“Isn’t this the area where you made your famous drug bust?” Burke asks.
“C’est vrai,” I tell her. “You have a good memory.”
She is looking out the taxi window. The tourists have disappeared from the streets. The artists must be inside smoking weed. Only vagrants and prostitutes are hanging around.
“Ignore the neighborhood. Le Petit Canard is amazing. I used to come here a great deal when I lived in Paris. With friends, with my father, with…”
She says, “With Dalia, I’m sure.” She pauses and says, “I am so sorry for you, Moncrief. So sorry.”
Softly, I mutter, “Thank you.”
Then I add, “And thank you for allowing me to take you to the crazy tourist sights. It lifted my spirits. It made me feel a little better, Katherine.”
Burke appears slightly startled. We both realize that for the first time I have called Detective Burke by her proper first name.
I look closely at Burke’s face, a lovely face, a face that goes well with such a lovely evening in such a beautiful city.
“Okay,” I say loudly and with great heartiness. “Let me call for the wine list, and we shall begin. We will enjoy a glorious dinner tonight.”
I fake an overly serious sad face, a frown. “Because you know that tomorrow…retour au travail. Do you know what those three French words mean?”
“I’m afraid so,” she says. “‘Back to work.’”
Chapter 34
Moncrief and K. Burke return to the hotel. If you were unaware of the details of their relationship, you would assume that they were just another rich and beautiful couple strolling through the ornate lobby of the Meurice.
Much to Moncrief’s surprise and pleasure, K. Burke had brought along an outfit that was quite chic-a long white shirt over which hung a gray cashmere sweater. That sweater fell over a black slim skirt. It was finished with short black boots. Burke could possibly pass as a fashionable Parisian, and she could certainly pass as a fashionable American. Moncrief had told her how “snappy” she looked.
“You look snappy yourself, Moncrief,” she had said to him. This was, of course, true: a black Christian Dior suit with a slight sheen to it; a white shirt with a deep burgundy-colored tie.
Moncrief walked K. Burke back to her room and said good night. He listened while Burke locked her door behind her. Then he walked to the end of the hallway, to his own room.
It was a dinner between friends, between colleagues. K. Burke had expected nothing more. In fact, K. Burke wanted nothing more. It had been a spectacular day-the odd museums, then the extraordinary dinner: foie-gras ravioli, Muscovy duckling with mango sherbet, those wonderful little chocolates that fancy French restaurants always bring you with your coffee (or so Moncrief told her).
The night had turned out to be soothing and fun and friendly. He referred to Dalia a few times, and it was with nostalgia, sadness. But there was no darkness when he reminisced about his late girlfriend.
Now, as Burke unscrews and removes her tiny diamond studs, she wonders: Can you have such a wonderful time with a charming, handsome man and not think about romance?
Of course you can, she tells herself. But then again, it’s impossible to put a man and a woman together-the electrician who comes to fix the wiring, the traffic cop who stops you for speeding, the attorney who is updating your will-and not consider the possibilities of What if…at another time…under different conditions…
Burke removes her shirt and sweater. She sits on the bench at the white wood dressing table and removes her boots. As she massages her toes she shakes her head slowly; she is ashamed that she is even having such thoughts. Despite the pleasant dinner, she knows that Moncrief has not remotely begun to recover from Dalia’s awful, sudden, horrible death. And yet here I am, selfishly thinking of how great we look together, like one of those beautiful couples in a perfume ad.
“Enough nonsense.” She actually says these two words out loud.
Then she goes into the bathroom, removes her makeup, brushes her teeth, and takes the two antique combs out of her hair. She slips her T-shirt (GO RANGERS) over her head, then she removes her contact lenses and drops them into solution. There is only one more thing to do.
She goes to her pocketbook to do what she does instinctively every night before bed: check the safety on her service weapon. Then she remembers-she doesn’t have a gun. The French police said that she and Moncrief were on official business for New York, not for Paris. No firearms permits would be issued.
She remembers what Moncrief said to her when she complained.
“Do you feel naked without your gun, K. Burke?”
“No,” she had answered. “Just a little underdressed.”
Chapter 35
The same cramped and ugly little room. The same primitive air-conditioning. The same stale air. The same inadequate Internet service. But most of all, the same rotten luck in finding “the fingerprint,” the instinctive connection between one of my past investigations and the tragedies in New York.
Detective Burke and I keep working. We are once again seated in the police archives building, outside Paris. We have been studying the screen so intently that we decided to invest in a shared bottle of eyedrops.
The screen scrolls through old cases, some of which I had actually forgotten-a molestation case that involved a disgusting pediatrician who was also the father of five children; a case of a government official who, not surprisingly, was collecting significant bribes for issuing false health-inspection reports; a case of race fixing at the Longchamp racecourse.
“This looks bigger than fixing a horse race,” she says. “The pages go on forever.”
“Print them,” I say. “I’ll look at them more thoroughly later.”
Forty pages come spitting out of the printer. Burke says, “It looks like this was a very complicated case.”
“Not really,” I say. “No case is ever that complicated. Either there’s a crime or there isn’t. The Longchamp case began with a horse trainer. Marcel Ballard was his name. Not a bad guy, I think, but Ballard was weary of fixing the races. So he fought physically-punching, kicking-with the owner and trainer who were running the fix. And Ballard had a knife. And Ballard killed the owner and cut the other trainer badly.”
K. Burke continues scrolling through the cases on the screen. She does say, “Keep going, Moncrief. I’m listening.”
“I met with Ballard’s wife. She had a newborn, three months old, their fourth child. So I did her a favor, but not without asking for something in return. I persuaded Ballard to confess to the crime and to help us identify the other trainers who were drugging the horses. He cooperated. So thanks to my intervention-and that of my superiors-he was allowed to plead to a lesser charge. Instead of homicide volontaire, he was only charged with-”
“Let me guess,” says K. Burke. “Homicide involontaire.”
“You are both a legal and linguistic genius, K. Burke.”
I grab some of the Longchamp papers and go through them quickly. “I’m glad I did what I did,” I say. “Madame Ballard is a good woman.”
“And the husband? Is he grateful?” K. Burke asks as she continues to study the screen intensely.
“He has written to me many times in gratitude. But one must keep in mind that he did kill a man.”
Burke presses a computer key and begins reading about a drug gang working out of Saint-Denis.