Murder in the Palais Royal (16 page)

“Wait a minute, Monsieur. You work at the Ministry of Culture? Can I get a few more comments?”

“Strike that. No comment.”

Several
flics
herded the bystanders away from Clémence’s body. “Now if you’ll assemble over there and tell us what you saw.”

Any moment,
La Proc
, the investigating magistrate, and the crime-scene squad would arrive. Aimée had to avoid the police; she was already a suspect in René’s shooting. Her stomach knotted, chills racked her. Her denim jacket lay on Clémence’s lifeless body. She moved behind a column and bumped into one of the men, who thrust the penlight into her hands.

Aimée caught a better glimpse of him now. Graying temples, tall, a look of concern in his eyes. He wore a tailored suit and Lobb handmade shoes which she recognized as René wore them too, and held a briefcase embossed with the Ministry of Culture logo.

“Did you see anyone running away, Monsieur?”

He shook his head. “I’m so sorry about your friend.”

“Not just her. She was pregnant.”

Turning, she kept to the shadows. She molded herself into a dark stone niche, straining to hear the
flics
questioning the bystanders. She couldn’t leave the scene until she found out what the woman who’d identified Clémence knew.

“So you knew her. You can identify her, Madame?” a
flic
was asking the woman with the odd plastic bag on her head.

“Terrible, such a sweet girl. Clémence Touvier.” The older woman clutched her purse. “She lives just by Molière’s statue. We’re not safe here. There are thieves everywhere these days.”

“If you’ll step over here, Madame.” The
flic
took the woman aside to question her.

Tires screeched nearby. Orange-red lights bathed the Palais Royal façades. Aimée hid in the shadows, out of sight of the arriving Brigade Criminelle. And then she recognized Melac.

Merde!
A record quick police response. She pressed herself deeper into the shadowed niche.

Melac leaned over Clémence. Then he signaled to the medical examiner. Not two minutes later, the medical examiner stood and nodded to Melac. The Mylar crinkled as the medics covered Clémence’s face. On the count of three, the medics lifted her onto the stretcher.

Melac gestured to the arriving crime-scene squad, then to the blue-uniformed
flics.
“Keep the scene secured.” He scanned the dark columns.

In a brief moment, she felt his eyes combing the niche in which she was hiding. She covered the silver buckle on her bag, afraid it might catch the light. But no, he’d headed under the colonnade in the other direction, toward
La Proc
huddled with the medical examiner.

Moonlight reflected on the leaves. The tree branches cast dark slanting shadows over the bushes. The damp odor of crumbling wet stone clung in the corners.

She wanted to search Clémence’s apartment for Nicolas’s notebook. Instead of taking it to work, Clémence might have kept it hidden there, she hoped. Unless the killer already had it.

Aimée waited twenty minutes, shivering in the shadows, her hair damp, her knees knocking from the cold, watching the woman speaking to the Police Judiciaire officer. She kept gesticulating, but Aimée couldn’t catch a word.

René had been shot, Nicolas had been murdered, and now Clémence. Think like the perp, her father always said. But how could she, without a clue as to how these events were linked? She had to find that damned notebook.

The conversation over, the woman headed around the corner and entered the first door of the adjoining building. Aimée kept to the shadows, out of the
flics’
sight, and pressed the buzzer of the woman’s building.

The door clicked open.

Aimée slid inside to see the woman looking down over the sculpted rosettes of the iron banister.

“
Oui?
Is that you, Officer?”

Aimée let the door close behind her before she stepped into view. “Pardon, Madame, but I need to speak with you.”

“Who are you?”

“Clémence was supposed to meet me, Madame,” Aimée said. “I saw you talking to the
flics
.”

“But you were there. I saw you. Why did you leave the scene?” The plastic bag, beaded with moisture, was still on her head, giving her a bizarre look.

Aimée mounted the stairs two at a time to the landing.

“Clémence was pregnant,” Aimée said. “You know what that means.”

“I do?” An unsure look. “Aaah,
l’amour
, of course.”

“Et voilà.
” Aimée nodded as if that explained everything.

“Tell the authorities.”

Aimée wanted to get out of the drafty hallway and out of view from the windows.

“Madame, I told the officer what I knew.”

“Eh? I didn’t see you.”

Aimée shrugged. “Then you missed the officer mesmerized by my cleavage behind the ambulance. Please let me explain. It’s important.”

“I don’t understand. Who are you?”

“Clémence’s friend, please.”

“Just for a moment.” The woman relented and gestured to her apartment door. Aimée found herself in a narrow hallway wallpapered with faded peonies from the thirties. The close air, tinged with the woman’s perfume, tickled her nose. The hallway opened to a small room furnished with spindly gilt chairs and walls covered with oil paintings. A place from another era, Aimée thought. A roll-top desk baring a ledger was prominent.

A narrow, winding metal staircase led below to what Aimée realized was the military medal shop. Like many in the nineteenth-century covered passages, this woman lived above her business. A cramped life, she remembered from Celine’s description in his scathing novel about growing up over a Passage Choiseul shop run by his parents.

“Autumn bites with a full set of teeth,
non
?” the woman said, using an old-country colloquialism as she disappeared behind a lace curtain.

Aimée stood, afraid to move and send a glass bibelot, one of the many paperweights on the shelf, to shatter on the floor.

The woman returned and spread plastic produce bags on a chair. She’d removed the bag from her hair to reveal blond-white waves, a hair color unique to Parisiennes of a certain age. “I am Madame Fontenay,” she said. “And you?”

“Aimée, a friend of Clémence.”

“And she was pregnant?” Madame Fontenay settled on a chair and leaned forward. “Clémence didn’t let on. But what do you want from me?”

A gossip. Good. Aimée would use that to her advantage.

“Will you inform her mother?” Aimée said.

“Me? But I never met her mother.”

“Weren’t you close with Clémence, Madame?”

“It’s a village here.” She gestured toward the semicircular window fronting the Palais Royal. “I wouldn’t say close. But everyone knows everyone else.”

And their business. Aimée glanced at the escritoire. Thick, off-white stationery, imprinted “Fontenay, established 1885 in the Palais Royal.”

Of course the woman knew the lives of everyone who lived here and their secrets. Aimée had to appeal to her, coax her to reveal what she knew.

“Madame, who could have done this to Clémence?”

“Not that I’d break sugar on someone’s back, but. . . .”

Aimée hadn’t heard that circumlocution for “gossip” in years.

Madame Fontenay leaned forward, her small made-up eyes glittering, eager to impart gossip. “Can’t say I didn’t warn her; I told her, ‘Clémence, he’s not your type.’ ”

“Who?”

“What do you mean, ‘who’?” Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Wasn’t Clémence your friend?”

“That’s just it. I haven’t seen her for a few months, then she called saying she was pregnant. We were to meet, but. . . .” Aimée sniffled.

“Her sometime boyfriend,” the woman said with a self-satisfied smirk. “The chef strangled her. And I told that to the
flics.
”

“The chef at the bistro? But she just quit.”

“A real miser, that one. He wanted to move in with her and not pay rent.”

Aimée recalled the angry chef muttering into his cell phone.

“But wasn’t he busy cooking?” She stopped before she revealed too much.

Madame Fontenay shrugged. “There’s ways. You don’t even have to come up for air here, if you know what I mean.”

Aimée didn’t. “What do you mean?”

“Part of the fountain’s built over an old Roman reservoir. Or what’s left of it.” She smirked. “It’s common knowledge to the residents. Tunnels run under the buildings, crisscross the garden. It’s like a maze underneath.”

Could the chef have strangled Clémence and used a tunnel to escape? He’d have needed split-second timing. But she filed the possibility away.

“
Mais
, Mademoiselle, I’ve already told the
flics
what I know, done what I can.”

“Clémence had a train ticket home tonight.” Aimée shivered and hoped that sounded plausible. “But her poor mother,” Aimée said, making it up as she went along. “I don’t know how to contact her.”

Madame Fontenay sighed. “Please give her my condolences.”

Aimée shook her head. “But I don’t remember Clémence’s address, although I know it’s near the Molière fountain.”

Madame Fontenay stared at her. Her small eyes, like black beads, studied Aimée as she decided. “You don’t know her apartment?”

Madame had a brain below that waved hair of hers. She liked to gossip but not get involved.

Aimée wiped her eye. “I lost it. But I lost a lot of things in Geneva at the TB sanitarium. Of course, I don’t blame you if you don’t trust me, Madame. But would you speak to her mother, Madame? Break the news. I don’t know if I can.”

Madame batted her eyes in shock. “
Zut
!” She shook her head. “But I told you, we weren’t that close.”

Madame Fontenay’s perfume, a thick floral scent, was getting to her. She knew standard police procedure required that they contact the family for a formal identification. She had to get to the apartment before the
flics
did.

“It’s so tragic, just when we were going to meet. I understand your reservations about me.”

“Non,”
Madame Fontenay said conclusively, “it’s better coming from you or Dita.”

Who was Dita? “If you say so, Madame.”

Madame Fontenay stood and glanced out the window at the dark hulk of the Théâtre du Palais Royal roof, a stone’s throw away. “The last act finished an hour ago. Dita should be leaving the makeup room by now. I’ll call her.”

Aimée’s heart sank. Dita must be Clémence’s roommate. She wouldn’t know Aimée.

Madame dialed. “No answer.”

Aimée breathed a sigh of relief.

“So sad,
non?
It always comes down to passion or money.”

Or revenge, Aimée almost added. She didn’t believe the chef had strangled Clémence. This was about the notebook.

If she didn’t find it, she’d question Dita.

Aimée moved, and the plastic bags crackled under her. “You’re right, Madame; even though it’s hard to do, it’s better coming from me. And the apartment number, Madame Fon-tenay?”

“32, rue Molière.”

* * *

A
IMÉE PASSED THE fountain bathed in moonlight with its elevated bronze statue of Molière sitting in thought. Below him, the muse of drama and comedy carved in marble flanked his statue. Underneath, three lions’ heads gushed water into a semicircular marble trough cornering the fork of the street. Every so often she looked back on the wet cobbled street, but she saw no one. A shudder crossed her shoulders as she stood in a darkened doorway, waiting for someone to enter 32, rue Molière. A taxi pulled up and a couple emerged. Middle-aged, the woman wore high boots and the man sported a leather cowboy vest. They entered #32. Before the door could close, she slipped in after them.

She found herself in a stone-paved carriage entrance lit by a timed light. To the left a set of stairs spiraled up, and on her right a sign read CLUB EROS.

She looked back to see a woman paused in the doorway, two
flics
filling the frame. As they stood there talking, they blocked her exit.

“The third floor,
oui.
What, my roommate?” Aimée heard the woman say.

One
flic
followed the woman, who must be Dita. The other remained at the door.

Aimée lowered her head and walked as fast as she could toward the blue light and open door of the Club Eros.

Cigarette smoke, blue neon light, and the wail of a saxophone greeted her. And a doorman.

“Club member?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“A thousand francs.”

“What?”

A nicotine-stained finger pointed to a sign. “Singles admission, plus membership. One thousand francs.”

She backed up, casting a glance over her shoulder. Dita still stood in conversation with the
flic.
Aimée rooted in her wallet and came up with three hundred francs.

“
Alors,
Mademoiselle. You pay or you leave.”

What could she do? She was stuck.

“You take traveler’s checks?”

I
N THE GREEN languid water, René gasped for breath. He was five years old, caught in the undertow at the beach at Biarritz. Bits of shale and sand stuck between his toes. He fought for air in a slow-motion green world. His arms flailed in the heavy water, battling to rise to the surface; but the current sucked him down deeper in the dense turgid water.

He saw Aimée’s face. She looked different underwater, all odd angles, and her blue helmet was crusted with silt. Then the blast of the shot rippled the water and pain seared his chest.

“Monsieur Friant! It’s all right.”

René grew aware of a hovering green light. He was in a hospital room. And he gasped, trying to breathe. Sweet air. His thick tongue felt acidic, with a bad taste. His throat was on fire, but at least no tube was choking him.