Murder in the Sentier Read Online Free PDF

home. She shuddered, thinking of Jutta Hald. Pathetic, desperate Jutta. As greedy and evasive as she’d been, Jutta didn’t deserve to have her brains splattered on a stone wall. No one did. After twenty years of prison, she’d paid her dues.
    Part of Aimée wanted to forget she’d ever met Jutta. Another part of her said Jutta’s killer might be able to lead to her mother.
    From her backpack she pulled out Jutta’s pill bottle. Inside was a balled-up sketch of the tower along with a torn magazine photo. In it, a salt-and-pepper-haired man was holding an award.
    The caption read “Romain Figeac.”
    She recognized the name. Romain Figeac, the monstre sacre , Prix Goncourt—winning author, and sixties radical. In the seventies he’d been the ruine du jour and in the eighties, passe . Now the old man was still a bleeding liberal, according to his own autobiography. Or was that his wife, an actress … she couldn’t remember.
    She ran her fingers over the smooth blue tiles on the basin counter. Was what Jutta Hald told her the truth … any of it?
    Aimée wondered if the address book Jutta had waved by her had really been her mother’s.
    She turned on the tap and stuck her head under the cold water. Squeezing her lavender soap, she washed the tattoo parlor smell out of her hair, then shook her wet locks like a dog. But it didn’t clear her head. Her mind was spinning.
    Jutta Hald’s words kept coming back. She had asked if Aimée’s mother had sent her something. And then Aimée realized a bathroom drawer had been left half open, her towels hastily folded, and the medicine cabinet ajar. Nothing was missing but what had Jutta been searching for?
    Then the realization hit her. Someone had killed Jutta. She could be next!
    Nothing made sense, yet it connected to her mother.
    Since the day her mother left, Aimée had been desperate to know what happened to her. Now she had a chance to find out. Slim at best. But more than before. She had to pursue it.
    She went to the kitchen and plugged in the small refrigerator. It was empty and emitted the hiss of slow-leaking Freon. She filled Miles Davis’s chipped Limoges bowl with steak tartare left from the train trip. He sniffed, then cocked his head as if to say, “What’s this?”
    “Sorry, furball,” she said. “I’ll pop into the charcuterie later.”
    Her seventeenth-century apartment needed an overhaul: central heating instead of feeble steam radiators for bone-chilling winters; plumbing more current than the nineteenth century; enough juice to keep a chandelier, computer, fax, scanner, DSL line, and hair dryer on concurrently; and access to her basement cave for storage. Too bad the cave had been declared a historical treasure because it had provided an underground escape route to the Seine for nobility during the Revolution, and had been closed for repairs. Closed for as long as she could remember.
    She kept buying lottery tickets. Someday, she told herself, Architectural Digest would visit. But maybe not in her lifetime.
    She remembered her mother calling her Aamée in a flat American monotone, unlike her father’s French A-yemay , his syllables dipping at the beginning. Had he refused to speak of her mother, because of shame that he, a flic , had a wife in prison?
    Aimée consulted the Minitel. No listing for Romain Figeac. She tried his publisher, Tallimard.
    “Can you help me reach Romain Figeac?”
    “ Tiens , this is a joke, right?” the receptionist said.
    Taken aback, Aimée paused. “If you can’t give his number, his address …?”
    “Such bad taste,” the receptionist interrupted.
    “Look I need to talk with him,” said Aimée.
    “Don’t you know?” the receptionist said.
    “Enlighten me.”
    “His funeral was yesterday.”

Sunday Morning
    A IMÉE SURVEYED THE MIRRORED Café d’Or on busy rue d’Aboukir and tapped her chipped red nails. A fly landed on the sugar bowl tongs and she shooed it from the counter. Few patrons were inside