Death of a Chef (Capucine Culinary Mystery) (28 page)

His face still contorted by worry, Brissac-Vanté shook his head, either in derision or in an attempt to dispel the nightmare. He started to protest, but his throat was too dry for the words to come out. His eyes dropped to the floor.

“But that’s not all. There’s also a real
pièce à conviction.
After you were released by your kidnappers, the police kept up its investigation.”

Brissac-Vanté looked up sharply.

“Particularly the financial part. Early on we discovered that you have three accounts in the Isle of Jersey branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Very conveniently, you can access your account over the telephone using only number codes, no names. While you were being held by the kidnappers, we monitored those accounts only to see if any payments had been made
out
of them. There weren’t any. But after your release, we intensified our efforts and discovered that wire transfers for significant amounts had been made
into
them at periodic intervals. We looked into those. A good number came from Sotheby’s. We checked with them. You had been auctioning off faïence. Sotheby’s was very cooperative. The pieces you were selling were identical to some of the pieces in Chef Brault’s collection.”

Brissac-Vanté’s head fell into his hands, supported by his elbows on his knees.

Capucine knew full well she was at a crucial turning point. She had only the thinnest case. As she had spooled out her pieces of evidence, they had sounded so hollow, Capucine was amazed Brissac-Vanté was so cowed. This was very clear broth for a
procureur
. Obtaining a full confession was critical.

“Your only hope is to cooperate. If you give me all the details, the fact that you have helped the police may dispose the judges favorably toward you. That might make a big difference.”

Brissac-Vanté looked at Capucine with almost childlike hopefulness.

“It was all that awful woman’s fault. It started because I wanted to help Chef Brault. He was completely neurotic about his stupid hotel. It got to him so badly, his cooking was suffering. He couldn’t get bank loans for it, and my wife certainly would have said no to any further investments with him. And then Roque came to see me. He wanted breathing money. The Faïence was doing all right, but he felt he was always a day late and a euro short on everything. He wanted our investment syndicate to cut him another big tranche of debt. But that wasn’t going to happen, either.

“I mentioned this to Chéri during a dinner one night. Okay, okay, I did have a short fling with her for a few weeks, but it was no big deal, and she certainly doesn’t count as a mistress. Let’s be perfectly clear on that. Anyway, she cooked up the idea. Brault was going to supply the pieces, and Roque would copy them in his plant at night. That suited everyone right down to the ground. Brault would keep his collection and get some money, and Roque would get some money while working with his hands and fucking the capitalists. It was great for everybody.

“That is, until that stupid bitch double-crossed everyone. She started keeping a few of Brault’s originals and slipping him forgeries. Just one or two at the beginning and then maybe as many as ten or fifteen a year. The problem was the originals. Chéri could only sell lesser pieces at her stand. The quality stuff needed to be sold at auction or in top-quality antique stores. There was a limit to what could be sold in France, so she talked me into taking them to London to put them up at auction there.” He paused to look at Capucine to see how she was receiving the story. Capucine smiled encouragingly.

“I’m sorry to say I found that the extra cash came in handy. All my accounts are joint with my wife. It’s true I had a girlfriend or two. And I also like to play the occasional game of backgammon. I’m sure you can understand that. Then the inevitable happened. Brault noticed that one of the pieces that had come back from Roque was a fake. He figured the whole scam out immediately and called me, completely hysterical.” Brissac-Vanté paused, realizing he’d got ahead of his story. “You see, they didn’t know each other. Brault would put the pieces in the trunk of my car when I went to have dinner at Chez La Mère Denis, and then a month or so later he’d retrieve them from my trunk when I went back again. Do you understand ?”

Capucine nodded.

“So one day Brault calls me up, berserk. I’d been stealing from his collection. He went on and on, raving completely out of control. So I say, ‘Look, the woman who works with me on this and I are going to take you out to dinner, and we’ll talk it all over, and everything’s going to be just great.’ And he buys that, or at least he calms down somewhat. So Chéri and I take him to this restaurant in the Twentieth. This place used to be a hole-in-the-wall, but when we get there, the crowd seems to be more upmarket than what it was, and I’m worried we’ll run into someone we know.

“Dinner was not too congenial, to say the least. Brault starts drinking and getting more and more pissed off and talking louder and louder, and people are looking over at us and staring and all. It was turning into a very bad scene. So Chéri gets this great idea. ‘Let’s go over to my stand at the Puces, and we can discuss this quietly,’ she tells Brault. At this point Brault is already completely sloshed. He’d nod off at the table and then wake up, ranting. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to get out of that damn restaurant.” Brissac-Vanté paused, exhausted.

“Would you like some coffee or some water?”

“A coffee would be very welcome.”

Capucine nodded at Momo, who stepped to the door to mutter at the uniformed brigadier standing guard.

Coffee in hand, Brissac-Vanté looked hard at Capucine. “It all went badly downhill from there. I drove Brault in my car, and Chéri followed in his. When we got to her stand, we sat around, drinking this really shitty cognac she had. Brault got completely out of control, taking out all his frustrations on us—not just the faïence scam, but his worries about his stars, his cooking, his future, his failed life. He was going to turn us in, we were going to do big time in jail, and we were going to pay for what we’d done to him. In the middle of a rant he falls out of his chair, completely passed out. I have to say I was well beyond buzzed myself. I was ready to call it quits.

“But no. Chéri gets up, says she’ll be right back, and returns dragging this big Vuitton trunk and a shotgun, which she said she’d found in the trunk of Brault’s car. She tells me to take Brault’s clothes off, which I do. Then she opens the Vuitton trunk and tells me to grab Brault under the arms while she picks up his legs. We stuff him in the damn thing. I figured it was some kind of joke to teach him a lesson and she was going to lock him in there until he’d slept it off.

“But then she rams the shotgun between his legs. Brault wakes up and struggles desperately to get out of the trunk. She holds him and pulls the trigger.” He paused and shook his head. “It was unbelievable. I couldn’t hear, my ears were ringing so loudly. Half of Brault’s face was gone. There was blood all over the inside of the trunk. It was a nightmare. Worse than a nightmare.” Brissac-Vanté fell silent, horrified by the enormity of the story he was telling.

“She looks at me. ‘Problem solved,’ she says. ‘Help me get this back to where it goes,’ she says. So the two of us drag the trunk back down to this other stand, dump Brault’s clothes in a Dumpster, and get the hell out of there. Chéri gets into Brault’s car and drives off, and I get into mine and go home.”

There was a long, flat silence. Brissac-Vanté put his head back in his hands. Capucine said nothing, waiting to see if there was more to come.

“Will I go to jail?”

“Yes, for a while, but with some luck you may be prosecuted only as an accomplice. You need to sign the printout of the confession you’ve just made, and when you come up in front of the prosecutor, be as open with him as you’ve been with me. Don’t try to outsmart him. Do you understand?”

Brissac-Vanté nodded dumbly. He was clearly far more relieved at the absolution from his confession than at the prospect of a short prison sentence.

CHAPTER 44

T
he door to Capucine’s office flew open. Isabelle stormed in, her face black with rage. She leaned over Capucine’s desk, hands braced on the edge, shoulders spread, muscles of her back bunched. The multiple studs in her face glistened. Capucine suspected there might be one or two new ones.

“Half of my files on the Brault-Roque case have vanished off the face of my computer,” Isabelle said through clenched teeth.

“I noticed that myself,” Capucine said serenely.

Isabelle took no heed. “Roque has disappeared completely. It’s all gone. Our case notes. All the
PV
s we collected. Even the part of the transcript of the Lecomte interview that dealt with Roque has disappeared.”

“I know.”

Isabelle ignored Capucine’s comment. “I had a hunch. So I called the magistrates’ hall—one of the girls who works over there is a pal—and got them to send me a copy of Lecomte’s signed confession, which the procureur is going to submit to the judges when he presents his case. And you know what?” She stopped, demanding an answer to her rhetorical question.

“What?”

“It’s been doctored. The part about Roque’s murder has been taken out. All that’s left is her confession of having murdered Brault.”

“We were lucky to get her to confess to that. I thought she’d stonewall us to the end.”

“Commissaire, how can this not piss you off? An entire case has vanished into thin air. Poof.” Isabelle snapped her fingers.

“I suspected that might happen. I spoke to the procureur yesterday. He intends to prosecute Chéri for the premeditated murder of Brault. The premeditation part struck me as a bit contrived since the murder was obviously a spur-of-the-moment decision, heavily fueled by alcohol. But he’s going for a life sentence without the possibility of parole, and he needs premeditation for that.”

Isabelle stared at her, throbbing with anger.

“And he’s only asking for a very light sentence for Brissac-Vanté, building his case around a picture of a manipulated, weak-willed, dead-drunk playboy who was tricked into becoming an unwilling accomplice to murder. The way he’ll present it will make Chéri look even more guilty.”

Isabelle thrummed, champing to hear about the Roque case.

“At the end of my chat with him there was an awkward moment, as if the procureur was daring me to ask about the Roque case. Which I didn’t.”

Livid with rage, Isabelle flexed her shoulder muscles, looking for someone to punch.

“Let it go, Isabelle. You can’t serve a life sentence twice. When you get right down to it, what difference does it really make?”

At eleven that night, as they watched the evening news, Capucine disentangled herself from Alexandre to grab her cell phone as it vibrated its way across the coffee table.

“Salut, Jacques.”

“I thought this would be a good time to call. I’m sure you need a break from the strain of applying CPR to your corpulent consort’s nether regions. I’ll call back later if you were having even a glimmer of success.”

“No, Jacques, right now is perfect.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. It must be an uphill climb for you. But cheer up. I have good news. You have an important meeting at the Hôtel de Beauvau tomorrow morning at eight thirty. I’m to deliver you myself. I’ll pick you up at eight. Now, get back to work. It’s the eager bird that catches the flaccid worm. Isn’t that the phrase?”

 

The next morning Jacques refused to elaborate, rattling on with silly facetiousness in the confines of the miniscule Smart Car.

It was only as they swept under the elegantly curlicued gold-plated decoration on the enormous iron gates of the Ministry of the Interior that Jacques made a comment on the upcoming meeting. “If you play your cards right, this could be a big step for you. Who knows, you might even get a little red ribbon to wear on your lapel. Just think how happy that would make Tante Coralie. A Légion d’Honneur medal, just like Daddy’s.” He was still braying his laugh as he handed the toy-sized car over to the
voiturier.

A
huissier
in a morning coat, with a silver chain around his neck, showed them into a large office. The emerald light of the elaborate garden poured in through three French windows, rendering the man sitting at the enormous desk, which was dripping with gilt prettification, indistinguishable in the backlight.

It took Capucine’s eyes several seconds to adjust. The ministerial toad. She had completely forgotten about him.

Coffee was served with fussy politeness by men in black morning coats. The scene smacked so resolutely of the upper echelons of the French government, the rarified air seemed difficult to breathe.

“Commissaire, I must compliment you on your finesse,” the ministerial toad said. “None of the solutions I came up with for our little imbroglio were half as elegant as yours.” The toad took a sip of coffee. “It would have been easy enough to bury the Roque case, but the danger would have lurked. There would have always been the threat that one day an inquisitive journalist would do some digging and accuse us of having left a murderer on the loose.” He smiled and took another sip of coffee. “But your solution tied up all the loose ends. Not only did you create a culprit, but you put her behind bars, from where she can be produced by this government, or any future government, if she’s ever needed. Exemplary.”

The toad reclined in his chair, threw back his head, and drank the last, sweetest drops of his coffee.

“Naturally, I’ve already given the magistrates’ hall the gentlest nudge to make sure your culprit will be sentenced to the maximum security ward at Clairvaux Prison, where she will never have the slightest possibility of communicating with the press. And I think we’ve poured enough oil on the troubled waters of the Faïence de Châteauneuf-sur-Loire that we won’t be hearing from them again. Madame Brissac-Vanté was so grateful to hear that the government was making every effort to insure her husband would receive the shortest possible sentence that she’s extended a gratifyingly large tranche of credit to the Faïence. Their financial worries are over.”

The toad sat back in his chair and contentedly laced his fingers over the considerable tumescence of his stomach. He looked at Capucine with a long, thin U of a smile, a squat reptile contemplating a fly, waiting for the propitious moment to nab it with a flick of his tongue.

“Commissaire, I really shouldn’t tell you this, but last night I received a call from the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.” He waved his finger in the general direction of the Élysée Palace across the street. “They are very pleased with you over there. More than pleased, grateful. Particularly about the consideration you showed Monsieur Brissac-Vanté. The feeling is that a short sojourn behind bars will do him a world of good, and—now this really is just between you and me—a certain person was delighted that his former wife will lose a little face. But you knew exactly how far to go. Well done.”

He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “I’m going to betray another little secret and tell you that I’ve been instructed to proceed rapidly in awarding you a decoration that, it is felt, you richly deserv—”

Very quietly, Capucine stood up, walked soundlessly across the Persian carpeting out into the hallway, and slammed the carved oak door behind her as hard as she could.