The Red Brick Cellars: A Tolosa Mystery

by R. W. Wallace

  The girl with the big Twitter following agreed to tweet a picture of him in front of the recognizable gazebo as soon as they left. He struck what he hoped was a natural pose of someone unaware of being in a picture, feeling like a complete moron and thinking his plan had better be more effective than the last one.

  Having to settle for pictures of him talking to girls instead of successfully flirting with them, he decided perhaps to get some pointers from Mouad on how things worked here these days.

  It was official. Louis was old.

  Eleven

  Louis heard the men behind the gazebo laughing, followed by the sound of several pairs of feet sprinting down a path. Curious, he walked partly around the gazebo to see what they were up to. Against the streetlights of the round-about and the cars’ headlights, he saw the silhouettes of three men climbing the fence to get out. Louis shook his head. That group was either high on something or up to something.

  The tang of smoke hit his nostrils. Had someone in his group been smoking? He didn’t think so. Looking back to his companions in the gazebo, there were no cigarettes in sight. The smell intensified.

  Worried now, Louis approached the bushes the three men recently vacated. One of the lights he assumed was from outside of the park and only shining through the bushes was in fact a fire. “Oh putain,” he exclaimed as he jumped back from the heat of it.

  They had gathered twigs and dry leaves into a small hollow and set fire to it. There was no way it was accidental. Even as he watched, the fire spread to the largest nearby bush and two leaves of an elm towering over the hollow blasted into short bursts of flame like the first tentative fireworks on the fourteenth of July. If that fire wasn’t put out, it would quickly become a bouquet final.

  Louis sprinted back to Mouad and the others. “There’s a fire on the other side of the gazebo! We have to put it out!”

  Everybody jumped up and went to look. There was no need to go behind the bush now; the whole thing was ablaze.

  Louis grabbed the blanket. If they were quick enough, they should be able to put it out. But as he ran, he realized the others weren’t running in the same direction. With the exception of Mouad, who followed hesitantly, everyone ran for the fence. Unbelievable. A fire in a dried-out park after three months of drought and sun and they were more concerned with not getting caught trespassing than about the fire spreading. This park burning down would be bad enough, but there were four large avenues going out from the Grand Rond, all of them lined with giant old trees, their canopies connecting. It wouldn’t take much for the fire to spread through the whole city center.

  At this thought, Louis turned to yell at Mouad while he started fighting the fire with the blanket. “You have to call the fire department!”

  Mouad didn’t join him, but kept glancing over to the last of the party-goers disappearing over the fence.

  “What are you doing?” Louis said, starting to cough. He was making progress on the bush, but fire spread to the grass and large elm above. There wasn’t much he could do about the tree.

  Mouad yelled over the slapping of blanket on bush and grass and the growing sound of fire sucking in air. “I really can’t afford to be caught out here.” He looked at the fence again, then up at the burning tree. He held his hand out to Louis. “Give me your phone and I’ll call it in. Then I have to leave.”

  Louis didn’t have the time to argue. He laid down the blanket to fish his phone out from his pocket and threw it over to Mouad, then went back to beating down the burning grass. He managed to stop it from moving toward a group of beech trees, though in the meanwhile, it spread through the grass in the other direction, around the gazebo. He hoped the paths would be enough to stop the fire on that side.

  Louis started when he felt something touch his back pocket. It was Mouad giving his phone back. “They’re on their way,” he said.

  Louis continued his battle against the fire while Mouad fled.

  ***

  The elm tree was declared dead by one of the firemen. The bush where the three idiots started the fire was nothing but ashes. The same went for a large patch of grass in the surrounding area. The gazebo’s roof ignited minutes before the firemen arrived and would require major repairs.

  Luckily, the fire station was less than five hundred meters away, so a siren had sounded almost immediately after Mouad’s call. Ten minutes later, the fire was out.

  A fireman of average height and built like a moving truck ruffled his short dark hair after removing his helmet. He approached Louis and said, “Good job, Monsieur. You saved the park. Possibly an avenue or two.”

  Louis stared at the devastation in dismay. Though he’d had nothing to do with starting the fire, he regretted having been a member of the party in the first place. All his plans kept backfiring. The sliver of a silver lining: it should get his mother and sister off his back. But the collateral damage had not been worth the end result.

  Shame for receiving praise rose like bile in Louis’s throat. Hands on hips and head bowed, he shook his head, speechless.

  “What were you doing here at this hour, anyway?” the fireman said.

  Louis opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Starting to get annoyed at his own weakness, he cleared his throat and answered, “We were just…hanging out.”

  The fireman frowned at him. “You didn’t start the fire, right?”

  “Of course not!” Though he understood why the fireman asked the question, the idea of him setting fire to anything in Toulouse, especially this beautiful park, made his anger flare. His adrenaline still ran high from imagining half the city going up in flames.

  “Do you know who started it?” The fireman did an excellent job at ignoring Louis’s anger. He must have seen Louis’s flaming red cheeks illuminated by the headlights of one of the firetrucks.

  “I don’t know his name,” Louis replied. “It was the guy who organized the whole meeting and two others. Hang on.” He pulled his phone from his back pocket and logged into Facebook. “I should have his name on the event in here.” He searched through the different menus and his feed, but couldn’t find anything. He checked the calendar again; no entries for that night. “He deleted it,” he said, defeated. “I didn’t even know you could do that.”

  The fireman glanced at the phone over Louis’s shoulder. “There was an event organized on Facebook here? How many of you were there?” A hint of accusation entered his voice.

  “Ten or eleven. It wasn’t a public event.” Louis hung his head again in shame. No more juvenile excursions for him; he was going to have a hard enough time living this down if news got out—which it probably would if that girl held up her part of the Twitter deal.

  Flashing blue lights and shrill sirens arriving down the allées François Verdier, one of the large avenues leading to the Grand Rond, caught Louis’s attention and he straightened to watch their approach.

  “I believe you, Monsieur Saint-Blancat. If you’d started it, you wouldn’t have stayed to help. But you should hang around for a little longer.” He nodded toward the police cars double-parking on the sidewalk by one of the main entrances to the park. “The police will probably want a statement.” The fireman touched a hand to his forehead in a mock salute and backed away from Louis. “Good night.”

  Twelve

  Angry and dirty Louis Saint-Blancat was a revelation.

  Catherine watched as he jumped down the three steps outside the police station and walked briskly toward the escalator leading into the metro. His dark green long shorts, dark blue t-shirt, and white and black scarf were covered in dirt and soot. A huge black smear covered one hairy, muscled calf and several black smudges marred his face as if he’d dragged dirty fingers across it repeatedly. His hair stood up in all directions and a five o’clock shadow darkened his jaw.

  Catherine felt a mix of thrill and fear as she ran to catch up with him before he disappeared into the metro. “Monsieur Saint-Blancat!” she called out.

  Slowing his pace, he turned
his head in her direction. When he recognized her, his black eyes narrowed. He smoothed a hand down his scarf.

  “Excusez-moi de vous déranger,” Catherine said. I’m sorry to bother you. “I’d like a few minutes of your time, Monsieur Saint-Blancat. I promise you won’t regret it.”

  He stopped a few steps from the escalator and turned to face her. Hands on hips, he was dark and looming and slightly scary. “Promise?” His voice was hoarse and about an octave lower than the last time they’d talked. Catherine told her heart to get a grip. “You pretend to know me well, Madame Marty.”

  A stab of annoyance at herself for not having gone through with changing back to her maiden name was summarily quelled. “It’s Mademoiselle, actually,” she said. But of course, he wouldn’t care if she was married or not. “Never mind. I wanted to congratulate you on your heroic effort on behalf of Toulouse yesterday.” She pulled an iPad out of her purse and brought up the Midi Républicain article on Louis Saint-Blancat single-handedly fighting a budding fire in the Grand Rond.

  Louis frowned, soot enhancing the lines of his forehead. “What?” he barked.

  She turned the iPad toward Louis. “This article has been all over the internet since this morning. There are some extra photos running around on Twitter.” The image in the article showed one of the huge trees in the Grand Rond on fire. In the foreground, the silhouette of Louis Saint-Blancat could be seen fighting the fire with nothing but a blanket. Silently, she scrolled down to the bottom of the article where a close-up of Louis left no doubt about the identity of the city’s savior. “The most popular one on Twitter is of you and a firefighter after the fire’s been put out. Would you like to see it?”

  “No.” The man didn’t give any sign of being pleased about being hailed a hero in the local newspaper. For someone who was part of the political elite of the city and had a history of his stunts ending up as news, he should be thrilled for this kind of free publicity. But the man looked downright glum, frown still in place and a muscle in his jaw working overtime. He caught Catherine’s gaze. “What do you want?”

  This wasn’t working according to plan. He was supposed to mellow out when he saw the pictures, not clam up like this. Catherine swallowed. “This isn’t actually why I hunted you down. I wanted to start with the good news.”

  His eyes said he disagreed with her definition of good news.

  He was going to love her bad news.

  She prodded at her iPad for a few seconds. “I wanted to show you a different picture.” She looked up at him, trying to gauge how bad his mood was. She should have chosen a different time to approach him, but it was too late to turn tail and run now. “I received this at my desk yesterday. I’ll be working on an article around it, but I’d really like to involve you in the process.” She turned the iPad with a picture of the dead Géraldine Hérault so Louis could see.

  His lips twitched in disgust, then he looked up at Catherine with an expression saying clearly that he was wondering why she would show him this.

  “It’s the body of the other corpse,” Catherine said. “The woman who was discovered at the same time as your father?”

  Brows drawn together again, Louis stared at her, ignoring the picture. “The other body was a skeleton.”

  “Yes,” she replied. She swallowed. “But if you recall what I wrote in my article…” Not the right thing to say. His beautiful, deep-set black eyes stared thunder at her and Catherine heard his teeth grinding. Catherine set her jaw. There was no turning back. “The witness—the prostitute who discovered the bodies—said the woman was not a skeleton when she first saw her. The skin turned to dust once it was touched, leaving only the skeleton. Nobody believed her, but this picture proves she actually spoke the truth.”

  Some of the anger leaked out of Louis’s eyes, replaced by skepticism. He studied the picture in detail. “You want me involved in this? Why?”

  She shoved the iPad back in her purse and raised a hand to shove a stray lock of hair behind her ear. She’d worn her hair down for exactly one day when she arrived in Toulouse, and endured all her new colleagues commenting on the Englishwoman with the boucles anglaises, English curls. Not needing another reminder that she was a foreigner, she’d confined her curls to a tight braid ever since. The irony of them being named French curls by the English was not lost on Catherine.

  “I’d like to make up for the previous article as best I can,” she told Louis. “If you’re involved in the research, you shouldn’t get any surprises when it’s published. But my main reason is actually that I want your input.” She locked eyes with him, making every effort to convey her sincerity. “You know Toulouse extremely well. There are things I’m sure I’ll miss, but you won’t.”

  “I haven’t lived in Toulouse for ten years,” Louis replied. He looked toward the metro entrance, clearly thinking of ditching her.

  Catherine lifted one corner of her mouth in the beginnings of a smile. “But I have. See? We’re complementary.” She nodded toward the police station behind her. “The police aren’t getting anywhere finding your father’s murderer. They have these pictures.” She indicated her iPad. “But I think they annoy them more than anything else. Together, we could find something to help discover the people behind all this horror.”

  Louis crossed his arms and chewed on his lip. Catherine’s heart skipped a beat. Why did he have to be so…French? The man was easy on the eyes, and it was killing her concentration. But she was a professional and intended to get through this.

  “I’m not convinced,” Louis replied. “But I also don’t want to let you loose on your own. Can we discuss this further sometime later? I really need a shower right now.”

  Yes! Catherine grinned like a kid at Christmas and didn’t care if Louis saw it. Let him appreciate that this was important to her too.

  “No problem,” Catherine said, feeling giddy. “Why don’t we meet up at one of the cafés on place du Capitole this afternoon? I’ll show you everything I have and we’ll take it from there.”

  “All right,” Louis replied. He rested both hands in a tug on each tale of his dirty scarf against his chest. “You have my number. Send me a text with the exact time and place and I’ll be there.” He turned away and headed to the escalator leading down to the metro.

  Catherine sighed as she watched him leave.

  Thirteen

  After a healthy breakfast, a long shower, and some clean clothes, Louis had collapsed on his bed and slept for five hours. Now he felt rested, but oddly cut off from himself. A news broadcast on the TV in his room provided background noise. Standing on the terrace off his master suite, Louis contemplated the rooftops of the neighboring houses. It was mostly red brick walls, orange roof tiles, and green treetops. The palm tree in their front garden reached the terrace, proof he’d been away for a long time. The plane trees lining the street almost reached the fifth floor of the apartment building next door. Trees actually grew quite a bit in ten years.

  He couldn’t get the images of himself fighting the fire out of his head. The Twitter girl must have stayed behind when everyone else ran away and snapped more pictures. She had done exactly what he’d asked of her, but instead of proving he was worthless, accomplished the exact opposite.

  The contrast between the acclaim in the article Catherine showed him and the attitude of the police was something of a joke. Despite the firefighter’s insistence that Louis couldn’t possibly be responsible for starting the fire, the police had brought him in for a second night in the police station in one week. His mother called their lawyer again. And Louis had entered the man’s name and number in his phone for future reference.

  Louis shook his head to dispel the thoughts.

  He had always loved being out here on the terrace. Faced with too little space in their house, his parents had decided to add an extra level when Louis was born. Contrary to what most people with this problem did in Toulouse, they didn’t add an entire floor. They transformed a part of the roof into a terrace and
constructed what could be described as a wooden hut in the middle. The room in itself wasn’t very big, but it had plenty of natural lighting, distance from the rest of the family, and that enormous terrace. His parents also used the terrace to get some sun and air from time to time, but for the most part, the entire rooftop was his. It had originally been Audrey’s, but when she moved away from home, Louis had taken over. Though he’d been away for a decade, it was still his room, complete with dozens of posters of Zizou and a few other soccer players nobody remembered anymore. With a grimace, Louis acknowledged that his parents might have expected him to come back and join their work in politics and he’d disappointed them.

  The sound of his name made Louis turn toward the TV. On the screen, he could see OPJ Petit in front of the police station hosting another press conference. With a regretful glance at the palm tree blocking his view of the café on the other side of the street, Louis walked inside to see what the police had to say.

  “Monsieur Sanchez has been brought to the police station for questioning,” Petit said to the camera. “I underline that he has not been arrested in relation to the murder of Monsieur Saint-Blancat. We have found evidence of bribery, which is why he was brought in.”

  Louis sat down on the floor in front of the TV, hands in his lap. This was it. They were going to drag the Saint-Blancat name through the dirt and there was nothing he could do about it.

  A question was asked too far from the microphone to be heard, but OPJ Petit nodded before replying. “Yes, money changed hands between Pierre Saint-Blancat and Monsieur Sanchez. It is believed it was to ensure the mayor’s collaboration in the construction of the tramway leading to the airport.”

  Louis slammed a hand into the sofa next to him, then turned off the TV. The police clearly had no idea what they were doing and followed the only false lead they tripped over. And in so doing, were ruining his father’s reputation and insulting his memory instead of searching for his murderer.