by Sandi Scott
He shook his head. “I was supposed to meet with someone about setting up sales to a new restaurant near Rue Froidevaux. I thought it was you.”
“I’m sorry, I’m just a baker.”
“Ah! That’s it! You look like you belonged with a restaurant somehow.” She gave herself a quick glance. Unless she had a big streak of flour on her face, she wasn’t sure how he’d come up with that idea.
“Are you from one of my customers? Is there a problem?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said. “I mean, I am from one of your customers, L’Oiseau Bleu on Rue Daguerre.”
“That’s on Jan’s route,” he said. “Jan Hamelin. He’s your driver.”
“Yes, I’ve met him.”
“Jan has been working for us for ten years. He really knows the customers. He always seems to know when someone needs more wine. We kid him about it, call him Jan the Télépathe. You know? Reading minds.” M. Gergovie chuckled before he continued. “When he first started working with us, we had some trouble with him. He was always screwing up orders, getting into arguments. ‘You won’t need so many expensive reds, I don’t know why you bother to order them. Order more cheap stuff. You think you are a grand hotel, but you’re just another brasserie with checkered tablecloths. Nobody who comes here wants to drink that expensive stuff, and I’ll sell you something so good, that people will come to your store, thinking that they’re ripping you off for how cheap your wine is.’ He’s still the same guy. He’s just learned how to talk people into what he knows is going to sell. He’s the one who picked the champagne for L’Oiseau Bleu. The chef wanted to use cheap champagne for the crêpe specials that that girl was making ...” M. Gergovie’s eyes widened. “Oh! That’s you. Are you here to complain about the cost of the champagne?”
“No, not at all. I’m certain that it helps with the sales.”
“See? It’s just expensive enough that the chef has to charge extra for it, which means that the customers think they’re getting something special. They are, I’m sure, but the customers, they don’t always believe what their taste buds tell them. You have to convince them by charging them by what they think the dish is worth.” M. Gergovie crossed his arms over his chest, leaning backward as if he had delivered a statement of true wisdom. “But that’s my Jan. He’s from Denmark, he came here when he was a small child, but you would never be able to tell. You’re from America, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You see? You are the crêpe maker. Chef Lemaire hires these American women, everyone says, ‘You’re going to destroy your business, they will never learn how to do things properly,’ but no, I knew that he would succeed. Chef Lemaire, could identify the one true Frenchwoman out of a room full of Japanese tourists.”
She laughed. “I’m not true French!”
“Oh, but you are. I can see it. You are not a Parisiènne, that is true. You belong in the countryside of Burgundy, taking care of the kitchen while your husband harvests the grapes. In the morning, you stand by the window making the dough for the bread, and when your husband passes by the window, you will brush your hair away from your face, like so, and he will think, ‘Oh, what an angel I have found,’ and the two of you will grow old together.”
Ashley had almost completely given up on trying to ask M. Gergovie any questions, he seemed to be willing to gush forth on any topic without prompting whatsoever. All she had to do was listen long enough, and she was sure she would hear his life story, along with the life stories of his ancestors all the way back to the time of Charlemagne. She gave him a little smile then brushed back her hair, doing her best to encourage him to continue.
“Like that!” he exclaimed, booming with laughter. “And so, you see how it is not always the French who are the true French? Don’t tell anyone I said that.”
From behind her, a voice said drily, “She doesn’t need to. You tell everyone that.”
M. Gergovie laughed again. Ashley turned around and almost blushed to see Jan Hamelin standing behind her.
“I know why you are here,” he said. “To speak with me.”
He gave M. Gergovie a look, the owner nodded and gracefully dismissed himself, parting with a slight bow and an “au revoir.”
“So,” Jan Hamelin said.
Surreptitiously, she had been studying the knuckles of his hands. They were covered with scabs and bruises. The first two knuckles on his right hand were swollen.
“So,” she said. “What have you been doing in the neighborhood in the evenings? I’ve seen you all over the place. You’re not making deliveries, though. So, what are you doing?”
“What are you doing, following me around?”
“I wasn’t. I was out walking my dog.”
He screwed one eye closed and stared at her through the other. “That doesn’t mean you can spy on me.”
“Well?”
“I’m not required to tell you anything. Who are you, the police? The neighborhood good deeds committee?”
“When Monsieur Babin was killed, where were you?” Ashley persisted.
“So that’s what this is all about.” He shook his head, staring at his feet and shoving his hands into his pockets. “You’re here to get Mademoiselle LaFontaine out of trouble by placing all that trouble at my own feet. I won’t have it, I tell you.”
“Why not just say what you were doing? You were fighting, I can tell.”
Jan raised one hand and curled it into a fist. The scabs were obvious now. “All right, I was fighting. Some bastard was beating up someone helpless. I jumped out of the truck and ran to break things up. I lost my temper.”
“Where was that?”
“Nowhere that you need to know about.”
“You still haven’t said anything that makes me think that you’re innocent.”
Jan threw up his hands. “Why me?”
“Because you’re acting suspiciously.” Ashley spread her hands out in front of her and did her best to look as if suspecting Jan was the most natural thing in the world.
“What are you going to do, turn me over to the police?”
“Why are you being so dramatic if you’re innocent?”
“I don’t like everyone knowing my business the way they do around here.”
“People are starting to talk about you anyway.”
“Because you’re spreading rumors.”
“Am I?” she said. Fighting with Jan was strangely fun, with both of them rolling their eyes and gesturing dramatically. But really, she’d had enough. “Do I really seem like the type?”
He chewed on the inside of his cheek, then crossed his arms, and jutted out one hip, the very picture of an artist studying the picture he was painting. “Eh, I suppose not.”
“Will you just tell me what you were doing?”
“No, I don’t think I will. You have enough of your own troubles to take care of without nosing around in my life, too.”
“What does that mean?” she demanded.
“Oh, everyone knows that your boyfriend is a computer thief, and that he dragged you into his plans. One look at you and everyone knows you’re innocent, but we all have to wonder when he’ll be back. When will you return to America? What will you do about the dog? How long are you going to stay at L’Oiseau Bleu, and what will happen to the crêpes when you are gone? How long will it take for you to report Oscar Metais to the police?” He broke off sharply, they both knew that he had made a mistake.
“Why would I report Oscar Metais to the police?” she asked. “He only spoke to me in the alley next to Monsieur Babin’s little garage for his cart, the place where he was killed. Which you wouldn’t know about unless you saw us.”
Jan shook his head. “I’m not saying another word.”
“What were you doing there, Jan? I didn’t see you. You must have been further down the alley, behind Oscar.”
Jan stubbornly shook his head again, blond hair flying, and retreated through the front door, slamming it behind him. Jan had left Ashley with a di
lemma. She had no proof of his involvement in M. Babin’s death, but his actions now seemed more suspicious than ever.
Should I talk to the police? Ashley pondered her options. What would I say, that I am a nosy American and have been following the man around? I could drop a hint in the market owner’s ear, and the gossip would spread throughout the neighborhood like wildfire. But then, what if I got Jan fired or worse, and he turned out to be innocent? Ashley’s thoughts ran in circles. But what if he turns out to be guilty? And I’ve just let a murderer know that I suspect him? By saying nothing,will I be putting myself in danger?
M. Gergovie returned to the room, shaking his head. “Well, whatever you said, it didn’t go over well! Jan is very unhappy.”
“Monsieur ...” she hesitated. She didn’t want to dig herself in deeper, but Ashley had to know. “Did Jan have something against Monsieur Babin?”
M. Gergovie raised a suspicious eyebrow. “Why?”
“Because he keeps appearing and disappearing around the neighborhood at night, driving your truck, and because he was near the place where Monsieur Babin keeps his bicycle cart about the same time that Monsieur Babin was killed. Jan refuses to explain anything.”
“Ahhhh ...” M. Gergovie said in understanding. “That’s our Jan, no? He likes his privacy, he would be horrified to have to be interviewed by the police. But if you think he might have seen something, well, I’ll try to talk him into an interview. He uses the truck with our permission, of course. He is picking up deliveries of leftover bread and taking them around the neighborhood for the homeless. When he was a boy ...” M. Gergovie launched in on a story about Jan as a little boy, growing up very poor, and being very distressed to find out as an adult, that there were immigrants who had it so much worse than he did because they came into the country illegally and were trying to hide from the authorities.
“The government is unpredictable,” M. Gergovie admitted. “Sometimes we can do the deliveries with a wink and a smile from them, and sometimes they drag us through the whole bureaucracy backwards with our hands tied behind our backs and an apple in our mouths. Politics!” He shrugged. “And so, Jan drives from place to place, picking up extra bread and supplies and delivering them to places where the homeless can collect them without having to deal with the government.”
“Oh,” Ashley said. “I didn’t know.”
“He doesn’t like to talk about himself,” M. Gergovie asserted. “And, of course, the more people who talk about what we’re doing after hours with our trucks, the more of a chance that someone will mention it in the wrong ears.” He winked at her.
Ashley said, “All the same, where was he about eight p.m. that night that Monsieur Babin was killed?”
M. Gergovie tilted his head and said, “I would not know unless ...” He walked over to a battered desk with a new computer on top and sat down in the chair, clicking on a few things. Ashley suspected she knew what he was doing so she stood behind him to make sure that he didn’t change anything. He pulled up a database. Without changing any of the data, he said, “Jan returned that night at seven minutes past eight. That is, he logged the truck in at that time, using his own passcode. We have security camera footage from that night if you want to see it.”
“No, that’s fine ...” Ashley let her voice trail off as M. Gergovie pulled up another program and started sorting through the files. He double-clicked on one marked with the right date in the filename, and fast forwarded through it to eight p.m. “I’ll copy this one to the saved folder.” M. Gergovie squinted at the screen. “Otherwise, it will be deleted in a month. We can only save so much video before my son gets angry at me for taking up all the hard drive space on the servers.”
The camera looked down on a garage door in an alleyway. M. Gergovie moved through the video until the on-screen time showed 8:07, moving slowly enough through the video so Ashley could see that no one else was on the screen. Then, the nose of a truck appeared outside the garage door and stopped. Jan Hamelin, with his hood pulled back, got out of the truck and walked up to a keypad beside the door and punched in a code. “That’s him,” M. Gergovie said.
Ashley felt like a complete and utter heel. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it too much,” M. Gergovie said, patting her on the arm as he turned to stand up again. “Now, when you hear the gossip that Jan is doing something he shouldn’t, you will know better, I’m sure.”
“Of course.”
He gave her a wink. “Now, where is the other one? She is late.”
Ashley raised her eyebrows but didn’t ask. His comment almost seemed like M. Gergovie was implying that the person who was asking him about setting up an account for a new restaurant was the other American working at L’Oiseau Bleu—Patty LaFontaine.
“Does Chef Lemaire give our extras to you?” she asked.
“But of course.” M. Gergovie shook Ashley’s hand and wished her luck in solving the murder of M. Babin, as well as solving the case with ‘her American friend’. She thanked him, and he added, “I will ask Jan – gently – if he saw anything while he was out that night. He will not tell you, but perhaps he will tell me.”
“Will he tell the police, though?”
M. Gergovie shrugged. That was the best answer she was going to get.
CHAPTER 14
Ashley had gone back to the front of the wine area of the shop and rescued Belle. Now they were walking through the streets, wandering in whatever direction Belle decided to go since it was broad daylight, and Ashley had her phone in case they got lost.
They walked along slowly. Belle was happy to sniff the scents of a new neighborhood and Ashley had a lot to think about. If Jan Hamelin wasn’t involved in the death of M. Babin, and Patty wasn’t, then the murderer must have been Oscar Metais. He had the classic three elements of a guilty murderer: being fired gave him a motive, he had the opportunity – Ashley knew he was at the right place at the right time, and he had the means, he could have easily found a blunt object near or on the cart and used it to bash in M. Babin’s head.
The only problem with her theory was that if Oscar was clearly the most obvious suspect, why hadn’t he been arrested yet?
The only reason would be if he had an alibi. If that was the case, it had to be a false one: Ashley had seen him in the alleyway. Then again, she had told the detective that she had seen him in the alleyway, so they knew that already, and he still hadn’t been arrested.
Making up her mind suddenly, she and Belle changed direction and started walking back to M. Babin’s neighborhood. Ashley wanted to check something.
When she arrived at the stretch of the street where she had last seen M. Babin, Ashley stopped at the little garage door. It was closed and locked, but that was no surprise. Surely Oscar Metais was still out with the cart for the day.
Ashley thought about trying to break into the garage in broad daylight but dismissed the idea. Not only was she far better at hacking computers than she was at picking locks – not that she’d ever picked a lock – but it was broad daylight, and anything she did would soon be reported back to the relevant authorities or, at the very least, the neighborhood gossips. No, what she was looking for was something else. Questioning M. Gergovie had given her a better idea.
Entering the alley where she had spoken to Oscar Metais, Ashley was delighted to see a security camera aimed at the roll-up door of M. Babin’s garage. She took several zoomed-in photos of the manufacturer name and model number, which she could barely see from the street, then she entered another address on her phone’s GPS, told it to give her the shortest walking route, and glanced at the time. It was 3:57 p.m.
BREATHLESS, ASHLEY and Belle arrived in front of the door of the Martinique Club, the one that Patty had been to the night of the murder. Ashley had been there with Patty and Marie while they had still been taking the class, primarily the club played electronic dance music. She had to take an alley to get to the club, it was one of those narrow alleys that have apartm
ents stacked over it extending from the surrounding buildings.
The club was closed right now, it was still too early for the Parisians to think about going dancing. But that was fine. Ashley checked her cell phone, relieved to see it had taken her twenty minutes to reach the club from the front door of M. Babin’s garage.
Which seemed to mean that it would have been impossible for Patty to have committed the murder. She would have had to walk all the way from the club to the little garage and back, surely someone would have noticed that she was missing for forty minutes, maybe even longer. Generally, at least twenty minutes were needed to get a cab near here, especially during the evening. Ashley knew from experience that they didn’t just hang around the streets in this neighborhood.
Ashley had a bottle of water in her bag for Belle, she put it out in a travel dish then drank the rest of the water herself. While she was drinking, she heard the worst sound in the world – a bicycle bell! A cyclist rode through the entry to the alley, passed her, and disappeared between a building and a nearby garden cottage. As Poirot would say, mon Dieu! Patty could easily have ‘borrowed’ a bicycle from nearby and saved herself a lot of time. She could have done it!
Ashley and Belle walked back to the apartment more slowly than they had left. Ashley’s feet hurt and, frankly, she was in a bad mood. She climbed the steps to her apartment, and found that her neighbor, Mme. Guibert, was waiting for her with her door open.
“Ma chère,” she said, “do come to visit me.”
Ashley put Belle back in the apartment and returned to see what was up. Ashley was offered a tiny cordial glass of Chambord. “I regret to tell you that I have heard some bad news,” Mme. Guibert said very seriously, sitting gracefully on the arm of an overstuffed chair. “Your American ‘friend’ has been seen.”
“Here?”
“Non, Dieu merci, but elsewhere in Paris.”
“Doesn’t that mean that they’re about to catch him?”
“It might, but then again, it might not. I have heard from a friend of my son’s, a boy who grew up in bad circumstances, that he was seen attempting to purchase a gun.”