“And her plan must have been to disappear back out there once she’d done the deed and wait until we’d cleared out,” David said. “If we hadn’t been waiting for her, it might even have worked.”
As they spoke, five uniformed Police Judiciaire officers emerged from the round stairwell hatch.
At the sight of the uniforms Capucine dropped Alexandre’s hand and took charge.
“Brigadier-Chef,” she said to an officer with three chevrons on his epaulets. “Handcuff this woman and take her down as quickly as possible. I want absolutely no disturbance.”
A beefy officer put his hands under Béatrice’s arms and lifted her to a sitting position. Another handcuffed her wrists behind her back.
“Brigadier-Chef,” Capucine continued, “radio the men below to tape off the section of the lawn directly under us. Have them search for a plastic kitchen squeeze bottle. Alert forensics, who are to collect it and analyze the contents.”
The fireworks display crescendoed to the finale. As four officers carried Béatrice to the hatch, two or three of the guests turned to look but immediately returned their attention to the brilliant pyrotechnics.
It was no easy matter getting Béatrice down the narrow circular stairway. The beefy officer held her by the armpits, her head lolling on his chest, another officer locked his arms around her thighs, above the knees, and they inched down one slow step at a time, followed by the rest of the uniformed officers.
“Now,” said Capucine, “Alexandre, you and Momo are next. Alexandre, put your left hand on Isabelle’s shoulder and follow her down the stairs with your right hand on the banister. I’ll take Momo down. Okay, off you go. David, have a quick look around to see if we missed anything and then clear out and join us downstairs.”
Capucine had no idea why she wanted Isabelle to be her husband’s Virgil; the order had been given reflexively. However, the impact on Isabelle was manifest. She swelled with pride.
Capucine was sure she would be held to task for not cordoning off the crime scene and not leaving officers behind to painstakingly collect the names of all the people on the roof and compare them to their identity papers. Useless or not, police procedure was inviolate. But throwing a wet blanket on Chef Delmas’ opening was out of the question. Without his cooperation there would have been no arrest.
“Okay, vieux,” she said to Momo quietly enough so David wouldn’t hear. “This time it’s me who’s got your back.”
“You always do, Commissaire,” Momo said, walking in lockstep behind Capucine, his left arm on her shoulder.
At the bottom of the stairs more uniformed PJ officers waited with a gurney. The uniforms laid Béatrice out and handcuffed her wrists to the aluminum struts. It was a tight fit in the elevator but they squeezed in. On the way down Béatrice started to writhe. One of the officers unzipped a black shoulder bag and removed a syringe. He picked up Béatrice’s right hand, found a vein, slid the needle in, and squeezed the plunger slowly. Béatrice settled back into unconsciousness.
Passersby paused to look as the police emerged from the elevator but then walked on. Some old buffer must have had a heart attack. The uniformed brigadier-chef came up to Capucine.
“The shot is going to last at least three hours, maybe more, Commissaire. Where do you want her taken?”
“Down to the Quai. Get the duty doctor to come in and monitor her carefully. Take Brigadier Benarouche and my husband with you and have the doctor look at their eyes. And have forensics call him once they identify the substance they were squirted with so he can decide if they need to be hospitalized. Tell the doctor I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Sneaking back up for your dinner, are you?” Alexandre asked. “The grenadin de veau is worth the detour.”
“I need to check out Renaud’s apartment. Sometimes confessions come a little more quickly when the suspect is confronted with some hard evidence.” As she spoke Capucine realized she had stopped thinking of Béatrice by her given name.
“Aren’t you gilding your lily by hoping for a confession ?” Alexandre asked.
“Pas du tout. We have her in flagrant délit for an attempted homicide. I want to make sure she’s convicted for the murders, too.”
Fifteen minutes later Capucine, David, and Isabelle sat in the Twingo, staring at the green wood door of number twenty-four rue Madame, a few streets away from Béatrice’s restaurant, waiting for a contingent of Capucine’s officers and the INPS van.
The officers from the brigade were first to arrive. A single officer descended from the patrol car and opened the front door with a passkey. The door open, three more officers emerged with heavy canvas bags and entered the building. Capucine and her two detectives followed. Without a word the three rode up in the elevator to the third floor as the uniformed officers took the stairs two at a time, their boots soundless on the crimson runner held by brass rods over the polished wooden steps.
On the third floor landing they were confronted by two doors, one oak and the other, Béatrice’s, covered in green enameled steel plating. High-security doors had been encouraged by insurance companies for decades in Paris.
The officer who had opened the downstairs door examined the locks on the steel door carefully.
“Commissaire, this is a Picard seven bar lock. There’s nothing I can do with it.”
“Does that mean we can’t get in?”
There were muted snickers from the officers on the landing.
“No, Commissaire. These richies spend a fortune on burglar-proof doors but they can’t be bothered to strengthen the frame that holds the door in the wall. I’ll have the frame out in a minute, but there’s going to be a little mess.” There was open laughter from the other officers. Jobs like this were the reason they had joined the force.
The officer produced a chisel-ended crowbar and explored the wall, tapping gently. At one tap he seemed to hear what he wanted and banged the crowbar into the plaster with a vicious jab. It went in a good four inches.
“A toi, Jérôme,” he said.
Another officer jabbed into the other side of the door with an identical crowbar. The two men heaved and threw their weight against the bars. There was a sound of masonry cracking and a large seam appeared at both doorjambs.
“Attention. Ça vient!” Everyone pulled back from the door, which fell into the hallway with a resounding crash. A cloud of plaster dust rose in the air.
“Et voilà! That’s how you do ’er,” the brigadier called Jérôme said with a happy smile.
The apartment was as tidy as if readied for a fashion magazine to shoot for a profile of the up-and-coming chef. Peach-colored walls were dotted with aged family portraits in elegant gold frames. A handful of delicate antiques punctuated bold leather and steel settees and chairs in brilliant primary colors. A large white enameled bookcase housed a large collection of cookbooks, most by current celebrity chefs but many in the faded back cloth bindings and gold lettering of the nineteenth century.
The Police Judiciaire officers milled and peered but did not touch, waiting for the forensics team to arrive.
“Didn’t your mamas teach you to knock first?” Ajudant Dechery said in his basso profundo as he walked over the destroyed door. Three of his agents techniques peered over his shoulder.
“Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. I’ve been at the Eiffel Tower. Your people found the squeeze bottle. I sent it to the lab, but I knew from the first sniff what it was, belladonna.”
“Belladonna?” Capucine asked. “The stuff the Moroccans use in their kohl to make their eyes big?”
“The very same. Deadly nightshade. Grows all over the place in the Midi. The berries are loaded with atropine, which is what makes your pupils dilate.”
“I have to make a call.”
“If it’s to the PJ duty doctor, don’t bother. I already had a chat with him. He knows how to handle it. It doesn’t seem like your husband ingested enough to have any effect. But both he and your brigadier got enough atropine in their
eyes so they won’t be seeing much for a few hours.”
Capucine felt as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
“And belladonna is a poison?”
“Oh, definitely. The atropine has been used as a pupil dilator since the beginning of time. It’s probably what Cleopatra used to snag Mark Antony. But those delicious little berries also contain tropane alkaloids, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine, all of which are deadly. Macbeth, the real one, not the one in the play, knocked out a whole army with the stuff.” He paused, proud of his erudition.
“All right, m’dear. What if you let us get going in here?”
As Dechery’s team got to work, Capucine, Isabelle, and David continued peering at the contents of the apartment, their hands behind their backs like children who had been warned not to touch.
Of course, it was Dechery who found the piece of evidence needed for a court conviction. He called Capucine over. In the extravagantly fitted and impeccably clean kitchen, the lowest drawer in the least accessible corner was filled with household detritus, supermarket plastic bags, boxes of rubber bands, and menus from Chinese takeaways. At the very bottom of the pile Dechery found an eight-inch turkey trussing needle—its tip flattened into a sharp blade—and a length of neatly coiled kitchen twine.
When the forensic technician had finished an endless series of flash photos of the needle in its habitat, had dusted it for fingerprints, and had taken even more photographs, Dechery picked it up carefully with a pair of long tweezers and examined it closely.
“See these brown stains,” he said to Capucine. “That’s not turkey blood. From the color, it comes from a mammal. We’ll get DNA off this thing for sure, and I’ll bet you a month’s salary right now this is what was used to stitch Arsène Peroché’s mouth shut.”
From the living room Isabelle called out, “Hey, Commissaire, come check this out!”
In the sitting room a technician was busy at the desk—a lovely Boule piece that must have come from Béatrice’s family home—dusting and taking pictures. The desk was littered with books, most with slips of paper marking pages, a stack of bills, a pile of invitations. In the exact center was a mahogany glass-topped case, about seven inches by twelve, containing a single drawer. Through the glass top, most of which had already been obscured by aluminum fingerprint powder, Capucine could see the drawer had been fitted with white foam rubber into which ten grooves had been set. Expensive looking pens had been laid in every alternate groove.
“Can you open this for me?” Capucine asked the technician.
He tugged at the knob with tweezers. Capucine bent over. The drawer contained four fountain pens and, incongruously, a plastic Pilot artist’s felt-tip. The gold cap of one of the fountain pens was clearly engraved with the letters AP.
Capucine said to the technician, “This is a critical piece of evidence. It must be treated with the utmost care.”
“Commissaire, we treat everything with the utmost care. We’re not an industrial cleaning service.”
Isabelle had wandered off into the bedroom. “It just keeps getting better and better,” she shouted. One of the technicians had just found a pair of French Army night glasses. “Momo was right. She must have used this in the blind restaurant. The famous ghostly green glow was the reflection from the eyepieces on her face.”
The technician nudged Isabelle away and continued taking flash pictures.
“Five pens, Commissaire,” Isabelle said. “That means there are two murders we don’t know about. But with all this evidence she’s bound to confess, right?”
“We’ll see. I’m not so sure about a confession. And I’m even less sure we’ll ever find out about the other two victims. But I think we just might have enough evidence for a full conviction.”
CHAPTER 40
On her way to the Quai, Capucine called in and learned that Alexandre and Momo had been sent to the small police infirmary in the enormous Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu adjacent to the Quai. Béatrice had been placed in an interrogation cell in the basement of the Quai after she had regained consciousness. She showed no obvious external signs of concussion but had become violent when the doctor attempted to examine her.
Walking down the hall to the infirmary Capucine could hear Momo and Alexandre laughing uproariously. She shook her head in wonder that she had actually thought her husband might experience a post-stress reaction. As she approached the sound she realized she was dreading seeing him. The rush of triumph of the arrest had worn off leaving the bitter realization of the enormity of her actions. She had used the depth of his love for her as a cheap tool in her cheap career, which was really no more than a cheap effort to find a cheap reality for herself. She had actually used him.
It was worse than creeping home in the early dawn after having spent the night with another man. Far worse.
A male nurse in dark blue scrubs the same color as a police uniform sat at a desk reading a paperback edition of Jean-Claude Izzo’s Solea. With his wire-rim glasses and spiky, close-cropped hair the nurse seemed more like a university intellectual than a member of the police force. Wrenching his eyes away from his book, he looked up at Capucine, inquiring with his eyebrows.
“Commissaire Le Tellier. I’ve come to see my husband and Brigadier Benarouche.”
The nurse stood up out of respect for Capucine’s rank and smiled. “Oui, Commissaire. They’re the ones making all the noise. Good thing the ward’s empty. Your brigadier had some of his pals from La Crim’ bring in some beer. They’ve been at it since the doctor made his last visit. Naturally, I haven’t noticed a thing.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“Their eyes had been squirted with a concentrated atropine solution.”
“I didn’t know it was concentrated. Are they in any danger?”
“Good Lord, no. If they were, I wouldn’t be letting them get soused. Atropine is just a harmless cycloplegic. It only produces mydriasis.”
“Mydriasis?”
“An abnormal dilation of the pupils. It was standard stuff a few years ago when ophthalmologists examined retinas. They don’t use it anymore because the patient would be blind as a bat for two to six hours.”
“I was told my husband might have swallowed some of the stuff.”
“The doctor didn’t think so. If your husband had ingested any of it, he’d have a severely upset stomach.” In the next room Alexandre sang six bars of Don Giovanni, even more painfully off-key than usual. “Of course, that might not have been a bad thing.”
Capucine did not smile. She turned toward the ward. The nurse sat down, clearly delighted to be able to get back to his book.
Capucine took two steps and turned back to the nurse. He rose reluctantly, meeting her gaze.
“If atropine’s no longer in use, isn’t it impossible to get?” Capucine asked him.
The question obviously pleased the nurse. He put his book down on the desk, pages open so he could get right back to it. “No. Nothing could be easier. All you have to do is boil down the juice of belladonna berries. It doesn’t need any further processing. Anyone with a kitchen could do it.”
In the ward six beds were lined up with military precision, all empty except for Alexandre’s and Momo’s. They sat on the sides of their bunks, facing each other, their gazes not quite meeting. They each held an infirmary tumbler of beer. A full quart bottle was beside each bed. Two empties had rolled against the wall, and two other bottles were neatly stacked under Momo’s cot.
“So,” Alexandre said, tapping Momo’s knee, “three nuns walk into a bar and—”
“Alexandre,” Capucine said sharply.
Alexandre—clearly two, if not all three, sheets to the wind—looked around sightlessly for the source of the sound.
“So you two are having a little party?” Capucine asked.
“Parfaitement,” Alexandre said. “We’re toasting Momo’s bravery and celebrating the fact that I’ve crossed off the top item on my bucket list—being a murder victim in one of m
y wife’s cases.” Alexandre erupted in laughter and poked Momo’s upper thigh. “Bucket list, murder victim, get it?” He exploded into peals of laughter again.
Momo looked sheepish. “ ’S’cuse me, Commissaire. I was assuming I’m not on duty anymore, so it’d be okay if I rinsed a little of the dust out of my throat. Ale ... Monsieur de Huguelet is safe here. No more worries. Right?”
Momo reached down to the floor, grabbed the quart bottle and sloshed beer into their glasses. Amazingly, only a small portion wound up on the floor.
“If you’re drinking to Momo, you ought to drink one or two to David as well. I seem to recall he had a little more than a mere assist in the play for your salvation,” Capucine said.
“By all means. Absolutely. Definitely,” Alexandre said, waving his glass in the air, wildly seeking to clink it against Momo’s. Failing in his effort, he drank deeply.
“The nurse—he’s a great guy, by the way—said that just as soon as our vision comes back, he’ll send us home in a squad car. But,” Alexandre said, wrinkling his forehead and putting his index finger to his lips to indicate the extreme secrecy of what he was about to say, “we’re going to get the car to take us to the Pied de Cochon, near the old Halles. They stay open all night and we’re starving. Absolutely ra-ve-nous. You’re right. We’ll need to get David to come with us. And maybe the nurse too. Did I tell you what a great guy he is?” Alexandre drained his glass of beer and tapped Momo’s knee to get him to pour another.
“You two are going nowhere except home. I’ll leave orders. Trust me on that. If you want, you can take Momo home with you. And if you’re still all that hungry, you can make your truffled scrambled eggs, but that’s all you’re going to get tonight. Put Momo up in the guest bedroom. He needs some rest.”
Capucine kissed Alexandre on the forehead with what she hoped was great tenderness and made for the Quai interrogation rooms. Alexandre smiled at her and turned back toward Momo, anxious to unleash another joke.
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