Cara Black - AL06 - Murder in Montmartre

“We’ll straighten this out, Laure, reste tranquille, ” Aimée said, even as she wondered what she could do.

A door slammed somewhere. The fluorescent lights flickered. Drunken voices shouted in the hall. An orderly ran down the green-tiled corridor, his footsteps echoing.

“You’ve got to help me,” Laure said. “Everything’s hazy, it’s hard to remember.”

Aimée feared they’d saddle Laure with an appointed attorney and conduct a minimal investigation. Or, more likely, just forward the inquiry to Internal Affairs, where police-appointed judges presided.

“They relish making an example of flics like me,” Laure said.

The sad thing was, it was true.

But she had to reassure Laure. “It won’t come to that, Laure. Like I said, there’s been some mistake.”

Laure stared at Aimée, her lip quivering. “Remember, we promised we’d always help each other out, bibiche ,” she said. Laure leaned against Aimée’s shoulders, sobbing.

Aimée held her, remembering how Laure had always had to play catch-up, had been the butt of playground jokes before her cleft palate surgery, yet had dreamed of a career like that of her heroic, much decorated father. Unlike Aimée, who kept the flics at arm’s length.

“I swear on Papa’s grave, I didn’t kill Jacques.” Laure gripped Aimée’s arm, then closed her eyes. “I’m dizzy, everything’s spinning.”

“Laure Rousseau, we’re ready for you now,” said a nurse.

About time, Aimée thought. “Looks like shock, a concussion,” she said.

“Diagnosis is our job, Mademoiselle.” The nurse wheeled the gurney toward a pair of white plastic curtains.

“How long will it take?”

“Intake and observation will take several hours.”

The same flic walked past her. Aimée caught his arm. “I’ll come back then to pick her up and take her home.”

She recognized a “don’t count on it look” in his eyes as he shook his head.

“Why not?”

“I don’t have time to explain.”

“Take my number, call me.” She put her card in his hand.

He disappeared behind the curtains.

AIMÉE STOOD on the gray slush-filled pavement in front of the hospital. She had to do something. She couldn’t stand the idea that Laure, still injured and in shock, would be arraigned at the Préfecture. There had to be evidence to clear her on the scaffold or the roof. There had to be some way out of this nightmare for Laure. She pulled out her cell phone with shaking hands and called her cousin Sebastian.

“ Allô Sebastian,” she said, eyeing the deserted taxi stop. “Can you pick me up in ten minutes?”

“For the pleasure of your company?” he said. “ Désolé, but Stephanie’s making a cassoulet.”

Stephanie was his new girlfriend, he’d met her at a rave.

“Remember, you owe me?” Aimée replied.

Pause.

“It’s payback time, Sebastian.”

“Again?” She heard music in the background. “What do I need?”

“Gloves, climbing boots, the usual. Make sure the tool set’s in your van.”

“Breaking in like last time?”

“And you love it. Don’t forget an extra set of gloves.”

Sometimes you just had to help out a friend.

SEBASTIAN, WEARING tight orange jeans, an oversize Breton sweater, and a black knit hat pulled low but with the glint of his earring still showing, gunned his van up rue Custine. His over-six-foot frame was squeezed into the beat-up van he used for deliveries. Beside him, Aimée sat scanning the shuttered cheese shops, florists, and darkened cafés dotting the steep, twisting street. Once this had been a village high outside the walls of Paris. Parisians had flocked to the butte , “the mound,” to dance at the bal musettes , to enjoy la vie bohème and to drink wine not subject to city taxes. Artists such as Modigliani and Seurat had followed, establishing ateliers in washhouses, before their paintings commanded higher prices. Then Montparnasse had beckoned.

“ Voilà ,” she said, pointing to the gated building with leafless trees silhouetted against the lights of distant Pigalle.

The crime-scene unit and police vans were gone. Jacques’s car,too. Sebastian parked by a fire hydrant Parisian style, which meant wedged into whatever space was open on the pavement.

“Bring the equipment, little cousin,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Eighteen rue André Antoine, a white stone nineteenth-century building, faced others like it on a serpentine street. Gray netting camouflaged the upper floor and scaffolding of the roof, which adjoined the other buildings in the courtyard. A red-brown brick church wall partially occupied the rear of the courtyard, cutting off the view. She’d hoped to question the man who’d stood on the steps but he had not lingered. Only a crust of snow crisscrossed with footprints remained.

The wind had died down. From somewhere came the muted squeak of a creaking swing. The crime-scene unit must have left not long after she’d been evicted, evidenced by the light dusting of snow on the cars now parked where the police vans had been. Thank God, the architect Haussmann had been unable to swing the wrecking ball here. No one could tear these buildings down or the ground underneath would collapse. The earth was riddled with spaces and tunnels . . . like a Gruyère cheese, as the saying went. Aimée could never figure that out; Emmenthaler was the cheese with the holes. You received a certificate that the building was sound when you bought a place. But, as a friend had informed her, the latest geological calculations had been made circa 1876.

She rang the concierge’s bell, unzipping her jacket to reveal the blue jumpsuit Sebastian had brought for her, and noted that there were no names inscribed above the upper floor’s metal mailboxes. Several moments later, a sharp-eyed woman answered. She wore a man’s large camel coat belted by a Dior chain, black rain boots, and had a cigarillo clamped between her thumb and forefinger.

“Don’t tell me you forgot the body?” she said, exhaling acrid smoke in Aimée’s direction.

Startled, Aimée clutched a workbag labeled Serrurie and leaned away from the smoke.

“I’m here to change the locks,” Aimée said.

“But the locksmiths were already here.”

Aimée stamped the ice from her boots on the mat. “To secure the windows and skylight access?”

“Far as I know.”

“But we’re doing the rear windows. They didn’t finish.” She jerked her hand toward Sebastian. “We had the parts back at the shop.”

“What do you mean?”

Aimée thought fast, wishing the concierge would quit questioning her.

“Tiens . . . they didn’t tell you . . . the rear windows need special locks?”

The concierge sighed. “The apartment’s vacant. The upper floors are being remodeled.”

“ Bon, we’ll go home,” Aimée said, turning toward Sebastian. “You can explain to the commissaire why snow blew in through the windows to blanket the apartment like a rug. Squatters will love it then.”

The woman glanced at her thumb, pushed the cuticle back. “The top floors have been empty for a month already.” She shrugged. Another sign of the gentrification that was invading the area. “Be sure not to disturb the old coot on the first floor. He’s furious as it is what with all the commotion,” the concierge said. Her mouth turned down and she stabbed the cigarillo out in an empty flowerpot. Then she thrust a small key ring at Aimée. “That’s the door key. I won’t wait up for you.”

“We’ll see ourselves out,” Aimée said, nodding to Sebastian, who shouldered the tool kit.