Bound and determined to find something while her shoes dried, she rooted through the kitchen drawers, found a meat-tenderizer mallet, summoned her energy, and whacked the lock, over and over, until it cracked.
Feeling better, she tried jimmying the top drawer open, only to end up using a can opener to open its side. Inside lay financial statements in folders going back some years. The second drawer held letters, and the third, mostly receipts and clippings.
She stirred two brown-sugar cubes into the chipped espresso cup and sipped, yawning while scanning the files. Statements from the last five years, requiring tedious checking. She opened the window a crack, trying to keep her head clear. Below lay the frosted, skeletal grape vines that produced a harvest each fall. The pride of Montmartre, but acidic. An acquired taste. She found a crocheted blue blanket and wrapped it around her feet.
Bankruptcy papers, the divorce decree. She leaned forward and got to work. The plaintive strains of someone practicing the cello accompanied the drip of melting ice outside Nathalie’s window.
Boring, routine checking of handwritten financial notes and printed bank documents. After half an hour she discovered the discrepancies. Big discrepancies. And easy to track after she’d discovered the pattern.
The large deposits had started three months ago, coinciding with the Gagnards’ divorce decree and bankruptcy. No moonlighting flic made fifty thousand francs a month working part-time! No wonder Jacques had convinced Nathalie to keep the driving school. It was a perfect place to stow the infusion of francs that had been deposited every month for three months. A simple way to hide blackmail?
Looking around the clean, utilitarian kitchen and IKEA assemble-it-yourself apartment furnishings, she doubted whether he had shared the largesse with Nathalie. Simple greed, always demanding more . . . had that been his downfall?
But this didn’t dispel the possibility that it was something Jacques knew that had killed him.
With the few rigged machines she’d seen, she doubted Zette could afford a fifty-thousand-francs-a-month payoff. Jacques could have collected from other small bar owners and mined the district. A pattern?
Zette’s murder might have been a warning to others of what lay in store if they neglected to pay up. Yet, Jacques had been murdered two days before Zette’s death.
She opened another file and glanced at a water-stained Monoprix flyer advertising a men’s coat sale, a torn typed page inside. Why keep something like that? She put it back with the other papers.
Stymied, she sipped more espresso, pulling the blanket up over her lap. Had Jacques worked with others? She found several deposit slips with J. Gagnard written both as payee and payor.
So far, she’d only found answers that raised more questions. Opened a can of worms. Jacques could have been killed by any of his “clients” eager to stop the payoffs. That gave her a whole slew of possible suspects. She doubted that the authorities would be eager to investigate extortion charges against a slain, respected officer. After all, they had Laure and her smoking gun.
She looked at the twisted mess she’d made of the file cabinet drawer and was about to kick it when an idea stopped her. She bent down and, avoiding the rough, sharp edges, felt under each drawer for something taped. Nothing.
She’d found evidence of Jacques’s extortion and knew that he gambled. But on a deeper level, she suspected there was more.
Whoever had killed him would have trashed Nathalie’s place by now if they suspected he’d hidden something valuable here. But they were divorced; Nathalie could have brushed off anyone who questioned her, denying that she remained in his confidence. Yet the newspaper article that had appeared in today’s paper would connect her to him. If they hadn’t known about Nathalie before, they would now.
Something bothered her. What was it? She stared at the moonlight on the rimmed frosted window, then back into Nathalie’s apartment, scanning it afresh. No computer. She scrutinized the apartment again. No printer.
She took out the Monoprix flyer, found the torn typed paper inside: a half page of computerese: //_e738:Ñ followed by more hash marks, numbers, strings of letters. She stared at it. Hadn’t Oscar Wilde said that the true mystery in the world is the visible, not the invisible.
A pattern repeated. Of course, part of an encryption key! Bordereau’s words about the data-encryption leak echoed in her mind. Did this fit? Had she finally found the link?
To piece the puzzle together she had to get onto a computer. Excited, she stuck the page in her pocket, put the files back, pushed the cabinet back under Nathalie’s bed, donned her now-dried shoes, killed the lights, and was just about to close the apartment door when she heard footsteps coming up.
She shut the door without a sound, slipped off her shoes, and padded barefoot up to the next floor, crouched down, and listened. A Wagnerian opera came from the neighbor’s flat, masking the sound of knocking on Nathalie’s door. What kind of séance were they having?
She peered down through the metal railing, saw knitted caps on men’s heads, and their down-jacketed shoulders. Then one of them looked up.
Her heart pounded. She’d seen the mec’s profile; it was the one with bad teeth and the knife. Her hands shook.
The timed lights clicked off. She backed up the steps. Don’t come up here, she prayed. Then light flooded the landing and stairs again. She heard shuffling, a grunt, and the impact of a crowbar as the mec wedged the door open.
“Quick,” one of them said, “. . . waiting outside.”
She’d have to hurry, silently descend, and slip past the broken door, evading whoever was waiting. Pulling on a woolen cap, she said another prayer as she tiptoed past the half-open door and downstairs to the vestibule.
An older woman wearing a winter white wool cape was checking her mailbox. “Cold, eh? Are you the new tenant on the top floor?”
Aimée was in no mood for conversation. She wanted to leave. Now. She put her finger over her lips, then whispered, “I’m worried. The door of number six has been broken open. And I heard noises inside as I walked by.”
Thumps sounded above. Alarm showed on the woman’s face.
Aimée nodded, pulling the woman close. “Don’t go up there. I forgot my cell phone. Do you have one?”
The woman nodded.
“Punch in 18, call the flics,” Aimée said.
As the woman pulled out her cell phone, Aimée slipped on her shoes, and left.
On the glistening outer steps she hesitated. Up or down? She heard the thrum of an idling engine and, looking down, saw the yellow lighted tip of a cigarette held by someone in the driver’s seat of a car. She kept to the darkened border of the stairs, climbing fast, and had almost reached the top when a figure stepped out of a doorway and blocked her path.
Thursday Night
THE OVERHEAD LIGHT POOLED on the table. René stared at a worried Isabelle.
“It’s your fault,” Isabelle said. “You! We were fine until you appeared, asking questions, pretending to be . . .”
“Blaming me won’t help find Paul,” René said.
Inside he felt sick and full of guilt. If the killer was on to Paul, no place he’d hidden could keep him safe.
René saw himself out of the apartment where Isabelle kept vigil. Above him, a lone brown leaf from a plane tree drifted in a slow dance on the breeze. He watched it, feeling as lost as the leaf. He had already checked the rooftops and the cave where Isabelle said Paul sometimes hid. No trace. Where would a frightened boy hide? He tried to think the way Paul would.
The darkened Montmartre street lay deserted at this time of night. René walked, the ache in his hip exacerbated by the freezing temperature. Around the corner, past the building where Jacques was murdered, he saw the construction site. Frost laced the corrugated metal fencing the courtyard.