Murder in the Sentier

Sunday Afternoon

AIMÉE KNOCKED ON THE Figeac apartment door. The Polish cleaning woman who answered surveyed her with narrowed eyes. She had a weathered face with high cheekbones and was wearing a short blue skirt and rolled-down ankle socks with sandals. Radio talk blared in the background.

“Pardon,” Aimée said. “You remember me, eh? I’ve come to gather the owner’s things.”

The woman leaned on her mop, tucking wisps of hair back under her scarf. “The immobiliére doesn’t want people in here,” the woman said, shaking her head.

“Bien sûr, the agent’s right,” Aimée said, thinking fast. “But he forgot his carte d’identité.”

“We’re not supposed to … something to do with insurance,” the woman said, shaking her head.

“Only take a moment.” Aimée smiled, hoping she sounded more authoritative than she felt. She edged her foot in the doorway.

“Tanya!” the other cleaning woman shouted from inside. The rest of the words were in Polish.

“Go ahead,” Aimée said, “I’ll just pop into the study, then leave.”

The woman looked at her wristwatch, hesitating.

“We’re running behind,” she said. “Got two more places to clean today.”

“I’ll make it quick,” Aimée said, stepping inside. “For your help, merci.”

The woman moved back reluctantly.

Thank God they hadn’t started in Romain Figeac’s writing room yet.

Aimée walked into the tall-windowed room, closed the door, and locked it with the key Christian had used. Pulling on latex gloves from her backpack, she found her Swiss Army knife and surveyed the room.

No bookshelves lined with books. No photos. No announcements tacked on the wall. Not even old mail or torn envelopes. Just a secrétaire, with cabriole legs, in the middle of the room. The room’s stillness and stale air bothered her. But she knew people had shot themselves with a .25 and lived. It didn’t add up.

She opened the desk’s only drawer. Full of off-white, thick vellum paper.

Blank.

On the desktop lay a wooden pen and an assortment of nibs by a bottle of bleu des mers du sud Waterman ink. The typewriter, a shiny red Olivetti, was a classic. Under it was tucked a sheet of paper, a reference sheet, on which appeared a series of page numbers and typographical error symbols. A copy editor’s comments, she imagined.

She looked closer. Under the Tallimard logo, a line read, “From the desk of Alain Vigot, éditeur.” In the bottom right-hand corner, she saw “agit888 … Frésnes,” written in blue ink, running off the paper.

Frésnes was the prison where Jutta said her mother had been held!

She didn’t know its significance but she folded the paper and stuck it in her backpack.

If Romain Figeac wrote in ink, then transcribed it on the typewriter, where were the boxes of his work—as well as newspaper clippings, photos, or research notes? Where would Idrissa have put them?

She got on her hands and knees and went over the sloping wood floor looking for a floor safe.

Nothing but dust and cracks in the honey-colored parquet.

The floor creaked every time she moved. No wonder Christian Figeac heard noises. Or thought he did.

Dust motes flickered in the fading light slanting through the windows. She knew she was missing something. What, she didn’t know.

She sat in the desk chair, an old leather one. Then put her head down on the desk. She measured from that point to the red-brown bloodstain smudged on the wallpaper. At least a meter and a half.

She knelt. With her Swiss Army knife she cut away a long rectangle of the bloodstained floral wallpaper from the recess bordering the door frame. She peeled it down to the baseboard. Another layer of smudged wallpaper, older and with a faded blue striped pattern, emerged. The bloodstain was fainter.

She cut into the faded stripes, peeled off a section, and found an older layer with dense clusters of roses. Quaint, turn of the century.

Dark red blood splatters had even soaked into this old-fashioned rose wallpaper. Not only gruesome, she thought, but odd.

Carefully, she pulled the wallpaper down to the baseboard and pried loose the edge.

A dark red congealed clump had seeped down. She sat back; she really didn’t want to do this. Jutta Hald’s face flashed before her.

A faint metallic odor came from the dried, encrusted blood. She scraped up a sample, took a glue stick from her bag, and rubbed it over the wallpaper. She pasted each layer, except for the old-fashioned roses, back on and smoothed them over.

Still on her knees, she checked the creaking parquet floor. At the tall window, the rooftops of the Sentier spread before her, squat chimneys, impossibly angled rooflines, and bricked-up windows opposite.

Doubtful if anyone could see in.

She traced her gloved fingers over the cold glass windowpanes. Felt in the grooves where glass was framed by metal. Something hard was stuck between the glass and metal.

She wedged it out, fingered it.

A small ivory bone fragment.

She turned the fragment over in her palm. Curved and with jagged lines, like a river seen from space.

She felt around more. Near where the metal joined the floor was another bone bit.

Apprehension came over her. What gun had sufficient force to scatter bone this far?

She’d come here looking for clues about her mother. And they were here somewhere. But if Romain Figeac was a suicide, she was his onetime neighbor Madame du Barry.

The door rattled as the knob turned.

“Mademoiselle, we have to clean in here!”

Aimée scanned the room again, wondering where the writer’s files could be kept.

“Open up at once or I’m calling the agent!”

She slipped the bone fragments, the wallpaper sample, and then her gloves into a Baggie. Time to get out of here.

The cleaning woman shook her fist, but Aimée was out the door and bidding her adieu before she could do anything else.

“SO YOU’VE joined the big boys now, eh, Serge? Working on a Sunday?” Aimée said, dumping the Baggie on the Institut Medico-Legal’s stainless steel counter. “Congratulations!”

Serge Leaud, with his rosy cheeks and trimmed beard, appeared too dapper to be a pathologist. He looked up from his microscope. “At least I don’t have to run from Belleville to Quai des Orfèvres! They saddled me with the blood inquiries.”

From Leaud’s window, distant pinpricks of light could be seen twinkling on the quai. The muffled clatter of the Metro as it crossed Pont d’Austerlitz reached them in the white-tiled lab. Arctic air-conditioning brought goose bumps to Aimée’s arms.

“Seems I’ll never live down that Luminol case in the Marais,” he said.

“You’re a world authority on Luminol now … why would you want to?” she asked, gesturing around the lab. The high-powered microscopes and microtomes for tissue sectioning were impressive.

“I’d like to see my twins once in a while. My wife says they’ve forgotten how to say Papa.” He grinned, setting down long-handled tweezers. “But something tells me this isn’t a social call.”

Aimée was about to reply when a posse strode into the adjoining waiting room, three big-shouldered men in black suits.

Aimée grabbed a physician’s lab coat, slipped it on, and set the Baggie on a glass specimen tray. “I need your help, Serge.”

The men burst through the lab doors. Only Renseignements Generaux, an intelligence-gathering arm of the Interior Ministry linked to the police, entered the morgue’s lab like that.

“Gentlemen, we’re wrapping up a minor detail before I finish your report….”

“We’ll wait, Dr. Leaud,” interrupted the biggest one. He had a headful of curly red hair and thick lips parted in a smile. “No pressure, you understand, of course. Our report goes to the Quai des Orfèvres.” His grin widened and he glanced pointedly at his wristwatch. “Within the hour, you understand. Priorities. But don’t rush on our account.”

Priorities my derrière, Aimée thought. Leave it to the RG to act as if the rest of the law enforcement world didn’t exist.

“Dr. Leaud, this detail puzzles me,” she said, sticking the glass tray in front of Serge, sliding the specimen from his microscope and ignoring his look of surprise. “These lines. Those striations. Visible more closely under magnification, I suppose.”

One of the RG men cleared his throat. Another tapped his blunt fingers on the windowsill.

She emptied the Baggie onto a fresh petri dish, slipped it under the microscope. “Quick and dirty, doctor, then I’ll leave you to these gentlemen.”

“No need for magnification to see the beveling,” Serge said. “It’s obvious. But to see the powder residue, it’s useful.”

She smiled at the biggest man. “Forgive me, but Dr. Leaud’s extensive background in forensic pathology saves so much time.”

Serge Leaud put his eye to the lens, whether to keep from laughing or to hide his trepidation, she wasn’t sure.

“Interesting,” he said slowly. “Give me a brief description of the recovery scene.”

She did, mentioning the suicide and caliber of the gun.

“Nice fragment of occipital bone,” he said a minute later.

A part of the skull, she remembered that much from her year of premed at the Ecole des Médicines.

“Those lines are part of the lambdoidal suture,” Serge Leaud said.

“Lambdoidal suture?”

“The union between the bones of the cranium, on the side of the skull,” he said. “What’s this?” He pointed to the other items.

“A wallpaper sample I obtained,” she said. “From a wall a meter and a half away from the victim.”

Serge Leaud turned a knob and adjusted the microscope light. He studied a portion of the sample. “There’s the blood mist from the blast. Distinctive spatter and darker stain. Heavier particles follow.”

He looked up at her. “Did you say this was a suicide with a .25 that perforated the skull?”

Aimée nodded.

“You’re telling me a .25-caliber perforated the skull and sent tissue spattering against the wall?”

Aimée shrugged, watching his eyebrows knit.

“Sounds like a contradiction, eh, Dr. Leaud?” the red-haired RG man said. His feet beat a rhythm on the linoleum floor. “More like a .357 or a .44.”

Mentally, she agreed.

“Attends,” Serge said. “There’s internal beveling on the bone.”

“Internal beveling?”

She noticed the RG men had stopped looking bored. Interest flickered in their eyes.

“As the bullet enters the skull it causes a wider fracture on the inside, beveling it,” Leaud said. “There’s a very clear demonstration right here. You can see it with the naked eye.” He pointed to a curved line. “But that’s not all.”

More from that small bone fragment?

“Look at those traces of soot—gunpowder residue deposited on bone,” he said, “right there. That helps with the range of firing. Of course, I can’t say exactly without further tests but it was close range.”

“How close?”

“Within centimeters, I would say.”

Like Jutta Hald.

“Anything you can be sure of?”

“If a .25 did this, then it will snow tiny white chocolate nonpareils on Noël,” Serge Leaud said, pouring the bits back into the Baggie for her. “My twins would like that.”

Aimée could hear the RG men laughing as she hung up the lab coat. Serge’s quick and dirty analysis confirmed her suspicions. She beckoned to him on her way out. He excused himself and met her in the tiled hallway.

“You know, Aimée, I’ll have to write this up,” he said in a low voice. “It’s procedure with suspicious findings. I’ll need more details.”

Good, she wanted Serge to make a report, to spur the police to investigate Figeac’s death.

“Serge, request the autopsy findings on Jutta Hald, a woman murdered at Tour Jean-Sans-Peur. You should see a match with the bone beveling and gunpowder soot. If the same gun didn’t do it, I’ll make it snow nonpareils in your twins’ room. That’s a promise.”

Outside the morgue, couples strolled along the quai, outlined against the fading dusk. Aimée stared at a bateau-mouche on the rippling Seine, black and thick like pudding, wondering what these deaths had to do with her mother.

From Place Mazas, she took Pont Morland past the swaying péniches moored in the canal facing the Bastille. Colored laundry hung from clotheslines, tricycles and pots of geraniums stood on the barge decks. A lone fisherman sat with a camp lantern, his legs dangling over the stone.

Muggy heat still hugged the narrow streets. Not a breath of air stirred. All the way to her apartment, a bridge away on the Ile St. Louis, her uneasiness mounted.

She tried to telephone Etienne Mabry, without success, so she took Miles Davis for a walk, grabbing a baguette and pâtè before the shops closed. After sharing the pâtè with the puppy, she cracked open her tall windows, rested her feet on the top of the balcony grillwork, the Seine visible through her toes, and got to work on her laptop. Miles Davis curled up next to her.

Once online, her fingers flew over the keyboard. Within minutes, she found Haader-Rofmein, the seventies terrorists’ site. A Web page with photos of young people circled around a hookah. Her cousin Sebastian had a hippie coat like that from Istanbul, she remembered. Probably still in his closet.

Aimée leaned over, and clicked to the next Web page.

She saw long-haired men and women clutching Mausers and Russian bazookas. They stood by a cinder-block building. Distant targets showed in what appeared to be desert bleakness. Some wore El Fateh headgear and army fatigues. None looked much over twenty.

Aimée combed her nails through her hair. Some of the members had died in shoot-outs. The leaders, the rock-star types, had hung themselves in prison but, according to the site, controversy still surrounded the supposed suicides since there was only the warden’s word for it.

She saw the name J. Hald on the once-active list in a sidebar. What had her role been, besides the young and dumb part?

She hacked into a German court records site. According to what she could understand from the West German trial transcripts, Jutta had been charged with multiple counts: arson, armed robbery, stolen vehicles. A heavy-duty powder puff!

Reading further, she saw Jutta’s indictment in France was for complicity in a bank heist and murder. For that, she’d gotten twenty years.

Aimée stood up, stretched, and picked up Miles Davis.

But still no answer as to why Jutta had said her mother owed her!