She remembered Elise writing about a view of the Seine from her first flat in Paris and Maggie wondered how many times her sister had seen it just like it was now. Exciting and gray and compelling. She held her rain jacket tightly around her, the temperature seeming to dip as she walked. She hurried down the Quay de Conti until it turned into the Quay Malaquais where L’Ecole des Beaux Arts appeared before her. The street where the School of Fine Arts was located was brimming with some of Paris’ oldest cafés. Immediately south of the school, Maggie caught her breath to see the L’eglise St.-Germain-des-Pres. Originally built in the sixth century, the church and adjacent abbey were stunning in their majesty and antiquity.
Maggie returned her attention to Elise’s school. So this is where she went, Maggie thought, moving toward the entrance of the school. This is where Dad sent her. And while I was studiously trumping all my classes with A’s at the University of Georgia, Elise was prancing through the massive stone gates of one of the finest art schools in the world. Maggie regarded the impressive façade of the school.
And then she had dropped out.
Maggie retraced her steps on the Quays as they flanked the Seine and imagined her sister returning to her flat this way. It was the most direct route to Elise’s apartment and would have taken her by Zouk’s shop. Maggie was aware that the most “direct route” home would not necessarily be Elise’s first choice. Chances are, she’d stop in at one of the smoky, dark cafés packed shoulder-to-shoulder with ponytailed young people who subsisted on thick and harsh demi-cups of French coffee and pack after pack of Gitanes and Gaulouises.
Maggie walked until she reached the Rue Dauphine and then turned south onto it. She could see before she reached the shop that the proprietor had returned.
Madame Zouk stood in the doorway of her shop, as if expecting Maggie. A cigarette was held to her mouth and blue smoke encircled her beautiful face. Maggie was not prepared for the intensity of the woman’s appearance. Madame Zouk was tall and slim, dressed in black with gray stockings and black velvet slippers. A thin web of black velvet caught her long dark hair up and carried it gracefully at the nape of her long pale neck. Michele Zouk ‘s eyes were dark and almond-shaped, her mouth was full yet not too large for her delicate and finely-boned face. The drama of her dark eyes against her swan-white skin was startling.
Maggie approached slowly. Zouk smiled, then dropped the cigarette gracefully at her feet, not looking to see it fall into the deep Paris gutter. She retreated into the shop without turning her back on Maggie.
“Bonjour, Madame,” Maggie said huskily, unsure of her voice. It suddenly occurred to her that Zouk might not know any English.
“Bonjour, Madame,” Zouk answered in a light, musical voice. She smiled at Maggie and gestured her into the interior of her shop. “You are American, are you not?”
Maggie nodded, finding it difficult to stare at the woman so openly and not blush.
“How did you know?” she asked.
Zouk swept into the shop before her, tendrils of her black chemise wafting behind her like fog on the air. She moved to the other side of a counter in the shop upon which was displayed an assortment of jewelry and hair ornaments.
“I didn’t,” she said. “I guessed.” Madame Zouk settled herself on a stool behind the counter and looked up into Maggie’s eyes. “How can I help you, Madame?...or is it Mademoiselle?” Her eyes danced.
“It’s ‘Mademoiselle’,” Maggie said, following the woman to the counter. “Your English is so good, you hardly have any accent at all. You are French, aren’t you?”
Zouk laughed, a warm throaty sound that made Maggie smile.
“Mais, bien sûr, I am French!” she said, shaking her head and gesturing to herself, her shop. Except for the flawless English, the woman was the pure embodiment of Maggie’s idea of the quintessential French woman: stylish, beautiful, mysterious, with just a tincture of hard-earned wisdom or sadness.
Maggie shook her head and blushed.
“Stupid question,” she said apologetically.
Zouk smiled kindly. “You aren’t looking for clothes today, Mademoiselle?”
Maggie touched her rain jacket and felt distinctly frumpy next to Zouk.
“No, Madame, I am looking for you.” Maggie rushed on in the face of the woman’s raised eyebrow. “I think you knew my sister, Elise Newberry, and, if you did, I was hoping you could tell me some things about her.”
As she spoke, she noticed that Zouk’s manner had changed. The smile disappeared from her lips and her graceful spine stiffened. Zouk brought her hands together quietly and observed Maggie for a moment.
“You are Maggie,” she said finally.
Maggie nodded. “And you were...Elise’s friend,” she said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
The French woman looked at Maggie without speaking. Then, she got up slowly and picked up another handmade sign with the word “Ferme” printed on it. She walked to the front of the store and Maggie watched her place the sign in the window. She carefully turned the lock on the massive front door and returned to where Maggie was standing.
“Come,” she said, leading Maggie to the back of the store. “I’ll make tea.”
2
The man’s fingers drummed nervously on the paint-chipped wooden desk, his fingernails bitten and scarred as if he’d actually chewed them completely off his fingers a time or two in the past. Burton watched Donnell’s mutilated fingers continue their drumming and vowed to stop biting his own nails just as soon as he had the nicotine thing kicked.
Dave Kazmaroff sat across the room—with its single table and three chairs—and balanced a legal pad on his knee. He’d heard all this before. A hundred times before. But they had to keep asking. You never knew, something might get said. His stomach growled and he glanced at his watch.
“Come on, Bob, it’s a simple question.” Kazmaroff could hear the fatigue in Burton’s voice. Usually, it was a feigned weariness to allow the suspect a certain false security, to encourage him to lower his guard. Tonight, Kazmaroff doubted the weary tone was affected.
“I told you. I told both you guys. I told—“
“Told us what? What did you tell us?” Kazmaroff chimed in.
“I told you that I was just walking along and—“
“Oh, give me a break, man.” Burton tossed a pencil down onto the table and Donnell flinched. His partially bald head glistened with sweat. Every so often, he would reach up and smooth the top of his bare crown with his fingers. It was a gesture that repulsed Burton. “You were just walking along and saw this apartment and decided to go knocking on doors. Right. Man, you don’t start helping us out here—“ The threat hung in the air.
“I don’t know what other kinda help you want from me!” Donnell’s hands flew to his mouth where he began to gnaw the forefinger with some vigor. “I confessed to everything, didn’t I?” His voice was muffled.
“Man, take your fuckin’ hands outta your mouth,” Burton said, his eyes flashing at the man seated across the table from him.
Donnell jerked his hands back to the table.
“I said I did her, right? I told you who and how I—“
“And now we just wanna know why, Bob.” Kazmaroff spoke softly to countermand Burton’ roughness.
“Yeah, Bob,” Burton said quietly. “Why’d’ja do her? How come, man?”
“How come?” The killer looked at the detectives with wide eyes as if he didn’t understand the question.
“Yeah,” Burton said. “Like, instead of riding your bike ten miles that day...or say, painting your living room, why did you go out and strangle someone you didn’t know? Why?”
“Why?” the man chirped back at them, a panicked look beginning to appear on his face.
Kazmaroff didn’t know how much more patience Burton had for this kind of crap but he knew it was considerably less than he had and he was about to throttle Donnell with the next repeated “why?” or “how come?”
“Well,” Donne
ll crooned softly, staring at his bad hands, “’cause she never cared about me. That’s the reason.” He looked down at his shirt front, resting his chin against his chest. “She only pretended to when he was around but when he was gone she used to laugh at me or not talk to me at all, not talk to me or look at me never, just pretend like I didn’t...like I wasn’t there.”
Kazmaroff eased the front legs of his chair back onto the ground. Here we go! he thought, a small pulse of excitement bursting in his chest.
Burton’ calm face hid his own eagerness as he nodded his head and picked up the pencil from the table.
“Who?” he asked.
Donnell looked up, a mask of misery and frustration. “Betty,” he croaked. “You know? Betty?”
Burton restrained himself from screaming: Betty Rubble? Betty Crocker? How would I know what Betty you’re talking about you stupid prick?!
“Betty?” he said, instead. “Your...mother?”
Donnell nodded bitterly and buried his sweating head on his folded arms upon the table.
“Mother,” he said, weeping. “I picked up the gun, she looked so much like Mother. I had to kill her.”
The gun? Burton covered his face with his hands.
“He didn’t do it,” Kazmaroff said to no one in particular over the prisoner’s sobbing. “He didn’t friggin’ do it. I’ll be damned.”
3
Maggie took a sip of tea from the fragile tea cup, its roses long faded from the translucent china rim. Across from her, on a dark red velvet loveseat trimmed with heavy gold tassels and ropy fringe, sat Michele Zouk, her small, slippered feet tucked daintily under her. Zouk held her tea cup with both hands and gazed pensively at the worn, expensive Oriental rug on the floor. She had wept, briefly, while making the tea, her back to Maggie as she spooned the loose tea into the large china teapot and then poured in the boiled water. Now, Zouk sat silently and sipped her tea.
Maggie waited and watched the French woman. It didn’t seem odd to her at all to discover this exquisite creature as the best friend of her sister, Elise. Elise, who had grown up in old-south-Atlanta, with white-gloved parties and little friends whose fathers were either colonels or reverends. And although Elise may have rebelled against the gentility and sterility of a southern childhood, she’d nonetheless, lived it. Maggie imagined that Michele Zouk had probably been the dream-embodiment of all of Elise’s fantasies of who she wanted to be. The difference was that this woman had grown up in an environment that had been friendly to her exotic development, had encouraged her sense of style and presentation. Elise’s ages-old habit of bucking the system had become so completely ingrained in her that she couldn’t stop once she’d achieved her dream, her level of desired sophistication. Unlike Zouk, Elise had turned to drugs and despair to fill in the gaps for her.
“Your sister was my dearest of friends,” Zouk said finally, sharing a sad smile with Maggie. “Une amie de coeur, you are familiar?”
Maggie nodded, knowing the term if not the sensation.
“She once lived near here. Do you know that?”
Again, Maggie indicated that she did. This time the woman shrugged.
“Ahh, but you want to hear what it is you do not know, am I right?”
“Madame Zouk,” Maggie said, taking a long breath. “I am trying to find out who killed her.”
Their eyes met and locked. Zouk’s long lashes fluttered briefly and she looked away. “And you have come to Paris to do this?” she asked doubtfully.
Maggie pushed her empty tea cup onto the nearby hassock which was dressed to match the ornately gilded loveseat. “I’m not quite sure why I’ve come to Paris, to tell you the truth,” she said, sighing. “I need to talk to her ex-boyfriend and he’s here—“
“Gerard Dubois?”
“That’s right. Do you know him?”
Zouk shrugged. “But, of course. He is a very bad man. When he took Elise with him to Montmarte, I cried for Elise.” Michele poured herself and Maggie more tea. “I was very sad. I cried and begged her not to leave. But it was l’amour, eh? She was in love with him.”
“So, you knew her before she met Gerard?”
“As I’ve said, her apartment was very near. She would shop here, we would talk. We were of one spirit, do you understand?”
Maggie nodded. Elise had, of course, never mentioned this woman in any letter or phone conversation to Maggie or her family.
“I was older but we were both artistes, in our own ways. We met when she came into the shop one day after her art classes. Your sister was very beautiful, Mademoiselle. She would have made a wonderful model. We talked and became friends. Soon, we would shop together, have dinner together. She was so different from my other French friends, yes? Her...American-ness made her blunt and forward. I found it charming.” Michele smiled at the memory. “Elise wanted so much to be French and, in many ways, she was very French. But it was the, how can I say this? her straightforwardness, yes? that I found beguiling and valuable.”
“She shot from the hip,” Maggie suggested.
“Exactement. To be so beautiful and so honest...”
“Elise didn’t always tell the truth,” Maggie added gently.
Zouk laughed. “No, of course not. I wasn’t talking of honesty in that way. Elise had many secrets and some of them so bad that I feared they would end up killing. But we resonated, she and I. The beautiful American artiste. Tortured, intelligent. And the most loving of friends.” She glanced at Maggie to see her reaction. “I loved her very much,” she said.
“And Gerard?” Maggie prompted.
“When Elise met Gerard,” Zouk said, her cheeks darkening in anger. “everything started to die for her. We saw less and less of each other until, poof! Nothing. He moved her to his apartment—filthy pigsty!--in Montmarte. She would write me. We live in the same city, but she would only write me!” Michele Zouk’s eyes were wide and indignant. “Then, he drags her and the child south—“
“You knew Nicole too?”
Zouk got up to rummage through a bureau drawer standing against a wall in the cramped little room. She returned holding a small photograph. She examined it carefully herself and then handed it to Maggie. Maggie felt her heart squeeze to see Elise, a few years younger and smiling sweetly at the camera. In her lap was eight-month old Nicole, a thin and pallid baby with large eyes and dark hair. Maggie scrutinized the tiny face of the baby in an attempt to see a resemblance to the Nicole now living in Atlanta.
“May I keep this, please?” she asked the woman. “I...I’ll have a copy made and return it to you, okay?”
Zouk sat back down. “Keep it,” she said, straightening out the long, languid pleats of her skirt with pale, tapered fingers. “After they moved to the Cote d’Azure,” she continued. “I never saw her again.”
“But she still wrote to you?”
“She did.” Zouk tossed a small wadded-up paper napkin at the tea tray perched on the tasseled hassock. “Monsieur Dubois is a swine and a jackal,” she said. “He is your murderer, Mademoiselle. I am sure of it.” Michele Zouk’s eyes were a deep, frigid blue.
“Do you know Monsieur Dubois very well?” Maggie asked the French woman.
Michele’s face hardened into a frown. “You are looking to find him in Paris, are you not?”
“I am.”
Zouk contemplated Maggie briefly and held her teacup to her lips.
“I know where you can find him,” she said grimly.
Chapter Eighteen
1
The little china plate that held her two over-sized croissants was obviously antique, Maggie noted, as she spread freshly-made jam on her rolls. She had risen early to breakfast in the hotel before the rush of tourists and travelers, and had the pleasure of a solitary meal in a very sunny and very French dining room.
After she had left Chez Zouk, Maggie had come directly back to her hotel and gone to bed. Now, refreshed and ready to begin her investigations, Maggie ticked off her to-do list on a small pad of
paper. The walls of the little dining room were lavishly papered in a country French mini-fleur design combined with an elaborate border and ribboned panels. It was pretty in a confusing sort of way, Maggie decided. The same unpleasant young woman who worked the front desk served her coffee and croissants and was no less cross in this new role. Maggie was determined to ignore her while being as cheerful as possible herself during her stay at L’Etoile Verte.
After breakfast, Maggie dropped off her room key at the front desk and left the hotel, heading north again toward Notre-Dame. There seemed to be even more people out this sunny, but cool, Saturday morning and Maggie picked up her pace to join them in their hustle. All their hurry and urgency was in sharp contrast to the numerous cafés filled with happily idle coffee-drinkers, smoking and arguing politics and philosophy. As she hurried along, Maggie had another twinge of missing Laurent and wishing they were just another couple mooning over each other and a cup of café-au-lait at one of the crowded tables.
She hesitated when she reached Notre-Dame and had to fight the impulse to again take a seat on one of the stone benches in the cathedral gardens facing the Seine. The roses, in tender colors of pink and violet, were still in full bloom in early October and the air felt cool and invigorating. Even at eight in the morning, there were lovers strolling the sidewalk bordering the Seine, and solitaires reading L’Express and munching on crusty baguettes. Maggie forced herself to move on. Hurrying across the Seine on Pont St.-Louis, she spotted a Metro sign and jogged down its steep stairs to board the train to Montmartre.
Maggie emerged from the underground station and entered a seedy world of cheap strip shows, porn cinemas and sex shops. Although still wearing its late-nineteen twenties Bohemian artist’s garb of darks and sooty grays, Montmartre had long since become mired in the oily underworld of drug lords and panderers. The streets were filthy, the few reputable shops sold leather-studded costumes or pizza-by-the-slice, and “Ne Rodez Pas” signs hung from most doorways. No loitering.
Little Death by the Sea Page 24