She had already helped herself to a seat before it occurred to Floyd that she really did not look very much like her sister.
“I’m sorry about the state of my office,” Floyd said, indicating the piles of barely sorted paperwork. “Someone decided it needed rearranging.”
“You needn’t apologise,” Auger said, resting a handbag on her lap. “I’m just grateful that you’ve agreed to see me at such short notice.” She looked him squarely in the eye. “I appreciate that this is all very unusual, Mister Floyd.”
“There’s nothing ‘usual’ where a homicide’s concerned,” he said. “And I don’t imagine any of this has been easy on you.”
“I won’t pretend it’s been easy,” she said. “On the other hand, I won’t pretend that Susan and I were the closest of sisters, either.”
“Family trouble?”
“Nothing so dramatic. We were just never very close when we were growing up. We were half-sisters, for a start. Susan’s father died before I was born. She was four years older than me, which might not sound much, but it’s a world of difference when you’re children. Susan may as well have been a grown-up for all that we had in common.”
“And later, when you were both older?”
“I suppose the age difference became less important, but by then Susan was spending less and less time at home. She was always running off with boys, bored out of her mind with our little town.”
“Tanglewood, Dakota,” Floyd said, nodding.
Her eyes widened in what was either mild surprise or mild disbelief. “You know it?”
“I know of it, but only because of what I learned from the papers in your sister’s tin. Funny thing is, I looked it up in a gazetteer and it doesn’t seem to exist.”
“You mean it wasn’t in the gazetteer. I assure you it exists, Mister Floyd. I would have a great deal of trouble explaining my childhood if it didn’t. Do you have an ashtray?”
Floyd passed her one. “It must be a real one-horse town.”
Auger shook her head as she lit a cigarette. “It has wild ambitions of becoming a one-horse town.”
“Like that, is it? In which case, I understand why your sister felt she had to leave. A place like that can begin to feel like a prison.”
“Where are you from, if you don’t mind my asking? I don’t even know your first name.”
“I’m from Galveston, Texas.” Floyd said. “My father was a merchant marine. I was a trawlerman by the time I was sixteen.”
“And you ended up in Paris?” Auger blew out a line of smoke. “I hope you weren’t the navigator.”
“I was the navigator, wireless operator and a lot of other things until the day I decided I liked making music more than catching fish. I’d just turned nineteen and I’d heard that Paris was the place to be if you wanted to make it as a musician. Especially if you were American. Bechet was here, Baker, Gershwin. So I caught a boat to Marseille and decided to try to make my name. I landed in nineteen thirty-nine, a year before the tanks rolled into the Ardennes.”
“And?”
“I’m still trying to make my name.” Floyd puffed out his cheeks and smiled. “I gave up on my serious jazz ambitions after about six months. I still play as a hobby, and now and then I make more money out of it than I do from the detective business. But I’m afraid that’s more of a sad reflection on the business than my luck as a musician.”
“How did you get into this line of work? It’s something of a jump from trawlerman to private detective.”
“It didn’t happen overnight,” Floyd replied, “but I had an advantage before I even landed. My mother was French, and I had the paperwork to prove it. The French army was undermanned and unprepared for the German army lining up on the border. When they finally woke up and realised they were being invaded, they weren’t too fussy about who they let into the country.”
“And did you man those guns?”
“I told them I’d think about it.”
“And?”
“I thought about it and decided there were things I’d rather be doing than waiting around for German Seventy-Sevens to pound the hell out of me.”
Auger abandoned her cigarette, barely smoked, stubbing it out in the ashtray. “Didn’t the authorities come after you?”
“There were no authorities. The government had already cut and run, leaving a city run by mobsters. For a while back there, it really looked as if the German invasion was going to succeed. It was only luck that those armoured divisions got bogged down in the Ardennes—bad weather working for us, for once. That and the fact that we realised they were in trouble in time to put some bombers over them.”
“A close thing, in other words. It almost makes you wonder what would have happened if that advance hadn’t stalled.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad,” Floyd said. “At least there’d have been some kind of order under the Germans. Still, it was the right outcome as far as I was concerned. There was a lot of dirty work to go around. A man who could speak American and French and pass as either was very valuable in those days.”
Auger nodded. “I can imagine.”
Floyd waved a hand, compressing years of his life into a single dismissive gesture. “I got a job as a bodyguard and chauffeur for a local gangster. That taught me more ropes than I ever knew existed. When the local gangster opposition wiped out my boss, I made a couple of sideways moves and found myself running a small, struggling detective agency.”
“Shouldn’t there be another chapter—the one where you end up running a huge, successful detective agency, with branches all around the world?”
“Maybe next year,” he said, smiling ruefully.
“I like your attitude, Mister Floyd. You don’t seem to feel that the world owes you a living.”
“It doesn’t. I’ve played jazz with some of the best musicians alive. And I’ve seen them paid in bottles of medicinal alcohol, which they gladly sucked down until they went blind from it. While I still have a roof over my head, I can’t feel too sorry for myself. This little operation won’t make me or my partner Custine rich men, but somehow or other we stumble on from year to year.”
“Actually—and this is going to sound somewhat indelicate—it’s your little operation I came to talk to you about. Or rather one particular investigation being conducted by your agency.”
“I wondered when the small talk was going to end. Pity—I was actually beginning to enjoy it. Shall we get to Susan’s belongings?”
He could see the relief on her face. “You have them, then. I was so worried when I heard about what happened to her landlord.”
“I have the box she gave him for safekeeping,” Floyd said. “I don’t have anything else, and it’s only good luck that I have the box.”
“Why did Mister Blanchard give it to you?”
“He thought the contents might shed some light on why she was killed. The old man was pretty convinced she was murdered.”
Auger sighed. “Well, I can understand why he might feel that way. But it wasn’t murder.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“I knew my sister. Not well, as I’ve already told you, but well enough not to be surprised that this happened.”