The Killing Song, page 11
Cameron got by the rope line by flashing his press ID and I stayed close behind. As we tried to descend some stairs to a walkway on the river level, he was stopped. He was arguing with two cops who I assumed were detectives. The taller of the two was a woman in black leather with wild curly dark hair. I realized she was the same cop I had seen in the police station yesterday.
Our eyes met and through a feathery rain, we stared at each other for three or four long seconds. Then she turned her attention back to the river. I took advantage of the chaos and slipped down the stairs so I could get a better look. I found myself by the river’s edge, behind drooping yellow tape and a young officer in a rain slicker.
I touched his shoulder. “S’il vous plait,” I said.
It must have been my bad accent that betrayed me but I was grateful the officer answered me in English.
“Yes, sir?”
“Could you tell me what happened here?”
“A woman is in the river.”
More confident now that I would not be thrown out of the area, I took a longer look around. Two police boats were nestled against one of the bridge’s low-slung arches and I could make out a black dot in the swift-moving green river. Two divers. They were swimming around a gray form that looked like it was caught on something just below water level. The divers were trying to put ropes around the form but the current kept moving them away.
“Do they know what happened to her?” I asked.
“It is probably a suicide.”
I looked back at him. “Suicide?”
He let out a long breath. “There are thirty-seven bridges on the Seine,” he said. “People here jump off them all the time, women mostly.”
I was staring at a spot of red in the green water. It was a scarf around the woman’s neck. She was fully clothed.
“Merci,” I said to the officer.
As I turned away, disappointment came over me like a damp blanket. It was quickly followed by disgust at myself for hoping that this woman’s death had been a murder. In my desperation to make some sense of Mandy’s death, I was willing to grab hold of anything, be it a couple lines from a song or a stranger’s suicide.
I turned away from the river. I spotted Cameron coming up the steps and went to him.
“It’s a suicide,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Matt,” Cameron said. “I shouldn’t have gotten you all riled up.”
I looked up toward the black skeleton of the Eiffel Tower.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
He had a good view from his place in the crowd atop the Pont Neuf. Luck had been with him during his trip to Miami and it was with him still. He was lucky he had been watching the morning news when the story of a woman being pulled from the Seine came on. He was lucky he was even awake, since his night had been spent in fits and turns, his mind resistant even to the GHB.
He had known immediately that the woman in the river had to be the same one who had fallen into the sewers. He knew what happened after heavy rains, that the sewers overflowed into the river, washing garbage, dead rats and bodies—yes, bodies—into the Seine. But he had come here to make sure it was her.
It was crowded on the bridge, and he was having a hard time getting close enough to see anything. There were divers in the water, men in black suits and yellow gloves, trying to extricate the woman’s body from what looked like a wire around one of the bridge’s pillars.
He spotted something red. It was her scarf, floating like a bloody slick on the green water. The yellow gloves moved about her body like feeding fish. But everything else was too far away for him to make out.
Did she still wear his necklace or was it lying in the bottom of the sewers?
Laurent moved down the bridge, pushing his way to the railing. His eyes began to burn, not from the wind but from the pain of loss.
The divers had freed the woman! Now they were moving her along the surface of the water on her stomach.
His mind screamed at their incompetence: Turn her over! Turn her over so I can see her neck!
He had to get closer, but there were too many officers, too many barriers. They weren’t letting anyone down to the walkway below. He spotted a man with a camera, one of those fancy ones with a long lens like a telescope. He was Indian, the woman with him dressed in a green sari with a red bindi on her forehead.
“Excuse me,” Laurent said, hoping they spoke English. “May I look through your lens?”
The man lowered the camera and stared at Laurent. Laurent pointed to the camera lens, then gestured toward his eyes. The woman said something to her husband in Hindi and the man reluctantly offered his camera to Laurent.
The camera gave him a clear view of the divers and the woman. They were moving her like she was a raft they were returning to shallower water. She was still facedown.
Turn her over!
The divers neared the bank and other men standing on the walkway reached down to grab the woman’s arms. As they lifted her up, she lost her other shoe.
The Indian man touched his arm, but Laurent roughly shrugged him off, ignoring the chatter of Hindi.
Now… yes! They flipped her onto an orange board. Her head dropped in his direction, her hair covering her face like wet straw, her arms dangling to her sides. One of the men in yellow gloves lifted her arms to secure them and—yes!—moved the red scarf so they could fasten a strap across her chest.
There it was!
Lying on her chest like a gold coin.
He shoved the camera back at the Indian man and moved swiftly down the bridge, pushing people from his path, always keeping one eye on the woman as they carried her toward a waiting van.
The stone steps leading down to the walkway were cordoned off. Two policemen stood at the yellow tape. Laurent stopped, suddenly realizing he could call no attention to himself. He knew he had nothing to fear, and it was likely that the police would believe this was just another suicide.
But there were other bodies to consider. Bodies that had been discovered and were clearly homicides. Other bodies that still lay just under the surface of the city.
Control yourself.
Laurent watched as the woman was transferred to a black body bag. Watched as she—and the necklace—disappeared. He felt the sting of tears. He had not cried in years, twenty years maybe.
He wiped his face. He had to think clearly now. Think about getting the necklace back. But how?
He watched the van pull away, his mind replaying everything the girl had told him. Something about a friend. Yes, a girlfriend, she had been traveling with a girlfriend. Eventually she would realize her friend was missing and she would go to the police. And eventually, she would be the one who would get the dead woman’s personal effects.
What was her name? He closed his eyes, concentrating. Paulette? No… Paula.
He remembered now that she had food poisoning and had been confined to their hotel. Damn… what was the name of the place?
Then it came to him. The Hotel Albion.
He had to be in Spain in less than a week. He would tell Maud to cancel the Spanish engagement if he had to.
He heard a whispering in his ear and spun. But no one was there, the crowd had left and he was alone on the bridge.
Yet he could hear her, clearly, as if she were right next to him, telling him, just as she always had, that everything was going to be all right.
L’espoir est le rêve d’une âme éveillée, Laurent. That is what his mother had always told him, Hope is the dream of a soul awake.
He would get the necklace back for her.
16
Yesterday, after we had left the bridge, I told Cameron I would be going back to Miami as soon as I could rebook my flight. He took the rest of the day off, insisting on showing me around the city. It was cold but at least it had stopped raining, so we just walked.
I wasn’t used to walking. Miami was a car town, and even in the Grove, where I lived, people would drive three blocks to a restaurant rather than hoof it. Truth was, for all its tropical allure and gleaming buildings on Brickell Avenue, Miami just wasn’t a city that made a human being feel welcome walking on the street.
Paris was different, I discovered. And as we walked—for miles with no particular route or destination—I found myself unclenching my muscles for the first time in a week. We sat on benches, poked around in a store that sold antique maps, had a beer in a Vietnamese café. We walked through Pigalle, where the hookers hunched in doorways like molting birds.
We took the funicular up to Sacré-Coeur and looked down over the city spread below. My heart still ached, because I knew Mandy would have loved to have seen Paris, and I still hadn’t been able to shed a tear for my sister. But at least I didn’t feel like something was devouring me from within.
We ended the day eating Greek food in some dive by the river, then went next door to a jazz club, where I smoked a couple of Cameron’s foul cigarettes, pissed in a urinal next to a guy dressed like a woman and drank too much really bad shit that the waitress had promised me was American scotch.
Now it was the morning after and I was standing in Cameron’s phone-booth-sized john staring at the shelf looking for aspirin. Finally, I gave up and went back to the kitchen. I tried to make coffee with the press but it came out filled with grounds. I poured a cup anyway and took it back to the sofa.
Cameron had left me a copy of that morning’s Herald Tribune. I thumbed through it, stopping on page four at the headline WOMAN PULLED FROM SEINE.
I was surprised to find out she was an American. Her name was Casey Hoffmann and she was a tourist from Orlando, Florida. When she didn’t return to her hotel by evening, her friend Paula Ridley had contacted the police. Despite what the cop had told me about it being a suicide, there was no mention of it in the article.
But I knew from my own experience that there would be no official ruling on the cause of death until a medical examiner had confirmed it.
I leafed through the rest of the paper—the first paper I had looked at since leaving Miami—but all it did was make me want to get home and bury myself in work. It was the only thing that ever helped. Every time something had gone wrong in my life, I had relied on work to distract me. Right after Nora left, I threw myself into the pharmaceutical investigation that had won all the awards. For six frenzied months I was fine. But when it was finished, the hole in my heart was still there. A Pulitzer certificate made a lousy patch.
I tossed the paper aside. I picked up my coffee and began to wander around the apartment.
Cameron had warned me it was “a dump,” that he didn’t make much at the Tribune and had no ambitions to carry the journalistic lance into battle anymore. The place was tiny, just a living area with a kitchenette, one bedroom and the john. But it had two great things going for it: heavy wood beams that crisscrossed the ceiling and a beautiful stone wall that Cameron said was a surviving part of the city’s twelfth-century barricades against invaders.
The place had another thing going for it. Everywhere you looked, it told stories, interesting stories, about the man who lived within.
Sometime last night, a couple of drinks in at the jazz club, Cameron had leaned close and said he had something important to tell me. Amazingly, I could still remember it.
If you stand with one foot in the past and the other foot in the future, Matt, all you’ll do is piss on the present.
Last night, it hadn’t registered. But now, as I wandered around Cameron’s place, it did.
I looked at the shelves of CDs and antique books, at the Japanese prints on the walls and the butts of black cigarettes lying in an antique Limoges saucer. I looked at the bottle of Moët champagne in his fridge and the butter that was so good I ate it with a spoon. And I stared for a long time at the framed picture that I found on the bedside table of Cameron with his arms around Athena. I took all of it in and I felt a stab of envy.
I was scheduled to go home in two days. What awaited me back there? An empty cottage with a stained La-Z-Boy, where my packed duffel sat by the door and the only thing of value I had taken the trouble to hang up was that damned Pulitzer certificate. One of my feet was mired in the past of a dying profession. My other foot was forever pointing toward the future, which I always assumed would be better than anything I had tried to create in the moment.
Mandy … I had talked big to her, telling her to live her life large. But I had lived my own life so very small.
And Nora?
I was saved from thinking about that by a knock on the door. It surprised me because I knew the only way into Cameron’s building was by the keypad down at the street door. I opened the door a crack. It was a woman with dark intense eyes.
“Yes?”
“Matt Owens?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
The crack filled up with an ID badge of some kind. I saw a photo and a couple words that registered: Prefecture de Police.
“May I come in?”
“How did you get—?”
“The concierge let me up. May I come in, please?”
I stepped aside and she came in. She gave my robe a quick look and the room even less notice before those eyes, as dark as the grounds in the coffee press, came back to me.
“I am Inspector Eve Bellamont,” she said.
She was every inch as tall as me, maybe taller with that corona of dark curls. Standing there in my ugly robe and black socks—she wore jeans and a black leather jacket—I felt a ripple of intimidation.
“I understand you have been asking about an old murder case here,” she said.
I suddenly realized this was the same woman I had seen at the bridge yesterday, and the day before at the police station. It seemed pretty odd that we kept crossing paths. And it was more than odd that she had bothered to track me down.
“Yes,” I said. “I was asking about the woman found in the windmill.”
“I was told that your sister was murdered,” she said. “I’m sorry.” There was the barest hint of compassion in her eyes.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
“I was also told that you think it has some connection to the case here.”
I decided not to say anything. It was an old reporter trick. People hated silence; if you waited them out, they would always fill it. But this woman just stared at me calmly.
“You have come a long way to ask about this,” she said finally.
“Only four thousand miles, give or take a couple,” I said. I realized I was still holding the coffee cup. “You want some coffee?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Probably smart,” I said. I went to the kitchenette and poured the coffee in the sink. When I turned back, Eve Bellamont was looking around the apartment, but her eyes quickly came back to me.
“Why do you think your sister’s murder has anything to do with my case?”
Her case? Well, that was interesting at least. And it suggested that the windmill case was still open. I saw something in her eyes and I wondered if she had meant to drop that nugget.
She was determined this time not to say another word. We were playing some little game here, and it was obviously my serve.
“My sister had an iPod,” I said. “There was a song on it, an old Rolling Stones song. The song is about a serial killer in Paris who buried his victim in the Bois de Boulogne.”
She was quiet, waiting for me to go on.
“It was not the kind of song my sister liked,” I said. “I think it was put there by her killer.”
Eve Bellamont still said nothing, so I pressed on.
“I read that a tape was found with the woman in the windmill,” I said. “What was on it?”
“Monsieur Owens,” she said, “I cannot tell you the details of an ongoing investigation.”
“Well, then, maybe you can tell me what you’re doing here?”
She hesitated. “I have an open case and you are asking questions about it. You were also at the bridge yesterday. I do not think you were just there out of curiosity.”
“I thought maybe it could be related to my sister’s murder,” I said.
“It was a suicide,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“We have many suicides here.”
“So I’m told.”
From down below came the ring of a school bell and then the screams and laughter of children as they poured into the courtyard.
“According to the paper, the woman was American, from Orlando, Florida,” I said. “Do you get a lot of American tourists jumping off your bridges here?”
Eve Bellamont said nothing.
“Sure seems like a long way to go to kill yourself,” I said.
“She had just broken off an engagement,” she said.
“Who told you this?”
Her dark eyes snapped. “We talked to her best friend. She said that they had taken their trip together so Mademoiselle Hoffmann could forget about her fiancé.”
I was thinking of Nora and how, when I broke off our engagement, she had sent the ring back in a can of kitty litter. I knew all women were different. But I still wasn’t buying the idea that a woman would come thousands of miles to kill herself over a busted relationship.
“This Paula person,” I said, “she told you her friend was upset about the broken engagement?”
“Yes, that is what she told us. I know you think it might be strange for an American woman to commit suicide in a foreign country, but believe me, it does happen.”
I was quiet. Any hope I had harbored that this woman might be willing to listen to me about Mandy was fading.
“May I ask how long you are staying in Paris?” Eve Bellamont said.
The question surprised me. “I’m scheduled to go home the day after tomorrow,” I said.
She gave a small nod. “Again, my condolences for the loss of your sister.” She started for the door.
“Wait,” I said.
I went to my computer bag and dug out one of my business cards. I held it out to her.
