Murder in the Sentier

“But that was years ago,” Aimee said. Suspicion fought with her longing to know about her mother. “Maybe you should get to the point.”

Jutta Hald’s lips tightened. She unbuckled a brown leather bag, a ragged remnant from the seventies by the look of it.

“You’re in your early thirties, right?”

“Close enough,” Aimee said. “Look, I need to see some proof that you really knew my mother and that you’re telling the truth.”

“She wrote things. Lots of them,” Jutta Hald said, pulling out an envelope. “The guard confiscated this during a lockdown. Take a look.” Jutta Hald set the envelope on Aimee’s marble-topped claw-footed table. She took out a package of unfiltered Turkish cigarettes, lit one.

The short hairs on Aimee’s neck bristled as she reached for the envelope. “How did you get this?” Aimee asked.

“You don’t know much about prison, do you?” Jutta Hald replied, taking a drag.

The yellowish creased envelope with FRESNES PRISON stamped on it seemed to glow in the afternoon light. Aimee reached for it, trying to control the trembling of her hands. What if the mother who deserted her really had been a convicted terrorist?

Her heart hammered. And what if it wasn’t true?

Aimee expected something weighty with answers, reasons, and excuses. But the envelope felt curiously light as she held it suspended aloft in the rays of the sun.

For a moment, the face of her mother appeared to her. The carmine red lips and eyes crinkling in laughter. The warmth of her large hands, the faint smell of lilies of the valley—muguets—clinging to her clothes.

Aimee didn’t want to open the envelope. She wanted to keep her mother hovering in the ether, between reality and her little girl’s fantasy.

Slowly, she opened the envelope.

Inside lay a once-glossy sheet torn from a fashion magazine. Wrinkled and worn. She unfolded the paper carefully.

A washing-machine advertisement covered one side. On the other, a mother, sweater draped around her shoulders with sleeves knotted, strolled hand in hand with a child in the Palais Royal garden. The caption read, “Arpege for the active woman—for every part of her life!”

Under the caption was written in ballpoint pen: “Like Amy, like us … she loved that sandbox.”

Below that, Aimee saw skillful cartoons of a pudgy mouse with long whiskers bordering the bottom of the page.

A dagger went through her heart. Her “Emil,” her stuffed mouse! The ragged little doudou she had hugged to sleep every night. For years. How would anyone know this but her mother?

Aimee emptied the envelope. That was all. She looked at the envelope again. The name B. de Chambly written in pencil was visible in the lower right-hand corner.

“What’s this?”

“Her name,” Jutta Hald said.

“What does ‘B.’ stand for?”

“I forget,” Jutta Hald said.

Not only her language but everything about Jutta Hald seemed stilted, forced.

“Tell me about her,” Aimee said. She pulled Miles Davis closer.

“I was transferred. Later, I heard she’d been released.”

“Released and then?”

“The trail leads to you.” Jutta Hald crossed her spindly legs.

“Trail?”

Jutta Hald looked around again, surveying the faded eighteenth-century murals on the twenty-foot ceilings.

“How do you keep this place clean?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but wiped her palm on the table. “You don’t.”

Not only was the woman rude, she’d come for something and Aimee didn’t know what. Shouldn’t it be the other way around, wasn’t she supposed to give information to Aimee?

“You’ve lived here a long time, haven’t you?”

She didn’t like the woman’s manner or anything about her.

“Instead of offering me information,” Aimee said, “you seem to want something, Madame Hald. What is it?”

The woman’s pale face cracked into a huge and disconcerting smile. She wet her fingers, tamped the cigarette out between them, and put the stub in her pocket. “No one’s called me Madame Hald in years.” Jutta Hald shook her head, still smiling.

For a moment Aimee thought she looked human. “Tell me about her,” she repeated.

“I’m a little short of cash right now.”

“Maybe you just found this piece of paper, just heard some stories….”

“She was released in 1977; she must have come back here or gone to the cemetery.”

Aimee had been in the lycee then. No, she’d been an exchange student in New York! Aimee grasped the table edge and took a deep breath. This woman spoke in riddles.

“What are you talking about?”

Jutta Hald looked down. Aimee wondered if she was assessing the carpet’s price. “What do you want?” she demanded.

“You saw the proof,” Jutta Hald said. “Fifty thousand francs.”

Fifty thousand francs! That was office rent for six months! “What do I get for it?”

“I have more things,” Jutta said. “Her things.”

“Things like her photo? Or a location where I can find her?” Aimee asked, hoping she didn’t sound as desperate as she felt.

“Drawings,” she said. “There’s an anklet chain, an address book.”

“Her address book?”

“Lots of foreign addresses in it,” Jutta said, taking a deep breath. “Aah, free air, like I remember. So sweet after twenty years.”

“But I don’t have that kind of money.”

In theory she did, but Leduc Detective’s assets consisted of a bloated file of accounts receivable that Rene was trying to collect. He’d had little success with their big corporate clients, who took several months to pay up.

“I’m sure you can find it, if you want to,” Jutta Hald said, jotting something in her notebook, then snapping it shut. “I came straight from prison, just to see you.” She looked out the French doors that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. Then she picked up her bag and took another look around the room.

“You know,” Jutta Hald said, “a little dusting and cleaning would improve this place.”

Aimee bit back her reply.

“Guess you’re not interested. I’m leaving.”

Aimee hesitated. “Non….” She didn’t want the woman to leave. She had an urge to entreat Jutta Hald to stay, to ask what her mother had said about her.

Jutta Hald’s eyes darted around the apartment. Her long fingers pinched and worried the leather bag handle.

Her fidgeting made Aimee uneasy.

“Think about it,” Jutta Hald said. “Maybe when your mother came back to your apartment … she left something?”

Wouldn’t her father have told her? Could her mother have come and gone without wanting to see Aimee, her daughter?

“This should convince you,” Jutta said, pulling out a small bound notebook from her bag. Aimee saw a faded