Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

A flash of red disappeared around the corner. Madame Wu.

Aimee glimpsed a few Chinese people crowding the short walkway behind the luggage shop. The dark walkway between the buildings was crowded with garbage bins, wood palettes, old cart wheels, the view ending in a dim red lantern shining on back stairs. Not a hundred yards from the resto. Her shoulders tightened.

“Meizi lives here above the shop.” Rene panted, his breath frosting in the cold. The windows he pointed to were dark. Where were the Wus?

Aimee fought a rising panic, picking her way through Chinese people of all ages, mumbling and scraping their feet on the ice.

“Has someone been …?” Aimee’s question was interrupted by a woman’s piercing scream. People jostled her shoulder as they ran away, their footsteps thudding on the snow. Shivering in the cold and full of misgivings, Aimee crossed the now deserted walkway.

Not Meizi, non … don’t let it be Meizi.

A rat, fat and brown, its tail the length of its long, wet, furred body, scurried down the steps over the new- fallen snow. It left a trail of red in its wake.

At the foot of the crumbling stone stairs by Meizi’s door, a man’s snow-dusted trouser-clad leg sprawled from a wooden palette. She gasped. Bits of gnawed, bloody flesh, orange peels, and black wool threads trailed in the snow. Good God. Her stomach lurched. The rat.

Aimee couldn’t peel her horrified gaze from the corpse, which was half wrapped in clear plastic, the kind used to secure merchandise to palettes. The man’s matted red hair, prominent nose, and cheekbones all melded, smooth and tight, under the clear plastic. Her gaze traveled to his wide, terrified eyes, then to his mouth, frozen open in a snowflake-dusted scream.

She stumbled and caught herself on the ice-glazed wall. Who was he? He hadn’t been here long, judging by the light coating of snow. Where was Meizi?

“Mon Dieu,” Rene said, stepping back. He took a few steps and pounded on Meizi’s back door.

No answer.

Aimee gathered up her long leopard-print coat and stepped with care around the dirtied snow, avoiding the overturned garbage bin’s contents.

Her insides churned. She shouldn’t have looked at the eyes.

A pair of black-framed glasses lay in the snow beside his gnawed calf. Crinkled papers, a half-open wallet. Using a dirty plastic bag to cover her hands, she picked the wallet up. No cash or credit cards. Cleaned out.

“Come on, Aimee,” Rene said. “The flics will handle this. We have to find Meizi.”

Wedged deep in the wallet’s fold she found a creased Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers library card with an address and the name Pascal Samour. The photo showed a younger version of the pale face in plastic before her.

She turned the card over.

“Put that down, Aimee,” Rene said.

Stuck to the other side of the library card by gummy adhesive was a smudged photo of a Chinese girl with a glossy ponytail. Meizi. “But look, Rene.”

He gasped, and his face fell. He stepped back, shaking his head. “I don’t understand.”

She caught her breath. “He knew Meizi, Rene. What if she …”

“You think she’s involved?” he sputtered. “Impossible.”

He punched numbers on his cell phone. “She’s still not answering. She’s in trouble.”

At that moment, wide flashlight beams blinded Aimee. She stumbled, dropped the wallet. Static and voices barked from a walkie-talkie: “First responders, truck thirteen. Alert medical backup we’re in the walkway.”

“Someone reported this incident,” the pompier medic shouted, his blue anorak crunching with snow. “Was that you?”

Aimee shook her head.

His colleague brushed past her with his resuscitator equipment. He pulled on latex gloves, took out clippers and snipped the plastic away, revealing that the man’s wrists were bound behind him. The medic felt the man’s carotid artery. A formality. He shook his head.

A shout erupted. A bedraggled figure came down a side staircase shaking his fist. He wore a matted fur coat, a sleep mask on his forehead, and orange slippers. “I’m trying to sleep.”

Aimee hadn’t noticed the crumbling stairs, the bricked-up windows. Or the Permis de Demolir sign on the building. Condemned.

“How many times have we told you to stay in the shelter, Clodo?” said the second medic.

“They took my wine,” the homeless man said in a rasping voice.

She wondered why the rats hadn’t chewed him, too. “Did you hear anything? Or see this man attacked, Clodo?”

“Every night I hear the angels sing. Then the devils come. Like you.” A loud burp.

“Clochards.” The medic shrugged. “Guess this is one for the flics.” His partner packed away the resuscitator.

“You’re going to leave him like that?” Rene shivered beside her in the footprinted snow. Aimee scanned the ground, but the wallet with Meizi’s picture had disappeared.

“Alors, it’s not like he’s going to spoil in the heat.” The words came from an arriving blue-uniformed flic with a roll of crime-scene tape. “What’s this kid doing here?”

Rene blinked. His snowflaked eyelashes quivered. He hated being mistaken for a child.

“Need your eyes checked?” Aimee glared at the flic.

The flic gestured to his partner, who was approaching from the street. Behind him she saw the blue van. The crime-scene unit piled out.

“You two,” said the flic, “in the van for questioning.”

AT THE REAR counter in nearby Cafe des Arts et Metiers, Aimee squeezed Rene’s arm. On edge, she tapped her stiletto boot heel on the mosaic tile. She wanted to discover where the hell Meizi had disappeared to. And get Rene home.

Still, if they had to be questioned, the cafe beat the frigid police van. They’d allowed her to clean up in the cafe’s WC. Two blocks from the scene of the murder, in the warm cafe by the Metro station, felt like another world.

Several flics and plainclothes hunched over espresso at the counter. Their wet coats dripped on the floor. Little pools formed at their feet among scattered sugar wrappers and cigarette butts. Odd, so many flics here at this hour.

A clearing throat interrupted her thoughts. “Mademoiselle Leduc, you were saying …”

“My partner’s in shock.” Aimee turned to Prevost, the chef de groupe of the Police Judiciaire. Late thirties, stocky and sallow-faced, a permanent downturn to his thin lips. He stood ramrod straight, his close-set eyes not unlike those of the rat that had gnawed the corpse.

“This is a formality, you said,” she reminded him. “My partner’s got nothing to hide.”

Prevost tilted his head and leaned in. She could feel his hot breath on her face. “Do you?”

She slammed her hand on the counter, and Prevost flew back. “Just the run in my stocking,” she said.

“Witnesses need to cooperate, Mademoiselle.”

Her taxes paid his salary and she didn’t care for his attitude. “Witnesses? Talk to whoever called this in. There was a whole crowd in the walkway before we got there.”

“Like usual in Chinatown, everyone’s disappeared.”

Disappeared?

Aimee had an uneasy feeling Prevost had defaulted to them as suspects. Meizi’s photo in Samour’s wallet didn’t make her feel any better. Best to go to the head honcho. “I want to speak with le Proc.” She straightened, crossing her arms.