Murder in Pigalle (28 page)

The hairs on her arm rippled. “I don’t understand. They’ve tracked the rapist—”

He raised his hand. “Forget him. He has nothing to do with this.”

Neither girl was the rapist’s type. But then how did the attacks connect to Zazie’s circle of friends? Could it be just a coincidence? “The rapist’s not involved in the girls’ disappearance?”

He shook his head. “And I can’t tell you any more.”

“Fine.” She made as if to stand. “I’m leaving.”

He grabbed her wrist. “To keep them alive we need to move now.”

Her fingers trembled. “You expect me to trust you? Just like that? Tell me why I should.”

“It’s complicated.” His voice cracked. Serious. He was serious. But he was holding back.

“You’re on parole, your ex-wife’s in rehab, you know this man.”

He averted his eyes.

“Why should I believe you?”

“My daughter’s …” he took a breath. Looked toward the taxi. “They’re both pawns.”

“Pawns in what?”

He hesitated.

“If this man’s holding something over you, why not go to the
flics
?”

“You know I’m on parole. I can’t. That’s why I came to you.”

This put a new spin on it. But she needed more. “Tell me who took them.”

“Do you really want an answer? Or do you want to rescue the girls?”

A nervous energy emanated from him. Intense eyes. The eyes of a father. She hated to, but she believed him.

“Why me?”

“Everyone trusts a pregnant woman; together we’ll be able to get in without arousing suspicion. Plus you’re a detective, I checked,” he said. “I saw you on the
télé
—you want to save them as much as I do.”

He had that right.

“But last night’s murder …” Her throat caught. “Were you involved in the shooting of that woman? Is that related to whatever this is?”

“
Non. Pas du tout.
” He stood. “But your choice. Either you take the chance and believe me, or you wait to find out the Ivry warehouse is a hoax and lose two hours.”

He was already hailing the taxi, which started up its engine.

“Coming?”

P
IGALLE
. T
HE MORNING
street sweepers’ brooms raked the detritus from the celebrations into the flowing gutters. The scraping over the cobbles sounded not unlike fingernails on a chalkboard to Aimée—her nerves were acting up. Parents walked children to school on the narrow pavement. The neon club signs looked naked in the sunlight.

“Follow the plan, okay?” said Zacharié.

A makeshift plan involving a reputed lead to an old crony’s brother-in-law, but she put on her Jackie-O sunglasses and readjusted her spiky black wig, the one she kept in the pocket of her oversize bag. Thank God the leather pants’ waist was expandable. “I’ll call you.”

“What?”

“If there’s an obstacle, we go to plan B.”

“What’s plan B?” said Zacharié.

“Improvise.”

She left the taxi in front of the disco Le Bus Palladium, the “temple of rock” when she and Martine clubbed there in the early nineties. Or had it been the late eighties? The white facade glared starkly in the daylight.

She was overrun by doubts about Zacharié’s plan. But she knew one thing. If Zazie was here, she’d find her.

“
Bonjour.
” She smiled at the young woman barring her way with a vacuum cleaner. “I’m late. But he’s waiting for me.”

“Who?” The woman stood her ground, readjusting her paisley headscarf.

“Like I said, he’s expecting me.” Aimée scanned the vacant box office, the deserted, red-carpeted foyer. She remembered the layout: beyond the ground floor’s closed double doors lay the dance floor. That wouldn’t help. To the right was a short staircase leading to a
resto.
Directly across from the
resto
she saw a sign: O
FFICE
.

The disco, a former theatre, hadn’t changed except for the DJ names on the posters. She’d never heard of any of them. A new generation and it made her feel old.

“He’s waiting for me in the office.”

“No one’s up there, Madame,” she said. “Only the cleaning crew comes in this early.”

“And you’re so efficient. He couldn’t run the place without you.” She tried to step around the woman towards the stairs.

“No one’s allowed upstairs.”

“
Chut
!” Aimée pressed her finger over her Chanel red lips. “Let’s keep this between us. Woman to woman.” Aimée pointed to her stomach. “His wife doesn’t know yet. But she’ll understand, I tell him. All the nights he spends away, here with me.”

The young cleaning woman blinked. “Raoul?” She pointed to the color photos of staff on the wall. “That Raoul?” A balding, fifty-something man in thick glasses squinted at the camera. He wore a floral shirt.

“
L’amour
.” Aimée sighed.

The woman shrugged. Aimée took the stairs two at a time and knocked on the office door. No answer. It was locked. “
Bonjour
,
chéri
, it’s me,” she said loudly, for the benefit of the cleaning woman.

With her lock-pick set, she inserted an upper and lower prong into the door lock and toggled. A moment later she turned the handle. A dark, empty office.

She hit the lights. Desk, posters of Johnny Hallyday and Depeche Mode, a brocade chaise in need of reupholstering.

No Zazie.

No closet, no back room. She wanted to kick the legs off the ugly chaise. Stupid to go along with Zacharié’s idea, to think that this Raoul would lock the girls up in an office, with the
resto
so close by. But he’d been so sure, so adamant that Raoul was key.

Key.

The desk’s third drawer yielded to her lock-pick. Paper clips, business cards, and three sets of color-coded and labeled key rings: yellow backstage door, red stage entrance, blue lighting loft.

She took all three. Picked up the yellow-handled flashlight from the desk and noticed a receipt under it. Bottled water, toilet paper, apples from the nearby Monoprix—the receipt was dated last night. She stuffed it in her pocket. Parched, she twisted the cap off the Evian bottle from her purse and drank in the hot, airless room.

She had to find something else, something more, and quick—before the cleaning woman got curious or Raoul showed up. She opened and went through every drawer again—there were only three—then lifted the faded Turkish throw rug, peeked behind the posters, emptied the metal-wire trash bin. Vacuuming sounds came from the stairway. As she was about to give up, her eye caught on something red tangled in the bottom of the overturned trash bin.

A red tassel. Like the one on Zazie’s backpack zipper. Like the one she’d already found in the de Mombert apartment.

Her pulse raced.

Outside in the hallway she studied the evacuation diagram required in every building for the fire brigade.

She hit Zacharié’s number. Let it ring once. Clicked off then rang again.

“
Oui
?”

“I’ve got Raoul’s keys. Meet me at the backstage entrance.”

“Where’s that?”

“Rue Pigalle.” She clicked off.

The closed
resto
dining room, converted from one half of the old theatre stage, sported retro decor with a splash of old polished silver and fifties turquoise glass. More
branché
, catering to the
bourgeoises-bohèmes
rather than the rockers downstairs.

The back stairs from the kitchen led down to a door. She tried six keys from the red key ring before she got the right one.

She stepped out onto a dim, sloping stage, passed the DJ apparatus—turntables, microphones. At the backstage door, she let Zacharié in.

“Find them?”

“Just this.” She showed him the red tassel. “It’s Zazie’s.”

“Marie-Jo has one, too.”

“How would you know?” she said. “You’ve been in prison.”

“Think we didn’t communicate? That I don’t know what’s going on with my daughter?” His gaze swept the seats, the balcony. “We wrote each other every week. She sent photos. She had a backpack with a tassel like that.”

“So they were here,” Aimée said. “We’ve got three options: backstage, stage entrance, lighting loft.”

“Lighting,” said Zacharié without skipping a beat.

“Why?”

“You said you’d trust me.”

She nodded.

“Raoul’s in charge of lighting.” He took the flashlight and headed toward the spiral staircase on the right. “Stay down here.”

She hiked up the waistband on her leather pants. She hated heights. “Like hell I will.”

T
HE HIGH CATWALK
, rimmed with colored gel-filter spotlights, swayed like a tightrope, making her feel like she was on
a high-wire act with no safety harness or net. Only a top rail, thin metal planks and a toeboard between her and the orchestra pit below—and the whole outfit in serious need of welding.

She snuck a glance down at the stage. Big mistake. Dizzy, she grabbed the narrow rail, made her feet move, shuffling one forward after the other. Every breath of the hot, dense air was a struggle.

Under the rafters nested a cockpit-like glassed-in booth. When she followed Zacharié inside, it turned out to be larger than it appeared. More hot, stale air, a flat console with toggle switches and buttons, an overflowing ashtray. An empty bottle of Ricard sat on the unswept wood floor.

Raoul’s lighting nest in the eaves stifled her. She gasped, finding it hard to breathe. Zacharié cursed and kicked the stool over. “I know Raoul’s got them. Give me the keys. I’ll search backstage, under the orchestra pit.”

She’d climbed up this high—she was going to spend longer than one minute examining it. And catch her breath before the long way down. “Impatient type, eh?” She took the flashlight from him. Shone it on wall shelving filled with plugs, odd bulbs and tools. “The color’s different here.”

“
Et
alors
?” He’d turned and headed to the walkway. “There’s no time to waste. They’re in danger.”

Her frustration mounted. “Quit the runaround. What kind of danger?”

Zacharié’s lips pursed. She could see the conflict behind his eyes. “You don’t want to know. If not for yourself, think of that baby inside you.”

His words sent a shiver down her neck.

She played the flashlight over the shelves once more, more carefully. This time, the beam revealed a chalk mark, faint and smudged, but distinctive: an X.

Her throat caught. She’d seen that chalk X in the park. Zazie’s sign. “That’s from Zazie.”

“You’re sure?”

“Help me move these shelves aside.”

That done, they saw a light-colored plywood sheet, hung at the side with hinges, like a door. A door no bigger than a suitcase.

He pulled back the hinged door, then propped it back with a power strip. Going onto her knees, she studied the crawl space. The air was even denser than in the stifling lighting booth. But if Zazie was here …

She hunched down and crawled. Her hands pressed against swags of dank velvet, and cobwebs clung to her damp arms.

She emerged on her knees into a stale, musty room. Bright mid-morning sunlight seeped through the closed shutters and softened the dust-swaddled edges of a Second Empire-style salon.

“Zazie? Where are you?” Her voice echoed off the high
boiserie
-molded ceilings.

The place looked deserted. Had they walked into some kind of museum?

Disappointed, she strode past a stuffed ostrich, framed paintings and a writing desk piled with old letters bound with ribbon. She walked over to a mirrored dressing table covered in perfume bottles and ivory-backed hairbrushes and picked up a gold lipstick case. Ruby-colored lipstick inside with a cloying sweet scent.

How long ago had it been abandoned? Like something from a Proust novel, from another era. A past long gone, frozen in time.

She and Zacharié searched every nook and cranny from the enamel, claw-footed bathtub to the large brick-and-iron coal furnace in the kitchen. She checked the walk-in pantry and found a yellow matchbox and a portrait of Maréchal Pétain.

Dust everywhere. Patches disturbed on the kitchen floor, the carpet in the salon. Random or a sign?

“No one has lived here for a while,” Zacharié said, wiping his finger over piles of yellowed newspapers dated 1940.

“We’ve missed something,” she said. She paced through the rooms. In the library she noticed more mashed footsteps in the dust on the faded carpet. Behind a gilded chair she discovered a six-pack of water bottles and some toilet roll—the only evidence of the modern day.

Frustrated, she leaned against the wall. “They’ve been here. Look.” She pulled out the Monoprix receipts. “Bought yesterday.”

Alarm filled his eyes. “Then we’re too late. He’s moved them.”

“Who’s he?”

“Better you don’t know.”

“Quit playing games. You’ve got what this man wants, right? Your daughter’s the pawn for it. And Zazie.” She leaned against the bookcase. “Why don’t you call the shots? Threaten to expose whatever he doesn’t want exposed?”

It seemed simple to her.

“I can’t.”

“Or won’t? Got a better idea?” She shook her head. The man had told her nothing, expected her to just go along with him. “I don’t care what the hell you’ve done. But quit keeping me in the dark. Tell me what else he’s holding over you.”

“That’s unimportant. Just say he knows too much.”

“I’m guessing you do, too,” she said, putting it together. “He, whoever he is, hired you.”

He blinked, clutched her arm. “Shut up.”

But she wouldn’t. She’d hit a nerve.

“He kidnapped your daughter to keep you on task. But Zazie got involved. So give me the information.”

Zacharié nodded. Hung his head. “He killed my partners. I was next. But I escaped.”

Shivers went up her arms. And that was the man who had Zazie?

“We can’t trust him. He’s desperate,” said Zacharié. His jaw quivered. “He’s killed already to keep people silent. The girls’ lives are at stake.”

Zazie held by a sadistic criminal—a man who kills to make sure no witnesses survive? Fear clamped her stomach. Breathe, she had to breathe in this hot, dense air and figure this out.