Murder in Clichy (26 page)

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.

“From the battle of Dien Bien Phu, you mean?”

“He said odd things in his sleep,” she said. “Over and over, about a dragon.”

Aimée gripped the edge of the table. “A jade dragon
?
Did he mention that?”

Madame Daudet took her reading glasses from her nose. “A list of animals, he kept repeating it. But when he woke up, he denied knowing anything about them.”

The astrological animals of the Chinese zodiac? Excited, Aimée leaned forward. Was he one of the soldiers who’d looted the Emperor’s tomb? Did Madame Daudet know Gassot?

“What do his comrades in the Sixth Battalion say?”

“They’re scared,” she said. “Afraid the past has come knocking on their door. After I mentioned that his pants cuff was rolled up, Picq had such horror in his eyes. He hasn’t been in touch since.”

“Wait a minute.” Aimée scanned the autopsy report. In the description of Albert’s body there was a tattoo, a flower with a dripping knife, on his left calf.

“Didn’t you think it odd?”

“More like disrespectful, a careless staff error, so I made my thoughts known to the director.”

“I mean his tattoo.”

“They all had them. Some drunken Haiphong foolishness, Albert told me.”

“Doesn’t the Sixth Battalion keep in touch, meetings and so on?”

“You mean swapping war stories of the good old days in Indochina?” She shook her head. “Not like that at all. Albert was in the supply commissary. He hid behind his desk. I think he had seen some combat but he didn’t like talking about it. Most of the boys shipped in on transports, dallied with bar girls. But then who didn’t? Got shot up and shipped out in wood boxes or on troop transports. But me, I knew the old Indochina.”

Madame Daudet’s eyes took on a faraway look. “I remember the flame trees and the tamarinds by the grass lawn that spread all the way down to the mouths of the dragon.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand, Madame.”

“The Mekong has nine tributaries, like the nine mouths of the dragon, the Indochinese say,” she said. “My parents had parties, magical soirées with lantern lights, the banana leaves nodding in the breeze, tables of hors d’oeuvres and so many servants we tripped over them.”

Aimée hoped this was going somewhere.

“My father planted rubber trees. Kept big accounts with the tire manufacturers he supplied on the île de la Jatte.”

Aimée tried another tactic. “Was your husband a rubber planter, too?”

“Paul, my first husband, was a naval attaché.” Her eyes misted over. “I polished his épaulettes, kept the gold braid just how he liked it. We’d go to Café Parisien, you know, where the right types were seen: the governor, and everyone of importance. Such a scent of frangipani in the courtyard! At one time they called it the Paris of the East. Gustave Eiffel designed the post office, can you imagine?”

Aimée didn’t think she expected an answer.

“But there’s no more rue Catinat now. Our beautiful ochre villa’s a community center, someone told me. They don’t even call it Saigon anymore,” she sighed. “We wore hand-sewn silk tea dresses. No one wears things like that anymore. And we changed several times a day,
très élégantes
. The humidity, you know. Dense, heavy like a wet blanket all the time. I’ll say one thing for the natives, they knew how to dress for the weather.”

“Did you know the de Lussignys over there?”

“My dear, we dined with them at the Café Parisien,”

Madame Daudet said, a trace of hauteur in her voice.

To Aimée it sounded sad, so long ago and so far away.

“Was the old man a jade collector?”

“He loved everything native, including his mistress,” she said. “Life seemed perfect until the guerillas bombed the café. As far as I’m concerned, it ended then. All the guerilla warfare that followed, attacks on us by the Hoa-Hoa and Cao Dai.”

“Cao Dai? But it’s a religious sect.”

“Religion cloaks many things.” Madame Daudet shrugged. “A political vehicle for
les asiatiques.
Paul always said that. The Cao Dai had an
army
. At first, I didn’t blame them. Starving on the streets, well, we could see that. With all those green shoots in the rice paddies, I wondered where the rice went but the guerillas took it. They brainwashed the peasants. Our servants, too. Imagine, after all those years, and how generous we were! Those betrayals hurt. But I prefer to think, well, not everyone.”

A true colonial childhood, Aimée thought. And now she had come to this. Aimée noticed the small armoire, the door ajar, which held only a few housedresses on hangers.

“When my old nanny died, a devout Buddhist, they laid a banana on her stomach, as a guarantee of an afterlife. Imagine!” she said, sighing. “The Cao Dai bury their dead sitting up.”

“With jade?” Aimée asked.

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” she said.

Outside the weak sunshine slanted on the wall. The voices of children and the bouncing of a ball echoed from the recesses of the courtyard.

“How can I get in touch with Picq and Gassot?”

“Bad lot,” she said. “I always said it. They proved me right, the
flics
did.”

Frustrated, Aimée wished the woman would give her facts, not hints. Gassot might have the clue to the jade she needed. “What do you mean?”

“They were arrested for possession of explosives,” she said. “Last I heard, they were in jail due to their crazy scheme.”

“Gassot, too?”

“Seems he can move fast despite his peg-leg.”

“So he escaped. Where could I find him?”

Madame Daudet pulled back.

“I think he knows why your husband was killed,” Aimée said. “Please, tell me how to find him.”

Madame Daudet blessed herself and kissed the gold cross around her neck. She pointed across the narrow yard to a five-story hotel with peeling shutters, that displayed the sign HÔTEL, and a phone number with the old-fashioned prefix BAT 4275. There was a shuttered café below it.

“Are they ever open?”

Madame Daudet rolled her eyes. “A money-laundering front for some gang. At least that’s what Albert said. No wonder Gassot lives there cheap.”

And then Aimée remembered the address she’d gotten from the police. The building Thadée owned in the back of the gallery courtyard: What had the faded old blue sign said? A warehouse or manufacturer?

“Either your husband, Picq, or Gassot left a contact phone number at the
anciens combattant
s. Was it the telephone number of the tire warehouse?”

Madame Daudet nodded.

“Were there other men from the Sixth Battalion in their group?”

“Nemours. He’s a gourmand who loves food more than life itself. We all thought he’d go first, with his cholesterol!”

“But your husband was the first. And someone’s after his remaining comrades, aren’t they?”

Madame Dinard looked down. “I don’t know.”

Aimée tapped her heels on the wooden floor wanting to steer the conversation back on track.

“What about Nemours?”

“He follows Picq. They’d meet with Albert at the tire warehouse. When Albert retired, he became a part-time custodian. After work, they’d go to play belote upstairs in the café on rue des Moines.”

Now it made sense. She’d met them already. The day she confronted Pleyet in the upstairs room of the café, the day after Thadée was killed. She shivered with fear.

Could she have it wrong? Had
they
killed Thadée, then their comrade Albert, out of greed?

“Did Albert ever mention Thadée Baret? He was related by marriage to the de Lussignys.”

“
Mais bien sûr,
all the time!” she said. “Albert loved talking to Thadée about Indochina. Thadée ran the gallery. He received it in the divorce settlement. Once the de Lussignys owned the tire factory. They were rubber barons who intermarried with the natives,” said Madame Daudet, her mouth crinkled in a
moue
of disgust.