Murder Without Pity Read Online Free PDF Page B

Europe’s far right past has come back once again to terrorize.”

CHAPTER 6
    A DEATH IN THE FAMILY
    “The arriving officer swore the deceased had terror in his eyes,” Stanislas explained in the back seat of the Peugeot the following Monday. “That’s what he remembers most about that night, that look of terror. Imagine that hardened Corsican spooked. Not from how broken the victim looked splayed out on the stairs. But from the trauma captured in those eyes bulging with that look of horror.”
    “The dead I’ve seen had their eyes closed,” his driver said over his shoulder. “As if peace had descended in their final moment.”
    “No peace at the end for this poor soul, if he ever enjoyed any,” Stanislas replied. “It was like fear of whatever he saw had struggled to escape through his eyes and failed, the officer kept saying.”
    The young police photographer in front of him stiffened. She remained as quiet as she had since they had started talking about Léon Pincus. If she insists on working for me, Cassel thought, she must get used to living with finality.
    “You ever have a Little Misery like that, Monsieur Judge?” the driver asked.
    “Considering that twisted expression on his face, no. Nothing as bizarre. And my men haven’t located any next of kin yet either. And no eyewitness so far for that matter. The concierge was out doing chores. The other tenants, except a retiree, a Monsieur Lenoir, who found the body, were at work. They’re checking on his alibi.”
    “The attack was that vicious?” Christophe, sitting beside Stanislas, entered into the conversation at last.
    “The better word’s ‘sadistic,’ Monsieur Minh. The coroner thinks he was tortured.” Stanislas tapped on a page of the autopsy’s report. “‘Cardiac arrest arrhythmia due to stress.’ Whatever he saw caused his heart to beat way out of its normal range. In a word, he died of fright.”
    His clerk acknowledged understanding of the tragedy with a drowsy nod. The attempt to engage him was failing, Stanislas noticed. The poor boy must have endured another colicky night with his son.
    Stanislas shoved the report back into the dossier as a sharp pain ripped through his stomach. He had again forgotten to take his ulcer medication and was paying the price. He gazed out to take his mind off his discomfort. The policeman strained forward for sight of any path through the fog and blinked the headlights as he inched across Place de la République.
    Somewhere east of them lay Belleville, Stanislas thought. Enclave of the outcast, the striver, the pious, Léon Pincus’s world. Had he begged or confronted Boucher for some reason the day of his murder? And why had those men, he wondered, held him captive, and who were they? No answers came to him; the previous Friday night’s protestors’ death chant had kept him awake, and he too had slept poorly and felt tired.
    Shortly a neon sign, hazing pink a Tunisian restaurateur’s window, came into view. Two Jews in wide-brimmed hats and frock coats hurried into a kosher deli. A black woman, hair swathed in bandanna, paused under a fruit stand’s canopy. The exotic signaled they had arrived in Belleville. The driver slowed at another intersection. Stanislas saw they had turned onto Boulevard de la Villette, Léon Pincus’s last stop.
    The tenement’s lobby was dark except for light at the end of the foyer from a window arching over the concierge’s door. Inside her quarters, a baritone’s voice from an opera boomed. Stanislas punched the minuterie to his right once, then twice. No lights flickered on. The switch hadn’t worked when the police had arrived at the crime scene, he recalled from their report. The darkness on Pincus’s floor might have also contributed somehow to his death. The four of them moved ahead, fixing a mop and bucket against the wall next to her lodge as their rendezvous.
    Taped to one of the door’s windowpanes was a roster of renters’ names on notebook