AL06 - Murder in Montmartre

Answer.

“Aimee, forgive the late notice.” The husky voice of Martine, her best friend since the lycee, boomed over the line. “Gilles shot more pheasant than we can eat in a lifetime. They’re plucked, herbed, and roasting. And there’s a perfect Brillat-Savarin for after dinner. Say you and Guy will come, please.”

These days, Martine inhabited the world of the Sixteenth Arrondissement. Soirees and chateaux on the weekend. Courtesy of her boyfriend, Gilles. But that milieu was staid and lifeless to Aimee.

“Martine, I can’t talk,” she whispered, turning toward the canal.

“Did you and Guy fight again?”

“Eh, what’s that?”

“You heard me, Aimee.”

No use pretending. Might as well come clean. She could never keep the truth from Martine for long.

She cupped her hand over her mouth. “Guy moved out, Martine,” she whispered. “This is not a good time.” She squirmed, embarrassed that Lucien Sarti might overhear her.

“Then, of course, you must come!” Martine said, her husky voice rising. “Gilles’s colleague from Le Point’s here. You’d like him.”

The conservative right-leaning journal, known for nostalgic articles on the de Gaulle era? Not likely.

“Look, this mec’s chasing me. . . .” Aimee whispered.

“Lust often, love always, as they say. You sure don’t let the grass grow under your heels!” Martine said. “A bad boy?”

“Bad-bad.”

“Tiens! You mean . . . nom de Dieu! Not this again . . . you’re not getting involved!”

“Later, Martine.” She clicked her phone off and turned back.

“Your man moved out, eh?” Lucien said.

She wanted the metal sewer lid under her feet to open up.

Sarti leaned his long legs against the skating-rink fence. The glittering quayside lights reflected in his eyes. Faraway eyes. “My woman . . . once she was my woman . . . belongs to someone else now.”

“I’m sorry.” Caught off balance, she didn’t know what else to say. These things happened. As she well knew.

“Life’s like a train,” he said, his voice low. “I got off too soon.”

Maybe she had, too. Not tried hard enough with Guy. Now, in some way, she felt that she and Sarti shared something, as if they paddled in the same boat.

She had to get back to the point.

“Let’s discuss that guy, the one framing you. Your doppel-ganger? How do you know him?”

“Petru?”

“If he’s the one who looks so much like you.”

“He’s from another clan,” Lucien Sarti told her. “He’s different from me.”

Clan? Sounded old-fashioned, insular.

“What do you mean?” she asked. She kept her eye on the sparse crowd at the crepe stall under the arcade. A kerosene lantern hung from the cart. She heard the scraping of ice skates, scattered laughter of couples, and the strains of a Strauss waltz wavering on the wind.

He should have been fearful, but Lucien Sarti appeared sad and wistful. He didn’t seem like a killer.

“I miss the rhythm of village life,” he said. “Here the horns beep at a red light, one runs from one Metro stop to the next. Rushing, always rushing. In Corsica the pace of life is human.”

“Petru appears to have adapted pretty well,” she said. “Who does he work for?”

“You should know,” he said.

She thought quickly. Of course. Yann Marant had said Lucien Sarti had arrived at the party later. “You were at Monsieur Conari’s party. How do Petru and his goons fit in?”

“Goons? All I know is that she . . . someone warned me Petru had planted terrorist pamphlets in the recording studio and arranged for the flics to arrest me.”

“Do you believe this woman?”

His eyebrows rose. “Why should I doubt her?”

Why frame him as a terrorist? How did that connect to Jacques’s murder? Too many pieces—odd, disparate ones. How to connect them?

“Why would Petru implicate you, then follow you?”

“Like I said, he’s not from my village.” Lucien paused with a tight smile. “Who knows? My great-uncle could have stolen his father’s mule. Eh, it’s just like you Parisians characterize us.”

“Interesting angle, musician. You’re the one stereotyping.”

“So, you willing to hang out with an alleged Corsican Separatist?” He interrupted, shooting her a look.

Cut the sarcasm, she wanted to say.

“Not if I can help it.” No reason for him to know she made a beeline for bad boys, once even a Neo-Nazi who’d turned out to be a good guy in disguise. “Convince me you’re not one.”

“To you, we’re goatherds with shotguns, taking care of vendettas, savage and wild like our island, eh?”

“Let’s get back to the point. What did you see the night Jacques Gagnard was killed?”

“You, handcuffed, being herded into the police van,” he said, not skipping a beat.

There was more, she sensed it.

“Did you hear shots?”

His hand trembled for an instant on the ice-coated railing.

“I think you saw something,” she said.

“You’re not a flic.”

“I told you, I’m a private detective,” she said. “Someone framed my friend but I’m going to get her off.”

“That’s what this is about?” His fingers relaxed.

She nodded. “I found Jacques Gagnard, dying, on the snow-covered roof. His heart still responded, his eyes blinked.” She looked down at a hole in a patch of gray snow. “He tried to tell me something. His eyes communicated. It’s hard to describe.”

The flics had dismissed it as a dying person’s involuntary response. Why was she telling him this? She should shut up, ask the questions.

Lucien rubbed his arms and leaned on the railing. “They gunned down my grandfather in the village. He bled to death under a chestnut tree,” he said, his voice low. “It took a long time. I sat with him as the shadows lengthened. A dragonfly fluttered, attracted to the blood on his chest. His three fingers moved . . . and moved . . . my brother told me I imagined it. I was young.” He paused, rubbed the growth of stubble on his cheek. “A week later my uncle found the murderers, three of them, hiding in a lemon grove.”

He shrugged. “I still see the branches swollen with fruit, lemons fallen split and pulped on the dirt, their citrus scent mingled with the metallic tang of blood. Revenge, that I would have taken, an obligation to my grandfather. . . .”

His eyes seemed faraway. He spoke hesitantly yet he was confiding something deeply felt. No stranger had ever spoken to her like this—by turns intimate, sarcastic, then sad.

She was sure he knew more than he was telling about Jacques Gagnard.

“Let’s try again. Tell me what happened. Why weren’t you questioned at the party?”

He turned away, his face in shadow.

“You need my help, musician. Assuming you’ve told me the truth.”

“Revenge, that’s in my culture. I helped you, didn’t I? Let it go. I’ll get by on my own.”

“With the CRS roaming everywhere? There’s probably an alert out on you already if you’re a member of Armata Corsa.”

“Not me. Not anymore. You are misinformed. I play music. That’s what I do.”

“How do I know you weren’t working with Petru? You could have killed Jacques Gagnard, and set another flic up, then double-crossed Petru. And maybe that’s why he’s after you.”

Was that hurt in his eyes?