2 Éclair Murder (4 page)

“Yes, fine. You’re lucky that my men are so fast.”

“Fast? You’ve cost us a whole day of business! We pride ourselves on freshness, so some of the desserts are garbage now.”
 

“If that’s the case, why don’t you give them to us?” Cyril said.

Clémence couldn’t tell if he was joking. His face was neutral, awaiting a response.

“You can’t be serious! You expect me to give our gourmet desserts and pastries to you and your team as a reward for shutting down our store, arresting one of my employees with no real evidence, and insulting me?”
 

Cyril sputtered. “You did say the desserts were going to waste.”
 

“What are you, pigeons? No, I’m not giving you anything!”
 

Ben had to stifle his laughter.
 

Cyril’s face fell. “Fine. Our men are leaving soon. They’ve tested a good portion of your pastries for poison so a lot of your food is already in the garbage anyway.”
 

“Whatever,” said Clémence. “Now get out, all of you.”
 

Some of the men who were still working turned to her with alarm.

“No need to be rude, Damour,” said Cyril with an infuriating grin. “We’re off. We got what we wanted. Just accept it. One of your employees is a cunning killer. Poisoning a customer like that. You’ll be lucky this whole thing doesn’t spread. People will avoid your store out of fear for their lives.”
 

With that, Cyril turned and left the store. His men followed after gathering up their supplies, leaving the store a mess.
 

CHAPTER 6

Clémence called Caroline. Together, they called back in many of their employees to help clean up the store. They were open almost as late as the other restaurants at Place du Trocadéro, so they could aim to reopen for dinner if they cleaned up on time.
 

While Cyril’s team did indeed throw a good portion of the food into the trash, there were still plenty left on the covered cooling trays. As the employees got to work, Clémence gathered up Caroline, Celine and Marie in the employee lounge. Marie worked in the patisserie as a cashier. Celine was a hostess as well as Clémence’s friend.
 

“I didn’t want to tell the others,” Clémence started, “but I have to let you know that Raoul has been arrested.”
 

“
Pourquoi?
” Celine frowned.
 

Clémence told them about the dead customer, Alexandre Dupont, and how Raoul had been seen arguing and fighting with him last week on the street.

“I’m just wondering what you know about Raoul and this Dupont guy,” said Clémence. “
C’est grave.
It’s very serious. Raoul might be tried for murder.”

“That can’t be,” Marie exclaimed. “Raoul is a great guy.”

“I agree,” said Caroline. “Raoul is one of our best employees. He’s friendly and smiles a lot. Customers have commented that his smile really brightens up their day when they buy their morning pastries. I can’t believe he’d fight Dupont—and murder?”

“What else do you know about Raoul?” asked Clémence. “If we’re going to clear his name, I need more of his background info, as well as Dupont’s.”
 

“He’s from Marseille,” said Caroline. “He likes working in the patisserie, but his real passion is music.”
 

“He wants to be a music producer,” said Marie. “He’s already helping some new hip hop artists in the studio, but not enough to make a living yet.”
 

“Now, he lives in Courbevoie, near La Defense.”

“What about the fight with Dupont?” Clémence
 
asked. “Why would he do that? There were two eye witnesses who saw him punch Dupont on the street.”
 

“Dupont…who is he?” Marie asked. “There are so many costumers and we don’t know them all by name.”
 

Clémence tried to describe him the best she could, from what she could remember of the dead body anyway.
 

“Is his top lip thinner than the bottom lip?” Marie asked.
 

“Yes,” said Clémence .

“I do remember this guy. I don’t like him. He doesn’t say a lot, but he seems arrogant. I don’t think Raoul liked him much either.”
 

“Why exactly? Did he ever say anything?”
 

“It was more his eyes,” said Marie. “He had these pale blue eyes that were really cold. He’d only order by saying what he wanted, never a
s’il vous plait
.”
 

“What would he usually order?”
 

“He liked the éclairs, mainly the pistachio ones. Sometimes he’d order the chocolate, or the salted caramel one as well. Otherwise, he’d buy a
pain au chocolat
.”
 

“I think I’ve seen him dine with his work colleagues in the
salon de thé
for lunch,” said Celine. “But I’m not sure. You can’t really pick this guy out of a crowd. He looks like every businessman in the area. I’m not sure why Raoul would fight with him. I wonder if he knew him personally.”
 

“I want to ask him,” said Clémence, “but he’s detained right now. The police are grilling him. We’ve got to find out more about Dupont.”
 

“We do have a video camera installed in the patisserie,” said Caroline. “It’s hidden in the chandelier.”

“Really?”
 

Clémence went into the patisserie and the girls followed. She looked up at the dazzling chandelier and couldn’t see the camera.

“I can’t believe it’s up there,” she said. “Did my parents install this recently?”

“A year ago,” said Caroline. “It was long overdue.”
 

“How do we replay the footage from yesterday?”
 

“There’s a company in the 15th arrondissement that we hire for our security,” Caroline said. “The camera quality is not HD or anything, but we’d be able to see if this Dupont was here that day and whether Raoul had anything to do with this.”
 

“Great! I wonder why that inspector didn’t ask to see the store surveillance footage. Probably because he’s so clueless. I’m going over there right now.”
 

“I’ll give you the card of the company,” said Caroline, who disappeared into the back office to get it.
 

***

Clémence took the Métro to Avenue Emile Zola. She’d made an emergency appointment with the surveillance company and knocked on the door of a storefront with dark tinted windows. A guy in his early thirties with scruffy facial hair answered the door.

“Bonjour,” Clémence greeted him. “Are you Monsieur Ralph Lemoine?”
 

“
Oui
. Clémence Damour?”
 

“
C’est moi
.”
 

He let her in. The place was set up more like an apartment. The kitchen was at the front, with a living room that was really scattered with plenty of surveillance equipment, including TV screens and computers. There was a staircase that led to a floor upstairs.
 

Ralph was wearing scruffy jeans, sneakers, a ripped grey T-shirt and a white hoodie. His brown eyes were rich in color, but his dark under eye circles suggested that he hadn’t slept much.

“Do you live here as well?” Clémence asked out of curiosity.
 

“Oh, no,” said Ralph, “It’s not an apartment, although I live in the neighbourhood. There are a few other guys working upstairs surveilling your stores and some other companies. I’m only dressed this way because we don’t need to dress up for this job since we look at screens all day, excuse me.”
 

Ralph rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. In Paris, appearances were everything, but she knew how liberating it was to dress like a slob and not have to worry about what people thought. She had dressed in sweats during a good portion of her travels abroad.

Clémence smiled. “Don’t apologize. You can dress however you want. I’m the one taking up your time.”
 

“Do you want a
café
?” Ralph asked, moving near the expresso machine on the kitchen counter. He looked like he needed one.
 

“
Non, merci
.”
 

He made one for himself and sat down at the counter.

“So you’re looking for someone in the surveillance tapes?” Ralph asked.
 

“Yes. This guy named Alexandre Dupont. I just want to look through the footage of Thursday morning to early afternoon. This is in the patisserie section of our store in the 16th.”
 

“Sure,” said Ralph. “Let me find it.”
 

He went to his workspace, switched on a screen and began typing on a keyboard. After a few minutes of fiddling, he was able to find the footage.
 

Clémence sat beside him as he started playing the footage at the beginning of the work day. The camera had a view of the profile of the customers in line, as well as the cashiers. She looked carefully at every man’s face in the sped up footage. After a couple of hours of reviewing each customer carefully, rewinding and freezing the footage at times, she shook her head.

“He wasn’t there,” she said. “Are you sure this footage is from yesterday?”
 

Ralph pointed to the date on the bottom right of the screen. “I’m 100% sure.”
 

“So this Dupont guy wasn’t in the shop,” Clémence said.
 

“If you don’t recognize him, then he didn’t.”
 

“Apparently he had bought two pistachio éclairs,” Clémence said.
 

If Dupont didn’t buy the éclairs himself, someone else must have bought it for him that morning.
 

Cyril had mentioned that he ate two pistachio éclairs. He could tell because of the glazing smeared inside the bag. There was no receipt to go with the purchase, but they had to have been bought in the morning. Clémence knew this because the nub of the éclair that she had inspected on the ground had been fresh indeed. She could tell by the texture, by the shine on the glazing. Besides,
Damour
never sold day-old pastries. Everything had to be fresh.
 

She had a idea. She would just have to find out who had purchased two pistachio éclairs from their cash register.
 

After thanking Ralph for his time, she grabbed her coat and immediately headed back to the patisserie.
 

CHAPTER 7

The employees at
Damour
had done a good job of getting the patisserie back in shape. When Clémence walked in through the door, the counters were filled halfway up with fresh macarons, éclairs, tarts, croissants and their other signature desserts and pastries. The staff for the evening shift had already arrived, and Caroline said that they could reopen soon.
 

Clémence asked Caroline and Marie to help her dig up all the purchases and transaction information on their cash register before the store opened.

“I want to know who bought two pistachio éclairs that morning,” Clémence said. “If you can recall their names or faces that would be great, but either way, I’ll take the time of the transaction and go back to our surveillance guy to match the time the purchase was made to the video, so we can put a face to the purchase.”
 

Caroline punched in her manager code on the touch screen of the cash register. With a few more punches of the keys, she was able to print out a long receipt of all the transactions made on Thursday. While it printed, Clémence turned to Marie.

“Do you always choose the right flavors when you’re ringing up, say a pistachio éclair versus a chocolate éclair?”
 

“Yes,” she replied. “We all do. It’s how we determine which flavors are more popular.”
 

“Which éclair flavors are more popular anyway?” Clémence
 
asked.

“The salted caramel and the chocolate are neck and neck,” said Marie. “But pistachio and passion fruit are popular as well.”
 

“Are there any customers who buy two pistachio éclairs on a regular basis?”
 

“Hmm, I don’t know. Sometimes it happens, I suppose, but people buy all sorts of combinations. It’s hard to keep track.”
 

When the receipts finished printing, Clémence turned her attention to it. Numerous éclairs had been bought that morning, but they weren’t as popular as croissants, pain au chocolats and other pastries and breads for the morning crowd. Single éclairs had been bought, but two?
 

After she went through all the purchases, she found out that there had only been three transactions that included two pistachios purchased at the same time.
 

Clémence called Ralph again, saying she was coming back and needed more of his help.

***

Ralph opened the door, but he had changed clothes. Instead of his casual sweats, he was wearing khakis, a striped blue dress shirt and brown dress shoes. Gone was his facial hair, and his hair had been combed.
 

He smiled and a dimple appeared on his left cheek that Clémence hadn’t noticed before when he had the scruffy facial hair.
 

“I decided to go home and change,” he said.
 

“What made you do that?” Clémence
 
asked.

“In case another beautiful woman comes in to see me today,” he said, looking into her blue eyes.
 

Clémence blushed.
 

He did look handsome all cleaned up. He stood up straighter too and Clémence could tell that he was in good shape telling from what his well-fitted dress shirt revealed.

She hadn’t paid much attention to him before, but she appreciated his effort in looking good for her. She was in a white oversized cashmere sweater that hung nicely on her thin frame, black python-print leggings and black ankle boots. The outfit was chic enough, but not exactly something to inspire men. She couldn’t take his flirtations seriously however. Many men were incorrigible flirts.