Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 111, No. 1. Whole No. 677, January 1998

The Fatted Goose by Hoyford Peirce

© 1997 by Hoyford Peirce

Many authors who write about exotic locales rely on reference books to fill in necessary details. Not Hayford Peirce. The author lived in the place that inspires his fiction for many years, and when he returns on holiday nowadays, he has the added aide to on-the-spot research of a son-in-law who is a Tahitian Inspecteur de Police in the vice squad.

Unlike many Tahitian women who grow noticeably stouter — though no less high-spirited — with age, Angelina Tama had retained her youthful slimness in spite of having borne four children and, even more burdensome, being married to French Polynesia’s most noted trencherman.

Part of her slimness was due to genetics; the rest could be attributed to caution.

“She read the menu,” grumbled her husband, Alexandre, who was easily three or four times the size of his diminutive wife. “Nothing on it but goose and foie gras, so she decided she wouldn’t come. Imagine that: a wife of mine who doesn’t like foie gras.” His great belly shook with mirth as he waggled his massive head in mock dismay. Wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, dark blue trousers, and shiny brown sandals, the chief of police of Papeete, Tahiti’s capital city, ran his eyes curiously about the kitchen of this just-opened inn deep in the island’s mountainous interior. Chez Ma Mere l’Oie — At Mother Goose’s — was at the far end of a dozen kilometers of nearly impassable road and Tama wondered how it would survive, even if its cuisine was as good as its owner promised it would be.

“So get yourself another wife,” shouted Michel-Pierre LaRochelle, the restaurant’s owner, above the sudden roar of a torrential downpour crashing against the roof, “like I’m going to do one of these days, one with some meat on her bones, not like little Miss No-tits over there.” The burly, white-clad Frenchman jerked his head contemptuously in the direction of his graceful but undeniably boyishly svelte wife as she disappeared through the kitchen’s swinging doors.

Tama stared coldly at the walrus-moustached Alsatian whose protruding belly was nearly a match for his own. In spite of his own occasionally Rabelaisian nature, the Commissaire de Police detested gratuitous vulgarity, especially when directed at so noticeably gracious — and highly attractive — a person as the wife of this loutish goose farmer and innkeeper. Pockmarked and bulbous-nosed, with dirty gray ringlets of greasy hair spilling from beneath his stained chef’s toque, this relatively recent arrival in Polynesia was far from being sympathique. “You say there is a room ready for us?” demanded Tama, casting a dark scowl at the sheet of water cascading relentlessly down the kitchen windows.

“Just the one. I don’t know how anyone ever gets anything done on this damned island with nothing but these Tahitian monkeys working for you. Instead of the eight rooms they promised to have ready last month, there’s still just one.” Scowling ferociously, LaRochelle yanked open one of the many glass doors of a gleaming new commercial refrigeration unit and peered suspiciously at a closed compartment holding a dozen or so small dishes filled with curlicues of butter. “But don’t you worry, Monsieur le Commissaire, your room is just waiting for you, with two fine beds. If you and your Chink friend here are up to those kind of tricks, you can always push them together—” he chuckled coarsely “—or I can send my own sack of bones up for the two of you since you didn’t bring your own.” His chuckle became a guffaw.

Tama glanced at his companion, a muscular little Eurasian male in neat white shorts and a hideously garish Hawaiian shirt. Did Colonel Yashimoto understand anything this ghastly goose farmer was saying? He hoped not. If it weren’t raining with all the fury that only a tropical rainy season could provide, he certainly would never contemplate spending the night under the roof of so gross a bigot and vulgarian. Tama turned back to their host just in time to see the Alsatian poke a hairy finger into a piece of soft butter, then wipe his finger against his already richly stained white tunic. “Isn’t that butter supposed to be refrigerated?” asked Tama, always willing to talk food with even the most loutish of creatures.

“And it is — perfectly. Look: separate butter and cheese compartments with their own temperature controls. Haven’t you ever noticed how the butter in this damned country is always too hard or too soft? Not at Chez Ma Mere l’Oie — at least here the butter’s going to be just the temperature it’s supposed to be.”

“Excellent, I detest butter that’s too hard to spread.” Tama waved a gigantic mahogany-colored hand at another compartment in the refrigerator. Here were silver platters with thickly sliced pieces of creamy beige foie gras. “You’ve numbered the platters on the bottom so no one will know which foie gras we’re eating?”

“Just like a wine tasting,” agreed LaRochelle in his thick Alsatian accent. “Not even a professional snoop like Monsieur le Commissaire will be able to tell which is which — except by tasting, and then you’ll know which one is mine — the best one.”

“I certainly hope so,” said Tama with complete sincerity, for only the purported excellence of the inn’s homemade foie gras could keep him any longer in the company of this appalling restaurateur. “When does the judging begin?”

“As soon as the last of the judges gets — Hey there, you, Cherry Cheeks, what the devil are you doing with that aspic?”

An ivory-skinned half-Tahitian in his late teens looked up with doelike eyes from a cutting board where he was dicing sheets of glittering brown aspic. “Just... just what you told me to do, Monsieur le patron,” he stammered. His already noticeably rosy cheeks flushed even redder.

“Mince alors!” LaRochelle lurched forward in sudden fury. “I told you to—” He stumbled against an enormously fat yellow dog that had waddled into the kitchen with bushy tail awaggle. “Bordel de Dieu!” screamed the Frenchman, unleashing a vicious kick against the dog’s flanks. “Martine, get this beast of yours out of the kitchen before I feed it to the geese!” Yelping piteously, the dog fled into a corner. “Now then, you, Cherry Cheeks! What I told you was...”

With a disgusted shake of his head, Tama pulled his companion toward the swinging doors. “I’d like to have that... that fellow in my little jail for a day or two,” he muttered in lightly accented English. “I’d teach him some manners.”

“Aren’t all French chefs supposed to be temperamental?” asked Colonel Yashimoto with a faint grin as they moved into the inn’s wood-beamed dining room.

“Temperamental, not vicious. I’d stuff him down the throats of his own geese! Except, of course, that would ruin the foie gras, and he’s the only one on the island who’s tried to make any in thirty years.” Tama’s angry black eyes moved about the room.

Two Tahitian waitresses in bright red dresses decorated with white hibiscuses were lighting candles on linen-topped tables. In the flickering yellow light, crystal wine glasses began to glitter enticingly. On the far side of the room, in a massive fieldstone fireplace, a waiter was fanning the flames that licked tentatively at three enormous logs. Here in the island’s mountains, far from the warm coastal plains, it was always chilly at night, especially in the midst of their frequent cloudbursts.

Next to the fireplace, the restaurateur’s wife was arranging enormous sprays of gaudy hibiscus and creamy gardenia blooms along the table on which the foie gras for the tasting would be presented. Tama nodded reluctantly. It wasn’t a bad idea of the cloddish innkeeper: a competition between his own homemade foie gras and the finest that Perigord and Alsace could offer, with a panel of distinguished local bon vivants as judges. Just the thing to drum up a little free publicity for Tahiti’s newest, and most inaccessible, restaurant.

Madame la patronne made a final adjustment to the yellow and orange hibiscus in her own jet-black hair and stepped back to admire the table’s floral arrangements while, in turn, Alexandre Tama let his eyes come to rest admiringly upon her.

Martine LaRochelle was a tall but delicate, almost fragile-looking demi-Chinoise in her early thirties with a lovely oval face, large almond eyes, and glossy black hair that fell ruler-straight to the small of her back. Like many demi-Chinoises, she enjoyed the best of both worlds: the golden-brown skin of the Polynesian and the dainty features of the Chinese. Wearing a shiny green silk dress embroidered with golden dragons that fit her boyish figure like an exotic skin, she was, Tama thought, as beautiful a half-Chinese girl as he had ever seen — no matter what the size of her breasts. How this lovely creature put up with so brutish a husband was hard to fathom...

“A glass of champagne, messieurs?” A smiling waitress proffered a laden tray. “The buses with most of the other guests are just beginning to arrive.”

A few minutes later, in spite of the thunderous rain that occasionally made conversation difficult, the dining room of the small inn was nearly filled with loudly chattering guests. “Hrmph,” rumbled Tama to his companion, “it looks like le tout Papeete is here, the same old faces, never anyone new. I guess LaRochelle brought them out in a couple of special buses. I hope they don’t fall in the ditch on the way home. If they do, they’ll never get out in this deluge.”

“And where’s your charming wife?” demanded an enormous Tahitian lady whose girth was nearly as great as Tama’s and who was the Minister of Social Affairs for this island group that spread across an area of the Pacific as large as Europe or the United States. “I knew you’d be here — anywhere there’s a free meal and drinks you’ll find Alexandre Tama!”

The Commissaire de Police smiled tolerantly. “Home — she can’t stand foie gras. So I brought our house guest from Hawaii instead. This is Colonel Yashimoto, chief of the state police on Big Island. The two of us were in school together in Honolulu years ago, where he was known as Mad Dog — though I can’t now remember why.”

“Big Island! I adore Big Island! Do you know Kona, Colonel Yashimoto?”

“Monsieur le Commissaire?” It was the ethereal Martine LaRochelle tapping shyly on Tama’s arm. “If you could come along? The other judges are here; we’re about to begin the tasting.”

An hour later Tama and Mad Dog Yashimoto sat by themselves at their own candle-lit table while Madame LaRochelle directed the serving of enormous pieces of foie gras onto sparkling beds of diced aspic and aspic rounds. To accompany the goose liver, the handsome half-Tahitian youth LaRochelle had disdainfully called Cherry Cheeks glided from table to table pouring golden Sauterne into crystal glasses.

“How can you eat any more of that pâté?” marveled the Hawaiian as he watched Tama slather butter that, as LaRochelle had promised, was the perfect consistency, upon a triangle of toast and then add a thick wedge of foie gras. “I must have seen you put away at least two pounds of the stuff already.”

The Commissaire de Police winced. “Foie gras, Mad Dog, foie gras! Pâté is to foie gras as... as a McDonald’s hamburger is to a perfectly marbled ribeye steak with Béarnaise sauce!”

Colonel Yashimoto pushed away his own largely uneaten piece of foie gras and nibbled gingerly at a rubbery piece of aspic. “You mean there’s a difference? Up on Big Island, even in the fanciest hotels, we peasants always call it pâté de foie gras.”

“An enormous difference, like the difference between my opu here and Inspector Opuu.” Tama chuckled appreciatively as he tapped his gargantuan stomach, for opu means belly in Tahitian, while the faithful Inspector Opuu was one of the skinniest men in the islands. “Real foie gras, the stuff we have here before us and that the charming Mr. LaRochelle makes out back, is nothing but the entire liver from a specially fattened goose and a little seasoning. Sometimes it’s two or three livers pressed gently together, then cooked very, very slowly in a very low oven. Or sometimes they just wrap a hot towel around it and leave it to cook by itself overnight. That’s foie gras. Pâté is anything that’s ground up. Those cans of deviled ham we used to eat on picnics — that’s pâté!”

“It is? Deviled ham?”

“And canned dog food — that’s pâté too.” The Commissaire de Police chewed his foie gras appreciatively. “Where people get confused, even Frenchmen, is that sometimes leftover bits and pieces of genuine foie gras are ground up with pork fat and veal and God knows what else and that’s what’s called pâté de foie gras. It can be pretty good sometimes, especially if you put in a truffle or two, but foie gras it’s not.”

“Live and learn.” Colonel Yashimoto pushed his plate away. “And this guy’s foie gras is good? Did it win the tasting?”

“Yes, it really is good. And it really did win the tasting. Against canned foie gras, it’s true, but still, I’m amazed: foie gras as good as this, made in Tahiti! If he can keep it up, he’s going to make a fortune.”

“Not from me, he’s not,” declared the American. “Here, you can have the rest of mine. And all of this awful aspic, too.” He bounced a piece derisively against his plate. “Look, it’s just like rubber.”

“No, his gelée isn’t up to his foie gras, it’s definitely the commercial variety, right out of a package. Very nasty stuff.” Tama pursed his lips. “I wonder, though, if we can’t make it disappear by some other way than just eating it? Let’s see now, I think this menu would be just about the right size if we tore it in half...”

Colonel Yashimoto watched curiously as Tama ripped the piece of paper neatly in two, then reached for a piece of shiny round aspic the size of a silver dollar. Laying the aspic precisely in the middle of the paper, the Commissaire carefully folded the paper around it until it was wrapped securely in a tight little packet of multiple folds.

“Now then,” said Tama, tapping the packet against the rim of a wine glass, “what we’ll do is place this right here in the middle of the table. And then we’ll put your hand over it like this just to make sure it doesn’t go anywhere, and then I’ll put my hand over yours to make doubly sure—” his enormous hand entirely covered Colonel Yashimoto’s “—and then I’ll say the magic words, ‘Be gone, wretched aspic!’ And then we’ll open it up to see if it’s really gone.” He withdrew his hand. “Here, you open it.”

The unfolded packet was, of course, empty. “I suppose you’ll never tell me how you did that?” said Colonel Yashimoto sourly. “Of course not — I’d be drummed out of the magician’s union.”

“Then you’d better not try finding it in my ear later on — or I’ll show you just why they used to call me Mad Dog.”

The next course was a simple salad with a few pieces of diced foie gras scattered among the garlicky croutons. It was followed by a slice of foie gras that had been sauteed golden brown along with small green grapes. “Marvelous,” rhapsodized the Commissaire de Police as he washed it down with a chilled Gewurztraminer from Alsace, and even Colonel Yashimoto agreed that it was worth tasting.

“And now,” said Tama, “we come to a very interesting junction in the menu. We can have either the confit d’oie, which is preserved goose fried brown and crispy, with sarladaise potatoes, or we can have the filet mignon on an artichoke heart stuffed with foie gras, accompanied by bordelaise sauce. You know,” he said to the awestruck waitress, “I think I’ll have one of each — that way we’ll be sure of using up all of those poor geese who so nobly contributed to making the foie gras.”

“They really do pour food down a funnel into the poor geese,” asked Colonel Yashimoto as they watched red wine being poured, “to make them fatter?”

“I’m afraid so. The whole point is to make the liver as big as possible. The liver for a good foie gras is at least three or four times the size of a normal one.”

The Hawaiian shuddered slightly. “You don’t think that’s awfully cruel?”

“I don’t know,” said Tama with a massive sigh. “The anti-foie gras people say it’s cruel, the people who raise the geese say the geese love it and follow them around just begging to be fed.” He waggled a thick finger. “Suppose I turn you into a goose — and let you find out for yourself?”

Some time later Colonel Yashimoto picked halfheartedly at his enormous piece of crispy goose breast. “I suppose there’ll be foie gras ice cream and then pitchers of goose fat to pour into the coffee? Can you get me an appointment with a cardiologist for tomorrow morning?”

“Nonsense! It’s been scientifically shown that Frenchmen who eat geese and goose fat live far longer than—”

“More wine, messieurs?” murmured the rosy-cheeked Tahitian waiter. He poured for Colonel Yashimoto, then reached across to pour for Tama.

“You dolt!” hissed Michel-Pierre LaRochelle, who, freshly changed into a clean white tunic, had been making his way triumphantly from table to table through the dining room, a glass of champagne in hand. “I told you to always pour from the right! Can’t you damned faggots ever get anything straight?” Seizing the bottle from the boy’s hand, he poured a glass for Tama. “Excuse me, Monsieur le Commissaire, someday I’ll see if he can’t get something right.” He thrust the bottle back at the cowering waiter. “Here! Now go do it right for the rest of the guests! Or I’ll kick your cute little ass for you!” He reached out and pinched the boy viciously on the cheek. “There, maybe that’ll help you remember, Cherry Cheeks! Enjoy the rest of your meal, messieurs,” he murmured unctuously and swaggered on to the next table.

Tama’s fingers drummed furiously on the table. “I can’t believe the Inspecteur de Travail will permit such behavior! I’ll personally have a word with—”

He was interrupted by a startlingly loud sound that it took a moment to identify as silverware being banged against a crystal wineglass. Tama and Colonel Yashimoto peered around the room until their eyes came to the far comer. Here a thickset woman in a plain black dress stood by her table, whanging a glass lustily. In the restaurant’s flickering candlelight all Tama could see of her clearly was an enormous mop of thick blond hair and the largest heart-shaped violet sunglasses he had ever seen.

“Good evening, friends,” said the blonde in a voice that was hardly more than a husky whisper and that yet filled the room effortlessly. “I hope you’ve all enjoyed your delicious dinner.” She cast a broad smile to all sides while two male companions moved away from the table and began taking photographs. A few tentative bursts of applause died away as the flashbulbs flared brightly.

“A delicious dinner procured from the bodies of tortured animals!” cried the woman with sudden passion, pulling off her blond wig and throwing it to the floor. A moment later, as the flashbulbs flared again, she tossed away her sunglasses.

“Dear God, it’s Valérie Valescu,” muttered Tama disgustedly in English. “Just what we needed to ruin a perfect meal.”

“Valérie Valescu the actress?” murmured Colonel Yashimoto in awestruck tones. “But...”

“... she’s nearly as fat as I am. No, retirement hasn’t been kind to her. I wonder how she got in here?”

The one-time sex goddess of the French cinema shook her closely cropped black hair with its famous stripe of platinum gold running across the top and raised a hand to silence the once-again noisy dining room. “I know, dear friends, that none of us likes to think about where our delicious food comes from, but sometimes we have to! When we have beautiful scallops of pale white veal, for instance, do we think about the tortured little calves locked up in their—”

The voice of the world’s most famous animal-rights activist was drowned out by a wave of hisses and derisory catcalls, as if she were a nearsighted referee at a football game.

“Hou! Hou!”

“Shut up and let us eat!”

“Take off your clothes and go back to showing your ass!”

All the time her two grinning companions were hopping about the room and rapidly snapping pictures.

“So that’s how she got in,” shouted Tama to Colonel Yashimoto above the uproar. “Those clowns with the cameras are the owner and editor of one of the local rags. I knew she was here in the islands incognito, but thought she’d gone over to Brando’s island to commune with nature at the bird sanctuary. She must have heard about this little dinner and figured she could get some free publicity by smuggling herself in.”

“She seems to have succeeded — now they’ve got VCRs going. All of this will be on television, I suppose.”

“All over the world. She—”

“Please!” cried Valérie Valescu, vainly rapping her fork against her water glass. “Please, let me—”

The chorus of boos grew louder.

The still-sensual lips of the middle-aged ex-sex kitten grew tight. With a surprisingly athletic gesture she threw the glass precisely into the middle of the fireplace, where it smashed noisily. “Will you just let me finish?” she pleaded into the sudden silence. “Behind this restaurant, there are pens where the owner keeps his poor tortured geese. I beg of you: Go look at them, ask yourselves if—”

Once again her voice was drowned out, and now the inn’s owner, Michel-Pierre LaRochelle, could be seen stalking ominously across the dining room.

“Then eat your dirty foie gras,” screamed V. V. above the clamor, “eat your filthy liver from tortured birds!” From somewhere she produced a white plastic bag. A moment later she was throwing gleaming brown objects in all directions. One of them landed squarely against the crisp white tunic of the restaurant’s owner, and it was then that Tama identified what she was throwing.

“Chicken livers,” he bellowed gleefully, “she’s throwing raw chicken livers! Look at that, she got old Dr. Vonnegut right in the face!”

Another glob of liver landed on the creamy white breasts of a redhead in startling décolleté. The horrified woman began to scream hysterically. Two more handfuls were fired at random and then Michel-Pierre LaRochelle’s hairy hands fastened around V. V.’s neck.

“Let me go!” she cried, grinding chicken liver into his face. “Murderer! Torturer! Sadist!”

Equally enraged, the half-blinded restaurateur pummeled the screeching actress with a flurry of blows as he dragged her to the front door and manhandled her into the night. Cursing furiously, he turned back to look for Valérie Valescu’s companions, but they had made a prudent withdrawal. A ragged volley of cheers went up from the stunned diners as Michel-Pierre LaRochelle vanished behind the swinging doors of his kitchen.

“Well!” exclaimed Colonel Yashimoto admiringly. “This has been an evening worth seeing! Thank you for bringing me, Sandy, it was even worth the foie gras ice cream!”

“Bah!” muttered Alexandre Tama darkly. “Children, all of them. There’s something about this island that turns everyone into children.”

“I guess our sex goddess is gone, but what are you going to do about our gracious host? That looked pretty much like common assault to me, what he was doing to V. V.”

The Commissaire de Police snorted angrily. “It’s up here in the mountains, completely out of my jurisdiction. And why should I? I love foie gras. Let her go raise a fuss about baby seals or iguanas — those I don’t eat!”

Tama spent a restless night in the sole room the inn had ready for guests.

Perhaps because he was in a strange bed that, though large, still wasn’t quite large enough.

Or perhaps because Mad Dog Yashimoto in the adjoining bed occasionally broke into light snores before once again falling silent.

At some point during the night he came awake in the darkness with a sudden start and a violently throbbing head. Maybe he really shouldn’t have had that last glass of champagne. Water, he badly needed several liters of water. Fumbling for the lamp beside his bed, he located it only to discover that the light wouldn’t come on. He fell back with a groan. Obviously, way up here in the mountains, the Mother Goose inn had to generate its own electricity. And, as in most little places like this, the generator was equally obviously turned off at night to economize on fuel.

Tama muttered to himself, found his bedside glass of water in the darkness, and eventually drifted back to an uneasy sleep.

Sometime later the thunderous rain suddenly stopped and in the absolute silence that ensued he could hear the frantic honking of geese. No foie gras without geese, he thought disjointedly, and no geese without honking. And no honking without Valérie Valescu. And no V. V. without... Rolling over, he fell into a troubled sleep in which he was pursued by giant geese waving bright red livers held before them in dainty white human hands.

He was awakened again by having his shoulder violently shaken. “Come quickly, Monsieur le Commissaire! My husband is hurt, I think he may be dead!”

Groggy, Tama looked up to see the once-lovely features of Mar-tine LaRochelle only inches from his. Now, however, her eyes were wild and her face was mostly hidden by bright red blood. A scalp wound, he thought automatically, they’re always messy, just as several drops fell against his bare skin. “Are you all right?” he muttered, staring at her disheveled hair, muddy blue bathrobe, and bloody hands.

“Yes, yes, it’s my husband who’s hurt! Hurry!”

Groaning loudly, Tama pushed himself upright. “Pass me that bathrobe and then go in the bathroom and wrap a towel around your head to stop the bleeding — there’s not room enough for all of us in this one little room.”

In the pale gray light of a misty dawn, Tama and an equally groggy Colonel Yashimoto followed the half-stumbling demi-Chinoise through the soggy grass. Ahead of them loomed two surprisingly large buildings that, Tama supposed, housed the geese. In the distance he heard a muted honking and saw thirty or forty long-necked white birds disappearing over the crest of a small rise.

“She let them out,” murmured Martine LaRochelle in an uninflected monotone as they rounded the corner of the buildings. “She let them out.”

“Who—” began the Commissaire de Police but was stopped short by the sight of last evening’s host lying in a morass of thick mud. The restaurateur wore nothing but a yellow and white pareo cloth knotted tightly around his ample stomach and a single muddy green slipper — the other one was half buried in the mud a few yards away. Just behind him was the chain-link fence that enclosed an equally muddy yard on the side of one of the buildings. A gate in the middle of the fence stood open.

“Michel!” Throwing herself to her knees in the viscous mud, Martine LaRochelle cradled her husband’s head against her thighs. “Michel!” His pale blue eyes stared up at her unblinkingly. Even from here, Tama could see that Tahiti’s only producteur de foie gras was dead.

“Looks like he’s been bludgeoned,” murmured Colonel Yashimoto into Tama’s ear. “Look at those dents in his skull.”

“Yes, and there’s the wrecking bar that did it, lying in the mud over there.”

“No chance of fingerprints with that mess.”

“Fingerprints? In Tahiti?” Tama puffed out his great cheeks. “You’ve been watching too much television.” He moved forward with his customary sure-footed delicacy that constantly astonished Colonel Yashimoto and gently drew the newly widowed Martine LaRochelle to her feet. “Come along, Madame. I fear there’s nothing we can do for your husband. And we ought to have your head attended to — we can’t have you bleeding to death.”

With an anguished wail, Martine LaRochelle buried her head against Tama’s massive shoulder, then let herself be led around the far corner of the barn and back towards the inn. A listless sun was just beginning to appear above the edge of the mountains surrounding the inn’s narrow valley.

In a shed next to the inn Tama saw an open door, and through it a kerosene lantern casting a dim yellow glow and deep black shadows. The naked back of a slim male was bent over a dark green machine. “Who—” Tama began.

“It was Valérie Valescu who did it,” said Martine LaRochelle with sudden animation, pulling herself away from Tama’s arm and looking up at him with wide, childlike eyes, “Valérie Valescu! We were asleep, Michel and I, and we heard the geese honking and honking and when they didn’t stop we got up and turned on the generator and then turned on all the lights and came out and there she was, trying to open the door to the goose pen with something in her hands and when Michel ran up to stop her she swung around and hit him in the head and then she hit me and I fell down and I saw her hit my husband some more and then she hit me again and when I woke up Michel wouldn’t move and I came and got you and now you tell me he’s dead.” Her mouth fell open, and from beneath the towel wrapped around her head a rivulet of blood began to flow down her cheek with renewed vigor.

“He’s dead? Le patron?” The young Tahitian waiter LaRochelle had called Cherry Cheeks stood in the doorway of the shed, a long wrench in his hand and smears of grease across his face. He wore nothing but a blue and white pareo wrapped around his slim hips. His eyes moved in wonderment from Martine LaRochelle to the Commissaire de Police to Colonel Yashimoto, as if one of them would tell him he was mistaken.

“Yes,” said Tama, wrapping his arm protectively around Mar-tine LaRochelle, “I’m afraid so. That’s the generator you’re working on?”

“It’s stopped working. I think it’s probably the flywheel, we had some trouble with it last week.”

“Get it going as soon as you can — we’re going to need electricity here.” Tama nodded towards the inn. “Is there someone there to get us breakfast while we wait for the gendarmes?”

“No, Monsieur, all the other personnel went home for the night. I’m the only one here.”

“Then keep working on the generator. We’ll take care of our own breakfast.”

But when they reached the front desk of the inn and Tama lifted the phone to call the Gendarmerie Nationale there was utter silence. “Mince!” he rumbled. “The damned phone line must have been knocked down by the storm.” He turned to Colonel Yashimoto. “You see to Madame LaRochelle’s head while I get coffee going. Then as soon as we get some clothes on, we’ll drive out to the nearest phone.”

Twenty minutes later Tama used the six-inch length of steel tubing bolted to the fender of his four-wheel drive Ford Explorer to pull himself into the front seat. “I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he said to Colonel Yashimoto, “it may be minutes or it may be hours. Madame LaRochelle speaks some English. If an emergency comes up, there’s always her car to get you out of here.”

The state policeman nodded. “I think I can handle a middle-aged French sex-kitten — even with a crowbar in her hands.”

But two kilometers later Alexandre Tama found the former sex-goddess at the second wooden bridge he came to along the mud-churned road. A raging torrent of white and brown water surged through the crossing where late yesterday afternoon a bridge had stood. Just this side of the flood waters was a light blue rental car. Lips pursed, the Commissaire de Police peered through its side window. Inside, mouth half open, huddled up against herself in the rear seat, was Valérie Valescu, sound asleep.

“That was quick,” said Colonel Yashimoto admiringly as Tama dropped down from the driver’s seat. The Hawaiian’s eyebrows shot nearly to his hairline as he watched a badly disheveled Valérie Valescu climb down from the other side of the car. Her clothes and hair were caked with dried mud. “And you’ve already caught the perp — I can see why you don’t bother with fingerprints in Tahiti!”

Tama grimaced as he took V. V.’s elbow and guided her towards the front door of the inn. Her head was bowed and her eyes downcast. “I’m afraid it isn’t going to be as simple as that. Where’s Madame LaRochelle?”

“Asleep, I think. We cleaned her up and found her some sleeping pills and got her to bed.”

“And the boy? Has he got the generator going yet?”

“No. Now he thinks it’s probably the fuel pump. His name’s Dominique, by the way, and he seems like a nice little fellow even if LaRochelle didn’t like him.”

Tama grunted. “All right, let’s see if we can find something to eat — it may be a long time before we get out of here. In the meantime I’ll tell you what’s happening.”

Valérie Valescu sat sullenly between Tama and Colonel Yashimoto at a small table in the unlighted kitchen and poked listlessly at the golden brown omelet Tama had cooked for her with a few deft turns of a blackened skillet. The Commissaire swirled a piece of bread into the last creamy remains of his own six-egg omelet and pushed it into his mouth. “The damned butter’s hard as a rock,” he grumbled. “Nothing ever works right in Tahiti for very long.”

Colonel Yashimoto took a cautious sip of his inky-black coffee and turned his eyes towards the silent actress. “And she says she didn’t do it?”

“Yes. She admits that she came back in the night to let the geese out of their pens — that’s the wrong word, she boasts that she came to let them out. For some reason, someone at the rental car place left a wrecker’s bar in the backseat and that’s what gave her the idea. By the time she got back the rain had stopped and all the lights were off. She started prying at the gate that led to the barn and the geese started honking. She got the gate opened and the geese running around like crazy, and then, she says, in the total darkness, she felt a hand fasten around her neck.”

“Scary,” muttered Colonel Yashimoto. “And then what happened?”

“She dropped the crowbar and tried to scream. By this time she knew it was LaRochelle, because he was yelling and cursing as he tried to strangle her. But then they slipped and fell down in the mud and she managed to pull herself loose and get away to the car. She says she expected LaRochelle to come running after her but for some reason he didn’t. She was too grateful to wonder why but just jumped in the car and drove away. By the time she got back to the bridge it had been washed away. So she climbed into the backseat and went to sleep.” Tama sighed heavily. “The sign, I suppose, of a clear conscience and a good digestion.”

The Hawaiian turned a dubious eye to the former movie star. “There’s something here that doesn’t make sense. She says she came back and did all this fighting and running in the dark? Where were the lights?”

“That is indeed the curious part. Let me go over this one more time with Mademoiselle Valescu to make sure I’ve understood her correctly, and then I’ll fill you in.”

For the next five minutes Tama prodded the actress with a series of softly spoken questions. As she replied, reluctantly at first, then with growing animation, her head snapped up and her voice became increasingly emphatic. Finally she rattled off a long string of machine-gun-like French, staring Tama squarely in the eye and pounding the table for emphasis.

Lips pursed, Tama nodded. “What it boils down to,” he said in English to Colonel Yashimoto, “is that Madame LaRochelle couldn’t possibly have seen Mademoiselle Valescu doing what she was supposed to have done because there simply weren’t any lights.”

“An’ I proof it!” interjected Valérie Valescu in heavily accented English.

“Well, maybe,” conceded Tama. “What she says is that when she came back in the night with just her parking lights on, she parked the car some distance away and made a careful reconnaissance around the entire inn. She was almost scared out of her wits when she came around the side of the inn and saw a light suddenly come on.”

“From where?” asked Colonel Yashimoto.

“From the kerosene lantern Monsieur LaRochelle was using inside the shed as he worked to repair the generator. She could see him clearly.”

“Ah. So she’s saying the generator was already broken and—”

“—that Madame LaRochelle was nowhere in sight and couldn’t have seen her even if she had been lurking in the darkness.”

“That’s a lie!” shouted Martine LaRochelle as she lurched with unsteady steps through a side door into the kitchen. She wore a fluffy white peignoir, her eyes were swollen and red, and she suddenly had to grip a countertop to keep her balance.

“Madame, you should be in bed!” exclaimed Tama, pushing his vast bulk to his feet and moving purposefully across the kitchen.

“But I tell you she’s lying!” The half-Chinese pointed a violently trembling finger at Valérie Valescu. “We’d turned the generator off for the night just the way we always do when we go to bed. Then when we heard the geese honking, we turned it back on; there’s a button right there beside the bed to switch it on. We turned on the lights in the inn and the courtyard and we came out and found her... found her at the pen. And... and...” She swayed against the counter, recovered her balance, and turned her enormous almond eyes to Tama. “Ask Dominique — he’ll tell you the generator was working when he woke up this morning and that it stopped just before I came to get you. Please,” she beseeched Tama, “that’s the truth!” Once again she swayed from side to side — and fell directly into the Commissaire’s arms.

“Bah,” muttered Tama when he had returned to the kitchen from putting the semiconscious Martine LaRochelle back to bed, this time locking her door from the outside with the old-fashioned key he had found in its keyhole. “She says one thing, the other one says the opposite, and this wretched boy Dominique will probably say something entirely different. Where is la Valescu, anyway?”

“I took her upstairs for a shower in our bathroom — she could use a little soap and water, you know.”

Tama nodded. “And with the door locked, she can’t get in to scratch the eyes out of our skinny demi-Chinoise” He plopped himself down heavily in the plain wooden chair in which he had breakfasted and his eyes moved moodily across the table. “What do you think?” he asked, hefting a crusty piece of stale baguette and absently tapping it against the butter dish.

“It’s one word against the other’s. If they were in my jurisdiction, I guess I’d just try to sweat both of them until one of them broke.”

“And that’s just what the gendarmes and Monsieur le Procureur will do. Though how much her lawyers will let them sweat little Miss V. V. is open to question.” Tama’s eyes dropped to the butter dish on which only a partial curlicue remained. “You know,” he said slowly, “there may be an easier way to find out which one of them is lying. Up on your feet, Mad Dog, and assume your official persona of Colonel Yashimoto, commander of the state police.”

“What do you mean?” asked the Hawaiian as he rose to his feet.

“At some time in the future both of us will be required to make formal depositions.”

“About what?”

The Commissaire swung around to point at the glass-fronted commercial refrigerator that took up most of one wall of the kitchen. “About the state of the food in the refrigerator. I think that ought to tell us all we want to know about the generator and whether it was working or not when the LaRochelles went out to the goose pens.”

“Ah, I see what you mean.” Colonel Yashimoto drew himself up with as much dignity as his shorts and gaudy Hawaiian shirt permitted. “I am ready to testify as an official witness.”

Tama pulled open the door of one of the main compartments. “Look,” he said, “feel. All the food is still cold, although definitely beginning to get a trifle sweaty. The air is still cold, which is what you’d expect with a well-insulated refrigerator, whether the electricity has been off for a couple of hours or not. The test, however, will come when we examine the butter.” He placed an enormous hand on the smaller door that housed the separate butter and cheese compartments and yanked it open. “There’s what’s left of last evening’s butter. Well, pretend you’re our gracious host and stick your finger in it, Mad Dog, and tell me what you find.” Colonel Yashimoto extended a cautious fingertip against the side of a curlicue of butter. “Hard as a rock,” he muttered. “Let me try another one. Nope, they’re all hard, every single one of them.” Tama nodded and, after prodding each of the curlicues with his own thick finger, shut the door. “And you will so state in your deposition?”

“Of course.” The Hawaiian shook his head in gloomy wonderment. “So that means that Mrs. LaRochelle was telling the truth. The generator was working when they got up, the electricity was inadvertently left on for most of the night after they were attacked, and the refrigerator was going and the butter was kept cold. So she’s telling the truth — and Valerie Valescu did kill her husband. What a story this will make!”

“Au contraire,” murmured Tama wearily as he once again seated himself at the table. “Food in a tumed-off refrigerator will stay cold for many, many hours, particularly at night when the refrigerator is never opened. Even the ice cubes won’t start melting. That’s what lets people in Tahiti who use generators turn them off from time to time, especially at night.”

“But—”

“Let’s think very carefully about what happens when the electricity goes off, Mad Dog. First, of course, the refrigerator goes off. And so does the small electric heater or coil in the butter compartment that heats the compartment just enough to keep the butter soft. The main refrigerator remains cold. And the butter compartment becomes cold.”

“What? You’re saying that—”

“Exactly. If the generator’s off long enough, instead of getting softer, the butter gets harder.” Tama harrumphed noisily. “As far as I’m concerned, this proves the electricity was off and the generator broken just as Mademoiselle Valescu says it was when she saw LaRochelle working on it during the night. Which means that that beautiful wife of his is lying when she says it was on. And since she’s lying about being able to see V. V. attacking them, it means she’s probably also lying about who killed her husband.”

“You think she did it?”

“Of course. Probably with the help of that cute little waiter of theirs. God knows that LaRochelle probably gave them both enough provocation. She obviously did see her husband and Valérie Valescu fighting at the geese pen — she was probably standing in the darkness right behind them. Then she watched V. V. drive away and decided that here was the golden opportunity she’d been waiting for to get rid of her brute of a husband. She picks up the crowbar V. V. has left behind in the mud and takes a swing, maybe hitting him on the shoulder. They fight, she gets a superficial but gaudy scalp wound, but finally ends up on top thanks to the crowbar. She may be skinny, Mad Dog, but she’s tall. She’d get good leverage with those long arms of hers. And then she just waits until morning to spin me that story of hers.”

“Hmmm.” Colonel Yashimoto slumped down against the table and ran a crust of bread through the now thoroughly soft butter. “Probably so. But if I was her, a beautiful girl like that married to a brute like him, I’d change my story to saying the husband caught her in bed with the waiter and attacked them — with a knife maybe. And that she killed him in self-defense.”

“In bed with the waiter out there in the mud?” Tama nodded sourly. “Well, it’s an idea — and one that I’m sure will occur to her lawyer.” His lips tightened and he glared angrily at Colonel Yashimoto. “But what I want to know, no matter what happens to this wretched woman, is, what am I going to do now for my supply of foie gras?”