At the neighboring desks, the other two employees, a young bleached blonde who must have worshipped Madonna, and a boy with all the physical appeal of a slug, turned toward them, startled.
“Keep it down, please! No need to shout,” grumbled the woman, her voice lowered to a whisper.
“You’re right,” said Boizot, conciliatory. “My question is simple: Did your boss also know this Franck Héron?”
Raïssa Rzaev suddenly looked down and with her right hand chased away some imaginary dust from the blotter on her desk. “I don’t think so. No, when Héron came in, it was to find work, and he always had to deal with employees.”
Boizot nodded, but he was not really convinced that the fat woman was telling him everything.
“Are there a lot of employees at this agency?”
“Three employees, that’s all.”
“And those are your two colleagues over there?”
“Yes.”
“And how have things been since your boss’s death?”
“We’re waiting to find out what Madame Plesse will decide to do, but she told us not to get all worked up.”
Boizot glanced around: the premises were bright, welcoming, obviously well maintained.
He continued, “What kind of man was your boss? Was he attentive, cruel, a womanizer?”
“Monsieur Plesse was somewhat demanding. You know, he started this agency himself seven or eight years ago, I think, and it was a bit like his baby. He worked very hard to make a name for himself and compete against the big companies in the industry.”
“So he must have had enemies?”
She stared at him blankly, then said, “Why would you say that? He didn’t wrong anyone.”
Boizot smiled. “Once you start shaking things up, you always make enemies.”
“If you say so. Monsieur Plesse never told me anything of the sort, however.”
“Did you know him well?”
“I was hired three years ago. For me, it was an unexpected opportunity. My husband had just left me, I hadn’t worked for at least ten years, and at forty-two years old, my situation looked dire. One day, I came into the agency seeking a temp job. I ran into Monsieur Plesse himself. He was really annoyed because an employee had just quit. When he found out that I had trained to be a secretary, he hired me on the spot.”
“Well, that was a lucky break!” Boizot commented while continuing to take notes.
“It was. But I can’t say that I knew him well. With him, it was always work, work, work. He invited me to lunch once or twice here in the neighborhood, and each time it was to talk about the job.”
“Was he friendly and fairly approachable?”
“He was always in a hurry, always had a million things that needed to get done. He didn’t have much time to joke.”
“Was the company profitable?”
“That I don’t know.”
“But you must know if business is slow or if there’s a lot of work.”
Raïssa Rzaev shrugged. “You know, temp jobs are cyclical. Lately, I’ve noticed a slowdown, but nothing exceptional.”
“Your boss hadn’t changed in any way recently, had he?”
“Changed? In what sense?”
“I don’t know. But he might have been more anxious, for example.”
“No, not at all. He was really looking forward to vacation. We’re closed the last two weeks in August. If anything, I’d say as summer wore on, he seemed exceptionally upbeat.”
“Really? Just because of the vacation? That’s funny for someone who loved to work so much.”
“You know, you can love your work and still want a vacation. We’re not robots.”
From the street came the muffled noise of traffic.
“Does the agency have a particular focus?”
“Let’s just say that we work mainly in the service industry, with small and medium-sized businesses looking for reliable office employees.”
The customer next to them stood up, shook hands with the blonde, and left with an enthusiastic “Have a nice day!” Evidently, he had gotten some good news. Out of the corner of his eye, Boizot saw the blonde get up and head to the back of the office, where she disappeared behind a door marked PRIVATE.
He returned to his questions. “Were you the one who called the police the day of Monsieur Plesse’s death?”
The fat woman picked up a tissue and blew her nose loudly. She nodded. Boizot told himself that now was the perfect time to push the interview a little further. “How was the relationship between your boss and his wife?”
Raïssa Rzaev threw her Kleenex in the wastepaper basket. “What does that have to do with your investigation?”
“It’s fundamental! That kind of detail allows a journalist to really capture an individual’s personality. And don’t forget that your boss didn’t die in his sleep. That’s why my editor put me on the case.”
She sighed and was silent for a few seconds, as if trying to collect her thoughts before answering. “I was not very close with the family. From time to time, I’d speak to Madame Plesse on the phone when she was trying to reach her husband. But in three years, I’ve met her only a dozen times.”
“And since the death?”
“I saw her at the wake, but we just exchanged the regular niceties, and then I saw her at the funeral.”
“The day the agency was robbed?” Boizot interjected.
“Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”
“I do work for a newspaper,” said Boizot, smiling. “And speaking of that, did you find it strange that someone robbed the agency three days after robbing your boss?”
“I don’t know.”
Boizot scribbled a few abstract words in his notebook, which gave him enough time to quickly go over in his head everything that had been said.
“Anything stolen during the burglary?”
“No, nothing at all. You know, we never keep any money here. So if it was local youths who did it, they must have been rather disappointed.”
“That’s for sure!” said Boizot, still smiling.
He leaned forward in his seat and whispered, “Let’s get back to my question about your boss and his wife. Did they get along?”
“You can never tell. But I never heard him say anything that would lead me to believe they didn’t.”
“He didn’t have a mistress, did he?”
“No. That I’m pretty sure of. He divided his time between his work and his family. He adored his children. He would speak to me about them almost every day.”
“How many did he have?”
“Two boys, seven and nine. He had big plans for them. Since the oldest is good on the piano, he pictured him as a concert pianist, receiving ovations in New York and Berlin. He was funny, Monsieur Plesse, when he spoke about his kids. You could tell they made him really happy because he would lose that worried look of his and start talking about his dreams for them. The youngest is crazy about tennis, so he obviously imagined that he would play in the grand slam tournament at Roland Garros or win big at Wimbledon.”
Boizot nodded, smiling, and said good-bye to Raïssa Rzaev. He wasn’t going to get much more from her, and the other two employees seemed too insignificant to spend any time on.
Chapter 27
Claudio’s day was not improving. After Lullier’s departure, Lionel had hardly said three words to him. Instead, he’d locked himself in the bathroom for a while. When he’d emerged, his face had looked as bleak as before. Then he’d gotten dressed silently and called himself a taxi.
“I’m having lunch with the Alpha group,” he said. “Tell anyone looking for me that I’ll get back to them later.” Then he’d left without another word.
Claudio had nodded silently, sulking. The Alpha group annoyed him. The name was simplistic and childish in his opinion. I
t referred to a group of like-minded party deputies who met twice a month in the same restaurant on Rue Saint-Dominique, where they had a room reserved. Lionel had never invited Claudio to one of these lavish luncheons; when he went, he was never back before five and always came home slightly hammered.
After Lionel left, Claudio had felt compelled to do something—which was why he’d taken a seat at the hideous mahogany desk in the office. The desk was an atrocity that clashed horribly with the rest of the furniture of the apartment, but Lionel was deeply attached to it for some mysterious reason. Now, as Claudio sat there, he took a deep breath, put a stack of papers on the blotter, and methodically started to examine each sheet, one after the other.
Lionel was hiding stuff from him, he was sure of it. His strange connection to Lullier worried Claudio.
He had just put a series of uninteresting documents back in the second desk drawer when Perdiou’s work cell phone rang, startling him. He closed the drawer, composed himself, and answered the phone. He recognized the voice immediately: it was that journalist again, the man who’d already left a message earlier.
“I’m sorry, Monsieur Boizot, but Monsieur Perdiou is in a meeting and will not be available until at least five o’clock. May I ask what this is regarding?”
Docile, Boizot explained that he had met Perdiou on the night of the burglary in Batz and wanted to get his reaction now that the thief had been identified.
After hanging up, Claudio reflected for a moment. He stood and went to open the French doors to the office. He needed some air. This reporter could perhaps be useful to him if he knew how to be clever. He carefully entered two phone numbers into his phone’s address book: the newspaper and Boizot’s cell phone.
When the doorbell rang, Philippe Congy was in the garden taking care of his flowers. Inside, Catherine was ironing. When Philippe opened the door, two cops stood waiting on his doorstep. The older one showed his badge and said, “Monsieur Congy? Police.” He nodded. He had been expecting their visit. He had spoken on the phone with Fernand Héron for a long time on Saturday. After the publication of the article in L’Actualité that same morning, the police had visited his old friends at their retirement home in Biarritz and had asked them to confirm their statements. Now the authorities were on his doorstep.
“Hello officers,” he said. “Would you like to come in?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
They nodded hello to Catherine, who had just unplugged the iron, and politely declined the cup of coffee she offered them. The older cop, whom Philippe guessed was the higher-ranking one, explained: “Sorry to bother you, but Franck Héron’s parents told us that you have a key to the front door of the house?”
“We do. When Fernand and Marie-Jeanne moved to Biarritz, they gave us a set of keys.”
“We’ll return them later,” the cop said.
“Of course,” Philippe said. “Fernand called to let me know that you would be coming. Here you go.” Philippe handed them a keychain with three keys attached. “That’s the key to the front door; the others open the garage door and the mailbox.”
The younger man took the keys while his colleague continued, “Thank you, Monsieur Congy. Incidentally, were you the one who contacted L’Actualité after seeing the photo of Franck Héron in the newspaper?”
“Yes, yes. My wife and I immediately recognized Franck.”
“Why did you not call the police instead?”
“I don’t know. When I saw the phone number in the paper, my wife and I were a bit stunned by the news.”
The officer nodded, and without further comment, the two left.
They spent a while in the house next door and then came out carrying two large cardboard boxes, apparently filled with papers.
“What about the keys?” asked Catherine, who was posted behind the living room curtains.
“Didn’t you expect them to hold on to them? To be honest, that’s what I would prefer,” said her husband.
When Lionel Perdiou sat down in his office just past five o’clock, he had a little bit of a headache. Maybe it was the stormy weather or maybe it was the three digestifs he had knocked back after lunch. For a moment, he tried unsuccessfully to jot down some notes. In a little over two weeks, at the party’s summer retreat in La Baule, he would be giving a speech on the fight against crime. And if he wanted to one day have an office at the Ministry of the Interior, he had to be brilliant. But he could not concentrate on his topic.
At that moment, Claudio came in with the cell phone in his hand. “It’s the journalist,” he whispered.
Perdiou sighed loudly and grabbed the phone. “Talk to me,” he said curtly.
After listening in silence, he said, “Look, Monsieur Boizot, I would love to answer all your questions. But I hate being interviewed on the phone. So if it’s convenient for you, why not come over to my place. I’m busy working. It will be much easier this way.”
Lionel Perdiou knew that in a one-on-one with this reporter, he could more easily play up his charm. Maybe he could even get the guy to talk and give up what he knew about the case.
An hour later, a timid sun was pushing its rays between two clouds when Boizot arrived at Quai d’Orléans and looked up at the beautiful building where Perdiou lived. The man wasn’t poor, that was for sure. Boizot had barely pressed the doorbell when someone answered. He smiled.
“Hello, it’s Dimitri Boizot,” he said into the intercom.
“Yes, Monsieur Perdiou is expecting you. The apartment is on the third floor.”
When the buzzer sounded, he pushed open the heavy front door, which closed behind him with an abrupt slam. The noise made him think of the gunshots he’d heard that night in Batz-sur-Mer.
Claudio, Perdiou’s lover and personal assistant, was waiting for him behind the half-open door on the third floor. He certainly did have the face for the job, not to mention thick, shiny black hair, an olive complexion, dazzling white teeth, and a pleasing build emphasized by a tight T-shirt.
“Come in. Monsieur Perdiou is expecting you in his office.”
Boizot entered a large high-ceilinged room. The half-open French doors led to a balcony that overlooked the quay and flooded the space with light.
Perdiou, who seemed to be pretending to do work, got up when he walked in.
A fixed grin brightened his pale features. The guy has a real mortician’s face, Boizot mused as he shook his hand.
“Monsieur Boizot, please, have a seat. Would you like something to drink?”
“No, I’m fine, thank you,” said Boizot as he sat down on an extremely uncomfortable but very modern-looking chair. Perdiou dismissed Claudio with a wave.
“We can’t get rid of each other, can we? Neighbors on vacation, now Paris. What can I do for you?” he said, settling behind a large desk.
Boizot smiled in return.
“Well, since we last saw each other, your burglar has been identified. I guess you must know that by now.”
“Yes, I have seen your article. A very nice one, by the way.”
“I guess by now you are also fully informed about this Franck Héron?”
Perdiou stared at Boizot like he did not understand the meaning of the question.
“What do you mean, Monsieur Boizot?”
“Well, you probably know that Héron was already known to the police for some thefts.”
“No, I’m afraid I didn’t know. Besides, that didn’t appear in your article.”
“Correct. I only learned of it yesterday when I called Captain Tworkowski. He wasn’t very thrilled that I had one-upped him, as you can well imagine. But I must admit that he has regained the upper hand. He was able to tie the name Héron to several petty crimes in the Paris region. The prosecutor, who gave a press conference on Saturday afternoon, was able to add these new details to the briefing and give the impression they�
�re in control of the investigation.”
Perdiou smiled, as if to indicate that he was also delighted by the trick played on the investigators in Saint-Nazaire.
“So this boy had a criminal record?”
“A small one. He was caught pickpocketing about ten years ago and received a suspended sentence. Really no big deal.”
“Evidently. But that kind of profile does correspond well with what the investigators had thought from the beginning: that the perpetrator was a petty thief who wanted to case a vacation villa. But, you know, Monsieur Boizot, this does not take away the guilt I feel. Killing a man is the worst thing that can happen to someone, as I now know from firsthand experience.”
Hypocrite, Boizot said to himself. Still, he admired Lionel Perdiou’s acting ability. For a moment, he almost bought it, just like thousands of voters had bought Perdiou’s empty promises.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “Monsieur Perdiou, do you know a Charles Plesse?”
Boizot carefully observed the man’s face.
Perdiou blinked rapidly several times. Then, in the most neutral tone possible, he said, “Plesse? Doesn’t ring a bell. Why?”
Boizot shrugged and smiled, as if the question were irrelevant: “The man was the victim of a burglary that occurred at the same time as yours, but here in Paris. And in his case, it ended badly, since the thieves killed him, rather than the other way around.”
Boizot saw with satisfaction the drops of sweat suddenly beading on Perdiou’s forehead.
The deputy stood up a little too abruptly, went over to the French doors, and opened them wider. Then he turned to Boizot and said, “Excuse me, but it’s a little too hot in here.”
He returned to his seat without any sign of emotion.
“Yes, this proves that the party is right in making the fight against crime one of our main talking points. That said, Monsieur Boizot—you still don’t want anything to drink?—I have never heard of this Monsieur Plesse. Should I have?”
“No,” Boizot said simply.
Perdiou raised an eyebrow: he clearly wanted to demonstrate his lack of understanding. To Boizot, this was an opportunity to ask for further explanation.
Mortal Ambitions (A Dimitri Boizot Investigation Book 1) Page 15