by Cara Black
“That was a few weeks ago. Nothing more recent?”
Nathalie shook her head, hurt pooling in her eyes.
For a moment, Aimée pitied her. Guy had bought a Christmas tree and together they’d strung the lights on the tree and on Miles Davis, too, finally falling asleep in each other’s arms at dawn.
Snap out of it, she told herself. Get down to business. Think. Did Jacques have mistresses whom he supported? Was he trying to maintain a lifestyle beyond his reach? She’d seen it happen to her father’s colleagues.
“Jacques was making monthly car payments according to the report,” Aimée said. She remembered seeing the tow truck hooking the Citroën. “What happened to his car?”
“I can’t make the payments,” Nathalie said. “I’ve returned it.”
“Did you divorce him because of his spending?”
Nathalie leaned forward. “Just between you and me, things were tight. We divorced and declared bankruptcy to save our assets, but we were still together. How plain must I make it? The woman killed him out of jealousy. But she won’t get away with it, I won’t let her.”
Aimée felt sorry for Nathalie, desperate to revenge her unhappiness somehow. But her accusations damaged Laure, who was surely innocent.
“The Brigade Criminelle will investigate and find the criminal.”
“Wake up,” Nathalie said, rising and pushing back in her chair so that it scraped on the wood floor. “The old-boy network didn’t want her father’s name dragged in the mud. But no one will cover up for her.”
“Yet, Jacques took her as a partner—”
“Like I said,” Nathalie interrupted, “he liked to help people.”
Something struck Aimée as wrong.
“I’m late.” Nathalie looped a tangerine kerchief around her neck, reached for her coat, and walked out of the building.
Aimée followed her to the low-slung Renault Mégane with the AUTO-ÉCOLE plastic box on top parked outside. Wind whipped down the street, bringing the smell of wet, sodden leaves.
“You own a driving school?”
“We only kept this,” Nathalie said, unlocking the door. Her sigh indicated she’d known a better life. “Before the divorce we had a fleet of six cars, eh. I’m not the type to sit at home so I was involved in the business.”
So the divorce had saved what was left of their business. Again she wondered if Jacques had grown too accustomed to the finer things. Flics often moonlighted, doing security to supplement their salary.
“Did Jacques work security?”
Nathalie’s mouth formed a moue of distaste. “Consultant,” she said. “He did consulting.”
The rain-swept pavement mirrored the dull gray clouds. The number seventy-four bus shot out diesel exhaust as it gunned by.
“With his skills, of course,” Aimée said. So both of them had held two jobs, working hard. Yet Nathalie had stiffened when she’d asked about Jacques’s past.
Nathalie opened the car door.
“I need to verify this,” Aimée said. “Can you remember the company for whom or the location where he consulted?”
“He knew Montmartre, he had contacts here. Sometimes he took private jobs, you know, for VIPs.”
“Who could I talk to who might know about this sideline?”
“I didn’t get involved.”
Why wouldn’t this woman talk?
“Try to remember, Nathalie. A name?”
“Look, she murdered Jacques, how does it matter?”
“Everything’s important,” Aimée said, trying to appeal to the woman’s pride. “Let me stress that if all the facts don’t come to light now, they could be used later to prevent a conviction, to let the killer go free. As a flic’s wife, you know that.”
Nathalie blinked, threw her purse in the passenger seat. “He talked about Zette sometimes, an old boxer who runs a bar. On rue Houdon.”
CLUB CHEVALIER , the bar on rue Houdon, had seen better days. And they had passed several decades ago, Aimée figured. The dark bar was lined with plastic-covered banquettes and decorative columns, their plaster bases now heavily gouged. A large woman with blonde hair, a pink apron around her girth, vacuumed the matching once-pink carpet. What VIPs did they serve here, Aimée wondered?
“Pardon, Madame, may I speak with Zette?”
“Eh, we’re not open.”
“Is Zette here?”
The woman sighed and switched off the vacuum. An artificial-stone water fountain gurgled in the corner, green fungi grew on the lip of the shell-like basin. Several game machines blinked red and blue in the corner, the kind that used to have slots but now were computerized. A radio blared out the results of the horse races from somewhere in the back.
“Who wants to know?” the woman said, her hand on her hip.
Aimée grinned. “Jacques’s friend sent me.”
“Not that business again?”
Have the police been here, too, Aimée wondered. “I need to talk with him.”
The woman shouted, “Zette!”
No answer. Just the excited voice announcing the race winners: “Fleur-de-Lys by a head, Tricolor a close second, and Sarabande makes it third!”
Aimée heard the clink of a glass and someone slapping papers down.
“Zette!”
“Leave me in peace, woman!”
“Someone to see you,” the woman said.
Aimée heard a muttered “Merde.”
A balding gray-haired man poked his head around the door in the back of the small bar. He had several gold teeth, a crooked nose, and a white scar splitting his right eyebrow, giving him a perpetually questioning look.
“Will talking to you make me happy, Mademoiselle?”
“How about a drink and we’ll find out.”
“Aaah, such possibilities!” He scratched his neck, gave her the once-over, and raised his other eyebrow. “But I can smell a flic from way off,” he said, with a wide smile. “Have your boss call me. I deal with the commissaire. Show me some respect, eh, Mademoiselle.”
Respect? Who gained respect that way? The woman, a bored look on her face, pulled the vacuum cleaner into the back.
“I’m not a flic, but my father was.”
“So you say. Where?”
“Commissariat in the fourth arrondissement before he joined my grandfather at the detective agency that I run now.”
“Aaah, so you know Ouvrier?”
He was testing her.
“I went to his retirement party last night, around the corner.”
“Me, too,” he said. “I didn’t see you.”
“The tail end,” Aimée said, edging toward the bar. “I’d never seen him out of uniform but he looked sharp in a pinstripe suit, eh?”
“That’s a fact,” he said. “I left early, had to man the bar here. Knowing Ouvrier, next time he wears it will be his funeral.”
Pause. From the silence, she figured Zette hadn’t heard about what had happened to Jacques.
“Mademoiselle, I didn’t catch your name, or your father’s,” Zette said.
Not only careful and street-wise, he’d let her know he was well connected at the Commissariat. As a smart club owner should be, but it bothered her.
“Jean-Claude Leduc,” she said. “Aimée Leduc, here’s my card.”
She set it on the wet, glass-ringed counter.
He turned her card over in his hand. “A woman PI?”
She nodded. “Computer security.”
Had he known her father? “Does the name Leduc sound familiar?”
“I know a lot of people. So tell me what you really want to talk about.”
Aimée realized she’d passed muster, set twenty francs on the none-too-clean counter, and smiled. “Bet you’re thirsty.”
Wine would make this dance with Zette more palatable. Or so she hoped.
“I’ve got a nice little Corsican red that sings in the gullet.” He reached for an unmarked bottle and two wineglasses and set them in front of her. “It�
�s never too early for me.”
She noticed his loaf of a body, a bit gone to fat, but biceps bulged under the tight red soccer shirt. He must work out. An old prizefighter with the scars to prove it.
“Young ladies don’t visit me much anymore,” he said, pouring the garnet red liquid.
Zette’s attempt at charm? She took a sip. Plump, fruity, and smooth on the way down. Not bad.
On the bar wall hung a framed newspaper sport section headlined ZETTE KO’S TERRANCE THE MAD MOROCCAN.
“So you’re that Zette? My father went to your matches at the Hippodrome.”
She stretched the truth. He’d won complimentary championship tickets from the Commissariat once. A worn-around-the-edges retired prizefighter might soak up the flattery.
Zette shrugged as though used to this.
“Boxing gave you a good living, eh?”
“All this.” He took a long sip and gestured around the bar.
“And a VIP security service with Jacques Gagnard, non?”
“You’ve got it wrong,” Zette said without skipping a beat and drained his glass. Poured another and topped up hers. She took another swig.
“How’s that, Zette?” she said. “You worked with Jacques, didn’t you?”
“So that’s who you want to talk about,” he said, staring at her. “Something’s happened to him, hasn’t it?”
She hesitated to give him the bad news. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry, what do you mean?”
She paused, her index finger tracing the rim of the glass. “He was shot and killed on a rooftop. On the next street.”
Zette’s fists balled. He shook his head. “But I saw him last night! Nom de Dieu, he was at the bar, I bought him a drink, we talked—”
“Everyone did. We’re all shocked. He was off duty, too, when it happened.”
Zette’s face clouded with sadness and he poured more wine. Was there more behind that look?
“To Jacques, a good mec.”
They raised their glasses.
“Who found him?”
“That’s the thing, Zette; I did.”
Zette made the sign of the cross with his big knuckled hands. “I still can’t believe it.”
“What did Jacques talk about, do you remember?” Aimée asked. “Was he nervous, was he acting any way unusual?”
Zette rubbed his jaw. “How did you get my name?”
She controlled her frustration. “Nathalie, his ex-wife, said he worked for you.”
“Work? More like he did me a favor from time to time. My VIPs like protection.”
What celebrities called Club Chevalier their hangout?
“By VIPs, you mean who?”
“Tino Rossi sat on the stool you’re sitting on,” he said, with a proud look on his mug.
Tino Rossi, a Corsican singer popular with the over-sixty crowd? She tried to look impressed. “Wasn’t he before Jacques’s time?”
“My guests want to keep a low profile, they want discretion,” he said. “They like to sample Montmartre without their goons, and to be escorted by a local.”
An escort service? She looked around the club, saw the frayed postcards of Ajaccio on the smudged mirror. Of course, this was a Corsican bar, why hadn’t she picked up on that? Instead of Jacques squiring provincial businessmen to the hooker clubs, could it have been Corsican gang leaders who wanted protection without their “goons”?
“I see. You’re Corsican, Zette?”
He flashed his gold teeth. “At one time we ran the quartier. The golden days. Pepé le grand was rubbed out right in front of my place, and Ange Testo ran the big brasserie on Place Pigalle. It was a wehrmachetspeiselokal, German soldiers’ canteen, during the war. Those bathrooms were a mess, all graffitied with swastikas, things you don’t want to know. In the end Ange just wallpapered it over.” He shrugged. “We Corse had a code of honor, still do. But now, I’m the only one left.”
She nodded and drank her wine. Code of honor? More like the code of silence. Talk and one talked no more.
She envisioned the postwar days of zazous wearing big zoot suits and flashing money, the jazz clubs and strip bars, when the Moulin Rouge was considered high class.
“Zette, tell me about the last job Jacques did for you.”
“Like I said, now and then he did favors for me.”
“Bon. What favor did he do for you?”
“Like I said, some escorting.”
Getting a Corsican to talk was hard work.
A broad-shouldered young man wearing a leather jacket, wool cap low over his forehead, and jangling what sounded like coins in his pocket, entered. Zette glanced up. Instead of telling him the bar was closed, as Aimée expected, he nodded at the young man who’d gone over to a game machine. If she hadn’t been studying Zette in the mirror behind the bar she would have missed what came next. The flick of his wrist under the counter, the slight whirring sound, and the brighter red glare of the game machine reflected in the mirror.
And then she knew! It was a fixed machine, regulated by a switch under the counter! Pigalle and Montmartre bars had once been notorious for them. Placed among the legitimate game machines, one, resembling all the others, would be rigged. Inside was a device, a Sicilian specialty. The owner kept a tab of wins and losses and paid out or collected. If the player didn’t honor his tab, he never played the machines in Montmartre, or anywhere, again.
“Look, Mademoiselle, I’m busy. Time for me to open up. Jacques, rest his soul, hadn’t done a favor for me in months.”
He wanted her to leave so he could carry on with his crooked machine unobserved.
She gave him a look, understanding in her eyes. “But I want to find Jacques’s killer. If you’re his friend, you’d want to help me.”
“Mademoiselle, stick to your own concerns.”
She resented the brush-off. “I’m not interested in your business here. The rigged machines.” She gave a pointed look at his hands resting on the glass-ringed counter. A look to say she held something over him now. Or was he protected by the police, as he’d implied? Did they let him operate in return for information? Did he inform? That could be messy. But she didn’t care. There had to be something beneath the surface here. And it might have gotten Jacques murdered and backfired on Laure.
She tried a hunch. “Jacques owed money, didn’t he? To you, and he had to work it off. Repay you with your favors to your clients.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Zette said. He took the wine bottle, set it back on the shelf, put the wineglasses in the sink, and grabbed a towel.
“I think you do,” she said. She paused. The pings of the game machine filled the empty bar. Rows of cherries and bananas whirled behind the young man’s shoulder. “And who might have wanted him dead.”
“That’s a big leap,” Zette said, his voice even. Unconcerned. “And here I thought you were being friendly, buying me a drink.”
He must be protected. Well protected. Maybe he paid off the Commissariat big time for his crooked machines. She gripped her bag. A new thought occurred to her. Had he been paying off Jacques?
“Help me here, Zette,” she said, in a conciliatory voice. “Why do you think Jacques was killed?”
“I have no idea.”
He swiped the towel across the counter, rubbing the water rings into blurred spots on the zinc. Try some cleanser, she wanted to say.
Instead she leaned forward, planting her elbows on the counter. “Your turf’s Montmartre. Don’t tell me ideas aren’t going through your mind about who had a reason to off Jacques. Wasn’t this his beat, his turf, too?”
Several men walked in through the door. Some wore windbreakers or tracksuits. Dark, hollow eyed, the kind of men who hung around Pigalle Metro station, picking up odd jobs, helping movers or unloading trucks. Not legal, but better than begging. Some did that, too. A sinking feeling came over her as she realized that all the money they earned ended up in Zette’s machines.
Annoyan
ce shone in Zette’s eyes. Good. If she badgered him enough he’d give her something to get her to leave.
She put her bag on the counter, careful to avoid the wet spots, to show Zette she wouldn’t budge until he talked. “Who might have killed him, Zette?”
He didn’t like that, she could tell. Silently, he glanced at his watch, then looked out the fogged-up window.
“I’ve got time for a nice long conversation,” she said. “I can wait.”
Zette leaned forward. “You’ve heard of the vendetta?” he said, his voice lowered.
Surprised, Aimée nodded.
“Vendetta?” she repeated, in a loud voice.
That bothered Zette and she felt the eyes of the men on her back. “Jacques wasn’t Corsican—”
“His mother was. That’s why I helped him. Now, if you don’t mind, Mademoiselle, I’ll escort you to the door.”
OUT IN windswept Place Pigalle, she stared at the dry fountain. All but the Saint Sulpice and Jardin du Luxembourg fountains were kept dry in winter to avoid freezing. Gambling, a vendetta? She knew a large percentage of the police force was Corsican. Still in the dark but full of new questions, she headed to the Metro.
Tuesday Afternoon
LUCIEN PAUSED BY THE industrial stove. Steam rose from copper pans, the high blue flame licking the blackened edges. He stepped over gunnysacks of red potatoes and cardboard boxes half-filled with carrots lining the clapboard-sided kitchen of Strago. Above them hung Lenin’s stern-jawed photo and thirties Moscow State Theatre posters with their bold Constructivist geometric designs.
Anna had run this Communist Corsican restaurant for years, letting him sleep in the back room when times were rough, as they had been recently. She read manifestos to him while she fried onions or cured prisuttu ham.
“Lucien, some mecs were nosing around here.” Anna, stout and with graying hair, stirred the pot of ziminu spicy fish stew on the iron stove as she spoke. “Good thing I’d sent Bruno next door to the marché for eggplant.”
Lucien’s hand clenched in his pocket. His eyes rested on his cetera, the sixteen-string lute-like instrument in his open bag next to the compact sound mixer he’d packed for DJing later. Should he grab it and run, forget his clothes stored in the pantry?