Death of a Chef (Capucine Culinary Mystery) (16 page)

CHAPTER 24

T
he Brissac-Vantés lived on the avenue Henri-Martin—the epicenter of the moneyed citadel of the Sixteenth Arrondissement—in an apartment that took up the top floor of a Haussmann-era building. When Capucine introduced herself, Yolande extended her hand as if they were at a cocktail party. She had a pleasant, horsey face with a mouth that seemed to contain too many teeth.

“I’m Yolande Brissac-Vanté,” she said, eyeing Capucine’s light tan Sonia Rykiel blazer. “You look so familiar. I’m sure we’ve met before. But your name doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Maybe because I use my maiden name at the police and my husband’s name, Huguelet, when I’m off duty.”

“Capucine de Huguelet, of course. How silly of me! We met at a show-jumping event last summer. I remember you perfectly. Your husband was at home, writing a restaurant review, and mine was off doing Lord knows what.”

Capucine had completely forgotten the June afternoon at l’Etrier, Paris’s riding club. Show jumping had been one of Jacques’s momentary whims, and he had dragged her off one Saturday afternoon when Alexandre had been agonizing over a lengthy piece for his paper.

It was a turning point in the interview. If Capucine allowed Yolande to meander through their common acquaintances, they would bond as social equals, and Capucine needed to talk about money, an impossible barbarism among friends in Yolande’s circle.

“I’m sorry to intrude on your time,” Capucine said. “I’ll be brief. There are only a few questions I need to ask.”

Yolande did not miss the rebuff, mild as it was. Wordlessly, she led the way down an endless hallway covered in flowered silk into a darkly paneled living room, easily large enough for indoor polo.

“I’m investigating the deaths of Jean-Louis Brault and Firmin Roque. Your company has investments in both of their businesses.”

Yolande showed her many teeth in a broad smile that stopped just below her nose.

“I don’t deal with any of that. Thierry’s in charge of the investments.” She looked defensively at Capucine, as if admitting a serious fault. “You see, I don’t know anything about money. I see to the children and the houses. Thierry has been an excellent custodian of my father’s inheritance. Part of it’s still in trust, and the trust officer told me I should be very pleased with the way Thierry’s handling things.” She smiled virtuously, as if she had scored a telling point.

Capucine said nothing. A clock ticked loudly somewhere in the room.

At length Capucine said, “I understand that you’re very close friends with Sidonie Le Dréau.”

Yolande colored. “Sidonie Dabrowski. The president doesn’t like it, but she’s keeping her married name. The church is right; marriage is forever. Sidonie has been my closest friend ever since we were at boarding school together.”

Yolande paused and stared at her feet, flat on the floor, awkwardly pigeon-toed.

“She’s much happier now that she’s . . . estranged . . . from her husband. She’s a little like me. A bit . . . well . . . shy. She loathed all those receptions and dinners. Of course, Thierry and I helped out all we could and went to as many of them as possible to support her, but there were a great number we couldn’t attend. And . . . well . . . it was all a great strain on her. Now she lives in the country with the children. It’s a much more normal, more balanced life, filled with horses and dogs and green things that grow.” Yolande shored herself up with the reassuring image.

“There are rumors that some of the investments you’ve made might have a connection to Madame Le Dréau or her ex-husband.”

Behind the rigid rictus of her smile, Yolande was outraged.

“
Quelle idée!
Sidonie is just like me. She has no interest whatsoever in things that involve money. And as to her husband, you can’t think I’d have anything to do with a man who has taken up with a foreign woman a third his age with the morals of a prostitute.”

A radiant Thierry Brissac-Vanté burst into the room, dispelling the storm clouds like an emerging sun. He hugged his wife affectionately, turned to Capucine and started to kiss her on the cheek, caught himself, and said, “Commissaire, what a pleasant surprise to find you here. I’ve just got off the Eurostar from London and had no idea we had guests.” Not giving Capucine a chance to reply, he turned to his wife. “Darling, let’s drink some champagne. We need to celebrate.”

“Oh, darling, you completed your deal with Samantha Chilcott. How perfectly wonderful!”

Smiling at him with adoring eyes, Yolande left the room to get the champagne.

“Samantha Chilcott?” Capucine asked.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know who she is. The rock singer who married a famous soccer player and then started her own line of clothing? I signed her as the spokesperson for a new line of French lingerie.”

Yolande returned, followed by a male servant in a short striped jacket who was carrying a tray with three flutes and a bottle of Cordon Rouge tinkling in an ice-filled silver cooler.

Once the three glasses were filled, Brissac-Vanté raised his. “Let’s drink to Samantha Chilcott and the brand-new French chapter of her fabulous career.”

“Oh, darling! I’m so proud of you.” Yolande looked at Capucine, beaming. “Isn’t he wonderful?”

Brissac-Vanté assumed the expression of a humbly victorious warrior. “It wasn’t easy. I had the decisive dinner with her at the Connaught Hotel restaurant right after I arrived. That’s the one that’s been taken over by that young French chef. I thought adding a French touch to the occasion would be a good idea. Samantha had her agent with her. It was tough going, but I laid a pretty damn good deal on the table. They said they would think about it and get back to me the next day.” Brissac-Vanté paused to give his story dramatic effect. Yolande stared at him, unblinking, breathing through parted lips.

“And then the catastrophe. The press got ahold of my cell phone number and started calling me nonstop first thing the next morning about Firmin Roque’s death. My cell phone became useless. It wouldn’t stop ringing. An impossible situation. I had no idea the poor man had died the night before, and I had absolutely nothing to say to the press. Anyway, all I cared about was getting the call from Samantha’s agent. And I had to turn my damn phone off because of all these stupid calls from reporters. I tell you, it was a real dilemma.”

“You poor dear. What did you do?”

“Well, I thought about it very hard all though my breakfast and then bit the bullet and called the agent at exactly ten o’clock. I was going to tell him that my cell phone had broken, but before I could, he said he had been trying to reach me all morning because they
loved
the deal I had proposed and wanted to draft a contract so we could sign it.”

“Oh, darling, that must have been ever so exciting.”

“Of course, it took days and days to hammer out the wording of the contract, but now it’s all signed, sealed, and delivered.” He raised his glass in an exaggerated gesture and then drained it.

“Thierry is a real genius,” Yolande said to Capucine. “His firm is really getting going. You’ll see. In a few years he’s going to be a key figure in the French business world.” She twinkled lovingly at her husband.

“Just before you arrived, your wife and I were talking about your investments.”

The statement dampened the mood as if a heavy sea fog had descended. Yolande’s lips compressed in distaste at the breach of manners, but Brissac-Vanté smiled on resolutely at Capucine.

“Yes, we’re very proud of those projects. We add real value. It’s not about money. We give of ourselves, holding the hands of our managers and counseling them, fueling their growth.”

“Even the Faïence de Châteauneuf-sur-Loire?”

“Oh, yes,” Yolande said. “Thierry has been very supportive of the new management. And he’s going to be so needed now. It’s been a great strain on him going to all those board meetings. The Loiret is so dismal, and those awful Communists never even offer the board members a decent meal. Can you imagine?”

Capucine got up to leave. Brissac-Vanté accompanied her down the long hallway to the door.

“You know, Commissaire, that train going through that endless tunnel always frightens me. It’s the pressure of all that water. I always think if someone sneezes, the whole thing will come crashing down and I’ll be crushed to death by the weight of an entire sea.” He stopped short. “In the tunnel I couldn’t shake the thought that someone’s after me.”

“After you?”

“The standard-bearers of two of my investments have died violently. My assets are people, not companies. Do you think there’s any chance
I
might be the real target here?”

 

At eleven that night Capucine was stretched out on the crimson leather chesterfield in Alexandre’s study, her head on his lap, draining the last drops of a clear liquid from a tiny stemmed glass. After a Gorgonzola and red pear risotto and an arugula and radicchio salad with vinaigrette and walnuts, they had moved to the study to finish the evening with glasses of Poire William, an
alcool
that boasted it took seventeen pounds of Bartlett pears to make a three-quarter-liter bottle.

“Let me get you another,” Alexandre said, gently extracting himself from under Capucine’s head to go to the kitchen. In a moment he returned with a bottle and refilled her glass with the Poire, oily thick from the freezer.

“Isn’t Poire William supposed to have a pear inside, like those little ships in bottles?”

“Usually. But this is Swiss, and they probably haven’t figured out how to make a pear that will puff up when you pull a string.” Capucine slapped him playfully. “Also, it would be very un-Swiss to inflate their margins by filling a quarter of the bottle with a fruit.” Alexandre ticked Capucine’s ear and slipped back onto his spot on the couch. “How’s your case going?”

“I ran into another brick wall this morning.”

“Poor baby.”

“It’s very frustrating. Not only did I waste my morning, but now I have to fill out a lot of useless paperwork.”

“What happened?”

“I was being zealous. Brissac-Vanté is on the persons-of-interest list, so I dropped in on him. His wife was there, too. As it happens, he has an ironclad alibi for Firmin Roque’s murder. He was in London, having dinner with Samantha Chilcott, trying to get her to agree to some tacky deal with a sexy lingerie company.”

“Some people have all the luck,” Alexandre murmured.

“But the alibi still has to be confirmed. In the police anything international has a Kafkaesque bureaucracy all its own. Forms in triplicate with long explanations just so some designated official can e-mail Scotland Yard in order to get us a statement steeped in mealymouthed officialese with three drops of content per gallon of text.”

“Hang on.”

Alexandre gently lifted Capucine’s head, stood up, and extracted a well-worn leather address book from the inside pocket of his tweed jacket hanging on the back of a chair. He picked up the cordless phone receiver and, lifting Capucine’s head, resumed his position.

He dialed a number.

“Phoebe,
ma belle,
” Alexandre cooed into the phone. There was a momentary pause and then a girlish shriek, followed by an excited exclamation of “Alexandre!” more than loud enough for Capucine to hear. A minute of flirtatious patter in Alexandre’s accented English ensued. Halfway through, he cupped the receiver and said, “It’s Phoebe, the hostess at the Connaught restaurant.”

Capucine sat up. “I’m going to watch television,” she said frostily.

Alexandre raised a hand, wrinkled his forehead, and pursed his lips in admonition.

“Listen, Phoebe. Can you have a peek into your reservation book for me? I need to know if Samantha Chilcott—” He was cut short; loud exclamations leaked through the receiver.

“When did you say she was there? Last Friday? That was the twenty-second, right? And who was she with?” Long pause. Alexandre cupped his hand over the receiver. “She remembers Chilcott, and now she’s checking the reservation book.”

“So the table was booked in the name of Brissac-Vanté, I see. And who paid? Can you find that out for me? Be a dear. I’ll make it up to you.” There was a pause. Rapid chatter at the other end came out as unintelligible babble.

“That’s a very stiff price,” Alexandre said with a laugh. “But with you it would definitely be fun.”

Capucine frowned.

“She’s checking the credit card registry.”

“I’ll bet,” Capucine said, sitting on the edge of the sofa.

“American Express. Thierry Brissac-Vanté. No, I don’t need the card number,” Alexandre said with a chuckle and began cooing into the phone again.

“I won’t be back in London for a couple of weeks. . . . Of course we will. . . . You know you’re the only reason I go to London, ma chérie. . . . Bisou, bisou . . . Can’t wait.” He hung up.

“Voilà. Alibi confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt and with no bureaucracy at all.”

“I’m not impressed. And I’ll tell you something else. You’re never going to London again without me.”

CHAPTER 25

C
apucine could never make her mind up about Dong. The last time she had been there was to examine a dead body in the men’s room, famous for its urinals painted to resemble openmouthed women in garish make-up. That had revolted the feminist in her far more than she had found the murder odious.

Since then, the restaurant had been entirely revamped. A famous designer had transformed the décor into a fantasy world of bottom-lit Lucite, setting off the tracery of nighttime Paris seen through the glass dome of the rooftop greenhouse of what had been Paris’s largest department store. The cuisine was no longer an afterthought; it was now intended to be the showstopper. Aiko Kikuchi, a willowy young Japanese chef who had trained in the kitchens of the most august of three-star establishments, had taken over with éclat. As a result, the ever-bored
jeunesse dorée
had trooped back en masse.

Aiko seemed to have a genuine flair for Japanese dishes with a French twist. Belle and Zen duo of foie gras, yellowtail carpaccio, and glam-chic tomatoes all sounded undeniably inviting.

As Jacques studied the menu, Capucine examined a young thing two tables away, wearing a skirt that barely covered her crotch and, except for the three-inch heels, what looked like normal L.L. Bean rubber-soled, leather-topped boots.

“You should have invited Alexandre, too. He loves this place in its new incarnation. Well, he loves the food. The fauna, not so much.”

Jacques brayed his impossibly loud donkey laugh. The girl in the high-heeled Bean boots turned toward them with a disdainful sneer, caught sight of the source of the bray, and the sneer evolved into something decidedly more coquettish.

The meal was a success. Capucine opted for the Délice de Dong, a tasting dish of lobster spring rolls, yellowtail sashimi, tuna tartare, shrimp satay, and shiitake macaroni. Jacques ordered yellowtail carpaccio with yuzu sauce and coriander, followed by udon noodles with lobster.

They chatted away happily with their usual insouciance, each finishing the sentences of the other, as they had done virtually since they were old enough to speak. Still, the mood was not quite right. Capucine and Jacques met frequently for lunch to gossip and exchange mock flirtation, but the handful of tête-à-tête dinners they had shared had all revolved around some professional problem. Truth be told, there had only been three of them since her marriage, all at Capucine’s request when she needed her cousin to use his astonishingly broad political connections to extricate her from some quagmire or other. Jacques himself had never suggested a
dîner à deux.

Yet nothing was forthcoming. Capucine poked at her food and listened to Jacques prattle. Champagne flutes arrived inexorably. Within an hour Capucine’s shoulders had dropped a good two inches in relaxation. Maybe this was just luncheon transmogrified to a later hour. In any case it was doing her a world of good.

Plates removed, dessert refused, bubbling blue drinks emitting puffs of vapor arrived in test tubes, tokens of appreciation from the management.

The bill paid, Jacques stifled a yawn. “Bed for me,” he said.

As they left, out of the corner of her eye, Capucine caught the girl in the rubber boots following Jacques with her gaze. Capucine wondered if her own legs had looked that long when she had been that age—all of five years before.

When the valet-parking attendant drove up in the miniscule Smart Car, Jacques’s latest toy, Capucine decided that moving the fraternal lunches to the dinner hour had not been a bad idea at all. She felt at one with herself, and the frustration of her unsolvable cases had retreated to a safe middle distance.

She was so relaxed, it took her a few seconds to realize that Jacques had taken a wrong turn. They had torn up the rue du Pont Neuf at a speed faster than she would have thought possible for the little car, but instead of continuing on down the street and turning left at the rue des Halles, Jacques had ducked into the subterranean labyrinth of roads that had been built when the infamous Trou des Halles had been transformed into an underground shopping mall.

“It would have been quicker if you’d stayed on the rue du Pont Neuf ’til the end,” she said.

Jacques shined his Cheshire cat grin at her and put his index finger gently to his lips.

The drop into the underground roadway was so steep, Capucine’s stomach lurched and she tasted a redux of yellowtail. Her cell phone chirped loudly, letting her know it had lost its signal. Jacques slowed the car to a crawl. The roadway was completely deserted.

“My little cousin made me very proud today. She was brought up at the meeting of the DGSE senior officers this morning all by herself, without any help from me.”

Capucine sat up straight and stared at him intently. Jacques slowed the tiny car even further.

“Of course, I’m violating all my vows by even alluding to it.” He put his hand on Capucine’s thigh, and his fingers wandered under the hem of her skirt to the very edge of the no-man’s-land he couldn’t have breached legitimately without papal dispensation. “But our ties transcend the confines of mere words.” He snapped her lace G-string panties. “Don’t they?”

Capucine continued to stare at him wordlessly.

He put his hand back on the wheel.

“There is concern in high places about the possibility of a brouhaha surrounding the Firmin Roque case.”

“Brouhaha?” Capucine asked with a little snort.

“As I believe you’ve been told, a message was passed to the highest echelon of the police hierarchy that the case was to disappear from the public view. There is concern that this”—Jacques paused and turned to smile his irritating grin at Capucine—“
directive
will not be entirely respected at the implementation level of the force. I had to give my most ringing assurance that it would.”

Jacques slowed the car to the speed of a walking man and gave Capucine a long look, clearly searching to see if she had taken the message on board.

“You need to understand, cousine, that even if your inept efforts eventually identify a murderer, there won’t be a trial.”

“That’s absurd. Of course there will. Otherwise, it would be a miscarriage of justice.”

“It’s you who’s being absurd. Great pains were taken to achieve a successful denouement for the so-called liberation of the Faïence de Châteauneuf-sur-Loire. A catastrophic end to that episode could easily have polarized the nation’s political factions.” Jacques paused to let this sink in. “Obviously, no one wants that success to be reversed.”

“So I’m supposed to drop the case, is that it?”

“
Pas du tout.
High places have an unquenchable thirst for information, even if no action is planned.”

“And when I catch the murderer?”

“If that happens, a decision will be taken
en famille
.”

Capucine gave him a very black look.

As the car inched along, Jacques stared back at her. “Contacting a
juge d’instruction
or magistrate out of school would make things difficult for everyone, particularly you and your muscled mentor, in whom you seem to find such a satisfying outlet for your Electra complex.” He whinnied an attenuated form of his braying laugh.

“Jacques, is your shabby outfit bugging my home?”

Jacques put his hand back on Capucine’s thigh and accelerated the cramped car. They soared up the ramp of the rue de Turbigo exit.

“Spy on your domestic life? You can’t possibly think we’d corrupt the morals of our pure young operatives by subjecting them to the caterwauling that emanates from your bedroom.” His strident cackle was cut off by the happy chirp of Capucine’s phone announcing it was back in service.

“And so this insufferable tailor,” Jacques said loudly, “had the impertinence to attempt to convince me that Prince of Wales checks were démodé. He insisted on pinstripes. I look positively anorexic in pinstripes. I was so upset, I went right out and had three suits made at Lanvin, even though they just don’t understand my leg. They really never have. . . .”