“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.