Killer Critique (27 page)

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Authors: Alexander Campion

BOOK: Killer Critique
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The roof was a broad, flat, slightly oily metal surface, riveted like the side of a ship, circled by an alarmingly low single rail, only slightly higher than waist level on a good-size man. Even though the sun had slid under the horizon half an hour before, the western sky was still washed in pastel pinks and yellows. As the dark rose into the sky, lights began to twinkle in the city spread out like a Persian carpet below them. Enraptured by the magic of the moment, the crowd fell silent.
Behind them the second wave of guests emerged from the stairwell. By the time they had all been served their flutes of champagne, night had settled and the canvas beneath them had become a luminous gold tracery laid out on a black background. The first rocket soared up lazily from the Champ de Mars and, with a loud, sharp crack, burst into an elegant shower of white sparks. It was immediately followed by two more, the three knocks that announced the beginning of a play in the French theater.
The crowd gravitated to the southern rail. The sky erupted in a blaze of sound and color. Momo locked his muscular hand around Alexandre's arm.
“The boss wants us to stay out of the crowd.”
The pyrotechnics continued. The throng exclaimed loudly at each burst.
Capucine scanned the scene, Isabelle by her side. David seemed to have disappeared.
A rocket shot into the sky with a loud shrill whistling, exploding with an almost painful concussion, showering the sky with brilliant red meteors. It was immediately followed by six more. The din was numbing.
Capucine had no idea how it happened so quickly. She looked away for an instant, searching for David, and when she looked back at Alexandre, he and Momo stood clawing at their eyes. A figure in a white chef's outfit grabbed Alexandre by his upper arms and began pushing him toward the west railing, away from the crowd. Alexandre cried out, Momo lurched after him blindly. As they hurtled forward, the white-clad person grabbed Alexandre by the nape of the neck and seemed to squirt something into his mouth with a plastic squeeze bottle. They reached the rail. Alexandre struggled, flailing, coughing, spitting. Momo crashed into them. The squeeze bottle was projected into the void.
As Capucine raced across the roof, she saw the white-clad figure reach under Alexandre's jacket, hauling at his belt to lift him over the rail. Capucine accelerated. Momo staggered like a drunk, helpless. She wasn't going to make it. The figure grabbed Alexandre's thigh and began to push him into the void. Then came the gesture that saved Alexandre. The figure dropped his leg and reached into his jacket. David stepped into the tableau and made a languid, almost caressing gesture over the white-clad figure's head, a priest's benediction. The figure immediately went limp, collapsing on the iron deck of the roof.
As the figure went down, Momo managed to get a hand into Alexandre's collar and pulled him off the railing. They both stood, sightless, tears streaming, gulping air.
Capucine skidded to a halt in front of them. Béatrice lay at Alexandre's feet, inches away from the edge, her arm dangling languidly over the abyss. She looked as tranquil as if she had fallen asleep in the sun at a garden party.
Even blinded, Alexandre had no difficulty maintaining his unrufflable persona. Capucine kissed him on the mouth.
“Ah, what delicious lips,” he said. “I'm almost sure I recognize them. Now, don't tell me whose they are. Let me guess. I love this game.”
Capucine kissed Alexandre a second time and gripped his hand. From behind she could hear Isabelle scolding David. “What did you hit her with? That wasn't regulation equipment, was it?”
“Oh, just a little toy Momo brought me from his last trip back home. Effective enough when you know how to use it.”
“Still, it's not regulation, now is it?”
Capucine continued clutching Alexandre's hand, her breath coming in short gasps, as the happy staccato of Isabelle and David squabbling behind her reassured her that it really was all over.
Even though the fireworks display was a good five or ten minutes away from the grand finale, the crescendo rose to a deafening level. The crowd was rapt. The entire episode had passed unnoticed.
CHAPTER 39
“I
don't see how she could have got up here,” Isabelle said.
“I saw her climb off a girder,” David said. “She probably came up in the service elevator in the middle of the afternoon. In her cook's outfit no one would have noticed, particularly if she was carrying a tray of something. Of course, you have to have brass balls to spend the afternoon hanging on to a steel strut thirty-five stories off the ground.”
“You know,” Isabelle said, “when you look at them, those struts are square in section. She could have squeezed inside, put her butt on one of the crossbars and her feet on another. Wouldn't have been all that uncomfortable. If she was below the level of the roof, she would have been completely invisible.”
“And her plan must have been to disappear back out there once she'd done the deed and wait until we'd cleared out,” David said. “If we hadn't been waiting for her, it might even have worked.”
As they spoke, five uniformed
Police Judiciaire
officers emerged from the round stairwell hatch.
At the sight of the uniforms Capucine dropped Alexandre's hand and took charge.
“Brigadier-Chef,”
she said to an officer with three chevrons on his epaulets. “Handcuff this woman and take her down as quickly as possible. I want absolutely no disturbance.”
A beefy officer put his hands under Béatrice's arms and lifted her to a sitting position. Another handcuffed her wrists behind her back.
“Brigadier-Chef,”
Capucine continued, “radio the men below to tape off the section of the lawn directly under us. Have them search for a plastic kitchen squeeze bottle. Alert forensics, who are to collect it and analyze the contents.”
The fireworks display crescendoed to the finale. As four officers carried Béatrice to the hatch, two or three of the guests turned to look but immediately returned their attention to the brilliant pyrotechnics.
It was no easy matter getting Béatrice down the narrow circular stairway. The beefy officer held her by the armpits, her head lolling on his chest, another officer locked his arms around her thighs, above the knees, and they inched down one slow step at a time, followed by the rest of the uniformed officers.
“Now,” said Capucine, “Alexandre, you and Momo are next. Alexandre, put your left hand on Isabelle's shoulder and follow her down the stairs with your right hand on the banister. I'll take Momo down. Okay, off you go. David, have a quick look around to see if we missed anything and then clear out and join us downstairs.”
Capucine had no idea why she wanted Isabelle to be her husband's Virgil; the order had been given reflexively. However, the impact on Isabelle was manifest. She swelled with pride.
Capucine was sure she would be held to task for not cordoning off the crime scene and not leaving officers behind to painstakingly collect the names of all the people on the roof and compare them to their identity papers. Useless or not, police procedure was inviolate. But throwing a wet blanket on Chef Delmas' opening was out of the question. Without his cooperation there would have been no arrest.
“Okay,
vieux,”
she said to Momo quietly enough so David wouldn't hear. “This time it's me who's got your back.”
“You always do,
Commissaire
,
”
Momo said, walking in lockstep behind Capucine, his left arm on her shoulder.
At the bottom of the stairs more uniformed PJ officers waited with a gurney. The uniforms laid Béatrice out and handcuffed her wrists to the aluminum struts. It was a tight fit in the elevator but they squeezed in. On the way down Béatrice started to writhe. One of the officers unzipped a black shoulder bag and removed a syringe. He picked up Béatrice's right hand, found a vein, slid the needle in, and squeezed the plunger slowly. Béatrice settled back into unconsciousness.
Passersby paused to look as the police emerged from the elevator but then walked on. Some old buffer must have had a heart attack. The uniformed
brigadier-chef
came up to Capucine.
“The shot is going to last at least three hours, maybe more,
Commissaire.
Where do you want her taken?”
“Down to the Quai. Get the duty doctor to come in and monitor her carefully. Take
Brigadier
Benarouche and my husband with you and have the doctor look at their eyes. And have forensics call him once they identify the substance they were squirted with so he can decide if they need to be hospitalized. Tell the doctor I'll be there in an hour.”
“Sneaking back up for your dinner, are you?” Alexandre asked. “The
grenadin de veau
is worth the detour.”
“I need to check out Renaud's apartment. Sometimes confessions come a little more quickly when the suspect is confronted with some hard evidence.” As she spoke Capucine realized she had stopped thinking of Béatrice by her given name.
“Aren't you gilding your lily by hoping for a confession ?” Alexandre asked.
“
Pas du tout
. We have her in
flagrant délit
for an attempted homicide. I want to make sure she's convicted for the murders, too.”
 
Fifteen minutes later Capucine, David, and Isabelle sat in the Twingo, staring at the green wood door of number twenty-four rue Madame, a few streets away from Béatrice's restaurant, waiting for a contingent of Capucine's officers and the INPS van.
The officers from the brigade were first to arrive. A single officer descended from the patrol car and opened the front door with a passkey. The door open, three more officers emerged with heavy canvas bags and entered the building. Capucine and her two detectives followed. Without a word the three rode up in the elevator to the third floor as the uniformed officers took the stairs two at a time, their boots soundless on the crimson runner held by brass rods over the polished wooden steps.
On the third floor landing they were confronted by two doors, one oak and the other, Béatrice's, covered in green enameled steel plating. High-security doors had been encouraged by insurance companies for decades in Paris.
The officer who had opened the downstairs door examined the locks on the steel door carefully.
“Commissaire,
this is a Picard seven bar lock. There's nothing I can do with it.”
“Does that mean we can't get in?”
There were muted snickers from the officers on the landing.
“No, Commissaire. These richies spend a fortune on burglar-proof doors but they can't be bothered to strengthen the frame that holds the door in the wall. I'll have the frame out in a minute, but there's going to be a little mess.” There was open laughter from the other officers. Jobs like this were the reason they had joined the force.
The officer produced a chisel-ended crowbar and explored the wall, tapping gently. At one tap he seemed to hear what he wanted and banged the crowbar into the plaster with a vicious jab. It went in a good four inches.
“
A toi, Jérôme,”
he said.
Another officer jabbed into the other side of the door with an identical crowbar. The two men heaved and threw their weight against the bars. There was a sound of masonry cracking and a large seam appeared at both doorjambs.
“Attention. Ça vient!”
Everyone pulled back from the door, which fell into the hallway with a resounding crash. A cloud of plaster dust rose in the air.
“Et voilà!
That's how you do 'er,” the
brigadier
called Jérôme said with a happy smile.
The apartment was as tidy as if readied for a fashion magazine to shoot for a profile of the up-and-coming chef. Peach-colored walls were dotted with aged family portraits in elegant gold frames. A handful of delicate antiques punctuated bold leather and steel settees and chairs in brilliant primary colors. A large white enameled bookcase housed a large collection of cookbooks, most by current celebrity chefs but many in the faded back cloth bindings and gold lettering of the nineteenth century.
The
Police Judiciaire
officers milled and peered but did not touch, waiting for the forensics team to arrive.
“Didn't your mamas teach you to knock first?” Ajudant Dechery said in his basso profundo as he walked over the destroyed door. Three of his
agents techniques
peered over his shoulder.
“Sorry I couldn't get here sooner. I've been at the Eiffel Tower. Your people found the squeeze bottle. I sent it to the lab, but I knew from the first sniff what it was, belladonna.”
“Belladonna?” Capucine asked. “The stuff the Moroccans use in their
kohl
to make their eyes big?”
“The very same. Deadly nightshade. Grows all over the place in the
Midi.
The berries are loaded with atropine, which is what makes your pupils dilate.”
“I have to make a call.”
“If it's to the
PJ
duty doctor, don't bother. I already had a chat with him. He knows how to handle it. It doesn't seem like your husband ingested enough to have any effect. But both he and your
brigadier
got enough atropine in their eyes so they won't be seeing much for a few hours.”
Capucine felt as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
“And belladonna is a poison?”
“Oh, definitely. The atropine has been used as a pupil dilator since the beginning of time. It's probably what Cleopatra used to snag Mark Antony. But those delicious little berries also contain tropane alkaloids, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine, all of which are deadly. Macbeth, the real one, not the one in the play, knocked out a whole army with the stuff.” He paused, proud of his erudition.
“All right, m'dear. What if you let us get going in here?”
As Dechery's team got to work, Capucine, Isabelle, and David continued peering at the contents of the apartment, their hands behind their backs like children who had been warned not to touch.
Of course, it was Dechery who found the piece of evidence needed for a court conviction. He called Capucine over. In the extravagantly fitted and impeccably clean kitchen, the lowest drawer in the least accessible corner was filled with household detritus, supermarket plastic bags, boxes of rubber bands, and menus from Chinese takeaways. At the very bottom of the pile Dechery found an eight-inch turkey trussing needle—its tip flattened into a sharp blade—and a length of neatly coiled kitchen twine.
When the forensic technician had finished an endless series of flash photos of the needle in its habitat, had dusted it for fingerprints, and had taken even more photographs, Dechery picked it up carefully with a pair of long tweezers and examined it closely.
“See these brown stains,” he said to Capucine. “That's not turkey blood. From the color, it comes from a mammal. We'll get DNA off this thing for sure, and I'll bet you a month's salary right now this is what was used to stitch Arsène Peroché's mouth shut.”
From the living room Isabelle called out, “Hey,
Commissaire,
come check this out!”
In the sitting room a technician was busy at the desk—a lovely Boule piece that must have come from Béatrice's family home—dusting and taking pictures. The desk was littered with books, most with slips of paper marking pages, a stack of bills, a pile of invitations. In the exact center was a mahogany glass-topped case, about seven inches by twelve, containing a single drawer. Through the glass top, most of which had already been obscured by aluminum fingerprint powder, Capucine could see the drawer had been fitted with white foam rubber into which ten grooves had been set. Expensive looking pens had been laid in every alternate groove.
“Can you open this for me?” Capucine asked the technician.
He tugged at the knob with tweezers. Capucine bent over. The drawer contained four fountain pens and, incongruously, a plastic Pilot artist's felt-tip. The gold cap of one of the fountain pens was clearly engraved with the letters AP.
Capucine said to the technician, “This is a critical piece of evidence. It must be treated with the utmost care.”
“Commissaire,
we treat everything with the utmost care. We're not an industrial cleaning service.”
Isabelle had wandered off into the bedroom. “It just keeps getting better and better,” she shouted. One of the technicians had just found a pair of French Army night glasses. “Momo was right. She must have used this in the blind restaurant. The famous ghostly green glow was the reflection from the eyepieces on her face.”
The technician nudged Isabelle away and continued taking flash pictures.
“Five pens,
Commissaire,”
Isabelle said. “That means there are two murders we don't know about. But with all this evidence she's bound to confess, right?”
“We'll see. I'm not so sure about a confession. And I'm even less sure we'll ever find out about the other two victims. But I think we just might have enough evidence for a full conviction.”

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