“That’s Paulette and Hélène.”
Preserved in that moment of joy, playing with a new puppy . . . too bad joy couldn’t be frozen and thawed at will.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but getting back to the present . . .”
“You don’t understand, do you?” he said, putting the photos away under the cushion. “Forget it.”
She’d rushed him. Stuck her foot in it and he’d clammed up, changed his mind. Or his guilt had taken over. Whichever, she’d lost him. Yet this story was relevant somehow. She had to curb her impatience.
“Try to remember what Hélène told you while it’s fresh in your mind, Monsieur.”
“Hélène’s confused,” he said. “She had shock treatments that left scars. You know what that means.”
Aimée recalled how widespread shock treatments for the depressed and deranged had been once. Now one took a pill.
“I shouldn’t have called the Commissariat,” he said.
“Monsieur, we need your help. No one’s accusing her. Since you’ve told me this much, it’s better I hear from her . . .”
He pulled back in his chair.
“Let me reassure you, Monsieur,” she said. “No questioning at the Commissariat, nothing like that.”
“Questioning, Commissariat?” His voice shook. “They said that, too.”
“Who?”
He gestured to the cobblestone-paved street outside. “The flics who rounded the people up. But no one ever came back.”
“That happened more than fifty years ago. I’m talking about now. A young woman has been murdered and if Hélène was there—”
“She’s not insane.” He shook his head. “She can’t be locked in Saint Catherine’s with the loonies. She keeps herself clean and asks for nothing. If she did anything, she’s not responsible.”
Aimée’s jaw dropped as she registered his meaning.
“Responsible! You’re saying Hélène may have killed . . . ?”
“I said nothing. Get out!”
His words shook her. Hélène had to be in her sixties, or even older. And she recalled the mechanic Momo’s words.
“Did she wear a scarf with butterflies, pink?”
He scratched his head. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
Big jump. Or was it? “You think she may have killed the person who threw the young woman into the Seine, that she may have confused the victim with Paulette, don’t you?”
He turned away from her.
“She’d have to be strong, Monsieur. And then, where’s the killer’s body? Exactly what did Hélène say? It’s important.”
“She said, ‘I took care of it.’”
“That could mean she acted in self-defense or even that she did nothing at all.”
“Exactement. Forget it, I’ve got work to do.”
“But there’s been a second murder,” she said. “A man was killed in the theatre. We can’t forget it.”
He clutched the armrest, surprised. “What?”
“I thought you knew why the flics surrounded the quai.” She pulled out the photo. “Have you seen this young woman around?” She pointed at Nelie.
No recognition shone in his eyes. His body deflated. He looked smaller, as if his flesh was retreating into itself. Protected, in a shell.
And then she noticed the silent line of tears trickling down his wrinkled cheeks.
“Monsieur, please.” She put her arm around him. His shoulders were so thin, like a sparrow’s.
He shook her arm off, wiped his face with his sleeve, and sobbed. “Leave . . . just leave.”
Guilt pierced her; reducing an old man to tears hadn’t been on her agenda. Her ringing cell phone broke into his muffled sobs.
Torn, she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t even have a
tissue. In her bag, she found a moist towelette pack, LÉON, BRASSERIE BELGE, with a green mussel imprinted on it. She tore it open and put it in his hands. Her phone kept ringing. Something wrong with Stella? Or Nelie calling?
“Allô?” she answered.
“It’s on the scanner, Aimée. Vavin’s been murdered,” René said, breathless.
“I know, René.”
In the pause she heard bleeps from the scanner.
“They’re on the lookout for a woman with spiky hair, wearing a red feather-trimmed jacket. . . .”
That damn security guard! Her heart sank to her wet high-tops.
“That’s me.” She couldn’t even go back to her apartment to change.
“What?”
“I found him.”
“What the hell’s happened? And Stella?”
“Later, René,” she said. “Stella’s with the babysitter at Martine’s.” She had to work fast. “I’m going to Regnault.”
“And run right into the flics? I heard the office address; that’s how I recognized him.”
“The flics will need to get a search warrant and that takes time,” she said. “I figure whoever killed Vavin is en route to his office. But I have the keys. That should give me some advantage.”
“Don’t go there alone,” René said.
“There’s not much choice. Or time.”
She heard the police scanner crackle in the background, glanced again at the wall clock. She’d have to hurry.
“I’ll meet you,” René said.
“You don’t have to, René,” she said, but she appreciated his offer.
“Where?”
“On the second floor,” she said. “Women’s restroom. Bring your laptop and a coat for me.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a—”
“Then meet me by the fire door next to it. Hurry, René.”
The old man had sat in the chair again and he was far away, lost in his memories. “Monsieur . . .”
“Leave me alone.” He shrugged her hand off his shoulder and drained the wineglass with shaking hands.
She set her card down on the table, her fingertips blackened with surface grime. “I doubt that Hélène killed anyone, but if she witnessed the murder, call me. I’ll use your back door if you don’t mind.”
In his galley kitchen piled with dirty pots, she opened the back door to a small courtyard. She looked back but he hadn’t moved.
She took a headband from her pocket, pulled it over her hair, fished out big black sunglasses from her bag. Put the jacket on inside out, on the red-and-orange-fiber side. Not bad. She looped a scarf around her throat to cover the Christian Lacroix label.
Several doors opened onto the small courtyard. She tried the one labeled HÔTEL and walked through an even narrower passage—once the seventeenth-century tennis court of Louis XIII, who liked the fashionable sport à l’anglaise—that led into the lobby of the four-star Hôtel du Jeu de Paume.
In the restored medieval timbered lobby, tapestries lined the walls and tall floral arrangements in Lalique vases adorned the tables. A woman whose face Aimée recognized from an eighties Louis Malle film stared at her. There was no time to waste.
She smiled at the young doorman, wishing the old White Russian who’d worked here for years was standing there instead. “Taxi, please.”
“You’re a hotel guest, Mademoiselle?” he asked.
“A guest of a guest,” she said. “I’m in a rush.”
“Pardon, Mademoiselle, but service extends to our guests only.”
That meant he wanted a big tip.
“He’ll appreciate my disappearance,” she said, palming fifty francs into the doorman’s hand. “Before the photographers arrive!”
One-upmanship was the only way to handle his type.
After a blast of his whistle, she stepped in a taxi and sat back on the leather seat.
“Six rue des Chantiers.”
She slouched down as the taxi sped past the flic cars.