Murder Without Pity

By Steve Haberman

Paris, France: dark with fog, riots over police killings, dirty Russian money, and Far Right demagogues. 

Here state criminal investigator, Stanislas Cassel, grandson of a French propagandist for the Nazis during WWII, works at the Palace of Justice. Ashamed of his family's infamy, he avoids anything political. Instead he absorbs himself solving small crimes. Little does he suspect the life-changing shock awaiting him when he looks into the bizarre murder of a pensioner, who seemed to have lived an uneventful life. "Murder Without Pity," by Steve Haberman, a mystery thriller for today's turbulent, dangerous times!  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Haberman
• Release date: Mar 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386229919

Steve Haberman

     Steve earned a B. A. Degree from the University of Texas in Austin, majoring in political science and minoring in history. Afterwards he passed his stock broker's exam and worked for a time at a brokerage house before returning to school.  Upon getting his legal assistant certification from UCLA, he worked at a law firm in Los Angeles. Successful stock market investments allowed him to retire early and to pursue two dreams, writing and foreign travel, and he has since traveled extensively and frequently to Europe. He speaks some French, a little less Italian, and four words in German and hopes to expand his fluency in all three languages.        He enjoys the cosmopolitan bustle, sidewalk cafes, the museums of Berlin, Rome, Vienna, London, Budapest, and Paris. Many of these capitals find their way into his stories of intrigue..."Murder Without Pity" (Paris), "The Killing Ploy" (London, Berlin, Paris, and Lugano) and the soon-to-be-released "Darkness and Blood" (London and Paris) and "Winston Churchill's Renegade Spy" (London and Zurich).  He's also researching for a fifth novel, this one to be set in 1946 Berlin.         I          

Book preview

Part I

––––––––

CHAPTER 1

HOUSE RULES

––––––––

The two men jumped Stanislas outside the burned-out apartment building, and he realized he had made a mistake. He raised his cane to strike, but it was too late. They muscled him up a flight of stairs and into a drafty room, and then they got serious.

The one with the German accent threw him hard onto a stool, making Stanislas cry out from pain that spiked up his bad leg. Next the accomplice yanked his arms behind, and he went to work, and everything went dark.

And afterwards, when Stanislas jerked to struggle loose, the man with the accent clamped a hand on his shoulder and warned in French, Monsieur Cassel, don’t. This warning frightened Stanislas even more. This stranger, who had helped ambush him, knew his name.

Monsieur Cassel, the man continued, you are a powerful examining magistrate here in Paris. You have investigated and solved many crimes. You know the high and mighty and have even indicted some. But you do not sit in your Ministry of Justice Annex office. And you cannot command the police to rescue you. You are in an abandoned tenement, alone and powerless. Our house rules: Not a word, please. I talk. You listen. You answer. A simple shake of your head for a ‘no.’ A simple nod for a ‘yes.’ House rules, as I said, because we cannot waste time. Understand?

And Stanislas, through his shock at having walked into a trap, just nodded. House rules.

The man with the accent squeezed his shoulder hard. Luc has roped your hands behind you. Understand?

Stanislas nodded yes.

He has blindfolded you. Understand?

Yes.

He has taken away your cane. Briefly, monsieur, you are our prisoner. Do you understand how serious your situation is?

Again, yes.

A cell phone beeped. Luc answered on the second ring, as though, Stanislas guessed, expecting the caller. In the near silence, as Luc listened, someone somewhere outside in the fog pounded an angry beat on congas. Through the throb, Stanislas could hear behind him Luc mumble words that sounded like code. Something about bringing the car around. About keeping the headlights low. Do this, Luc ordered. Do that. And Stanislas thought, they’re going to kill me.

Luc flipped shut his cell with a harsh click. He had finished chatting. Three minutes, he said. Now what, gag him?

At this hour, Luc? Who would hear him? Monsieur Cassel, listen carefully. House rules, remember? You have an interrogation tomorrow afternoon at your Justice Annex office. Yes?

They knew not just his name and profession, but where his office was, Stanislas realized. He nodded yes.

Your witness to question, the esteemed Monsieur Louis Boucher?

They had somehow gained access to confidential information too, he saw. Yes.

You will question the esteemed Monsieur Boucher about the murder of the pensioner Léon Pincus. Agreed?

Still more secret dossier material revealed. Again, yes.

You will go easy on Monsieur Boucher.

Not a request, but a demand. Stanislas hesitated.

The man with the accent clapped him on the side of his head. I said, go easy on him, please. Do not be stubborn. Save your crime fighting heroics for someone else. What time did he leave his apartment that morning? Does he take his strolls daily? Was he terrified when that Monsieur Pincus confronted him? You see? Easy questions.

Stanislas sighed and at last nodded.

Do not work yourself up over this case, the man continued. It is not worth it. After all, this Monsieur Pincus was what? A nothing, what you call one of your Little Miseries, living out his life in squalor. Investigate other dossiers, and we will forget you.

Stanislas shifted his head right. The man had moved behind him with ponderous steps.

Two minutes, the man named Luc said, also sounding as if he had stepped back.

Two minutes, Luc? In that case, a moment to spare. Any questions, Monsieur Cassel? You may speak.

Who are you? Stanislas asked, his own voice sounding thin and weak.

Who are we? The man chuckled. Luc, hear that? Why we are friends of Monsieur Boucher.

Good, Luc replied, also laughing. Friends of Louis Boucher, I like that. One minute, he added.

Stanislas tensed his fingers on his thighs for the blow. The conga player ripped off several beats and stopped. The quiet unnerved him, and after a moment more he blurted out, Are you there?

He heard his heart beating out his fear. But he detected nothing else. He waited, motionless, sweating.

Finally, minutes later, breathing slowly to relax, he dared.

He wiggled to free himself from the rope and hesitated. When neither captor hit or restrained him, he realized they might have tiptoed out, after delivering someone’s ultimatum: Leave Boucher alone, treat the Pincus file as an unsolvable murder, and his own life would continue its regular rhythm.

They were professionals. They had planned beforehand, he realized, that call to his office yesterday that promised information on the case, the desolate quarter of Paris to meet, and which squatters’ hole to meet in. And he, in his reckless desire to solve still another dossier, had fallen for their lure. The thought of his stupidity and their treachery angered him. A state criminal investigator of his stature threatened!

He twisted his hands, not caring how the cord burned his wrists, and after several attempts the rope slackened. He freed himself, pushed up his blindfold, darted his eyes around, saw they had in fact left.

On the wall facing him some vagrant had scribbled in chalk Franz Streible is a Hiterlite. He stood unsteadily, coughed from the dust, and glanced around for his walking stick, and didn’t spot it. They must have tossed it when they jumped me near the entrance, he thought.

On a crate before him he spotted his flashlight, which his captors had left after dragging him up there, and which he now clutched as a weapon after flicking it on.

His captivity still disoriented him, and he cautiously hobbled across to the doorway and down the darkened stairs. On the third floor landing, fearing he had detected footsteps from a floor above, he froze. He squinted at the gloom overhead for the threat’s direction, while he gripped his flashlight tighter, eager to strike, as he recalled how they had humiliated him. But he heard no other sound except the rush of wind outside. He relaxed his breathing as he limped down the rest of the stairs.

Finally, the ground floor hallway, ugly with graffiti. Next the doorway where he paused, seeing the wasteland of boards with nails, piping, and bales of wire piled in the courtyard.

He spotted his walking stick in a puddle off to his left. He stooped, wiped off the mud, poked his way carefully through the slush and rubbish.

At last he reached the wrought-iron gate. Its creak, when he pulled back, frightened something to scurry under cover of bushes. Then he limped across the street to a bar.

A white apron lay flung, he noticed, on the counter top. When he rapped on the window, no one appeared. When he called out, feeling strange asking for help, no one answered. Then he noticed a scrawled sign, CLOSED INDEFINITELY, hanging from the inside doorknob. The riots against that police killing must have caused the owner to flee, he thought.

A car sounded in the foggy distance. He stepped to the curb and waved the driver to stop. The wet cobblestones glistened like yellowy scales in the headlights as a blurry man sped past. He raced down the street and vanished into the mist. He’d have to return to his apartment another way, Stanislas decided.

As he gazed around to regain his direction, he glimpsed through the mist further uphill the outline of another car. This one remained parked. Its headlights suddenly blinked on. They dimmed twice before the swirling fog closed over. An engine revved.

Was that driver telegraphing a message? Stanislas knew the answer. As he limped downhill toward a metro’s entrance, the sender’s warning echoed in his mind: We know where you are. Investigating the Léon Pincus murder had turned out to be more dangerous than he had anticipated.

CHAPTER 2

SOME TROUBLING QUESTIONS

––––––––

The next day, late afternoon.

The Ministry of Justice Annex, fourth district.

A woman prisoner, cuffed on a corridor bench, screamed.

A gendarme, passing by, yelled at her to shut up. Two other gendarmes escorted drug dealers, just indicted by Stanislas, toward the entrance and a waiting police van. The building settled back into quiet.

Stanislas glanced at his phone console, cursed with blinking lights throughout the last few hours. In the last minute or so, it had flashed red only once; the police had uncovered nothing incriminating yet in that abandoned tenement.

At the end of the hallway rested in silence the communal fax machine, a link to the Palace of Justice proper, downstream on the Ile de la Cité. Christophe, his clerk, had excused himself for the men’s room to dab away some tea stains.

At last a moment’s rest, Cassel thought. He ran a chewed nail down a page of his appointment book and saw he had one last task for that Friday, an interrogation at 16:30. Following that, he could depart for the evening, a short work regime of ten hours, completed.

He rested his eyes, feeling fatigue made heavier from little sleep as a result of the terror of his captivity. He had closed them for only a second when he heard a bossy knock on his door. Glancing across, he saw a shadow against the pebbled glass pane. Before he could reply, a second rap knuckled loudly, followed by an imperious rattling of the doorknob.

One moment! he shouted. I heard you the first time. Not bothering to straighten his tie, he pushed himself up, grabbed his cane that leaned against his trash basket, and limped over to the entrance, where he jerked open the door, agitated.

A stranger stood before him, straight-backed, in an overcoat with a muffler around his neck like a fashion model. He would have looked appealing except for a scar, slashed from the right of his lip to his jaw, which hinted at violence.

Monsieur Cassel? the man asked.

Stanislas shied back a foot as he nodded. That scar, the outcrop of brows—the resemblance to his grandfather was unmistakable.

I’m Monsieur Louis Boucher. His smile died.

From further down the hallway, a trolley clanked as a clerk pushed his load of dossiers along. From somewhere outside the Annex burst police klaxons. Stunned at the familial similarity, Stanislas ignored the noise, wondering half in jest where were the Germans to protect their man. But this was contemporary Paris, he reminded himself, not that of the Occupation. Collabo Marcel Cassel was dead from assassination, and Louis Boucher had said something more.

I said, I must protest your summons. Why have you called me here?

You’re a witness to a murder, he heard himself reply.

I’m quite aware of that as your judicial police explained when they questioned me at my apartment. And I’ll tell you exactly what I told them: I witnessed nothing. That Monsieur Pincus begged for money. I shooed him away. End of story. I know nothing whatsoever about his murder.

A gendarme, guarding Stanislas’s office a few steps away, glanced at him. He shook away any assistance. He could handle the witness. A seat, he insisted with as much courtesy as he could manage. Overlooking Monsieur Boucher’s early arrival he stepped aside for the man, who, after some hesitation, entered, followed an instant later by Christophe, shaking his head over their querulous visitor.

Squeezing behind his desk, which angled to the right of Stanislas’s, Christophe latched the top to his teapot, before flipping on his computer. From a shelf beside the doorway, Stanislas snatched a placard with HEARING IN PROGRESS. ENTRANCE FORBIDDEN printed in black. He looped it over the doorknob, after which he closed shut his office door and retreated to his chair.

Boucher studied the district map of Paris on the wall to his left, next the desk piled with dossiers, finally Stanislas. Attack, attack, attack, that’s your profession’s slogan. Politicians, business leaders, ministers, no one is safe from your questions and indictments. And in the end, we have what? Reputations ruined. You understand the police checked my alibi?

Monsieur Boucher, the law considers anyone a witness who can aid a dossier’s progress. You were the last one to see the victim alive. I must clarify just a few points to your police testimony about him. This shouldn’t take long.

That beggar?

Call him what you want. The president of this tribunal has charged me with investigating his death. He nodded at Christophe to swear him in.

Boucher grunted displeasure as he seated himself in the chair across from Stanislas. Then he tugged off his gloves, finger-by-finger as though he were the interrogator, and raised his right hand.

Would he give his version of that Wednesday morning, 13 September? Stanislas asked after Boucher finished taking the oath. Boucher adjusted a cuff with a tug of distaste. He radiated too much confidence for a witness called in for questioning, Stanislas decided. The man knew how to handle himself in the presence of authority. In the margin of his legal pad, he scribbled a note to investigate Boucher further.

Several minutes of testimony passed, with Stanislas dictating Boucher’s version to his clerk. And afterwards, the questions.

Why did you look around after you locked your gate the morning of his murder? Stanislas asked.

I’ve already explained that to the police.

I want you to tell me.

Because I heard footsteps and a shout of ‘Excuse me, monsieur!’

Was that the only reason?

But of course. Why else would I have turned?

Because Monsieur Pincus called out your name for some reason.

That’s absurd.

You still deny, as you did to the police, any acquaintance with him?

He was a beggar from out of nowhere, who confronted me.

You’re familiar with the proprietor of the Café Flaubert?

The mention of the café’s owner softened Boucher’s sharp features. It seemed to bring him a warmth lacking in the austere office and to promise diversion from the questions. Of course. A friend of many years.

According to this witness’s police testimony, Monsieur Pincus ordered a white coffee there at 7:30 on the morning in question. However, he barely drank it after the waiter had served him. The proprietor further stated the deceased appeared restless, that every few minutes he checked his pocket watch, and that he seemed to be waiting for someone. Was he waiting for you?

Waiting for me?

And when you didn’t show, he decided to go to you.

Boucher exploded in laughter. This man appeared to do this. He seemed to do that. Such fruitless speculation. For all we know, he may have been sulking over a lost love. I assure you, I never saw this beggar until that morning, and I thought no more about him until the police called later. It’s a simple story.

My police have located another witness. Stanislas watched Boucher’s reaction to his blunt statement. Also out that morning like you. This witness thinks the deceased might have shouted a name.

Name? I heard nothing of the sort.

Very well. Two last questions. Do you have German friends?

No.

German acquaintances?

None that I’ve kept in touch with for years.

You understand you’re under oath?

Monsieur Cassel, I move in my own circle, French.

Then who is Luc?

Sorry?

Luc, who is he?

Boucher crinkled his forehead in puzzlement. If I’ve any friend by that name, he’s kept himself hidden because I’ve never met him.

Steady voice, eyes aimed at him, and no pause throughout the hearing to invent. The signs of innocence in a witness who, nevertheless, may have given doubtful testimony now on record. The first interrogation was over, Stanislas decided. The investigation into Monsieur Léon Pincus’s murder had started.

CHAPTER 3

A CALL FOR MONSIEUR BOUCHER

––––––––

The telephone in the apartment above rang for the sixth time. Its stifled urgency through the front door pressed down on Boucher in the lobby. He paused in fear at the stairs, one foot on the marbled step, eyes on the first floor, praying the ringing would stop. There’s another meeting to discuss the financing, he thought, and immediately changed his mind. It’s that examining magistrate working late, and he’s summoning me for a second hearing. For a moment Boucher imagined himself back in that investigator’s office. "My police have located another witness. This witness thinks the deceased might have shouted a name." Who was this witness? he wondered. A neighbor in this quarter with a vengeful memory of the war years?

A door closed on a floor above. He gazed up to locate the sound’s location. From the second floor, he guessed. From that retired cardiologist he had often argued with over politics? He looked old enough to have lived through the Occupation. Had that neighbor slipped up, made the fatal error of an amateur spy, nudged his door shut a little too hard after observing him for that judge? And his phone was once more ringing. An anxiety from alibis falling apart slowed his climb when he began trudging up the stairs.

To his relief, the ringing ceased as he switched off his security system beside the front door. The magistrate must have given up. It started again though once he stepped inside his foyer. The magistrate was persisting.

Enough torture, he told himself. With several steps, he was inside his bedroom. He lunged for the phone on his night table and ripped it from its jack with one vicious yank, then flung it toward his bed that was covered with newspapers. It landed on that morning’s edition crinkling the headline, ARMY TO HELP POLICE QUELL GROWING RIOTS. Peace finally, he thought.

The ringing continued, this time from his library. His cell phone, of course, he realized. He had forgotten about it. He banged open the louvered doors to his bedroom, stalked down the hallway past his dining room into the darkened library. He fumbled to his left, felt the dial, twisted. The room brightened from the chandeliers.

He focused ahead. There, just as he thought, in the middle of the room lay the locus of his anxiety, in the sofa. His cell must have slipped between the cushions when he had sat down earlier that day. When he was able to relax. Before that interrogation and the fears it had caused.

He rushed ahead, kicking aside a footstool in his path. He reached the sofa, pitched the cushions onto the rug, clawed through the underside, gripped the cell, smashed down the OFF button. Finally no ringing from either phone and absolute quiet.

Except that now one fear had loosened another. "Sooner or later you awake to the screams," he recalled poor old Kleist whimpering. Would he also hear them? Would they make him let slip a word or gesture at any second interrogation?

He caught his fingers shaking. The trembles, he hadn’t suffered from them since his trial. More than fifty years without them, and now they had returned. He should have stayed home that Wednesday morning instead of going for his walk. He tried to banish evidence of his nerves and clasped his hands behind him. "My police have located another witness." Would he finally crack and confess after these many years?

He felt a sudden urge to smoke. He patted his suit pockets and found no cigarettes. He crossed to his writing desk near the sofa, yanked a side drawer out to its full length, pushed around its contents. No Benson & Hedges. He slammed the drawer, yanked back its twin. Nothing.

He glanced to his right. There on a round table beside family photographs lay a packet. He shakily tapped out the last one. He lit up and sat down on the edge of a chair, when he noticed Paris Today on the carpet where he had flung it that morning. The weekly lay flipped open to its lead story, Some Collaborators of Yesterday: Where Are They Now? He, a civil servant during the war, had lived in blissful obscurity, invisible for decades afterwards till that scandal sheet had run that investigative piece. And after that, that Pincus fellow had shown up. Damn it!

He jammed the cigarette into a tray, stood, and wandered over to one of the tall windows. On the balcony, tendrils of vine in half shadow coiled around a pot’s neck.

And beyond the railing in the parking island in the street below, something flickered. The movement was fleeting, yet solid, definitely someone.

He squinted across the field of mist for a glimpse of the threat beneath the foliage. A heckler had returned to hurl rocks? That examining magistrate had put him under surveillance? Yes, he decided, that criminal investigator had ordered him watched. The mist swirled, thickened, and thinned. He bobbed his head left and right for a clearer view, but couldn’t pick out anyone below.

Maybe that judge had put him under surveillance for days, and he hadn’t realized his jeopardy. He could recall nothing alarming. Yet in the past few days,