Murder in the Sentier

“Desolee,” she said. And she meant it. “I’d like to but I have an appointment at the Quai des Orfevres.”

Rene rolled his eyes in disgust.

Stupid. She was being stupid. But she couldn’t get involved with this man. She had no time. She had to see the files on her father, and somehow find Idrissa again.

“Maybe later?” she asked.

“Feel like dinner at my place?” Etienne asked.

She nodded, wondering if he was for real. He even had a Harley.

“Take your chances with the chef,” his uncle said, “but I’ll bring the champagne.”

And they left; only a whiff of the cigar aroma remained.

“Don’t blow it, Aimee,” Rene said. “Even I can see he’s a catch. And he’s interested.”

“You’ve been talking with Martine.”

“Sometimes she makes a lot of sense,” Rene said. “This one’s not flying all over the world and making pit stops like Yves.”

Bad boys had always been her downfall, but this Etienne was different.

“I better change clothes.” And retrieve my own shoes, Aimee thought.

“Michel said it’s yours,” Rene said. “A gift.”

“Non, I can’t accept.” It was too much.

“But you sold ten of them,” Rene said. “Michel said it belongs on you.”

SHE PUT the scooter in gear and headed down rue Saint Honore for the Quai des Orfevres. At the Pont Neuf she crossed the Seine, sparkling in the sun, and took a left on the Ile de la Cite.

She parked the scooter and showed her carte d’identite to the blue-uniformed flics. Once inside the cobbled courtyard she veered to the left, passed under the portal that bore the inscription DIRECTION DE LA POLICE JUDICIARE, and climbed the five hundred steps to reach the blue insignia of the Brigade Criminelle.

It had been a long time. But she remembered the way well.

After again showing her ID, she was buzzed in. She found the vaulted wooden doors marked toilette. Now it served both sexes since the former ladies’ room had become part of the communication systems control room.

This was no classic hole in the floor or stinky urinal like many in the building but an elegant Art Nouveau lavatory: private wooden stalls with inset stained-glass panels and a glazed ceramic frieze accompanied by an elegant shoe-shine stand circa 1905.

The usual lavatory attendant was off duty, probably at lunch. A box with five franc tips sat on a ledge. A stall door opened a slit and Leo beckoned with a crooked finger.

“Timing is everything,” he breathed, as she joined him.

She slipped his amended credit report, with proof of the postage-meter glitch and three-day grace period for his online account, into his freckled hands.

His small sharklike teeth, crooked nose, and full head of curly brown hair gave him an academic air. “Devious nerd” best described him. And that, she thought, was being generous. Given his proclivity to taunt and blackmail fellow students in the lycee, his skills were wasted in the prefecture’s Records Department.

“Twenty minutes,” he whispered, handing her a manila envelope, “then I’ll come back for them. DST files are shut tighter than a nun’s legs.”

“Leo, that’s not the deal!” She pulled back her file.

He put his finger on his lips. “But I got this. My housecleaner sleeps with the adjutant’s clerk….”

“Look,” she said, making a moue of distaste. “I don’t want to know.”

“No photos.”

She nodded, and set her phone to Vibrate. “Call me when you’re coming back.”

He yanked the brass pull chain. A thunderous flushing noise filled the stall as he slid out the door.

Aimee shut the mahogany toilet lid and leaned on a shiny chrome knob. From her leather backpack, she lifted the portable scanner bar, then connected it to her wireless palm organizer revved up with extra memory by Rene. She punched in her office fax number. The organizer would simultaneously fax the scanned pages to her office. Scanning wasn’t photographing, was it? Apprehensive, she took a deep breath. She had a terrible thought … what if Rene hadn’t paid the France Telecom bill? Then she saw the familiar handshake logo indicating Connect on the tiny screen. Thank God!

With a studied calm she didn’t feel, Aimee thumbed open the folder from the IGPN, the disciplinary branch within the police. Inside lay a lined yellow sheet with notes written in an angular hand.

With the bar, she began scanning the notes, which were dated 1976. The first page had a coffee stain and recounted surveillance on rue de Clery. She recognized the address. Romain Figeac’s apartment.

Her brow beaded with sweat. The air in the lavatory was stifling and the scanner’s speed was only about five pages per minute.

The surveillance entailed the comings and goings from the apartment of a female suspect. The phone tap report stated she’d used Figeac’s phone for calling and receiving calls from a Left Bank gallery owner, known by the police to fence stolen paintings. From what Aimee gathered, the gallery owner was feeding information to the police. There were several blurred black-and-white photos of a woman wearing what looked like a long blond wig, in sunglasses, carrying a shopping bag supposed to contain Modigliani paintings. The woman caught in the act was named—Sydney Leduc.

Her own mother caught (by her father?) in a police sting. Aimee sat in the small cubicle, and the world, as she knew it, crumbled.

Aimee’s mother had been jailed and brought to trial, not for terrorism, but for the theft of Laborde’s paintings. There was no proof of her participation in the kidnapping and murder of Laborde. So that’s why she’d only been in prison a year.

But why hadn’t Aimee known about any of this? She looked at the date … That year she had been sixteen, that was the time she’d been an exchange student at a high school in New York!

Aimee read further. Offered the chance to inform on the gang for a lighter sentence, Sydney had agreed to find out the location of terrorist gang members and their loot. But Aimee read between the lines. Her father had cut a deal for her mother.

Yet at the end of the report, her father had been brought up for disciplinary hearings. Why? That didn’t make sense.

There was no explanation, unless he had been found in possession of the seized paintings on July 15th during the surveillance sting.

On another sheet, with “Surveillance Unit” written across the top, were several names:

Szlovak

Dray

Teynard

Leduc

She recognized Szlovak, a middle-aged man on her father’s Commissariat team who’d retired early. Dray had been kicked upstairs to the prefecture at the Quai des Orfevres ten years or so before. Teynard had been posted to the STUP, the narcotics branch of the Brigade Criminelle.

Her wrist ached. She managed to scan the Action-Reaction files before her cell phone vibrated. Within two minutes she’d finished, disconnected the scanner bar from her palm organizer, and stood reapplying Chanel red lipstick at the old silver-edged mirror.

The lavatory attendant, an older woman with her white hair in a bun, a copy of Tele- Journal under her arm, appeared as Leo returned. Aimee watched him enter the stall but not before she winked and dropped ten francs in the bowl.

A half hour later, back at her office, she found Szlovak’s number on the Minitel, left a message, looked up Dray in the prefecture, and had no luck finding Teynard at the Brigade.

At the prefecture, the receptionist said Dray had left for vacances the day before. Aimee sat down to reread the pages she’d faxed and to read those she hadn’t had time to.