Crime Fraiche

by Alexander Campion

  “Jean-Charles is fabulous in bed. Much better than Philippe. Much. Jean-Charles knows exactly how to respond to a woman’s needs. Philippe was like a freight train. It was wonderful, of course, but it was almost as if he didn’t care if you were there or not. Do you know what I mean?” she asked, looking at Capucine with alarming intentness.

  Capucine stayed the mounting tide of amatory revelations by raising a hand and asking for two more glasses of Loupiac. Happily, the waiter was of the chatty sort, and by the time he left, Marie-Christine’s élan to share her bedroom experiences had subsided.

  “So, do you think I should divorce him? Tell me the truth. Don’t hold back.”

  “Loïc?”

  “Of course Loïc.”

  Capucine paused. She had run out of foie gras and considered buttering the rest of her toast and eating that.

  “And you don’t want to try and fix it up?”

  “You’re right. You’re so right. I should try. I will try! I owe him that at the very least.”

  There was another awkward silence. Mercifully, the waiter returned with the two glasses of Loupiac, but unfortunately he noticed the tension at the table and retreated without a word.

  “But what can I do? How do you make yourself love someone? Particularly someone who doesn’t want to sleep with you.”

  “Counseling program?”

  Marie-Christine brightened. “I could do that. Definitely I would. Do you really think it could help?”

  “If you left Loïc, what would you do about the élevage ?”

  Marie-Christine sighed with relief. “That’s the one thing I’m clear about. Loïc will have it no matter what happens. I had a big fight with the man at Lazard. You know, my trust officer. He said we would sue for a majority in the company, but I told him I would never allow that. He told me it was not for me to decide, but I won’t allow it. I really won’t.”

  “It sounds like you’re moving ahead with your plans for the divorce.”

  “I’m not. I swear I’m not. Would you hate me if I were? I don’t know if I am. What else am I going to do? Loïc is wonderful, but he’s just a good friend when you get right down to it. The only thing he’s passionate about is the élevage.” She leaned forward confidentially. “You know, it’s even worse than what I told you when we went to Honfleur. The last time we made love was three years ago. And it didn’t even last five minutes. And he fell right asleep. I’m sure Alexandre’s not that bad. From the way he looks at you, I can tell how—”

  Mercifully, like a high-tech deus ex machina, Capucine’s phone buzzed insistently.

  It was the brigadier on reception duty at the commissariat. “A gendarmerie capitaine, some guy called Dallemagne, just called. Sounded kinda urgent.”

  Capucine had Dallemagne’s number on her cell phone’s speed dial. “Ah, Commissaire, kind of you to return my call so promptly. Normally I wouldn’t bother you, but I know you’re very keen on liaison.”

  Dallemagne paused for a response, but Capucine remained silent.

  “One of our patrol vehicles picked up a man last night who had been in one of these workers’ brawls. An Arab. He was inebriated and stank of beer. He had been badly beaten. They threw him in our drunk tank to give him a rest and let him sleep it off. This morning he still wasn’t entirely conscious and the duty officer discovered he had a pistol in an ankle holster. A dangerous sort of weapon, actually. One of those expensive lightweight Smith and Wessons that shoot three-fifty-seven Magnums. Funny thing for a Beur to have, but you never know what they’ll do.”

  The bile rose in Capucine’s throat, but she said nothing, knowing that that would only slow the story down.

  “The reason I’m calling is that it would appear he claims to be a Police Judiciaire officer and works in the Twentieth Arrondissement. Of course, they like to say things like that and think they’re more believable if they talk about arrondissements they know.” Dallemagne chuckled. “It’s the sort of story I’d disregard in the normal course of events, except that when they inventoried his possessions, the pistol turned out to be loaded with police-issue ballistic-tipped bullets. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about this individual, would you, Commissaire ?”

  CHAPTER 43

  The second she got off the phone with Dallemagne, Capucine punched in the speed dial for her commissariat, got through to the duty officer, and instructed him to have Momo picked up at the Saint-Nicolas gendarmerie by a SAMU emergency medical unit and taken to an ER in Rouen. The doctor at the ER was to call her as soon as he had assessed Momo’s physical condition. With any luck Momo would be in a hospital within half an hour, forty-five minutes at the outside. Far too long, but it was the best that could be done under the circumstances.

  That settled, Capucine’s adrenaline surge collapsed into a pool of guilt and frustration. Keeping Momo at the élevage after he had already found out the essence had been gilding the lily, and with his blood to boot, as it turned out. She desperately wanted to rush to the scene, but that would have been ridiculous. After all, she was a commissaire of the Police Judiciaire, not a distraught mother, and he was going to be in perfectly good hands.

  Her phone buzzed again. This time it was Isabelle. She was out of breath and obviously walking rapidly on a street somewhere. “We’ve got her! We have so goddamn got her! David’s watching her do her number right now. I’m going in to make the arrest with him.” She could barely contain herself.

  Capucine’s adrenaline level shot back to its former apex.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m walking down the rue des Beaux-Arts, heading toward the Marché Maubert, which is where it’s happening. David’s been staking out one of the art students since early this morning, and he followed her to Maubert, where it turns out she’s the one. SHE’S THE BELLE!” Isabelle’s level of excitement rose, making the sentence sound like some gushy TV presenter announcing the winner of a fabulous prize.

  The map of the area popped into Capucine’s head. Isabelle was ten streets to her left. David was about ten streets to her right. She enormously wanted to be present at this arrest. Walking all the way to the Marché Maubert was out of the question; maybe if she had been wearing her Prada Skimmers, but definitely not in Zanottis. And the Clio was illegally parked in front of the restaurant, facing west—the wrong way for the market—on the one-way quai des Grands-Augustins, so she had no choice but to head toward Isabelle.

  “Turn around and walk back to the quai. Watch for the Clio. I’ll pick you up in three minutes.”

  Marie-Christine was wide-eyed and flushed.

  “What’s going on? It sounds so exciting.”

  “We’re making an arrest. I’m afraid I have to rush off,” Capucine said, shrugging her shoulders, raising her hands palms upward in supplication, while blowing out a puff of air in the Gallic gesture that is intended to signify that we are all but mere slaves to the vagaries of the heavens.

  Capucine rooted through her wallet, found a fifty-euro note, put it on the table, squeezed Marie-Christine’s shoulder, and said as she dashed out, “I’ll call you. We’ll finish this conversation later. But listen, like the song, you can’t do better than follow your heart.” She leaned down and kissed Marie-Christine on both cheeks.

  As she ran out the door, she kicked herself mentally. If Alexandre ever caught her mouthing a banality like that, he’d kid her mercilessly for weeks.

  Once in the car Capucine almost felt sorry for Marie-Christine. All she had wanted was some sort of sanction for doing what she knew she was going to do anyway, and the poor dear had gotten no more than a piece of chocolate cake. On the other hand, the cake really was exceptional, as even Alexandre reluctantly agreed.

  In less than two minutes Capucine picked up Isabelle and maneuvered the car onto the boulevard Saint-Germain, heading toward the market.

  Isabelle didn’t even wait to slam the door before she gushed with her tale.

  “So yesterday we see this girl coming out of the school
. I had a really good feeling about her. I had David follow her home and stake her out in the morning. Turns out she lives in the Eleventh. She gets going around noon today. It was just like you said it would be. Yesterday she was all short skirts and lots of colors, but today she was all dark hair and long, flowy dresses. You can bet David gave me the full details of the hair over the phone. Anyway, she takes the metro and gets off at the Maubert station. Right there I knew we had a winner. She walks around the market once or twice, finds a nice spot in a corner, and all of a sudden goes ploof and collapses on the sidewalk. So David calls me and I call you.”

  “Did anyone rush over to help her?”

  “Not at first. But David told me why that was. She didn’t faint or anything sudden like that. She just lay down and stretched herself out like she was going to bed. She looked like some sort of kook or something. You know, like maybe she was protesting about how unhappy chickens are. So naturally everyone walks around her trying real hard not to see. But later, every now and then some loser leans over and says something. Most of the time she just lies there, oblivious, with her eyes closed and they go away, but if they don’t, David said you could see her say something sharp, like she’s telling them to piss off.”

  Capucine pulled into a bus stop on the avenue Saint-Germain, at the corner of the market, which was thronged with office workers on their lunch hour. It was one o’clock, the frenetic closing hour of the market, when the merchants did everything possible to sell off what they had left. The stalls were alive with the raucous cries of impossible discounts and the excitement of the high-powered forced sell. “One euro! One euro only! Everything I’ve got, one euro only! Eggs! Eggs! They were in the chicken this very morning. Two dozen for the price of one! Two dozen for the price of one!”

  They could make out David in the far corner of the market, wearing a fashionably crumpled off-white linen suit. And fifty feet away they could see the Belle on the sidewalk, curled up with the insouciance of a model in a mattress advertisement, her long, brilliantly dark blond hair artfully fanned out on the ground and her limbs in graceful repose. She definitely had a waiflike appeal that tugged at the heart. The scene was so incongruous, it was electric.

  “Isabelle, I want you to duck out of the car as quietly as possible and circle around the perimeter of the market and join David. Then you two make your approach as we planned.”

  The idea was to get David to pose as a novelist and collector of Limoges porcelain who was out shopping with his sister. In the reality of daylight the setup suddenly seemed utterly ridiculous, but with Isabelle already on the way, they were stuck with it.

  Isabelle made her circuit, joined David, put her arm in his, and the two made a great show of peering into the market stalls with fervent interest. Capucine eased out of the car and retreated behind the corner of a building.

  When the couple reached the Belle, David turned to Isabelle and said in a high, effeminate falsetto loud enough for Capucine to hear, “Look, Isabelle, that poor girl seems to have fainted. Whatever can have happened to her?”

  Capucine cringed and was sure David had blown it right there. She had warned him over and over again to resist his love of amateur theatricals. But amazingly enough, David’s patter seemed to work. Isabelle leaned over, her body language expressing both concern and maternal affection lightly seasoned with just a soupçon of sexual interest. Slowly, with fawnlike awkwardness, the Belle rose, steadying herself shakily on David’s arm. They chatted for a few minutes. The Belle demurred shyly and then seemed to agree to something reluctantly, almost overcome with embarrassment.

  The three walked slowly in the direction of Capucine’s car, Isabelle and David supporting the halting Belle. The scene was reminiscent of a couple walking a postoperative patient gingerly around the grounds of a hospital.

  When they reached the car, Capucine came up directly behind them and squeezed her electronic key, unlocking the doors with a loud click. Alarmed by the noise, the Belle started and David seized her upper arm and wrist, preparing to immobilize her in a policeman’s lock.

  The Belle drooped, deflated.

  “Mademoiselle,” Capucine said, “je regrette, but you are under arrest.”

  CHAPTER 44

  The Belle meekly allowed herself to be seated in the back of the car and reclined limply. It was as if she was still persisting in her charade. Isabelle, sitting next to her in the backseat, was tense and keyed up, jiggling her leg violently enough for Capucine to feel it through the floor of the car. It was no secret what she was worried about.

  Capucine puttered down the boulevard Saint-Germain at the Clio’s relaxed pace. When they reached the quai de la Tournelle and she took the bridge toward the Twentieth and not the quai in the direction of the Ile de la Cité, Isabelle exhaled sharply in relief.

  “Hey, we’re going back to the commissariat. I figured we’d be going straight to the courthouse.”

  Isabelle clearly thought that since the Belle had been caught red-handed, it would count as a flagrant délit and she would go directly to court for a summary trial and begin her sentence immediately. In that case Isabelle would have received almost no brownie points for the arrest.

  “Lying down on the sidewalk doesn’t break any law I know of,” Capucine said.

  They drove on in complete silence.

  At the commissariat, Capucine went immediately to her office to see if she could learn any news of Momo, leaving Isabelle and David to take the Belle to one of the brand-new interrogation rooms. Capucine was well known in the commissariat as a fervent adept of modern interrogation techniques. When she had assumed command, she replaced the classic PJ technique of a Grand Guignol good-cop, bad-cop routine, followed by a sound hammering on the head with a telephone book, with Reid’s infinitely more subtle nine steps. She had also redecorated the gulag-style interrogation rooms with the breezy décor of an autoroute motel.

  While she waited to be put through to the ER, she realized she was ravenous. The foie gras had been delicious but not even close to substantial enough. She guessed that David and Isabelle hadn’t eaten, either, and that the Belle was probably just as hungry. She buzzed the duty brigadier and asked him to get someone to the corner café for an assortment of sandwiches and sodas.

  Just as she hung up, the phone buzzed and the ER receptionist came on the line to say that the SAMU had delivered Brigadier Benarouche, but he was still being examined by a doctor, who would call her as soon as he was done.

  In the interrogation room Capucine found Isabelle behind the desk and the Belle sitting in the suspect’s uncomfortable metal folding chair. The Belle looked as serene as Isabelle was tense. Both were completely silent. David was absent, and Capucine was sure he was in the squad room, propped up in front of the TV monitor that was used for observation. The mirror on the wall was a dummy, its only use to increase the anxiety level of suspects. She looked up at the miniature video camera barely visible in the ceiling tiles.

  “David! Come in here. Bring a chair,” she yelled, forgetting the efficiency of the very expensive set of microphones she had had installed. “We’re going to have some lunch before we get down to our chat.” She could feel Isabelle’s disapproving frown boring into her back.

  David and the sandwiches arrived simultaneously. Everyone stood up. Capucine arranged the chairs around the desk, and the four tucked into their lunch. Somehow Isabelle wound up in the suspect’s uncomfortable chair. Despite the potential for awkwardness, it was almost a convivial moment. Capucine pulled rank and grabbed the single duck-rillettes sandwich. Rillettes were one of her favorites, and they were absolutely at their best on a doughy baguette. The effort of chewing the bread partially cleared the nagging thorns of her worry. Momo was in good hands and undoubtedly had enough morphine in his system not to be feeling any pain. Marie-Christine was just a foolish schoolgirl who was always going to find enough support among her boyfriends to be happy, and she could be counted on to do only minimal damage to Loïc. It was the Belle wh
o was the tricky one.

  The Belle nibbled at the corner of her sandwich, leaving tiny marks, as if a mouse had been at it. She had a dreamy, reposed look that made Capucine wonder if she really knew where she was.

  “Mademoiselle,” Capucine said, “before we get started, I have to ask you for your identity papers.”

  “They’re at home. But my name is Miriam Mizrahi, and I live at eleven, rue de la Folie-Regnault in the Eleventh Arrondissement.”

  “You know in France you’re required by law to have your identity papers with you at all times,” Isabelle said sharply. Capucine quieted her with a look.

  “Mademoiselle Mizrahi,” Capucine said and paused. “Is it mademoiselle?”

  The Belle nodded.

  Capucine went on, “Mademoiselle, you’re going to be charged with six separate counts of theft.” She looked up at Isabelle for her to read off the names of the victims. Hierarchically, Isabelle prompted David with a jerk of her head. With his ballet dancer’s grace, David twisted elegantly, produced a folded piece of square ruled paper from the back pocket of the pants of his linen suit, and read:

  “Monsieur et Madame John Admonson, a langue d’oïl manuscript page. Monsieur Georges Lafarge, a Daumier caricature. Mademoiselle Thérèse Thibodeau and Mademoiselle Noemie Chesnier, a Marie Laurencin watercolor, small. Monsieur Claude Josse, a Mene animalier bronze statuette of a deer, small. Monsieur Hubert Lafontaine, a collection of manuscript letters by Hector Berlioz. And Monsieur Jean-Marie Lavallé, a Boulle-style marqueterie chest, small, possibly containing an important sum in bank-notes.”

  “There were two others,” the Belle said, looking down at the table with the guilty expression of a small child caught snatching cookies to give to her friends.

  “So you freely and openly admit to your guilt,” Isabelle said.

  “Calm down, Isabelle,” David said.

  “Listen, asshole, I’m in charge here.” Isabelle caught herself, looked at Capucine out of the corner of her eye, pursed her lips to form the word pardon, thought better of it, and remained silent.