Murder in the Bastille (9 page)

“Arnica does wonders,” Lulu whispered. “Reduces the swelling. Sleep sitting up. And once those stitches come out. . .”

Did Lulu assume since her face was swollen and she wore dark glasses that Aimée had just had plastic surgery?

“Josiane wanted to look young, to recapture her youth.” Lulu went on, apparently satisfied with her own explanation. “That’s my theory. You know, some of them put on clear plastic shoes with patterned socks, carry a doughnut-shape shoulder bag, and buy a new face. You’ve had some work done, too, eh?”

Aimée stayed silent. Chantal cleared her throat and pinched Aimée.

“Are you a reporter, too?” Lulu asked her. Chantal must have shaken her head since Lulu went on, “Well, Josiane was blonde. Me, well my hair’s red now. I should be safe.”

Was it widely known that the victims were all blondes? Aimée remembered Morbier saying that, but this fact had not been mentioned the one time she’d heard about the crimes on the
téle.

”Lulu, no one’s safe.”

“You’re right.” Lulu let out a big sigh. “We’re dancing between landmines here. Complacency’s dangerous. I’ll get the faubourg association to do something.”

Aimée doubted they could do much. If they hadn’t stopped the Beast of Bastille before, what could a neighborhood association do now?

“Lulu, he attacked me, too,” Aimée said, “But Josiane was his target.”

“He attacked both of you?”

“It was the jacket,” said Aimée. “I think he confused us. He went for me, thinking I was Josiane.

Aimée kept her head steady and focused her eyes in what she hoped was the right direction.

“But the man who attacked me wasn’t the serial killer. The
flics
won’t investigate; they think it’s an open-and-shut case. They’re sure it was the Beast. So please, tell me about her.”

“Alors
, this goes from bad to worse,” Lulu said. “Josiane freelanced as a journalist. From what she said, she mostly did pieces on human rights. A green type . . . political. But a limousine liberal, you know.”

Aimée hadn’t known. Did green types go in for cosmetic surgery? That seemed to strike a false note. But on the other hand, why not?

Footsteps tramped in the door, then came rustling noises, then the slinging metallic sound of clothes hangers sliding along a rack.

“Madame . . . I’ll take this in medium. Here’s my card.”

Aimée heard clicks, a muttered curse. Lulu must have slid a credit card through the portable machine, then slammed it hard on the pink concrete counter. She’d done the same thing with Aimée’s card last week. Another loud thwack and Aimée jumped. Right against something that jiggled. The beaded jewelry display?

“Piece of garbage, this thing.” Lulu’s voice, in a low growl, came from Aimée’s right. “My clients wait, the charge doesn’t go through. I end up doing this twenty times a day! Look, we’ll have to talk later.”

Aimée felt an arm and Lulu’s frangipani-scented lip tint brushing by her cheek and realized she was being escorted out the door. “I’ll do what I can.”

* * *

ALL THE way back along the slippery pavement, clinging to Chantal’s arm, Aimée wanted to kick herself. She knew she must look awful. And the crowded, narrow streets and cars whizzing by terrified her. Noises jumped out from everywhere.

Something chirped and startled her. Birds . . . near the Bastille column?

“That traffic signal’s for us,” Chantal said. “You can let my arm loose, you know. I’ll need it later and you’ve nearly squeezed off my blood circulation.”

“Sorry,” Aimée said, feeling sheepish. She was adrift in the sea of sounds.

“You need protection, now,” said Chantal. “You’ll feel safer once you master simple cane skills.”

Chantal left her in the lobby and Aimée rode the elevator by herself. The numbers were announced automatically, and she felt proud when she got off at her floor until, once again, she sensed another presence. Someone stood in the hallway. Somewhere near her room. Her voice caught in her throat.

She took two steps. Grabbed for the railing and missed. Found it the next time and reached for her keys.

“Looking for someone?” she asked.

Silence.

Paralyzed, she waited.

Then the elevator whished open behind her. She turned, her keys pointed.

“Shopping, in your condition?” René asked behind her. “Find anything?”

“I found out more about Josiane Dolet. Now I’m certain she was the intended victim,” Aimée said. “Anyone else here?”

“Just us.”

“Could you look inside my room for me?”

She felt him take the door key that she held between her fingers, poised in the attack mode, and brush by her.

The door clicked as it was unlocked. “Coast seems clear,” René said a moment later.

Was she paranoid? Hadn’t someone been standing there when she got out of the elevator?

She told him about Sergeant Bellan’s questioning and Morbier’s comments about Vaduz.

The attacker had taken nothing from her. She figured he’d been in a hurry when he found out she wasn’t the right woman.

“Time to get to work, partner,” she said, feeling her way along the wall. After a big breath and three steps, she reached her bed and kicked her bag under it.

She located a bottle of water, twisted the top, and took a slug. Half of it went down her shirt. Cold and soaking wet.

“Here’s the screen access program I promised you,” said René. “Blind programmers say DOS screen readers go quicker than what we’re used to. They’re dealing with strings of text with no graphic interface to slow it down. I think 128 megs of RAM should be enough for you. Schematics, variable capacity and interfaces work off those. Remember, the way we designed the Populax firewall?”

She heard the machine power up, the echoing pings as the net connection was made.

“A double password protected firewall, as usual!” she said.

“Click on Internet, then open browser,” René said.

A silky robotic-tinged voice responded “Log-in completed, internet connection established.”

“You’re wonderful, René.” Simultaneously, a surge of power ran through her. “Now I can investigate what’s bothering me.”

“What’s that?”

“Why did Vincent tear up our contract?” she said. She nodded, her fingers finding the keys, nestling in the ridges. Enjoying the familiar little clicks, feeling at home. Her fingers racing over the keys and responding to voice commands. “What is he hiding?”

She positioned the laptop on her bed, crossed her legs, and opened an internet browser. A pleasant male voice, deep and with a slightly robotic accent, responded to her key commands.

“Sexy enough for you?” René asked.

“He’s no Aznavour, but he’ll do,” she said. “René, I need a favor. Please copy these numbers.” She thrust the paper with Josiane’s speed dial numbers at him and the phone itself.

“And then . . .” she paused. She didn’t want to ask him to do this. But one of them had to comb the hard drive as soon as possible. René had provided her with the software so she could, and right now he would be better at interviewing someone.

“Up to calling on these folks and getting information from them, René?” she asked.

“It says Leduc Detective on our door,” he said. “Doesn’t it?”

Thursday Morning

RENÉ BACKED HIS CUSTOMIZED Citroën into a vacant sliver of space on boulevard Richard Lenoir. Never mind that it consisted of several zebra crossing stripes. A Parisian parking spot—you got in where you could.

Red-brown leaves fluttered from the trees, crackling under his feet. A weak, late-morning sun was framed by the bare plane tree branches overhead.

Opposite stood the Bataclan theatre. Once a pagoda-style folly built by Napoléon III for Empress Eugénie, then
un caf’ conc’,
café concert hall, where Maurice Chevalier sang for the Germans, later a cinema. Now the marquee read “Limited run only . . .
Viva Zapata,
the musical!”

The chance to
do
something, work in the field like Aimée, excited René. Their roles were reversed, finally. But his stomach churned. The burden was on him to investigate a murder and the attack on Aimée. He’d made an appointment with Miou-Miou, the woman who answered the first number on Josiane Dolet’s speed dial.

“
Monsieur Friant, ça va?”
said a woman with blonde ringlets who skated up to him in front of the Bataclan. She flashed a card: “Astrology readings by Miou-Miou—day or night, I rollerblade to YOU.”

“Thanks for meeting me. Let’s have a drink,” he said, indicating the dim café.

“
Bon,
my next client’s the numbers man upstairs.”

René wondered if that boded well for the Bataclan’s finances. He struggled to keep up with her. The curse of short legs, he thought, as he had a thousand times. Boulevard de Temple, known in the eighteenth century as the notorious “Boulevard du Crime,” bordering the Marais and the Bastille, lay ahead of them.

The café, once the Bataclan lobby, looked overdue for a renovation.
At least a cleaning,
René thought. Remnants of Chinese temple-style pillars and red lacquer beams, paint peeling off in places, arched above them. The circular zinc bar, a 50s island in the sea of café tables and rattan chairs, beckoned with a rainbow display of liquor bottles.

“Taurus . . . Scorpio rising,” Miou-Miou said, with a big grin. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

René nodded.

She sat down, crossed her rollerblades, and pulled her shoulder bag onto her lap. She opened it, and drew out a pile of astrological charts. “First consultation costs two hundred francs. Then I prepare your chart, which I keep with me. You can call anytime and I’ll give you a reading on the spot or come to you with a detailed horoscope. For fifty francs more, I do important events or weekly forecasts.”

René pulled out five hundred francs, signaling the waiter.

“I’m sorry but I didn’t make myself clear. I want information about Josiane Dolet,” he said. “Your number was on her speed dial.”

“My client’s charts are confidential.” She shook her head, returning the charts to her bag as if to leave.

“Not any more,” he said, forcing his eyes to move past the lime tulle ribbon around her blonde curls, the pink lips, red- and-white-striped tights, pink leggings, and green denim jacket. “Hear me out, first,” René said.

A waiter old enough to be his father, bald and earringed, appeared. He wore a long white-apron and skinny black T-shirt and stood, tapping his foot.

“
Un Cardinal
,” René said.

“What’s that?” Miou-Miou asked.

“Here we call it the
Communard
,” the waiter said, writing down the order.

“Red wine,
crème de cassis,
and juice,” René said. “It’s the same drink, but the name lines up at the other end of the political spectrum.”

The waiter shrugged.

“And you, mademoiselle?” he said, tossing a bowl of salt-encrusted
cacahuètes
on the ring-stained table.

“
Une feuille morte
,” she said. “I like the fallen leaf autumn color of Pastis mixed with menthe and grenadine.”

After the waiter moved away, René leaned forward. The table’s rim hit his chest. “Josiane Dolet was murdered in a Bastille passage. Your number was on her speed dial.”

“You’re a detective?” Miou-Miou’s eyes widened. “No wonder she didn’t show for her reading
.
Such a shame
.
Josiane was a free spirit. But her chart indicated tumult. A storm brewing since August. Tempestuous relations. But I never imagined. . . .”

And I’m the Rhône ranger,
René thought.

A paunchy, middle-aged man waddled into the café. He kissed the harried cashier, who paused and returned his
bisous,
then leaned over the zinc to the shaven-headed, earringed barman, a younger version of the waiter, who was polishing glasses.

“
Attends
,” Miou-Miou said, “That’s my client. I’ll be right back.” She glided over to the man, whose glasses glinted, reflecting the flickering neon sign advertising Picon.

Frustrated, René picked at the peanuts. Stale and oily. He looked around.

In the far corner, as if supporting the Chinese pillars, sat a pale-faced trio: a couple and a midget wearing a fedora. An aura of time suspended, surrounded them. Most cafés were lively places where people conversed or went to see or be seen.

Not here. It was like a railway waiting room.

René’s radar picked up on it at once. Circus people. He hated the old fug of sad-eyed clowns and freaks away from the big top. They looked familiar, probably from the nearby
Cirque d’hiver
. Perhaps cronies of his mother. Unemployed. Or waiting for a casting call.

He felt again the trials his mother, a normal-sized juggler, had endured. The drafty circus tents, tears coursing through her makeup when money was tight, and the love she had borne him. The determination that he’d never perform as a freak.

And he hadn’t.

Her amazing good fortune in becoming the old marquis’s housekeeper in Amboise had helped. The marquis had attended her performances every year. He’d loved René’s mother’s unique juggling act and her wit.

A circus aficionado, the marquis had maintained a private museum of mechanical toys from the 1700s up to the 1930s. When she’d grown “ready for the pasture,” as the circus owner termed it in his delicate way after a flaming arrow severed the tendon in her left hand, the marquis invited her to oversee his “little collection.” She’d ended up running his château. And probably more, but René didn’t dwell on that.

An odd but sweet man, he’d financed René’s clinic bills during his stretching therapy. It hadn’t worked. His hip displacement had gotten worse. The marquis helped with his education. Paid for extras at the Sorbonne. And the car.

René never told Aimée any of this. He wasn’t sure why. He liked the fact that Aimée had never asked, had never wanted explanations. She’d simply introduced herself one afternoon at the Sorbonne café, saying “Rumor says you can access a mainframe in twenty minutes.”

She’d shoved a laptop across the table.

“You heard wrong,” he’d told her, rolling up his sleeves and establishing a net connection. “Twelve minutes is the longest it takes me.” And using the number his friend had given him he’d accessed the mainframe and done it in ten.

Her big, kohl-ringed eyes had lit up. Right there, she’d offered him a job on a project she’d undertaken. The work grew and when he ended up spending more time on computer security at Leduc Detective than at the Sorbonne, he quit classes. And she did, too.

His confused feelings about her surfaced: her terrible driving, her unconventionality, the passion she brought to things and the fierce loyalty she showed him. And glimpses of the raw inner hurt he’d seen exposed a few times. Like the hurt he’d so often felt.

He thought about her huge eyes and the funny way she hid her feelings for Morbier yet yearned for his approval.

Never mind that she didn’t provide tickets for restaurants or a Carte Orange pass for the Métro like some employers, she made sure she paid into his
seçu
, the
mutuelle
for medical insurance, and his
prévoyance
. When bills were paid and lucrative contracts signed, they celebrated with champagne and sushi. The odd thing was, his mother and the marquis had seemed pleased.

Would Aimée let him take care of her now that she was blind? Or would she push him away? Should he team up with Rajeev? Join him and form a software business, as Rajeev was urging him to?

He repressed his feelings. As always. But the thought that though she was his best friend, sometimes that wasn’t enough, kept rising up. He wanted more. More of her. He pushed that away.

He drank the
Cardinal/Communard
and half of another, then stared at the old chrome coffee machine topped by a winged eagle and at the special VIEILLE PRUNE ARTISANALE 4L.- 45 FRS
.
written in white on the beveled mirror until Miou-Miou returned. Breathless. She grabbed her drink and downed it three long gulps.

“That bad?”

She nodded.

“Another?”

He caught the waiter’s eye, pointed to their glasses.

“Does your client cook the Bataclan’s books?”

“He’s the comptroller,” she said. “And since his sun crossed Virgo . . . very auspicious . . . he’s decided to ask for the hand of his plumber’s sister who lives three houses down in the same Batignolle
banlieue
.”

“At least he’ll be able to fall back on his brother-in-law if the theatre business gets tight,” René said. He handed the waiter several hundred-franc notes.

“
Vraiment,
I was worried about Josiane’s chart,” she said, reaching for her new drink. “The one I never completed. Of course not, it got stuck under . . .”

“The comptroller’s?” René interrupted.

She nodded. The tulle ribbon bobbed in her curls. “Look,” she said, setting down a chart. The spheres of planets were crossed by red, aqua, and orange lines. “I hadn’t finished the alignment of the houses and the dominant planets . . . but Josiane called, wanting to meet. She said I could finish later, but she had an important question to ask first.”

All this astral plane talk unnerved him. “And you said . . . ?”

“Clients call my hotline or hit my website with questions all the time,” she said, noting disbelief in his eyes. “I’m very good.”

René grew aware of the sounds of conversation and the clink of glasses around them. Tables filling with the café clien- tele, the waiter rushing to fill orders and barking new ones to the younger look-alike barman.

“Sometimes I’m so good, it’s scary,” Miou-Miou confessed.

René avoided her eyes. He shifted on the rattan chair and wished his dangling legs could touch the floor. Just once.

“If I finish the orbit of her ruling planet . . . see how the sun line intersects . . . that shows warning. ‘Tread lightly on the rungs of life’s ladder.’ But here,” she slapped the chart, rustling the paper. “The lifeline was cut.”

“When?” If she was so good she’d know.

“11:40 p.m. last Monday night,” she said, glancing at her watch. She stood up, hefted her bag across her chest and snapped her green denim jacket closed.

“How do you know that?”

“She was going to call me. She didn’t,” said Miou-Miou. “I have to go. I’ve got another appointment.”

Josiane’s body was found Tuesday midday, René thought. But the morgue would have an estimate of the actual time of death.