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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.
