“So what are you doing here?” Guillaume asked. He didn’t seem at all calm.
“Because Monsieur Cohen wanted to talk to you.” Blanc’s vision dimmed. It seemed to him the cacophony made by the frogs was getting louder by the second. It felt as if the frogs were laughing at him. Pull yourself together. “In our investigation of this tragic accident, we by chance came across Cohen’s papers,” he said, being somewhat economical with the truth. “And among them was his research into an old criminal case. The theft of the Van Gogh in the Musée Maly.”
“That didn’t have anything to do with his accident,” Guillaume blurted out.
“Probably not. But a criminal case is a criminal case. We’re gendarmes and can’t just ignore something like that, even if it’s only an unusual chain of circumstance that brought it to our attention. Regulations are regulations,” Blanc said, looking regretful. “It would appear that Monsieur Cohen had come across some new lead in this old business. And we’re following up on it.”
“And so, of course, you come up with me. You’re no wiser than your colleagues all those years ago.”
“It was Monsieur Cohen who came up with you,” Blanc replied drily.
“He called me. I have no idea where he got my number from. We aren’t in the phone book. I didn’t want to meet him. Journalists are almost worse than cops. But I let myself be talked into it because…” Guillaume gave his mother a look like a dog wanting a pat on the head, but she was staring at Fabienne again. “Because, for some reason or other, I believed he considered me to be innocent,” he said, finishing the sentence a bit more dejectedly.
“Is that what he said?” Blanc asked.
Guillaume changed his weight from one foot to the other. Standing around on this parking lot must be even worse for someone who limps than it is for us, Blanc thought. “Not in so many words. But for one reason or another, I had the impression that Cohen suspected somebody else. On the phone he was so…”—Guillaume sought for a word—“sympathetic,” he finally blurted out. “I would genuinely have been glad to meet him. I might have been able to tell him something or other.”
“You also had a suspicion of your own back then?” Fabienne interjected. Her voice sounded higher than normal, nervous because of the old lady fixing her constantly with a hostile glare.
Guillaume rubbed his right temple. He wasn’t sweating despite his socks and long-sleeved shirt. “They just suspected me back then because I was the janitor. A doormat. They could pin it on me, they thought. But I defended myself!”
“We’re talking to you as a witness, not a suspect,” Marius reminded him.
“Your colleagues should have interrogated that Boré! And his girlfriend!”
“Marie-Claude Elbaz?” Blanc asked, to be sure. He was wishing people in Bel Air ate more frogs’ legs so that they could have had an easier conversation.
“They were a fine pair, I can tell you! Boré always presented himself as a tough guy, ran around like pop star Johnny Hallyday, and wanted to paint like Picasso. But nobody would have taken him for either of them.” Guillaume gave a short, bitter, ironic laugh. “He was a phony, a loser. He was always going to the doctor’s with his diabetes.” Blanc recalled the little machine he had spotted in the art historian’s house—a test set, for measuring blood sugar levels. Were diabetics allowed to drink that much pastis?
“Real artists,” Guillaume went on, “are tough and good. Boré was weak and hated all artists because he was jealous of them. In the Musée Maly he set up the spotlights so as to create shadows or reflections on the canvases. On one occasion I caught him deliberately turning a light the wrong way. I was the one who had to rectify it all. He didn’t write any explanatory texts to go with the pictures. There was all the correct information about the artist, about the year the work was done. But even that always sounded somehow … patronizing, condescending. As if the artists didn’t really deserve to be shown in the museum, know what I mean? He couldn’t do that with Van Gogh, he was too famous. And the drawing was really, undoubtedly sublime. And then one night it was gone. Odd, eh?”
“You think Boré stole it?”
“He insisted he had gone to see the yachts down at the Voiles. But he couldn’t have told the difference between a schooner and a punt. He probably can’t even swim. And could you imagine Marie-Claude on a millionaire’s yacht?”
Blanc thought of her natural elegance—and the fact that she was married to a rich and influential publisher. “Yes,” he said calmly.
“Then you have more imagination than me,” Guillaume replied irritatedly. “Marie-Claude wasn’t as harmless as she looks. She has a past, you should be interviewing her! I wondered back then why the cops didn’t dig deeper. She would have had no scruples about stealing a picture. She already had someone on her conscience.”
Blanc glanced at Marius. His answer was to turn his bleary eyes up to the sky. Connard, that meant. A few minutes before Fabienne had gotten out her iPad and googled Marie-Claude Elbaz. She shook her head: no entry.
“Did you mention your allegations when you were being interviewed?” Blanc asked.
“I mentioned it, and a young woman typed it up in the minutes of the interview, but the cops looked at me as if the moment I left the room they would throw it in the trash.”
“Are you still in touch with Monsieur Boré and Mademoiselle Elbaz?”
“After the stolen Van Gogh business they fired me. The pair of them scurried off to Paris. Every now and then you hear something about Boré. But wild horses couldn’t drag me to an exhibition organized by that guy. I’ve had nothing to do with that pretty pair for ages.”
Fabienne quickly typed something into her iPad and turned it as inconspicuously as possible so that Blanc could read it: G doesn’t know that B and M-C split up long ago. And he probably doesn’t know either that both of them are currently down here in the south, Blanc filled in mentally, nodding.
“Monsieur Guillaume,” he said aloud, “in his notes Cohen also refers to a place on the edge of the Camargue, not too far from your house: Saint-Gilles. Have you any idea whether that could have anything to do with the theft?”
Guillaume automatically grasped the golden cross hanging on his chest, then noticed that the gendarmes had noticed and immediately let it go again. “That’s a long way from the Côte d’Azur,” he mumbled, as if that had some significance. Then he stood up straight. “I have no idea why Cohen made some note about Saint-Gilles,” he declared. It sounded honest but at the same time as if he was concealing something.
“You had arranged to meet Monsieur Cohen on the morning of Friday, August the fifth. When did he call you to arrange the meeting?”
Guillaume shrugged. “Tuesday? Wednesday? Down here one day’s much the same as the next. Hard to say for sure. Wednesday, I think.”
“Could it have been Thursday?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Because you weren’t at home on Thursday?” Blanc pressed him, trying hard to sound indifferent.
“My son is at home every day. It’s only in the evening he goes out to work in Gadet,” Guillaume’s mother interjected, staring at Blanc to challenge him. The old woman had worked out why I was asking, the captain realized. Clever old witch. She’s just given him an alibi for the day of Cohen’s death. He was at home with Maman.
“Merci beaucoup et bonne journée,” Blanc said, concluding the interview and holding out his right hand.
Guillaume hesitated fleetingly and then shook his hand.
“Nice watch,” the captain commented in passing.
“It’s a memento from my father,” Guillaume replied, somewhat embarrassed. His mother glared at Blanc with open hatred and snorted. “Time for lunch,” she announced, and began to lead her son off. Marius just nodded in farewell, but Fabienne took a quick step forward and shook Guillaume’s hand.
“Why did you do that?” Blanc asked when they were back in the hot patrol car. “And don’t tell me again that you were admi
ring beauty.”
“I just thought that for once at least Guillaume might feel the touch of a woman,” Fabienne explained.
“A troll!” Marius exclaimed, slapping the dashboard with his hand. “I’m thirsty, let’s get out of here.”
“Do either of you believe a word Guillaume said?” Blanc asked when they had finally turned back onto the main road and the frog chorus from the drainage ditch was behind them. “Boré a would-be Johnny Hallyday? Marie-Claude a sinister murderer? And Guillaume himself an innocent doormat?”
“If I had a mother like that I’d be crazy in the head, too,” Marius observed.
“One thing is clear,” Fabienne said. “He knows next to nothing about Boré or the woman who is today Madame Leroux. He doesn’t even know who Cohen was. He’s a hermit crab.”
“Or maybe the stolen Van Gogh is hanging on a wall somewhere in that shabby little house,” suggested Blanc. “Maybe that’s why the old woman wouldn’t let us in.”
“And why did Guillaume react so strangely to the reference to Saint-Gilles?” Fabienne asked. “There was some reason why Cohen made a note of the name. It had something to do with the case. And then there was that outsize watch…”
“That might be irrelevant,” Marius said. “He maintained it was something he’d inherited. His father was a respected lawyer in Gadet, everybody knew him. If a farmer wanted to argue about a public right-of-way over his land, or a baker wanted to fire one of his hired hands, or somebody wanted a quickie divorce, then voilà there was Guillaume Senior. I would have used him in my divorce case, but he was no longer with us. He was a cultured man, respected, and apart from that chairman of the local arts council. He was said to have had quite a collection.”
“Boré said the same thing,” Blanc continued.
“One day the old man was simply gone,” Marius said. “To Paris, or Nice, nobody knew exactly. There were a few rumors about a younger woman doing the rounds in Gadet. One way or another there was another quickie divorce for his colleagues, this time one of their own. And that was that.”
“Leaving behind an embittered wife, a disturbed son, and a decrepit house,” Blanc suggested.
“Guillaume was just a kid back then?” Fabienne asked.
“Yes, not even ten years old, if I remember correctly. No surprise that he’s not quite right in the head. And no surprise that ever since his mother has had no love for young, good-looking X-chromosome carriers.”
* * *
After work Blanc invited his two colleagues to dinner. “We could try somewhere a bit grander than the restaurant in Gadet,” he told them. “I dragged you both into this crazy case, so I ought to treat you.”
“I’m glad you’ve realized that, better late than never,” Marius replied, rubbing his hands together. “Let’s go to Le Villon!”
“You’re really going to make Roger pay up!” Fabienne laughed. But she didn’t say no.
They took the 2CV to Saint-César, where Blanc recognized that the steam horse didn’t really fit in with the restaurant. Le Villon stood on the bend of a narrow ill-lit street on the edge of the town, with a few houses from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had previously been either a mews for coaches or perhaps an artisan factory: a wall of unplastered stone separated the courtyard from the street. An LED spotlight in a niche illuminated the glass-covered menu and the Michelin star underneath the restaurant’s name. They walked through a wrought-iron gate into the cobblestoned courtyard, where wooden chairs and tables stood in the shadow of a mimosa, the ten-foot-high crown of which acted as a sunshade. Its flimsy leaves fluttered in the breeze, and there was the scent of herbs and roasted meat in the air. As the young waitress led them to the only free table, Blanc was trying in vain to remember the figures on his last bank statement.
“What is the house specialty?” he asked Marius.
“They change the menu here every six weeks. Let’s wait and be surprised.” Marius sat up straight and began studying the menu with more attention than he’d ever applied to a case file.
Eventually he ordered the foie gras on apricots and then the liver ragout. Fabienne and Blanc both decided on the tomato carpaccio with crayfish as a starter. To follow, Blanc’s colleague ordered the monkfish medallion, while he himself, thinking of Madame Leroux’s enthusiasm, ordered the filet of veal with Camargue rice. As an accompaniment, they began with a local white wine, which Fabienne stayed with, while the men switched to a Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Altogether it was going to cost Blanc as much as the repairs to his Renault Espace. Merde, it would probably last as long, too.
Blanc didn’t want to talk shop all evening, so he asked Fabienne, “How’s your petition against the Front National mayor going?”
“If you hung out on Facebook a bit more often you would already have given it a like,” she replied with a sigh. “I could do with a few. You wouldn’t believe the comments you get when you come out as a lesbian. We’re living in the Middle Ages.”
“Trolls live in the Middle Ages,” Marius said sympathetically.
“Well, it seems that half of France has been colonized by trolls. They get so worked up about our wedding plans you’d think we’d thrown Molotov cocktails into the Berre oil refinery. I thought the public would be on our side.”
“The Front National is the biggest party around here. What did you expect?” Marius asked. “The medal of the Légion d’Honneur?”
“The hatred of others will only strengthen your relationship,” Blanc added, trying to cheer her up.
“There’s the experienced marriage guidance counselor talking.” Fabienne laughed and held up her wineglass for a toast. “To women!” she shouted.
“Well, at least one of us is successful with women,” Marius muttered, once again knocking his wine back in one.
“You’ll both find beauties who’ll give you a chance. You, Roger, have definitely got a chance with our marijuana-smoking body slicer. Or you could start an affair with the chilled investigating judge.”
Blanc’s wine went down the wrong way, leaving him coughing and spluttering until his eyes watered.
“I was joking!” Fabienne said hastily, embarrassed. “Pardon, I’d forgotten who she was married to.”
Blanc smiled and wiped his face. “It was just that the joke was out of the blue,” he apologized. He was going to have to be extra-careful. Once a rumor about him and Aveline got out in the little world of Gadet, he could kiss his job good-bye.
“Let’s talk about the case,” Marius suggested, to the surprise of the others. He held up his hands when he saw them look at him in astonishment. “What? At least the dead guy by the field is less depressing than having to listen to you two going on about women. And when we’ve finished discussing it, we can all agree over coffee that we should close the file.”
“Ah, that’s where you’re coming from,” Blanc said, shaking his head. “But I’m only just starting to enjoy the whole business.”
“Me, too,” Fabienne said. “At first I was with Marius and reckoned that Cohen had been stupid enough to open the gate to the field. But after what I found on his computer, I’m dead set on continuing the investigation.”
“You and your computer,” Marius declared theatrically.
“Not Fabienne’s computer, Cohen’s,” Blanc corrected him calmly. “So, we have Cohen the journalist who enters the happy hunting grounds in a bizarre fashion, and we have Leroux the publisher, who may or may not know that his star reporter had gotten himself involved with a story that had nothing to do with the one they had agreed on. A man who fires his journalists to the extent that Cohen complains about it. A man who feels up so many women that tout Paris would like to see the end of him sooner rather than later, but nobody dares. We have the publisher’s wife, Marie-Claude, who had previously had an affair with an ambitious art historian and was maybe having one with Cohen. A woman who grows Camargue rice and may have a dubious past.” He reflected that it was not just Guillaume but Aveline, too, who had hinted at t
hat. But he could hardly mention that here. “We have her former lover Boré, who just happens to be in Provence at the same time. A star in his field, but scorned by all his colleagues. Someone who spoke with Cohen shortly before he died, someone who desperately wanted to know more about Cohen’s research. And we have a cranky guy living with an old witch of a mother, who’s accused Boré and Marie-Claude Leroux of theft, among other things, and who had been persuaded to talk to Cohen about an old theft. Except that it never got that far.”
“At the precise moment when the bull was exposing Cohen’s guts to the light of day, Ernest Leroux was supposedly on his yacht at the edge of the Camargue. Marie-Claude Leroux was in their house in the Camargue, but with no witnesses. Their daughter, Nora, was somewhere or other, we have no idea where. Boré was allegedly in a museum in Marseille. And Guillaume was at home with Maman. Shaky alibis, every one of them,” Fabienne summed up.
“Putain,” Marius exclaimed. “What alibi do you have? We can’t suspect everybody who was out and about in Provence last Thursday afternoon! Can you imagine ladies’ man Leroux standing by the gate of a fighting bull? Can you imagine his elegant wife planning to kill her lover in such a gruesome manner? Do you think a spoiled teenager like Nora was up to it? Or a pastis-guzzling diabetic wet blanket like Boré? A mommy’s boy like Guillaume, who can’t even make a decent job out of working as a waiter in a bar in Gadet? Please, I ask you, you want to go to Nkoulou on the basis of this?”
“I’d put it like this,” Blanc went on, unfazed by Marius’s outburst. “Cohen’s curious death accidentally led us onto a lead in an old, unsolved case: the 1990 theft of a Van Gogh. That’s not the febrile imagination of a forcibly relocated captain with sunstroke, it’s an unsolved crime. D’accord?”
“Yes,” Marius reluctantly admitted.
“As long as we’re still investigating Cohen’s death, we can also stay on the trail of the old theft. If we close the Cohen file, we have to give back his computer and his phone. Leroux will make sure of that. We would find it hard to convince Nkoulou why we might want to interview Boré or Guillaume again or follow up on links that involve them. Not to mention the fact that Marie-Claude Leroux would become virtually inaccessible. So let’s officially keep up our investigation into Cohen’s death for a few more days at least. Meanwhile we can be secretly hunting down the Van Gogh.”
Deadly Camargue: Provence Mystery #02 Page 12