Murder On The Rue Cassette (A Serafina Florio Mystery) (31 page)

Chapter
41: Valois and Serafina

Valois rose when she entered,
kissed her on both cheeks. It was a warm, genuine expression of friendship.

“As soon as we’re settled, we’ll
ask you for a dinner,” she said. “We’re staying in the Busacca apartment on
Place de Passy. You know it well.”

“New carpet, I hope.”

They laughed.

When they were through catching
up, she told him that she’d been to visit Ricci. “I saw the photographs and the
plates. I would have known the woman was not Elena.”

Poor Valois. He tried to hide
his surprise. He buttoned and unbuttoned his frock coat. “Ricci seemed
cooperative, but only to a point. Perhaps we didn’t ask the right questions.”

“I’m sure you did, but he had a
cagey way of answering, and since I’ve got secrets of my own, I understood him
and called his bluff. Don’t forget, we’re both Sicilians.”

“Where are the photographs?”

She told him and after he’d made
a note, she summarized her meeting with Sophie’s youngest son.

“Have you spoken with your
photographer, the one who took the photos?”

Valois shrugged. “He quit last
month.”

“There’s the
connection—the photographer. He must have been well paid by one of the de
Masson’s, and I have a feeling it was Sophie’s oldest son.”

She produced the IOUs and showed
him the difference between the forgeries and Ricci’s signature. “When is Ricci
not Ricci?” she said, half to herself. She paused to let him examine the
documents. “Will Sophie be tried?”

He shrugged. “A matter for the
insurance lawyers. If Elena were alive, they’d prosecute—fraud, pure and
simple. But since she’s dead, I don’t know. I heard Busacca’s lawyer is working
with the insurance company, an Italian company based in Trieste. He wants to
protect his sister.”

“He wants to protect the name of
Busacca, you mean.”

“So you might want to ask him,”
Valois said. “More to the point is the question of whether or not Sophie would
collect. I’d have to read the terms of the policy—payout might be
nullified since Elena’s death was self-inflicted.”

She looked at her watch,
realized she was taking more time that she thought she’d need, and apologized.

“Not at all, I’m always glad to
see you, and when we’re through discussing your concerns, I have another case I
think you may be interested in, also involving a forgery and the death of a
pregnant woman brutally savaged. We’re strapped for men these days. Now that
peace has arrived, crime rises again.”

Serafina told him about the fire
destroying their means of livelihood, an apothecary shop that had been in
Giorgio’s family for centuries, no doubt in retaliation for what she’d done to
Don Tigro’s men. She told him about her confrontation with the local mafia
capo, his demand for a percentage of her pay and her refusal to give it. “So we
are here to stay, at least for a while. We thought of America, but I’m more
familiar with Paris. We’re comfortable here, it brightens our spirits, and we
have ties now to Busacca—our oldest daughter works for him.”

“Greater protection for you
here, especially from thugs like the mafia. You’d have them on your back the
minute you arrived in New York. The Italian immigrant community is brutalized
by them. Become French citizens, my advice. I’ll put in a word and so will the
prefect, I know. He’s been impressed with our handling of the Elena Loffredo
case.”

She felt the tears spring up and
bit her lip. She wouldn’t cry in front of the inspector. “That means more than
I can say, but we’ve just arrived and I still feel the ties to my country. It’s
so difficult to give up my home. Best now not to think too much of leaving, but
to concentrate on solving crimes. Your streets are so clean, it’s hard to
imagine crime has increased. How can it be worse now than during Commune?”

“Of course not. Peace is much
better. But theft, rape, murder, they’re all on the rise.”

“Here’s my real reason for
disturbing you.”

Valois shrugged and his smile
was lopsided.

She told him of her concerns
involving Elena’s confession. “I don’t see how she could have killed the woman
on the Rue Cassette, and to tell you the truth, I almost goaded her into
confession.”

“That’s so terrible? It was a
proper confession. My men heard it. Everyone who witnessed it did, according to
their statements.”

“Bad because I hadn’t thought it
through. I hadn’t read the autopsy, studied its details, the entry wound, the
angle that the bullet must have traveled, the height of the shooter and victim.
Elena was a terrible shot you know, lucky for Loffredo.”

“And for you.”

She nodded. “With a short
barrel, she’d have to have been very close to the woman to hit her target. And
the angle was wrong. I’m not an expert, not by any means, but the coroner told
me they found the bullet in the victim’s mouth. Could Elena have shot her,
given her height? But it wasn’t until coming back here that I thought hard about
it. I don’t think she shot the woman.”

He sighed, walked to the window,
and stared out. She followed his gaze to a broken sky, to rays of sun streaming
through fast-moving clouds. She loved the play of light and dark on the French
tricolor, the limestone buildings and slate roofs, the bridges of the Seine.
She gave him time to consider.

He turned to her. “I agree, but
...” He shrugged. It was a Gallic gesture of futility, of humor, of hope.

“One of the reasons I love
France is your pursuit of truth and liberty. It deserves a daily revolution in
the mind.”

He shook his head and smiled.
“So you think she didn’t kill the woman?”

“I didn’t say that. I think she
had help.”

“One thing I’ll say about you,
your French has improved, but you’re still as stubborn.”

She explained her plan.

Chapter 42: Rue d’Assas

The sky was ominous when
Serafina knocked on the door to the small home at 23, Rue d’Assas. She waited.
As she stood there, she felt sharp drops of water pelt her cape. The wind
swirled leaves and small branches. They twirled in midair before descending
once again and skidding down the street. She felt her matted hair, felt the
water running down the side of her head and into her ear. She knocked again,
louder this time.

Presently she heard footsteps.
The door opened and Gaston’s butler appeared, just as fussy looking as the
first time she’d seen him.

Serafina held out her card and
he peered at it, pursed his lips, and pretended he did not recognize her.

“My name is Serafina Florio, but
most people call me Donna Fina. I’m here on rather urgent business to see
Monsieur Étienne Gaston. You remember me, I’m sure. I was here a few weeks ago,
and this is a continuation of that meeting with him. If I may say so, you’re
wearing a lovely shirt, the lace exquisitely crafted.

The butler simpered. “Won’t you
come in, Madame? I’ll see if he’s in. This way, please,” and he led her into
the receiving room. She remembered it from a few weeks ago, the stuffy
atmosphere and the musty smell.

“You didn’t tell her I’m busy?”
She heard Gaston’s irritation coming from the hall.

Looking harried, Gaston entered
the room and gave her a curt nod. “Madame, I have very little time, very little
time indeed. What is it? I’m about to give a lecture at the
Académie
des Sciences
.”

“Again?” She doubted it. She
looked at his face. It was wan, the skin yellowed, more wrinkled than she
remembered. She stared at him until she saw the small compress on his face and
everything fell into place.

“Sit please. I’m much in demand
and can spare you only a brief moment or two.”

“You helped Elena, didn’t you?”

“Pardon?”

“You helped Elena kill the woman
in the Rue Cassette, didn’t you?”

He looked at her, his eyes frozen.
“How dare you!”

“She couldn’t have done it
without you. She needed you. She loved you, then she despised you, but she was
passion personified and you soared in her arms. Hers was sparkling
conversation, a world of parties and salons, of artists and poets. She made a
heaven of your hell, and she carried your child. And when she needed your help,
needed you to find an expendable body, you had one at the ready, didn’t you?
And it was perfect for you, wasn’t it, because you found the woman who’d given you
that wretched disease—the disease you then passed on to Elena.”

“Enough!”

“And when she needed your help
to pull the trigger, you pulled it, didn’t you? Elena was too short to reach
the woman’s head, so you stood in back of the duped soul and fired into her
brain, the bullet angling downward. What was the name of the woman you shot?”

“I ... don’t know.”

“You slept with her then shot
her and you don’t even know her name.”

He looked from left to right,
backed away from Serafina and hit the arm of a chair, teetering off balance.
“Fabrication!”

She moved in his direction.
“Fabrication, indeed,” Serafina said. “You’re lying. Lied to me before and
you’re lying to me now.”

She took a few more steps toward
him.

He shook his head. “N-no, not
true.” He backed away.

“You lied about how long Elena
stayed with you on the night she disappeared and when I asked you if you had a
gun, you told me it was a revolver and it was missing.”

“Yes, missing, I tell you!”

“But you keep a set of pistols
in the wooden box right here, don’t you? Why did you go upstairs to check?”

“I needed to be sure ...”

She walked over to the box and
opened the lid. Lifting it, she showed him the green felt, the empty
depressions made for a pair of pocket pistols.

His eyes darted around the room.

“Take the bandage from your
face.”

“How rude!”

“Remove the bandage. Show me the
lesion.”

“Enough.\!”

“You don’t have much time.
Confess. Ease the burden. Grant yourself some peace.”

He darted left, right, and in a
few steps bounded to the hall, opened the front door and stared into the faces
of Valois and his assistant.

Chapter
43:
Glace au Four

The Loffredo’s were settled in their apartment—at
least for the most part—and with some exceptions, they began to enjoy
Paris. The children spent time exploring the city, wandering the many parks,
attending the expositions at the Palais de l’Industrie, treating themselves to
pastry, switching from Sicilian to Italian to French without realizing it. They
were always accompanied by Assunta who met friends in the many parks. She told
Serafina that she must be in heaven. “Pinch me, please, Donna Fina.”

All the bedrooms were sorted.
Loffredo had his study. Although she missed her mother’s sitting room, Serafina
spent her thinking time in the ladies’ parlor or for particularly knotty
problems, in the conservatory where she could look out over the city and let
her mind wander.

Serafina and Loffredo were
dressed and sitting in two of the parlor’s Louis XV chairs waiting for their
guests to arrive.

“Where did Rosa get that fancy
butler?” Loffredo asked.

Serafina smiled. “Jacques? He
adds a certain
je
ne sais quois
to her teas, don’t you think? He worked for Gaston. Last week she knocked on
his door, looked the butler up and down, and offered him a job on the spot.”

Because of their move to Paris,
as well as her happiness, Serafina’s figure had returned to a more youthful
appearance and she wore her favorite dress, a deep French blue with organdy
flounces for the occasion. Loffredo was Loffredo, gorgeous as always in formal
attire. To celebrate the longest day of the year, they had invited the Valois
family and Levi Busacca, the first dinner guests in their new home, although
Busacca had visited on prior occasions and stayed for tea. An old man, aging
rapidly after the death of his daughter, he accepted the invitation with
pleasure but stated he’d leave soon after the meal. Except for Carlo, the whole
family would be together. And Rosa and Tessa, of course.

Serafina hadn’t seen Giulia or
Carmela since the afternoon of their arrival nearly a month ago. As she stared
at the glass above the mantel, she couldn’t help thinking of Oltramari and
Carlo. No word from him, but it was too soon for his reply to the letter they’d
written two weeks ago, all of them penning something. She fought the churning
pit in her stomach. Perhaps her oldest son had been right. She should have paid
Don Tigro his protection money. It was the idea of payment for no services
rendered that she found abhorrent, and Loffredo agreed. She couldn’t pay him,
wouldn’t do it. But it was also the visit to Paris that drew her away from the
increasingly meager joy that life in Oltramari had become.

The mystery surrounding Elena
Busacca’s death and disappearance was over as far as the police were concerned.
Not to Serafina, however. The absence of one truth continued to nag. “I need to
ask him a few questions tonight. I hope you don’t mind.”

As soon as the press got wind of
it, the news of Étienne Gaston’s arrest for the murder of a streetwalker made
the front page of
La
Presse
.
Parisians wallowed in the story for two weeks.

“He was a minor figure with some
following, a scholar, known to university professors and the
Académie des Sciences
perhaps, but he wasn’t
generally known by the public,” Loffredo said, “until the journalists got hold
of him. They blew him up into a personality, aggrandizing his importance.”

“You mean those inky fingers
created Gaston out of newsprint,” Serafina said.

“Precisely. Turned him into
someone the public loved to hate. People swore they’d followed his career for
years, although a month ago he was unheard of. It was brave of Valois to
imprison him.”

“The inspector found it
distasteful, I could tell by the way he held his mouth,” Serafina said. “But
I’ve grown fond of Alphonse.”

Some of the lesser papers gave
juicier accounts of Gaston’s affair with Elena. Others treated it as a
cautionary tale, mentioning Elena Busacca’s disappearance and her role in
falsifying her own death, her life as a demimonde, her rapid dissolution, and
her ultimate suicide.

“When Tarnier told me why he
treated her, I knew she was doomed,” Loffredo said. His eyes roamed the walls
looking for comfort, finding it, she hoped, in her eyes. They kissed.

“Weren’t you frightened? I mean,
she was your wife.” Serafina had longed to ask Loffredo whether he worried
about his own physical wellbeing but was afraid. If in a moment of loneliness,
he and Elena had taken comfort in each other—only natural, they were
after all husband and wife—then Elena may have passed on a disease that
might mean her own demise. But Serafina believed there were areas of a person
that should remain private even in a marriage, and she wouldn’t invade that
part of Loffredo, not ever. She had no hesitation about asking her children
anything, their most secret thoughts, for instance, but that was another
matter.

“I was frightened for her, not
for me. She was my wife in name only. We never ... I couldn’t manage to ...”

“Not even on your wedding
night?”

He shook his head.

“You mean you were celibate all
that time until we began to ...?”

He nodded. “Over twenty years.”

Serafina felt the hot stirring
of her blood. She dabbed her forehead with a linen, not daring to touch him.
She consulted her watch. Their guests would be here any minute. Best to fan
herself and change the subject.

She rose and kissed the top of
his head, contenting herself with drawing a circle round his ear. Lest she take
a deeper step in that direction from which there’d be no return, she strolled
into the dining room where the table had been set with linen, silver, crystal,
and Limoges.

Rosa had settled in. By now she
knew half the arrondissement. Her afternoon gatherings were quite the thing,
and not just for their tea and delicate sweets. A growing number of guests
frequented her apartment to be entertained and to be seen. They listened to her
talk with hushed attention, some adding a salacious detail or two they’d picked
up, but all realizing that Rosa, with her first-hand knowledge of the more
sordid details of society—the Busacca incident for one—had little
compunction in telling her tales.

How their lives had changed.
Serafina and her family were used to sitting at a plain round table in a
familiar setting, the kitchen in their home in Oltramari. But she looked around
at the opulence of the dining room, its polished mahogany table, the crystal
chandelier suspended high above it, the shiny parquet floors that Totò loved to
slide on, the oriental carpets, the damask drapes, and began to feel at home.

Their expenses were far greater
here than in Oltramari and she knew they’d increase, but that didn’t seem to
bother Loffredo who managed the ledger now that Vicenzu worked for Busacca. In
the fall there’d be schooling for Totò and they must engage a
femme savante
dedicated to Maria’s
non-musical education. And of course they’d need more servants—Assunta
couldn’t keep the apartment by herself. So Rosa who’d made friends with all of
the building’s residents, found Serafina an out of work butler, a parlor maid,
and a young maid to help out in the kitchen.

Through Rosa’s new butler,
Jacques, they’d found a music teacher for Maria, one who would prepare her for
entry into the Paris Conservatory where she would study piano and composition.
The school was located in the ninth arrondissement, one of the first
conservatories in the world to admit females, but it was a long trek for a
ten-year old. Loffredo had taken her there every day, walking with her along
the Seine until they reached the Tuileries, then northeast to the far corner of
the ninth arrondissement where Maria would stare at the building that housed
her new passion. The move had been good for Maria, Loffredo told Serafina. She
was no longer a queen bee, but just one of thousands with musical talent,
determined to make her way. Soon she knew the route by heart, and they’d take
shortcuts and detours, roaming the streets, nodding to the neighborhood, but
Maria would always find her way to Rue du Conservatoire. “Closed for the year,”
Loffredo told her the first time they’d found it, but he told Maria to imagine
the students filing in and out. She told him she could feel the longing in her
fingers. Mornings and afternoons she practiced on the grand piano in the
second-floor ballroom, never tempted by the breathtaking view of Paris.

But there were moments when
Serafina thought they’d made a mistake moving to Paris, a few times when she’d
lain awake tossing, turning, smelling again in her mind the charred remains of
the apothecary shop or the sweet fragrance of the public gardens. And she’d
have a few pangs of regret even in the sumptuous parks of Paris when she’d
listening in vain for the sounds of her native tongue on the boulevards and
streets. Then the longing for her native land took her breath away and she’d
have to sit.

Last week when she began
planning the meal, Renata had asked for Serafina’s help with the menu, the wine
list, and the seating.

The seating was the easiest
part, Serafina told her, “Loffredo and I at either end, seven on each side.
We’ll begin with Loffredo’s right where we must seat Busacca.”

Renata nodded and began drawing
a diagram. “Opposite Busacca, we must put Vicenzu, and next to him, Carmela.”

“Perfect,” Serafina declared.
“Let’s put Teo and Arcangelo close to Busacca as well. He’s a man with many
connections in this town.”

“Too many men on one end of the
table I think,” Renata said when she looked at their first seating diagram.

“Then you’ll sit next to Busacca
across from Arcangelo and we’ll put Carmela next to him. I hope for your sake
he’s changed the bandages on his foot and ankle, but the aroma of your cooking
will mask its sourness, I hope.”

“Mama!”

“Who should we place next to
you?” Renata asked.

“Françoise Valois on my right,
the inspector on my left.”

“I’m beginning to see the reason
for this dinner, Renata said.

“Connections and work, of
course. What else is there?” Serafina asked.

“What about friendship and
conviviality, the love of food and wine, the celebration of light?” Renata
asked.

“Of course, my sweetness, but we
must also make room for conniving. We have to live, don’t we?” She threw this
last part out to Rosa who had entered.

“What are you so worried about? Loffredo’s
loaded and he’s your husband now. That makes you a countess. Better start
acting like one. The French love aristocracy, you know. You need a new wardrobe
and you should be frequenting the parks with your nose held high and show a
little more of your décolleté, especially now that the weather is warm. You
cover everything up. Countesses don’t do that. What’s wrong with Giulia, she
should be designing daring frocks for you? Instead, you wear a long face and
sit inside hunched and fretting. Leave Oltramari behind you and live. And by
the way, I’ve just had a letter from Scarpo who watches both our houses and
takes care that the guards are properly stationed. All is well.”

“Except for Carlo,” Serafina
said. “I feel it.”

Rosa said nothing.

“Then help us plan the meal.”

The madam rubbed her hands
together and spoke to Renata. “Create something worthy of Paris in the summer,
but of course you will. And no pasta, please. Not a time to show off Sicilian
cuisine. You’ve been to
Les
Halles
, haven’t
you?”

“Every day. The vendors tip
their hats to me now.”

Serafina stopped her reverie and
looked at her watch. Two minutes to eight. Time to receive her guests. She
walked back and whispered in Loffredo’s ear. “Bet on the first to arrive?”

“I say the Valois family.”

She shook her head. “Giulia,
perhaps, or Busacca, but of course never Carmela.”

“Not fair, choose one.”

“Busacca, then.”

He kissed her. “And we bet for
what?”

“The usual,” she said.

“Either way, I win.”

The Valois were the first to
arrive, followed quickly by Busacca. The butler took their things and showed
them to the parlor and there were introductions, hugs and kisses and more
commotion when Carmela and Giulia arrived, then Rosa and Tessa.

“The last to arrive are those
who travel the least.”

“Who said that?”

“I just did.”

They formed small groups or
looked out the window at the view, the bustle of traffic below, in awe of the
luminous quality of the summer sky. Valois took Loffredo aside and began a
conversation. Serafina watched Loffredo nodding as Valois spoke but was too
busy to hear them. Presently Valois laughed and clapped Loffredo on the back
and the two men shook hands. She complimented Françoise on her dress, a blue
silk in summer weight that matched her eyes. For her part, Françoise admired the
view and the furniture.