Murderous Mistral

by Cay Rademacher

  He greeted her with a nod. “I’m afraid I have to ask you a few awkward questions,” he said.

  “You have a wonderfully old-fashioned way of expressing yourself, mon Inspecteur. Lucien warned me though.” She nodded toward the iPhone lying on the table. “He just called. I believe he’s been a guest of yours.”

  Blanc cleared his throat. “At least that spares me a few explanations,” he muttered, angry at himself at the same time. The two would have had time to coordinate their stories. “Were you at Monsieur Le Bruchec’s house last Sunday?”

  “I do hope your moral standards aren’t quite as old-fashioned as your means of expression.”

  “Around what time?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Afternoon.” She thought for a moment. “Lucien says he was back home about three thirty P.M., so it must have been about then. I was back home before the evening news. We took turns in going to each other’s house.” She didn’t seem embarrassed in the slightest.

  “Were you also with Monsieur Le Bruchec on Thursday evening? And Friday morning?”

  “You want to know whether I was with my lover when my husband died?”

  “That would make a few things easier.”

  “No, I was alone. I had called Lucien around noon on Thursday. But he wasn’t free. He said he had a commission he needed to work on. So I went to play tennis at the club and then spent the evening in front of the television.”

  Blanc forced himself to ignore his headache. If Lucien Le Bruchec and Miette Fuligni had planned together to get rid of Pascal Fuligni, this would have been their ideal opportunity to create an alibi. Madame Fuligni, who already knew the cop was aware of her affair, only needed to say she had spent the hours in question with her lover. That way they would both have given each other an alibi. See what you can do about that! But as it was, neither had an alibi for either Thursday evening or Friday morning. Paradoxically that might indicate that neither had anything to hide. So maybe it really was an accident? Or was there a third party involved? He felt faint.

  “Would you like a café au lait, mon Inspecteur? Or maybe a pastis?” Miette was giving him a look that was half sympathetic, half ironic. Even at that moment she was a tempting woman.

  “One would give me a heart attack, the other finish my brain off.”

  “Inspecteur,” she called after him at the door. “When will the pathologist release my husband’s body?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “To prepare his funeral.”

  “Pardon,” he stammered, suddenly embarrassed. “I’ll ask, and request that they finish the investigation as quickly as possible.” Amazing how easy it was to lie when his brain was on fire and all he could think of was fresh air. At that moment his Nokia rang.

  “C’est moi.” It was Fabienne Souillard’s voice. “It didn’t take long to check out the phones. Madame Fuligni’s phone called Le Bruchec’s number about three eleven P.M. on Sunday. The call lasted about a minute and a half. That ups his credibility.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Then this won’t please you either. Nobody saw any of the architect’s cars in Saint-César on Friday. The big parking lot near the yachting harbor, the one anybody can use, is just in front of the Office du Tourisme, a converted old church. They have a surveillance camera, and on the footage from Thursday evening to Friday morning, none of the cars of interest to us show up.”

  “Footage from a single camera is hardly proof. He could have parked somewhere else without anybody noticing the car. And an architect more than anyone else would notice details like a surveillance camera on a building. He would never have parked there.”

  “Even so, we don’t have anything to contradict Le Bruchec’s statement.”

  “You can’t always be lucky.”

  “It would appear you don’t believe my husband was the victim of an accident?” Miette Fuligni asked as Blanc terminated the call. She was standing in the door. Just two steps outside the captain could feel the mistral tugging at his jacket.

  “I’m not ruling anything out, Madame,” he replied cautiously.

  “My husband had no enemies. Even I loved him, despite the fact that our marriage was … difficult.” She looked exhausted all of a sudden, like an actress who’s been onstage too long.

  Blanc took a step closer. “Your husband never felt threatened?”

  “Not remotely. He got angry about this Moréas. And he broke into a tirade about you when you more or less accused him of murdering the guy at the garbage dump.” She waved away the contradiction. “That was just Pascal: always shouting and complaining. But he quickly got it out of his system.”

  “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary in the days before his death?”

  “Depends on what you mean by ordinary. That he flirted with his little Romanian hooker in our house and I had to watch the pretty little performance? That had been going on for weeks.”

  “Was your husband nervous? Anxious? Was he, for example, spending more time down at the boat than normal?”

  “His daily routine was the same as always. Very predictable.”

  Blanc considered the fact that Miette Fuligni had left Le Bruchec in time to be home for the evening news. A very predictable family life, up to a point. “Did your husband have any unusual guests recently?”

  She shook her head. “The usual friends. Lafont, a few fellow sailors. Building workers.”

  “Anything unusual in the post? A parcel? A letter?”

  “Who still writes letters these days? No, not as far as I know.”

  The captain went over the scene down at the harbor again, the first time he had met Fuligni. The builder had been using his phone. But on Friday the forensics team hadn’t found a cell phone. Maybe it had fallen overboard along with him and was lying somewhere on the murky bottom of the Étang de Berre. “Is your husband’s cell phone here?” he asked, just for the sake of it.

  “Maybe,” Miette Fuligni answered dismissively. “Pascal was always forgetting it. I keep telling him he would…” She gulped, suddenly realizing she would never talk to her husband again. “I’ll just go and look on the bedside table,” she whispered, and disappeared into the house. A few seconds later she came back with an iPhone in her hand. “This is his,” she said.

  Blanc took it out of her hand. It was locked.

  “You don’t by any chance know the code.”

  “It’s zero-three-zero-eight,” she replied. “Our wedding day.” She swayed on her feet.

  Blanc could see the tears welling up. “You’ve been extraordinarily helpful, Madame,” he said quickly. He suddenly felt himself surprised by a wave of empathy toward this woman, so stubbornly and bravely fighting the depredations of age, lack of confidence, loneliness, and now grief. “We will sort everything out,” he told her, meaning not just the death of her husband but also the unspoken accusations against her lover.

  “The sooner the better,” she said, attempting a smile and waving to him as she closed the door.

  Blanc drove off without looking in the rearview mirror. But he was too impatient to drive straight back to the gendarmerie station. Instead he pulled to the side of the road and took out Fuligni’s iPhone. The code was correct. He looked through the list of incoming calls, but none of the numbers meant anything to him. He would let Marius deal with them. Or Fabienne. That would be quicker. He checked the text messages: a meeting, apparently with his bank manager. An address, for the delivery of a wheelbarrow to a certain Luca. An order for a ten-foot-by-five-foot cast-iron fence. A few fairly obscene messages to a woman designated only as ma chatte, which Blanc was fairly certain did not refer to Madame Fuligni. The last text, sent on Thursday evening about 4:25 P.M., was a few lines to Marcel Lafont: It’s all going to come out. There’ll be enough blood spilt to fill the harbor.

  Blanc sat there a while gazing out of the windshield. The mayor of Caillouteaux. The wind was still blowing just as strongly through the branches of the pine trees, mak
ing the treetops spin in an absurd ballet. Fuligni’s old friend. The air was so clear it seemed as if every color—the gray of the asphalt, the brown of the ditches, the red of the poppies—all seemed to have been painted over with lacquer. Lafont, the man who at the time of Fuligni’s death was also out on the Étang de Berre, out of sight on the opposite side of the lake, or so he said. A crow emerged from a battered oak tree, fluttered its wings in vain against the mistral, then retreated back into the branches.

  Blanc turned the key in the ignition and set off slowly. He needed time to think about what to do next.

  * * *

  Back at the station he nodded to Fabienne Souillard. Weekends in Paris almost everybody was at their desks as normal. Down here he was on his own except for his young colleague and a solitary sleepy gendarme at the front desk. “I need to make a couple of calls,” he said with a brief apologetic smile, “then I have a bit of a story to tell you.”

  He closed the door of his office and sat there staring at the landline. Who should he call first? The juge d’instruction, and then his boss. Ought he to mention Fuligni’s last text message? He couldn’t make up his mind. It was a lead. But he had had so much grief whenever he made accusations, the last thing he wanted now was to involve the mayor. He needed to find out more first. Discreetly.

  He called the juge d’instruction’s number first. A man’s voice answered. Merde, it was the weekend. He had the minister on the line. He gave his name and asked if he could speak to Madame Vialaron-Allègre.

  “You’re calling my wife at midday on a Saturday?” The nasal tone was indignant and sarcastic all at once.

  “It’s about a case we’re investigating.”

  “You can tell me.”

  Blanc’s mind whirred. The matter was confidential. Then again, if he refused he would find himself posted to Lorraine. He gave the briefest possible summary of the two deaths and the architect who had disappeared and been picked up at a highway tollbooth.

  “Sounds very confusing. Are you coping?” Vialaron-Allègre sounded as if he knew the answer but just didn’t want to hear it.

  Blanc could feel his pulse racing. Don’t let him wind you up. “I need to discuss the next steps with Madame le juge. We put out a search warrant for Le Bruchec, brought him in for questioning, and let him go again. It wouldn’t be a good idea if the first she heard of it was on Monday morning, possibly in the newspaper.”

  Silence on the other end of the line. “You’re right,” the minister finally admitted, although it was fairly obvious he would have preferred to say nothing of the sort. “My wife will be with you in a minute.”

  Blanc felt himself relax when the judge came on the line. Ridiculous. But he forced himself to keep calm and repeated the story of what had happened over the previous few hours.

  “We don’t have enough to arrest Monsieur le Bruchec,” she said calmly.

  “No.”

  “You were right to put out a search alert for him. But you were also right to let Lucien go again so quickly.”

  “I have other leads that I’m following.”

  “On the weekend?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Call me if you have anything new.” A slight pause. “And thank you for keeping me up to date, even on a Saturday.”

  Blanc put the phone down and stared out of the window. Could have been worse, he thought. Much worse.

  He was in a mild state of euphoria and therefore less cautious than he might have been as he dialed the second number. Nkoulou. Blanc had intended to give a brief military-style report and took a deep breath when the receiver was picked up, but then stopped without saying a word when he heard a woman’s voice: “Allo?” It was a young woman’s voice, with an accent Blanc didn’t immediately recognize. The word was slurred slightly, as if whoever was speaking was drunk, on drugs, or had a disability. “Who is this?” the voice said, and then, “Putain. It’s Saturday.”

  “Captain Blanc speaking. Is this the number for Commandant Nkoulou?” He sounded to himself like a complete idiot.

  There was a noise on the line as if someone had tossed the receiver to one side. “Hey, Nicolas,” in the distance. Crude. Blanc thought back to what his colleagues had said about Nkoulou’s nonexistent private life and the bet he had been automatically included in since his first day in Gadet. Seems I might be on to a winner, he thought. But even so he found it hard to imagine any correlation between his punctilious boss and this impolite woman.

  “Nkoulou.” The voice was slightly breathless and shaky, as if there was a touch of anger or even fear in it.

  For the third time that day Blanc related the story of Le Bruchec’s disappearance and reappearance.

  “You’re calling me up to tell me this shit?!” Blanc held the receiver away from his ear. He had never imagined the boss capable of yelling like that. “The man defrosts his fridge and you send out a nationwide arrest warrant for him?”

  “It wasn’t an arrest warrant, it was—”

  “Whatever the hell it was, it’s of about as much interest to me as the contents of my small intestine! You had a respectable citizen stopped on the highway as if he were a bank robber on the run! You have him brought nearly two hundred miles in a patrol car at night and put him in an interrogation room, only to let him go five minutes later. Pardon, all a bit of a misunderstanding.”

  “Should I have not done anything when I discovered he had disappeared?”

  “You didn’t need to organize a military-style alert. There are other ways of doing things. What if Monsieur Le Bruchec lodges an official complaint against us?”

  With Minister Vialaron-Allègre perhaps, Blanc thought. He was never going to understand the Midi. “I’ll deal with it,” he said, a sentence that meant everything and nothing. He was not keen on the idea of apologizing to Le Bruchec. He wasn’t letting him off the hook quite yet.

  “Don’t spoil my weekend again, mon Capitaine, or I’ll spoil every one of your weekends for the next twenty years.” A clunk. Nkoulou had hung up. Blanc waited until the dial tone came back, then put down the receiver as if it were nitroglycerine. He wondered whether his boss’s fit of rage was really to do with the steps he had taken in the investigation, or whether it was because he had accidentally spoken with a woman whose voice he should never have heard.

  * * *

  “You look like you’ve got a bad stomach,” Fabienne said when he walked into her office.

  “Are you on weekend shift?”

  “Voluntary overtime, but I’m heading off on my Ducati in a moment.”

  “Leave your thunderbird where it is for five minutes.” Blanc pulled out Fuligni’s phone and showed his colleague the dead builder’s last text message.

  “Hmm, he was a better builder than writer: ‘There’ll be enough blood spilt to fill the harbor.’ Think that’s got anything to do with his row with Moréas about the mooring?”

  “What is there that could come out regarding that? And why would he text Lafont about it?”

  “We don’t really know what he’s talking about here. Or whether it has anything at all to do with his death. It might be irrelevant. Forget it.”

  “Have you ever received a text about the harbor flowing with blood? You don’t think it’s a bit of a coincidence that the man who sent it should be found dead a few hours later, in the harbor?”

  “Does Nkoulou know about it?”

  “The boss didn’t want to be disturbed. He was with someone.”

  She gave him a dirty look. He raised his hands and in as few words as possible told her that the boss had given him the cold shoulder. “We’ll add Fuligni’s phone to the list of potential evidence, and list the text message in the files, but we don’t need to tell anyone else for now.”

  “So when Nkoulou takes fire at you, I’ll be in his sights too?”

  “It’s something of a consolation to know I won’t be going to Lorraine on my own.”

  Souillard laughed. “Bet I can get to Metz faster on
my Ducati than you can in that old mom van of yours,” she said, grabbing her helmet. “See you Monday. Have fun with your secret files.”

  * * *

  When he was finished in the office Blanc drove around the local countryside aimlessly for a bit in the Espace. Next to one of the minor roads stood the ruins of what must at one point have been a very grand farmhouse. Its yellow stone walls were covered with vines gone wild while the branches of an oak tree had grown around the blackened broken beam that had once held up the roof like the fingers of a man in a cell. Radio Nostalgie switched from an old Bee Gees hit to “Joe le Taxi” by Vanessa Paradis. Blanc reached for the switch and silenced her little girly voice. He wound down the window but the mistral was blowing so icy cold it made his ears hurt. He parked in the dark shadow of a cypress tree and stared up at the bright blue sky above him. Light. Wind. It was real painter’s country. Van Gogh had gone out of his mind down here. But a cop? Blanc realized he couldn’t stand facing an empty weekend.

  He wouldn’t sit down this evening with his kids making plans for a Sunday excursion. He wouldn’t go out to eat with friends. He wouldn’t pile into bed alongside his wife. Merde. He couldn’t even settle down and watch some stupid movie, because he hadn’t a television in his wreck of a house, and in any case reception here would be awful. House? Shack. It would fall down before long if he didn’t do more than he had done up to now. A lot more. In any case that would be better than sitting in a battered minivan staring out of the window.

  Blanc drove on until he came to a roundabout with a sign to Salon. Within ten minutes he reached a suburb that was cut through by a major highway. A giant supermarket. Car dealerships on either side. And down a grimy dead-end street next to the highway: Bernard Philibert—Matériaux et Bricolage, a green and white building with pallets, stones, tiles, and bags of concrete next to its parking lot.