Cara Black - AL06 - Murder in Montmartre

The beep and click of the bedside machines brought Aimée back to the present. She made her legs move. Could Laure talk? Was she well enough?

“ Ça va? How do you feel?” she asked, rubbing Laure’s chilled fingers, careful to avoid the intravenous lines taped to her wrist and the top of her hand.

Laure’s eyes fluttered open. Her pupils were dilated. Recognition slowly dawned in her face. “The report . . . you’ve read the report . . . that’s why you’re here, bibiche ?”

“Laure, which report?”

“It’s so cold. Where am I?” Laure asked, bewildered.

“In the hospital.” Aimée pulled the blanket up to Laure’s chin.

Laure’s eyes wandered. “Why?”

Had the concussion wiped out her memory?

“Take it easy, Laure,” she said. “Don’t worry. Can you remember what happened?”

Laure tried to put her finger to her lips but missed. “It’s . . . it’s a secret.”

Aimée’s spine prickled. “Secret?”

“ Non, I’m not supposed . . .” Laure tried to prop herself up on her elbow and slipped. With an exhausted sigh, she gave up and fell back, her matted brown hair fanning out on the pillow. “No . . . not right . . . the report.”

“Jacques’s report?”

Laure blinked, shook her head, and then grimaced in pain.

“You asked for my help, remember,” said Aimée. “If you keep things from me, I can’t help you. Even if you promised him to keep quiet, now it’s all right to speak. You won’t help him by keeping it inside.”

Nothing could help Jacques now. Aimée hated pressing Laure while she was disoriented, but, with any luck, she might mention a sound, a detail, that would identify her attacker.

Aimée placed a small pot of hothouse violets next to the water carafe on Laure’s bedside table. Say it with flowers—hadn’t René recommended that for Morbier? “Too bad they don’t have any fragrance.”

“Violets in winter! Merci .”

En route, Aimée had spent an off-season fortune at the Marché aux Fleurs behind Hôtel Dieu. She’d asked the red-cheeked flower seller, a stout woman wearing layers of sweaters under her smock, how the flowers survived in such cold. “But the flowers like it here, Mademoiselle!” she’d answered.

Laure gave a weak smile. “So thoughtful. You always watch out for me.”

“Laure, what do you remember?”

Pain crossed Laure’s face. The thin white scar creasing her upper lip caught the light.

“My head’s throbbing. It feels like it’s full of cotton.”

“Please try, Laure. Try to picture going up on the scaffolding and tell me what you heard.”

Laure’s hands balled into fists. But her eyes widened as though she remembered something.

“Stay calm, Laure,” Aimée said, unfurling Laure’s clenched fingers.

“So hard . . . yes, Jacques called me. Screaming. The men . . .”

Hadn’t Zoe Tardou said she’d heard male voices? “You said he was meeting an informer.”

Laure’s eyes brightened. “He needed my back-up. Now I remember but . . . my head’s throbbing.”

“You saw these men?” Aimée leaned forward, gripped the metal bed rail. “You were set up! What did they look like?”

“I heard men’s voices. That’s all I remember.”

“Raised in anger?”

Laure rubbed her head. “Can’t they give me something to stop the pain?”

“Like an argument? Low or deep voices?”

“Not speaking French,” she said. “I didn’t understand them.”

Zoe Tardou had said the same thing.

“What did it sound like?”

Laure closed her eyes.

“Try to think, Laure,” she said. “What language did they speak?”

“I just remember the stale smell of sweat, a quick whiff from the rooftop,” she said, her voice fading. “And thinking it was Jacques and he had to be scared. Maybe . . . I don’t know . . . the way he called out.”

A scared man because a deal had fallen through? Or was there something else?

“Were you afraid for Jacques? Did you feel that he needed help? Why did you enter the apartment, Laure?”

Tears streaked down her pale cheeks. “What else could I do? I couldn’t even pass the exam . . . Jacques fixed it for me. . . .”

Her police exam, the one Laure had spent nights studying for? “Don’t worry about that,” Aimée said, wiping away the tears with a cloth, stroking Laure’s arm.

If Laure had surprised the men meeting Jacques, they could have attacked her, taken her gun, and used it to shoot Jacques. But Aimée didn’t see how to account for the gun residue on Laure’s hands.

“Papa made me promise . . . not to tell you. . . .” Laure’s voice trailed off.

“Not to tell me what?” Aimée demanded.

Georges had passed away several years earlier. Had the concussion returned her to the past, so she was reliving a memory? A feeling of foreboding filled Aimée.

“What do you mean, Laure?” She tried to avoid the exasperated tone she’d used with the younger Laure when she had tagged after Aimée and dogged her movements.

Laure’s eyelids fluttered.

“That pile of Carambar, remember? I didn’t tell you. I took them from the concierge.”

Carambar, the candy caramels Aimée loved. Still did.

“He didn’t mean to, Aimée. Neither of them did,” Laure gasped in pain.

Aimée’s spine stiffened. The way Laure spoke indicated that something more than stolen candy was on her mind.

“Who didn’t mean to?”

“When we came home from school . . . that day I stole the Carambar . . . the envelope . . . on the concierge’s table. Remember, I imitated her?”

The high-pitched beeps from one of the monitors alarmed Aimée.

“Laure, I don’t understand.”

“Your papa, the report saying your papa . . . non, I’m so confused. That happened much later. Some cover-up.” She lay back. “With Ludovic . . . too tired.”

Aimée felt a sickening lurch in her stomach. Laure’s words indicated her father had gotten involved in something shady. A cover-up? With “Ludovic”?

“Mademoiselle, stand aside, please.” Aimée felt arms pushing her out of the way and from the corner of her eye saw a team of white-coated staff rushing past her.

“Oxygen! Monitor her blood pressure,” a doctor said. “Her pupils are blown.”

“Sixty over forty,” said the nurse.

“Looks like increased intercranial pressure—”

Aimée stumbled toward the nurses’ station. The staff pulled a white curtain, its hooks jingling, around Laure’s bed.

“Please, tell me what’s happening.”

“Complications,” said a brisk nurse, grabbing a chart.

Complications. Did the nurse mean permanent damage? “Why has her condition worsened?”

“Only medical personnel are permitted here now. You must leave the ward.”

“But my friend—”

“We’ll handle this, call back later,” the nurse said peremptorily, steering Aimée out.

Tuesday

AIMÉE STARED OVER THE melting, dirt-encrusted snowdrifts on the bank of the Seine, racked with worry and guilt. She’d pushed Laure, subjected her to critical stress. She would never forgive herself if the pressure of her questions had caused Laure permanent damage.

Laure’s disjointed words spun in her mind. Old story, old news, about her father’s corruption, she wanted to shout. Hadn’t she proved he wasn’t crooked? Yet a sliver of doubt remained. Had Laure some knowledge of a cover-up, something her father had gone along with? Ludovic . . . was he Ludovic Jubert? The one who’d been referred to by the Interpol agent in Clichy in connection with Aimée’s father’s death in the Place Vendôme? The gray-hued Seine, swirling by in eddies, provided no answers.