Murder in Montmartre

Wednesday Morning

“ YOU’RE LOOKING FOR ZETTE? ” said the blonde woman to Aimée in the rue Houdon bar. She shook her lacquered blonde bouffant hairdo. “Not here. His day off.”

A pity. Aimée had counted on probing and getting answers. Next, dropping off the computer files she’d copied at Maître Delambre’s office, and then visiting Laure.

“Where can I find him?”

“Sleeping it off,” the blonde woman said, tying an apron around her waist, about to turn on the vacuum cleaner.

“And that would be where?”

The woman stared. “You were here the other day.”

Aimée nodded; she had to dispel the woman’s suspicion. “Zette’s an old colleague of my godfather’s,” she said, hoping it sounded plausible. “I wanted to show him a photo.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. She switched on the vacuum. It wheezed as it sucked up grit from the floor. “Come back tomorrow.”

Aimée peered at the counter, which bore wet ring marks and a filled ashtray. Below the counter sat a pile of stapled invoices addressed to Z. Cavalotti. She couldn’t read the rest.

“Does he work from home?”

The blonde woman’s mouth tightened in a thin smile.

“In a manner of speaking, eh. I think he does the accounts at his place,” she said, turning to the vacuum cleaner. “If that’s all . . .”

“I’ll come back, merci.”

Aimée left, pulled her coat tighter, and sidestepped across the slush. Five minutes later she’d found a Z. Cavalotti in the phone book, listed on rue Ronsard. Time to pay a visit chez Zette.

She climbed up the street, made a right downhill, then another right, and a left into Place Charles Dullin. Camion-nettes, small delivery trucks, their doors open, lined the bare-branched, tree-filled square. Posters advertised a current adaptation of Racine’s Phèdre at the nineteenth-century theatre at the rear of the square. Phèdre played in Paris all the time, either a classical performance or an avant-garde one like this ver- sion, with an African tribal motif. The timeless Greek tragedy of a woman in love with her stepson still filled the seats.

Beyond the iron-and-glass-roofed Marché Saint Pierre, a stone-and-brick wall bordered a Neolithic mound and wound its way upward. She climbed the steep flight of stairs with double rails in the middle, so typical of Montmartre, and found Zette’s address, a white stone building tilting into the hill like so many others. His, unlike them, however, had weeds in the concrete cracks, worn stucco walls, and peeling pale blue shutters.

The wooden front door lay open to a courtyard with ivy-covered walls. She peered at the mailboxes, found the name Zette Cavalotti, and trudged up a spiral staircase to the first floor. She stopped at a warped wooden landing that creaked beneath her feet; before the door was a woven mat and a sign CHAT LUNA-TIQUE! So, Zette had a crazy cat. She knocked on the door and it opened. Her hand paused in midair.

“Monsier Zette?”

No answer. Apprehensive, she stepped inside the sparse, chilly apartment. It was neat and orderly. She shivered at the freezing blast from the open window. Framed newspaper articles and photos lined the walls showing Zette, “The Corsican Magnifico,” defeating Terrance, “The Blue-Eyed Mad Moroccan,” for the championship. He’d had quite a career. Tracksuits and sweatshirts were hung from nails in the wall around the otherwise neat room. Hadn’t Zette heard of hangers or armoires? A hot plate sat on a thin wooden counter next to bottles of mineral water.

“Allô?”

No answer. Where was he?

A poster of “Corsica, Isle of Beauty” hung over the sofa, which he used for a bed, she figured from the piled blankets.

She poked around. Just the remnants of a glory-filled boxing career long over. A late-model Moulinex washing machine hummed. A matchstick was wedged into the wash-cycle panel. Was that the only way it worked? Judging by the heat radiating from the washer, it had been on for hours. A plastic basket with dirty sweats and an empty lemon-scented Ariel detergent box lay on top of a table together with bottles and vitamins, protein powder. Had he run out to buy laundry detergent and left the door open?

She leaned against the machine to wait for him. Tapped her heeled boots on the wooden floor. She heard a faint meow, noticed a closed door.

“Monsieur Zette?”

The meowing grew louder. She knocked. Waited, then opened it. A small room with barbells and weights filling the corner. Looked like he still trained.

She felt fur rub her legs as a black cat with yellow eyes passed her. Zette could have stopped for a verre at a local café. She looked at her watch. Better to wait for him downstairs, outside.

The black cat padded beside her on the staircase, then continued out to the courtyard. Had Zette stopped to chat to a neighbor? She followed the cat, who stopped by a wooden water-stained door, an old WC in the rear of the courtyard.

“Allô?”

The sweetish cloying smell of cheap detergent wafted from Zette’s window. The cat meowed louder, claws scratching on the wood.

Curious, she pulled the door handle, felt its heaviness as it creaked open. Mold and damp mingled with the detergent aroma. Her arm brushed something and she turned. Zette’s arms hung and his feet dangled, his collar was stuck on a hook in the door. She gasped and stepped back onto the cat’s tail. He screeched and bolted. Zette’s throat was slit from ear to ear in a red smear, and his long blackish tongue had been pulled out through the hole. A Sicilian necktie. Grotesque.

Covering her nose and mouth with her sleeve, she forced herself to look at Zette’s body suspended from the door hook; the whites of his eyes were visible in the slants of light. The murderer had seen to it that Zette would talk no more. Vendetta-style. A toad of a man but he didn’t deserve to end like this, whatever he’d done. No one did.

Clotted black-red blood trailed down his chest. A thin cape of ice sparkled over his sagging shoulders. His red tracksuit jacket was ripped where he’d been hung from the door hook. Whoever did this hadn’t meant him to be found for a while. Or for his dirty sweats heaped in the basket to be washed. Ever.

She backed out, shaking. The strains of a harmonica wheezed from a children’s television show blaring somewhere above. She ran from the building, trying to get the smell out of her nose.

Around the corner, she found a phone cabin. She didn’t want to use her cell phone because it could be traced. She dialed 18 for the police.

“Sixty-eight rue Ronsard,” she said, catching her breath. “The courtyard WC, something smells bad. An old man went down there and we’re worried.”

“Name please, caller. We need to verify your identity and your location.”

She hung up. Took a deep breath. Tried to still her shaking hands.

Jacques murdered and now Zette, too, a Corsican tied to illegal gaming, with police connections. What did it mean?

She hitched her bag onto her shoulder and turned, about to push open the door of the telephone cabin, and found herself facing the side steps up to Sacré Coeur.

Then she remembered something.

She rifled through her bag, found the photo she’d printed out from Jubert’s file, the one she’d planned on asking Zette about. She stared at it closely.

Those were the same steps in the photo. Overgrown with ivy now, but it was the same place. These were the steps on which her father, Morbier, Rousseau, and Ludovic Jubert had stood years before. They had been facing Zette’s building. If Zette had known her father, why hadn’t he said so?

Two broad-shouldered men in down jackets and blue denims stood in front of the phone cabin. She didn’t like the way they crowded the door. She had to think fast. She shoved the door open.

“What’s your hurry?” said the taller mec, who wore dark glasses and a black wool cap.

“Do I know you?”

He grinned, showing a mouthful of yellow teeth. “Not yet. What were you doing up there?”

He jerked his thumb toward Zette’s building.

“You’ve mistaken me for someone else,” she said, edging past him.

He kept pace with her. The other mec hemmed her in on the other side. “You’re out of your league, Mademoiselle.”

“I don’t understand.” Panicked, she waved to a man bent against the whipping wind in the otherwise deserted street. She called, “Pierre . . . wait!” But the man kept going.

With a quick step she dodged past them and headed down the hill. She felt the men’s eyes on her back as she hurried on the wet pavement, heard their steps behind her. Their footsteps were faster now. Why weren’t there any other people on the street? Who were these mecs?

She quickened her step. Whoever they were they could gang up on her, shove her into a doorway, and . . . imagining the possibilities, she broke into a run.

The street forked at Marché Saint Pierre. The Art Nouveau metal struts of the red-brick market were frosted with ice. A dull silver overcast sky threatened rain, then opened. She ran into an alley filled with fabric shops. Rain pelted the canvas awnings. Underneath them, bolts of toile, bright Provençal designs, and gauzy chiffon reminded her of a bazaar. Every hue, texture, and width imaginable was on display. Glancing behind her, she saw the mecs. Ahead the alley came to a dead end.

Frantic, she looked around for shoppers to hide amongst. Usually this area hummed with activity. Where was everyone? Chased indoors by the bitter cold?

Cornered in the fabric market! There had to be a way out.

She rounded the corner. A street-level chute used to deliver bolts of fabric to the basement stood flush with the pavement. She hunkered down in the cold iron chute and gripped the sides.

“Mademoiselle, that’s for deliveries. You can’t go down there!” a deliveryman shouted from the shelter of his van.

Like hell she couldn’t.

She slid down the chute before the mecs saw her, landing on rolls of fabric in a vaulted white-plaster-walled cellar. The strong musky scent of silk fiber made her nose itch. And sneeze.

“Eh, Alphonse, that you?” said a man’s voice from behind the piles of dictionary-sized spools of thread. “You filled the last order, what’s the matter?”

Quick. She had to escape before this man investigated. Navigate this underground honeycombed by tunnels, riddled with caverns. She edged her way into the shadows, walking fast, following a trail through the piled rolls of shining silk.

“Alphonse?”

She kept going, blinking in the darkness, wondering where this led. Rounding a curve, she saw steps, and mounted a spiral metal staircase. Opening the door, she found herself standing behind a glass counter heaped with bolts of cloth. What now? Then she ducked, as a man with a tape measure hanging from his shoulder appeared. Her cell phone fell and she heard the resounding crack of the antenna. She grabbed the phone and, shaking, crawled through several aisles until she saw a pair of brown loafers in front of her. A magenta gauze cloud billowed over her and she sneezed again.

“Mademoiselle?”

She got to her feet, the swag of magenta tenting her head.

“My cell phone . . . I dropped my cell phone,” she said to the surprised face of a gray-haired clerk. “Excuse me.”

She’d emerged into the shop next door to the one with the chute and realized that these stores connected in their basements. Through the window, she saw the mecs waiting in front of the other store. She controlled her trembling. Somehow she had to find a way out, avoiding them. She made her way through the almost empty store, pretending to study the tables spilling over with fabrics, one eye on the mecs outside. A stroller blocked her way in the cramped aisle. The lone shopper, a mother, lugged a large shopping bag and urged her red-cheeked toddler to get inside the stroller. Aimée had an idea.

She smiled. “Would you like some help? I’m leaving, too.”

“Why, merci,” the woman said.

Aimée leaned down to the child by the stroller. “What about a ride in this, eh?” She lifted the child inside. “Voilá. Let me push the stroller; it will make it easier for you.”

“I appreciate it,” the woman said, “my bag’s heavy.”

Aimée pushed the stroller out the street door, walking with her head down next to the child’s mother until she paused to look in a shop window. Then Aimée hit the stroller brake with her toe and ran off.