The Red Brick Cellars: A Tolosa Mystery

by R. W. Wallace

  The pathetic sales-effort only annoyed her. What really put her on edge was the price. Their house was in the very center of Toulouse, less than 200 meters from the Capitole, allowing for it to sell at a relatively high price despite the difficult market. The price they’d agreed on was already fifty thousand euros above what Catherine thought the house would sell for, but they needed to allow for negotiations. Everybody knew they could knock the price down a little from what the ad said. Maxime hadn’t used the price they agreed on; he’d added another hundred thousand euros. So now it was up for sale at a hundred and fifty thousand above the market value.

  They were never going to find a buyer at that price.

  With shaking hands, Catherine pulled her phone out of her purse. She started typing, hitting the screen so hard it made the same sound as her neighbor typing on the computer keyboard. Not able to keep her anger out of her message, she sent the first words that came to mind: “Change the price to what we agreed or I’ll come into your office screaming like a maniac and tell them we’re divorced.” Catherine was certain he hadn’t announced the news to his colleagues yet, in the hope that they would get back together.

  Less than a minute later, a reply came. “Where are you?”

  Catherine wanted to scream, but was in a public library, so she kept it internal. As she texted her location to her ex-husband, she saw Louis ambling toward her. She took several deep breaths to calm down. When he reached her, she felt almost normal.

  “Bonjour,” she said as she stood up and craned her neck to do la bise. He wouldn’t catch her by surprise this time. At the café the other day, she had yet again forgotten about the way the French greet each other. Three years living here, and if her mind was occupied elsewhere, she didn’t understand why people got so close. It was especially unnerving with men. Her very first day in Toulouse, she had actually slapped one of her colleagues when she thought he was going to kiss her. They all laughed about it now, but it made Catherine cringe with embarrassment every time.

  “Bonjour, Catherine,” Louis replied. “Ça va?” His voice was as agreeable to hear in French as it was in English, but his Toulouse accent was a little less sexy than the French lilt on his English. He must have been a great hit with American girls during his time overseas. She resisted the urge to switch to English, needing to practice her French and keep her brain in French gear for writing the next article.

  “Ça va,” she replied. Like “How do you do?” back home, you weren’t actually supposed to answer. In fact, replying with the same question was the expected comeback.

  They both sat down, Louis dragging over a chair from a nearby table. He nodded and smiled at the people who turned, annoyed by the noise.

  Catherine opened one of the web-pages she prepared that morning. “I have looked at the subjects currently under discussion in the city council and made a quick selection based on what seems to have created the most controversy. Your input, as on the taxis yesterday, could be helpful.”

  He didn’t react to the reminder of potential corruption. That would qualify as his backing up her article, surely.

  “All right,” Louis replied. He tipped his chair back on two legs and leaned forward, holding onto the table with one hand. “What are the subjects?”

  Catherine glanced at her notes for the first subject on the list. “There’s a new urban development plan in progress.”

  “Another one?” Louis didn’t appear impressed. In fact, he was almost dismissive.

  “You don’t like urban development plans?”

  Louis focused his black eyes on her. “Oh, I like them well enough. They’re very nice on paper.” A mirthless smile crossed his lips. “In Toulouse, we never manage to follow them through. There’s always one plan or another in progress, but before it’s finished, something comes along to stop it and it ends up being replaced with another one.” He let his chair fall down on all four legs. All of his focus was on the subject at hand now. How anyone could be passionate about an urban development plan was something of a mystery to Catherine. “Take rue Alsace-Lorraine,” he continued. “The plan was to make a wide, straight avenue going all the way from the boulevards to the allées Jules Guesde. But they only made it to the Carmes market. There the road is suddenly only half as wide and starts twisting and turning.” He waved a dismissive hand in the direction of the city center. “It’s the same with all the other plans. Some get started, then interrupted. Some never even get that far.”

  Catherine took some notes, but didn’t see how this would help them find the old mayor’s killer. She tried to turn it over in her head and could see nothing interesting.

  Louis was apparently of the type not to like silence. “What’s the new plan about anyway?”

  Catherine obliged, thinking at least there was something about Toulouse that she knew and he didn’t. “They’re re-vamping all the streets between the Capitole and the Garonne. Not destroying any houses or anything, just making it prettier and more…let’s say user-friendly.”

  Louis nodded. “Have they started working yet?”

  “No.” Catherine checked her notes again. “It’s planned to finish in 2019, apparently.” Though her house being in the middle of the zone under renovation should add some value, she doubted it would be a hundred and fifty thousand euros worth. “Did you hear about the house that collapsed there not too long ago?” she asked Louis. It wasn’t exactly fascinating news, but he seemed to like Toulouse trivia.

  Louis’s chair was back to balancing on two legs, but he was paying attention.

  “One of the old Toulousaines not too far from my old house was being renovated. They were digging in the cellar to plant micropiles to strengthen the structure when the whole thing started shaking. All the workers made it out, luckily, before the entire house collapsed. The only thing standing is the front façade.” She hoped the renovation plans wouldn’t cause her own property any damage.

  Louis whistled. “Whoever validated that project must have gotten an earful. I hope they’ll make the effort to keep the façade and not put up a modern apartment building or something.”

  Not knowing what to say, Catherine moved to the next element on her list. She was in the middle of explaining how the current city council had canceled several festivals, which Louis was apparently already aware of, when she saw Maxime approaching.

  She had managed to suppress her anger toward him with the help of her motivation to write another killer article and forgotten she sent him a text with her current location. She wanted him to lower the price of the house, not come see her.

  Unfortunately, it was too late to get rid of Louis. Catherine was not looking forward to the next fifteen minutes, but it was going to be much worse for Maxime.

  She got ready for battle.

  Fifteen

  Louis was afraid he’d said something stupid or offensive when, in the middle of a sentence, Catherine suddenly shut down. Her eyes flew animatedly between the computer screen and Louis’s face, then the gray-blue eyes that had been so agreeable to look at for the last half hour were suddenly ice cold. Her complexion, miraculously white for someone living through a summer in Toulouse, turned pink.

  Louis tried to remember his exact words, but nothing special came to mind. Then he noticed that Catherine wasn’t looking at him. She was looking over his shoulder at someone behind him.

  Louis let his chair’s legs down on the floor and turned around. Given Catherine’s expression, Louis half expected to see the leader of the extreme right-wing political party, Marine Le Pen. But it was a regular-looking man, probably in his late thirties, dressed in black dress pants and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, which was the Toulouse engineering uniform. Louis assessed his short, graying brown hair, a nose a little on the big side like Louis’s, and rectangular rimless glasses thinking if that guy was anything else than a computer engineer, he would eat a rat.

  The man rounded Louis’s chair and Catherine got up to greet him. Surprisingly, she did la bise a
little too roughly, as if to prove some point. “Qu’est-ce que tu fous là?” she hissed, asking him what he was doing there. She used the informal form of address, tu, and not-so-polite verb foutre instead of faire, indicating this was someone close to her. But not in her good graces.

  Louis stood up and held his hand out to the man. “Bonjour,” he said with a smile. “I’m Louis.”

  The man shook his hand, but it must have been mostly out of reflex. “Who are you?” he asked.

  Catherine slapped her friend on the shoulder. “Maxime! What’s wrong with you?” She looked at Louis. “I’m so sorry about this. It should only take a minute.” To Maxime, she said in a much colder tone, “This is Louis. He said as much when he introduced himself. Which is more than you did.” She pointed to the chair at the computer next to theirs. It had been liberated moments earlier by an old woman with purple hair. “Sit.”

  During his time in the States, Louis greatly profited from his French accent. Girls seemed to find it sexy, so he never tried to get rid of it. As he listened to Catherine’s tirade in heavily accented French, he discovered there were two sides to that coin. Those English Rs gave him goosebumps.

  Maxime obeyed the command to sit with a dark look at Louis. Louis got comfortable in his own chair. This was fun, but he should probably keep that feeling off his face so Catherine wouldn’t turn on him, too.

  “You could have just called,” Catherine said. “Or even better, changed the price to what we agreed. Did I not make myself clear the last time? We did agree on a price, yes?” She gave the poor man half a second to respond, but he’d only gotten so far as to inhale before she continued. “I’m quite certain we agreed that we will sell the house now that the divorce is final.”

  So this is her ex-husband. Louis gave the man a once-over. At least ten years her senior, he seemed to be in good shape. He looked…French. Louis had come to recognize the physique the rest of the world considered typically French since he also qualified. Slim, dark hair, dark eyes, big hooked nose, angular features.

  Catherine gave the man no chance to defend himself. “I’m also certain we fixed a price. A price that was well over the market value, but a good place to start. A price that could attract actual buyers.” Her whole face was red and the flush crept down her slim neck too. “Do you remember all this, Maxime?”

  The ex-husband finally got a word in. “Yes, but—”

  Ah. Two words. Catherine attacked again. “Then why on Earth did you put it up for a hundred thousand extra? Do you need new glasses? Are you so old you’re suffering from arthritis and your finger didn’t find the right button on the keyboard when you entered the price?”

  Louis was fascinated. This Englishwoman, who he had only seen calm and serene, was bearing down on her ex-husband as if he was a goalie who’d sent the ball into his own net on purpose seconds before the end of a tied game. She managed to keep her voice down, but there was a mixture of fire and ice in her tone that was both terrifying and exciting. Louis realized too late he was staring with his mouth hanging open.

  Maxime lifted a hand and pointed at Louis. “Why is he still here?” he managed to say while Catherine drew a breath.

  Catherine never took her eyes off her ex-husband. “Because he’s working with me on an article.” She snapped her fingers in front of Maxime’s eyes. “The important question here is: why are you here? Why am I still paying that mortgage?”

  She stopped talking, apparently done with her tirade. She sat straight as a ramrod in her chair, arms crossed and waiting for an answer.

  Maxime gave Louis another surly look.

  Louis stared back. He was waiting for the fight to finish so they could get back to work on the article. Not that they had anything to put into it yet.

  “I came because I need your signature,” Maxime said finally, his deep-set eyes softening considerably as he gazed at his ex-wife. “I put the house up for sale at that price because I figured it was worth a try.” He held up a hand to stop Catherine going off again. “Let me finish.” Bending forward, he pulled a fad of papers out of his back pocket and held them out to Catherine. “I got a visit after two days and they made an offer to buy the house at the price I was asking. So I only need your signature on these papers so I can take them to the notary and start the selling process.”

  Catherine unfolded her arms and gingerly took the papers. She opened them, but only glanced at the title before turning to Maxime. “You got a buyer at this price after two days?” The ice was gone from her voice, but not the fire.

  Maxime gave a curt nod. He was hunkering down in his chair, the air clearly gone out of him. Louis pitied the man. He’d been married to this beautiful Englishwoman, but probably messed it up somehow. And now the only link he had with her was that house—which they were selling.

  “Why didn’t you say so at once?” Catherine asked, flush rising over her cheeks again. “Why didn’t you text it to me?”

  Wide-eyed with innocence that didn’t even fool Louis, who’d known the man for less than ten minutes, Maxime replied, “I needed your signature. I couldn’t get that by text.”

  Catherine huffed with frustration, but flattened out the papers next to the keyboard. The computer screen was in screen-saver mode and abstract curves were dancing in wait for them to come back to work. She signed the document so hard it probably wouldn’t be necessary to initial the other pages. She went ahead doing just that without reading anything but the title on the first page.

  She slammed the pen on the table and shoved the papers into her ex-husband’s chest. “There. Now you can go.”

  Louis made a mental note never to buy a house with a woman. Especially this one. Though it was difficult, Louis kept his mouth shut while Catherine calmed down after her ex-husband’s departure.

  She logged back in to the computer and did what appeared to be random searches on the internet.

  When he saw her typing “get rid of ex,” he figured it was time to intervene. “So where is this house? Someplace nice, I understand?”

  Starting, as if she’d forgotten he was there, Catherine clicked the search window closed. “It’s in rue Déville between the Capitole and the Garonne.”

  “So right in the middle of the new urban development plan. Maybe that’s why you were able to sell over market value.” Louis wasn’t particularly well informed on what influenced the value of a house, but he did know that a house in that area would cost a fortune. Her ex-husband must make a lot of money for them to afford that.

  “Sure,” Catherine drawled. “Or it’s because of our wonderful damp cellar, which isn’t even good for storing wine.”

  Louis sat up straight. “You have one of those old cellars with vaulted brick ceilings?”

  Eying Louis as if he’d said he loved playing soccer in a hailstorm, she replied, “Yes. But it really is good for nothing. Too damp. You go down there for five minutes and you’ll feel certain you’re about to develop tuberculosis.”

  “That’s a shame.” Louis thought of the different cellars he’d visited all over the Toulouse city center. In the old days, almost all the houses had built-in cellars made of red brick just like the rest of the house, but without plaster since it wasn’t visible or exposed to wind and rain. Today, several restaurants took up the larger of the cellars and were quite popular for the atmosphere they provided.

  “Yes, well, it won’t matter anymore now,” she said in curt tones. “It’s apparently sold. Shall we get back to the list of city council subjects?”

  Louis nodded, but his mind was already off dreaming of what he would do if he had his own red brick cellar. What did people use them for, anyway? There were the restaurants, at least one was used for reading poetry every full moon, probably a lot of wine cellars…and the crypts. Like the one Le Bouffon Plaisant had visited to feel up dead La Belle Paule. There had been several of them, but the one in the Cordeliers church was the best known since it had been open to visitors. Talk about tourist attraction.

  Lou
is pulled his chair closer to Catherine and leaned in. “When the bodies were found, the woman was in perfect condition, right?”

  Catherine leaned away from the invasion of her personal space, but nodded.

  Louis backed away a few centimeters. “And this was in the Galerue. The police said they weren’t killed there, though. But honestly, how far could they have been transported without being seen? So he could have been killed somewhere in the vicinity of the Capitole. Which is also where all the crypts that preserved bodies were.”

  “This was a thing?” Catherine asked. “All the crypts preserved the bodies?”

  “Not all,” Louis said. “Only the ones in the area between the Capitole and the Garonne. The theory was that the soil was rich in limestone from the construction of the churches and abbeys, and that was part of what kept the bodies from rotting.” He sat back in his chair and waited for the information to sink in. Was the direction his thoughts had taken too weird? Would Catherine have the same idea?

  She took her time studying him for several minutes, tilting her head back and forth.

  Louis kept silent.

  “You think the killer has access to one of those crypts?”

  She did come to the same conclusion. Though he didn’t know her well enough to judge if she was also wont to produce horror-movies in her head based on articles she read instead of bedtime stories.