Authors: Susanne Alleyn
“Does she have an alibi?” François continued as they elbowed their way through the excited crowd. “Did she ever claim she was somewhere else that afternoon?”
“Not that I know of. The other lodgers in the boardinghouse all swore that she was rarely absent from meals, and that they would have remembered if she had gone missing on a
décadi
, when everyone turns up because the food is better that day. That puts her at the Maison Deluc by eight o’clock in the evening. She might have been anywhere between dinner and supper, though.”
He shared a roast chicken and a dish of beets with François in a nearby tavern and, when they were done, could not remember a word of what they had talked about.
Something small, inconsequential, something he had overlooked … something to do with Rosalie, something he had seen on the day the examining magistrate had questioned her.
They returned for the afternoon session, hurrying through the great gilt-tipped gates to the courtyard of the Palais de Justice. Abruptly Aristide stopped short, looking up at the gates and their heavy locks.
Locks—no,
keys
. Something about a key. Rosalie’s key.
“You go ahead,” he told François. “Don’t save my seat for me. I’ve business elsewhere.”
He hurried down the steps to the door of the Conciergerie. Presenting his police card to the prison clerk, he asked to be shown the inventory of the items that had been found, upon admission, on the person of the prisoner Juliette Vaudray.
“Nothing out of the ordinary, it seems to me,” said the clerk as he fetched his records. “Vaudray, Vaudray … here we are, transferred from La Force, admitted on the fourteenth of Frimaire, Juliette Vaudray, widow Ferré, called Rosalie Clément—that the one?”
Aristide nodded.
“A charming young woman, by all accounts.” The clerk turned the book about and thrust it toward Aristide. “The turnkeys are quite taken with her. We let her keep most of her personal possessions,” he added. “Handkerchiefs, things of that sort.”
Aristide glanced over the short list of articles. One civic identity card made out in the name of Rosalie Clément; one penknife; four steel hairpins; money to the sum of two livres six sous in copper coin, and 370 livres in assignats, a paltry sum that might buy the value of four or five livres in gold or silver; two dissimilar latchkeys of ordinary type—
“Keys,”
Aristide said, staring at the inventory. “
Two
keys, unalike. Do you carry two latchkeys?”
“No, just one.” The clerk closed the book, uninterested. “To my lodgings. The porter opens the street door for us.”
“Exactly. So do I. So does nearly everyone who hasn’t a household to run. Only bourgeois housewives carry bunches of keys with them. But the rest of us—bachelors, folk who live alone or in small establishments—the porter opens the front door for you, or one of the servants if it’s a boardinghouse; or if the porter can’t be bothered, the front door remains open all day, then by law is bolted at ten o’clock and you have to ring. Why two keys?”
The clerk shrugged. “How should I know?”
One key for her room at the boardinghouse,
Aristide thought,
and one key for … what? A trunk or a strongbox? She didn’t have one. The front door? Why can’t the maid open it? For … for the door to Aubry’s apartment, even?
“Citizen, I’ll need to borrow those keys for a while.”
#
Neither key fit the lock to Aubry’s apartment. Aristide went on to Rue des Cordiers and rang the bell at the Maison Deluc. The middle-aged servant soon answered the door and warily ushered him inside.
“Before I interview the other tenants,” he said, after assuring her that the police were not about to invade the house again, “I should like to try a key in this door.”
“Who gave you a key to the front door, citizen?”
“Do the tenants not have keys to it?”
“No. The front door is always unlocked during the day, from six in the morning till ten, when it’s bolted according to the regulations, and someone’s there to let them in until midnight. The guests only have keys to their own rooms.”
“So why would a tenant here be carrying two latchkeys with her?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said the maid. “One would be for her room. Maybe the other is for someone else’s. They do that sometimes, exchange spare keys, if they strike up a friendship.”
Frowning, Aristide tried the keys in the front door. Neither would turn. Marching up the five flights to Rosalie’s room, he tried them again. One of them opened the door to reveal a startled young man hunched over a pile of books at his desk.
“Citizeness Deluc’s already rented it out,” the maid explained, apologetic. “As soon as the police took away all Citizeness Clément’s things and took the seals off … there’s no money to be had from leaving it empty.”
“Heaven forbid,” Aristide said. “All right, then. This larger key opens this door. Can your mistress spare you to go round with me to the other rooms?”
The maid led him down through the lower floors of the boardinghouse. Several of the tenants were at home and volunteered information, or opinions, about their former fellow boarder. Hadn’t been living in the house long, only since the summer; quiet; kept to herself, even at mealtimes; spoke little about herself; seemed to have no family. Occasionally went out by herself in the evening, to the theater she said, but returned before midnight. Never received letters. No one could have
ever
imagined they were living in the same house as a murderess.
The extra key fit none of the locks.
With some relief, Aristide extricated himself from a disagreeable old lady and proceeded to the next tenant, a medical student named Lumière who had just arrived back from the nearby Academy of Surgery.
“What can you tell me about Rosalie Clément?” he asked, for the seventh time, strolling with the young man into the empty dining room where a persistent odor of boiled cabbage seemed to cling to the tatty tablecloth and curtains.
“I thought the police were done asking their questions,” Lumière remarked with a saucy grin. “They sending their spies to nose around and finish the job?”
“To ask the questions they neglected to ask,” Aristide said, ignoring his impertinence. “What did they ask you?”
“Oh, the usual rubbish. Did I see her on the day of the murders, and did I see her looking guilty or apprehensive afterward, all that. How am I supposed to remember what I saw a month ago?”
“How well did you know her?”
“Not as well as I’d have liked. She was civil, but no more.”
“You admired her?”
“Well, she was passably pretty. And she lived alone, without any tiresome chaperones to get in the way. Lonely young widow, easy enough, you’d think. But she already had a lover.”
Aristide stared at him for an instant, speechless. Rosalie? A
lover?
“Are you quite sure?”
“Well, she had a friend in the background, to be sure. She never mentioned anyone, when the talk and the gossip got a bit racy at dinner, so I thought perhaps I had a chance with her. But she never played along.
You
know.” He winked and threw himself into the nearest chair.
“How do you know about him? Who is he?”
Lumière grinned. “Don’t know. Might have been a woman, for all I know. One late afternoon a couple of months ago I’d no lectures, and nothing else to do, so when I saw her leaving the house, I thought I’d trail after her. If it was only a stroll to the Luxembourg, it was still an opportunity to start a conversation.”
“And did she go to the gardens?” Aristide said, disregarding Lumière’s leer.
“No, she set off across the river, to a mangy quarter near the Hôtel de Ville. Not a very pleasant area for a rendezvous. But she went into a house and didn’t come out again. I waited for over an hour, and plenty of other people went in and out, but she didn’t. What else would she be doing in a place like that, except meeting a lover for a cuddle? So I gave up on the pretty widow and found myself a little shopgirl instead.”
He remembered the approximate location of the house, a street or two away from the City Hall, with a tavern on the ground floor. Aristide returned to the Right Bank and, after two fruitless inquiries at taverns, found himself at last on Rue du Cocq, in the ancient, crowded, and squalid quarter north of the Place de Grève. At the tavern once known, according to the painted-over carvings above the door, as the Cabaret du Fleur-de-Lys, and now as the Good Patriot, a barmaid pointed him to an unshaven man reading a newspaper in the corner and puffing at a pipe.
“Would you be wanting lodgings upstairs?” the man inquired, swinging his legs from a chair. “Furnished rooms, reasonable rent, pay by the quarter. The name’s Barbier. Care for a glass?”
“I might be looking for a simple room,” Aristide said, hailing the barmaid. “Nothing too large. For one or two people.”
“Just big enough for a bed, eh?” the landlord said with a knowing smirk. “I have a few like those, on the upper floors, cheap. If the lady doesn’t mind climbing stairs.”
Aristide decided subtlety would gain him little. “I am an authorized agent of the police,” he said, showing Barbier his police card, “and I’m tracing one of your lodgers, or one of your lodgers’ guests. A woman of twenty-eight, medium height, dark brown hair, brown eyes, modestly dressed, speaks well. She probably arrives here alone to meet a friend. Do you know her?”
“A woman by herself?” The girl brought their glasses of cheap brandy and Barbier tossed down a swallow, smacking his lips. “It’s probably Citizeness Clément you want. Good tenant—”
“Clément?” Aristide set down his glass untasted. “Show me her room.”
None too pleased at having to climb to the garrets, Barbier led the way up the narrow, rickety staircase that spiraled at the back of the noisome courtyard, to the sounds of squalling babies, hoarse shouting, and the clatter of cooking pots and crockery. At the seventh-floor landing he pointed, puffing, at the second door and pulled out a ring of keys, but Aristide raised a restraining hand.
“Let me try first.”
The spare key slid neatly into the lock. Within, the sloping garret ceiling constricted the room until it was scarcely large enough for the battered bedstead, traveling trunk, table, chair, brazier, and washstand that were its only furniture. Prompted by Lumière, a secret love nest had been his own first notion, but he began to doubt it with a glance at the lumpy, narrow bed, little larger than a cot. Two could not have lain on that bed with any comfort, let alone pleasure.
“Is the furniture yours or hers?” he inquired, dropping his hat on the bed.
“The trunk is hers. The rest comes with the room. She said a double bed wasn’t necessary and took the cot instead, in exchange for a lower rent.”
Aristide’s gaze roved to the wall and a row of pegs. Two men’s coats hung from them, one a plainly cut redingote in dark moss-green, the other a more elegant fawn-colored frock coat in last year’s exaggerated cut with oversize collar, still passably stylish. A pair of top boots stood below them, one leaning against the other like a weary comrade.
He turned to Barbier. “You did say a young woman let this room? These are all men’s things.”
“Oh yes, Citizeness Clément.” He described Rosalie and rocked back on his heels, blowing a smoke ring. “Though I did see a well-dressed young fellow once or twice, just going in or out, late at night. I asked her who he was, and she said he was her brother.”
“The world’s oldest subterfuge,” Aristide said dryly.
“He might have been her brother, at that; I didn’t get a good look at him, but I’d say he resembled her. She said he rarely came to Paris. But it’s not my business if she has a friend to stay the night now and then.”
A glance beneath the bed revealed nothing but dust and mouse droppings. Aristide ran his fingers through the handful of gossamer black ash in the brazier, soft and frail as cobweb, but found no clue as to Rosalie’s purpose.
A shelf beneath the tiny mirror held a box of rice powder, a pot of rouge, a comb, a pair of scissors, a clothes brush, and a small cardboard box full of hairpins and a few frayed ribbons. Nothing else betrayed a woman’s presence. At last Aristide threw open the trunk’s lid and peered inside.
On top of a stack of neatly folded shirts lay a black low-crowned round hat.
“
So he does exist,” Brasseur said. He peered into the chest. About to quit the commissariat for the night, Aristide’s urgent message had sent him jouncing irritably across Paris to Rue du Cocq. What Aristide had found had quickly put him in a better humor. “I was beginning to think he was just a myth.”
“He
is
a myth,” Aristide said.
“Eh?”
“She told her landlord here that he was her brother—”
“Her
brother,
” Brasseur scoffed.
“—and he believed her because he saw the resemblance. But at her boardinghouse, no one remembered her ever mentioning any family at all.”
Brasseur grunted and lifted out the hat. “Smallish head,” he muttered, gazing at it. He clapped it on his own head, where it perched precariously and then slid off as he turned to Aristide. “Wouldn’t fit me, or you either. The man, whoever he is, isn’t very big. Look at this coat. I doubt you could struggle into it, and you’re no Hercules.”