Murder in the Palais Royal by Cara Black Read Free Book Online

passage for the Queen of Hungary. Conditions improved for a while. During the Terror, Julie’s royalist sentiments brought her to the guillotine.
    Melac flashed his badge. “Show me the taxi dispatch log, Monsieur.”
    By the time the dispatcher returned from a back office with the taxi log, Aimée was almost jumping out of her skin.
    Melac crowded the counter, blocking her view. After a moment, he flipped the pages of his notepad.
“But you live on Ile Saint-Louis at Quai d’Anjou.”
“And the Métro runs till midnight. So?”
    She elbowed Melac aside and read the log entry: At 12:21 P.M., 5, rue des Capuchines, Pickup.
    She stared at the taxi destination listed, and her mouth went dry: 17, quai d’Anjou.
    Her address.
Tuesday
    B LACKMAIL NEEDN’T GET fancy, Clémence Touvier thought, as she cut words from the newspaper with her manicure scissors. She’d seen this done in an old black-and-white film and figured the technique would still work. Besides, given the stakes, she felt certain that no detective or crime lab would ever examine her cut-and-paste job.
    Clémence hunched over the upturned cask in the arched stone wine cellar below the Palais Royal bistro. Dust-covered wine bottles lined the racks in the naturally cool cavern with a temperature of a perfect 18 degrees Celsius. Only two more words to cut out.
    “Clémence?” Someone pounded on the locked wine-cellar door. “You there?”
    Merde! Carco, the chef and her sometime boyfriend, had arrived in the adjoining kitchen to prepare the evening sauces early. How had he known to look here? There were only ten minutes left before her wait shift, and she had to finish this.
    Despite her queasiness from the sharp tannin smell of red wine, she made herself keep absolutely still. She heard voices, then shuffling footsteps, from the tunnel. He’d given up. She clipped her blond hair back, tiptoed to reach the glue she’d hidden behind a bottle of Saint Emilion, and got back to work.
    The last word applied, the glue drying, she stared at her work. Simple and to the point. Fifty thousand francs would buy her silence.
    She’d never be caught. She wore plastic dishwashing gloves from Monoprix. No fingerprints.
    Nicolas, her ex, had never talked about his money source. But his payments had ceased and she was broke. Last night, desperate, she rummaged through Nicolas’s belongings stored in her basement. She discovered a newspaper article and realized it held a link to Nicolas’s aristo friend.
    What the connection was, she didn’t know yet, but the article gave her enough to allow her to bluff and suggest she did. She figured the threat of leaking a scandal to the press would suffice. That money would buy her ticket out of Paris.
    Aimée Leduc had put Nicolas behind bars. She would worm the information out of him. Clémence had taken care of that too.
    A slap on the stone, a muffled grunt, and then voices came from the tunnel outside the wine-cellar door. Again she heard Carco’s voice. “That’s the last delivery. Anyone seen Clémence?”
    She held her breath. Pots clanged in the kitchen. She had to hurry.
    Tried and true worked best, non? As her uncle, the salaud, would say. Her uncle had raped her in the woods the summer she was ten. It all came back to her: the dense heat of those afternoons; pine needles scratching her back; the resin scent mingling with his wine breath. How he’d put his tobacco-stained fingers over her mouth.
    The fear that everyone would know.
    Much later, her uncle had been imprisoned for killing a bank guard. At sixteen, she’d left Toulouse but found Paris, like other provincials before her, as gray at heart as its gray-cobbled streets. No sunflowers nodding in the fields, only rare splashes of color, no life embracing Provençal humor, only Parisian irony: that half-smile, the brittle shrug.
    Now at twenty, Clémence refused to struggle with dead-end jobs. Her attitude had ended work cleaning offices and flats in the prestigious