Crêpe Murder_A Seagrass Sweets Cozy Mystery

by Sandi Scott

  “What time is it?” She checked. She’d been sitting on the couch since five o’clock, it was now ten.

  “Later than you thought,” Patty joked. “How did it go?”

  Ashley summed up. “It’s going really smoothly. I’m not coming across anything difficult, and I’ve worked with all the software and systems involved, so it’s not like I have to reinvent the wheel or anything. The way that most people handle their computer security is almost criminal. I mean, I know I’m not going to take advantage of people, but what about all the hackers in China? Most systems are getting constantly bombarded with ...” Seeing Patty’s glazed eyes she stopped midsentence and said. “It’s going well.”

  “You look like you’re enjoying yourself.”

  “I enjoy doing a job well,” Ashley admitted. “But, I’d really rather be baking. Pulling apart a cake recipe and discovering why it’s not as moist as it should be gives me, and the world, a lot more happiness than my programming does. And honestly, it’s kind of scary going into programming mode ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week when there’s a really big project happening. I almost stop feeling human. I don’t get to talk to anyone or even smell anything. I just drink a lot of caffeine and let the code go directly from brain to screen.”

  Patty said, “I can see why you’d want to get out of it, but I’m still grateful that you’re doing it for me. You must be one of the best.”

  “I have a friend who’s even better,” Ashley said. “His name’s Ryan.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “No, just a friend. I thought about dating him at one point, but it never worked out. I am not his type. He’s the type of guy who wants platinum blondes in red dresses. I’ve lived through about a dozen of his whirlwind romances, by my count.”

  “A real ladies’ man,” Patty laughed.

  “Not that you’d ever know it to look at him. He seems like he’s completely sweet and shy, I’ve known him since my first real IT job. We’ve played a lot of video games together. Every time he breaks up with a girl, I’m on duty for cookies and Grand Theft Auto. That’s when his real self seems to come out – completely reckless, I tell you.” She shook her head. Patty likely had no idea what Ashley was talking about.

  “And he’s even better than you are?”

  “Yes, which is another one of the reasons that I’m perfectly fine getting out of the programming business. Ryan and I used to work at the same company. When I left, he was talking about starting his own security business. We were always complaining about how terrible security around the Internet was, I mean just laughing about it, and he finally said that he was tired of joking and wanted to do something about it.”

  “Have you talked to him lately?”

  “No,” Ashley said guiltily. “I think he may have called a couple of times lately, but things with Serge were so tense that I didn’t want to answer the phone. I thought it wasn’t fair to spend an hour complaining to another guy about how Serge was working too much and didn’t want to go anywhere with me.”

  “To a friend,” Patty said gently.

  Ashley took a deep breath then stood up and went through her usual post-programming stretching routine. It felt like something snapped while she was reaching for the ceiling, not anything physical, but something in her heart. Serge never loved me, she realized. I don’t owe him loyalty, not in anything. No more excuses for how he’s so busy or stressed, no more trying to figure out what he thinks so that I don’t make him mad accidentally. No more waiting for him to come home, hours late, without calling.

  “I could call Ryan,” Ashley said when she finished stretching.

  “Why don’t you?”

  “I ... I just can’t,” Ashley said.

  “It’s the time difference, isn’t it?” Patty checked her slim black and gold watch, which she never wore at work but fastidiously put on as soon as she had finished her shift. “It’s just after ten here, which means it’s four o’clock in New York. I don’t remember the time zone in Texas ... Central? Yes? Then, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “Oh, Patty. It’s more than that.” Ashley shook her head. “I just can’t.”

  Patty sighed. “All right, but I think he’ll be more supportive and less mad that you’ve been ignoring him than you think.”

  Ashley felt her face redden, it was like Patty was reading her mind. But really ... talking to Ryan would just have to wait for a while. Until she made it back to the States, probably. Her phone rang. She pulled it out and stared at the number in shock. It was Ryan.

  “It’s him, isn’t it?” Patty asked.

  “I’m not sure, I think that’s his number,” Ashley said.

  “And you’re just going to let it go to voicemail, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” The phone stopped ringing. After a minute or so, it gave a little chirp, announcing the arrival of a text.

  Patty sighed. “At least you have tomorrow off.”

  “I do?” It seemed impossible. And Ashley wasn’t sure she wanted a day off at this point either.

  Patty pointed out, “You don’t have to work every day like a slave. This isn’t a programming project where you have to work straight through until it’s done. It’s a restaurant in France. You get days off.” Patty yawned. “Unfortunately, I do have to work tomorrow morning, so I think I will valiantly take a break and go to sleep.”

  “I’ll be quiet,” Ashley promised.

  “Don’t stay up all night talking. The phone rates to the states are horrible.” Patty disappeared into the bathroom.

  CHAPTER 18

  Ashley decided to stay up and wait for her program to finish running. She would get the password and go back to work. It shouldn’t take that long. Until then, she would spend some quality time with the man who had never let her down: Hercule Poirot. She curled up on the couch with her laptop on her lap and Belle beside her. Finally, the laptop chimed and she snapped awake. She had not dozed off, she really hadn’t, had she?

  The brute-force password program had coughed up a password that looked like a French surname and a string of numbers. Probably his mother’s maiden name and an old phone number. Quickly Ashley logged into M. Babin’s home computer and went to work.

  Soon, she had identified that there was only a camera over the front of the garage door and not the back, but that the camera had been working just fine on the night of the murder. There was no sign of anyone, Oscar Metais or otherwise, at the door on the night in question. She was able to find the part of the tape where M. Babin had brought the cart back for the evening and was relieved to see that it didn’t show her at all, but that was it.

  Whoever had killed M. Babin had not come through the front door of the garage. Now what am I going to do?

  BY THE TIME ASHLEY finished finding out that her one lead was useless, Patty had left for the restaurant, so Ashley took a long hot shower. It wasn’t the first time that she’d worked all through the night and the next day as well. She put the leash on Belle and went out for breakfast, research, and a walk.

  Stomach complaining that she was a terrible person, just terrible, she forced herself to walk past several cafés, and most of the way to M. Babin’s apartment before she stopped to eat. At a small café, she indulged in coffee and several pastries. Ashley found herself missing the big American breakfast places that served mountains of scrambled eggs, bacon laid on the plate in a crisscross alongside tiny squares of toast with prepackaged jelly. It was a strange thing to miss, and one she’d never admit to Patty, but she did have good memories of breaking out of a programming project and going for ridiculously huge breakfasts with Ryan.

  The pastries were delicious. She could probably make better ones, though. Her hunger satisfied, Ashley sat back and savored her second cup of coffee, thoughts turning to what could happen once she returned to the States, especially if Patty could be persuaded to come back with her.

  They could open a real French café in Sweetgrass. She would do all the pastries and b
read and crêpes, and Patty would handle everything else. It would be amazing! Hah, as if Patty would ever move from Paris to Texas. If anything, she’d just go back to Manhattan. But of course, she was going to get that loan and open her own French café, right here in Paris.

  The options Ashley had left for discovering the real murderer were rapidly dwindling to waiting for the police to figure it out and ... waiting for the police to figure it out. She wanted to take another look around M. Babin’s neighborhood one last time before she decided to give up, though.

  She reached the block and started walking around it. She had noticed that Oscar Metais had taken the crêpe cart back to Rue Daguerre this morning, so at least she didn’t have to worry about running into him again. Ashley walked past the little garage door, studying it without stopping. She knew exactly where the camera was pointed, and she didn’t want to look suspicious by standing in front of the door for too long. The light on the keypad was securely red. After she reached the end of the block, she turned around and walked back. This time she stopped at the entrance to the alley where Oscar Metais had confronted her, looked around, and went in.

  The narrow alleyway was much longer and narrower than the alleys leading to the inside of street blocks in the area. It wasn’t wide enough for a car, just barely wide enough to roll a bicycle through, and far too narrow for the crêpe cart. She wouldn’t even have to stretch her arms out to reach both sides. There was even a spot where the brick walls on either side of her did a jig, and she had to take a step to the side in order to avoid walking straight into the next wall. The alley was more of a drainage ditch than anything else, and in fact was still damp with standing water, which Belle delicately trotted around.

  Ashley and Belle reached the more brightly-lit courtyard on the other side of the tunnel-like alley and stepped out into an area that mainly consisted of delivery doors. A small garden area looked abandoned with several tents staked out near the brick walls along the edges. Looking around, Ashley spotted several surveillance cameras. That was both good news and bad news. She was going to have to avoid doing anything too suspicious, but if she was desperate, she could try tracking down a few of them and finding more information that way.

  I’d have to be really desperate to try something like that. Biting her lip, she tried to figure out which door led to the back of M. Babin’s little garage. There didn’t seem to be one, the doors near the back side of the garage led to the ground-level shops on either side of the garage. The shops were both clearly marked – La Cave Rustique and Marie! She could try sneaking in one and finding the back door of the garage from there ...

  “Mademoiselle?” a voice broke in on her thoughts. A woman, probably homeless, in a weather-beaten jacket and blue jeans had stopped on her way through the courtyard, looking at her with her head tilted. “Do you need help? Are you all right?”

  Ashley’s first instinct was to say that she didn’t need anything, merci, but she thought better of it. “I work with Jan Hamelin,” she said. “Do you know him?”

  “Oui!” The woman’s face brightened. “He stops nearby to pass out the extras from time to time. When restaurants have a little too much – but you know this if you know Jan. He is a good man.”

  Ashley nodded encouragingly.

  “He is a driver for Gergovie and Company,” the woman added. “I can’t help but wave whenever I see his truck. He’s a bright spot, all right.”

  “Was he here last week at all?”

  “Oh, haven’t you seen him around?”

  “No, it’s not that.” Ashley struggled to come up with an excuse for asking her question and decided to come out with the truth, although not necessarily the whole story. “It is possible that Jan will end up being a suspect in the murder of M. Babin, who lived here and had his ...”

  “Not Jan!” the woman interrupted her. “Non!”

  “The police know that he was in the area on the night of the murder,” Ashley said sternly. “If you want to help him ...”

  “I do! He was in the area, I remember. But he was not the only one!”

  “Oh?”

  The woman snorted. “No. Oscar Metais was hanging around all day, waiting for M. Babin to return with the cart! He was fired very early that morning, we all heard it. It was a real screaming row. But when M. Babin came back, Oscar wasn’t allowed inside at all. M. Babin wouldn’t hear of it whatsoever.”

  “Which door belongs to M. Babin?”

  “Oh, he doesn’t have a separate one. He shares the door marked La Cave. He stands outside and smokes there all the time and makes crêpes for us if it suits him. He did, I mean, before he died.”

  “And he argued with Oscar?”

  “Non, non,” the woman said, laughing now and waving a hand in the air. “I meant that M. Babin would not even let that scoundrel inside. There is an intercom button, see? We could hear them arguing over the speaker.”

  Ashley saw the small box next to the door, just as the woman said, with a speaker and keypad below it. It was the same kind as the keypad out front.

  “Are you sure?” she asked almost desperately. If the murderer isn’t Oscar Metais, who could it be?

  “Oui.”

  “Was there anyone else who came to the door that night? And have you told that to the police?”

  The woman drew herself up with dignity. “I will tell them if they ask, but they have not.”

  “They haven’t?” Ashley said incredulously.

  “It is easy enough for some to forget that people like me exist.”

  Ashley couldn’t argue with that. “Was there anyone else at the door?”

  The woman’s eyebrow twitched. “Yes.”

  “Who?” The woman didn’t answer. “Jan Hamelin?”

  She shook her head. “No, he doesn’t deliver in this courtyard.” she gestured toward the other tents, “We had just come back from visiting him. You take the little alley, cross the street, and walk two blocks. That’s where he delivers when he has something for us. This was someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman.”

  Ashley’s stomach lurched. Suddenly she regretted having eaten any breakfast, no matter how small and dainty it was.

  “Who? What did she look like?”

  “She was a little taller than you with blond hair and bangs across her eyes like this.” The woman made a snipping gesture at her forehead. Patty has blond hair and bangs like that. Unbidden the thought flashed through Ashley’s mind, and the woman’s next words worried her even more. “She arrived riding a bicycle, and she was out of breath. She spoke to M. Babin through the intercom, before he came to the door and let her in. She was there for only a few moments before she left. She was weeping when she left, I saw her.”

  Ashley tried to absorb the woman’s statement. Could it be true? Could Patty have murdered M. Babin?

  Patty would have had to ride a bicycle at full speed through the streets from the club to here, then back again before anyone had missed her, just as Ashley had realized earlier. It would have taken at least ten minutes to get here and back. She had been here only a few moments. Her friends had been dancing at the time. An absence of fifteen or even twenty minutes was not something that would be noticed. A trip to the ladies’ room and waiting at the bar for a drink could easily consume that long on a busy night at a Paris club, even in the Fourteenth Arrondissement. Ashley didn’t want to believe it.

  “Do you know what she wanted?”

  “I think she wanted to talk about purchasing M. Babin’s bicycle cart. Which was foolish. Who sells their livelihood? If I had a cart like that, I would never let it go. If only there were more places for the homeless and refugees in this city! I want to work. I hate sitting here ... I feel like the shadows of the building are draining the life out of me.”

  “What will you do?” Ashley asked.

  The woman made a cutting gesture. “In Tunisia, I was a tailor. I made men’s suits for my father. He didn’t like to say that to the customers
, though, so officially I was just a clerk.”

  Ashley commiserated with her about the difficulties of overcoming paperwork and said that she would keep an ear out for anyone in the neighborhood who wanted some tailoring done.

  “I would walk to Rue Daguerre for a job,” the woman announced. “I would move my little tent, too. But I no longer have my tools. Not even a pair of scissors. I have a little sewing kit that someone threw out, that is all.” She shrugged.

  Ashley sighed. Sympathetically, the woman asked, “This woman, is she a friend of yours?”

  “Yes,” Ashley admitted. “She says she didn’t kill M. Babin, but she also said that she came nowhere near here. Your description sounds like her.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t her, but someone else,” the woman said encouragingly.

  “Maybe.” Ashley thought back over the conversation. “Was there anyone else?”

  “Yes, but—” the woman bit her lip.

  “What?”

  CHAPTER 19

  “It was strange.” The woman spoke thoughtfully, “It was a man with a cab driver’s tweed cap, you know that kind of style? It wasn’t M. Babin, and it wasn’t one of the owners of La Cave. There is a key code on the door, you know? The man punched in a code and let himself in without using the intercom first.”

  “He must have been there on business for La Cave.”

  “Let me finish, please, before you jump to conclusions. The man went in, and when he came out, he was carrying a backpack.”

  “A backpack?” Ashley said, puzzled.

  “Oui. A blue one.”

  “He didn’t have it with him when he went inside?”

  “Non.”

  “When was that?”

  The woman made a thoughtful face. “I do not have a watch, only the church bells to go by. Jan Hamelin makes his deliveries about six-thirty or seven. What you would like me to say is that the woman arrived before the time of the murder, at eight o’clock, and the man arrived at eight o’clock exactly. But I cannot say that. In fact, I must tell you that the clocks struck eight o’clock, and then the woman arrived. The man arrived about three-quarters of an hour later. The half hour had rung, but not the nine o’clock bells.”