Killer Critique

by Alexander Campion

  So where the hell was Alexandre? It was almost ten. Like a black-clad Provençal grandmother working her rosary beads, she counted off the minutes of his evening. He would have left the apartment at eight. Arrived at the restaurant at eight thirty. Been seated by eight forty. Sipped a flute of champagne while he studied the menu. That would have taken at least ten minutes. No, sometimes it was even more. So, let’s call it eight fifty-five—She stopped, the exercise was pointless. He wasn’t going to be home before eleven and that was that. She looked at her watch again. Three minutes to ten.

  She went to the window. But definitely not to see if he was coming. Definitely not. Sheets of rain made ghostly curtains around the streetlight. Her cell phone trilled. Capucine snapped it open.

  “Allô, Commissaire. C’est David.”

  Capucine snorted in exasperation.

  “I’m soaking wet, but that’s not why I’m calling.” The cell phone connection crackled. David hesitated.

  “David, out with it. I’m expecting an important call.”

  “Well, I’m tailing Charbonnier and Voisin like you ordered and they wound up at the Hôtel Costes, you know, the place on the rue Saint Honoré where all the celebs go—”

  “David, I know where the Hôtel Costes is and who goes there. Trust me on that. Why are you calling?”

  “Well, I’m standing here soaking wet and all of a sudden Sybille Charbonnier—Sybille Charbonnier herself!—comes out with this doorman holding this huge umbrella over her. And she says that she and her dear friend Monsieur Voisin had noticed that I was following them and they felt very bad about leaving me in front of the hotel getting wet. So they wanted me to come into the restaurant and eat something, where, as she said, ‘I would be dry and could keep an even better eye on them.’ ”

  “Are you calling me because you don’t like having your leg pulled or because you think you need my permission to knock off some victuals at their expense?”

  “Neither. That’s not it at all. Of course I’m going to eat in the restaurant. Who would pass that up? But my hair’s a mess. I mean really a mess. Totally. I look like an Afghan Hound that’s been left out all night. What would you do?”

  Despite her anxiety, Capucine’s laughter erupted.

  “The ladies’ room has hair dryers. There’s an attendant—Josette, I think her name is—who’s very good with hair. Give her a good tip. You can put it on the expense account. Enjoy your evening.”

  The oily bubble of mirth blew away all too quickly as the storm clouds returned.

  The problem, she decided as she stared out into the black night, was double edged. The killer could only be caught if he kept on killing. But that would be like Russian roulette. If he kept on killing, sooner or later Alexandre would be the target. There was no amount of protection she could possibly provide to guarantee that wouldn’t happen. Look at how easy it was to kill a head of state.

  So it would be better if he stopped killing—as he seemed to have done. But then maybe he’d start up again one day. And it might be Alexandre’s turn. A sword of Damocles would hang eternally over their heads. The joy would be sucked out of their lives. They would never, ever walk into a restaurant again without feeling susp—

  Capucine heard the most glorious sound the world could produce, the C major click of a key in the front-door lock, which in its one single note carried an entire symphony of love, joy, and happiness. Alexandre was home!

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  Capucine’s eyes filled with tears of rage. She looked at her watch. It was eleven minutes after ten.

  “You knew perfectly well I was worried about you and still monsieur decides to dawdle over his dinner and then flirt with the hostess and come home virtually in the middle of the night.” Tears streamed down her cheeks and splattered on the floor.

  Alexandre came up to her and attempted to sweep her into his arms. She pushed him away violently. He plastered an opéra bouffe look of confusion and hurt over a hint of a wry smile. Capucine kicked him in the shin with her bare foot.

  Alexandre backed off, pretending to limp. “You’re right. I should have left earlier. It was a Corsican restaurant. I had a rather boring fressure de cabri sautée.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s made with four different kinds of entrails from a goat kid—the liver, the sweetbread, the heart, and the lungs. They’re stewed in pork caul with some cubed salted pork, garlic, and a fistful of Corsican spices.” Capucine made an exaggerated grimace of disgust. “Actually, it can be excellent,” Alexandre went on. “But this was merely bland.”

  For a split second Capucine looked deep into Alexandre’s eyes to see if she was being kidded. One of Alexandre’s fortes was making girls shriek at dinner parties with invented grotesque recipes. But he seemed perfectly serious.

  “And Adenia, the hostess, is involved in a tragic dispute with her fiancé. I certainly would never have even thought of flirting.”

  “Well, it’s good that you got your Corsican review done with.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because Momo hates Corsican food. And I fully sympathize with him.”

  Alexandre looked lost.

  “Momo?”

  “Of course, Momo. He’s going to be your constant dinner companion from now on.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Two days later Capucine found herself inching crablike down the vertiginous stone steps to the Seine. The three-inch-heeled Max Kibardin Rosette Sandals, delectable as they were with their delicate leather roses decorating the straps, had definitely been a mistake, particularly if one was laden with an impossibly heavy metal canister.

  After all the time she had wasted in Lille she had had misgivings about devoting an entire half day to Vavasseur, who, truth be told, hadn’t really produced any earthshaking revelations the last time she had seen him. On top of that she had been loath to run the gauntlet of Jacques’ gibes in order to get him to set up the appointment. In the end she had capitulated, more from a neurotic desire to leave no stone unturned than out of any real conviction.

  Jacques has been even more snide than expected, but, as always, his barbs had been directed at the more robust areas of her id.

  “I knew Docteur Vavasseur would find a willing patient in you,” he had said. “All that effort you expend puffing up Meaty Mate’s libido must be completely draining. I often think I should offer you a cinq à sept myself to ease the tension.”

  “Cher cousin,” Capucine had replied, “it’s a thought. We could meet for a quiet drink and I could tell you all about Alexandre’s savoir faire. You might pick up some useful pointers.”

  “No thanks. I’m not even close to the stage where I need to attempt to make my embonpoint appear seductive,” he had replied. “When you trot along to Vavasseur tomorrow for lunch you might check if he has any Lacanian insights on pepping up limp Life Partners.”

  When she reached the bottom of the stairs Vavasseur was as diffident as at the first meeting. At her approach he eased cautiously away until he butted up against the police barricade. It was only when he noticed the olive drab canister that he began to relax.

  Vavasseur took a tentative step forward. “I see you brought our lunch. Just put it down so I can have a peek and see if I have a wine that will do it justice.”

  Capucine placed the container gently on the cobblestones and backed off five paces. Vavasseur scuttled forward, grabbed the canister, and retreated to the safety of his alcove. Keeping her in his field of vision, he snapped the container open and sniffed deeply. The aroma of the food seemed to imbue him with confidence. He beamed.

  “Langoustines, definitely. They know I like fish best because it comes from the water and the water is safety. And something else. A fowl of some sort. Quail. Yes, it’s definitely quail.” He fanned the aroma to his nostrils with an open hand. “Good. I have a very nice two thousand five Côte de Vaubarousse that should just be at the right temperature. Perfect for the langoustines, although
I have some doubts it will be full-bodied enough for the quail, but life is all about compromise, isn’t it, after all?” His breathing had slowed to normal. He was almost completely relaxed. Food definitely did the trick for him.

  “Why don’t we have a little apéro before we get to our lunch and after we can talk about all the things on your mind?”

  He produced a bottle from under the bed. “This is Yamazaki. It’s actually a far better single malt than most of what the Scots produce. The Japanese have succeeded where the Californians have failed in making a better product than the mother country’s.”

  The notion that the Japanese had managed to attain the pinnacle of single malts while the California wines, even though excellent, could not even come close to matching the best of Bordeaux was one of Alexandre’s favorite themes. Capucine wondered if the notion had reached Vavasseur through Jacques, who she knew was a far greater admirer of Alexandre than he would ever admit.

  They sipped their whiskey standing beside the Seine, which flowed quietly but powerfully, with almost frightening inexorability. The man on the far bank emerged from his cardboard crate, stretched, waved at them, and made off with his perfect Labrador to wherever it was that he went during the day. Vavasseur drew a deep breath.

  “Seeing him escape from that box is such a relief.” He sighed contentedly. “Let’s see what they’ve sent us today,” Vavasseur said, rummaging around in the container. “Pas mal!” he said, reading from a little card. “We start with langoustines in a crispy crust with basil pistou and for a main course have caille en brochette caramélisée sur un frou frou de légumes révélés de wasabi—skewered caramelized quail on an amusing bed of vegetables made exciting with wasabi. The Chablis will be perfect with both.” Vavasseur pursed his lips in appreciation.

  “Is your food always this good?” Capucine asked, impressed.

  “Oh, yes,” Vavasseur answered, a little taken aback, as if she had asked him if he changed his socks every day. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  The meal was superb and the wine perfect, greenish yellow and deliciously full. As they ate, they chatted aimlessly, happily; the sun danced off the relentlessly questing river and a cool breeze flowed under the arch of the bridge. The meal was as serene as it was estival.

  “Well,” said Vavasseur after he had cleared away the dishes. “Why don’t you relax on the bed and share your thoughts?”

  Without awkwardness this time, Capucine stretched out, kicked off her dainty shoes, and let them fall on the cobblestones. She wriggled her toes sensuously, taking inordinate pleasure in their release from the bondage of shoes straight out of the box. The whisper of a warm zephyr brushed a lingering kiss across the soles of her feet. She started to float away and brought herself back with a sharp snap.

  “I’m not getting anywhere with the case. I think I understand even less than when I came to see you last time.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “I have no leads, nothing. When I started I had a list of suspects but that’s meaningless now. And the worst part is that the killer seems to have gone to ground. He hasn’t manifested himself for over four weeks. I don’t know if he’s extending the gap between murders or if he’s simply disappeared. Is it possible he’s really stopped killing?”

  “As we’ve already discussed, the killer may have defined such complicated conditions for his murders that it is very difficult for him to find suitable venues.”

  Capucine nodded but said nothing.

  “And then it’s also possible that he is finding his fetishes more and more effective in prolonging his sense of satisfaction and wholeness that he now needs to kill less frequently.”

  “Fetishes? You mean like men who want their women to wear garter belts and black stockings?”

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that. The value of the fetish stems from the nature of desire in Lacanian terms. For Lacan desire could never be satisfied.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Of course desire can be satisfied.”

  “You have a need for your husband to love you, don’t you?”

  “Obviously. It’s by far my greatest need.”

  “And are you confident he really does love you?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “And how many times a week do you ask him if he does?”

  Capucine laughed. “At least five. Sometimes more.”

  “That’s an expression of the fundamental unfulfillabil-ity of need, which, Lacan explained, results in permanent, unquenchable desire. As he put it, desire takes up what has been eclipsed at the level of need.”

  “So you’re saying that the killings satisfied the killer’s need temporarily, but the desire remains afterward.”

  “Yes, precisely, but it’s not immediately apparent to him. Let me explain. When you make love to your husband, your need is fulfilled for a moment, but soon the desire manifests itself again.”

  “That’s for sure,” Capucine said with feeling.

  “The killer may be able to palliate that unquenchable desire with a fetish, something tangible that represents a surrogate of his fulfilled need.”

  “And what would this fetish be?”

  “It could be almost anything. Most likely it will be something personal and intimately connected to the victim. A shoe. An item of underwear. A lock of hair.”

  “But nothing like that was missing from the victims. Our forensic teams are fabulously thorough.”

  Capucine thought for a moment and then shook her head. “But let’s say, for discussion sake, that there were fetishes. For how long would they be effective?”

  “Impossible to say. An hour. A day. A month. But not forever.”

  “So you’re sure he’ll kill again?”

  “Nothing in life is sure, but it’s more than likely the value of his fetish—if he has one—will fade quickly. And if his constraint is finding a suitable scene for his crime, that, too, is just a question of time.

  “I’m inclined to think the fourth murder is overdue. Well overdue. And also I have a feeling this one will contain all the information you need to identify the murderer.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Two days later Capucine received another one of Martinière’s beautifully written notes. Now that he had been officially sanctioned, Capucine viewed the juge almost affectionately, like an ill-tempered house cat that had been declawed and could now be picked up and stroked without risk.

  Despite his disgrace, at least on paper Martinière seemed to have lost none of his arrogance. The note “convoked” her peremptorily to his office the next day at eleven. As Capucine admired his handwriting, she wondered if the juge was even capable of turning on a computer or if he ever arrived in his office before ten thirty.

  She arrived at the meeting her customary fifteen minutes late. Martinière looked at his thin gold watch and shrugged with a small sigh. He seemed to have shrunk and sat with rounded back at his ornate desk, as if he was trying to achieve a fetal position.

  “Commissaire, you’re fifteen minutes late,” he said almost listlessly.

  “Yes, I stopped to have a coffee, because I knew you wouldn’t offer me any.”

  “You should have brought me one,” he said plaintively. “The coffee here is execrable.”

  Capucine smiled sweetly at him.

  “Commissaire, I’m dismayed you chose not to tell me personally about your case in Lille. I had to find out about it from an official circular.”

  “Monsieur le Juge, that murder had absolutely no connection to the serial killer. It was a complete red herring.”

  “Are you sure? A restaurant critic was killed in a restaurant where he was working on a review, exactly like the other three murders.”

  “Pure coincidence. It was a crime of passion. An irate husband killed his wife’s lover after she had had a tryst in a hotel.”

  Martinière made a caricatural grimace of doubt. Stealthily, he extracted a thin file covered in flimsy blue paper from under the tooled leather c
over of his blotter. He opened it carefully on his lap, withdrew a gold pen from his inside breast pocket and held it upright between his thumb and his first two fingers. The pen seemed to give him strength. He pivoted the pen to the horizontal and jabbed it repeatedly at Capucine as he spoke.

  “Commissaire, my credulity is strained.”

  The familiar gesture with the pen had always made Capucine think of someone miming a pistol firing bullets. Now it seemed entirely phallic. She repressed a smirk.

  “A restaurant critic killed performing his function—precisely the same modus operandi as the other three killings—please. There simply must be a connection. Let’s review this case carefully.”

  He uncapped his pen and made tick marks in the margin of his file.

  “And I’ll tell you another thing,” he said as an afterthought. “If the Lille murder wasn’t our killer at work, that means he’s been inactive for well over a month. And that’s something I just can’t accept.”

  “Monsieur le Juge, the victim wasn’t really a restaurant critic. He was just a failed journalist who worked as a stringer, writing pieces that no one else could be bothered with. He wasn’t even really writing a review of the restaurant. He was conning them out free meals.”

  As she spoke Martinière took copious notes with his pen.

  “And the perpetrator was an older man in a rage that a wife fifteen years his junior was having a fling. It was a banal crime of passion.”

  Martinière put down his pen and raised his index finger to indicate she should wait until he finished his note before continuing. She noticed traces of blue ink on his thumb and first two fingers.