As the train rocketed through the dark gray suburbs, she swayed her way to the bar car, disgruntled that her lunch was going to consist of a cottony, cellophane-wrapped ham and cheese sandwich with a tiny bottle of toxically tannic red wine. She was further dismayed when she found the door to the bar car locked. Through the glass she could see the barman industriously setting up his wares. He smiled at her and made a victory sign with thumb and index finger to let her know he would be opening up in just two minutes.
As she waited, leaning up against the side of the gently oscillating railway car, Capucine reflected on how much Lille depressed her. It was a city that had recently reinvented itself, becoming heavier, more plodding, and even less French in the process. In previous generations, the capital of the North had been the locus of France’s booming coal, mining, and textile industries. Fortuitously, just as these activities had waned, the TGV, the tunnel under the Channel, and the European Union seemed to arrive almost simultaneously, transforming Lille into the nexus of Europe’s two financial capitals, London and Brussels. Almost overnight, rotund, prosperous bosses of heavy industry became runner-lean, gym-hard, sharp-elbowed, obscenely wealthy wizards of finance.
After a trip that lasted precisely the scheduled one hour and two minutes, Capucine was greeted at the Lille-Europe station by Lieutenant Tirmont of the Lille Police Judiciaire. With his James Dean slouch and worn leather jacket, he overdid the movie look of a Paris PJ detective. But, wardrobe effects aside, there was no doubt Tirmont was a thoroughly professional flic.
Deferential to a Paris commissaire, Tirmont suggested they go first to the crime scene, chat with the general manager of the inn, then view the body in the morgue, and afterwards, interview the victim’s boss at the newspaper, whom Tirmont had only spoken to briefly when he identified the body at the morgue. Then it would be up to Capucine to decide what to do.
As they drove down a departmental road through Lille’s neat suburbs, Tirmont detailed the facts of the case.
“The perp was hiding behind a bush next to the door, waiting for the victim, Didier Rocher. His footprints in the soft, turned soil tell the story. He must have been crouching, waiting for his man, and stood up to take his shot when the guy walked out. He made a noise or called out. When the victim turned, he let him have both barrels of a twelve- gauge shotgun in the face. Blew half his head off.”
“Any doubt about the ID?”
“None. There was enough face left to match him to the photo on his national identity card, and, anyway, his editor made him out straight off at the morgue.”
“Any idea how the killer got away?”
“No problem there. No one seems to have heard the shot, so he must have walked back to his car and just driven off. The first people who came out the door raised the alarm, but according to forensics, he’d already been dead for fifteen to twenty minutes.”
“Rocher was a journalist at La Voix du Nord, right?”
“He wasn’t a salaried employee. He was what the editor calls a stringer. They’d publish his freelance pieces, but only if they liked them. The editor doesn’t seem to hold him in high esteem.”
When they pulled into the meticulously raked gravel courtyard of Le St. Jacques de Lorraine, the long, low stone building looked like every other Relais & Château country hotel, blatantly expensive despite its ostensible simplicity.
The area in front of the elegant rustic oak double doors to the inn had been cordoned off with yellow police crime-scene tape. A large, professionally-lettered poster-board sign propped up on an easel directed patrons to enter by the side door.
Ten feet in front of the closed door, a small rust-brown stain indicated where the victim had fallen. Given the size of the stain, he had clearly already been dead by the time he landed. Capucine ducked under the tape and stood next to a four-foot-high laurel bush flanking the door. It was a perfect spot for an ambush.
The general manager, a Monsieur La Farge, a round-faced clone of Bibendum—Michelin’s roly-poly avatar—was waiting for them behind the marble-topped reception counter.
La Farge led them down a long hallway covered in gray watered silk dotted with Piranesi prints in artfully gilt frames. A thick velvet curtain covered the entrance to the dining room.
“You can see why no one noticed the shot,” Tirmont said.
They walked through the dining room where a cleaning crew was vigorously vacuuming and stripping the immaculate white cloths from the tables and sat at the outside terrace overlooking the garden. An immense lawn rolled out flawlessly into the middle distance, broken only by the occasional round bed of tall perennials in carefully coordinated pastel colors.
La Farge beamed at them using only the bottom of his face, panting and mopping his brow with a handkerchief, fidgeting nervously as only a fat man can.
“Are you going to remove your tape?” he asked urgently.
“The crime-scene tape? Why is that so important?” Capucine asked.
“C’est une catastrophe. Lunch today was off by nearly thirty-five percent. The patrons have the feeling that something sordid has happened. When they see your tape, they get back in their cars and drive off.” He threw up his hands in an exaggerated gesture of despair.
Tirmont looked at Capucine, who nodded. “Feel free to remove the tape at your convenience,” he said.
La Farge beamed. This time with his whole face. He made a beckoning gesture with his stubby fingers at one of the staff, who rushed off after a brief whispered discussion.
“That’s an enormous load off my mind,” he sighed. “And now, how can I be of service to you?”
“We’d like to talk about Didier Rocher, the man who was killed here last night.” Capucine said.
“What a shabby little person. He started out as a minor inconvenience and wound up as a major problem.” La Farge mopped his face energetically with his handkerchief. “I should never have allowed that tacky little specimen on the premises in the first place.”
“I would have thought you’d welcome a review in La Voix du Nord,” Capucine said.
“Frankly, madame, I’d prefer not to be reviewed at all. Most of our customers are Lille companies who know us well and have their executive meetings here. They’ve been with us for years. We don’t need any help from the press. As it is, we’re almost full all year round. Still, La Voix du Nord is a very powerful paper. When this man Rocher called me, I just couldn’t afford to risk antagonizing them.”
“Of course,” Capucine said.
“But when this Rocher came the first time, he didn’t look quite right. His clothes were shabby, even for a journalist. He was arrogant with the staff. He sent dishes back. He drank a good deal of very expensive Armagnac after his dinner. In short, he was an insult to the restaurant. And then he had the impudence to claim that he couldn’t write a review unless he had dined here three times. He wanted to come back two more times. Can you imagine!”
“What did you do?”
“I checked up on him. It’s easy with the Internet. It turned out he’d never written an haute cuisine review for La Voix du Nord. So I called his paper. It seemed he was a freelancer. I was furious, but I was still stuck. If I threw him out, he might have succeeded in publishing a disastrous review. I was powerless.” His face crinkled like a baby on the edge of tears.
With its wall of gleaming stainless-steel refrigerated lockers and hydraulic lifting tables, the Lille morgue was far more up to date than the one in Paris.
The pallid, wiry remains of Didier Rocher, rapaciously vulpine even in death, lay naked and obscenely vulnerable. Utterly insensitive to the sacrosanctity of human clay, a forensic technician sat comfortably on the middle of the table, his buttocks abutting the cadaver’s hip, flipping through his file, looking for the right page.
A deep Y-shaped incision had opened the body from shoulders to scrotum. A quadrant of the head was missing, the open surface black with dried blood, except for the section where pale gray brain matter was clearly visible.
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The technician snapped the file shut. “Both barrels of a twelve-gauge. Can’t tell if it was a side by side or an over and under. Most of the shot went straight through, but a couple of pellets lodged in the cranium. Steel. Impossible to identify the manufacturer.
“Nothing noteworthy in the autopsy. He was in good health. Out of shape. Drank and smoked too much but no significant health problems.
“Alcohol content in the blood was high enough to make waking difficult for him. His stomach was full. He’d just finished a large meal. His scrotum was partially emptied, a condition consistent with someone who had ejaculated four or five hours prior to death.”
“What can you tell us about the angle he was shot from?” Capucine asked.
“That’s very straightforward. Given the position of the body, he was shot when he was a foot or two out the door of the restaurant. He had turned his head to face his attacker. The line of fire is about fifteen degrees off center. The attacker seems to have partially missed, which is why the blast hit the right part of the head, not the middle.”
“Can we see the personal effects?” Capucine asked.
The technician produced a large cardboard box labeled CAS NO. 8144-732. The contents were meager, a pair of pointed loafers, scuffed and down at the heels; a lightweight gray summer jacket with too-thin lapels, dotted with stains; a pair of dark blue cotton trousers that looked like they would have been tight around the legs of even such a skinny body; a white shirt with decorative embroidery down the front; a black knit tie that looked like it had been stretched considerably and bore the faint traces of a good number of meals.
A plastic bag contained the victim’s possessions: a much-dented steel-capped Waterman fountain pen, a wallet containing a national identity card, a Carte Bleue bank card, seven business cards imprinted with the La Voix du Nord logo, eight credit card receipts, and a ten- and a five-euro banknote.
Capucine picked out a new-looking steel wristwatch and examined it carefully.
“Looks cheap enough,” Tirmont said.
“Not if it’s genuine. It’s a Cartier. One of the Santos line they brought out to commemorate the centennial of the Brazilian pilot’s death.”
The numbers and the engraving on the back had the feel of authenticity.
“How much would it have cost?” Tirmont asked.
“About five thousand euros if it’s not a knockoff. Doesn’t quite go with the shoes or the clothes, does it? Do you think you can have someone check out if it’s real?”
It was true that Aristide Callies, the editor who screened Rocher’s submissions, didn’t hold him in very high regard.
“There’s not a lot that I didn’t tell Lieutenant Tirmont yesterday,” Callies said. “Rocher had been a stringer for the paper for about five years. Sooner or later, most of these stringers wind up with a full-time contract. But not Rocher. He was lazy and he cut too many corners. He didn’t hesitate to make up a fact or two if it suited him. That kept him from being assigned to anything serious.”
“What sort of pieces did he write?” Capucine asked.
“He did the stuff the full-time staff thought was beneath them. Reviews of children’s movies. Book reviews of mystery novels. Cute puppy-dog human interest stuff. And the occasional restaurant piece about down-market places. The last one he did was on Charolais Allô when they opened in Lille.” Callies paused and looked at Capucine. “You probably don’t know who they are. It’s a fast-food chain that specializes in beef.”
“I know them all too well,” Capucine said with unexpected emotion. “So how did he get assigned to review a Relais & Château restaurant?”
Callies laughed. “He hadn’t been assigned. The first I heard about it was from Lieutenant Tirmont. He must have called the restaurant and got them to comp him a fancy meal. Even if he’d gotten around to actually writing a review, I doubt we would have run it.”
“And he had no family, no wife, no children?” Capucine asked.
Callies shook his head.
“Any girlfriends?”
“He wasn’t gay, if that’s what you’re asking. I know he’d had one or two flings with women here at the paper, but I don’t know anything else about his sex life.” Callies chuckled. “He had a pretty stormy breakup a few weeks ago with one of our fact-checkers that kept too many people gossiping at the coffee dispenser. I actually had to speak to the girl about it.” Callies laughed. Capucine frowned. Callies tilted his head at a woman who had just passed his cubicle, indicating she had been Rocher’s paramour.
Capucine had noticed her walk by the cubicle several times during the interview—a blowsy, home-dyed redhead who must have been fetchingly buxom as a young girl but who was now edging to the slatternly—to all appearances waiting to consult with Callies on some urgent matter. Capucine had no difficulty in imagining her creating a public ruckus over a failed office romance.
The interview over, Tirmont proposed they have a beer in the Grand’Place, in front of La Voix du Nord. He assured Capucine it was one of the great architectural marvels of Europe and a perfect place for them to sit and plan out their next moves.
In the hallway the redhead was pacing back and forth impatiently in front of the elevator bank, her stiletto heels clicking loudly on the white tile floor.
“You’re the police, aren’t you?” she asked Capucine as they came up. “And you’re asking questions about that asshole Rocher, right?”
“Did you know him well?” Capucine asked.
“He spent most of his nights in my apartment for six months. Does that count as ‘well’?”
Capucine replied with her most empathetic smile. “Can you tell us anything that might help with our investigation ?”
“Girlfriend, can I ever. But not here. I knock off at six. Can you meet me at one of the café tables at the opposite end of the square?”
Capucine and Tirmont killed the half hour drinking demis of beer while Tirmont swelled with pride as he launched into a recitative of the glories of the vast Grand’-Place. To Capucine’s eye the pink wedding cake buildings dripping with curlicued white trim looked like they belonged in Belgium, not France.
Tirmont was specially proud of a large bronze statue of a crowned woman that dominated the square from the top of a pillar. “That’s La Déesse—the Goddess of the North. The statue was cast to go on the top of the Arc de Triomphe.” Capucine shuddered at the thought. “And those,” he said, pointing to a number of dark spots, like blackheads, in the white trim of the square’s buildings, “are Austrian cannonballs from the attack on the city in seventeen ninety-two. Isn’t that amazing?”
He was almost disappointed when the redhead bustled up, cutting his lecture short.
“Natalie Duchamp,” she said, extending her hand aggressively.
Capucine completed the introductions, asked her to sit, ordered another round of demis.
“You were Rocher’s girlfriend?” Tirmont asked.
Natalie looked at him sourly. “His mark. That would describe it better.”
“Tell me about it,” Capucine said gently.
“He was in it for what he could get. We got friendly one night, after someone’s retirement party, and he started staying over at my place four or five nights a week. I knew he was coming over because he was too broke to buy himself a meal in a restaurant, but I still liked the company. I like to cook. He liked to eat. It was nice. Then we’d do a little ‘sheeeet,’ ” she said the word in Frenchified English—apparently outdated American slang for recreational drugs was still cool in the North—“and get cuddly. Like I said, it was nice.”
“Why was he so broke?” Tirmont asked.
“I never did figure that out. He didn’t make much from his pieces at the paper, but he must have had enough to live on. I think he was blowing the little he had on women.”
“What makes you say that?” Capucine asked.
“For one, he just couldn’t get enough. The minute he walked into my apartment, he was all over me. It was
hard as hell to cook with him around. He’d keep me up until late and then wake me up again at three in the morning. In the beginning it was fun, but the sleep deprivation got to be too much.”
“Just because he found you so attractive doesn’t mean he went out with other women,” Tirmont said.
“Right.” Natalie shot him an irritated glance. “I caught him in the act.”
“Poor you,” Capucine said. “What happened?”
“One evening I saw him in a café, sitting with a girl, leaning over and whispering in her ear. Two nights later he came by for his free meal and free fuck and—can you believe this?—he actually convinced me the girl was just a friend.” She shook her head in self-disgust. “So we kept on going. Business as usual.”
A heavy silence lasted for two long beats.
“Then it happened. About a month later he comes over and I cook up his favorite dish, rôti de porc au maroilles.” Natalie paused. She was on the edge of tears.
Embarrassed, Tirmont jumped into the breach. “Maroilles is the best cheese of the North.” He bunched his fingers together, kissed them, and opened them up toward the sky, as if releasing a divine spirit. “The dish is a Northern classic, pieces of pork roasted in a cream and cheese sauce.”
“Not just any cream,” Natalie said, giving him another acid look. “Crème fraîche. It’s the bite of the crème fraîche and the onion that make the dish work—”
Capucine cut her off by putting two fingers on the back of her hand.
“What happened after he ate your rôti de porc au maroilles?”
“What do you think happened? We went to bed. Actually, we didn’t even make it to bed.” She smiled happily and then paused, frowning.
“So, the next morning I see that he’s putting the things he has at my place—two or three shirts and some shaving stuff—in this plastic bag. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask him. ‘I’m breaking this off. I’ve found someone else,’ he says, just like that. I was drying the breakfast dishes and started throwing them at him. The little coward was so scared, he ran out the door and left his pathetic little bag.”
Killer Critique Page 17