Murder Without Pity (5 page)

Christophe placed his laptop on a wooden chair and administered the oath. Would she explain her activities, Stanislas asked afterwards, the day of Monsieur Pincus’s death?

She tucked her blanket under her thighs and began, pausing whenever Stanislas asked so he could dictate her version to his clerk. And in a gust of cooperation, she quickly ended by describing how she had seen neighbors crowded around a police van with poor Monsieur Lenoir inside and an officer beside him listening to how this tenant had stumbled upon Pincus’s body at the bottom of the stairs. Strange, she continued, a death like that in her building. The first of its kind in her ten years working there. These renters, she assured him, were her family. In fact, they called her Mama Napoleon because she had scolded them, after several burglaries, to ensure the front door was always locked and to never give out the entry code.

Her face flushed as she recalled that painful day of the murder, and Stanislas waited for her to calm down before he asked his questions. “Did the monsieur have many visitors?”

“Him? None that I could tell, and I pride myself on knowing who enters my building.”

“Did you by chance notice the kind of mail he received?”

Despite his status, her face hardened. “Monsieur, I merely deliver the mail to the floors. I don’t read it.”

He backed off with an understanding nod. “Was he rowdy?” he asked, choosing an extreme to provoke her.

She giggled at his suggestion. “Why, I hardly noticed him. He came and went at strange hours. There were days when I didn’t see him at all. He was practically invisible except that one day when he lugged those boxes down the stairs. He made such a commotion he almost woke….”

Boxes? he asked himself. The police hadn’t mentioned that in their report. “What boxes, madam?”

“…entire building. Couldn’t he have chosen—”

“Boxes?” he interrupted loudly to break her gathering hysteria. “What boxes?”

His question perplexed her into a frown, and she turned quiet with uncertainty as though he doubted her story.

“These boxes, madam, filled with trash? Stuffed with books? Made of cardboard or wood? Large or small?” he pursued. “Unsecured? Or secured with, say, string?”

She glanced away to the wall. She plucked uneasily at the crocheted seams of her blanket. She remained quiet.

His eagerness had intimidated her, he could see. He became quiet, hoping she’d answer him in her own time, which she did after a further moment of reflection.

“Secured, Monsieur Examining Magistrate,” she exclaimed. “Wrapped around many times with gray, industrial tape I’ve seen my husband, a plumber, use for special jobs. And tied, not with string, but with rope.” She giggled at the memory of the man as she must have imagined him staggering down those stairs. “With rope wound several times around each package like buried treasure unearthed. He has diamonds and emeralds in each, Monsieur Judge?” And her fleshy neck rippled at her humor. “Buried emeralds and diamonds in them?”

“When was this?” he asked, pen poised for her response. “Can you recall?”

“Just after our second burglary. Around May-something, I think. Poor Mademoiselle Garlin on the third floor had had every single Yves Montand cassette stolen. I won’t forget that morning either. What commotion from her. The theft almost caused the poor girl a heart attack from her loss. The break-in must have sent out an alarm to our monsieur. I remember him turning white with fright, which I thought odd. And that very next Monday, I saw him lugging his precious jewels down those stairs. Staggering down them all morning. Sweating through his shirt, yet refusing assistance. Shouting at anyone in the way to stand clear and not to touch anything even if something should fall out. Refusing a taxi, too, which I’d offered to call. You can ask Monsieur Lenoir. He was there. He saw that spectacle.”

Just as quickly as she had opened up, she turned silent. She grabbed a hardback on numerology that lay open-faced on her pillow and clutched it to her bosom. “This fog. These riots. Now a death in my own house. I know it, monsieur. Evil times are upon us.”

The sloppiness of the police investigating this case, he thought. He marked his frustration by flaring two question marks after “boxes” he had scribbled in his notes. Valuables or junk? He might never know what lay inside. He must work with what he had, he decided, however insubstantial, and took her pudgy hands in his. She wasn’t in any danger, he explained. The death of Monsieur Pincus seemed personal. Yet to guarantee her safety, he promised a policeman outside the apartment building for several days.

He had only two requests. Would she set aside Pincus’s mail for the police to collect each Friday? And could she please try to recall where she might have written down the man’s next of kin? Satisfied she understood the seriousness of his appeal, he left her lodge for the foyer’s gloom.

At the bottom of the stairs, he caught a delicious whiff. Someone must be sitting down to a hot lunch with fresh bread and wine. Would his driver run up to Boulevard de la Villette? he asked. Steamed rice, vegetables, and chicken. A tuna sandwich with black olives, green peppers, and tomatoes. He didn’t care. Anything nourishing from a restaurant there to carry him through until dinner, he explained, as he thumped his cane on the first of the steps to begin his climb up to Pincus’s studio.

“That concierge must give everyone constipation with her hysterics,” Christophe said.

How dare those police treat my case with disrespect, Stanislas thought.

“It’s one of their job qualifications,” the photographer trailing behind said.

Stanislas glanced sideways at his clerk. “They didn’t question her thoroughly. We may never know what he was hauling off and why.”

As they reached the second floor landing, he worried what else the police in the Pincus dossier might have overlooked.

VIEW FROM A WINDOW

The tenement seemed to him to pulse with desperate rawness as they felt their way up through the dim light. Somewhere below, a tap stammered through the pipes like a machine gun. On some floor above, a door slammed shut, trapping inside wailing Arabic music and shouts of a couple arguing. Somewhere outside, a child screamed. He punched open a window and glanced down into the weedy courtyard several stories below. A girl kicked a second ball under an ironing board propped open. He withdrew and continued in a limp up to the fifth floor.

A policeman in a chair glanced above the page of a horse racing magazine, then rose to shake hands while he yawned out his greeting. He’d had no problem with anyone trying to intrude, he explained, and added that the new crime scene technicians had finished late yesterday.

“They wore gloves as soon as they entered?” Stanislas asked. First, inept gathering of evidence; next sloppy questioning of a witness. How could that much carelessness infect a new dossier that quickly? he wondered. The disrespect toward it was intolerable.

The policeman cupped another yawn while nodding. “A top-to-bottom search this time, Monsieur Judge. As you ordered.” He handed Stanislas a checklist he had marked off.

“Let’s hope they discover something those bunglers missed,” Stanislas replied and said another guard from the tenth district station would relieve him shortly.

Speaking of relief, the policeman said, now that the judge was here, could he excuse himself for the Turkish toilette?

Someone—Léon? he wondered, after nodding assent—had machine-stamped Pincus’s last name in white capitals across a width of black tape above the doorbell, which didn’t work, he discovered, when he pushed it. A dusty pile of flyers on the floor advertised “Business French,” and he recalled Pincus had once taught at a school near the Place de la Bastille. While Christophe recorded their entry, he cut the seal that secured the studio against the curious.

He hesitated at the threshold, surprised at the room’s barrenness, at a life hardly lived. Blinds opposite swayed from a breeze and blades from a window fan pinged against the grill as they eased around. Curtains stirred and collapsed. A sadness pulled at him while he surveyed the meager furnishings. This is what the man had accumulated from a lifetime of work? But even Little Miseries deserve respect, he reminded himself, and stepped inside.

He paused beside a chest against the left wall and noticed an armory of medicines lined up in rows to battle ailments. Over-the-counter sleeping tablets and pills to control blood pressure as well as bottles crammed with extra-strength aspirin and others that promised relief from arthritis and ulcers and angina, all in formation to lessen pain, to put the sleepless to sleep, to help Pincus hobble through another day. And he’d gathered enough strength one drizzly, cold morning to make his way across to the sixteenth district to beg, as Boucher claimed?

He noticed a notebook of some kind on a bookcase beside a window on the right side of the room. He meandered over and saw the
French Academy of Language and Culture
in black letters across the front. He brushed off dust with a reflective caress. Then again, he thought as he lifted back the cover, maybe Boucher did tell the truth. Pincus was simply begging that morning, and his later death had no connection to that witness, except…. An inexplicable unease with that possibility bothered him.

He glanced at Pincus’s notes in the margin of a page. The furrow of his pen’s pressure revealed an intensity for work. Something’s not quite right, Stanislas warned himself. At his interrogation, didn’t Monsieur Boucher deride the man as riffraff? Yet the victim had seemed in command of his life, however impoverished it was.

He ignored the restless shuffle of feet to his right, Christophe waiting to type his observations; the policewoman, eager to show her crime scene prowess, snapping photos. He pushed open two of the four windows that bracketed the bookcase and leaned out.

To his right past several windows, a satellite dish was perhaps receiving some Middle East program. And five stories below visible through the mist, now slipping around the corner onto the brick street below, a sedan with a rear aerial, whipping high its owner’s importance. This sleekness in a quarter with a homeless shelter across the square?

Alarmed, he swung around to his clerk and policewoman. “Either of you tell anyone we were coming?”

Christophe, in a chair with his laptop on his knees, glanced up. “I told no one.”

“Not even your wife?”

“Not even Suzanne.”

“I took your word, Monsieur Judge.” The policewoman answered before he had turned to her.

He shifted to her, in no mood to indulge her few years on the force. “And what did I say?”

“We’re working a dangerous dossier, Monsieur Judge.”

“And someone could die from carelessness so secrecy was vital.”

She looked too scared to reply and simply nodded.

Then who was slipping through the mist? A slum lord, inspecting his property? A lost tourist? He limped from window to window, trying to glimpse the license plate number, but realized the height made that impossible.

Somehow word could have leaked out from the Justice Annex. Hadn’t those friends of Boucher boasted that night they had held him captive they had inside contacts? Hadn’t they threatened him if he pursued the dossier? And here he was, at the scene that might tie Boucher to the murder. Get out, he warned himself. The driver might have accomplices. You arrived minutes ago. You found nothing. You left. That’s how it might look, if you leave immediately. Return later with backup.

He hesitated. In the shadows between the bookcase and windowsill lay some kind of pamphlet. He grasped what turned out to be a fold-out map of Berlin. His stomach shot out pain. Berlin, he thought. Capital of Hitler’s New Europe. The darkest of cities. My grandfather’s favorite.

Get out, he told himself. You’re risking the lives of assistants. He ignored the urgency, tried reaching the guard with his cell phone, and failed. He must have clicked his off. Stanislas ordered the photographer to rush to find him. He could duck outside and hopefully get a plate number phoned in.

Curious, Stanislas shook the map open. “Monsieur Minh,” he said, studying it, “there’s a black limousine on the street below. See if you can tell if it’s stopped or driving along. Stay back from the windows. The driver could be armed.”

In the map’s lower left-hand corner, he noticed an Attractions Index that listed places of interest. The guide looked like a complimentary offering from a hotel to its guests. Pincus as tourist? Could anyone merely sightsee in a city that had scarred millions? “It’s still moving along?”

He tilted the map toward the lone overhead bulb. “It’s moving like a snail,” he heard his clerk reply. “He’s driving like he’s searching for something. He’s in a Renault, a Safrane, maybe.” Stanislas quickly ran a finger down the index’s three columns for a clue to Pincus’s interest. He spotted no markings, not even next to the Body Body Club, where a man might venture, unless he directed his passions elsewhere. Pincus as searcher? Get out! You’ve no right to risk their lives.

“He’s pulled up in front of this building.”

“What’s he doing?” Stanislas lowered himself awkwardly to the floor. Then he tumbled out books from the five shelves, hoping for a detailed map, marked, to explain the man’s interest in Berlin. Grammar texts mostly, he discovered. Language catalogues of teaching aids, too. The dry paraphernalia of the man’s outer life.

“Nothing so far as I can tell,” Christophe answered at last. “He’s just idling.”

Play it safe, his silent voice warned. Get out while you can. You’re endangering innocents over mere curiosity, and you can’t build a case on that. He clumsily pushed himself to his feet, and in that instant the studio came to him with clarity. Where was the TV? The radio? The pictures or posters to soften the dreariness?

“He’s getting out,” Christophe warned.

And something else. To his left, that bed with its blanket creased back with the care of a hotel maid. “Anyone with him?” he asked.

“I can’t tell yet.”

And next to the bed, on that fragment of cloth, cut into a rug, slippers to furnish Pincus a little warmth each morning…before he continued some task that led to Berlin? “Can you describe him?”