French Kiss

Chapter 35

The same cramped and ugly little room. The same primitive air-conditioning. The same stale air. The same inadequate Internet service. But most of all, the same rotten luck in finding “the fingerprint,” the instinctive connection between one of my past investigations and the tragedies in New York.

Detective Burke and I keep working. We are once again seated in the police archives building, outside Paris. We have been studying the screen so intently that we decided to invest in a shared bottle of eyedrops.

The screen scrolls through old cases, some of which I had actually forgotten-a molestation case that involved a disgusting pediatrician who was also the father of five children; a case of a government official who, not surprisingly, was collecting significant bribes for issuing false health-inspection reports; a case of race fixing at the Longchamp racecourse.

“This looks bigger than fixing a horse race,” she says. “The pages go on forever.”

“Print them,” I say. “I’ll look at them more thoroughly later.”

Forty pages come spitting out of the printer. Burke says, “It looks like this was a very complicated case.”

“Not really,” I say. “No case is ever that complicated. Either there’s a crime or there isn’t. The Longchamp case began with a horse trainer. Marcel Ballard was his name. Not a bad guy, I think, but Ballard was weary of fixing the races. So he fought physically-punching, kicking-with the owner and trainer who were running the fix. And Ballard had a knife. And Ballard killed the owner and cut the other trainer badly.”

K. Burke continues scrolling through the cases on the screen. She does say, “Keep going, Moncrief. I’m listening.”

“I met with Ballard’s wife. She had a newborn, three months old, their fourth child. So I did her a favor, but not without asking for something in return. I persuaded Ballard to confess to the crime and to help us identify the other trainers who were drugging the horses. He cooperated. So thanks to my intervention-and that of my superiors-he was allowed to plead to a lesser charge. Instead of homicide volontaire, he was only charged with-”

“Let me guess,” says K. Burke. “Homicide involontaire.”

“You are both a legal and linguistic genius, K. Burke.”

I grab some of the Longchamp papers and go through them quickly. “I’m glad I did what I did,” I say. “Madame Ballard is a good woman.”

“And the husband? Is he grateful?” K. Burke asks as she continues to study the screen intensely.

“He has written to me many times in gratitude. But one must keep in mind that he did kill a man.”

Burke presses a computer key and begins reading about a drug gang working out of Saint-Denis.

“What does this mean, Moncrief? Logement social.”

“In New York they call it public housing. A group of heroin dealers had set up a virtual drug supermarket in the basement there. Once I realized that some of our Parisian detectives were involved in the scheme, it was fairly easy-but frightening-to bust.”

“How’d you figure out that your own cops were involved?” she asks.

“I simply felt it,” I say.

“Of course,” she says with a bit of sarcasm. “I should have known.”

We continue flipping through the cases on the computer. But like the race fixing and murder at Longchamp, like the drug bust in Saint-Denis, all my former cases seem to be a million miles away from New York. No instinct propelled me. No fingerprint arose.

We studied the cold cases also. The kidnapping of the Ugandan ambassador’s daughter (unsolved). The rape of an elderly nun at midnight in the Bois de Boulogne (unsolved, but what in hell was an elderly nun doing in that huge park at midnight?). An American woman with whom I had a brief romantic fling, Callie Hansen, who had been abducted for three days by a notorious husband-and-wife team that we were never able to apprehend. Again, nothing clicked.

We come across a street murder near Moulin Rouge. According to the report on the computer screen, one of the witnesses was a woman named Monica Ansel. Aha! Blaise Ansel had been the owner of Taylor Antiquities, the store on East 71st Street. Could Monica Ansel be his wife? But Monica Ansel, the woman who witnessed the crime at Moulin Rouge, was seventy-one years old.

“Damn!” I say, and I toss the papers from the Longchamp report to the floor. “I have wasted my time and yours, K. Burke. Plus I have wasted a good deal of money. And what do I have to show for it? De la merde.”

Even with her limited knowledge of French, K. Burke is able to translate.

“I agree,” she says. “Shit.”