Bones of Paris (9780345531773) by Laurie R. King

Stuyvesant had seen that bait before, and he knew better than to snap at it too eagerly. “No problem,” he said.
    “Tell me about your search for Mlle. Crosby, M. Stuyvesant.”
    “Oh, you know how it goes: you spend days gathering odd pieces before you can start fitting them together. I’ve found a number of places she isn’t, and where she hasn’t been seen, and have a few names of people who might have seen her somewhere else.” Doucet looked expectant, so Stuyvesant went on, warning himself against the temptation to open up: Doucet wasn’t a partner.
    “When I got to Paris on Saturday, I headed for Montparnasse, because that’s where you look for an American like Pip Crosby. I worked my way through the bars in the Quarter, but nobody seemed to remember her. Sunday things were pretty dead, but last night I shifted up to Saint-Germain. Of course, things haven’t picked up yet after the summer, but even so, nobody seems to know her—or if they remember her, they haven’t seen her in a long time. Which I thought strange until I saw Pip’s—Miss Crosby’s—room, and found a bunch of matchbooks from clubs up in Montmartre.”
    “How is her French?”
    “I guess better than I noticed.”
    “Better than the average American visitor’s, would you say?”
    “Since the average American visitor can only manage Bonjour, Combien? and Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? then yes. She has French novels on her bookshelf, with tickets to French theaters stuck in as bookmarks.”
    “I very much hope—” Doucet’s hopes were interrupted by the arrival of a square meter of iced oyster bed and another pair of beers. Following several ounces of both, he finished the question. “I hope you did not remove anything from her possessions?”
    “You’ll be happy to find everything waiting for you, looking just likeit did four months ago. As,” Stuyvesant said pointedly, “you might have gone to see for yourself.”
    Doucet was suddenly very interested in the oyster balanced between his fingers.
    “M. Stuyvesant, I am given to understand that you are an honest man.”
    “Who told you that?”
    The name he said made Stuyvesant’s grin fade. It was not one most Paris cops would have known—or known how to reach.
    “What the—what were you doing talking to him?”
    “You left your card with my sergeant yesterday, and do you know, these international telephone lines, they are so useful when a strange man comes asking questions. Particularly a strange man who is on the books as having spent a night in a Paris jail. And because I have been in contact with so many Americans over the years, it is not a difficulty to get certain questions answered. The man would appear to know you well.”
    “And yet he told you I was honest.”
    “His words were, ‘Stuyvesant is an honorable man.’ ”
    Honorable? Hah—tell that to the string of Lulus. Tell it to Pip
. “I’m not sure that’s the same thing as ‘honest.’ ”
    “It is sufficiently close that I am willing to believe that you are not … what was your word? A ‘crook.’ ” Doucet chose another oyster, waiting to see if the American would pick up the test he’d set before him.
    One of Stuyvesant’s problems, these past three years, had been that no agency but the Pinkertons—who wanted his muscles and his English, but not his experience—would hire him without a recommendation from his former boss. And since that boss was Bureau director J. Edgar Hoover, and the two men had not parted on the best of terms, it meant doing without a recommendation.
    He wasn’t about to explain that history of animosity here—but if Doucet had talked to the man he’d just mentioned, then he’d heard both sides of the story, and was sending out a little feeler: was Stuyvesant honest, or no?
    “You’re right,” Stuyvesant said, reaching for his notebook. “I didn’t take anything from Miss Crosby’s apartment but information—and, this.” He dropped the dramatic