Death of a Chef (Capucine Culinary Mystery)

by Campion, Alexander

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “He was shot in the trunk, not placed in it after death. The hole was definitely made by the shot, since there are traces of his blood and brain matter. The DNA match is conclusive. My guess is that he passed out drunk and woke up to find himself naked in the trunk with someone trying to put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. He was struggling when the shot went off, which is why it only hit one side of his face. The infrared examination showed some bruising that might, or might not, have come from a hand trying to push his head back into the trunk.”

  “Time of death?”

  “Between nine and midnight on Friday.”

  “The Puces is pretty much deserted after nine. He might well have been taken there and shot. There were no traces of drugs or sedatives in the blood?”

  “None. Just a hell of a lot of alcohol.”

  “And the pathologist will release the body for the funeral even though it’s a murder?”

  “He’s mad as hell about it, but he has no choice. We had a call from the mayor’s office very early this morning. The mayor himself is going to the funeral.”

  Capucine said nothing.

  “Commissaire, are you still there?”

  “Sorry. I was just thinking about the consequences of what you’ve told me. Thank you, Ajudant. I’ve really got to run.”

  In the kitchen, Alexandre had seen the LINE IN USE indicator extinguish and was pressing in the numbers for another call. When he saw Capucine’s expression, he squeezed the OFF button and put the phone down.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “He was murdered.”

  “Brault was murdered?”

  “Without a doubt. The killer pressed Brault’s thumb on the wrong trigger of the gun. He was dead drunk, and someone took him to the Puces, squeezed him into the trunk, and shot him.” She paused for a few seconds to let this sink in. “The forensics people think Brault was struggling, and that’s why the gun hit only half his head.”

  There was a long pause. Alexandre was visibly shaken.

  “I’m going to have to call Bocuse and Troisgros. They’ll need to reframe their eulogies.” Alexandre thought for a moment and then broke into a sad grin. “The fleck of silver in the lining of this very dark cloud is that I won’t have to argue with that insufferable priest anymore.”

  “What priest?”

  “The pastor of the church is a runty, stuck-up little man with a face like a donkey’s ass. He’s attempting to refuse a church service on the grounds that Jean-Louis committed suicide. I had to imply that I had it on good authority that the police were convinced it was murder.”

  Capucine raised her eyebrows and made a moue of false astonishment.

  “But the silly man insisted on compromising—a memorial service with no mass and coffin waiting outside in the hearse. I was just going to go down there and do battle with him. When are the police going to announce this? I’d love to be able to wave a newspaper in that preening little cockalorum’s face and watch him sputter.”

  “That’s for headquarters to decide, but it’s certainly not going to happen until I tell his fiancée or girlfriend, or whatever she was. It would be unthinkable for her to find out from a newspaper. I’m going out to Sèvres to see her this morning.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The restaurant Chez La Mère Denis was at the very end of the avenue Gambetta in Sèvres, on the edge of the Parc Saint-Cloud. Even though Sèvres was a busy commercial suburb of Paris, the avenue Gambetta turned out to be a sleepy, tree-lined street so narrow it was almost a country lane. The avenue led to massive lichened stone pillars supporting a large wrought-iron gate, beyond which Capucine could see the endless green acres of the park.

  The hotel, across the street from the restaurant, was a nondescript, white-fronted, three-story building, which announced itself demurely in gold letters on a small black marble plaque: L’HOSTELLERIE DENIS.

  The interior was as opulent as the exterior was plain. The small reception area had been done up in watered silk curtains and brass-rimmed black-and-white floor tiles with a backdrop of dark seventeenth-century portraits in elaborate gilt frames and ancient-looking blue and white faïence vases on tall stands made to resemble Greek pillars.

  A fastidiously coiffed and made-up woman behind an elaborately carved oak desk explained politely to Capucine that she was in the hotel and Mademoiselle Duclos had a flat in the apartment section of the building. Capucine would have to walk around to the entrance at the back.

  The rear of the building had clearly not been touched. Paint peeled from the once white façade, and long black streaks ran down from the gutters. There were six buzzers by the side of the unvarnished wooden door, most identified by scrawls on scraps of paper Scotch taped next to the button. Only one—BRAULT—had been cut from an engraved calling card.

  Capucine pressed the button. There was a long wait. Finally, a sleepy voice asked, “Ouais?” in the coarse accent of the Paris projects.

  “Mademoiselle Duclos? It’s Commissaire Le Tellier.”

  The accent morphed into gentility. “Mon Dieu! You’re early. You said you’d be here after ten. Well, tant pis, come on up. You’ll have to give me a second to get decent. It’s three flights up. Sorry, there’s no elevator.”

  The hallway was even dingier than the façade. Uneven tiles clicked loosely under Capucine’s feet. Fading paint flaked on the walls. The stairs were bare wood, three of them unsteady enough to constitute serious violations of the building code. Converting even part of the dilapidated building into a luxury hotel had clearly been a labor of love and a very costly one at that.

  Delphine Duclos was waiting on the third-floor landing in a sequined sweatshirt, looking even more gawky than at the morgue.

  “I was planning on dressing better, but you arrived way before I expected.”

  The living room was decorated with nondescript, well-worn furniture that might have come from thrift shops. Incongruously, the room was dotted with a good number of valuable-looking pieces of faïence.

  Sitting down, Delphine lit a cigarette and said, “I have to apologize for my rudeness yesterday. It was a very upsetting moment.”

  A large antique faïence yellow and blue inkstand with three demitasse-sized inkwells sat on the scarred top of a shabby coffee table with wobbly legs. Delphine removed the cap of one of the inkwells and tipped in her ash. She glanced at Capucine apologetically. “Don’t worry. The ashes wash right out. Anyway, we don’t have any proper ashtrays. Jean-Louis didn’t allow smoking.”

  In the back of the apartment someone turned on the shower. Delphine blushed.

  “That’s Prosper Ouvrard, our sous-chef. He, you know . . . It’s, like, they’re fixing the plumbing in his apartment,” Delphine said in a rush. “So he has to come down here to shower.”

  There was a moment of awkwardness.

  “Mademoiselle, there’s been new information about Chef Brault’s death. I thought it would be better if I came to tell you personally.”

  Delphine took three quick puffs on her cigarette and stared at Capucine, alarmed and puzzled.

  “Information? What kind of information?”

  “The results of the autopsy indicate he was murdered.”

  Delphine looked at her, uncomprehending.

  “He didn’t commit suicide. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah. I get it.” Delphine paused. “But I don’t see what difference it makes.” She glanced nervously at the door that led to the back of the apartment. “He’s still dead.”

  “It will excite the press, who will almost certainly badger you. You need to make plans to protect yourself from them. Also, there has been a change in plans for the funeral. There’s now going to be a mass at Saint François Xavier in the Seventh before the interment.”

  “A mass. I don’t know anything about that stuff. Do I have to do anything? What am I going to wear? One of those big floppy black hats, like in the movies?”

  “You won
’t have to do anything. Chef Brault’s friends will take care of all that. Anything dark and conservative will be perfect. You won’t need a hat.”

  Delphine drew her lips down in a frown.

  “You don’t want to go, do you?” Capucine asked.

  “Sure I’ll go. I had a soft spot for Jean-Louis. More than he had for me, anyway. All he cared about was his cooking.” She paused. “It was all he thought about. We’d be going over the weekly accounts and he’d stop and ask me something crazy, like, ‘What would pigeon and lobster taste like together?’ Naturally, I didn’t have a clue. But he could make dishes in his mind that were so real, he could actually taste them. Then he’d go to the kitchen and cook it up and keep cooking it up over and over again, until what was on the plate matched exactly what was in his mind.

  “He’d get up in the middle of the night to cook something he’d been dreaming about. Sometimes he’d spend the whole night in the kitchen, and he’d be in there, sweating away, when I came down to breakfast. The poor guy was completely strung out about food, and a whole bunch of other stuff, too, not like Monsieur Calm in there, his sous-chef.” Delphine jerked her head in the direction of the back of the apartment.

  “What other stuff?”

  “You know, money and crap. Everything. His whole life was one worry after another.”

  “Wasn’t the restaurant doing well?”

  “Of course it was. But Jean-Louis got it in his head that a three-star restaurant that wasn’t in downtown Paris had to have a luxury hotel tacked on to it. I think he picked that up from Troisgros when he was an intern there. Another of his crazy ideas was that true gastronomy only happens in provincial towns. You know, Bocuse in Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or, or Point in Vienne, or Troisgros in Roanne. This place was a compromise. It looks like it’s in a small town, but it’s only a taxi ride away from Paris.”

  “I see. And there wasn’t enough money to finish the hotel, is that it?”

  “You got it. His financial backer staked him with enough to buy the building and do up the entrance hall and a couple of rooms. Then the backer drew the line. I guess the hotel cost way more than he had been told to begin with. So every penny the restaurant made went into decorating rooms.” Delphine sighed and shook her head. “And this was when he still only had two stars. He was convinced that Michelin would never give him the third one unless the hotel had eight rooms that the president of the republic would feel at home in.” She lit a cigarette and took the lid off the other inkwell on the stand, ready to flick her ash.

  “Jean-Louis needed things he could touch. Things that lasted longer than food. I guess that’s what his obsession with faïence was, another prop in his life. When the hotel bug was biting him extra hard, he’d look at one of his beloved pieces of faïence and you could hear his stomach growling. He’d be thinking about selling it off to finance another room but wanting to keep it. Choosing between the two would eat him alive. I tell you, he was a complete wreck until he finally got that third star.”

  “Did he calm down when that happened?”

  “Yeah. For all of two weeks. And then that awful Lucien Folon got going. He’d written bad reviews in the past, but he really went to town when we got the third star. He started out with a review saying Jean-Louis’s cuisine was pipo—bullshit—and that Jean-Louis was just a fake whose gimmicks had conned Michelin. And Folon wouldn’t let go. He kept coming here way more often than any other critic. Jean-Louis would make himself sick cooking for the guy. He’d cook everything himself. The line chefs couldn’t touch a thing. And every single time Folon would sneer at Jean-Louis and tell him the meal was pure shit. And the reviews he wrote! I felt like crying when I saw how Jean-Louis took them to heart.”

  She crushed her cigarette out in the inkwell; her eyes filled with tears.

  “Folon’s last review was the worst. After he panned the cooking, he claimed that he had it on good authority that the restaurant was going to be demoted to two stars in the next Guide and that Michelin was being generous to give him any stars at all. Jean-Louis had a fit and ordered the builder and the decorator to do two more rooms in the hotel, even though we didn’t have the slightest hope of paying them.”

  A man in his early forties strode jauntily into the room, combing his damp hair straight back from his forehead. He checked when he saw Capucine and looked guiltily at Delphine.

  “Prosper, this is a police officer who has come to tell me that it turns out that Jean-Louis was murdered.”

  Ouvrard pursed his lips slightly and lifted his eyebrows fractionally, but made no comment.

  “So, Monsieur Ouvrard, you’ve taken charge of the kitchen.”

  “That’s right, Madame. I’m the chef as long as they want to keep me.”

  “Who are the ‘they’?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know. It’s not clear to us who owns the restaurant. There are some investors, but they haven’t said anything yet,” he explained. “And I guess Chef Brault must have owned the majority, but we have no idea who’ll inherit. So, for the time being, we’re carrying on as usual. Delphine will pay the suppliers and meet the payroll, and I’ll keep on cooking. We’ll see what we’ll see when we see it.”

  Delphine glanced at Capucine with a look of woman-to-woman conspiracy. “Voilà. The non-worrier.” And then to Ouvrard, “The restaurant will go on forever, and it will get even better with you in charge of the kitchen.”

  “Has business fallen off since the death of Chef Brault?”

  “Just the opposite. We’re taking reservations for three weeks from now. And when they learn that Chef was murdered, we’ll be booked solid right through to Christmas. Nothing whets the appetite like scandal. Excuse me. I have to get down there and start the luncheon service.” Without thinking, he started to bend down to kiss Delphine, but nipped the motion in the bud.

  CHAPTER 7

  The nineteen-century hulk of the Church of Saint François Xavier was far more colossal than Capucine remembered, larger even than most provincial cathedrals. Drab and grimy on the outside, the cavernous interior was bright with turn-of-the-century frescoes and dripping with gold trim.

  Capucine sat next to Alexandre on a hard oak bench, her Sig Sauer biting into her lower back. She squirmed. Three hundred feet away, a huge gold tabernacle rose like a miniature vault over the gilt and marble altar. On a raised dais four black-clad priests droned out the mass.

  Capucine nudged Alexandre. “I thought they were supposed to wear purple.”

  Alexandre groaned. “They’re doing a full requiem mass. It’s going to take forever. They wear black for that. That priest with the dried-prune face goes from one extreme to another. I hope you’re comfortable. We’ll be here for a while.”

  So far the high point of the ceremony had been Chef Labrousse’s reading. Pale and drawn from his overnight flight from New York, he had moved many to tears with his delivery of Isaiah’s “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.” From his gilt throne, the pastor, whose face really did resemble a dried prune—resplendent in a ponderous black silk, gold threaded chasuble—had stared daggers at Labrousse, furious at having been upstaged.

  Clearly delighted to be back at center stage, the pastor in his finery raised an enormous wafer on extended arms and pirouetted, almost on tiptoe, to display it to the entire congregation. He then repeated the dance step with a jewel-encrusted gold chalice. In both gestures, the priest’s self-admiration drowned any notion of the worship of the Deity. Capucine felt the temperature of the congregation drop by a few degrees. No wonder the Church in France was losing its constituency so quickly.

  When the interminable mass was finally over, Paul Bocuse slowly mounted the steps to the lectern and delivered a eulogy moving both in its content and brevity: the bright light of French haute cuisine had dimmed, darkening each of our lives. Next, Jean Troisgros ratcheted his arthritic bulk painfu
lly up the steps. He spoke at greater length than Bocuse about an intense young man, a boy, really, who had promised greatness even as an intern. He told stories so dense with kitchen jargon, they must have been comprehensible only to the culinary professionals. At one point his eyes became liquid and his voice broke. He shook his head, explaining that he was unable to go on, and lumbered down the steps. There was a leaden silence in the church, largely at the sight of both of the two living grand masters of French cuisine so moved.

  To the resonance of an enormous brass organ playing Fauré’s Requiem, the congregation shuffled out of the church. The black-draped coffin was wheeled out and carried down the steps by uniformed pallbearers. Outside, two news vans disgorged camera crews. Capucine recognized Lucien Folon scuttling down the sidewalk. She wondered if he had been at the back of the church or if he had simply stood outside during the service.

  The body was placed in a waiting mortuary van, and a hundred or so mourners squeezed into cars to follow it the short distance to the Montparnasse cemetery, where the same priest vaingloriously sprinkled holy water on the coffin with an elaborate silver ciborium. He grandiloquently proclaimed a few words, and what was left of Jean-Louis Brault was returned to the earth in the brilliant sunshine of a crisp autumn morning.

  After, a group of fifteen, mainly critics and chefs, gathered in nearby Diapason, a restaurant that had been demoted to two stars after Jean-Basile Labrousse sold it to a consortium of investors and exiled himself to New York. The new chef, Bruno Gautier, greeted them nervously at the door. It was the first time Labrousse had been back to his old restaurant, and Gautier was visibly intimidated.