French Pastry Murder

by Leslie Meier

  Or not, she discovered, peering through the peephole and seeing a figure with a remarkably distorted face. She was puzzled at first, wondering if this was a person with a terrible injury, but she finally realized it was a man with a stocking over his face.

  She was hitting REDIAL, calling Girard, when to her horror she saw the door open, restrained only by the security chain. She reached for the knob to pull it shut but was too late; the stocking man had inserted a pair of bolt cutters through the slim opening and had snapped the chain. It was only when the bolt cutters were withdrawn that Lucy saw her chance and pulled the door shut, yelling for Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth took in the situation immediately and grabbed hold of the few inches of chain that remained, dangling from the door. She held on as tight as she could, and Lucy hung on to the knob, but the assailant was strong and had the advantage of leverage. Peering through the peephole, Lucy saw he’d placed his foot on the wall, beside the door, and was using it to brace himself.

  Lucy’s hands were sweating. She felt the knob slipping from her grip in what she feared was a deadly tug-of-war. Elizabeth was also straining to hang on to the short piece of chain, her body pressed against Lucy’s.

  “I can’t hold it much longer,” she whispered.

  “Me, either,” said Lucy, who suddenly remembered her high school physics class, something about equal and opposite forces. “At the count of three, let go,” she whispered.

  Elizabeth shook her head. “I’m scared.”

  “It’s our only chance,” said Lucy. “Trust me.”

  “Okay.”

  Lucy whispered the count. “Un, deux, trois!” They let go simultaneously, and the door flew open, sending the assailant flying across the small hallway at the same time they heard the woo-wah of a police siren approaching. The guy ran for the stairs, and Lucy pulled the door shut, her chest heaving.

  Once they were safely inside, she and Elizabeth fell into each other’s arms.

  “That was good thinking, Mom,” said Elizabeth.

  “I got an A in physics,” said Lucy, who was still breathing heavily.

  “It’s broken,” said Elizabeth, who was examining the lock. “And the chain’s cut. I can’t lock the door. What am I going to do?”

  It was suddenly quiet; the woo-wah had stopped, and they heard footsteps on the stairs. A moment later two uniformed flics were at the door.

  “You’re breathless, madame?” asked one, emphasizing the password. He was young and good-looking in a rakish way, and Lucy thought he looked a bit like the young Jean-Paul Belmondo.

  “Oui,” said Lucy, still panting from the exertion of holding the door shut. “Breathless.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Jean-Paul Belmondo cop wasn’t interested in talking to Lucy, but he and his shorter, darker partner were questioning Elizabeth closely, nodding along as she showed them the broken locks and the duffel bag that had concealed the cash-filled envelope. When she’d finished, he called headquarters and asked for Girard. After a somewhat lengthy conversation, which Lucy couldn’t follow, he informed them that the apartment would be sealed as a crime scene and Elizabeth would have to move out temporarily.

  “Not again,” sighed Elizabeth.

  “Do you have a place to go?” he asked, rubbing his cheek with his index finger.

  Lucy thought his tone was rather too concerned; next thing he’d be offering to put Elizabeth up at his place. “Yes, she can stay with me and her father,” said Lucy.

  “D’accord,” he replied with a professional nod.

  “You must be very careful, mademoiselle,” advised the partner.

  “I will make sure she does not go anywhere alone,” said Lucy, feeling like a nineteenth-century chaperone. “And you are taking the money?”

  “Oui, oui, I have the papers right here,” said the partner, producing some closely printed documents on very thin paper. “You must sign here, please.”

  So Lucy signed and handed over the envelope while Elizabeth, once again, packed a bag. Then a taxi was called, and Lucy and a rather sullen Elizabeth went back to the vacation apartment, where the friends were just sitting down to a simple dinner of pasta with cheese, salad, and bread.

  “Comfort food. Just what we need,” said Lucy, tucking in. Even Elizabeth, she noticed, had loaded up her plate and was eating as if she’d never heard of calories. There was nothing like a near brush with danger to perk up the appetite. “We’ve had quite an interesting afternoon,” she said, going on to tell the group about discovering Sylvie’s cache of cash. She’d just started to tell them about the attempted break-in when Richard arrived, bearing a box of assorted pastries.

  “So Sylvie was a call girl,” suggested Sue, who was arranging the colorful fruit tarts and the éclairs on a plate. “I’ve heard that can be very profitable, if you have the right clientele.”

  “And the Cavendish Hotel would certainly have plenty of the right clients,” said Richard.

  “But she would have to be terribly discreet, or she’d lose her job, wouldn’t she?” asked Rachel.

  “And how much could she earn that way?” asked Pam. “I mean, fifty thousand euros is a lot of, well, bonking, for lack of a better word.”

  “Bonking’s fine with me,” said Ted with a leer.

  Elizabeth glanced at her mother and rolled her eyes, sending the message that this was just the sort of thing she couldn’t stand about her parents’ friends.

  “I mean, what does a first-class bonk cost?”

  Sue was directing the question to Richard, who put up his hands and shook his head. “Why are you asking me?”

  “You’re a reporter, that’s why. I thought you guys have inquiring minds,” she answered, placing the platter of pastries on the table. “Coffee will be ready in a minute.”

  Elizabeth was helping herself to a plump chocolate-covered éclair filled with mocha cream. “I don’t think Sylvie was a first-class professional bonker, not from the guys I saw her bring to the apartment. I think she was an amateur,” she said, taking a big bite. “An enthusiastic amateur.”

  “Well, we know there was a black market ring operating at the hotel. Maybe she was involved with that,” suggested Bill, choosing a mille-feuille topped with a strawberry.

  “She would have to be the mastermind to have that much money,” said Richard, “and pretty young girls aren’t usually at the top of the criminal food chain.”

  Lucy thought he was right about that. Her experience as a reporter had taught her that attractive young women were usually the victims of crime, subject to abduction, rape, beatings, and worse.

  “She was no mastermind,” said Elizabeth, reaching for a second éclair.

  “She was obviously holding the money for somebody,” said Bob, speaking with authority as he dug into a strawberry tart with his fork. “And it seems obvious that Adil and Malik were looking for it. I suppose they must have had trouble breaking in to the girls’ apartment, so they thought they’d try our place, on the off chance the money had been hidden here.”

  “I guess whoever they’re allied with is getting a bit desperate,” said Lucy, who had chosen an éclair and was scraping her plate with her dessert fork to get every last bit of cream filling. “That guy this afternoon seemed like a pro, with a stocking mask and bolt cutters.” A horrible thought occurred to her. “Maybe he was the one who killed Sylvie.”

  Silence fell at the table as the group members began to realize the terrible danger Lucy and Elizabeth had been in.

  “Just imagine . . .” began Rachel, only to be interrupted by her husband.

  “Sylvie was probably holding the money for somebody, and they sent that guy to get it back. Money laundering is big business, and it’s endemic. It’s everywhere. Even respectable banks do it. The Swiss have made a specialty of it,” said Bob.

  “He’s right,” agreed Richard. “Paris is full of Arab factions, all busy raising money for weapons and equipment. Just look at Syria, for example, and Iraq, and of cour
se, there’s Egypt. And now that France has started aggressively hunting down Muslim radicals in former colonies like Mali, there’s been a real upsurge in resistance. And that’s on top of the more established groups, like Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.”

  Elizabeth was leaning back in her chair with her hand on her stomach and a blissful expression on her face. “Boy, that was good,” she said. “I guess I needed carbs.”

  “You do, after a scare like you had,” said Pam, who took nutrition seriously. “It’s the aftereffect of all that adrenaline. Your body thinks you ran a marathon, and wants to replace all those nutrients you burned.”

  “This is so weird,” said Elizabeth. “I can’t believe I lived with Sylvie for six months and knew so little about her.”

  “She must have been very secretive,” said Sue.

  “I think she was really a nice girl who got in over her head,” said Rachel.

  “Perhaps nice isn’t the right word,” said Pam. “It seems she was a little too wild to be nice, but I do think she was basically a good person. I don’t think she would have done anything she believed was evil.”

  Lucy wondered if Pam was drawing on her own experience here. She knew she’d been a bit of a wild thing before she met Ted and settled down.

  “Believe being the operative word here,” said Richard. “None of these terrorists think they’re evil. They think they’re fighting the good fight, jihad.”

  “Yup,” added Bob. “They think that if they die, they’re going straight to heaven and they’ll be awarded a whole bunch of virgins.”

  “Talk about misogynistic,” said Sue. “All those veils and blankets the women have to wear. So unchic.”

  “Not Sylvie,” said Elizabeth. “She didn’t care about issues. She only cared about Sylvie.”

  “That will always get you in trouble,” said Sue, carefully cutting a raspberry tart in half and taking one piece for herself and giving the other to Sid, adding it to the half-eaten éclair that was already on his plate.

  “Madame, you are too kind,” said Sid, licking his lips.

  When Sid said the word madame, Lucy had a fleeting image of Madame Seydoux, Sylvie’s mother. Mothers and daughters had a unique knowledge of each other, she thought, even when they didn’t seem very close. There was something about a mother-daughter bond. Maybe it was nothing more than shared genes, but it was there. She’d seen it operate in even the most destructive relationships; nobody knew better how to hurt the other than a mother or a daughter. She amended the thought. Except, perhaps, sisters. Lucy didn’t have a sister herself, but she’d seen the dynamic at work in her own family, among her daughters.

  “Did Sylvie have any sisters?” she asked hopefully.

  “As far as I know, she was an only child,” said Elizabeth.

  “Then I think we should take a little trip to Chartres tomorrow, to express our condolences to Madame Seydoux.”

  “Well,” admitted Elizabeth, “I have been wanting to see the cathedral.”

  When the train arrived at Chartres the next morning, Lucy and Elizabeth didn’t have to ask for directions to the cathedral. It was immediately visible, dominating the town from the top of a hill. Worshippers and sightseers alike had to make the climb if they wanted to gain entry to the church, and Lucy thought it was an apt metaphor for the Christian’s path to salvation. A path that was guaranteed to involve considerable pain and sacrifice, but first, she wanted to visit Sylvie’s parents and get rid of the heavy basket of fruit she’d brought from Paris as an expression of sympathy.

  It was easy enough to find their tabac. It was in a prime location next to the train station, and the sign above the door identified the proprietor as M. Émile Seydoux. The modest little shop, which sold candy and gum, phone cards, papers and magazines, as well as cigarettes, must be a real cash cow, thought Lucy. The sign, however, was quite old-fashioned, with fading paint, and Lucy suspected it was a reference to a previous M. Seydoux, perhaps the founder of the business. Another sign, this one handwritten in shaky ballpoint pen and taped over a printed placard announcing, “OUVERT DE 6H00 À 22H00,” read simply, FERMÉ.

  “What now?” Elizabeth wondered aloud. “The shop’s closed.”

  “I bet they live upstairs,” said Lucy, pointing to windows above the storefront that were covered with spotless lace curtains. “I think that must be the door,” she said, pointing to a simple wooden door beside the shop windows that was painted blue.

  An old-fashioned bell pull was next to the door, and she gave it a good tug, producing a distant chime. A few moments later Madame Seydoux opened the door. Lucy was shocked at her appearance. Her hair was uncombed, and she was wearing a very worn and faded housedress, the sort of wrapper Lucy’s grandmother used to wear when she tidied the house before dressing for the day.

  “Quoi?” she demanded.

  Lucy’s French wasn’t up to lengthy explanations, so she simply held out the fruit basket while Elizabeth expressed their condolences in French.

  Madame took the basket with a curt “Merci” and was about to shut the door when Lucy spoke up.

  “Elizabeth, did you tell her about the money?”

  That caught Madame’s attention; it seemed she did understand some English. “Money?” she asked, letting the door swing on its hinges.

  “When we packed up your daughter’s things, we found some money hidden in a duffel bag she kept at work,” said Elizabeth, speaking in French.

  “Sylvie was a very good girl, very thrifty,” said Madame, taking a crumpled tissue from her pocket and wiping her eyes. “Where is this bag? Did you bring the money?”

  “It was quite a lot,” said Lucy. “We gave it to the police.”

  Madame was very distressed to hear this. “Non, non,” she said, shaking her head. “La police? Pourquoi?” Then she launched into a long tirade involving finger shaking and a few words that Lucy understood, mainly “les im-pôts ” and “les officiels du gouvernement.” Eventually, Madame ran out of steam, placing her hands on her hips and demanding to know how much money they had found.

  “Cinquante mille euros,” said Elizabeth, getting an incredulous look from Madame.

  “Pas possible,” said Madame, correcting Elizabeth. “C’est cinq mille, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Non, madame,” insisted Elizabeth. “Not five thousand. I know my numbers. It was cinquante mille, fifty thousand. Not five thousand, or cinq mille.”

  Madame seemed to sway a bit on her feet, and Lucy took her arm and guided her to the stairs beyond, where she sat down heavily. “C’est incroyable,” she said.

  “Ask her if she thinks Sylvie was keeping the money for someone,” Lucy instructed Elizabeth, who obliged. While she and Madame Seydoux were talking, Lucy looked around the hallway, which was spotlessly clean. The stairs were covered with a thick striped carpet, and the banisters and railing were polished to a high sheen. A few pictures hung on the gray-painted walls. One especially large one was a photo of a handful of French legionnaires arranged in front of a pyramid.

  “Pardon, madame,” apologized Lucy, interrupting. “Was Monsieur in Egypt?”

  Madame looked at the photo, and her expression softened, as if she were remembering a younger, handsomer Monsieur Seydoux. “Non,” she said, shattering Lucy’s assumption. Madame pointed to the picture. “My father. Sylvie took an old photo,” she said, describing the snapshot’s size with her fingers. “I don’t know the word,” she continued, pointing to the crisp new print. “For my anniversaire.” Then, regaining her energy, she stood up, her arms wrapped around the fruit basket. “Merci, merci beaucoup,” she said, making it clear it was time for them to leave.

  “What did I miss?” asked Lucy as they followed the winding road up to the cathedral. “I gather the legionnaire was her father, and Sylvie had an old photo restored as a birthday present.”

  “That’s right,” said Elizabeth. “She said she didn’t believe Sylvie had that much money, but she was really upset that we gave it to the p
olice, although she finally admitted that we didn’t have any choice. It was kind of weird. At first she thought the money should have gone to her and Monsieur, but when she realized it was really fifty thousand, she backed off, like she knew it was tainted in some way.”

  “Did she think Sylvie was killed because of the money?” asked Lucy, breathing hard as she pounded her way up the cobblestones.

  “She didn’t say that, but I got the feeling that she didn’t want to be involved. She said the money must have belonged to the previous tenant, the old lady. She mentioned how those old folks who’d been through the war saved every penny. They were fearful that hard times would return.”

  “Did you tell her the envelope had the Cavendish logo?” asked Lucy.

  “She said maybe the old lady worked in the hotel, too. I left it at that. I didn’t tell her that it was the new logo, that they switched from green to gold about the time I started working in Paris.”

  “I wonder what Papa did in Egypt,” mused Lucy as they reached the plaza in front of the cathedral, where there were also a few shops and a restaurant. “Maybe there’s a link to Adil and Malik and Les Amis du Roi.”

  “Or their parents, maybe even their grandparents,” said Elizabeth as they paused to admire the cathedral before attempting the steps leading to the cathedral doors. “That picture was taken years ago.”

  “But if the grandfather was involved with King Farouk,” Lucy said, speculating, “there might be some sort of personal tie. I mean, it must be important to Madame Seydoux, or Sylvie wouldn’t have made the enlargement for her. It has some significance.”

  Together they gazed at the enormous building, with its elaborate carvings around the doors, its flying buttresses, and its mismatched spires, one plain and the other elaborately carved, reaching heavenward.

  “I’m sick of Sylvie and her complicated life,” declared Elizabeth, referring to her guidebook. “The cathedral was built in the twelfth century. That’s the eleven hundreds. However did they do it without modern machinery?” She paused. “The stained glass is original. It was stored during World War II to protect it from the bombings.”