Cara Black: Murder in the Bastille

She heard him suck in his breath. In her mind she saw him—his mismatched socks, suspenders, and shock of thick salt-and-pepper hair. She wondered if he’d kept off the weight he’d lost over the summer and if he still wore patches to help him stop smoking.

“They call it special detail, Leduc.”

That meant several things. Damage control was one of them. Since he was working out of the Bastille area, was he involved with the serial killer . . . had she found what she was looking for?

“Look Morbier, I need to know about the victims and anything else you feel like sharing about the Bastille serial murders.”

“Leduc, I’m busy.”

Maybe he didn’t know she’d been attacked.

“Something tells me you have the information I need.”

“What’s it to you if I do, Leduc?” he said. She heard a metallic ratcheting, as if he had turned in an unoiled swivel chair.

Something in his voice told her he knew.

“Leduc, I just got in,” he said. “I haven’t had time to read the update file. Or finish my espresso.”

She sensed another presence in her hospital room. Something she couldn’t explain. The hair stood on the back of her neck. Wariness overtook her; she covered the phone with her hand.

“Who’s there?”

No answer. And then footsteps moved away. Was it a nurse, the doctor, or a volunteer?

Or . . . ? That tar smell near the broom closet? For an awful moment she was struck by the thought of the attacker, lurking, waiting to finish his task. It would be so easy to don a uniform, wear a mask, and search the corridors. Her heart clenched with fear. She took a deep breath.

“Call me curious, Morbier,” she said. “Please, we need to talk.”

“I’m tied up,” he said. “Staff meeting in five minutes. The unit has to come up with some answers. And I still haven’t read the file.”

“Answers to why Patrick Vaduz was released due to incorrect procedure? And why a woman got murdered in the passage? Well France 2 news put it together and blamed the bungling on . . .”

“Got to go,” Morbier interrupted. In the background, chairs scraped the floor, murmuring voices rose.

“But they’re wrong. I don’t think Vaduz killed that woman,” she said. “Meet me in room 312, l’hôpital Quinzes-Vingts.”

“Investigating something?” he said. “Leave the serial killers to us, Leduc. Stick to computers.”

“I can’t, it’s personal.” She wanted to confront him face to face.

Morbier’s voice betrayed no surprise. “Leduc, you know hospitals bother me.”

True. He hadn’t even come to see her after the terrorist bombing in Place Vendôme, the one that killed her father and put her in the burn unit. She’d been lucky; the skin graft on her palm was the only visible scar.

“I can help you,” she said, lowering her voice. “But not over the phone.”

“ Tiens! We know Patric Vaduz did it.”

She had to make Morbier interested enough to come. This needed to be said in person. “Well, there’s a witness who thinks otherwise.”

A siren wailed below Aimée’s window as an ambulance pulled into the hospital courtyard.

“So this witness has proof?”

She heard an edge of interest in his voice.

“You might say living proof.”

Wednesday Noon

“ ATTENTION, PETIT !” SHOUTED A perspiring delivery man wheeling a dolly loaded with beer crates. “Didn’t see you.”

René, carrying Aimée’s bag, sidestepped the man on the pavement. He ignored the stares from passersby in rue Fau-bourg St-Antoine. Born a dwarf, now just four feet tall, he was used to people staring. Most of the time.

He’d heard Aimée’s message on his voice mail and gathered things from her apartment. Now he turned into the Passage de la Boule Blanche, a narrow half-covered alleyway lined with old storefronts and doorways to courtyards housing craftsmen, upholsterers, and furniture makers. Wide enough for a small car. Once the site of the crimes of the notorious poet-criminal, Lacenaire, guillotined in 1836.

René retraced his steps to the place where he’d found Aimée sprawled on the cobbles. Not far from the metal waist-high barricade with a Piétons barrés sign. He wondered if there was anything he hadn’t found last night.

Green garbage bins, emptied and waiting, hugged the narrow stone wall. Too bad, anything left behind would have been cleaned up by the ébouers . Nothing there to indicate the horror of Aimée’s attack last night. What had she said . . . she remembered a light?

He looked around and in the October sunshine saw the imposing entrance of the Quinze-Vingts hospital at the end of the passage. The Quinze-Vingts—fifteen times twenty—was the number of beds the hospital’s founder, Louis XV, had needed for his knights blinded by Saracens on the Ninth Crusade; the name had endured. Had she meant a light from the hospital?

The Passage de la Boule Blanche, in the throes of construction, lay deserted. The young designer’s shop was closed. Ahead on the right lay the courtyard of the Cahiers du Cinéma , their former client. He walked over but the gate was chained. On it hung a sign saying CLOSED FOR REMODELING. Too bad, he would have felt comfortable asking questions of people he knew there. He could have ferreted out whether anyone had been in the office late.

He gazed up. A mossy stone wall lined a good part of the passage. The network of passages in the Bastille once connected the wood shipped down the Seine and the woodworkers and furniture makers in the faubourg’s courtyards. After Louis XI licensed craftsmen in the fifteenth century, this Bastille quartier grew into a working-class area; cradle of revolutions, mother of street-fighters and artisans, home of the Bastille prison.

Later tinsmiths, blacksmiths, mirror-makers, gilders, and coal merchants joined them, occupying the small glass-roofed factories and warehouses. Now, many of these were gentrified, and the rest had been bulldozed.

Then he heard hammering from the nichelike entrance on his left.

René didn’t feel much like a detective even though the sign where he worked read LEDUC DETECTIVE. They shared the computer security jobs, but only Aimée had a criminal investigation background.

Now he had to take up the slack. Help figure this out. Aimée, his best friend, had suffered a brutal attack outside this atelier; maybe someone inside had seen or heard something.

He walked into a small, damp courtyard. A sign, styled like a coat of arms, read CAVOUR MASTER WOODWORKERS, EST. 1794. Low strains of a Vivaldi concerto floated through the doorway.

“Pardon,” René said, raising his voice. He walked through a narrow entrance opening into a large atelier illumined by skylights. The sharp tang of turpentine reached him. “Anyone here?”

A middle-aged man, wearing a blue workcoat, glasses pushed up on his bald head, stood at a work table. With delicate strokes he rubbed the gilded legs of an antique lacquered chair. Small and exquisite, it looked to René as if anyone sitting on it would snap it in pieces. In the middle of the large room stood a heater, its flue leading to the roof, a water cooler, and more worktables filled with furniture in various stages of repair. From the walls hung every type of antique wooden chair René had ever seen—and many he hadn’t.

“Forgive me, monsieur,” René said, “for disturbing your work.”

The man looked up, took in René’s stature, but showed no surprise. He had dark pouches under his eyes and a sallow complexion. His pursed mouth gave him a harried look.

“Tiens ! I’ve done all I can with this,” the man said, setting down a mustard-colored chamois cloth. “I’m Mathieu Cavour. How may I help you?” he asked René, picking up several cracked Sèvres porcelain drawer knobs, and slipping them into his pocket. “My showroom’s in the front, off the other courtyard, if you’d like to see our finished work.”