AL05 - Murder in Clichy

She climbed into bed, weary, her arm aching, but she couldn’t stop the thoughts spinning in her head.

Endlessly.

Aimee pushed the duvet down. She slipped on wool socks and an old bathrobe of her father’s. Below, blue barge lights on the Seine reflected off the glistening wet stone Pont Marie. Pigeons, nesting in the pear tree below, in the courtyard, cooed.

In the dim salon, she powered up her laptop. Who was Thadee Baret? All she knew was he had possessed stolen jade— stolen from whom she didn’t know—and needed money. One didn’t go out in raw November weather without a coat unless to dash down to a nearby tabac or a cafe below one’s apartment. Certainly not with a backpack of valuable jade. So she figured he had lived close by the place where he had died.

Start with the obvious, her father had always said. Sometimes it worked and saved time. She searched in the phone book. No listing.

Online, she hacked into the standard financial databanks, a practice she and Rene performed routinely to find someone’s credit history. There was no credit card issued in his name. Talk about flying below the radar. Bank account searches required more time, so she put that aside.

He’d looked arty, had an intello air, a former junkie by the old marks on his arm . . . was he a gauche caviar who’d squandered the family wealth? Searching further, she checked university registrations for the past fifteen years. Ecole nationale d’ad-ministration, then of Political Science. Nothing. Not even at the Ecole des Beaux-arts.

If he needed money . . . drugs? But his tracks were old. Gambling? Wait a minute, she’d forgotten something. Paper had rustled in her pocket . . . why hadn’t she checked it? She ran, her wool socks padding softly on the floor, to the coatrack in her hallway, and emptied her pockets. Besides the envelope, there was a half of a torn PMU— Pari mutuel urbain— horse race betting slip. She remembered the sounds accompanying his phone call. Like a cafe-tabac in the background, where bets were taken. It must have been a local place, where he awaited her call.

She’d investigate tomorrow. After she retrieved the jade from Guy’s office. It would be a place to start. Getting the RG off her back was a bigger problem.

In her bedroom, she sat crosslegged and put the small jade disk on the window ledge. It glowed in the light. Ethereal. A circle of beauty. She closed her eyes, tried to empty her mind. Concentrate. Inhaling, exhaling, counting her breaths.

But the images of the jade animals floated above her, as if they were pulling her back to consciousness. She saw the mocking smile of the jade monkey, then the hawk-nosed man. And felt the stinging and smarting of her stitches.

She rubbed her eyes. The corners of her vision blurred. Nervously, she washed down a pill with bottled Vichy water.

Her dreams echoed with the insistent cawing of the crows nesting over the boulangerie where Baret had been shot— loud and grating. Their flapping, glossy, obsidian-black wings tried to tell her something. Dawn found her on the floor, shivering.

Tuesday Evening

HERVE GASSOT DIPPED HIS fingers in the icy holy water font of the nineteenth-century church. He stuck his cap in his wool overcoat pocket, smoothed down his fringe of white hair and sat in the worn pew. He ignored the tsk, tsk of an old woman woman bent in prayer as he lifted his artificial leg onto the kneeler. His prosthesis, stiff on the cold unforgiving stone floor, had rebelled.

Candles sputtered by the saints’ statues, their scent of burning wax as familiar as the low drone of prayer from the confessionals. He bowed his head and prayed for his stupid camarade, Albert, from his old regiment. Albert, who’d earned the croix de guerre at Dien Bien Phu, had gone to the clinique, between the plumber’s and Communist party office, for a routine cardiogram and ended up on a cold slab in the morgue.

The priest made the sign of the cross, ending the evening rosary. Gassot stood and went to shake hands with the younger priest who wore a clerical collar and jogging shoes as he passed out the liturgy calendar.

“Bonsoir, mon pere,” he said.

“Don’t forget the sing-along liturgy tomorrow, mon fils,” the priest said.

But Gassot knew neither he, nor the church congregation, all over sixty, would make that a priority. Out in the vestibule, the white marble gleamed in the low light.

On the church steps, Picq, one of the few left from his regiment in Indochina, sidled up next to Gassot, lighting two unfiltered Gitanes. He offered one to Gassot, who accepted, inhaled the woody tobacco, and exhaled into the night air.

“The first one to go, eh?” Gassot said, shaking his head. “And in a careless way, but that sums up Albert.”

“Not careless,” Picq said. He wore a blue raincoat that matched the hard blue of his rheumy eyes. He leaned close to Gassot’s shoulder. “Lucie’s upset, something strange with the doctor’s report. I showed it to my nephew, the medecin.”

Medecin? Picq’s nephew had flunked out of medical school and made false teeth now. And a good living.

“Funny red pinpoints in his eyes,” Picq said. “And bruising on his neck.”

Gassot’s shoulders tensed. “But he went for a cardiogram and his heart gave out!”

“Not according to my nephew,” Picq said. His eyes narrowed. “You know what that means.”

“But he was in a clinic!”

Picq jumped to conclusions. Always had. Still Gassot’s stomach twisted.

Albert had always worried he’d be the first one they caught up with: Their miscalculations had wiped out the village near Dien Bien Phu, but it had been by mistake.

“Lucie said the strangest thing,” Picq continued. “Albert’s pants’ cuff was rolled up when she claimed his body.”

“Eh, so what?” Gassot said.

“Rolled up beyond the tattoo on his ankle.”

Gassot stiffened. The dripping knife. They each had one.

“That could mean anything.”

“Try convincing yourself after reading the report from the Prefecture,” Picq said. “They’re calling it suspicious, starting an investigation. It all began after the jade reappeared.”

The jade?

“We’ve been looking for years. . . . How can you be sure?”

“Use your head, Gassot,” he said. “We had a lead. Albert blabbed and shot it to hell.”

“You call that rumor a lead?”

“Seems the mec took the bait. . . .”

“Wait a minute Picq, what bait?”

“We got to talking, I had every intention of telling you.” Picq shrugged. “But Albert challenged this guy. Told him ‘If the jade’s resurfaced in Paris, prove it.’ To force his hand we offered him a cut if he discovered it. He doublecrossed us and took some bullets in the back.”

Gassot clenched his teeth. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It happened right over there.” Picq pointed to the boulangerie.

Harebrained schemes. Imagining themselves rogue warriors but they were just foolish old men like himself.

“Did he have the jade?”

“We don’t know,” Picq said.

Gassot wanted to distance himself from his comrades but he had to know the extent of the damage they’d