Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery) (15 page)

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lexandre and Capucine drove north on the A52 autoroute, cutting a swath dead straight through unending fields of Tyrian-tinted lavender. Capucine was as keyed up as a convict who had just pulled off a jailbreak. It took all her self-discipline to keep from shouting for joy and pumping the accelerator of the borrowed compact Renault to the floor. Her brand-new blond bangs snuck into her field of vision under her oversize sunglasses. She blew the strands away with a jubilant snort.

Alexandre contemplated her from under sleepy lids.

“It’s just not you, that hair.”

“That’s precisely the idea,
mon ami.
” Capucine puffed again.

Capucine and David had spent the better part of the prior day doing her hair. Early in the morning they had donned rubber gloves and attacked it with a thick concoction of L’Oréal powdered bleach and three different kinds of whitener. It had looked exactly like the industrial mayonnaise Alexandre proscribed from their Paris kitchen. When David had bolted off to a town council meeting in the village, Capucine sat in her bathroom, steeping in a chemical miasma despite wide open windows, scrutinizing her creamy mop, occasionally teasing out a lock with the pointed handle of a styling comb to check the color. The process left her simultaneously despondent and jubilant. The beloved auburn hue of her hair was gone, but she was going to be unrecognizable.

Hours later, David had shaped her light golden blond tresses with scissors and rollers. His first attempt evoked Catherine Deneuve’s tousled bedroom curls in
Belle de Jour.
Capucine liked the look. It was one she could grow into.

“Non, non, non!” David had said. “Like that, you are too lovely, too noticeable, and too feminine for police work.”

He had gone at her hair a second time. She had emerged from the fray with long bangs descending well over her eyebrows, the top teased high and blown full, and the sides cut back to just below the level of her ears. The look was overdone, démodé, even slightly cheap. Capucine hated it.

“Perfect!” David had said. “You look like anyone but you.”

“I had no idea hairdressing was one of the skills taught in the Police Judiciaire,” Alexandre said.

“He has a real flair for it. Isabelle used to kid him and tell him that he’d missed his true vocation.”

“Well, he’s certainly found it now.” Alexandre crossed his arms over his chest and pouted. Getting up before ten always made him testy.

When the fields of lavender finally morphed into military rows of grapevines, Alexandre perked up.

“You know, we’ll be in Nîmes before long. We’re in no rush. Why don’t we explore the Roman ruins, have an apéro, and then lunch at one of my favorite restaurants? Appropriately enough, it’s called Alexandre. Two stars in the
Michelin.
They have some spectacular dishes. One is a fillet of
taureau
—bull—in honor of the bullfighting in the Roman Colosseum.”

Alexandre leaned forward with a grunt, patted his pockets, and dug out his phone. “I’m sure they could find us a little nook for lunch.”

“Don’t even think about making that call. The last thing we need is you broadcasting our presence to the restaurant world. Even if you buy an even faker beard, the only bull meat you’re going to be eating is in the Golden Arches of a service area.”

Alexandre crossed his arms and pouted.

“And we
are
in a rush. We’re going straight to Perpignan. We can have a sandwich in a café there.” Alexandre grimaced. “I’ve wasted enough time as it is. High time to find Nathalie’s murderer and end this nonsense.”

As it happened, even though it wasn’t in a Michelin-starred restaurant, they unearthed a lunch that Alexandre deemed “perfectly acceptable,” high praise in his lexicon. They arrived in Perpignan at twelve thirty and decided on a brief recce of the downtown area to see if they could spot someplace suitable. They wandered into the place de la République, a spacious, traffic-free cobbled square surrounded by inviting
restaurant-cafés
with parasol-covered tables on outdoor terraces. One was conspicuously more crowded than the others. Fifteen minutes later they were eating
carré d’agneau
with a crust of tapenade, washed down with an excellent Languedoc-Roussillon red that the waiter had praised to the skies.

“You’re absolutely right, my dear. I’ve let myself become enslaved to haute cuisine. This is haute enough for any mortal, and it’s a joy to sit outside in this sun, especially with a sexpot blonde like you.”

Capucine frowned. Alexandre took her hand.

“So what are we doing in Perpignan? You’ve been a bit cagey about that.”

“I’m here to see Angélique. I need to launch a proper investigation. I’m going to see them all, and I might as well start with her. She’s spending the last of her vacation here.”

“And how did you discover that?”

“Nothing simpler. I dialed her cell phone. I told her we were driving around the Midi and would love to have a drink with her when we got to Perpignan, which just happened to be today.”

“And she didn’t think it was odd that we weren’t on the boat when they got to Saint-Raphaël?”

“Not at all. They were so anxious to get off the boat, they scampered like rats fleeing a sinking ship the second they touched the dock. She even apologized to me for her rudeness in leaving in such a rush and not saying good-bye.”

Alexandre lost interest in the subjects of boats and police work and settled into his mode of luncheon raconteur, waxing on about Languedoc-Roussillon and Perpignan. Capucine had known it was the last town on the coast before you reached Spain, but had had no idea the place was so dear to the hearts of the Catalans.

“Indeed it is,” Alexandre said. “Perpignan is the true capital of Catalan culture. So much so that Salvador Dali maintained Perpignan was the center of the world. He even claimed that the exact center was the Perpignan train station and went so far as to paint a picture to that effect. Apparently, every time he sat in the waiting room, he experienced a tempest of creativity and got all his best ideas there.”

“I’ll have to give that a try,” Capucine said.

After lunch, Capucine dropped Alexandre off near the cathedral—he was planning a tour of the shops to sample the local foie gras—and told him she would meet him later at the train station. She wished him a whirlwind of inspiration in the waiting room and drove twenty minutes out of Perpignan to the Château du Riell, a luxury hotel nestled in rocky gorges, where Angélique had been staying since she’d left the boat.

They met on a terrace on one of the château’s crenellated ramparts overlooking the dramatic craggy terrain. Angélique shrieked when she saw Capucine’s hair.

“You look just fabulous. Fabulous! It’s a whole new you. I almost didn’t recognize you.”

She circled Capucine to admire the hairdo.

“Where did you get this done? Have you been back to Paris? Nobody down here could possibly have that kind of genius.”

“It was someone I found near Bandol,” Capucine said, settling at a glass table beneath an oversize white parasol.

“You have to give me their number. I might just make a detour on my way back to Paris. I’ve never seen you look so pretty.”

The tea Capucine had been promised materialized as gin and tonics. Angélique snatched hers off the waiter’s tray before he had a chance to serve it. Capucine suspected she had had at least two or three already.

Their chat started out pacifically enough, revolving around the last day of the cruise. Capucine was astounded Angélique actually believed both Capucine and Alexandre had been on the boat right until the end, and even recalled a discussion she had had with Capucine after they docked at Port Grimaud.

The minute the waiter hovered into sight, Angélique made an impatient gesture for another gin and tonic. Flustered, she took a deep draught when the drink arrived.

“Capucine, I’m sure you heard us fighting in our cabin on that last day. Of course you did. Everybody must have. You heard those horrible things he said to me, didn’t you?”

“Who? Dominique?”

Angélique nodded, and a tear ran down her cheek, leaving a black slug’s trail of mascara. She waved irritably at the waiter for another drink.

“Of course Dominique. I threw him out before we left Port Grimaud. I told him to take the car—my car—and go wherever he wanted. And then I rented another car and drove here. And I’m having a good time. A
very
good time.” Angélique paused, downed the remaining half of the gin and tonic and made a tipsy gesture at the waiter for yet another.

“What an odious, loathsome, vile man Dominique is. I can’t understand how I could ever have married him. Do you know that while we were having dinner in Bonifacio, in that restaurant with the fabulous view, he was down on the boat,
fucking—
yes, that’s the word,
fucking!
—that slovenly boat girl?”

Angélique had screeched loudly enough to turn heads at surrounding tables. Capucine guessed that she was a single drink away from a loud scene with the waiter when he refused to serve her.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure? Of course I’m sure. That bastard will put his pecker into anything that’s warm and damp.”

More heads turned. An elderly couple got up and left the terrace, clucking and shaking their heads.

“Thank God, I was spared actually seeing him in the act. But still, I know perfectly well what happened. Right after lunch, when it became obvious Dominique wasn’t going to join us, I went looking for him. Naturally, the first place I looked was the boat. No one was in the salon, but I thought I could hear something going on in that awful girl’s cabin in the forepeak. So I walked out on deck as quietly as I could, and sure enough, two people were
fucking
in there.”

Angélique was puce with rage. She had finally been loud enough to prompt the waiter to action. He appeared, looking simultaneously stern and apologetic.

“
Madame, je vous en prie,
” he said with hands outspread in supplication.

“Okay, okay. I’ll be a good, quiet little girl if you bring me another gin and tonic. But if you don’t, I’ll raise hell,” Angélique said, slurring her words. “And make it a double. Hell, a triple!” She giggled.

Angélique leaned over the table and continued her story in a sibilant but carrying stage whisper.

“I couldn’t really see who was in the forepeak, and fool that I am, I assumed she was with Serge. You remember how we all thought they had a thing going, right? So I went off to the shops in the lower town to see if I could find Dominique there. And guess who I ran into? Guess!”

The waiter returned with Angélique’s gin and tonic. She thanked him in her stage whisper, put her index finger to her pursed lips, making a theatrical shushing noise. The waiter departed without a word.

“I ran into Serge. That was all the proof I needed.”

“Couldn’t it have been someone other than Dominique?”

“Of course not. I saw the little glances he had been giving her. And that little bitch was a slut, but I don’t think she was enough of a slut to haul some guy right off the dock onto her bunk at dinnertime.”

Capucine said nothing.

“So I’m divorcing him. That’s all there is to it. I’ve called my lawyer and started the proceedings. I also called my concierge and had the locks on our—
my
—apartment changed. Voilà, it’s done.”

She slumped in her seat, eyes half closed.

“I’m sorry, Capucine. I wanted our day to be a happy one. But this has been such a trial for me. Dominique has always been despicable with women. And I put up with him because I thought he would get over it. But I learned I was building a castle in the sky. I feel terrible, but I also feel much, much better . . . free at last to be the real me.”

She squinted, having trouble focusing.

“I think I need to lie down. I’m sure you understand.”

Capucine helped the swaying Angélique into the hotel, put her in the elevator, and drove back to Perpignan. She felt a little numb.

C
apucine was dismayed by the vaunted waiting room of the Perpignan train station. In the flesh, it was no different from any other small-town SNCF waiting room: low ceilinged, overbright with flat fluorescent light, the walls relieved only by a row of vending machines dispensing tickets and candy bars. The focal point was a glass window labeled
ACCUEIL
, allowing potential passengers to yell questions at a sullen clerk through a
Hygiaphone,
a glass labyrinth, which not only protected the clerk from airborne germs but also obliged customers to strain to make themselves heard. The only distinctive note to the room was the ceiling, which had been decorated in amateurish polka dots joined by primary-color whorls, apparently in some sort of oblique homage to Dali.

Capucine made a quick lap of the room, stopping only at the tiny news stall to purchase a postcard reproduction of Dali’s painting. The painter, incongruously, arms and legs akimbo, floated into a giant sunburst in the sky, surrounded by figures from Millet’s praying peasants. Capucine felt she was missing some sort of joke.

Capucine sat on a hard oak bench and pondered the postcard.

After a few minutes, she put it in the pocket of her jacket. Her plan of action had appeared full blown in her head, mapped out as clearly as if it had been honed in a long series of team meetings with her brigadiers. Maybe Dali was right and the waiting room
was
the creative center of the universe.

She pulled out her iPhone and searched through the directory. Then she extracted one of the borrowed cell phones from another pocket and punched in David’s number.

“Salut, David. How are things in La Cadière?”

“Blissful, as they have been since time immemorial.”

“Would you have time to do a little police work for me?”

“I’d like nothing better.”

“Good. Here’s what I need you to do. I want you to go to Bonifacio and find out as much as you can about the movements of certain people on a certain date.”

“Hang on Com . . . Capucine. Let me write this down.”

When he came back on the line, Capucine gave him the date of the group’s lunch in the town and their departure from Bonifacio. “Now, David, I want you to go online and find the blog of someone called Régis de La Rochelle. He’s been posting a good number of pictures of our cruise. They are tagged with the names of the people involved. I’d like you to make portraits of the eleven of us and interview anyone permanently involved with the marina—port captain’s office, bars, food stores, whatever—about their movements around lunchtime on the two days in question. Pay particular attention to Nathalie Martin.”

“The victim?”

“Exactly.”

“I’ll get the pictures out of the computer right away and then drive down there. There’s a car ferry direct from Marseilles to Bonifacio. I’ll take the first one out tomorrow morning.” He paused. “Can you tell me more about what I’m looking for?”

“Nothing specific. I just want to know who came and went from our boat around lunchtime that day.”

Capucine slipped the phone back in her pocket and looked around the waiting room. The same four people still sat on different benches, waiting as endlessly if they had been there since the beginning of time. Of course, she undoubtedly gave them the same impression.

With her mind’s eye she transported herself to her office. She was sitting behind her desk, leaning back in her chair, feet on the desk, lecturing her three brigadiers in her commissaire’s take-charge voice.

We still need to do work on five possibles—Serge, Régis, Aude, Florence, and Dominique. I’m going to start with Florence. There’s too much I don’t understand about her. I want you to try to figure out where the other four might be. They haven’t been answering their cell phones.

Capucine shook herself back to the material world. She had only one brigadier on the case, and he was fully utilized. It was all up to her.

She pulled out her own iPhone, searched for Florence in her directory, then rooted for one of the borrowed phones in her pockets, feeling ridiculous. She dialed Florence’s number.

“Oui.”

“Salut, Florence. C’est Capucine.”

“Allô, Capucine.”
The voice was surprisingly distant. Nearly outright cold.

“Where are you? What are you doing with the rest of your summer?” Capucine tried hard to project a smile across the ether.

“Nothing exciting. I have an apartment in Carcassonne. I’m here catching up on my reading.”

“You are! How wonderful. Alexandre and I are taking a driving tour of the Midi, meandering back to Paris. We’re planning on stopping at Carcassonne. We’ll be there tomorrow. Why don’t we drop by for a drink? You could tell us all the best places to go. Alexandre is always on the lookout for restaurants only the locals know.”

There was an awkward pause.

“Tomorrow? Tomorrow might not be ideal. My day is pretty packed.”

“I thought you were just catching up on your reading.”

“Yes, I am. But I told a friend we’d go clothes shopping tomorrow.”

“That’s no problem. We won’t be arriving until around five. We’ll come by then. What’s the address?”

Grudgingly, Florence surrendered her address, and Capucine rang off with exaggerated cheer.

Capucine changed phones once again and rang Inès, who also seemed distant.

“Any news on the case?” Capucine asked.

“News? No. Not really. What about you? Still hiding out at your friend’s house?”

“No. I’m on the road, interviewing people. I’ve decided to let the chips fall where they may and get off my duff and solve this thing.”

“Be careful. Have you found out anything?”

“I saw Angélique in Perpignan today. She’s decided to divorce Dominique and is drowning her sorrows in gin.”

Inès snorted.

“Tomorrow I’m off to Carcassonne to interview Florence.”

“Carcassonne?” There was a long pause. Capucine could hear the tapping of keyboard keys. “Carcassonne. Yes, yes, of course. How could I have missed that?”

Capucine waited.

“It’s impossible to do proper work without sufficient police support.”

“What do you mean?”

“André Tottinguer has disappeared. The day he was released from garde à vue, he vanished. I just remembered he has a house in Carcassonne. I’ll bet he’s there with Florence. He’s bound to have maintained his relationship with her. Capucine, this is a valuable opportunity. I need you to shadow Florence. Find out how involved she is with Tottinguer. Take your time. Plan on spending a week or two. Report back to me tomorrow night and tell me how it’s going. Keep me in the loop. This is excellent news. Really excellent news.”

Capucine hung up and pursed her lips into a frown that reached up to the bottom of her nose. As she mused, dismayed, she saw a person walking toward her and mistook him for Alexandre. But it wasn’t anyone she knew. This person had an enormous ginger mustache cascading down over his upper lip. But he had Alexandre’s gait down to a T. It
was
Alexandre! He’d bought himself a disguise. This was too good to be true. Capucine dissolved into paroxysms of giggles. Alexandre stood over her, frowning under his mustache, tapping his foot in indignation. The severity of his expression only intensified her giggles.

Choking, she said, “You look like half of Dupont and Dupond from
Tintin.
You know, in the story where their hair and mustaches keep on growing and changing color.”

“My dear, you obviously are a babe in the woods when it comes to disguise. I acquired this at a very upmarket costume shop. It’s real human hair. Cost a pretty centime, too. Not only is its verisimilitude beyond reproach, but it also gives me a very distinguished look. I decided we needed to go out for a proper dinner, and since you’re in disguise, I shall be in disguise, as well.”

Capucine continued giggling.

“Pull yourself together, my dear. I’ve booked at a one-star restaurant here in Perpignan, La Galinette. The chef is well known for his vegetables. He has his own little farm where he grows the forgotten ones. He does seven varieties of eggplant.”

“Wait a minute.” Capucine’s face went dead sober. “How did you get a reservation in a one-star restaurant for the same day without using your name?”

“How you underestimate me, my child. I called a chef I know in Paris who happens to be a buddy of the chef of this place. The chef in Paris told him we were called Estouffade. That’s our new name for tonight. Voilà,” Alexandre said, sensuously smoothing his mustache.

“So now this chef in Paris knows where we are.”

“Oh, please. The police are hardly likely to interview every last chef in Paris to see if anyone knows where I am. Besides, you know how chefs are. They never tell anyone outside of the business anything.”

Capucine was mollified. She was on the road back to her normal persona, and that definitely included eating in starred restaurants.

“I suppose you’re right. And we’ll be in Carcassonne tomorrow, anyway.”

“Even better. There are two restaurants there I’m dying to try out.”

They walked out of the train station hand in hand, Alexandre fondling his mustache, his new love.

“And don’t you dare even think about growing one of those,” Capucine said, butting Alexandre with her hip.