“Of course, when we were still young, you know, he would claim his rights as a husband more frequently than I thought a man ever could. He didn’t care if I wanted to or not, and he was always very rough. Many times he made me bleed, and if I told him to stop, then he really would hit me, and not just a gifle—a little slap—like when I had done something wrong. I was very glad when he grew too old for that, believe me.” She crossed herself, glancing at the crucifix, and then laughed, but this time with a note of heavy irony.
“What about his friends, the people he saw, his life when he wasn’t here?”
“Mademoiselle, you know men. He only saw his friends at the café. How could I know them? Decent women don’t go to cafés. Of course, nowadays they seem to be filled with these young hussies all tarted up with makeup. What’s the world coming to? And, of course, he went hunting in the winter and fishing in the summer, like all men do. It’s not a woman’s place to know her man’s friends. I suppose they all worked with him at the élevage. They must have. Half the men in the village work there.”
“Do you know if he had any enemies or if anyone wanted to see him dead?”
“I’m sure he had enemies. All men do. As to seeing him dead, I don’t know about that, other than me, of course.” She laughed an almost carefree chuckle but suddenly became serious, as if an unpleasant thought had occurred to her.
“So it wasn’t true, what Capitaine Dallemagne said about you and the taxes?”
“Capitaine Dallemagne came to see you?”
“Just the other day. He asked me almost the same questions you did about Lucien. And as he was leaving, he told me you worked for the fisc, the tax agency, and you were going to try to take my inheritance away. But I knew that couldn’t be true. He’s a jealous one, he is, that Capitaine Dallemagne. These flics, they’re all the same. Oh, pardon, mademoiselle. They say you’re a flic, too. Can that be true? I don’t know what to believe anymore.” She crossed herself again, darting an even more reverent glance at the crucifix.
“My dear Bebette. I’m now a commissaire in the Police Judiciaire in Paris. I have nothing at all to do with taxes, thank God.” Capucine started to cross herself and nipped the gesture in the bud. The habit was infectious. Get a grip, she told herself.
CHAPTER 28
As subtly as a face aging, the cloakroom had morphed. If before it had been merely the stage for a comic interlude, with perhaps a secondary role as a portal into Capucine’s childhood and early adolescence, it had progressively revealed its own genius loci and become a vital sanctuary from the present time.
Behind the closed door, now a universally recognized sign at Maulévrier that she was not to be disturbed under any circumstances, Capucine picked up the receiver of the telephone, ancient even in the world of rotary dial models, and laboriously dialed Loïc Vienneau’s home number.
“Allô,” Vienneau answered anxiously.
“Allô, Loïc. It’s me, Capucine. Good morning,” Capucine said, trying hard to project a warm smile down the line.
“Do you have any news?” Vienneau’s voice was just a shade below a shout.
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t. I was calling you about something else.”
“I got through to her,” Vienneau said. “It took some doing, but I did it! I tried all yesterday and kept getting her sister, who wouldn’t put me through and who wound up becoming sharp with me. So I tried a little trick this morning. I waited until I knew her sister had left for work and borrowed my financial director’s cell phone. You know how all the cell phones have the same prefix—oh-six?” He paused, seeming to actually want a confirmation for the obvious truism.
“Yes, I did know that, Loïc.”
“Good. So I called her sister’s apartment, and she picked up, not knowing who it was.” Capucine was astonished at how childlike Vienneau had become.
“And what did Marie-Christine have to say?” Capucine asked.
“That’s just it. She didn’t want to talk to me. She says she needs time to herself. Can you imagine!”
“So then what did you do?” Capucine had a sinking feeling as if trying to put a drunk dinner guest into a taxi at three in the morning.
“I called our doctor in Rouen to discuss Marie-Christine’s condition. It was a disappointing conversation. He said the same thing you did, to leave her alone and let her come to grips with her problems. I don’t understand this. What’s wrong with everyone? Why can’t they see what’s happening to Marie-Christine? She’s obviously not well—”
Capucine cut him off. “Loïc, I was calling to ask your advice.”
“My advice?”
“Yes, I need to find out who Lucien Bellec’s friends were at the élevage.”
“Lucien Bellec . . . oh, of course, the poor man who was shot. The person who would know about that is Pierre Martel, one of the foremen. He’s the one who showed you around, remember? He knows everyone and everything that’s going on. Just go to the front gate and ask for him. I’d go with you, but I have a meeting with the bankers in Rouen this morning. Now, listen, do you think you could call the doctor yourself and—”
Capucine rang off with the strong feeling that Vienneau was probably still blabbing into the phone after it went dead.
Summoned by the security guard, Martel arrived quickly. Recognizing Capucine, he adopted the classic stance of male aggressiveness, legs spread, thumbs hooked into his belt, hands circling his genitalia. He stared hard at her, daring her to speak.
“Monsieur Martel, I wonder if I could ask you a few questions about Lucien Bellec.”
“You’re not going to ask me squat. I already gave my deposition to the flics, so you can fuck off.”
“You already gave your deposition?”
“You deaf or something? That’s what I just said. The gendarmes came around the other day, and I said what I had to say, and now I’m done with you guys.”
“The gendarmes came here to ask you questions about Lucien Bellec?”
“You got it. Capitaine Dallemagne himself. I told him what he wanted to know and he said I wouldn’t have to answer any other questions, no matter who else showed up, ’cuz he was the boss.”
“Did Capitaine Dallemagne also ask you about Clément Devere?”
“I’m not going to tell you what he asked me, but I’ll tell you what he said. He said you were a Paris cop who had no authority down here. He said you were snooping around, hoping to find someone who was cheating on their tax returns. He said you were looking to make trouble for the élevage. He didn’t exactly tell me to shut my trap in front of you, but I ain’t that dumb that I don’t know which side is up and which side is down.” He widened his stance and hooked his thumbs deeper into his belt. “Time for you to get off the property, or I’ll call the gendarmes.” He sneered, delighted with his perceived ascendency.
With a resounding clunk the penny dropped. Ever efficient, someone from the DCPJ must have notified the gendarmerie about Capucine’s assignment to the Saint-Nicolas incidents the minute the staffing committee broke up. And the gendarmerie must have sent some sort of communiqué immediately to Dallemagne. And he had not wasted a second trying to beat her to the punch by a couple of days. Well, at least it had gotten him off his butt and on the move.
CHAPTER 29
Apparently, an uninterrupted breakfast was something that was just not going to happen at Maulévrier. Yet again, just as Capucine had dropped a lump of sugar in her café au lait, Gauvin crept up to tell her in his usual whisper charged with suppressed excitement that the “police were on the line.” Maybe the solution was just to have Gauvin serve her breakfast in the cloakroom and be done with it.
It was the receptionist at the commissariat who announced that Isabelle wanted to talk to Capucine and was going into her office with David so they could use her speakerphone. As she waited, she put her legs on the table and tipped the chair back. She missed Isabelle admiring her calves and David her shoes. Of course, there wouldn’t have been all that much to c
heck out that morning. She was wearing an old pair of tweed trousers; a long, drooping, belted tan cashmere cardigan; and clunky square-heeled walking shoes. All very un-Paris and un–Police Judiciaire. The cardigan would have made wearing her service pistol impossible.
Isabelle’s strident voice burst into her reflections. “Commissaire. Commissaire! Are you there?” Then, “Merde, David, this fucking thing doesn’t work.”
“Yes, it does, Isabelle. I can hear you perfectly. You don’t have to shout. Hi, David! So what’s going on?”
“There’s been another one.”
“Another one, what? A Belle episode?”
“Exactly. This time she ripped off Jean-Marie Lavallé.”
“You mean the movie actor? The one who did all those cape and sword films in the sixties and seventies? I didn’t think he was still around.”
“He is. Totally. He’s only in his seventies. Healthy as a horse. Just maybe a little less rich.” The two brigadiers’ snickering sounded like static on the line.
Capucine ached to be in the room. She missed Paris very much indeed.
“So he has this killer apartment on the quai de Montebello,” Isabelle continued. “You know, just across the river from Notre Dame. There’s this long terrace, and every single last room looks out over the cathedral—”
“Back up a minute. Where did she pick him up?”
“I told you.”
“No, you didn’t, Isabelle,” David said.
“Okay, asshole. Commissaire, it was at the flower and bird market. On the Ile de la Cité. The place we always used to take our sandwiches when we worked at the Quai. What I didn’t know is that they get rid of the flowers on Sundays and just sell birds.”
“Everybody in Paris knows that,” David said with disdain.
“Anyway,” Isabelle continued, “she did her fainting routine just at the end of the market, you know, where they have one of those new municipal bicycle stands, the kind where you rent the bicycle for the day and turn it in anywhere you want.”
“That sweetie must have brass balls,” David said. “You can see that spot from the windows of thirty-six fucking quai des fucking Orfèvres. I mean the entire Crim’ could have been looking down at her. She must know we’re hot after her, and she still doesn’t give a shit.”
“So, anyway,” Isabelle continued, “along comes Jean-Marie Lavallé, all slim and spry, you know, with the hair jelled back, and the open collar, and the trendy intellectual glasses with no frames, looking like he’s going off to some TV show to be totally suave and ageless—”
“Isabelle, get on with it.”
“So he finds La Belle lying on the sidewalk. It seems he’s just bought some goddamn bird at the market, something called a Chardonneret Mullet, which he explained is a goldfinch crossed with a canary, and sings more beautifully than any other bird, and just happens to be totally illegal. He wants this bird to put in his kitchen so it can sing to him when he cooks, which he says is just about the thing he likes to do most in life.”
“Sure, that’s the thing he likes most,” interjected David. Capucine could see the daggers Isabelle shot him with her look as clearly as if she had been in the room.
“So he’s walking along, swinging his little cage with his little bird chirping away, and finds La Belle napping happily and says to himself, ‘Hey, what a poor sweet thing. I’ll just take this little bit of cuteness home with me and nurse her back to health. It’ll be cool. She can keep my little bird company.’ ”
Capucine’s impatience got the better of her. “And she stays three or four days and then hoofs it, right? What did she take?”
“A small chest made of copper filigree beaten into a tortoise shell. He must have a thing about endangered species,” David said.
“It’s called Boulle marquetry,” Isabelle interjected. “The guy who cooked up the technique was someone by the name of André-Charles Boulle. He worked back in the early seventeen hundreds.”
“This wasn’t an original Boulle piece, was it? If it was, it would belong in the Louvre. It would be her biggest hit yet,” Capucine said.
“Yeah, that’s the funny part,” David said. Capucine could hear him rattling a piece of paper. “In the original procès-verbal taken down by the uniformed officer who received his initial complaint, he said it was worth twenty-five thousand euros. But when we called his insurance company, he had it listed on his policy as a copy valued at three thousand. Our guess is that he jacked up the value because there was something inside the chest and he wants the insurance company to cover that, too.”
“Like, say, a big wad of cash he needed to keep handy in case he wanted to score something fun to stick up his nose,” Isabelle added.
“But, of course, he’s not going to press charges. Oh, no. All he wants is a police statement certifying the burglary so he can hit the insurance company,” David said.
“If it really was cash,” Capucine said, “it’s interesting she took the chest as well. Look, I need you two to interview Lavallé and get a decent deposition. Also, get the best physical description you can. Focus on what she was wearing when he picked her up and if she left anything in his apartment after she left. Find out if she said anything, told any stories or whatever, that might be relevant to the investigation. We’ve got to get an arrest quickly. The press is going to have a field day with this. She’s done two celebrities in a row. We’re going to have to move fast, or we’re going to start taking major shit.”
Isabelle was put out. She obviously took this as a criticism of her performance on the case. “ ‘Get an arrest quickly!’ You’ve got to be kidding. This girl is like Fantômas. She doesn’t leave traces. She vanishes into thin air. Her scam is so perfect, her victims don’t even want to press charges.”
“There you go,” Capucine said. “Why don’t you ask Lavallé how to deal with her? His best role was Fantômas. I’m sure he’s got all sorts of insights.”
The receiver was banged down on the speakerphone. It was Capucine’s turn to have gone too far.
CHAPTER 30
Even as a child Capucine had thought the gendarmerie building was an eyesore and an affront to the countryside. The fact that she now knew it was the headquarters of the cantonal brigade didn’t do anything to raise it in her esteem. A good-sized tract had been bulldozed out of the forest halfway between Saint-Nicolas and the next village and encircled by a rough-hewn cement wall—in keeping with an architectural vogue that had lasted for all of several minutes back in the seventies. Behind the wall a futuristic glass pillbox-like structure had been erected in the middle of a vast, stark cement lot.
Inside, the gendarmerie hummed like a beehive, looking every bit the military installation it was. Gendarmes strode back and forth in crisp blue uniforms that had visibly passed a rigid inspection that morning. It was the antipode of her own commissariat. Capucine had a fond vision of her moody punk detectives slouching over their chaotic desks and asked herself for the thousandth time what on earth she was doing.
At the reception counter she presented her police card and asked a gendarme brigadier-chef for Capitaine Dallemagne. The man somehow managed to come to attention while still sitting in his seat. “Oui, Madame le Commissaire,” he said crisply and spoke inaudibly into a telephone. Within seconds a gendarme brigadier appeared and escorted her, walking so stiffly he was almost marching.
Dallemagne’s office seemed to be even more rigidly disciplined than at her last visit. A capitaine’s kepi, resplendent with silver bands, had been carefully placed in the upper-right-hand corner of the desk, the brim perfectly aligned with the edge of the desk, next to a pair of carefully smoothed brown kid gloves, also laid perfectly parallel to the edge. A single slim official blue file was set in the exact middle of the otherwise empty surface.
Capucine was reminded of Capitaine Renault’s office in Casablanca, but she doubted that this was going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Dallemagne sat stiffly, only five inches of
buttock in contact with the government-issue swivel chair. Without rising, he waved Capucine into one of the two metal seats in front of his desk.
“Madame, I believe you owe me an apology.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“As well you should. I understand you issued a formal complaint about my conduct of the two investigations we discussed. And you did this behind my back. And,” he paused and gave her a particularly malevolent look, “I have it on good authority that, having been officially rebuffed, you had the temerity to invoke your family’s contacts. And you did all this without the slightest heed to the damage it might cause my career. This is conduct unbecoming to an officer. Madame, if you were a man, I would call you a cad and invite you outside for a physical explanation. But as it is, I am simply speechless.”
Which was the last thing he was. Not only had he managed to fire two broadsides before Capucine had even opened her gun ports, but he firmly held the weather gauge. She had underestimated her enemy.
“Capitaine, this is not about careers. It’s about seeing that justice is done—”
“Well said, madame, and your interference has seriously undermined the credibility and authority of the gendarmerie in this canton. The negative consequences of that action to the pursuit of justice are impossible to calculate. What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Capitaine, I regret that you have formed this interpretation of the events. However, as it happens, I have received formal instructions from the DCPJ to take charge of these two cases and to avail myself of you and your men for assistance.”
Dallemagne looked at her fixedly for several beats, saying nothing, with no change of expression. He was definitely far better at this sort of thing than she had anticipated. Eventually, he picked up the file on the desk, opened it, and riffled the pages against his thumb and crooked forefinger.
Crime Fraiche Page 15
