The Trouble with Too Much Sun by Camilla Crespi

Author:Camilla Crespi [Crespi, Camilla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781491721414
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2014-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

We sat down at a corner table of Langou’s, “where the women are beautiful and the food is good” according to Langou himself, a dark lizard of a man in his eighties who whisked rapidly between tables with plates stringing down his arms like oversized buttons.

Having finally caught my breath after tearing up the hills in Beaujoie’s toy Renault as if we were winning the Monte Carlo Rally in a Porsche, I said, “Here’s what I found.”

I used the magazine to lift the package onto his empty plate. Beaujoie reached over to the sideboard to swipe a naked green bottle, unscrewed the top, and poured two glasses half full with rum.

“This is what Eric was really after,” I said, gloating a little. I’d already told him about Eric barging into Zaza’s apartment.

Beaujoie took a gulp of rum, then unfolded a clean handkerchief from his breast pocket.

“I’m afraid you’ll find a lot of my fingerprints on it too. I dropped it and shoved it back in my purse real quick. I didn’t want Tommy to see it. It was my very own BIG CLUE, something to be shared only with my sleuthing companion.

Unwrapping the roll with his handkerchief, Beaujoie opened the plastic bag and sniffed inside as if he were one of those DEA dogs I’d seen at Kennedy Airport.

“Is it cocaine?”

“I doubt it is flour.” He rerolled the bag and slipped both handkerchief and package in his pocket. He looked unimpressed.

“Well, what do you think?” I was annoyed. I guess I’d expected a smacking “bravo.” “Is Eric hooked or is he a private dealer?” I’d figured there was about a cup of white powder in that bag. Julia Child translates eight ounces into about two hundred and thirty grams, and I’d read somewhere that suppliers asked twenty thousand dollars for a kilo of coke. We were looking at approximately five thousand dollars worth, IF it was cocaine.

“People on Guadeloupe have no use for powdered drugs. We have our own.” He drained his glass. I didn’t touch mine.

“What about the people coming from the Metro?”

“A few sniffs have come in with the tourists. In a shoe, inside a portable radio, once inside the stuffing of a bra. All in all, Customs has found very little.”

“I thought it might be a motive for murder.” It didn’t take much these days. Last year some teenagers in Connecticut had killed a man for eighteen dollars’ worth of Chinese takeout, “Eric has talked about money coming in, that soon he’ll be able to buy any distillery he wants.”

“Not with this amount of drugs.”

“Couldn’t it be one of many such packages?”

“Perhaps, but there was no need to kill her to claim this one. What defense did Iguana have against him? Not her friend Zaza, who is as thin as a newly sprouted root?”

“Rudi…” I interrupted myself as I looked down to see Langou, his head looking like an oversized nutmeg, grinning at me. His chin barely cleared the tabletop.

“Ka ou fe, Commissaire.” He dropped four plates

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