Nancy frowned. She’d almost rather risk the wrath of a blackmailer than borrow money from someone like Ashley Amberton. “Did you save the blackmail letters?”

He pulled some papers out of his uniform pocket and handed them to her. “Here they are,” he said, with what sounded like relief. “I hope you catch this crook. It is a horrible thing to be blackmailed. I live in fear every day of losing my job.”

“I understand,” Nancy told him. “I can’t promise you anything, but I’ll do my best to get this straightened out as soon as possible.”

She got out of the limousine in front of the hospital. Hurrying up the steps, she glanced quickly at the two letters the chauffeur had handed her. The message, typed in French, was identical in each one: “Put $2,000 in a red plastic bag and drop it into the trash can at Nelson’s Column on Monday at noon. If you don’t, your employer will learn about the drugs.”

Monique Levere was alive, Nancy discovered, but pale and groggy after her narrow escape from an overdose of sleeping pills. There was a frightened look in her eyes as she lay in the hospital bed.

Nancy introduced herself and asked Monique what had happened. In a small voice the young woman told Nancy that she’d been sick for a few days. She had taken a sleeping pill in the middle of the night, and the next thing she knew, she was in the emergency room having her stomach pumped.

“I told the police a million times that I took only one pill, to help me sleep,” Monique said. “They don’t believe me, though. They say I got sleepy and took the whole bottle by mistake—or that I tried to kill myself!”

“Did you keep the bottle beside your bed?” Nancy asked calmly.

Monique nodded, obviously fighting hysteria. “I think somebody put something into that pill! I think somebody tried to kill me!”