Crime Fraiche Read online

  Also by Alexander Campion:

  THE GRAVE GOURMET

  CRIME FRAÎCHE

  ALEXANDER CAMPION

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  Copyright Page

  Évidemment, encore une fois, pour T.

  Acknowledgments

  Chantal Croizette Desnoyers—who had the indulgence to put up with me as a husband for twenty-six years—dipped into her reserve of patience once again to share her extensive expertise on mushrooms.

  Thanks also to my daughter Charlotte—now a registered nurse—for her tireless patience in answering my endless medical questions just as she was trying to get to sleep after a long night on the ICU floor.

  And of course, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Sharon Bowers, my ninja agent who, in addition to being a gifted negotiator and invaluable co-conspirator, is without peer at applying the old oil when the machine starts to squeak alarmingly.

  PROLOGUE

  Goddamn it. There are too many of them. Way too many. They had grouped into a tight pack and were heading straight at him. I’m dead meat, he said to himself.

  Waiting tensely, he teased the edge of the trigger with the tip of his finger, hating himself for the nervous tic, which all by itself could spell disaster. But he couldn’t help it. Too much was at stake.

  When there were that many, you wanted to blast right into the middle of the flock with both barrels, but you’d miss them all if you did that. What you had to do was get a grip, focus on a single bird, and swing through on it all calm and relaxed.

  But he couldn’t concentrate. He kept thinking about what a glorious day it had started out to be. His first really fashionable shoot. Driven partridge, the hardest birds to hit. Something most guys never even get to see.

  The comte himself had poured his coffee when they’d gathered. And a few minutes later he had sloshed some Calvados from his own private reserve into the dregs. To get his juices going, the comte had said, slapping him on the back as if he was an old friend. Even his boss, normally so standoffish, had been all over him. Wouldn’t be doing that if the sad clown knew even the half of it.

  He’d been in seventh heaven, and now he was going to miss them all and be a laughingstock. Being laughed at was the one thing he really couldn’t stand.

  Far off in the distance the beaters had begun walking slowly across the field. He had seen them tapping the ground with their long sticks. After a few long minutes, the partridge, who had been scurrying invisibly through the stubble, had taken to wing in a dark cloud a hundred yards in front of the beaters, skimming along almost at ground level. When they had reached the base of the hill, they had lifted and gained altitude, closing into a dense formation.

  Shots began hesitantly, like the first kernels of corn popping loudly in a metal pot. Then the cadence picked up and birds started falling out of the sky, wings hanging down like little broken toys. But there were still too many for him to find just one to aim at. He jerked his gun right and left, each bird a better target than the last.

  He made up his mind and raised his gun resolutely, stepping forward to take his first shot. Inexplicably he was brought up short, as if he had walked into a wall. A wall made of grass. He marveled at the perfection of the individual blades and the iridescence of the green. The color paled. Then he saw nothing.

  CHAPTER 1

  “So she wants people to think she’s what? Dead? Raped? I don’t get it,” Brigadier David Martineau said, lazily twisting a silky auburn lock around his index finger with far more insouciance than was normal for Police Judiciaire brigadiers.

  Brigadier Isabelle Lemercier rose to the bait and rolled her eyeballs skyward, shaking her head, her rough cropped hair swaying angrily like wheat in a summer storm. “Look, numnuts, wake the fuck up. It’s a scam. She’s hoping some patsy will get all mushy and take her home and nurse her back to health, right, Commissaire?”

  “That’s the way she works it, Isabelle,” Commissaire Capucine Le Tellier said. “She’s—”

  “In this town people go out of their way to ignore someone lying on the sidewalk. She’s gotta be doing something special,” David said, glaring at Isabelle.

  “She does seem to have a gift,” Capucine said with just enough steel in her voice to let her rank be felt. Both the brigadiers sensed they were at the threshold of going too far and straightened up in their chairs. “Apparently, she exudes a defenselessness that attracts people. She’s done it three times so far. Once in the Sixth Arrondissement, where two American tourists took her in, then in Neuilly, where a retired senior civil servant befriended her, and now in the Twentieth, where two women, magazine illustrators, cared for her in their apartment.”

  “And there’s bling in this?” David asked.

  “Oh, very definitely,” Capucine said, unclipping a lethal-looking black Sig service pistol from the small of her back, reclining in her government-issue swivel chair, putting her feet on the scarred top of her desk, and dropping the inch-thick file on her lap. She caught Isabelle admiring her legs and David her shoes, a brand-new pair of Christian Louboutin sling pumps that probably weren’t really appropriate for police work, at least not in the Twentieth Arrondissement.

  She was well aware this wasn’t the tone commissaires were supposed to take with their brigadiers, but they were all on the same side of thirty and these were two of the three street-savvy flics who steered her through her first murder case a year before, when she was still a rookie in the Crim’, the Police Judiciaire’s criminal brigade. In fact, if it weren’t for them, she’d probably be back watching the clock as a lieutenant in the fiscal fraud squad instead of running her own commissariat.

  Beyond the glass wall of her office Capucine could see the third brigadier, Momo Benarouche—Momo to everyone—at his desk in the squad room, glowering at a pile of official forms as blue uniformed officers and unshaven, be-jeaned, sneakered plainclothes detectives gave him as wide a birth as they could.

  She snapped herself back to the present and tapped the file. “She’s doing very well indeed with her con. By the way, our perp has been given a name. With their usual love of high culture, headquarter
s seems to think she’s the archetypal Disney character and is calling her La Belle au Marché Dormant—the Sleeping Beauty of the Market.”

  David and Isabelle snorted derisively. Headquarters, the Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire, was well known for its tragicomic bureaucracy.

  “The Americans were both professors of French philology at someplace called Valparaiso University, which, oddly enough, is in Indiana. They’d done an apartment swap for a month and—”

  “Why the fuck would anyone who lived in the Sixth Arrondissement of the City of Light want to spend a month in Indiana?” David asked. “Man, things just keep getting weirder and weirder around here.”

  Capucine smiled at him with the tolerance of a parent for a wayward child. “After three days of tender loving care from these Indiana philologists, the Belle walked off with an illuminated page from a medieval langue d’oïl manuscript they had bought the week before. Apparently, the thing was rare enough for the Bureau of Antiquities to question if they would allow it to be taken out of the country.”

  Both Isabelle and David pursed their lips in respect. “It’s nice their little problem was solved for them,” Isabelle said.

  “In Neuilly,” continued Capucine, reading from the file, “she walked off with a Daumier caricature. The civil servant in question collects them. But this was the only one in his collection that was an original drawing and not a print. It’s also worth thousands.”

  David and Isabelle nodded appreciatively.

  “The two magazine illustrators, a couple, apparently”—Capucine paused for a beat while Isabelle looked up sharply—“were robbed of a small Marie Laurencin watercolor portrait of someone called Natalie Clifford Barney. It was the single picture stolen from among at least fifty in their apartment.”

  “Barney was a great person,” Isabelle said, “an American writer who expatriated herself to Paris to become one of the pathfinders of the lesbian movement. I’m sure a portrait of her by Laurencin is worth a bundle.”

  “Voilà!” said David with a broad smile from which any trace of sarcasm had been scrupulously scrubbed. “Finally, the ideal case for our dear Isabelle.”

  Isabelle’s pupils contracted and her face darkened. She punched David in the arm, putting her whole upper body behind the blow, visibly causing him considerable pain.

  “In fact, David, I am putting Isabelle in charge. This inquiry is just what I’m going to need to support her application for promotion to brigadier-chef. And you’re going to back her up—without any lip, understood?” Isabelle put her thumb to her nose and wiggled her fingers at David as he massaged his arm. “Here’s the file,” Capucine said, thumping the dossier on the desk in front of Isabelle. “I’m off for a week’s vacation. You can tell me all about your dazzling progress when I get back.”

  “Where are you going, Commissaire?” Isabelle asked. “Some fabulous island in the Antilles?”

  “No such luck. Just to my uncle’s house in the country. I’m not sure how it’s going to work out. It’s the first time I’ve been down there since I joined the force. He was pretty upset at the time.”

  “Yeah, I got that, too,” David said. “My mother was devastated.”

  “She had her heart set on you becoming a hairdresser, right?” Isabelle asked.

  “My uncle tells everyone I’m a civil servant with the Ministry of the Interior,” Capucine said. “I don’t know how he’s going to react to seeing me as a flic in the flesh.”

  “Why don’t you wear your uniform?” Isabelle asked. “You look fabulous in blue, and all that silver braid would set off your hair.”

  From the look Capucine gave her, Isabelle knew for sure she had gone too far.

  CHAPTER 2

  When Capucine arrived at her apartment in the Marais, she found her husband, Alexandre, in his study, sprawled in a decrepit leather club chair, frenetically typing with two fingers on a laptop nestled against the gentle protuberance of his stomach, the stubby remnant of a Havana Partagas Robusto clenched between his teeth, an empty on-the-rocks glass perched precariously on the arm of the chair, and piles of newspapers and magazines heaped in a sloppy bulwark on the floor. As she walked in, he continued to stare fixedly at the screen and lifted one hand, index finger raised, wagging it slowly from left to right in supplication to be allowed to finish his sentence. Alexandre was the senior food critic for Le Monde, the grande dame of Paris journalism, and Capucine was well versed in the tensions of deadlines. He typed energetically.

  “Voilà,” he said, raising his cigar stub high over his head for histrionic effect. “ ‘Chef Jacques Legras’ sole aim appears to be to astonish the bourgeois with vulgar pyrotechnics so far removed from the actual taste of food that what Marcel Pagnol said of aioli—if nothing else, it has the virtue of keeping flies at a distance—can be said of Legras’ entire oeuvre.’ What do you think of that? One more enemy of beauty and truth dealt the bloody nose he so richly deserves.”

  “What amazes me is that you say these things and these chefs are still delighted when you go back to their restaurants. If I were Chef Legras, I’d pee in your soup,” Capucine said.

  “In Legras’ case it would be an improvement. Anyway, he’s desperate for his third star and mistakenly feels he’ll never get it unless I bestow my toothy smile on him. So he’ll keep on trying until he goes to the great kitchen in the sky or learns to cook properly. Think of me as the great protector of French gastronomy soldiering cheek by jowl with the great defender of French deontology.”

  Refusing to be goaded, Capucine rocked the unstable pile of newspapers on the floor with an elegant toe. “Are you erecting fortifications as a defense against being carted off to the country?”

  “Pas du tout. I’m officially on vacation as of right now!” Alexandre said, tapping the “ENTER” button with élan, closing the laptop with a snap, and dropping it on top of the pile of newspapers, which threatened to topple. “Copy submitted. Pastoral rustification about to begin. A whole week of communion with the spirits of wood and wind and you and most especially you!” Alexandre said, standing up and bending his wife backward in a thirties Hollywood kiss.

  Gasping for breath, Capucine said, “Don’t get any ideas. We have to pack. You promised. Oncle Aymerie is expecting us for lunch tomorrow. Remember, a quick lunch just with the family, then dinner with some guests, and then a pheasant shoot on Sunday. He said it would be his first time out in a week. I can’t imagine why. Normally he shoots every day in season.”

  Alexandre said something, but since he was nibbling her neck, Capucine missed the gist. As she was about to reply, he swept an arm under her legs and picked her up. Capucine’s mood played a vigorous volley between irritation and attraction. For a half second her muscles prepared a blow that had probably been used by the police since the long-gone days when street savate was the accepted means of dealing with the vicious apaches. But at love-forty she relaxed and melted into Alexandre’s arms. Her friends could never believe that her relationship with a husband almost twice her age could be so physical, but it really was.

  The next morning Capucine woke at a respectable hour and, not finding her satin robe, went to the kitchen as she was. She deftly made coffee with the Pasquini, a professional machine she had given Alexandre for Christmas years before, which, somehow, he was unable to master, his only failing as a consummate chef. Certain that Alexandre would not rise before eleven, she racked her brains for an excuse to offer Oncle Aymerie for missing his welcoming lunch. She was fully aware that if Alexandre walked in while she was in her current déshabillé, they would probably miss dinner as well, but she brooded on, tranquil in the knowledge that it would take an earthquake to rouse him.

  This visit to the country had been like a canker in her mouth that she could not resist exploring with her tongue no matter how much the probing hurt. Of the family, Oncle Aymerie, her mother’s elder brother—the paterfamilias who had inherited the title, the sixteenth-century château, and the fortune to keep it up—h
ad been the most dismayed at her decision to join the police and the least sympathetic to her explanation that intimate contact with the grit of Paris’s streets was essential to her blossoming as a person. As a result, she had not been back to Maulévrier in three years, even though she deeply missed the surrogate childhood home her parents had consigned her to as they departed on their frequent world travels. When Oncle Aymerie had called a few weeks before, she had suddenly felt he might be, maybe, finally ready to attempt a reconciliation. But as she sipped her coffee, her confidence evaporated and she toyed with the idea of picking up the phone and booking tickets for Guadeloupe before it was too late.

  Two coffees later her resolve had returned and she heard Alexandre grunting and thumping his way into the bathroom. She beat a hasty retreat, slipped on a pair of jeans and an oversized Breton fisherman’s sweater, returned to the kitchen, and had the Pasquini whistling away cheerfully by the time he came in.

  “You won the battle but not the war,” Capucine said. “We’ve missed lunch but are going to leave as soon as we’ve packed. We’ll eat on the road.”

  “Lunch on the road?” Alexandre grimaced. “Poisoned by fast food on the autoroute? Never. That’s no way to start a holiday. But don’t despair. The good news is that it just so happens that I’ve been invited to the opening of a new little bistro only a few streets away. We can dart in, have a little something sur le pouce—on our thumbs, as they say—before we zip off to Normandy.”

  Capucine ground her teeth. She knew all about whisking in and out of restaurant openings. Her irises darkened from their normal cerulean to the purple of a stormy sea in midwinter. These physiological changes were not lost on Alexandre, who, with as much dignity as he could muster, trotted off to the bedroom to pack, coffee cup in hand, Capucine close in his wake.

  As Alexandre started filling his suitcase, Capucine was again reminded that she had been married to Alexandre little more than two years and that, even though she knew he had extended family vaguely in the country, she had no experience of him extra-muros—beyond the walls of Paris. As he made neat piles of his country togs on the bed, she found it hard to imagine he had ever left Paris at all. He unfolded and admired a pair of extraordinarily baggy knickers that she thought might possibly match a disreputable tweed jacket she refused to allow him to wear outside the apartment.