Had she been staying with her uncle Thadée? And most important, where was she now?
“Aimée. Aimée!” Zazie was saying. ”Yoo-hoo, you there?”
She’d been lost in thought. She stared at Zazie.
“You’re a little detective in the making, Zazie,” she said, stabbing out her cigarette.
Zazie’s eyes shone with pride.
And for a brief flash Aimée wondered what it would it be like to have a child. Would she be like Zazie, and never go to bed?
“Is that a photo of you over the espresso machine, from when you were five?”
Zazie grinned. “It’s from the école primaire, but I was six.”
Close enough. Little Michel was five and had the same smile as his mother, Nadège. Aimée had to find her.
She pulled out her lipstick and slid it into Zazie’s hand. Zazie’s eyes sparkled.
“For me?”
“Don’t tell your maman,” she grinned. “Someday you’ll follow me into the business, Zazie. Until then, get some sleep.”
OUTSIDE, ON dark Avenue de Clichy, a lone streetsweeper dealt with the detritus of the local Armistice Day Veterans’ Parade. Each year the number of marchers got smaller. With the driver’s assistance, an old man alighted from a taxi onto the wet pavement. His wool suit hung from his shrunken frame. A blue, white, and red tricolor ribbon was draped over his caved-in chest; several medals glinted on his lapel.
Aimée guessed he was one of the few remaining veterans from the First World War. His limbs trembled as he hobbled to a door on rue Sauffroy. The taxi driver lit a cigarette and drove away.
Peeling posters of the Nigerian footballer Okocha glistened with rain on the stucco walls. Aimée heard the metal clink as the old man’s keys hit the ground. She stooped to pick them up.
“Monsieur, your keys,” she smiled. “May I help?”
“I always forget the code,” he said, his rheumy eyes tearing. “It’s in my pocket somewhere. My hands shake so.”
“Permit me?” She stuck her hand in his pocket, found a card with his name, address, and digicode.
“Caporal Mollard, that’s you, eh?” she said.
He nodded.
She punched in his code. The green door clicked open.
“Merci,” he said.
“Did you enjoy the parade?”
A lost look painted his hollow-cheekboned face. “That farce?”
Shocked, she saw that he picked at the ribbon as if trying to pull it off. But the effort seemed too much for him.
“Most of me died in the trenches. The mustard gas took one of my lungs. The rest, well. . . .”
“Caporal, you must be tired,” she said, not knowing what else to say.
“We were supposed to save the world for peace, mon enfant. Fight the war to end all wars,” he said. “Did it do any good?”
She shook her head. What had happened in 1914–18 on French fields had just been the beginning. “I don’t know. Can I help you inside, does someone wait for you?”
“Everyone I knew is dead,” he said. “It’s my turn.”
RENÉ HAD left a note on the laptop in the hotel room.
“Dining downstairs on Cameroun manioc, fish and rice aloko. Join us.”
She put her head in her hands, rocked back and forth. Her hands came back sticky with tears and black mascara. She’d lost her man, been tempted to sleep with a chiseled-cheekbone charmer, and still hadn’t found Gassot or the jade. She curled up on the lumpy settee by the window, overlooking wind- and rain-blasted rue Sauffroy, feeling as alone as the old vet.
Sunday Morning
SHE WOKE UP TO her cell phone’s ringing. René lay asleep, pale lemon light pooled on the duvet bunched around him. Her stockings were twisted and she straightened them while listening to Serge’s voice.
“Sorry, Aimée, I was called to Nantes, just got back to the morgue,” Serge said. “I have to work Sundays now.”
“Which twin had the fever?” She could never tell them apart, the boys never stood still long enough to enable her to figure it out.
“Both came down with la grippe; thank God my mother-in-law came with us.”
“Do me a favor, Serge, find me the autopsy report on Albert Daudet.”
“Why?” he asked.
“It’s a suspicious death.”
“You stopped all that, didn’t you?”
Not Serge, too!
“I’ll bring Miles Davis over,” she said. “Let the twins take him for a walk.”
“Look Aimée, that’s not your field now.”
“It never was,” she said. “But if I tell the boys you wouldn’t let me bring—”
“Arrête! What’s the deceased man’s name again?”
“Daudet, Albert.”
“Like the writer, eh? Hold on.”
She heard the shuffle of papers, conversations in the background. By the time Serge came back on the line, she’d taken her pills and pulled on her skirt.
“Daudet died under medical care, so it took a while to dredge it up,” Serge said. “Hmm, interesting report. Most old men who go in for a cardiogram don’t die from cartilage thyroid fractures and hemorrhaging in the neck.”
“Meaning?”
“Asphyxiation due to manual strangulation. My guess is it came from a carotid sleeper hold.”
She gasped. Regnier and his henchmen. Hadn’t René said he’d been caught in a carotid sleeper hold?
“Daudet had a preexisting coronary condition. It didn’t help. The compression of the carotid did it for him,” Serge said. “I figure it took three or four minutes. That’s indicated by extensive bruises to the neck and petechiae.”
“Would the killer have to be muscular?” she asked.
“It helps. Hook and hold the neck in the crotch of the arm, apply pressure, and most folks pass out in ten seconds. Hold a few minutes longer and it’s the big sleep.”
“And Serge, in your professional opinion?”
“The evenness and deep pressure bruises indicate a big guy,” Serge said. “But that’s off the record.”
“Fax it to me, will you?”
“You owe me, Aimée. Count some babysitting in, too!”
AIMÉE KNOCKED on the door of Albert Daudet’s widow, Lucie. She lived in a peeling stucco former loge de concierge at the mouth of a cobblestoned courtyard.
The window lace shimmied and swayed as the glass door opened. Crocheted figures danced and then became still forever, caught on the lace panel, as if sculpted by sea-salt spray.
“Madame Daudet?” she said.
“Oui?” said a woman with a tightly curled gray perm and reading glasses hanging by a beaded string around her neck.
“May I take a few moments of your time?”
She stared at Aimée, smoothing down her apron. “The coffin’s all I can afford right now. Forget the memorial service you people try to cram down my throat. The anciens com-battants should help bury a veteran!”
“I’m a detective.” She flashed her license. “Sorry to impose at this time but I want to ask a few questions.”
“The flics came by yesterday,” she said. “I told them the same thing. It’s foul play.”
Aimée nodded. “I know. It’s in the autopsy report.”
“They won’t show it to me. Keep telling me to wait.”
“But I have a copy,” she said. “Would you like to see it?”
Madame Daudet covered her mouth with her hand. “Come in,” she said.
The converted loge, a suitcase of an apartment, was crammed with shelves of religious statues and plastic vials of holy water from Lourdes. Bronze statues of the Virgin Mary and a kneeling Bernadette were prominent. A small sink with a floral print curtain below stood next to a two burner stove.