“Would you mind if I went there, asked a few questions about the old man?”
“Not at all, be my guest. Do you want any backup?”
“No, thanks. I’ll keep it low-key and let you know if I learn anything interesting.”
Forty minutes later, with his tie off and a red civilian jacket over his uniform, Bruno parked in a dowdy side street near the station in Bergerac and entered the only modern-looking shop on the strip. It was sandwiched between a small hardware store and a tired-looking boulangerie whose window carried cream cakes that had seen better days. A handwritten notice offered a sack of stale bread for pets for two euros.
“Bonjour, monsieur, always a pleasure to see a new client,” said the woman at the front desk. She wore a white coat, had dyed blond hair and wore lipstick that matched her fingernails. Her eyebrows were black and sculpted in the way he’d seen at the beautician’s in Périgueux. There was something familiar about her, but he couldn’t place it.
“Bonjour, madame,” he replied, but before he could pull aside the jacket to show his badge, she suddenly eyed him intently and said, “I know you. Wait, it will come to me. School. You’re Benoît. Remember me? Cécile? You could never stop looking at my boobs. And not just looking.”
Bruno broke out in delighted laughter. “Cécile! Mon Dieu, your breasts were the first ones I ever saw, the first ones I ever held and kissed. I’ll remember them to my dying day. We were what, fifteen?”
She stood and presented her cheek to be kissed, and he gave her an affectionate hug. She sat down, still smiling, but with something steely in her eyes as she said, “You’re a cop these days. From time to time I see your photo in the paper. Is that what brings you here?”
“Afraid so.” He sat down on a bench along the side wall and glanced at a wall poster offering Thai, Swedish and deep-tissue massage. “It’s about a client of yours, an old man in his seventies named Driant who died a couple of weeks ago.”
“I read about it. Heart attack when he was alone at his farm, it said in the paper. What makes you think he came here?”
“He told one of his old friends about you, and there were four calls here on his phone. Don’t worry, Cécile, this isn’t official. And I’m not here for a freebie.”
“That makes a nice change for a cop. Yes, he came here a few times. Always wanted a different girl.”
“How many do you have?”
“Is this between you and me, Benoît? Off the record?”
“Yes, I’m just looking for background.” He smiled, less to reassure her than hearing himself called by the name he’d been given at the church orphanage, a name he hadn’t used since his schooldays.
“There’s a Vietnamese who pretends to be Thai, an Albanian blonde who pretends to be Swedish, a Congolese girl and a Syrian, a new one. Plus a couple of part-timers, French girls who really are masseuses. And then there’s me, the qualified nurse with the credentials.”
“And whatever extra services the girls offer are between them and the client, is that how it works?”
She shrugged. “Clients want their privacy. I don’t go behind closed doors. But if a guy wants to pay extra for a hand job or something more, that’s their business.”
“I see you charge fifty euros for a massage. How do you split that?”
“Don’t tell the fisc, Benoît, but it’s half for me and half for the girl.”
Bruno did the math in his head and gave a low whistle. “Five girls, even at just four clients a day each you’re making over two thousand a week.”
“Less than half that after the rent and taxes and a few payoffs. And you wouldn’t believe how much I spend at the launderette every day, all the sheets and towels. I have to buy new ones every few months. Massage oil is a bastard to get out.”
“How’s your life, Cécile? You married? Kids?”
“Once widowed, once divorced, with a daughter who works on the railway who’s just made me a grandmother. I had her at eighteen. And a son in Bordeaux training to be an architect.”
“Good for you! I haven’t got any kids yet. Never found a woman who wanted to settle down with me.”
“Don’t look at me, Benoît,” she said, returning his smile. “Sometimes I wonder how you and I might have turned out. But I’ve had more than enough of men.”
“So, what can you tell me about Driant?”
“As I said, he wanted a different girl every time. From the time he was in there, I suppose it was hand jobs. He was a sweet old guy, very courteous, tipped well. The girls had no complaints. When he called, it was always to ask if we had someone new. What do you know about this business?”
“Nothing at all.”
“I could write a history from the women in this game. Back in the nineties they came from the Yugoslav wars, Bosnians and Serbs. Then it was Ukrainians and Russians. After the Americans went crazy, we started getting the Afghans and Iraqis, and lately it’s been the Syrians. You show me a war and I’ll tell you what new girls turn up in the business, selling the only thing they have to get by. So you tell me who comes next. Probably those poor girls risking their lives on leaky boats to get across the Mediterranean.”
Bruno sighed and nodded. “I see what you mean. Tell me, did Driant pay in cash?”
“Yes. Most guys do. Wives can read credit card bills.”
“Did you learn anything about him? Did you chat while he was waiting?”
“Not much. He always asked for a glass of water when he came in, took one of those little blue pills, Viagra. It worried me a bit, thought he might have a heart attack in one of those back rooms someday. At least the old guy would have died happy. But we hadn’t seen him for well over a month. He used to be a regular, always came midweek in the daytime when it was quiet. Then he stopped. Until I read about his death in the paper I didn’t know what had happened.”
“I think maybe it was lambing time. He was a sheep farmer.”
As she rolled her eyes, Bruno went on, “Could I talk to the women who attended to him, find out what it was he wanted, how he reacted?”
Her eyes turned hard. “Is that relevant, Benoît? Or is it just your dirty mind?”
“No, Cécile. The death certificate says he died of a heart attack, but there are reasons we have to double-check that. I want to know if he ever collapsed here or had any health trouble, if he was always able to perform or if he used any drugs.”
“I’m not aware of anything apart from Viagra. A lot of guys take that. The masseuses would have called me in if he’d had any health problems. A couple said they liked him, felt sorry for him.”
“So nothing unusual?”
“Not unless you’d call a topless massage with a hand job unusual,” she said, smiling. “Quite a lot of clients try to get more, but my house rules stop at that.”
Bruno chuckled and Cécile sat up. “You went off into the army when you left school? How did that work out?”
“It was great until I got shot, invalided out. Then I became a cop. I’m happy enough, just hope I can find the right woman someday.”
“You will, believe me,” she said. “You always were a decent guy, Benoît. Who knows, if you’d stayed on at school and I hadn’t hooked up with that bastard Didier and got pregnant, you and I might have made it work.”
“Didier?” he exclaimed. “The butcher’s son with the big ears? You were the best-looking girl in school. How on earth did you end up with him?”
She grimaced. “He had his own car, simple as that. That’s where he got me pregnant and that’s what killed him, eventually. He died drunk, running into one of those log piles on the road to Cadouin. They think he fell asleep. Left me with the little girl and pregnant with the boy. So I buckled down and went to nursing school while raising them. I thought it was a real profession. I hadn’t realized it meant wiping a lot of bottoms, which was exactly what
I was doing at home with little Mo-Mo, now my big Maurice. So I went into physiotherapy, did a massage course and here we are.”
Bruno nodded slowly and they stared at each other for a long moment, and then the door opened and a man shuffled in, late middle age and wearing a floppy hat that hid half his features. Bruno rose, raised a hand in thanks and farewell and left Cécile to her customer.
Back in his Land Rover he checked his phone. He’d turned off the ring tone when he had been in the massage parlor and found a text message from Yves, the head of the forensic team attached to J-J’s office. Yves was at Driant’s farm, and they had something. Bruno texted back that he was on his way.
Yves came out of the farmhouse wearing a snowman suit with booties and a plastic hat, saying his team was still at work and he and Bruno should stand on the doorstep. J-J had been checking locations on Lara Saatchi’s phone and had found three occasions when she was connected to the cell-phone tower closest to Driant’s farm. He read out the dates. Bruno pulled out his phone to check the calendar. Today was Wednesday. Driant’s funeral had been the previous Wednesday and he’d been found by Patrice the postman on the Friday before that. Time of death had been estimated by Dr. Gelletreau at some time between the previous Sunday evening and Tuesday at the latest.
“The last time her phone was here was that Sunday evening, from just before six until just after nine,” Yves said. “She could have been there when he died. We could even be looking at a murder, but with the body cremated we’ll never prove it, not unless she confesses.”
“Where is she now?” Bruno asked.
“The last location we had was this morning in central Périgueux, but then it went dead. She must have taken out the battery. We have an automatic trace for when she turns it back on.”
“Have you found anything else in there?”
“Cosmetic traces in the bathroom and long, black hairs on a towel. Lots of fingerprints and somebody washed up some dirty dishes. They were wiped clean, but we have prints on the handle of the dishwashing brush.”
“That could be Driant’s son or daughter,” said Bruno. “They came to pick up some family souvenirs. But neither of them has black hair.”
“I’ll go back in,” said Yves.
“Can you keep an eye open for any sign of cocaine?” Bruno asked. “I checked with a doc—that could have been what killed him.”
Yves raised an eyebrow but nodded as he went back inside. J-J’s voice was excited when he answered Bruno’s call, the way he sounded when he was on the trail and the quarry was close.
“I think we’ve got an image of your Lara Saatchi,” he began. “We went by your description, but then we got confirmation from that woman you mentioned in the beauty shop by her office. She identified her in each tape, one from the parking garage and the other from the bank.”
“Yves and I just checked the dates when her phone was at Driant’s farm,” said Bruno. “Her last visit coincides with the likely time of death, so Yves said to tell you we might be looking at a possible murder. Send the best images you have to my phone, and I’ll take them to the farmer who saw her at Driant’s place. We have cause enough to have her picked up for questioning.”
“I’m not sure about that just yet, Bruno,” J-J said. “If I say we may be investigating a homicide we’d have to bring in a magistrate, and that screws up Goirau’s plan. It’s Sarrail and Stichkin he’s after, not the office assistant. After a death certificate of heart failure and the cremation, we’d never get a conviction anyway. Even if the old man died when this Saatchi woman was there, we might not get more on her than failure to report a death.”
“It’s your call,” said Bruno. “I think it’s suspicious that she’s dropped off the map. Yves said she must have taken the battery out of her phone. By the way, I visited that massage parlor Driant called four times. He was a regular customer, no health incidents and the girls liked him. He was also a regular caller to a sex chat line.”
“And he was what, seventy-four and still at it like a teenager?” Bruno could hear him chortle down the line. “There’s hope for us all yet. What’s your next step?”
“I’ll leave you to track down Sarrail and Constant. You have better resources than I do, and I’m not sure what progress I can make unless we have them back in Périgueux where I can reach them and start putting pressure on. Meantime, once I get those images of Saatchi, I’ll show them to my witness for a positive ID.”
“What about the other guy who’s connected to Sarrail, the accountant? And isn’t there some investment adviser in those offices as well? You could have a crack at them?”
“On what grounds?” Bruno asked, trying to keep his irritation under control. “There’s no direct connection as far as we know between them and Driant or the retirement home. We have probable cause to ask questions of Constant about the insurance and Sarrail about his work as notaire, but not those others or, at least, not yet. And I’m no accountant, I wouldn’t even know what to ask. Surely that’s the responsibility of Goirau and the fisc. You can’t just send me in blind.”
“Goirau wants me to fix you up with a wire when you go to see them.”
“On what grounds, J-J? Without a magistrate taking over the case and authorizing it, that’s not legal, J-J, and you know it. I’m really not comfortable with the way Goirau thinks he can use us as a kind of battering ram to put pressure on Stichkin. That’s not what we do. We’re officers of the law. We uphold it, we don’t use it for some bureaucrat’s convenience.”
“Merde, Bruno. Tu me casses les couilles,” J-J almost shouted and then ended the call. Bruno was giving him a hard time, but for the right reasons.
Bruno shrugged and stomped off through the farmyard to the pasture where the sheep had been, looking across the valley that he loved and knowing that this was his responsibility, this place and its people. He hadn’t liked Goirau and didn’t like Goirau’s operation nor his arrogantly casual assumption that J-J and Bruno worked for him. And, Bruno thought, it would be him and J-J in trouble if this all went wrong.
His phone beeped. It was J-J sending over the video clips of Saatchi. As he looked at them, it rang again, an incoming call. It was J-J again.
“Sorry,” he said. “My big mouth. And I don’t like Goirau’s plan either. But from what you say about the Saatchi woman being at Driant’s farm around the time he died, we have reasonable cause to investigate. But I won’t ask the procureur to open a dossier and appoint an investigating magistrate, not yet.”
“Fair enough. But we do have grounds to haul her in for questioning. So let me go see if I can get an ID.”
“Okay. And then what do you plan to do next?”
“Then I have to finish building a chicken coop.”
Chapter 18
When Bruno called at Guillaumat’s farm, he confirmed that the images of Lara Saatchi on the phone were indeed of the young woman from the insurance firm whom he’d met at Driant’s place. As Bruno left, he told himself there was little he could now do until J-J confirmed that Sarrail or Constant was back in Périgueux. In the meantime, as well as finishing the chicken coop, he had to prepare for taking Balzac to the breeding kennel on Saturday.
It would be a big day for his young dog, and Bruno knew he was feeling a little nervous on Balzac’s behalf. He’d have to pack an overnight case, and perhaps he should make a new batch of Balzac’s dog biscuits as a gift to Claire Mornier. Or should he take flowers to the female owner of the dam his Balzac was about to mount? There was a dilemma of etiquette, he thought, and laughed at himself, happy to be back in his usual good mood. Then he realized there was someone he should tell about Balzac’s coming weekend. He pulled off the road and called her cell phone.
“Bruno, it’s great to hear from you,” came the familiar, beloved voice that reminded him again how much he missed this woman. “I was thinking of you just this morning. It’s the fir
st real summer day here in Paris and I was walking to work through the Tuileries gardens on the way to the ministry, looking across the river at the Musée d’Orsay and remembering that time we went there. Happy days. And how are you?”
“I’m good, thanks, Isabelle, and you sound fine, but I’m calling about Balzac.”
“Is he all right?” She sounded concerned.
“He’s fine, never better. But he has a big weekend coming up. You remember when you first brought him to me as a pup and told me about the military kennel at Suippes, how they wanted to breed him when he was fully grown? Well, his big day will be this weekend.”
“Mon Dieu. How time flies, a puppy and now he’s going to be a father. Where will this take place? At Suippes?”
“No, at a kennel north of here, close to the Limousin border, run by a breeder who was a corporal at Suippes when we first got Balzac. She was the one who arranged for us to have him. Now she’s done her twenty years with her pension and breeds dogs for the military. I’ll be going there Saturday and staying overnight. They like the dogs to have more than one, er, mating.”
“Like master, like dog, as I recall,” she said with that light, warm laugh that he knew so well. “Do you think Balzac would like me to be there?”
“We always said he’s as much your dog as mine, and you know how he loves to see you.” As he waited for her response, Bruno could hear the sound of pages being turned and computer keys being clicked.
“I can come Saturday, but I have to be back by Monday,” she said. “You said you’ll be staying overnight, do you have a hotel booked?”
“No, the breeder has a room for visiting owners,” he said, and then added, tentatively, “I can book you a nearby hotel if you like.”
“Nonsense. I want to be on hand for Balzac, and with you, of course, Bruno. You know how much I miss you, and the Périgord, and Balzac.”
“And I you,” he replied, delighted at the prospect. “I could meet your train at Limoges or at Brive.”
The Shooting at Chateau Rock Page 15