Murder in the Sentier

expected to see Idrissa. Curious, she approached him.

“I’m Aimee Leduc.”

“Khalifa, I’m Ousmane Sada’s cousin,” he said, a pained expression on his long face. “Blood relation on his mother’s side. Why didn’t you call me?”

“Believe me, Monsieur Khalifa, if I’d known you existed I would have,” she said. “I’m sorry. Is Idrissa Diaffa coming?”

“Ousmane’s employer called me.”

“His employer, you mean from Club Exe?”

“Nessim Mamou, the clothing manufacturer, where he worked. Ousmane wanted to go home, you know,” Khalifa said. “To his village outside Dakar, to his fiancee.”

Nessim Mamou … Michel’s uncle?

Inside the red-brick Institut Medico-Legal building, Serge met them. “The autopsy’s just finished,” he said. They followed him down to the green-tiled basement. Aimee hated the formaldehyde smell and the reek of pine disinfectant. It reminded her of the time she’d had to come and identify her father’s remains after the explosion.

Serge signed in at the desk and took them to the waiting room, furnished with a Naugahyde couch and orange plastic chairs. A rectangular window was covered with plastic shower curtains.

“I’ll bring the body to the window.”

When the curtains parted, Serge knocked on the glass.

Khalifa went to the window. He was so tall he had to stoop to see. He nodded his head. “I never thought I’d see him like this.”

Aimee looked. Ousmane Sada’s eyes were closed, thank God, but the first of a series of black thread stitches was visible in his sternum.

The curtains closed. Serge joined them in a few minutes with a plastic bag. “Please sign here that you identify him and down here for his personal effects.”

Khalifa opened the bag. The bloodstained pink bra and garter belt spilled over the Naugahyde couch. His eyes widened. “What kind of mistake is this?”

But Aimee’s eyes fastened on the bit of beaded yellow feather fluff stuck in the dried blood on the pink elastic.

“It’s a talisman, isn’t it?” She pointed. “What does it mean?”

“Mumbo jumbo superstition,” he said in a disgusted tone. “I don’t believe in that stuff, but he did. Ousmane liked women, not to dress like a woman … I don’t understand.”

“Monsieur, the autopsy shows he suffered from virulent tuberculosis,” Serge said, consulting the autopsy report.

Khalifa nodded. “He was a presser in a garment factory. They get this disease.”

“He was very sick. Lung disease from long exposure to machine dust or the toxic gas from the flat irons and pressing machines. I’ve seen this too often in the Sentier. Without treatment he wouldn’t have lasted. I know that’s not any consolation but …”

“Why did someone kill him?”

Serge’s cheeks reddened. “I’m sorry.”

Outside in Place Mazas where the Metro rumbled by, Aimee pulled Khalifa aside. “I think Idrissa was the target. She’s gone into hiding, maybe they wanted Ousmane to tell them her whereabouts.”

Khalifa’s eyes sparked with anger. “None of this makes sense.”

“I’ll help you,” said Aimee, handing him her card. “I’m a detective. First, I have to find Idrissa.”

“No one will talk to you. You ask too many questions.”

Of course, to them she was an outsider, a white woman barging into private places, bringing attention to those who preferred to stay hidden in the Sentier woodwork. Especially the sans-papiers who hid from authorities.

“So help me, Khalifa,” she said. “Romain Figeac, the man Idrissa worked for, was killed. And now Ousmane.”

“What’s it to you?”

“Like it says on my card, I’m a detective,” she said. Not adding that she thought Idrissa had information about her mother but didn’t realize it.

Khalifa shook his head. “My cousin’s shamed by such a death.” He put his head down. “Ousmane’s supposed to be under my wing, my uncle won’t understand a killing like this.”

Who would understand?

“I’m so sorry.”

“He’s dead.” Khalifa started to walk away. “What does it matter?”

“Idrissa’s next,” Aimee said. “I want to warn her, that’s all. Please take my number.”

She thrust a card into his large work-worn hand. “I don’t turn people in.”

With long strides Khalifa walked away over the cobblestones.

Her cell phone vibrated on her hip.

“Allo?”

“Meet me on my lunch hour,” said Leo Frot in his distinctive nasal tone. “Show your carte d’identite at 36, Quai des Orfevres. They’ll let you in. Then you know where to go.”

AIMEE PARKED the scooter in one of the dark stone passages behind the Palais Royal. Once home to kings, the Palais Royal was an arcade-lined square laid out by the duke of Chartres, now housing cafes, shops, apartments, and the Comedie-Francaise.

Aimee crossed the gravel, crunching past the beds of blue delphiniums bordering the long oasis of a garden. Under the double rows of plane trees providing leafy shade, children napped in strollers while mothers spoke on cell phones or read.

The water spray from the fountain beaded a fine mist on her arm. Refreshing and cool. And then she saw the sandbox past the trees. Just as she remembered it. And the pain welled up.

She pulled out the creased ad Jutta had given her, stared at it. But her mother wasn’t a smiling bon chic bon genre type in pearls with a sweater knotted around her shoulders. She’d been a terrorist, linked to the bombing that killed her father, a druggie on the run with another man, in Africa. Or she was dead.

And for the millionth time Aimee asked herself why. But all she knew was that in her bones, she felt her mother was alive. And she had to find her.

Entering the exclusive wing of apartments, she mounted the massive oak staircase surmounted by a balustrade of Doric columns. At number 38, a harried Michel opened a beveled-glasspaned door, a crystal chandelier in evidence behind it.

“Nom de Dieu, at last!” He scurried ahead down the herringbone-patterned wood floor, a pincushion tied on his wrist. “The laptop program has glitches, the musician’s late, and the model’s gained two pounds.”

“Don’t worry, Michel,” she said with a small smile, “things will work out.”

Aimee wished her apartment looked like this one. And with the expenditure of several million francs it could. Her seventeenth-century apartment had good bones with high ceilings, airy salons and parlors, and period detail. But all were original and had not been repainted since the last century. Or maybe the one before, she could never remember.

She stepped into a white-and-gilt-paneled salon with woodwork moldings, pilasters and carved garlands, and a large, veined-marble fireplace. Delicate gilt chairs were lined up in rows.

A partially made-up model in jeans, with her hair in rollers, slinked toward her, runway style. All bony hips and hollow cheekbones. The other designer, a man in black Goth attire with black fingernails and lipstick and white makeup, crawled on the parquet floor, sticking down tape demarcating the model’s route.

Murals and painted coffered ceilings decorated the adjoining eighteenth-century-style salon. The enfilade suite of rooms were done up in a mix of styles evoking different periods. Breathtaking and luxurious.

The music room, hung with green silk damask, doubled as the dressing room. Outfits hung from aluminum