She felt sorry for him. After her mother left, Aimée’s father had done his best to make up for it. Her grandparents had, too. But had Romain Figeac done the same for Christian?
“I’ve got an extra couch,” she said. “You’re welcome to it.”
He blinked, shook his head as if coming to. “What kind of an outfit … a plumber?”
“I tried to break into your place and find that panel concealing the tapes,” she said. “Are there any more?”
“In the bank maybe,” he said.
“First thing tomorrow you need to get them. Listen, this is about your father. We need to talk.”
He followed her out of the courtyard.
They skirted the ambulance, passed the parked fire trucks. On rue Réaumur, she raised her arm to hail a taxi.
“No, we’ll take my car,” he said, pointing to an olive Jaguar XKE, dented, with scratched paint. A battered classic.
Christian Figeac sank into the leather ribbed seat, switched on the engine.
“What do we need to talk about?”
He seemed calmer. She hoped he could handle what she had to say. Late-night strollers crossed in front of them, pale and caught, like frightened deer, in the Jaguar’s headlights.
“Where to?” Christian asked.
“Ile St. Louis, Quai d’Anjou,” she said. “My apartment.”
He gunned the engine and shot toward Boulevard de Sébastopol.
She didn’t know how else to say it. “I’m sorry, but your father was shot with a large-caliber gun, not the one you said he’d used.”
“How do you know?” he asked, surprised.
“From the residue on the wall. It’s not consistent with …” She hesitated. “A .25 has a nice recoil but it’s not a blaster. I took a sample from the wall to the lab yesterday.” Good thing she’d followed her instinct since everything had now gone up in smoke. And it struck her. “You know, that’s what the murderer wanted … all the evidence gone.”
He slowed down. “Murderer … why?” he asked.
“You tell me,” she said. “Did your father have enemies, someone who didn’t …?”
Her phrase was lost in a blare of honking klaxons. Christian floored the pedal. He cornered rue de Palestro. The Jaguar responded, roaring bulletlike down the narrow medieval street.
“But he left a suicide note,” Christian said. “How could he have been murdered?”
“Think back to when you found him. Tell me what you saw.”
Christian’s shoulders heaved. “It was dark, he was slumped over on the desk … like when he’d been drinking.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But really he was killed.”
“Papa’s writing played the most important role in his life,” he said. “Everything else ranked below it.”
“You’re proving it yourself,” she said. “He wouldn’t have committed suicide.”
They sped through the empty Sentier streets. Dark buildings encrusted with grime illumined by globular street lamps peaked above them. Alleys and passages jutted like capillaries from a veinous hub, calcified by old coaching inns.
“Christian—if I may call you that—with a suicide, the gun stays there. The .25 wouldn’t …” She paused, trying to say it tactfully.
“I didn’t pay much attention but it was his,” he said. “The flics took it.”
“Check the coroner’s office, ask where it is,” she said. “The coroner’s making a report, they’ll open an inquiry.”
“Non,” he shouted. “Papa’s dead. I had enough of those reporters after Maman’s suicide. They printed those awful photos, the ones of her remains in the car. They’ll just hound me and want to rake up dirt.”
“It’s painful for you, I’m sorry,” she said. Of course, he was right and how sad. But, she thought grimly, it didn’t change the fact that his father had been murdered.
Aimée wished the bucket seat had a working seat belt. Christian Figeac seemed intent on crossing Paris in ten minutes.
“Why can’t the past leave me alone?” he said. He combed his hair back with his fingers, stubby and bitten to the quick.
“Don’t you see?” she said. “Someone murdered your father. Now they’re after you.”
He screeched his brakes on the quai before her apartment. They stopped with a jerk. “But I thought it was my fault.” He slumped over the wooden steering wheel, pounded the leather dashboard.
“Christian, why did you think it was your fault?”
“Below his standard, never reached his expectations … ,” he mumbled. Shadows curtained Christian Figeac’s face.
All his life he had been haunted by high-profile parents; a renowned father and mother and a string of public tragedies. Sad to think of the pain stamped on his psyche.
“You didn’t kill him. Someone else did,” she said. Then she told him how Jutta Hald had appeared in her life.
“That’s why I contacted you. Think again,” she said. “Maybe she came to your door?”
He shook his head.
Again, he combed his stringy hair behind his ears with his fingers. It was as if he’d numbed out, refusing to deal with what she said. Who would want to know his father had been murdered?
She hadn’t.
She got out of the car, slammed the dented door. But she stood on the cobblestones, unable to move her feet. She had to make him understand.
“What if it had been you in the apartment when it caught fire? You must realize you’re in danger. And I am, too. Someone knocked out your concierge and whacked me from behind.”
She turned and let him see the throbbing welt on her head in the quayside light.
Now he looked scared. And lost.
“What can I do?” He shook his head. “Even if you’re right, everything went up in smoke.”
True.
“You said he kept things at the bank or with his publisher,” she said. “Idrissa transcribed your father’s work. I need to talk with her again. Perhaps something can still be found.”
“Go ahead, she won’t talk to me.”
“What’s her number?”
“01 75 98 72 02.”
She pulled out the first thing that came to hand from her bag, a lip-liner pencil, and wrote it down on the back of her hand.
“You asked me to help you, remember?” she said. “If I were you, Christian, I’d be afraid.”
“Did I say I wasn’t?” he asked. “So, girl detective, you think you will find out who killed my father?”
She nodded. And she would find Jutta’s killer, too.
He wrote another check, thrust it through the window at her.
Surprised, she stared at him.
“Not enough?” he shouted, reaching over to add more zeros.
“Throwing money at me?” But René would shoot her if she didn’t take it.
She took it. Michel’s loan hadn’t covered it all.
A crow flew past, swooped, then perched on the quayside wall. His black silhouette was outlined against the lighted Seine.
“Let’s look at the things he kept in the bank,” she said. “My mother’s trail led me to your father.”
“Always your mother,” he said. “I hardly knew mine.”
“Neither did I. And mine was American, too.”
Christian looked away. He flipped the key in the ignition and the engine sputtered to life. “I’ll stay with Etienne,” he said abruptly. “Meet me tomorrow at two at the Credit Industriel et Commercial in Place des Victoires.” And with that he roared off down the darkened quai.
Surprised by his continual changes of mood, she climbed up the stairs. Miles Davis sniffed her with his wet nose as she entered the apartment. She pulled out the half-eaten baguette sandwich Hervé the fireman had given her and set it in his bowl on the kitchen floor. Then she stumbled down the hallway to her bedroom and collapsed on her feather duvet.