Murder in the Sentier

Thursday Afternoon

MARIUS TEYNARD WALKED past his receptionist, Madame Goroux, who was busy at the keyboard.

“Mark me out for this afternoon,” he said.

“Monsieur Teynard, there’s a late afternoon appointment….”

“Tell the boy to take it,” he said. The boy, as he referred to his nephew, was fifty-five. Teynard slipped on his oatmeal-colored linen jacket, ruffled his white hair back from his temples, and gave her a half-smile. “You know how to handle him.”

He knew Madame Goroux would think he was visiting his mistress, who lived on the next block in the rue de Turbigo. She often covered for him. Let her think what she wanted.

Out on the haze-filled street where the heat hovered, hemmed in by the tall Haussmann buildings, he turned in the opposite direction. Teynard headed toward the préfecture de police on Quaides Orfèvres.

Along the broad part of rue de Turbigo that sliced the edge of the Sentier, he passed the Kookai boutique. Salesgirls smoked outside on the steps and the tatouage sign on rue Tiquetonne blinked orange-pink neon in the dusk. A dope haven if he ever saw it, but he knew the flics let it slide as long as their informants checked in with them. And, he reminded himself, that wasn’t his business.

Not anymore.

In the distance he saw the Tour Jean-Sans-Peur nestled behind the sandstone-colored school. The scum had been right here … a stone’s throw from his office. Merde!

He was getting slow, admit it. Not on top of it anymore. Yet no one said that but himself. Be your own harshest critic, he’d learned, then no one else could be.

But that would change. He’d entered the fray. Time to wipe out the degenerate lice once and for all, if it was the last thing he did.

The hunt, the chase—these were the only things keeping him alive. The shivery tingle on the back of his arms … it was what he lived for. Face it, had always lived for.

He’d deluded himself when he retired from the préfecture, started the agency, and kept half-time hours. Even the DST contract work hadn’t filled the need. Keeping a young mistress had become difficult, and so time-consuming. His true mistress was his work.

He needed to get this information face-to-face, without risk of compromised phone lines, big-eared subordinates, or his former cronies from the Quai des Orfèvres. Time to mine his old-boy network.