Murder in Montmartre

Thursday Night

AIMÉE DIDN’T NEED LUCIEN Sarti’s kind of trouble. Why couldn’t she get the way his eyelashes curled out of her head?

At the bookstore on Place des Abbesses that had stayed open late for a poetry reading, she found an edition of that morning’s Corse-Matin, the Corsican daily newspaper.

At least the bookstore had a heater, so she could get the chill out of her bones. On the third page she found two articles datelined Bastia. One reported a bomb threat to the central Bastia post office, discovered to be a hoax. A shorter article described vandalism of a fighter jet on the runway at a military installation, blaming workers from the nearby construction site. The construction company, Conari Ltd., declined to comment. Félix Conari’s firm.

Flights had been canceled, and the airspace over Corsica declared a no-fly zone. Overreaction? That was a precaution the military enforced when national security was at stake. Even at an outpost on the tip of Corsica, far from the French mainland? Yet Conari had flown back.

Her eyes fell on another stack of newspapers.

IN COLD BLOOD, MY HUSBAND’S PARTNER SHOT HIM! The headlines stared back at her from Le Parisien. Next to a photo of Jacques Gagnard in uniform, a sidebar said: “as told by Nathalie Gagnard.”

Sick to her stomach, her anger simmering, Aimée stuck her metal nail file into the antenna slot of her cell phone, wiggled it, and called 12 for information. She requested the number of Nathalie Gagnard and was connected.

“Allô, Nathalie?”

“Why ask me for ideas? You’ve already planned Jacques’s funeral,” said Nathalie, her voice slurred.

Drunk?

“Nathalie, you’re going to retract those lies in the newspaper article,” she said, controlling her tone. “Taking vengeance on Laure won’t bring Jacques back.”

“What? You salauds. I have n-n-no money to pay . . . Jacques . . . gambled it all.”

Aimée caught her breath.

“Gambled?”

A sob answered her. “Debts. I can’t even pay to bury him.”

It began to fall into place. Jacques gambled yet he had a new car. He was in debt. But something on that snow-covered roof was supposed to make him a rich man.

“Nathalie, it’s Aimée Leduc. I’m coming over.”

The line went dead.

On her map, she found the nearest station—Lamarck-Caulincourt, one of the deepest stations, carved out of the old gypsum mines.

Ten minutes later she emerged in the drizzling mist under the curving Art Nouveau arch of the Metro. An inviting yellow glow came from the bistro by the steps. Dark stairs like parentheses ran up both sides of the hill. Then another flight of stairs, a street, and more stairs. They looked like rows of sagging accordion keys. At the top, the frosted white dome of Sacré Coeur resembled a pastry made of spun snow.

Plastic bags tossed by the wind fluttered and caught on a metal grille. Like her progress in this investigation, she thought, every step impeded and whipped about by the wind, ending nowhere. Laure’s innocence was still in doubt. She’d have to make Nathalie admit Jacques’s gambling habit to the authorities. Aimée wouldn’t leave until she did.

Deep inside, Aimée felt that a larger conspiracy existed, and that Laure was enmeshed in it, like the fly in a spider’s web. If only Laure were to recover and could talk!

The green metal lamppost illuminated the little-trafficked side of Montmartre where the occasional café still sold charcoal. A chic pocket of intellos, bourgeoisie, and the occasional Socialist bookshop in which Trotskyite pamphlets still filled the shelves. This was where the Surrealists had invented the “kisso-graphe.” To most, it meant a flight of stairs instead of a street; a climb of several flights, hauling groceries after a long day, rewarded by a breathtaking view.

Out of breath, she paused, noticing the walled Saint-Vincent’s cemetery entrance with placards illustrating various plans for coffin burial. Three-deep coffin burials were the most economical. She turned left on rue Saint Vincent, passed the rose-walled Lapin Agile cabaret, and the last vineyard in Paris, its bare stalks of vines coated by a rim of frost.

Nathalie Gagnard’s building adjoined the rue du Mont-Cenis stairs. Not thirty minutes ago, she’d stood at the top with Félix Conari and Lucien, overlooking another cemetery.

Circles . . . she’d gone in circles all night.

She pushed Lucien out of her mind.

The building was once a hôtel particulier, now chopped into apartments. Aimée saw the worn digicode numbers and letters. Too bad she’d left her plasticine back at the office. Frustrated, she pulled out her miniscrewdriver, unscrewed the plate, and connected the red and blue wires. The door clicked open. She stuck her boot in the opening, screwed the plate back on, and entered a dark hall.

After hitting the light switch, she scanned the mailboxes, found “Gagnard,” and hurried up the spiral staircase before the timed switch could cut off.

“Nathalie?” She knocked on the door. “Nathalie! It’s Aimée Leduc!”

Silence, except for the measured ticks of the timed light.

She pounded on the door. “Are you there, Nathalie?”

A man wearing chunky black motorcycle boots peered from behind a neighboring door on the landing.

“Mind keeping it down?” he said. “We’re conducting a séance in here!”

A séance?

“Sorry, I’m worried about Nathalie. . . .”

“I feed her parakeet. Nathalie was fine the last time I saw her.”

“Her voice sounded slurred over the phone. Do you have her door key? Would you mind opening the door for me?” She flashed her detective badge.

His eyes crinkled in interest. “A detective in kitten heels?”

“Let’s forget the fashion commentary.”

“I bet you ride a scooter, too.”

He meant Aimée didn’t look like a professional. What should a detective look like?

“Should I wear some kind of uniform to look official and stand out in a crowd?”

If René were here, he would have shot her a warning look. A ripple of chimes came from inside the neighbor’s apartment.

“Désolé,” he said and slammed the door.

Her feet hurt, the cold air chilled her legs, and her patience was exhausted. She pounded on his door until he opened it.

“Look, I’m on official inquiry. You must cooperate with me.”

His eyes widened and he stepped back. “Bossy, aren’t you?”

“Nathalie’s in trouble,” she said. Deep trouble from the sound of her voice.

“The spirits won’t like that.”

“The spirits? Ask me if I care!” Too bad she hadn’t kept the fish-gutter knife. She stepped closer and glared at him.

He read the message in her eyes.

A moment later, he held out a key chain around the frame of the door. She took it, tried the keys until one fit, turned it, and opened the door.

“Merci,” she said, delivering the keys back to him. Then at Nathalie’s door she called, “Allô?”

She found Nathalie sprawled in her vomit on the parquet floor. Labored breaths whistled from her open mouth. The phone and pill bottle lay next to her.

She panicked, then reached under Nathalie’s shoulders, dragged her to the small bathroom, and put Nathalie’s head over the toilet.

“Come on, Nathalie, get the rest out!” she urged.

Nathalie’s head rolled, her black hair clumped to her thin cheekbones.

Aimée grabbed the rubber gloves by the bottle of CIF cleanser near the shower, pulled them on, and stuck her finger down Nathalie’s throat. A loud heave was followed by a spew. All over Aimée’s leopard-print heels and the floor, missing the bowl.

And for fifteen francs more she could have waterproofed them.

Then Nathalie heaved again, this time on target.

“Nathalie. Nathalie, can you hear me?”

Her head lay on the toilet-bowl rim.

So much for relentlessly questioning her about Jacques’s gambling.

Aimée stepped out of her shoes, put them in the sink, and toweled off. In the other room, she picked up Nathalie’s phone and dialed 17 for SAMU, the ambulance corps, and gave the address.

“I found Nathalie Gagnard unconscious with a half-bottle of Ambien, I got her to throw up—”

Clicks and a sound like waves in the background.

“You’ve got to hurry.”

“We’re sending an ambulance that’s already in the area,” said a calm-sounding dispatcher. “It should arrive in three to five minutes.”

“There are several flights of stairs,” Aimée said.

“Aah, a Montmartre special,” the dispatcher said. “So no ballerina medics on this call. Thanks for letting us know.”

“Any advice?”

“Check for other pills.”

Aimée rooted around on the floor and found some pills in the cracks between the wood slats. “I just scooped up more Ambien from the floor.”

“Make sure her mouth stays clear and she can breathe, that there’s no obstruction,” said the dispatcher without missing a beat.

THE STRETCHER carrying Nathalie bumped the wall, and one of the buff paramedics, a Hôpital Bichat armband straining around his arm, swore. Aimée shut Nathalie’s apartment door behind them, used the rest of the CIF to clean up the mess on the floor, and set her shoes to dry by the heating vent. That done, she located coffee beans in the freezer of Nathalie’s trunk-sized refrigerator, ground them, and found a beat-up metal Alessi all-in-one espresso maker. She lit the gas burner, which flared to life with a blue flame.

She wouldn’t leave this apartment until she found some evidence documenting Jacques’s gambling. The two rooms, wrapped around the corner of the building, remained quasi-intact with a high recessed sculpted ceiling, and she realized this had once been part of a ballroom. A faded charm remained despite its crude conversion into living room and sleeping nook.

While the espresso maker dripped and hissed, she searched the apartment. No desk, no files, no books. Nothing. Just a pile of well-thumbed Marie Claire magazines and a parakeet, asleep in a covered birdcage, a box of bird seed below. Where did Nathalie keep her bills, paychecks, records?

She checked the kitchen cabinets, under the sisal rug, unzipped the sofa cover, checked the lamp shades, and felt for anything taped under the table. Again, nothing. In Nathalie’s armoire, she found a selection of skirts, white shirts, several jackets, and one black dress. And an array of colorful scarves to dress up her basic wardrobe.

Didn’t she ever wear jeans?

Aimée got on her knees and struck gold. Under Nathalie’s bed she found a squat olive green file cabinet. Nicked, old—and locked. She levered it out and pushed it across the floor to the kitchen where she swiveled her nail file inside the lock. Instead of popping open, the lock jammed and broke. Just her luck! Par for the course, she thought, a perfect accompaniment to an eventful evening: a knife held to her throat; an encounter with a moody, sarcastic artiste whose touch she wanted to forget; Félix Conari’s reminder of his affiliation with church and state; and only a garbled reference to Jacques’s gambling from a pilled-out Nathalie. And then Nathalie’s special addition, vomit on her good heels!

Bound and determined to find something while her shoes dried, she rooted through the kitchen drawers, found a meat-tenderizer mallet, summoned her energy, and whacked the lock, over and over, until it cracked.

Feeling better, she tried jimmying the top drawer open, only to end up using a can opener to open its side. Inside lay financial statements in folders going back some years. The second drawer held letters, and the third, mostly receipts and clippings.

She stirred two brown-sugar cubes into the chipped espresso cup and sipped, yawning while scanning the files. Statements from the last five years, requiring tedious checking. She opened the window a crack, trying to keep her head clear. Below lay the frosted, skeletal grape vines that produced a harvest each fall. The pride of Montmartre, but acidic. An acquired taste. She found a crocheted blue blanket and wrapped it around her feet.

Bankruptcy papers, the divorce decree. She leaned forward and got to work. The plaintive strains of someone practicing the cello accompanied the drip of melting ice outside Nathalie’s window.

Boring, routine checking of handwritten financial notes and printed bank documents. After half an hour she discovered the discrepancies. Big discrepancies. And easy to track after she’d discovered the pattern.

The large deposits had started three months ago, coinciding with the Gagnards’ divorce decree and bankruptcy. No moonlighting flic made fifty thousand francs a month working part-time! No wonder Jacques had convinced Nathalie to keep the driving school. It was a perfect place to stow the infusion of francs that had been deposited every month for three months. A simple way to hide blackmail?

Looking around the clean, utilitarian kitchen and IKEA assemble-it-yourself apartment furnishings, she doubted whether he had shared the largesse with Nathalie. Simple greed, always demanding more . . . had that been his downfall?

But this didn’t dispel the possibility that it was something Jacques knew that had killed him.

With the few rigged machines she’d seen, she doubted Zette could afford a fifty-thousand-francs-a-month payoff. Jacques could have collected from other small bar owners and mined the district. A pattern?

Zette’s murder might have been a warning to others of what lay in store if they neglected to pay up. Yet, Jacques had been murdered two days before Zette’s death.

She opened another file and glanced at a water-stained Monoprix flyer advertising a men’s coat sale, a torn typed page inside. Why keep something like that? She put it back with the other papers.

Stymied, she sipped more espresso, pulling the blanket up over her lap. Had Jacques worked with others? She found several deposit slips with J. Gagnard written both as payee and payor.

So far, she’d only found answers that raised more questions. Opened a can of worms. Jacques could have been killed by any of his “clients” eager to stop the payoffs. That gave her a whole slew of possible suspects. She doubted that the authorities would be eager to investigate extortion charges against a slain, respected officer. After all, they had Laure and her smoking gun.

She looked at the twisted mess she’d made of the file cabinet drawer and was about to kick it when an idea stopped her. She bent down and, avoiding the rough, sharp edges, felt under each drawer for something taped. Nothing.

She’d found evidence of Jacques’s extortion and knew that he gambled. But on a deeper level, she suspected there was more.

Whoever had killed him would have trashed Nathalie’s place by now if they suspected he’d hidden something valuable here. But they were divorced; Nathalie could have brushed off anyone who questioned her, denying that she remained in his confidence. Yet the newspaper article that had appeared in today’s paper would connect her to him. If they hadn’t known about Nathalie before, they would now.

Something bothered her. What was it? She stared at the moonlight on the rimmed frosted window, then back into Nathalie’s apartment, scanning it afresh. No computer. She scrutinized the apartment again. No printer.

She took out the Monoprix flyer, found the torn typed paper inside: a half page of computerese: //_e738:Ñ followed by more hash marks, numbers, strings of letters. She stared at it. Hadn’t Oscar Wilde said that the true mystery in the world is the visible, not the invisible.

A pattern repeated. Of course, part of an encryption key! Bordereau’s words about the data-encryption leak echoed in her mind. Did this fit? Had she finally found the link?

To piece the puzzle together she had to get onto a computer. Excited, she stuck the page in her pocket, put the files back, pushed the cabinet back under Nathalie’s bed, donned her now-dried shoes, killed the lights, and was just about to close the apartment door when she heard footsteps coming up.

She shut the door without a sound, slipped off her shoes, and padded barefoot up to the next floor, crouched down, and listened. A Wagnerian opera came from the neighbor’s flat, masking the sound of knocking on Nathalie’s door. What kind of séance were they having?

She peered down through the metal railing, saw knitted caps on men’s heads, and their down-jacketed shoulders. Then one of them looked up.

Her heart pounded. She’d seen the mec’s profile; it was the one with bad teeth and the knife. Her hands shook.

The timed lights clicked off. She backed up the steps. Don’t come up here, she prayed. Then light flooded the landing and stairs again. She heard shuffling, a grunt, and the impact of a crowbar as the mec wedged the door open.

“Quick,” one of them said, “. . . waiting outside.”

She’d have to hurry, silently descend, and slip past the broken door, evading whoever was waiting. Pulling on a woolen cap, she said another prayer as she tiptoed past the half-open door and downstairs to the vestibule.

An older woman wearing a winter white wool cape was checking her mailbox. “Cold, eh? Are you the new tenant on the top floor?”

Aimée was in no mood for conversation. She wanted to leave. Now. She put her finger over her lips, then whispered, “I’m worried. The door of number six has been broken open. And I heard noises inside as I walked by.”

Thumps sounded above. Alarm showed on the woman’s face.

Aimée nodded, pulling the woman close. “Don’t go up there. I forgot my cell phone. Do you have one?”

The woman nodded.

“Punch in 18, call the flics,” Aimée said.

As the woman pulled out her cell phone, Aimée slipped on her shoes, and left.

On the glistening outer steps she hesitated. Up or down? She heard the thrum of an idling engine and, looking down, saw the yellow lighted tip of a cigarette held by someone in the driver’s seat of a car. She kept to the darkened border of the stairs, climbing fast, and had almost reached the top when a figure stepped out of a doorway and blocked her path.