“I suppose the food’s edible, if you still have a stomach for game, which I—unfortunately—no longer do. I’ll grant you that. It’s the service that’s insufferable. They’re trying to con the local rubes into thinking that arrogant, stuck-up personnel and astronomic prices make for gastronomy—not the food. The tragedy is that their cooking, even though it’s far from Odile’s standard, is honest enough and the staff are probably charming farm children who would be delightful if someone freed them from the muzzle of pretentiousness.”
Of course, he was right. He always was about restaurants. The staff had the look and feel of cheerful paysans, but they minced around with their faces locked into the stiff rictuses of croupiers or undertakers. Capucine was tempted to pinch one to see if she could elicit a human reaction.
After dessert, fabulously overpriced after-dinner drinks arrived and the sycophantism shifted into high gear with speeches dripping with praise for the chairman’s inexorable and courageous quest for a better world, making no reference at all to the acquisition of the Elevage Vienneau, which, after all—even though it was the object of the dinner—was merely a relatively small financial operation when compared to Opportunité’s global aspirations. Alexandre busied himself with the double-barreled delights of spelunking in the telephone-book-thick drinks list for the most expensive Armagnac the restaurant possessed—which he intended to consume copiously at Opportunité’s expense—and charming a black-clad waitress, who looked to be nineteen at the most, to see if she could be made to giggle without cracking her makeup. Capucine decided she was extraneous to both pursuits and set off in search of the lady’s loo.
It turned out that the restaurant also served as one of the amenities of a hotel three doors down the road, to which it was linked by a long, serpentine corridor that wound its way through the intervening buildings. The road to the indoor plumbing seemed endless, filled with wrong turns and dead ends, an eternal detour in a surrealist movie that was supposed to signify something profound. Eventually, Capucine blundered into a cul-de-sac ending with a frosted-glass-paneled door that opened into a small, gloomy, mahogany-paneled bar. Vienneau sat slumped on a bar stool, moodily sipping amber liquid from an oversized on-the-rocks glass.
He greeted Capucine as if he had known she would arrive. He held up his glass. “It’s Yamazaki, a Japanese single-malt whiskey. I’m having a rebellion against things French,” he said. “Have one. I owe you at least a drink.”
“Loïc, you shot Philippe Gerlier, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did. I never met a man who deserved more to die.”
“But he was your henchman.”
“That he was. But he was also fucking my wife.” Vienneau downed his whiskey and tapped his finger on the bar to attract the attention of the barman, who shot him a surly I’ll-get-to-you-when-I-get-to-you look that was refreshing after the android responses of the rest of the staff. Eventually, two glasses of Japanese whiskey were produced and Vienneau picked up the thread of his tale.
“You’re goddamn right I killed him. It took me a while to find the opportunity. I had to wait until the shooting season started, and then I nudged your uncle into inviting him and then prodded him into posting Gerlier near the center of the line. I knew I’d be placed not too far away. The first drive turned out to be ideal. I waited until the partridge rose at the crest of the hill and then let him have both barrels right in the chest when everyone was looking up. It did me a world of good.” He slammed his glass down.
The bartender, who was no longer making the slightest pretense of not listening, came over with the bottle of Yamazaki and added an inch to both glasses.
“You did this because he was having an affair with Marie-Christine.”
“No, no. Not at all. Marie-Christine always needed to be having an affair with someone. It was part of her psyche and I don’t blame her for it, the way you can’t really blame a dog for stealing scraps off the dinner table.” He downed half of his drink.
“Merde. If I had gone around shooting all the people she’d slept with, Saint-Nicolas would be a ghost town.” He laughed and finished his drink. The bartender, who was now leaning across from them, elbows on the bar, as if he were officially included in the conversation, poured another two inches in Vienneau’s glass.
“I killed that fucker because he wasn’t even really interested in screwing her. He didn’t love her. He didn’t have the hots for her. He didn’t even like her. He was doing it because she was there for the taking and he just couldn’t pass up a freebie.” Vienneau pushed a bowl of peanuts toward Capucine to illustrate his point, drunkenly spilling half of them on the bar.
He collected himself. “Look, how do you think I knew he’d be such a willing flunky with the hormones when I interviewed him? It was obvious he didn’t have a shred of integrity. I hired that guy when he had been thrown out of some small élevage in the Limousin for petty embezzlement. I needed someone to take over day-to-day operations, and that included dosing the cattle on the sly. Gerlier didn’t give a shit. He was happy to do anything. He had no scruples at all. He did exactly the job I wanted him to do. But I wasn’t going to let him get away with treating my wife like some scullery maid you fuck because there’s nothing on TV, now was I?”
“Why did you need an assistant all of a sudden?”
“So you know I’d been using hormones since the day I took over the élevage, do you? Well, I was. You’re right. I took over a dying business and moved it to the top. And when I’d done it, I just didn’t want to get my hands dirty anymore. I wanted to do statesmanlike stuff, like running the breeders’ association and things like that. I wanted to act like the company chairman I was. And Gerlier was my man. He was perfect. In a way it was Marie-Christine who screwed everything up, but it wasn’t even really her fault.”
Capucine looked at him as he swallowed the last gulp of his whiskey.
“And you really had to use the hormones?”
“Of course I did. How else are you going to get beef of that quality and still put a few euros in your wallet? Shit, why do you think I sold out to those clowns?” He laughed cynically. “No hormones and they’ll be producing supermarket quality at best. But they know that. All they want is the brand.” He shook his head, overwhelmed by the strength of his logic.
There was a long pause as Vienneau chewed an ice cube and spat the bits back in the glass. The vulgarity of the gesture so irritated the bartender, he snatched it up and returned with a fresh one, devoid of ice, filled nearly to the brim with whiskey.
“So tell me,” Vienneau asked, “how did you know?”
“How did I know that you killed Gerlier? I suspected from the beginning it wasn’t accidental. The shot pattern was too tight and the angle was wrong for it to have been someone from down the hill. It had to have been someone right next to him, and that meant the person had shot him on purpose. But when my officer discovered you had been signing the expense chits for Gerlier’s trips to America while you let the accountant sign all his other vouchers, then I knew for sure.”
Vienneau, now the drunken sage, nodded wisely.
“What’s still not clear to me is if you were involved with Devere’s and Bellec’s deaths,” Capucine said.
“Nope, I had nothing at all to do with either of them. Martel was entirely my good friend Gerlier’s creation. You see, one of Gerlier’s roles was to be a cordon sanitaire, my security buffer, if anything went sour. He was the fall guy. I didn’t want to know what he was up to. To tell you the truth, I had no idea Martel was working for Gerlier. Of course, when Devere and Bellec were shot, I had a hunch Martel might be behind it, the same way you did, but, hey, it wasn’t my problem, was it? All I can say is that I’m glad that’s all over and I can get on to something else,” he said in a tone of someone who has just finished an irksome task like washing his car or doing his taxes.
“So tell me, Commissaire”—he drew the word out to extract the maximum irony—“how many times have you had the murderer
confess over a friendly drink and not been able to do one single goddamn thing about it?”
Capucine decided it was high time to get back to Alexandre and began the long trek to the restaurant. For a few seconds she toyed with the idea of acting on Vienneau’s confession and then chided herself for her rookie’s reaction. Even signed confessions witnessed by two officers of the law were ridiculously easy to overturn in court, and this had just been drunken boasting witnessed only by a bartender who was certain to swear he hadn’t heard a word. It was always the same: no evidence, no case. And there never was any evidence in hunting accidents.
At one point in her lengthy odyssey Capucine remembered she had yet to find the little lady detective’s room and began exploring passageways she had ignored on the way out. In a narrow side hallway she almost collided with Henri Bellanger, who achieved the impossible by looking even more pleased with himself than usual, sporting a deep apricot tan of the sort obtainable only in the Caribbean and apparently genuinely delighted at the encounter.
“Actually,” he said, “I came looking for you. I saw you leave the restaurant and thought I’d find you out here somewhere. I’d hoped to be able to buy you a drink. I owe you a considerable debt.”
“How so, Monsieur Bellanger?”
“Thanks to you I just collected a very healthy fee. If you hadn’t solved the case, I don’t think Monsieur Vienneau would have sold his business. That psychopath Martel would have eased into Gerlier’s job, and it would have been business as usual. Vienneau would never have divested.”
Capucine, who from her days in the fiscal branch of the Police Judiciaire was fully conversant with the structure of investment bankers’ fees, was perplexed. “Surely, the sale of the Elevage Vienneau couldn’t have been that important to you.”
“Oh, but it was. You see, it was necessary to structure a very complex financial montage. In addition to the usual tax issues, there was a tricky divorce in the works. Of course, I charged a good deal for that.”
“Financial montage?”
“Yes, just between you and me, the bulk of the transaction was offshore. So, not only did I map out the transaction, but I portaged the shares for a little while and brokered the transfer of funds from one holding company to another until they wound up, well, wherever they wound up. And, naturally, my fee reflected all that activity.”
“Are you trying to tell me the funds are all hidden in some fiscal paradise like the Isle of Jersey?”
“Oh, my dear, how you date yourself. No one but the sort of people who want to buy cashmere twinsets goes to Jersey anymore. Nowadays it’s all done with puts and calls and anonymous escrows in faraway places.” His toothy smile was made all the whiter by his deep tan.
Back at the restaurant Capucine found that the Opportunité executives had all left and Alexandre had lit a cigar, pulled back his chair, and was telling a long story to the waitress, now sitting on the edge of the table, fully reverted to her gangly teenage persona. As Capucine walked up, she was wrinkling her nose and attempting to take a sip from a comically large snifter while giggling uncontrollably. She caught sight of Capucine through the enormous glass, blushed deeply, and darted off.
“I see you had a lot more fun than I did.” She picked up the huge snifter and took a deep draft. “What is this stuff?”
“Something that was allegedly put in a bottle in eighteen ninety-three. Its most impressive attribute is its price.”
Capucine drained the glass. “Order me another one.”
“I’ll do even better. There’s one on the list that claims to have been bottled in eighteen fifty-four. Your trip to the ladies’ seems to have been eventful.”
“I ran into both the bad guys.”
“Was it who and what you thought it was?”
“Almost exactly. Except I did learn that the Channel Isles are no longer in vogue.”
Alexandre demanded little of his wife except the privilege of having the last word, something she was always happy to grant him. “So,” he said, “tradition still prevails and the two national pastimes—tax evasion and eliminating one’s enemies with bird shot—continue unabated. As Alphonse Karr, that good boss of Le Figaro, liked to say, ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’—the more it changes, the more it’s the same. Continuity is so reassuring.”
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2011 by Alexander Campion
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2011922120
ISBN: 978-0-7582-7220-1
Crime Fraiche Page 27
