French Kiss Read online

  “Où suis-je?” I ask. Where am I?

  “Hermès, Monsieur Moncrief. Bonsoir. Je peux vous aider?”

  The Hermès store on Madison Avenue. It is…was…Dalia’s favorite place in the entire world to shop.

  “Non. Merci, Monsieur. Je regarde.” Just looking.

  On the glass shelves is a collection of handbags, purses, and pocketbooks in red and yellow and green. Like Easter and Christmas. I feel calm amid the beauty. It is a museum, a palace, a château. The silk scarves hanging from golden hooks. The glass cases of watches and cufflinks. The shelves of briefcases and leather shopping bags. And then the calm inside me dissipates. I say, “Bonsoir et merci” to the sales associate.

  I have neither my police phone nor my personal cell. I do not have my watch. I do not know the time. I know I am not crazy. I’m simply crazed.

  It’s early evening. I walk to Fifth Avenue. The sidewalks are crowded, and the shops are open. I walk down to the Pierre. I was recently inside the Pierre. Was I? I think I was. I continue walking south, toward the Plaza. No water in the fountain? A water shortage, perhaps? I turn east, back toward Madison Avenue, then start north again.

  Bottega Veneta. I walk inside. No warm greeting here. A bigger store than Hermès. Instead of a symphony of leather in color, this is a muted place in grays and blacks and many degrees of brown. Calming, calming, calming, until it is calming no longer.

  I leave. My next stop is Sherry-Lehmann, the museum of wine. I walk to the rear of the store, where they keep their finest bottles—the Romanée-Conti, Pétrus, Le Pin, Ramonet Montrachet, the thousand-dollar Moët. The bottles should all be displayed under glass, like the diamonds at Tiffany.

  I am out on the sidewalk again. I am afraid that if I don’t keep moving, I will explode or collapse. It is that extraordinary feeling that nothing good will ever happen again.

  A no-brainer: I cannot return to Dalia’s apartment at 15 Central Park West. Instead I will go to the loft where I once lived. The place is in the stupidly chic Meatpacking District. I bought the loft before I renewed my life with Dalia. I sometimes lend the place to friends from Europe who are visiting New York. I’m pretty sure it is empty right now.

  Will I pick up the pieces? There is no way that will ever happen.

  Move on, they will say. Mourn, then move on. I will not do that, because I can’t.

  Get over it? Never. Someone else? Never.

  Nothing will ever be the same.

  As I give the address to the cabdriver, I find my chest heaving and hurting. I insist—I don’t know why—on holding in the tears. In those few minutes, with my chest shaking and my head aching, I realize what Elliott and Burke and probably others have come to realize: first, my partner, Maria Martinez; then my lover, Dalia Boaz.

  Oh, my God. This isn’t about prostitutes. This isn’t about drugs. This is about me.

  Somebody wants to hurt me. And that somebody has succeeded.

  Chapter 30

  A loft. A big space; bare, barren. Not a handsome space. It is way too basic to be anything but big.

  I lived here before Dalia came back into my life. Even when I lived here, I was too compulsive to have allowed it to become a cheesy bachelor pad—no piles of dirty clothing; no accumulation of Chinese-food containers. In fact, no personal touches of any kind. But of course I was spending too many of my waking hours with the NYPD to think about furniture and paint and bathroom fixtures.

  I turn the key and walk inside. I am almost startled by the sparseness of it—a gray sofa, a black leather club chair, a glass dining table where no one has ever eaten a meal. Some old files are stacked against a wall. Empty shelves near the sofa. Empty shelves in the kitchen. I have lived most of my New York life with Dalia, at Dalia’s home. That was my real home. Where am I now?

  I stretch out on the sofa. Fifteen seconds later, I am back on my feet. The room is stuffy, dry, hot. I walk to the thermostat that will turn on the air-conditioning, but I stare at the controls as if I don’t quite know how to adjust the temperature. I remember that there is a smooth single-malt Scotch in a cabinet near the entryway, but why bother? I need to use the bathroom, but I just don’t have energy enough to walk to the far side of the loft.

  Then the buzzer downstairs rings.

  At least I think it’s the buzzer downstairs. It’s been so long since I heard it. I walk to the intercom. The buzz comes again, then once more. Then I remember what I’m expected to say. A phrase that is ridiculously simple.

  “Who is it?”

  For a split second I stupidly imagine that it will be Dalia. “It was a terrible joke,” she will say with a laugh. “Inspector Elliott helped me fool you.”

  Now a hollow voice comes from the intercom.

  “It’s K. Burke.”

  I buzz her inside. Moments later I open the door and let her into the loft.

  “How did you know where to find me?” I ask.

  “I called your cell twenty times. You never picked up. Then I called Dalia’s place twenty times. You weren’t there, or you weren’t picking up. So I found this place listed as the home address in your HR file. If I didn’t find you here, I was going to forget it. But I got lucky.”

  “No, K. Burke. I got lucky.”

  I have no idea why I said something so sweet. But I think I mean it. Again, an idea that comes and goes in a split second: whoever is trying to destroy me—will he go after K. Burke next?

  She gives me a smile. Then she says, “I’m about to say the thing that always annoys me when other people say it.”

  “And that is…”

  “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  I take a deep breath.

  “You mean like brewing a pot of coffee or bringing me a bag of doughnuts or cleaning my bathroom or finding the son of a bitch who—”

  “Okay, I got it,” she says. “I understand. But actually, Nick Elliott and I did do something for you.”

  My forehead wrinkles, and I say, “What?”

  “We tracked down Dalia’s father. He’s in Norway shooting a film.”

  “I was going to call him soon,” I say. “But I was building up courage. Thank you.” And just thinking about father and daughter begins to break my already severed heart.

  “How did he accept the news?” As if I needed to ask.

  “It was awful. He wailed. He screamed. He put his assistant on, and he eventually…well, he sort of composed himself and got back on the line.”

  My eyes begin filling with tears. My chin quivers. I rub my eyes. I am not trying to hide my emotions. I am merely trying to get through them.

  “He sends you his love,” K. Burke says. I nod.

  “He is as fine a man as Dalia was a woman,” I say.

  “He asked me to tell you two things.”

  I can’t imagine what Monsieur Boaz wanted to tell me.

  “He said, ‘Tell Luc that I will come to America tomorrow, but he should bury Dalia as soon as possible. That is the Jewish way.’”

  “I understand,” I say. Then I ask, “And the other?”

  “He said, ‘Tell Luc thank you…for taking such good care of my girl.’”

  This comment should make me weep, but instead I explode with anger. Not at Menashe Boaz, but at myself.

  “That’s not true!” I yell. “I did not take good care of her.”

  “Of course it’s true,” K. Burke says firmly. “You loved her totally. Everybody knows that.”

  “I…let…her…die.”

  “That’s just stupid, Moncrief. And it smells a little of…” K. Burke abruptly stops talking.

  “What? Finish your thought. It smells of what?” I say.

  “It smells of…well…self-pity. Dalia was murdered. You could not have prevented it.”

  I walk to the floor-to-ceiling windows of the loft. I look down at Gansevoort Street. It’s this year’s chic hot-cool place to be—the expensive restaurants and expensive boutiques, the High Line, the cobblestone streets. It is packed wit
h people. I am disgusted with them because I am disgusted with me. Because Dalia and I will never again be among those people.

  I turn and face Detective Burke, and suddenly I am more peaceful. I am truly grateful that she is here. She has stopped by to offer the “personal touch” and I was hesitant at first. Afraid I would feel nervous or embarrassed. But K. Burke has done a good thing.

  I walk back toward her and speak slowly, carefully.

  “There is one thing we need to discuss very soon. You must realize that these two murders had nothing to do with prostitutes or Brazilian drug dealers or…well, all the things we have been guessing at.”

  “I realize that,” she says. I continue speaking.

  “The first murder, at a rich man’s home, was to confuse us. The next murder, at a school where people learn to be police professionals—that was to torment us.”

  K. Burke nods in simple agreement.

  “These murders have to do with me,” I say.

  “In that case,” K. Burke says, “these murders have to do with us.”

  Chapter 31

  “What the hell is the story with these two murders?”

  This question keeps exploding off the walls of NYPD precincts. It is the commissioner’s question. It is Nick Elliott’s question. And—obsessively, interminably, awake or asleep—it is my question.

  The question is asked a thousand times, and a thousand times the answer comes back the same.

  “No idea. Just no goddamn idea.”

  Forensics brought in nothing. Surveillance cameras showed us nothing. Interviews at the scene turned up nothing.

  So it is now time for me to do the only thing left to do: turn inward and rely entirely on my instincts. They have helped me in the past, and they have failed me, too. But instinct is all I have left.

  I confront Nick Elliott. I tell him that the answer to the murders is obviously not in New York. The answer must be in Paris.

  “Paris?” he shouts.

  Then I say, “I need to go to Paris—look around, nose around, see if I can find something there.”

  Nick Elliott gives it a long pause and then says, “Maybe that’s not a bad idea.”

  Then I tell him that I want to take K. Burke with me.

  He pauses again, another long pause. Then he speaks. “Now, that’s a bad idea.”

  “Inspector, this is no holiday I’m planning. This is work. K. Burke and I will be examining cases that—”

  “Okay, okay, let me think about it,” Elliott says. “Maybe it’ll help. On the other hand, it might end up being a waste of time and money.”

  I think quickly and say, “Then it will be a waste of my time and my money. I’ll supply the money for the trip. I only care about getting to the bottom of these murders.”

  “I guess so,” says Elliott.

  I say, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  A minute later I am telling K. Burke to go home and pack.

  Her reaction? “I’ve never been to Paris.”

  My reaction? “Why am I not surprised?”

  Chapter 32

  K. Burke and I are sitting at a steel desk in a small room with bad Internet service at Les Archives de la Préfecture de Police, the dreary building on the periphery of Paris where all the old police records are kept. Here you can examine every recorded police case since the end of the Great War. Here you can discover the names of the French collaborators during the Vichy regime. You can examine the records of the Parisian bakers who have been accused of using tainted yeast in their bread. Here are the records of the thousands of murders, assaults, knife attacks, shootings, and traffic violations that have occurred in the past hundred years in the City of Light.

  It is also here that K. Burke and I hope to find some small (or, better yet, large) clue that could connect us to whoever is responsible for the brutal deaths of Maria Martinez and my beloved Dalia.

  To find the person who wishes to hurt me so deeply.

  “Here,” says Detective Burke, pointing to my name on the screen of the archive’s computer. “L. Moncrief était responsable…”

  I translate: “L. Moncrief was responsible for the evidence linking the Algerian diplomat to the cartel posing as Dominican priests in the 15th arrondissement.”

  I press a computer key and say to Burke, “Listen: after years of being dragged to church by my mother, I know a real priest when I see one, and no prêtre I’d ever seen had such a well-groomed beard and mustache. Then I noticed that his shoes…eh, never mind. See what’s next.”

  We study my other cases. Some of those I worked on are ridiculously small—a Citroën stolen because the owner left the keys in the ignition; a lost child who stopped for a free jus d’orange on his way home from school; a homeless man arrested for singing loudly in a public library.

  Other cases are much more significant. Along with the phony Dominicans, there was the drug bust in Pigalle, the case I built my reputation on. But there was also a gruesome murder in Montmartre, on rue Caulaincourt, during which a pimp’s hands and feet were amputated.

  In this last case my instincts led me to a pet cemetery in Asnières-sur-Seine. Both the severed hands and feet were found at the grave of the pimp’s childhood pet, a spaniel. Instinct.

  But nothing in the police archive is resonating with me. I do not feel, either through logic or instinct, any link from these past cases and the awful deaths of my two beloved women.

  “I think I need another café au lait, Moncrief,” K. Burke says. Her eyelids are covering half her eyes. Jet lag has definitely attacked her.

  “What you need is a taxi back to Le Meurice,” I say. “It is now quatorze heures.…”

  K. Burke looks confused.

  I translate. “Two o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “Gotcha,” she says.

  “Go back to the hotel. Take a nap, and I will come knocking on your door at dix-sept heures. Forgive me. I will come knocking at five o’clock.”

  I add, “Good-bye, K. Burke.”

  “Au revoir,” she says. Her accent makes me cringe, then smile.

  “You see?” I add. “You’re here just seven hours, and already you’re on your way to becoming a true Parisienne.”

  Chapter 33

  We meet at five.

  “I am not a happy man,” I say to K. Burke after I give our destination to the cabdriver. Then I say, “Perhaps I will never be a completely happy man again, but I am un peu content when I am in Paris.” Burke says nothing for a few seconds.

  “Perhaps someday you will be happier.” She speaks with an emphasis on the last syllable. Perhaps someday I will be.

  Then I explain to her that because we will have to get back to our investigation tomorrow—“And, like many things, it might come to a frustrating end,” I caution—this early evening will be the only chance for me to show her the glory of Paris.

  Then I quickly add, “But not the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre or Notre Dame. You can see those on your own. I will show you the special places in Paris. Places that are visited by only the very wise and the very curious.”

  Detective Burke says, “Merci, Monsieur Moncrief. ”

  I smile at her, and then I say to the cabdriver, “Nous sommes arrivés.” We are here.

  Burke reads the sign on the building aloud. Her accent is amusingly American-sounding: “Museé…des…Arts…Forains?”

  “It is the circus museum,” I say. And soon we are standing in a huge warehouse that holds the forty carousels and games and bright neon signs that a rich man thought were worth preserving.

  “I can’t decide whether this is a dream or a nightmare,” Burke says.

  “I think that it is both.”

  We ride a carousel that whirls amazingly fast. “I feel like I’m five again!” shouts K. Burke. We play a game that involves plaster puppets and cloth-covered bulls. K. Burke wins the game. Then we are out and on our way again.

  This time out I tell our cabdriver to take us to Paris Descartes University.
<
br />   “Vous êtes médecin?” the cabdriver asks.

  I tell him that my companion and I are doctors of crime, which seems both to surprise and upset him. A few minutes later we are ascending in the lift to view the Musée d’Anatomie Delmas-Orfila-Rouvière. The place is almost crazier than the circus museum. It’s a medical museum with hundreds of shelves displaying skulls and skeletons and wax models of diseased human parts. It is at once astonishing and disgusting.

  At one point Burke says, “We’re the only people here.”

  “You need special permission to enter.”

  “Aren’t we the lucky ones?” Burke says, with only slight sarcasm.

  From there we take another cab ride—to the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge across the Seine. I show her the “love locks,” the thousands of small padlocks attached to the rails of the bridge by lovers.

  “They are going to relocate some of the locks,” I tell Burke. “There are so many that they fear the bridge may collapse.”

  So much love, I think. And for a moment my heart hurts. But then I hail another cab. I point out the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, and we both laugh when I explain that it was once an asylum for “hysterical women.”

  “Don’t get any ideas, Moncrief,” Burke says.

  Since our bodies are still on American time, it is almost lunchtime for us, and I ask K. Burke if she is hungry.

  “Tu as faim?” I ask.

  “Très, très hungry. Famished, in fact.”

  Ten minutes later, we are in the rough-and-tumble Pigalle area. I tell Detective Burke that she can always dine at the famous Parisian restaurants—Taillevent, Guy Savoy, even the dining room in our hotel. But tonight, I am taking her to my favorite restaurant, Le Petit Canard.

  “Isn’t this the area where you made your famous drug bust?” Burke asks.

  “C’est vrai,” I tell her. “You have a good memory.”

  She is looking out the taxi window. The tourists have disappeared from the streets. The artists must be inside smoking weed. Only vagrants and prostitutes are hanging around.