Murder in Montmartre

Thursday Night

NATHALIE GAGNARD’S DAMP SWEATER clung to her. Her hand came back wet from touching her cheeks. She was crying, and she hadn’t even realized it.

Light from the streetlamp slanted through her half-closed shutters and checkered the sisal mat under her bare feet. In her apartment, once a ballroom—a quarter of it, anyway—clung the dense odor of white chrysanthemums for Jacques’s funeral service. They lay in the sink, needing water, still wrapped in green paper. The body of the man she ached for would repose in a steel morgue drawer until the ground dried out enough for a grave to be dug. The flowers could wait.

The phone rang next to her.

“Madame Gagnard, Officer Rassac calling,” said a voice she recognized. “Please accept our condolences. We’ve taken up a collection for the funeral. The way we think Jacques would like it.” Pause. “We hope you’ll agree.”

Had they made arrangements for Jacques’s funeral without consulting her? As the ex-wife, she wasn’t even a proper widow nor would she be entitled to his pension. She scrabbled for her cigarettes, found the packet, and lit one.

“Madame Gagnard?”

She exhaled; a gray wisp of smoke trailed into the room.

“So you’ve managed everything.” She bit back the rest.

There was a pause. “We wanted to make things easier, you know. The men . . . ,” he paused again, cleared his throat. “We wanted to relieve you of this unexpected burden.”

Her tears flowed, accompanied by sobs she couldn’t control.

“Do whatever you want.” She hung up, ashamed. They knew she had no money.

If only Jacques had been able to keep his hands off the machines. The gambling fever was a curse. Their debts mounted, they’d pay off one loan shark, then Jacques would gamble again and get in debt to another.

She ground out her cigarette in the full ashtray. A few months ago he’d joined a program on his own, tried to quit, surprising her. He’d told her he was quitting for himself, it was something he had to do. She hadn’t asked him why, just thanked the stars. And then, last week, those telltale shining eyes, that fevered look. Right away she knew. He’d gone back to the machines.

Mounting excitement, pills, big plans, a coup, he said, that would make all their debts disappear. Like every big idea he’d had, it backfired. And this time, it took him with it.

Her heart heaved. Jacques’s tousled hair, the way he’d tickled her under her knees, how he’d made her purr beneath the sheets. Life with him had been a joy—on good days.

She grabbed the half-empty bottle of Ambien pills and curled her legs under her on the couch. She longed for oblivion. To forget. She thumbed open the horoscope page in Marie Claire, as she did every month, and scanned the advice under her sign, a Scorpion, drawn biting its lethal tail.

Jacques had said she embodied Scorpio’s dark, jealous nature and secretiveness. And despite his free spirit, he’d seemed to like it during their five years of marriage. Opposites attract, wasn’t that the saying?

Under Scorpio’s Feelings Forecast she read: Venus rising indicates time for reflection. The same for dreams. Take time, ponder, the answers will come. A warm-colored sun illuminates your journey.

Answers will come? Already, as she’d told the reporter, that bitch was in custody. The little harpy with her cleft lip, like the upper lip of a hare, a sign still regarded in her Breton village as the malicious act of an elf or fairy. Old sayings and beliefs still held sway in the countryside. Hadn’t her mother refused to let her pregnant sister cross in front of a rabbit for fear of miscarriage?

That Laure was cursed and transmitted the curse to others around her. Nathalie known it the moment she’d laid on eyes on her.

Nathalie’s fist balled, knocking the pills over, sprinkling them across the floor. How many had she taken tonight? The doctor said two would dull the edge of anxiety. Two?

She’d vowed to Jacques she’d never go back on the street. She’d given her word. Did it matter now?

Jacques, fresh from the military in Corsica, and new to the police force, had found her. She would never forget that bitter February evening. The flics were making a routine sweep of rue Joubert; she was just a few months into The Life. At the Commissariat he’d grinned, handing her hot coffee and offering her a seat in his warm cubicle. He’d treated her like a human being and winked, offering her a “cousine’s” job, which was what they called informers. He’d promised her better things and, to his credit, later he had made an honest woman of her. She owed her life to him.

And it had been sweet, especially those last few days. Talking with him every day, sometimes twice, his saying he needed her, that only she could help him, and it would all work out. He’d leave the force, they’d settle in Saint Raphael, buy that little bistro. But now, it was all over, all due to that jealous whiner.

Proof? Why did they need more than Laure’s smoking gun? Those juges d’instructions got more fussy every day; soon, as Jacques had said, they’d need to video a crime before anyone got nailed.

What had Jacques put away, the night she came home early? Groggy, she reached down for the pills, picked them up one by one, put some back in the bottle, and took two more. Or was it three more?

Little was left to comfort her. Most days her only interactions were at work or with the cashier at Casino, the market, who lived downstairs. Her life had been mechanical and soulless since Jacques had left. And now he was gone for good.

The Marie Claire fell to the floor. Her muscles had relaxed. The walls glazed before her eyes, a hazy aura of vanilla light came through the window from the street. Hadn’t her horoscope indicated a colored sun . . .?