Murder at the Lanterne Rouge (6 page)

She’d rather see the other set of books she figured he kept. He was prepared. He’d expected a visit.

“
Zut!
You leave me no option. We’ll run your fingerprints in our database, and check them against the prints on file for identification.” She smiled and held up the plastic bag with the nail polish bottle from her purse. “Glass shows prints so well. Unless you’d like to tell me where you’ve hidden the Wus?”

He glanced at his cell phone. Then at her. Deciding. “Come back later.”

“Why? So you can check with Ching Wao?”

A horn tooted on the street. “Big shipment.” And before she could press him, he’d hurried after the delivery man out the door to the waiting truck. But instead of unloading, he jumped in the passenger seat and the truck roared away.

Great. René would have done better getting answers with his Glock. All she’d done was shake the tree, and now the birds had flown.

But frustration wouldn’t get her answers. Aimée ducked behind the counter and explored the back of the shop. Boxes, cartons, a cracked, stained porcelain sink. Dark, empty cupboards. Wet mops leaning against the cobwebbed, padlocked back door. No one had used this door in a long time. Barred windows filmed with dirt looked onto the narrow walkway. The place reeked of damp and mildew. No one hid here, or would want to. She followed the cartons into the side hallway. The young woman looked up from the carton she was taping.

“Why are you afraid?” Aimée asked. “Did they tell you to keep quiet?”

The young woman dropped the tape dispenser. Perspiration beaded her lip. “Why you bother me? Why you make problem?”

“Problem? I think you’ll have a problem when the
flics
ask to see your ID, your residence permit. Or don’t you have one?”

“You no understand.” The girl’s lip trembled.

“Understand what?” Aimée said. “Look, if Meizi’s in trouble, I can help her. So can my partner.”

She could tell the girl understood more than she let on. Aimée’s scarf fell from her arm. “It’s hard feeling alone and afraid. I want to talk with Meizi. Won’t you help me, tell me where she’s gone?
S’il vous plaît
?”

The girl stepped closer, picked up Aimée’s scarf. Met her gaze and pressed the scarf into her hand.

“No good to ask questions. People watch you. Understand?”

A
IMÉE PAUSED AT
the walkway behind the shop, still blocked off by orange-and-white striped crime-scene tape. She wondered what evidence besides the wallet the crime-scene techs found. Wondered if the evidence had degraded in the melting snow. Or with the rats. Could the
flics
identity Meizi from the picture? It would be almost impossible if Meizi were illegal.

L
IKE FINDING A
single snowflake in a gray snowpile in the gutter.

Dejected, she walked, glad to get away from the synthetic smells hovering in the street.

Fake. Like everything else here, in this conspiracy of silence.

The feeling she’d been beaten dogged her.

So far she’d learned the Wus didn’t live above the shop. Meizi cleaned toilets, Monsieur Wu was a different Monsieur Wu. And things stank.

But she had someone’s fingerprints on her
rouge-noir
nail polish bottle. Five minutes later, she’d reached Benoit, a fingerprint analyst in the crime-scene unit on 36 Quai des
Orfèvres. He’d gone to school with her cousin, liked heavy metal. And with the promise of highly coveted concert tickets, agreed to meet her.

With two hours until their rendezvous, she needed to keep busy. Sniff around.

Where rue au Maire elbowed right, she noticed a small hotel, the one-star variety. A
hôtel borné
, her father had called them, a fleabag demi-pension with rooms rented by the hour, typically by working girls, or old men who couldn’t afford anything else rented by the month.

The hotel’s open door led to a booth, then winding stairs. The smell of turmeric and onion mingled with the sweetish odor of tobacco.

A North African man in a red-and-green striped djellaba smoked a hookah in the cubicle of a reception booth. “We’re full,
complet
,” he said. “Try later.”

Aimée wanted information, not a room. She saw hotel business cards on the chipped counter. Sophisticated for a one-star hotel. “Hôtel Moderne, proprieter Aram,” she read. “You’re Aram?”

He shook his head.

“Did you know the man who was murdered last night? Or his girlfriend Meizi, from the luggage shop?”

The man shook his head again. Gave a big, gold-toothed smile. “Better you ask Aram. Knows everybody. Here a long time. But he’s at
le dentiste
.” He pointed to his teeth.

Good chance, then, Aram knew the street talk. Or saw something. At least she figured he didn’t buy into the Chinese wall of silence.

“
Mon dentiste. Très bon
,” he was saying. “You need
dentiste
?”

“
Non, merci
.”

Did she have something stuck in her teeth? She ran her tongue over her teeth to check. But she’d speak with this Aram, the hotel proprietor, later.

In her heeled boots, she picked her way over the melted slush and puddles, avoiding the cobble cracks. She felt eyes on her back. Visiting the luggage store had set off her sensors. The awareness that she was being watched sent a frisson up her spine.

She noticed the quick looks from shop merchants. Everyone here had something to hide. How would she ever find Meizi when she couldn’t even find anyone willing to talk?

The address listed on the dead man’s library card was only a block away. She didn’t know if he lived alone or had a family, but she’d find out. She’d discover his connection to Meizi.

Diesel fumes lingered like a fog in the narrow canyon of street between the blackened stone facades. Aimée walked along the medieval gutter, a worn groove puddled with melted slush, down a passage to the next street. Here, roll-down aluminum shuttered the shop fronts. The old, faded sign of a printing press appeared above a wall plaque commemorating a member of the French Resistance, Henri Chevessier, shot by the Germans in 1943. A lone pigeon pecked at soggy bread crumbs near a drain. A forgotten islet of quiet.

Rusted metal filagree covered the dusty glass in the water-stained door. Aimée located No. 14 and read the nameplate. Samour/Samoukashian lived on the third floor. A married couple? Dread filled her as she thought of a grieving widow.

She kept her leather gloves on as she climbed the steep, unheated steps. Chipped plaster, scuffed baseboards, and sagging landings in between floors in the old tenement testified to the passing of centuries. Her breath frosted in the air. She needed to swim more laps in the pool and forego macaroons, she realized, breathless.

The third-floor door stood ajar. Alarm bells sounded in her head. She wished she had her Beretta, but it was home in her spoon drawer. Then smells of frying garlic reached her. Her stomach growled.

“
Allô?
”

“
Entrez
,” a woman’s quavering voice answered. Polished honey-wood floors gleamed under the high, dark-beamed ceiling. Oil portraits and landscapes hung on the whitewashed walls over fragrant pots of paperwhite narcissus. Not what she’d expected. The man had an exquisite apartment. Like a page out of
Elle Déco
in the “Makeover—what you can do to a historic flat” section.

“M
ADAME
,
excusez-moi
.”

“It’s Mademoiselle,” said the quavering voice. “Come to the kitchen.”

Aimée followed the paprika and garlic smells down the hall. Warmth emanated from the toasty floor. She wanted to take off her wet boots and go barefoot.

A tiny, trim woman, with hair as white as the blooming narcissus, chopped carrots and swept perfect orange circles into a bowl. Leeks and greens tumbled from a string shopping bag on the wooden table.

“My knees.” The woman looked up. Sharp brown eyes in an unlined face, a small scar running under her chin. She set down the knife and rubbed her hands on an apron with what looked like scientific equations printed on it. “At eighty, I only do the stairs twice a day now—not like before.”

Aimée blinked. She felt winded at one go.

“I’ve told you
flics
, I’m tired of questions,” the old woman said. “So if you don’t have answers, quit wasting my time.”

“I’m sorry, but you don’t understand, Mademoiselle Samour …”

“It’s Mademoiselle Samoukashian, can’t you people remember?”

Aimée handed the woman a card. “But I’m not a
flic
. I’m a private detective.”

Interest sparked in the woman’s brown eyes.

“Then sit down.
Café turc
?”

Turkish coffee? Aimée nodded. “
Merci
. Please accept my condolences.”

The woman turned her back on her.

“That doesn’t bring my great-nephew back.”

Nothing would. At a loss, Aimée hesitated. She needed to plow on and find out what she could.

The little woman slipped the chopped carrots into a longhandled brass pot of boiling water, then adjusted the blue flame. “Drumming up business? But you don’t look like an ambulance chaser. Why visit me?”

A sharp-eyed old bird who got to the point, this octogenarian. Aimée draped her leather coat on the thatched cane chair and sat, unbuttoning her vintage checked-wool Chanel jacket, a church bazaar find.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she offered again, the words sounding trite. She took a breath and continued. “But I presumed Pascal Samour lived here.”

“Then you saw my address on Pascal’s old student library card, like the
flics
did.” She nodded. “Bon, I figured you were smarter than you look.”

Aimée dropped her bag, but caught it in time before her mascara, encryption manual, and nail polish scattered across the warm floor.

“Pascal lives … lived near Square du Temple,” said Mademoiselle Samoukashian. “He taught at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.” The engineering school a few blocks away.

“I saw … found his body last night.”

“But how is it a detective just happens to find his body?”

Aimée couldn’t let the old bird intimidate her. She had to find out why Pascal had Meizi’s photo in his wallet.

“That’s why I’m here, Mademoiselle,” she said.

Mademoiselle Samoukashian handed Aimée a Limoges demitasse and saucer. Into it she poured frothing brown liquid, then crowned the coffee with a lip of foam. “Armenian style, with cardamom.”

“
Merci
.”

The old woman uncovered a plate of crescent rolls smelling of apricot. “
Dziranamahig
. We’re Armenian, Mademoiselle,” she said. “My grandparents sought refuge here from the Turkish genocide. And then we were only rounded up again here during the war, that time by French police. Since the last war, I don’t trust the
flics
. And I don’t trust them now. Neither did Pascal.”

The war? “But that was fifty years ago.”

“More. I’m hoping you’re better at math than that.” She shook her head. “Drink. Then I read your grinds. Then we see.”

See what, Aimée wondered.

“Please, first hear me out,” Aimée said, determined to leave out the horrific details. “Last night, my partner and I were eating dinner nearby in Chinatown when an old woman came into the
resto
shouting about a murder. We followed the crowd behind the luggage shop, and your … and we found Pascal. Everyone ran away, but I picked up his wallet to learn his identity. There was nothing in it but his library card.”

“That’s all you know?” Sadness pooled in Mademoiselle Samoukashian’s eyes.

“Meizi Wu’s picture was on the back of his card.” Aimée took a sip. “Can you tell me about their relationship? Anything you know about Meizi?”

“Ask her.”

“Meizi’s disappeared.”

She nodded, matter of fact. “
Bien sur
, she’s illegal, terrified.”

Like a steamroller, this little woman. “So you know Meizi?”

“Never heard of her. But that’s most everyone in this slice of the quartier.
Alors
, it never changes—immigrants, illegals. Roundups just like in ’42.”

“Roundups?” Was she really comparing Chinese sweatshop workers today to French Jews deported to extermination camps?

“I know the feeling. Hunted, hiding, moving all the time.”

Surprised, Aimée leaned forward. “You do?”

“I was part of the Resistance, you know,” the old woman said. “History forgot us: immigrants, political exiles, Communists. A ragtag bunch of Poles, Jews, Hungarians, Italians. Guerilla fighters. Our last names and politics didn’t fit in with de Gaulle’s myth of
la grande Résistance Française
. My cousin Manouchian, the Armenian poet, led thirty successful attacks against occupying Germans. But do schoolchildren learn this?” She shook her head. “His group was betrayed, branded as criminals by the Vichy collaborators—you’ve heard of the infamous Affiche Rouge poster? Those were the Communist Resistants. And they were all executed. No one talks about it.”

So the old woman related to Chinese illegals. Did she know Meizi? Was she trying to protect her, hide information?

“Meizi must feel so alone. Lost.”

“But there are always places to hide, to meld into the woodwork, like we did.” Mademoiselle Samoukashian shrugged, her eyes far away. “Pascal was a funny boy. Sweet but odd.”

From the sound of it, the woman would tell the story in her own way. Aimée needed to be patient. She took a sip of coffee, a thick mixture like silt with a cardamom aftertaste.

“His parents had him late in life,” Mademoiselle said, glancing back at the pot before continuing. “My nephew, his father, was held in a Siberian POW camp until the sixties. Never was the same, but don’t get me started. Pascal’s mother died from TB in a sanatorium.” She shrugged. “He came to live with me until he passed the exams for Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers.”

The prestigious
grande école
of technical engineering. “Quite an accomplishment,” Aimée said, wondering how this fit in.

“But Pascal still lives … lived nearby. Always fixed this, took care of that.” Mademoiselle waved her hand around.