The Red Brick Cellars: A Tolosa Mystery (5 page)

“It’s the police,” he yelled to Madame Sutra. “I’m sure they’ll leave soon.” He offered his arm to the old lady. “Can I perhaps walk around the cars with you?” He had learned years ago that offering to buy her cigarettes was not a good idea. She considered this outing her daily exercise—and given her advanced age despite being a chain smoker, there might be some truth to that.

Madame Sutra squinted at the offending police car, then at Louis. She appeared to recognize him. A pinching of her lips, which was her equivalent of smiling, accompanied a nod. “Yes, thank you, young Louis. That sounds lovely.” She grabbed his arm with a strong hand and leaned heavily on him to get down from the curb. Then she advanced with tiny shuffling steps along the two cars and again used Louis’s assistance to get back up on the sidewalk. After a few rattling coughs, she let go of Louis. “I’m glad you’re back, young Louis. The city needs you. Start with getting rid of the cars on the sidewalks.”

Shaking his head, Louis watched a moment longer as she shuffled away toward the tobacco store, then ambled back to his parents’ house. His mother’s now, he mentally corrected.

He was as annoyed by the police parked in front of his house as Madame Sutra, though not for the same reason. Perhaps he should do as she suggested and make sure the cars were no longer there when she came back.

He ran up the steps and in through the front door.

***

The bald police officer was in the parents’ bedroom going through Pierre Saint-Blancat’s bedside table. Louis couldn’t even imagine what the officer was hoping to find in there. Did he think the mayor used proof of bribes as night-time reading material?

Louis took one step into the room. This was his parents’ turf. He hadn’t been in here since he was about ten, when he still wanted to sleep the last half hour of the night in the middle of their bed. He cleared his throat. “I’d like to see the search warrant, please.”

The stocky man looked up from the thriller novel he was paging through. “OPJ Petit has it. He’s in the mayor’s study.” So Petit was an
Officier de Police Judiciaire
specifically in charge of investigating crimes—like murder.

Louis turned on his heel. As he stepped into the hall, he said, “Make sure you don’t lose his page in that book, Officer.”

He marched down the hall and into his father’s study. Originally Louis’s room, his father had taken over when Audrey moved in with her boyfriend, allowing Louis to move into her castle on the top floor. His father hadn’t bothered to repaint when he moved his desk in, so there were drawings of stick soccer players below the window and a picture of Zinedine “Zizou” Zidane in the corner. The other posters were taken down, but this one Louis had glued to the wall to make sure it wouldn’t be taken from him. And there it still was.

The contents of all the drawers were laid out on the large beechwood desk. OPJ Petit had apparently already gone through it all and was in the process of shoving papers back into the desk. A small stack of papers at the end of the desk went into a cardboard box on the floor.

The third officer, an aging Arab with a pot-belly, was efficiently leafing through all the books on the bookshelf. He was already on the second shelf, but had some work cut out for him. He’d started on the wall filled with fiction. Did he think that had a higher probability of containing proof of bribes than the section with political literature?

“I’d like to see the search warrant, please,” Louis repeated to OPJ Petit.

“Of course,” the man replied.

Louis didn’t like his tone. It was as if he was humoring a child.

Petit pulled a sheet of paper out of a pocket and handed it to Louis.

Louis glanced at the search warrant, but since he’d never seen one before, didn’t really know what to look for. He spotted the date—yesterday—and his mother’s name and address. The stamp looked genuine. Louis gave the piece of paper back. He didn’t actually suspect them of faking the warrant in any case. He wanted to show them he wasn’t happy.

Petit sat down in front of the laptop, which was already up and running. A Google Calendar page was open. “I’d like to access the mayor’s time-table over the last weeks,” the officer said. “But I need the password to get into all the Google appliances.”

Louis was surprised, but kept his expression neutral. His father had an impressive resistance to technology. Once Louis had shown him he could ask the browser to connect him automatically, he’d been happy. He didn’t want to worry about internet security; he just wanted to do his job. Louis’s guess was that he’d accidentally logged off the last time he’d used the computer.

OPJ Petit gave Louis an expectant look.

“What?” Louis asked. Was he supposed to be accountable for his father not liking passwords?

Petit sighed. “You wouldn’t happen to know your father’s password? I can go through other channels to have access to this information, but it would be a lot quicker if I could get in right now.”

The man wanted him to help crack into his father’s agenda? Louis should have stayed downstairs with his mother; he hadn’t gotten all the gossip from her associations and charities yet.

The thing was, Louis thought he might actually know that blasted password. Not wanting the bother of remembering several of them, his father tended to use the same one everywhere. Louis had helped him enter it for numerous sites over the years. It was the address to his father’s childhood home. Some numbers, one capital letter; everything requested for a password. But should he give it to the police?

If the man sitting in his father’s leather chair hadn’t been so annoying at the wake the other day, he probably would have cooperated. But he didn’t like the man, or that half the city was bound to have noticed the police cars parked in front of their house.

OPJ Petit continued staring at Louis.

“I’m sorry,” Louis said. “I haven’t been home much over the last ten years. And in any case, my father didn’t share his passwords with me.”

Looking dubious, the officer started to speak, but Louis beat him to it. “Do you share your passwords from work with your children?”

Since the man couldn’t be more than forty, if he had any children, they would be much younger than Louis. But the argument seemed to convince him and he turned back to the laptop. “I’ll access the public entries from his secretary’s account. I’ll get the private entries when the paperwork goes through.”

Not sure what to do with himself but reluctant to leave the men going through his father’s things without supervision, Louis hovered in the doorway. After a while, the officer from the bedroom came back empty-handed and started in on the non-fiction bookshelf. Half an hour later, they were done. The three officers readied to leave, carrying with them the cardboard box holding three zip-locked bags filled with papers and his father’s laptop. Louis didn’t like their looks as they left—he had a feeling they might have found something.

Louis shook their hands before they went downstairs to be let out by his mother. Before their cars were off the curb, he had his own laptop in his father’s study and the Google Calendar open.

The expression
un emploi de temps de ministre
—used to describe a very busy schedule—came to mind when Louis studied his father’s agenda. It seemed a mayor was just as busy as a minister.

He spent a few minutes figuring out the website before he was able to print out the details of all his father’s meetings over the last two months. Next, he went through the ones tagged “private,” for which the details wouldn’t be visible from the secretary’s account.

One was a dentist’s appointment. There was no reason for his father to have sent this meeting to the dentist, and it was highly unlikely the man was involved either in corruption or murder, but Louis deleted it anyway. There might be the slightest taste of spite toward the police in what he was doing, but Petit’s approach to his job made Louis’s skin crawl.

Two other private entries stood out: one was a lunch date eight days before the murder and one was a dinner appointment two days before the murder. The first was tagged as “M-P EZES,” presumably Marie-Pierre Ezes, one of the deputy mayors. The second entry was noted as “Jardins de l’Opéra,” which was a restaurant on place du Capitole. The first didn’t have a location; the second lacked a participant.

In the publicly viewable entries, Louis didn’t see anything obviously suspicious. There were several meetings with the Toulouse public transport system, Transport Toulousain or TT for short. The deputy mayor responsible for the urban development plan also appeared frequently. Of course, this was most likely simply the proof of a mayor doing his job.

Pocketing the agenda printout, Louis turned off his laptop, righted up a few thrillers in the fiction bookcase, sent a respectful nod to Zizou in the corner, and went downstairs to make sure his mother hadn’t eaten any of the officers on their way out.

Six

Catherine secured one of her favorite tables at the Café de la Concorde. She’d often enjoyed breakfast at this café in the past because it was situated between her apartment and the town center, and had an agreeable vintage feel. The walls inside were plastered with posters for theaters, concerts, and various other cultural occasions from the last fifty years or so. Everything, including the floor-to-ceiling windows, looked to have been there since the place was built over a hundred years ago. Peeling paint on the terrace roof pillars helped the café camouflage itself among the plane trees lining the street.

Catherine was on the café’s terrace, which extended across most of the wide sidewalk. Out of the three rows of tables they’d fit in the space, she preferred one closest to the building to avoid being too close to passing cars and, more importantly, to avoid being bumped into by pedestrians walking past the café.

As she waited for her ex-husband Maxime to show up for their rendezvous, she thought about ordering a tea. She would most likely need the comfort when she reminded Max that they had to sell the house he loved. Before she could signal the waiter, she spotted him coming up rue de la Concorde on his bike. He waved and smiled when he saw her and quickly attached his bike to one of the bike racks right next to the most outlying tables. Despite the feeling of frustration and underlying anger he now brought out every time she saw him, she still found him handsome. She’d always been attracted to what she considered the French archetype: slim, tall, dark hair, dark eyes, and strong nose. The sprinkle of gray in his hair only made him look more refined.

Unfortunately, looks weren’t everything.

Catherine stood as he approached. He looked chipper. She had a sinking feeling this meeting was going to be as emotionally taxing as the previous ones. When he reached her table, Maxime leaned in to give her a kiss. Luckily, she was used to this by now and saw the disaster coming. She turned her head at the last second, and he ended up kissing her cheek. She did the same, and before he could recoup, kissed his other cheek.

“We’re not married anymore,” she rebuked, talking soft enough that the people at the next table wouldn’t hear. “Remember? The divorce was finalized two weeks ago.”

“Right,” Max said. He smiled so wide she could see his two crooked bottom incisors. “Old habits die hard.”

Catherine pushed the second chair over to the opposite side of the table and sat back down. She wanted some distance and the opportunity to read him properly.

“I was so happy to get your text,” Max said as he dropped his phone, lighter, and wallet on the small round table. “And I read your article in today’s paper. It was brilliant! I’m thrilled you want to celebrate with me.” He caught the attention of the waiter. “I’ll have a coffee, please. And Madame will have a tea with milk and sugar, and probably some cake.” He turned back to Catherine. “You do want cake, right,
mon cœur
?”

Deep breath. Count to ten. Decide if she wanted cake more, or to make a scene and drill home that she was not his Madame anymore, she was not his sweetheart, and he needed to move on. Since she had received her paycheck the day before and was therefore once again well fed, the temptation to finally allow herself something sweet won out. She could get her cake
and
yell at her ex-husband.

“I’ll have a chocolate brownie, please,” she ground out between clenched teeth.

The waiter repeated their order. “Un café, un thé au sucre et au lait, et un brownies.”

Catherine shuddered. She couldn’t get used to the French adopting the word brownie, but always using it in plural form. So she always had to buy one brownies. They even corrected her on occasion.

Once the waiter was out of earshot, she pounced. “When are you going to get it into your thick head that we are divorced?” She kept her voice down, but there could be no mistaking her anger.

It had been like this all through their marriage. He had always treated her like she was a baby or an invalid, doing things for her that she was perfectly capable of doing herself. Like opening doors, carrying grocery bags, or deciding what she would eat at a restaurant. Stifled, Catherine needed to get out. After three years of marriage, she filed for divorce.

Max smiled like she was a teenager who didn’t want a parent to kiss her goodbye in front of her friends. “I’m sorry,” he said with no regret whatsoever. “Did you not want tea and cake?”

“That is not the point here,” she hissed.

“Are you suggesting,” he said in the reasonable voice he used when purposefully pissing off phone salesmen, “that I should have let you order for yourself just because we are no longer married? You would have ordered the exact same thing, but it would have taken twice as long for the waiter.” He threw his hands out to the side and there was the slightest of pauses as if he was going to add something, then changed his mind. “I saved time for everyone.”

“I sincerely hope,” Catherine said in a calm voice promising a storm to come, “that you were not going to add that I would have had to repeat myself in order for him to understand my accent, and that
that
was where we would all have saved time.”