by Sandi Scott
“Drugs,” Malik said. “Small packages. He wouldn’t have to carry an entire box.”
Another odd point. “But why would he do that at night?”
“So that he wouldn’t be seen.”
“I saw him,” Ashley pointed out. “And there were a couple of homeless people out there, too. Wouldn’t it be easier to do it during the day? Just put the baggies, or whatever, in one of the alcohol boxes or even just in an envelope marked ‘invoices, manager only’ or something?”
Malik grumbled.
“I don’t think it’s drugs,” Patty announced.
“What, then?”
“I don’t know, but we have loads of prep work and baking to do for today, let’s worry about that, not Jan Hamelin’s truck. When we get done with prep, then we’ll talk about it again. Not that I don’t care, I’m still a suspect and they could pull me back in at any time and arrest me. I want to figure out who killed M. Babin as much as anyone does, but we don’t have a lot of time to waste this morning.”
Ashley started her baking. When the first batch of cakes was in the oven, she pulled Patty aside. “Who were you with that night? Have they found him yet?”
Patty made a face. “I can’t believe how fast the rumors fly in this place. If you must know, I went to the Martinique Club to go dancing, that was true, but I didn’t leave with anyone and I didn’t leave early. Besides which, who told you?”
Ashley shook her head. She didn’t want to get the owner of the market in trouble.
“Fine, be that way.” Patty turned around with her nose in the air.
Ashley said, “If your alibi is so perfect why did you have to stay at the police station for two days?”
Patty looked over her shoulder. “It’s none of your business.”
“That’s true, but I’m pretty good at this kind of thing, you know.”
“Really.” It wasn’t a question. Ashley wanted to wince at the sardonic tone.
“I hack computers for a living. I mean, you might be able to fool me into hacking a computer that I wasn’t supposed to be hacking, but you can’t fool me with the computer itself.” She spread her hands. “If I can help, I’m offering my services. I’m not trying to get you into more trouble.”
Patty made another face, but this one was more thoughtful. “All right. I’ll think about it. I’m not exactly in a mood to trust anyone right now.”
Ashley couldn’t take that personally. “I know what you mean.”
Patty left the room for the bathroom where she noisily locked the door. Patty was like a cat, hard to get to know and touchy about everything and everyone. Ashley? She knew she was more of a dog person except where Serge was concerned. The very thought of Serge turned her into an angry black cat, with her fur standing on end.
Ashley got another batch of desserts ready after pulling the first set out of the oven, wheeling the first rack out to cool, rolling the other one in, and then setting the timer. With that done, she stepped to the front door to have a look at the crêpe cart. The line was small, filled with more curiosity seekers and people desperate for a snack than anything else. Oscar Metais continued making and selling crêpes with a smile on his face, though. He was glad his boss was out of the picture.
ASHLEY KEPT HERSELF busy trying to work out exactly what had happened. Maybe if she thought of it as a computer programming challenge, things would become clearer. Mentally she started lining up the whole series of events in an orderly fashion. She and Patty stood in front of the restaurant window at about four o’clock the day of the murder, looking at the cart. Patty had made up her mind to talk to M. Babin, and he had insulted her up one side and down the other. That couldn’t have taken more than five to ten minutes.
Then Patty stormed off, and Ashley went out the back door and through the alley to get home to her apartment, arriving at, say, four-thirty. The apartment felt off somehow, so she had been paranoid and spent some time searching her things to make sure Serge hadn’t been there before she went back out. No wait, she had also stopped at Madame Guibert’s apartment to see if she had noticed anything suspicious.
By that time, M. Babin had closed his cart for the day. His closing times varied although he almost always seemed to switch off with Oscar Metais around lunchtime until around 1:00 p.m. That day, he had been on the bicycle, ready to ride home early, say about 5:00 p.m.
Ashley saw him and followed him to where he parked the cart. She thought it was a little after five or so because she hadn’t checked the clock after she’d left the restaurant, but really it was about six-thirty.
Did it really take me that long to walk all the way there? Ashley paused and thought through her movements carefully before deciding, Yes, because of the traffic. Even though not that far of a walk, with the stop and go traffic through the narrow streets, the bicycle cart had been forced to move more slowly, and so had she. It was about a half-hour walk otherwise.
On her way back, Ashley had been stopped by Oscar Metais, who accused her of getting him fired so that M. Babin could hire Patty instead. She had told him that wasn’t the case, then two days later, he had showed up back in front of L’Oiseau Blue with M. Babin’s bicycle cart, making crepes again.
In Ashley’s mind, he had a doozy of a motive, a guy gets fired, goes to talk to his boss, kills him, then takes over his business. Except, Oscar wasn’t taking over M. Babin’s business, he was going to lose his job as soon as M. Babin’s brother sold the cart. Or was he? Ashley decided not to tell Chef Lemaire about Oscar’s offer. She wasn’t sure, but that story seemed intended to stir up trouble with Chef Lemaire and the other owners.
CHAPTER 12
Ashley continued organizing everyone’s movements after the murder in her mind. To her mind Oscar Metais seemed like the best choice but in computer programming as in life, all the options have to be explored and rejected before a solution was found.
Patty had gone dancing at the Martinique Club. Had she left the club with someone? Or was that just a rumor intended to cause more trouble? How long would it have taken for her to go from the club to M. Babin’s garage and back again? Putting that another way, how long would she have to have gone unseen by anybody who knew her? Had anyone who knew Patty actually seen her? Or was it just the regulars at the club who remembered her?
And then there was the business about Jan Hamelin’s truck being seen all over the place in the evenings? Was he being sent on errands or doing off-the-clock work for himself? Had M. Babin, who walked home at irregular times, crossed Jan’s path and seen something he shouldn’t have? What kind of person was Jan Hamelin?
Those were just the top three suspects on her mind: Patty, Oscar Metais, and Jan Hamelin. The other restaurant owners were lucky, they all had solid alibis because of being here at L’Oiseau Bleu at the time M. Babin was killed. They couldn’t help but alibi each other. And of course, the murderer might have been someone completely unrelated to the restaurant, an old lover or something, maybe it truly was a crime of passion.
Who left a club before eight o’clock, anyway? The night life would have barely been getting started! Ashley snorted to herself. The rest of the desserts went well aside from a few slipups caused by her staring into space and thinking of what would happen if Belle’s owner finally showed up.
Thoughts of losing Belle made Ashley’s thoughts turn to Dizzy, back at Smith Corp. I wonder if the company even kept Dizzy after I left? Ryan is probably on to another girlfriend by now, I should get in touch with him once I get back to the States. She told herself sternly that she was only interested in Dizzy, not Ryan but even as she considered a return to home she knew that wasn’t necessarily true.
CHEF LEMAIRE ARRIVED for the day and stopped to talk with Patty. Ashley would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that conversation, but she didn’t dare. Early lunch patrons had started to come in, and she had switched over to working on the crêpe griddle. She was half-hoping that Patty wouldn’t remember her vow to make Ashley work the fryer. Chef Lemaire m
ade his frites with rendered duck fat, which sounded so extravagant that Ashley never really could make herself believe it. Maybe vegetable oil blended with a little duck fat, that she might have believed, but no, Malik had told her it really was just duck fat. He might have been just pulling her leg, though. Sadly, as soon as Patty and Chef Lemaire stopped talking to each other, it was “Time to learn the ‘great mystery’ of les pommes frites”.
Ashley felt like someone who hated math being promised lessons in algebra. She was not a fan of frying things. Fortunately, her love of baking usually meant she could just skip frying and do something else. But then, this was Patty trying to teach her. She gamely tried to keep up with Patty’s instructions, eventually getting to the point where she could turn out a credible batch of the beautiful, golden fries – credible but not acceptable, according to Patty’s standards, now even more exacting than usual. Ashley was removed from the fryer, “Just for now,” Patty said, and returned to the crêpes griddle and the burners, which she was perfectly fine with handling. After the new arrangement had been established, much to Ashley’s satisfaction, Patty said, “You know what I heard?”
“What?”
“That Monsieur Babin and Jan Hamelin had a fight the night before Monsieur Babin was murdered.” She now had both Ashley’s and Malik’s attention. They glanced at each other. Ashley shook her head and Malik just shrugged. They hadn’t even known the two men knew each other.
“About what?”
“About the liqueur that Monsieur Babin used for the Crêpes Suzette. Monsieur Babin accused Jan of watering down the liqueur with cheap vodka.”
“No!” they both exclaimed.
“They had a knock-down row, says Chef Lemaire. If you look, you can see the cuts and bruises on Jan Hamelin’s fists.”
“Do you think Jan was really watering down the liqueur?”
Patty shook her head and jiggled her fry basket, checking that the frites were coming on nicely. “Not a chance. He could have resealed the bottles, they have machines for that, but Jan has too many customers to take that kind of risk.”
Ashley hated to be the only suspicious one in the group, but the idea needed to be explored fully, “Maybe some of his other customers persuaded him to do it, if you see what I mean.”
Patty said, “No, they couldn’t have.”
Malik said, “I don’t know. They’ve all been pretty angry since Monsieur Babin started operating his cart here.”
“Listen to the two of you,” Patty grumbled. “If they were going to... to do something to sabotage Monsieur Babin’s cart, it wouldn’t have been to replace his liqueur with vodka. There has got to be an easier, less traceable way to do it. And besides, Ashley was already working out the solution to the crêpe problem. Why attack a guy when you have him on the run anyway?”
Ashley shrugged. She could think of a few good reasons, the first one that came to mind was how easy that would be to do. What was strange to her though, was that Patty wasn’t willing to even consider the possibility. “Another option is Oscar Metais,” she said. “He could have been replacing the good liqueur with cheap vodka.”
“Yes, that’s it,” Patty said, almost with relief. “Oscar was drinking the liqueur in the mornings, replacing it with vodka.”
Malik said, “Why would he do that?”
“To cover up the fact that he was drinking it.”
“If he was an alcoholic, wouldn’t he just drink the cheap vodka?”
Patty threw up her arms then took the frites out of the fryer. “What is with the two of you? Why are you so focused on taking every word I say to pieces?” Neither one of them answered, they just looked at each other. Patty was in denial that Jan Hamelin and the other restaurateurs might have done anything illicit to try to get rid of M. Babin and his dreaded bicycle cart.
AFTER HER SHIFT WAS over, Ashley begged off spending the afternoon with Patty, saying that she wanted to talk to the market grocer and make sure that Belle’s owner was okay as well as a few other errands. She did want to do that, but it still felt devious saying it. What she really wanted to do was find out more about Jan Hamelin.
Do I think Jan killed M. Babin? No, not really, although the suspicion is there. She’d be more inclined to believe that he was ripping off his employers, or that he’d managed to pull the wool over the eyes of both the neighboring café owners and M. Babin, playing one group against the other. He just struck her as that kind of guy.
However, Ashley was pretty sure that the police were going to arrest Oscar Metais for the crime. He had the motive and the opportunity as well as the right attitude. Plus, she was willing to bet he was drunk at the time that he’d spoken with her.
Nevertheless, Jan’s behavior puzzled her, and she couldn’t help being curious. Her nosiness had served her well as a computer programmer and hacker. Every time she had said to herself, “What do we have here?” her abilities had grown by leaps and bounds. Even when you were writing most of the code yourself, you were always better prepared with the attitude that things weren’t always what they seemed, simply because the human mind couldn’t always predict how a computer would process entries, or how a program would interact with other programs or the hardware around it.
Baking was a little easier to predict. People were harder, sometimes much harder. In fact, most of her job as a baker was to understand what people wanted for a dessert. She could bake all day, a lot of people could, but it took real talent to know when to show up with a box of eclairs, or even whether it was better to just serve slices of French bread with Nutella on it.
Hacking was that way, too. If Ashley had stopped to think more about the human factors of the project and less about the coding problems – if she had stopped to think more about Serge’s behavior and less about having fun, for example. She stopped herself mid-thought. That’s enough of that line of reasoning.
She stopped outside her apartment and checked her phone, feeling depressed enough that she expected to have a message from Mr. Jones saying he was ready to pick up Belle now. That would be the perfect topping for her mood, but there was nothing. What was going on with that guy?
She went up to her apartment, changed clothes, and put on Belle’s leash. A quick search on her phone showed the address for Gergovie & Co and she realized it wasn’t too far away. They could walk over there, see what they could find out about Jan, and maybe put her mind at ease, but first the market.
Ashley picked her way through a group of customers. Seeing her, the owner smiled and waved her over to his counter. “I see that you have Belle with you! That is surprising. The owner called me yesterday evening and said he would call you. He was very excited to hear that you had his dog.”
She sighed. “We were supposed to meet last night, but he didn’t show up, and now he’s not returning my texts or messages.”
The owner frowned. “That is strange. I hope he is all right.”
“I do, too. Did he say anything about living nearby?”
“He said he was staying in another quarter while they were in Paris on business, that he and his family had come here for the shops and to go to the Catacombs.”
Ashley laughed. “That would be a morbid afternoon for two small children.”
“Three children,” the owner said.
“I thought he said two.” She seemed to remember that he had given their names, but she couldn’t remember what they were.
The owner shrugged. She shrugged it off too and said, “So has there been any more gossip about the murder?”
“The murder, the murder,” the owner said. “Yes, a lot of things have been said: They say that Patty and Monsieur Babin were lovers. They say that Monsieur Babin was killed by members of a cult, they say that he was killed by his employee, Oscar Metais, as part of a plot between Monsieur Metais and Monsieur Babin’s brother, who inherits the cart.”
“They also said that Patty had gone home from the club with someone,” Ashley said, winking.
The market owner laughed.
“Even I have trouble separating the truth from the gossip, mademoiselle.”
CHAPTER 13
Ashley and Belle started to follow the GPS trail that her phone had created for her, an invisible path that led her along nearby streets where she’d never walked. Soon the two of them had reached what was marked as the Gergovie & Co distributing company on her map—a narrow storefront with a small shop selling imported wine. The logo on the door looked correct, but the shop looked far too small for anyone to store enough wine and spirits for a whole neighborhood. Still, she wanted to be thorough in her quest for the truth, so she tied Belle to a post and went inside.
The young woman working at the desk was working on some paperwork, Ashley immediately wished that she’d brought a box full of cookies along with her today. That would have earned her some attention.
“Pardon?”
“Yes, Mademoiselle?”
“Is this Gergovie & Co?”
The young woman looked up at her and then at the logo on the cardboard box full of wine sitting next to her on the counter. Instead of asking sarcastically if Ashley had lost her mind, she said, “This is our storefront, yes.”
“I’m looking for the distribution warehouse,” Ashley said.
“Oh, that is here, too. You can get to it via the alley,” the woman said, brightening. “But since you’re here, just follow me.” She led Ashley through several narrow hallways and then across a courtyard to a row of garden cottages that had been converted into one long building. She let herself in the door with a key.
“François,” she called, “someone here for the distribution side.”
“I’ll be right there.”
In a moment, a large man in an apron appeared. “Salut. I am François Gergovie.” He gave her the once-over and said, “You are here about the new restaurant, non?”
She laughed, “Non. I’m here about something else.”