Murderous Mistral

by Cay Rademacher

  “And rinsing the coffee cups with boiling water?”

  “An eye for detail.”

  Vialaron-Allègre lit up a Gauloise. “What does your boss think about all this?”

  “Commandant Nkoulou thinks it was an accident.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” she said, nodding to dismiss him.

  “So is this an investigation or not?” Blanc called after her, confused.

  “Of course,” she replied. And for a brief moment they smiled at one another, almost as if they were friends.

  * * *

  Blanc got his phone out. He had to talk to Miette Fuligni, firstly to break the terrible news to her, but also, as discreetly as possible, to ask her a few questions. But he wanted to talk to the architect, Le Bruchec, first, before news of the death got around. For that reason he rang the gendarmerie first, but Tonon still didn’t answer. Instead he got through to Fabienne Souillard, who wasn’t exactly thrilled but agreed to drive out to see the widow. It took him a while to get through to Le Bruchec. The architect was at home. “I’d like to come and ask you a couple more questions,” Blanc said, as vaguely as he could.

  “Well, hurry up about it, I’ve got an appointment to play tennis.”

  With Miette Fuligni perhaps? Blanc wondered. On the other hand Le Bruchec didn’t exactly sound as if he knew his lover’s husband had been fished out of the Étang de Berre dead.

  * * *

  “Tell me, Monsieur Le Bruchec, are you a sailor?” he asked when he was sitting in the inner courtyard of the architect’s house fifteen minutes later.

  “I was when I was young. A 470.”

  “Sounds like a weapon.”

  The architect laughed. “Feels like one too. A 470 is an Olympic racing dinghy. Very sporty. Spend an hour in a good wind in one of those beasts and you’ll feel like you’ve got on a bucking bronco.”

  “So you don’t sail anymore?”

  He shook his head. “I sometimes go out fishing in a friend’s motorboat. But I’m too old for the little dinghies, and I don’t have the time to indulge myself with a big yacht. For every hour you spend out sailing, you spend two hours in port. There’s always something to fix or fiddle with or clean. Dreadful. I prefer tennis.” Le Bruchec was already dressed in a white Lacoste tennis shirt with matching pants, though he was still in flip-flops. “What’s the point of these questions?”

  “This morning Monsieur Fuligni was pulled out of the water near his yacht, outside Saint-César harbor. Drowned.”

  Le Bruchec stared at him vacantly a moment. Then he flinched, his left eyelid flickering. “Mon Dieu,” he mumbled. “What happened?”

  “He was hit on the back of the head and fell overboard. It may have been a tragic accident.”

  “Does Miette know yet?”

  “My colleague is with her now.”

  “The boom,” the architect said, more to himself than anyone else. “A loose cord and the thing swings across. It’s happened to every sailor.”

  “On the other hand, the mistral is blowing and Monsieur Fuligni might not have gone sailing. It is possible that someone delivered the fatal blow. Someone on board with him,” Blanc explained flatly.

  The architect looked at him, irritated. “Why do you say that? And why do you suddenly turn up here and ask me questions like that?”

  “Because you’re in a relationship with Madame Fuligni.”

  Le Bruchec opened his mouth as if he was going to launch into a tirade, then closed it again, got up, and began striding up and down the inner courtyard, like a tiger in a cage. “Are you accusing me of murdering him?”

  “Do you deny having an affair with Madame Fuligni?”

  “That doesn’t exactly make me a killer.”

  “Where were you last night? And where were you this morning?”

  “That’s absurd.” Le Bruchec wiped his right hand across his bald head, which had begun to sweat.

  “Please just answer the question,” Blanc said calmly.

  “I was here. In my house. I have been since yesterday afternoon.”

  “Have you any witnesses to that?”

  The architect glared at him. “No. It was my cleaning lady’s day off yesterday. And I had no visitors.” He sat down. “Listen to me, mon Capitaine. I’ve known Miette forever. I’ve always liked her. But we were friends, nothing more. But then when my wife died six months ago…” His voice failed him and he was silent for a minute. “Well, whatever, I was lonely. It was the same with Miette. Pascal neglected her, had done for ages. Then there was that Romanian girl, his secretary. It was both a scandal and ridiculous at the same time. Miette and I met regularly at the tennis club—and at some stage things happened. But it’s only an affair, nothing more. We were consoling each other, you could say. It was always clear to both of us that Miette wasn’t going to leave her husband for me. And I didn’t want things to go any further than occasional…” He looked for the right phrase. “… togetherness.”

  Blanc looked hard at the architect. He had no alibi—and he did have a motive, whatever story he came up with. He was still young enough to want a new partner after the death of his wife. But he was well known round and about. He needed to keep a good reputation if he was to keep getting commissions. In the long term an affair might harm him, though most people already seemed to know of it. But if Miette suddenly became a widow through a tragic accident, then he could make their relationship more or less public. After a suitably decent length of time, they might even get married. And someone who regularly played tennis would have a strong arm, strong enough to knock a man out with a stick or other blunt object in a single blow. “Can you please give me the make, license plate, and color of all your cars?” he asked. Perhaps one of his cars might have been seen in the harbor at Saint-César.

  A few minutes later he said good-bye, still without more than a vague suspicion. Nothing he was going to get a search warrant with, let alone an arrest warrant. He said, “Au revoir,” hoping it sounded like a threat. Le Bruchec shook his hand absently, staring at his tennis equipment lying in the hallway. He didn’t look like he was about to play his match.

  * * *

  Back at the gendarmerie he went to see Fabienne in her office. His young colleague was pale. “That was the first time I’ve ever had to inform someone of the death of a family member,” she whispered.

  Blanc was grateful she didn’t hold it against him that he’d made her do it. “How did Madame Fuligni take it?”

  “Silently, horribly silently. I think I would have found it easier if she cried or collapsed. I would have been able to offer her consolation or called the medics or something. But she just stood there looking at me for what seemed like ages. I didn’t know how to react.”

  “Were you able to ask her any questions?”

  “Yes. Later. Madame Fuligni rang an old friend, and when she arrived, she seemed to come round a bit. She told me her husband had gone down to the boat last night, with the intention of sleeping on board, something he did often. She thought nothing about it, watched television for a while, and then went to bed.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “She said she was alone the whole time.”

  “Yes, too much to ask for.”

  “You don’t think Madame Fuligni herself dumped her husband in the Étang de Berre?”

  “I was hoping for a good, solid witness statement to rule out that possibility. But she had a motive. Also she knows the harbor and the boat, and her presence wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary. She’s fit too, fit enough to knock someone out with a blow to the back of the head.”

  “Statistics are against you. Nine out of ten murders are committed by men.”

  “Women don’t get caught so often.”

  “What about the coffee cups with boiling water poured over them? Miette Fuligni would only have needed to put them back in the cupboard. If her prints had been found on them or anywhere else on board, it would have been totally normal. She’d been on the Amzeri, so what? She�
�s his wife. She must have been there a hundred times.”

  “Maybe she’s an obsessive cleaner.”

  Fabienne just laughed and pointed to a few sheets of computer printout. “This came in from the forensics lab while you were down at the harbor. It’s the report on the bullets used to kill Moréas.”

  Blanc read the first few lines, then whistled through his teeth. “So, not the weapon we found under Moréas’s bed. But a ‘hot’ gun,” he whispered. “Seven-point-six-two-millimeter ammunition was used in a Zastava M70, a Yugoslav Kalashnikov copy. The cartridge cases had characteristic marks from the ejector system. Some of the cases showed two ejector marks, implying they had been reloaded and ejected, then fired this time. Cartridge cases with similar marks had been found last year in one of the suburbs north of Marseille, in the stairwell of a dilapidated apartment block where someone had shot dead a North African drug dealer.” A murder that still hadn’t been cleared up. “I wonder if our killer is the same man,” he said.

  His colleague shook her head. “I’d bet a month’s wages the gun was bought cheap in Marseille. After every murder the killers buy a new weapon—Kalashnikovs are cheap. That way a murder can never be laid at their door even if we find them with a weapon. Our colleagues in Marseille in any case haven’t been able to find any link between the dead dealer and Moréas. The dealer had only arrived from Algiers three months before his death. He didn’t know his way around, did some business on the turf of one of the Corsican clans. That alone would have been enough to send an assassin after him.”

  “Who buys hot guns like those from known killers?”

  “Pros from the Balkans who couldn’t care less whether or not the French police are looking for a particular weapon. Or kids looking for the cheapest they can get. Opportunists who don’t realize they’re being sold a ‘hot’ weapon.”

  “Well, that reduces our number of suspects.”

  “You’re joking, I assume.”

  “On the contrary. At least now we can be fairly certain that Marseille drug dealers aren’t mixed up in this, even if our perpetrator copied their technique. Maybe that was a deliberate attempt to divert our attention.” All of a sudden Blanc’s mind switched to the death of Fuligni. That too had been arranged to suggest one specific solution, even though there were lots of possibilities. “Our killer is fastidious,” he mumbled to himself. He read the rest of the report. The Kalashnikov they had found in Moréas’s house hadn’t been fired for years. It had never come to the attention of the police either in Marseille or anywhere else in France. As far as instruments of murder go, it was still a virgin.

  The door opened and Corporal Baressi stuck his head round it. “We’ve sent a couple of people down to the harbor at Saint-César with the details of Le Bruchec’s cars.” The chubby gendarme glanced down at the list in his sweaty hand. “Nice wheels. I wouldn’t mind a couple of these. But neither the harbormaster nor anyone else spotted any of them. The architect wasn’t down at the harbor.”

  Fabienne Souillard gave him a scowl. “Le Bruchec doesn’t keep a boat down at the harbor,” she said icily, “and therefore he wouldn’t have had the code for the parking lot. If he had been down at Saint-César he would have had to park in one of the side streets. Did you ask around there too?”

  Baressi disappeared without answering.

  * * *

  “I have something else for you,” Souillard said. “It’s about the German painter. Almost certainly meaningless.”

  At that moment Tonon came in with a half-eaten croissant in one hand and a cardboard coffee cup in the other. “So this is where you’ve been hiding,” he said to Blanc, kissing Fabienne on the cheek. “Well, it’s prettier than in our old boys’ office.” Hanging from his gun belt was an ancient silver mobile CD player with a thin headset cable leading up to his hairy ears.

  “Is that a brain pacemaker?” Fabienne asked sarcastically.

  Tonon pulled out his earbuds and tinny music drowned out the whirring of the computer’s fan. Blanc thought he could just make out the voice of Serge Gainsbourg. “Used to belong to one of my kids. Can’t remember which. I found it while cleaning up.”

  “You’re so nineties.”

  “My best years.”

  “What were you about to tell me, Fabienne?” Blanc interrupted the pair of them. He wasn’t exactly thrilled at his partner only just showing up and acting as if he was on vacation.

  “Gérard Paulmier called, the former La Provence journalist. He said he had been speaking to his old colleagues again about Monsieur Rheinbach’s visit. He said he thought it would floor you, and that it was something you might want to know.”

  “He knows his people.”

  “You men are so transparent. Anyway, it would appear Rheinbach asked not just about Moréas, but more specifically about his involvement in the attacks on tourists.”

  Tonon, already slurping at his coffee, took a gulp and coughed, sending a fine brown spray across the desk. Souillard turned her eyes away, and used a Kleenex to wipe her computer and iPad.

  “What precisely did Monsieur Rheinbach want to know?”

  “It seems first of all he just wanted to read the original articles about the attacks and the arrests after the tourist was killed. There were quite a lot of reports at the time, including about the arrest of Moréas, although his name was never mentioned, just ‘a suspect from Caillouteaux.’ But if you know the story then it’s pretty obvious they’re referring to Moréas. It soon became clear, however, that Rheinbach had already read the stories. He just wanted more information and kept pressing them, as to who wrote the story, for example. It was as if he was after information that didn’t make it into the published piece at the time. But the journalists turned him away.”

  Blanc looked at his colleague. Tonon had gone pale, the paper cup in his hand shaking. “That old story,” he mumbled, “that same damn old story.”

  Blanc had been intending to ask Tonon to look into it, but he began to realize Marius obviously wouldn’t exactly relish going back over the old case. Instead he said to Fabienne, “Would you look into it? Find out why a jigsaw puzzle painter should be so interested in this grubby old story. Why this Rheinbach was so obsessed with Moréas. Was he intending to blackmail him? Had he found out something that had been missed all these years?”

  Tonon snorted indignantly.

  “Or maybe Rheinbach was just after something he could use as a defense because he felt threatened by Moréas?” Blanc continued, unperturbed. “Or was he trying to threaten Moréas himself? Maybe there are some documents relating to their properties? Or maybe one of the two women who had a brief relationship with Rheinbach had also hung around with Moréas?”

  “Moréas had annoyed this timid painter when he was out in the forest with his canvas and brushes,” Tonon grumbled. “He just wanted to know who he was dealing with. That’s all.”

  “I’ve never gone down to a newspaper to try to find out details about a neighbor’s involvement in some ancient incident,” Blanc said. “I think that in itself is something worthy of investigation.”

  “Discreetly,” advised Tonon, “very discreetly.”

  Blanc and Souillard both nodded, though neither of them had any idea what their colleague felt they needed to be so discreet about.

  * * *

  “Come over for dinner tonight,” Blanc said to Marius a bit later when they were back in their own office, bent over their ancient computers. Tonon seemed to be particularly worked up about their digging into the old highway robbery case again. Probably, Blanc thought, because he saw it as a lasting accusation against himself, that he had made a mess of the case and never brought Moréas to justice. Now here was some cop from Paris and a young lesbian who were going to open it all up again. What if they were to find something he had missed all these years?

  “I’ll bring a few things along so we don’t have to eat out of cans,” he replied, attempting a smile.

  Nkoulou appeared. “You two are to continue i
nvestigating the Fuligni death. The juge d’instruction insists on it,” he told them. “I’ll give you time, until the autopsy report is done. If you don’t have anything by then, I shall tell Madame Vialaron-Allègre that somebody has called a false alarm.” And with that the commandant slammed the door behind him.

  “He’s going to explode with anger if you keep on like this,” Tonon whispered.

  Blanc grabbed the phone: “Have you got the pathologist’s number?”

  “It’s on speed dial. Hit ‘8.’ You’re not going to put pressure on Dr. Thezan?”

  “On the contrary. I’m going to tell her to take her time with the autopsy.”

  If Fontaine Thezan was surprised by his call, she didn’t show it. “I’m going to cut open the body today,” she replied. “I assume we won’t find anything new, but I can order blood and tissue samples to be taken and test them for drugs and such. That can take a while.”

  “I owe you a coffee,” said Blanc.

  “I drink green tea,” the pathologist answered, and hung up.

  Blanc spent the rest of the day writing up a report for the files. At some stage Tonon disappeared. “Buying ingredients,” he announced. “See you this evening. Shall we say around eight?”

  The captain shut down his computer early and got to his feet. There was nothing more to be done for the day. It was an unusual feeling. He decided to go home, sort out the house a bit, and relax. There was no mobile reception in the old mill, although if he took a few steps out from the plane trees he could just about get a weak connection. He spent a little time surfing the Internet hoping maybe to get mail or other news from his children. On Facebook he found he had a friend request from Fabienne Souillard. He confirmed it. Three more of his former Paris colleagues had disappeared from his fast-shrinking list of FB friends. But his daughter had posted something: two party photos with a few people he hadn’t seen before. But nothing from his son. His daughter had wished her mother a good vacation in Martinique. What was Geneviève doing in the Caribbean? Had she already gone or was she about to leave? Was she with her new guy? He turned the damn Nokia off. Across the river Serge Douchy was rattling along on his asthmatic tractor and nodded to him. Blanc thought the goatherd was being ironic, but he realized he was probably imagining it. He raised a hand and waved. Don’t feel sorry for yourself, he told himself.