Death of a Chef (Capucine Culinary Mystery) (7 page)

CHAPTER 12

C
apucine had never understood Alexandre’s abiding love of restaurant openings. They struck her as being as pointless as office Christmas parties. If it was a restaurant of stature, the gratin of the culinary world would be invited. Naturally, none of the critics would even think of writing a critique of a meal consumed in a nimbus of alcohol-fueled jollity, and the best the restaurant’s owners could hope for was one or two column inches announcing they had opened for business. Still, Capucine felt the occasional appearance at an opening luncheon was a wifely obligation. After all, Alexandre put up with the impositions of her police career.

This particular opening was the renaissance of the venerable Brasserie Brech—long renowned for the perfection of its seafood—the third historic bistrot taken over by France’s most starred chef, who had developed a lucrative side business of revamping classic eateries and coating them in a shining luster of dernier-cri chic.

Capucine exceeded her usual fifteen-minute lateness and arrived a good half an hour after the affair was to have started. Alexandre waved at her cheerfully from the middle of what was clearly the table of honor, a vacant chair by his side reserved for her.

Capucine had been to Brech many times over the years. Even though nothing seemed to have been changed, the décor had an entirely unfamiliar feel, almost as if she was entering the restaurant for the first time. She wondered how the effect was achieved. The bar now seemed to be partitioned off from the twenty or so tables behind a gleaming, head-high, varnished wooden partition, topped by opaque, turn-of-the-century cut-glass panels. Capucine asked herself if it had been recently added or if it had always been there and she had just never noticed it.

As she sat down, the hilarity at the table was just shifting up a gear.

“
Mon chou—
my cabbage,” Alexandre said, loading her plate with oysters from a platter of crustaceans on crushed ice raised high by a wire frame, “you have to try these. They’re fabulous.”

For the thousandth time Capucine wondered why being called a cabbage was the universal French form of endearment for women and children.

“The big ones are Gillardeaus, these smaller ones are fines de Prat-Ar-Coum, and of course, these are fines de Claire, but they’re the largest ones I’ve ever seen.”

The oysters were delicious. Even after an overnight ride in a refrigerated truck from Brittany, they still brought the full delight of the briny tang of the sea to her mouth. A woman at her right—well into her late seventies, her skin leathery and nut-colored from endless summers in the Midi, the red ribbon of the Légion d’honneur winking out between the tweedy pastel threads of a Chanel suit—smiled at her. “Pure bliss, n’est-ce pas?”

Just as Capucine eyed the depleted plateau, about to grab the last remaining
tourteau
—a tiny pink Mediterranean crab—a waiter snatched away the platter and its supporting stand. Another waiter emerged from behind him and placed a large, shallow soup bowl in front of her.

“That’s going to be far better than that crab,” Alexandre said. “I ordered for you. Lobster
ravioles
in a sauce of crustacean butter.”

A waiter placed a dish in front of Alexandre, intoning, “
Aiguillettes de saint-pierre vapeur aux poireaux et truffe.
”

“I love John Dory, and this one has been steamed and truffled and is served with leeks.” He took a bite. “Absolutely perfect.”

A man across from him, who had been given the same dish, said, “Absolutely. It would have been delicate enough even for Jean-Louis Brault.”

At the table there was a silence as shocked as if someone had passed wind loudly. Brault’s suicide-murder had unquestionably been placed on the
index
of the culinary world.

Mercifully, there was a buzz when the multi-starred restaurateur appeared to make his lap around the tables, accompanied by the executive chef of the restaurant, a fresh-faced young man still in his twenties, wearing a highly starched chef’s outfit with an immaculate white kerchief knotted around his neck. Significantly, the restaurateur wore a business suit, making it clear that, while the cooking was the domain of the executive chef, his was the genius of creation.

As hands were shaken and backs patted, the elderly woman next to Capucine leaned over and said in a loud aside, “How young they are nowadays. I can remember when chefs had to be in their sixties and have enormous bellies.”

Another unfortunate comment. The table was cued to recall that Jean-Louis Brault had been the second youngest chef in France to receive a third star.

With intense fervor the diners at the table applied themselves to their dishes.

A man lurched out from behind the bar screen, squinting angrily into the room with deep-sunk, cadaverous eyes over frameless half-glasses. Visibly drunk, he careened into a table, coming to rest by supporting himself with both hands on the back of a diner’s chair. The room iced in embarrassed silence.

“Mille fois pardon, Monsieur Ducon
. A thousand apologies, Mister Asshole,” the drunk sneered when the man turned angrily.

“Lucien Folon,” Alexandre whispered to Capucine, who had never met him and had only had a glimpse of his profile as he scuttled away from Brault’s funeral mass.

Hands still on the back of the chair, head jerking, Folon laboriously examined the room until he singled out Alexandre.

“
Ah, voilà le petit bougre.
There’s the little bugger,” Folon said in a loud voice and zigzagged over to Alexandre’s table.

“Listen up,
connard—
you complete asshole,” he said, latching on to the back of Alexandre’s chair like an exhausted swimmer grabbing the edge of the pool. “
Kritikós,
my fucking ass. Not only are you a goddamn snob who doesn’t know the first thing about cuisine, but you’re also illiterate.”

He rattled Alexandre’s chair violently.

“You write another word about me or that no-talent, limp-dicked Brault and you’re going to see what you’re going to see!” Folon shouted, reeling and waving his fist in the air.

A Junoesque redhead across the table, the wife of the food critic of
Le Parisien,
said, “That’s quite enough, Lucien. High time for you to go home and sleep it off. I won’t have you say another word about poor Jean-Louis. And for what it’s worth, if Jean-Louis Brault had ever looked my way, I would have jumped right into his bed. But, sadly, he never did.” Her husband rubbed her back affectionately.

The little color left drained from Folon’s face. Ashen, he renewed his grip on the back of Alexandre’s chair with both hands, breathing shallowly, spitting in the effort to make a spiteful retort.

“The elderly woman next to Capucine said, “Yes, little man, Agnès is perfectly right. If I were ten year younger—goodness, forget about that—if he were still alive, I’d be delighted to slip under the eiderdown with him anytime he wanted. Now, go crawl back under your rock, you repulsive little insect.”

Fanned by rage, the dim coals in the recesses of Folon’s eyes glowed dark red in their orbits. His prissy dark lips opened and twisted downward into a scowl, revealing sharp, rodent-like incisors. He lifted his arm high and open-handed, intending to slap the elderly woman.

Capucine rose and, with a fluid motion, twisted Folon’s arm behind him in a policeman’s lock. While he snarled and growled, another diner grabbed Folon’s other arm, and the two of them marched him to the door. Capucine let the man put the sole of his shoe to Folon’s posterior and propel him violently into the street. Folon bounced off a parked car, regained his balance, and shambled off.

When she returned to the table, the elderly woman said to Capucine, “Goodness, my dear, you didn’t need to do that. I was all set to knee him in the balls.”

The table dissolved in laughter.

CHAPTER 13

I
t had been a disappointing meeting. None of the three brigadiers had anything that even looked like an idea. The case seemed completely stalled. Capucine got up from her desk and paced the room. After a lap she stopped in the far corner.

“We need to focus on Lucien Folon,” she said.

“The critic guy?” Isabelle asked.

“You think he might have rubbed Brault out because he didn’t like his cooking?” David asked. “Now, that really would have been a scathing review.” He twirled a silky ginger lock around his finger. Isabelle shot him a dark look. Momo uncoiled his frown a notch, his version of a smile.

“I met him for the first time yesterday. It was an impressive display. He’s definitely strung out about something. I want to find out what. He also has quite a violent streak. Isabelle, can you run him down on the screen for me?”

Two hours later, a very upbeat Isabelle returned, trailing the other two brigadiers.

“Commissaire,” Isabelle said, “you’re a genius. Get this. Folon and Brault come from the same town, and they were born in the same year. They must go way back together.”

Capucine waved the brigadiers into chairs.

“Start at the beginning,” Capucine said to Isabelle.

“Like I said, Folon’s thirty-three, same age as Brault. Both were born and grew up in La Cadière-d’Azur, in the
département
of the Var. Folon’s story is straight out of the good old South. His parents ran the village bakery. They still do.” Isabelle paused to give the next section its proper emphasis.

“His mother got married when she was sixteen. On her birthday. She had a child four months after the wedding. Nice, huh? She married the baker’s son. Our records show she drew a salary at the bakery from her fifteenth birthday, the earliest she could legally go on the payroll. My guess is that she worked there for years, the baker’s boy knocked her up, and her family made her marry him as soon as she could, which was on her sixteenth birthday. Nice birthday present.” Isabelle glowered.

“Was that child our man Folon?” Capucine asked.

“No. That was a daughter, Françoise. Lucien was born four years later. He graduated from the village’s primary school and the lycée and was one of the only two students in his class to pass the
bac.
” Isabelle snorted at the primitiveness of a small southern village where virtually no one bothered with the baccalaureate certificate, because they had no interest in going to university.

Momo’s frown deepened three notches. He didn’t have his bac, either.

“Folon shows up next in Marseilles, where he spends six years getting a
license
and a masters in journalism. Then he goes to work in the Marseilles office of the Agence France-Presse. After a few months they send him to the U.S. to work in their office in New York as a junior photo editor. He quits the AFP after six months but doesn’t set foot in France for a year and a half. We don’t know what he was doing, because he didn’t file a French tax return, legal enough if he wasn’t earning money in France. Next, he comes back to Marseilles and gets a job as a fashion reporter for
Le Dauphiné Libéré
—”

“Fashion reporter?” David asked. “How did he get into food criticism?”

“I’m getting to that, asshole. If you just sat there with your trap shut, like you’re supposed to, you’d find out.” Isabelle raised her eyebrows and shook her head in exasperation. “Next, he moves to Paris and gets a job with
Le Parisien,
writing for the women’s page. I guess that would have been recipes, fashion, and all that crap, right? He does that for two years.”

Isabelle made a sarcastic moue at David. “Here you go, num nuts. He joins
Le Figaro
on the staff of the restaurant page. He must have started at the bottom of the heap, because from his tax returns he was making peanuts. Nowadays he’s raking it in, though. He gets a good salary from the paper, has royalties coming in from three books, and does stuff on TV two or three times a month. That’s it.”

“Good work,” Capucine said.

“No. It’s thin. I don’t know anything about his life. We’d know if he’d ever been married, which he hasn’t. I had a quick look at his credit card records, and you don’t see him eating out all that much, but I’m guessing he gets comped wherever he goes.”

Capucine laughed. “He definitely eats for free in the upmarket places, and I doubt he often gets a yen for a Royal Cheese at McDonald’s.”

“So what do we do now, Commissaire? I can go out with the guys and start doing interviews and take his life apart.”

Capucine stared at Isabelle, unseeing, for a few beats.

“No,” she said finally. “We need to start at the beginning, in La Cadière. That’s where he knew Brault. Were they classmates?”

“Bound to have been,” Isabelle said. “They’re the same age, and the village only has one primary school and one lycée.”

“We need to dig deep into La Cadière. There may be something to find, but it’s not going to be easy. They’re notoriously closemouthed about their private lives in the Midi.” Capucine resumed her pacing, thinking.

She stopped behind David’s chair and put her hands on his shoulders. “You’re from down there, aren’t you?”

“Not as far as those guys are concerned, I’m not. I’m from Provence, almost on the Italian border. I grew up in a village east of Cannes, high up in the hills. In the Var they think that’s a different country.”

“But you know how to play
boules
and drink pastis, right?” Momo asked.

“Wait just a minute!” Isabelle said. “David’s not going anywhere. He’s an inch away from making an arrest on that child pornography case. He’s got the perp tagged and is just putting the finishing touches on the magistrate’s file. But the magistrate’s being a real pain and keeps wanting more stuff.”

Capucine ignored her. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to send David down to La Cadière under cover so he can soak the place up. We’ll have to cook up a good story for him.” She paused, contemplating David.

“David, do you think you can pull off being a journalist? No, even better . . . how about a writer doing a biography of Chef Brault? That would be perfect. It would be entirely natural for you to be finding out about Brault’s childhood pals.”

David’s eyes began to light up.

“Hang on just a minute, Commissaire. David can’t go anywhere until he wraps up his case. Let’s be clear about that,” Isabelle said.

“How long is that going to take, David?” Capucine asked.

“I don’t know. End of the week, maybe.” David said absently, lost in thought. “See, the way I’ll do it is lug a laptop everywhere and take real notes for the book. People will read over my shoulder and see that I’m actually working on something. This is going to be great. I’d get to run expenses and ply people with pastis, right?”

“Everybody’s best friend, the boozy writer,” Momo said.

Isabelle sat rigidly in her chair, livid.

“The tricky question is what to wear. I wouldn’t want to be the scruffy author with a five-day stubble. That just isn’t me. What I might do is a sort of Gallic Tom Wolfe look. White is particularly suited to the Midi and—”

“Let’s get serious, Commissaire,” Isabelle interrupted. “I really need David here until he buttons up his arrest. We just can’t let him drop that.”

“Isabelle, calm down. He’ll make his arrest.”

David paid no attention to this exchange. “Commissaire,” he said. “This is going to be great. I’m going to take myself to one of those old Pagnol movies tonight to start getting into the role. Maybe I should get a new laptop. That could really set off my imag—”

“All right, David, plan on taking the TGV to Marseilles Saturday morning and renting a car at the station. But that’s on the assumption that the magistrate is happy and he lets you make an arrest before the end of the week.”

David nodded, only half listening. “No prob. I can do that avec
les doigts dans le nez
—with my fingers up my nose,” he said in the broad, rolling accent of the Midi.