No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [29]
Edith was startled to hear a new voice when she phoned Leplée in the morning to change the time of their appointment. She must come to his apartment immediately, the man said, using the formal vous rather than the familiar tu with which Leplée adressed her. On hearing her name, the policeman who let her into the building followed her upstairs. The door was open. Leplée had been shot through the eye; he was dead. Decades later, Piaf recalled the shock: “How can I describe the feeling of total emptiness, of unreality, that left me senseless, unable to move or respond to a world that had gone to pieces in a second?”
Suddenly she was a suspect in a murder case. The police interviewed everyone from le Gerny’s, starting with her. They questioned her for two days about her background, her relationship with Leplée, her ties to the petty criminals of Pigalle. Under pressure, she reluctantly gave the names of her lovers, including Valette and Jeannot, but kept insisting that she knew nothing. The police verified her alibi and let her go. But she was to keep them informed of her whereabouts.
Following Edith’s release, the media refused to let her off the hook. Détective, a popular scandal sheet, ran photos of the grief-stricken singer at Leplée’s funeral, along with their analysis of the case. “The man in the street doesn’t know about Louis Leplée,” the journalist Marcel Montarron wrote, “but he does know about ‘La Môme Piaf,’ whose name and voice have already been heard on the airwaves.” Since the authorities had found nothing to implicate her, he guessed that blackmail, racketeering, or a combination of the two had motivated the murder, given the “special nature” of Leplée’s preferences.
What Détective did not say was that, three years earlier, Leplée’s friend Oscar Dufrenne had been brutally murdered at the Palace, the music-hall in Pigalle where Leplée had run the club. The murderer, identified as one of the men posing as sailors who picked up clients like Dufrenne and Leplée, was never found. When Leplée met the same fate, the police investigated Piaf’s entourage but were unable to find a lead, despite Leplée’s housekeeper’s description of the four young men who entered his apartment the night of the murder, tied her up, and accosted her employer. The men, presumably known to the victim, must have expected a handsome payment, the journalist suggested, but when the weapon they brought to scare him went off accidentally, a case of blackmail turned into a murder.
La Môme Piaf remained in the headlines while the investigation dragged on. The four men were never found. The newsreel Éclair-Journal tracked her down in its attempt to sensationalize the affair. Despite her stylish gloves and fur collar, Edith looked terrified. Asked why she had given her friends’ names to the police, she replied, “I had to say who I’d been with or they’d have thought I was protecting someone.” When the interviewer questioned her about how well she had known Leplée, she sobbed, “My friends are gone. I have no one. Leave me alone.”
Edith pulled herself together some days later for an interview with Montarron for another popular magazine, Voilà. Having become interested in her when researching his piece for Détective, he planned to do a human-interest story—one that would show readers that, though she came from Belleville, she was not one of the immoral creatures she sang about. “La Môme Piaf” appeared in Voilà on April 18, with photos of sparrows and of the little singer, her dark dress adorned with a white bow at the neck—an ironic touch, given the cigarette in her mouth.
Edith trusted