Private Paris Read online

  The Uber car turned up before I could reply. We climbed in and Louis gave the driver the address of our new client, the opera director’s mistress.

  When we were rolling, I said, “You did see something in the opera house that I missed, right?”

  “Perhaps,” Louis said.

  “Want to enlighten me?”

  “There is a friend of mine I wish to consult before I draw any conclusions or make any claims.”

  “Former cop?”

  “A professor of art,” he said. “And an expert on graffiti.”

  Chapter 19

  16th Arrondissement

  11:35 a.m.

  LOUIS AND I pulled up in front of a beautiful old building in a chic neighborhood north of Place du Trocadéro. The mistress’s maid, a tiny Vietnamese woman, opened the apartment door before Louis could knock.

  She led us into a well-appointed living area where two women sat on a couch, holding hands and struggling not to weep. The younger and larger of the two women was in her late forties, with dark, Mediterranean features. The older woman, a petite platinum blonde with a dancer’s posture, might have been sixty, but if so she’d aged incredibly well.

  The younger woman said, “Louis, we are so glad you’ve come.”

  “How could I not for an old and dear friend?” Louis said, taking her in his arms for a brief bear hug. Then he turned and said, “This is Jack Morgan, the head of all Private. Jack, this is Evangeline Soleil.”

  She greeted me with a sad smile and said, “I wish it were under different circumstances, Monsieur Morgan. And may I introduce Valerie Richard?”

  Before the name could register with me, Louis went straight to the woman and clasped her hand in his great paws, and said, “Madame Richard, I am so very sorry for your loss. If Private Paris can do anything, please ask.”

  For a second there I admit I was kind of floored to find the widow and the mistress comforting each other in their hour of grief, but then I chalked it up to one more thing that confused me about the French. I shook Madame Richard’s hand and she, too, thanked me for taking an interest.

  After the maid brought us coffee, the women sat side by side again, holding hands, looking expectantly at Louis.

  “What have you found out?” Evangeline Soleil said.

  “La Crim will tell us nothing,” Valerie Richard said.

  “How did you know your husband was dead?” I asked.

  The opera director’s wife said, “One of the guards called me, and I immediately called Evangeline.”

  “And I called La Crim,” the mistress said. “And all they said was that someone would be along to talk with us in due time.”

  “Have either of you heard Henri mention the phrase ‘AB-16’?” I asked.

  Both women shook their heads.

  “What does it mean?” Valerie Richard said.

  “We don’t know,” Louis said, and then masterfully recounted what we’d learned without telling them what we’d seen, as I’d guaranteed Hoskins.

  Rather than express shock or outrage that Richard had been with a young redhead, the two women looked at each other as if in vindication.

  “We were right,” the mistress said. “He was up to his old tricks.”

  “The foolish old goat,” the wife said. “It got him killed after all.”

  Both women said that Richard was ordinarily given to melancholy, but he had been acting strangely happy in the past few weeks, disappearing at night for mysterious meetings and telling neither of them where he’d been.

  Richard’s wife said she had confronted her husband finally, and he had said there was no new love interest, that he’d been holing up in a studio flat in Popincourt that he’d inherited from his mother to work on the libretto of a new opera. He had told his mistress the same thing.

  “Devious, wasn’t he?” Evangeline Soleil said to Valerie Richard.

  The wife sighed in anguish and said, “There are things we cannot change about some men no matter how hard we try.”

  “Some men?” the mistress said. “All men.”

  This vein of discussion made me shift in my seat and try to change course. “Did he have any enemies?”

  Valerie Richard shot me a look as if I were mentally challenged. “What man in a position like his does not have enemies?”

  I hadn’t thought of opera house director as being a particularly dangerous or controversial job before. “Anyone specific?”

  Evangeline Soleil let out a long, slow breath and said, “Anyone in the opera community you might think of, Mr. Morgan. I mean, they all acted nice to Henri, but you know how it is when someone is successful in Paris.”

  “Uh, actually, I don’t,” I said.

  Louis said, “The people in the same field, they hate you for your success. They think something must be wrong, that you’re corrupt in some way.”

  “Of course,” Richard’s wife said. “They plot against you.”

  I said, “Was there anyone actively plotting against him lately?”

  “The redhead, obviously,” his mistress sniffed.

  “Focus on her,” the wife agreed. “A woman will be at the center of it all.”

  Chapter 20

  18th Arrondissement

  Noon

  HAJA HAMID EXITED the women’s toilet and went to the fountain in the lobby of the mosque. She performed the ritual of ablution—washing her hands and feet—with practiced ease. When she stepped into the women’s prayer hall, there were already fifty or sixty women inside. Like Haja, they all wore brown or black robes and matching scarves. Some, like Haja, also wore veils.

  She knelt at the back, listening to the clicking of worry beads and the voices murmuring surrender to Allah. The sounds brought back so many memories that she was filled once again with strength and resolve.

  Facing east, Haja started the physical motions of Islamic prayer, bowing to put her forehead flat on the carpet and then rising with a stiff posture. She wasn’t silently reciting lines from the Koran, however. Her lips curled around vows she’d made long ago.

  She waited until Imam Ibrahim Al-Moustapha went to the front of the prayer hall to lead the service. The second his back was turned, Haja got up and returned to the anteroom, searching for her sandals amid all the other shoes.

  The imam began his talk just as she snatched up her sandals and went out the door, into the street. Head down, Haja kicked into the sandals and moved past three men trying to paint over the AB-16 tag on the mosque’s outer wall.

  Satisfied that the bloodred tag was still bleeding through, she walked by a man sweeping the sidewalk in front of FEZ Couriers, a messenger service next door to the mosque, and then a tailor shop that sold robes.

  “Ay, pétasse!”

  The call—“Hey, bitch!”—came from the other side of the street.

  Haja glanced left and saw him: late teens, pale skin, and brown curly hair. Carrying a camera slung across his chest, he was pointing at her in a rage.

  “Can’t wear the veil in public, Muslim bitch!” he yelled.

  Haja tore down the veil, turned her head from him, and broke into a trot. When she glanced again, he was angling across the street at her.

  That kicked her into an all-out sprint down the sidewalk toward an old green Peugeot sedan. She got there half a block ahead of her pursuer, jumped in the backseat, and said, “Get us out of here. Now.”

  Epée already had the Peugeot running. He threw it in gear and squealed out, heading back toward the mosque. The teen stepped from between two cars, trying to aim his camera.

  Haja pulled up the veil. In the front passenger seat, Mfune, who was dressed in the green jumpsuit of a Paris sanitation worker, turned his head. Epée jerked the wheel toward the kid as if to run him down.

  The photographer jumped back between the parked cars and they were past him.

  “What was that all about?” Epée asked.

  “My fault,” she said. “When I came out of the mosque, I still had the veil up and he started
shouting at me that I was a Muslim bitch.”

  “Why the camera?” Epée demanded, turning off the boulevard heading toward the train tracks.

  “I have no idea,” she said, taking deeper and slower breaths. “None.”

  “Did you get the job done?” Mfune asked.

  The tension fell from Haja’s shoulders. She wiped at the sweat on her brow, saying, “Just as we planned. You?”

  The captain held up a green translucent plastic bag filled with trash and said, “What do you think?”

  Chapter 21

  WE LEFT EVANGELINE Soleil’s flat, having received permission from Valerie Richard to search her home. She’d offered to take us there straightaway, but Louis said he wanted to go take a look at her husband’s opera-writing hideaway first.

  The Uber car was waiting, and Louis gave the driver the address.

  “So is that the norm in Paris?” I asked. “To have a mistress and a wife who are friends?”

  “No,” Louis said. “And even to have a mistress now, it is not so common among men younger than fifty.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Changing times,” he said with a note of wistfulness. “Now, the young are all in relationships, except when they are—how do you say?—exchanging.”

  “Exchanging what?”

  “Each other,” he said.

  “You mean swinging?”

  “That’s the word,” Louis said. “There are clubs, even, for these things.”

  As we pulled out into traffic, I stared out the window at people and wondered how many had mistresses, or were mistresses, or were swingers. I live in L.A., and I am hardly a prude, but I found Paris behind closed doors oddly fascinating.

  “Are they right?” I asked. “About the redhead being at the center of it?”

  “She’s part of it. But the center? I don’t think so.”

  “Reason?”

  He brooded for several moments before saying, “Just my instinct, Jack. Still nothing hard that I can hold on to yet.”

  That seemed to remind Louis of something because he got out his iPhone and started punching in numbers. Before he finished and hit send, my own cell rang. It was Justine calling from L.A.

  “How’s Sherman?” I asked.

  She sounded exhausted and upset. “He’s in surgery, Jack. They’re removing a piece of his skull to relieve the pressure from brain swelling.”

  “That’s awful,” I said, frustrated again that we didn’t have his granddaughter in a safe place. “What’s his prognosis?”

  “The doctors won’t tell me,” she said. “I’m not next of kin. But a nurse in the ICU said he’ll probably be held in an artificial coma for the next couple of days. Is the granddaughter on the way home?”

  “She ran. We don’t have her.”

  “This is bad, Jack,” she said. “There’s no one here to make decisions.”

  “Find out who he named as the executor of his living will.”

  “After I get a few hours’ sleep,” she promised. “It’s four a.m. here and—Del Rio just came in. He wants to tell you something.”

  “Jack?” Del Rio growled.

  “You’re up early.”

  “Late,” he replied. “One of the great perks of the job.”

  Del Rio told me that he’d gone through Wilkerson’s home before alerting the L.A. sheriff about the assault and break-in. The deputies and detectives who arrived weren’t very happy about the delay in notification, but they’d live.

  “You figure out what they were looking for?” I asked.

  “No,” Del Rio replied. “At least nothing that jumped right out at me. But I did find something you might find useful. Wilkerson still keeps paper bank statements around, and some involve her trust.”

  “You’ve got an account number?”

  “I do. She uses a debit card and makes cash withdrawals from ATM machines. No checking account.”

  “You have records of the withdrawals?”

  “Not for this month yet, if that’s what you mean.”

  “It is what I mean,” I said. “Even though Sherman’s old-school when it comes to keeping his financial records, his bank won’t be. You should be able to get an up-to-the-minute electronic record of all withdrawals she’s made.”

  “It’s a private account.”

  “Use your imagination.”

  “That’s never been one of my long suits, but I’ll let you know.”

  “Get some sleep. The both of you.”

  “Nah, we’ll stick around until he comes out of surgery, and charge you double time while we’re doing it.”

  “Nice of you.”

  “I’m a saint. Didn’t you know?” Del Rio said, and hung up.

  Louis ended his call as well and said, “My friend the graffiti expert will see us once classes are over for the day. Around four.”

  I brought him up to date on Sherman’s condition and on Del Rio’s discovery of Kim’s trust account.

  “If you can get some kind of alert every time she uses her ATM card, we should be able to track her down,” Louis said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “I’d still like to know what they were after—the guys who beat Sherman, I mean.”

  “Maybe the same thing,” he grunted. “Some way to track Kim.”

  It made sense, and it made me anxious. Even though she’d run on us, I didn’t want to see her end up like her grandfather, with surgeons sawing off part of her skull to relieve the swelling.

  The driver pulled over a few minutes later in front of a pharmacy on the Rue Popincourt, a narrow street of trendy boutiques. Louis led the way to the high arched double doors next to the pharmacy and was ringing the bell when I happened to glance at the lower wall. I tapped Louis on the shoulder and gestured at the small red letters.

  AB-16

  “Looks like we came to the right place,” Louis said.

  Chapter 22

  I GOT OUT my phone and took a picture of the tag before the door opened and the concierge, an older woman in a smock and apron, looked out at us suspiciously, and barked at us in a French patois that completely lost me.

  Louis showed her his identification and spoke to her. She argued for a bit, but then reluctantly allowed us in. We entered a nice courtyard, and Louis spoke again to the old woman, who scolded him in return.

  “Okay,” he said. “Richard’s mother’s place is on the top floor.”

  As we climbed a steep set of switchback staircases, I said, “I didn’t understand a thing that came out of that old woman’s mouth.”

  “Because she’s from Portugal,” he said. “Most concierges are.”

  “What were you arguing about? The apartment?”

  “No, no,” he said. “About the woman. She says she never saw a redhead come to see Richard here. Plenty of other women, but no redhead.”

  “She here all the time?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “When was the last time she saw him?”

  “Four days ago.”

  We reached the upper floor. The ceiling of the garret was quite low and we had to stoop beneath a beam to get to Richard’s studio flat. We put on latex gloves. Louis got out a pick set and fiddled with the lock until it clicked.

  When we pushed open the wooden door there was a rush of wind. Shredded paper and several pigeons flew everywhere. The windows were wide open. Once we’d shooed out the birds and closed the windows, I could see that the place was less than five hundred square feet and completely in shambles.

  Bookcases turned over. Desk drawers pulled out. Files dumped. A laptop computer lay smashed beside them. The kitchen cabinets were open. So was the small refrigerator, which smelled of rotted meat and curdled milk.

  Paper was strewn across the floor and on the bed, which had been stripped of linen and blankets save a blue pillowcase. And on the wall above the headboard there was the tag again: AB-16.

  Louis picked up a handful of papers and files and started going through them.

  I went to th
e head of the bed, leaned over, and sniffed the graffiti paint.

  “New,” I said, pulling back and crinkling my nose. “Past day or so.”

  Louis said, “And it looks like he was working on an opera libretto.”

  Then he looked confused and went back to reading.

  I got down on my knees to look under the bed, hearing Louis grab up more files and more paper. At first glance, I saw nothing. But as I drew my head back to get up, I noticed that a section of floorboard about eighteen inches long was sticking up a half inch or so over by the wall.

  I got up and moved the bed to get at that floorboard. I was able to use my fingernails to pry up the board, revealing a plastic Tupperware-style container.

  I lifted it out, unsnapped the lid, and looked inside.

  As I did, Louis slapped the files in his hand and said, “I sensed at the murder scene that Monsieur Richard had been playing with fire. This proves it. No wonder he got burned.”

  That didn’t register for several seconds while I studied the shocking contents of the box. Finally, I looked up and said, “Come again?”

  “The libretto of his opera, Jack,” he said. “It is the tale of a doomed love affair between a Catholic priest and a Muslim woman.”

  I glanced back in the box, squinted one eye, and said, “Then I’ll bet this is what they were in here looking for.”

  Coming over to look, Louis said, “What have you got?”

  “The gas Henri Richard played with when he was playing with fire.”

  Chapter 23

  INSIDE THE BOX were condoms, lubricant, and sex toys. There were also raunchy porno photos of Richard in a priest’s collar having sex with a woman.

  In some of the pictures she wore a flowing black robe hitched up over her hips. In others, she was naked from the neck down. But in every picture we found, she wore a black hijab and veil that hid her face except for deep-brown eyes that seemed to stare defiantly into the camera lens.

  I took the pictures out, one by one, and set them on the lid, where Louis could see and make his own judgments. When I did, I realized there was something else zipped inside the kind of clear plastic case my mother used to use to protect her sweaters.