The Stiff Upper Lip (6 page)

I glanced at the rearview as I pulled away from the curb. I stopped for a red light, still on the Ile de la Cité, and glanced again.

“Give me the address,” I said, when the light switched to green and I turned on to the Boulevard du Palais.

“Why do …?”

“Just do like I say,” I said sharply. “Give me the address.”

She did.

“Is there a phone?”

There was. She gave me the number.

I headed slowly across the Ile de la Cité toward the Right Bank.

“Now listen carefully. When I get to the Châtelet, I'm going to stop at a newspaper stand. I want you to get out, leaving the door open, then duck around the stand and down into the Métro.”

“But I …”

“Don't argue. Just do what I tell you.”

“I'm sorry, Cage, I didn't …”

“Don't look around either. Go down into the Métro. You ought to have enough of a head start. Ride out to Neuilly, but, just in case, don't take the direct line. When you get there, stay there. Keep him there. Above all, don't try to call me. I'll come when I can, but probably not before tomorrow.”

The Châtelet Métro station is one of the biggest in Paris. Three lines go through it, meaning they'd have a one-in-six chance of ending up on the same platform she was on if I could reduce them to guessing. “They” was an unmarket Peugeot 304 I'd seen pulling out of a slot behind us on the Quai des Orfèvres. They'd followed us across the Ile de la Cité and the Pont au Change, and when I stopped at the Châtelet kiosk, sure enough they tucked in behind me. I left the motor running when she got out, and it took them a good couple of minutes after she disappeared to realize she wasn't coming back. Then one of them got out to check. I reached across, closed her door, and drove off, followed abruptly by the 304. The last I saw of the one who'd gotten out, he was waving his arms and shouting something after us from the sidewalk, and probably I was too busy congratulating myself to notice that they weren't the only company we had.

I gave the Giulia some exercise just for the hell of it, then drove back to my bathtub. The tail in the 304 was good enough to discourage any ideas I might have had about trying to lose him on the way to Neuilly that same night. In the morning he, or a replacement, was still sitting in the 304 outside the hotel, complete with partner, so I took the Métro myself, losing the partner in a little wrinkle I'd worked out for just such emergencies in the Montparnasse-Bienvenüe station. Then I was in that posh apartment in Neuilly, with Valérie looking out the window again and Roscoe Hadley making a half-assed job at trying to hide the fact that, around the time Odessa Grimes got his throat slit, he, Roscoe, was shacked up in bed with Odessa Grimes' sweetie pie.

4

The 14th Arrondissement of Paris is a mixed bag of a neighborhood that starts at one twentieth-century monument, the Tour Montparnasse, and ends at another, the circular urban autoroute known as the Périphérique. Parts of it are still chic, but behind the Sheraton Hotel extends a so-called “popular” quarter of dingy streets bordered by condemned buildings, boarded-up shop fronts, and narrow, littered sidewalks. Such businesses as survive there are of the low-overhead variety: cheap bars and restaurants, small groceries, dry cleaners, headshops, fly-by-night galleries, and they cater to a populace the only common denominator of which is its lack of political clout, meaning Ayrab, Portuguese, Slav, black, and also the young and transient, and also the old and immobilized.

Marie-Josèphe Lamentin lived in a cul-de-sac off the rue de l'Ouest, a narrow, cobbled alley where you could touch the doors on either side and the rooftops tilted forward, shutting out the sky overhead. The number I wanted could only be reached by walking through another building, then a courtyard where a gang of neighborhood cats was standing guard over some garbage cans. Somebody somewhere was cooking fish. I went up the dark stairs, ducking my head. Marie-Josèphe Lamentin lived on the third floor left, but her doorbell gave off no sound and there was no answer to my knock. I tried the third floor right. I had the impression someone was in, but if so, they didn't want visitors. I retreated then to the ground floor, the courtyard, looked for a concierge, found none, then to the alley, and finally, through a curtain of colored plastic strips, to a storefront bar at the corner.

A group of gents from the wrong side of the Mediterranean were playing cards noisily at a formica-topped table near the front window. The tables behind them were empty except for two of their compatriots who were drinking tea out of glasses in the back and talking to someone, presumably the cook, who stood in a rear doorway. The lighting was harsh, fluorescent, there was the sweaty reek of couscous, and to top off the atmosphere, a jukebox was playing “Heartbreak Hotel,” Bedouin version.

The food may have been great, but the service wasn't. I waited at the bar while the card players finished their hand. Then one of them gathered the loose cards and proceeded to shuffle while another, fat and beslippered, with a mustache to compensate for his balding skull, scraped back his chair with a sigh and shambled over to the other side of the counter.

“I'm looking for Mlle. Lamentin,” I said to him. “Marie-Josèphe Lamentin. She lives in the passage, number eleven
bis
, third floor left. She's not there now. Do you know where I can find her?”

I had no reason to assume that he should know her. Only he did. Not that he said so, or that there was any change in his bland expression, but when I mentioned her name there was a momentary break in the sound behind me. Even the jukebox seemed to stutter.

“Marie-Josèphe,” I repeated. “Do you know her?”

Ayrabs, in my limited experience, are a suspicious race, but if you're not careful, they'll be telling you their life story five minutes after they've met you. All it takes is a little encouragement.

I decided to encourage him.

I ordered a glass of Mescara, that lethal red wine they squeeze in Algeria. I took a hundred-franc note from my wallet and put it on the bar top, making sure he saw there was more where it came from. He wiped his fingers deliberately on his shirt front, then produced a juice glass and a bottle from under the counter. The bottle was about three quarters full and had no label. He filled the glass, put the bottle away, wiped his fingers again. Then he took the hundred-franc note, looked it it, turned it over on the other side, looked at it, and, presumably satisfied, made change.

I left the change where it was.

“Marie-Josèphe Lamentin. She has, or had, a boy friend called Grimes. Odessa Grimes. A black American. The black man who's been murdered.”

The barman shrugged.

“Do you know her?” I said.

“I don't know her,” he answered.

“Or him?”

There was a mirror behind the bar, and I could see the card players watching me through it while pretending not to.

“Look,” I said, “I'm not the police. I'm not even French. I just want to talk to her. I was a friend of Odessa Grimes, the black man.”

I said it loud enough for the whole bar to hear, but nobody answered, and when I turned toward them, the card players looked the other way.

Your friendly neighborhood saloon, in sum.

I sipped at the wine. It had a taste that would have taken some acquiring. The card game stopped and the conversation died off. The only noise was that lovesick singsong from the jukebox, and the bartender stared at me with the patient, unseeing stare his people had learned when the French invaded the Casbah. Odessa Grimes had been murdered; his sweetie pie had known about it. Roscoe Hadley had been shacked up with her at the time, and the first inkling he'd had of what had happened was when he'd started worrying about Odessa coming back and finding them between the sheets.

Because Marie-Josèphe had told him not to worry, that Odessa wouldn't be coming back.

Which had driven Roscoe Hadley out of his skull, or at least out into the streets.

According to Roscoe Hadley.

A fly crawled across my change.

I sipped some more wine, and the fly flew off. The bartender's eyes flicked away from mine, then blandly returned, and there was a sudden burst of conversation from the table behind me.

Not much of a signal, but enough of a one.

I went out through the plastic curtain in a hurry, leaving the Allah-worshipers to fight over my change.

“Mlle. Lamentin!” I yelled after her. “Marie-Josèphe!”

It's funny how often oversized studs team up with little bits of women. By Parisian standards Marie-Josèpbe Lamentin wasn't that small, but even in the three-inch heels she wore, she couldn't have come up to Odessa's Adam's apple. In respects other than the center jump, though, she looked like she could more than hold her own. Her calves were thin but muscular, her tight-skirted ass had an independent strut. Her make-up was heavy and gray on the lips, and her lower lip protruded in that perpetual thick pout characteristic of the girls from down Pointe-à-Pitre way.

Maybe she heard me call her, but she didn't stop. I caught up with her in the inner courtyard.

“Marie-Josèphe,” I repeated, taking her arm.

She half-turned, not seeing, then yanked her arm free and headed into the second entryway.

“It's too early,” she said in an annoyed hiss. “Go away. I'm busy.”

“I only want to talk to you. I'm a friend of Roscoe's. Of Odessa's too.”

“Idiot!” she said, shaking free again. “I'm busy, can't you see?”

She started up the stairs. I followed, to the independent beguine of her behind.

I caught up with the rest of her at her landing. She fumbled in her bag for her key, then opened the door and went inside.

I followed.

The apartment was one room with a slanting, dirt-smudged skylight. Some plants hung from pots mounted on the walls, but otherwise the furnishings were nondescript. The bed was the principal object. It was covered with a large, multi-colored, India-cotton spread.

“All right, then,” said Marie-Josèphe, turning to me. “But it will cost you double.”

“How much is double?”

“Two hundred francs.”

“I only want to talk to you.”

“Talk or make love, it's all the same. Two hundred francs.”

I gave her the money. She kicked off her shoes and wriggled out of her skirt. She had nothing on under the skirt. She curled her body on the bedspread, her legs tucked under her, her blouse still on, and shook loose her black, curly hair and stared out in front of her, not at me, in a pose that was smoky, sullen, full-lipped. Her skin was the color of café au lait.

“You go in for plants,” I said.

“What?”

“I said: You seem to go in for plants.”

“Is that what you want to talk about?”

“No. It's just something I wouldn't have expected of Odessa's girl friend.” She didn't react. “You are Odessa Grimes' girl friend, aren't you?”

“I knew him.”

“You know what happened to him, then?”

“Yes.” Matter-of-factly.

“You don't seem particularly grieved about it.”

She didn't disagree, or agree either. She just shrugged a little.

“He did this to me,” she said. With an index finger, she pulled the skin taut under one eye, and bending over her, I could see what the heavy make-up largely hid: red welts on the cheekbone and, above, the remnants of a black eye.

“Did he beat you up a lot?'”

“When he felt like it.”

“When did he feel like it?”

She shrugged again, a dull, uncaring gesture.

“When you messed around with other men? Like Roscoe Hadley?”

The name brought a trace of smile to the corners of her mouth.

“He's sweet, Roscoe.”

“Is that why Odessa beat you up? Because you were messing around with Roscoe?”

“I wasn't messing around with Roscoe.”

“That's not what he says. What about yesterday, for instance?” She didn't answer, though more from lassitude, you'd have said, than from having anything to hide. “Wasn't Roscoe here yesterday? From, say, the late morning till the middle of the afternoon?”

“Yesterday?”

“Yesterday,” I said.

“I didn't see Roscoe all day yesterday.” Tonelessly.

“Listen, Marie-Josèphe. This is important. Roscoe says he came here yesterday morning to pick Odessa up. Only Odessa had already left. And one thing led to another and he ended up balling you till the middle of the afternoon. Isn't that the truth?”

“I didn't see Roscoe all day yesterday.”

It wasn't just what she said but the way she said it: that vague and smoky-voiced refrain. I reached for her arm, as though by accident, but she shifted toward the center of the bed.

As though by accident.

“Don't you realize that by saying that you're getting Roscoe into a hell of a lot of trouble? You knew Odessa was going to get it, didn't you? Did you also know they were going to finger Roscoe for it? But Roscoe wasn't there, Marie-Josèphe. He didn't kill anybody. He was here, with you. You're his alibi. But lest you forget, he's yours too.”

This didn't seem to fluster her, not in the slightest. She shrugged again.

“Didn't you tell me you weren't a cop?” she said.

“I didn't tell you anything. My name's Cage. Here's my card.”

I took one out of my wallet and reached it toward her. But I went past the card and grabbed for her arm. She tried to yank away. Then, caught, she became a bundle of twisting muscle. She thrashed like a trapped cat and cursed and carved wildly at my face with her free hand.

I caught the free hand and pinned her against me. She was on her knees on the bed, held fast, and her hair spun and flailed at my eyes, her teeth flashed, and her body contracted into a single muscle, sprung, contracted, sprung. I held on, forcing her head back with my own. She had a cheap, animal smell, and I could feel her body beating like a pulse, and the beat came inside me and did a high-assed beguine down into my scrotum.