“The tail end,” Aimée said, edging toward the bar. “I’d never seen him out of uniform but he looked sharp in a pinstripe suit, eh?”
“That’s a fact,” he said. “I left early, had to man the bar here. Knowing Ouvrier, next time he wears it will be his funeral.”
Pause. From the silence, she figured Zette hadn’t heard about what had happened to Jacques.
“Mademoiselle, I didn’t catch your name, or your father’s,” Zette said.
Not only careful and street-wise, he’d let her know he was well connected at the Commissariat. As a smart club owner should be, but it bothered her.
“Jean-Claude Leduc,” she said. “Aimée Leduc, here’s my card.”
She set it on the wet, glass-ringed counter.
He turned her card over in his hand. “A woman PI?”
She nodded. “Computer security.”
Had he known her father? “Does the name Leduc sound familiar?”
“I know a lot of people. So tell me what you really want to talk about.”
Aimée realized she’d passed muster, set twenty francs on the none-too-clean counter, and smiled. “Bet you’re thirsty.”
Wine would make this dance with Zette more palatable. Or so she hoped.
“I’ve got a nice little Corsican red that sings in the gullet.” He reached for an unmarked bottle and two wineglasses and set them in front of her. “It’s never too early for me.”
She noticed his loaf of a body, a bit gone to fat, but biceps bulged under the tight red soccer shirt. He must work out. An old prizefighter with the scars to prove it.
“Young ladies don’t visit me much anymore,” he said, pouring the garnet red liquid.
Zette’s attempt at charm? She took a sip. Plump, fruity, and smooth on the way down. Not bad.
On the bar wall hung a framed newspaper sport section headlined ZETTE KO’S TERRANCE THE MAD MOROCCAN.
“So you’re that Zette? My father went to your matches at the Hippodrome.”
She stretched the truth. He’d won complimentary championship tickets from the Commissariat once. A worn-around-the-edges retired prizefighter might soak up the flattery.
Zette shrugged as though used to this.
“Boxing gave you a good living, eh?”
“All this.” He took a long sip and gestured around the bar.
“And a VIP security service with Jacques Gagnard, non?”
“You’ve got it wrong,” Zette said without skipping a beat and drained his glass. Poured another and topped up hers. She took another swig.
“How’s that, Zette?” she said. “You worked with Jacques, didn’t you?”
“So that’s who you want to talk about,” he said, staring at her. “Something’s happened to him, hasn’t it?”
She hesitated to give him the bad news. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry, what do you mean?”
She paused, her index finger tracing the rim of the glass. “He was shot and killed on a rooftop. On the next street.”
Zette’s fists balled. He shook his head. “But I saw him last night! Nom de Dieu, he was at the bar, I bought him a drink, we talked—”
“Everyone did. We’re all shocked. He was off duty, too, when it happened.”
Zette’s face clouded with sadness and he poured more wine. Was there more behind that look?
“To Jacques, a good mec.”
They raised their glasses.
“Who found him?”
“That’s the thing, Zette; I did.”
Zette made the sign of the cross with his big knuckled hands. “I still can’t believe it.”
“What did Jacques talk about, do you remember?” Aimée asked. “Was he nervous, was he acting any way unusual?”
Zette rubbed his jaw. “How did you get my name?”
She controlled her frustration. “Nathalie, his ex-wife, said he worked for you.”
“Work? More like he did me a favor from time to time. My VIPs like protection.”
What celebrities called Club Chevalier their hangout?
“By VIPs, you mean who?”
“Tino Rossi sat on the stool you’re sitting on,” he said, with a proud look on his mug.
Tino Rossi, a Corsican singer popular with the over-sixty crowd? She tried to look impressed. “Wasn’t he before Jacques’s time?”
“My guests want to keep a low profile, they want discretion,” he said. “They like to sample Montmartre without their goons, and to be escorted by a local.”
An escort service? She looked around the club, saw the frayed postcards of Ajaccio on the smudged mirror. Of course, this was a Corsican bar, why hadn’t she picked up on that? Instead of Jacques squiring provincial businessmen to the hooker clubs, could it have been Corsican gang leaders who wanted protection without their “goons”?
“I see. You’re Corsican, Zette?”
He flashed his gold teeth. “At one time we ran the quartier. The golden days. Pepé le grand was rubbed out right in front of my place, and Ange Testo ran the big brasserie on Place Pigalle. It was a wehrmachetspeiselokal, German soldiers’ canteen, during the war. Those bathrooms were a mess, all graffitied with swastikas, things you don’t want to know. In the end Ange just wallpapered it over.” He shrugged. “We Corse had a code of honor, still do. But now, I’m the only one left.”
She nodded and drank her wine. Code of honor? More like the code of silence. Talk and one talked no more.
She envisioned the postwar days of zazous wearing big zoot suits and flashing money, the jazz clubs and strip bars, when the Moulin Rouge was considered high class.
“Zette, tell me about the last job Jacques did for you.”
“Like I said, now and then he did favors for me.”
“Bon. What favor did he do for you?”
“Like I said, some escorting.”
Getting a Corsican to talk was hard work.
A broad-shouldered young man wearing a leather jacket, wool cap low over his forehead, and jangling what sounded like coins in his pocket, entered. Zette glanced up. Instead of telling him the bar was closed, as Aimée expected, he nodded at the young man who’d gone over to a game machine. If she hadn’t been studying Zette in the mirror behind the bar she would have missed what came next. The flick of his wrist under the counter, the slight whirring sound, and the brighter red glare of the game machine reflected in the mirror.
And then she knew! It was a fixed machine, regulated by a switch under the counter! Pigalle and Montmartre bars had once been notorious for them. Placed among the legitimate game machines, one, resembling all the others, would be rigged. Inside was a device, a Sicilian specialty. The owner kept a tab of wins and losses and paid out or collected. If the player didn’t honor his tab, he never played the machines in Montmartre, or anywhere, again.
“Look, Mademoiselle, I’m busy. Time for me to open up. Jacques, rest his soul, hadn’t done a favor for me in months.”
He wanted her to leave so he could carry on with his crooked machine unobserved.
She gave him a look, understanding in her eyes. “But I want to find Jacques’s killer. If you’re his friend, you’d want to help me.”
“Mademoiselle, stick to your own concerns.”
She resented the brush-off. “I’m not interested in your business here. The rigged machines.” She gave a pointed look at his hands resting on the glass-ringed counter. A look to say she held something over him now. Or was he protected by the police, as he’d implied? Did they let him operate in return for information? Did he inform? That could be messy. But she didn’t care. There had to be something beneath the surface here. And it might have gotten Jacques murdered and backfired on Laure.