Crêpe Murder_A Seagrass Sweets Cozy Mystery

by Sandi Scott

  Ashley pushed open the door to walk with her, but Patty gave a shake of her head, and Ashley let the door close. What had the owner said to Patty? Ashley wondered. It must have been truly awful!

  She stared at M. Babin through the café window, wondering, until he caught her eye and sneered at her.

  Go on and sneer, she thought. Our crêpes are better than yours. She might have even stuck her tongue out at M. Babin before she walked away from the window, exiting through the back door and going to her apartment the long way around to make sure he couldn’t see her as she left.

  WHEN ASHLEY GOT BACK to her apartment something about it felt off. Belle was there, and she was fine, wagging her tail and begging to go out for a walk. Ashley walked through the room, looked out the windows, and checked the lock on the door. Serge’s stuff was all still where she’d boxed it up, in case he ever came back for it. If he did ever come back for it, she also had the local police number on speed-dial.

  When she first found out what was going on, she hadn’t believed it, but then she’d gotten angry. Furious, in fact! Ready to burn everything he owned and dump it in the Seine! But she talked herself down off that ledge. The current plan was, if Serge ever showed up, to pretend to be scared and give him his stuff back then call the police. She had also added a GPS tracking tag in one of the boxes, taped between the flaps. That was risky, she knew, but if it meant that Serge got caught, so much the better. He probably wouldn’t even notice it was there.

  Although, nothing had been moved or changed in the apartment, Ashley was still uneasy. Would Belle have tried to protect the apartment if Serge showed up? Probably not. She would probably just wag her tail and beg for treats if anyone ever broke in. She was such a good-natured dog, but still, she probably would have barked if someone strange was sneaking around.

  Ashley asked her next-door neighbor, Madame Guibert, if she’d heard anything during the day, someone moving around or Belle barking. “I don’t want to inconvenience you, Madame, but...” Madame Guibert was a retired schoolteacher who had grown tired of living with her adult children but didn’t want to be too far away from her grandbabies. She still dressed fashionably, ate out at cafés, and had excellent taste in décor with only a few simple photos of her family and a few lovely watercolor prints on her golden-yellow walls.

  “Pas de probleme,” she said. “I heard it was you behind L’Oiseau Bleu’s spectacular defeat of the crêpe cart?”

  Ashley’s face turned red. “I helped with things, yes.”

  Madame Guibert’s eyes sparkled. “That’s not what Patty says. She says you were obsessed!”

  “A little,” Ashley admitted. A Paris street had more than a bit in common with a small town in Texas, she was discovering.

  “So, what is the trouble you are having today? I assure you, that sweet dog you have rescued has not barked all day if that is what you are worried about, although of course I was out for a few hours, doing the shopping.”

  Ashley told Madame the worries she had about Serge returning to the apartment, and Madame Guibert admitted that she had heard many rumors about Serge, too. “A scoundrel!” she exclaimed. “I will keep an eye out for him, then, he’ll get what’s coming to him!”

  “Just call the police, please,” Ashley said. That being done, she finally took Belle out for a long walk. She kept half an eye out for Patty and another half an eye out for Serge, which meant that she wasn’t really paying attention to where she was going when she walked straight into the side of a crêpe cart.

  M. Babin’s crêpe cart, as a matter of fact. He was waiting to cross at a corner while a large moving truck slowly inched by. Fortunately, he didn’t notice her as she stumbled over the back tires of the bicycle cart. The moving truck passed, and he pedaled off down the street. On a hunch, Ashley quickened her pace and started following alongside him on the sidewalk. She was about to find out where the mysterious M. Babin left his cart in the evenings, information that was so secret that the café owners had been willing to pay Jan Hamelin to find out for them.

  How could she resist?

  She followed the cart along the streets, staying back about a third of a block. A few times she almost thought she lost him, and a few times she thought he’d seen her and was leading her on a wild goose chase. She was definitely not a professional private detective.

  Belle was perfectly content trotting along the streets of Paris all afternoon, behaving as all the best Parisian dogs should. Stepping out of the way of the pedestrians, giving trees, posts, and other dogs only the merest of interested sniffs. She even waited to do her business until they’d reached a little park, where Ashley quickly cleaned up the mess and disposed of it in a discreet, marked container. Belle drank neatly out of the fold-up water dish that Ashley had brought, too.

  Finally, M. Babin turned off the street and onto the sidewalk in front of a narrow, locked roll-up storefront. He typed a code into a keypad, pulled the roll-up door all the way up, and then wheeled his crêpe cart inside, whistling a cheerful tune. Whatever he’d said to Patty earlier that day, it clearly hadn’t stayed on his mind for long. The door was barely wide enough for the cart. The building looked like it had once been the opening to a narrow alleyway between two larger buildings, the brickwork was a different shade.

  CHAPTER 7

  Ashley waited. After a few minutes, M. Babin emerged from the little garage, closed the door, and typed another code onto the keypad, making a green light on the pad turn red as the keypad was secured. Then, with his hands in his pockets, he walked to a small door further down the block and went in. He probably had an apartment upstairs.

  Ashley took a picture of both doors and sent them to her email account, along with the street number. She probably didn’t need to know this, with the way that Patty’s crêpes were selling, but she still liked knowing that if she needed to track M. Babin down at some point, to make him feel bad for what he had said to Patty, she could.

  Walking back to her apartment, Ashley passed someone standing in an alley for a smoke. The sun had set behind the tops of the buildings, and now the sky was turning a soft golden—throwing the alley completely into shadow.

  “Hey, you, American,” a voice hissed at her.

  She just about jumped out of her tennis shoes. Belle turned toward the voice, her tail wagging but quickly the wagging tail stopped, and she began to growl in the back of her throat. Ashley told her to heel. Belle obeyed, but it was clear that she had her eye on the man in the alleyway. “You’re from L’Oiseau Bleu, aren’t you?” said the stranger.

  “That’s none of your business.” Ashley gripped Belle’s leash tightly.

  “You can tell your partner, the tall mean woman, that she got what she wanted, all right,” the man said bitterly. He threw his cigarette on the ground and stepped on it with one foot.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do I mean? Do you think I’m an idiot? The two of you are always talking together at that restaurant window.” Suddenly she realized that she must be talking to Oscar Metais, M. Babin’s morning assistant.

  “I’ve been fired,” he said. “Fired so that he can hire on that ...” he said a few loathsome words “and she can take my job away from me.” Ashley stared at him. After a few seconds, her eyes adjusted, and she was able to pick him out of the dark. Yes, it was Oscar Metais. She recognized him now.

  “She didn’t want a job,” she said. “She wanted to buy the cart. He told her off.”

  “Then, why did he fire me?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know. Whatever he said to Patty really got under her skin. She’s very upset.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it. You’re in a conspiracy with them.”

  “I have to go now,” Ashley said. “I’m sorry that things aren’t going well for you.”

  “I needed that job!”

  Ashley backed off. Belle started growling again and looking back toward Oscar Metais to make sure that he wasn’t following them. Ashley checked a few
times, too, but he only stood at the edge of the alleyway and lit another cigarette.

  ON THE WAY HOME, ASHLEY noticed a Gergovie & Co truck was parked along a side street, which was odd—when Jan Hamelin made deliveries, it was normally first thing in the morning as soon as Patty unlocked the doors. “The morning, the morning, always deliver first thing in the morning,” he’d told her once. “The owners expect it and the managers demand it. Once you start running out, it doesn’t matter if someone’s going to come with another delivery in half an hour, that’s it, you’re done for the day as far as the customers are concerned.”

  So why was the truck in the neighborhood at night? Ashley wondered about that and in spite of the long walk, Belle was still behaving well so Ashley decided to walk past L’Oiseau Bleu. A sign in front said, “Closed for the evening for family troubles.”

  Oh, no! She walked around the block to the alleyway leading to the back of the restaurant. Outside, a cloud of cigarette smoke filled the air, along with about seven or eight of the restaurant owners. This isn’t good! Ashley thought in dismay. Some sort of secret meeting is being held.

  “And the new crêpes are good,” one of the owners was saying, “but what will we do next time? Because there will be a next time, there is always a next time. It’s like rats. One of them shows up, you kill it, but there are twenty others crawling around the place.” Belle shook her head as if to commiserate, and the owners froze as they suddenly noticed her.

  “Salut, Mademoiselle Adams,” a couple of them said. “How are you this evening?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Just out for a walk with Belle.”

  She noticed Chef Lemaire at the back of the room and debated telling him about following M. Babin and his cart back to their night-time location, finally deciding against it. Chef Lemaire might be smugly victorious right now but the other owners still seemed pretty tense. Maybe tomorrow when he came in she would tell him, as long as it didn’t also mean telling him about Patty’s troubles. She’d have to consider her words carefully.

  “That dog that you rescued,” someone whose face she couldn’t see asked, “has the owner been found yet?”

  “No. I keep asking, but I haven’t heard anything. Because she responds to commands in English, I think the owner must have been American. See?” She showed off Belle’s training to them, and they applauded politely. “Well, I’m going back to my apartment,” she said.

  “It’s a good thing you have that dog,” another chef said, “for protection from the homeless immigrants around here if nothing else.” They all nodded. Homeless immigrants? Ashley had never really noticed any, and they certainly hadn’t made her feel unsafe or anything.

  “Have a pleasant evening,” Chef Lemaire said. “What are you having for supper?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Some cheese and olives and sausage, I think. You know how it is, you don’t like to cook after you get off work.”

  They all laughed, and Chef Lemaire went into the back of the restaurant, bringing out a tin dish covering a plate. “Here, for you. We are closed for the evening so that we can meet and decide what to do about those bicycle carts in the future. Of course, I made too much, you can bring the plate back in the morning.”

  “Thank you,” Ashley said. The dish turned out to contain a creamy parmesan-eggplant risotto with a side of roasted carrots and olives, the kind of dish that you didn’t normally get at a fancy French restaurant but from a home kitchen. She rushed home and ate it before it could get cold, drinking a glass of white wine with it and watching another Poirot episode on her laptop. Only as she was drifting off to sleep did she realize that she hadn’t seen Jan Hamelin with the others in the back of the restaurant. Oh, well, she’d probably hear all about it tomorrow.

  THE NEXT MORNING WHEN Ashley arrived at the restaurant, the sign on the front door was still there, and the door was locked. Nobody was moving around inside, the tables hadn’t been put out, and the sidewalk hadn’t been swept or the windows cleaned, this was trouble indeed!

  She walked around to the alleyway to the back of the restaurant. Several police cars were parked in the narrow alley, forcing Ashley to wiggle past them in places. To her horror she saw that Patty was by the back door, handcuffed and sobbing her eyes out, surrounded by two policemen.

  Ashley pushed her way through to stand close to Patty. “I work here. What’s going on?”

  “You are closed for the day, mademoiselle,” the officer said. “You must speak to the owner if you wish to know more.”

  “Why are you arresting Mademoiselle LaFontaine?”

  “For murder,” the officer said shortly.

  Patty, hearing Ashley’s voice, straightened up and tried to wipe her face with her handcuffed hands. One of the officers took pity on her and gave her a handkerchief.

  “Hello, Ashley,” she said. “I don’t think we’re going to have a good day for sales today.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Patty stiffened her shoulders and spoke firmly.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I came in to unlock this morning, but” she sniffed and then lifted her chin proudly. “The officers came and arrested me, saying that Monsieur Babin has been murdered.”

  “Murdered!”

  “Last night, at about eight p.m.”

  Eight p.m.! Ashley tried to remember what time she had seen the owner of the crêpe cart that everyone was so upset about. The sun hadn’t set, so obviously she’d seen him before he was murdered. “But I saw M. Babin just last night! And he was fine. I followed him to the place where he leaves his bicycle cart at night.”

  This attracted the attention of the two officers. “And who are you?”

  “My name is Ashley Adams. I work here temporarily as a baker. Here,” she paused and rooted in her purse, “these are my papers.”

  They looked everything over, muttering about too many Americans working in Paris these days, and then gave the papers back. “We would like to speak to you about what you saw last night.”

  “With the restaurant closed, I’m sure I can find time to talk with you.” Ashley said wryly. “I just need to take a break to walk my dog every so often.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Soon Chef Lemaire joined the group still standing at his back door, both hands balled up into fists. “What is the problem?” he asked angrily, “What is going on? Why isn’t the restaurant ready for business yet?” By then, the officers had taken Patty to the police station, leaving Ashley behind to talk to one of the detectives, Monsieur Marais.

  Other people were watching them from their windows, and Ashley knew that gossip would soon be spreading the news all over the neighborhood. Ashley quickly explained what she had learned from M. Marais, “Last night at about eight o’clock, M. Babin, the owner of the crêpe cart that liked to park in front of the restaurant, was murdered. He was struck in the head with a blunt object from behind while looking over his cart in the little garage that he rented below his apartment.”

  “And they think Patty killed him?”

  Ashley had told M. Marais the truth about what had happened, that Patty had gone out to ask M. Babin if he would be willing to sell the crêpe cart. But somehow, she really didn’t want to repeat that in front of Chef Lemaire. “Patty went out to talk to him yesterday,” Ashley said, “and they got in a fight.”

  “Over what?”

  “I was inside. I saw the fight, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. We had both finished our work for the day and were about to go home.”

  “Well, didn’t Patty come tell you what the fight was about afterwards?”

  “No, she was so angry that she stormed off without saying anything to me.”

  Ashley bit her tongue in frustration to keep from saying more. It was one thing to keep Chef Lemaire from finding out that Patty was thinking about starting her own business, but she now, by mentioning Patty’s anger, was giving the police a reason to look at Patty with even more suspicion.

&
nbsp; “And then what?” the detective said. “Please, continue with the statement you were giving before we were interrupted.”

  She nodded. “I went home and took my dog, Belle, out for a walk. I was trying to see if I could find Patty anywhere. I didn’t, but I spotted the crêpe cart on the street on its way home. Actually, I tripped over it. I wasn’t watching where I was going as I crossed the street. I decided to follow the cart, and ...”

  M. Marais interrupted. “Why would you do that?”

  “Well, we’ve all been obsessed about beating their crêpes for a couple of weeks, and now that we’ve done it, it felt ...” she shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess I just wanted to get another one up on him.” The officer frowned at her. Ashley’s French was pretty good, but sometimes she tried to say something in English that just didn’t come across the same way. “I wanted to feel superior to him by spying on him. Seeing where he lived.”

  That sounded terrible, but the detective just nodded. “Continue.”

  “I followed him to the location that I showed you on my phone. He opened the door, that is, there was a keypad on the door. He typed a code into the keypad, then opened the door, and wheeled the cart inside. After a few moments, he came back out, then closed and locked the door behind him.”

  “You are sure of this?”

  “Yes, and you can see here on the photo I took where the light over the keypad is red, which I think means it’s armed. Oh, and you can also see the time stamp on the image, so this was at six-thirty. Wow! At the time I’d thought it was maybe five o’clock or so. Belle and I must have been walking for a long time, much longer than I thought.”

  “And then?”

  “Well...” Ashley made a face. “As I was leaving, I met someone.”

  “Who was that?”