2 Éclair Murder Read online

  They walked back toward the tower and then to their building. Clémence thought about taking a bath to relax. This was the second time in a month that she’d seen a dead body. At least it was a stranger this time.

  “Just go home,” Arthur said. “We don’t even know if there is a killer. Like I said, the man could’ve died from natural causes.”

  “Killer?” Clémence hadn’t even thought about another killer being involved until Arthur mentioned it.

  CHAPTER 3

  When Clémence went into work the next morning, she had nearly forgotten about the dead body in the bush. She hoped that this was the end of her spell of finding dead bodies in Paris. In the kitchen, she busied herself with testing Sebastien’s savory éclairs. This one was stuffed with salmon, a mousse-like cream cheese and fresh herbs.

  “You’ve done it,” she said. “This is going on the lunch menu.”

  Sebastien beamed. “Did you still want me to work on the hotdog éclair?”

  The hotdog éclair was basically a wiener in the éclair’s “choux” shell—a gourmet hotdog with a French twist.

  Clémence nodded. “Yes. It doesn’t taste quite right yet. I want the perfect balance of French and American. Right now, it’s tasting too French.”

  Damour pastries often had an American or international twist. It was the fusion between the classic and the new that made the chain so popular.

  “What is it about it that’s so French?” Sebastien asked.

  “It’s the ketchup and mustard,” said Clémence .

  “But it’s freshly made,” Sebastien protested. “It’s perfect.”

  “Yes, but American ketchup has more sugar.”

  Sebastien wrinkled his freckled nose. “You want me to add more sugar to this perfectly good homemade tomato ketchup? Why don’t we just use a bottle of Heinz then!”

  Sebastien was being sarcastic, but Clémence took this idea seriously. Her mother was American, and she’d lived in New York during many summers growing up. She knew how good a New York hotdog from a street vendor could be.

  “Heinz…” she said. “Okay, let’s try it. I think that’s the only thing keeping that recipe from being a hit.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Sebastien muttered, but he called up one of the intern bakers to try to find some authentic America ketchup. The intern took a break from slicing vanilla beans in half for their vanilla macaron recipe to go to an American shop in the 7th arrondissement.

  “In the meanwhile, let’s work on the shrimp and avocado éclairs,” Clémence said.

  Berenice came back from her break with a strange look on her face. She was Sebastien’s younger sister, and also a baker. Both Soulier siblings had reddish-brown hair and pale, freckled skin. Sebastien was more serious and secretive, while Berenice was a lot more spirited and chatty.

  “Hey Clémence,” Berenice said. “There’s a couple of police cars outside the patisserie. Caroline’s talking to the police right now, and they’re causing a commotion with the customers.”

  Caroline was Damour’s head manager. Clémence wiped her hands on her apron. She was about to head out the door to see what was going on when Caroline came in with Inspector Cyril St. Clair.

  Clémence groaned.

  “The feeling is mutual Mademoiselle Damour,” Cyril said.

  Caroline, who was usually calm and collected, had panic in her eyes. “He says we have to close down the entire place for the day. They want to inspect for poison.”

  “What?” Clémence exclaimed.

  “Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” Sebastien asked. “What’s going on?”

  All the chefs and bakers in the kitchen turned to stare at Cyril and his men.

  “A man was found dead this morning at the Champs de Mars,” Cyril declared. “He died from eating poisoned éclairs from your patisserie.”

  “Poisoned?” Berenice said.

  “Yes. That’s right.” Cyril paced the kitchen with his long spidery legs. “One and a half pistachio éclairs from Damour was enough to kill a healthy 43-year-old man. We are shutting down the entire shop to check for traces of poison.”

  “Tell me you did not announce this loud enough for the customers to hear,” said Clémence.

  “I pulled him to the back before he did,” said Caroline.

  Cyril rolled his eyes. “Did you hear what I said? I need everybody out. My team is going to check every nook and cranny for anything suspicious.”

  “But you can’t do that,” Clémence implored. “This is ridiculous. We’re not lacing our pastries with poison. Our salon is full, and have you seen the lineup for the patisserie? We can’t shut down now. You have nothing on us.”

  “It’s for the good of the customers,” Cyril insisted. “We can’t have another one dropping dead from poison, can we now? Everybody out.”

  The employees looked at each other, then looked to Caroline and Clémence for further instruction.

  “Fine,” Clémence said. “Caroline, please come up with something and inform the customers that we’ll be closed for the morning.”

  “Not just the morning.” Cyril smiled slyly. “We might need the entire day. Maybe even tomorrow.”

  “That’s just not right.” Heat rose to Clémence’s cheeks. “First of all you’re wasting your time. And you’re not only wasting our time, but our business as well.”

  “I’m so sorry that you’ll be losing a few dollars,” said Cyril, “but I think a police investigation is more important than selling a few macarons, don’t you think?”

  “We have lunch reservations to fulfill, custom orders, and all this food and desserts are going to waste because we only sell them fresh—it’s just not right.”

  Cyril shrugged. “Police orders. You do know that a murderer is on the loose here? I can’t help that your patisserie happens to play yet another role in a murder. Call it bad luck, but we have to do our job.”

  Clémence got the urge, again, to smack the inspector silly. But she took a deep breath and turned to her staff.

  “I’m sorry guys. We’ll call you back in when this ordeal is over. In the meanwhile, enjoy the morning off.”

  They filtered out, but Sebastien and Berenice lingered as Cyril’s team got started.

  “What a pain,” said Berenice.

  “Don’t worry,” said Clémence. “I know exactly what to do.”

  “What?” asked Sebastien.

  “Call my mother,” she said.

  CHAPTER 4

  After Clémence informed her parents, who were back in Tokyo after traveling around Japan, her mother called Cyril and gave him a piece of her mind. She said that if the store wasn’t reopened by tomorrow, she’d have the country’s best lawyers down Cyril’s throat. She also threatened to bill him with the profit loss because there was no way any of her staff had anything to do with this.

  After she helped Caroline call and inform the customers with lunch reservations that the place would be closed for the day and that they would receive a 50% reduction for their next lunch, she put up two signs to inform walk-in customers of the closure as well.

  Clémence was so mad that she turned down lunch with Sebastien and Berenice. She went home to feed Miffy and tried to calm down.

  In her bedroom bathroom, she took a lavender bubble bath and tried to relax. She thought about the dead man in the bush. He had died eating pistachio éclairs. They had been fresh éclairs from what she could tell. It meant that they had been bought on the same day. There was no way that the staff would have had anything to do with this, on purpose or by accident. It wasn’t as if they had bottles of poison just lying around.

  But Clémence was worried. What if it was the éclairs? What if one of the bakers poured in something toxic by mistake, or some stranger had snuck in to do some damage? What if it was a competitor out to destroy their reputation?

  Clémence splashed water on her face. She had to relax. She just had to wait for the results. When Cyril concluded that Damour had nothing to do with this d
eath, the store would be reopened and it would be business as usual.

  She got out of the tub, ate lunch, and thought about how she could enjoy the rest of her day. It was an unexpected day off. If she were to hang out with Berenice and Sebastien, she would probably want to rant about Cyril, the whole situation, and get mad again. Maybe it was best for her to be alone and mellow out that day.

  She decided to paint. She had set up an easel on the balcony earlier that week with the intention of painting again, but she never got around to it since she had been so busy at work. But her first love was art after all. She did have great ambition to be a painter and put on her own show at a reputable art gallery someday.

  Clémence had graduated from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, one of the best art schools in the country. She mainly studied the techniques of classical paintings. It had been a long, rigorous process, but she did it because she wanted to perfect the techniques of the masters so she would have to tools to develop her own style of painting.

  What her style was, however, she didn’t exactly know yet, even after all the years at school. She personally loved the impressionist paintings, cubism, and anything surreal. She really liked the child-like whimsy in Marc Chagall’s work.

  For now, she would try to have fun with art again. To loosen herself up, she decided to sketch Miffy. She sat down with a glass of wine and called Miffy out to the balcony.

  It wasn’t hard for Miffy to stay still. Clémence gently told her to sit, explaining that she was going to draw her in charcoal. Miffy smiled and wagged her tail as if she understood.

  After an hour, she had five rough sketches of Miffy in various poses. She decided that she was ready to paint a portrait of Miffy.

  It had to be good enough for her parents to want to frame and display in the apartment. The thought of that made Clémence hesitant with her paint brush. Although she was proud to have graduated from one of the best art schools, she had never been considered the best in her class.

  One of her professors used to tell her that her paintings were average and forgettable. She had been in awe of a couple of her classmates who were so talented and so sure of themselves. Clémence didn’t have the same confidence when she held her brush. She hesitated, which was why she never made it as an artist. Plus, she hadn’t really given it a good shot.

  She was good at inventing pastries, and her skills could rival any top baker in Paris, but she’d learned that through osmosis. Her parents were the talented ones. It was in the blood. Baking, to her, was a lot simpler. It was a matter of picking and choosing ingredients and deciding which ones would work well together. The fun was in the “lab”, the kitchen where she’d try and fail until she got the combination right. It was a lot of adjusting and patience.

  So why couldn’t she apply the same patience, certainty and perseverance to her art? It was probably because she took it too seriously. Baking and experimenting in the kitchen was fun, while painting and trying to figure out what it was that she wanted to express through lines and colors was work. Painting conjured up insecurities, and it was easier to stick with what she was good at.

  When she was living with her ex-boyfriend in Le Marais before she went on her two-year tour around the world, she had been the girlfriend of a talented artist. Mathieu had been her classmate, and the one deemed “talented” in school. His technique did in fact rival the masters. His portraits of people were incredible.

  The last she’d heard, Mathieu had put on a small exhibition, portraits of farmers from the countryside. She read one of the glowing reviews in the papers. As everyone had predicted, Mathieu was on his way. She wondered if he was still with the girl he’d broken up with her for, Susanne whats-her-name. He had scouted her from the streets and asked her to pose for one of his portraits. What a cliché it had been, the artist and the muse getting romantically involved.

  The whole breakup had turned Clémence off from dating artists—and creating art. After it happened, she decided to go off and travel, which had been one of the best decision she’d ever made.

  She’d been together with Mathieu for three years, and she used to be crazy about him. Mathieu was so brilliant and charming, but ultimately, he didn’t think Clémence was good enough for her. Looking back now, he had hardly been encouraging about her work. He was condescending towards her efforts, paying false compliments as if he was a parent praising the ugly scribbles of a child. There could only be one artist in a couple and it certainly hadn’t been Clémence.

  “Oh what the hell,” she said to Miffy. “If I’m no good as a painter, I might as well just have fun with it, right? I already have a pretty good job. I’ll just do it for the enjoyment of it.”

  Clémence looked at La Tour Eiffel for support as well, which seemed to be emitting the positive response that she needed.

  “If it sucks, I’ll just throw the painting away, right? It’s just practice.”

  Clémence went ahead and sketched Miffy on the canvas. She painted her on top of a Parisian rooftop, since that was her view from the balcony.

  Time seemed to fly as she painted. Miffy barked every so often to cheer her on.

  When Clémence took a break in the kitchen to eat a snack, she heard knocking at the kitchen door.

  It was Ben, the Englishman who lived in one of the former servant rooms on the roof. He rented the room from her parents.

  “Hey.” The goofy Englishman was dressed all in black, his signature attire, and he was holding his laundry bag. “I saw that you were in and I figured I’d be able to do the laundry. I tried calling you.”

  “Come on in. Sorry, I was on the balcony so I didn’t hear the phone ring. Run the machine and come have a drink outside if you want.”

  “Sure.”

  “Plus I want to hear all the latest on your relationship with Berenice.” Clémence smiled mischievously.

  She had invited Berenice out to Ben’s poetry slam a few weeks ago and the two had hit it off.

  “You’re gonna grill me, are you? You’re going to have to ply me with alcohol first.”

  “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon,” said Clémence. “Sometimes I worry about your drinking problem.”

  “Don’t worry.” Ben grinned. “It’s just the British in me.”

  They took a bottle of white wine to share on the balcony. The sun was bright and the clouds were a brilliant white.

  “What’s that you got there?” Ben peered at the half-finished painting on the easel. “You did this?”

  “Just now,” Clémence said, a little embarrassed. She’d been looking at the painting so closely that she had not stepped back to look at it in its entirety until now. She scrutinized it, hoping that it wasn’t awful.

  “It’s amazing,” Ben said.

  “Really?” Clémence beamed. She did think the painting wasn’t too bad. There was a sense of whimsy to it, and it captured Miffy’s friendly personality well. “I’m still working on the shading.”

  “I’d forgotten that you were a painter,” said Ben.

  “I’m trying to get back into it,” said Clémence.

  “You’re obviously very good.”

  Clémence blushed. Her parents had always told her that she was good, but art school had been so competitive. It felt good to have another person tell her that she had talent, even if he was a friend.

  “Is that what you want to be? A painter? Your mother mentioned that you really wanted to be a great painter.”