Murderous Mistral Read online

  Heavy building equipment had ripped up the tarmac, as if it was an orange that had been peeled, and even the sidewalks looked as if hand grenades had exploded on them. The façades of the houses shook with the noise of jackhammers and drills wielded by men in helmets and protective clothing. White dust irritated their eyes and throats and covered the Mégane, which Blanc left between a digger and a pile of gravel.

  “They’ve been working on Place Morgan for three months. Everything is supposed to be better when they’ve finished. But one thing’s sure: It won’t be easy to find a parking space anymore. I’m not even sure we’ll still have streetlights. These guys aren’t exactly specialist electricians.” Tonon nodded at a restaurant with its window broken and the plasterwork covered in soot. “When they began work, they sliced into the electric cables underground. The next day they reconnected them, but they connected the mains cable to the restaurant’s electricity supply and set the freezer and oven on fire.”

  “I’m amazed Le Bruchec can work in all this chaos.”

  “Architects are used to building work and noise, and in any case his office is down a side street.”

  Tonon led him down a shady alleyway, and stopped outside a nineteenth-century building with a heavy wooden door almost ten feet high. On it was a brass plate that read: LE BRUCHEC, ARCHITECTE.

  Two minutes later Blanc was staring at a double-barreled shotgun.

  Le Bruchec had let them in himself, saying his secretary was on holiday. He led them into his studio where the weapon hung on the wall next to an enormous buffalo head.

  “A trophy, from Africa,” the architect said, slightly embarrassed by the look on the captain’s face. “I was a keen hunter when I was young. Today I let off steam playing tennis and golf. I find it suits me better.”

  “Suits the animals better too, I imagine,” Blanc muttered. “Monsieur Le Bruchec, why did you not tell us you had spoken to Charles Moréas just a few hours before his death?”

  Le Bruchec took a deep breath and stared out of the window. “That was stupid of me,” he admitted. “How did you find out? No, it doesn’t matter.” He sighed. “Although ‘spoken to’ is hardly the right expression. I said salut and Moréas didn’t reply. That was fairly normal.”

  “But nonetheless you were down at the garbage dump where his incinerated body was found.”

  Le Bruchec held up his hands. “I didn’t do it. I went there on Sunday to dump some trash left over from building the fence. I simply bumped into Moréas. It’s not unusual to bump into people. I completely forgot about it afterwards.”

  “You claim somebody tried to break into your house on Saturday. You suspected it was Moréas. The same man you bumped into on the following day. Didn’t you mention it? Accuse him? Did you not discuss it at all?”

  “What, and have him beat me up at the garbage dump?” The architect shook his head. “You didn’t know him, mon Capitaine. I was angry enough, but I didn’t say anything.”

  “What time was it when you bumped into him?”

  Le Bruchec thought for a moment. “About three or four P.M., I think.”

  “How long were you at the dump for?”

  “It took me about ten minutes to empty the trailer. Fifteen at most.”

  “Were you alone? Maybe somebody who worked there helped you?”

  “At weekends there are only a few people working down there, just to keep an eye on things. I unloaded the trailer on my own.”

  “And then?”

  Le Bruchec shrugged. “Then I left. It’s not the sort of place you hang about longer than necessary.”

  “Was Moréas still there when you left?”

  The architect thought for a moment. “I didn’t pay much attention to him. He was messing around over by the Dumpster. But yes, I think he was.”

  Blanc remembered that the dead man’s Yamaha bike had still been chained up. “Did your neighbor also have trash to dispose of?” He was wondering what Moréas might have been able to carry on a motorbike.

  Le Bruchec rubbed his thumb and middle finger together. “He was scavenging. Moréas wasn’t exactly the type to take his garbage down to a dump. He just left it outside his house or threw it away in the forest. I imagine he was rooting around in the Dumpster to see if there was anything of value. Old computers, phones, stuff like that. I had the impression he hung around there most of the day waiting for people like me to turn up and throw stuff away. Then he went through it to see if there was anything worth having. Like I said, a scavenger.”

  Blanc leaned toward Tonon and whispered, “Call the crime scene people. Have them go through the Dumpster.”

  The lieutenant nodded and left the studio.

  “Why didn’t you mention to us that you’d met Moréas?” Blanc asked when his colleague had left the room.

  Le Bruchec rubbed his eyes with one hand. “When I made the complaint on Monday I didn’t think it was important. What had it to do with the attempted break-in? In any case I had forgotten about it by then. Then when you told me Moréas had been killed I was shocked. I had accused him of a crime. I had bumped into him on the day he died. I thought if I admitted that you would arrest me as a suspect.”

  “Instead, the chance of you being arrested has dramatically increased,” the captain said softly. “You have to admit that your behavior is suspicious.”

  “I didn’t do it!” Le Bruchec insisted. “When I drove away from the damn garbage dump Moréas was still alive.”

  Blanc thought for a moment. Should he tell Madame Vialaron-Allègre that Le Bruchec should be arrested as a suspect? How would the juge d’instruction react? She was from the Midi, as was Le Bruchec. It was quite possible that they’d known one another forever. It was quite possible that she would see such a suggestion as overenthusiastic and ill considered. What proof did he have? No. He would be giving her a chance to accuse him of unprofessional behavior. An unforgivable error. Then, a quick chat with her husband and he would find himself transferred to Lorraine.

  “You’ll be hearing from us,” he said in as friendly a tone as possible, and got to his feet.

  * * *

  He found his colleague outside in the shade. “So, what did you make of him?” Tonon asked, as they strolled back to the patrol car.

  “Too good to be true. Le Bruchec has a motive: He felt threatened by Moréas, suspected him of attempted burglary. Le Bruchec knew Moréas visited the dump regularly—knew he searched through the Dumpster. He could have planned for them to bump into each other. He can shoot—there’s proof enough hanging on his wall. He didn’t tell us about the meeting. And, Le Bruchec ran into him in the window of time when we think the murder took place.”

  The lieutenant shook his head. “There’s a catch. Our witness, Julien, said he saw Le Bruchec down there about three or four P.M., but he also said there were more people than normal around. Too many. I mean, somebody was shot dead and his body incinerated down there, but only spotted by one of the staff on Monday morning. It can’t have happened in the early afternoon. Somebody would have reported it on Sunday.”

  “All we know from Julien is that he saw Le Bruchec down there about three or four P.M. God help us, can nobody around here remember an exact time? And we have no witnesses to say Le Bruchec left again after no more than fifteen minutes, as he claims.”

  “You think the architect waited until he and Moréas were there on their own, and then killed him?”

  “It’s a possibility we can’t exclude.”

  “But you can’t prove it.”

  “So what now?”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  “I’ll take you back to Gadet,” Blanc promised him.

  “But you won’t have a glass of rosé with me?”

  “The sun hasn’t gone down yet.”

  Blanc carefully circumnavigated the diggers, their engines ticking in the heat. He thought about what Vialaron-Allègre had said to him about his lack of experience in the Midi. You don’t know anybody. He felt like a European an
thropologist stranded on an island in the South Pacific. All the locals invited him to join in their rituals, but he didn’t understand any of them. “I need a fixer,” he said aloud. “A spider in the web, someone who knows everything about everyone, including the stuff you won’t find in the newspapers or official documents.”

  “‘Newspaper’ might just be the key,” Tonon said, clearly in a good mood. “Gérard Paulmier. Retired journalist who used to work at La Provence. Knows every family, every company, every restaurant, every politician, every farmer. Still writes a bit now and then for his old paper. But spends most of his time, allegedly, working on an oral history of the region.”

  “A journalist, happy to talk to the police?”

  “A pensioner, with too much time on his hands. Mention anything you like to him and he’ll tell you all you want to know.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “He has a little house in Caillouteaux.”

  “Want to come along?”

  “I’ll wait for your summarized version tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Blanc parked the Mégane on the outskirts of Caillouteaux; the narrow alleyways were blocked with cars parked all over the place, all with the local “13” number plate. There was a lot of noise in the distance. Loudspeakers. A woman’s voice. Applause. Even before he reached the church square he found himself looking at the backs of a couple hundred people. The open space was filled with people with tricolors flying above their heads, along with images of Marianne and slogans of the Front National. There was a smell of sweat and picnic food between the sunlit walls. On a podium in front of the house with the painted façade stood the blond woman he had seen smiling down from the poster opposite the town hall. The PR system had been so badly set up that her voice echoed in his ears and he could only make out a few words: “Euro … austerité … Marseille … France…” then last of all, “Kalashnikov.” The people all around him could hardly have understood more than he did, but were listening with a sort of ill-tempered politeness. Every now and then some of them would wave their flags or shout slogans that were no more comprehensible than the words of the speaker on the podium. He felt as if he had been catapulted into some piece of theater, as an extra on the edge of a crowd scene where everyone else was simultaneously dull, conservative, and dangerous. The young workers and their girlfriends in short skirts from cheap shops, the dumpy middle-aged women, the pensioners in dark glasses with battered hats didn’t exactly look as if they were going to light up flaming torches and storm the houses of their fellow citizens. But he could literally smell their anger, their sense of disappointment, and above all their fear—fear for their jobs, their savings, their children’s schools, fear of the unfamiliar, the new, the threatening. Mayor Lafont was right. Fear was a vote-winner.

  He made a detour around the town center, through empty alleyways. The sound of his cell phone startled him so much he nearly threw himself to the ground. It was one of the crime scene forensic squad: They had got back to the dump too late and the Dumpster full of old metal had been emptied. Next time, if he wanted something like that, he would do better to advise them a bit earlier.

  Blanc managed to suppress a sharp reply, and just said thanks. Before long he found himself standing outside the address Tonon had given him: an old, narrow, two-story house hemmed in between two much larger buildings, like a small boy squeezed between his two bigger brothers. Blanc couldn’t see a bell so he lifted the heavy bronze door knocker and let it bang with a dull thud.

  A small, thin man in his midsixties with gray hair, gray eyes, and an amiable face opened the door. The captain introduced himself and explained what he was doing there: “My colleague, Lieutenant Tonon, suggested I talk to you.”

  “Marius still in the cops, then, is he? Managed to hold down his job all these years, despite the old scandal? How long ago was that? Ten years?”

  The captain had no idea what the man was talking about and mumbled something vague. Paulmier led him into a living room with plush upholstered armchairs, an overstuffed bookcase, and a glass table. There were framed photographs everywhere: men, women, and children all smiling out at him, many of them from a beach, others in the mountains. In one corner an old computer stood on a little cabinet, humming away. No sign of a television.

  “You were a journalist for many years,” Blanc began, slumping into one of the soft armchairs and immediately wondering if he would ever get out of it.

  “I still knock out a piece most days for my old colleagues, as a freelancer,” Paulmier said.

  “Then you’ll know the sort of people I’m interested in, people like Charles Moréas.”

  The old guy laughed. “Nobody knew Moréas. Sure, everybody on the desk had heard the name at one time or other. There was that old story about the highway robberies and the tourist who got killed. He got arrested, but the case was never tried. That got the cops upset. But since then? He wasn’t exactly a headline-grabber.”

  “But he was a criminal?”

  “Maybe, but a small fish. Thievery, if and when he got the chance. Dealing in stolen goods, stuff like that. A veritable saint compared with the guys from Marseille.”

  “Maybe he’d got involved with them.”

  “The dealers down there wouldn’t waste five seconds of their time on somebody like Moréas. He got more and more weird over the years. Used to drive his enduro bike through the woods, swearing at anybody who got in his way. Lived in that cabane of his like a clochard. Apparently he’d been offered money a few times, or so I’ve heard, to buy that piece of land. He’d inherited it from his parents, but never sold off a single square yard, even though land down here in the Midi is worth a fortune. He could have made himself rich, without doing a stroke of work. But Moréas wasn’t interested. I think he had a screw loose in the head.”

  “It can’t have been easy being his neighbor.”

  “Le Bruchec? I find his architectural style too modern, but apart from that he’s okay. Pillar of the establishment. Does his bit for charity. On lots of committees.”

  “Does well in business?”

  “Very well. Ever since land down here got so expensive, only the really rich can have new houses built. Parisians, Russians, Brits. And anybody who is rich enough doesn’t bother to count the cents. Nice business for an architect.”

  “Were Le Bruchec and Moréas enemies?”

  “Le Bruchec has no enemies. Moréas had no friends.”

  “Do you know if Le Bruchec ever said he felt threatened by his neighbor?”

  The old journalist shook his head. “No. He drinks rosé at the Gadet town festival, plays tennis with his friends, fishes in the Touloubre. Not exactly the sort of stuff you do if you’re in fear for your life, is it?”

  Blanc leaned back cautiously in his chair, not sure if the back would really support him. “What about Monsieur Fuligni? Did he feel threatened? He and Moréas had an argument about a mooring at the harbor in Saint-César.”

  “Oh, stuff and nonsense. Pascal has too much on his plate. If somebody annoys him he swears at them, and then five minutes later he’s forgotten it. He built half of Caillouteaux. Him and his pal, Lafont.”

  “The mayor?”

  “Those two have known each other for decades. In the seventies and eighties Caillouteaux was well on the way to becoming a ghost town. The fashion back then was all for steel-and-glass high-rises. Nobody wanted to live in a medieval house up in the hills. Lafont and Fuligni between them renovated lots of houses around here, or persuaded their owners to. Now you won’t find an empty building here. The town’s been gentrified.”

  “I noticed the house on the square, with the painted façade. And the naked bronze beauty.”

  Paulmier shook his head, and gave an embarrassed smile. “Sometimes Lafont overdoes it. But better a little too much than much too little, don’t you think?”

  “It must have cost a lot of money, even now—Lafont has this dream of a médiathèque.”

  “And it’l
l happen. The plans have been sitting in the town hall for ages. They’re due to lay the foundation stone soon. Just in time for the election.” He nodded toward the window: “But it’ll be interesting to see how he does against the blondie from the Front.”

  “But where does all the money come from?” the captain pressed him.

  “Midi Provence. That’s the name of an organization that groups together the communes around the Étang de Berre. They coordinate projects that one little community couldn’t manage on its own: roads, schools, buses, environmental protection, things like that. They get money from Paris and from taxes on local businesses. An annual budget of some eight million euros. That would have been five billion francs in old money,” Paulmier added, as if only the old currency made any sense.

  “Used for bribes?”

  “No need. Midi Provence includes Berre and Fos, and they have factories, the oil tanker harbor, and the refinery. They get so much tax money from the local industries that they don’t know what to do with it. Some of it goes to communes like Caillouteaux. A pretty little place a long way from the horrid industry—it’s a perfect model.”

  “Lafont is using money from an oil refinery to prettify his little town?” Blanc reckoned there had to be endless ways in which that money could be diverted elsewhere.

  Paulmier saw what was on his mind and grinned. “Nobody has ever complained. There’s more than enough to go round.”

  The captain thought back to the Front National march. “Maybe not quite enough,” he muttered. But what could any of this have to do with the murder of a loner like Moréas? “Did Fuligni and Moréas argue often?”

  “You mean about the mooring down at the harbor. It’s something of a local legend. Half Saint-César laughed about it behind Fuligni’s back. He should have known that someone like Moréas was never going to give in. But Pascal is a thickhead and stubborn as an ox. He thought his smile could win over anyone, even a clochard from the woods. When it failed he got furious. More out of frustrated vanity than because he really worried about the issue. Sooner or later he’ll get a bigger spot for his yacht anyway, without arguing about it with Moréas.”