Crime Fraiche

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Authors: Alexander Campion

BOOK: Crime Fraiche
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Also by Alexander Campion:
 
THE GRAVE GOURMET
CRIME FRAÎCHE
 
 
ALEXANDER CAMPION
 
 
 
KENSINGTON BOOKS
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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
G
oddamn 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
“S
o 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, headquarters 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.

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