Satin Doll (36 page)

“You knew some of these people who were involved in the shoot-out, Miss Laredo?” he asked. “Have the Paris police or the Interpol people asked you to identify them?” Before Sam could answer, he continued, “Tell me, were the Iranians supplying you with drugs?”
 

“Good lord, were they Iranians?” Sam said, waking up long enough to be surprised. “I thought they were just terrorists.”
 

She had been shown some photographs of several swarthy young men, and now that the American consulate man mentioned it, she supposed they did look like Iranians. If so, that was certainly surprising. The first detective who’d questioned her, the small, rushed young man from the Paris metropolitan police, had taken her word that she had no idea who those faces with heavy black eyebrows and mustaches might be. The Paris police detective had told Sam before he left that the people up in the room behind the Maison Louvel storeroom in the drug factory were suspected of belonging to a terrorist group.
 

Sam closed her eyes, thinking of all the trips she’d made to the storeroom when she was moving Claude Louvel’s clothes out for the retrospective show. “I couldn’t identify them,” she told the consulate officer tiredly, “because I think I saw them only once. Actually, I thought they were the ghosts of the monks. The monks, that is, from the cellar.”
 

“You thought they were ghosts?” The consulate man looked as though his worst suspicions were confirmed. “They were processing heroin, Miss Laredo, brought in from Marseilles in the south of France. ‘Smack,’ ‘horse,’ I’m sure you know the street names for it. Aren’t you,” he said severely, “some sort of television personality back in the States?”
 

“Not really,” Sam murmured, drifting away again. “But I do think you ought to do something about those damned Iranians. Since you’re with the American government.”
 

That made him frown. “You are a friend of Alain des Baux, aren’t you? I understand you were with him when he was arrested.”
 

Poor Alain, Sam thought. She supposed he couldn’t have escaped if he’d wanted; she had taken his Lamborghini. She wondered if the police had found Alain des Baux just where she’d left him, in the spectacularly canopied antique bed in the darkened room.
 

“No, I was at the Maison Louvel.” Her voice sounded far away to her own ears, as if someone else were talking, but then this was the fourth or fifth time she’d been through an interrogation—with the Paris policemen, the Interpol detectives, and now the man from the American consulate. “I wasn’t supposed to come back when I did. I had just gone out of town. With Alain des Baux, as a matter of fact, but then I decided to come back.” Did the consulate man understand that she’d almost been killed? she wondered. “I made so much noise coming up in the elevator that when I finally opened the gate and stepped out onto the landing, the terror—the Iranians upstairs in the storeroom thought it was a police raid. Which it was,” she said opening her eyes and blinking them hard so they would stay open. “The police were already there in the building getting ready to attack. They weren’t expecting me, either.” That was almost the last thing she remembered, Chip’s voice yelling in her ear just before he threw her to the floor.
 

The consulate man was still staring at her suspiciously. “There are matters of circumstantial evidence, Miss Laredo,” he reminded her. “You’re employed by Jackson Storm, Incorporated of New York, aren’t you? And you’d been working in the Maison Louvel building since the first of June?” When he got no answer, he went on, “Have you been told that Mr. Storm and his associates are being questioned at Paris police metro? Are you confident his story will match yours?”
 

Sam looked in vague surprise. Jack was being questioned? Jack didn’t have anything to do with drug operations—he was a clothing manufacturer! This was turning out to be the sort of publicity Jackson Storm didn’t need—drug processing, heroin, Iranian terrorists right there in the old Maison Louvel. From what the young detective had told her, it was amazing how many people had been involved: Solange Doumer, the old night watchman, and Alain des Baux. It made her head hurt just to think about it. Sam touched the bump on her forehead gingerly with her fingers and winced.
 

She didn’t remember being interrogated, only telling the truth to the nice Frenchman from the Interpol office, Supervisor Lapin, that she’d left Alain at his house in Fontainebleau. That was one of the first things the Interpol man had asked her: where she’d been, why she’d come back to the Maison Louvel in the middle of the night and where she’d last seen Alain. In his house, she’d told Supervisor Lapin. Now she knew it was probably her fault that they’d promptly gone there to arrest him.
 

“The Louvel property here in Paris was part of the des Baux family holdings,” the consulate man said rather smugly, “before it was sold to your company, Jackson Storm of New York. Des Baux is the former owner of the building in the rue des Bénédictines. Surely you heard the circumstances of the sale. That des Baux was hoping to buy it back?”
 

No, she didn’t know much of anything, Sam told herself. The words turned over slowly in her sleep-drugged thoughts. Alain’s family had owned the Maison Louvel? Poor Jack, he’d gotten more than he’d bargained for in his Lyons silk mill purchase!
 

Fortunately, at that moment, Supervisor Lapin from Interpol came back and took the American consulate man away before he asked any more questions. Sam leaned her back against the wall again and sank into an exhausted sleep. It was barely half an hour later when the Interpol man woke her up to give her some coffee.
 

“Are you feeling better?” He was a short, middle-aged Frenchman with a round face and wire-rimmed glasses and awfully nice; Sam couldn’t help smiling at him somewhat groggily.
 

“Mmmm.” She took the coffee in a paper cup he handed her and sipped it.
 

At the end of the corridor several nurses and an orderly were trying to round up a group of French television cameramen who had gotten inside the emergency area doors and wanted a shot of her sitting there on the bench with Supervisor Lapin. Sam watched them disinterestedly. A film clip that would be shown on French television news of her sitting in a hospital corridor with an Interpol officer was certainly no stranger than anything else that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. She couldn’t help wondering what Jack Storm was doing right then. Sam sighed. “The consulate man asked me about my passport,” she told Supervisor Lapin. “I didn’t know what to tell him.”
 

Behind his eyeglasses Supervisor Lapin’s soft brown eyes were friendly. “Inspector Chiswick has your passport,” he told her.
 

Inspector Chiswick.
Supervisor Lapin even pronounced it right—
Chizzick—
so Sam knew that he really knew Chip. Inspector Christopher Chiswick, she told herself, still amazed. Sleazy Chip was a cop.
 

Well, it figured. She suddenly felt so light-headed she had to giggle. All that muscle, all that hard come-on had to belong to a cop or a burglar. And he really was an undercover cop from an international police agency, Interpol. He was Inspector Sleazy Cheap. Suddenly, in the midst of giggling Sam broke into loud sobs.
 

Supervisor Lapin was dismayed. “Ah, now, now, my dear young lady—” He stood up, looking around for a nurse. “Why don’t you let us put you in a room here in the hospital?”
 

Sam grabbed Supervisor Lapin’s hand quickly and made him sit back down again. She wasn’t going to be admitted to the hospital. She thought they’d settled that hours ago. She was going to sit right there until she got to see Inspector Chiswick, damn him.
 

“Mademoiselle, I assure you.” Supervisor Lapin pulled a clean white handkerchief from his breast pocket and pushed it into her hand. “Chiswick is in excellent condition. After all, he’s had experience with these things many times before, so please, no tears, yes?” He peered into her face anxiously. “A flesh wound in the ribs, that is all, and many small lacerations from marble chips. The grenade launcher used from above splintered the stairs, it caused many minor wounds among the police.” He gently took the handkerchief from her hand, since she seemed incapable of using it, and dabbed at her tearful face. “You were spared the spray from the floor, mademoiselle, since he was lying on top of you to protect you,” he soothed, misunderstanding her sobs. “Now, consider that you are in excellent condition, is that not lucky? Nothing to mar that lovely face, hmmm?”
 

“I’ve got marble flakes in my hair,” she wept. She couldn’t tell him that Chip had been lying on top of her, mad as hell, and she knew that was how he had been shot. “And all down inside my clothes. I’m a wreck!”
 

“Yes, yes, but you are all right.” He carefully took the coffee cup out of her hand and set it on the floor beside him. “And Chiswick will recover. He is a bit banged up, but it is nothing for someone like him.”
 

“He’d better be all right,” Sam spluttered. “He’s got my passport.” None of this would have happened if Chip Chiswick hadn’t been trying to uncover a drug operation. And pass himself off as a button salesman. It made her cry even harder. “I can’t get out of Paris without it!”
 

The Interpol man smiled. “Ah, to get out of Paris. That is what you kept telling us in the ambulance.” He sighed. “I regret, mademoiselle, that all this has happened to spoil your visit. The world grows disorderly, even in our beautiful Paris. It is very worrisome.”
 

Sam hiccuped into his handkerchief, drying her tears. She hardly ever cried, at least not like this. She was making a fool of herself and Supervisor Lapin was being nice about everything, especially the way she’d behaved in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
 

She hadn’t been at her best then, to put it mildly; she supposed she’d been what you might call hysterical. But then it wasn’t every day you discovered someone like Chip was a cop and that he’d nearly been killed trying to mash you into the floor and out of the way of flying bullets. She did remember yelling that if she didn’t get out of Paris, she was going to go crazy. The Interpol man and the Paris policeman who had been in the back of the ambulance with her hadn’t been able to make her shut up. Then Chip had suddenly sat up on the stretcher, all covered with blood, to yell at her to calm down. It had been such a relief to know he wasn’t dead she’d gone to pieces all over again.
 

Sam closed her eyes for a brief second. What a night, what a crazy twenty-four hours—from the retrospective show with the torrents of rain, the ancient bag ladies turning up, to the world fashion press descending on them at the last minute because Gilles Vasse had shot himself and the Mortessier show had been canceled, to Jack Storm flying in from New York. Then, when you could believe that nothing more could possibly happen, there’d been the nightmarish scene with Alain des Baux.
 

If you were writing a book about it or making a movie, the whole thing would end right there in the bedroom of Alain’s house in Fontainebleau. You wouldn’t pile on anything more, like a police raid on the Maison Louvel and Chip turning out to be an Interpol undercover agent. Sam shuddered. She could still feel the shock of gunfire in the darkness hitting her like a physical blow, the blast of red and yellow flames that seemed to explode right in her face, and Chip dragging her to the floor and falling on her. That was when she’d hit her head and blacked out.
 

“I could strangle you for this,” Chip had yelled. She supposed, shuddering inwardly, that everyone else felt the same way. The group in the storeroom had opened up just as she got the elevator door open, blasting the stairs and the whole fourth-floor landing before the police attack team could move in. Later, when the gunfire had died down and more police had come up from the ground floor carrying big portable spotlights, they had dragged Chip’s body off her. And at that point she’d gone a little wild because she’d looked down at Chip on the floor by the elevator, his tough body limp and unmoving. Blood covered him, and he’d looked deader than dead.
 

And all those bodies, Sam thought, trying not to start crying again, all those bodies lying on the stairs. She’d never seen dead bodies before, that was one of the things she’d missed in life, shot-up dead bodies. One body she would never forget, carried down on a stretcher, one white arm dangling and the slender hand waving as though it were still alive. All that beautiful red hair.
 

Sam put her hands over her face and bent over, feeling sick. The voices of the crowd at the end of the corridor seemed to fade away. She felt Inspector Lapin’s hand seize the back of her neck. “Your head between your knees, mademoiselle,” he said sharply. “Now we must get you to a room, I insist.”
 

But Sam took her hands from her face and sat up. She took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to pass out; then they would admit her to the hospital. “I’m all right,” she managed. There were some things she still couldn’t face, that was all.
 

When she looked up, she saw two policemen bringing Brooksie Goodman down the hall. Behind Brooksie were Nannette and Sylvie from the Maison Louvel. Unbelieving, Sam half rose from the bench.
 

Brooksie threw herself at her. “Oh, Sammy, are you all right? The
flics
came and got us, everybody’d who’d been working on the show today—yesterday,” she corrected herself breathlessly. “Jeez, they got us out of bed. When they went to get Nannette, they wouldn’t even let her wake up the people next door to take care of her kids. Would you believe she left a Paris
flic
babysitting them? They took us downtown to metropolitan
central
station and wanted to know what we knew about the Maison Louvel, and they wouldn’t even tell us what it was all about! I showed them my press card and it was like nowhere with them, the
flics
wouldn’t even look at it.”