Murderous Mistral Page 11

  “Did he get really furious?”

  “No. Pascal shouts and curses like the builder he is. But five minutes later he’ll sit down over a glass of rosé with you, and talk about the last Olympique de Marseille soccer game. After all, he doesn’t have much to complain about, really.” Paulmier used both hands to suggest the silhouette of an attractive woman.

  “Nastasia Constantinescu?”

  “There’s a lot of men around here who would like to have a Romanian secretary like that, even if they don’t have their own office.”

  “Madame Fuligni doesn’t mind?”

  “Oh, Miette doesn’t spend too much time on her own,” the journalist added, without going into details.

  “Merci,” Blanc said, and managed to pull himself up out of his armchair. Paulmier, who had leaped to his feet agilely, accompanied him to the door. “Funny that you should be asking so much about Moréas, though,” he said as if in passing. “Just a few days ago, somebody turned up at the offices of La Provence and began asking my former colleagues in editorial what they knew about Moréas.”

  “Who?” Blanc asked, stopping dead in the doorway. He could hear the loudspeakers outside echoing ever louder in the alleyways. This time it was a man’s voice, louder and more aggressive.

  “His other neighbor. That German painter.”

  “Monsieur Rheinbach?” Blanc felt the hair on the back of his head stand on end. The German had been in the town archives, and had been in the offices of the local newspaper. Days before the murder. “What in particular did he want to know from your old colleagues?”

  Paulmier shrugged his shoulders. “They didn’t tell me. They sent him off with a few polite excuses—we’re not an information office. I doubt he would have gotten anything about Moréas from them.”

  An Inquisitive Painter

  Blanc got back to his old mill in late afternoon. Nobody had broken in. He fetched a chair out of the house, sat down on it in the shadow of the plane tree, and opened one of the bottles of Bernard’s rosé. He approached the glass carefully, the childhood memory still haunting him. He was tempted to knock it back like medicine, get it down and over with. But he repressed the instinct and took just a tiny sip. It was cool. Refreshing. Just a little sour. He leaned back, relieved that at least he hadn’t re-experienced the shock of his first taste. It was a good thirst-quencher. I must be careful, though, he told himself. Otherwise I could end up like Marius. He took another sip.

  Rheinbach and Moréas. Why would the German painter have been asking questions about his neighbor? Had he heard the old stories about his car-hijacking days? Maybe something similar had happened to him. Or could there be something else behind it? Maybe a bit of blackmail between neighbors? It didn’t look like the painter was making a fortune on jigsaw puzzles. Maybe he was hard up enough to think he could make some money out of Moréas by blackmailing him with details about his past? On the other hand, if the painter really was a blackmailer, it didn’t make much sense for him to kill off his victim.

  “I’ll pay Monsieur Rheinbach a visit tomorrow,” he told the wine bottle, and then put the cork back in, for fear of losing himself in one-sided conversations.

  * * *

  The next morning he picked up Tonon from the gendarmerie station, telling his colleague on the way to the painter’s house what he had found about the research the German had been involved in. He no longer needed Tonon to navigate for him: He had memorized the route.

  “You’re starting to drive like a local,” Tonon remarked.

  Blanc remembered the story about his colleague’s accident and slowed down, to the extent that a farmer in an ancient R4 behind them began honking. The two gendarmes ignored him, until eventually they turned into the painter’s driveway.

  “Are you sure he’s at home?” the lieutenant asked. “He was off to paint the lavender fields.”

  “Maybe he’s realized by now that they’re not in bloom yet.” Blanc pointed with his right hand at the Clio parked by the door.

  And indeed the painter himself opened the door. “Glad to see you got back from Luberon so soon,” the captain said by way of a greeting.

  “I only knocked out a couple of watercolors,” the German replied, giving them a querying look. “The main part of the job has still to be done.”

  “I see,” Blanc replied, in a tone of voice that suggested he didn’t believe a word of it. “Can you spare us five minutes, Monsieur Rheinbach?”

  The painter led his guests, for better or worse, into his studio. Blanc noticed a half-finished bottle of rosé on the table. It was a bit early in the day for that sort of refreshment. They sat down on three hard chairs. “Monsieur Rheinbach. Why did you not tell us last time that a few days before the crime you had been at the editorial offices of La Provence, asking questions about your neighbor?”

  The artist’s face went red. “Does that make me a suspect?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  Rheinbach began playing nervously with a tube of green oil paint, then noticed what he was doing and quickly put the tube back on a side table. “I was afraid,” he said eventually, sounding ashamed of himself. “Afraid of this guy. I had only come across him a few times, happily. But a couple of times when I had been out in the woods painting flowers he had come up to me and acted threatening.”

  “How do you mean? Did he have a weapon? Did he insult or mock you? Something must have made you feel afraid.”

  “I can’t quite explain it, mon Capitaine, I mean he didn’t exactly produce a weapon or hit me or anything. When I saw him out in the woods with his hunting rifle, he ignored me. And all in all, he hardly ever said a word to me. It was really just the way he looked at me. He just stared at me, like a wolf. A predator eyeing its prey.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the gendarmerie?”

  “To complain about the way he looked at me? They’d have thought I was mad.”

  “So instead you went to the newspaper journalists.”

  “I didn’t tell them anything either. I just wanted to find out who this Moréas guy really was. I wanted to know if I was living next door to a human time bomb, or just some harmless nutcase. That’s not too unreasonable, is it?”

  “So what did you find out?”

  The painter let his hands fall on his lap. “Nothing. I had Googled him, but there are hundreds of men with the same name in France—but as far as I could tell, not one of them was the guy next door. There is simply no trace online of a Charles Moréas in Caillouteaux. I found that just as disconcerting. But as I couldn’t think what else to do, I went down to the newspaper offices, but the journalists wouldn’t tell me anything. I had the impression they were afraid too.”

  Blanc leaned back and closed his eyes. The story was so pathetic it might well be true. In which case Rheinbach’s researches might have been nothing more than the reaction of a frightened man trying to protect himself. A man so afraid that he would shoot dead the supposed “human bomb” without warning down by the garbage dump? He would have liked to take a look around in this house undisturbed. Maybe later.

  The captain got to his feet and nodded in farewell. Just when he reached the door, he turned back around and said: “What were you doing in the Caillouteaux town archives on Wednesday, June twenty-sixth?”

  Tonon stared at him, surprised by the revelation. And Rheinbach, whose face had more or less regained his normal color, went red again. “The old church,” he eventually managed to stammer. He didn’t even ask why Blanc had known he had been at the archives. “Saint-Vincent, twelfth century. I wanted to paint it. But for that I needed to send my employers a few lines of text that they could put on the jigsaw puzzle box. So I was doing some research in the archive. It’s part of my job.”

  Tonon said nothing until they were back in the car. “How did you find that out?” he asked, as soon as he had pulled shut the passenger door.

  The captain tapped the tip of his nose and said, “Instinct,” with a wry smile.

  “
Don’t bullshit me.”

  Blanc laughed and turned the ignition key. Then he told him how he discovered the fact by accident. “Strange though, that Rheinbach needed to spend six and a half hours in the archive just for a few lines of text about an old decrepit church.”

  Even before they had turned off the path through the woods onto the route départementale, Blanc reached for the radio, called the gendarmerie, and asked for an appointment with the juge d’instruction. “She’s working at home today, in her house in Caillouteaux,” a bored voice said through the static. Corporal Baressi.

  “Give me the address,” the captain demanded impatiently. Why was everything down here so hard?

  “Number 5, rue du Passe-Temps.”

  “You can’t get there in the car,” Tonon told him. “We can park on the square by the church and you can walk from there.”

  “Okay, we can walk.”

  “I’m staying in the car. I don’t fancy a cup of coffee with Madame le juge.”

  Blanc stepped on the gas without bothering to answer. His colleague was afraid of the woman. This could become problematic. He drove up the hill to Caillouteaux and parked in the shade of the bell tower. Of Saint-Vincent church. It would make a good design for a jigsaw puzzle. If Rheinbach ever got around to painting it. Tonon took off his seat belt and made himself comfortable in the passenger seat, pointing to a perfectly polished metallic blue Citroën C5. “Monsieur and Madame Vialaron-Allègre’s car.”

  “An office car?”

  “Paid for by your taxes.”

  Rue du Passe-Temps was actually a sidewalk of polished stone slabs, leading southwest from the square: stone-built houses on one side, on the other a wall behind which the hill fell sharply away toward the Étang de Berre. Blanc felt as if he were walking along the top of an old medieval castle wall. Number 5 was an old two-story town house of brushed-clean natural stone with dark green wooden shutters on the windows and door. There was a modern bell in a niche next to the door with a discreet security camera just above it. The captain shrugged and pressed the bell.

  The juge d’instruction herself opened the door. She was wearing pale Pierre Cardin jeans and an ochre blouse, and a trail of pale blue smoke rose from the cigarette between the slim fingers of her left hand. On this occasion there was a heavy steel diver’s watch on her wrist, a model for a man that on her slim forearm looked as brutal as a handcuff. Blanc forced himself not to stare at it. She led him down a bright hallway, with Japanese woodcuts on the walls, into an office that opened onto an inner courtyard and a little pool with sparkling blue water. Somewhere in the distance he could hear piano music. Chopin, or maybe Liszt?

  Aveline Vialaron-Allègre offered him a seat in an English club armchair with aromatic leather. Her Empire-style desk of dark wood was piled high with papers and folders.

  “Have you got any further, mon Capitaine?”

  “I’ve uncovered a few things that irritate me,” he began. “They might be clues. Or they might be meaningless.” Blanc paused. He was always careful with initial clues. Don’t try to tie yourself down to one version of events, motives, or even suspects. Stay open-minded. Don’t stop looking and listening too soon. It was an approach that in Paris had driven his colleagues, bosses, and even juges d’instruction to theatrical sighs and rolling of the eyes. The woman opposite him, however, remained calm, giving him her full attention. Against his will he had to admit that his opinion of Madame le juge had gone up a notch. So he told her about the building contractor, Fuligni, and his row with Moréas down at the harbor. About the architect, Le Bruchec, who had felt threatened, who was good with weapons, and who had been seen at the garbage dump with the murder victim. And about Monsieur Rheinbach and his unusual research into the life of his neighbor.

  “Each one of these three men had a motive,” Blanc concluded. “But none of their motives is wholly convincing. A row over a mooring place? A suspected break-in and theft of sporting equipment? The vague threat of a ‘wolflike’ stare? Of course people have been murdered in such circumstances. But a cold-blooded execution with an automatic weapon and subsequent immolation of the body? I just don’t think any of these men are capable of that.”

  Aveline Vialaron-Allègre looked at him pensively. “So, a settling of scores between drug dealers?”

  “Possible, but unlikely. The forensics people were in Moréas’s house and on every piece of land he owned, searched his motorbike and his old boat. Our colleagues in Marseille asked around in the drug world. Nothing. Nobody mentioned Charles Moréas and nobody seemed interested in his murder.”

  “So, what do you intend to do now?”

  Blanc was listening for traces of irony in the question, but it seemed to be perfectly serious. “I need a warrant to search Rheinbach’s house.”

  The juge d’instruction leaned back and took a deep draw on her cigarette. “To look for a Kalashnikov under a jigsaw puzzle painter’s bed?” Now the irony was obvious.

  The captain breathed in and out. “There’s something not quite right about this artist. Who runs down to the local newspaper editorial office to ask questions about their neighbor?”

  “Not in itself, however, sufficient cause to make him a suspect. The man gave you an explanation. You might not believe him. Eh bien, that is your problem. But you can’t ransack his house based on that alone.”

  “I’m not intending to ransack it. I just want to…” Blanc hesitated. To find a Kalashnikov? Absurd. Something else, something suspicious? But what? “Forget it,” he said in the end, giving up.

  “From everything you’ve told me, the clues point more toward Le Bruchec,” the juge d’instruction replied. “After all, he was the last person seen with the victim. But I have known Lucien for half a lifetime and I was a good friend of his wife’s.” She shook her head. For a second her mask of cool elegance slipped and Blanc thought he could see sadness in her face. “Just to think of a man like Lucien running around with a Kalashnikov is grotesque, let alone the idea of him executing someone in cold blood. I am impressed by the thoroughness of your investigations, mon Capitaine, but I can’t see that you’ve presented me with a suspect. Keep looking!”

  She led him back down the hallway, opened the door, and they were looking out onto a broad panorama that stretched to the distant horizon. It was as if from the protective stone shelter of her house there was a direct view of heaven.

  Blanc was impressed. “The gateway to the world.”

  For the first time Aveline Vialaron-Allègre smiled, if only for a fraction of a second. “Provence is a beautiful part of the country. And hard, even if it takes a little longer to realize that. And the people here are like that land they live on.” This time she did shake his hand.

  * * *

  “You don’t need to say a word,” Tonon grunted sleepily when Blanc got back to the car. “Winners have a different look on their faces.”

  “At least Madame le juge heard me out,” the captain said in his own defense.

  “Now what?”

  “We start all over again from the beginning.”

  “Well, that’s something. She could have just brushed you off.”

  “Did you know that the juge d’instruction is friends with one of our suspects?”

  “With Le Bruchec, the architect. Of course. And was even better friends with his late wife. That was one of the reasons I preferred to stay in the car rather than go see her.”

  Back at the station, Nkoulou called Blanc in: “Have you got any further?” Clearly he wanted to know everything that Madame le juge knew. The captain suppressed his impatience and repeated what he had just told Aveline Vialaron-Allègre.

  “What now?”

  “I keep looking.”

  “I wish Madame le juge had granted the search warrant. We might have been able to arrest the painter.”

  Blanc suddenly realized what his boss was thinking: a rather reclusive artist, a foreigner, nobody would have complained if Rheinbach ended up in jail. A man with no Mid
i family going back generations. Case closed. Reputation improved. He realized that the juge d’instruction had actually been more prudent than he himself. She had foreseen how badly things might go for the painter. Parisian ruthlessness didn’t quite work down here. Merde, the woman must have taken him for a tactless idiot.

  “We’ll catch the killer,” he promised. “Monsieur Rheinbach isn’t the only one in our sights.”

  “It’s not very clever to have a target in your sights and not pull the trigger,” Nkoulou responded.

  And this man is the best shot in the gendarmerie. Merde, thought Blanc.

  When he got back to his office he found Fabienne waiting in the hallway outside. She took him over to her computer screen. “After I found out that Fuligni had had a row with Moréas, I looked into the building contractor a bit,” she began, bringing up an official-looking PDF on her screen. “This is the building contract for the médiathèque,” she said. “Contracting client: the commune of Caillouteaux, with money from ‘Midi Provence’; General construction to be carried out by Pascal Fuligni. Estimated construction costs: eight million euros.”

  Blanc whistled through his teeth. “A big fat contract,” he mumbled.

  “The biggest Fuligni has ever landed.”

  “Are there other local building contractors who could have undertaken a job this size?”

  “No, in a hamlet like Caillouteaux, Fuligni is the only one who could do something on this scale.”

  “In other words, if we were to take Fuligni in for questioning in a murder case, or, worse still, arrest him, then Mayor Lafont would have nobody else to bring his precious médiathèque into the world before the elections.”

  “The mayor will do whatever he has to to keep us away from his old friend.”

  “Merde.”

  “Wrong word,” Fabienne said, with an ironic grin, “that’s where down here we say putain.”

  “‘Whore’ instead of ‘shit’?”