d want to hurt Clémence?”

He shook his head. A man raised his hand at a nearby table for his bill.

“Excusez-moi,
” Paul said. “I’ve got to work.”

So did she.

The Cours Carnot files presented tedious, time-consuming work, the reasons she’d hated criminal investigation. But her father always said if you didn’t fire the shot, you couldn’t hit the target.

Aimée pulled out her cell phone and got to work. She reached the voicemail of the first three students. She left a message saying she was conducting a Ministry of Education survey concerning their educational path and attainments after taking the Cours Carnot. Two phone numbers didn’t answer; the next had been disconnected. She tried the next few; answers ranged from “My parents made me sign up” to “I didn’t attend much.” After thirty minutes, she had yet to speak to a single student who remembered Nicolas.

Aimée rubbed the grid marks left on her thighs from the cross-hatching of the rattan chair. Scraps of conversation floated from the benches obscured by trees . . . “Velvet cufflinks, body jewelry.”

Not much raised eyebrows in this quartier; one kept one’s private life behind the salon doors. Curious, she leaned over the marble-topped table, straining to hear more. Under the windows of Colette’s former apartment two well-preserved matrons were sharing a bunch of purple grapes, lace handkerchiefs on their laps.

“. . . murdered in that sex club?”

“
Non!
Can you imagine, they found the girl right here!” one said. “We’re not safe in our beds!”

So word had spread in this village-like enclosure, this exclusive slice of the first arrondissement, whose inhabitants ranged from senior Banque de France and Ministry officials to concierges, shop owners, and bourgeoise matrons like these women.

She downed her espress. No time to get lulled into relaxation by the gushing fountain. She left a thirty-franc tip with her bill, crossed the gravel, and stepped under the arcade into the bistro.

From the look of the place, they needed wait staff and the sooner the better. Instead of waiters and waitresses preparing for the evening service with fresh place settings and floral arrangements, dirty dishes, soiled wine glasses, and empty wine bottles littered the tables.

On narrow rue de Valois at the bistro’s back entrance, she recognized Carco right away in his white side-buttoned chef’s shirt and black-and-white checkered trousers. He smoked, leaning against the crumbling wall. A pile of cigarette butts clogged the gutter at his feet.

To Carco’s right stood an open semicircular window flush with the pavement, through which a chute led to the basement. Wooden produce boxes were piled next to it.

At last. She rooted in her bag, found her pack of Gauloises, and pulled one out.

“Got a light?”

He produced a lighter from his pocket. Flicked it. He had such big meaty hands. Strangler’s hands?

“I saw you last night.” Carco’s forehead creased. “You’re the detective.”

Thanks to Paul, the weasel, informing him.

“And you’ve got a temper,” she said.

“So her arty roommate hired you? The bitch.”

No one had hired her. She could use a paying job. But her neck was in a noose and Melac burned to tighten it.

“Not at all,” she replied. “Right now she’s down at the morgue identifying Clémence’s body.”

The smoke filled her lungs and gave her a jolt.

“You’re angry, a hothead,” Aimée continued. She expelled a plume of smoke. “But the
flics
didn’t question you very long, did they?”

He fixed a glare on her. “Could I wring Clémence’s neck with ten
plats du jour
in preparation, appetizer garnishing, a
sous chef
at my side, the patron at my heels, and a broken stove to repair?”

He ground his cigarette under his shoe.

“Last night I never left that furnace of a kitchen for a minute. Not even for a cigarette. Even the owner backed me up.” He hefted a crate of green peppers, shot it down the chute. “The
flics
believe me.”

They’d let him go.

“You’d wanted to move in with her, right, Carco?” she said. “She refused. That made you livid. You followed her.”

“Follow her? No point.” He shrugged.
“C’est fini.
”

“Then what do you think happened, Carco?”

A mixture of defeat and sadness washed over his face.

“
Tant pis,
I should have known she had someone else,” he said. “She was two-timing me.”

Another man?

“With her ex in prison?” Aimée said. “I think she just felt sorry for him.”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head.

“But you harassed her.”

He leaned down to pick up some loose white asparagus that had fallen from a crate into the gutter.

“Zut!
Try cooking for a bistro of people with no gas and one waiter,” Carco said. “I didn’t even know she’d quit until I saw the orders sitting there getting cold.”

No chef allowed his orders to go cold. She believed him.

Despite the heat, a frisson ran down her arms. Granted that Clémence worked in a busy understaffed kitchen, still she could have told Aimée more over the phone. Clémence had held something back. Earlier, she’d refused Aimée’s offer to accompany her to La Santé. Run away angry. Then her insistence that they meet. And for a brief moment she wondered again if the alleged notebook had been a ruse. A way to lure Aimée into the passage, a deserted place.

She realized Carco’s eyes were tearing. “The baby wasn’t mine. She hadn’t let me touch in her months. Maybe she didn’t know whose it was.”

“Could she have gone to meet this other man?”

“I think she wanted to get the hell out,” he said. “Someone called her here every night.”

Thoughts spun in Aimée’s head.

“A jealous man, another boyfriend?”

Was that what this was about? That
mec,
Manu?

Rather than answer her, he stomped into the bistro.

After her visit to the prison, Clémence had known too much. Had her call to Aimée complicated things, some arrangement that backfired? Aimée imagined someone—a contact—catching up with Clémence, demanding the notebook or that she keep quiet. Say Clémence refused or demanded money, attempted blackmail, desperate to leave, for some reason Aimée didn’t know. An argument, and the killer took advantage of the deserted passage to stop her, choking her, then stole her bag to make it appear like a robbery.

And who was the person calling her at the bistro?

If the notebook existed, was Aimée the only other person to know about it? Did it contain the proof that Nicolas had been bribed? Say the killer knew, too. And had trailed her to the sex club, then to the Métro.

Was she next?

Goose bumps shivered her arms.

She made her way to Passage des Deux Pavillons. A caged white-plumed cockatiel warbled from an upper window; a woman shook a dust rag in a doorway. The shops lay shuttered and closed.

Nothing here.

Aimée walked back the few steps to the Palais Royal and paused amidst the alternating slants of light and shadow in the columned arcade.

“Papa, I’m a statue.” A small boy stood on one of the black-and-white-striped Buren columns that were ranked in assorted heights.

“Get down, Alain,” his father said. Khaki pants, guidebook in hand. A tourist from the provinces. Beside him a woman droned, reading aloud from her guidebook.

O
THER THAN STRIPS of yellow crime-scene tape on the barricade fronting Madame Fontenay’s medal shop, no evidence remained of Clémence’s murder. A closed sign hung behind the shop’s metal shutters.

Across from her, a man wearing a blue work coat embroidered with
Monuments et Travaux
beckoned to a hardhat. “Over here. Major water leak. You know what that means!” he said to the worker.

“Means my spanner turns off the water valve if you’re lucky.” He grinned. “Depends on the bolt size. And how much water’s in the tunnel.” A moment later, he made his way toward Madame Fontenay’s building, took out a ring of keys, inserted one, and opened the door she’d entered last night. Aimée followed. She stood again on the black-and-white-tiled floor at the foot of the staircase’s metal rosette-ornamented banister.

A side door in the foyer leading downstairs stood open. Cranking noises and the smell of mildew came from the stairway. She made her way down the dark stone stairs into a subterranean tunnel. Could Clémence’s killer have escaped this way?

Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket.

“
Oui?”

“Mademoiselle, concerning the Cours Carnot survey. Would participation be paid for? Is remuneration involved?”

After all those calls, her first bite. “Hold on a moment. Let me go to a place with better reception.” She ran back up the stairs, into the foyer.

“Allô,
Monsieur. Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“That depends on which study group you attended,” she said. “Your name, please?”

“Audric Loubel,” he said. “Our study group met for a year between 1993 and 1994.”

Promising, she thought. “
Un moment,
please. I’ll consult my notes.” She took out the first thing in her bag, the
Voici
magazine, and rustled some pages.

“Bear with me, please. They’ve made the survey guidelines so specific,” she said. “We provide honorariums yes, to specific groups and students we track.”

“Like who?”

“Of course, I’ve left the files at my office. Let’s see, I wrote down a name. Nicolas Evry. Were you in his group?”

Silence.

“There’s a mistake,” he said.

“In what way?”

“Nicolas didn’t attend any courses,” he said, disappointment in his voice, “although his friends did.”

She had to draw him out.

“That could explain a few things.” She gave a little sigh. “Can you help me correct this information then? I’ll need to verify that fact with you and his friends.”

“But Cours Carnot knows. . . .”

“Well, they’re the ones who furnished this information. I’d like to take your word, but that involves reconfiguring the survey.”

“It’s as I told you: Nicolas hung around us.” Audric sounded young. “That’s all.”

A door slammed. The sound of scraping reached her ears.

“Actually, Audric, you haven’t settled this to my satisfaction. Let’s talk in person. Then I can get some answers and pay you today.”

“How much?”

Greedy, too.

“Let’s talk. Meanwhile, I’ll check,” she said. “Say in half an hour?”

“I’m late for class,” he said. “I’ll call you back later.”

The line went dead.

She stared at the sheet with his address on rue des Bons Enfants, not five minutes away. And he’d known Nicolas.

The hardhat emerged from the stairs. “I need more tools to stop that leak. Meanwhile, close tunnel 3 in the south wing in case,” he said into his cell phone.

The tunnel network under the Palais Royal. For now it would wait. She had to catch Audric.

“
C
OMPLAINING AGAIN , SICARD ? ”

The La Santé prison guard handed Sicard his release papers at the last checkout booth before the gate. “Where’s your happy face?”

“Right here,” he said with an obscene gesture. I’ll be happy never to see a sadist like you again, he thought. His shoes pinched, his old jacket hung from his shoulders. He’d lost weight inside, yet his feet had swelled. Go figure.

How many years had he waited for this moment, walking out La Santé’s gate a free man? In his dreams, his girlfriend was waiting with open arms. They’d drive away in her car, her red hair trailing in the wind, to a restaurant. Good food, real food, then they’d spend the night and the next day in bed. He’d rediscover and explore every curve in her body, surfacing only to eat. And he’d go to the bank, find money waiting from his last job that his “friends” who put him in here had promised.

But, of course, the redhead had moved on two years ago, and the
mecs
he’d done the job with had served time at Clair-vaux, the maximum-security prison up north, and never made good on their promise to put his share in the bank.

What he found was dust swirling in the warm wind, grit in his eyes, and no one waiting.

Still, the air tasted sweet. And he was free. Free with the twenty francs he’d had in his pocket years ago when he entered and the five hundred earned from working in the prison kitchen.

Not the worst, he thought. He could live two, three days?

At the dock loading job he was qualified for (and that was several years ago), he’d earned less than a living wage. That’s what had gotten him into La Santé in the first place.

Instead of the bus, he walked. He felt light, walking alone on the wide dusty boulevard, the leaves crackling under his feet, the air warm and enveloping. No walls, no alarms, no damp cell or guards banging on the bars, no fetid breath down his neck. Just a woman and a little girl hand in hand waiting at the bus stop. Real people.

So what if the woman looked at him curiously, eyeing his outdated jacket, his mincing walk in his too-tight shoes, his prison haircut, and pulled her daughter closer.

He’d paid his debt to society. Now it owed him. At least one segment of society would pay. He’d worked it all out. In his shirt pocket lay Nicolas Evry’s gold mine that he’d found sewn into his cot’s mattress in their cell.

Too late for Nicolas to use it now. But he could, with a little help. Sicard smiled as he walked down the boulevard, inhaling the free fresh air.

AIMÉE WATCHED FOR Audric to emerge from his building, a limestone
belle époque
affair framed by a sculpted roofline frieze depicting nymphs holding bunches of grapes over long pillars supported by busty caryatids.