10 a.m.
THE DESIGN STUDIO and haute couture showroom of Jacques Noulan was on the Rue Clément Marot, only a couple of blocks from the Plaza Athénée-a plus given the fact that I hadn’t slept in thirty hours. I planned on talking to the designer and then getting some much needed sack time.
But when Louis and I reached the reception desk, we were told that Noulan had come down with the flu several days before and was convalescing at his country home in Nance. When we asked for a phone number and address, we were politely told that it was impossible to disturb him. Louis left his card and asked that Noulan call as soon as he returned to work.
“Convenient that he’s out of touch,” I said outside.
“I grant you that, Jack.”
I was about to tell Louis that I was going to the hotel to get some sleep when he gestured down the street and said, “That must feel like a thorn in Noulan’s ass. Maybe this is about jealousy and revenge after all.”
Yawning, I said, “I’m not following you.”
“Millie Fleurs,” he replied. “That’s her shop not a block away, Jack.”
Flashing on my bed at the Plaza, I sighed and said, “Maybe she can shed light on the situation.”
We crossed the street and went down the block to the shop. The shop lights were on, but the door was locked. It was one of those places where you had to buzz to get in. A tall, thin man in an impeccably tailored mouse-gray suit was working behind the counter. We must not have struck him as impressive because he glanced at us on a computer screen, grimaced, and went back to ignoring us.
Louis buzzed a second time and held up his Private badge to the camera. The man studied it, curled his upper lip against a pencil-thin mustache, and then buzzed us in. Surprisingly, the shop had very few actual clothes, but it had many life-size black-and-white photos of models wearing Millie Fleurs’s gowns and evening wear. Samples of the designer’s famous purses occupied translucent pedestals around the room, but otherwise the place was empty and white save for the fitting mirrors and counter workstation.
“Yes? Can I help you?” the man behind the counter asked in a voice that suggested he had zero interest whatsoever in helping us. “This is the haute couture shop. Perhaps you’d be more interested in the ready-to-wear line? It’s a few blocks from-”
“We’re not here to buy,” Louis grumbled. “We’re here to talk to Madame Fleurs.”
“Yes, well, wouldn’t we all like to?” he sniffed. “I’m afraid that’s out of the question. You’ll have to call for an appointment, and the soonest time she has is three months out.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He hesitated, twitched his mustache, and said, “Laurent Alexandre.”
“Mr. Alexandre, is Millie Fleurs here?”
“No,” he said, and turned away. “I am the only one-”
Then a woman called out, “Laurent, are you down there?”
Unfazed at being caught fibbing, he hurried toward a curtain at the rear of the shop, calling, “I’ll be right up. No need to-”
The curtain parted. A woman who reminded me of Shirley MacLaine appeared. Wearing black tights, gold slippers, and a crème tunic, she had a dancer’s posture. Her hair was pulled back in a girlish ponytail. She shook a black fabric sample at Alexandre.
“This is not the fabric I ordered for the princess’s cocktail dress.”
“Of course it is, Millie,” Alexandre said wearily.
“It looks wrong.”
“It’s what you ordered. I checked myself.”
“It’s not good enough for the princess!” she protested.
“It will have to be,” her assistant said. “She’s coming tomorrow morning.”
When Millie Fleurs looked ready to continue her argument, Alexandre gestured at us. “Besides, these men would like to speak with you about…what is it about? And who are you?”
“We are with Private,” Louis said, walking toward Fleurs with his badge and ID visible. “And we are here to talk about Jacques Noulan and murder.”
Millie Fleurs’s eyes went wide. “Noulan has been killed?”
“No, no,” I said. “But as you probably know by now, Lourdes Latrelle has been murdered, and-”
“Lourdes is dead?” she cried, her hand covering her heart. “And you think Noulan did it!”
“Madame Fleurs, please,” Louis said. “If you would just let us-”
“You were right about those e-mails,” Fleurs said to her assistant. “The great Noulan has lost his mind and gone homicidal.”
It took us a few minutes to get them up to speed on the developments of the past twenty-four hours, including the fresh graffiti tag on the cupola of the Institut de France.
This all seemed to dumbfound her. “So you think Noulan is targeting the academy for letting me in and not him? And what does this ‘AB-16’ mean?”
“We don’t know,” Louis said. “Has he threatened you? Noulan?”
She made a throwaway gesture with the black fabric swatch and said, “Jacques has been threatening me since I would not sleep with him thirty-five years ago.”
Fleurs explained that she had worked as a designer for Noulan early in her career, but after he tried to make his bed part of the work arrangement, she quit and started her own company. For nearly three decades, he had gone out of his way to make disparaging remarks about her designs, and when she was elected to the academy, he went ballistic and started sending her threatening e-mails.
“Can you print them out, Laurent?” she asked. “Bring them to the studio?”
“Of course, Millie,” her assistant said, and went behind the counter.
“I’m sorry, messieurs, but you’ll have to come along if you wish to speak further,” she said, heading toward the curtain. “One of my most important customers is coming tomorrow for a fitting, and I’m still the cocktail dress short. I’ll probably be up all night finishing.”
We followed her. I happened to glance at Alexandre as I passed, and saw beside the computer a sketch pad with a drawing of a dramatic black cocktail dress on it-probably what he’d been working on when we rang the shop bell.
Fleurs led us behind the curtain and up a steep staircase to a workshop with two cutting tables, three industrial sewing machines, and four mannequins, three of which sported dresses: one maroon, another white, and the third crème-colored. On the wall behind them hung sketches of those same dresses with notations regarding fabric choices, color, and stitching instructions.
The designer gestured to the dresses. “What do you think?”
“Stunning,” Louis said. “Never have I seen such beauty.”
Fleurs raised an eyebrow at him, and then at me.
“Remarkable enough for a princess,” I said.
The designer smiled. “I hope so.”
“A Saudi princess?” Louis asked.
“Who else can afford haute couture these days?” Fleurs said. “There are fewer than two hundred customers in the world for one-of-a-kind Parisian dresses, and ninety percent of them are Saudi royalty.”
“This is true?” Louis said, astonished. “Where do they wear them?”
The designer laughed. “At women-only parties in Riyadh, where even their husbands don’t get to see their hundred thousand dollar dresses. And they wear them when they visit Paris. They wear their robes and veil until they clear Saudi airspace, and then poof! The veils and robes come off and-”
“I have them here, Millie,” said Alexandre, who held a sheaf of paper.
“Let them look,” she said.
The assistant handed Louis the papers, and he scanned them and said, “Have you shown these to the police?”
Fleurs looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t because the rumor is that Noulan is sick, perhaps with early dementia. I figured these e-mails were due to that.”
“She’s too kind in some ways,” Alexandre told me.
That made the designer harden. “He was my mentor once, Laurent. I still admire his genius. Maybe he deserves it, but I thought it would be a crime to run his reputation through the mud if all that was going on was senility and spite.”