AL06 - Murder in Montmartre

“It’s better this way, Aimee. For you and for me. I’m sorry.” He grabbed the duffel bag, strode through the hall.

“But Guy . . .”

He was out the door before she could stop him.

Crushed, she ran to the window and pressed her nose against the cold glass as she watched him get into a taxi on the quay below. She heard the door slam and the taxi’s tires churn away over the slush. Her eyes welled with tears. Two months of living together, trying to . . . he was the man who’d saved her eyesight, who had written poetry about her. . . . Now he was gone, just like that!

Relationships . . . she didn’t get them. Shouldn’t people take each other as they found them? She’d blown it. Again.

She sank onto the duvet, stunned, and grabbed the pillow. She found herself clutching one of his socks. She remembered lying in bed at sunrise as the blood orange sun peeked above their toes outside the window, how his long fingers brushed her thigh, the bowl of steaming cafe au lait he’d prepared resting next to the thick Le Monde diplomatique on the balcony awaiting Sunday morning reading. She remembered how his nose wrinkled when he laughed. She buried her face in the pillow. Punched it. Trying to shut out the hollow ache inside her.

A small wet tongue licked her ear. Miles Davis, her bichon frise, panted eagerly, carrying his leash. She heard his low whine.

“Just you and me now, Miles,” she said.

A jade bangle, green and luminous, hung by the beveled mirror, on the birch branch where she kept her jewelry. It caught the gleam from the barge lights. It had been given to her by an old Vietnamese woman for good luck. She felt its cold smoothness as she slipped it onto her wrist, then pulled on a black down jacket, looped two wool scarves around her neck, and descended the drafty stairs, her heart leaden, to walk her dog.

A January night, and she felt as if she and Miles Davis were the only ones in Paris. Except for the ghosts.

She had lost her man.

A barge floated by with red Christmas lights still strung along the sides, framing the flat deck. A scratchy strain of a song accompanied by an accordion, reached her and she heard the lapping of wavelets.

Miles Davis wandered along, sniffing around the metal grille that surrounded the base of a leafless tree. She rubbed the jade but no reassuring warmth answered.

Her cell phone vibrated in her coat pocket. Guy?

“Allo,” she said, hope in her voice.

“Bibiche!” She recognized Laure Rousseau’s voice. Laure was the daughter of her father’s first partner, and the endearment was the one she’d used since they were eight years old. “Come celebrate, Ouvrier’s retiring. Remember him?”

Ouvrier was a horse-faced flic from her father’s old Commissariat. She heard conversation and the pinging of a pinball machine in the background. A bar? Not her scene, with a bunch of old flics reminiscing and drinking, the type who’d joined the force before the earth’s crust had cooled.

“I’ve got good news, bibiche. Don’t I owe you a drink?”

“Sounds like you’ve already started.”

“The seat next to me is warm,” Laure said.

Aimee thought of her empty apartment filled with cold, stale air.

“Place Pigalle, you remember L’Oiseau?” Singing erupted in the background.

She’d prefer falling off a stool with Laure to drinking by herself at the corner bistro.

Aimee looked down. The snow crystals crunched below her feet. Miles Davis had finished; she could take him upstairs.

“I’ll grab a taxi. See you in fifteen minutes.”

THIS SLICE of Montmartre had witnessed several heydays. Before the turn of the century, Edgar Degas had discovered his models here among the grisettes, young women waiting for work amid the horse-drawn milk carts. Now the sex clubs and cut-rate North African shops contributed a different flavor. Still, pockets of cobbled lanes with two-story artists’ ateliers dotted the route winding up to Sacre Coeur, which crowned the steep hill.

Aimee entered L’Oiseau through a haze of cigarette smoke and close, steamy air; the party was in full swing. Thank God she’d stuck on a second Nicorette patch in the taxi. Plainclothes flics, in their sixties and older, propped up the zinc bar and sat at the small round tables. She recognized several faces, men who’d worked with her father. They were more at home at a zinc bar than in their own kitchens. In this group, where she had once belonged, she now felt like an outsider.

Her godfather, Morbier, a commissaire, sat at the counter, his tweed elbow-patched jacket smelling of wet wool. She brightened, seeing a gold paper crown tilted on his salt-and-pepper hair, incongruous with his basset- hound drooping eyes and sagging cheeks. A half-eaten slice of Galette du Roi, Epiphany cake, and a small ceramic Santon charm sat in front of him.

Where was Guy? Forget it. She needed a drink.

“Now you’re the king, eh, Morbier? Where’s Laure?” she asked, motioning to the owner and helping herself to an almond-paste-filled tart. She took a sip from Morbier’s glass, then another. “The same please, Jean.”

She felt a tap on her shoulder and turned.

Laure Rousseau, grinning, stood framed against a yellowed Marseilles soccer-team poster that was peeling from the tobacco-stained walls. As always, her hand flicked across her mouth, a small self-conscious movement she made to hide the thin white line crossing her upper lip, the remnant of a cleft palate long since corrected by surgery.

“So, bibiche,” Laure said, her brown eyes scanning Aimee, “you want to talk about the truck that ran you down?”

That obvious? Aimee choked and spilled her glass. Burgundy splattered on the zinc counter. Laure reached for a rag and wiped up the mess.

“That bad?” Laure asked again.

She nodded. “Guy’s on call. Permanently on call.”

“Aaah, the eye doctor. You’ve broken up?” Laure asked. “I’m sorry.”

Aimee tapped her foot on the cracked brown tiled floor littered with sugar-cube wrappers and cigarette butts. “I blew it.

But rather than go into it, maybe I should leave. I don’t want to spoil the evening.”

Laure put her arm around Aimee’s shoulder. “Let’s get rid of that long face. Tell me.”

And Aimee did.

“He’ll be back,“ Laure said.

“I’m not holding my breath. We’re too different.” Aimee picked up a new glass and threw back a shot. Men came and went, didn’t they? There was always another one. With more wine, she’d convince herself of that and maybe get through the night.

“Bibiche.” Laure hugged her. “You can have anyone in here, anytime. The trouble is they’re all divorced, can’t keep a relationship going for a minute, and are as old as your Papa and mine.”

“As old as my father would have been,” Aimee said. “It’s been five years, Laure.” The Place Vendome explosion that had killed her father was now just a lost file in the Ministry, the one lead she’d had from Interpol . . . cold by now. She tried to shove these thoughts aside, too.

How familiar this smoky cafe-bar was. The kind where she and Laure had sat playing endless tic-tac-toe games, while their fathers worked weekend stakeouts.

She noticed the furrow in Laure’s brow and that her friend kept tossing back her long straight brown hair nervously. The navy blue pantsuit hung on her.

“You’ve lost weight,” Aimee said.

Laure averted her close-set brown eyes.

“I can’t keep these dinosaurs in line,” Laure said, a beat later. “At least the old-school types don’t toss out sexual innuendos every five minutes and tease me like the new recruits at the Commissariat do. My life’s on the line