Private Paris Read online

  “A rare man, then,” Louis said.

  With heat in his voice, Farad replied, “With all due respect, Louis, no, he’s not. There are many of us who think this way, who want to build communities, not destroy them.”

  He gestured to a storefront just beyond the mosque.

  The FEZ Couriers sign in the window featured a large Moroccan hat with a gold tassel hanging off the top. There were several men smoking out front and wearing jackets featuring the FEZ logo as well.

  “Firmus Massi built this business from nothing,” Farad said. “His parents came from Algiers, as mine did. He saw a need for a messenger service and started it on a credit card. Now he employs twenty messengers in Paris. A builder. Not a destroyer.”

  “An entrepreneur in France,” Louis said, impressed. “A rarer thing than a moderate Muslim.”

  Farad ignored him and gestured to the store next to the messenger service. “This is where the hijab and veil were made.”

  “Al-Jumaa Custom Tailor and Embroidery” was written above the door in French and Arabic. Farad went in first and we followed. The interior was crowded with bolts of fabric stacked in cubbies, several women working on sewing machines, and racks of robes, tunics, and veils on the far wall.

  Farad was soon talking to Monsieur Al-Jumaa, a gaunt man in a white tunic and black pants. His wife, who stood beside him, was dressed the same as the woman we’d seen running from the kid with the camera: long dark robes and a hijab that surrounded her face like a frame. For some reason she had been staring hostilely at me from the get-go. Maybe she didn’t like blonds.

  Farad did the talking in Arabic, and then in French, with Louis translating for me. We showed the tailor our Private badges. He seemed unimpressed. His wife, a pudgy-faced woman with the constant threat of a snarl on her upper lip, looked at the badges, flung her hands in the air, and chattered something in Arabic. Her husband chattered back.

  “She thinks we’re here to persecute them,” Farad said. “He agrees.”

  “Tell them Private doesn’t do persecution,” I said. “We just ask questions. They’re under no obligation to answer, but we could use their help.”

  Farad rattled that off, and we got grudging harrumphs in return.

  “Show them the picture, Jack,” Louis said.

  I did, and the Al-Jumaas studied it. Immediately the tailor turned suspicious and said, “Why do you have this picture to show me?”

  “It’s part of a murder investigation,” Louis said. “I’m sure the police will be by at some point to talk to you about it. We’re looking into it for the victim’s wife.”

  “We know nothing about a murder,” the tailor’s wife said, on the defensive now. “We are good people. We work hard.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said. “And you keep records, yes?”

  “What kind of records?” Al-Jumaa asked, the suspicion returning.

  “Orders,” Louis said. “Measurements. Addresses. Phone numbers. Who bought that hijab and that veil and when.”

  Madame Al-Jumaa clucked sharply at her husband in Arabic and threw her hands up in surrender. Al-Jumaa shrugged and asked to see the picture again.

  The tailor enlarged the photo and stared at the label for a moment, and then shook his head and said, “Ready-to-wear. No records of this.”

  “Explain that,” Farad said.

  Al-Jumaa pointed to two short, thin, black lines in the corner of the label and then gestured at the racks along the far wall.

  “All the premades carry these two lines,” he said. “The custom hijabs and robes carry a crescent.”

  “So you don’t keep a record of who bought ready-to-wear?” Louis asked.

  “Just that a robe was sold. No names. No addresses. We are not required to keep them.”

  “How’s business?” I asked.

  The tailor studied me, nodded, and said, “Business is good. Every year it gets better. The future is bright for us.”

  That surprised me. “Even with the laws on wearing the hijab and veil?”

  His wife heard that and started clucking in amusement this time.

  “She says those laws will be repealed eventually,” Farad interpreted.

  “What makes her think that?” Louis asked.

  Her husband said, “The population of old France is aging and dying, while the immigrant population is young and growing. The birthrate in old France is less than two children per marriage. The birthrate among immigrants is in the fours. We have five children. Sooner than later, we will simply outnumber the old French, and then the law will fall, just as I will grow rich.”

  His wife added, “It is simple mathematics. Like Allah’s will: indisputable and inevitable.”

  I couldn’t argue with the tailor’s logic. The numbers were the numbers.

  “How long until you see it happening?” I asked Farad and Louis once we were back out on the sidewalk.

  “It already is happening,” Louis said. “You can see it in places like Les Bosquets. There they are, bulging at the seams.”

  “Twenty years?” Farad said. “Twenty-five until the law changes?”

  “Something like that,” Louis agreed. “But by then I shall be too old to care.”

  “But by then, won’t the immigrants have assimilated more into French culture?” I asked.

  “Not if we isolate them,” Louis said. His cell phone rang and he answered.

  “What do you think?” I asked Farad.

  He shrugged. “I am not much interested in politics.”

  “Pincus?” Louis gasped. “Yes, of course. We’ll be right there.”

  Shaken, Louis shut his phone, looked at me, and said, “That was Sharen Hoskins. She has been ordered to accept your offer of a forensics team. La Crim’s criminalists are backlogged and AB-16 has struck again.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Who’s the victim?”

  “René Pincus. Arguably the greatest chef in all of France.”

  Part Three

  Les Immortels

  Chapter 35

  9th Arrondissement

  1:20 p.m.

  THE GREATEST CHEF in all of France hung upside down from a rope tied to his ankles and lashed to a steel beam that ran down the center of the kitchen ceiling. René Pincus’s swollen head hovered a few feet over the stovetops, and his arms were spread to the sides, tied with cooking twine.

  “Same general position as Henri Richard,” Sharen Hoskins observed. “But the graffiti is much more visible this time. We won’t be able to contain it.”

  The tag was painted three times inside the restaurant: once on the stovetop below Pincus, once on the dining room wall, and a third time across the front window. Word of the great chef’s death had leaked and a mob of media types gathered out front, training their cameras on the tag on the front window.

  “Was he strangled?” I asked.

  “No,” the investigateur said. “Drowned in his own chicken stock.”

  “So the method of killing is different, almost ironic,” I said.

  Hoskins nodded. “And it changes things, don’t you think? With those pictures you discovered, Henri Richard’s murder was easily attributed to revenge. Now I think we must look for a link between Henri Richard and René Pincus, some reason they were targeted for death.”

  “There is one link,” Louis said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Henri Richard ate dinner here several times in the last six weeks.”

  Hoskins squinted, crossed her arms, and said, “And how do you know that?”

  Louis realized he’d set a trap for himself, but he smiled and said, “Private Paris never reveals its confidential sources, but I can assure you it’s true.”

  “Louis,” she began.

  “Chéri,” he said. “Are we here to follow every nuance of the law? Or are we here to catch a killer who grows more prolific?”

  Hoskins stuck out her jaw. “Don’t call me chéri.”

  “Ah,” Louis said, acting chagrined. “A slip of the
tongue, no? I promise never to address you this way again.”

  Claudia Vans, Private Paris’s chief forensics tech, came up to Louis. She showed him several plastic evidence bags containing cigarette butts and said, “What’s the chance the staff has a habit of flicking cigarette butts around this place?”

  “Seems unlikely, but we’ll ask,” Hoskins said.

  Out in the dining area, other Private Paris forensics techs were photographing and taking samples from the AB-16 graffiti on the wall. Hoskins went to speak with them. When she was satisfied that they were covering every angle, she went to the front door and started letting in the staff to be questioned.

  Louis provided a running translation.

  The maître d’, a plump, nervous man named Remy Fontaine, said, “Is it true? He is dead?”

  “I’m afraid so,” the investigateur said.

  Fontaine and the other four employees broke down crying and hugged each other. The sommelier, a stocky blonde named Adelaide St. Michel, stopped crying long enough to say, “Does it have to do with the Bocuse d’Or?”

  “What makes you say that?” Louis asked.

  “The other chefs in France hated Chef Pincus,” she said. “Three times he wins the Bocuse d’Or, and every time you hear the vicious rumors right away, the terrible things they said about him. It was all envy, and I think it was strong enough for people to want him dead. How did he die?”

  Hoskins hesitated.

  “How did he die?” asked Fontaine, the maître d’.

  “He was drowned in his chicken stock,” I said.

  The sommelier snapped her fingers at me, and then at Hoskins, who was glaring my way. “There you go, then,” Adelaide St. Michel said. “Chef Pincus was world famous for his stock. This is a statement.”

  I had to agree. Killing him in his own soup was designed to send a message. But what, exactly?

  Chapter 36

  IT CERTAINLY DIDN’T appear to me that any of the staff were involved. All of them appeared genuinely heartbroken. To a person they seemed to have loved René Pincus. He was demanding. He was precise. He could be a withering critic of their work. But he was also extraordinarily generous.

  “It was a side of René that no one outside of us knew, really,” said the maître d’. “To the staff, he was like a demanding uncle. In public, he was the French chef of iron.”

  He’d said this last in English, so I corrected him. “Iron chef.”

  “Yes?” Fontaine said. “René was the iron chef of the world, and now he is no more.” The grief-stricken man broke down sobbing again. “What is to become of us? Who will carry on with the restaurant?”

  “Who would be the natural person to step forward?” I asked. “There must be a senior chef working beneath Chef Pincus.”

  “That would be me,” said Peter Bonaventure. He looked about forty but had the build of a marathoner. “But I can’t even think this way. I did not want his throne. I loved my job. René was a genius who made our work a passion. And he paid us well, gave us profit shares that were equal to his own.”

  “Equal?” I asked.

  They nodded. With every one of them making the same amount of euros as Pincus, the idea of financial gain as motive seemed to be diminishing rapidly.

  “How many of you smoke?” Louis asked.

  Four of the staff members, including the maître d’, raised their hands.

  “How many of you would discard a cigarette on the kitchen floor or in the wine cellar?”

  All four hands dropped. To a person they looked horrified.

  “That would be grounds for termination,” the sommelier said. “No smoking in the restaurant. René would have a fit.”

  Louis, Hoskins, and I exchanged glances. Someone with no fear of Pincus had tossed the cigarettes. Probably his killers.

  Louis got out his iPhone and called up a picture of Henri Richard. He showed it to them. “Did you see him in the restaurant in the past six weeks or so?”

  Remy Fontaine, the maître d’, took one look and said, “Bien sûr. He is the dead opera director. Monsieur Richard. He came here often.”

  “Alone?” Hoskins asked.

  “Never alone,” Fontaine said. “Always with a woman.”

  “Same woman?” I asked.

  The maître d’ and the sommelier glanced at each other before she said, “The last two or three times we think it was the same woman. Exotically beautiful, with perfect caramel-colored skin and big cat eyes. But she was different every time she came in. Hair color and cut.”

  “And eye color,” the maître d’ said. “Twice they were dark brown, but the last time they were in, her hair had been hennaed red, and her eyes were, I don’t know, like a cat’s eyes?”

  “So she’s wearing different-colored contacts,” I said.

  “And more than that,” the maître d’ said. “She had—how do you say?—extensions in her hair, and her cheeks, the thickness, they seemed to change.”

  Louis said, “Probably putting cotton high in her mouth.”

  “You ever hear him use her name?”

  “Mariama,” the headwaiter said. “No idea on her last name.”

  “You’re positive?” Hoskins said.

  “Definitely,” he replied. “I heard him call her Mariama several times.”

  The name could be useful, I thought. But then again, this is a woman who changes her hair and eye color and used cotton to alter her looks. It wasn’t a stretch to see her using an alias.

  “Did Chef Pincus know Henri Richard?”

  The maître d’ nodded. “They were not close friends, but they knew each other. In fact, the last time Richard was in with Mariama, René came to their table and talked.”

  “About what?” Hoskins asked.

  Fontaine shrugged. “I don’t know, but the chef shook his hand and seemed very happy returning to the kitchen.”

  The wine steward agreed. “He was whistling.”

  “And when was this?” I asked.

  “Last week.”

  “Are there security cameras here?”

  Investigateur Hoskins sobered, shook her head. “There are very few outside of government buildings. The French see it as an invasion of privacy.”

  “Who was the last to see Chef Pincus alive?” Louis asked.

  The maître d’ and the wine steward raised their hands. They gave us the timetable, and then described leaving the restaurant shortly after 1 a.m., and seeing a drunk passed out in the alley by the Dumpster.

  “You rarely see that in this neighborhood,” Fontaine remarked. “But you could smell the alcohol all over him, even over the garbage.”

  “What does it mean?” the steward asked. “The graffiti?”

  “When we figure it out, we’ll let you know,” Hoskins said. “For now, I want to clear the restaurant and let the forensics team complete its work.”

  Louis and I didn’t argue. We went back through the kitchen, where Chef Pincus’s body had been cut down and covered with a sheet. Out in the alley, we crossed to the Dumpster, finding a broken bottle of beer sitting upright beneath it. There was still two inches of booze in the intact bottom.

  “Why didn’t he drink it?” Louis asked.

  “What, from the broken part? There are glass shards in there. He’d have swallowed them.”

  “A clever wino would strain them out with his shirt,” Louis said. “Maybe this bum just wanted to smell drunk.”

  Chapter 37

  8th Arrondissement

  6:12 p.m.

  I GOT OUT of a taxi in the twilight, and felt vindicated and excited as I bid good evening to the doorman at the Plaza Athénée. Earlier, Louis and I left Investigateur Hoskins to deal with the media mob gathered around Chez Pincus, and went back to the offices of Private Paris. We put together a priority list for the evidence our techs had gathered at the scene.

  It was a big deal for a Private forensics team to be called in by a local police department, and especially by a renowned investigative operation
like La Crim. The decision spoke to the level of training and adherence to state-of-the-art forensics methods that I’d insisted on after deciding to get my company into the crime analysis business. Our labs were certified in fifteen states in the U.S. We maintain Interpol standards throughout the rest of the world, and police agencies were starting to recognize us for our efforts.

  That alone had put a positive spin on my day. But around 2 p.m., I’d gotten a call that put me in an even rosier state of mind. Michele Herbert asked if I would like to have dinner with her. Though I’d felt like doing a back handspring in response, I kept my cool, and we made a date for nine.

  I moved through the lobby and through an arch. I glanced to my right and saw a gathering happy hour crowd milling in an interior loggia that abutted the dining room and the courtyard. Along the walls of the high, narrow space, groups of the beautiful, the wealthy, and the famous sat in fine furniture, sipped from thirty dollar cocktails, and nibbled at plates of foie gras and caviar tureens.

  About halfway down, I spotted Randall Peaks by that gaggle of Saudi princesses, all of whom appeared to have changed dresses since the morning. Peaks looked at me and nodded. I nodded back, and then got on the elevator. As I did, my phone rang.

  “Jack Morgan,” I answered.

  “It’s me,” Justine said. “The swelling on Sherman Wilkerson’s brain has started to subside. The doctors think they’ll be able to bring him out of the coma tomorrow, or the day after at the latest.”

  “Long-term prognosis?” I asked.

  “Could take a year of therapy, but good, I think,” she replied.

  “That’s excellent,” I said, and breathed a sigh of relief. Not only was Sherman Wilkerson one of my oldest clients, but he was a truly good man, someone who most certainly did not deserve to live out his days in a vegetative state.

  “Anything on the granddaughter to report?” Justine asked. “I’m sure she’ll be the first thing on Sherman’s mind.”

  “She’s gone to ground. I haven’t seen any new alerts that she’s used her card.”