Grabbing my phone, I punched in Justine’s contact. I listened to her cell ring twice before she answered, “I was just thinking about you, Jack.”
“That right?”
“I don’t know exactly why, but you’ve been on my mind,” she said. “So, anyway, how are you? Any luck with Kim Kopchinski? Del Rio told me there was a charge to a café in Paris.”
I told her about my entire crazy day, from losing Kim, to seeing the opera director’s corpse, to finding the secrets of his pied-à-terre, to Michele Herbert’s collage. I took care not to make much of the artist beyond her smarts. I certainly wasn’t going to babble on about Herbert’s beauty and wit.
Instead, I emphasized her thoughts, her legions of followers, and her belief that someone who’d studied under or emulated a famous dead graffiti artist had painted the AB-16 tag.
Then I described the scene at Open Café, how we’d closed in on Kim Kopchinski, the gunplay that had ensued, and her escape. I didn’t say a thing about dinner or the world’s greatest fries or the fact that the artist liked my eyes.
“Sounds like you’ve got your hands full,” she said. “And this Michele Herbert sounds like quite a woman.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, she’s nice.”
“Uh-huh,” Justine said.
“You can’t resist analyzing every word, can you?” I said hotly. “It’s like you can take the therapist out of the therapy room but you can’t keep the therapy room out of the therapist.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“How’s Sherman?” I asked.
“They’ve got him in a deep medical coma,” Justine said. “They said it could take a few days for the swelling to subside enough to bring him out of it. I plan on stopping by there in the morning.”
“Sounds like you’re all carrying on well without me.”
“You’ve assembled a strong team,” she said. “You should be happy.”
“Oh, I’m a happy guy,” I said. “April. Paris. Mysteries up the wazoo.”
“Hobnobbing with famous French artists,” she added.
“That too,” I replied. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call tomorrow.”
“Uh-huh.”
I clicked off, wondering what I’d said or tone I’d used to cause Justine to home in so quickly on Michele Herbert. It was as if she had an emotional radar or something, an innate sensitivity that had made her so effective as a psychologist for the L.A. district attorney and as an investigator with Private.
I took a shower, flashing on Michele and finding it nice that she hadn’t spent the night scrutinizing me, trying to figure out what made me tick, or what old wounds I was trying to work out. Instead, she was interested, fun, and easy to be with, and I vowed I would not leave Paris without seeing her again.
Chapter 32
I WENT DOWNSTAIRS for breakfast.
The second the elevator opened, the big, shaved-headed Saudi royal bodyguard with the Texas accent was looking at me.
He nodded. “Mr. Morgan.”
“You know my name?”
“We know everyone who’s staying here.”
“What’s your name?”
“Randall Peaks.”
“Need a job, Randall Peaks?”
“I don’t think you could afford me.”
“Probably not. Can I go have breakfast?”
“Just don’t get near the princesses, and you’ll be fine.”
“So the royals don’t use Saudi bodyguards?”
“A few,” he said. “The rest of us are contracted.”
“How long have you been working there?”
“Seven years,” Peaks said as the elevator pinged behind me. “Have a good day, Mr. Morgan.”
I left him and went into the dining area, spotting a large table of Middle Eastern women who looked ready for fashion week. Every one of them was wearing a couture dress. Every one of them had flawless makeup, a dramatic hairdo, and stunning jewelry.
Laughing, chatting, and generally having a good time, they paid no attention to me. But the guards positioned discreetly around the room watched me all the way to my seat.
I read the International Herald Tribune and had an exceptional breakfast of poached eggs, asparagus, and a dill sauce that I wanted to eat with a spoon.
The princesses left before I had finished. Only one of them looked even remotely my way as they exited the room. She was the youngest, probably in her mid- to late teens, and by my estimation the most beautiful of them all. It took me a moment to realize that she wasn’t looking at me, but studying a painting over my right shoulder.
Brought back to earth, stuffed and caffeinated, I was at the offices of Private Paris by seven fifteen and not surprised to find Louis already at his desk drinking an espresso.
“Do you ever sleep?” I asked.
“Five hours, every night,” he said, and snapped his fingers. “Five hours and I am ready to go. I have only just heard from Le Chien.”
“Yeah?” I said, taking a seat. “He find anything on Richard?”
“Many things,” Louis said. “Including the fact that several times in the last week he ate at a very famous restaurant in Paris, Chez Pincus. By the amount of money he spent, it suggests that he was entertaining a woman. Perhaps the woman in the-”
Ali Farad, Private Paris’s newest hire, came in. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yes,” Louis said, leaning over a desktop computer and typing in a command. When he finished, he peered over the screen at Farad and said, “Ali, what you’re about to see you aren’t going to like, and you are to keep what you are about to see completely to yourself.”
“Okay…” Farad said.
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, okay.”
Louis pivoted the screen to show the hijab and veil that I’d photographed with my phone when we were inside the opera director’s love shack. Farad looked at them with little expression, and then shrugged. “Why are these important?”
“Because of these,” Louis said, and gave the computer another command.
The screen blinked, divided into quadrants, and up popped four photographs of the opera director in the Catholic priest’s collar having sex with the fierce-eyed woman in the hijab and veil.
Farad’s lips thinned. “That’s Henri Richard.”
“Correct,” Louis said. “He seemed to have a fetish about priests and Muslim girls. He was writing an opera about it.”
“We think he might have been killed because he was also living out his fantasies,” I said. “Are we off base on that? Could you see a Muslim father, or brother, or uncle finding out about the affair and deciding to kill Richard?”
Farad nodded without hesitation. “Sure, I could see it. I mean, this is just the rankest porn imaginable. Among radical sects, it would be just cause for revenge on Richard, and perhaps her death as well.”
“Richard was with a woman last night, before his death. A redhead,” I said. “Maybe this woman.”
“Any idea how we’d find her?” Louis asked.
Farad stayed quiet and scratched at his chin while my thoughts tracked to the hijab and veil, and I thumbed through the pictures I’d taken of them on my phone.
When I found what I was looking for, I sent it to Louis’s e-mail address and said, “Pull this picture up when you get it on e-mail, and blow it up on the screen.”
The file went through almost immediately, and quickly Louis had the picture up on his screen, where we could all see it well. The hijab and veil were turned inside out, exposing labels in Arabic.
“What’s that say?” I asked Farad.
The investigator scooted forward, studied the image, and said, “Al-Jumaa Custom Tailor and Embroidery. I know this place. It’s around the corner from my mosque.”
Chapter 33