Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [62]
He rang the doorbells on the second and third floors but nobody answered; a baby was crying behind one door, but no one opened it. A little girl in pajamas opened the door next to it. Her hair was made up in dozens of braids; she looked at him in silence, but before he had a chance to say a word, her mother appeared, with hair braided the same way, and as quietly as her daughter, pulled the child back and closed the door. He started up the stairs again. The stairway smelled of urine and vegetable soup but he didn’t have the heart to write it down any more than he’d had the heart to note the serious silence of the child and her mother. For a moment he thought of going back down and telling Legendre the building was empty, but then he heard a door open on the fourth floor and when he got up to the landing, he saw an old man watching him intently from the threshold of his apartment.
The man must have been waiting for him—or the police, more likely—because a plate of cookies was sitting on the kitchen table next to the entrance, as well as cups with coffee stains in them.
“Good morning, sir,” Arnaud said, holding out his hand, “I’m a private investigator looking into the crime that just occurred down there.” And the old man shook his hand with surprising gentleness.
He was wearing a big plaid jacket even though it was quite hot in the apartment, and a woolen cap he immediately took off with an embarrassed look: “I don’t even know when I’m wearing it anymore. Come in, come in.”
Arnaud remained in the doorway with his notebook in his hand, tapping the cover with his pen. “I don’t have much time, sir,” he said. “I have to question the whole building.”
But then the old man smiled knowingly, as if he was well aware that no one had opened their door for him on the lower floors, and simply repeated: “Please, come on in.”
Arnaud hesitated. Later, he wouldn’t be able to recall how he’d guessed the old man knew something; maybe because just as he was about to refuse again, the old man’s smile had hardened and he’d looked Arnaud straight in the eye. So he nodded and said, “Just five minutes,” and with two steps he was right there, in the kitchen. An old dog was sleeping under the radiator, stretched out on a plaid blanket the same colors as the old man’s jacket, and he didn’t even open his eyes when Arnaud pulled a chair over for himself.
As the old man puttered around in the kitchen, checking that the coffee was hot, putting the sugar bowl and a glass of milk on the table, he said: “She’s a kid, right?”
“Yes,” replied Arnaud, looking out the window at the trees in the park. Between their branches, blobs of color—the onlookers—were pressing against the yellow tape. “Layla M., seventeen or eighteen years old, they told me. She died from strangulation.” He was trying for the neutral voice of the private detective he claimed to be. “That means she was strangled, see.”
The old man had his back turned. His hands were in the sink; he was mechanically running spoons and knives under the faucet. He didn’t say a word.
“Seems she grew up near here,” Arnaud continued. “She hadn’t been living in the neighborhood for a few months, but I thought some people would be bound to remember her. You yourself—did you know her, by any chance?”
The old man still had his hands in the sink. He seemed to be washing the silverware under the faucet for an interminable length of time, and Arnaud, thinking the sound of the water might have prevented him from hearing, repeated more loudly: “You know her, by any chance?”
The old man kept his head down, but stretched out his hand and shut off the water. Finally, still without turning around, he said: “Yes, sir, I knew her. I knew her very well. I loved her like a daughter.”
Arnaud remained silent for a moment. He cursed Legendre for having put him in this situation; he had no more idea how to console a man than he knew how to grill him or judge his guilt,