Murder in the Palais Royal

by Cara Black

  “Aimée, I’m following the wire transfers,” Saj said, excitement in his voice.

  Saj had risen to the task. Did she smell René’s hand in this? But that couldn’t be.

  “The wire transfers jumped two accounts in twelve hours,” Saj said. “One to a bank in Malta, the other to Guernsey.”

  Well-known money-laundering locations for offshore accounts and shell companies. Seemed even more like a setup to her.

  “More later.” He clicked off.

  She hit the next message. A woman’s voice.

  “Remember you gave me your card? It’s Dita.”

  Clémence’s roommate. Surprised, Aimée gripped the pencil.

  “This mec asked for Clémence this afternoon. Maybe it’s not important, but. . . .” Her voice paused, hesitant. “He told me he’d been Nicolas’s cellmate and had something for her. He mentioned a book, that’s all. But I thought of the notebook you were looking for. A strange mec, he sent chills up my spine. Hard to explain. When I told him Clémence was dead, he seemed more angry than sad.”

  Nicolas’s cellmate Sicard, out on parole. She tried to remember what Clémence had said about him. If Sicard had Nicolas’s notebook, she had to see him. Her hopes rose.

  She called Dita back. No answer.

  How could she find him? Think. What options existed for a new parolee: family, friends, a hotel or a halfway house set up for transition? Every prisoner’s condition of parole involved reporting to a case officer weekly. And the case officer would have his address.

  She called her contact in the parole office. By the time she collapsed into bed beside a warm Miles Davis, she had an address.

  Friday

  AIMÉE PUT A franc in the tronc, the metal donation box under the round domed basilica of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption, and lit a candle for René. From the baptismal font she heard a crying infant held by a priest in a cassock intoning prayers. A well-dressed family completed the scene.

  Outside the church, she headed to the side door, down the stairs to the basement stone crypt, and was met by the warm and inviting aroma of paprika and garlic. Polska, the resto in the crypt below the church, served Polish dishes to a mix of the quartier. Wild mushroom ravioli headlined the chalkboard special. Reasonable and filling in a quartier noted for couture boutiques and the nearby Ritz.

  Morbier sat at a table covered by a red-checked tablecloth, among Polish workers and executive types who worked nearby.

  “Borscht?” Aimée said, noticing his soup bowl with surprise. “You’re a bifteck and frites man.”

  “Pas mal. Try it.” Morbier raised his napkin, tucked it into his shirt collar. This was the Morbier she knew, clad in a worn tweed jacket with leather patched elbows. The tired look in his eyes, nicotine-stained fingers, and mismatched socks, one blue, one black, were familiar.

  “For Xavierre.” She set a bouquet of apricot-colored roses on the table and sat expectantly. “So, how long have you two . . . ?”

  “We’re not here to discuss that.”

  A hurt look flashed in his eyes and then vanished.

  “I just thought you should know. . . .” She hesitated. That irrational pang of jealousy stirred again. She’d never seen him with a woman or looking so happy before. “That she’s beautiful. I enjoyed meeting her.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Leduc.” His tone was curt and all business.

  So his hot date had gone wrong? Concerned, she leaned forward.

  “Having a bad day, Morbier?”

  “I’ve had better.” Morbier nodded to the waitress, pointed to the chalkboard prix fixe menu. “She’ll have the same.”

  Aimée noticed the moustached man with big biceps who ladled the borscht. Hard not to, since the man’s eyes flicked Morbier’s way every few minutes.

  “You’re making the moustache nervous,” she said.

  “Jerzy? That’s not all I want to make him.”

  “Eh? Jerzy’s planning a heist?”

  “Indicateurs need to cooperate. I’m reminding him.” Morbier kept a web of informers who furnished him with the pulse of the community. Like all good flics. He nodded to Jerzy. “My visit’s a little reminder of our deal.” Then he turned a penetrating gaze on her.

  “You rub people’s hide the wrong way, Leduc.” He shook his head, reaching for his spoon. The crevice of his right jowl sported a whisker tuft he’d missed shaving. “Countless times. It’s like you enjoy it.”

  “And you call this helping me with Melac?”

  “Consider this more than a warning. Melac’s interested in you. And not in a good way.”

  Her knuckles tightened on the napkin. The waitress, a barrel keg of a woman, set down a plate of steaming borscht and tossed a basket of bread in the middle.

  “So he doesn’t like me.” She ripped a piece of bread off. “I’m not competing for Miss France.”

  But she groaned inside.

  “I noticed.” He glanced at her black leather pants, worn cashmere sweater, and denim jean coat. “C’est grunge, c’est-ça?”

  He pronounced it greunch.

  “Then you know I’ve cooperated, even furnished him with a video. What’s Melac doing to catch the woman who shot René? Instead of investigating, he suspects me.”

  “The financial flics find you interesting too.”

  “Someone’s framing me, Morbier.”

  He held up his thick age-spotted hand. “Not my turf. You asked for my help with Melac. I tried. But he’s got this bee in his bonnet that you’re laundering money.”

  “Why not say I’m milking the moon? That makes as much sense.”

  “Wake up, Leduc.” He wiped his soup bowl clean with a chunk of bread. “Haven’t you ever wondered if she’d use you one day?”

  Fear crawled up her spine.

  Her mother. He meant her mother.

  She pushed the bowl of borscht away. A wave of soup splashed over the rim, leaving a deep pink stain on the cloth. “Melac’s theory makes no sense. Who knows if she’s even alive?”

  But the wheels were spinning in her mind.

  “Unless you’re not telling me something, Morbier?”

  He shrugged. She couldn’t read the look in his eyes.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “That’s what it’s all about, your helpfulness connecting me to Jack Waller in New York. It’s just to track my mother, isn’t it?”

  Morbier set down his spoon. “Paranoid as usual, Leduc. That woman—”

  “‘Woman’? You can’t even say her name, can you? You’ve always refused to talk about her.”

  The waitress took the soup bowl and shoved a plate of tarama— fish eggs with a side order of sauerkraut—in front of her.

  “There’s nothing to say.” His mouth tightened. “Eat your sauerkraut, Leduc; they do it well here.”

  She tasted the sweet-and-sour cabbage. And let her fork fall on the plate. “How well do you know Jack Waller, Morbier?”

  “Jack Waller?” A lift of his eyebrows. And then Morbier’s face changed, his gaze faraway. “I knew him as Jacques Weill. Our fathers were cheminots, railway workers, at Gare de Lyon during the Occupation.”

  Morbier rarely spoke of his childhood. Or the war. She remembered a tale fueled by a late-night bottle of red. The empty shops and his family’s hunger drove him to trap pigeons in the park for dinner.

  “Resistance comrades. That creates a bond, Leduc.”

  “To hear people today, everyone served in the Resistance, non? Funny, considering only three percent of the population participated.”

  “Resisting took different forms,” Morbier said. “Small acts of courage. Especially if you needed to put food on the table. My father and Jacques’s loaded the wrong freight on rail cars, they did what they could.”

  His voice was wistful. “Jacques’s family moved to New York in the fifties.”

  “Jack Waller will only talk to me in person. He says I have to come to New York or forget his help.”

  Morbier paused. “
And that’s suspicious?”

  “It smells.”

  “Ingrained habits die hard, Leduc.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Jacques made captain in the NYPD, no small feat. Freelanced, did some work for the Company and Interpol.”

  “You mean the CIA?” She clutched her napkin.

  “They all do that,” he said. “Reciprocal arrangements, man on the ground the best thing, you know.”

  His matter-of-fact tone grated on her. What she had thought suspicious now stank to high heaven. “You connected me to a man who works with Interpol and the CIA?”

  “Who else, Leduc? He knows the terrain. A retired New York City police captain. Who better?”

  Surprised, she took his hand. “You’re naïve, Morbier.”

  He snorted. “I’ve been called a lot of things. But naïve? Never.”

  “My mother’s. . . .” The words stuck in her throat. She kept her hand on his. “Good God, don’t you see?”

  “That she’s on the World Watch List? Bon, you’re looking for this brother, non?”

  And then an awful thought hit her. What if the letters were a plant? A ruse to get her to New York?

  But why would anyone think that would draw her mother there too? And after all these years, why now?

  “Et alors, Leduc.” Morbier cupped her hand with his for a moment, then let go. He removed his napkin, took out a packet of tobacco and Zigzag papers, and with a deft movement rolled a cigarette. He tamped the loose blond tobacco into the tip, lit it, inhaled, and sent out a plume of smoke.

  She wanted to grab the cigarette from him.

  Instead, she waved the smoke away to join the cloud hovering over the smokers in the basement crypt.

  “Leduc, I try to help you, and you see phantoms, monsters.”

  She shook her head. He didn’t get it.

  “This obsession with the past—your mother—it goes nowhere.” He knocked off his ash into the Ricard ashtray, took a toothpick packet from his pocket. Aimée recognized the goose-feather toothpicks he used. Le Coq. Her father had used them too.

  “You’re a big girl. Face it. If Jacques found a link to this ‘brother,’ you’re lucky. Otherwise, take it the way it’s meant.” He put an open hand over his mouth as he picked his teeth.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if she buried her past and doesn’t want to be found, Leduc?”

  But I’m her daughter, Aimée wanted to shout. And she was again eight years old on that rainy March afternoon after school in an empty apartment.

  The voice she repressed that never went away murmured doubts. Had her mother left to protect her? The phrase from her little brother’s letter—“I think people follow us”—came to her mind. Years later had her mother been with another child on the run? The horrible thought that her mother might not have succeeded in hiding her little brother came to her. Lies or the truth? Her thoughts swirled. She didn’t know what to believe. Already Waller, whom Morbier trusted, turned out not to be who he purported to be.

  In the course of a few days René had been shot; Nicolas had died before his parole, a suicide or a murder victim; Clémence had been strangled; and Tracfin had been set on her tail. It all linked somehow. Only she didn’t know how.

  “Remember, after the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Stasi files were opened? The radicals, the terrorists with new identities, who’d made new lives, had jobs, families. All shot to hell. Think about that.”

  What made him mention that? “You referred me to Waller. Now are you saying to leave it alone?”

  Morbier stubbed out his cigarette and slid an envelope under his plate. “This consumed you. Night and day you hounded me for a contact in New York. Remember? Sometimes it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie, but you wouldn’t let go. I thought, bon,” he shrugged, “you’d try, get tired, give up. Then you’d finally move on. But your partner’s been shot, your business is in trouble, and now you’re blaming Jacques. Is that the thanks I get, Leduc?”

  She started. Was she paranoid? Yet the more she told Morbier, the more she stood to lose.

  “I’m late.” Morbier stood, wrapping his scarf around his neck. “But think about this, Leduc. The business your grandfather founded, the place your father put his heart and soul into running to provide for you . . . think about what he’d say.”

  “Papa?” Her heart sank. “Say to what?”

  “Risking it all for a mother who abandoned you. That’s a slap in his face. To his memory.”

  Stunned, she grabbed his hand. “How can you think . . . you knew her.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “People buckle under pressure, Leduc.” He spoke slowly. And he almost sounded sympathetic. “Nets tighten; and to survive, people do things they’re not proud of later.”

  “But it’s not that at all.”

  Morbier’s eyes narrowed. “Eh, then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He invoked her father’s memory to get her to turn her mother in. Morbier assumed a money-laundering network ran through her; they all did. The only reason they let her walk free on the street was as bait.

  “Let’s hope it’s not too late when you decide to come clean.”

  “Too late?”

  “That you’re not in a cell at La Santé.”

  Her blood ran cold. “You’re threatening me, Morbier.”

  “Right now, it’s cooperate or face prison.”

  With that, he shuffled ahead.

  “Monsieur, you forgot something.” The waitress pointed to the envelope Morbier had left.

  “An incentive for my friend.” Morbier shot a glance over at Jerzy, now red-faced and perspiring.

  A payment for his informer. “And keep the roses.”

  In life, one always paid. And even when you paid, she thought, you were on your own.

  Whoever had wired that money was linked to Nicolas, not her mother. She was almost certain. But she couldn’t prove that or anything else.

  All the way to Leduc Detective, she wondered if her father would want her to turn in her mother to save herself. She doubted she could.

  Friday

  “OLIVIER’S HIDING THINGS , Roland.” Gabrielle paced back and forth in Roland’s book-lined study.

  After Olivier’s enigmatic message about a ghost, he hadn’t answered his phone. Or come home last night.

  “What twenty-three-year-old doesn’t keep things from his parents?”

  “And there’s a prison inquiry into Nicolas’s suicide.”

  “Another inquiry like all the others?” He sighed. “But I’ll talk to him.” Roland caught her around the waist. “Slim and elegant, Gabrielle, you still have the body of the young woman I took against the armoire in your father’s house.”

  In 1968, after a protest at the Sorbonne; she remembered her bell bottoms on the library floor. That scorching September, the geraniums wilting in the heat on the balcony. The way he made her feel. The way he still made her feel. She felt a stirring in her chest. She pushed it aside.

  “Roland . . . it’s serious.”

  “Very serious.” He pulled her back, licked behind her ear. “I agree.”

  Gabrielle heard the long buzz of the apartment door. Olivier had forgotten his key again. She kissed Roland, then grabbed her briefcase. “Must be Olivier. Don’t forget.”

  He returned her kiss and breathed in her ear. “Later, ma chére.” She ran, briefcase in hand, to the apartment front door.

  No Olivier. Disappointment washed over her. Instead, she saw a lithe woman in heels, black leather pants, and denim coat, wearing oversized earrings. There was an inquiring look in her large kohl-rimmed eyes. The new neighbor, she wondered. They’d heard that a model had moved into the building.

  “May I help you?”

  “Madame de la Pecheray? I’d like to speak with Olivier, please.”

  One of Olivier’s conquests?

  As the woman handed her a card, Gabrielle noticed the copper puzzle ring on
one of her fingers.

  “Aimée Leduc,” she read, “Detective Privée. What’s this concerning?”

  “May I come in, Madame?”

  “But why, Mademoiselle Leduc?”

  Gabrielle glanced around the hallway. The concierge was dusting the stained-glass windows, no doubt listening.

  “It’s a private matter.”

  Gabrielle’s gut wrenched. The blackmailer?

  “This concerns a police investigation,” Aimée explained.

  The concierge continued dusting the same spot on the window.

  “I’m busy, Mademoiselle.” This Leduc woman bothered her. The tousled unstudied chic, the raw energy vibrating from her, and the determination in her eyes.

  “Maybe you’d prefer to hear via official channels first?” Aimée shrugged.

  Gabrielle stood aside and let her in.

  “Entrez. I’m listening, Mademoiselle.” Should she disturb Roland in his study? Better to keep this short, stay on the defensive, and deny whatever popped up.

  “On November third, 1993, a synagogue in the Marais was torched.”

  Gabrielle willed down her fear and managed to keep her face expressionless. “I fail to see how this involves me.”

  “A witness says your son participated with Nicolas Evry, who took full responsibility for the incident and was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned.”

  Gabrielle’s spine stiffened. The woman had some pieces but nothing to link them together.

  “There’s a mistake,” she said.

  “Olivier denied it too,” Aimée said.

  Gabrielle tried to remember to keep breathing.

  “If you’ve already spoken with Olivier, then what’s the point of this?”

  The Leduc woman shook her head. “My client believes Olivier’s covering up,” she said. “If he doesn’t come forward, he’s in trouble. He may be charged as an accomplice in a vehicular manslaughter and fleeing the scene of an accident.”

  Shaken, Gabrielle grabbed the foyer’s fluted pillar to restore her balance.

  “You’re still here, Gabrielle?” Roland strode into the foyer. “The Minister’s dropping by in ten minutes to finalize last minute arrangements for my investiture.”

  Even though the Leduc woman was still right there, she felt him draw her close. She leaned into him. Trying to draw strength. What was that look in his eyes?