Murder Below Montparnasse

by Cara Black

  “To fall.” Serge nodded. “His accumulated weight could have torn his jacket pocket, and he landed as you drove by.”

  Serge pointed to the photo of the body on the cobbles. The ripped jean jacket pocket.

  “Brilliant. No one dies twice. At least not as far as I know.” Aimée grinned. “This puts Saj in the clear.”

  Serge didn’t share her excitement. He tapped his pen. “Still doesn’t give me his cause of death.” His other gloved finger probed the Serb’s jawline. “He presents no wounds apart from the crushing attributed to the injuries sustained after death from René’s Citroën,” Serge said. “No bullet holes, knife marks, or concussion or injury to the brain.” He checked the autopsy clipboard. Turned some pages. “His organs, brain came out normal. No distinguishable cause of death.”

  Not her problem.

  “Aimée, I’ve never issued an inconclusive autopsy report in my career.”

  “Perfectionist” was Serge’s other middle name, after Pierre. He was thorough, a recognized expert in the medical pathology field.

  “C’est bizarre. But before I throw my hands up, I’ll do a microscopic examination of the organs for what could have caused sudden death. Inflammation in the heart, maybe, like myocarditis, or inflammation in the brain. Never obvious.”

  “What if he was using a new designer crack or injectable synthetic cocaine cocktail?” She shivered, and not only from the chill of the cadaver room. “They wouldn’t show on the standard tests you performed. You should run one of those advanced tox screen panels for other drugs, too. Have you examined his tattoos for puncture holes? He’s got enough of them.”

  “Speaking of crack, our department head’s cracking down on our pathology budget,” Serge said. “We’re allocated funds for only standard blood screens and tests.”

  “Didn’t you misplace that memorandum, Serge?” Aimée winked. “Or it got lost in the shuffle when you were at the medical conference in, where was it, Prague, non?”

  His dark eyes lit up. “You want me to bend rules, like you?”

  “Live dangerously, Serge. You’ve only got one life. Add spice.”

  “So you’re adding spice with Serb gangsters? You need to watch out, Aimée.”

  Her hands trembled. She put them in her pocket. She was tired of hearing this. “Has his brother ID’d him?”

  Serge took off his glasses again. Rubbed the other lens with the edge of his lab coat. “No family has claimed him so far.”

  Odd.

  “How did the flics ID him?” Aimée asked. “Driver’s license, carte d’identité?”

  Serge paused, put on his glasses and consulted another chart. Flipped the pages. “You never saw this either, Aimée.”

  A smudged copy of a receipt from a kebob takeout on rue d’Alésia for Feliks. He must have ordered ahead.

  “So his stomach contents corroborate this?”

  “See for yourself.” Serge gestured to a bowl.

  “Non, merci,” she said. “How soon will you file the autopsy, Serge?”

  “I’m not finished, Aimée. First, I need the cause of death.”

  She wanted to grab him by the throat. Shake him. Didn’t he understand?

  “Until you send in the prelim,” she said, keeping her voice even with effort, “Saj faces manslaughter for this mec. Please, Serge, you know it’s wrong to leave Saj hanging. Get the prelim paperwork to the lead investigator’s desk.”

  “What’s a few hours? Saj still needs medical care.”

  “Didn’t I tell you this Serb’s brother tried to talk his way into garde à vue—”

  “Bon,” Serge interrupted, waving his rib cutters. “You’re babysitting the twins while we take a weekend in Brittany.”

  “Wait a minute, I offered overnight—”

  “A weekend alone with my wife, Aimée. Take it or leave it.”

  She stifled a groan. Saj better appreciate this.

  SHE CHEWED HER lip as she opened Leduc Detective’s frosted glass door. Saj wouldn’t face manslaughter charges—a good thing. Yet, considering the snail’s pace of paperwork required for a release, she couldn’t hold her breath. She hated waiting for the catch-up.

  Stacks of printouts, color-coded folders, and copies of faxed proposals lay neatly on her desk. Maxence had been busy. Nice job. “You’re starting to dazzle me,” she said.

  Maxence grinned. “There’s a message on the machine.”

  “From who?”

  “Didn’t hear it, sorry. I got wrist-deep changing the printer toner.” Charcoal smudges ringed Maxence’s fingers. “Think you need a new printer.”

  And the money to pay for it.

  She hit PLAY.

  Aimée heard a cough, clearing of the throat. What sounded like running water. “Please pick up if you’re there. Please, Mademoiselle.” She recognized Yuri Volodya’s voice. “I should have told you the truth.”

  A chill crept up her neck. She turned up the machine’s volume. Listened close.

  “I lied to you last night.” She heard the catch in his throat. Fear edged his voice. “Come now.” Another pause. “Please, if you’re listening, pick up. Your mother told me things.”

  Her breath caught. Go on, Yuri, tell me what things. Tell me what my mother means in this. To you.

  “You look just like her, you know. Those same big eyes. Alors, we need to talk in person.”

  Aimée wanted to scream. What about my mother?

  “I have to trust someone,” he continued. “A person on the outside.” Still that sound of running water. “Zut, it’s complicated, but I know who stole the painting. I need you to understand.”

  Understand what?

  She made out a faint knocking in the background. “You should know … Merde!”

  Go on, Yuri, she prayed.

  The message clicked off.

  “He a friend of yours?” Maxence asked, looking up.

  “I wouldn’t call him that.” Frustrated, she tapped her chipped mocha-lacquered nails on the PLAY button.

  Maxence nodded in a knowing way. “Your mother referred him and now you have to help the old fart, n’est-ce pas? I know what it’s like.”

  She sat, stunned. A slap like a wave of cold Atlantic seawater hit her. “Say that again, Maxence.”

  “Don’t I know it, Aimée.” He shrugged. “My mom volunteers me all the time to help idiots who can’t even turn a laptop on. Stupid.”

  Maxence didn’t know her American mother was on the world terrorist watch list. Or that she’d gone rogue. Rogue from whom, and why, Aimée didn’t know.

  Her fingers gripped the phone. She sensed in the marrow of her bones that her mother was alive. Last month she’d been convinced that figure standing on the Pont Marie was … But what did that have to do with the painting?

  Aimée hit the callback button. Busy. Shivers of hot and cold rippled through her.

  She heard the fear in that sad, feisty voice of Yuri’s. Serb thugs had threatened him, he’d said as much. She’d found the Serb’s jacket button, seen the blood. The Serb dead before they’d hit him. What in hell was going on and how did it involve her mother?—if it even did.

  Some trap? A setup?

  The phone rang.

  “Leduc Detective,” she said.

  “I’ve changed my mind, Mademoiselle,” Yuri Volodya’s voice came on the line. “Forget my message.”

  “What? Why?” She tried to make sense of this. “Mon Dieu, you talked to my mother.” Silence on his end.

  “You two have history together, don’t you? That squat in the seventies. Trotskyists, non?”

  Water rushed in the background. “My damn sink’s flooding. Don’t … come. Too dangerous. Complicated. She doesn’t want you involved.”

  Doesn’t want … Her mother was here? So close?

  But she was involved already.

  “I’ll be right over.”

  “Tell me about it!” Maxence was saying. “So if he calls again, shall I tell him you’re swamped with �
�real’ work?”

  From her bottom desk drawer, she took her Beretta. Checked the clip to make sure it was loaded. Maxence’s jaw dropped.

  “Non, tell him I’m on the way.”

  BEFORE EXITING HER building’s foyer, she pulled on a black knit cap, shapeless windbreaker, and oversize dark glasses. She’d been warned three times this morning about Serbs; she’d exercise caution. On the rue du Louvre she scanned the parked cars for a telltale tip of a cigarette, a fogged-up window indicating a watcher. Nothing.

  Tension knotted her shoulders. On the side street, rue Bailleul, she unlocked her Vespa and walked it over the uneven cobbles. For a moment, she wondered if she had overreacted. Nothing seemed out of place on the busy rue du Louvre except for a lone squawking seagull on a pigeon-spattered statue. He was far from the water. As lost as she felt.

  She shifted into first gear and wove the Vespa into traffic, passing the Louvre. Fine mist hit her cheekbones. She shifted into third as she crossed the Pont Neuf. A bateau-mouche glided underneath, fanning silver ripples on the Seine’s surface. Swathes of indigo sky were framed by swollen rain clouds over Saint-Michel. The season of la giboulée, the sudden showers heralding spring.

  Too bad she’d forgotten her rain boots.

  Cars and buses stalled as she hit road closures on the Left Bank. Bright road construction lights illumined crews excavating the sewer lines. Street after narrow street.

  Frustrated, she detoured uphill, winding through the Latin Quarter, then zigzagging across to the south of Paris, former countryside squeezed between wall fortifications now demolished; past the old Observatoire, two-story houses, remnants of prewar factories leaving an urban patchwork.

  Clouds scudded over the slanted rooftops, the chimney pots like pepper shakers over the grilled balconies. Avenues led to tree-lined lanes in this neighborhood, fronting hidden village-like pockets of what her grandfather called “the Parisians’ Paris.”

  Her shoulders knotted in irritation. She didn’t have time for this scenic detour. Down wide Avenue du Général Leclerc, through the nodding shadows cast by trees and clouds of chestnut pollen, past the Métro signs and the steps of l’Eglise Saint Pierre de Montrouge. Into a logjam. Horns blared. Protesters chanting “Stop the developers!” and wearing La Coalition armbands blocked part of rue d’Alésia, a street known to fashionistas for designer markdowns. Of course, a demonstration!

  Great. No way she’d get through this banner-waving crowd on her Vespa. She downshifted and wove through protesters, desperate for a parking place. It took a good five minutes, then another five until on foot she turned into cobbled Villa d’Alésia. She paused where the narrow lane twisted to the right, past the two-story ateliers. Quiet. A world away from the street protest. Clouds above fretted the cobblestones with a patchwork of light.

  Further on, she saw a woman rattling Yuri’s front gate. What was going on? Her stomach churned.

  The older woman, in a mink coat over a purple jogging suit, gripped the grilled gate with one hand, beckoned her with the other. “Viens, Mademoiselle.”

  “Something wrong? Is Monsieur Volodya all right?”

  The woman, her dark penciled eyebrows at odds with her thinning brown hair, stared at Aimée, her mouth pursed. “All that yelling! Disturbed you too, non?”

  Nonplussed, Aimée nodded.

  “It’s overcast and you wear dark glasses?”

  “The optometrist dilated my eyes this morning,” Aimée improvised, removing them and sticking them in her pocket. “But Yuri …?”

  “Worried me, too,” the woman interrupted. “His water pipe’s flooding my wall and balcony again. A mess. Not the first time. But I’ve called.…”

  The screech of a police car’s brakes coming to a halt in front of them drowned her out.

  “You reported this, Madame?” asked the arriving flic, motioning to his partner. Aimée wondered how they’d gotten through the congested demonstration.

  “The commotion disturbed her too.” The woman gestured to Aimée. “All this yelling in the middle of the morning.”

  The woman took Aimée for a neighbor. She kept talking, but the flic and his partner ignored her. With a sense of foreboding, Aimée followed them inside, her ankle boots sloshing in water. A flood all right.

  “Monsieur?”

  Over the blue-uniformed officer’s shoulders, Aimée saw Yuri bent over the gushing kitchen sink. His bloody arms were tied with a necktie to the faucet. She gasped. Rivulets of red-tinged water streamed onto the floor, eddying around her boots.

  The first flic rushed to turn off the gushing taps. It took him several attempts to unknot the tie and hoist the old man down. Yuri’s blackened eyes were swollen shut, his face cut and bruised, his distended tongue thick and blue. His hair, plastered to his head, dripped water.

  “Mon Dieu.” Aimée’s hand flew to her mouth. “I’m too late.”

  “What’s that, Mademoiselle?”

  She shook her head. Instinct told her to keep her mouth shut. She wondered who’d tortured the old man in broad daylight.

  Trying to piece it together didn’t stop her knees from knocking or the shivers from running up her spine. A familiar floral note—like muguet, lily of the valley—floated in the damp atelier. Her mother’s scent. Then a piercing scream—Aimée jumped as the woman in the mink coat appeared in the hallway, pointing, her face crinkled in horror. The policier called for backup, speaking into the microphone on his collar.

  “Take your neighbor outside, will you?” he said. “We’ll talk to you both when backup arrives.”

  Her unlicensed Beretta felt heavy in her bag. A good time to make herself scarce. Guiding the sobbing woman, Aimée sloshed through the ebbing water. Just last night she’d sat here with Yuri. The vodka bottle and glasses were still on the table. But the card she’d left was gone.

  Good God, what if the killer had taken it?

  A broken chair, waterlogged books, and the armoire on its side showed evidence of a struggle. Had the thieves come back for the painting they hadn’t found last night? Or had her mother? And if her mother was involved in this, who was she involved with—Yuri, or whoever killed him?

  Chilled, she pushed that thought away.

  Only forty or fifty minutes had passed since she’d spoken with him. It made no sense. Last night his shock over his stolen painting had seemed genuine. Why torture him for a painting already stolen? Why had he called her and changed his mind? Saddened, she thought of her last image of Yuri Volodya, holding her card in his hands. Now she’d never get to ask him any of her questions.

  “Just like in the war,” the woman said, her shoulders heaving.

  Tense, Aimée put her arm around her. “What do you mean?”

  “Standard torture by les Boches,” the woman said. “That’s how they got information from my brother. They tortured him in a bathtub on rue de Saussaies. Left him on our doorstep.”

  Aimée only had a few minutes before backup arrived. She and her Beretta needed to be as far from here as possible. “Let me take you home, they’ll want to question us.”

  She escorted the woman up her stairs. “You heard Yuri yelling?”

  “But you heard it too,” she said.

  “Bien sûr.” Aimée needed to keep the woman talking. “It bothered my dog, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying.”

  “Who could, unless you speak Russian.”

  How did this add up? “You speak Russian, Madame?”

  “Les Russes filled the quartier once,” she said. “A generation or two ago, I don’t remember.”

  Lining the walls of the stairwell were faded amateurish watercolors of pastoral countryside and villages with canals. Painted long ago on holidays, she imagined.

  “My brother painted those,” the woman said, noticing Aimée’s gaze.

  Aimée nodded. “So talented, your brother.”

  “Then, in 1943, that afternoon, gone.…” Her words trailed off.

  Outside, Aimée heard ca
r engines.

  Both the woman’s brother and Yuri had been tortured in the same way. A link? Or maybe someone wanted it to appear that way? She’d think about that later. In the few minutes before the flics arrived she needed to pry information out of this woman. “Poor Yuri. He had so little.…”

  “ ‘Sitting in sweet butter,’ Yuri said to me,” the woman interrupted, reaching the first-floor landing. She opened her door and hung up her mink coat. Warmth and the smell of apples drifted from inside this atelier, which was similar to Yuri’s. Aimée guided her toward a chair as the woman dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “Bien sûr, his wife’s son, he’s been sniffing around. The type who wants the butter and the money to buy it.”

  An old saying of her grand-mère’s. Aimée hadn’t heard it in years. She remembered Yuri’s comment on his daughter-in-law’s cement blinis.

  “Mark my words, look to family,” the woman said. “That’s what those crime shows say.”

  “What sweet butter?” Aimée fingered her bag’s leather strap. “Yuri won the lotto?”

  The woman dabbed her eyes again. Shrugged.

  A painting so valuable Yuri had been tortured for it. Did that make sense? Aimée needed to press. This woman might have more information, a crucial detail.

  “Mais following his father’s funeral, he acted differently,” the woman said. “Didn’t you notice? After he visited the old Russian nursing home?”

  A knock sounded on the door. The flics. Flustered, Aimée took a stab in the dark. “Ah, you mean that painting he inherited from his father, non? Seemed to worry him?”

  “Not too much. Talked big after that, don’t you remember?” Her eyes narrowed. “Where do you live, eh? I haven’t seen you around.”

  “Juste à côté,” Aimée said. Time to get the hell out of here. “May I use the ladies’ before we talk to the flics, Madame?”