The Red Brick Cellars: A Tolosa Mystery (3 page)

Audrey rolled her eyes, then fixed her gaze on the city below them. “Basically, yes. They’re trying to identify the bones of the dead woman, and will look into the people Papa met with over the last weeks. But I’d say they’re clueless. They don’t even know when he died; nobody had seen him for two days.” She turned her chocolate-brown eyes on Louis. “So will you be there for my press conference? Back me up? Show the Toulousains that the Saint-Blancat family is still here for them?”

Exasperated, Louis raised a hand toward the family tomb. “Papa has been in there for less than five minutes and you’re already scheming to get ahead in your political career.”

She didn’t even flinch. “Of course I am. Papa would be proud and you know it. You’re running away from your responsibilities—again.
That
he would be less enthusiastic about.”

He shouldn’t have been surprised by this type of jibe having weathered them for years growing up, but something had been gnawing at him since he’d heard of his father’s death. His latest contract had ended in June, and he chose to stay in California instead of coming home to Toulouse and France for a spell. He had procrastinated, trying—but not too hard—to figure out what to do next. He supposed he had all the time in the world. So his father passed away without having seen his son for nine months, and without them having the chance to resolve their political differences. In a way, he should have been happy he didn’t have to continue that fight. Instead, a sinking feeling that there was something he needed to do played at the back of Louis’s mind. But he didn’t want to figure out what; he wanted to run away again.

However, his sister was right. He had to stay. To figure out what happened to his father and to spend time with his family. His mother shouldn’t be alone right now. He’d step up, be the man of the family. Though his sister had always been much better at that than him.

Four

A picture of Louis Saint-Blancat covered almost half the front page of that morning’s newspaper. On his arm, of course, a mystery woman. Catherine shoved the paper into her handbag. As she stepped up to the huge oak door of a building halfway down the narrow, none-too-straight rue Gambetta, she shook her head at her colleagues. Some covered the mayor’s death in what she considered a normal way—meaning they talked about how he died and the implications this would have on the city. But others were much more fascinated with the son, Louis Saint-Blancat, who was finally back home.

With the exception of one term, Pierre Saint-Blancat had been mayor for the last twenty years. His popularity had more to do with his natural charisma than his actual policies. Most inhabitants wouldn’t be able to say what his program was centered around, though they knew he belonged to the Republican Party. They also knew that if they wanted to chat with him, they only needed to go to the Marché du Cristal on Thursdays. The fruit and vegetables market on the boulevard de Strasbourg did business six days a week, but the mayor strolled through on Thursdays. He didn’t do any shopping, just stopped to talk to shoppers and vendors alike. Everybody loved him and loved reading about him.

Her boss at
le Midi Républicain
, the local newspaper, made sure to include at least one article on one of the members of the Saint-Blancat family every day. Catherine only very recently managed to extricate herself from writing those articles. She was finally allowed to concentrate on the actual politics of the city, to possibly make a difference for once. Then she went and made one little mistake and her boss told her to stay away from the story around the mayor’s death. The most interesting story since Mohammed Merah, at the very least, and she was banned.

Catherine was about to do something about that situation. She decided that the topmost label on the intercom might possibly say “Diatta” and pressed the button. The night before, Catherine had spent three hours trawling the Canal du Midi and talking to all the prostitutes. She was determined to talk to the woman who discovered the mayor’s body, no matter how unreliable that clown police officer considered her. An African girl of about twenty finally said she knew the woman. Mademoiselle Diatta hadn’t been feeling well since the discovery of the bodies and was not working that night. After some prodding and pleading, Catherine had obtained her address.

Static sounded through the intercom, then the door buzzed open. Catherine pushed inside and took a relieved breath of the cool air as her eyes adjusted to the long, dark corridor she found herself in. Toward the back of the house, another door opened to a back yard, and before that, a staircase with stone steps so used there were indentations in the center led up to the left. Assuming the top spot on the intercom meant an apartment on the top floor, Catherine started climbing. Most of these old houses in the city center didn’t have an elevator—there was no room for it.

The staircase turned up to the next floor, then another one took her yet farther up. The sun streaming in through windows at the end of the corridor on each landing was enough to see by. She had the impression it was cooler in the dark, which was always a godsend at the end of a long, hot summer in South-Western France.

The second floor appeared to be the last one. There were four doors, and none of them had a name-tag. As Catherine considered the possibility of knocking on the first one, it opened. A stunning African girl peeked out. One of the prostitutes Catherine talked to had said the girl was from Senegal. “
Qui êtes vous?
” she said in a honeyed voice.

Catherine put on a reassuring smile and answered the question. “My name is Catherine Marty. I work at
le Midi Républicain
. I’m working on an article about the mayor’s death and would very much like to talk to you about what you saw.”

Mademoiselle Diatta studied Catherine for several seconds before replying. “I already said everything to the police. They didn’t believe me. You any better?” Her stance gave away her fatigue. Bloodshot eyes stared out. They weren’t openly hostile. Simply…resigned.

Catherine looked the woman in the eyes. “I won’t know if I believe you until I hear your story,” she said. “If you don’t want your name in the paper, that’s not an issue. You can be a nameless witness.”

Mademoiselle Diatta huffed a mirthless laugh. “I’m the
only
witness. It won’t take a genius to figure out who you talked to.” She looked Catherine up and down once, then turned and walked back into her apartment, leaving the door open.

Catherine stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

The young woman had apparently not cleaned or tidied much over the last few days by the look of the clothes and empty pizza-boxes strewn about on all surfaces. It was probably due to stress, Catherine thought, for underneath, the place was squeaky clean. And beautiful. A short hallway with three doors opened on a living room with a smart red and white kitchen in the corner. The left-hand wall was covered with books and three floor-to-ceiling windows opened up on the crown of the oak tree growing in the back yard. The white leather couch was definitely not from IKEA, and the wooden dinner table and matching chairs glowed in the sunlight. Hardly how Catherine had imagined the home of a prostitute.

Gathering her wits, Catherine sat down at the table across from Mademoiselle Diatta and took out a pen and a block note. “Tell me in your own words what happened that night, please.”

The prostitute kept her eyes on the tree outside while she talked. The leaves were starting to turn yellow. “I went home for a spell around two o’clock.” She glanced at Catherine. “I needed to take a quick shower before going back out there.” Catherine suppressed a shudder at the thought of what could make a woman in her line of business want to get cleaned up. Pretty much everything.

“I was on my way back out. It was probably around two thirty when I found them.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I checked if they were dead. Then I called the police.” Her big, black eyes challenged Catherine. They were coming to the part the police didn’t believe.

“Go on,” Catherine urged. “Can you describe what you saw?” She was scribbling down verbatim what was being said and kept writing nonsense even when the woman wasn’t talking. People often found it easier to confide in someone who didn’t appear to be paying one hundred percent attention. She had trained her peripheral vision, as best she could, to still be able to take in visual impressions of her interviewees.

The woman’s voice was stronger now. She accepted the challenge and would give her story, no matter how Catherine judged her. Good for her. “When I got there, I saw two bodies. They were both naked. And though it’s been a hot summer this year and I know you white people can’t handle heat very well, you don’t usually go about naked.”

Catherine smiled and looked directly at the girl. Deliberately, she pulled a handkerchief out of her purse and dabbed her forehead with it. This apartment was relatively cool, but she had been sweating non-stop for the last three months. It was the one thing she couldn’t get used to in Toulouse. Then she set her pen back to her notebook and nodded to her interviewee.

“Anyway. The man was bent down like a Muslim during prayer—except he was facing the wrong way—and the woman was sitting there like some sort of Cleopatra. When I got closer, I got a look at her expression.” She shuddered. “I’ve seen a lot of horrible things in my life, but nothing has put a look like that on my face yet.” She mimicked what she had seen: open mouth, wide open eyes, all teeth showing. This woman still managed to look beautiful, but Catherine got the general idea. “So I touched her shoulder. To make sure she was dead?”

Catherine understood her question meant she was still working out the whys in her own mind, and nodded. The prostitute wouldn’t be judged by her.

The black woman looked down at her hands fidgeting with the seam of her shirt and continued in low tones. “When I touched her skin, I could feel it contracting. Then there was something like a hiss of air, and all of a sudden, I was touching bone.” Her voice firm again, she fixed Catherine with her gaze. “The skin
of the entire woman
just turned to dust.”

Right. Catherine could see why the police didn’t want to buy this story. Could the woman be making this up in order to gain attention? Had she been drunk? It wouldn’t be surprising with the job she had if she drank a glass or two before going to work. The apartment spoke in her favor, but for all Catherine knew, she could be renting it furnished.

An ironic smile graced Mademoiselle Diatta’s wide and generous lips. “You don’t believe me.”

Catherine sighed. “I want to,” she said. And she did. Her article would have been momentous if this had been true. “But you have to admit it’s a very…fantastic story. I can’t put it in print if I can’t double-check it anywhere.”

The girl barked a throaty laughter. “Double-check! As if you people ever do that. You find something you like on the net and print it right up.”

Catherine’s need to show goodwill toward her interviewee diminished. “Well, that’s how I do my job, Mademoiselle Diatta. There were no other witnesses there that night?”

A perfectly manicured hand flicked an imaginary crumb from the table top. “Nobody who saw the woman before she turned to dust, no.”

Abandoning that venue, Catherine asked, “Where exactly were the bodies?”

The prostitute stood up and went to lean against one of the windowsills. “They were in the Galerue.” The covered walk was under the arcades facing the Capitole and had a great number of paintings on the ceiling, depicting various themes or persons important in Toulouse’s history. “They were underneath the painting of the two women. You know, almost at the center?”

Catherine didn’t know exactly which painting that was, but nodded anyway. She’d check it out on her way home. She couldn’t think of anything else to ask, so she thanked the woman for her time and left. She hadn’t learned much, but no matter. With what she heard at the mayor’s wake, her article was sure to get attention. But first she had to convince her boss to print it.

***

Catherine planted her feet next to her boss’s chair and folded her hands loosely in front of her. Mathieu Lambert was giving his heavily worn leather chair quite a challenge with his ex-rugby-player body. His gaze switched back and forth between the two screens on his desk before looking at Catherine over the rims of his black glasses, wordlessly asking her why she was bothering him.

Catherine pointed at her boss’s screen and looked him straight in the eyes. “I just sent you an article by email. You’ll want to print that in tomorrow’s paper.”

Mathieu pursed his lips, but made no move to open his emails. “Will I.”

“I know you’re still angry with me”—Catherine folded her arms—“but I discovered something big on the mayor’s death. You really will want to print it.”

He leaned back in his chair and pushed his glasses up his nose. “You wrote an article on the mayor?” he said so low it was almost a whisper.

Catherine put her hands out in a placating gesture. “I didn’t set out to go against your orders, Mathieu. Really. But I came across information I couldn’t ignore.”

“You went against my express orders by accident?” Mathieu’s eyes bored into Catherine. “Or were you forced? Was your French suddenly not good enough to simply give this information to Arnaud who is
supposed
to cover the mayor’s death?” His voice still low and calm, spots of color appeared on Mathieu’s cheeks and his nostrils flared.

Catherine was certain the reason she hadn’t managed to make more headway in her career was her inability to communicate with her boss. They simply didn’t understand each other. She put some ice into her voice to remind him she was not without a temper of her own. “You would not expect any other journalist to give away a hot lead, no matter the case. Why should I?”

“Because you are unfit to cover this subject.” The sharp riposte made Catherine flinch, but she made a conscious effort not to take a step back.

Hands on hips, Catherine kept her voice calm. “I made
one
joke you blew out of all proportions—”