The Red Brick Cellars: A Tolosa Mystery

by R. W. Wallace

  Right. Catherine could see why the police didn’t want to buy this story. Could the woman be making this up in order to gain attention? Had she been drunk? It wouldn’t be surprising with the job she had if she drank a glass or two before going to work. The apartment spoke in her favor, but for all Catherine knew, she could be renting it furnished.

  An ironic smile graced Mademoiselle Diatta’s wide and generous lips. “You don’t believe me.”

  Catherine sighed. “I want to,” she said. And she did. Her article would have been momentous if this had been true. “But you have to admit it’s a very…fantastic story. I can’t put it in print if I can’t double-check it anywhere.”

  The girl barked a throaty laughter. “Double-check! As if you people ever do that. You find something you like on the net and print it right up.”

  Catherine’s need to show goodwill toward her interviewee diminished. “Well, that’s how I do my job, Mademoiselle Diatta. There were no other witnesses there that night?”

  A perfectly manicured hand flicked an imaginary crumb from the table top. “Nobody who saw the woman before she turned to dust, no.”

  Abandoning that venue, Catherine asked, “Where exactly were the bodies?”

  The prostitute stood up and went to lean against one of the windowsills. “They were in the Galerue.” The covered walk was under the arcades facing the Capitole and had a great number of paintings on the ceiling, depicting various themes or persons important in Toulouse’s history. “They were underneath the painting of the two women. You know, almost at the center?”

  Catherine didn’t know exactly which painting that was, but nodded anyway. She’d check it out on her way home. She couldn’t think of anything else to ask, so she thanked the woman for her time and left. She hadn’t learned much, but no matter. With what she heard at the mayor’s wake, her article was sure to get attention. But first she had to convince her boss to print it.

  ***

  Catherine planted her feet next to her boss’s chair and folded her hands loosely in front of her. Mathieu Lambert was giving his heavily worn leather chair quite a challenge with his ex-rugby-player body. His gaze switched back and forth between the two screens on his desk before looking at Catherine over the rims of his black glasses, wordlessly asking her why she was bothering him.

  Catherine pointed at her boss’s screen and looked him straight in the eyes. “I just sent you an article by email. You’ll want to print that in tomorrow’s paper.”

  Mathieu pursed his lips, but made no move to open his emails. “Will I.”

  “I know you’re still angry with me”—Catherine folded her arms—“but I discovered something big on the mayor’s death. You really will want to print it.”

  He leaned back in his chair and pushed his glasses up his nose. “You wrote an article on the mayor?” he said so low it was almost a whisper.

  Catherine put her hands out in a placating gesture. “I didn’t set out to go against your orders, Mathieu. Really. But I came across information I couldn’t ignore.”

  “You went against my express orders by accident?” Mathieu’s eyes bored into Catherine. “Or were you forced? Was your French suddenly not good enough to simply give this information to Arnaud who is supposed to cover the mayor’s death?” His voice still low and calm, spots of color appeared on Mathieu’s cheeks and his nostrils flared.

  Catherine was certain the reason she hadn’t managed to make more headway in her career was her inability to communicate with her boss. They simply didn’t understand each other. She put some ice into her voice to remind him she was not without a temper of her own. “You would not expect any other journalist to give away a hot lead, no matter the case. Why should I?”

  “Because you are unfit to cover this subject.” The sharp riposte made Catherine flinch, but she made a conscious effort not to take a step back.

  Hands on hips, Catherine kept her voice calm. “I made one joke you blew out of all proportions—”

  “You said, ‘Rather extreme way to get out of campaign promises, don’t you think?’”

  “That was a joke!” Catherine drew a deep breath and counted to three. She didn’t have the patience to go all the way to ten. “His motto when getting elected was ‘Nothing can stop us.’ I commented that death had stopped him. It’s a play on words.” At first, she’d been so proud to manage a joke in French, but soon realized it wasn’t even funny. So she’d made the worst joke of the year, all her colleagues were bound to remember it for years to come, and she’d tripped herself up big time career-wise.

  Mathieu pointed a meaty finger at her. “You made a grossly inappropriate joke about a beloved mayor who’d been murdered the day before. A mayor who was considered a good friend of le Midi Républicain.” He turned to one of the articles he’d been reading when she entered. “I can’t take the risk that you would say something similar again.”

  Catherine had imagined this meeting going a lot better. “Monsieur Saint-Blancat wasn’t the only dead body at the scene.”

  Mathieu looked at her for several seconds before enunciating every syllable as he said, “What are you talking about?”

  Catherine waved at the computer. “It’s all in there. Won’t you at least have a look?”

  Her boss still hadn’t moved a single of his impressive muscles. “Where did you get this information? Why haven’t I heard this anywhere else?” He leveled his finger at her again. “You better not be making this up, Madame Marty.”

  Catherine winced, but there was no turning back now. “I overheard a police officer telling the mayor’s son at the wake.”

  Mathieu banged his fist on his desk so hard three piles of paper fell to the floor. Catherine jumped. “You went to the wake?” he bellowed.

  Catherine flinched, but set her jaw to show she would fight for this article. In three years, she hadn’t known the man to use his physical strength on co-workers, and hoped he wouldn’t start today. His rugby-field voice was approaching ear-damage level. “I forbid you to go and you go anyway? Is this another one of your English idiocies? I told you no, so you went behind my back?” He drew a deep breath and shook his head.

  Catherine glanced out at the open space where her colleagues were all watching, mouths agape. She gave them a smile and a wave and closed the door, thinking she should have had the foresight to do that on arrival.

  When she turned back to face her boss, he popped two Tic Tacs into his mouth and leveled Catherine a hard stare. “I should fire you, you know.”

  Catherine’s heart sped up. She had known he would be angry, but not that he’d go so far as threatening to fire her. It was just a threat, right? Praying her voice was steady, she said, “You might want to take a look at the article first.” She stood meekly by the door, eyes pleading.

  Mathieu sighed and mumbled, “Too much of a bother. All that paperwork, and it’s bound to come back to bite me in the ass one day.” Then the fire was back in his eyes. “Why are you still standing there? Don’t you have enough common sense to know when to retreat?”

  “We English aren’t in the habit of retreating,” she quipped. “Living on an island rules that possibility out.”

  Mathieu stared at her.

  Shit, now he wouldn’t want to retreat either.

  “Please, Mathieu,” Catherine said. “Have a look at the article. I promise you it’ll be worth it.”

  “If I read it, will you leave?”

  “Yes.” Catherine allowed herself to relax when her boss opened the email she’d sent. That was the first time he’d ever mentioned firing her over a disagreement. Given the state of her bank account, she felt like she’d just had a near-death experience.

  She waited the few seconds it took Mathieu to scan over the article. The guy was some sort of skimming god. When he looked up, his eyes were wide with a mix of surprise, horror, and excitement and his mouth hung open.

  “You got this directly from the police?” He popped his Tic Tac box open and didn’t seem to
register that it was empty. He kept shaking the holder over his upturned hand. “They were planning to keep it from the press and the public?”

  Catherine nodded. The article would print, but she kept the smile off her face. No more faux-pas from her today.

  “And you’ve double-checked everything?” After throwing the empty box in the trash, Mathieu read the article again, stopping to ponder certain paragraphs. “You’ve misspelled compromettante,” he mumbled.

  Catherine huffed. “I’ll double-check my spelling. And yes, I contacted the witness for corroboration. Unfortunately, she’s just as unreliable as the police said, so it’s not worth much. But I’m confident there really was a second body—or rather skeleton—at the scene.”

  Mathieu nodded. The movement looked painful on the man. With no neck to speak of, or rather too much of it like so many first-line rugby players, it seemed to take an effort to loosen up the muscles. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll print the article.” He drag-and-dropped Catherine’s email into the folder containing the articles for the next day’s paper.

  Catherine did an internal happy dance.

  Mathieu’s finger was back to pointing at Catherine’s face. “But you’re still off the case. Arnaud covers the mayor’s death and everything that goes with it. Not another word from you.”

  Five

  Louis had trouble meeting his mother’s gaze. Michelle Saint-Blancat wore no makeup and no vivid colors this morning. Louis felt like he was looking at his mother naked. Other than the lack of her usual face paint and colorful clothing, his mother appeared to be doing fine. She hummed what Louis thought was the soundtrack of the old movie Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez as she prepared breakfast: a bowl of hot chocolate for him, a cup of coffee for her, and a shared baguette with Nutella. Louis briefly considered telling his mother he had been drinking coffee for four years now, but the nostalgia of eating his childhood breakfast was winning. He didn’t need caffeine anyway, since all he had planned for the day was to mope around at home.

  As his mother sat down on the second barstool, Louis glanced at the newspaper in front of him. A huge picture of his father’s casket in the Salle des Illustres at the Capitole covered the top half of the first page with an aggressive headline screaming out at Louis. Looked like the cat was out of the bag for the second body. Louis didn’t like the implication that his father had the police in his pocket.

  At first he didn’t pay attention to the article’s author, but his face heated up as he read almost word for word what that idiot police officer had told him at the wake. He studied the thumbnail photo: hair in a tight braid instead of long, flowing curls and wearing a lot less makeup than what she sported at the wake—not to mention much more conventional clothing—but it was the same gray-blue eyes, the same slightly upturned nose, and the same wide, generous mouth. The credit line read Catherine Marty. That English vixen was a journalist and had used him to get a story.

  To top it all off, like everybody else, she assumed he would go straight into politics. His intuition had been duped by living in an English-speaking country for ten years. He had forgotten the basics. Never trust the English.

  Louis’s mother glanced at the article taking up all of Louis’s attention. “Someone’s moving upward. That girl used to cover the gossip section.” She nodded to Louis’s bowl. “Your chocolate is going cold, chéri.”

  Louis obediently took a sip of his chocolate. Childhood memories flooded back. Of him fighting his sister for the Nutella. Of his parents having two different discussions with each other—him something to do with the city council and her with some association—but still coming to an agreement in the end. What was it with mothers that made them always know what their kids needed at any given time?

  The doorbell rang.

  “Here we go.” His mother sighed. She put her empty cup in the kitchen sink, straightened her white short-sleeved blouse, and went to open the door. “Please clean up your bowl before you join us,” she said as she exited the kitchen.

  Louis glanced out the window. Two police cars were double-parked on the sidewalk in front of their house. Old Madame Sutra from number fifteen was going to have a fit when she saw the sidewalk blocked once again. The fact that it was the police would make no difference to her. She already had trouble walking down the two steps to get out of her house and was not happy when she had to step off the curb as well to go buy her daily pack of cigarettes at the tabac down the street.

  Louis put his empty bowl next to his mother’s cup in the sink, then ambled into the hallway to see what the police wanted.

  Three officers crowded the doorstep, talking in low, reverent tones to his mother. “Excusez-nous de vous déranger, Madame Saint-Blancat,” the tallest one said. We apologize for interrupting. It was the one with the horrible empathy skills from the wake. “On behalf of the juge d’instruction, we find ourselves with the obligation to search your house.” The man glanced at Louis as he stepped up behind his mother, and gave a small nod of greeting. His look was filled to the rim with the accusation that Louis had called the press.

  When the officer turned back to Louis’s mother, his gaze didn’t stay focused on her face long. It wandered to the door, to the street, to his colleagues. Louis wasn’t the only one finding Madame Saint-Blancat without makeup a disturbing sight. It’s not that she was ugly without it, it was just so different. Like seeing someone without glasses for the first time.

  “Obligation?” his mother asked politely. “Who is forcing you, Monsieur Petit?”

  A muscle in the officer’s jaw worked as he ground his teeth. He had apparently been expecting a more cooperative widow. His mouth opened into something that was more rictus than smile. “As you know, Madame Saint-Blancat,” he said, “we were hoping to perform our inquiries in private, without the involvement of the press.” Now he looked straight at her. “Out of respect for Monsieur le Maire, we did not wish for any unnecessary rumors to spread.”

  Louis folded his arms over his chest and frowned at Officer Petit. “What kind of rumors?”

  Was that pity he saw in the man’s eyes? Louis didn’t want any pity, especially not from this guy.

  “There have always been rumors of bribes and corruption surrounding your father,” the officer said. “But there was never any proof, so we apply the presumption of innocence. Now, with that article in today’s Midi Républicain, we have to be seen looking into it. Or the police will lose credibility.”

  Finished with Louis, Officer Petit focused on Louis’s mother again. “So, I am afraid we have with us a search warrant. We’ll need to search the house to see if anyone was buying off Monsieur le Maire. Which we hope may lead us in the direction of his murderer.”

  “Fine,” Madame Saint-Blancat said as she stepped back to let the officers in. “But please try not to make a mess. And dry off your shoes.”

  All three police officers obediently dried off their shoes on the doormat, though what kind of dirt they could have accumulated in the dry streets of Toulouse, Louis didn’t know. Each of the three officers nodded a reverential greeting to Louis’s mother on their way past. “Where is the study, please?” the last one, a balding man with a few days of stubble on his cheeks, asked.

  Louis’s mother pointed up the stairs. “One floor up, last door on the right.”

  “Merci, Madame,” he replied. And up they went.

  His mother slid the door shut and walked back to the kitchen. She rinsed the bowl and cup, then put them in the dishwasher. Leaning against the window frame, she looked at Louis perched on a barstool at the kitchen counter.

  “You’re going to let them rummage around up there?” he asked.

  His mother cocked her head. “If they have a search warrant, there really isn’t much I can do about it.” She continued looking at him. Waiting.

  Louis moved to look up the stairs, then sat back down. He narrowed his eyes at his mother. “You knew they were coming, didn’t you?”

  “After that?” She nodded at the
article displayed in front of Louis. “Of course I did. They can’t let something like that slip by unnoticed. At least they were nice enough not to show up at six in the morning.”

  “They’re not going to find anything, are they?” Louis said.

  “Of course not,” his mother replied with a quick eye-roll. Then her chocolate-brown eyes sharpened. She carefully pronounced her every next word as she would when helping him learn a difficult lesson for school. “They’re not going to find anything because your father never took any bribes.”

  Louis frowned. “Right.”

  His mother’s eyes didn’t let him go yet. “They will not find anything because that would hurt the reputation of the Saint-Blancat family, not to mention the reputation of the city of Toulouse. How many people think of corruption as soon as you say the name Bordeaux because of that idiot Alain Juppé? Toulouse will not have that same stamp.” The core of steel that made up his mother’s backbone was on clear display. This woman was not bowed down by the death of her husband; she would keep fighting for the causes dear to her.

  Louis nodded.

  After a few more seconds of scrutiny, his mother appeared satisfied and grabbed the newspaper. She opened it to the crossword puzzles and sat down to work.

  Through the window, Louis saw the door to number fifteen open up and the voluminous hair of Madame Sutra appear. Her heavily painted eyebrows drew down to a deep V on her forehead when she saw the police cars. “I’ll go out and say hello to Madame Sutra.”

  When he reached the old lady, she was banging her closed umbrella on the tire of the closest car. “Bande de racaille,” she croaked in her smoker’s voice.

  Louis smiled. Racaille was the word President Sarkozy used to describe the youngsters revolting against the police in 2006, which had brought him such bad press. Louis couldn’t help but love his neighbor for using the expression on the police for parking on her curb.