Satin Doll

by Davis, Maggie;

  “And I’m not a drug rehabilitation clinic, either!” Sam yelled. She was so tired, so beleaguered by what she’d found there in the dark bedroom that she was shaking. “Look, give me a break, this has been a bad day for me. I—”

  She stopped, suddenly wanting to say something that would take the stricken look from his face. “Alain, listen, my brothers—that is, I’ve known people with problems all my life. People with booze problems, with getting into fights, being put in jail, having prison records, just being poor. You don’t know the kind of people I come from, but I know trouble, believe me. Sometimes I feel like I’ve never known anything else.” She looked him straight in the eye. “Right now I’m just not in any shape to handle yours.”

  “I adore you,” he said quietly.

  “It’s not enough. I was talking about love.” She turned away from him. “Alain, it was kind of dirty to bring me down here to spend a few days with you when I didn’t know what I was getting into. You thought I was a woman with a lot of experience, didn’t you? Well, I’m sure you would be disappointed.” She couldn’t keep her own disappointment out of her voice. So much for the dreams, she told herself. “Right now all I want you to do is to drive me back to Paris.”

  “You’re not going to leave.” He stepped in front of her, blocking her way. “Samantha, I need you, can’t you believe what I say? Get back in bed with me. It will be different this time, I promise.”

  Good lord, he wasn’t going to give up. “I said, drive me back to Paris, dammit!”

  “I am not going back to Paris tonight.” He reached for her. “And neither are you.”

  Sam sidestepped him, pointing a finger warningly. “You touch me, Alain, and I’ll slug you.” She meant it. “I’ve had just about all I can take today, so give me the damned car keys. Okay, I’ll do it myself.”

  They both lunged for the keys on top of the dresser. When Sam managed to scrape them into her hand, Alain caught her by the wrist, trying to pry them out of her fingers. “You can’t go back to Paris. Not tonight. I won’t let you.”

  Frustration and heartsick fury suddenly burst out of her. She feinted with a rabbit punch to his midsection before she followed through with her fist to his jaw. There was a loud, distinct thud as it connected.

  Alain reeled back, stunned and surprised, hit the bed and sprawled backward on it. He sat up almost at once. “Have you gone mad?” he muttered, fingering his jaw. “You—you fought me!”

  “I have four brothers. They taught me how to fight. I told you I come from a tough background.” She turned blindly, feeling she had to get out of there or else she was going to hit him again. “I’m sorry Alain, although I don’t know why I should be apologizing to you—you haven’t been very nice to me. You can pick up your car tomorrow at the Maison Louvel. I grew up driving pickup trucks and tractors—I guess I can drive your damned Lamborghini!”

  She slammed the bedroom door behind her.

  At night on the Autoroute du Soleil expressway going north, she had difficulty staying oriented as she fought sleeplessness and her lack of familiarity with high-speed French traffic, with the baffling knobs and dials of the superpowered Lamborghini. The terrible scene with Alain after her long day had drained her; at the Grigny exit she suddenly couldn’t go any farther. She pulled the Lamborghini down the ramp but didn’t quite make the lights of an all-night service station. Sam opened the door on the driver’s side, jerked the racing car to a stop and leaned out far enough to throw up in a patch of weeds at the roadside. In a second she was suddenly weeping and vomiting helplessly.

  Afterward she sat for several minutes, letting everything settle down. Losing the elegant dinner she’d been served at Alain des Baux’s house, she thought, wiping her eyes, ought to make her feel somewhat better. It was called getting a bad experience out of your system. She needed to go back to the apartment at the Maison Louvel, get a good night’s sleep and pack her things in the morning to leave Paris. She was running away again, and it felt good.

  It was after one o’clock when Sam connected with the Périphérique beltway that circled Paris, exiting the ramp three separate times to get her directions, fighting down the desperate feeling that the day, the night, would never end. At last, at the right exit for the Place de l’Opéra district, she hit streets that looked familiar. It took another half hour to find her way to the rue Cambon, and once there she couldn’t find the turn off for the rue des Bénédictines. By the time she had circled the block twice, Sam was close to screaming.

  She pulled the sleek black Lamborghini under a streetlight and just sat there. Okay, where do you go from here? Sam asked herself with the blankness of total exhaustion. So many dreams in her life had collapsed that, sitting there at two o’clock in the morning on a Paris side street, she didn’t even have enough strength to find her way back to bed.

  Slow tears trickled down her face as she told herself the best dream of them all had been Alain des Baux. Lord, he had been so perfect—so worth loving! She bent her head to the Lamborghini’s steering wheel and rested it there. She wasn’t fooling anybody, she knew now; she was shallow, ambitious, mixed up, so insecure that she’d been turning things into what she wanted to see instead of what they really were. If she wanted to be honest with herself, she’d admit that Alain des Baux was no dream prince, no golden aristocratic god living in a world that dazzled her, but a real person, a man with a terrible problem. And what had she done? She had socked him in the jaw and then walked out on him!

  Did she have to come to the end of her rope before seeing things as they really were? She hadn’t been in love with Jack Storm, and she hadn’t been in love with Alain des Baux. She knew that now.

  I’ve got to stop being the poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks who has to fight for everything she gets, she told herself in a burst of understanding. Now Jack thinks he wants to divorce his wife, and I don’t want Jack. I don’t think I ever did.

  She didn’t want Alain, either.

  Time to go home, she thought with a sigh, to bed upstairs in the apartment tonight, then back to New York tomorrow, and maybe all the way home to Wyoming by the end of the week.

  The rue des Bénédictines was dark, and she slammed the Lamborghini against one of the plane trees at the curb before she managed to bring it to a stop. All she longed for was to creep into bed, get a good night’s sleep and pack to leave Paris as soon as she could.

  The downstairs of the Maison Louvel was dark. Sam knew the futility of ringing for Albert, the night watchman, to come turn the lights on for her. She opened the door with her key and stepped into the lobby.

  For once she was so tired she decided she wasn’t going to bypass the treacherous little elevator, because she didn’t think she could climb four flights of stairs to the top floor. But when Sam got inside the cage, it was pitch-black. She had to fumble blindly for several minutes before finding the button for the fourth floor. She braced herself for the familiar sickening drop of the elevator and then its slow, grinding ascent.

  Between the second and third floors the cage came to a stop. Sam felt a moment of panic in the darkness. Let this night end, she prayed silently. All I want to do is get into bed. She hit the button panel with the flat of her hand. The lift mechanism gave a protesting groan, its gears slipping, and started up again, the sound loud in the silence of the empty building.

  Home stretch, she told herself, almost hypnotized by the dark, by her tiredness. The elevator cage stopped several inches short of the top floor and the gate wouldn’t open. Sam struggled with it for a long moment and then stopped, temporarily defeated, looking out on the empty fourth floor dimly lit by the faint shine of the skylight one flight above.

  Damn, her last night in this place and she was stuck in the elevator! She should have known better than to take the thing. And she wasn’t so tired that she didn’t consider, for an awful moment, the possibility of spending the night where she was, stuck just a few inches from where she wanted to be. Sam gave the gate a dis
pirited kick.

  The brass bars came partly open. She tugged at the gate, trying to squeeze through the opening. As she managed to push most of her body clear, she heard a voice yell out in the blackness. “Stay where you are!”

  Then the fourth-floor landing exploded.

  Flashing streamers of flame tore the air, and the silence ripped apart with strange, staccato burps and hoarse shouts. A force hit Samantha, slamming her to the wall, and a familiar voice growled in her ear, “Damn you, woman, I could strangle you for this!”

  Sam hit her head on the marble floor. For a moment not all the deafening noises and bursting lights were outside but right there inside her skull. Then, with a sudden jolt of pain, came total, enveloping night.

  Chapter Twenty

  The emergency room of the American Hospital in the Paris suburb of Neuilly was a surprisingly busy place at four o’clock in the morning. It was no place, Sam was finding, to try to get some sleep.

  She’d been sitting on a bench in the corridor since the ambulance had delivered her, and during that time a stream of ambulances had rolled up the driveway to bring not only the English-speaking wounded from the Maison Louvel, who were being transferred from French hospitals, but also three Americans who had been in an automobile accident on the Periphérique, a very pregnant woman about to deliver a baby and an elderly tourist couple from Chicago who had been taken from their Paris hotel with a case of food poisoning. The hospital people were having an increasingly hard time getting the arrivals through the growing crowd of newspaper and television crews that gathered in the emergency area parking lot outside, not to mention through the uniformed Paris gendarmes, French Internal Security men and Interpol agents filling the corridors inside the glass doors.

  The noise, Sam decided, the procession of rapidly rolling gurneys wheeling by the bench where she sat and disappearing into the hospital elevator, made this no place to be if you were sleepy. She was so exhausted that she had long since stopped making much sense. The brusque young man from the American consulate who sat beside her obviously had his own interpretation of what was wrong. He watched her closely.

  “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 e
mergency 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?”