Death of a Chef (Capucine Culinary Mystery)

by Campion, Alexander

  “You know, Mother, I’m going to ask you to help me on this case.”

  “Help you on a case? Well, I never! Not at the table, in any case. We’ll discuss it after dinner. In private,” Madame Le Tellier said, torn between outrage and curiosity.

  The rest of the meal was as anodyne as any at Capucine’s parents’. Jacques was politely outrageous; Madame Le Tellier clucked; Capucine’s father chatted happily with Alexandre, frowning every five minutes or so, when he remembered that he was expected to disapprove of him. Partridge gave way to salad, which in turn yielded to cheese, which surrendered to dessert. Finally, it was time to move to the salon for coffee.

  Jacques, pouring Armagnac into dollhouse-size crystal thimbles, followed the ancient, stiffly starched majordomo spurting coffee into elegant Limoges demitasses with only partial accuracy.

  “Did you really want me to help you with a case?” Capucine’s mother asked.

  “Of course, Maman. I don’t joke about my cases.” Capucine bit back her sharpness, kissed her mother on her cheek, reached into her bag to extract the plastic pouch containing the chevalière, removed it, and handed it to Madame Le Tellier, who examined it closely. The ring was highly worn, the crest rubbed almost flat, the engraving almost unrecognizable. Obviously handed down over the generations, it was the quintessential accoutrement of the aristocracy.

  “I can’t say I recognize the crest. Come with me to the library. We’ll look through my books.”

  The library had once been her father’s office, but as he spent more and more of his time at work in a private investment bank, Capucine’s mother had taken it over. One by one the leather club chairs had disappeared, to be replaced by pillow-strewn sofas and chintz-covered armchairs. The shelves had gradually filled with best sellers and a comprehensive collection of leather-bound volumes on the French aristocracy.

  Madame Le Tellier sat at the desk and turned on the lamp, an ormolu Empire affair originally made to hold candles under a dark green lampshade but now wired for electricity.

  She produced an oversized magnifying glass with a brass inlay, delicately carved ivory handle and examined the crest closely.

  “Ma chérie, I’m delighted you’re finally taking an interest in heraldry. It’s so much healthier for you than all those guns and things. Look here. You’ll understand immediately. See, this V in the middle of the crest is called a chevron, and the thin lines on the background are a code for the heraldic color, gueule, which is a blood-red. The coronet over the crest is a baron’s. In antiquity, a baron’s coronet was only a gold ring with no embellishment. But these little dots represent pearls. It’s the sort of fancy decoration that was added by the horde of barons Napoleon created. You know that he gave a barony to almost all his functionaries. Even the mayors of remote little villages were made barons. Of course, they aren’t true aristocrats. That’s why I don’t recognize the crest. But don’t worry. Give me half an hour with my books and I’ll tell you exactly who it is.”

  She picked up a big leather book and began to turn the pages with the excitement of a young teenage boy who has found a pile of Playboys in his older brother’s closet. Capucine slipped out, unnoticed, and returned to the sitting room.

  Jacques had resorted to his favorite pastime, teasing Alexandre with thinly veiled allusions to his imaginary adolescent sexual peccadilloes with Capucine. He had honed his technique to a point that the slightest innuendo could reduce Alexandre to paroxysms of jealousy.

  “So there I was, racing through the commons of the château—you’ve seen how extensive they are at Maulévrier—with both Capucine and Cécile chasing me and giggling as if they were trying out for a porno film, when I realized I was running into a dead end. Mercifully, there was an enormous haystack in a corner. I tried to burrow my way into oblivion. But I felt silky adolescent female hands grab my ankles and begin to pull me out. . . . Ah, cousine, just in time. I wanted a female voice to do the moaning necessary for the verisimilitude of the story.”

  Alexandre ground his teeth. Capucine’s father sat, oblivious, deep in the recesses of a down-filled armchair, reading La Croix, the official newspaper of the French Catholic Church.

  “What did you do with Tante Coralie? Do you have her on the street, tailing hoes and moes?” Jacques brayed his laugh.

  For a half hour calm was restored. Jacques poured more Armagnac. The two cousins and the cousin-in-law chatted happily, while Monsieur Le Tellier immersed himself in the doings of the mother church. Time bobbed on by as pleasantly as it was intended to in the Sixteenth Arrondissement.

  In twenty minutes the door opened with élan and Capucine’s mother breezed in, looking very pleased with herself. She made a noise that sounded like a loud, liquid belch. “Brrroooh!”

  Jacques sat up in mock horror. “Ma tante, what’s come over you? Are you ill?”

  “What on earth do you mean? Brault!” she eructated. “The Baron Brault. That’s whose arms they are.” She held a copy of a thick, clothbound book with the title conspicuous on the cover, Dictionnaire de la Noblesse Française, marking a page with a finger. She thumped the book down on a table and opened it.

  “Here’s the entry. The arms match perfectly. The current baron is Ferdinand Brault. He lives in the family château in La Cadière-d’Azur, a small town in the department of the Var. His issue is two sons. The aîné, Antonin, is thirty-seven, and the cadet, Jean- Louis, is thirty-three.”

  Alexandre sat up straight. “Capucine, did the victim have an aquiline nose and a very high forehead?”

  “Yes,” Capucine said. “And blue eyes. Or at least one.”

  Capucine’s mother paled. “The victim! Capucine, is this the dead man’s ring? This ring was on the body’s finger?” She put the chevalière on the table and backed away from it.

  “Yes, it was, Maman. You may have shortened the identification process by several weeks. If you’re right, think of how much anguish you’ve saved the family.”

  “I’m sure she’s right,” Alexandre said. “The description fits Chef Jean-Louis Brault perfectly.”

  “Why on earth would Chef Brault commit suicide?” Jacques asked. “I thought he was the boy wonder of the restaurant world.”

  “He is—or was. The youngest person after Jean-Basile Labrousse to get three stars from the Michelin Guide. But he’s always been very high strung. There are rumors that he has a lot of debt. And for the past few months Lucien Folon, the food critic for Le Figaro, has been attacking Brault viciously. He’s always accused Brault of being a flash in the pan, but a few weeks ago he started claiming that he knew for sure that Michelin was going to take away one of Brault’s stars in its next Guide. Obviously, no one thinks Folon has the slightest clue what Michelin’s ratings are going to be, but it’s not impossible his attacks may have pushed Brault over the edge.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The body, pasty white as a suckling pig in the window of a butcher shop, lay on a slide that cantilevered out from inside a refrigerated cubby. A long, gaping Y-shaped incision had been cut from the shoulders down to the pubic hair. The scalp and the top of the cranium had been removed, leaving an empty brain cavity. The side of the face obliterated by the shotgun blast faced the door and now looked like a civet de lièvre—a black-blood hare stew—dried hard and gone bad after it had been left too long in the back of a refrigerator.

  Formal recognition of bodies was the purview of the médecin légiste—the coroner—and did not normally involve the police. Still, Capucine was intrigued enough to find out if the body in the trunk actually was Chef Jean-Louis Brault’s to want to be present at the identification by Delphine Duclos, Brault’s live-in girlfriend.

  As she stared at the body, Capucine heard the stainless-steel door whine on its spring behind her back. A scrawny blond woman walked hesitantly a few paces into the room. She looked so ill at ease in her expensive dress, it might have been borrowed for the occasion from someone who had been reluctant to lend it. Her face was as scrubbed of emotion as the
body on the slide.

  She darted a quick glance at the cadaver and then looked up at Capucine.

  “It’s him, all right. Can I go, or do I have to sign a paper or something?”

  “How can you tell it was your fiancé without seeing his face?”

  “The scars on his hands and arms are very familiar.” She pointed to a scar on the wrist that was still slightly raised. “He got this one last week. He wouldn’t put ointment on it because he was afraid it would run into his sauces. So it got infected.” She glared at Capucine. “And he wasn’t my fiancé.”

  The backs of the body’s hands and its forearms were covered with an extended latticework of burn scars. But any chef’s would have been.

  “So, can I go now?”

  “The form you need to sign requires you to state you recognize his features. Can you come around to this side and look at his face, please?”

  Reluctantly, the woman moved to the corner of the slide, shot a quick look at the body’s head, and scuttled back to the far side.

  “Okay. It’s Jean-Louis. Can I go now?”

  “You also need to identify his possessions, a ring and a shotgun that might have been his.”

  A white-coated technician entered and queried Capucine with his eyebrows. She nodded. Without a word he slid the body back into the refrigerated cuddy and led Delphine into the next room. An official form had been set on a stainless-steel table, next to an elegant-looking shotgun and the chevalière, now back in a plastic pouch.

  “That’s all there was?” Delphine asked. The question came out in a choked gasp.

  She picked up the plastic envelope containing the ring, held it up to her eyes, and put it back down next to the shotgun.

  “It’s his ring. I’m sure of that. I don’t know about the gun. He had one like it, I guess, but I really couldn’t tell one gun from another. Let me borrow a pen. I want to go,” she said, looking away, pale, her eyes filling with liquid.

  The attendant produced a ballpoint pen. Delphine scribbled a signature and moved toward the door.

  “Can I ask you a few questions?” Capucine asked.

  “Can we do it outside? I really, really need a cigarette.”

  The crisp autumn air and the cigarette’s nicotine brought some of Delphine’s color back.

  “I should have introduced myself,” Capucine said. “I’m Commissaire Le Tellier. I’m in charge of investigating your financé’s death.”

  “Look. I keep telling you! He wasn’t my fiancé. I work in his restaurant. I live in his apartment. That’s it.” She paused and took a deep drag on her cigarette and then squeezed her eyes tight in rapid blinks.

  “I know I sound like a complete bitch to you. It’s just that our relationship was—how do they call it in the women’s magazines?—‘complicated.’ ”

  “Had you been together for a long time?”

  Delphine shot her a hostile glance at the word together and then decided to let it go. “Three years. I was out of a job and answered an ad for a restaurant hostess job. I wasn’t too excited that it was in Sèvres, but the money was good and I got a generous allowance for clothes.” Delphine ran her hands down the front of her dress to demonstrate the generosity of her clothing budget. “I also got free room and board, a small studio in the attic, and all I could eat at staff meals. It was a real good deal except for it being in the boonies.

  “The restaurant wasn’t open yet, so I helped out wherever I could. Jean-Louis discovered I knew a little about accounting, so he had me work on the books.” Her voice trailed away. She made an elaborate production of lighting another cigarette.

  “It took him way longer than I expected to make a move on me, and when it finally happened, he was so bad in bed, I thought he was a gay guy trying to prove something to himself. But he wasn’t.” She gurgled a snort of laughter.

  After a few puffs on her cigarette, she picked up her narrative.

  “He was a hell of a hard guy to figure out. He definitely wasn’t gay, but he sure wasn’t interested in screwing me. Pretty quickly I started running the business side of the restaurant, on top of doing the hostess job. So I figured he just wanted a patronne to keep the staff in line and thought it would be more credible if it looked like we were living together.” She looked searchingly at Capucine, as if she might have an answer.

  “So it was only for appearance’s sake? You never did anything together, like go off on vacation?”

  “Vacation? You’ve got to be kidding. Jean-Louis only had one thing going in his life—his restaurant. When he wasn’t sweating in the kitchen, he was sweating about losing one of his precious three Michelin stars.”

  Delphine lit a third cigarette and blew out the first drag slowly, shaking her head. “But I see what you mean. Maybe he did want something from me, but I never really did figure out what it was. Too late now. And I guess when you think about it, the poor guy did have one or two interests. He had this collection of old faïence that he would poke at every now and then, and look at auction catalogs, stuff like that. And he’d go shoot pheasants sometimes in Sologne.” She finished her cigarette and ground it out under the sole of her shoe.

  “The whole shooting thing was weird. He’d never come back with any birds. I used to kid him about it and tell him he had a boyfriend somewhere he didn’t want anyone to know about. That really pissed him off. So he made me go with him one Sunday. It was the muddiest place I’d ever seen. Of course, I wanted to make a good impression, so I wore my best pair of heels. I’m a Paris girl, born and bred. I don’t know anything about the country. Jean-Louis made me walk around all day with my feet in two five-pound clumps of mud. I guess he was punishing me for the crack about the boyfriend. The odd thing was that he shot more than a dozen pheasants, but he just left them there. I said we had enough to put on the menu, but he told me to mind my own business. He got so mad, he didn’t talk to me until we got back to the restaurant.”

  She dug her pack out of her purse and began to extract another cigarette but thought better of it. “Merde, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. It’s not like I’m going to miss him or anything. Did I tell you everything you wanted to know?”

  Capucine nodded.

  “Good. I’ll get going. I tell you, that Jean-Louis was a guy you just couldn’t figure out.” Her eyes filled with liquid again, and she rushed off just as the first drops rolled down her cheeks.

  CHAPTER 5

  Capucine awoke from a dream in which her husband was yelling at someone. Easing into the waking world, she realized that Alexandre actually was yelling somewhere in the apartment. Since there were no answers, he must be on the phone. The tin roofs of Paris were washed in water-color rose and carmine from the dawn sun. Nearly seven o’clock. Alarmed, she slid out of bed and slipped on a silk robe. Something awful must have happened. Alexandre never got up before ten.

  In the kitchen, Alexandre sat at the long central table covered with bright Provençale tiles, the cordless phone to his ear. He nodded in agreement with whatever was being said. Behind him, the red ON light of the Pasquini coffeemaker was lit, but both long-handled grounds filters lay on the counter. Alexandre’s only shortcoming in the kitchen was his inability to operate the complicated machine.

  Capucine started to reassemble the Pasquini, creating noise. Alexandre tapped imperiously on a tile on the table with his fingernail; when Capucine turned, he raised an index finger to the vertical and hiked his eyebrows in a cartoon supplication for silence. The gesture was usually reserved for pre-deadline tensions.

  “Paul, parfait. A demain, alors,” Alexandre shouted and hung up.

  “Bocuse?” Capucine asked.

  “Yes. He’s devastated. Poor man, he’s become completely deaf.”

  The phone rang.

  “Ah, Michel, salut. . . . Oui, c’est demain. . . . Eglise Saint François Xavier . . . onze heures. ”

  Capucine walked down the hall to the study and turned on the TV to catch the morning news. So Brault’s fun
eral was set for eleven the next day at the Eglise Saint François Xavier, a huge church in the chic Seventh Arrondissement. The Michel on the phone was bound to be Michel Troisgros. It was going to be a gathering of the eagles of the culinary world.

  Five minutes later, Alexandre stuck his head in the study door. “Capucine, ma chérie adorée, please come back. If you make some coffee, I’ll make you my scrambled eggs.”

  Back in the kitchen, Capucine finished reassembling the Pasquini and made coffee. Alexandre got started with the eggs.

  “That was Michel Troisgros. He’s coming with his father, Jean. Both Bocuse and Jean Troisgros will deliver eulogies. They were very close to Jean-Louis. I spoke to Jean-Basile Labrousse. He’s going to fly from New York to do a reading at the service. You can’t imagine. Every important personality in the cooking world is going to be there.” Alexandre’s almost childish excitement floated on top of a deep, dark pool of sadness.

  “Who el—”

  The phone rang again. Alexandre snatched it up. He deflated slightly and handed the receiver to Capucine, who wandered back down the hall to the study.

  “Commissaire? Ajudant Challoneau. I hope I’m not disturbing you so early.”

  “Not at all, Ajudant. Do you have news?”

  “Quite a bit. We just finished our post-autopsy meeting. We were ordered to hurry it up so we could release the body for the funeral. The pathologist was furious.”

  He paused expectantly, waiting for Capucine to make a comment. She said nothing.

  “Well, it was murder. There’s plenty of evidence. For openers, the blood alcohol content was point-two-eight percent. In other words, he was blind drunk. That’s not entirely inconsistent with suicide, but it’s very unusual. Also, there was no gunpowder residue on either of his hands. Again, powder residue tests are notoriously inaccurate, but it was another thing that pointed away from suicide. But there’s a real clincher. The gun was a side-by-side twelve-gauge shotgun with double triggers. One trigger for each barrel. The spent cartridge was in the left-hand barrel. It’s the back trigger that fires the left-hand barrel. There was a nice clear thumbprint of the victim on the front trigger but none on the back one, which had been wiped clean like the rest of the gun. It’s obvious that someone shot him, wiped the gun clean, and then afterward pressed his thumb on the rear trigger to leave a print. But whoever it was screwed up and picked the wrong trigger.”