Murderous Mistral

by Cay Rademacher

  Two hours later he found himself rubbing his tired eyes. Nothing. He had found a couple of references to Fuligni—he had built a kindergarten and a meeting hall for the commune and had renovated the town hall. Not exactly suspicious activity for a local builder. But in none of these could Blanc find anything that might be related to Moréas, whose name was conspicuous by its absence. He even came across a record of the civil wedding of Pascal and Miette Fuligni, but no reference to Moréas. It would have been interesting if perhaps the wife’s maiden name had been Moréas, he thought to himself wearily. Defeatedly, he closed the files, glanced at his watch, and entered in the records book at the archive’s only desk a note of the time he handed them in. Then he tiptoed out, trying not to make any noise so as not to disturb the clerk, who had dozed off in the stream of cool air from the fan. It was only when he got back out into the steaming heat of the town square that he clapped his hand to his head—and dashed back into the archive.

  The records book.

  He flicked through the pages. Everyone who used the archive had to enter their name and the time and date they looked through the records. There was no obligation to say why they were there or what they were looking for. Just a list of names, dates, and times. In the previous four weeks there had been nobody, except one man, exactly a week ago: Wednesday, June 26, from 10 A.M. until 4 P.M. Lukas Rheinbach.

  The captain woke up the clerk and showed the record book to the bleary-eyed woman. “Can you tell me what Monsieur Rheinbach was looking for when he came in last week?”

  Yawn. “It was my colleague who was on duty.”

  “How do I get hold of her?”

  Even longer yawn. “She’s on holiday. In Martinique. She’ll be back in August. Then I’m off.” Yawn.

  Blanc left the town hall asking himself why an artist who painted pictures for jigsaw puzzles would spend an entire day sitting in this sleepy archive room, just four days before the murder of his neighbor, Charles Moréas.

  * * *

  Back at the gendarmerie he found Tonon, badly shaven and with his hair unkempt—a clochard in uniform, Blanc thought to himself. He told his colleague what he had been up to. “That could explain a few things,” the lieutenant said pensively.

  “You have an idea of some sort?”

  “No. But it could explain why the boss has shut the door to his office. He got an unexpected call from high up and it put him in a bad mood.”

  “Vialaron-Allègre?”

  “Maybe. You trod on Monsieur Fuligni’s toes, almost accusing him of taking out Moréas. In the middle of the holidays, on his beloved yacht.”

  “I didn’t accuse him. I questioned him.”

  “He’s not used to that sort of thing. He’s a big shot in local business. Thick as thieves with Mayor Lafont. And he belongs to the same political party as Monsieur Vialaron-Allègre…”

  Blanc recalled Fuligni’s agitated telephone conversation as he was leaving the harbor.

  “You mean the builder rings his pal the mayor? And he in turn calls Paris?”

  “Our local dignitaries aren’t as provincial as you might think. There are invisible links that go far. I don’t know what the minister might have said to Nkoulou. Maybe simply: ‘Leave my friends alone!’”

  “And what would Madame le juge say to that?”

  “Madame le juge is a puzzle to us all. But I’m sure she’ll let you know what she thinks sooner or later.”

  “Let’s go for lunch,” the captain replied.

  “Now that’s not the worst idea you’ve had,” Tonon replied with a laugh.

  * * *

  In Le Soleil they once again got a table in the shade of the plane tree. Blanc ordered a whole bottle of mineral water; the heat was parching him. Tonon ordered a carafe of rosé the same size. “I recommend the lamb and rice,” he said. “Both come from around here.”

  “The rice too?” the captain said in surprise, thinking of the flooded paddy fields of Asia and coolies in their round hats.

  “Just beyond the Étang de Berre, you’re in the Camargue, flat country, beaches for tourists, meadows for fighting bulls, ponds with flamingoes and lots of swamps full of mosquitoes. But they grow great rice there.”

  “Bon, I’ll have that. I’m slowly becoming an expert.”

  “You need another few years of gourmet meals in the Midi for that.”

  “If I survive them.”

  “You afraid they’re going to get rid of you down here?”

  “Vialaron-Allègre still has me in his sights for some reason. I don’t know where his wife stands, but I am certain a careerist like Nkoulou would rather see me out of here as soon as possible rather than have trouble with a minister in Paris and juge d’instruction here.”

  “As long as you do your work well, nobody can touch you.”

  “I thought that last week too, and now look where I am.”

  “It’s not exactly Devil’s Island.” Tonon laughed again and clapped him on the back. “And if you manage to put on a white T-shirt rather than a black one, you might not even feel the sun so much.”

  Blanc looked at his companion’s glass, the rosé wine sparkling like some tincture from an alchemist’s laboratory. “What have we got to so far?” he muttered. “We have Charles Moréas, a loner nobody knows anything about, not even how he earned a living. A man who probably had a criminal past and an even more criminal present, even if we haven’t so far found any drugs or any other suspicious substances in his possession. He’s had a few run-ins with the police but never been convicted. A man with no record.”

  Tonon snorted scornfully.

  “This man,” Blanc continued calmly, “had no friends, just enemies. Everyone who got to know him wished they’d seen the last of him. Bon. Now we find this guy riddled with holes by a Kalashnikov and incinerated on a garbage dump. Who do our investigations unearth? Lucien Le Bruchec, an architect, a cultivated man, a widower, who just happens to be a neighbor of Moréas. He accuses him of attempted burglary and stealing sport equipment. They’ve also had altercations in the woods belonging to their adjacent properties. But can you imagine a sixty-year-old man wielding a Kalashnikov on a garbage dump? Bon. Then we have the other neighbor, Lukas Rheinbach. A German artist, not exactly successful either with his art or with women. A man clearly afraid of a wild guy like Moréas. A man who in the week prior to the murder was the only one anywhere in the area who spent hours in the Caillouteaux town archives. Looking for something. But what?”

  “And the day after the murder tells us he’s heading for Luberon to paint the lavender fields, even though he had to know they wouldn’t be in bloom for several weeks yet,” Tonon added.

  “Should we go and see Madame Vialaron-Allègre? A harmless painter poking around in the archives? Who wants to paint lavender fields before they’re in bloom? The two things could be pure coincidence, unrelated to anything. What could they have to do with a murder on a garbage heap? It’s ridiculous. I don’t even have enough to ask him to come in for questioning.”

  “Unlike Pascal Fuligni.”

  “An argument over a mooring place at the harbor. Sounds equally ridiculous at first, but if it’s something that’s been festering for years then it could have gotten out of control. Apart from anything else, Fuligni offered him five thousand euros for the spot. That means the object of their argument was of some value. He says he spent the whole of Sunday afternoon down at the harbor and only went home after dark. He claims two witnesses to that—his wife and his Romanian secretary. For the hours between their argument and when he got home he has no witnesses.”

  “Precisely the time when Moréas was probably killed.”

  “Possibly. We still don’t have an exact time of death, and given the state of the incinerated corpse it’s possible the pathologist won’t be able to establish one. Sunday afternoon? Sunday evening? Certainly not before and certainly not after. That still leaves us with a big window, from about three P.M. to midnight.”

  “Fuligni h
as an alibi for half that window, but not the other half.”

  “Does that mean we should bring him in? After it looks like he’s pulled strings reaching as far as Paris? Without anything more than what we have at present Nkoulou would pull us off the case immediately to save himself any more problems.”

  Blanc’s phone rang. An irritated voice from the forensics team. Nothing out of the ordinary on Moréas’s boat.

  “So, what now?” Tonon asked.

  “We’re up to our necks in shit. We’ve got nothing.”

  “Madame le juge will be delighted.”

  * * *

  “Go home,” Tonon advised him after lunch. “The midday heat dulls the mind. You can’t think properly anymore. Later this afternoon we can ask the colleagues in Marseille and Aix who’ve had to do with Moréas in the past. Maybe they’ll have something for us.”

  Blanc didn’t know what else to suggest. Here he was taking a midday break. His colleagues in Paris would have laughed themselves silly. But he was up a blind alley. He might as well sit down in the cool shadow of his ruin and do his thinking there. He did some shopping in the little supermarket just before it closed for lunch: tomatoes, melon, and eggplant. On the shelves he spotted several more bottles with the “Bernard” label so he bought a white and a rosé. This time the shop owner smiled as he packed up his purchases for him. In the newsagent’s next door he bought a copy of La Provence. The murder had made the local paper’s front page. Blanc skimmed the report, which was remarkably bland. Evidently the press were treating it as just another feud between drug dealers. Blanc folded the paper under his arm, hoping that he wouldn’t have his investigations interrupted by any journalists. Then he picked up some baguettes from the bakery. The interior of his Espace smelled wonderful as he drove back to Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée.

  Three horses were crossing the route départementale, ridden by Paulette Aybalen and two teenagers. “My daughters, Agathe and Audrey,” she said, jumping down from her horse when he stopped alongside them. The girls were in every way younger versions of their mother: slim, deeply tanned, with wild black hair tightly pulled back into a braid. Paulette threw the reins of her horse to the elder of the two. “Look after the animals. I’ll be back shortly.” Blanc nodded in acknowledgment to the girls. They smiled shyly and nodded back before clicking their tongues to set the horses into a trot.

  As Paulette obviously wanted to have a chat with him, Blanc for better or worse opened the passenger door for her and drove her the last few yards home. Now that she was sitting just inches from him he realized again just how incredibly tanned she was. He wondered if she spent even as much as a few hours a day indoors. Maybe she even slept in the open? She smelled of grass, saddle leather, and horse hair.

  “Have you started clearing out?” she asked. She must have seen the furniture he’d left outside the door, Blanc reckoned.

  “The first step in a spectacular renovation.”

  She laughed. “You might need to call in a few experts for that.”

  “I’ve already got to know a builder. Monsieur Fuligni.”

  “Pascal? He’s okay. He knows what he’s doing. He’s local.”

  “Like yourself?”

  She glanced at him. “I was born in Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée. There’s nothing on earth that would ever make me move.”

  “Everything has a price.”

  “Not for me. Not for that. I even let my marriage go rather than move. My husband found it too quiet here. He wanted to move to Marseille, and that’s where he’s been since. As far as I know.”

  Blanc didn’t bother to tell her about the collapse of his own marriage. He just smiled and nodded toward his shopping on the rear seat. “Would thyme go with that?” he asked.

  She glanced at him and shook her head at his lack of local knowledge. “You can just cut some thyme by the roadside whenever you want. It’s best at midday because that’s when there’s the most oil in the leaves. Some people say you should pick your thyme only on May first: They harvest it then in huge bunches, bring it into the house, dry it, and keep it for the rest of the year. But one way or another the aroma is so intense that I only use it for meat sauces, or in a stew. But not with vegetables.”

  He braked as they came into Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée, and she jumped out of the Espace outside her house. “That was almost as comfortable as on horseback,” she called in farewell. “One of these days I’ll teach you how to make lamb filet in garlic and thyme sauce.”

  Blanc turned off to his olive oil mill in a good mood. Don’t get any ideas, he told himself. You don’t know Paulette. And you’re not even divorced yet. He took his shopping into the house, then lay down on the dry meadow in the shade of the plane trees. It was wonderfully cool, the scent of thyme in the air, a concert of cicadas in the background. He could feel himself dozing off. Then his phone rang. Tonon. “We’ve got a witness,” the lieutenant told him. “Someone who saw one of our friends down at the garbage dump on the day of the murder.”

  Witnesses

  Blanc leapt into the Espace and roared off. The route départementale was empty in the early-afternoon heat. It was only just before he pulled into Gadet that he realized he had failed to lock the house.

  “Gaston Julien,” Tonon informed him on the phone, “a farmer from Lançon, nearly seventy years old. He read about the incident in La Provence this morning and remembered meeting somebody at the garbage dump.”

  “This morning? So why does he wait until lunchtime before getting in touch with us?”

  “He had to take his herd of goats out into the woods and couldn’t come in until his son turned up to take his place.”

  The captain sighed. “Where is he?”

  “In the office next door. Nobody’s using it at the moment and the sun isn’t as bad as in here.”

  * * *

  Blanc would have guessed the man to be twenty years younger than his age: Julien was a burly man with thick brown hair only streaked with gray, in dusty jeans and a faded pullover. He shook Blanc’s right hand with a grip like a vise and hands as hard as iron.

  “Monsieur Julien, I believe you were out at the garbage dump on Sunday. What time was that?”

  “Just after lunch.”

  After the quarrel between Moréas and Fuligni down at the harbor, the captain thought. “You bumped into Charles Moréas there?”

  “I saw him. He wasn’t the sort of person you wanted to talk to.”

  “But you knew him?”

  “I know everybody around here.”

  “What were you doing at the garbage dump?”

  “The last mistral ripped the tar paper off my chicken coop. I loaded the pieces into the car and took them down to the dump. They were no use anymore.”

  “And what time would that have been?”

  “Like I said, after lunch.”

  “So about two P.M.?”

  Julien laughed. “Where do you come from? Later than that.”

  Blanc told himself not to lose his patience. “How much later?”

  The old farmer took out his car key and, lost in thought, used it to scratch the inside of his left ear. “Three o’clock? Four o’clock? Let’s say four.”

  “What was Moréas doing?”

  “No idea. He was over by the skip, the one filled with trash. You would come across him often there, either putting something in or taking something out.”

  “Did you notice anything else?”

  Julien had managed to extract a lump of dried wax from inside his ear and flicked it away with his finger. Blanc tried not to look. “I thought it was busy, for a Sunday,” the farmer mumbled. “I mean, in summer you don’t see people down at the dump much. But when I got back into the car, I had to do a U-turn because there was so much traffic. There was a little red car parked in the entrance gate, then there was Moréas’s motorbike, and just as I was about to put my foot down that architect pulled up in front of me.”

  Blanc leaned back in his chair. “Which ar
chitect?”

  “Monsieur Le Bruchec. He’s normally nice enough. A local. But he seemed to be in a hurry. Hurtled past me in his four-by-four, without even saying hello. Had a trailer in tow, full of trash.”

  “Are you sure that it was Lucien Le Bruchec?”

  “Am I sure that I’m Gaston Julien?”

  “Did you see whether Monsieur Le Bruchec and Charles Moréas spoke to each other?”

  “No. I put my foot down before some other connard arrived.”

  “Merci beaucoup.”

  Tonon typed up Julien’s statement and got the farmer to sign it before going back to his goats. “Strange that Monsieur Le Bruchec would appear to have forgotten to mention that,” the lieutenant said.

  “I think we need to jog his memory.”

  * * *

  As they got into the patrol car, Tonon said, “By the way, I spoke on the phone with Miette Fuligni. We were at school together. She was hot stuff in those days. She was a couple of years below me, but never even gave me a glance.” He got lost in his memories, then shook his head and added, “She told me her husband came home almost exactly at eight P.M. on Sunday. He interrupted her watching the headlines on the evening news.”

  “If what he told us is true, then he must have been in Saint-César until about a quarter to eight.”

  “But theoretically he would have had time to drive to the garbage dump, kill Moréas, and still get home on time. He has no alibi.”

  “Nor does our architect.”

  Tonon directed him to the town center of Salon, as they assumed Le Bruchec would be in his office. They didn’t call first. Blanc wanted to take him by surprise. Yet again they found themselves on a big square shaded by plane trees, part of it covered by a roof of glass and green wrought iron, with cafés and three-story houses all around. “Place Morgan,” the lieutenant said. “Used to be nice here. Great market and you could always find a parking place, except on market days.”