Murder in Passy (10 page)

“My neighbor’s comings and goings?” Madame de Boucher leaned on her ebony walking stick and gave a dismissive wave with her other blue-veined hand. “Ask the concierge.”

“But I did, Madame, and she suggested I speak with you.” Aimée gave a wide smile and flashed her PI license with the less-than-flattering photo. In the background she heard high-pitched singing and recognized “Leaves of Autumn,” based on the Verlaine poem.

“I spoke to the
flics
already,” the old woman said. “Told them like I’m telling you, I saw nothing, heard nothing.
C’est tout.
”

Aimée groaned inside. After Agustino, for the past two hours she’d questioned the lane’s inhabitants: a retired professor, a musician, several cleaning women and maids, all of whom had said the same thing. People either hadn’t been home last night or had drawn their shades. She’d hit another wall.

“A shame, Madame.” Arms weary, she set her bag down. “The family’s devastated that they can’t even hold a service, but I thought—”

“Is that for me?” interrupted Madame de Boucher, staring at the
gâteau
Basque on top, which was emanating a fragrance of cherries.

Aimée saw a way in the door. “Of course, but let me heat it up. Seeing as you’ve got a.… ” She paused. Was it a recital? Singing lessons? “There’s plenty for your guest.”

“Guest?” Then a look of understanding on the old woman’s face, crinkling in a web of fine lines. “You mean Hector? I’m busy cleaning, Mademoiselle.”

At her age? And in this
quartier
resplendent with hired help?

“Come back tomorrow, Mademoiselle.”

She had to get inside in the door.

“But I can help and warm this for you in the kitchen.”

“
Comme ça?
In that outfit?”

So her standby funeral suit, a flea-market-find black wool Givenchy, would go to the dry cleaners. “No problem, Madame.”

Madame de Boucher tapped her stick on the newspapers piled on the threadbare hall carpet runner. Another wave of her hand. “Into the parlor, then,
s’il vous plaît
.”

Humor her, Aimée thought: she might know a detail, might have noticed something over the past few days. Aimée scooped up the rustling, yellowed newspapers and followed Madame de Boucher.

The cracked leather-bound volumes filling a wall of bookshelves and worn, brocaded Louis chairs couldn’t mask the faded charm of the nineteenth-century parlor. A chandelier with missing crystals cast a dim glow on the high-ceilinged, carved-wood
boiseries
bordering the cream wood-paneled walls and dried flower arrangements under glass globes.

She felt like she’d entered a Proust novel. Except for the chrome high-tech medic alert remote-control device and the blue-and-yellow-plumed singing parrot perched near a matching cloisonné vase on a claw-footed table.

“Hector’s particular, you know,” Madame said, pointing to the dirty wire cage.

The parrot’s repetitive singing grated on Aimée’s ears. She set the
gâteau
Basque down on the table.

“He’s my companion of twenty-five years now,” she said.

Aimée’s nose crinkled as she pulled out the birdcage tray clumped with bird feces dotted with feather fluff. Slants of light from the window lit the faded Turkish carpet, turning it a dull red, reminding her of old blood.

She changed the newspaper lining and jerked her chin toward the window. “What a wonderful view over the garden.” She paused, pretending to put it together. “That’s Xavierre’s garden,
non
?”

“They use it like a parking lot these days. Disgusting.”

Aimée nodded. “Of course you notice the comings and goings. How can you miss seeing, eh? Especially last night, Irati’s big party, the noise, guests.… ”

“My stupid cousin widened the gate. In my grandfather’s time it was just wide enough for a
fiacre.
”

A horse-drawn carriage from the last century.

“Nowadays they’re garages,” she continued.

“I suppose you knew Madame Xavierre?”

“What’s it to you?” The old woman bristled, her tone changed.

Bad tactic. “Madame, I’m—”

“Snooping and asking questions, like they did,” Madame de Boucher interrupted.

Aimée’s ears perked up. The parrot’s tone shrilled. She shoved the clean newspaper-lined tray back inside the cage and tried not to sneeze. If only the damned bird would shut up.

“Who do you mean, Madame?”

“I told them nothing, you understand. Like always.”

“But weren’t you worried? Upset? Your neighbor’s murdered in her garden almost outside your window?” She tried to keep her voice level.

“
Et alors,
I heard nothing.” Madame de Boucher’s mouth tightened.

“Help me understand the timeline, Madame,” she said. “The report places the murder at seven forty-five. A Mercedes pulled out of that driveway minutes later. Did you hear—”

“The Bomb could drop while I listen to my program on Radio Classique and I wouldn’t hear it,” Madame de Boucher interrupted. “I knew the poor woman to say
‘Bonjour’
in the morning, that’s all.”

Disappointed, Aimée knew she needed to change tactics. This woman, who’d lived here eighty years, had to know something. And didn’t like the
flics.

“But it’s a person like you, Madame, who knows the
quartier
, the rhythm of life here, who can help me the most.” She smiled, determined to ingratiate herself. “So quiet and peaceful here.”

Madame de Boucher snorted.
“C’est un village ici.”

Aimée nodded. “
Bien sûr.
Maybe you noticed a person you hadn’t seen before in the past few days?”

Madame de Boucher guided Hector, now perched on her ebony stick, into the cleaned cage. With one hand she covered the cage with a black flannel cloth, and the parrot quieted at once. She sighed, sinking into the armchair brocaded with fleurs-de-lis, setting her stick against the armrest.

“A detective?” said Madame de Boucher, her eyes hooded with suspicion, glaring at Aimée’s suit. “Since when do the
flics
wear couture? Or do my taxes pay for that?”

Aimée didn’t bother to enlighten Madame as to the fact that private detectives didn’t work for the
flics
. And wished she had a tissue to wipe off the grit clinging to her hands.

“On my salary I shop at Réciproque, the
dépôt-vente
consignment shop, Madame.” Aimée winked. That store was the
quartier
’s bargain-hunter mecca of gently worn couture from wives who cleaned out their closets every season.

“You’re some special investigator?” she said, still suspicious.

Aimée sat down. The chair leg creaked under her. “Nothing so exciting, I’m afraid.” She leaned forward as if in confidence. “You’ve heard of Internal Affairs?”

Madame de Boucher shook her head.

“
La police des polices.
We check irregularities in police investigations. But that’s between you and me.”

“You’re all the same. Lists. Always lists,” said Madame de Boucher, waving her hand. “We just follow the directives and go by the list, they said.”

What did a list have to do with Xavierre’s murder?

“Madame, what list?”

“Nineteen forty-three, the hottest July I can remember,” she said. The old woman’s gaze leveled somewhere in the distance. A past Aimée couldn’t see.

“Beat the record,” Madame said. “Humid like a steam room. Not even a breeze. I’d closed the shutters, but that didn’t keep out the heat. At six
A.M
. they came pounding on the door. Within two hours they’d ransacked our building, looted every apartment.”

Aimée opened her mouth to speak, but Madame de Boucher continued.

“The Milice, the French Gestapo, arrested my brother. Criminals, all of them. Felons released from prison to do the dirty work.”

Madame gave a little shrug. “More Nazis lived here than in any other
quartier.
Six hundred ninety-two official German-requisitioned buildings, according to surviving records,” she said. “They lusted after the town houses, made the Hotel Majestic a
Kommandantur.
Forbade us calling them
boches,
preferred
Fritz
. Regardless of what we called them,
les Fritz
requisitioned whatever they wanted. Apartments,
hôtels particuliers
, garages, hotels, clinics, bars, restos, theaters. Four Gestapo bureaus, even a
soldatenheim
on the Champs-Elysées.”

“But Madame,” Aimée interrupted.

“They had taste, I’ll say that for them.” The old woman continued as if she hadn’t heard. “After Liberation, I had to share this apartment with the family of a Milicien who took my brother. Can you imagine?”

Aimée shook her head, hoping this was leading somewhere.

“That too went according to a list. A housing-shortage list. I got a pittance after the war. A few pieces. That one.”

She gestured to the blue-and-white cloisonné vase.

“The Milice forced my brother to work in the Bassano, a
hôtel
particulier
, outfitted like a restoration studio but an internment camp,” she said. “Just blocks away. Who knows now, eh? He restored the looted pianos stored under the Palais de Chaillot. Pleyels, Bechsteins, Steinways, all confiscated from Jewish apartments.” A shuttered look crossed her eyes. “Took Madame Morgenstern’s baby grand. She lived on the second floor. Later, they took her.”

Impatient, Aimée wondered how this connected to Xavierre— or if it even did. Was it just another sad reminiscence of the war by an old woman who kept a parrot for company, death taking everything but her stories? Or had Xavierre’s murder jogged loose the old stories, some with a parallel to the present? She had to draw Madame from the past, discover some detail from this eagle-eyed woman who, she suspected, didn’t miss a thing.

“So the man, or men, you spoke to wore uniforms?”

“Uniforms?” The old woman shook her head. “They wanted to rent space for their car.”

Aimée contained her frustration. The woman dipped back and forth in time. Not that this was leading anywhere. But she had to try.

“Was that before or after Xavierre’s murder?”

“Everything’s political, you know.”

What did
that
mean? Aimée gritted her teeth. But she nodded, determined to persist.

“You’re a Socialist, Madame?”

“Picasso said that. My father collected some of his smaller works. All taken,
phhft.
” She expelled air from her mouth. “A nasty little man, that Picasso, but I agree.” Her tone dismissive. “So does Irati. It’s those protests she attends.”

Alert, Aimée leaned forward. A new angle to consider. “Protests? Irati doesn’t strike me as political.”

“
Phfft!
The young these days,” Madame said, as if that explained it. “We met at the poll during the last election. We both voted Socialist. Irati joked that we’re the only two Socialists in the
quartier.
Our mayor’s a Taittinger, the Champagne seigneur; we’re his fiefdom.” Madame de Boucher’s chignon loosened as she nodded. A strand of white hair fell, softening the contours of her thin face. “
C’est tout.
Then I get this! A mistake. No interest to me.”

Aimée sat up.

“May I see?”

Madame de Boucher used an aluminum rod with pincers at the end to clutch some papers on the divan.

Aimée took the white paper, folded pamphlet-style, titled
Euskadi Action
. The Basque-language leaflet didn’t make sense to her either. But an address on rue Duban and the date Sunday at 6:30
P.M
., that much she understood. The rest she’d find out.

Madame de Boucher nodded, staring at the
gâteau
Basque. “Aren’t you going to cut me a slice?”

* * *

“C
RIME IN OUR
quartier
?” Dubouchet, the on-duty sergeant in the Passy Commissariat, grinned, showing yellowed teeth. “Just the usual: rich teenagers thrill-shoplifting,
domestiques
stealing from their employer. What goes around comes around, eh?”

She’d come to check with Thesset about the Mercedes, but he’d gone off duty. “But on the
télé,
the news announced this crime of passion.… ”

“I can’t talk about ongoing investigations, Mademoiselle.” Dubouchet’s voice turned serious.

Great: now he’d clammed up. And Thesset, her source, was gone. The smell of hot printer toner wafted from behind her. An old-fashioned heater rumbled, sending out dribbles of heat.

“Zut!”
Gandon, a middle-aged lieutenant sitting at a desk, ground out his cigarette in his demitasse saucer. “Dubouchet forgets the glory days, our unrivaled crimes.” He opened a drawer, pulled out a thick stapled manuscript with relish. “Bit of a history buff myself. My little opus, which I hope to publish next year, could enlighten you.”

“Might want to finish writing the thing first, Gandon,” Dubouchet said in a tired voice.