Murder at la Villette, page 14
One of the drinkers gestured inside.
The bar, an old bistro with a cracked tile floor and red-and-white checkered tablecloths, served simple bistro fare, evidenced by the chalkboard with the specials and by the lingering tomato aroma. The menu du jour was fait à maison, made in house. Her stomach growled.
Too bad lunch was over.
On the zinc counter, très traditionnel, were unwashed glasses, coins stacked by the beer pulls and an old-fashioned cash register. Little had changed from the last century by the look of it.
“Allô?”
A head popped out from behind the frosted glass-paneled door at the back. “Un moment.” The speaker disappeared.
Like she had time for this?
“Monsieur Dubois?”
The only answer—a clang of a pot.
Too bad if he was busy. So was she.
She marched across the tiled floor, a cracked mélange of brown-and-blue design, reminiscent of her grandmother’s farmhouse. It needed a scrub.
Local place, homemade fare, last remodeled in 1900, if that. At the window to the kitchen she heard metallic sounds and peeked inside.
“Excusez-moi, but if you’re Roget Dubois, we need to talk.”
“Impossible.” He had on a hairnet over his dirty-blond hair, wore a long apron and was mashing garlic in a press. He looked about Aimée’s height. Early thirties. The muscle in his cheek twitched.
“As in you’re Roget but can’t or don’t want to talk? Or you’re not Roget? Either way . . .”
The small kitchen was jammed with spices, pots, cans of olive oil and the pervading smell of caramelized onions and tomatoes. The cooktop took up most of the space. She felt claustrophobic.
“Who are you?”
“Détective privé.” Too bad she’d given her last card to Jacquot Devries, the journo. “It’s about the letter you sent the flics.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The anonymous letter indicating le Balafré’s back.”
“If you’re not a flic, what’s it to you?”
She kept going. “You wrote that no one listened to you about the victim on rue Petit, that the police drawing was wrong and the victim’s brother told you so.”
The dense, hot air had a layer of grease. She couldn’t breathe.
“Why don’t you answer my question,” he said.
“Let’s get out of the kitchen and go somewhere quiet.”
“Zut alors, my grand-mère’s sick so it’s on me to stock and to prepare sauces for tonight.”
She heard a flush and the spray of a water faucet. The lace-curtained old-fashioned glass door opened, and a woman with gray hair entered, then took an apron from the hook.
“Don’t lie, Roget. Go clean up the bar.”
It seems grand-mère was back in charge. She shooed them out.
Roget’s eyes crinkled in fear, and the muscle in his cheek twitched into high gear. For a moment she thought he’d sprint out of the bar, get away.
“You’re not in trouble. Look, we can talk while you work, okay?”
He hesitated.
“You wash and I’ll dry.”
At the bar, he plunged the glasses in the sink full of suds. While he was looking away, Aimée found the mini recorder in her go bag, stuck it in her pocket and powered it on.
“Why do you say le Balafré’s back? Did you see him?”
“You’re not a flic. Why should I talk to you?”
Back to zero. She just didn’t have time to finesse an interrogation with him.
The suds splashed. After a quick rinse, she grabbed a towel. She’d have to tell it to him straight.
“Vraiment? I’ll give you the ugly truth.”
He looked at her expectantly, worried. If he was in his thirties like the victim’s brother, he had a childlike attitude.
Time to stretch the truth. “Roget, they think it’s a flic. That’s why I’ve been pulled in.”
His mouth gaped open. The towel squeaked on the glass.
“They? An inside job?”
“I’m privy to the investigation but not ‘on’ it, so it allows me to investigate my way. Le Balafré doesn’t know. Comprenez?”
Roget scrubbed the glasses harder.
“Talk to me, Roget. Where did you see him?”
Roget looked around. Rinsed.
She waited him out, impatient. No one liked uncomfortable silences. She picked up a wet wine glass and dried.
On the terrace, the apéro drinkers were playing cards. the wind picked up, and small whirlwinds of leaves swirled in the gutter.
“I didn’t make it up,” he said.
Despite her impatience, she had to take this slow.
“I understand, Roget. If I thought you’d made it up, I wouldn’t be here.” She hoped that reassured him, and dried another wine glass.
She’d love an espresso and felt inclined to turn around and work the machine herself. Roget seemed jumpy. Aimée didn’t want to lose him. He sent out panic vibes, but she couldn’t let up.
“From all accounts, this investigation went wrong from the start,” she said. “Can you fill me in on what happened from the beginning?”
He turned to the espresso machine. “Coffee?”
She thought he’d never ask and nodded.
“Tell it as you remember it, Roget.”
He did. Once he got started, it all tumbled out while she dried and listened. He’d been a classmate of the first victim’s brother. Roget detailed how it had unfolded from his then-sixteen-year-old’s perspective. How no one had seen the girl, Carine, after she left for her friend’s birthday party wearing a miniskirt and eye makeup, which her mother forbade. How Hugues, her brother, remembered seeing a man with acne scars in the elevator. How Roget had seen a pockmarked man at the back of the building before he and Hugues went to the movies that night. How later all of them had mentioned this man to the police.
How Carine’s friends said she’d never shown up at the party. How Carine’s mother called home as usual that night and she hadn’t answered. Hugues’s shock when next day his sister’s body was found in the cellar below the building’s laundry. The horror and pain.
How Hugues showed him the police sketch and said no, it was not like the man he remembered seeing. How Roget then remembered the man with pockmarks on his face, who looked nothing like this portrayal.
Aimée found another towel and kept drying.
He spoke of this in vivid, sharp details, as if it were yesterday.
“Are you in contact with her brother? The family?”
“Why?”
“You say in this note you saw le Balafré again. Wouldn’t you share that with them?”
Roget shook his head. “They moved a long time ago. I’m not good at writing. Or using the computer.”
But he’d written to the police.
She took a guess. “Dyslexic?”
His lip went out in a pout.
“I hate that word. It’s a label.”
“My cousin, too,” she said. “School was always so hard for him. But he’s found his niche, what he loves doing. He even owns his business.”
He still hadn’t answered her question.
“I believe you,” she said. “I do, but let’s talk about the present-day sighting. That’s vital now. Please give me the details.”
There was silence, apart from the splash of soapy water and the low conversation and slap of cards from the outside tables.
She tried another tactic. “Do you know Jacquot Devries, the journo who wrote for Le Parisien?”
“Him? He’s still a nosy reporter. He didn’t listen, like all the rest.”
“You mean you told him what you’ve told me?”
A nod. “Ages ago.”
“I think he’s changed his thinking and wouldn’t doubt you now.”
“Like I care? Pwahh . . . He’s a waste of space.”
Aimée wouldn’t argue with him. Or get sidetracked. She needed to keep her goal front and center. A patron beckoned from the terrace to settle the bill.
A few minutes later, Roget returned and stacked coins in a pile by the beer pulls.
“Where did you see him, Roget?”
“In the park.”
She thought of the nearest: Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.
“You mean Buttes-Chaumont? By the playground?”
Why had she asked that? Was it because she took Chloé there often?
He nodded.
“But there’re three playgrounds, a donkey ride and . . .”
“It’s on my way to my other job. Something about him made me look twice. It was as if he was watching me.”
Paranoid?
“What do you mean? How can you be sure?”
“I felt stuck to a wall with a pin. Inspected like a specimen.”
Was he delusional? Crying wolf as Morbier had said?
“How could he recognize you after all these years? You looked different then. So did he.”
The phone rang in her pocket. René.
“I’ve got to take this,” she said. “Hold on.”
Out on the street, René’s voice competed with the noise of a siren.
“I need to give you something. It’s important.”
“In person?”
The grinding of the garbage trucks, metal on metal, grated in her ear.
“Where can you get to in thirty minutes?”
She thought quick. Remembered la Vache Bleue, the alternative art space under the old railway arches on the canal at quai de l’Oise.
She gave him the address.
“D’accord,” said René. “See you in thirty.”
“This better be worth it, René.”
But he’d hung up.
Great.
Interrupted right when she was getting through to this young man who acted like a sulky teenager.
But Roget seemed like he’d closed off while she was gone. Maybe she’d missed her chance to get some real answers out of him.
“Please, talk to me,” she said. “I need more than what you’ve told me to find this man.”
If he even exists. She was ready to give up on this Roget. He was unreliable.
No attacks had been attributed to le Balafré for years. Was he in prison or dead, like Devries had posited?
Wait, what had Isabelle said about rumors?
Now she remembered. She’d almost forgotten.
That’s right—Isabelle said on Sunday a young woman had been attacked near the canal. The attacker had been interrupted and fled, but he’d left a wire.
Le Balafré’s signature.
She filed this away to think about later.
Could this Roget have been traumatized and permanently affected by what had happened to his friend?
Still no response. A waste of time. He offered nothing new.
“Désolée,” she said, setting down the towel and grabbing her bag.
“The man did this jerky, kind-of-nervous thing with his fingers. Like crazed spiders. I heard his ring, a metallic sound, tapping on the play structure. That’s what caught my attention.”
She turned around.
“Just like that, in the park?”
Her skin tingled. A buzz went up her spine. Was that in the file she’d only glanced at? Not general knowledge?
“Can you show me?”
He tented his soapy fingers, made them crawl and twisted them like Aimée did with Chloé when they played “Itsy Bitsy Spider.”
“You’re sure?”
“I don’t know. I just kept walking. He looked older, too. He had a light beard, you know, like people do to cover up bad skin.”
“You’re sure?”
“How could I forget that weird man?”
“Did he recognize you?”
“I’m not sure.”
A hunted look filled his eyes.
“What happened?”
“I just saw him get on a motorcycle.”
The Angels or someone else?
She looked at her Tintin watch. Merde, she’d be late for René.
A lump settled in her stomach.
“Meet me later at the park, show me where, okay?”
“Only when the park’s closed.”
“I need proof, comprenez? Proof that he’s here. To stop him before he attacks again.”
Roget scribbled something on a beer-stained coaster.
A diagram with X’s and 10 P.M.
“Follow that. It’s how everyone gets into the park.”
AIMÉE STOPPED AT the fix-it shop she’d passed down the street. To beat several Metro changes, she forked over a wad of euros and bought the used kick scooter she’d seen in the window—it was a dull silver with pink handlebars. Going down the hills, she’d reach her destination quickly. The brisk air, the lights twinkling in the dusk—they gave her an exhilarating sense of freedom, as if she were flying past the park, cars and buses.
Her cheeks reddened in the chill. She felt alive.
Let the killer try and catch her.
By la Vache Bleue, the canal split left and north into Canal Saint-Denis. Here, hidden ateliers and cultural spaces nestled off the quai; art lessons, tarot readings, tango and salsa classes, along with Afro-Caribbean and Portuguese fado music at night. Everything happened in the coved trestles under the old petite ceinture railway—très alternatif. The fence was blue, the greenery decorated with colorful lanterns and Tibetan prayer flags. Wind chimes tinkled and leaves rustled on the plane tree branches.
She’d made good time, had beat René. So she sat down on a log bench, folded the trotinette and set it against her knee. She then opened the file on le Balafré and gave it her full attention.
On October 12, 1986, a few days after the homicide of sixteen-year-old Carine Joffre in the cellar of her apartment building, a police investigation had accounted for all the building’s tenants and visitors within the eighteen-hour period of her murder. This resulted in a police sketch of a suspect, widely disseminated in the media, depicting a man around age thirty, with chestnut hair and pockmarked skin on his face. This composite sketch was created based on the testimonies of several people who had seen a man, unknown to any tenants, of this description in the building the evening of the murder. Witnesses included the victim’s half brother.
That much she knew.
Why hadn’t Roget’s conflicting testimony gotten logged? It made her wonder what else hadn’t made it into this report. She continued reading.
Sometime after the departure of her mother for her evening job, Carine would have taken the elevator to go to her friend’s party. Her attacker had then probably overpowered her, dragging her into the cellars to rape and kill her. She was found with her hands bound together as if in prayer, strangled by common electric wire and tied in a kneeling position.
Le Balafré, as the suspect was nicknamed due to the sketch of his pockmarked face, was then suspected of a second murder exhibiting the same signature. Anne Roussel, sixteen, disappeared in April 1987. Her body was discovered underground in a blockhaus, now a site of techno parties, in a kneeling position with the same type of ligature wire tying her wrists. This old German bunker at the edge of the nineteenth arrondissement was near her parents’ apartment. A list of six more rapes and murders committed between 1986 and 1994 with the same wire ligatures and disturbing staged scene of prayer were attributed to him, per the Paris prosecutor’s office.
Hideous, Aimée thought.
According to this report, in 1994, after the eighth murder was linked to le Balafré, the case evidence samples from each crime scene were compiled, compared and tested for DNA. The resulting DNA on each of the victims’ clothing and on the wire used to bind and strangle them corresponded to the DNA of one person. However, none of the DNA had been matched to anyone in the existing criminal database.
Aimée looked up and saw René by a hewed chunk of wood shaped and painted red like a billiard ball. Near him was a hanging installation of old tobacco pipes and Italian olive tins with faded labels strung together by mustard-yellow silk threads.
“Where’s the blue cow?” he said.
“In back.” She pointed to the life-size sculpture.
“Why’s the cow upside down?”
Upside down—just how she felt.
“Art?”
“I’d never find this place on my own. You must know it exists to find it. Perfect for Saj,” said René. He sniffed. “They even burn his kind of incense.”
Aimée sneezed.
“What’s so important, René?”
“You need help.”
“I know that.”
“Legal and physical,” he said, ignoring her tone as he pulled out his phone.
“Both of those take time I don’t have,” she said.
A dull thud grew in her head.
“If we want to keep the business running—a business in which I’m also a partner and shareholder—I need to work with our clients, honor the contracts to avoid bankruptcy. Saj needs stability, too. Not to mention what will happen to Chloé if you go to prison.”
The thudding amped up to a ringing in her ears. All the precursors to an attack of blindness. This couldn’t be happening.
The other day, she’d gotten up, kissed her daughter goodbye, then gone to work—and now she was a fugitive. Was being hunted.
Her head throbbed. Tangles of what looked like black twigs webbed her vision, and she felt dizzy. She closed her eyes, put her head down.
“What’s the matter? Are you all right?”
“Fine. Just give me a second.”
If she waited, the nausea and dizziness would pass.
Wouldn’t it? She took a deep breath. Then another.
“Too much stress, Amy. Like last time. Don’t you ever learn?”
Amy? That’s what her American mother called her.
But it couldn’t be her. She was wanted herself—on the Interpol’s watch list.
She blinked, and the bright light pierced her vision.
“Wait . . . René?”
Someone stuck a pair of glasses behind her ears.
“Keep these on, Amy.”
There was no mistaking that American accent.
“Maman?”
Bile rose in her throat. Any minute she’d gag. She kept her eyes shut.
“You’re going to stand up,” her mother said. “I’ve got your arm. Follow my lead and take small steps. I’ll guide you. We’re getting in the car.”
