The Grave Gourmet

by Alexander Campion

  Capucine was at a loss. They so obviously had nothing more to say. Perrault saved the day. He stood up like a sergeant major and ordered, “Au travail!” The staff dinner was suddenly over. Capucine felt as if she had been left on the dock as the stately liner eased off to sea.

  Chapter 27

  Three days later Alexandre had one of his caprices and insisted on taking Capucine to a late dinner at Hand, the latest hot spot for le tout Paris.

  “I thought you hated this place,” Capucine said when they arrived.

  “I absolutely loathe it. Its überchef Armand Duval’s latest attempt to squeeze a few more euros out of the world of haute cuisine.”

  “So why are we here? Although you have to admit the decor is kind of cute.” Capucine sat on a banquette strewn with Bargello needlepoint throw pillows while Alexandre reclined in an enormous wicker throne. The tableware consisted of lacquered Japanese bento boxes equipped with ergonomically designed cutlery as well as expensive-looking ebony chopsticks.

  “‘Know thine enemy,’ as has so often been said,” Alexandre said with a smirk. Capucine was almost disappointed she was not treated to his Asian Sage face. “And Duval is definitely the enemy despite his unquestionable talent. He maintains that this restaurant responds to the current need for culinary zapping. There’s no real menu. You pick something from column A, something else from column B, and maybe another something from column C. He calls it ‘modular mix and match.’ If you want béarnaise on your salad along with sushi doused in pickle relish, why, just go right ahead! This is Fusion 2.0.”

  “Sounds like fun. If I ever get pregnant this is where we’ll come. I still don’t understand why you hate it so much.”

  “Let me put it this way. Jean-Louis once told me that he thought he was the only one of his three-star peers who really deserved to be called ‘Chef,’ and I think he’s right. All the others have become mere businessmen. They want to open as many operations as they can, and so they opt for formula restaurants in far-flung corners of the world that are based on grossly overpriced fashion food and outlandish decors. Jean-Louis likes to say he would rather sell crepes from a street stand in front of a department store on the boulevard Haussmann than spend his time flying to Las Vegas in a private jet. That way he would at least have the feel of food in his hands and the smell of cooking in his nose.”

  “Poor Jean-Louis. A little giggle now and then wouldn’t hurt him. Especially right now.”

  Despite Alexandre’s muttered stream of invective, Capucine was delighted with her dinner. From the youmkoumg consommé brimming with squid and shellfish to Hand’s version of a BLT—Batavia lettuce, watercress, heirloom tomatoes, and grilled pancetta on a brioche roll delicately anointed with balsamic mayonnaise—to her dessert of bubble-gum ice cream, she loved it all. Alexandre, even though he didn’t admit it, also seemed to enjoy his squid with a sauce of chopped preserved lemon followed by a designer version of mac and cheese. As Capucine pecked at her ice cream Alexandre ordered shch, which the waiter assured him was the classic Japanese worker’s liqueur. It arrived in a thick-bottomed shot glass that would have been at home on the set of a Western.

  “This is a long, long way from Diapason but probably better than their staff meal, isn’t it?” Alexandre asked.

  “Actually, the food was not bad at all. The problem was that just as I was getting them to loosen up Perrault made them all go back to work. It was highly frustrating. I’d love to get my hooks back into that restaurant but Tallon’s dead set against it.”

  Alexandre sipped his shch and made a face. “Bleech. This stuff tastes like watered-down vodka. What do you mean Tallon’s against it?”

  “His new thing is that he’s got his heart set on tagging Martin Fleuret. He ordered me to stop everything else and has my three brigadiers, as well as six others he’s assigned to the case, following Fleuret around the clock. He even got Madame d’Agremont to sign off on level-one wiretapping, which is a huge deal because it means that real people listen to his phones all day long instead of the usual computers. In the Police Judiciare world this is a full-court press.”

  “And has all this produced anything?”

  “Of course not. What we did find out is that Fleuret’s a workaholic. At his desk by eight, lunch in his office or something gobbled at a café counter, home by nine to eat a dinner prepared by his housekeeper. No social life. The phone taps yielded nothing more arousing than conversations with his clients and corn-fed good-night chats with Karine Bergeron. If you ask me, there’s no way this Fleuret can have had anything to do with the murder. Tallon’s wasting our time. The solution is bound to be somewhere in the restaurant. I told Tallon. Actually, we even had words about it.”

  “Your first tiff, how charming” Alexandre said sweetly.

  “I know I’m a newbie at homicide and he’s the grand old man with the brilliant reputation, but I still know I’m right. I trust my instin—” She was interrupted by the quiet buzzing of her cell phone.

  “Lieutenant!” Isabelle said with suppressed urgency. “He just drove out of the underground parking lot in his car. We follow him, right?”

  “Absolutely. Get going, but stay on the line.”

  Capucine heard the sound of running footsteps, a car door slamming, the distant voice of Isabelle talking to someone, no doubt Momo, who never relinquished the wheel.

  “Okay,” Isabelle said, “we’re on him. That was totally weird! We could see the light of his TV and it sure looked like he was hunkered down for the evening, but all of a sudden he comes tearing up the ramp in his big fat-cat Mercedes 500. Now he’s doing sixty down the avenue Henri Martin. We’re a couple of hundred yards behind.”

  Capucine pressed the MUTE button on her phone and turned to Alexandre. “Maybe Tallon was right after all. This is my three musketeers. They’re chasing Fleuret across Paris.”

  “This is going to be better than the movies. Do you want some popcorn or will a drink do?” Alexandre beckoned the waiter over, pushed the still-brimming shot glass over to him, and mouthed “Cognac” with two fingers raised.

  For the next fifteen minutes Capucine listened to Isabelle’s slightly breathless reports and commented them to Alexandre. The brigadiers followed Fleuret out of the Sixteenth and into the avenue de Neuilly, a broad avenue lined with small office buildings erected on tight plots that had formerly held stately townhouses.

  “Okay,” Isabelle said, “he’s just turned down a ramp into the garage of one of these office buildings. All the window are dark. Looks kind of deserted. What do we do now?”

  “You and David get out of the car and stake out the front. Have Momo drive around the block and see if there is a back entrance.”

  Three minutes later Isabelle was back on the line. “There’s nothing in back. The only ways in and out are the front entrance and the garage door.”

  “Good. Tell David to use his post-office passkey and get into the lobby, but have him stay out of sight and be sure not to turn on any lights. Have him watch for any movement of the elevator. You and Momo stay outside in the car and watch the front of the building.”

  “What’s this about a post-office passkey?” Alexandre asked.

  “I thought everyone knew that. The postal service has a passkey that opens every apartment building in Paris so they can get in to deliver the mail. The post office was kind enough to give us a few copies.”

  “The things I learn, even at my age.”

  Capucine picked up her cell phone. “Oh, yes, and have David call me on 06 23 26 89 97 and leave the line open. I don’t want to call him and have his phone ring while he’s staking out the lobby.”

  “That’s my number!” Alexandre said.

  “The show’s going to get better. From now on it’s surround sound. I’m requisitioning your phone.”

  In less than five minutes Alexandre’s phone buzzed like a bee trapped under a glass and scuttled sideways across the table as it vibrated.

  “Hey, Lieutenant, it’s Dav
id. I’m in the building lobby. Both the elevators are here on the ground level and they just wouldn’t be programmed to return automatically. The building’s way too small to have elevators that sophisticated. I have this feeling that our boy’s still down in the garage. There’s some weird shit going down here.”

  Capucine did not answer. She stared fixedly at Alexandre without seeing him. After five seconds David asked nervously, “Lieutenant, are you still there?”

  “Sorry, I was just thinking. I can’t imagine why a high-priced lawyer would be hanging around the garage of a empty office building, but, still, I think you might be right. Look, can you guys open the garage door?”

  “Of course. The post-office key always works on those, God knows why.”

  “Okay. I’m going to have Momo drive the car down the ramp and see what’s going on. You stay in the lobby. I’m coming down there. Call me if anything happens.”

  Capucine stood up and pecked Alexandre on the forehead. “You can grab a cab, right? And you don’t need your phone, right? I’m off.”

  “You women are all just the same: any excuse to stick us with the check.”

  Capucine barely heard. She was striding urgently across the restaurant.

  Capucine had parked the Clio with its front wheels on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, a parking habit unchanged from her student days. Of course, she told herself, the beauty part was that she no longer had to worry about parking tickets. She put both phones on the passenger seat and bounced the car off the curb. There was nothing but silence during the ten-minute drive to Neuilly.

  When she arrived at the address, the front was deserted. She picked up Alexandre’s phone and asked, “David, are you still there?”

  “Oui,” came the whispered reply.

  “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t have a clue. I heard the garage door roll open and I guess Momo and Isabelle got down there. Me, I’m sitting here staring down the elevator display lights. And they’re staring back at me. Two big zeros, like tiger’s eyes. So far neither one of us has blinked.”

  “Don’t get poetic on me, David. Hang on. I’m going to check out the garage door.”

  Capucine walked down the ramp and pressed her ear against the metal door. It was unexpectedly cold. Capucine had the fleeting sensation she was listening at the door to a morgue cubicle. She could hear a man screaming, “Salaud! Traitor! Whore’s son! You deserve to be killed. You worm of no honor. You’re like a mangy, maggot-infested dog!” She hammered violently on the door. There was no response. Exasperated, she walked to the front entrance and banged on the glass door. Again no response. In a rage, she walked back to the Clio and picked up one of the phones. “David, will you open the fucking door!” No response. She realized she was yelling into her phone, not Alexandre’s, and tried again. “David. It’s me at the door. Will you hurry up and open it, for Christ’s sake.”

  Once inside, she hit the light switch, found the stairwell, and beckoned David to follow her. They inched down a short flight of stairs and Capucine eased the door open with her foot while she and David took cover at either side, Sigs drawn and held rigidly in the air.

  Momo and Isabelle were standing rooted, facing the garage door, their guns anchored in both fists, aiming at a dark car, packed with passengers, which sped up the ramp, its tires squealing and smoking. Inexplicably, they did not fire.

  Martin Fleuret lay collapsed on the cement floor, his limbs akimbo and his neck twisted so impossibly far back it looked broken. Blood dripped from his slack mouth and made a small puddle on the floor. The representation of agony was so vivid it looked fake, like a death scene in a particularly lurid B movie. Fleuret jerked in a convulsive spasm. Capucine wondered if he hadn’t just died for real.

  Chapter 28

  Momo’s and Isabelle’s story didn’t even fill the wait for the ambulance. They had opened the garage door with the postal service key, driven down the ramp hoping to look like regular tenants arriving to park their car, and found a gang with Asian features vigorously kicking a supine Fleuret. Momo had been impressed with the professionalism of their endeavor. The two brigadiers had jumped out of their car, badges in one hand and guns in another, and approached the group, who had turned tail, run to their car, and driven off at speed. Unsure of who was whom, neither brigadier had fired at the car. It was at that point that Capucine and David had appeared.

  When the ambulance arrived the paramedics had been utterly indifferent to Capucine’s Police Judiciare card and even less moved by her insistence that the victim was key to an important murder case. They shouldered her aside roughly to examine Fleuret, and it had been all she could do to jump aboard the ambulance as it drove off with its earsplitting pam-pom-PAM. Capucine was relegated to a far corner while the paramedics, with the studied calm of great emergency, clapped an oxygen mask on Fleuret’s face, inserted an IV drip in the back of his hand, and glued a seemingly infinite number of electrocardiogram sensors to his chest and legs. The ambulance lurched off, rolling from side to side sickeningly as the driver wove sharply through traffic. One of the paramedics held a running dialogue on the VHF radio, to all evidence with a doctor somewhere, and gave crisp directions to his partner, who injected a series of drugs into a rubber stopper connected to the IV, consulted the electrocardiograph with furrowed brow, consulted his colleague, and continued giving injections. Capucine’s repeated questions as to how Fleuret was doing fell on disdainfully deaf ears, but it was clear things were touch and go. Eventually the ambulance backed into the loading bay of an emergency room. Capucine had no idea where.

  Inside, Capucine continued to be ignored. Fleuret was placed on a gurney and, surrounded by a team in scrubs covered with transparent yellow plastic aprons, rolled at speed down a corridor. As he was pushed into an operating room the smallest of the group, a very short and very round woman, wheeled and peremptorily insisted Capucine go to the waiting room if she was family or leave the hospital if she was not. Intimidated in spite of herself, she dutifully went off to the waiting room wondering what Rivière would have done and, biting her lip, announced to the duty nurse that she was Fleuret’s wife.

  After an hour a very young doctor in blood-spotted green scrubs, a face mask pushed down around his neck, came up to her smiling in the carefully constructed grand-fatherly way he had been erroneously taught is reassuring to patients’ families.

  “Madame Fleuret?”

  “Not exactly,” Capucine answered with a smile, brandishing her card. “Police Judiciare. Your patient is a suspect in a murder case and this attack may well have something to do with it. How is he?”

  “He’ll be fine. He probably owes his life to the ambulance crew. In addition to three fractured ribs, he has a ruptured spleen, a number of very nasty contusions, and a deep cut in the tongue. When they picked him up, his B.P. was seventy over ten and his heart was at one eighty and very thready.”

  Responding to Capucine’s blank look, he explained. “A blood pressure reading that low with a very high and weak pulse rate meant he was very close to death. But his vitals are now back within normal range. There’s no doubt he’ll recover.”

  “Don’t you have to operate for a ruptured spleen?”

  “That was in the old days. Now we just keep the patient in the hospital and let the spleen heal itself. If all goes well he’ll be on his feet and out of here in a week or ten days at the most.”

  That was the good news. The bad news was that he had been heavily sedated on top of a healthy dose of morphine. Fleuret wasn’t going to say anything that made any sense until the next day at the earliest.

  Purely out of a desire to take some kind of action, Capucine stationed a uniformed gendarme outside Fleuret’s door and beat a retreat to the Quai.

  At six the next morning Capucine arrived with Fleuret’s breakfast tray. His eyes had sunk deeply into dark hollows in his paper-white face. He seemed to be in pain despite the drugs. He looked up and frowned at Capucine.

 
“What are you doing here?” he growled hoarsely.

  “Maître, I think your guardian angel would like you to show a little appreciation that my people were following you and divined you were coming to no good in that garage. If they hadn’t driven in you’d be in a whole lot worse shape right now, wouldn’t you agree? From what I hear, your little playmates were just getting warmed up. So, what exactly was going on?”

  “This doesn’t concern you since I’m not going to press charges.”

  “Actually, it does concern me. You’re a possible suspect in a murder case and everything unusual you engage in is very definitely the subject of police scrutiny.”

  Fleuret’s lips puffed a protracted “Pfffff!” of derision and he twisted painfully, reaching for the nurse’s call button.

  “I wouldn’t be too quick to do that if I were you. You can easily be transferred to a police hospital where I doubt you’d find conditions as comfortable.” Capucine prayed Fleuret wouldn’t know the most she could do was what she’d done already: post a gendarme at his door. “I’m going to insist you make a deposition.”

  “All right, all right, anything to get you out of here. That was a meeting with the client of a client of mine.” Fleuret smiled ironically. “Or I should say ex-client of an ex-client of mine since when I declined to advise my client regarding the transaction in question I was fired and as a result he abandoned the transaction. I imparted that fact to the ex-client of the ex-client and, as you saw, he was somewhat less than pleased. Voilà. If you type that up I’ll be happy to sign it.”

  “Maître, impressed as I am by your heroic sense of humor, I’m sure you can understand that the Police Judiciare does not appreciate levity. Let’s hear your story.” Capucine sat on the edge of the bed.