Death of a Chef (Capucine Culinary Mystery)

by Campion, Alexander

  It was only as they swept under the elegantly curlicued gold-plated decoration on the enormous iron gates of the Ministry of the Interior that Jacques made a comment on the upcoming meeting. “If you play your cards right, this could be a big step for you. Who knows, you might even get a little red ribbon to wear on your lapel. Just think how happy that would make Tante Coralie. A Légion d’Honneur medal, just like Daddy’s.” He was still braying his laugh as he handed the toy-sized car over to the voiturier.

  A huissier in a morning coat, with a silver chain around his neck, showed them into a large office. The emerald light of the elaborate garden poured in through three French windows, rendering the man sitting at the enormous desk, which was dripping with gilt prettification, indistinguishable in the backlight.

  It took Capucine’s eyes several seconds to adjust. The ministerial toad. She had completely forgotten about him.

  Coffee was served with fussy politeness by men in black morning coats. The scene smacked so resolutely of the upper echelons of the French government, the rarified air seemed difficult to breathe.

  “Commissaire, I must compliment you on your finesse,” the ministerial toad said. “None of the solutions I came up with for our little imbroglio were half as elegant as yours.” The toad took a sip of coffee. “It would have been easy enough to bury the Roque case, but the danger would have lurked. There would have always been the threat that one day an inquisitive journalist would do some digging and accuse us of having left a murderer on the loose.” He smiled and took another sip of coffee. “But your solution tied up all the loose ends. Not only did you create a culprit, but you put her behind bars, from where she can be produced by this government, or any future government, if she’s ever needed. Exemplary.”

  The toad reclined in his chair, threw back his head, and drank the last, sweetest drops of his coffee.

  “Naturally, I’ve already given the magistrates’ hall the gentlest nudge to make sure your culprit will be sentenced to the maximum security ward at Clairvaux Prison, where she will never have the slightest possibility of communicating with the press. And I think we’ve poured enough oil on the troubled waters of the Faïence de Châteauneuf-sur-Loire that we won’t be hearing from them again. Madame Brissac-Vanté was so grateful to hear that the government was making every effort to insure her husband would receive the shortest possible sentence that she’s extended a gratifyingly large tranche of credit to the Faïence. Their financial worries are over.”

  The toad sat back in his chair and contentedly laced his fingers over the considerable tumescence of his stomach. He looked at Capucine with a long, thin U of a smile, a squat reptile contemplating a fly, waiting for the propitious moment to nab it with a flick of his tongue.

  “Commissaire, I really shouldn’t tell you this, but last night I received a call from the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.” He waved his finger in the general direction of the Élysée Palace across the street. “They are very pleased with you over there. More than pleased, grateful. Particularly about the consideration you showed Monsieur Brissac-Vanté. The feeling is that a short sojourn behind bars will do him a world of good, and—now this really is just between you and me—a certain person was delighted that his former wife will lose a little face. But you knew exactly how far to go. Well done.”

  He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “I’m going to betray another little secret and tell you that I’ve been instructed to proceed rapidly in awarding you a decoration that, it is felt, you richly deserv—”

  Very quietly, Capucine stood up, walked soundlessly across the Persian carpeting out into the hallway, and slammed the carved oak door behind her as hard as she could.

  CHAPTER 45

  “Blood. I thought blood was the essential part,” Capucine said.

  “Pas à table. Not at the table, ma chérie. We’re eating, dear.”

  For a half second Capucine thought that her mother had added yet another topic to the long list of things that could not be spoken about at the dinner table. But then Capucine realized her guilt. She had committed the unforgivable : providing fuel yet again for one of her father’s interminable etymological lectures. Everyone at the table, except Alexandre, shot her a dark look.

  “Not at all, ma petite,” Monsieur Le Tellier said. “Civet come to us from Old French, which in turn comes from the Latin caepatum, signifying a dish made of onions.”

  “Your Chéri was taken to Clairvaux Prison this morning,” Jacques said to Capucine, sotto voce.

  “In the Middle Ages civets were dishes of roasted meat, which were then braised in a sauce of onions, spices, and verjus. At the end of the process the sauce was bound with burnt bread. It was that liaison that gave it its characteristic black color.”

  “We were lucky to get a conviction. Chéri only signed her confession because we had an ironclad case against her Roque murder. It was a play for leniency. She knew that the evidence for the Brault killing was entirely circumstantial. Now that she knows the Roque case has been dropped, she must be fuming.”

  “Of course, verjus is the juice of unripe wine grapes. Medieval tastes were very different from ours today. They liked their dishes very acid and heavily spiced.”

  “She’s not the only one fuming. As it happens, your pet toad really is in a pet. You’ve definitely lost a friend there.”

  “Absolutely,” Alexandre interjected. “They only started adding blood to civets in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, when cuisine bourgeoise blossomed, ushering in heavy, thick, dark liaisons,” Alexandre said, aiming his comment at Monsieur Le Tellier.

  “If you’re in a dark street late at night and you hear a squishy hopping sound behind you, duck into a doorway quick as you can. There’s a very angry amphibian out there, looking for revenge. For his species, a blow to self-esteem is more painful than a kick in the cojones.”

  “Now, there’s a very interesting word—” Monsieur Le Tellier was cut off by the arrival of the much-discussed civet de lièvre, in a terrine Capucine only now recognized was an eighteenth-century faïence pot-à-oille, probably Strasbourg, even though she had seen it all her life.

  The room fell silent as Madame Le Tellier ladled out the civet onto beds of flat noodles and a bottle of Charmes-Chambertin 2005 circulated around the table. Madame Le Tellier’s matriarchal fork lifted, the four other diners applied themselves with gusto. The hare in the civet had been shot the week before at Jacques’s father’s château, their gamy muskiness attenuated by a night spent in a wine marinade, their flavor polished by the dense blood sauce. There was a long moment of appreciative silence.

  Five minutes into the dish Capucine could see her mother’s forehead contract and relax rhythmically. Both Capucine and Jacques read the signs without difficulty. She was wrestling with a thought.

  “Ma tante,” Jacques said, the cynicism of his smile stopping only a half step before insolence, “you’re dying to ask Capucine how she solved her case but are afraid the question is going to result in inappropriate dinner conversation, n’est-ce pas?”

  “I was thinking no such thing.” She looked crossly at Jacques for several beats. “But since you bring it up, no doubt to satisfy your own curiosity, Capucine, how did you figure it out? I studied the newspapers very carefully and didn’t have an inkling.”

  “Actually, Maman, it was an accident. If the circumstances of Monsieur Brissac-Vanté’s kidnapping hadn’t been so suspicious, we wouldn’t have continued monitoring his offshore bank accounts after he was released. And we would never have discovered he was selling a good number of pieces of faïence through Sotheby’s in London. Once I learned that, the whole case fell into place. The rest was just a question of legwork.”

  Madame Le Tellier beamed. “The kidnapping, of course. I’d forgotten about that. Since there was only the slightest reference to it during that awful woman’s trial, I didn’t think it was important. Who on earth would do that to such a nice boy? It seems hard to believe he was kidnapped at all.”


  “Oh, he was kidnapped, all right,” Capucine said. “He’s an inveterate gambler. He started out gambling in Paris’s private clubs and graduated to illegal casinos set up in apartments by the Milieu.”

  “The Milieu?” Madame Le Tellier asked.

  “Organized crime,” Alexandre supplied between mouthfuls.

  Madame Le Tellier nodded enthusiastically.

  “He left markers all over town that he couldn’t cover. His problem was that after a few drinks he was convinced he was master of his wife’s fortune, which was very far from being the case. So the Milieu made an example of him.”

  “Imagine that. And did they ask for a great deal of money, ma petite? Did the family have to pay this milieu a fortune?”

  “There, Maman, I can’t help you. The police was never made privy to that information.” Capucine gave Jacques a charged look.

  “Mon oncle,” Jacques said. “That’s an interesting term isn’t it, the Milieu?”

  “Jacques, on est à table! Now, ma petite Capucine, there’s something else I don’t understand. How did Monsieur Brissac-Vanté meet this woman? What was her name again? Lecomte? Is that it? The press intimated they were lovers. Were they?”

  “They met at the Interallié—”

  “The Interallié, voyons! That woman couldn’t possibly be a member of the Interallié.” The Interallié was her mother’s favorite club, housed in a lavish hôtel particulier with a spectacular garden on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

  “No, Maman, she’s not. She was invited by someone to a reception organized by Brissac-Vanté for one of his sports promotions. She already had the idea of making fakes and was attracted to him because of his financial involvement in the Faïence de Châteauneuf-sur-Loire. He must have found her attractive enough to take to dinner. It was then that they came up with the synergy of Chef Brault’s collection and the Faïence’s ability to produce fakes and all the participants’ need of money.”

  “So it was all about money?”

  “Yes. I don’t think they were lovers.”

  Madame Le Tellier flushed a pink that quickly escalated into glowing crimson. She opened her mouth to protest, but words failed her. Capucine had the tingling sense of having gone too far. She knew she was teetering on the edge of being returned to a status where her position in the Police Judiciaire was no longer admitted by her parents.

  Capucine interjected rapidly, “Brissac-Vanté was easily led. My guess is that Chéri Lecomte quickly discovered his urgent need to pay off his gambling debts and lost no time putting a ring through his nose.”

  “And why was it necessary for these people to kill this chef?” Monsieur Le Tellier asked. Capucine was astonished he had been listening at all. “Alexandre tells me he was truly exceptional.”

  “The answer to that is simple—alcohol. I see all too much of it in my profession.” Capucine cringed, expecting her parents to bridle at the reference to the police. When would she learn enough was enough? But they just nodded, encouraging her to continue.

  “From the start it was a difficult evening. Chef Brault, fueled by all his neuroses, was on the edge of hysteria. Brissac-Vanté must have been quaking in his Westons. Lecomte saw a very lucrative business that she had become financially dependent on going down the drain.”

  Capucine cut a tiny morsel of the civet. Despite her best efforts, the notion of the blood sauce repelled her.

  “Committing murder is always easy. The tricky part is getting rid of the body. And all of a sudden Lecomte had a vision of how it could be done. Once she had that epiphany, nothing was easier than to drag her drunk victim and drunk accomplice off to the Puces and commit the deed.”

  “And the court understood that?” Monsieur Le Tellier asked.

  “Oui, Papa. Brissac-Vanté got five years. If he doesn’t get into trouble in prison, they’ll let him out in two, maybe even less. But Chéri Lecomte will spend the rest of her life in jail.”

  “She must thank her lucky stars the guillotine is no longer used,” Madame Le Tellier said.

  “Perhaps not,” Alexandre said. “There is a movement afoot that claims that these endless incarcerations in our primitive prisons are far worse than a speedy, painless death.”

  Capucine staved the digression off at the pass. “Brissac-Vanté has already started to serve his sentence in Paris, at La Santé Prison. I understand his wife comes religiously to the weekly visits he is allowed, and then spends every night on the boulevard Arago with a crowd of Arab women, hoping to get a glimpse or a word from their husbands from a window of the prison.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence at the table. Even Jacques could not find something irreverent to say. It took Capucine’s mother to break the mood.

  “Ma fille,” Madame Le Tellier said. “Tell me what happened to your charming brigadier. The one with the beautiful hair. I’ve been wondering if he isn’t one of the Martineaus from Quimper. I’d like to talk to him about that. If he is, I’m sure we’re distantly related.”

  Capucine laughed. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Maman. He’s from a small village high in the hills behind Cannes. Since he was from the Midi, I sent him down there to look into Chef Brault’s past. It seems the trip rekindled his childhood love of the region. Right now he’s back down there, taking his six weeks’ vacation, looking for a house to buy, and working on his biography of Chef Brault. I had an e-mail from him this morning. He’s standing for election for the town council of the village and seems to think that they might even vote him in as mayor. Apparently, he has a real plebiscite. Even the old former mayor of the village leaves his retirement home once a day to campaign for him.”

  “Does that mean he’s no longer working for you?” Madame Le Tellier asked.

  “For the moment he still is. And, of course, he’ll be able to commute back and forth between Paris and La Cadière if he’s elected. The high-speed train makes everything possible. But I do have a feeling he just might have found his true vocation.”

  “And so, Alexandre, what about that acerbic food critic? Lucien Folon, wasn’t it? What happened to him?” Monsieur Le Tellier asked.

  “He was inconsolable about the death of Chef Brault. He’s taken a leave of absence from his paper and moved to Tokyo to write a book about molecular gastronomy in Japan.”

  Madame Le Tellier opened her mouth to ask the obvious question of what molecular gastronomy might be but then shut it with the equally obvious consideration that her son-in-law—who was quite undesirable for reasons she could no longer remember—had already been paid far too much attention that evening.

  “You see, dear,” Monsieur Le Tellier said. “I told you all along that la petite Capucine’s job was perfectly satisfactory. Look how interested you became in her case.”

  “Hardly, mon ami.” When irritated, Madame Le Tellier retreated into a world of the previous century, when spouses were treated as mere acquaintances and addressed by the formal vous.

  “She could easily have found a reputable position in a ministry, just like her cousin Jacques.” Madame Le Tellier smiled adoringly at her nephew. “Mon neveu, shall we take coffee in the salon? I’m sure you need a digestif after your long, demanding day at the ministry.”

  Jacques rose to take his aunt’s arm and lead her into the sitting room.

  Capucine and Alexandre were the last to leave the table. Capucine slipped her hand into Alexandre’s, buoyed by the sensation that the entire orbit of her existence was defined by the tiny pocket made by their clasped hands.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

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  Copyright © 2013 by Alexander Campion

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

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  Library of Con
gress Card Catalogue Number: 2013936488

  ISBN: 978-0-7582-6881-5

  eISBN-13: 978-0-7582-8928-5

  eISBN-10: 0-7582-8928-6

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: July 2013