Crime Fraiche

by Alexander Campion

  The switch flicked again and time went into fast-forward. Everyone moved at once, dropping to the ground, diving for cover, swiveling around to face the thicket, holding pistols rigidly in both hands in the textbook prone position.

  Capucine ran over at a crouch to the downed man and took up a kneeling position, protecting him with her body, her Sig held straight out. She barked out a series of orders to the brigadier-major and punched 15 into her cell phone, the quickest way to get the SAMU, who promised to be there in under ten minutes. The brigadier-major began directing the operation in a majestically clear, resonant voice, compelling enough to induce the most timid mortal to follow him over a cliff.

  The five men ran to the C8 while Capucine and the brigadier-major emptied clip after clip into the thicket, laying down covering fire for them. Three took cover behind the C8 and two continued on, flanking the wooded lot to take up positions at the far side to prevent the shooter from escaping in that direction.

  One man ran back in a crouch with the embarrassed hobbled haste of a ball boy at a tennis match, carrying a large white medical kit, dove down behind Capucine, and applied a compress to the downed man’s leg, leaning into it as if he were about to do a push-up. The two others ducked into the side door of the C8 and reappeared holding evil-looking Beretta Model 12 machine pistols and hefty bags of ammunition hooked over their necks.

  Two shots crashed into the C8, one into the body of the van and the other straight through the windows, continuing on to shatter an upper window of the house, giving a good line toward the shooter. The brigadier-major indicated the direction to the two men with automatic weapons with a chopping motion of his right hand and then held both arms out in a Christlike position, directing them to fan out.

  They separated at a run, emptying their clips with an enormous rending noise like a giant sheet tearing, threw themselves on their knees at the edge of the thicket, and got down to business, firing methodical half-second bursts, aiming low, trying for a kill. The effect on the flora was devastating. Branches and bits of vegetation flew into the air as if an unseen ogre hacked with a machete. The last thing Capucine wanted was a dead suspect. She bit her tongue to keep herself from calling them off.

  She took a deep breath. Things seemed under control. Only two worries: the officer down—death could come astonishingly fast from arterial wounds—and the officer stationed in the thicket, who had not been heard from since his last call to the brigadier-major.

  There was a yell from the thicket. “Je me rends!—I give up!” The men stopped firing. But the suspect did not show himself and the yell had a muffled quality, as if he had been lying facedown on the ground. One more thing to worry about. He could easily be attempting a decoy so he could cut down another officer or two.

  The switch flicked again and time went back to normal speed. The brigadier-major began a new stream of orders in his magnificent voice.

  The two men who had gone to the back of the lot came forward along the flanks at a crouch. The missing stakeout man popped out from behind a tree and moved up with one of them.

  “Drop your gun and stand up with your arms outstretched.” The brigadier-major orated loudly.

  Nothing happened.

  “Prepare to resume fire!” he ordered.

  “No, no, wait! I’m going to stand up. Ne tirez pas!—don’t shoot!”

  Pierre Martel’s head appeared from the brush and then his torso, arms up in the air at forty-five-degree angles. Four officers crashed through the brush and handcuffed his arms behind him.

  Despite herself, Capucine couldn’t help but think that a little pumping adrenaline was really all it took to get them to deal with undergrowth.

  With an earsplitting pan-pom-pam, the SAMU ambulance arrived and disgorged three paramedics—completely indifferent to the bevy of flics brandishing weapons—who ran up to the victim, carrying a furled stretcher. One of the medics took over from the officer, applying even more pressure on the wound, while the other two lifted the man onto the stretcher. All three dashed back to the ambulance, which screeched off immediately, wheels spinning on the dirt road.

  Two men led Martel up to Capucine. He seemed a bit pale but otherwise unchanged from the last time she had seen him, his bull-like truculence intact.

  “I showed you, didn’t I? It was stupid to have your men drive in front of my house. Even my simple wife knew what you were up to. It was even dumber to put one of them in the café. The whole village knew the police were up to something. But I gotta say, I missed the guy in the covert. Where I screwed up was that I wasted my first shots trying to take you out instead of going for the easy hits.” He laughed cynically.

  “You’ll have plenty of time to tell me all about it in Paris,” Capucine said, indicating with her head that Martel be taken to a car. Two officers, with a policeman’s profound loathing of a cop shooter, virtually lifted him off his feet in their zeal.

  The motorcade moved off, not without a number of discreetly parted curtains in the village. Capucine could easily imagine the comments. “Did you see? It was that woman from the château. All this shooting and dragging people off at night. It’s as bad as when the Boche were here during the war. And that woman was such a sweet little child, too.”

  When they reached the A13 autoroute, Capucine’s cell phone rang.

  “Commissaire, this is Docteur Blanchard from the ER at the Hôpital La Pitié in Rouen.” Capucine recognized the voice of the doctor who had attended to Momo. “Once again I was asked to call you as soon as I had a prognosis on your man. He just came out of the OR. The bullet opened the femoral artery but did not sever it. It was successfully sutured shut. He should recover with no ill effects, but it was a close call with the amount of blood he lost.” He paused.

  “Yes, Docteur?”

  “I have to say I’m very glad I don’t work for you.” He rang off.

  Capucine knew he had intended it as a friendly joke, but it still felt like a slap. She brooded over her two mistakes. The first one was that she should have been more decisive once Momo gave her the incriminating information, sparing him what he went through. The second was, well, whatever it was she had done, or not done, to make the arrest go off so badly. She had made a mistake in there somewhere, but she was damned if she knew what it was.

  Capucine was on the edge of tears. She resorted to the most powerful solace in her armory, imagining she was in Alexandre’s arms, stroking his tummy as she fell off to sleep, but she knew that was not going to happen for a while, maybe even not at all that night. But even so, the thought rocked her in its cradle and she dozed off.

  In the front seat, the driver, who had been observing her in the rearview mirror, turned to the brigadier-major. “Did you ever see such sangfroid? The boss has ice water running through her veins.”

  CHAPTER 47

  They were met at the door of the commissariat by one of Capucine’s lieutenants—a man as unassuming and diffident as an insurance adjuster. Even though it was one in the morning and he was ending his shift, Durand looked like he was just starting, not a trace of five o’clock shadow, nondescript brown necktie still tight against his collar. The lieutenant led the way to the interrogation room, followed by Martel—held by two uniformed brigadiers, backs of wrists hard up against each other in too-tight handcuffs—with Capucine in the rear guard.

  Capucine had no illusions about how much was at stake. She didn’t have the slightest shred of proof that Martel had committed the two murders. If he was hardheaded and denied any involvement, she could still take him to court for shooting at the arresting officers and wounding a brigadier, but a good defense attorney would make much of why the arrest had occurred in the first place. Even if he was convicted, the press would give the police a very hard time indeed. Indicting him for the beating of Momo was even less promising. It could easily be passed off as a workers’ brawl. And there would be the awkward question of why an armed police officer had not announced who he was and had allowed himself to be beaten.
Obtaining a signed, witnessed confession to the two murders was absolutely essential. There was no way around that.

  In the interrogation room the uniformed officers removed Martel’s handcuffs, seated him in the hard metal suspect’s folding chair, and left without a word. Martel swiveled his arms and massaged his wrists, grimacing at the pain of the returning circulation.

  Durand took his seat behind the desk, symbolically removing himself from the conversation to come. His role was to remain silent and act as a counterweight in the interrogation.

  Capucine smiled apologetically at Martel. “I’d like to get this over quickly so we can all get to bed. I’ll bet you’re exhausted, too.”

  As he was supposed to, Martel looked a little confused by her friendly tone.

  “You probably worked a hard day, too. What time did you get going this morning?”

  Martel relaxed slightly. “Five thirty. We moved fifty head into the feed shed yesterday. Sometimes they have a hard time going from grass to grain, and I wanted to make sure they were settling in okay.”

  “You showed us that shed when you took us around the élevage. I think it’s amazing the way you finish them off on grain to get them to grow faster. But I never understood why they weren’t fed on grain from the beginning.”

  Martel launched into a detailed technical explanation. As he spoke, his comfort level rose visibly and he seemed to forget how threatening his situation was: a man observed him coldly from across the desk, other observers undoubtedly peered at him from behind the large one-way mirror, and he had been demoted to tu but still was required to address the officers by the respectful vous.

  They chatted for a full half hour. Martel became more and more at ease. Eventually, he stretched back in his uncomfortable chair and started to cross one leg over the other. Capucine put her hand on his knee to stop him.

  “You know you’re here to explain your multiple crimes. Two murders, the assault and battery of Mohamed Benarouche, a police officer, your armed assault of a contingent of police officers with intent of homicide, and the consequent grave wounding of one of them. Do you understand that?”

  “That’s complete bullshit!” Martel half rose from the chair, the muscles of his body bunched, ready for a fight.

  “Sit down,” Capucine said like a whip crack.

  Martel sat but with some of his weight still on his legs, poised to jump up again.

  Capucine stood up, looming over Martel. “You shot a police officer in front of a dozen witnesses. Right there you’re good for life without parole. I want you to tell me about the rest of it.”

  Martel looked up insolently at Capucine, his feet still under him, ready for action, but his eyes darted right and left, assessing his options.

  “Look, that’s a bunch of crap. How was I supposed to know he was a cop? All I knew was that he was a lazy fucking Beur who slacked off all day and drank all night. I caught him breaking into the accounting office, thinking he could pick up some cash, probably to buy more booze. He got a friendly little warning, that’s all. And taking a few potshots at you guys, well, what do you expect? Strangers drive by my house. I figure my wife is being threatened. So I protect my home. That’s what people do. I fired some shots in the air, and yeah, someone got hit in the leg by accident. Big fucking deal. But murdering people, I don’t know nothing about that.” He crossed his arms, a portrait of righteous indignation.

  On the face of it Martel’s pugnacious self-assurance seemed unassailable. It was easy to understand why at least half a dozen of Capucine’s officers had no faith in psychological pressure and relished the interrogations based on “physical incentives” for which the Police Judiciaire was infamous.

  Capucine dug a sheet of paper folded in four from her pants pocket and shook it open.

  “We have the ballistics report on the rifle you were firing at us this evening. A Czech CZ five-fifty chambered for three hundred Winchester Magnums. That’s yours, right?”

  Martel nodded.

  “It would appear that the bullets it fires are a perfect match for the one found in the body of Lucien Bellec. We need to talk about that.” This, of course, was pure fabrication. The bullet in Bellec’s body had been filed away to perdition in some gendarmerie warehouse, and no ballistic examination had ever been performed.

  Martel blanched slightly but said nothing. He remained just as truculent but a little shadow of worry could be seen in the corners of his eyes and his forehead had three slight creases in the middle.

  “I don’t know nothin’ about th—”

  Capucine stopped him with her hand on his knee.

  “Pierre, right now you need to listen to me. We’ve got all the proof we need. What I’m doing here is trying to see your point of view so we can work something out. But you’ve got to help me. I could see when you were telling me about feeding the steers how much you love your work and the élevage. You do, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “And you did it so the élevage could survive, didn’t you? There were people trying to destroy the élevage, weren’t there?”

  Martel looked a little confused. The theme wasn’t striking a cord with him, yet.

  “I didn’t do any of that stuff,” he said belligerently. “I—”

  Capucine cut him off. “You’ll get your chance to talk in a while,” Capucine said. “Right now I want you to listen to me.”

  Capucine took a risk. “It’s all about the hormones, isn’t it?”

  Martel nodded. Inwardly Capucine breathed a sigh of relief. She had succeeded in the decisive pass. All that was left was capework. But it still had to be done just right.

  “I want to start with the intern, Clément Devere. Tell me why it was important to remove him.” Martel looked anxiously around the room as if someone might come to his help. Durand met his gaze but remained silent, his expression impassive.

  “Hey, I’m not a murderer. I’m really not. I—”

  Capucine cut him off again with her hand on his knee. She inched her chair closer. “I’m going to want to hear everything you have to say in a minute. You’ll get your chance, believe me. I know you’re the kind of guy who’d only kill someone unless you really had to.”

  Martel ran his hands through his hair and licked his lips.

  Capucine pushed her chair a little closer. “I want to help you. We’re going to sort this out. We really are. Let’s do the easy part first. Tell me about Devere. He was threatening the élevage, wasn’t he? I need to know exactly what he was doing.”

  Martel leaned forward and put his head in his hands, the textbook gesture of submission. Capucine had no difficulty reading his mind. He was at a crossroads. His anxiety level had reached the point where he wanted to be anywhere but in this room—even a jail cell would be better—but he could not quite bring himself to confess.

  Capucine reached forward and put her hand on his shoulder. “Trust me. We’ll make it work. I want everyone to understand you were acting to save the élevage and you’re not some thug who can’t control his anger. You were just trying to do the right thing, weren’t you?”

  His head still in his hands, Martel nodded.

  Very quietly she asked, “He found out about the hormones, didn’t he?”

  “I don’t want them to think I’m just a dumb bruiser.”

  “Of course you don’t. And you’re not. How did Devere figure it out?”

  Martel sat up and laughed. “I’m not even sure he did. But he was so anxious to meet that guy Jean Bouvard, you know, the one who bulldozed the fast-food place, that I figured he was going to spill the beans. I just couldn’t take the risk, could I?”

  “Of course not. But how could Devere have known?”

  “He was interested in growth rates of beef cattle. He spent hours reading the charts. He was writing a paper on it for his school. He must have figured out the only way our cattle were going to grow that fast was because they were on hormones.”

  “And what about Lucien Bell
ec?”

  “That fucker? He had it coming, believe me. His problem was that he got dangerous. He was the guy who helped me inject the cattle. When we had to stop ’cuz Gerlier wasn’t around to give us the hormones anymore, Bellec made me keep paying him out of my own pocket. Then, one night when we got drunk together, I blabbed about Devere and he started blackmailing me for that. He was out of control. I mean, the guy could have brought the élevage down all by himself. I had to stop that, right?”

  Capucine was astonished how quickly Martel had internalized the interpretation of his crimes he had been offered only a few minutes before. She pushed a small button hidden under the seat of her chair. In a few seconds the door opened and a man came halfway in, leaning on the doorknob, relaxed and smiling. He was in his fifties, slightly paunchy, with a smoker’s raspy voice. He wore the infectious smile of someone who really wants to buy you a drink. It was Capucine’s other lieutenant, who had just received a plaque for thirty years’ service with the force.

  “Hey, guys. How’s it going?” he said cheerfully, as if he was going to send out for pizza and had popped in to see if his colleagues wanted some.

  “Hi, Jean-Luc,” Capucine said. “Come on in. Pierre here has just been telling us about the two deaths. We’re working hard to make it clear to everyone that he did it for the good of the élevage. We don’t want people to think he’s some sort of vicious killer.”

  Yeah! Martel’s eyes beseeched. He leaned forward in supplication.

  The lieutenant slid in, shutting the door with his foot in an easy gesture, and sat on the edge of the desk, still very much the coworker who had just dropped in for a little gossip. “Listen, Pierre, I’m not assigned to this case, so I don’t know the story. Can you take it from the top for me?”