AL06 - Murder in Montmartre

“Her voice sounded slurred over the phone. Do you have her door key? Would you mind opening the door for me?” She flashed her detective badge.

His eyes crinkled in interest. “A detective in kitten heels?”

“Let’s forget the fashion commentary.”

“I bet you ride a scooter, too.”

He meant Aimee didn’t look like a professional. What should a detective look like?

“Should I wear some kind of uniform to look official and stand out in a crowd?”

If Rene were here, he would have shot her a warning look. A ripple of chimes came from inside the neighbor’s apartment.

“Desole,” he said and slammed the door.

Her feet hurt, the cold air chilled her legs, and her patience was exhausted. She pounded on his door until he opened it.

“Look, I’m on official inquiry. You must cooperate with me.”

His eyes widened and he stepped back. “Bossy, aren’t you?”

“Nathalie’s in trouble,” she said. Deep trouble from the sound of her voice.

“The spirits won’t like that.”

“The spirits? Ask me if I care!” Too bad she hadn’t kept the fish-gutter knife. She stepped closer and glared at him.

He read the message in her eyes.

A moment later, he held out a key chain around the frame of the door. She took it, tried the keys until one fit, turned it, and opened the door.

“Merci,” she said, delivering the keys back to him. Then at Nathalie’s door she called, “Allo?”

She found Nathalie sprawled in her vomit on the parquet floor. Labored breaths whistled from her open mouth. The phone and pill bottle lay next to her.

She panicked, then reached under Nathalie’s shoulders, dragged her to the small bathroom, and put Nathalie’s head over the toilet.

“Come on, Nathalie, get the rest out!” she urged.

Nathalie’s head rolled, her black hair clumped to her thin cheekbones.

Aimee grabbed the rubber gloves by the bottle of CIF cleanser near the shower, pulled them on, and stuck her finger down Nathalie’s throat. A loud heave was followed by a spew. All over Aimee’s leopard-print heels and the floor, missing the bowl.

And for fifteen francs more she could have waterproofed them.

Then Nathalie heaved again, this time on target.

“Nathalie. Nathalie, can you hear me?”

Her head lay on the toilet-bowl rim.

So much for relentlessly questioning her about Jacques’s gambling.

Aimee stepped out of her shoes, put them in the sink, and toweled off. In the other room, she picked up Nathalie’s phone and dialed 17 for SAMU, the ambulance corps, and gave the address.

“I found Nathalie Gagnard unconscious with a half-bottle of Ambien, I got her to throw up—”

Clicks and a sound like waves in the background.

“You’ve got to hurry.”

“We’re sending an ambulance that’s already in the area,” said a calm-sounding dispatcher. “It should arrive in three to five minutes.”

“There are several flights of stairs,” Aimee said.

“Aah, a Montmartre special,” the dispatcher said. “So no ballerina medics on this call. Thanks for letting us know.”

“Any advice?”

“Check for other pills.”

Aimee rooted around on the floor and found some pills in the cracks between the wood slats. “I just scooped up more Ambien from the floor.”

“Make sure her mouth stays clear and she can breathe, that there’s no obstruction,” said the dispatcher without missing a beat.

THE STRETCHER carrying Nathalie bumped the wall, and one of the buff paramedics, a Hopital Bichat armband straining around his arm, swore. Aimee shut Nathalie’s apartment door behind them, used the rest of the CIF to clean up the mess on the floor, and set her shoes to dry by the heating vent. That done, she located coffee beans in the freezer of Nathalie’s trunk-sized refrigerator, ground them, and found a beat-up metal Alessi all-in-one espresso maker. She lit the gas burner, which flared to life with a blue flame.

She wouldn’t leave this apartment until she found some evidence documenting Jacques’s gambling. The two rooms, wrapped around the corner of the building, remained quasi-intact with a high recessed sculpted ceiling, and she realized this had once been part of a ballroom. A faded charm remained despite its crude conversion into living room and sleeping nook.

While the espresso maker dripped and hissed, she searched the apartment. No desk, no files, no books. Nothing. Just a pile of well-thumbed Marie Claire magazines and a parakeet, asleep in a covered birdcage, a box of bird seed below. Where did Nathalie keep her bills, paychecks, records?

She checked the kitchen cabinets, under the sisal rug, unzipped the sofa cover, checked the lamp shades, and felt for anything taped under the table. Again, nothing. In Nathalie’s armoire, she found a selection of skirts, white shirts, several jackets, and one black dress. And an array of colorful scarves to dress up her basic wardrobe.

Didn’t she ever wear jeans?

Aimee got on her knees and struck gold. Under Nathalie’s bed she found a squat olive green file cabinet. Nicked, old—and locked. She levered it out and pushed it across the floor to the kitchen where she swiveled her nail file inside the lock. Instead of popping open, the lock jammed and broke. Just her luck! Par for the course, she thought, a perfect accompaniment to an eventful evening: a knife held to her throat; an encounter with a moody, sarcastic artiste whose touch she wanted to forget; Felix Conari’s reminder of his affiliation with church and state; and only a garbled reference to Jacques’s gambling from a pilled-out Nathalie. And then Nathalie’s special addition, vomit on her good heels!

Bound and determined to find something while her shoes dried, she rooted through the kitchen drawers, found a meat-tenderizer mallet, summoned her energy, and whacked the lock, over and over, until it cracked.

Feeling better, she tried jimmying the top drawer open, only to end up using a can opener to open its side. Inside lay financial statements in folders going back some years. The second drawer held letters, and the third, mostly receipts and clippings.

She stirred two brown-sugar cubes into the chipped espresso cup and sipped, yawning while scanning the files. Statements from the last five years, requiring tedious checking. She opened the window a crack, trying to keep her head clear. Below lay the frosted, skeletal grape vines that produced a harvest each fall. The pride of Montmartre, but acidic. An acquired taste. She found a crocheted blue blanket and wrapped it around her feet.

Bankruptcy papers, the divorce decree. She leaned forward and got to work. The plaintive strains of someone practicing the cello accompanied the drip of melting ice outside Nathalie’s window.

Boring, routine checking of handwritten financial notes and printed bank documents. After half an hour she discovered the discrepancies. Big discrepancies. And easy to track after she’d discovered the pattern.

The large deposits had started three months ago, coinciding with the Gagnards’ divorce decree and bankruptcy. No moonlighting flic made fifty thousand francs a month working part-time! No wonder Jacques had convinced Nathalie to keep the driving school. It was a perfect place to stow the infusion of francs that had been deposited every month for three months. A simple way to hide blackmail?

Looking around the clean, utilitarian kitchen and IKEA assemble-it-yourself apartment furnishings, she doubted whether he had shared the largesse with Nathalie. Simple greed, always demanding more . . . had that been his downfall?

But this didn’t dispel the possibility that it was something Jacques knew that had killed him.

With the few rigged machines she’d seen, she doubted Zette could afford a fifty-thousand-francs-a-month payoff. Jacques could have collected from other small bar owners and mined the district. A pattern?