Private Paris Read online

  I did, and she blew it up on a computer screen in a corner of the studio. She made a little puffing noise and then gestured at the loops and shadow work on the A and the B of the tag. “You see how these come together to create that—how do you say?—pop?”

  “The three-dimensionality?” I asked.

  “This too,” Herbert said. “But you see the letters, how they seem to hover? It is one of the signature methods of a Parisian graffiti artist who called himself Zee Pac-Man.”

  “Where can we find him?” I asked.

  “He was murdered late last year, just after Christmas. Found dead in the 9th beneath his last tag. Stabbed several times in the back.”

  Louis said, “So what? This could be a follower of Zee Pac-Man?”

  “Or simply a thief,” Herbert replied, and then looked to me to explain. “Artists steal what we like and admire, you know this?”

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  “Do you still have all those followers?” Louis asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Think you could ask them if they’ve seen this tag elsewhere?”

  “Bien sûr,” she replied. “What do I say it is about?”

  “Just say you’re interested,” Louis replied, and then explained to me that Herbert had a Facebook page where people from all over the world posted shots of interesting graffiti. The page had been “liked” by more than half a million people.

  “She has thousands of Parisians who follow her. Isn’t that right?”

  Herbert blushed again. “They follow the graffiti. I just help others see it.”

  I liked her. A lot. In the past I’ve met a few successful artists, and had several as clients. The majority are quirky egocentrics quick to turn the lights on themselves, a trait that inevitably leads to self-destructive behaviors. But Herbert seemed normal as well as self-deprecating, smart, and, well, just gorgeous.

  “Any help would be much appreciated,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said. “You are in Paris long, Monsieur Morgan?”

  I glanced at Louis, thought about all that had happened since my arrival, and said, “That’s unclear. But a few more days, anyway.”

  “Well, then, I will put the request on the Facebook page rapidement.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “And it was an honor to meet you.”

  Herbert touched her neck, laughed, looked at Louis, and said, “An honor?”

  “The man has a way with words.”

  Herbert smiled and said, “And it is…sorry, it was wonderful to meet you.”

  Louis’s eyes bounced between us a few times before he said, “Michele, would you care to have a glass of wine with us?”

  Her head cocked left, and then right, before she laughed again and said, “Why not? I have been working much too hard lately.”

  “Come, then,” Louis said. “Where should we go?”

  Before she could answer, my cell phone rang. It was Rick Del Rio.

  “How’s Paris?” he asked.

  I glanced at Michele Herbert, held up a finger, walked away, and said, “Looking up all of a sudden.”

  “Well, then let me make your day even sunnier.”

  Del Rio had managed to get hold of Kim Kopchinski’s most recent cash withdrawals and credit card charges.

  “Anything today?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’ll e-mail you the particulars. I also arranged it so we’ll both get alerts of any future transactions sent automatically to our phones.”

  “You’re a machine.”

  “Bionic man,” he said, and hung up.

  I hurried to catch up with Louis and Michele Herbert. My phone dinged to alert me to an e-mail. I opened it and showed it to Louis as we left the building.

  He slowed and scanned the addresses of the ATM withdrawals and debit charges. “These are all in the Marais.”

  “One of my favorite areas in Paris,” Herbert said. “We could go there for drinks, and maybe something to eat?”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  Chapter 28

  4th Arrondissement

  5:20 p.m.

  LOUIS TOOK US to a café on the Rue des Archives.

  The art professor looked around and said, “Louis, there are much more sympathetic places to entertain Jack in the Marais.”

  “This is true, Michele,” the big bear of a man said, taking a seat outdoors. “But we are mixing business with pleasure.”

  “Does it have to do with the tag?” she asked.

  “It’s a missing persons case,” I said.

  “Well, sort of,” Louis said. “This person wants to be missing.”

  “Who is this person?” Herbert asked.

  “The granddaughter of a client of mine back in Los Angeles,” I said.

  “So, she is a runaway?”

  “Not like a teen runaway. But she’s trying to escape something or someone and we don’t know why, other than knowing that drugs are involved.”

  “And you think she’s here somewhere?” the artist asked, looking around.

  Louis pointed across the street and said, “At eleven o’clock this morning, she withdrew five hundred euros from an ATM machine in that pharmacy. Twenty minutes later, she used a debit card to pay for a haircut in that salon. She also bought wine at that shop over there. And forty minutes ago, she returned to get more money from the pharmacy ATM.”

  The artist grew excited and said, “We are on the stakeout, yes?”

  “Something like that,” Louis said.

  “I feel like I am in a film noir,” she said, beaming at the idea.

  “Nothing that thrilling,” I said, flashing on the car chase and shoot-out from the night before and wondering just how much we should tell her.

  A waitress came. Louis ordered a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. It soon arrived and was chilled perfectly. There was a warm breeze as Michele described the neighborhood. First settled in the 1200s, Le Marais—the marsh—was one of the oldest districts in the city. During the Renaissance, it was the preferred neighborhood of noblemen. Jews had lived there for centuries. The Chinese came after World War I, and the gays more recently.

  “Many galleries in Paris are here,” she said. “Nice restaurants too.”

  “Do you have pieces in them? The galleries?”

  “I do,” she said. “I can show you some later.”

  The conversation drifted to discussions of Paris and Los Angeles. Time seemed to disappear as we chatted and laughed. The artist had a semi-humorous take on nearly everything, and after a while I became less flabbergasted by her looks than I was by her mind, which could be cutting or playful. Again and again, I heard this voice in my head saying that I’d never met a woman like Michele Herbert.

  “So,” she said at one point. “Are you in love, Jack?”

  I startled and glanced over at Louis, but was surprised to find him not there. I’d been so engrossed in my conversation that I hadn’t heard or seen him get up.

  “Jack?”

  “I’m in love with life,” I said.

  “But there is not someone special?”

  “Not at the moment,” I said, feeling my cheeks burn slightly. “You?”

  “Just my art,” Michele said, doing that tongue-in-the-teeth thing before draining her glass. “More?”

  I finished my glass and poured us both another. Louis returned and said, “Henri Richard’s murder is the talk of the café.”

  “A terrible thing,” the artist said. “Have they got a suspect?”

  “Not yet,” Louis said, and eyed the bottle. “Shall we order another?”

  “Why not?” Michele said.

  I was about to agree when I felt my phone buzz with an incoming text. I read it, looked up at Louis, and said, “She just bought something at Open Café.”

  He jumped up and said, “It’s two blocks. One of the big gay clubs.”

  We both looked at Michele, who started laughing and making shooing gestures. “Go, go!” she said. “I’ll pay an
d then come to find you.”

  Louis was already moving. I had to run hard to catch up with him.

  “Why would she be in a gay bar?” Louis grunted.

  “Good place for a woman to hide?” I said.

  We ran to the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie. Open Café was on the southwest corner. A crowd of men had spilled from the club onto the sidewalk, blocking our view of the tables inside and out.

  Rather than go straight into the bar, however, Louis kept us on the opposite side of the intersection, walking north across the Rue Sainte-Croix and then west across the Rue des Archives. In front of the Agora bookstore, I panned the crowd and looked right past Kim Kopchinski at first and second glance.

  Then she turned and I caught her in profile, sitting at a table by the club entrance. Her shoulder-length brown hair was gone in favor of short spikes dyed the color of straw. She wore no makeup, a black T-shirt, and pants. If I hadn’t just spent time with her, I might have thought she was an effeminate-looking guy.

  “You see her?” Louis said, still searching.

  “Yes,” I said. “Let me do the talking.”

  Crossing the street, I felt many eyes in the crowd turn toward me, sizing me up. I’m over six feet with a football player’s build. The men ogling me looked as though they’d never seen a gym, but one came at me straightaway and started propositioning me.

  I told him I was flattered, but straight, and on my way to meet a friend. He said something unflattering that I didn’t catch and turned his shoulder.

  Kim lit a cigarette with that lighter she kept on a chain around her neck. She was chatting with a man in a white tennis sweater who had his back to me. I was trying to close the last few feet to her table when an older Brit got in my way.

  “Don’t you even think of not talking to me, cowboy,” he said loudly.

  “I’m straight,” I said again, trying to get around him, only to bump into a waiter, who dropped a tray.

  The sound of breaking glass was enough to split the crowd and draw Kim’s attention. She took one look at me and got to her feet fast.

  Her wineglass exploded.

  Hit by flying glass, she panicked and pivoted right to get inside the club, but another waiter holding a tray at shoulder height blocked her path.

  She ducked as if to go under his arm. The waiter jerked, dropped his tray. A plume of bright blood appeared on his white shirt, and he collapsed.

  “Shooter, Jack!” Louis shouted.

  I dove to the ground, twisted, and saw that pale, gaunt guy from the night before crouched in a combat shooting stance and aiming a suppressed pistol from twenty-five feet away.

  Kaboom!

  That shot was Louis’s. He roared, “Everyone down!”

  The crowd threw themselves to the street and sidewalk, leaving Louis to my right leveling his Glock at the pale guy who still faced me.

  The gunman must have caught sight of Louis in his peripheral vision, and his reflexes had to have been astounding, because in a move that was as quick as a cobra strike he dropped to his knees, pivoted the gun, and fired, hitting Louis square in the chest and blowing the big man off his feet.

  Chapter 29

  THE GUNMAN SWUNG his weapon back my way, and then looked past me into the club. A split second later, he took off west on the Rue Sainte-Croix.

  My marine training kicked in.

  Lurching to my feet, I charged toward Louis, who sprawled in the gutter. Sirens wailed in the distance when I crouched beside him, expecting the worst.

  “Get him,” Louis croaked.

  “You’re hit,” I said. “I’m staying right here.”

  “Armor,” he croaked. “I’m fine.”

  I stared a second at the hole in his loose shirt and the blue ballistic vest showing beneath it before I jumped back up to start after the gunman. But he was gone. And after I searched the nightclub, I knew that so was Wilkerson’s granddaughter.

  Michele Herbert came running to me when I exited.

  “Mon Dieu,” she cried, looking at Louis still lying there, trying to get his breath back. “I heard the shot. Is he…?”

  “He’s good,” I said. “Just had the wind knocked out of him.”

  The same could not be said of the waiter who’d taken the second bullet. He died before the ambulances got there. The police were on the scene quicker and soon cordoned off the area until La Crim could arrive.

  To our chagrin, Investigateur Hoskins was the first to arrive. She took one look at us and groaned.

  “All of it!” she shouted. “I want all of it. Right now!”

  It took us twenty minutes to tell her everything—the phone call from Sherman Wilkerson, the trip to Les Bosquets, the car chase and gun battle the evening before, Kim’s escape and the way we tracked her.

  I said, “Because of the break-in at Sherman’s house back in Malibu, I think the pale guy must have had access to the same bank and credit card accounts that we had. When she paid for those drinks, she brought him in as well as us.”

  The investigator chewed on that for a few moments, and then said, “A shoot-out last night on the A5 and you don’t report it?”

  “Discretion is often the better part of valor,” Louis replied.

  That seemed to annoy her, because she said, “Your license to carry is still up to date?”

  “Of course,” he said wearily.

  “Why are you hassling him?” I said. “If it wasn’t for Louis standing up and taking the hit, who knows how many people that guy might have killed?”

  Hoskins appeared to struggle with that, but then let it out in a sharp exhalation. “You’re right, Monsieur Morgan. I apologize, Louis.”

  “Accepted,” Louis grunted, and rubbed at his chest.

  The investigator turned her attention to Michele Herbert. “You are the art expert they went to see?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “So where’s the art in all this?” Hoskins asked.

  “No, no,” Louis said a little too quickly. “A different case entirely. Michele had merely joined us for a drink.”

  I hated to think what would happen if Michele mentioned that her expertise was in graffiti art. Me deported. Louis tossed in some dungeon.

  “True?” Hoskins asked the artist.

  Michele nodded. “Just as they said.”

  Clearly exasperated, the investigator said, “And you have no idea why the pale guy wants to kill her?”

  “None,” Louis said.

  “What about the man she was sitting with? The one with the curly brown hair and the white tennis sweater?”

  “I didn’t get a good look at him,” I replied. “And I haven’t seen him since. Believe me, I looked.”

  “I saw him,” Michele said. “He ran right by me after the shooting stopped.”

  “Which way was he going?” Hoskins asked.

  “South on Rue des Archives.”

  We were kept on the scene for another two hours and then brought to La Crim, where we made formal statements. Because he had discharged his weapon in the city, Louis was still giving his statement when Michele and I were released.

  We were both hungry, so she took me to a bistro near her flat in the 8th Arrondissement.

  “The best frites you have ever had,” she said on the way in, and she was right. They were shoestring, hot, salted, and crispy.

  “These could be addicting,” I said.

  Michele smiled. “I try to stay away, but I can’t. I must have them at least once a week.”

  “If I lived in Paris, I think I’d be here every other day.”

  “Your job,” she said after we’d finished and were drinking coffee. “It is always dangerous like today?”

  “No,” I said. “Well, sometimes.”

  She made a throwaway gesture with her hand. “It makes me think that what I do is—how do you say?—trivial.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that at all. Artists help us explain the world to ourselves.”

  “I like that,” she s
aid later, when I was walking her back to her apartment.

  “What?”

  “What you said about artists,” she replied.

  “I think I read it somewhere, but it makes sense.”

  We got to her building. “Thank you for the most exciting day I think I have ever had,” Michele said.

  I smiled and said, “My pleasure.”

  She walked up the stoop, used her keys to open the front door, stepped inside, and turned to me with that impish expression on her face.

  “You have nice eyes, Jack Morgan,” Michele said, and shut the door.

  Walking away, I’d rarely been happier.

  Chapter 30

  9th Arrondissement

  April 8, 1 a.m.

  WEARING SOILED CLOTHES, his face smeared with grime, Émile Sauvage acted the drunken bum and lay sprawled in an alleyway upwind of a Dumpster and downwind of some of the most amazing odors he’d ever smelled. The scents boiled out of a steel door that was ajar about fifty feet away, and made the major realize he should have eaten more. Then the breeze stilled and he could smell the beer he’d poured on his pant legs.

  Sauvage glanced around, saw no one, and pressed his hand to the tiny transceiver in his ear. “How many left?” he murmured, knowing that the throat microphone would pick it up loud and clear.

  “Two,” Epée said. “Maître d’ and the sommelier.”

  “Stay patient,” Sauvage cautioned. “You know his rep. Every day the same way. Like clock—”

  The steel door pushed open. The maître d’, a plump, intense-looking man in his late thirties, exited and immediately lit a cigarette. The sommelier, a younger woman, came after him, turned, and called back inside, “À demain, René.”

  Then she closed the door, locked it, and followed the maître d’ toward Sauvage’s position.

  “He works too hard,” the wine steward was saying.

  “It’s his passion,” the maître d’ said.

  “His heart will just break one of these days.”

  Glancing in disgust at Sauvage lying in the filth, the maître d’ replied, “The price of greatness.”

  “I just wish he’d pause to look around, relax, enjoy what he’s built.”