Killer Critique

Book 3: Capucine Culinary Mystery

by Alexander Campion

Genres: Mystery; Cozy Mystery; International Crime & Mystery; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Between haute couture and haute cuisine, Parisian Commissaire Capucine Le Tellier finds murder to be more than the spécialité du jour. . . When the senior food critic for Le Figaro is found face-first in a plate of Ravioles d'homard, there seem to be as many suspects as there are restaurants in the City of Light. Yet Capucine feels she'll solve the case quicker than it takes to find a 3-star rating in the Michelin Guide. Un problem, murders of food critics have become an epidemic. And there are just as many suspects, including a sexy starlet, an award-winning novelist, and a smorgasbord of aggravated chefs. While Capucine struggles to zero in on the murderer's tastes, she is confronted with a false dilemma: file and forget the case, leaving restaurant critics across France vulnerable to a killer's episodic cravings, or use her husband, Alexandre, himself a famous food journalist, as irresistible bait. Praise for Alexander Campion's Capucine Culinary Mysteries "Will appeal to a diversity of readers. Devotees of G.M. Maillet and Charles Todd will especially enjoy this different and delicious series." -- Booklist on Killer Critique "[A] countryside romp." -- Kirkus Reviews on Crime Fraîche "An astonishing debut that raises the bar on today's detective novel." --Aram Saroyan on The Grave Gourmet

Release date: July 11, 2012

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 337

Sample

“Is he dead yet?” Brigadier David Martineau asked. “No, not quite. Wait a minute. Hang on. There. Now he’s dead,” Commissaire Capucine Le Tellier replied. The other detectives were struck dumb. Hardened as they were, actually seeing a life escape from its body was deeply moving.

For Capucine the scene was all the more disturbing because the context was so familiar. Gautier du Fesnay, senior food critic for Le Figaro, good friend of her husband, Alexandre, senior food critic for Le Monde, was—had been—very proud of his blog. He delighted in going to restaurants he was reviewing, placing a miniature camcorder on the table, and making acerbic comments as he ate. He would edit them at home, adding a little background music, blurring out his face, inserting a graphic of the noise level and ambient temperature, winding up with a shot of the check. Even if he loved the meal, he always managed to sound cynical and drop a caustic barb or two.

Capucine knew that Fesnay had taken far more pleasure in these little videos than in his highly polished pieces for Le Figaro, which Alexandre claimed were the summum bonum of food criticism.

The clip had started out exactly like all the others. Fesnay had walked jerkily down the rue de Varenne, the street still bright in the summer twilight, swinging the camcorder left and right, making supercilious comments about the austerity of the ministerial façades until, hesitantly, the street blossomed with chic boutiques as it approached the rue du Bac. As if by accident, Fesnay had discovered Chez Béatrice with a little exclamation of joy.

The camcorder had dropped to waist level as Fesnay entered the restaurant and was shown to his table. Once seated, Fesnay had placed it on the table and had twisted the zoom lens to extreme wide angle. Not yet blurred out, his face was aristocratically haughty as he had scanned the menu and wine list, chatted with the waiter, and ordered. There had been a long, slow pan of the room, filled with cheerful well-to-do youths, promising-looking, young bankerly types and their wives, well dressed from bon chic, bon genre boutiques but still a few years away from bespoke tailors and forays to Givenchy.

The waiter had appeared with a dish of pâté. “Ah, the famous truffled duck foie gras from the Landes,” Fesnay had whispered. He cut a small piece, put it on a piece of toast, nibbled, pursed his lips, and nodded in silent approval.

After a fifteen-minute interval the waiter had returned and placed a large, flat soup bowl in front of Fesnay. The camcorder had been lifted, the zoom homed in on a closeup, and the dish examined meticulously. In a conspiratorial murmur Fesnay had announced, “Ravioles d’homard—lobster ravioli—in a sauce of carrot and tandoori spices, served with a mousseline of citrus fruit confit.” The dish seemed to consist of three or four oversized raviolis in a copious, thick sauce. Fesnay had held a fork in his left hand and a large spoon in his right and had delicately cut a quarter out of one of the raviolis and scooped it up with a good quantity of the sauce.

“Pas mal. Pas mal du tout—not bad at all,” Fesnay had stage-whispered conspiratorially.

As he swallowed, he had jerked slightly, as if repressing a hiccup. The camcorder had continued to admire him placidly. He had remained immobile for lengthy seconds, holding the fork and spoon in clenched fists over the sides of the bowl. Slowly, with the solemnity of a marble Roman statue toppling off its base, he had leaned forward, almost imperceptibly at first, gradually accelerating until he had collapsed face-first into his bowl, crating a splashed nimbus of crimson sauce.

It was the interminable wait after the crash that had prompted David’s question. Finally, another eternity after Capucine’s diagnostic, a hand had appeared, lifted Fesnay’s head, turned it sideways, and let it sink back into the bowl. Fesnay stared into the camera with immobile, glassy doll eyes. A piece of ravioli stuck to the tip of his nose.

“So if it’s curare, like the guy from forensics thought, he could be alive here, unable to move, crying out his anguish in tormented silence,” David said, twisting one of his locks into a tight noose around a finger, intent on the screen.

“Nah, he’s dead, all right,” said Brigadier-Chef Isabelle Lemercier with a snort. “He musta drowned in the sauce. Don’t need forensics to tell us that, right, Momo?”

Brigadier Mohammed Benarouche, a giant North African of few words even when he was in a good mood, glowered at his immediate superior.

All four stared at the screen, each horrified in his own way. Absolutely nothing happened. The scene was as static as a photograph. Finally, as if it had been the entire purpose of the cinematographic endeavor, the scrap of ravioli fell off Fesnay’s nose. The screen went black.

Five hours earlier Capucine had been awash in bliss, supine on a long wooden bench next to the huge Provençal table that dominated their kitchen, as Alexandre massaged her feet, prattling on about cooking. Her tummy had been pleasantly full of his latest creation, a large scoop of lamb ragù served on a bed of chrome-yellow risotto alla milanese. The secret to the ragù, she would have learned had she been listening, was to puree the vegetables in a processor and then brown them to the point of cruelty before adding the rest of the ingredients, and the sine qua non of the risotto was to add the threads of saffron only at the very end, precisely at the moment when the dish’s climax was at hand.

The soothing lapping of her husband’s mellifluous prose had been interrupted by the shrill note of the phone. Despite Alexandre’s insistence that she let the little gremlins of electronic technology deal with it, Capucine had recognized the leaden timbre of the call to duty and snatched the cordless handset off its base.

Contrôleur Général Tallon, her boss’s boss and well into the stratosphere of the Police Judiciaire hierarchy, was known for his testiness. “Commissaire, I hope you weren’t planning on an early evening. I’m assigning you to a case because of your knowledge of the restaurant industry. A man has been killed in a restaurant on the rue de Varenne in the Seventh called Chez Béatrice. The chef and owner, a certain Béatrice Mesnagier, called it in, and I want you in charge.”

At the words “restaurant industry” Capucine had beckoned to Alexandre, who had put his ear next to hers against the receiver.

“I know it’s outside of your brigade’s sector, but it’s clearly your area of expertise, or at least your husband’s. Good evening, Monsieur de Huguelet.”

Capucine resisted the impulse to stare at the window to see if anyone was peeking in. Tallon’s ability to know her better than she knew herself was always unnerving.

Alexandre smiled. “Bonsoir, monsieur le contrôleur général.” He had met Tallon only twice, but the two had developed a natural affinity in the way that oil and vinegar complemented each other.

“The bad news,” continued Tallon, “is that you both must know the victim, Gautier du Fesnay. If he was a friend, I offer my most sincere condolences. Anyway, Commissaire, I need you to get right over there with some of the team from your brigade. The local police are on the scene, and you know how quickly they can muddy up a crime scene. Report to me in the morning.”

Capucine was numb. They had seen Gautier at a dinner a week before. He wasn’t an intimate friend, but he was someone they saw frequently at friends’ houses, restaurant openings, and once or twice a year at dinners in their own apartment. Gautier was unquestionably part of the furniture of their existence.

On her way to the bedroom to change she had called the front desk of her brigade and had given instructions that Isabelle, David, and Momo were to join her at the crime scene. She had stared unseeing into her closet and had finally mechanically chosen a beige linen summer suit. Even though it was by Christophe Josse and had been the pride of her summer wardrobe the year before, it was now relegated to the role of a work outfit. Behind her Alexandre had stared moodily out of the bedroom window, brooding.

“I feel guilty for having had mixed feelings for Gautier,” he had said. “He was a brilliant critic but had a decided haughty streak. Even his rave reviews always had an unpleasant twist to them. I think he made up for it with that blog of his. He spent more time on that than writing for his paper. Somehow he must have felt that those silly videos made him more human.”

“You don’t think he was just in love with his own image, even if it was blurred out?” Capucine asked as she clipped her Sig Sauer into the back of her pants.

“Possibly. It was a bone of contention with his paper. His blog had a huge following and they felt it pulled readers away. I guess that’s not going to be a problem anymore. Merde, I’ll miss him, but there are going to be a lot of chefs in town who will breathe a sigh of relief tomorrow morning.”

“What about Béatrice Mesnagier?” Capucine asked. “What do you know about her?”

“Her name’s not really Mesnagier. She’s the only child of Paul Renaud, the owner of that huge drinks business. They’ve now bought out so much of their competition that they must be the second or third largest producer of alcoholic beverages in the world. A real empire. The story has it that she wants nothing to do with the family and opened her restaurant under the name Mesnagier with money she borrowed from a bank.”

“The name sounds medieval.”

“It’s intended as a joke. A double joke, actually. Le Mesnagier de Paris—The Paris Housewife—is one of the first cookbooks ever published. In thirteen ninety-three, if memory serves, supposedly by some bourgeois type hoping to inspire his wife. Renaud might have chosen the name to let her father know that as far as she was concerned, tying her apron strings to a stove was preferable to becoming an executive in the family business. Also the real author of the book was the famous Taillevent.”

“Like the restaurant?” Capucine asked.

“Exactly. Since Taillevent is supposed to be the best restaurant in the world, I suspect La Béatrice is hinting that she’s aiming at taking their place.”

“The things you know. So she’s an heir to the Pastis Renaud fortune? And with all those millions she spends her evenings sweating in a kitchen? Well, well, well.”

“Don’t be so snide, my dear. I seem to recall you infuriating your parents by joining the police just so you could get your hands deep into the nitty-gritty. In her case it wasn’t the police, it was the rough-and-tumble of the professional kitchen.”

Capucine had pursed her lips in a theatrical pout.

“Good for her, then,” she had said. “Can she cook?”

“Can she cook? Very definitely. When she first opened the restaurant, she stuck to a menu based on the dishes of her childhood in the Midi. At her opening I recall starting with a fougasse stuffed with a complicated tapenade and then a main dish of oxtail with foie gras. A skilled twist on traditional recipes. Now that her commercial success is assured, her cuisine is becoming more sophisticated and she’s edging into the world of genuine haute cuisine. She’s definitely someone to keep an eye on.”

The three brigadiers continued to stare at the black computer screen until Capucine picked up the palm-sized camcorder splotched with black fingerprint powder and unplugged it from her computer. She leaned back, producing an outraged squeal from the swivel of the ancient government-issue office chair, and put her legs up on the desk, a gesture that invariably produced an admiring look from Isabelle and a knowledgeable comment about her shoes from David. But this time only Momo spoke.

“Jeez, Commissaire, that was the first time I’d ever seen a snuff film. Can’t say I want to see another one.”

“Momo,” Isabelle said testily. “That’s not what snuff films are. Snuff films are the worst possible manifestation of female oppression. There’s humiliating sex, and at the end—” She stopped short as the three other detectives exploded into laughter.

“All right, Brigadier-Chef,” Capucine said with a smile. “Walk us through what we have here.”

Isabelle read stiffly from her notebook in the litany of police officialese. “Du Fesnay, Gautier, journalist, unmarried, residing at thirty-two rue Cardinet in the Seventeenth Arrondissement, found apparently murdered in a restaurant by the name of Chez Béatrice in the Seventh Arrondissement. The identification of the body is from the victim’s identity papers and has been confirmed by Commissaire Le Tellier, who was acquainted with him.

“The INPS forensics expert on the scene, Ajudant Dechery, believes that the death was due either to a nerve poison or curare since (a) there is a small puncture wound just under the victim’s right ear and (b) the victim fell into his plate of food, which was very liquid and, judging from the amount of said food visible inside his nostrils and throat, he continued to breath even though he had collapsed and apparently was unable to move. It is highly likely that the victim died by drowning in the sauce and not from the poison. Such acute muscular failure is typically associated with nerve gases and curare.”

Isabelle looked up and said in her normal voice, “Of course, we won’t know fuck all until they do the autopsy and all their cultures and whatever else it is they do, but Dechery seemed pretty sure that someone had walked by and either stabbed him or shot him with something that contained a very potent muscle relaxant.”

“Time of death?” Capucine asked.

“A few minutes after nine. We have that from the timeclock on the video and the fact that pretty much everyone in the restaurant saw him keel over just after nine. Of course only two people actually admit they saw it happen.”

“Actually,” Capucine said, wagging a size-six foot comfortably shod in Zanotti flats, thanking her guardian angel for the current trend away from high heels, “I had a word with Ajudant Dechery as they wheeled the body out. He thinks he might be seeing a glimmer of something metallic about half an inch inside the wound. He had no idea what it might be, but certainly not a bullet from a gun.”

“Air-gun pellet?” David asked.

“Yes, of course, that’s what it could be,” Capucine said. “I hadn’t thought of that. Someone could have shot him in the neck as they walked by.”

“This case is going to be a no-brainer,” Isabelle said. “It had to be someone who was either eating there or was working as waitstaff. No one could have rushed in off the street, and the cooks don’t go wandering around the restaurant, right?”

“Except for the chef,” Capucine said. “It would have been normal for her to make a little cameo appearance. My husband tells me she loves to press the flesh in the front of the house.”

“She did,” David said. “But that was half an hour before our stiff keeled over. One of the waiters told me. Those nerve things are supposed to be very fast acting. Does that mean she’s off the hook, Commissaire?”

“No, not really,” Capucine said. “You know how unreliable crowd testimonies are. She could easily have come out again. We’ll need to go into that very carefully.”

Isabelle snapped through the pages of her notebook noisily. “There were exactly ninety-two people—plus the chef makes ninety-three—who were either customers or worked in the front of the house. One of them has to be the killer. So the perp’s name is already right here in my little book. This is an all-time first!”

“Oh, goody,” David said. “A locked-room mystery. I’ve always wanted to work on one of those.”

Isabelle glared at him.

“Make that ninety-one people,” Momo said with his ponderous logic. “The chef is the boss’s husband’s pal, and the boss is close buds with one of the customers.”

“Let’s stick with ninety-three,” Capucine said. “Even if Béatrice Renaud were Alexandre’s buddy, which I don’t really think is the case, she very definitely could still be a suspect. And I was as amazed as anyone else to run into Cécile de Rougemont. It’s true she’s a very close friend, but that certainly doesn’t mean she won’t be investigated as thoroughly as anyone else.”

Ever so slightly, the three brigadiers pursed their lips, moved their eyebrows together, and nodded fractionally in a highly attenuated version of the Gallic expression of ironic incredulity.

“How many of the people in the dining room did you three talk to?” Capucine asked.

Isabelle consulted her notebook. “We had a quick word with all twenty-one of the waitstaff and eleven of the customers. We concentrated on the ones sitting nearest the victim’s table, like you said.”

“And?”

“And same as always, big nothing. None of the customers saw anything, except two women who saw Fesnay fall over. One of them wanted to get up to help him, but her husband stopped her. And the waiters did what you’d expect them to do; they got that solemn priestly look, like what was going on at their tables was as secret as confession in church.”

“But you got their names and addresses and told them not to leave Paris without permission?”

“Of course,” Isabelle said. “We even double-checked their identity papers to make sure no one was fibbing. So what do we do now, Commissaire?”

“Starting first thing in the morning, you’re going to haul each one of the ninety-three down here to the brigade and interview them formally. They’re going to be different animals outside of their comfort zone. Feel free to get tough. Use the usual tricks. You know, tell them that someone at the next table swears he saw them get up just before the murder. Scare them. When they get really desperate to get out of the interview room, they’ll spill whatever it is they might actually have seen.

“Then start going through their backgrounds. See if you can find anyone who has even the remotest connection with the victim. Same hometown, worked in the same company, you know the drill. If the murderer really is one of the people in the room, we’re going to need to find a motive.”

“And what do you want us to start doing in the fall?” Isabelle asked ironically.

“Fair enough,” Capucine said. “It is a lot of work for you three. How many backups do you need?”

“As many as I can get,” Isabelle said with a grin.

Capucine shuffled through her duty roster file. “I think I can give you five brigadiers for a week. That should give you a start. We’ll figure it out from there. By the way, I had already planned a lunch with Madame de Rougemont tomorrow, but I still want one of you three to interview her down here just like the others. What are you so happy about, Isabelle?”

“This case is a slam dunk. I mean, shit, how many times are we absolutely certain we have the perp’s name down on a piece of paper on day one? All we have to do is slog through the grunt work and we’ll have the guy in cuffs in no time at all.”

“Let’s hope it’s that simple. It might not be. I’ve been ordered to see the juge d’instruction in charge of the case tomorrow.”

“Big deal. Aren’t those guys just a formality?” David asked.

“Normally they are. But I’m sure you remember the most excellent Juge d’Instruction de La Martinière?”

“August-Marie Parmentier de La Martinière?” Isabelle asked. “How could I forget that pompous little faggot? The sun just went out of my life. Merde, it makes you want to quit the force.”

“Thinking about becoming a nun again, Isabelle?” David asked.

With blinding speed Isabelle landed a short right jab on David’s upper arm. The pain was enough to take his breath away.

At lunchtime, La Dacha—a caviar bar smack in the middle of Paris’s Golden Triangle, home to the cream of its business world—was the canteen for a select handful of investment banks, management consulting firms, and advertising agencies, the senor staffs of which felt that their expense accounts fully entitled them to lunches as exorbitant as the portions were small. In the evening the fauna expanded to include talking heads from TV news shows and senior officials from government ministries. Cécile de Rougemont was a frequent participant at both servings.

From early childhood Capucine and Cécile had been best friends, with that white-hot intensity that men invariably mistook for sexual glue. Their friendship had survived the cruel watershed when intimacy was transferred to the opposite sex and had even grown as they evolved into womanhood.

As Capucine entered, Cécile rose from the miniscule table to greet her. The two women stared deeply into each other’s eyes, embraced, kissed on both cheeks.

“I loved seeing you at work last night. Right out of a movie. So tough, so completely in charge, so ordering people right and left!” Both women laughed. “All I get to do,” Cécile continued, “is humbly offer my little opinions to my clients.”

“Humble. Right. You charge three thousand euros a day and you order your associates around like slaves. If I took that tone with my brigadiers, they’d probably shoot me in the leg.” Cécile was an associate partner—one small step away from becoming a full partner—at the most prestigious of management consulting firms, Beisdean and Company, a firm so elite that knowing the correct pronunciation—BASE-tchan—separated the winners from the losers throughout the Western business world.

A waiter in a severely starched formal white mess jacket cut off at the waist, trimmed with shiny brass buttons and gold brocade epaulets, came up with the menus. The intended effect was to vaguely evoke Czarist Russia. The menus were entirely superfluous. Both Cécile and Capucine had known the contents by heart for years.

Cécile smiled warmly at the waiter. “Hervé, just bring us a quarter of vodka and give us some time to sort ourselves out.”

The vodka came promptly: a small quarter-liter decanter frozen into a solid block of ice in a silver-plated cooler. The cooler has been dipped briefly in very hot water so that the block of ice would come free when the decanter was lifted. The waiter filled two dollhouse-sized crystal stemmed glasses. The liquid was thick and oily from being so close to its freezing point.

Both women raised their glasses and giggled happily. Capucine took a sip. The vodka was so cold, it had no taste at all, just a numbing feeling on the tongue. But once in her stomach it spread with an acid flame that melted the edge of her perpetual angst. Her shoulders relaxed a half a notch. She grabbed Cécile’s hand.

“It always does me such a world of good to see you.”

Cécile put her other hand on top of Capucine’s and squeezed her reply with an earnest smile. Then she broke the moment by tapping the back of Capucine’s hand impatiently with her index finger.

“So. Tell me, whatever happened yesterday? What did that poor man die of? Food poisoning? And who was it? Anyone we know of?”

Capucine’s answer was delayed by the return of the waiter, who announced that the restaurant had just received a good quantity of beluga caviar that was of a far better quality than he had seen in months. Capucine was impressed. Beluga, the largest grained of the three caviars, was now on the endangered species list and illegal to serve. The fact that the waiter, who knew full well that Capucine was a commissaire in the Police Judiciaire, felt not the slightest qualm in touting it spoke volumes about the insouciance of an establishment that catered to the upper echelons of politics and commerce.

“Voilà,” said Cécile. “We’ll each have fifty grams of your beluga with a mountain of toast and worry about the rest later.” She was transparently eager for the waiter to leave.

“Come on, ma belle, you’re tormenting me by not telling what happened last night.”

“It was Gautier du Fesnay. You know, the restaurant reviewer for Le Figaro.”

“You mean the one with the blog that has all those prissy videos of him eating with his face fuzzed out? Who on earth would want to kill that bumptious little man?”

“That’s the sort of thing they pay me to find out. Someone seems to have injected him with some form of nerve drug, and he fell over and drowned in his dish of lobster ravioles floating in a nice thick tandoori sauce.”

“I had that myself. It was outstanding. Good Lord, the poor man actually drowned in his dinner?” As Cécile thought about it, her face became rigid and she began to tremble. Finally, she could contain herself no longer and erupted in giggles.

“I know it’s terrible, and he must have died horribly, but what a perfectly appropriate death for that catty little snob.”

Capucine was caught by the mood and knew she was fighting a losing battle with suppressing her own giggling fit. In desperation she took a deep swig of vodka, choked, coughed, and finally broke free from her attack of fou rire.

Both women patted the tears out of the corners of their eyes with napkins, careful not to spoil their makeup.

“What was he injected with that killed him so quickly?” Cécile asked.

“The forensics people think it might have been some sort of nerve poison, curare or one of the military versions. The thinking is that it was probably an air-gun pellet tipped with curare. One of my detectives is hoping it was done with a jungle blowgun.” Capucine laughed, expecting Cécile to join in.

Cécile looked at her expressionlessly.

“Blowguns don’t shoot metallic projectiles,” Cécile said with the heavy gravitas of a Beisdean consultant. “They shoot darts made from the stems of the inayuga palm, which grows in certain parts of the Amazon rain forest. The stems soak up the curare mixture, which is then dried. The darts remain effective for years.”

“And you know this from your Beisdean Little Consultant’s Handbook, of which you read a few pages every night before bed even if you’re a bit tipsy?”

Cécile smiled tolerantly. “No. Oddly enough, I was at a reception last week at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine—you know, that old hôtel particulier in the Faubourg Saint-Germain—for some fund or other that protects Amerindians. There was an exhibit of Brazilian Indian hunting weapons with lots of blowguns and darts and bows and arrows and stuff like that. A man from the embassy gave a little lecture about the exhibit.”

“Interesting?”

“Au contraire. In fact, it was so boring that some of the guests got a little out of hand. A few golden youths who were pretty drunk to begin with decided that it would be great fun to wander off and blow darts into a portrait of the president of the republic that had just been unveiled in the reception room.”

“Really?”

“Actually, it’s a lot harder to. . .