Murderous Mistral

by Cay Rademacher

  A dented old Fiat Marea turned into the olive oil mill’s drive. Tonon honked his horn and dragged his huge frame out the door. He was wearing pale linen pants and a blue and yellow Hawaiian shirt, his eyes concealed behind an ultramodern pair of sunglasses with jagged lenses.

  “You could be in the next Dany Boon film,” Blanc said by way of welcome.

  “That would be a good career move,” Marius grunted. “Give me a hand.” He opened the trunk.

  “Have you got a cannon in there?”

  “It’s a barbecue grill.”

  “It looks like a heap of junk.”

  “Well, now it’s yours.” Tonon set up the huge, rusty piece of apparatus outside the mill, and then produced a bag of charcoal, a plastic bag dripping fat, a string bag full of eggplants, and a small bag of potatoes.

  “What is this? I invite you over for dinner and you bring everything with you?” Blanc said, only halfheartedly. His stomach was rumbling.

  “Pure egoism. I just don’t trust your cooking skills.” From his plastic bag from Géant Casino supermarket he also pulled out a bottle of Ricard. “Pastis is better than yoga for relaxing.”

  Blanc dragged a table and two chairs into the open air, while his colleague set up the grill, piled charcoal in, and put a fire lighter in the middle. They poured a finger of pastis into two glasses and added ice and water. Tonon raised his glass and toasted him. Blanc sniffed the aroma of almonds, took a sip, and let the pastis rinse his mouth with alcohol and the taste of licorice. It also quenched his thirst. Tonon downed his glass in one, and refilled it.

  Over the next hour Tonon grilled a dozen merguez he had produced from the plastic bag, piercing the spicy lamb sausages with a fork so that fat dripped onto the steaming charcoal, while the merguez themselves shrank to dark hard sticks. Marius wrapped the eggplants and potatoes in foil along with rosemary and thyme and threw them onto the grill. Blanc learned that his colleague had two grown-up children. “The boys are so left-wing they are embarrassed to have a cop as father,” he said, laughing. It wasn’t quite clear whether or not he was still in contact with them. Blanc thought of his own kids and the fact that Facebook was really his only link to them, and decided not to ask his colleague for too much detail. He took another sip from the glass of pastis, the scent of cooking meat and vegetables sending him into a mild state of euphoria. Before long the bottle of Ricard was empty. He opened a bottle of Bernard rosé, wondering how his colleague intended to get home later.

  They enjoyed the spicy merguez, eggplant, potatoes, a baguette with cheese, and wine. “Not exactly Michelin star, but tell me when you ever ate better in Paris?” Tonon challenged.

  “You are an artist,” Blanc admitted. He decided he would fix up an improvised guest bed for Marius. They would finish off another bottle of rosé, and neither of them would go anywhere for the rest of the evening.

  Then the Nokia he had left outside rang. Souillard. “Fabienne, don’t tell me you’re still at work?” Blanc said, with more than a touch of guilt.

  “Not really. My girlfriend is away and I was just surfing the Internet in the office,” she said dismissively. “But this woman appeared.”

  “On the Internet?”

  “No. Waiting in the office next door. A cleaning lady, who’d been working in her boss’s house this morning. Over the years he’s usually left her money in an envelope on the kitchen table—but not this time. Also the fridge had been left to thaw, and a few suitcases were missing. Nothing like it had ever happened all the time she’s worked for him. She was puzzled, but did her job. Later on she tried to get hold of her boss—calling him at home, in the office, on his cell phone. But every time it went straight to voice mail. This evening she talked to her husband about it and he advised her to go to the police and file a missing person report.”

  Blanc already had an inkling of what was coming. “So who is this missing boss of hers?” he asked, trying to get rid of the alcoholic fug clouding his brain.

  “The architect, Lucien Le Bruchec.”

  The Last Text Message

  “We need to get down to the gendarmerie,” Blanc called to his colleague. “I’ll drive.”

  Tonon took his time emptying his wineglass. “I hope we’re not going to have to see anything that will bring my sausages back up.”

  They climbed into the Espace, but it only spluttered when Blanc turned the key in the ignition.

  “Did you forget to fill up?” Tonon asked.

  “I filled up with more than enough this evening,” Blanc grumbled. “We’d better take your car.”

  His colleague threw him the keys, but they missed him by several yards, leaving the two of them fumbling around on the ground in the dark until they found them. Blanc readjusted the seat and rearview mirror to fit his height. “Where are the lights?” But Marius had already put his head back on the passenger seat and was snoring away. Merde. Blanc felt his way around the controls until he found the light switch. By the time they finally got on the road, he felt as if it had been half an hour since Fabienne’s call. He drove down the middle of the route départementale for fear of ending up in a ditch on either side. Only then did it occur to him that Tonon hadn’t even asked why they suddenly had to be on duty at this late hour of the evening. “Le Bruchec has disappeared,” he shouted into the lieutenant’s ear. “Open your eyes and turn your brain back on.”

  At the gendarmerie he greeted the corporal who was on night shift, and hurried to Souillard’s office, the bleary-eyed Tonon dragging behind him. “I sent the cleaning lady home. It’s late,” she said on seeing them. Then, “Mon Dieu, what happened to you, Marius?”

  “We had a barbecue,” Blanc explained.

  “So what do we do? Issue an arrest warrant for Le Bruchec?”

  “No, we don’t have evidence enough against him for that. We’ll send out an alert giving his description to every police station and the border posts in Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, as well as the Marseille airport and all the main stations. Do we have any photos of him?”

  “There are dozens on the Internet. I’ve already downloaded one and prepared an alert. But are you sure it’s legal?”

  “We’ll reformat the cleaning lady’s statement as a missing person report, and then it will look official,” Blanc said. “Consider it a shortcut.”

  “I asked the cleaning lady to leave us her keys.”

  “I’m going to recommend you for a promotion.”

  “As far as Nkoulou is concerned, a recommendation from you is the kiss of death for my career. Do you intend on taking Marius with you?” she asked, indicating Tonon, who had already nodded off in his seat.

  “Is it going to annoy you if I leave him here?”

  “Not as long as he doesn’t start to snore.”

  Blanc nodded thankfully. “It won’t take me long. Then I’ll come back and will take Marius home.”

  As he left the office she was staring at her screen again.

  * * *

  The mistral was still rustling the tree branches. Blanc could see little more than shadows. It sounded as if he was in the midst of a waterfall. The woods were full of demons. But as he got close to Le Bruchec’s house halogen lights concealed in the ground and triggered by invisible motion sensors enveloped the house in bright white light. It reminded Blanc of the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He opened the door, flipped on the lights, and went from room to room. The house was clean and tidy. Too tidy. He found the main bedroom. A vast built-in wardrobe along one wall, a monument in mirrors and aluminum. The door slid back silently at the touch of a finger. Shelves of neatly folded polo shirts, pants, underwear. Some of the piles were higher than others. Below was a row of suitcases, with one empty space. The bedside table had been cleared. At first glance there didn’t appear to be a cell phone in the house, not a notebook, or paper, or cash, a checkbook or glasses. In the kitchen the doors of a huge American-style refrigerator stood open, the interior thawed out.

  Blanc went
out to the garage and opened the doors. A Range Rover, a Porsche, a BMW. One space was empty. The captain took out his phone and called Fabienne: “Give me a list of all Le Bruchec’s cars.”

  Within a few moments he knew that Le Bruchec had taken the smallest, least conspicuous of his cars, his late wife’s VW Polo. Blanc remembered what the farmer who had been at the garbage dump the day of Moréas’s death had said: There had been a little red car parked there. And then he remembered that the farmer had admitted seeing Le Bruchec—but roaring past him in his Range Rover. I’ve had too much wine, he said to himself. An hour later he had finished with both house and garage and was driving back, slowly, to make sure he didn’t end up in a ditch.

  In the gendarmerie, Fabienne—still frighteningly fresh and lively—smiled at him. “Half of France is on the lookout for Le Bruchec now.”

  “And the other half is out for the count,” Blanc muttered, nodding toward his colleague, who hadn’t moved from his chair. He got the corporal to help him drag the massive Tonon, reeking of pastis, rosé, and sweat, out into the passenger seat of the Fiat. “Drive on ahead to Lieutenant Tonon’s house,” he ordered him. He followed the patrol car to Saint-César, where they parked by one of the giant pillars that soared above the rooftops supporting the viaduct far above their heads. Tonon’s house was narrow and looked as if it had been squeezed in as an afterthought between two much larger buildings: two stories, an old door, wooden shutters, pale plasterwork of an indistinguishable color. “This place could do with a bit of a makeover,” the corporal coughed, as they dragged the lieutenant toward the door. Blanc fumbled in Tonon’s pants pocket until he found the key, and managed to open the door, all without letting go of one of his arms. A few minutes of cursing and swearing later and they had managed to lay Tonon, in uniform but without his shoes, on the bed.

  “Now I’ll show you a house that really, really needs a makeover,” Blanc said to the corporal. “Drive me to Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée.”

  By the time he got back to the old mill and watched the taillights of the patrol car disappear, all he wanted to do was sleep. A few of his neighbor’s goats were bleating in the dark; one of them kicked at the wooden gate with its hoof. Then Blanc flinched as a rough voice yelled at him from across the river: “Next time, watch your damn barbecue grill. There are still embers. The mistral is here, putain! One spark and the whole valley would have gone up in flames.”

  “At least then we’d have had grilled goat,” Blanc called back. Goddamn Douchy. He swayed into the house.

  Next morning Douchy’s cockerel woke him up. The mistral was still rattling the shutters. A Saturday morning in July: He should be sleeping it off in a big soft bed, breathing in Geneviève’s perfume, feeling her soft skin beneath his fingers. Instead, he struggled to his feet from an old camping mattress on an iron frame and about as comfortable a bed as in an interrogation cell. A cold shower. Strong coffee. Only then did his brain cells struggle to come to life.

  Then he dragged himself into the Espace, which at least started straightaway. But Blanc was too tired even to wonder what had caused this sudden change of heart in the old car. A couple of curves down the road and his phone rang. Blanc braked, pulled to the roadside, fumbled in his pocket for his Nokia, then dropped it between the pedals. He cursed, fished the phone up with his feet, and didn’t even glance at the display to see who he had just missed a call from. Later. He drove to the gendarmerie, where Fabienne greeted him with a smile, looking as fresh as if she’d had ten hours of sleep. Tonon was nowhere to be seen.

  “I tried calling you,” she said.

  “My phone decided to develop a life of its own in the car.”

  “They’ve caught Le Bruchec.”

  Blanc was suddenly wide awake.

  “Who? Where?”

  “At the toll booth on the A7, outside Lyon, just before three A.M. A motorbike patrol of the Sécurité routière just happened to be there. The officer spotted the red VW Polo. Le Bruchec didn’t seem too surprised when he was waved over. He’s on his way here and should be with us in half an hour. I just wanted to make sure you’d be in the office.”

  “I couldn’t be better,” Blanc lied. “Does Nkoulou know yet?”

  “The commandant can’t wait for the result of your interrogation.”

  Blanc wondered if he ought to call Madame Vialaron-Allègre. He decided against it. Better to hear what the architect had to say first. “Half an hour should be just long enough to have a coffee,” he said, and went into one of the Gadet bars for his second wake-up shot of the day.

  Exactly thirty-six minutes later, he was sitting opposite Le Bruchec. The architect was pale, unshaven, and looked ten years older than the last time they met. Blanc had brought three cups of coffee from the bar, and pushed one across the table to him. The second was for Fabienne, who was going to take notes. He had brought the other for Marius, but he hadn’t turned up yet. So he knocked back the bitter brew himself.

  “You’ve done cleverer things in your life than choosing now as the time to disappear,” Blanc began.

  “Well deduced. You should apply to join the police,” Le Bruchec replied. The coffee seemed to have done its work.

  “Where were you heading? Abroad?”

  “Nonsense. I was going to Paris. I have friends there from my student days. I just wanted…” He searched for the right word. “A chance to breathe. To clear my head. It’s not against the law.”

  “Absolutely not. But you must have realized that disappearing like that was bound to cause alarm. You vanished without even a word to your cleaning lady.”

  “I needed peace and quiet.”

  “Monsieur Le Bruchec, can we go back to the Sunday when you met Charles Moréas at the garbage dump?”

  The architect sighed. “It’s like having teeth pulled.”

  “A dentist can’t arrest you,” Blanc replied softly. “So, you say you bumped into Moréas there about three P.M. and exchanged no more than a few words with him. A quarter of an hour later you left the dump, and Moréas was still there.”

  “I can prove that,” Le Bruchec said, though he sounded more resigned than self-confident.

  “Last time we spoke you said you had no witnesses.”

  “Last time we spoke you knew less about my private life. Madame Fuligni was with me. She called me when I was down at the dump and told me her husband had gone down to his yacht. We arranged to meet at three thirty.”

  Blanc scribbled a note on a sheet of paper and gave it to Souillard. Get the cell phone data for LeB and M.F. Check if they spoke on Sunday about 3:15 P.M. She nodded and turned to her computer screen.

  “How long was Madame Fuligni with you?”

  “Until just before eight P.M. She wanted to get back in time for the evening news in case her husband turned up.”

  The captain closed his eyes. He had a pain behind his eyes, his stomach was chafing from too much coffee, and he still felt tired.

  “It’s the mistral,” Le Bruchec said, with just a touch of schadenfreude in his voice. “It’s like wine: Some people can take it, while others get headaches.”

  Blanc pulled himself together. He would check out the architect’s story. If it was true, then the man had an alibi until eight o’clock on Sunday evening. Maybe they would be able to strike him off the list of suspects altogether. It would certainly be enough to let him go. No judge would issue a warrant, and Madame Vialaron-Allègre in particular would scratch his eyes out if he even suggested anything of the sort. And on the second death, they had got no further at all: no progress on Pascal Fuligni.

  “You can go,” he said wearily. “Apologies for the inconvenience. But we would appreciate it if you would let us know the next time you intend to go away, until this case is declared over. We may need another statement from you, as a witness. You would appear to be the last person to see Charles Moréas alive. Apart from his killer.”

  * * *

  For a moment the captain wondered if he should ask one o
f the ranks to drive him to Fuligni’s house, then decided he was up to driving himself. He took the Espace rather than turn up in a blue gendarmerie patrol car outside the house of a woman who’d been recently widowed. It was going to be hard enough.

  As he pulled up to the house, he noticed a taxi outside. The driver was putting a huge suitcase and a full blue Ikea plastic bag into the trunk. Nastasia Constantinescu was standing next to it in a thin top and short black leather skirt. Her large sunglasses only partially concealed the fact she had been crying.

  “Are you leaving, Mademoiselle?”

  She attempted a smile. “Now that Pascal … Monsieur Fuligni has been taken from us, nobody knows how to carry on the business. Madame no longer needs me either, so I’m going to my sister in Toulon.”

  Blanc took down her sister’s name and address. He didn’t think the young Romanian had anything to do with either murder, but you could never be sure. “Au revoir,” he said, and waved good-bye.

  The door was open. He knocked and went in. Miette Fuligni was sitting at an oak table in a large open-plan kitchen/living room. She had two bowls in front of her, one of café au lait, and yogurt mixed with cherries in the other. The cherries had left red streaks in the yogurt, like bloodstains. Madame Fuligni was wearing pale blue linen pants and leather sandals; her toenails were painted red. The top two buttons of her short white blouse were open, offering him a clear view of the cleavage between her perfectly formed breasts. Good cosmetic surgery, Blanc thought, and looked out the window.