Death of a Chef

by Alexander Campion

  Chéri shook her head, with an exaggerated frown of tolerant incredulity.

  “As to the other murder, the forensic examination of the trunk in which Chef Brault’s body was discovered indicated that it had been dragged twice over cobblestones, once empty and once laden. That strongly suggested you had gone down to Arnaud Boysson’s Vuitton stand, dragged the empty trunk to your stand, stuffed Brault inside, shot him, and then dragged it back to Boysson’s stand. On top of that, Brault’s clothing was put on sale at the Puces the day after the murder, another indication he had been killed there.”

  Capucine paused, eyes fixed on Chéri.

  “That’s it? That’s all the evidence you have?” Chéri said, beaming. “It’s all entirely circumstantial. No prosecutor would even think of going to court with that.”

  “My dear, your knowledge of French criminal proceedings seems to come entirely from American TV shows. In France circumstantial evidence is entirely admissible if there is enough of it. And there is more than enough here to secure both convictions. But even if it weren’t, there are also two trump cards.”

  Chéri’s self-assurance wilted slightly at the edges.

  “The first ties you inextricably to Roque’s murder. The way you did it was clever. After your meeting with him, you hung around until he and his wife left the house—he must have mentioned he was going out to dinner—and jimmied your way back in with a credit card. There were telltale marks on the door frame. Then you went to the basement, figured out which was the fuse for the lights in the front part of the ground floor, took that fuse out, and screwed it into a slot that had held a fuse for double its amperage, probably the one for the kitchen. The fuse immediately blew out, and you replaced it in its original slot. Then you removed all but one of the spare fuses with the right amperage and poured a jugful of water on the floor in front of the fuse box. So far, so good, but then you got far too clever.

  “You needed a nice conductive substance to make sure the person who screwed in the replacement fuse would get a lethal shock. So you rubbed it with conductive gel for an electrical muscle toner. You thought you were in luck because you had a small plastic bottle of the stuff in your purse, probably left over from your last trip. I’m sure you always take your toner with you when you travel. It was a clever thing to do, and it worked perfectly. But our forensics group was able to identify the manufacturer of the gel—Slendertone. A brand that’s not distributed in France. And you were careless enough to leave the bottle in your medicine cabinet, where my officers just found it a few minutes ago, as they were going through your apartment.”

  “Utterly ridiculous. You have no proof that I even saw Firmin that day.”

  “Of course I do. You were so proud of yourself, you got careless. On your way home, you stopped for gas and a bite to eat at the Dordives service station on the A6 autoroute, twenty miles away from Châteauneuf-sur-Loire. It’s the first service station on the autoroute. We have your credit card records. You paid for your meal at ten twenty-two and your gas at ten forty-one. Those times are perfectly consistent with the timing of the crime.”

  The vertical creases in Chéri’s brow deepened.

  “And your other trump card?”

  “That one’s even better. Your accomplice is in the next room, signing a confession,” Capucine fibbed.

  Without a word Capucine and Isabelle left the room.

  They went into the big staff room, to a long table populated with TV monitors. From three different angles Chéri could be seen fidgeting, darting nervous glances at the fake one-way mirror, hoping to catch a glance of the people who were examining her. Capucine left Isabelle at her task and stepped into a room identical to the other except that the carpeting was a slightly different shade of blue.

  Thierry Brissac-Vanté sat in the uncomfortable folding chair, cowering under Momo’s glower.

  “I nabbed him coming out of that club on the Champs-Élysées,” Momo said. “Funny thing, when I put the collar on him and took out the cuffs, the three fat cats he was with bolted real fast. You see that stuff in the projects, but I’ve never seen it in the Eighth.”

  When he recognized Capucine, Brissac-Vanté rearranged his features into a carefully constructed mélange of upper-class arrogance and a convalescent’s rightful indignation, topped off with a gratin of “Do you know who I am?” petulance.

  “You’re under arrest for the murder of Jean-Louis Brault.”

  “That’s absurd. I demand to see my lawyer.”

  “It’s too late for that. Your accomplice, Chéri Lecomte, is also under arrest. She’s in the next room and has just confirmed your guilt.”

  Amateurishly, Brissac-Vanté mimed incredulity. Acting was not his forte.

  “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  With her foot Capucine pulled a pale blue–cushioned wooden chair into the prescribed position, forty-five degrees and three feet away from the suspect’s knee, and sat down.

  “Let me share with you what Mademoiselle Lecomte has already confessed. Feel free to correct the details.”

  Capucine outlined the two murders as she had done for Chéri. Brissac-Vanté was a considerably less skilled poker player than she was. By the end of her narrative, his brow was damp and his eyes were wide with panic.

  Still, even though it was done with a lack of conviction, he attempted a riposte. “All you’ve got is the confession of this hysterical arriviste woman, whom I don’t even know. The rest is just conjecture.”

  Capucine looked at him with a stony face for several long beats. By the end, he squirmed out of her gaze.

  “If you don’t know her, how do you know she’s an arriviste ?”

  Brissac-Vanté’s lips thinned, and the dampness of his brow grew into beads of sweat.

  “For openers, Mademoiselle Lecomte alerted me to your kidnapping. She called me, claiming she was your mistress and you had stood her up for a date and then had disappeared. She suspected foul play. She was at her wit’s end. It was very moving.”

  Brissac-Vanté attempted a snort of derision, but it came out as a dry cough.

  “We also know that she called you repeatedly after your return, but you refused to pick up for her. Then there’s the fact that both of the murdered men had received financing from you. On top of that, our forensics department determined beyond any doubt that the forged faïence was made at Châteauneuf.”

  His face still contorted by worry, Brissac-Vanté shook his head, either in derision or in an attempt to dispel the nightmare. He started to protest, but his throat was too dry for the words to come out. His eyes dropped to the floor.

  “But that’s not all. There’s also a real pièce à conviction. After you were released by your kidnappers, the police kept up its investigation.”

  Brissac-Vanté looked up sharply.

  “Particularly the financial part. Early on we discovered that you have three accounts in the Isle of Jersey branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Very conveniently, you can access your account over the telephone using only number codes, no names. While you were being held by the kidnappers, we monitored those accounts only to see if any payments had been made out of them. There weren’t any. But after your release, we intensified our efforts and discovered that wire transfers for significant amounts had been made into them at periodic intervals. We looked into those. A good number came from Sotheby’s. We checked with them. You had been auctioning off faïence. Sotheby’s was very cooperative. The pieces you were selling were identical to some of the pieces in Chef Brault’s collection.”

  Brissac-Vanté’s head fell into his hands, supported by his elbows on his knees.

  Capucine knew full well she was at a crucial turning point. She had only the thinnest case. As she had spooled out her pieces of evidence, they had sounded so hollow, Capucine was amazed Brissac-Vanté was so cowed. This was very clear broth for a procureur. Obtaining a full confession was critical.

  “Your only hope is to cooperate. If you give me all the deta
ils, the fact that you have helped the police may dispose the judges favorably toward you. That might make a big difference.”

  Brissac-Vanté looked at Capucine with almost childlike hopefulness.

  “It was all that awful woman’s fault. It started because I wanted to help Chef Brault. He was completely neurotic about his stupid hotel. It got to him so badly, his cooking was suffering. He couldn’t get bank loans for it, and my wife certainly would have said no to any further investments with him. And then Roque came to see me. He wanted breathing money. The Faïence was doing all right, but he felt he was always a day late and a euro short on everything. He wanted our investment syndicate to cut him another big tranche of debt. But that wasn’t going to happen, either.

  “I mentioned this to Chéri during a dinner one night. Okay, okay, I did have a short fling with her for a few weeks, but it was no big deal, and she certainly doesn’t count as a mistress. Let’s be perfectly clear on that. Anyway, she cooked up the idea. Brault was going to supply the pieces, and Roque would copy them in his plant at night. That suited everyone right down to the ground. Brault would keep his collection and get some money, and Roque would get some money while working with his hands and fucking the capitalists. It was great for everybody.

  “That is, until that stupid bitch double-crossed everyone. She started keeping a few of Brault’s originals and slipping him forgeries. Just one or two at the beginning and then maybe as many as ten or fifteen a year. The problem was the originals. Chéri could only sell lesser pieces at her stand. The quality stuff needed to be sold at auction or in top-quality antique stores. There was a limit to what could be sold in France, so she talked me into taking them to London to put them up at auction there.” He paused to look at Capucine to see how she was receiving the story. Capucine smiled encouragingly.

  “I’m sorry to say I found that the extra cash came in handy. All my accounts are joint with my wife. It’s true I had a girlfriend or two. And I also like to play the occasional game of backgammon. I’m sure you can understand that. Then the inevitable happened. Brault noticed that one of the pieces that had come back from Roque was a fake. He figured the whole scam out immediately and called me, completely hysterical.” Brissac-Vanté paused, realizing he’d got ahead of his story. “You see, they didn’t know each other. Brault would put the pieces in the trunk of my car when I went to have dinner at Chez La Mère Denis, and then a month or so later he’d retrieve them from my trunk when I went back again. Do you understand ?”

  Capucine nodded.

  “So one day Brault calls me up, berserk. I’d been stealing from his collection. He went on and on, raving completely out of control. So I say, ‘Look, the woman who works with me on this and I are going to take you out to dinner, and we’ll talk it all over, and everything’s going to be just great.’ And he buys that, or at least he calms down somewhat. So Chéri and I take him to this restaurant in the Twentieth. This place used to be a hole-in-the-wall, but when we get there, the crowd seems to be more upmarket than what it was, and I’m worried we’ll run into someone we know.

  “Dinner was not too congenial, to say the least. Brault starts drinking and getting more and more pissed off and talking louder and louder, and people are looking over at us and staring and all. It was turning into a very bad scene. So Chéri gets this great idea. ‘Let’s go over to my stand at the Puces, and we can discuss this quietly,’ she tells Brault. At this point Brault is already completely sloshed. He’d nod off at the table and then wake up, ranting. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to get out of that damn restaurant.” Brissac-Vanté paused, exhausted.

  “Would you like some coffee or some water?”

  “A coffee would be very welcome.”

  Capucine nodded at Momo, who stepped to the door to mutter at the uniformed brigadier standing guard.

  Coffee in hand, Brissac-Vanté looked hard at Capucine. “It all went badly downhill from there. I drove Brault in my car, and Chéri followed in his. When we got to her stand, we sat around, drinking this really shitty cognac she had. Brault got completely out of control, taking out all his frustrations on us—not just the faïence scam, but his worries about his stars, his cooking, his future, his failed life. He was going to turn us in, we were going to do big time in jail, and we were going to pay for what we’d done to him. In the middle of a rant he falls out of his chair, completely passed out. I have to say I was well beyond buzzed myself. I was ready to call it quits.

  “But no. Chéri gets up, says she’ll be right back, and returns dragging this big Vuitton trunk and a shotgun, which she said she’d found in the trunk of Brault’s car. She tells me to take Brault’s clothes off, which I do. Then she opens the Vuitton trunk and tells me to grab Brault under the arms while she picks up his legs. We stuff him in the damn thing. I figured it was some kind of joke to teach him a lesson and she was going to lock him in there until he’d slept it off.

  “But then she rams the shotgun between his legs. Brault wakes up and struggles desperately to get out of the trunk. She holds him and pulls the trigger.” He paused and shook his head. “It was unbelievable. I couldn’t hear, my ears were ringing so loudly. Half of Brault’s face was gone. There was blood all over the inside of the trunk. It was a nightmare. Worse than a nightmare.” Brissac-Vanté fell silent, horrified by the enormity of the story he was telling.

  “She looks at me. ‘Problem solved,’ she says. ‘Help me get this back to where it goes,’ she says. So the two of us drag the trunk back down to this other stand, dump Brault’s clothes in a Dumpster, and get the hell out of there. Chéri gets into Brault’s car and drives off, and I get into mine and go home.”

  There was a long, flat silence. Brissac-Vanté put his head back in his hands. Capucine said nothing, waiting to see if there was more to come.

  “Will I go to jail?”

  “Yes, for a while, but with some luck you may be prosecuted only as an accomplice. You need to sign the printout of the confession you’ve just made, and when you come up in front of the prosecutor, be as open with him as you’ve been with me. Don’t try to outsmart him. Do you understand?”

  Brissac-Vanté nodded dumbly. He was clearly far more relieved at the absolution from his confession than at the prospect of a short prison sentence.

  CHAPTER 44

  The door to Capucine’s office flew open. Isabelle stormed in, her face black with rage. She leaned over Capucine’s desk, hands braced on the edge, shoulders spread, muscles of her back bunched. The multiple studs in her face glistened. Capucine suspected there might be one or two new ones.

  “Half of my files on the Brault-Roque case have vanished off the face of my computer,” Isabelle said through clenched teeth.

  “I noticed that myself,” Capucine said serenely.

  Isabelle took no heed. “Roque has disappeared completely. It’s all gone. Our case notes. All the PVs we collected. Even the part of the transcript of the Lecomte interview that dealt with Roque has disappeared.”

  “I know.”

  Isabelle ignored Capucine’s comment. “I had a hunch. So I called the magistrates’ hall—one of the girls who works over there is a pal—and got them to send me a copy of Lecomte’s signed confession, which the procureur is going to submit to the judges when he presents his case. And you know what?” She stopped, demanding an answer to her rhetorical question.

  “What?”

  “It’s been doctored. The part about Roque’s murder has been taken out. All that’s left is her confession of having murdered Brault.”

  “We were lucky to get her to confess to that. I thought she’d stonewall us to the end.”

  “Commissaire, how can this not piss you off? An entire case has vanished into thin air. Poof.” Isabelle snapped her fingers.

  “I suspected that might happen. I spoke to the procureur yesterday. He intends to prosecute Chéri for the premeditated murder of Brault. The premeditation part struck me as a bit contrived since the murder was obviously a spur-of-t
he-moment decision, heavily fueled by alcohol. But he’s going for a life sentence without the possibility of parole, and he needs premeditation for that.”

  Isabelle stared at her, throbbing with anger.

  “And he’s only asking for a very light sentence for Brissac-Vanté, building his case around a picture of a manipulated, weak-willed, dead-drunk playboy who was tricked into becoming an unwilling accomplice to murder. The way he’ll present it will make Chéri look even more guilty.”

  Isabelle thrummed, champing to hear about the Roque case.

  “At the end of my chat with him there was an awkward moment, as if the procureur was daring me to ask about the Roque case. Which I didn’t.”

  Livid with rage, Isabelle flexed her shoulder muscles, looking for someone to punch.

  “Let it go, Isabelle. You can’t serve a life sentence twice. When you get right down to it, what difference does it really make?”

  At eleven that night, as they watched the evening news, Capucine disentangled herself from Alexandre to grab her cell phone as it vibrated its way across the coffee table.

  “Salut, Jacques.”

  “I thought this would be a good time to call. I’m sure you need a break from the strain of applying CPR to your corpulent consort’s nether regions. I’ll call back later if you were having even a glimmer of success.”

  “No, Jacques, right now is perfect.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. It must be an uphill climb for you. But cheer up. I have good news. You have an important meeting at the Hôtel de Beauvau tomorrow morning at eight thirty. I’m to deliver you myself. I’ll pick you up at eight. Now, get back to work. It’s the eager bird that catches the flaccid worm. Isn’t that the phrase?”

  The next morning Jacques refused to elaborate, rattling on with silly facetiousness in the confines of the miniscule Smart Car.

  It was only as they swept under the elegantly curlicued gold-plated decoration on the enormous iron gates of the Ministry of the Interior that Jacques made a comment on the upcoming meeting. “If you play your cards right, this could be a big step for you. Who knows, you might even get a little red ribbon to wear on your lapel. Just think how happy that would make Tante Coralie. A Légion d’Honneur medal, just like Daddy’s.” He was still braying his laugh as he handed the toy-sized car over to the voiturier.