Cara Black - Murder in the Sentier

“They hauled me in for questioning, I found his body in place Ste-Foy. Poor mec , they’d stuffed him in a garbage bag, the truck was about to scoop him up.”

Silence.

“Someone said he worked at your place. They’re coming to your club to look for her if she doesn’t show. With the immigration squad.”

She lied but that should spur them to find Idrissa. Most of the help, she remembered from her last visit—the kitchen crew, musicians, and the deaf-mute cleaner—she figured they were sans-papiers , illegal.

“Where should she go?”

She’d guessed right.

“Place Mazas, the morgue,” she said. “Tell her to be there at ten A.M. tomorrow when it opens.”

The man hung up.

Aimée would call Serge at the morgue and be out front waiting for Idrissa.

She pondered sleeping in the office, not ready to face her apartment after the break-in. But she needed to change clothes.

She stuffed her phone in her bag, swung the laptop case over her shoulder, and headed downstairs. Tonight was her night for walking. She made her way down the quai, past lovers sitting by the Seine. And on the way she wondered if she’d always be alone.

Thursday Night

MARIUS TEYNARD MET ALPHONSE DRAY, his old police colleague, over a bottle of chilled Sancerre. Even this late at night the brasserie was full. The floodlights illuminating the préfecture on the Quai des Orfèvres shone in the background.

“So how’s Jules Bourdon?”

“The words ‘cocky’ and ‘arrogant’ come to mind,” said Dray.

“So he hasn’t changed,” Marius Teynard said with a smile. “Good. I’ll get him this time.”

“Any other reason you want to know his progress after leaving Senegal?”

“Catching him isn’t good enough?” Teynard poured more white wine into his companion’s wineglass.

“Don’t you wonder why he’s left now?”

“Homesick, broke, or both,” Teynard said. He took a long gulp. “Maybe the mercenary jobs dried up.”

“He’s not alone.”

Teynard paused. He eyed the woman opposite from them, who’d crossed her legs. “She’s with him?”

“Let’s just say you can buy followers when you’ve got the money.”

FRIDAY

Friday Morning

AIMÉE WOKE UP and made coffee. She’d cleaned up the spilled sugar in the kitchen last night. One of the blue tiles behind the faucet was loose. She’d have to caulk it later.

“ Bonjour , Serge,” she said, when she reached him in his lab.

“Nice fragment of occipital bone with internal beveling from a bullet you had the other day,” he said.

Trust Serge to be gruesome, but that was the medical examiner in him.

“There’s a detective who wants to discuss the Figeac evidence,” he said.

Finally!

“In conjunction with Jutta’s murder, I hope,” she said.

“Officially, it’s the detective’s job to request it,” Serge said. “But I faxed him my findings concerning Jutta’s wound. An exact match on the beveling of bone. Now the ball’s in his court.”

“I’m calling to see a corpse, probably a Franck, if he’s been cleaned up. A man in pink underwear.”

A Franck was a male unidentified corpse; unidentified female corpses were Yvettes. On average they stayed in the morgue coolers sixteen months. Some were held for years. The staff was always eager for a possible identification.

She heard paper crumple. “The noir found in the Sentier last night?” Serge asked. “Does this have anything to do with Romain Figeac?”

“They’re linked but I don’t know how yet. For now, we need an ID, Serge, that’s all,” she said. “Otherwise he could lie unclaimed for a long time.”

Finally, he agreed.

René called as she was leaving. “Michel’s dress rehearsal starts in less than an hour but we’ve got a snag in the operating system. We need to get it up and running today.”

“Give me the address in the Palais Royal.”

“Enter on the Galerie de Beaujolais side. Number 38, near Colette’s former apartment.”

“Not too shabby,” she said, not adding that she had an appointment at the morgue first.

Riding her scooter down the quai, she phoned Christian.

No answer.

“LOOK AT it yourself,” Aimée said, passing the Baggie with the wallpaper sample and bone over the detective’s desk. “Romain Figeac’s .25 didn’t do that.”

Detective Tolbiac, a barrel-chested man in his forties, shook his head. A radio blared, advertising summer bargains, from across the square into the open Commissariat windows. “You say the son hired you to find ghosts. But you feel Romain Figeac was murdered? Isn’t it up to his son?”

“Why don’t you check with your report?” Aimée asked.

“If memory serves me right,” Tolbiac said, leaning back in his chair, “I recall a suicide note, the guy being blotto—his usual condition—then a cremation. Kind of a done deal.”

“Don’t you think the fragmentation of the occipital bone looks atypical for a .25?” Aimée asked. “Couldn’t you test it?”

“Well, first we’d need DNA for a match wouldn’t we? To see if this was Romain Figeac’s bone. You could have picked this fragment up in the garbage for all I know.”

Aimée stood up. Tolbiac made it sound as if everything was too much trouble.

“His son caused the hurry up,” Tolbiac said. “Let him come talk to me.”

Great. She’d put the lead to the murders of a terrorist and a writer on this detective’s plate but he wasn’t hungry. Obviously, no one would assist in finding the connection to her mother.

Outside the morgue, a tall ebony-skinned man in a green street-cleaner’s jumpsuit stood where she had expected to see Idrissa. Curious, she approached him.

“I’m Aimée Leduc.”

“Khalifa, I’m Ousmane Sada’s cousin,” he said, a pained expression on his long face. “Blood relation on his mother’s side. Why didn’t you call me?”

“Believe me, Monsieur Khalifa, if I’d known you existed I would have,” she said. “I’m sorry. Is Idrissa Diaffa coming?”

“Ousmane’s employer called me.”

“His employer, you mean from Club Exe?”

“Nessim Mamou, the clothing manufacturer, where he worked. Ousmane wanted to go home, you know,” Khalifa said. “To his village outside Dakar, to his fiancée.”

Nessim Mamou … Michel’s uncle?

Inside the red-brick Institut Medico-Legal building, Serge met them. “The autopsy’s just finished,” he said. They followed him down to the green-tiled basement. Aimée hated the formaldehyde smell and the reek of pine disinfectant. It reminded her of the time she’d had to come and identify her father’s remains after the explosion.

Serge signed in at the desk and took them to the waiting room, furnished with a Naugahyde couch and orange plastic chairs. A rectangular window was covered with plastic shower curtains.

“I’ll bring the body to the window.”

When the curtains parted, Serge knocked on the glass.

Khalifa went to the window. He was so tall he had to stoop to see. He nodded his head. “I never thought I’d see him like this.”

Aimée looked. Ousmane Sada’s eyes were closed, thank God, but the first of a series of black thread stitches was visible in his sternum.

The curtains closed. Serge joined them in a few minutes with a plastic bag. “Please sign here that you identify him and down here for his personal effects.”

Khalifa opened the bag. The bloodstained pink bra and garter belt spilled over the Naugahyde couch. His eyes widened. “What kind of mistake is this?”

But Aimée’s eyes fastened on the bit of beaded yellow feather fluff stuck in the dried blood on the pink elastic.