Chapter Seventeen
Catherine’s apartment was on the Rue Pont aux Choux—Bridge of Cabbages—although the street looked as if it had never hosted a vegetable in all its history. Quite the contrary. It gave of being entirely and eternally industrial, flat cream walls occasionally broken by store fronts or lowered metal security rollers. “Pas de vente au détail,” read a sign in one of the store windows—“No retail sales”—and Rachel guessed the street was so empty because many of its stores were wholesale only. Whatever the reason, they made for a road she wouldn’t want to walk down alone at night.
Catherine’s building had what seemed to be the only elegant façade on the block, oak double doors surrounded by a carved doorframe, their faceted brass knobs polished until they shone, and a gleaming brass plate announcing the building number. Rachel lifted a hand to the entry keypad. Then she dropped it.
“The code.” Her voice was flat. She’d forgotten that an address was not much use in Paris without an entry code to go with it. No point knowing where a building was if you couldn’t gain access to it.
“Oh, don’t be silly.” Magda reached over Rachel’s head and put her palm flat on the panel, pressing all the buzzers at once. After a few seconds, the door gave its opening click. “Works when you’re fifteen, works now.” Magda pushed the porte d’entrée open. “Somebody’s always stupid.”
“Wait.” Rachel put out a hand to catch the door. “We need a plan.”
“A plan?”
“Yes, a plan. We need to decide who we’ll say we are. We can’t just show up at people’s doors and say we think she’s been murdered, do they have any information.”
For a minute Magda looked as if she was going to ask why not, but then she said, “Well, we can say we’re police.”
Rachel thought, shook her head. “Bad idea. No ID.”
“Oh yeah.” Magda considered. “Then we can say we’re detectives. That’s even true.”
“No.” Rachel shook her head again. “We can’t do that. No one ever talks to detectives. Didn’t you see Spiral?” A rhetorical question; they watched the series together religiously every week.
They stood for a while, defeated by both reality and television. Then inspiration struck. “I know. We can say we’re reporters.”
“Reporters?” Magda looked dubious.
“Yes. It’s perfect. What Parisian doesn’t want to tell tales to the newspapers? We can tell them they’ll be anonymous sources, and I bet they spill everything.”
Parisians were notorious gossips. Squashed together into small spaces, with buildings designed so that the windows of their homes faced each other across courtyards, they couldn’t avoid watching each other, and they turned necessity into pleasure by talking about what they saw. A reporter would offer another chance to share tittle-tattle, and giving information would show that they were in the know—something else Parisians loved.
“Okay.” Magda added, “We can say we’re from Le Trois.” At Rachel’s questioning look, she explained, “It’s a local paper. I found it while I was doing my research on Catherine.”
Rachel let the door open fully, and they walked into the courtyard. There was no crime scene tape marking off a space, no soapy water splashed on the paving to erase bloodstains. It looked like any other courtyard in Paris, with a few plants scattered here and there and a set of stairs on either side leading up to the apartments. How fast a life, and an existence, can be erased, Rachel thought. Seeing the courtyard now, no one would guess that only a few days ago a dead body, itself alive just a second before, had lain on these paving stones.
Magda’s practical voice interrupted Rachel’s reverie. “Where do we start?”
Her friend might have known the constants of human nature, but Rachel knew the constants of Parisian résidences. “We start by talking to the plump woman in the apron.”
Magda looked around. “What plump woman in the apron?”
“Every apartment building in Paris has a plump woman in an apron.”
Sure enough, a few seconds later a rotund woman in an apron appeared, a broom in her hand. She made to sweep a corner of the courtyard, but Rachel knew she’d come out to see who they were.
She smiled. “Bonjour, madame.” They walked over to her.
“Bonjour.” Her brown eyes, two bright buttons in her plump face, crinkled at the corners as she returned Rachel’s smile.
“We are from Le Trois.” The woman continued to smile but gave no sign that she recognized the name. Excellent, Rachel thought. Their masquerade would go much more easily if no one actually knew the local paper. It removed the risk of awkward questions. “The local newspaper,” she explained.
At the word “newspaper” the woman began to look interested. “Ah, oui?” She put down the broom.
“Yes.” Magda joined in. “We’re writing a memorial to Madame Nadeau.” The woman’s eyes flicked involuntarily to the space behind them. “We were hoping to get some information about her.”
The woman nodded. “I can help you. I live just there.” She jerked her head toward the ground floor apartment behind her. “And it was I who found her.” She looked both discomfited and a tiny bit proud.
It was Rachel’s turn to flick her eyes, toward Magda. Jackpot, her look said.
“Well,” she began, “can you start by telling us a little about her?”
“She was a lovely woman. And so gracious!” The woman gave a shake of her head. “It’s so sad. Just at Christmas she gave me the most beautiful orchid to say thank you for taking in her deliveries.”
“Her deliveries?” Magda said.
“Oh yes! She receives a package at least once a week, and when she isn’t home I hold them for her. You know,” the woman leaned forward confidingly, “she has a little business, a store. I think the deliveries are stock.”
Neither Rachel nor Magda pointed out that stock would be sent directly to the little business. Instead, Rachel said, “Ah, yes, the store. It was doing well, then?”
“Weeell …” The woman squinted her button eyes. “It hadn’t been doing well, but Catherine told me a little while ago that her affairs had improved.”
Rachel said meditatively, “And yet, the way she died. It suggests some sort of personal difficulty. Without any explanation, it seems so unexpected. Did she have any other troubles that you knew of?”
“Well, of course her amoureux had just died.” Again the sorrowful shake of the head. “I happened to be at my window when she heard—I glanced over and saw her on the telephone. And when I met her here in the courtyard a few moments later, she seemed shocked by the news. Over the next days, as well—devastated, devastated. I’m certain his passing influenced what she did.” She cast her eyes to heaven. “The death of love is a tragedy.
“And on the day she … left us”—Rachel tried to move the conversation as delicately as possible—“did she have any deliveries or any visitors?”
“No.” The woman thought back. “It was quiet all day. In fact, too quiet.” Her eyes locked on Rachel’s. “I don’t think anyone would disagree with me when I say there was a sense of foreboding in the air.”
She took a breath in order to continue, but Rachel moved quickly: “When you say ‘anyone,’ did Madame Nadeau have other close friends here we might talk to?” The woman preened slightly at the suggestion that she had been a close friend of a postmortem celebrity, but shook her head. “Or did she have any frequent visitors?”
“Well, of course, her ami stopped by now and then.”
“Of course.” Magda took over. “But more recently? Maybe on the day she passed? Did anyone visit?”
The woman thought for a second, then said, “No, I didn’t see anyone.”
“Or maybe even less recently?” Rachel tried to keep her voice light. “None of her women friends visited?”
“I don’t spend all day peering out my windows. I’m not a spy!” The woman drew back. Then, having made her spotless character clear, she said, “Anyway, I didn’t notice anyone else.” She reflected for a second, then offered, “Perhaps you’d like to see the orchid? It’s very lovely. You could take a photo of it for the article.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” and Magda did sound genuinely upset, “but the paper isn’t giving us space for photos, except for one of Madame Nadeau. We would like to talk to some other neighbors, though, although I doubt they’ll be as helpful as you. Can you point us in the right direction?”
“Of course.” The woman nodded toward the left-hand staircase. “She lived on the second floor. Apartment five.” She picked up the broom again and watched them begin to climb.
Where did Magda get her skills, Rachel wondered as she mounted the stairs. It wasn’t just her boldness or her readiness with a story that Rachel found enviable; it was the ease with which she came up with plausible lies, and her smoothness in telling them. Rachel suspected that was the motto of the true detective: always be prepared with a good lie. They were the anti–Boy Scouts.
On the second landing they rested for a second, then found apartment five. The door to apartment six stood at a right angle to it, and Magda knocked. No answer.
“Well,” said Rachel, “it is the middle of the day.”
As if to prove her right, there was no one home at apartment seven either. But at apartment eight they struck gold: not just a neighbor, but a resentful neighbor.
“The woman couldn’t stop making noise,” he said. “Thumping up and down the stairs every other day with a new package in her hand. And I could hear her laugh through my walls. Really, people who live in apartments should take their neighbors into account.”
The man was of a type Rachel knew well. For him, everything that disturbed his peace was an affront, and he lived for such affronts. He would have collected and remembered Catherine’s crimes against his tranquility with bitter love. All he needed to make him their ideal source was to be a shut-in who stayed home all day, every day.
“And I heard plenty of her noise,” the man continued, “because I’m home all day these days. Since I left my job. Well,” he qualified, “they’d probably tell you they let me go, but the truth is I couldn’t stand working there anymore, so I let them fire me. They kept changing my hours on unacceptably short notice, no understanding that I might have a life of—”
Magda clicked her tongue. “Some people! So discourteous!” She shook her head at the sorrow of it all. “Like Madame Nadeau. I suppose her visitors disturbed you? You see,” she explained, “we’re trying to find friends to interview, and we assume some friends visited her. Maybe you can remember the name of a visitor who was particularly thoughtless? To whom you pointed the noise out?”
“All her visitors were thoughtless.” He was a king commenting on peasants. “But none of them gave their names.”
“Well, do you remember anyone in particular? Someone you could describe perhaps? We rely so much on members of the public for our information.”
Magda must have managed the right combination of fawning and need, because instead of making a comment about the uselessness of depending on the public in the modern age, the neighbor said, “Women visited sometimes—friends, I suppose. All Amazons in high heels, from the sound of them. And a man came by a couple of times.”
“A man?” Magda had her notebook open in her hand; now she took a golf pencil from the binding. “What did he look like?”
“I hardly saw him.” The neighbor shrugged. “He didn’t make much noise. He was wearing a coat, and he had dark hair.”
That could be anyone, Rachel thought. Magda flipped the notebook shut. “No one else?” Rachel asked hopefully. She tried to prod him as she had the self-appointed concierge. “Do you remember any of the women visiting recently?”
“Are you suggesting I’m unobservant?” The man drew himself up. “I assure you I was aware of every visitor. I have the ears of a lynx!”
Rachel hadn’t known that lynxes were famous for their hearing, but she could recognize the moment when she lost someone’s good will. This man wouldn’t tell them anything more. She stepped lightly on Magda’s foot to indicate that they should leave.
“What?” Magda said.
“What?” the man was taken aback.
“No, I’m sorry,” Magda responded. “Not you.”
The man stared at her, bewildered. “What?”
They could be on that merry-go-round all day. Rachel broke in again. “I’m sorry, but we need to go. We’re on a deadline. You’ve been most helpful.”
“Well, if you don’t have time to listen to what I have to say …” He shrugged, then closed the door. Even the air pushed out from his apartment felt aggrieved.
Magda and Rachel looked at each other, managing not to laugh. They went down the stairs and crossed the courtyard; the unofficial concierge watched them from her window as they left.
“Well, that was pointless.” Out on the street again, Rachel felt gloom descend. Another idea proved barren.
Magda was cheerier. “I wouldn’t say so.”
“What would you say? Stairs climbed, neighbors plumbed, and nothing but that there were a lot of deliveries!”
“Well, that in itself is useful, actually. The fact that she was a personal spendthrift adds weight to the idea that she was blackmailing someone: she needed the money at work and at home.”
Rachel grunted, simultaneously accepting the point and finding it inadequate. “Yes, but apparently she didn’t have any recent visitors, which cancels out the idea that someone pushed her.”
“The neighbor said a man visited her.”
“And the woman said Edgar visited her. Two plus two equals they were the same person.” When Magda looked as if she would protest, Rachel added, “And even if not, he said the man had dark hair and wore a coat—so he could be most of the men in Paris. And more to the point,” she said, her voice rising in despair, “he said he hadn’t seen any women lately!”
“No, that’s not what he said.” Magda kept her voice level. “He never said whether or not he’d seen any women: that was the moment where he got on his high horse.” She looked at Rachel. “He has the ears of a lynx, you know.”
Now they did laugh. “All right.” Rachel felt her frustration loosen a bit. “So your feeling is what? That we should ask someone else?”
“No, I’m not sure that would do us any good. If you’re being blackmailed by someone and have come to kill them, it’s more likely that you’d take care not to be seen. So I doubt we’d have much luck finding a witness. I think our best bet is to try to figure out who has the most reason to be blackmailed.”
“And that leads us back to Elisabeth and Mathilde, and via them to the mystery item in the appartement.”
Magda nodded.
“And your idea is that if we can figure out who has the most reason to kill Edgar, we can then work to connect them to Catherine’s murder? Inductive rather than deductive reasoning.”
Magda nodded again.
To Rachel this approach seemed an awful lot like guessing, but it did have the benefit of linking to their only piece of certain evidence, Mathilde and Elisabeth’s argument. She acquiesced. “All right. We’re back to whatever’s in Edgar’s belongings. Well, since it’s small enough for Mathilde to be able to refer to it as a bibelot, it can’t be anything very large. And since Elisabeth’s reference specifically to Edgar’s papers suggests it’s some sort of document …”
“But what sort of document?” Magda frowned. “And why would Mathilde and Elisabeth want it?”
Rachel had a thought. “What if they didn’t both want the same thing? We only assume they’re looking for the same thing because one wanted to fetch something and one wanted to hide something. But the two somethings don’t need to be connected.” She warmed to this possibility. “In fact, there’s no real indication that Elisabeth, at least, actually knows what’s there.” She put up a hand to keep Magda from speaking. “She lied, but that doesn’t mean she knows anything for certain. In fact, put that together with her stumble in the library and the fact that she’s still lingering around the appartement, and it all suggests she doesn’t know if there’s something there, but she’s afraid there is.”
“Something incriminating. Yes, that makes sense.” Magda crossed her arms and tucked her hands under them. “God, it’s cold.”
Rachel drew her down into the nearby Métro station. Warm air gusted out from the platform into the ticket area; Magda began to take off her gloves. “What about Mathilde?” she asked. “Do you think what she wants is incriminating?”
Rachel replayed the confrontation in her head. She remembered the outrage in Mathilde’s posture and her voice. But how do you guess the source of outrage? Mathilde had been too angry to reveal anything beneath. She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. I’ve thought about that before. I’m sure what’s back there is valuable to her in some way. But beyond that, I don’t know.”
Another “I don’t know.” We’ve been saying “I don’t know” over and over since we started this enterprise, she thought. It wasn’t very detective-like. Did Mr. Monk say, “I don’t know”? Did Nero Wolfe? She supposed that she and Magda were like detectives in that they found things out and tried to draw conclusions from them, but so far they were unlike detectives in that they hadn’t found out much and they’d been unable to draw any conclusions. But now it was enough: this was the “I don’t know” that broke the camel’s back. It was time for a bold move.
She steeled herself. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”
Magda looked disconcerted by this sudden vehemence. “How?”
Rachel’s lips thinned. “I’m going to search the bureau. I’m going to go and find whatever’s back there, and then we’ll know.”
“But David is living in the appartement now! And Elisabeth is still spending all day there, actually in the bureau.”
Rachel brushed these aside. “I haven’t seen David since the first week. From what Fulke says, he often stays out all night. And he sleeps a lot. And as for Elisabeth”—she had no answer for that—“I’ll figure something out.”
“You sound like me.” Magda frowned. “That’s not reassuring.”
“Don’t worry,” said Rachel grimly. “It’ll all be fine.” She fumbled in her pocket for her Navigo pass and waved it at the barrier sensor. Over the sound of the ensuing bleep, she said, “Trust me.”