Opera Cake Murder (A Patisserie Mystery with Recipes Book 8)

by Harper Lin

  “I’m sorry,” Clémence realized. “It just dawned on me who you are. That’s funny, because I just started using your concealer on my friend Sophie’s recommendation.”

  “Sophie Seydoux? I’ve worked with her. Don’t worry about it. How many makeup artists can you count on one hand? Most people wouldn’t know what Francois Nars, for example, even looks like.”

  Tata must’ve been in her late thirties or early forties. She dressed well, in a trendy and sophisticated black silk button-down shirt printed with flamingos. She wore tiny earrings shaped like pineapples. Clémence supposed she was drawn to kitsch. She had dark features set on a olive face and small brown eyes that mascara and eyeliner couldn’t enlarge. Her most interesting feature was her strong nose. Her cheeks were severe. Tata was no model, but her face had harsh angles that would’ve made interesting shadows in photographs.

  “Did you know Natalie Albert at all?” Clémence asked.

  “What do you mean ‘know’?” Tata asked in her brisk way. “We know each other professionally. We don’t tell each other our deepest, darkest secrets. This is maybe the second time we’ve met. As far as I know, she hasn’t been working for Marcus for long.”

  Clémence had also met Natalie recently. She hadn’t known Marcus that long either, only a few months, which was as long as Clémence knew Natalie as well.

  “What did you think of her?” Clémence asked.

  Tata shrugged nonchalantly. “I’ve met worse.”

  “Any idea why anyone would kill her?”

  “Kill? I don’t know. It’s a petty business. I’ve been working in this industry for almost twenty years. The backstabbing I’ve seen has been brutal. Things could get heated.”

  “But a literal backstabbing?” Clémence asked. “Don’t tell me that’s commonplace in the fashion industry.”

  “No, but I’ve seen a photographer almost strangle a client to death once.” Tata looked around. “When are the police getting here? I really want to go have a cigarette. Ever since they banned smoking inside, it’s been hell to live.”

  “You need a smoke?” a model piped up. “I’ve got an e-cigarette.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Tata muttered, taking the slim device from the girl’s hand. “I should really buy one, although I prefer the real thing. I love the sensation of burning my insides.”

  Clémence bit her tongue and tried not to make any remarks. Her biggest pet peeve in the world was smoking, yet she was living in Paris, where everyone smoked. She observed the room. Everyone was talking intensely among themselves. Half of the models were sucking on e-cigarettes, too.

  Tata seemed to be the only person who seemed utterly calm about the whole thing. It was as if she was used to crime scenes and hearing about people getting stabbed.

  “None of this seems to faze you,” Clémence observed. “You seem to be handling this a lot better than the others.”

  “Nobody here really cares about the death of an assistant,” Tata said curtly. “They just like to savor the drama of being on a crime scene. Frankly, I’m beyond that. Other people’s misfortunes bore me rather than excite me.”

  “You’re not even curious who would do such a thing?”

  “It wouldn’t be surprising if any of the people here committed the crime. Like I said, this industry is full of terrible people.”

  Tata was saying it within earshot of the models, including the one who had lent her the e-cigarette. Clémence didn’t know whether to find the makeup artist intriguing or frightening. Was she just a jaded member of a cruel business? Tata seemed to detest the very people she worked with. Clémence didn’t doubt there was truth to what she said about them. There were cutthroat people in every industry, but there was an elevated shallowness and egoism that pervaded the entertainment industry, where everyone was clamoring for fame and status.

  Tata had a piece of that pie, yet she didn’t seem to appreciate it. In fact, it didn’t seem like she had any feelings at all except for apathy. Clémence couldn’t understand how she could be so desensitized to something like murder. Even though Clémence had seen more dead bodies than she could count on one hand in the past year, she would never get used to them. The fact that someone was murdered, however little she knew about them, would never cease to disturb her.

  If she didn’t know any better, she would think Tata was behaving like a psychopath. Did Clémence know any better?

  But then again, psychopaths would know better than to express their true feelings openly, wouldn’t they? They would be clever enough to disguise their disgust with humanity rather than let on about their disdain.

  There were some people who were simply selfish. Perhaps Tata was right. Fashion was full of selfish people, Tata included.

  The fact that somebody had been stabbed barely made a dent on someone like Tata’s day. Even though Clémence couldn’t understand that line of thinking, she didn’t want to jump to conclusions to think that Tata had something to do with it.

  But the fact still stood that Tata didn’t care for people, and she didn’t bat an eyelash at a murder scene. That made Clémence suspicious.

  Before she could continue with her line of questioning, the person Clémence dreaded seeing came into the room.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “ L a heiress,” Inspector Cyril St. Clair exclaimed, clapping his hands together. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

  Clémence crossed her arms and tried not to roll her eyes.

  “That was sarcasm, if you didn’t get that,” Cyril said.

  “Loud and clear.” Clémence gave in; she did roll her eyes.

  “So what happened here? Someone ate another one of your desserts and died?”

  Clémence’s face turned pink. Cyril snickered, knowing that his words had a poisonous effect on her mood. A few fashion people and the security guard were within earshot. But she would not let Cyril’s words start a chain of rumors about her patisserie chain, and she pulled him aside.

  “No. That’s not what happened. I know you’re unprofessional, but I can sue you for saying things like that.”

  Cyril raised an eyebrow. “Somebody’s a little sensitive today.”

  “Shouldn’t you be doing your job instead of trying to get a rise out of me?”

  “Au contraire. I am doing my job. Whenever I come onto a murder scene, who better to go to than the source?”

  He waved her to the room where Clémence had initially found Natalie.

  “I hear the body’s in that room,” he said. “Care to look, or have you seen it already?”

  “As a matter of fact, I was the one to find the body.” Clémence gritted her teeth. She could hear herself getting defensive, and she had to silently tell herself to cool it.

  Cyril chuckled. “Why am I not surprised, mademoiselle?”

  It was so easy for Cyril to push her buttons. His smugness and arrogance never ceased to prompt her disdain. He was a man in his late thirties with smile lines like parentheses on the sides of his mouth. Not that he smiled. Rather, he smirked. He had a strong, hawk-like nose and green eyes that were pale, like a dead fish’s.

  She wondered if what she felt for Cyril was what Tata felt about most of the people she worked with. If it was, Clémence was starting to sympathize with her more and more.

  A man on Cyril’s team opened the door for the inspector. Cyril put on his gloves and instructed Clémence not to touch anything. Clémence winced again at the sight of the dead body. Only a couple of hours ago, she had been talking to the dead girl.

  Natalie’s head was turned to the side. Her eyes were half open. With her right cheek squished on the floor, her saliva had dripped from the side of her mouth to mix with the blood. There was so much blood.

  “Struck in the back with a knife,” Cyril stated the obvious.

  Clémence stopped herself from making a snide remark about that. She couldn’t afford to irritate him, no matter how much she wanted to, since he would soon find out that the knife belonged to the Damour pati
sserie.

  She decided to offer this fact up front, to get the accusations out of the way.

  “Why did she have the knife?” Cyril turned to her with more suspicion in his eyes, as Clémence expected.

  The faster she cleared her name, the faster they could move on to actually solve the case, so she helped him.

  “She was holding onto it for me because we were going to surprise Marcus, the designer, with a cake.”

  She explained her patisserie’s collaboration with the Marcus Savin collection and how Natalie had stored the cake somewhere in the building. Clémence had been trying to find her backstage so they could bring it out for Marcus.

  “How do we know that you didn’t have a disagreement with—” he snapped his fingers at one of his men. “What’s her name?”

  “Natalie Albert,” the young man replied.

  “Natalie here, and you stabbed her with your knife?”

  Clémence sighed. “I know you’d start with that. It’s not possible because I was watching the runway show. Natalie was last seen alive working backstage before the show started. There were a million cameras out there to capture me in the audience, so it would’ve been impossible for me to kill her from here. Once the show was over, I came backstage and asked around for her. If you interview the witnesses, you’ll find many people who saw me. Marcus, for example, or Tata Milan, the makeup artist, who I talked to just before I went behind the screens to the office door and opened it. You’re wasting your time if you want to pin this one on me.”

  “Whatever you say.” Cyril shrugged.

  He began to ask her a string of other useless questions, like what she had done that day and why she had come to the show. A photographer was snapping away at the crime scene, asking Cyril and Clémence to step back. The rest of the crew were noting and gathering evidence. As she spoke, she noticed a slight, faint footprint in the blood.

  Clémence could see it, a very faint “S.” She’d seen that footprint before. It was from a certain brand of luxury shoes, but she couldn’t recall the name. It had been trendy all season, and she was sure plenty of the fashion set owned a pair of shoes from that brand.

  “Look,” she pointed out, stepping forward carefully, closer to the faint footprint.

  “A footprint,” Cyril said wearily. “We have eyes. We’ll get on it.”

  “No, don’t you see the S? It’s a certain brand. Whoever killed her was wearing shoes from this brand. That’s a major clue. It’ll be much easier to narrow down the suspects.”

  Cyril squinted at the S and instructed the photographer to take more close-up photos of it.

  “Well, what’s the brand called?”

  Clémence racked her brain. “Styra! It’s pretty popular.” She looked at the bloody footprint again. “It looks like it could have come from boots, but also heels. The S is printed at the front of the sole. It’s faint, but I’m sure that’s the logo.”

  “So all we have to do is gather up the people who are wearing this brand,” Cyril said. “We’ll check the soles of every man and woman backstage.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  C lémence went home to her apartment on Avenue Kleber, utterly exhausted. She had only expected to be gone three hours at the most to support her friend at his fashion show in the early afternoon and ended up coming home at eleven in the evening.

  When she opened the door, her little dog Miffy came running to her. Miffy jumped up and down, excited to see her. She was a white West Highland terrier and the happiest dog in the world. Perhaps it was the way Miffy’s mouth was shaped, but Clémence thought she was always smiling. Even Miffy’s eyes shone when she was happy.

  “Coucou, girl,” Clémence greeted her. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “I got your texts.” Arthur Dubois came down the hall at the sound of her voice. “Are you okay?”

  Her boyfriend gave her big hug and a passionate kiss on the lips before Clémence got a chance to reply. Arthur had recently moved in with her. They’d met because they were neighbors. Arthur’s family lived in the same building, two stories down.

  The two of them had not liked each other when they first met. Clémence thought Arthur was a massive playboy, which he was, but when he fell in love with Clémence, all that changed. A romantic was who he was at the core underneath the snotty, gruff exterior.

  Clémence’s apartment wasn’t exactly hers. It belonged to her parents, who were living in Asia for the time being to oversee new Damour locations opening up in major cities. They were due back home earlier than expected, in two months, and Clémence didn’t know where she would live after that.

  She supposed it would be time to buy her own apartment, but would she do it with Arthur? It was time to start thinking about the future, but Arthur seemed so content in their relationship that she didn’t want to have that talk with him yet. Not that she was in a major rush to get engaged. She could wait. They were head over heels in love with each other, but they hadn’t even been together for a year yet. Madeleine had dated her boyfriend forever before he had proposed recently.

  “Everything’s fine,” Clémence said. “I’m not a suspect.”

  “Come on, I made you dinner. You must be hungry.” He took her hand and led her to the kitchen.

  He had made pasta—one of the few things he knew how to make, but she beamed nonetheless. Smelling the fresh tomato sauce and cheese made her realize just how hungry she was.

  “Merci, cherí.” She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek before sitting down and devouring the food.

  “I ate without you,” Arthur said. “I was starving.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s so late, of course you’d be starving waiting for me.”

  She was glad he gave her the time to eat before she could tell him what had happened in her day. Talking about it would make her ill—thinking about Natalie’s body like that, the knife sticking out of her back and all the blood on the floor…

  After she finished her plate, she had a glass of wine with Arthur, their preferred way of ending a meal.

  “There were around forty people backstage,” Clémence was saying. “A zoo. The models, Marcus and his team, a few members of the media, and me. And of course, I had to be the one to find this body.”

  Arthur grinned, his brown eyes laughing. “It’s your fate in life.”

  “I wish my fate could be finding rainbows or something.”

  “It is. Your life is pretty great, except for the murder cases that seem to come by every few weeks.”

  “Yup.”

  “But you know you enjoy solving a good case. Who’s on your suspect list this time?”

  “Arthur.” She looked up and smiled. “You are my Watson.”

  “I must be,” he joked back, “since we share the same bed.”

  Clémence laughed and sipped her wine. Although her day had been hectic, she loved knowing that she could count on Arthur at the end of it.

  She told him about the Styra footprint.

  “Three women were wearing Styra shoes,” Clémence said. “Gabrielle, the supermodel, left before she could talk to the police. I don’t know what she was wearing. I doubt she would be the killer, though. She closed the show. After the show, she would’ve only had a small amount of time to kill Natalie.”

  “And you didn’t see Gabrielle during that time?”

  “No. I was still in my seat in the audience. By the time I went backstage, Gabrielle was changing, and the makeup artist was waiting to come back to help her take her makeup off. Apparently Gabrielle greatly prefers Tata Milan to touch her face, which is why Marcus paid a lot more to hire Tata.”

  “Who’s Tata? What a strange name.”

  “She’s a famous makeup artist. The strange name is making her millions, since it’s also the name of her makeup brand.”

  “I know nothing about makeup,” Arthur said.

  Clémence smiled. “Anyway, Tata didn’t seem very personable, so I don’t know why Gabrielle likes her so much. Then again, I don�
�t know Gabrielle at all.”

  “Talented people can get away with a lot,” Arthur said.

  “That’s true. If you’re talented and you have a lot of money and influence, I suppose people would try harder to like you. Maybe Gabrielle is cut from the same cloth. She left the crime scene even though she wasn’t supposed to. Like Tata, she probably doesn’t care about other people, either.”

  “When I was younger, I used to date models,” Arthur said.

  “You mean last year?” Clémence raised an eyebrow.

  “Okay, okay, I know I used to have shallow taste. Until I met you. The models, well, I got tired of them looking at their reflections all the time.”

  “It took you long enough to stop looking at them, though.”

  Arthur grinned. “Men are dumb. They take a while to learn their lessons.”

  “I bet you had fun learning.” Clémence stuck her tongue out at him.

  “Let’s go back to talking about the case,” Arthur said lightly. “So what happened? Who were the other women wearing the shoes?”

  “Let’s see. Two of them were models, and one was a fashion blogger. Only the fashion savvy wear this brand. It’s too cool for me. The police are probably still questioning them. They kicked me out.”

  “Were the models wearing the shoes during the show, too?”

  “No. The models had to wear these high, strappy shoes from Marcus’s collection. They’re pretty cool, but not practical. I don’t think I would be able to walk in them. The thing about Styra shoes is that they are relatively comfortable, because they have chunky heels. The heels are not that high, either. The models probably shouldn’t have changed into their own shoes so soon after the show, since some of the press were still there, but I suppose Marcus’s shoes were so uncomfortable that they had to change back. I love Marcus, but nobody wears his shoes except rich Middle Eastern princesses who never have to walk anywhere.”