Private Paris (Private 10)

For a second there I admit I was kind of floored to find the widow and the mistress comforting each other in their hour of grief, but then I chalked it up to one more thing that confused me about the French. I shook Madame Richard’s hand and she, too, thanked me for taking an interest.

After the maid brought us coffee, the women sat side by side again, holding hands, looking expectantly at Louis.

“What have you found out?” Evangeline Soleil said.

“La Crim will tell us nothing,” Valerie Richard said.

“How did you know your husband was dead?” I asked.

The opera director’s wife said, “One of the guards called me, and I immediately called Evangeline.”

“And I called La Crim,” the mistress said. “And all they said was that someone would be along to talk with us in due time.”

“Have either of you heard Henri mention the phrase ‘AB-16’?” I asked.

Both women shook their heads.

“What does it mean?” Valerie Richard said.

“We don’t know,” Louis said, and then masterfully recounted what we’d learned without telling them what we’d seen, as I’d guaranteed Hoskins.

Rather than express shock or outrage that Richard had been with a young redhead, the two women looked at each other as if in vindication.

“We were right,” the mistress said. “He was up to his old tricks.”

“The foolish old goat,” the wife said. “It got him killed after all.”

Both women said that Richard was ordinarily given to melancholy, but he had been acting strangely happy in the past few weeks, disappearing at night for mysterious meetings and telling neither of them where he’d been.

Richard’s wife said she had confronted her husband finally, and he had said there was no new love interest, that he’d been holing up in a studio flat in Popincourt that he’d inherited from his mother to work on the libretto of a new opera. He had told his mistress the same thing.

“Devious, wasn’t he?” Evangeline Soleil said to Valerie Richard.

The wife sighed in anguish and said, “There are things we cannot change about some men no matter how hard we try.”

“Some men?” the mistress said. “All men.”

This vein of discussion made me shift in my seat and try to change course. “Did he have any enemies?”

Valerie Richard shot me a look as if I were mentally challenged. “What man in a position like his does not have enemies?”

I hadn’t thought of opera house director as being a particularly dangerous or controversial job before. “Anyone specific?”

Evangeline Soleil let out a long, slow breath and said, “Anyone in the opera community you might think of, Mr. Morgan. I mean, they all acted nice to Henri, but you know how it is when someone is successful in Paris.”

“Uh, actually, I don’t,” I said.

Louis said, “The people in the same field, they hate you for your success. They think something must be wrong, that you’re corrupt in some way.”

“Of course,” Richard’s wife said. “They plot against you.”

I said, “Was there anyone actively plotting against him lately?”

“The redhead, obviously,” his mistress sniffed.

“Focus on her,” the wife agreed. “A woman will be at the center of it all.”

Chapter 20