Death of a Chef (Capucine Culinary Mystery) (27 page)

CHAPTER 43

“T
his wasn’t the easiest case we’ve ever had, eh, Commissaire?” Isabelle asked.

Hands on the wheel, Capucine turned and gave Isabelle a tolerant smile. They crossed the Pont Marie onto the eternally peaceful Ile Saint-Louis.

“I got worried when you refused to believe I was right about who the murderer was. But I guess you saw the light in the end,” Isabelle continued.

Capucine turned left at the rue Saint-Louis en l’Ile.

“Commissaire, I can’t imagine why you didn’t agree with me from the beginning. The trail of evidence was a mile wide.”

At the end of the street, Capucine turned left again onto the quai d’Anjou, drove a few hundred feet, and parked illegally in front of a garage door.

Both women got out of the car and walked up to small, crimson, enameled wood door with a semicircular top, which centuries before had undoubtedly been the servants’ entrance to the spacious town house. Isabelle produced a bunch of keys, examined the lock, opened it. Inside, they inspected a row of mailboxes labeled with small plastic numbered squares and, only occasionally, a scrawled paper label with a name.

“It’s in the back,” Capucine said.

Isabelle opened a second door with her set of keys, and they crossed a tiny stone-flagged courtyard with three cracked clay flowerpots containing shriveled geranium plants. The building in back had been built up over what had once been the stables. There was no lock on the door.

“
Putain
—shit,” Isabelle said. “No elevator.”

Capucine strictured her to silence with pursed lips. They began the climb up the four flights of worn oak steps on the sides of their feet, making as little noise as possible.

After two flights they paused to catch their breaths. Capucine’s cell phone vibrated in her pocket. Automatically, she glanced at the caller ID. David. Calling in the middle of the afternoon meant it must be serious.

Capucine cradled the phone in her cupped hand and pressed the green ON button.

“Not a good time, David. Tell me quick,” Capucine whispered softly.

“I just interviewed Fanny Folon. The incident wasn’t at all what we thought. It couldn’t have been Lucien Folon. He doesn’t even come close to having a murderer’s profile, and there’s no motive at all.”

“He hasn’t been a serious suspect for weeks. I’ll call you later, and we’ll tell each other all about it.”

At the last landing they stopped in front of the door on the left. Capucine knocked politely. Nothing happened. Impatiently, Isabelle rapped loudly, her knuckles reverberating on the wood. The door opened a timid crack. Isabelle pushed it open violently with her shoulder.

“Police!”

Chéri Lecomte fell back, eyes wide.

When Capucine stepped around from behind Isabelle, Chéri’s eyes gaped even wider.

“Ca . . . Capucine . . .” Her voice faded.

“Mademoiselle, you’re under arrest for the murders of Firmin Roque and Jean-Louis Brault.”

The instant she took measure of the situation, Chéri’s confidence popped up like a jack-in-the-box.

“You can’t arrest me. I’m an American citizen. Here, just look at this.”

Chéri wheeled and grabbed at her handbag on a table by the door.

Isabelle grabbed Chéri’s extended arm, twisted it behind her, and slammed her into the wall with a loud thud. She twisted the other arm around and snapped on a pair of handcuffs.

Capucine opened Chéri’s handbag, extracted an American passport from a side pocket, and waved it disdainfully in front of Chéri’s face.

“As they used to say in New York, ‘This and fifteen cents will get you a ride on the IRT.’ In France it will get you absolutely nothing. Let’s get going.”

 

Back at the brigade Chéri was put in one of Capucine’s interrogation rooms, recently redecorated as blandly as a mid-market motel room. Only the black-framed six-foot-long mirror—a fake, intended to raise the stress of the interviewee—and a folding metal chair, painstakingly chosen for its lack of comfort, hinted at the room’s purpose.

Chéri was seated in the uncomfortable chair, rubbing her wrists to ease the pain of the over-tight handcuffs. Slate-faced, Isabelle observed her from behind a Swedish blond-wood desk. Capucine paced the room.

“I demand you call the American embassy. You have no right to hold me like this. I need them to appoint me a lawyer right away.”

“Don’t be silly. This is a police interrogation. You have no right to a lawyer. When I hand you over to a prosecutor for trial, you’ll have the opportunity to select counsel and your embassy is free to help you with that. But until then, you’re all mine,” Capucine said with a malevolent little smile.

“All right, have it your way. What can you possibly think I’m guilty of?”

“I’m going to start by telling you what happened, and then you can fill in the details. You were at the center of a racket that produced and sold forgeries of antique faïence. Pieces from Chef Jean-Louis Brault’s collection were copied at the Faïence de Châteauneuf-sur-Loire by Firmin Roque. Then you either sold the copies yourself or had them sold through your contacts.”

Chéri raised her eyebrows with polite incredulousness, as if a slightly tipsy friend had made a comically farfetched allegation about one of her acquaintances.

“Really?”

“But you got greedy. And instead of returning all of Chef Brault’s original pieces, you kept some of them and gave him forgeries.”

Chéri maintained her tolerant smile.

“But Brault discovered what you were up to and went into a paranoid rage. He was so out of control, you thought he might go to the authorities. So you killed him.”

There was a long pause. Pantomiming extreme patience, Chéri made a show of her thin smile.

“And when Roque learned that Brault had been murdered, he immediately made the connection. He knew that if his involvement in the forgeries became known, his halo of Marxist sanctity would crumble. He insisted you come to see him. He intimidated you. You knew he was a consummate politician and perfectly capable of blowing the whistle so he could frame you and Brault and hide behind the smoke screen of your murder trial. So you seized your opportunity and killed him, too.”

Chéri laughed happily. “You have a delightful imagination. I can just see you and Alexandre sitting around the dinner table, sipping wine and swapping your fabulous stories. Kudos. But you don’t have the slightest shred of proof for any of this.”

“As it happens, I have more than enough evidence to remand you to the juge d’instruction right now.”

The merest trace of worry dimpled Chéri’s brow.

“Let’s review the evidence. The tip-off was the outrageous bid you placed on that sixteenth-century Menton rafraîchissoir. The explanation was obvious. You had returned a forgery of the original to Brault after it had been copied at Châteauneuf. A few months later Brault decided to sell it to help finance his hotel. You saw the piece in the auction catalog and desperately needed to buy it before someone noticed it was a fake.”

Chéri shrugged her shoulders.

“Next, we have the fact that four pieces in the auction of Brault’s collection were discovered to be fakes. As it happened, two of those pieces had been auctioned to Brault by the commissaire-priseur, who was certain that when he sold them, they were genuine. Therefore, someone must have substituted the originals with forgeries. And that someone had to be you.”

Chéri shrugged again.

“Our forensics unit determined that you were selling fakes made at Châteauneuf from your stand at the Puces. Since you were selling identical copies of the same piece on successive days, it was obvious you were actively and knowingly perpetrating a fraud.”

Chéri shook her head, with an exaggerated frown of tolerant incredulity.

“As to the other murder, the forensic examination of the trunk in which Chef Brault’s body was discovered indicated that it had been dragged twice over cobblestones, once empty and once laden. That strongly suggested you had gone down to Arnaud Boysson’s Vuitton stand, dragged the empty trunk to your stand, stuffed Brault inside, shot him, and then dragged it back to Boysson’s stand. On top of that, Brault’s clothing was put on sale at the Puces the day after the murder, another indication he had been killed there.”

Capucine paused, eyes fixed on Chéri.

“That’s it? That’s all the evidence you have?” Chéri said, beaming. “It’s all entirely circumstantial. No prosecutor would even think of going to court with that.”

“My dear, your knowledge of French criminal proceedings seems to come entirely from American TV shows. In France circumstantial evidence is entirely admissible if there is enough of it. And there is more than enough here to secure both convictions. But even if it weren’t, there are also two trump cards.”

Chéri’s self-assurance wilted slightly at the edges.

“The first ties you inextricably to Roque’s murder. The way you did it was clever. After your meeting with him, you hung around until he and his wife left the house—he must have mentioned he was going out to dinner—and jimmied your way back in with a credit card. There were telltale marks on the door frame. Then you went to the basement, figured out which was the fuse for the lights in the front part of the ground floor, took that fuse out, and screwed it into a slot that had held a fuse for double its amperage, probably the one for the kitchen. The fuse immediately blew out, and you replaced it in its original slot. Then you removed all but one of the spare fuses with the right amperage and poured a jugful of water on the floor in front of the fuse box. So far, so good, but then you got far too clever.

“You needed a nice conductive substance to make sure the person who screwed in the replacement fuse would get a lethal shock. So you rubbed it with conductive gel for an electrical muscle toner. You thought you were in luck because you had a small plastic bottle of the stuff in your purse, probably left over from your last trip. I’m sure you always take your toner with you when you travel. It was a clever thing to do, and it worked perfectly. But our forensics group was able to identify the manufacturer of the gel—Slendertone. A brand that’s not distributed in France. And you were careless enough to leave the bottle in your medicine cabinet, where my officers just found it a few minutes ago, as they were going through your apartment.”

“Utterly ridiculous. You have no proof that I even saw Firmin that day.”

“Of course I do. You were so proud of yourself, you got careless. On your way home, you stopped for gas and a bite to eat at the Dordives service station on the A6 autoroute, twenty miles away from Châteauneuf-sur-Loire. It’s the first service station on the autoroute. We have your credit card records. You paid for your meal at ten twenty-two and your gas at ten forty-one. Those times are perfectly consistent with the timing of the crime.”

The vertical creases in Chéri’s brow deepened.

“And your other trump card?”

“That one’s even better. Your accomplice is in the next room, signing a confession,” Capucine fibbed.

Without a word Capucine and Isabelle left the room.

They went into the big staff room, to a long table populated with TV monitors. From three different angles Chéri could be seen fidgeting, darting nervous glances at the fake one-way mirror, hoping to catch a glance of the people who were examining her. Capucine left Isabelle at her task and stepped into a room identical to the other except that the carpeting was a slightly different shade of blue.

Thierry Brissac-Vanté sat in the uncomfortable folding chair, cowering under Momo’s glower.

“I nabbed him coming out of that club on the Champs-Élysées,” Momo said. “Funny thing, when I put the collar on him and took out the cuffs, the three fat cats he was with bolted real fast. You see that stuff in the projects, but I’ve never seen it in the Eighth.”

When he recognized Capucine, Brissac-Vanté rearranged his features into a carefully constructed mélange of upper-class arrogance and a convalescent’s rightful indignation, topped off with a gratin of “Do you know who I am?” petulance.

“You’re under arrest for the murder of Jean-Louis Brault.”

“That’s absurd. I demand to see my lawyer.”

“It’s too late for that. Your accomplice, Chéri Lecomte, is also under arrest. She’s in the next room and has just confirmed your guilt.”

Amateurishly, Brissac-Vanté mimed incredulity. Acting was not his forte.

“I don’t know anyone by that name.”

With her foot Capucine pulled a pale blue–cushioned wooden chair into the prescribed position, forty-five degrees and three feet away from the suspect’s knee, and sat down.

“Let me share with you what Mademoiselle Lecomte has already confessed. Feel free to correct the details.”

Capucine outlined the two murders as she had done for Chéri. Brissac-Vanté was a considerably less skilled poker player than she was. By the end of her narrative, his brow was damp and his eyes were wide with panic.

Still, even though it was done with a lack of conviction, he attempted a riposte. “All you’ve got is the confession of this hysterical arriviste woman, whom I don’t even know. The rest is just conjecture.”

Capucine looked at him with a stony face for several long beats. By the end, he squirmed out of her gaze.

“If you don’t know her, how do you know she’s an arriviste ?”

Brissac-Vanté’s lips thinned, and the dampness of his brow grew into beads of sweat.

“For openers, Mademoiselle Lecomte alerted me to your kidnapping. She called me, claiming she was your mistress and you had stood her up for a date and then had disappeared. She suspected foul play. She was at her wit’s end. It was very moving.”

Brissac-Vanté attempted a snort of derision, but it came out as a dry cough.

“We also know that she called you repeatedly after your return, but you refused to pick up for her. Then there’s the fact that both of the murdered men had received financing from you. On top of that, our forensics department determined beyond any doubt that the forged faïence was made at Châteauneuf.”