The Red Brick Cellars: A Tolosa Mystery

by R. W. Wallace

  With a hitch in her breath, Catherine stammered, “Anything but this mummification stuff.”

  Louis punched in the next code.

  The door unlocked.

  ***

  Louis’s victorious smile faltered as OPJ Petit appeared in the doorway. He hadn’t cracked the code. The police had finally arrived and unlocked the door with the keys from the other side.

  “That’s one missing person accounted for,” Petit said dryly.

  “Two,” Louis corrected and turned to help Catherine to her feet. She took his hand and together they walked out of the cellar stairs and into the light of the hallway.

  At least ten Police officers crowded into the house. Véronique apparently managed to get them to take her seriously.

  “We got two simultaneous calls to the seventeen,” Petit said as two of his colleagues started down the stairs to the cellar. “One from you which was cut off before you gave the complete address, and one from the land line of this house which was mostly silent.”

  The front door was destroyed. Where they had been stuck earlier, there was now a gaping hole out to the sun lit street. A young couple sneaked a peek in as they strolled past. Louis saw several police cars and one fire truck.

  “Both calls were from me,” Louis replied to OPJ Petit. “I was interrupted by Marie-Pierre Ezes, who wanted us to come back down in the cellar to be buried alive.”

  The officer gave Louis a sharp look, but said nothing. Louis realized he was being flippant, but it was the only tool he had at his disposal to maintain a certain distance from the reality of the situation.

  Louis pointed to the open cellar door. “They’re going to find a great number of bodies down there.” He relived the feeling of Marie-Pierre slumping under him and seeing the jagged point of a broken wine bottle cut through a good part of her neck. “Only one of them is recently dead.”

  “Maxime and Alima are down there,” Catherine whispered. Her gaze flew to OPJ Petit. “Perhaps Maxime isn’t really dead. You have to be quick.” Her gray-blue eyes pleaded with the officer.

  “Alima was also in that room?” Louis asked her.

  “Yes,” Catherine replied, her eyes darting back and forth between Petit and Louis. “They’re in a room farther into the tunnels. With a lot of other bodies.” Louis squeezed her hand and didn’t let go.

  Petit cut in. “How many bodies can we expect to find down there?”

  Louis looked at the man’s chin as he answered. “Three in the cellar down there, one of which is Marie-Pierre Ezes. The other two are her parents, dead these last thirty years. Farther into the tunnels leading out of the cellar, you’ll find a crypt. It has perhaps twenty bodies, unfortunately no longer in prime condition. Could you please dig the dirt out of the full sarcophagus down there too?” They hadn’t touched it when they prepared their ambush, but he felt certain a body was buried in there.

  Catherine took up the tale with a shaking voice. “Even farther down the tunnels there are more rooms. I only went into one of them, but it was full of dead, rotting bodies. That’s where my ex-husband and Alima Diatta are. Can you please go find them straight away? Max might still be alive.” Her voice cracked on her ex-husband’s name and Louis felt her hand tremble in his. From the sadness in her eyes, Louis didn’t think Catherine had any real hope of Maxime being alive but only that the possibility shouldn’t be ruled out.

  “He came in to save me,” Catherine whispered. “The tunnels apparently link to our old house a couple of streets down.”

  OPJ Petit moved away a few steps to confer with one of the two officers who’d gone first down into the cellar. As the second man talked, Petit stared at Louis and Catherine, his expression showing that what he was told matched what they’d said. Petit then gave several instructions to the other man and the man bounded down the stairs again, followed by several other officers.

  “What is your role in all of this?” Petit asked, stepping closer to Louis.

  Louis swallowed and took a deep breath. “I killed Marie-Pierre Ezes,” he said, looking the man in the eye.

  “That was self-defense,” Catherine injected irritably. She faced the officer. “She had me abducted last night and was planning all sorts of wonders for my dead body. You’ll see examples downstairs. Louis and Maxime both came to save me, but that horrible woman killed Maxime and would have killed the both of us if we hadn’t stopped her.”

  “All right, Madame,” OPJ Petit said, his tone a fraction softer than earlier. “Can I ask you two to wait in the ambulance outside, please, while I get an overview of the situation here? I’ll need to ask you some more questions.”

  Louis couldn’t help but wonder if they would arrest him for killing Marie-Pierre. If they did, he wouldn’t resist arrest, but he’d get the family lawyer on the case within minutes.

  They were escorted out to an ambulance by an officer so young, Louis didn’t think he could have finished high-school yet. Two paramedics jumped to action when they saw them coming, bringing Catherine into the ambulance to look at her injuries. Her feet were covered in bloody dirt. Louis let them work their ministrations, suffering them checking him out to find nothing but a few scratches and very dirty clothes.

  Half an hour later, OPJ Petit was back. His face looked even grimmer than usual. “Your story seems to check out,” he said. “We found three other rooms with bodies in them, though none were as rotted as the ones in the room where we found Monsieur Marty.”

  He turned to Catherine, who bolted up behind Louis in the ambulance at the mention of her ex-husband’s name. “I’m sorry, Madame Marty, but your ex-husband was indeed dead.”

  Catherine nodded as she sat down next to Louis and looked down at her hands.

  Louis said, “That would be the chambers Madame Ezes was experimenting in to reproduce the properties of the crypt.” Something had been nagging at Louis since he’d come out of the house. “Is it true that the tunnels connect to their old house like she said?” he asked, pointing to Catherine.

  Petit seemed to debate with himself if he should answer the question, but ended up nodding.

  “This just proves that she wasn’t alone on this,” Louis said. “That house was bought by the city of Toulouse and I don’t think Marie-Pierre had that kind of power. Bernard Gallego does.”

  OPJ Petit frowned, clearly regretting giving Louis any information. “Why don’t you let us do our job, Monsieur Saint-Blancat? We’ll look into it.”

  Louis didn’t like being put down by a man only a few years older than him, but was too tired to fight. “Fine.”

  Petit spoke to both of them. “I have one request of the two of you: no talking to the press about this.” Under his breath so only Louis could hear him, he added, “This is going to be big enough as it is.”

  Louis glanced at Catherine. She stared at OPJ Petit, eyes blank.

  With a journalist in the middle of it all, good luck keeping a lid on it.

  Thirty-Nine

  The ambulance and police cars’ revolving blue lights produced dancing violets on the brick walls of the surrounding houses. The paramedics finished bandaging up Catherine’s feet. Since there were only minor injuries, they decided to stay put until the police officer in charge gave the all clear. Louis’s hand covered his forehead and eyes as he shook his head.

  Catherine’s legs dangled back and forth, a movement that made her think of five-year-old girls with ponytails. It helped to be reminded that innocence still existed in the world. “So…what’s with the plastic sheep?”

  Louis lowered his hand and gave Catherine a crooked smile. “You noticed that, huh?”

  Catherine managed a faint smile of her own.

  “It’s not a particularly funny story,” Louis said. “It was the farewell gift from my nephew. He’s two and that was his second most favorite sheep.” With a look of feigned hurt, he added, “I wasn’t quite worth parting with sheep number one.”

  This time, Catherine’s smile was genuine. “That’s so sweet.”<
br />
  They watched the emergency lights dance around in the street.

  Catherine took a breath to ask a question, then changed her mind. But decided she had to know. “How did you know about the brains? Please tell me that wasn’t an idea you picked out of thin air.”

  Louis drew a hand across his face. “That was the old crypt of the Cordeliers church.”

  “The one we talked about at the café? That preserved bodies?”

  “Yes. As you could see, the properties of the crypt are still the same.”

  “That doesn’t explain the exploding brains.” Catherine studied Louis’s profile.

  Shaking his head, Louis made a half-hearted attempt to brush the remains of dead brains off his t-shirt. “I found that crypt absolutely fascinating when I was thirteen. I read everything I could about the place. I think I already told you of Le Bouffon Plaisant, who visited the crypt and claimed to have felt up La Belle Paule’s body?”

  Catherine nodded.

  “There was also another guy who wrote quite a long article about going to that crypt. He’d apparently been allowed to experiment with the bodies.”

  “Experiment?” Catherine felt her lips curl at the idea of willingly doing anything to dead bodies.

  “The article didn’t actually say what he did, only what his findings were. He said the bodies appeared to be perfectly preserved, but that was actually only the skin. The insides had mostly dried up, and if the bodies were brought outside of the crypt for any amount of time, they turned to dust.”

  “Like Geraldine Hérault.”

  “Exactly. This man was also fascinated by the brains. He said they looked like sawdust: dry and yellow. I guess it’s the sawdust comparison that made him try to set fire to it. It caught fire just fine and set off a small detonation.” Louis looked at Catherine out of the corner of his eyes. “That’s the part I was hoping was true when I started bashing in all those poor corpses’ heads.”

  Catherine looked into Louis’s dark eyes. “Yeah. Those short minutes will be burned into my memory forever.”

  After a small nod, Louis said, “The man actually went further with his experiments than just setting fire to the stuff.”

  “Really? What else did he do? Try to make papier-mâché masks?”

  Louis flashed a quick smile. “I’m sure he’d have done it if he’d thought of it. No, he also claimed the brains had no taste. I’ll let you imagine what he did to come to that conclusion.”

  Catherine made a face and let her tongue hang out. “I didn’t need to know that.”

  “Sorry.”

  At least he was keeping her mind busy, but the reprieve was only momentary. The knowledge that Maxime was dead kept flooding her mind, washing out all other thoughts. How can he be gone?

  After a minute of silence, Louis sighed. “I missed my train.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “Away. But lately, whatever I try to do, it has the opposite effect of what I planned for. Perhaps I should plan to stay.” A mirthless smile graced his lips.

  “Why would you leave?”

  Louis shook his head. “There’s nothing for me here but people pushing me around.”

  Did she detect the hint of an accusation in his tone? “Pushing you to do what?”

  Louis sighed again, apparently frustrated that he’d have to spell it out for her. “Politics. No matter what I try to do in Toulouse, everybody always expects me to have a political agenda. That I’ll want to continue where my father left off.”

  “Oh.” Catherine thought of the several articles she had written since he arrived in Toulouse. Every one of them contained at least one paragraph to that effect. “And you don’t want that?”

  He looked up at the clear blue sky. “No. I don’t want that.”

  Catherine took a deep breath. “Sorry about what I wrote, then. I didn’t realize.”

  Louis smiled at her with real feeling this time. “I know. Apology accepted.”

  Catherine thought through the time she had spent with this man over the last weeks. He knew all sorts of things about Toulouse and its history and had charm and charisma to spare just like his father. The question escaped her before she could think better of it. “But why?”

  Louis shifted in his seat. “Why don’t I want to go into politics? Because I don’t like what the politicians are doing.”

  “You don’t like what the current politicians in Toulouse are doing? Wouldn’t that be a reason to get involved?”

  “You don’t understand,” he said, shaking his head. “I disagree with almost everything the Republican Party decides. It might be a democracy, but my single vote in that party isn’t going to do any good.”

  Catherine thought she must be missing something; he wasn’t making much sense. “Then join the Socialist Party. Or the Ecologist Party. Or the Communists!”

  “My family has been in the Republican Party for three generations.” As if that explained anything.

  Actually, it probably did. With compassion in her voice, Catherine said, “You’re a grown man, Louis. You can make your own decisions. If you don’t agree with the Republicans, don’t join them. Check out the other parties, find out whoever corresponds the best with your point of view, and start making changes.”

  Louis shook his head. “It’s not that easy.”

  “Yes, it is. Especially for someone with your personality.”

  “My family would see it as a betrayal. It’s a family tradition to work with the Republican Party.”

  Catherine hooked a dirty strand of hair behind her ear. “Are you sure you won’t hurt them more by running away? Have you asked them if they would perhaps be proud of you for standing up for what you believe in? How do you feel about what you did today? You stopped a serial killer. If it wasn’t for you, she would have continued her awful experiment and more people would have died.” When Louis didn’t answer, she continued, “You should feel really good about yourself for that. As the person on the top of the hit list, I thank you.”

  “Of course it’s a good thing she was stopped,” Louis conceded.

  “That’s the kind of feeling you can expect to find on a regular basis if you go into politics. You can make Toulouse an even better place to live by helping in a less violent way than today.”

  “There are already enough politicians around here. I’m sure they’re able to do the work, be it for the Republicans or the Socialist Party. They don’t need me.”

  “I’m sure there are many competent politicians in Toulouse, but there are also people like Madame Ezes. That crazy woman was on the city council. And so is Bernard Gallego, who was apparently responsible for your father’s murder.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re a good man, Louis. The city of Toulouse could really benefit from you staying.”

  His forehead furrowed as he thought about it.

  Catherine had nothing to keep her from thinking of Maxime. She felt all alone in the world, which was stupid considering she’d spent the last year trying to get rid of the man. But the feeling wouldn’t go away. Who would she turn to now if she needed help? To stop her heart from careening into a gallop, Catherine started composing an article in her head. She realized she had all the inside information on what happened in those tunnels and it would make a hell of an article. This, she decided, would be her silver lining.

  “You’re not thinking about writing an article about this, are you?” Louis interrupted her thoughts.

  Catherine threw her arms in the air. “How can I not? I have all the facts and the population should know what has been going on under their feet. Besides,” she added, “am I not allowed some gratification for what I went through?”

  Louis shook his head. “So how much were you planning to tell? About the tunnels going under the streets and the houses of so many people? The deputy mayors who worked nights as serial killers? The young Saint-Blancat who killed the bad guy with his bare hands?” His voice broke on the last words.

  Catherine grimaced. �
�I can leave that last part out if you want.”

  “Then how would you explain the end of this adventure? That the police killed her? They won’t be any happier with that.”

  “I don’t know,” Catherine said, her voice rising slightly. “But the other journalists know even less, so they’ll be speculating much more than me.”

  “Either you claim you were down there and know everything or you don’t write the article at all. If you leave something out, they’ll know it and come searching for the answers.”

  Catherine wasn’t sure if “they” referred to the police or the Toulousains. “This could be my big break,” Catherine said. “I’m the best person to cover this catastrophe.”

  “Didn’t you hear Petit earlier? They don’t want any of this in the press. They’ll give a minimum of information themselves, probably the names of all the victims they find down there, and that will be it.”

  “He said not to talk to the press; he didn’t say not to write an article.” She sounded like a petulant girl, but didn’t care. This was her job. Her passion. She couldn’t turn a blind eye.

  Louis looked at her beseechingly, a look that suited him too well for comfort. “Will you let it go for me, please? I don’t want any more attention than I already have. And I don’t want the Toulouse city council to get any more bad publicity than is strictly necessary. It’s not good for the city.”

  Catherine couldn’t care less about the city’s reputation; it would do just fine on its own. Louis, however, she did care about. He had become something of a friend over the last weeks and had come to save her.

  He clearly knew he was winning. He put a hand on her arm and added, “Please, Catherine. I would owe you big.”

  “Fine,” she finally conceded. Who knew, it might be a good thing to have a Saint-Blancat indebted to you.

  “Thank you,” Louis said. Then he leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

  Catherine could feel her cheeks flaming and hoped the grime and dirt from the crypt were enough to cover it.

  “How about I take you out to dinner sometime,” Louis said with a smile, oblivious to Catherine’s ill-ease. “To make it up to you and celebrate our success. I know this quaint little restaurant close to Saint Sernin.”