The Awkward Squad Read online

  Torrez was still in the living room when Capestan came back downstairs. A long, curling thread suggested that one of the belt loops on the lieutenant’s sheepskin jacket was starting to come away at the seam. Torrez checked his watch.

  “Midday. I’m going for lunch. Let’s meet outside number 32, Serge Naulin’s place, at 2:00 p.m.?”

  Without waiting for a response, he walked out.

  Commissaire Anne Capestan was left on her own, her arms held out in a gesture of helplessness.

  10

  Two hours later to the minute, Torrez came rolling down the street like a rhinoceros.

  “I was doing some thinking on my break,” he declared.

  The two officers were standing on the pavement, keeping their distance from the house owned by Serge Naulin, the man who had alerted the authorities. A badly pruned laurel hedge was shielding them from the windows on the ground floor.

  “Since the murder, the house has never been put up for sale. It seemed odd to me that no squatters had come flooding in, so I wondered . . . Do you suppose the brother’s paying someone to keep an eye on the old place? No idea who.”

  So maybe the brother was prioritizing security over sanitary measures. Interesting.

  A plaque above the letterbox read MONSIEUR NAULIN.

  The man who opened the door was still in his pajamas and a burgundy dressing gown. He possessed a sort of greasy softness that somehow allowed him to be both thin and fleshy. He raised his droopy eyelids and studied Capestan with a crooked smile, in no apparent hurry.

  “Lieutenant Torrez and Commissaire Capestan,” she said drily, showing him her badge. “We won’t disturb you for long, we just have a few questions about your former neighbor, Marie Sauzelle. She was murdered seven years ago. Do you remember?”

  “Of course,” he said, letting them in.

  The man deliberately did not move far enough aside, obliging Capestan to brush past him. She held back a shudder of disgust before forcing her way through roughly.

  “The street was blocked off for ages after that horrible event. Would you like something to drink?” he offered in a smooth voice. “I have some schnapps, or perhaps a crème de cassis?”

  “We’ll be fine, thanks,” Capestan replied curtly.

  A few patches of stubble intruded on Naulin’s otherwise bare cheeks, while his long, thinning hair was slicked back in a scraggly ponytail. He was clearly cultivating a bohemian look, desperately trying to come across as sensual and seductive. Seeing that Torrez was at the ready with his ballpoint and notebook, Capestan made a start:

  “Did you know her?”

  “A little. We conversed from time to time . . . The usual good-neighbor things, nothing more.”

  He lit a cigarette, which he held between the tips of his slender fingers. Half the filter vanished when he brought it to his crimson lips.

  “Were there any other burglaries in the area around that time?” Capestan asked, looking away from this distinctly unappetizing spectacle.

  “No, just her house. Even though she was by no means the most well-heeled person on the street . . .”

  “Did you hear anything that night? Any details that came back to you later on? Someone you saw scoping out the house beforehand, or anyone hanging around?”

  “Nothing,” he said, puffing out smoke. “Nothing remarkable.”

  “Did she seem at all anxious in the days before?”

  Naulin stroked the corner of his lips with a yellow-stained finger, not bothering to think before giving his answer.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “Though she wasn’t a worrier by nature. Would you like some cookies? I have some stashed away in a tin.”

  Capestan didn’t want booze and she didn’t want cookies. Capestan wanted new information, something specific, anything to relaunch this investigation and give them a fresh line of inquiry. She wanted to honor the memory of Marie Sauzelle, and she also wanted her squad to succeed where others had failed.

  This Naulin guy was prevaricating. He was displaying the smugness of someone who was sitting on what he knew, taking pleasure in keeping it warm. Capestan dropped the questions about the burglary and chose a different tack:

  “Anyone have a grudge against Marie Sauzelle? Any locals, for example?”

  Naulin did not seem pleased with this abrupt change of tone.

  “Of course,” he said reluctantly, taking a deep inhalation. “She was a bit of a battle-ax and could be very stubborn, often without taking much heed of other people. The Issy–Val de Seine property group, for starters . . . now they were hardly enamored of her!” he said with a sardonic chuckle.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “A new media center was supposedly going to be built right here. Bernard Argan, the developer, offered her a fortune for her place . . .”

  “How are we spelling ‘Argan’?” Torrez interrupted.

  Capestan let him note it down before continuing:

  “She didn’t sell?”

  “No . . . Bless her soul, she never wanted to, the silly bitch.”

  Torrez jerked his head up, the tip of his ballpoint still touching his notebook.

  “Your house is just next door,” Capestan said, trying hard not to blink. “Did she consult you before sending them away?”

  “No.”

  “You must have had to turn down a lot of money.”

  “Two million euros. It was a tidy offer, at the time.”

  Naulin seemed to have no qualms about providing such a wonderful motive. Maybe he organized the burglary to frighten Marie Sauzelle and pressure her into moving, and it turned sour? Capestan rejected this thought before it had even fully taken shape. Naulin was still looking at her through the slits of his lizard-like eyes: he had cast his rod and was waiting for her to take the bait. No doubt he’d have an alibi for the time of the crime. She did not want to give him the pleasure of announcing it, so she chose to let him stew in silence instead.

  “I was in Bayeux,” he said, as if reading the commissaire’s mind, “at my parents’ place. I only came home two days before discovering the body. I didn’t kill her. Just as well I didn’t bother, because as you can see, her death hasn’t changed a thing. They ended up building the center over by the boulevard.”

  “So the brother refused to sell, too?”

  “There’s no hiding anything from you two.”

  “He even pays someone to keep an eye on the house. That’s the real bummer,” Capestan said, playing him at his own game.

  “Me. He pays me,” Naulin replied, stubbing out his half-smoked cigarette in the overflowing ashtray.

  “You’re not working terribly hard,” Torrez chimed in. “We walked straight into the house in broad daylight.”

  “I didn’t say he paid me well.”

  So Naulin was the one in charge of security. Maybe this was the piece of information he had been brooding over so mysteriously since the start of the interview. The man did not know much, but he packaged it in such a way as to swell his own sense of importance. Or perhaps he was throwing them a dummy with this admission. Capestan decided not to push any further until she had dug around in his past a little. It was time to call it a day.

  After a few more questions about the discovery of the body, the officers gratefully hauled themselves off the foam sofa that had swallowed them up. They left a contact number, just on the off-chance that Serge Naulin hit upon some memories or some compassion, and left after the customary farewells.

  Torrez ripped a flyer off the windshield that promised him unbeatable prices on full leg waxing.

  “Nice guy, wasn’t he?” he asked, scrunching up the ad before tossing it into a nearby trashcan.

  Capestan opened the passenger door of the 306 and practically dived in, despite its lingering smell of stale tobacco. Once Torrez was inside, too, she delivered her verdict:

  “There’s something not quite right about the guy. And there’s something not quite right about his connection with the brother, either.”<
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  “You think it wasn’t a burglary after all?”

  “No, I do, because crim said so. They did work on the case for a while, to be fair to them. I just don’t know,” she admitted, rolling down the window to let in the warm afternoon air.

  A sticker on a road sign was saying NO TO AUSTERITY! On a bench on the square, in the shade of a plane tree, two young women chatted as each of them rocked a buggy.

  “We’ll need to take a look at Naulin. He might be hiding something.”

  “I’ll take care of it when we get back,” Torrez said before starting the engine.

  He pulled out of their space in silence, cautiously avoiding the cars that were hurtling recklessly down the street.

  “And the brother,” he said once they were on the move. “Seven years later and he hasn’t sold? Having the place watched? Strange behavior.”

  “The brother. I don’t think we should make up our mind before we’ve seen him. We need to go down there.”

  “In this car?” Torrez exclaimed, the tinge of concern in his voice not quite disguising his excitement about going back to Creuse.

  “Let’s take the train and hire a car down there. Our budget is only supposed to cover local journeys, but it’s set for forty people. There are still only about four and a half of us, so we should get away with it.”

  Capestan thought for a second longer. It would also be good to meet the police officers from the time and find out what led them to conclude that it was an isolated robber.

  “No,” she said, turning to Torrez. “I’m not buying the burglary theory at all.”

  “Neither am I.”

  11

  They drove back on the other side of the Seine and had to slow down when they were level with place de la Concorde. Capestan gazed across the square, with its obelisk and street lamps surrounded by little clusters of tourists on Segways. They advanced in short bursts, stiff with apprehension and smiling nervously as they clung to the handlebars of their mobile platforms. They had all of Paris before their eyes, but most of their excitement was focused on their thick rubber tires on the pavement. Thanks to the traffic jam, Capestan had time to appreciate this whirligig. When the lights finally went green, the 306 stalled. Torrez glared at the windshield menacingly, took a deep breath, and turned the key. The engine revved back into action just as the lights went red again, setting off a deafening blast of horns that almost ruffled the seagulls occupying the bridge. Twenty yards later, they were met by yet another holdup.

  Torrez sighed and drummed the steering wheel impatiently.

  “Let’s stick the light on . . .”

  He took his eyes off the traffic for a second as he searched the dashboard, then under the passenger seat. Nothing.

  “There isn’t one,” Capestan confirmed wearily.

  “What about a siren?”

  “Afraid not: no siren, no lights. We’re an auxiliary squad and we do get a budget, but it doesn’t cover everything.”

  Bearing in mind the state of the office, the computers, and the cars, Capestan had resigned herself to such setbacks.

  “So it doesn’t cover sirens?”

  “Not for equipment. We get the hand-me-downs and the surplus. Or the stuff that’s gone out of fashion. And sirens are still in.”

  “How are we supposed to work without them?”

  “We’re not in any great hurry. Our case is seven years old. A few minutes here or there . . .”

  The car was still at a halt and Torrez was staring at the commissaire in silence. She felt as if she had just told him he was transferring to Minsk.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You know what,” Torrez said after a few seconds’ hesitation, “I’ve been a cast off for years. Before it was just me, but now there’s a whole team of us. As far as I’m concerned, that’s progress.”

  The brake lights on the Volvo ahead went out, and they were on the move again. Torrez joined the right-hand lane, taking care to avoid a bike that was studiously ignoring the cycle path six feet to its side. The lieutenant’s face suggested he was chewing over a question but was hesitant about spitting it out. Capestan knew precisely what it was, and decided to give him until Châtelet to come out with it. He finally cracked at Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois.

  “Did you really shoot that guy, then? That’s quite something to pin on you bearing in mind . . . what you’d done before.”

  Bull’s-eye. She had plenty more to say on the matter, but she trotted out the familiar phrase instead:

  “Self-defense.”

  Torrez screwed up his face with skepticism and kept his hands tight on the wheel. The second question would come soon. The same inevitable follow-up. But Torrez abstained: he was saving it up for later.

  They arrived at boulevard de Sébastopol and pulled into the Vinci parking garage, where a few spaces were reserved for the squad. One of them was filled with a sumptuous jet-black Lexus.

  “What the hell is that?” Torrez said.

  “My guess is it’s Rosière’s car.”

  “I bet she’s got a siren.”

  12

  When Capestan and Torrez reached the landing, they noticed that the door was locked from the inside with the key still in it. She had to stoop to ringing the bell to get into her own commissariat. The sound of barking came from inside, and she couldn’t for the life of her think what was going on. Lebreton opened the door, a furious dog at his feet. He nodded at them and returned to his conversation, the little hound walking alongside him.

  All four of them went to join Rosière, who had furnished her Empire desk with remarkable opulence: a chic leather blotter, an intricately gilded pen holder, and a bronze lamp with false candles and a shade with the Napoleonic bee-print pattern. She had also unashamedly expanded her territory, adding two large armchairs—upholstered in stripy green-and-cream satin—opposite her own mahogany throne. Sitting in one of these chairs was a woman with blonde curly hair. She was holding a file and turning the pages in a perfectly measured manner. A new recruit, the commissaire thought to herself.

  “I found it in that cardboard box,” the young woman explained, pointing to one at her feet marked DRUG SQUAD. “Supposedly a closed case, something about a dealer operating in parc Monceau.”

  She stood up when she saw Capestan.

  “Good morning, commissaire, I’m Lieutenant Évrard. I used to be in the gambling task force, but they transferred me here. When I found out you were in charge of the squad, I thought . . .”

  She held out her hands in a manner that roughly translated as “got to be worth a try.” Capestan put on a welcoming expression at the same time as returning to her internal list of CVs. Évrard . . . lieutenant, yes, but also a compulsive gambler who had been banned from all casinos and sidelined for suspected foul play involving underground gambling dens. She looked perfectly clean-cut and open, with big innocent blue eyes. Not your everyday bluffer—that must have been a bonus for her.

  “Hello, lieutenant. Delighted to have you on the team. Is that your dog?”

  “I’m going to get a coffee,” Torrez said, heading into the kitchen.

  Évrard suddenly turned pale. She had just recognized the notorious Malchance and was automatically reaching for a salt shaker or a lucky charm of some sort. She thrust her hands into her pockets and managed to regain a semblance of calm. After pouring his coffee, Torrez looked at her irritably and then disappeared down the corridor to his office.

  “Whose dog is this?” Capestan said again.

  “Mine,” Rosière answered. “You don’t mind, do you? We can say he’s a police dog . . .”

  “He’s not even eight inches high, your police dog.”

  “Don’t listen to that lady, my little Pilou. She’s talking nonsense,” Rosière said in a falsely consoling tone, then added: “He’s got flair, you know.”

  Capestan felt the need to assert a basic level of authority. But the dog plonked his rear on the floor as if it weighed three tons and stared back a
t her with his ears and nose in the air. His enormous paws and disproportionately large head gave him the appearance of a perpetual puppy. In any case, Capestan had never been overly fond of authority.

  “What breed is it?”

  Rosière answered by numbering on her left hand:

  “There’s some corgi, like the Queen of England has, then some dachshund, some mutt, a bit of pooch, and some mongrel. He’s even more hybrid than my Lexus,” she chuckled, delighted either by her joke or by the dog itself. “His name is Pilote, but you can call him Pilou.”

  “Oh, I can? He won’t get upset?”

  Rosière smiled, leaned down, and tickled the neck of her dog, who stretched his muzzle as far forward as possible to take full advantage of his mistress’s attentions. Capestan was about to go and join Torrez when Merlot appeared in the doorway. He greeted the mere commoners in the room with a gesture that was almost as expansive as his waistline:

  “Ladies and gentlemen! And canines,” he added, acknowledging the world’s least effective guard dog.

  After much bowing and scraping, Merlot made the most of the introductions to plant an enthusiastic kiss on the hands of the unfortunate Évrard and Rosière, whom he had never met before. Reeking of cheap wine that was potent enough to strip wallpaper, he embarked on yet another round of urbane conversation. He held forth one way and the women recoiled; he held forth another way and the women fainted. Lebreton, whose height gave him access to purer air, listened for a few moments without losing his balance, then retired to his desk.

  During a brief respite, Capestan turned to Évrard:

  “That case about the parc Monceau dealer that you were talking about just now . . . is it a murder?”

  “No, it’s all to do with badly cut coke. It just seems strange that they never wrapped it up despite having all the info they needed. Parc Monceau is full of kids—a dealer’s going to do some damage.”

  “Absolutely. Can I leave you to take a look with Merlot?”