Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery)

by Alexander Campion

  He went on. Capucine didn’t listen. She realized she was being conscripted into the ranks of senior police officers who were also government toadies. Her blood boiled. Bufo misunderstood her reaction.

  “I can see you are concerned, Commissaire. Put your mind at rest. The shell casing from your gun is long gone, consigned to the oubliettes of the administration, from whence it will never return.”

  Capucine felt her hand strain to grab an ornate inkwell on the desk and hurl it into Bufo’s flaccid face. At great expense she managed to construct a simulacrum of a smile. She rose.

  “Monsieur le Conseiller, thank you for your time. This has been an extremely illuminating meeting.”

  CHAPTER 40

  “They’re here,” the uniformed receptionist announced.

  “Capitaine Bourlon has the suspect in interrogation room A.”

  Capucine put her coffee down and walked down the hall to one of her two interrogation rooms. Both of the rooms had been redecorated in motel pastel blandness when Capucine had taken over the brigade. Capitaine Bourlon sat behind a vaguely Scandinavian blond-wood table; a uniformed brigadier stood in the far corner. Dominique sat on a hard-edged folding metal chair, chosen for its lack of comfort.

  He attempted to stand up when he caught sight of Capucine, but the brigadier pushed him back down.

  “Capucine,” Dominique said. “What am I doing here? Am I under arrest?”

  “Not for the moment,” Capucine said. “You’re about to be interviewed about your involvement in the murder of Nathalie Martin.”

  “What are you talking about? You know I had nothing to do with that. I read in the paper that Serge had been convicted. This is ridiculous.” His pitch rose.

  “Let’s start at the beginning. You had been having sex with Nathalie.”

  “Yeah, right, with my wife on board. Capucine, how do you dream these things up?”

  “I dream them up from DNA analysis. There was semen on the spinnaker bag in Nathalie’s cabin and trace deposits of semen in her anus. Both match your DNA perfectly.” Capucine stared him down with a long stony look. She told herself she had become a convincing fibber. The police had no samples of Dominique’s DNA. Of course, before the interview was over, a blood sample would be taken from Dominique, and Capucine had not the slightest doubt the match would be perfect.

  “All right, okay, so I did have a little fling with her. She was available. And I definitely wasn’t getting any from my soon to be ex-wife. All that skinny bitch cares about is her job. If you’re not getting it at home, you get it where you can, right?” He stopped. His brows furrowed.

  “Anyway, the fact that I was humping some skank doesn’t implicate me in her murder, now does it?” The words dribbled out of his mouth, damp with cynicism.

  “It gives you a motive to kill her. The night she died, you were stalking her. You were hiding in her cabin, waiting for her to come off watch so you could have another go.”

  “Wh . . . why would you think that?”

  “When I looked into her cabin while we were searching for her, I saw deep footprints impressed in her bed.”

  “That must have been Serge.”

  “No, he was passed out, sitting against the mast. It was you waiting for her.”

  “Look, this is all conjecture. There’s no evidence of anything here. I shagged the girl. Big deal. Now I want to call my lawyer so he can get me out of here. I’ve had enough of this crap.”

  “This is a murder investigation. You have no right to have a lawyer at present. You’ll be able to speak to your lawyer only after we indict you.”

  “Capucine, look. Please listen. I haven’t done anything. You’ve got to believe me.”

  Capucine gave him her stoniest look. There was a very long silence.

  “All right, I’ll tell you. I was in Nathalie’s cabin. I was waiting for her. Angélique had been on my back all day. You saw that. I was horny. I had it in for Angélique. I needed a good pop to calm me down. What’s so bad about that?”

  “Dominique, be very careful. Remember that lying to the police is a crime in and of itself.” Capucine paused to let this sink in. “Did you see Serge kill Nathalie?”

  “N—” There was a fifteen-second pause, and then in a tiny, almost inaudible voice, he said, “Yes.” Another pause, then, in a slightly louder voice, he added, “Maybe. I’m not really sure what I saw. It was a very dark night. You remember, right? All of a sudden Nathalie appeared right above where I was standing. And she slips her foulie pants down, and I’m saying to myself, ‘This is a great view’ and ‘Maybe I can talk her into coming down for a quickie.’ But just as I’m about to open the hatch, I see someone walk up to her. I’m pretty sure it was Serge, but it was really dark. And I hear some talking, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying through the hatch. Then I see whoever it was lean forward. I assumed he was trying to kiss her, and then I realized there was only one person up there. Nathalie had gone. That’s the truth, Capucine. I swear it.”

  “What else did you see?”

  “After a few seconds the person left my field of view. Then, a few minutes later, someone came up and started yelling for Nathalie. I think that must have been you.”

  “And why didn’t you mention this at the time? If you’d given the alarm right away, we might even have saved her.”

  “Come on, Capucine. How was I going to do that? Tell everyone on the boat that I was waiting in her cabin to shag her?”

  Capucine looked at Capitaine Bourlon. “Non-assistance à personne en danger. Refusal to give assistance to a person in danger.” They both knew the term so well, there was no need to articulate it. In France it was very serious.

  Bourlon nodded.

  “What?” Dominique asked sharply.

  “Refusing assistance is a very serious business. It’s going to have to go in the transcript of testimony, which you’re going to sign when we finish.”

  “Now, wait just a minu—”

  Capucine held up her hand to silence him.

  “What did you do next?”

  “Nothing. I figured everyone would come up on deck to look for Nathalie, so I just hung out and then went running around with the gang.”

  Capucine looked at Bourlon. “Fingerprints.”

  Bourlon nodded, stood up, and left the room. He reappeared almost instantly, followed by a uniformed officer carrying a long, flat metal box. Dominique recoiled in his chair.

  “Don’t worry. We’re not going to hurt you. It’s an electronic fingerprint reader. You won’t even get your fingers dirty.”

  The officer rolled Dominique’s fingers one by one over the long glass rectangle on the box’s top. When he was finished, he looked at Capucine. “Commissaire, it won’t take me longer than five minutes.”

  In fact, it took seven minutes for the officer to return and hand Capucine a file. “Eighteen points of comparison. Three more than needed.” He left the room.

  Capucine opened the file, flipped through the pages, and smiled a tight smile at Bourlon, who smiled thinly back.

  Capucine looked stonily at Dominique and drummed on the file.

  “Dominique, coupled with the crime you’ve already admitted, this is going to send you to prison for twenty years.”

  Dominique blanched.

  “I want you to be perfectly honest with me. At some point earlier in the day you stole my pistol and used it to shoot at Nathalie that night.”

  “No, no, never. I’d never shoot anyone. Never.”

  “When the Italian police searched the boat, they found a shell casing in the scuppers of the bow area.” She handed Dominique a page-size glossy photo. “This is the shell casing. It has your fingerprints on it. No court in the country would fail to believe that you shot at her. You certainly had the motive. You had just seen your lover kissing a rival.”

  “Capucine, wait. Wait. Please. Let me explain.”

  Capucine said nothing.

  “I took your gun after Nathalie had gone
overboard. After. Do you understand?”

  “Why did you take it?”

  There was a painful silence.

  “Why did you take it?”

  Dominique looked wildly around the room, scrabbling for a way out. He realized he had just painted himself into a corner.

  “Look, Capucine, you’ve got to believe me. I didn’t do it for myself. I . . . I did it because I was told to—” Dominique cut himself off. He realized his corner had become even tighter.

  “Who told you to?”

  Another long silence. More panicked searching of the walls.

  “My uncle.”

  “Your uncle?”

  “Well, he’s not really my uncle. He’s the husband of my mother’s cousin. He’s a very important man. He has a very senior job in a ministry. He knows I’m always broke because that horrible bitch wife of mine doesn’t let me have any money, and every now and then he helps me out. He’s a good guy.”

  “Which ministry?”

  Dominique sagged in relief. They were going to talk about the uncle and not what had happened on the boat.

  “The Ministry of the Interior.”

  “And what does he do there?”

  “He’s the personal assistant to a cabinet member. It’s a very important position,” Dominique said, the pride showing through.

  “Which cabinet member?”

  “A man called Bufo.” This was great. The boat was going away from the story. Far away.

  “And he told you to do this while you were in Nathalie’s cabin in the middle of the ocean?”

  Dominique laughed. Things were definitely coming back his way. He was getting off the hook.

  “He texted me. On my BlackBerry.”

  Or maybe he wasn’t all that off the hook.

  “He texted you just like that?”

  “No, you don’t understand. A week before we left, there was a big Sunday lunch at my uncle’s house in Versailles. I told them all about our trip, who was going, where we were going. Stuff like that. They have a huge place with a beautiful garden. I like to go there to paint.”

  Capucine stopped him with an open hand and then made a rolling gesture with her index finger to get him back to his narrative.

  “So we talked about our trip to Corsica. A couple of days later, my uncle called me and told me to text him every day and tell him about the boat trip, especially all the stuff that happened. If I did that, he’d slip me five thousand euros when we got back. So while I was waiting for everyone to come on deck so I could get out of Nathalie’s cabin, I did what I was supposed to do and texted him. He texted back and told me to find your gun, shoot it once, and stuff the shell into one of the holes in the scuppers. And that’s exactly what I did.

  “Remember, I hadn’t really seen anything. I was just waiting for Nathalie, and all of a sudden she wasn’t there anymore. So I hopped out of the cuddy and milled around with everyone else, coming and going, looking into all the cabins. I went into yours and found your gun in the top drawer of your chest of drawers. I took it and went up to the bow to shoot it off, like my uncle said. There was a lot of thunder, but I still didn’t want to risk making too much noise, so I grabbed this jacket that was up there and wrapped it around the gun to silence it and catch the shell. You know, like they do in the movies. But as I was doing that, the goddamn gun went off all by itself.”

  The folly of leaving a bullet in the chamber, Capucine told herself.

  Dominique mistook her silence for disapproval.

  “It really did go off by itself. It really did. I’m not making this up. So I unwrapped the jacket and somehow managed to drop the shell. It disappeared. I have no idea where it went. So I wrapped the jacket around the gun and fired a second. That time I managed to hang on to the shell, which I stuffed into a hole in the scuppers, like I was supposed to.”

  He fell silent, exhausted with the effort of catharsis.

  “Then what?”

  “I stuck the jacket into the railing of the bow pulpit, put your pistol in my pocket, and went below. Everybody was listening to Serge on the radio, so I just ducked into your cabin and replaced your pistol. I swear, Capucine, that’s all I did. You’ve got to believe me. I had nothing to do with Nathalie’s death. You’ve got to believe me.”

  The uniformed receptionist stuck his head into the room and made a gesture with extended thumb and little finger, imitating a phone. Capucine had a call important enough to warrant an interruption of an interrogation. She went out into the hallway.

  “Juge d’Instruction Maistre’s secretary is on the phone. She asked me to disturb you. She said the juge will have a twenty-minute break between two meetings and she’d like to see you.”

  “When?” Capucine asked.

  “In half an hour.”

  “Tell her I’ll be there.”

  Capucine returned to the interrogation room and spoke to Capitaine Bourlon. “Put him in the detention cell. Something’s come up. I’ll be back in an hour. We can finish the interview then.”

  “Are you going to lock me up? But I told you I didn’t do anything. I swear,” Dominique said.

  Capucine drove with the pulsing blue beacon on her dash and the siren wailing its pam-pon-pam-pon. There was no possibility of thought in the din.

  In fifteen minutes Capucine was facing Inès across her desk.

  “You called me the afternoon of Serge’s conviction, but I wasn’t able to take your call. I didn’t want to leave you hanging. What was the matter?” Inès asked.

  “An état d’âme. A state of mind. But I’m over it.”

  “Excellent. So you’ve filed the Nathalie case away?”

  “Not at all. I’ve just arrested Dominique Berthier.”

  Under her foolish red frames, Inès’s eyes smoldered.

  “Dominique confessed that he fired the shots from my gun in an attempt to incriminate me for the murder of Nathalie. It seems he was acting under the instruction of a certain Monsieur Bufo, a big shot in the Ministry of the Interior.”

  “I know who Bufo is,” Inès said. She glared at Capucine and traced patterns on the desk with her index finger. “And your plan?” Inès asked.

  “Indict him. Have a procureur prosecute him. It’s a serious crime. In fact, it’s at least seven serious crimes. Among others, an attempt to incriminate someone, fabricating false evidence, several counts of lying to the police of two nations, and the pièce de résistance, refusal to assist a person in danger, who quite possibly died as a result of his indifference. He actually saw Nathalie go overboard. What would he get for all of that?”

  “At least twenty years, if well prosecuted. But it won’t go to court.”

  Her face like flint, Capucine said nothing.

  “I suspected Bufo had one of his fat fingers in this,” Inès said. “He wasn’t named directly, but I had a hunch it might be him. I understand he doesn’t like you. I don’t know what you did to him, but apparently, he would be delighted to use you as a scapegoat.”

  “You seem far more informed than I am.”

  “Instructed is the right word. That’s why the position is called a juge d’instruction.” She smiled at her joke. “Sometimes I am instructed by the police, and sometimes by others.” She continued to trace patterns on the desk.

  “Capucine, you’re being silly because you’re angry. You’re trying to go up against something you can’t go up against. It’s as foolish as throwing rocks at a herd of elephants. They won’t even notice, but in the unlikely event they do, the consequences could be catastrophic.”

  “Elephants?”

  “The denizens of the core of the power structure. They’re as powerful and indestructible as elephants. And they take notice of little animals like you and me only when we can be of use.”

  “But you’ve devoted your life to bringing down these rogue elephants.”

  “Hardly. I only go after small game. I want results.” She drummed the desk again, then smiled. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m a hypocr
ite. But you’re wrong. Sometimes the elephants actually help you.”

  “How were you helped?”

  “Let’s not waste time on something you’ll read about in tomorrow’s paper. Suffice it to say, I obtained a full dossier on Tottinguer. More than enough to prepare an unbeatable court case.”

  “From Bufo?”

  “Good Lord, no. How naïve you can be, Capucine. I received it with the good graces of the senior partner of our largest law firm, who happens to be the biggest and possibly most powerful elephant of the herd.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “Nothing at all, really. I merely promised not to throw rocks. I promised not to be as foolish as you seem to want to be. You see, it really was a very good deal, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not sure I understand. I learned that Nathalie was an occasional operative for the DST. It turns out that Dominique is an outlier in Bufo’s family. I assumed that this was all a plot to put you out of the way and have me blamed for it.”

  “You’re absolutely right about that. And that’s the way it would have happened if I didn’t have a benefactor. A benefactor who acted in his own interest, not mine, but a benefactor nonetheless.”

  Capucine looked at her blankly, lost.

  “Capucine, I have two words for you. Jade pendant. Does that answer your question?” Inès stood up. “I have an interview coming up. One I’ve been waiting a long time for. And one last thing before you go. Let me be perfectly clear. You have no case whatsoever against Dominique. No procureur in Paris would even look at the thing.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Capucine stormed out of Inès’s office, punched the elevator button incessantly until the elevator cab arrived, then accelerated her car in bursts, screeching to a stop when she was held up by traffic. At one point, after a stop so violent she skidded sideways, the driver of the car in front, a middle-aged man with a comb-over, shook his fist at her. Irate, Capucine clapped the blue police beacon on her dash and flipped on the siren, smirking as traffic scurried out of her way.