Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery) (21 page)

C
apucine arrived at her brigade at six thirty the next morning, a good hour before normal. Only the skeleton night shift was on duty. The uniformed officer at the reception desk saluted her without enthusiasm and glanced at his roster sheet.

“You weren’t supposed to be back until next Monday, Commissaire. Don’t tell me you got bored on holiday?”

The officers at their desks didn’t look up as she walked to her office. Her desk was swept clean except for three pink message slips recording personal calls. Her one captain and three lieutenants apparently had had no problem running the brigade in her absence. A sense of alienation rose in Capucine’s stomach like bile. She roved around the brigade, chatting with the officers as they arrived for duty. They were happy enough to see her, greeting a colleague or boss who had returned from vacation, but there was no urgency in their greeting. She was disappointed that there didn’t seem to be any problem desperately awaiting her return or any sense of a weakly helmed bark awaiting her steady hand. Worse even, they all seemed oblivious to the calvary she had just been through.

When she returned from a particularly long lap, Capucine was delighted to find Isabelle and Momo in her office.

“We heard you were back,” Momo said. “Isabelle thought you’d want a report first thing.”

Capucine looked at him. She had an odd sensation of the diametric opposite of déjà vu—
jamais vu—
if that was what it was called. It was as if, familiar as all this was, she had never seen it before.

Attempting to punch through the distancing screen, she put her legs on the table, a gesture that had characterized her meetings with her hard-core brigadiers for years. True to form, Isabelle admired her legs, but the effect was spoiled since there was no David to comment on her Stuart Weitzman studded ballet flats.

Capucine tuned in to Isabelle’s monotone reading of her report.

“Neighbors and concierge declined to comment on subject. Local merchants know subject well and are forthcoming on subject’s personal specifics. . . .”

Isabelle looked up, checking that Capucine had seized the nuance. Caught up in her enthusiasm, Isabelle abandoned her report.

“You know how it works in these fat-cat neighborhoods like the Sixteenth, right? The merchants force the patrons to cultivate them. You’re not going to get the choicest cut of beef or the freshest fish if you don’t cross their palms with non-tax-reportable silver, right? These guys like to come across as being all feudal and forelock tugging, but they actually have it in for the richies. And they don’t miss a trick.”

Isabelle paused for effect.

“It seems our Mrs. Rich–Lacy Pants gets beaten up pretty regularly. The butcher I spoke to—who thinks he’s one beautiful, macho dude and God’s gift to women, by the way—said that at least once a week she shows up with bruises on her cheek that come from slaps. Like, he’s a butcher and should know, right? And then sometimes she comes in with enormous sunglasses, and he figures she’s had a whaling, you know, closed-fist punching and all.”

Isabelle paused, then went on.

“The other
commerçants
told me pretty much the same thing, except they weren’t as expert with . . . with . . .”

“Meat,” Momo said.

Isabelle’s eyes shot him a flow of daggers.

The report went on and on. Alexandra Tottinguer was unquestionably a seriously battered woman.

Capucine had lunch in a workers’ bistro with her senior officers. The nagging feeling of alienation persisted.

After lunch she drove to Inès’s office. For the entire trip she toyed with the idea of canceling the meeting but could find no plausible excuse. Maybe Alexandre was right, and she should quit the force and do something more, more . . . more what? That was the crux of the problem.

When Capucine reported on Isabelle’s progress, Inès was elated.

“Frequently assaulted?” Inès rubbed her hands in satisfaction. “Excellent. Just excellent. I can’t tell you how pleased I am you’re back on the job.”

Capucine said nothing.

Inès leaned over her desk to lend force to her words. “I’m going to authorize close surveillance. I want you to put a full team on her around the clock. She’s bound to seek medical care before long. I want you to know about it and interview her in whatever ER she winds up in. That’s when she’ll be at her most vulnerable. You have to convince her the only path to personal safety is to cooperate with me. Put your best people on this.”

Capucine groaned inwardly. Complete close surveillance required three teams of six officers. The loss of eighteen officers would wreak havoc with her duty roster. By the time she had reached the car, Capucine decided that assigning the three rookie recruits who would arrive at the end of the week was more than sufficient.

That evening Capucine and Alexandre drove deep into the Bois de Boulogne to Le Pré Catelan, the first of the three-star restaurants to open after their summer closures. Alexandre was ebullient. So ebullient, he had even invited Jacques.

“We owe him for the idea of that dinghy ride, which not only got us out of quite a pickle very elegantly, but was also an adventure I fully intend to regale our grandchildren with.”

“Grandchildren?”

“Of course.”

“But I thought you thought it was too soon for childr—” They had arrived at the restaurant, and the doorman popped open Capucine’s door.

Jacques was already at the table, resplendent in an impeccably cut white linen suit, a Hermès silk square cascading from the breast pocket, a Turnbull & Asser blue-checked shirt open at the throat. He rose, took Capucine in his arms, kissed her cheeks, ran his hand down her back until he reached her Sig Sauer holstered at the back of her trousers.

“Ford’s been restored to his flivver. Your
fesses
weren’t this rewarding all summer long.”

Alexandre glared. Just as he was about to open his mouth to remonstrate, the chef arrived with the maître d’hôtel and fawned over him. Alexandre responded like a puppy whose tummy was tickled, wriggling in pleasure. But beneath the sycophantic eyes, he retained his hardness. He would be fully capable of writing a scathing review if the food did not live up to his expectations.

“Where were you on vacation?” Alexandre asked the chef.

“La Ciotat, a stone’s throw away from Marseilles. I had an epiphany of Midi cooking. I’ve brought the Mediterranean back with me.”

Capucine gave Alexandre a sharp look.

“I would be honored if you could comment on my epiphany in your paper.”

There was no escaping the tasting menu. The dishes arrived in an endless parade. All fish. The pièce de résistance was a
gelée de bouillabaisse
—a jellied version of the classic Marseilles fish stew. The pudding-like bouillabaisse had been made almost entirely with sardines and was served in enormous flat white plates. Rouille, the traditional garlicky-peppery orange paste that usually accompanied the dish, was served as polka dots in three colors meticulously placed across the tops: creamy white spots of garlic, golden dots of saffron, silver dabs of sardine.

The procession of dishes continued. All made of fish, all surrounded by highly complex mousses, all more titillating than delicious.

Dessert was the ne plus ultra. A perfect product of the laboratory. A flawless green sphere, which could have been apple skin had it not been so seamless. Both Capucine and Jacques were at a loss about how to attack it. Alexandre smiled the tight-lipped smile of a platoon leader about to spearhead a charge out of the trenches, raised his spoon, battered in the top of the orb. Capucine and Jacques leaned over, peering intently. No baby dinosaur emerged. It was an apple soufflé with a heart of ice cream flavored of Carambar, a popular children’s caramel candy bar. Capucine finished the entire thing, something she never did with dessert.

As the meal had progressed, Alexandre had swelled. His gravitas, which had atrophied in the past two weeks, had been restored in the space of two hours. The maître d’hôtel arrived at the table and leaned over to stage-whisper in Alexandre’s ear. “Chef wonders if you would enjoy coming to the kitchen to meet some of the staff. I also think,” he said with a twinkling smile, “he may have prepared a little
surprise
that is not on the menu.”

Jacques and Capucine watched Alexandre float off to the kitchen doors, followed by the maître d’. Jacques took a sip of wine.

“Corpulent Consort is like a pig restored to his pond of nitrogenous waste. He’s finally recovered from his two weeks of culinary incertitude, a changed man. You, on the other hand . . .”

“What?”

“Seem to be even more troubled than when I pulled you out of the choucroute by pushing you into that dinghy.”

Jacques took her hand. “I’ve always known that rubber was your thing.” His braying laugh was a far louder eructation than was acceptable in a three-star restaurant. Heads turned.

Capucine traced a complicated pattern on the starched tablecloth with her fingernail.

“I’m frustrated.”

“That doesn’t surprise me in the least. No one in the family thinks Portly Partner can possibly meet the demands of your celebrated libido.”

Capucine tore off a sharply pointed end of a three-cereal roll that was still on her bread dish and threw it as hard as she could at Jacques. Disappointingly, the soft end made contact, not the pointed end, which would undoubtedly have drawn blood. Heads turned again.

“Let me guess. The wisdom of letting sleeping dogs lie has finally dawned on you. You’ve figured out who killed poor scruffy Nathalie, but you don’t have any hard evidence. Both the powers that be and the hardest taskmaster of all, your inner voice of reason, tell you to drop the non-case. But, like the itch you were told not to scratch as a child, you just can’t resist. Is that it?”

“Something like that.”

“This is one time you might be advised to listen to that voice of reason.”

“Why would you say that?”

“There are many more eddies and currents flowing through this tide than you’re aware of.”

“Trust me, Jacques, I may just be a humble flatfoot, not a well-placed spook like you, but I think I’ve been brought up to speed on all the little eddies at work here.”

Jacques gave her a long, level look. “So you know that Nathalie Martin was a DST agent?”

“What!” Capucine said loudly enough to make heads turn and glare.

Jacques smiled his Cheshire cat grin at her.

“That can’t be right,” Capucine said. “We checked her out carefully. There’s no doubt at all she was a bona fide boat bum.”

Jacques took another sip of wine. “The DST, before it was merged into the magma of the administration’s commonweal, had recruiting policies very much like the CIA’s. They like to use stringers, people who are kept on very low levels of retainers and lie low, waiting to be called for odd jobs if the need arises. It’s cheap and it’s secure, even if it’s not all that efficient.”

Capucine said nothing.

“Almost invariably, these people are socially marginal,” Jacques continued, “which is a plus because that makes them undetectable. Of course, their marginality makes them unreliable, and like in the CIA, there are endless cock-ups. They have no discipline and negligible training. Usually, the little training they have is very specific. You know, a little bit about a specific explosive or how to shoot a certain gun. Do you understand?”

“Of course I do. And what was Nathalie’s training?”

“She knew how to shoot a Glock.”

There was a long pause at the table.

“And had she ever used it?”

“Twice. With satisfactory results, apparently.”

“And did she have her Glock with her on the boat?”

“Yes, she did.”

“But the Italian police never found it.”

“I have a very proprietary attitude about assets belonging to the French government, as you know.”

Capucine could see Alexandre returning to the table, his expression of beatific joy cranked up a few notches.

“And what was her ‘mission’ on the boat?” Capucine asked with leaden quotation marks.

“That,
ma cousine,
is something even I may not fully know. And even if I did, I doubt very much I would tell you.”

“Y
ou’d think there’d be an airport closer to Saint-Tropez than Marseilles,” Garbe said, scraping the last of the pâté out of the tiny airline dish with his plastic knife. Capucine handed him her untouched luncheon tray.

“It’s only forty-five miles away. We’ll rent a car and be at the marina in less than an hour.”

“And then what? We stand around all day and watch the forensics guys work? And our juge wanted not one, but two commissaires on hand? I’m goddamn glad I only have a hundred and twenty-three days of this bullshit before I haul my ass out of the force.” In irritation he patted his empty left armpit, failing to reassure himself his Manurhin was there.

“I think her idea was to have me there so I could make sure they dismantle everything, right down to the water and gas tanks. And you had to be there because you’re in charge of the case.”

Garbe made a moue. It was not clear if it was at Capucine’s comment or Air France’s version of
blanquette de veau.

“Right. I’m going to be a big help. I’ve never been on one of these boats in my life. And your basic forensics unit needs prodding to be thorough. What the hell. The good thought is that the day after tomorrow it will be less than a month. I can start counting down in weeks.”

Diomede
was easy enough to find in the almost empty maintenance area of the marina. Perched on stilted cradles, her deck was almost twenty feet off the ground. Men in filmy white jumpsuits scrambled up and down two willowy stepladders.

In the heat, Garbe had removed his suit jacket, which he held in a crooked index finger over his shoulder.

“Fuck this. No way in hell I’m going up there.”

“I doubt either one of us would be welcome.”

Capucine walked over to the boat and yelled up in the general direction of the deck. “How far along are you? Have you found anything you want to talk to us about?”

A man in his middle fifties, wearing half-frame reading glasses, peered over the side.

“You Commissaire Garbe?” he asked in a rolling Marseilles accent so thick
commissaire
came out as a four-syllable word.

“No. I’m Commissaire Le Tellier.”

“Yeah. I forgot. The e-mail said there were going to be two of you. Obviously, we’re finding stuff. We’ve been at it since before dawn this morning. What I don’t know yet is if it has any relevance to your case. Why don’t you two go find some lunch or something and come back in the late afternoon? Then I’ll tell you what I ca—

“
Non, Jean, attention!
Don’t use a blowtorch there. You’ll melt the fiberglass. Cut it away with a hacksaw.”

As they walked across the bone-dry cement lot, Capucine saw a small crane crawl toward
Diomede
and lift off a large stainless-steel canister, which had to be one of the two-hundred-gallon water tanks.

Driven by a sense of duty, they ate at a sad, empty little café in the marina service yard that provided a full view of
Diomede.
They both ordered the
gambas,
which turned out to be shrimp so oversize, they could have gotten into the ring with lobsters. The slightly metallic taste of frozen seafood cut through the unctuousness of a heavy garlic and herb sauce made thick with olive oil, but they were definitely welcome, particularly with an ice-cold bottle of Sancerre. Capucine smiled at the fact that she was sitting in one of the most famous areas of the Riviera, eating Brittany shrimp and drinking Loire Valley wine. Still, it was pleasant enough.

“So, are you going to stay in Paris after you retire?”

Garbe perked up. This was the top-of-mind subject.

“Nope. I have a little house in the
département
of Cantal, smack in the middle of the Auvergne.”

“Are you a
Cantalou
by origin?”

“Lord, no. I’m a
Parigot
. I was born and raised in Paris. But I don’t like people, and I do like the country. I bought my little place years ago. I’m doing my part for the republic. Cantal is the most depopulated region of France.”

“And you’re repopulating it?”

Garbe smiled. “
Si tu veux.
If you want. Fifteen years ago I bought eighteen acres, which are around a nice stone house, which is around a nice stone fireplace. It was cheap enough that I could afford the mortgage on a lieutenant’s salary. The mortgage has been paid off for three years already. And now, in exactly four months and one day, I’m going to move down there and be so far away from all this bullshit, it will seem like it never existed.”

Capucine sensed he was warming up to a diatribe on his life philosophy, which she guessed was based on the fact that all you needed to beat the system was to be tough enough. But just as he got going, his lips tightened and he jerked his head in the direction of the café’s window. The senior forensics technician was walking across the dusty cement toward them, a large plastic box in his hand.

The technician walked over to their table, pulled out a chair, asked the man behind the bar for a
demi
—a half-liter glass of beer.

“I think we’ve found what you asked us to look for, but we’re still digging. Anyhow, since you came all the way down here, I reckoned I’d have a beer with you guys and tell you where we are.”

How different the Provençal approach to life was than the Parisian one. In Paris the forensics unit would have been as secretive as a cabal of alchemists, would have remained utterly silent for at least a week, and would have communicated their findings in a dry, impenetrably complex memorandum.

The technician took a deep swig of his beer, put the plastic box on the table, hiked his eyebrows, and opened the lid. Putting his hand inside, he said, “Abracadabra,” produced a plastic evidence bag, and waved it in front of them at eye level.

Capucine leaned forward and examined the bag. Actually, there were two bags. Inside the police-issue evidence bag was a commercial freezer bag, easily identifiable by its two-color sliding closure. The bag on the inside was mottled with shiny aluminum fingerprint powder, making it difficult to see what it contained.

Capucine held her hand out. The technician handed her the bag.

“Please, look but don’t open it. We found this bag when we cut open one of the water tanks. It’s been in water for a good bit of time, and the latent prints have been washed off and are not coming up with powder. I still need to get it under a high-power Luma-Lite and do some other little tricks we have back at the lab.”

Close up, Capucine could see a luminescent jade juju so brightly colored, it could have been plastic. A dark strand, undoubtedly sweat-stained rawhide, could be clearly discerned passing through a round hole drilled in the pendant, which had also been dusted with aluminum powder.

Capucine handed back the bag and let the gesture ask the question.

“My guess was that someone put the little jade amulet in the bag, rolled it up, and shoved it down the deck opening of the water tank. Pretty good hiding place since there’s no other opening to the tank. We cut open all the tanks on the boat—the other water tank, the fuel tank, and the holding tanks for the crappers. Nothing in any of them. Is this what you wanted?”

Capucine nodded. “The fingerprints may prove decisive.”

“Good. Because just with the powder, there is a good set of latents. Two different people. When I get back to the shop, I’ll see if the computer can ID them, and I’ll get back to you on that tonight.”

This definitely wasn’t Paris. That was for sure. In Paris it would have taken a week.

“Did you find anything else?”

“There’s a stainless-steel cable that runs from the point of the bow to the top of the mast. One of my guys sails a lot. He tells me it’s called a forestay and helps hold the mast up and is used to fly the front sail, the jib. Anyway, on this particular boat there’s a device you can use to wrap this jib around the forestay. We unfurled the sail and had a very careful look at the cable. There’s a strand that’s come unraveled, and it has what we think is blood on it. It’s a long strand, and the bloodstains go up a good half an inch. Looks like someone was hanging on that cable and got quite a cut. We’ll type the blood and get a DNA profile back at the lab.”

“Did you guys find anything else?” Garbe asked.

“What do you think? It’s a rental boat, so it’s like a hotel room. People come and go. They clean them after each rental, I suppose. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to pick up traces of pretty much everyone who’s been on the boat for at least the last six months or more. When I finally finish my report, which is bound to be at least fifty pages long, I’ll send it to you. You can read it at night, and it will put you to sleep.”

He called for another demi, presumably to dull the grim thought of having to dictate a fifty-page report.

When the beer came, the technician looked from one police officer to the other.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though, that might interest you. There’s a tiny little cabin in the front of the boat. My man, the one who’s the big sailor, tells me that on big boats like that, there’s always a bit of unusable space in the bow. It seems that the area is usually used to store sails, but sometimes they’re turned into a small cabin for a teenager or a professional hand.”

He paused to see if they understood. Capucine nodded. Garbe seemed to have floated off to the Auvergne.

“There’s a bunk in there, all right. But the rest of the cabin is filled with a sail bag. My guy, the sailor, tells me it’s something called a spinnaker. The way he describes it, it’s a sort of parachute-like thing that can be used to pull the boat downwind. Apparently, it’s considerably more complicated than that. He says they’re optional extras for charters and not all that common. We checked the bag out. We have a portable Luma-Lite, which is nowhere near as effective as the big one we have back at the lab, but it can still show some stuff. There is a stain on this particular bag that looks very much like semen to me. Of course, that’s just a guess, but we’re taking the bag in to the lab. If it turns out to be semen, I’ll give you a preliminary DNA breakdown when I send my report in tonight.”

The technician downed the rest of his second beer and stood up.

“I have to get back. We’ll be done in half an hour. A rough draft of my report will be on your computers before you get home, but it will take two weeks for the final boring tome to reach you.”

He turned to leave and then swung back.

“You know, an administrative problem is going to crop up here. We’ve taken that boat apart pretty thoroughly, and we’re sure as hell not going to put it back together. The owners are bound to complain. The Paris PJ will deal with the complaint, right?”

He slipped out the door, clicked it shut.

Garbe snapped himself back from the Auvergne. Capucine could see it took two jolts, and he wasn’t all that happy to be back when he finally arrived.

“So does that give you what you need?” Garbe asked Capucine.

“It will, if the fingerprints and the DNA of the blood on the forestay check out.”

“You know as well as I do they will. So we’re going to be making an arrest?”

“As soon as the forensics report arrives.”

“But we’re arresting only the fall guy, right?”

“Fall guy? What fall guy? We’re going to arrest the man who killed the victim. The perp.” Capucine glared at him.

“And we’re going forget about the loose ends, right?”

Capucine continued to glare at him.

“Let me ask you a question, Le Tellier,” Garbe said. “You don’t really think that the perp went to the trouble of shoving his little ornament into the water tank—and took the trouble to seal it in a plastic bag before he did—just so no one would find it, do you? Especially when it would be so easy to throw overboard.”

“Of course not. Someone found it and hid it.”

“And that someone would not be the same person who planted the shell casing that came from your gun, would it?”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Capucine said through clenched teeth. “But none of those two or more people committed any crime other than tampering with evidence. They certainly didn’t kill anyone. And our job is to catch serious criminals and make sure they get the punishment they deserve.”

“Punishment they deserve, eh. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Commissaire.” He gave Capucine’s title an ironic twist. “You and I are going to have to tune our violins very carefully, because if those ‘two or more people’ emerge in the court case, your perp is going to walk. You understand that, right?”

Capucine said nothing. Her jaw was so tightly clenched, the muscles stood out.

“My suggestion would be to say that the pendant was found somewhere at the front of the boat. There’s a compartment that holds the anchor chain, isn’t there?”

Capucine nodded.

“There you go. And you can tell your pal, the juge d’instruction, to make sure that forensics aren’t put on the stand and that the defense never finds out about the shell casing.” Garbe smiled innocently. “But, hey, don’t get me wrong. With only a hundred and twenty-nine days to go, the last thing I need to do is open up a can of worms. So I’m right behind you on this one. Trust me on that.”

Even before he had finished the sentence, Garbe’s eyes lost their sharp focus and Capucine could see him transporting himself back to the Auvergne.