AL05 - Murder in Clichy

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AIMEE KNOCKED on the door of Albert Daudet’s widow, Lucie. She lived in a peeling stucco former loge de concierge at the mouth of a cobblestoned courtyard.

The window lace shimmied and swayed as the glass door opened. Crocheted figures danced and then became still forever, caught on the lace panel, as if sculpted by sea-salt spray.

“Madame Daudet?” she said.

“Oui?” said a woman with a tightly curled gray perm and reading glasses hanging by a beaded string around her neck.

“May I take a few moments of your time?”

She stared at Aimee, smoothing down her apron. “The coffin’s all I can afford right now. Forget the memorial service you people try to cram down my throat. The anciens com-battants should help bury a veteran!”

“I’m a detective.” She flashed her license. “Sorry to impose at this time but I want to ask a few questions.”

“The flics came by yesterday,” she said. “I told them the same thing. It’s foul play.”

Aimee nodded. “I know. It’s in the autopsy report.”

“They won’t show it to me. Keep telling me to wait.”

“But I have a copy,” she said. “Would you like to see it?”

Madame Daudet covered her mouth with her hand. “Come in,” she said.

The converted loge, a suitcase of an apartment, was crammed with shelves of religious statues and plastic vials of holy water from Lourdes. Bronze statues of the Virgin Mary and a kneeling Bernadette were prominent. A small sink with a floral print curtain below stood next to a two burner stove.

“Albert was my second husband, you know,” said Madame Daudet, gesturing to chairs around a table which bore a file of supermarche coupons. The corners of her mouth turned down in a sour expression. “I never had to do such things before but the pension’s not enough.”

She pulled her reading glasses on and read the autopsy report.

“What’s this ‘petechiae’?”

“In layman’s terms?”

“I don’t speak medicalese.”

“Red pinpoint hemorrhages in his eyes. Their presence indicates strangulation.”

Madame Daudet’s brows creased with concern. “I don’t understand.”

But Aimee thought she did.

“Did he have enemies?”

“Albert?” Though she shook her head, the tight curls budged not a centimeter. “He supervised the tire warehouse for forty years. A joker. Always good with his hands, he was.” She pointed to the built-in shelves, like in a ship’s cabin. “I told the police the same thing. Don’t you talk to each other?”

If she thought Aimee worked with the flics, why enlighten her?

“I just need to clarify. Why do you think someone would do this?”

Madame Daudet scanned the report. “Albert talked. ‘Big mouth,’ I called him. To his face, mind you. He knew what I thought. No lies between us. That’s why I wondered. . . .”

She paused, her eyes wistful.

“You wondered if he’d run off at the mouth and it got him in trouble?” Aimee asked.

Madame Daudet nodded. For the first time Aimee saw tears in the corners of her eyes. She brushed them away.

“Was it something he mentioned to his comrades from the Sixth Battalion?”

“Some scam. For the first time, well, Albert kept secrets from me. I thought they were just old men with fantasies.”

“Fantasies?”

“Who comes out of war unscarred, eh?” she said, clipping the coupons, and putting them in the box. “But when the nightmares started again. . . .”

“Madame Daudet, what do you mean?”

“The nightmares Albert had!” Madame Daudet said. “He woke up screaming, bathed in sweat. The first year we were married, it happened every night.”

Aimee crossed her legs and shifted the file of coupons. Outside in the courtyard, footsteps sounded on the cobblestones. Despite the cramped warmth inside, a damp muskiness permeated the floorboards.

“From the battle of Dien Bien Phu, you mean?”

“He said odd things in his sleep,” she said. “Over and over, about a dragon.”

Aimee gripped the edge of the table. “A jade dragon? Did he mention that?”

Madame Daudet took her reading glasses from her nose. “A list of animals, he kept repeating it. But when he woke up, he denied knowing anything about them.”

The astrological animals of the Chinese zodiac? Excited, Aimee leaned forward. Was he one of the soldiers who’d looted the Emperor’s tomb? Did Madame Daudet know Gassot?

“What do his comrades in the Sixth Battalion say?”

“They’re scared,” she said. “Afraid the past has come knocking on their door. After I mentioned that his pants cuff was rolled up, Picq had such horror in his eyes. He hasn’t been in touch since.”

“Wait a minute.” Aimee scanned the autopsy report. In the description of Albert’s body there was a tattoo, a flower with a dripping knife, on his left calf.

“Didn’t you think it odd?”

“More like disrespectful, a careless staff error, so I made my thoughts known to the director.”

“I mean his tattoo.”

“They all had them. Some drunken Haiphong foolishness, Albert told me.”

“Doesn’t the Sixth Battalion keep in touch, meetings and so on?”

“You mean swapping war stories of the good old days in Indochina?” She shook her head. “Not like that at all. Albert was in the supply commissary. He hid behind his desk. I think he had seen some combat but he didn’t like talking about it. Most of the boys shipped in on transports, dallied with bar girls. But then who didn’t? Got shot up and shipped out in wood boxes or on troop transports. But me, I knew the old Indochina.”

Madame Daudet’s eyes took on a faraway look. “I remember the flame trees and the tamarinds by the grass lawn that spread all the way down to the mouths of the dragon.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand, Madame.”

“The Mekong has nine tributaries, like the nine mouths of the dragon, the Indochinese say,” she said. “My parents had parties, magical soirees with lantern lights, the banana leaves nodding in the breeze, tables of hors d’oeuvres and so many servants we tripped over them.”

Aimee hoped this was going somewhere.

“My father planted rubber trees. Kept big accounts with the tire manufacturers he supplied on the ile de la Jatte.”

Aimee tried another tactic. “Was your husband a rubber planter, too?”

“Paul, my first husband, was a naval attache.” Her eyes misted over. “I polished his epaulettes, kept the gold braid just how he liked it. We’d go to Cafe Parisien, you know, where the right types were seen: the governor, and everyone of importance. Such a scent of frangipani in the courtyard! At one time they called it the Paris of the East. Gustave Eiffel designed the post office, can you imagine?”

Aimee didn’t think she expected an answer.

“But there’s no more rue Catinat now. Our beautiful ochre villa’s a community center, someone told me. They don’t even call it Saigon anymore,” she sighed. “We wore hand-sewn silk tea dresses. No one wears things like that anymore. And we changed several times a day, tres elegantes. The humidity, you know. Dense, heavy like a wet blanket all the time. I’ll say one thing for the natives, they knew how to dress for the weather.”

“Did you know the de Lussignys over there?”

“My dear, we dined with them at the Cafe Parisien,”