Private Paris Read online

  That provoked silence in the room until Mfune looked at Sauvage and said, “Private has a strong reputation, Major. A first-class operation.”

  Sauvage said nothing, just twisted his head as if adjusting his collar.

  “Can you rewind that?” Haja asked. “Back to when Meeks was talking?”

  “Sure,” Amé said, and backed the feed up.

  “Stop there,” Haja said, and then stepped closer to study the men behind the institute’s director. “I know these two. I saw them outside the mosque the other day.”

  “Are you sure?” Sauvage asked, engaged again.

  “Positive,” she said. “I never forget a face, Émile. The older one is French, but I think the other one is American.”

  “Then we have a problem,” said Epée, who’d lost color. “The old one is Louis Langlois. He used to be a top investigator with La Crim.”

  “How do you know that?” Haja demanded.

  “He arrested my father for burglary when I was a kid,” the tagger said. “I think he runs Private’s Paris office now.”

  “I’ll check,” Amé said, grabbing a laptop. A moment later, she said, “It’s Langlois. And the American is Jack Morgan, the owner of Private and the guy who found the Harlows last year.”

  Haja knew exactly what she was talking about. Who didn’t? Thom and Jennifer Harlow, Hollywood’s most famous couple, had been kidnapped along with their three children. Morgan and Private L.A. had found and rescued the family in Mexico.

  She felt minor panic ripple through her. Why had Morgan and Langlois been at the mosque that day?

  Mfune and Epée were upset as well.

  “Those Private guys,” the tagger complained. “I read about them in Paris Match last year. They cut corners, break laws. They’re not like normal cops. They never give up once they get on something, especially Morgan.”

  Though his arms were crossed, Sauvage smiled. “No, they’re not like normal cops,” he said. “And Morgan and Langlois would appear to be formidable foes. But with a little creativity, I think Private Paris can be neutralized without much change in our original plans.”

  “How?” Mfune demanded.

  “We’ll put a pincer move on them, and squash them like bugs.”

  Chapter 50

  8th Arrondissement

  10 a.m.

  THE DESIGN STUDIO and haute couture showroom of Jacques Noulan was on the Rue Clément Marot, only a couple of blocks from the Plaza Athénée—a plus given the fact that I hadn’t slept in thirty hours. I planned on talking to the designer and then getting some much needed sack time.

  But when Louis and I reached the reception desk, we were told that Noulan had come down with the flu several days before and was convalescing at his country home in Nance. When we asked for a phone number and address, we were politely told that it was impossible to disturb him. Louis left his card and asked that Noulan call as soon as he returned to work.

  “Convenient that he’s out of touch,” I said outside.

  “I grant you that, Jack.”

  I was about to tell Louis that I was going to the hotel to get some sleep when he gestured down the street and said, “That must feel like a thorn in Noulan’s ass. Maybe this is about jealousy and revenge after all.”

  Yawning, I said, “I’m not following you.”

  “Millie Fleurs,” he replied. “That’s her shop not a block away, Jack.”

  Flashing on my bed at the Plaza, I sighed and said, “Maybe she can shed light on the situation.”

  We crossed the street and went down the block to the shop. The shop lights were on, but the door was locked. It was one of those places where you had to buzz to get in. A tall, thin man in an impeccably tailored mouse-gray suit was working behind the counter. We must not have struck him as impressive because he glanced at us on a computer screen, grimaced, and went back to ignoring us.

  Louis buzzed a second time and held up his Private badge to the camera. The man studied it, curled his upper lip against a pencil-thin mustache, and then buzzed us in. Surprisingly, the shop had very few actual clothes, but it had many life-size black-and-white photos of models wearing Millie Fleurs’s gowns and evening wear. Samples of the designer’s famous purses occupied translucent pedestals around the room, but otherwise the place was empty and white save for the fitting mirrors and counter workstation.

  “Yes? Can I help you?” the man behind the counter asked in a voice that suggested he had zero interest whatsoever in helping us. “This is the haute couture shop. Perhaps you’d be more interested in the ready-to-wear line? It’s a few blocks from—”

  “We’re not here to buy,” Louis grumbled. “We’re here to talk to Madame Fleurs.”

  “Yes, well, wouldn’t we all like to?” he sniffed. “I’m afraid that’s out of the question. You’ll have to call for an appointment, and the soonest time she has is three months out.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  He hesitated, twitched his mustache, and said, “Laurent Alexandre.”

  “Mr. Alexandre, is Millie Fleurs here?”

  “No,” he said, and turned away. “I am the only one—”

  Then a woman called out, “Laurent, are you down there?”

  Unfazed at being caught fibbing, he hurried toward a curtain at the rear of the shop, calling, “I’ll be right up. No need to—”

  The curtain parted. A woman who reminded me of Shirley MacLaine appeared. Wearing black tights, gold slippers, and a crème tunic, she had a dancer’s posture. Her hair was pulled back in a girlish ponytail. She shook a black fabric sample at Alexandre.

  “This is not the fabric I ordered for the princess’s cocktail dress.”

  “Of course it is, Millie,” Alexandre said wearily.

  “It looks wrong.”

  “It’s what you ordered. I checked myself.”

  “It’s not good enough for the princess!” she protested.

  “It will have to be,” her assistant said. “She’s coming tomorrow morning.”

  When Millie Fleurs looked ready to continue her argument, Alexandre gestured at us. “Besides, these men would like to speak with you about…what is it about? And who are you?”

  “We are with Private,” Louis said, walking toward Fleurs with his badge and ID visible. “And we are here to talk about Jacques Noulan and murder.”

  Millie Fleurs’s eyes went wide. “Noulan has been killed?”

  “No, no,” I said. “But as you probably know by now, Lourdes Latrelle has been murdered, and—”

  “Lourdes is dead?” she cried, her hand covering her heart. “And you think Noulan did it!”

  “Madame Fleurs, please,” Louis said. “If you would just let us—”

  “You were right about those e-mails,” Fleurs said to her assistant. “The great Noulan has lost his mind and gone homicidal.”

  It took us a few minutes to get them up to speed on the developments of the past twenty-four hours, including the fresh graffiti tag on the cupola of the Institut de France.

  This all seemed to dumbfound her. “So you think Noulan is targeting the academy for letting me in and not him? And what does this ‘AB-16’ mean?”

  “We don’t know,” Louis said. “Has he threatened you? Noulan?”

  She made a throwaway gesture with the black fabric swatch and said, “Jacques has been threatening me since I would not sleep with him thirty-five years ago.”

  Fleurs explained that she had worked as a designer for Noulan early in her career, but after he tried to make his bed part of the work arrangement, she quit and started her own company. For nearly three decades, he had gone out of his way to make disparaging remarks about her designs, and when she was elected to the academy, he went ballistic and started sending her threatening e-mails.

  “Can you print them out, Laurent?” she asked. “Bring them to the studio?”

  “Of course, Millie,” her assistant said, and went behind the counter.

  “I’m sorry, messieurs, but
you’ll have to come along if you wish to speak further,” she said, heading toward the curtain. “One of my most important customers is coming tomorrow for a fitting, and I’m still the cocktail dress short. I’ll probably be up all night finishing.”

  We followed her. I happened to glance at Alexandre as I passed, and saw beside the computer a sketch pad with a drawing of a dramatic black cocktail dress on it—probably what he’d been working on when we rang the shop bell.

  Fleurs led us behind the curtain and up a steep staircase to a workshop with two cutting tables, three industrial sewing machines, and four mannequins, three of which sported dresses: one maroon, another white, and the third crème-colored. On the wall behind them hung sketches of those same dresses with notations regarding fabric choices, color, and stitching instructions.

  The designer gestured to the dresses. “What do you think?”

  “Stunning,” Louis said. “Never have I seen such beauty.”

  Fleurs raised an eyebrow at him, and then at me.

  “Remarkable enough for a princess,” I said.

  The designer smiled. “I hope so.”

  “A Saudi princess?” Louis asked.

  “Who else can afford haute couture these days?” Fleurs said. “There are fewer than two hundred customers in the world for one-of-a-kind Parisian dresses, and ninety percent of them are Saudi royalty.”

  “This is true?” Louis said, astonished. “Where do they wear them?”

  The designer laughed. “At women-only parties in Riyadh, where even their husbands don’t get to see their hundred thousand dollar dresses. And they wear them when they visit Paris. They wear their robes and veil until they clear Saudi airspace, and then poof! The veils and robes come off and—”

  “I have them here, Millie,” said Alexandre, who held a sheaf of paper.

  “Let them look,” she said.

  The assistant handed Louis the papers, and he scanned them and said, “Have you shown these to the police?”

  Fleurs looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t because the rumor is that Noulan is sick, perhaps with early dementia. I figured these e-mails were due to that.”

  “She’s too kind in some ways,” Alexandre told me.

  That made the designer harden. “He was my mentor once, Laurent. I still admire his genius. Maybe he deserves it, but I thought it would be a crime to run his reputation through the mud if all that was going on was senility and spite.”

  “Three people dead,” her assistant replied, and then looked at us in alarm, as if he had just realized something. “Do you think Millie is in danger?”

  “You are still a member of Les Académies?” Louis asked.

  “Election is for life,” Fleurs replied.

  “Then I suggest you take every precaution,” I said. “At least until the police have a suspect in hand.”

  “Perhaps you should finish the last dress at home,” Alexandre said.

  “Nonsense,” the designer snapped. “This is my atelier. No one is scaring me away from it, at least until the princess is pleased and a check has been written. There’s too much riding on this. You of all people should know that.”

  Her assistant nodded, but he wasn’t happy. “You are the boss, Millie. As you wish.”

  Chapter 51

  MY CELL PHONE rang me awake after a much needed nap back in my suite at the Plaza. Groping for the phone on the nightstand, I knocked it to the floor and had to turn on the light. By the time I had the phone in hand, the ringing had stopped. When I checked caller ID, it said, “Michele Herbert.”

  Before calling her back, I went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. My cell rang again, and I answered, “How’s my favorite art professor?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Jack,” Justine said.

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize it was you.”

  “I got that,” Justine said coolly. “Anyway, I’m just leaving UCLA Medical Center. Sherman Wilkerson has come out of the coma.”

  “Thank God,” I replied. “How is he?”

  “The doctors say he could be a lot worse.”

  That made my heart sink. “That bad?”

  “He’s disoriented and had no idea who I was, even after I identified myself for the fourth time,” Justine replied. “But he knows who you are, and he remembers that you are protecting his granddaughter.”

  “You didn’t tell him we lost her, did you?”

  “No, I figured it would upset him too much,” she replied, and then paused. “The problem is he thinks Kim is twenty, and taking a junior year in Paris.”

  “Oh, that’s sad.”

  “Heartbreaking, actually,” Justine said. “He kept talking about how she loved hot chocolate, and how her favorite place in Paris served the best hot chocolate in the world.”

  “Okay…”

  “I’m just giving you a report. Nothing on your end?”

  “Kim’s vanished. And honestly, we haven’t had a minute to look for her.”

  “Who has the beef with Les Académies?” she asked.

  “Jacques Noulan, for one.”

  “Noulan,” she said, impressed. “I owned one of his dresses once. Made me look glamorous.”

  “You always look glamorous.”

  “Sweet,” she said, softening. “And you almost always look dashing.”

  “How’s Cruz’s mother?”

  “Fading,” she said. “Going into congestive heart failure.”

  “Sucks.”

  “It does. I’ll be back to talk with Sherman in the morning, and I’ll call you afterward with an update.”

  “That works,” I said, and hung up.

  After a deliciously hot shower and a shave, I tried Michele Herbert and got her machine. I left a message that I was sorry to have missed her call. I dressed and ordered a croque monsieur sandwich and a salad. The melted ham and cheese on a fresh baguette was fantastic, and I was thinking I should order another when something dawned on me, and I picked up my phone again.

  “You awake?” I asked Louis Langlois.

  “I never went to sleep,” he said.

  “Are you some kind of freak of nature?”

  “You hadn’t noticed before?” Louis laughed.

  “Can you come get me?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Where are we going?”

  “To search for the best hot chocolate in Paris.”

  “A much debated subject, Jack,” he grunted. “Liable to start a fight. Or a squabble, anyway.”

  Chapter 52

  ACCORDING TO LOUIS, every Parisian has his or her own idea of where the best foods can be found in the city, from croissants and baguettes to cassoulet and goat cheese.

  “But with hot chocolate, the argument verges on impossible,” Louis said as we stood outside the Plaza waiting for an Uber car.

  “C’mon,” I said.

  He shrugged and walked over to several other patrons of the hotel who were waiting for cars or taxis.

  “Mon ami,” Louis said loudly to the doorman. “Where is the best hot chocolate in Paris served?”

  “Angelina,” the doorman said without hesitation. “Rue de Rivoli.”

  “For tourists!” cried a young woman smoking a cigarette. “Jean-Paul Hévin on Rue Saint-Honoré, no doubt. The blend they serve is heaven. An aphrodisiac.”

  “Ah,” scoffed her friend, a sallow man in a suit and a thin tie. “I have nothing against aphrodisiacs, but the hot chocolate at Les Deux Magots is sublime.”

  A fourth person chimed in to nominate the Café Martini, and a fifth said Carette in the Trocadéro was without a doubt the best purveyor of hot chocolate in the world.

  The Uber car pulled up. Louis was roaring with laughter when we pulled away, and they were all still arguing the point. “I love Paris,” he said. “I really do.”

  We went to Angelina first. The staff at the Viennese-style tearoom did not recognize Kim Kopchinski from the pictures we showed them. Neither did the various waiters and waitresses we talked
to at Jean-Paul Hévin, Les Deux Magots, the Café Martini, and Carette.

  It was almost 4 p.m. by then, and I’d all but decided that this was nothing but a wild-goose chase. When we climbed back into the Uber car outside Carette, I was going to declare surrender and suggest that we return to Private Paris. But then something occurred to me.

  “Where was the best hot chocolate in Paris seven or eight years ago?”

  Louis looked perplexed, but the driver said, “That’s simple. Besides Angelina, in those days it was definitely the Hôtel Lancaster on the Rue de Berri. Best hot chocolate of the new millennium.”

  I shrugged. “Can’t hurt.”

  “And it’s not that far,” Louis said. “We go.”

  About ten minutes later, we pulled up in front of the Hôtel Lancaster, another of Paris’s famed five-star hotels. The entrance was far more understated than the Plaza’s, and we had to search for the front desk, where we asked about the hot chocolate.

  We were directed to a tearoom overlooking a courtyard, and soon found an older waitress named Yvette, who took one look at the photograph and smiled.

  “C’est Kim,” she said. “She’s been coming here off and on for years.”

  “Lately?” I asked.

  She nodded and said, “Yesterday, about this time. And the day before that.”

  We thanked her, and she walked away.

  “She’s not a celeb or a high roller,” Louis said. “She’ll be coming in the main entrance.”

  We crossed through a lobby to a short hallway that led to double glass doors, where the valet and doorman were posted. I’d taken two steps when I saw Kim Kopchinski sprinting diagonally across the street, heading for the opposite sidewalk with Whitey in close pursuit and carrying a pistol.

  Chapter 53

  BY THE TIME Louis and I burst out of the Hôtel Lancaster, they were well down the block, heading south and west. I took off after them, with Louis bringing up the rear.

  I was closing the gap when I realized that Big Nose was running ahead of me on the opposite sidewalk, paralleling them. Just shy of the Champs-Élysées, he cut across the street.