Crime Fraiche

by Alexander Campion

  Pierre opened the car door for Capucine. “Ah, I see you’ve been buying cheese,” he said with a histrionic grimace. “Before we start our tour, my father’s going to take you over to his house for a taste of the product while I make a few calls. Then I’m all yours.”

  Jean led them off to an ancient stone cottage at the far end of the courtyard.

  “Pierre and his family live over there,” Jean said, proudly pointing to an even smaller stone cottage. Capucine tried, and failed, to imagine what it would be like having her parents living fifty feet away, peering into her living room every time they walked by.

  In his house Jean opened the doors of a nondescript oak armoire. The shelves were packed with thickset bottles with a red and tan label depicting a cheerful medieval paysan in a pointed hat sitting in front of a roaring fire, smoking a churchwarden, and sipping contentedly from a tiny glass.

  “This is my personal cave,” Jean said. “I keep a selection of our recent production alongside of some of our more notable older millésimes. Pierre has the reins of the domain firmly in hand, but I still have the memory. That’s why we work so well together.” His face softened as he looked out the window toward his son’s house. “I plan to hang around until I can see young Frédéric getting involved too.

  “Enough of that! Let’s get to work. I’m only going to give you two grades to taste. The first is our Réserve Familiale. It’s been in the cask for six years and is our mainstay. The second is the nineteen seventy millésime, which has been in wood for fifteen years and is the finest product we commercialize.” Alexandre’s tiny glasses filled, Jean began pouring for Capucine. She stopped him.

  “I have to drive back,” she said with an embarrassed laugh.

  Jean puffed out a snort, as if to say that these Parisians really lived in an incomprehensible world all of their own.

  Rapt, Alexandre ignored the exchange. “It’s extraordinary,” he said. “The nineteen seventy has a far more pronounced pear note in the mouth than the Réserve. And, naturally, it’s much more subtle and nuanced, with hints of licorice, almond, orange, and, of course, wood, but it’s the presence of the pear that makes it so exceptional. Monsieur, I congratulate you. It’s truly extraordinary.”

  Pierre, with Frédéric in tow, walked in just as Alexandre was giving his verdict. All three looked at each other without expression, but their joy was nonetheless palpable. This was the ultimate reward.

  “Let me tell you about the domain,” Pierre said. “We’ve had the same seven acres for over a hundred and fifty years, so we’re getting to know them quite well. Most Domfrontais is thirty percent pear, but that’s not enough. Ours is made with seven pears to every three apples. And, of course, all of our fruit comes from right out there,” he said, pointing through the window at rows of gnarled, leafless trees aligned with military precision.

  “Let’s go see the distillery and I’ll show you how it’s made.”

  The first stop in the ramshackle outbuilding was the head-high oak fermentation vats.

  “The apples and pears are crushed in those presses over there, and the juice is left in these vats for eleven months, until it turns into nice hard cider. Then the fun starts.” They moved on to the next room, filled with a gleaming copper alembic and a row of shining copper tanks.

  “We only distill once. Most producers double distill, but we think our way preserves the depth of the fruit taste. You should come back when the distillation is going full steam. You get drunk just standing here, right, Frédéric?” Father and son laughed happily.

  “At that point the liquor is clear as water. It’s the oak barrels in the next room that give it its color. The distillate goes into the barrels at a hundred and forty proof. Years later it comes out in its distinctive golden robe at only eighty proof. The missing alcohol is what we call the part des anges—the angels’ share. The longer it stays in the barrel, the more the angels get. When we die, we’re going to come back as Domfrontais angels, aren’t we, Frédéric? They’re the ones who have all the fun.” Father and son laughed uproariously at the funniest joke in the world, even though it must have been trotted out at every visit.

  Before they left, Alexandre bought two bottles of the 1970 millésime for himself and a wooden case of six of the Réserve Familiale for Oncle Aymerie.

  As the bottles were being loaded into the car, Jean came out to say good-bye. He shook Alexandre’s and Capucine’s hands and then wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell? Good Lord, you have a whole case of Livarot back here, cooking in the sun. Enjoy your trip home,” he said with a grin. As they drove off, all three generations of Lemonnots were doubled over in laughter at the hapless Parisians.

  The Livarot became too much for them even before they reached the town of Domfront, seven minutes away.

  “Let’s leave it at a railroad crossing. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with foundlings?” Capucine asked.

  “Defeat is not in the code of the Huguelets. We’ll stop in the village, procure some twine, stow the damned stuff on the roof of the car, and turn on the air-conditioning. That should do it.”

  The solution proved imperfect. Even with the windows closed as tightly as the twine would allow, the odor of Livarot was still very much in evidence. Capucine counted the minutes. She searched for a topic that did not involve cheese.

  Alexandre came to the rescue. “You know, of course, that I don’t have the slightest doubt you’ll find the culprit. I just hope you won’t suffer in the process.”

  “I’m suffering already. But if you’re referring to Dallemagne, there’s no problem there. The Police Judiciaire has authority throughout France. Actually, I was planning on paying a visit to a pal I have on the DCPJ.” She paused at Alexandre’s blank look. “I thought you knew all the ins and outs of the PJ by now. The Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire. Headquarters. The loonies who make staffing decisions with a Ouija board, remember them? Sure, they’ll think I’m being a bit impetuous, but I have a good pal there from the commissaire’s school. No problem at all. He’ll fix it all up.”

  “I was thinking more about the village. It would be a mistake to underestimate Dallemagne. Your success will be his failure, after all. The village knows you as a sweet little girl who blossomed into the charming Madame La Comtesse. They’re not going to like it when you rip off your rubber princess mask and reveal yourself as a Police Judiciaire fiend who has come to prize open their little boxes of nasty secrets.”

  Capucine giggled but her eyes hardened and her mood swung.

  “Tant pis. As Napoleon said, ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.’ It’s simply beyond me to let a murderer walk away free. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Wasn’t that Robespierre? But you’re sure there really is a murderer?”

  “Of course there is, you ninny. And I even have a good idea of who it is and what it’s all about. But suspicions hardly make a case I can take to a magistrate, do they?”

  Just then they mercifully arrived at Maulévrier. Gauvin rushed up, checked at the odor, but bravely opened the car door for Capucine. She nearly wept in gratitude.

  CHAPTER 18

  “Did you cut your vacation short?” Isabelle asked hopefully when she caught sight of Capucine walking into the commissariat at ten in the morning.

  “Nope. I had to come to Paris for the day to deal with something, and I thought I’d stop by and see if you guys were playing together nicely.”

  Capucine made a tour of the open-plan office while Isabelle hovered at a distance, making a pointed display of her patience. She reminded Capucine of a dog hoping to be taken out for a walk. There was no doubt that ambition was the most insidious of the vices.

  The commissariat seemed to be carrying on quite happily in her absence. Two almost anorexic young men sat on either side of a desk, dressed identically in torn jeans and slack hoodies. Only the fact that one pecked hesitantly at a keyboard labeled him as the flic, while the waves of intense animos
ity radiating from the other identified him as the perp who had been apprehended in some misdemeanor or other. A few desks beyond, a detective with a shaved head and muscles that made his tight olive drab T-shirt look like an overfull bag of potatoes waited patiently with a warm smile, ready to take the deposition of a woman who quieted a crying baby with a bottle as two grubby children sat listlessly on the floor by her chair, sucking their filthy thumbs. The woman had a bright fuchsia hematoma over most of one side of her face. Capucine wondered what instrument her husband had used to produce it.

  The uniformed receptionist at the front desk waved his telephone receiver in the air at Capucine, indicating that he had a call he thought she should take. She went to her office.

  “Salut, Capu!” She didn’t recognize the voice, but it had to be one of her classmates from the commissaire’s course at the ENSP, where she had been stigmatized with the odious nickname. Then it hit her: Bruno Lacombe, the oldest member of the class, well into his fifties, an up-from-the-ranks cop who started out as a gardien de la paix directing traffic and was now the commissaire in charge of the Fourth Arrondissement East, which covered the ultra-chic Ile Saint-Louis and the fashionable part of the Marais.

  “So how’re you making out in my commissariat?” His laugh was rusty from cheap Cognac and exhaust fumes. The big joke when the class had received their postings was that working-class Lacombe wound up in the Fourth while Capucine was sent to Paris’ tough Twentieth.

  “I’ve been meaning to call you, but you know how it is,” he said. Capucine allowed that she did indeed.

  “I’m inviting you to lunch. Better late than never, right? Is twelve thirty okay?”

  “Today?” Capucine was taken aback. In her world asking someone to a social function for the next day was an affront, much less for the same day.

  “Of course today. Fact is, we’ve got a case here that I think really belongs to you. No reason not to discuss it over lunch. My treat. We’ll have a good one. Seems like a legitimate enough expense account item to me.”

  “What’s this about a case?”

  “I’ll tell you over lunch.”

  “You’re on. Actually, I have to be in your neck of the woods at eleven to see our dear classmate Damien Pelletier. It would be fun to have lunch after.”

  “Pelletier? What are you doing at headquarters? You didn’t get yourself into trouble, did you?”

  Capucine laughed. “I’ll tell you over lunch.”

  Headquarters, the Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire, was viewed by most PJ officers as a useless, vestigial organ good for nothing except generating an endless stream of seriocomic bureaucratic bumf and surreal staffing assignments. They also saw relevance in the fact that the DCPJ was located at number eleven rue des Saussaies, headquarters of the Paris Gestapo during the WWII occupation.

  Commissaire Damien Pelletier had been an unassuming, clean-cut, well-scrubbed, considerate, zealous student, highly unpopular with his colleagues for those very virtues. He had drawn what his peers considered the worst possible posting—human resources in the DCPJ—and had rejoiced.

  “So let me see if I understand this right. You want to be seconded part-time to the Normandy subdivision to work on a case in your native village? Is that it, Capu?”

  That nickname again. If Alexandre ever got wind of it, it would be an unmitigated disaster.

  “Not quite my native village but almost. My uncle lives there, and I pretty much grew up in his house. I know the village inside and out. There have been three violent deaths in as many weeks, and my uncle is convinced they’re foul play. Actually, he’s pretty much convinced me, too.”

  “And the local gendarmerie in all this?”

  “Damien, the local capitaine is a card-carrying asshole whose only interest in life is making it to retirement age without rocking his boat. Look, if I don’t focus on this, a murderer will go scot-free, thumbing his nose at the police.”

  Pelletier stared at the wall, massaging the wattle under his jaw, for fifteen seconds. “Capu, you were admired in our class for your pragmatism. I understand what’s driving you here. I really do. But it just can’t happen. It’s true the PJ has national jurisdiction and ascendance over the gendarmerie, but, when the sun goes down, we all drink at the same watering hole.” He looked earnestly at Capucine, verifying that the metaphorical subtlety of his nyet had registered.

  “So you’re turning me down?”

  “I don’t decide these matters on my own, of course. If you absolutely insist, I suppose I could air the idea at the next staffing committee meeting, but it would be a waste of time. There’s not a hope in hell they’ll approve it.”

  He looked at her earnestly. “Capu, you need to forget about this. But I’ll tell you what. Not to let a classmate down, I’m going to send a memo to the Normandy division of the gendarmerie indicating our interest in the case. That will trickle down through channels to your capitaine, and I think you’ll find it will have a decidedly salutary effect on him, letting him know he has to keep you fully abreast of his progress.”

  On her way out Capucine was torn between attempting to demolish the elevator door with a Louboutin ostrich flat and dissolving into giggles at the notion of the “decidedly salutary” effect a memo that would “trickle down through channels” was going to have on Dallemagne. Anyway, that was that. The bad news was that she was off the case. The good news was that she had been lifted off the horns of her dilemma and she could get back to the real world. With a groan of defeat and a sigh of relief, she walked off to lunch.

  Mercifully, the restaurant where she was to meet Lacombe was only two streets away and she was no more than her customary fifteen minutes late.

  Surprisingly for such an upmarket neighborhood, the bistro was an authentic period-piece bar à vin run by the owner and his family. As she walked in, a boisterous wave of roiling guttural diphthongs, tabac brun fug, and the earthy odor of robust red wine washed away most of the bad taste of the morning.

  Lacombe was hunched over a glass of whiskey at the bar in earnest conversation with the owner—a shaggy man with a drooping ginger mustache who could have passed as a character in an Asterix comic—and his large Griffon Vendéen, a perfect clone of his master, save for some unfortunate technical glitch resulting in it coming out as a quadruped. Both of them reminded Capucine of Bouvard, who must be happily proselytizing in Fresnes Prison. She tapped Lacombe on the shoulder.

  “Capu!” he exclaimed. “You’ve gotten even more beautiful, and I do believe your ass is just a tiny bit bigger and even more luscious.”

  “Vieux cochon,” Capucine said, delighted, giving him a slap that wound up as a caress. A whiskey later they were both ready to brave the tight circular staircase and be shoehorned into a table, elbow hard against elbow with their neighbors. The owner’s wife flatly announced what they would be drinking—a Tavel, “the likes of which had never before come through the gates of Paris”—and left them to their deliberations over the menu.

  Lacombe had gained a few pounds and lost the worry lines on his face, which had been his most salient feature during the commissaire’s course.

  “You seem to have prospered in the Fourth East.”

  “Who wouldn’t? You get it all, from the Amerloque richies on the Ile Saint-Louis to the creepies on the boulevard Bourdon and back to the caviar leftists on the place des Vosges. You know how it is. I hear you’re doing not so bad yourself. I admit that I thought the Twentieth was going to be too much for you, but I hear you’ve turned into quite the little star.”

  “You know how it is.” They both laughed. “So what’s this case that you think is mine?”

  But the owner’s wife scurried up importantly with the food and preempted center stage. A tangy dish of marinated herrings cooked with shallots, coriander leaves, herbes de Provence, and bay leaves, served on a bed of tiny, round ratte potatoes sautéed in the herrings’ oily marinade for Lacombe and a duck magret for Capucine. Being a commissaire had its compensa
tions, particularly when you could take two hours for lunch, followed by a long walk back for your digestion.

  “It’s a pretty weird little story, even for my commissariat. See, a couple of days ago we get this missing person’s report from Hubert Lafontaine. You’d have known who he was, but I didn’t have a clue this guy is the major living French composer. The sort of dude who will be known five hundred years from now.”

  “Lafontaine must be over ninety now.”

  “Ninety-two. But he’s spry enough. I went to see him. He has an apartment at the end of the Ile Saint-Louis. Filled with antiques and stuff, overlooks the Seine, very nice, just what you’d expect. He told us that his niece, who is living with him, had been missing for four days.”

  “And you can’t find her?”

  “That’s not it. Problem is that the niece died thirty-six years ago. At the time, she was living in Lafontaine’s apartment, same place he’s in now, while she was going to university. It was nineteen sixty-nine and she had just entered the Sorbonne and was staying at her uncle’s because her mother—Lafontaine’s sister—was worried that a simple girl from the provinces would be corrupted by Paris living.” Lacombe snorted. “The girl went home for a long weekend and was killed in a car crash down there. She drove into a combine harvester coming down the wrong side of the road with no lights on.”

  “So it’s senile dementia. Nothing exceptional about that at the age of ninety-two.”

  “Oh, he has dementia all right, no doubt about that, but there actually was someone staying with him last week. I interviewed the cleaning lady, who never really saw anyone, but she did make a bed that had been slept in and changed towels that had been used. The concierge saw Lafontaine going up the stairs the previous Sunday with a woman she described as being in her early twenties, wearing a long, flowing white dress, and having a ‘face like an angel.’ Anyway, one day this angel just upped and left.” Lacombe filled their glasses, emptying the bottle of the Tavel. “Kinda sounds like it might be your Belle au Marché, doesn’t it?”