Murder in the Latin Quarter by Cara Black Read Free Book Online Page A

said.
    “This Mireille must know about it,” he said. “For some rea-son, he trusted her.”
    True. He’d entrusted her with an envelope. Aimée figured the envelope contained the file Mireille had mentioned.
    “We can help each other.” He leaned forward, his face close to hers. “What’s your interest in this?”
    Even if she didn’t quite trust him, he didn’t seem to be working for the cops. And if he located Mireille, she wanted to know. She decided to use business as the pretext for her involvement.
    “I’m a private detective,” she told him.
    A guarded look appeared on his face. “Employed by who?”
    “That’s private information.”
    Ringing startled her. It wasn’t the phone on the table. Edouard reached inside his jacket. His hand came back cup-ping a different cell phone.
    “Excusez-moi, ” he said, turning toward the open window facing the street. He spoke in what sounded like Flammand, a Belgian dialect.
    Something had fluttered from his pocket onto the floor. Aimée stretched the toe of her shoe out to cover it, then inched it back toward her.
    “Here’s my number.” His phone call over, he handed her a card.
    She searched her bag, pretending to look for hers. “I’m all out, no paper . . . wait.” She reached down to the floor and scooped up what had fallen from his pocket and a sugar wrapper.
    Grabbing her kohl eye pencil, she wrote her number on the sugar wrapper.
    The lilac overhanging the rue Buffon wall shuddered in a sudden gust, releasing that familiar cloying scent. What else did Edouard know? What should she reveal? To get, one had to give.
    “If Benoît’s murder involved his work, as you seem to think,” she said, “why attempt to give him a facelift?”
    Edouard sat very still. Only a muscle twitched in his jaw. “What do you mean?”
    “The skin had been peeled from his temple and his ear had been severed,” she said. “And he lay within a circle of salt. Symbolic, non? But of what?”
    The lines around Edouard’s mouth creased in pain. “I don’t know.”
    “Call me when you do.” She placed the sugar wrapper with her number on the table and walked out.
    After a few blocks, she stopped and leaned against a stone wall to catch her breath. Her pulse raced. Edouard wanted Benoît’s killer, she needed to find Mireille, and she hoped they weren’t after the same person.

Tuesday Afternoon

    “PORCELLUS, MADEMOISELLE,” said the Ecole Nor-male Supérieure administrator.
    Latin for pig. Aimée remembered that much. But what did that have to do with Professeur Benoît?
    Looking up from the university directory, the administrator squinted at Aimée through thick glasses. “Professeur Azacca Benoît is . . . was a world authority on pigs. Renowned.”
    “Of course,” she said, blinking back her surprise. Her gaze went to the glass door open to the Ecole Normale Supérieur’s courtyard: manicured hedges, gravel paths, and busts of the learned adorned what had once been an old convent enclosing a spacious garden. The Ecole Normale Supérieur, like many of the Grandes Ecoles, was housed in an ancient edifice in the Latin Quarter. Yet for all the school’s prestige, she thought, the building could use a paint job. The walls had faded to a burnt brown-yellow; it looked run-down.
    “I assume he was on the faculty,” she said.
    “The Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique sponsored Professeur Benoît’s research. He did his lab work in the Collections Osteologiques Anatomie Comparée,” he said. “As a visiting lecturer, he conducted one seminar a term.”
    She’d just come from there! “You’re sure? A seminar on pigs?”
    “We were eagerly awaiting completion of his statistical survey with respect to the comparative anatomy of small hoofed animals in the twentieth century.”
    Talk about obscure!
    “Was his seminar well attended?” she couldn’t help but ask.
    “The flic asked that, too,” she was told.
    The administrator shut the thick