Century Rain Part 28

They drove back through thick Thursday-afternoon traffic, taking avenue de Choisy north to place d'Italie and then cutting through a darkening rat's maze of side streets until they were on boulevard Raspail. Floyd turned the radio dial, searching for jazz, but all he got was traditional French accordion music. It was the new thing now. Traditional was in; jazz out. Chatelier himself had called jazz morally corrupting, as if the music itself was a kind of narcotic that had to be wiped from the streets.

Accordion music always made Floyd feel seasick. He turned off the wireless.

"There's something I need to ask," Custine said.

"Say it."

"There's a possibility we haven't really discussed. It concerns the old man."

"Go on."

"Do you think it's possible he killed her?"

Floyd thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. "Makes no sense, Andre. If the police weren't

interested, why would he risk re-opening that can of worms?"

"Human nature being what it is, anything's possible. What if he has a secret need to be discovered?

Once the police abandoned their inquiry, he'd have had no choice but to call in private detectives."

"All the evidence we've seen so far points away from Blanchard."

"But we know he had access to her rooms. He's the one person who has keys for every room. What if

she did have a lover, and Blanchard found out about it?"

"Explain the wireless, or the smashed typewriter, or the box of papers."

"Perhaps he's playing some kind of double-bluff game with us, strewing our path with misleading clues

while hoping we have the sense to see through them and-"

"Is this the way they teach you to think at the Quai?"

"I'm just saying that we shouldn't exclude the possibility. He seems like a nice enough old gentleman,

but the worst ones generally do."

"I think you've been sitting in that room for too long, Andre."

"Perhaps," Custine said. "Still, a little suspicion never goes amiss in this line of work."

Floyd turned the car on to boulevard Saint-Germain. "I agree that we can't rule it out, all the other

evidence notwithstanding. I'll even admit that the thought had crossed my mind."

"Well, then."

"But I still don't believe he killed her. That said, if you feel you need to explore the possibility...well,

I'm sure you can nose around the problem without being too tactless. Ask him again about the police not

taking up the case. Ask him if he knew of anyone who might have been jealous of the time he spent with the girl."

"I'll be the very model of discretion," Custine said.

"You'd better be. If he loses his temper and throws us off the case, we're going to have to start looking

for new premises in a less salubrious part of town."

"I didn't think there was a less salubrious part of town."

"My point exactly," Floyd replied.

He parked the Mathis. Nothing new in his pigeonhole; no bills or mysterious letters from long-lost

girlfriends. That, he supposed, had to count as a kind of good luck.

But the elevator had broken down again, jammed somewhere up on the fourth floor. The engineer from the elevator company was sitting on the lowest flight of stairs, smoking a cigarette and studying the

racing pages. He was a small, shrewlike man with pomaded hair who always smelled of carbolic soap.

He nodded at Floyd and Custine as they tramped past.

"Busy, Maurice?" Floyd asked.

"Waiting for a new part from head office, Monsieur Floyd." He shrugged expressively. "With the traffic

the way it is today, could be hours before they get here."

"Don't break a sweat," Floyd said.

Maurice saluted them and went back to his newspaper.

Entering their office, Custine put away his tools, washed his face and hands and changed his s.h.i.+rt and

then set about making tea. Floyd sat at his desk, pulled the telephone across and called the Paris operator to request an international call to Berlin. He gave her the number of Kaspar Metals, reading from the letter in the tin, and waited for the connection to be made.

After a while, the operator's voice came back on again. "I'm sorry, monsieur. That number must be wrong."

Floyd gave her the number again, but there had been no mistake. "You mean no one picks up the telephone?"

"No," she said. "The line is totally dead."

Floyd thanked her and returned the receiver to its cradle. One more dead lead, then. He drummed his fingers and then dialled Marguerite's number in Montparna.s.se.

"Floyd," Greta said, answering.

"How are things?"

"She's resting."

"Can I see you this evening?"

"I suppose so."

"Easy on the enthusiasm, kid."

She sighed. "I'm sorry, Floyd. It's just that I may not be in the best of moods."

"Then you could use some cheering up."

"And you're the man for the job, I take it?"

"Custine and I have been working hard on the case. I think we all need a treat tonight. How about I take the three of us out to dinner, and we finish off the evening in Le Perroquet Pourpre?"

"I suppose I can make it," she said, not sounding at all sure of herself. "Sophie's in tonight, studying, so I could ask her to look after Marguerite-"

"That's the spirit. I'll drive over in an hour. Spruce yourself up-we're hitting the bright lights tonight."

"I'll do my best," she said.

Custine and Floyd drank tea and discussed the case, making sure they'd shared all the essential observations, comparing notes on their interviews with the tenants. While they talked, a scratchy old Bluebird pressing of Sidney Bechet playing "Blues in Thirds" spun on Floyd's phonograph.

"What we're left with," Custine concluded, "is an odd American woman who liked to mess around with

wirelesses, a.s.suming that she did that and not some previous tenant."

"We're left with a bit more than that," Floyd said. "We know she had an odd interest in a manufacturing contract in Berlin. We know that when she died, her typewriter died with her. We know she had a habit of acc.u.mulating books and things."

"Unusual observations collectively, but all perfectly explicable in and of themselves."

"But taken together-"

"Not enough to make a convincing case that she was a spy."

"What about the children?"

Custine gave Floyd a reproving look. "I was rather hoping you wouldn't mention the children again."

"I still never got to speak to the one tenant who had a really good look at the girl."

"I'll visit him again tomorrow, if it will make you happy. In the meantime, might I suggest that we restrict ourselves to firm leads?"

Floyd thought for a moment, his mind adrift on the rise and fall of Bechet's saxophone. The disc was scratched and ancient, the music almost buried in a surf of hisses and clicks. He could have replaced it with a cheap bootleg tomorrow, and the sound would have been as clear and clean as a tin whistle. But it wouldn't have been the right kind of clarity. The knockoff might have fooled ninety-nine people out of a hundred, but there was something raw and truthful engraved into this damaged old sh.e.l.lac, something that cut through the noise and thirty years like a clarion.

"The Berlin connection's a dead end," he said. "And we don't know what she was doing with the books and magazines."

"And records," Custine reminded him. "Except, of course, that we have Monsieur Blanchard's sighting of her entering Cardinal Lemoine Metro station with the loaded suitcase, and her subsequent reappearance with an empty one."

"As if she'd exchanged the contents with another spy."

"Precisely. But again, it's circ.u.mstantial. She could just as easily have handed the contents to a s.h.i.+pping agent."