Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery) (12 page)

A
fter lunch, Capucine and Alexandre left David, who went off to a meeting of his
conseil municipal
—his town council. They walked up the narrow lanes through the hills to the mas. The heat was intense, shimmering up from the baked earth and radiating down from the sky. The only sound was the raucous sawing of the cicadas. The hills seemed deserted. Alexandre pointed at large rusty patches in the scrub.

“Know what that is?”

Capucine shook her head. Alexandre led her out on the grass, holding her hand. Close up, the rusty patches were made up of squat little plants with tiny purple flowers. Alexandre reached down, yanked out a handful, crushed it in his fist, opened his hand under Capucine’s nose.

“Serpolet
—sweet wild thyme—the backbone of one of France’s most imaginative inventions, herbes de Provence.”

“Invention?”

“Of course. It’s like the fiction of the
Gaulois
resisting the Romans from their tiny fishing villages. The real paysans down here have a very delicate hand with their wild herbs. They pride themselves on dosing them one by one for each dish. They’re hardly going to let a big bag of premixed stuff sit in the back of their cupboards so long, it turns into sawdust.”

Alexandre was as enraptured by wild herbs as he was by the mushrooms of the damp autumn forests of the Île-de-France. He foraged and presented Capucine with the spiky stems and bulbous violet and purple flowers of wild rosemary, white-flowered savory, yellow-flowered fennel, and a big bunch of lavender, which Capucine wadded, sniffed, and stuffed in the pocket of her frock.

They reached the crest of a hill that overlooked the mas. The hills seemed to roll on eternally. There was not another house in sight. They sat down and held hands like little children, fingers intertwined.

“Are you feeling a little better about things now that we’re home?” Alexandre asked.

“We’re not home. We’re abusing the generosity of one of my former flics while I sit flopping on the ground with my wings clipped.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“Oh, am I? Well, let me tell you, then. From what I’ve seen, I’d guess David has more than a fair chance of getting elected to the Assemblée Nationale. He has the potential for an important career in politics.”

“Of course he does.”

“But what I think you’ve forgotten is that every mayor in France is also a representative of the state and, technically, an officer of the Police Judiciaire, in addition to head of the local police force, if there is one. That means that if a warrant for my arrest is issued, David would be obliged to arrest me. If he continues to hide me, he could easily be removed from office and sanctioned. That would be the end of his political career.”

“Should we move to a hotel?” Alexandre asked.

“I’ve thought about it. Not just yet. But maybe soon. Just as soon as I figure out a way to break out of house arrest.”

They didn’t arrive back at the mas until six. David was waiting for them with his brow slightly furrowed.

“Bad news?” Capucine asked.

“Not at all. Isabelle e-mailed back. She came up with only slim pickings. I printed out two copies so we could go through it together. I’m assuming I’m working with you on this. Right?”

“Of course it is. Let’s see what Isabelle came up with.”

The printouts were barely a page long.

Capucine’s mood brightened. This was like the old days, when she’d put her feet up on her desk during a meeting and Isabelle would admire her legs and David her shoes. Capucine put her feet up on the chair next to her.

“Oh, my God, Capucine! Where did you get those horrid sandals?”

“In Bandol. You don’t like them?”

“
Loathe
would be the appropriate word. Those ribbons going up your leg destroy the line of your calf. No more shoe shopping in Bandol without me. If you know where to go, there are actually one or two little shops that have some very cute things.”

David snapped his page and read. So did Capucine.

David dropped his printout on the table.

“I’ll go check her out? Nothing could be easier. These boat girls are all pretty much the same. They love the life of the sea but lack the skills and the muscles to get work on big-time ocean racers. So they hook up with skippers of crewed charter boats and pretend they’re cooks, even though all they really do is clean out the heads. But it gets them rides and good times. They’re on boats, get fed, laid, and hang out with the boating set. What could be better when you’re a teenager?”

“How do you know so much about this?”

“I used to sail a lot. I even spent a few summers working at a yacht charter operation in Villefranche. I still have some pals in the charter business. I think I can get a good rundown on your victim. There aren’t many points of departure in southern France. Saint-Tropez, the Îles d’Hyères, Antibes, and Villefranche should do it. I’ll Photoshop a few snaps from La Rochelle’s blog and have those ports covered in two or three days.”

“And you’d do it anonymously, without using your mayor’s card?”

“Of course. Mind you, I used to be well known in those ports and still have a lot of pals down there, but the risk of anyone making the connection is slim.”

Capucine’s brows wrinkled.

“Look, Capucine. It’s not like I’m some amateur. I used to do this for a living, remember? It’s the middle of August. I’m entitled to some vacation. What’s more natural than a guy like me sipping pastis with my old pals on the Riviera?”

T
he next morning Capucine found David in the kitchen, squabbling in Provençal with Magali. Despite the fact that Capucine could pick up only a word here and there, it was clear the tiff revolved around David’s attire. David’s fashion-plate outfit had been replaced by a greasy, moth-holed T-shirt sporting the faded logo of an ancient boat race, high-tech shorts with an unwarrantable number of zippers, and—the pièce de résistance—a pair of decrepit boat shoes as flecked with dots of paint as a Jackson Pollock painting, with one sole separated enough from the upper to provide an unobscured view of David’s right big toe.

“Going in for disguise, are we?”

“Of course. That business of
l’habit fait le moine
—the habit making the monk—is pure dead on. No habit, no monk. That’s all there is to it. This is all stuff I’ve kept from my sailing days. It’s going to be just perfect.” He performed a little pirouette. “I’m off. I’ll keep in touch through your collection of cell phones. And I’m leaving you the Peugeot. I have a plain-vanilla rental car. Much more anonymous.”

Capucine opened her mouth to speak. David bridged her lips with a finger reaching from the point of her chin to the tip of her nose. “Don’t worry. I’m just a happy-go-lucky guy looking for a ride on some boat in the Porquerolles race and hoping maybe to run into that hottie I met last summer. What was her name again? Oh, right, Nathalie. It really would be a shame to lose that one from sight.”

When David left, Capucine was surprised to find herself mildly disoriented. She felt awkward going to La Cadière without him and decided instead on an expedition with Alexandre to the open market in Bandol.

The market was laid out under the stare of the Cyclops’s eye of the town church, the stands protected from the sun by flaxen parasols casting a golden light over the produce. Alexandre was overjoyed.

“I’m going to make you stuffed artichokes, the excellence of which you’ve never even dreamt. Now, what we need is a proper market basket. We can’t wander around like Parisians. They’ll try to palm off on us the rubbish they were about to throw out. Look at those baskets over there. One of them would be perfect for us back in Paris.”

At the mention of Paris, Capucine felt an unpleasant chill ripple up her back. How long would it be before that happened?

At the stand, Alexandre investigated the baskets with care. “There’s an optimal size to these things. Too small and they’re useless. Too big and they’re too heavy to carry.”

As Alexandre rooted through the bags, Capucine amused herself by trying on floppy straw hats. Abruptly, she snatched one off the rack and clapped it on Alexandre’s head.

“Hide your face. It’s the Le Galls, complete with all three of their impossible children.”

Alexandre admired himself in the mirror the stall provided, chuckling. “Ah, the secret snobbism of my flic wife, whose only true aspiration is to burrow into the grit of the mean streets. Just because Bandol has a reputation as the poor man’s Saint-Tropez doesn’t mean we aren’t going to run into anyone we know here.”

“You’re right. It was a stupid idea. Let’s go back.”

“No. We can do better than that. I really want to buy some of those artichokes and those unbelievable mackerel. The mackerel will be perfect as
maquereaux grillés à la moutarde
for dinner. But before we go back, I’m going to take you to a little restaurant on a back street. A hangout for locals. Guaranteed to be completely free of Paris vacationers.”

Lunch was as delicious as it was simple: sea bass on a bed of layered fennel, wild thyme, preserved lemons, carrots, zucchini, yellow onions, cooked in pastis. As promised, there were no tourists. In fact, there was even a healthy smattering of Provençal in the buzz of conversation.

Lunch over, Capucine didn’t dare go back to the town and scurried straight to the Peugeot, the brim of her new hat pulled well down over her face.

They spent the rest of the afternoon wandering through the hills behind the mas. Capucine was dismayed. In her mind’s eye she had had a clear swath of safe country all the way from the mas through La Cadière down to Bandol, an hour away by car. Now Bandol and her access to the sea had been cut off. Her
espace vital
had been reduced drastically to the mas, the village, and the corridor in between. Capucine was well aware her paranoia was blossoming but was unable to keep it in check.

The next morning, when Capucine took her second bowl of coffee into her “office,” the cardboard box of phones buzzed and rattled, as if filled with insects. One of the phones was ringing.

“Good morning,” Inès said. “There’s news.”

Capucine sat heavily.

“The evidence from Italy has arrived. It seems it took so long because they really did send it through their post office, if you can believe that. The Police Judiciaire have put the case in the hands of a Commissaire Garbe from La Crim’. Do you know this Garbe?”

“I’ve met him a few times. Never worked with him. Lean, tall man, late fifties, cheerful as an undertaker.”

“That’s the one.”

“So you’ve seen him.”

“Yes, he came to my office to ‘consult’ with me, but, in fact, it was nothing more than a standard interview. The useful part was that he went over the basic facts the Italians have.

“There are three main pieces of evidence. The shell casing, my jacket, and your gun. On top of that, there are all their notes and photographs of the boat. The evidence went straight to forensics, even before Garbe was appointed. They confirmed that that hole in the jacket was, in fact, from a nine-millimeter bullet and that there were traces of gunpowder on the entry hole, but no blood. They determined from the firing-pin marks that it was your gun that had fired the shell.”

“Nothing new there,” Capucine said.

“No. Garbe was put out that Jacques and I were the only two passengers on the boat he was able to contact. From his comments Jacques must have given him a very hard time, indeed.”

Capucine smiled, imagining Jacques being interviewed by a police officer.

“The key point for Garbe was that you did not return immediately to Paris and report the incident to Police Judiciaire headquarters, particularly since, to use his words, you are far more than ‘a simple observer’ in the case. He also found it curious that your cell phone is apparently switched off.

“I played the
naïve
and said that you and Alexandre had decided to continue your vacation and that you probably thought there was no point in reporting an incident that would remain hearsay until the evidence arrived in Paris. I also said I had a notion that you had gone to Corsica and might be in the hills, where there was no cell phone coverage, so it probably wasn’t that your phone was off, just that there was no signal.”

“It sounds plausible enough when you say it.”

“Not to Garbe. He made a report to PJ headquarters, and they involved the Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale—the police of the police—who have assigned a lieutenant to liaise directly with Garbe. The idea is that there is to be an investigation of your conduct regardless of the outcome of the case.”

Capucine frowned. “How did you find that out?”

“The juge d’instruction assigned to the case, an old friend, Joseph Léonville, invited me to lunch. It was awkward, to say the least.”

Capucine said nothing.

“Capucine, this is not going the right way at all. These two bovines are perfectly capable of destroying my case against Tottinguer once they figure out the link. I can’t allow that to happen. I need to get going right away.”

There was a long, awkward pause.

“Look, Capucine, you understand the urgency. Do you know anyone in the fiscal brigade who could take over? Just for the time being, naturally, until you are back in circulation. No one has anything even close to your talent.”