Cara Black: AL06 - Murder in Montmartre

Miles Davis wandered along, sniffing around the metal grille that surrounded the base of a leafless tree. She rubbed the jade but no reassuring warmth answered.

Her cell phone vibrated in her coat pocket. Guy?

“ Allô ,” she said, hope in her voice.

“ Bibiche! ” She recognized Laure Rousseau’s voice. Laure was the daughter of her father’s first partner, and the endearment was the one she’d used since they were eight years old. “Come celebrate, Ouvrier’s retiring. Remember him?”

Ouvrier was a horse-faced flic from her father’s old Commissariat. She heard conversation and the pinging of a pinball machine in the background. A bar? Not her scene, with a bunch of old flics reminiscing and drinking, the type who’d joined the force before the earth’s crust had cooled.

“I’ve got good news, bibiche . Don’t I owe you a drink?”

“Sounds like you’ve already started.”

“The seat next to me is warm,” Laure said.

Aimée thought of her empty apartment filled with cold, stale air.

“Place Pigalle, you remember L’Oiseau?” Singing erupted in the background.

She’d prefer falling off a stool with Laure to drinking by herself at the corner bistro.

Aimée looked down. The snow crystals crunched below her feet. Miles Davis had finished; she could take him upstairs.

“I’ll grab a taxi. See you in fifteen minutes.”

THIS SLICE of Montmartre had witnessed several heydays. Before the turn of the century, Edgar Degas had discovered his models here among the grisettes, young women waiting for work amid the horse-drawn milk carts. Now the sex clubs and cut-rate North African shops contributed a different flavor. Still, pockets of cobbled lanes with two-story artists’ ateliers dotted the route winding up to Sacré Coeur, which crowned the steep hill.

Aimée entered L’Oiseau through a haze of cigarette smoke and close, steamy air; the party was in full swing. Thank God she’d stuck on a second Nicorette patch in the taxi. Plainclothes flics , in their sixties and older, propped up the zinc bar and sat at the small round tables. She recognized several faces, men who’d worked with her father. They were more at home at a zinc bar than in their own kitchens. In this group, where she had once belonged, she now felt like an outsider.

Her godfather, Morbier, a commissaire, sat at the counter, his tweed elbow-patched jacket smelling of wet wool. She brightened, seeing a gold paper crown tilted on his salt-and-pepper hair, incongruous with his basset-hound drooping eyes and sagging cheeks. A half-eaten slice of Galette du Roi, Epiphany cake, and a small ceramic Santon charm sat in front of him.

Where was Guy? Forget it. She needed a drink.

“Now you’re the king, eh, Morbier? Where’s Laure?” she asked, motioning to the owner and helping herself to an almond-paste-filled tart. She took a sip from Morbier’s glass, then another. “The same please, Jean.”

She felt a tap on her shoulder and turned.

Laure Rousseau, grinning, stood framed against a yellowed Marseilles soccer-team poster that was peeling from the tobacco-stained walls. As always, her hand flicked across her mouth, a small self-conscious movement she made to hide the thin white line crossing her upper lip, the remnant of a cleft palate long since corrected by surgery.

“So, bibiche ,” Laure said, her brown eyes scanning Aimée, “you want to talk about the truck that ran you down?”

That obvious? Aimée choked and spilled her glass. Burgundy splattered on the zinc counter. Laure reached for a rag and wiped up the mess.

“That bad?” Laure asked again.

She nodded. “Guy’s on call. Permanently on call.”

“Aaah, the eye doctor. You’ve broken up?” Laure asked. “I’m sorry.”

Aimée tapped her foot on the cracked brown tiled floor littered with sugar-cube wrappers and cigarette butts. “I blew it.

But rather than go into it, maybe I should leave. I don’t want to spoil the evening.”

Laure put her arm around Aimée’s shoulder. “Let’s get rid of that long face. Tell me.”

And Aimée did.

“He’ll be back,“ Laure said.

“I’m not holding my breath. We’re too different.” Aimée picked up a new glass and threw back a shot. Men came and went, didn’t they? There was always another one. With more wine, she’d convince herself of that and maybe get through the night.

“ Bibiche .” Laure hugged her. “You can have anyone in here, anytime. The trouble is they’re all divorced, can’t keep a relationship going for a minute, and are as old as your Papa and mine.”

“As old as my father would have been,” Aimée said. “It’s been five years, Laure.” The Place Vendôme explosion that had killed her father was now just a lost file in the Ministry, the one lead she’d had from Interpol . . . cold by now. She tried to shove these thoughts aside, too.

How familiar this smoky café-bar was. The kind where she and Laure had sat playing endless tic-tac-toe games, while their fathers worked weekend stakeouts.

She noticed the furrow in Laure’s brow and that her friend kept tossing back her long straight brown hair nervously. The navy blue pantsuit hung on her.

“You’ve lost weight,” Aimée said.

Laure averted her close-set brown eyes.

“I can’t keep these dinosaurs in line,” Laure said, a beat later. “At least the old-school types don’t toss out sexual innuendos every five minutes and tease me like the new recruits at the Commissariat do. My life’s on the line every day, just like theirs. When I leave in the morning, I don’t know if I’ll come back. Still, they think I’m fair game.”

“You’re on patrol, just want you wanted,” Aimée said, noticing the pin on Laure’s lapel. “I’d offer congratulations, but you know how I feel about your patrolling.”

Laure had left paperwork behind and was now assigned to active duty. Patrolling wasn’t a job Aimée thought wise for her. They’d had endless discussions over it. Laure’s need to prove herself— whether it arose from her complex over the harelip that had marred her appearance until the operation, or from her desire to match her father’s decorated service—hadn’t changed.

“Why must you put your life on the line?”

Again, that averted gaze, the hand motion brushing over her mouth.

Raucous laughter erupted from a knot of back-slapping gray-haired men, drowning Laure’s reply. The well-lubricated crowd, conversing at a roar, competed with the pinging of the 1950’s pinball machine.

“ Encore? ” Jean, the owner, asked, pointing to her glass.

Laure shook her head.

“Something bothering you, Laure?”

Laure jerked a thumb toward a man in his thirties with black slicked-back hair and a clipped mustache, who was crouched over the zinc counter. ”My partner, Jacques Gagnard.”

Aimée noticed Jacques’s mouth twitch as he spoke into a cell phone while lighting a Gitanes cigarette. His hands shook, shook so much it took him two tries to light his cigarette.

Aimée had seen a lot of nervous flics in bars like this. The ex-military type who’d joined the police approaching middle age.

“Just divorced?”

“ Bien sûr , got a new green Citroën and a girlfriend, the usual,” Laure confirmed.

It must be nerve-racking to have a partner like that, Aimée thought. She took another sip, aware of the whispering and the pointed looks at Laure. Was there more to it?

“What’s the buzz? You’re up for promotion already?”

Laure took a deep breath and shook her head. Then she excused herself and joined Jacques.

Aimée downed her glassful, and had ordered another when she heard Laure’s voice over the din. “The last time!” She saw Laure’s flushed face. She was pounding her fist on the counter. The hush that fell over the bar was punctuated by the pinging of the pinball machine.