Private Paris Read online

  “I’ve got the priest’s collar and the hijab here,” I said. “Those could be different women in the pictures using the outfit to fulfill his fucked-up fantasies.”

  Louis shook his head and said, “It is the same woman. Sans doute.”

  I looked at him skeptically and then he pointed out the evidence in the pictures, and I was horrified and sickened. Setting the pictures back on the box top, my mind whirled with questions and speculations.

  Was the veiled woman in the photographs also the redhead Henri Richard was seen with last night? Were these disturbing photos behind the opera director’s murder? Someone in the woman’s Muslim family seeking vengeance?

  Something Louis said came back to me, and I looked over at him. “What was that you said earlier about the murder scene being more than it seemed?”

  His jaw stiffened. “With these photos, I cannot see it another way now. The whole thing looked highly symbolic to me, Jack.”

  “Okay.”

  Louis hesitated and then said, “Remember how Richard was hanging?”

  I nodded and said, “Inverted, arms out to his side, looking down at the graffiti.”

  “Yes, now put a narrow beam of wood behind him from above his toes to below his head, and a second one holding his arms out at right angles.”

  I saw it, and my eyes flew open. “An upside-down cross?”

  “The cross of the apostle Saint Peter,” Louis said. “Do you know this story?”

  Though lapsed, I’d been raised a Catholic by my staunch mother, and vaguely remembered the story. “When the apostle Peter was condemned to death for spreading Christ’s word, he asked his executioners to crucify him upside down because he thought he was unworthy of dying as Jesus had died.”

  “This is correct,” Louis said.

  “But what does that have—”

  He held up his hands and said, “Over the centuries, Saint Peter’s upside-down cross also became an anti-Christian symbol, one that suggested the religion’s ultimate demise, especially among Islamists and during the Crusades.”

  “Crusades?” I groaned. “I hope you’re not telling me this is one of those hokey stories that link a killing to some secret Christian society and a valuable ancient whatever belonging to Saint whomever.”

  “No, no,” he snorted. “No evidence of that, thank God. I’m just saying that you can interpret Richard’s body position as anti-Christian, and perhaps pro-Islamist. That’s how it struck me at first view, but I had no other link. Now, with pictures of Richard role-playing a priest having sex with a Muslim woman, and Richard writing an opera about a torrid affair between a Catholic priest and a Muslim woman, I’d say we have the link.”

  “So who killed Richard? Father? Brothers? And who was the redhead?”

  “I don’t—”

  The door blew open behind us and the little flat became crowded with men aiming pistols at us.

  Chapter 24

  SHAREN HOSKINS CAME in behind her men. Her face contorted and red, she snapped, “You are both under arrest.”

  “On what charges?” Louis demanded.

  “Obstruction of justice!” the homicide investigator shouted. “Evidence tampering! And I can probably come up with six more!”

  “We were given permission by the widow to be here,” I said. “And we followed Interpol search procedures. This place was tossed before we got here.”

  Hoskins’s expression soured, and she said, “You have absolutely no say in any of this, Monsieur Morgan.”

  Louis said, “Can we help it if La Crim moves at a snail’s pace, while Private Paris makes discoveries missed by whoever searched this place first?”

  Hoskins narrowed her left eye and said, “What discoveries?”

  Langlois told her about Richard’s opera libretto. I showed her the hijab and veil, and the pictures. She studied them coldly while Louis explained his belief that the women were all one and the same, and that the opera director’s body position was meant as an anti-Christian statement.

  “Do you see?” he asked. “Now imagine if we are under arrest and we explain this to every journalist we can get interested in our case.”

  Hoskins set the photographs down, thought for several moments, and then said, “For finding this evidence you are no longer under arrest.”

  “It was just a mix-up,” Louis said in a magnanimous tone.

  “Yes,” I said. “And in a gesture of goodwill, I can offer you Private Paris’s forensics team to work this room. They are fully certified.”

  “I’m sure,” she said, cool. “But we can take care of it.”

  The investigateur stepped toward Louis, hardened, and shook a finger in his face, saying, “But so help me God, Louis, if you or your boss breathe one word of what you’ve seen in here, or if you pursue anything having to do with what you’ve seen in here, Monsieur Morgan will be deported immediately, and you, Louis, will be held incommunicado for as long as I see fit.”

  “You don’t have that authority,” he said in a soft growl.

  “But I know people who do,” Hoskins said. “Now, gentlemen, I need you to get far, far out of my way.”

  Langlois looked ready to argue further, but I said, “Louis, don’t we have that other appointment anyway? The art lady?”

  “What art lady?” the investigateur asked.

  “Another case,” Louis said, brightening and moving toward the door. “On my honor, we will not breathe a word of what we have seen here.”

  “Louis, you have no honor,” she said.

  “You wound me,” he said, opening the door, and we left.

  Outside on the street, I said, “So what do we tell the wife and mistress?”

  “Officially, we say that we cannot continue under orders from La Crim,” he said. “Unofficially is another story. As you have just heard, I have no honor.”

  “I, for one, disagree.”

  “You have not known me long enough,” Langlois grunted, and laughed.

  He lit a cigarette, and we walked along the Rue Popincourt.

  Recalling that Del Rio was trying to track Kim Kopchinski through her finances, I suggested we do the same for the opera director. Louis said that it was certain Hoskins had frozen access to the accounts.

  “Even his wife couldn’t get at them now,” he said, and then smiled and blew smoke rings. “Ah, but I bet a dog I know could get to them.”

  Chapter 25

  20th Arrondissement

  3 p.m.

  LOUIS SAID WE still had almost an hour and a half before we were due to meet with his friend the graffiti expert, so we took a short Métro ride and came aboveground at the Philippe Auguste station.

  We headed north along the Boulevard de Ménilmontant until we reached the Rue de la Roquette, where we headed west to number 173. Louis rang the bell of an apartment on the second floor of the small building, but no answer.

  “No problem,” he said to me. “I know where Le Chien will be.”

  “Why are we looking for a dog?” I asked as he lit another cigarette.

  “Not a dog, Jack. The Dog. And if he is not home, he is usually sniffing around gravestones.”

  We crossed the boulevard and entered Père-Lachaise cemetery.

  “This place is huge,” I said. “How are we going to find him?”

  “He usually orbits between the tomb of Héloïse and Abelard and the grave of Jim Morrison.”

  I’d never been in the famous cemetery before, and as we walked the paths I had to hand it to the Parisians. They knew how to commemorate their dead. Each headstone or tomb face was carved in some bas-relief or fitted with the statues of angels, or children, sleeping men, or women whose bronze faces were streaked with green patinas so they seemed to be weeping.

  We passed tourists gathered by the tomb of the ill-fated twelfth-century lovers Héloïse and Abelard, but spotted no one who fit Louis’s description of Le Chien. For several minutes I thought we were on a wild dog chase, but then we looped toward a crowd around Morrison’s
grave.

  Many of the pilgrims wore pictures of the dead singer on their shirts. Others were lighting candles. A speaker cabled to an MP3 player was blasting “Peace Frog,” which caught my attention because the song had played a part in a bizarre series of crimes in Los Angeles the year before. In any case, Jim Morrison was chanting about ghosts crowding the child’s fragile eggshell mind when Louis said, “And there he is.”

  Mouthing along with the lyrics and carrying a filthy green book bag, the Dog moved outside the perimeter of the crowd, seeming to know which monuments he could step up on to get a better look at the people in front of the rock singer’s grave. There he’d pause a second, make a slight sideways twitch of his head, pop the tips of the fingers on both hands together, and then move on a few feet and repeat the ritual.

  Louis cut him off. “Chien?” he said.

  The Dog stopped and looked afraid, but then relaxed a bit and said, “Louis?”

  “Right here, my friend, as always,” Louis said, and held out his fist.

  The Dog hesitated, scratched at his scraggly reddish beard, and contemplated Louis’s hand for a long beat before reluctantly bumping it.

  “I have a job for you,” Louis said. “If you feel like working.”

  “Who’s he?” he asked.

  “Jack,” Louis said. “He’s my boss.”

  “Boss is from fantastic L.A.,” the Dog said, as if remembering the fact.

  “That’s right,” I said. “I live in Los Angeles.”

  He seemed to tune us out then, and started to sing with Morrison, “Blood in my love in the terrible—”

  Louis snapped his fingers in front of the Dog’s eyes and said, “Work?”

  The Dog tilted his head sideways, and I noticed a thick white scar high on the left side of his head, not quite hidden by his hair.

  “How much?” he asked.

  “Sensitive job,” Louis said. “Two thousand euros.”

  “Make it twenty-five hundred, and the Dog starts right now.”

  “Deal,” Louis said.

  “Need somewhere quiet,” he said, and then started walking away from us.

  We followed as the Dog strolled on, tilting his head, popping his fingertips together, and never looking back. He finally took a seat on the marble stairs to the right of Frédéric Chopin’s grave, which featured a muse with a lyre sitting in grief.

  The Dog took off his knapsack and pulled out a MacBook Pro. He set it in his lap and opened it. When he did, he seemed to change—become calmer, certainly. The facial tics did not stop, but they subsided as he stared at the screen, and his language became more fluid and connected.

  “What do you need, Louis?” he asked.

  Louis handed him a piece of paper he’d scribbled on during the Métro ride and said, “I need this man’s financials. Past three months.”

  The Dog looked at it and said, “He’s the opera director.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So the accounts will be frozen.”

  “You’re right again.”

  “This will take a while,” he said. “Later today?”

  “That will be fine.”

  “Cash on delivery.”

  “Same as always.”

  And then it was as if we’d been dismissed. The Dog gazed at the screen as if it were a doorway into another world, and he started to type.

  Louis tugged on my sleeve. We left him, heading back toward the cemetery’s front gate. When we’d gotten out of earshot, I said, “Okay, so what’s his story? What’s that scar on his head?”

  “The scar and his story are one and the same,” Louis replied sadly.

  The Dog’s real name was Pierre Moulton. Louis had been best man at the Dog’s parents’ wedding. The boy was born soon after and proved to be a prodigy. He could speak with fluency at fourteen months and learned algebra at five years old. His true genius surfaced at age eight, when his parents gave him a computer and he taught himself how to write code.

  “They lived there on the Rue de la Roquette, where we rang the bell,” Louis said. “Pierre was, as I said, a genius. But he was not very coordinated and possessed very little common sense. When he was fourteen he went out riding his bike without a helmet.”

  A motorcyclist clipped him, sending him flying. His head collided with a curb and caused a massive injury to his skull and brain.

  “A tragedy,” Louis said. “It is only because of his incredible natural intelligence that he can do what he can now. He’s still a brilliant hacker.”

  “What’s with the name?”

  He shrugged as we left the cemetery. “It was something he just came up with one day. He liked that it made him sound tough.”

  “Parents?”

  Louis dipped his head and said, “Both dead. His mom to cancer, and his dad to a heart attack. In the will, I was named his guardian and the trustee of the insurance money he got from the accident, which was not much when you consider he’ll probably live a long time.”

  “But you give him work when you can?”

  “Of course,” Louis said. “He’s a genius and I’m all the Dog has left.”

  Chapter 26

  6th Arrondissement

  4:35 p.m.

  WE CLIMBED FROM a cab on the Rue Bonaparte and went to the security gate at L’Académie des Beaux-Arts.

  Langlois asked for Professor Herbert and was given directions to a studio in a large building across the cut-stone courtyard. Classes were letting out. Scores of young hipsters poured out into the courtyard carrying sketchbooks as they bustled toward the street.

  “This is the school for artists in France, correct?” I asked.

  “The students are less French these days. You get kids from the States, or Japan, or wherever, and they want to study art. Their rich parents have heard of this place, which was, at one time, the very center of the art world. Now not so much. The art world has passed by this place, except for my friend Professor Herbert, who is a groundbreaker, as you will see.”

  Louis led the way to a high-ceilinged room, where an older man with gray frizzed-out hair was talking to a lean woman in jeans and a starched white shirt with the collar turned up against her bobbed hairdo. He stood in three-quarter profile. She had her back to us.

  They were studying a huge collage that featured iconic Parisian street scenes as a backdrop. Over the top of the backdrop were images from France’s past, both good times and bad. There were bright blue graffiti tags as well. They featured arrows and question marks linking the images in a way that suggested the city’s vast history and commented on it.

  “Professor?” Langlois called.

  I don’t know why, but I expected the older guy to reply.

  Instead, the woman smiled and cried, “Louis Langlois, it has been much too long!”

  To say that Professor Herbert was good-looking would be like saying Usain Bolt jogged or Adele sang a few songs in her spare time. She had a flawless complexion; high, pronounced cheekbones; and a delicate jaw that ran out from lush dark hair to a dimpled chin that featured a tiny mole on the left side.

  Her eyes were soft, aquamarine, and turned up ever so slightly at the outer corners, as if fashioned after teardrops. Her nose looked wind-carved, with a narrow bridge and flaring nostrils. Her lips were thinner and more alluring than the Botox pout you see on so many models and actresses back in L.A., and her smile, though brilliantly white, wasn’t perfect. Like the actress Lauren Hutton, she had a small gap between her upper two front teeth.

  “This is my boss, Jack Morgan,” Langlois said after embracing her and blowing Euro kisses. “Jack, may I present Professor Michele Herbert.”

  Her smile broadened, and she pressed her tongue into the back of that gap between her teeth. She held out her hand and said in lightly accented English, “Enchanted to meet you, monsieur. I have read of Private’s exploitations. That is the word, yes?”

  I was frankly mesmerized, but m
anaged to say, “Close enough. And I am the one who is enchanted.”

  Her eyes and hand lingered on me before she pressed her tongue again to that gap in her teeth and turned, gesturing to the old guy with the frizzy hair.

  “Louis?” she said. “Do you know François? My representative?”

  François took Louis’s hand and then mine in that weird little three-quarter thing the French call a handshake.

  “Michele has made a miracle, yes?” he said, pointing at the collage.

  Louis nodded and said, “Something that the French can ponder and argue about for years to come.”

  “And Monsieur Morgan? It pleases you?”

  “It intrigues me,” I said.

  “‘Intrigue’ is good, yes?” said Michele Herbert, who smiled impishly.

  “I’ve made a good living out of intrigue.”

  “And Michele will do this as well,” her rep said. “I have galleries all over the world clamoring to represent her.”

  Herbert blushed and said, “François, you make too much of me.”

  “I must be going, to make much of you everywhere I can,” he replied. He blew kisses past her cheeks and then sort of shook our hands again before leaving.

  “So, how may I help you?” the art professor asked.

  “I told Jack that you are an expert on graffiti,” Louis said.

  Herbert turned the smile on me again and said, “He also makes too much of me. Graffiti is my interest as a historian, and it has become a part of my own work over the years.”

  Digging out my iPhone, I showed her the photograph we’d taken of the AB-16 tag outside Henri Richard’s pied-à-terre.

  She said, “I have never seen this before. What does it mean?”

  “We don’t know,” Louis said.

  Herbert looked at it again, a frown appearing as she said, “C’est bizarre.”

  Chapter 27

  “WHAT’S BIZARRE?” LOUIS asked.

  “Can you e-mail this photo to me?” she asked. “So I can see it better?”