Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery)

by Alexander Campion

  “Look, Commissaire,” Isabelle said, “that’s why we came down here. We’re your team. You’re not going to get this solved without us, you know.”

  “Don’t think I don’t appreciate it, but that just can’t happen. You both have to be back in the brigade bright and early Monday morning. Think about it. If you start doing legwork, you’re going to have to go on the stand at the perp’s trial, right?”

  Momo nodded.

  “That would mean that even with a conviction, you’d still face a serious problem with the IGPN not only for abetting a fugitive, which is what I’m going to be, but also for investigating a case without being ordered to. There’s no way they’d let that drop. You’d get kicked off the force and could even face criminal charges.”

  “I don’t give a shit about that,” Momo said. “There’s more to life than police work.” The statement sounded proud but rang hollow.

  “Momo’s right, Commissaire,” Isabelle said. “You can’t solve a case sitting in front of a screen in the hills of the Midi. You have to get out on the street.”

  Capucine did not reply for several beats. Instead, she stared intently at Isabelle and Momo. “You both have done a lot. Way too much. You’ve already advanced the case a great deal. I’ll have it tied up in a few days, and things will get back to normal. Let’s all stop worrying the damn thing to death.”

  There was a belligerent silence. Capucine, Momo, and Isabelle avoided each other’s gaze. The sawing of the cicadas grated.

  “In any case, we can’t do anything until after tomorrow,” David said. “It’s the feast of Saint Veluton, the imaginary patron of the village. I get to make one of my beloved motivating speeches, and then the whole village shares a table of potluck dishes. I know for a fact Magali is determined to outdo herself.”

  The next morning the village square was as packed as the Paris Metro at 6:00 p.m. The instant David’s speech was over and loudly cheered and he was absorbed into the melee, a determined phalanx of paysans appeared with trestle tables. They spread them about and covered them with tablecloths and the trappings for dinner. Finally, a platoon of village matrons marched in to place an earthenware cocotte at the center of each table. An expectant hush settled over the crowd.

  “Monsieur Alexandre.” Magali had sidled up to Alexandre and drew him with some occult magnetic attraction to her table. She edged the lid of her cocotte to one side and inserted a spoon. “You’re going to have news for me,” she said with a flirtatious smile that transformed her back into a teenager.

  The dish was a Toulouse cassoulet: white beans—known as lingots Tarbais, ingots from Tarbes—goose confit, salt pork, garlic sausage, and tiny white Toulouse sausages. A classic recipe, but to Capucine’s nose, in a class entirely of its own. Surreptitiously, Magali spooned out samples for Capucine and Alexandre. Alexandre exuded an orgasmic groan.

  Capucine dropped to her knees. Alexandre assumed it was the vulgarity of his eructation.

  “I’ve lost a contact lens!”

  “You don’t wear contacts.”

  “Of course not, you idiot. It’s happened again. This time it’s the Chambourdons.”

  “You don’t wear contacts.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here right now. The church . . . Hurry up!”

  Inside the church Capucine vanished into one of the tiny transepts. And from there out a small door in the sacristy leading into a field at the back of the church. Alexandre was hard on her heels.

  “Curse those Chambourdons,” Alexandre said. “It was a truly heinous crime to abandon that cassoulet.”

  “I’m sure Magali will make you another. We’re not going to be leaving the mas for a while.”

  When they reached the house, Alexandre puffing, they stopped on the terrace. “I need sustenance after all that emotion. Wait out here and I’ll get us both some pastis.”

  “Not out here. Let’s drink it in the kitchen.”

  “The kitchen? There’s no light in there. The windows are tiny.”

  “That’s just the point.”

  To compensate for the gloom, Capucine had a Lillet Blanc and Alexandre a double pure malt Scotch. Gradually, Capucine relaxed. She fluffed up the back of her hair in a feminine gesture.

  “Tell me,” she asked, “how do you think I’d look as a blonde?”

  CHAPTER 24

  For once, Inès was having a good day. Such a good day that she hardly noticed the poisoned seesawing between the unbridled ambition and desire for acceptance that ordained her life.

  Years before, while still in law school, she had decided to consult a psychiatrist about it. All her friends had assured her that the process would make her feel far more comfortable in her skin and would heighten her productivity. Instead, the shrink had announced she had a serious case of something he called “dissociative identity disorder.” She had looked the term up and discovered it was the latest in cocktail party psychobabble. Her skin fit perfectly. So perfectly it was the font of her success. She had stalked out of the office. Just who the hell did that quack think he was talking to?

  The trigger for her good mood was her discussion of a case with a procureur at the Palais de Justice. The prosecutor had been beyond admirative.

  “This is beautifully prepared. Absolutely perfect,” he had said, tapping the bundle of papers tied up with a cloth tape between traditional red binders. “Even the greenest of procureurs couldn’t fail to get a conviction with this one. Your talent exceeds your reputation, and it’s quite a reputation. I know you have detractors who claim you’re a press hound, even a sensationalist, but that’s pure jealousy. You are by far the most talented juge we have.”

  The meeting over, Inès smiled a tight but pleased smile and started down the marble staircase of the Palais de Justice. Of course, the culprit in the case was only a tiny fish, a mere anchovy, part of the management of a small private bank, specializing in so-called mid-cap deals. He had tried to sweeten his fees on a transaction by getting a cousin to buy a good-size hunk of a company he had been mandated to sell to an international conglomerate. Yes, a very little fish, but it was still a joy to think of him in the van on his way to prison.

  At the bottom of the staircase, she could see the procureur de la République, an enormous man, made even larger by his long bloodred and black robe trimmed in faux ermine. He was encircled by a sycophantic entourage, a crimson shark in a cloud of pilot fish. Since he was titular head of all the Paris prosecutors, his function was primarily that of a senior government official rather than that of an actual practicing prosecuting attorney. Inès had shaken his hand three or four times at receptions, but they had never exchanged more than a few polite banalities.

  When they were fifteen feet apart on the staircase, the procureur de la République dismissed his retinue with an imperial gesture and bounded up the steps with unexpected energy. He stopped on the step below Inès but still towered over her.

  “Madame le Juge, what a happy coincidence. I was just going to call to ask you to lunch.”

  “Lunch?” Inès said, unable to mask her surprise.

  “Absolutely. I’ve been reviewing your cases. Your approaches are always innovative. I’ve been remiss in not spending more time with you.” Below them the cortege hovered; above, a small crowd accumulated, too deferential to descend.

  “Why don’t we go to my chambers, have a little apéro, and see if we can’t find a suitable date?”

  Inès assumed the chambers would be imposing, but was nonetheless surprised by the opulence. A huge oil of Jean Domat, the father of French jurisprudence, framed in dripping rococo, dominated the room. The piece belonged in the Louvre.

  The procureur disappeared into a side chamber to remove his robes and returned in an immaculately cut suit with the red rosette over a silver ribbon of the grand officier of the Légion d’honneur conspicuous on its lapel. He produced a chased crystal decanter and two stemmed goblets.

  “Pineau des Charentes,” the procureur announced. “A good fr
iend of mine sends it to me from the Charente-Maritime.”

  Inès’s seesaw reached its tipping point. Pineau des Charentes, an oversweet fortified wine, was the sort of thing working-class people gave their aged grandmothers, not something you offered a peer. The perceived slight felt like a slap and stung.

  The procureur smiled at her over the rim of his glass, relishing its content. “Not only are your cases always brilliantly prepared, but you tie them up in record time. In many ways our work is like that of light cavalry. It’s all in the speed. The main thing is to strike before the enemy has time to organize its defense, don’t you agree?”

  “No, I don’t. I prepare cases against guilty people, and I demonstrate their guilt with enough proof to resist even the most carefully structured defense.” Inès wondered where this was going. Bizarrely, he really did think the Pineau was something special. Maybe she had misunderstood.

  “And your case against Tottinguer? Is that going to resist all defense, as well?”

  Inès sat back in her armchair and waited for the rest. There was an eternal five-beat silence.

  “The halls of the Palais are alive with rumors that you intend to investigate the son, André.”

  Another five-beat silence.

  “Sooner or later, these rumors will reach the outside world.”

  Another silence. The procureur drained his glass and raised the decanter in Inès’s direction before he realized she hadn’t taken a single sip. He filled his glass and set it down on the table with a click.

  “If your intentions reach the outside world, your case will be compromised. You may even be sued by the Tottinguers. That would be a good diversionary tactic for them to try, don’t you think?”

  Another long silence. He had the sense of timing usually found only at the Comédie-Française. Inès decided she would drop in on one of his court appearances to see how he performed on his feet.

  The procureur toyed with his glass, then looked up sharply, his eyes boring into Inès’s. She definitely was going to have to go see him in the parquet.

  “I also understand there is a possibility you might be able to receive enough corroborative evidence from inside the banque Tottinguer to present your case very quickly, which would be key tactically. As our Anglo-Saxon friends like to say, it’s time for you to either fish or cut bait, my dear.”

  Inès stood up, smarting at the slight of being given a specific instruction. It took control not to storm out, slamming the door. But she had to admit he was right. Her timing on the case was off. And he was dead right that timing was all.

  “Thank you for the apéro, Monsieur le Procureur de la République. You have a most excellent Pineau.”

  He smiled at her. She was not sure if in complicity or mockery. As quietly as she could manage, she walked out.

  On her way down the stairs she remembered that the question of lunch had not arisen.

  Back at her office she told her secretary to go to the café and bring her back a sandwich jambon-beurre—ham in a baguette spread copiously with butter—and an Orangina. When her lunch arrived, she pushed the sandwich to one side of her desk but sucked greedily at the Orangina through a straw. The sweet-sharp taste of the soda erased the taste of the Pineau.

  The more she thought about it, the more she realized how completely right he was about the timing. She slurped at her straw, enjoying the loud, vulgar rasp when she reached the bottom. The specter of Lévêque lurked. She hadn’t expected his tentacles to be so far-reaching.

  She picked up her phone and buzzed her secretary. “Call our HR contact at Police Judiciaire headquarters. Have him prepare a list of suitable commissaires in the financial brigade to take charge of investigating a case. If possible, I’d like to review his suggestions this evening. I want to get going on this first thing tomorrow.”

  She just had to face up to reality, awkward as it sometimes was. It made no sense at all to wait for Capucine.

  CHAPTER 25

  Alexandre and Capucine drove north on the A52 autoroute, cutting a swath dead straight through unending fields of Tyrian-tinted lavender. Capucine was as keyed up as a convict who had just pulled off a jailbreak. It took all her self-discipline to keep from shouting for joy and pumping the accelerator of the borrowed compact Renault to the floor. Her brand-new blond bangs snuck into her field of vision under her oversize sunglasses. She blew the strands away with a jubilant snort.

  Alexandre contemplated her from under sleepy lids.

  “It’s just not you, that hair.”

  “That’s precisely the idea, mon ami.” Capucine puffed again.

  Capucine and David had spent the better part of the prior day doing her hair. Early in the morning they had donned rubber gloves and attacked it with a thick concoction of L’Oréal powdered bleach and three different kinds of whitener. It had looked exactly like the industrial mayonnaise Alexandre proscribed from their Paris kitchen. When David had bolted off to a town council meeting in the village, Capucine sat in her bathroom, steeping in a chemical miasma despite wide open windows, scrutinizing her creamy mop, occasionally teasing out a lock with the pointed handle of a styling comb to check the color. The process left her simultaneously despondent and jubilant. The beloved auburn hue of her hair was gone, but she was going to be unrecognizable.

  Hours later, David had shaped her light golden blond tresses with scissors and rollers. His first attempt evoked Catherine Deneuve’s tousled bedroom curls in Belle de Jour. Capucine liked the look. It was one she could grow into.

  “Non, non, non!” David had said. “Like that, you are too lovely, too noticeable, and too feminine for police work.”

  He had gone at her hair a second time. She had emerged from the fray with long bangs descending well over her eyebrows, the top teased high and blown full, and the sides cut back to just below the level of her ears. The look was overdone, démodé, even slightly cheap. Capucine hated it.

  “Perfect!” David had said. “You look like anyone but you.”

  “I had no idea hairdressing was one of the skills taught in the Police Judiciaire,” Alexandre said.

  “He has a real flair for it. Isabelle used to kid him and tell him that he’d missed his true vocation.”

  “Well, he’s certainly found it now.” Alexandre crossed his arms over his chest and pouted. Getting up before ten always made him testy.

  When the fields of lavender finally morphed into military rows of grapevines, Alexandre perked up.

  “You know, we’ll be in Nîmes before long. We’re in no rush. Why don’t we explore the Roman ruins, have an apéro, and then lunch at one of my favorite restaurants? Appropriately enough, it’s called Alexandre. Two stars in the Michelin. They have some spectacular dishes. One is a fillet of taureau—bull—in honor of the bullfighting in the Roman Colosseum.”

  Alexandre leaned forward with a grunt, patted his pockets, and dug out his phone. “I’m sure they could find us a little nook for lunch.”

  “Don’t even think about making that call. The last thing we need is you broadcasting our presence to the restaurant world. Even if you buy an even faker beard, the only bull meat you’re going to be eating is in the Golden Arches of a service area.”

  Alexandre crossed his arms and pouted.

  “And we are in a rush. We’re going straight to Perpignan. We can have a sandwich in a café there.” Alexandre grimaced. “I’ve wasted enough time as it is. High time to find Nathalie’s murderer and end this nonsense.”

  As it happened, even though it wasn’t in a Michelin-starred restaurant, they unearthed a lunch that Alexandre deemed “perfectly acceptable,” high praise in his lexicon. They arrived in Perpignan at twelve thirty and decided on a brief recce of the downtown area to see if they could spot someplace suitable. They wandered into the place de la République, a spacious, traffic-free cobbled square surrounded by inviting restaurant-cafés with parasol-covered tables on outdoor terraces. One was conspicuously more crowded than the others. Fifteen minutes later t
hey were eating carré d’agneau with a crust of tapenade, washed down with an excellent Languedoc-Roussillon red that the waiter had praised to the skies.

  “You’re absolutely right, my dear. I’ve let myself become enslaved to haute cuisine. This is haute enough for any mortal, and it’s a joy to sit outside in this sun, especially with a sexpot blonde like you.”

  Capucine frowned. Alexandre took her hand.

  “So what are we doing in Perpignan? You’ve been a bit cagey about that.”

  “I’m here to see Angélique. I need to launch a proper investigation. I’m going to see them all, and I might as well start with her. She’s spending the last of her vacation here.”

  “And how did you discover that?”

  “Nothing simpler. I dialed her cell phone. I told her we were driving around the Midi and would love to have a drink with her when we got to Perpignan, which just happened to be today.”

  “And she didn’t think it was odd that we weren’t on the boat when they got to Saint-Raphaël?”

  “Not at all. They were so anxious to get off the boat, they scampered like rats fleeing a sinking ship the second they touched the dock. She even apologized to me for her rudeness in leaving in such a rush and not saying good-bye.”

  Alexandre lost interest in the subjects of boats and police work and settled into his mode of luncheon raconteur, waxing on about Languedoc-Roussillon and Perpignan. Capucine had known it was the last town on the coast before you reached Spain, but had had no idea the place was so dear to the hearts of the Catalans.

  “Indeed it is,” Alexandre said. “Perpignan is the true capital of Catalan culture. So much so that Salvador Dali maintained Perpignan was the center of the world. He even claimed that the exact center was the Perpignan train station and went so far as to paint a picture to that effect. Apparently, every time he sat in the waiting room, he experienced a tempest of creativity and got all his best ideas there.”

  “I’ll have to give that a try,” Capucine said.