The Red Brick Cellars: A Tolosa Mystery (15 page)

Louis felt as if he’d taken a fist to the stomach. Dirty money had paid for his little piece of paradise? The fact that it had originally been built for Audrey didn’t help in the least. And Audrey knew about it? The tone she used was well-known to Louis. She treated him as if he were five and too stupid to grasp the simple facts of life. But surely this time he was right? She had been brought up in the same way; shouldn’t she have the same moral compass? This wasn’t about right- or left-wing policies, it was about right or wrong.

He turned to his mother.

Pity filling her eyes, she leaned against the kitchen counter, the cup of coffee in her hands. She recognized that this was news to him. And he that it wasn’t news to her.

“This is true, Maman?” Louis’s arms hung slack down his body. He felt exhausted.

Luckily, his mother still read him well. “Come sit down, Louis
chéri
,” she said as she drew out a chair for him. “I’ll make you hot chocolate.”

Louis wanted to refuse. He wasn’t a child anymore; hot chocolate wouldn’t solve his problems. But he had just woken up, his stomach was empty, and hot chocolate sounded like exactly the thing he needed. “
Merci
,
Maman.”

As his mother put a kettle on the stove and poured milk and chunks of chocolate in, Louis turned to Audrey. “If you knew about the bribes, why didn’t you try to talk him out of it?”

Audrey threw back her head and barked a mocking laughter. “This coming from the guy who hasn’t been home for a decade! The guy who never once stood up for himself. Whenever you disagree with anything, you bow your head and slink away to lick your wounds.”

That hit too close to home. Louis had often walked away from an argument with his family, but had always seen it as a heroic deed. He didn’t want to upset anyone and figured they probably knew better than him when it came to the politics of the city. Audrey seeing him as a coward hurt more than he wanted to acknowledge.

“If it’s all true and you condoned taking bribes, then why are you so upset about that article?”

Audrey looked at him the way she had so many times while they were growing up; he was so slow and such a baby for not understanding things that she, five years his senior, had grasped long ago. “Because the bribes weren’t exactly common knowledge until now, dimwit.” And, he realized, she was afraid it would hurt her own electoral campaign by association.

Starting to recover from the first shock, Louis decided not to let go for once. “There was no proof in that article, only implications.”

“Which is more than enough to sink my campaign.” Audrey threw her hands in the air and resumed pacing in front of the window. “Are you really that naive?”

So not only was he a coward, he was also naive? He didn’t want to upset his mother, but he’d had it with his sister. She had gone too far. “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot this was all about you.”

Audrey got in his face in the blink of an eye. “This is about the Saint-Blancat name and our position in Toulouse. It’s about what’s best for this city. Not that you have ever cared one whit about either of them.”

“The family and the city were exactly why I kept my distance and my mouth shut all those years.” Louis realized he was shouting, but his blood was up and he wanted to throttle his sister just like the good old days. He might even have a chance at victory now that he was a head taller than her. “I was told we must always show a united front, so I let you all call the shots. I trusted you to know what was best for the family and the city, but I was clearly wrong.”

Audrey opened her mouth to retaliate, but was interrupted by Chloé running in from the living room. “Hot chocolate?” She looked at what her grandmother was doing at the stove with such a hopeful expression that Louis’s anger evaporated immediately and he bent down to give her a kiss on the cheek.

“Yes, it is,” he said, then pulled his niece up on a chair next to him. “I’ll share.”

Chloé clapped her hands and started swinging her feet so that she hopped up and down on her seat.

Louis’s mother put one big ceramic mug in front of Louis and a pink Hello Kitty plastic mug in front of Chloé. She poured hot chocolate for them both. “There you go.”

Chloé touched the outside of her mug. “Oh, it’s hot!”

“Wait a couple of minutes,
chérie
,” her grandmother said. “It’ll cool down in a minute.”

“Okay.” Chloé smiled and crinkled her eyes, then turned to Louis. “How old are you?”

Louis took a sip of his chocolate. It was a little hot, but not unbearably so. And it did help. He felt much calmer already. “I’m thirty-five.”

“Oh good,” Chloé said, then cocked her head as she thought about something very hard, mouth open. “You won’t die for a long time.”

Louis almost choked on his drink. Setting down his mug, he said, “Well, I certainly hope I’ll be around for a while. What makes you say that?”

Her mouth set into a serious line, Chloé locked eyes with Louis. “People die when they get old. Maman is thirty-nine. Mamie is sixty-two. Grand-Papy is seventy-nine. He’ll die next.”

Louis didn’t know what to say. He looked to his mother and sister for help. Audrey seemed resigned and his mother nodded as if this was perfectly normal behavior for a five-year-old. She took pity on her son. “When her grandfather died, that was her first encounter with death. We have explained to her that death is natural, that people get old and die.” They must have omitted the part where grandfather was actually murdered and much younger than her great-grandfather. “She has figured out the logic and is now collecting the ages of everyone she loves to reassure herself they will not die soon.” Except for her great-grandfather, presumably.

Chloé frowned at her grandmother in concentration, but didn’t appear upset. Louis envied her confidence that everything would be all right.

Audrey gave her daughter a kiss on the cheek. “Why don’t you take your hot chocolate with you into the living room,
chérie
? Just be careful not to spill.”

Chloé was more than happy to comply and hopped down off the chair before carefully taking her mug in both hands and carrying it into the living room.

Once he was sure his niece was out of earshot, Louis said to his sister, “Your problem is going to be with the police, not the press. If Papa was corrupt, then that press conference yesterday actually meant that they found something when they searched the house. That article”—he pointed to the discarded newspaper—“doesn’t change that in the least.”

Audrey hadn’t let go of her anger. She turned to her mother. “How come it was so easy for the police to find proof of bribery, Maman? Couldn’t he at least have hid it somewhere?”

Their mother smiled, but her eyes were sad. “There was no reason for him to suspect the police would show up and go through all his things, Audrey. But I don’t believe he did keep much proof. If they found something, it can’t be much.”

“That’s hardly reassuring,” Audrey said. “And couldn’t you have checked before they showed up? It was five days between Papa’s death and their search.” Keeping the Saint-Blancat record clean was clearly much more important to his sister than her mother’s feelings. The woman was thinking of her campaign again!

Some steel found its way into his mother’s voice. “Like I said, your father didn’t include the bribes in his bookkeeping. If they did find something, I don’t know what it could be. And during those five days, I had other things on my mind than going through a room full of papers and books looking for things that weren’t even supposed to be there in the first place.” She turned to Louis, her voice now soft. “How is the chocolate, Louis? Are you feeling better?”

The casual way his mother and sister were discussing corruption had his stomach churning, but the chocolate did help a little. “Yes, thank you, Maman.”

He had the feeling that he wouldn’t like the answer, but had to ask. “Why did Papa take bribes, Maman? Didn’t he earn enough as the mayor of Toulouse?” Hadn’t he told Louis time after time that laws and rules were there for a reason and must always be followed? Why had he made an exception for himself?

His mother sighed and sat down on a chair opposite Louis. “He didn’t take the money because he needed it. I think it was something of a game for him.” She drank the rest of her coffee and reached back to set the empty cup next to the sink. “He only took bribes when he agreed with what they wanted to buy. Take the taxis, for example. So long as the public transport didn’t come up with a viable solution for transport out to the airport, he’d let the taxis bribe him.” Glancing at her daughter, accusation clear in her eyes, she added, “Practically all the money went back to the city of Toulouse. He’d give it to associations and charities, for the most part.”

Louis wasn’t sure if that made it any better, but kept his mouth shut. Having finished his chocolate, he felt as empty as his mug. “Why didn’t you stop him, Maman?” Did everyone have to insist on ruining the image of his father when the man himself was no longer there to explain himself, or to make up for the mistakes he’d made?

His mother gave him the look that she always used when telling him everything would be all right. “It was not my place to tell him how to run things. He was the one elected—four times.”

Louis wished he could be five years old again.

Eighteen

“That’s her, over there,” Catherine said to Louis as they crossed the Minimes Bridge over the Canal du Midi. They had started their stroll at ten—apparently the time when most prostitutes started working—but it was now an hour and a half later and none of the numerous prostitutes they’d seen were Mademoiselle Diatta. Catherine regretted her choice in shoes; sneakers would have been more appropriate than the heels she was wearing. Small heels, but still.

In the shadow of an overhanging magnolia with her hands in the pockets of a short black leather jacket, their target chewed gum and stared dispassionately at the cars driving by. As the two sleuths drew closer, Catherine noticed that the woman wore red tights and black high-heeled boots. Her clothing didn’t actually make her look like a prostitute. It was the way she stood there waiting for customers. Catherine had been mistaken for a prostitute herself about a year earlier. She was waiting for a friend at a bus-stop late at night—so there would be no buses—when a man had stopped, rolled down his window, and asked, “
Vous travaillez
?” Catherine hadn’t even understood why the man wanted to know if she was working, but replied “no” since she wasn’t out chasing an article. Only when the man had driven away with a red face did the penny drop. Since then, she had been very careful of standing alone on a street, looking at cars rolling by.

As they crossed the street to the corner where Mademoiselle Diatta stood, the woman recognized Catherine. “What do you want?” she said.

“
Bonsoir, Mademoiselle
,” Louis greeted her with a big smile. “We were wondering if we could talk to you for a few minutes.”

The woman shook her head. “I’m working. It’s Friday night and I’ve already been away for almost a week because of…” She nodded in the direction of Catherine. She presumably didn’t imply it was Catherine’s fault she’d taken time off from work, but now associated her with the whole finding-the-mayor-dead business. “I can’t afford to lose my regular customers.”

Catherine shifted from foot to foot. She’d thought her feet hurt before, but once they stopped, it was even worse. Ironically, the woman worked less than a hundred meters from where Catherine lived. Down the short rue Gutenberg and to the right, and she would be home. Mademoiselle Diatta was probably one of the prostitutes who regularly brought her customers back to Catherine’s street for some privacy. From the mezzanine where her bed was, Catherine had a perfect view of what was going on in the cars that parked for ten minutes at a time in front of her house.

Louis did not appear to suffer from their walk along the city’s avenues. He was all smiles and charm with this black woman whom his father had worked so hard to stop from plying her trade in the city center. “Of course we don’t want to hurt your business, Mademoiselle. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I caught your name. I’m Louis.” He extended his hand.

To Catherine’s surprise, the prostitute shook his hand and replied, “I’m Alima. But I still have to work.”

Louis cocked his head to the side and gave a charming half-smile. “What if we pay for your time?” He looked like he was about to say something else, but hadn’t quite figured out how to say it.

Alima gave a deep-throated laugh. “It’s thirty euros for ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes?” Both of Louis’s brows shot up in surprise. The duration seemed to shock him more than the price. Poor, innocent rich boy. Catherine decided to let him manage this part of the discussion.

Alima also smiled, flashing white teeth that almost glowed against her black face in the shadows. There was no mistaking the half-flirtatious, half-mocking expression. “Yes. Thirty euros, up front. Ten minutes.” She put one hand on her hip and tapped the finger of the other hand on her full lips. “However, you don’t appear to have a car. And there’s an audience.” She pointed to Catherine. “So I might have to charge you more.”

Catherine was tempted to tell her they could use her place just down the road and that in any case, she had probably watched Alima in action already, but figured that wouldn’t really help.

Louis, Catherine was delighted to discover, turned beet red. “Very funny.” He cleared his throat and looked up to the dark sky before addressing Alima. “Like I said, we only have a couple of questions. I’ll be more than happy to pay thirty euros for ten minutes of your time. For answering questions.”

Alima’s smile now covered most of her face. She was having fun, and so was Catherine. But the prostitute’s smile fell. Pointing a thumb in Catherine’s direction, she said, “No matter what price, I will not be talking to her. She didn’t believe me the last time we talked and made me look like an idiot in the newspaper.”

Catherine grimaced. She hadn’t anticipated this. Like the upper class English girl she was brought up to be, she hadn’t thought the prostitute might read her article. How she had assumed a girl with that many books in her home would not know how to read, Catherine couldn’t explain. So much for walking away from the hypocrisy her parents were masters of. She took a deep breath. Time to apologize.