Cara Black - AL05 - Murder in Clichy

“ Merci, ” he said.

“Did you enjoy the parade?”

A lost look painted his hollow-cheekboned face. “That farce?”

Shocked, she saw that he picked at the ribbon as if trying to pull it off. But the effort seemed too much for him.

“Most of me died in the trenches. The mustard gas took one of my lungs. The rest, well. . . .”

“Caporal, you must be tired,” she said, not knowing what else to say.

“We were supposed to save the world for peace, mon enfant. Fight the war to end all wars,” he said. “Did it do any good?”

She shook her head. What had happened in 1914–18 on French fields had just been the beginning. “I don’t know. Can I help you inside, does someone wait for you?”

“Everyone I knew is dead,” he said. “It’s my turn.”

RENÉ HAD left a note on the laptop in the hotel room.

“Dining downstairs on Cameroun manioc, fish and rice aloko . Join us.”

She put her head in her hands, rocked back and forth. Her hands came back sticky with tears and black mascara. She’d lost her man, been tempted to sleep with a chiseled-cheekbone charmer, and still hadn’t found Gassot or the jade. She curled up on the lumpy settee by the window, overlooking wind- and rain-blasted rue Sauffroy, feeling as alone as the old vet.

Sunday Morning

SHE WOKE UP TO her cell phone’s ringing. René lay asleep, pale lemon light pooled on the duvet bunched around him. Her stockings were twisted and she straightened them while listening to Serge’s voice.

“Sorry, Aimée, I was called to Nantes, just got back to the morgue,” Serge said. “I have to work Sundays now.”

“Which twin had the fever?” She could never tell them apart, the boys never stood still long enough to enable her to figure it out.

“Both came down with la grippe ; thank God my mother-in-law came with us.”

“Do me a favor, Serge, find me the autopsy report on Albert Daudet.”

“Why?” he asked.

“It’s a suspicious death.”

“You stopped all that, didn’t you?”

Not Serge, too!

“I’ll bring Miles Davis over,” she said. “Let the twins take him for a walk.”

“Look Aimée, that’s not your field now.”

“It never was,” she said. “But if I tell the boys you wouldn’t let me bring—”

“ Arrête ! What’s the deceased man’s name again?”

“Daudet, Albert.”

“Like the writer, eh? Hold on.”

She heard the shuffle of papers, conversations in the background. By the time Serge came back on the line, she’d taken her pills and pulled on her skirt.

“Daudet died under medical care, so it took a while to dredge it up,” Serge said. “Hmm, interesting report. Most old men who go in for a cardiogram don’t die from cartilage thyroid fractures and hemorrhaging in the neck.”

“Meaning?”

“Asphyxiation due to manual strangulation. My guess is it came from a carotid sleeper hold.”

She gasped. Regnier and his henchmen. Hadn’t René said he’d been caught in a carotid sleeper hold?

“Daudet had a preexisting coronary condition. It didn’t help. The compression of the carotid did it for him,” Serge said. “I figure it took three or four minutes. That’s indicated by extensive bruises to the neck and petechiae.”

“Would the killer have to be muscular?” she asked.

“It helps. Hook and hold the neck in the crotch of the arm, apply pressure, and most folks pass out in ten seconds. Hold a few minutes longer and it’s the big sleep.”

“And Serge, in your professional opinion?”

“The evenness and deep pressure bruises indicate a big guy,” Serge said. “But that’s off the record.”

“Fax it to me, will you?”

“You owe me, Aimée. Count some babysitting in, too!”

AIMÉE KNOCKED on the door of Albert Daudet’s widow, Lucie. She lived in a peeling stucco former loge de concierge at the mouth of a cobblestoned courtyard.

The window lace shimmied and swayed as the glass door opened. Crocheted figures danced and then became still forever, caught on the lace panel, as if sculpted by sea-salt spray.

“Madame Daudet?” she said.

“ Oui? ” said a woman with a tightly curled gray perm and reading glasses hanging by a beaded string around her neck.

“May I take a few moments of your time?”

She stared at Aimée, smoothing down her apron. “The coffin’s all I can afford right now. Forget the memorial service you people try to cram down my throat. The anciens com-battants should help bury a veteran!”

“I’m a detective.” She flashed her license. “Sorry to impose at this time but I want to ask a few questions.”

“The flics came by yesterday,” she said. “I told them the same thing. It’s foul play.”

Aimée nodded. “I know. It’s in the autopsy report.”

“They won’t show it to me. Keep telling me to wait.”

“But I have a copy,” she said. “Would you like to see it?”

Madame Daudet covered her mouth with her hand. “Come in,” she said.

The converted loge , a suitcase of an apartment, was crammed with shelves of religious statues and plastic vials of holy water from Lourdes. Bronze statues of the Virgin Mary and a kneeling Bernadette were prominent. A small sink with a floral print curtain below stood next to a two burner stove.

“Albert was my second husband, you know,” said Madame Daudet, gesturing to chairs around a table which bore a file of supermarché coupons. The corners of her mouth turned down in a sour expression. “I never had to do such things before but the pension’s not enough.”

She pulled her reading glasses on and read the autopsy report.

“What’s this ‘petechiae’?”

“In layman’s terms?”

“I don’t speak medicalese.”

“Red pinpoint hemorrhages in his eyes. Their presence indicates strangulation.”

Madame Daudet’s brows creased with concern. “I don’t understand.”

But Aimée thought she did.

“Did he have enemies?”

“Albert?” Though she shook her head, the tight curls budged not a centimeter. “He supervised the tire warehouse for forty years. A joker. Always good with his hands, he was.” She pointed to the built-in shelves, like in a ship’s cabin. “I told the police the same thing. Don’t you talk to each other?”

If she thought Aimée worked with the flics, why enlighten her?

“I just need to clarify. Why do you think someone would do this?”

Madame Daudet scanned the report. “Albert talked. ‘Big mouth,’ I called him. To his face, mind you. He knew what I thought. No lies between us. That’s why I wondered. . . .”

She paused, her eyes wistful.

“You wondered if he’d run off at the mouth and it got him in trouble?” Aimée asked.

Madame Daudet nodded. For the first time Aimée saw tears in the corners of her eyes. She brushed them away.

“Was it something he mentioned to his comrades from the Sixth Battalion?”

“Some scam. For the first time, well, Albert kept secrets from me. I thought they were just old men with fantasies.”

“Fantasies?”

“Who comes out of war unscarred, eh?” she said, clipping the coupons, and putting them in the box. “But when the nightmares started again. . . .”

“Madame Daudet, what do you mean?”

“The nightmares Albert had!” Madame Daudet said. “He woke up screaming, bathed in sweat. The first year we were married, it happened every night.”

Aimée crossed her legs and shifted the file of coupons. Outside in the courtyard, footsteps sounded on the cobblestones. Despite the cramped warmth inside, a damp muskiness permeated the floorboards.