Murder in Clichy Read online

  She entered a cobbled crescent that had a village feeling. Two-story buildings lined the street and old people congregated on the green slatted benches beneath the clock tower of the columned church: a pocket of “old” Paris.

  Aimée saw a thirtyish man, wearing black pants, his thin white shirt whipping in the wind, scanning passersby from under an awning over the boulangerie. He had a pale face, wore thick black-framed glasses, and held a backpack by its strap. An arty or political type . . . Baret?

  She waved and saw recognition in his eyes. And what looked like fear.

  Around him on crowded rue Legendre mothers pushed strollers and old women walked their dogs by the acacia trees. Fresh-baked bread smells wafted from the boulangerie. As she approached, she saw how thin his arms were, and how he kept picking at something on his wrist and wiping his nose with his sleeve.

  She waved again, wrapping her scarf tighter as she hurried toward him. Coatless, wasn’t he cold? An old woman huddled under an umbrella near the glass phone cabinet by the blackened stone buildings.

  “Monsieur Baret?” she asked. “I’m Aimée Leduc. We talked on the phone.”

  He reached out and grabbed her arm.

  “Do you have it?”

  She nodded and handed him the envelope Linh had entrusted to her. He put the strap of the backpack in her hand.

  “For Linh. Sling it over your shoulder.”

  She did.

  “They’re following me,” he said in his breathless way.

  “Who?” She looked around. She saw only busy shoppers. Slush from car tires rolling over the cobblestone street sprayed her boots.

  “But you must know,” he gasped into her ear.

  “Tiens, wait a minute,“ she said. “I don’t understand what’s going on here.”

  He registered her surprise. His eyes darted around the crowd; he glanced across the street. “They’re here.” He clutched her coat, a wild look on his face. “But Nadège and Sophie depend on me . . . if I don’t. . . .”

  “What do you mean?”

  She saw his terror as a motorcycle gunned its engine, drowning his answer.

  “Look, I’m just helping a nun . . .”

  The words disappeared in the crack of rapid gunfire. Baret’s body jerked. Someone yanked at the backpack on her shoulder. But she grabbed the strap and held on to it. A motorcycle engine whined. The sound of a bullet’s ricochet echoed off the stone buildings. Then there was the screech of tires.

  “Get down!” Aimée yelled.

  Little balloons of stone dust grit burst on the pavement ahead of her. She ducked, pulling open the nearby phone cabinet door for shelter. As she pulled at Baret, he collapsed onto her, his shattered glasses red with blood mist. An exhalation, smaller than a sigh, escaped his lips.

  Panic flooded her as she saw that red-black holes peppered the back of his white shirt.

  He sprawled on top of her as she heard the roar of the motorcycle engine gunning away. Her arm stung. She saw blood and realized it came from her. Shouts and cries erupted around her.

  Crows cawed, their nest above the boulangerie doorway disturbed.

  The old woman ran, then tripped; her baguette launched onto the glistening cobbles in a slow motion arabesque. Aimée tried to pull Baret into the shelter of the phone cabinet but his hand caught on her pocket. Someone screamed. And screamed.

  Aimée’s knees trembled as she felt for his pulse. None. Her fingertips traced ribbed scars and scabs, the needle tracks on his arm. Bluish purple, old marks. Blood trickled down his pale chin onto the rain-slicked cobbles.

  “Mon Dieu . . . call the flics!” She couldn’t reach the pay phone. Where was her cell phone? In the silence someone was sobbing, and a child howled.

  Then there were voices. “Terroristes!”

  “Non, she did it . . . she fought with him,” Aimée heard someone say. “She pulled him down!”

  “That one,” the old woman sprawled on the wet pavement whimpered, pointing her out. Someone pulled the body off Aimée, and tried CPR.

  Aimée struggled to her feet. A man grabbed her shoulders. “Hold on, Mademoiselle, we saw what you did,” he accused.

  “What do you mean?”

  The old woman was shaking her, grabbing at her scarf. A dog barked. Aimée looked around in panic.

  “Let go! Don’t you understand . . . someone on a motorcycle shot him!” Aimée said.

  Aimée saw a woman’s face in the tall window opposite, her mouth open in a silent scream. And then she heard the approaching police siren. Warm blood dripped from her arm.

  A large green and white garbage truck had stopped in front of them, blocking the street. She saw the motorcycle at a distance, stuck in traffic.

  “Stop that motorcycle,” she shouted, but no one listened. She broke past the throng and tried to run, the backpack bobbing on her good shoulder, the bloodstained envelope she had tried to give Baret now clenched in her fist.

  The motorcycle shot down a narrow street on the right, weaving between the cars. Aimée ran, trying to keep up, for half a block. The helmeted, black-leather-clad figure looked like every motorcyclist on the street. She collapsed against a dented Citroën, panting. Tried to catch her breath.

  “Stop her,” someone shouted. Then the motorcycle turned, jumped the curb, and aimed for her.

  The hair rose on the back of her neck.

  She scrambled to her feet, slipped as her heel caught in a cobble, got up again and ran into an open courtyard. Panting, she raced down a narrow slit between buildings. No exit, just doors. All locked. She pounded on several until one opened.

  “We don’t let patrons into the laundry this way,” said a woman, plastic hangers in her hands. She eyed Aimée’s black fishnets, boots and black-leather-belted coat. Behind the woman were steamed-up windows and the roar of industrial dryers.

  “My ex-husband’s on a rampage.” Aimée said the first thing she could think of. “Please, I need to come inside before he sees me.”

  Another woman, bent over a pressing machine, glanced up. “Eh? This isn’t a public thoroughfare,” she said.

  “Just this once, please.”

  The woman shrugged and stood aside.

  Aimée edged past the crisp white sheets piled on the counter, careful not to let the blood from her arm drip on them.

  “Next time, use the front entrance,” said the woman.

  But Aimée had pulled on a wool cap over her spiky rain-drizzled hair and gone out the front door. She wrapped her wool scarf around her arm. An ambulance and police cars came to a screeching halt by the boulangerie. She headed over to the next narrow street, her heart thumping. Keeping her head down she walked close to the buildings. On rue Boursault she huddled in a doorway until the Number 66 bus disgorged riders, then entered it by the rear doors. Trembling, she pulled her coat close around her and sank into the seat, thrusting the envelope into her coat pocket.

  The few passengers on the bus read or sat with eyes closed, ignoring her. She set the backpack down on the next seat and felt inside it. Her hands touched something hard. A gun? She felt again, rummaged within, touching soft silk and hard smooth carved surfaces. She located a small, intricate object.

  She peered inside. The absinthe-green of a jade monkey’s face stared back at her.

  Late Afternoon Tuesday

  IN THE APARTMENT, NADÈGE pulled her bag from under the bed. The duvet stank of cat piss; feathers floated in the last of the November light slanting through the tall window. Techno pounded on the Radio Liberté station.

  She had to make her legs move or her uncle Thadée would find her like this, hollow-eyed and shaking. Waiting for the next pipe of life. He’d throw her out, like her father had.

  She’d slipped. Again.

  Her little Michel, only five years old, needed milk money. But she needed money more. Well, Grand-mère would take care of him. Bien sûr. Grand-mère always did.

  The phone chirped. Merde! She hunted under the piled Le Parisien newspap
ers, around overflowing yellow ashtrays with RICARD printed on them, beneath the leather jacket on the soft wood floor. Where was it?

  She wound her thick silky black hair in a knot and held it in place with a tortoise-shell comb.

  “Allô?” she said finally when she had retrieved the phone.

  “Where’s Thadée?” asked a deep voice.

  “Playing pool at Académie de Billard,” she said. More likely, buying smokes at the café-tabac, she thought, wishing she had one herself. He was supposed to meet her here. Why hadn’t he come? He’d left his jacket.

  “Then I’m the Queen of Hungary,” said the voice.

  “Very funny,” she said.

  “Tell Thadée I’m waiting.”

  “Maybe I will,” she said, throwing her makeup into her bag, scrabbling into her shoes and her shearling parka. “Maybe I won’t. Tell me what you want.”

  “No candy then. Kiss those bonbons goodbye.”

  “Wait a minute, Thadée’s straight . . . what’s . . . ?”

  He’d hung up. Arrogant salaud! She had other sources. But she didn’t want Thadée to know about them. If he found out, he wouldn’t let her stay here again.

  Monsieur Know-it-all! the Bonbon King . . . what did he know? Not much unless Thadée had confided in him. Thadée had gone to clinch the deal. The deal, he’d told her, that would settle his debts, hers, and more.

  Taking the two hundred francs she found in Thadée’s jacket pocket, she slipped down the winding back stairs. Passed through the gate to the cobbled courtyard with its decaying vegetable dampness and rotten wood molding smells, a repository for vats of used cooking oil re-sold to cheaper restos. A Romanian flophouse, doubling as a sweatshop in the day, faced onto it.

  As Nadège exited onto rue Truffaut she saw a motorcycle take off, spraying gray splinters of ice and wetness. Her eyes rested for an instant on a stroller with a crying infant, an old woman huddled on the pavement, and then on Thadée’s body sprawled against the phone cabinet. Gasping, she edged toward the crowd. She tugged the red silk cord around her neck feeling for her lucky piece. Saw the blood, the flics, medics, and one of the Bonbon King’s henchman edging into the throng. She ducked before he could see her. Her hands shook. It didn’t make sense, this wasn’t supposed to happen!

  Could she help Thadée? But she knew he was beyond help.

  She backed up, shaking uncontrollably. Where could she go? And what about Thadée’s stash that he said would clinch the deal?

  She ran back to the courtyard, her heels echoing on the soot-blackened stone. In the rear, behind an old staircase, she loosened a stone and felt behind it for the hollow in which Thadée had once hidden dope: only bits of brick and old paper wrappers. Dirt got under her fingernails. Then she felt something cold. Metallic. She scraped it out. An old-fashioned key. But to what? Sirens wailed. She dropped it into her vintage Versace bag and ran.

  Tuesday Early Evening

  AIMÉE’S HEART POUNDED. STILL shaken, she stood at the eye clinic reception desk in Guy’s private consulting office on rue de Chazelles. The freshly painted, high-ceilinged suite overlooked the old metal foundry in whose courtyard the Statue of Liberty had been forged. Now, the courtyard stood deserted, gray and beaded with rain.

  The last evening patient had passed her as she came in. Guy smiled, pushed his glasses onto his forehead and set his stethoscope on the reception counter.

  “Doctor Lambert,” his receptionist said as she put on her coat, “I’m sorry but I’m late picking up my daughter from daycare. Do you mind . . . ?”

  “Go ahead, Marie,” he said. “I’ll close up.”

  Marie smiled at Aimée and left.

  “Lock the door,” Aimée told him, “I may have been followed.”

  “Kind of jumpy, aren’t you?” Guy said, coming forward and kissing her on both cheeks. Lingering kisses. “I’ve missed you. Geneva was boring without you.” He ruffled her hair.

  “Sorry,” she said, inhaling his Vetiver scent. “Perhaps it’s force of habit.”

  “But you’ve given all that up, haven’t you?” he said. He put his hands inside her coat, ran his warm fingers down her spine.

  “You think I’m overreacting?” she asked. “Just before I came here . . . there was an incident.”

  “Quoi? Criminal work again? You know your optic nerve’s delicate, that stress could cause a rupture. You have been warned.”

  She didn’t need him to tell her this again. She hadn’t seen him since he returned from the medical convention in Switzerland and already they were off to a bad start. Maybe she should leave.

  He looked at her coat. “What’s this? Blood?”

  “I think I need stitches.”

  “What’s going on, Aimée?” he asked in alarm. He pulled her into an examining room. “You’re paler than usual.” He took her coat off, rolled up her sweater sleeve. “I’m so stupid . . . tell me about this incident . . . what happened?”

  “I thought it was a graze but. . . .”

  “Looks deep.”

  A black-red slit, the length of a toothpick, oozed below her elbow.

  He lifted her onto the cold examining table. The white paper crinkled. “What happened?” Antiseptic smells of alcohol and pine soap wafted over her.

  “A man died in my arms. Shot.”

  He stared at her, then pulled out disinfectant, surgical tweezers, needle, and thread.

  “I should report this,” he said, swabbing her arm with topical anesthetic. “What about your promise to stay out of trouble?”

  She gritted her teeth.

  With deft movements, he probed, pulled out a sliver of gray metal, and cleaned the wound. “Your leather sleeve protected you, it could have been much worse. What do the police say?”

  She tried to ignore the stinging and his question as he sewed her up.

  Outside the window, the half-moon hung over the foundry, bathing it in a pearlescent sheen. The glowing orb reflected on the glass roof.

  “Guy, you make it sound as if I invited a bullet,” she finally said, pulling back after his last stitch. She shivered, feeling cold.

  “Four stitches. I suppose, for you, it’s all in a day’s work,” he said.

  “But it’s not like that, Guy,” she said as he taped a bandage to her arm.

  “Take this for the pain,” he said, handing her a glass of water and a pill. “Tell me what happened, Aimée. You trust me enough to come here to get stitched up, tell me the rest.”

  “I didn’t want to get involved in anything. The Cao Dai say giving back is as good as receiving. I just wanted to help.” She downed the pill with water, took a deep breath and told him how she had tried to “give back” by doing Linh’s errand.

  “Then when you deliver this backpack to the nun, you’re finished?” Guy asked.

  “I better be,” she said.

  His gray eyes softened. She felt his tapered fingers on her neck, his wonderful long fingers.

  “If I promise to be good . . .” she said.

  “Ah oui? If you promise to be bad, that’s another matter,” he said, kissing her neck.

  “Guy . . . no lectures, promise?”

  “Lectures? That’s all I’ve had for two weeks,” he said. “I have other ideas in mind.”

  “Now that,” she said, pulling him close, “won’t be a problem.”

  “You know I missed you. Couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

  “You told me. You’re not on call this time, are you Guy?”

  “At least not for another two hours,” he said. “Even if there were a nuclear attack.”

  At least that’s what she thought he said before his lips found hers. And then his fingers were massaging her spine, his breath in her ear. His scent in her hair.

  “Now that we’re together,” he said, “I don’t want to let go.”

  The paper crinkled under her. She ran her hands through his hair.

  The phone rang and Guy kicked the examining room door shut with his left
foot.

  “Shouldn’t you get that?”

  “That’s why I have an answering service.”

  “You do this often, doctor?”

  “You’re the first,” he said, nibbling her ear.

  Her skin tingled and warmth spread all over. She didn’t want his hands to stop exploring.

  “I’ve always loved your tattoo,” he said, his breath on her back.

  “The Marquesan lizard, the symbol of change, with the sacred tortoise inside?”

  He grinned. “Why haven’t we ever done it like this before?”

  “Your old office was too small,” she said and she nibbled at the nape of his neck.

  He took off his white coat. “Is this better?”

  “We’ll have to find out, doctor,” she said, pulling him on top of her.

  GUY’S WATCH beeped in her ear. Her eyes opened to the examining room, bathed in the moon’s dim reflection on the stainless steel. His arm shifted under her head and she remembered what they’d been doing. And how wonderful it had been.

  “I have to hurry. I have hospital rounds in thirty minutes,” he said, kissing her, then dressing hastily. “Sorry, I hate to leave you. Let me find you more medication before I go.”

  She sat up, found her shirt, and stretched.

  Her cell phone rang.

  “Allô?”

  She heard a crackle and then Linh’s voice. “Aimée, don’t you have something for me?”

  The nun’s words brought it all back. The bullets ricocheting, Baret’s lifeless body.

  “Oui, but Linh,” she said, “Thadée Baret’s dead. Shot . . . there’s more to this than. . . .”

  She heard Linh gasp. “I can’t talk now. There are men outside. Watching me.”

  “You mean . . . Linh, I’m surprised you entrusted me with . . .”

  “Keep it safe,” Linh said, her voice agitated. “I can’t come now. We’ll meet tomorrow.”

  “Wait a minute—”

  But she’d hung up. Aimée hit the call back number. Only a buzz. Probably Linh had called from a public phone.