“Go away,” he said.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, but we’re—”
“I don’t care who you are. Go away.”
“If we could just—”
“No.” He swallowed. The hand that held the black metal door ajar tightened. “The police have already been here, which means you’re either press or just death gawkers, and I’ve had enough of both. So get going.”
The door swung closed, but before it could shut Magda stuck her foot in it. “We’re not press, and we’re not gawkers. We’re detectives, and we want to talk to you about one of your employees.”
The man didn’t open the door, but he peered around it. “Which one?”
“Cyrille Thieriot.”
“Thieriot! That emmerdeur! What’s he done now?”
Magda gave the classic detective’s response. “What makes you think he’s done anything?”
“Because he lives to make other people’s lives difficult. As he demonstrated right before I fired his ass, which is why I did fire his ass.”
“What did he do?”
“What am I, the front page of Le Figaro?” But he opened the door a little wider. “Look, I’m going to tell you this, and then I’m going shut the door and not open it again. Thieriot spent all his time here telling anyone who would listen that he used to be Roland Guipure’s compagnon, so when Guipure’s company rented this place for his party, I had a little fun by putting Thieriot down to work. I figured he was lying, and I wanted to see his reaction. Well, his reaction was to disappear during the party and not come back. I had to get behind the bar myself! And when I play the security footage afterward, what do I see but him following Guipure into the men’s room and then come rushing out two minutes later, heading straight out the back door. Staff are not supposed to interact with customers, and they sure as hell aren’t supposed to bring their personal dramas into my club. So when he showed up for his next shift, I gave him the boot, and I don’t know or care anything else about him.”
Then, true to his word, he pulled the door back to slam it. But Rachel put her hand on it.
“Wait. Please. Could you just tell me if you saw this man at the party?” She held up her portable, where she had used the search engine to find Naquet’s author photo.
The man tried to close the door, but she braced her arm with all her weight. After a few seconds of unresolved back-and-forth exertion he gave up and leaned forward, squinting at the screen.
“Who the fuck is that?”
“He’s a writer. I just … Imagine him older, and with less hair.”
The man squinted harder, with his head slightly tilted. “Okay, maybe. I think so. I might’ve seen him a couple of times in the course of the night. I mean, he wasn’t taking notes or anything, so I can’t be sure it was him.” He laughed uproariously.
“And did you see—” But in her excitement Rachel had relaxed her pressure on the door. He slammed it shut.
“What was that about?”
Rachel relayed what Dolly had told her about Naquet’s book. “And I just thought, if Naquet was desperate to talk to Roland, he might try to sneak into a party where he knew Guipure would be.”
Magda made a face. “Seems like a lot of work. All Thieriot had to do was follow him into the men’s room. And then he rushed right out the door afterward.”
“Thereby drawing attention to himself as all cunning murderers do?” Rachel shook her head. “He showed up for his next shift, which doesn’t really indicate guilt.”
“Or it indicates that he’s guilty but smart enough to cover it up.”
Rachel thought of Dolly first saying Thieriot wasn’t smart enough to be a Machiavelli and then saying he might be smarter than she thought. He might be. But even if he was, murder wasn’t the most logical motivation for following an ex-lover into the bathroom. “He could’ve been trying to patch things up so he could get back on his gravy train.”
“I could say the same of Naquet. And Thieriot was the go-between for Guipure and his dealer, so we know he knew where to get heroin.”
“I think a celebrity biographer knows where to buy drugs.”
“Ah, you think. But you don’t know. But that’s what it really comes down to, isn’t it? Not who had the best motive or was in the best place, but who had the heroin. If we know that, we know our murderer.”
Rachel looked down at the pavement, made up of the same gray stone rectangles that lined the Rue Vieille du Temple, the Place Saint German des Prés, the Rue St. Paul. In her mind’s eye she saw a cup, filled with hot minty tea; a plate glass window that offered a full view out onto the street and in from it. She saw a business card that at that moment lay somewhere in her bag, its edges becoming increasingly frayed and its glossy black surface turning dull from scuffs and scratches. She took a deep breath, then sighed it out. “Matthieu Mediouri can help us with that.”
Chapter Fifteen
Once he was done laughing with surprise and exclaiming in disbelief, Mediouri said yes, he could find out what they wanted to know. But it wouldn’t be quick. He would need to contact some former friends, and those friends might need to contact some people themselves. The process couldn’t be rushed, and he couldn’t promise a result. Rachel should wait for him to contact her.
“Don’t tell Alan,” she said to Magda the next day.
“So far there’s nothing to tell.”
Two weeks earlier, it had been cold enough to wear a winter coat; four days earlier, spring had been near enough for that coat to be worn open; today, on the morning of the second of May, it was warm enough for a man to sit outside in only his blazer and smoke a cigarette. Rachel knew this was the case because that was precisely what Gédéon Naquet was doing when she and Magda arrived at Les Deux Magots. He sat beneath the restaurant’s green and white awning at a table near the door, his chair angled so that he could keep an eye on the computer Rachel could see through the window behind him.
“We want to catch him off guard,” she had said when Magda suggested they contact Naquet to arrange a second meeting, so she was gratified by his start of surprise when he realized who was standing in front of him. But he recovered quickly, half rising with a smile and inviting them to join him.
“Monsieur Naquet.” Rachel scraped her chair as she sat down. “We’re here because we spoke to the owner of the LaLa Lounge.” Had it been the owner? Well, Naquet would never know if it had or hadn’t been. “I showed him your author photo, and he told us that you were at Guipure’s birthday party.” She cut him off as he opened his mouth. “Not outside, but inside the club itself.”
Naquet was a quick thinker. “What is a pair of filmmakers doing questioning the owner of the LaLa Lounge?”
But Magda was a quicker thinker. “It was the scene of Guipure’s death. Of course we were going to go there as part of our research.”
Outfoxed, Naquet put down his cigarette and crossed his arms. “Yes, I was at the party, but so what? Roland invited me. I forgot: he did call, after the collection showed. He suggested I come to the party.”
Magda raised her eyebrows.
“He did,” Naquet said sulkily. “He said we could talk there.”
Magda folded her hands on the tabletop, leaning forward and looking him in the eye. Her lips made the shape of a smile. “Monsieur Naquet, let me explain. Rachel and I are trying to be filmmakers. We thought the story of Roland Guipure’s life would make a wonderful documentary. Then the police said Roland had been murdered, and we thought the story of his life and death would make a wonderful documentary. But then we did some research, and in the course of that research we found out that you were at the party where Guipure was murdered, even though you told us you hadn’t had any contact with anyone at Sauveterre since Guipure went into rehab. And now you are claiming, in a very unconvincing tone, that you forgot that Guipure had contacted you after all and invited you to that party—that you forgot you were there on the night of his death. I think you can see why we might feel that your sto
ry would make an even better documentary.”
While she had been reading Knight’s Forensic Pathology and taking Approach to Agency Marketing online, had Magda been taking Approach to Interview Techniques? Rachel felt her own throat go dry, and Naquet drew on his cigarette so hard that she expected to see it burn up to the filter. He stamped it out, then lit a new one with a shaking hand.
“I can see why you’d think that,” he said at last, “but you’d be wrong. All right, Roland didn’t contact me. But I meant what I said about thinking there was a great book in his recovery. And I thought—I thought if I could just talk to him, I could make him see it that way. But Madame Fauré would never put me through, and he never answered my e-mails. Then I read on Quelles Nouvelles that he was holding a big party for his fortieth at the LaLa Lounge the next night, and I—” A flush crept up his face. “I waited outside and asked someone going in if I could be her plus one. I—I gave her fifty euros to do it.”
“And?”
Naquet snorted “And much good it did me. There must have been two hundred people in the place. The only time I even saw Roland was once when I spotted him hugging his sister, and that wasn’t until around two in the morning. Then he vanished again. I waited another hour, then went home. The next day I got an alert telling me he’d died outside the club.” He pulled on the new cigarette and exhaled. “I suppose I must have walked by him on my way home and thought he was a clochard.”
He said this not with pity or even disgust, but rather in the tone of a man trying to figure out how he might develop that detail into a marketable story. Rachel felt a strong desire to be out of his company.
Magda must have felt something similar, for they stood up at the same time.
* * *
“What do you make of his story?” The sun had begun to shine as they walked back down the Boulevard Saint Germain. Rachel noticed that the Deux Magot’s curious little outdoor island—a covered dining area walled in by shrubbery and set in the middle of the Place Saint Germain des Prés—was entirely filled, and when she looked at her watch, she was surprised to see that it was lunchtime. The smell of butter from the crêpe kiosk a few meters away banished the memory of Naquet’s cigarette smoke from her nostrils, and the attention she’d need to weave in and out of the hungry pedestrians hurrying to find a place to eat distracted her from the disgust she’d felt in his company. Still, she waited until they were close to the Sèvres portique, the extraordinary ceramic archway created to showcase the skills of the Sevres porcelain company for the 1900 World’s Fair, before she replied. She had forgotten the portique in her gloomy assessment of the Boulevard Saint Germain after their first meeting with Naquet, and as they drew closer, its art nouveau beauty, combined with the green scent of the garden next to the Église Saint Germain, restored her to rationality before she replied.
“It could be true. He certainly seemed to legitimately believe that he could have convinced Guipure to work with him.”
“And to be legitimately angry that he didn’t get the chance to ask him.”
“On the other hand, if you were a murderer, you’d probably work hard to be seen as legitimately something else.”
By this time they had turned onto the Rue de Seine. Rachel paused in front of the glossy blue front of an antique bookshop, where the window displayed a medieval manuscript open to an illuminated picture of Romulus fighting Remus. The tips of their swords had been gilded, and behind them the hills of Rome were a wash of verdant green. Why did art always depict murder so elegantly? There was never any of the confusion or grotesqueness of the real-life act, just an obvious murderer tidily and simply killing an obvious victim.
“What are you thinking?”
“Oh, just aimless thoughts about death.” She took Magda’s arm and continued down to where the Rue de Seine became the Rue de Tournon. This turned right into the Rue de Vaugirard, which eventually led to Rachel’s own street. At least geography offered direct routes to the goal.
Chapter Sixteen
The next few days passed slowly. Rachel scoured the newspapers and websites, but there were no mentions of breakthroughs in the Guipure investigation. She briefly reconsidered telephoning Capitaine Boussicault to see if she could worm anything out of him, but again decided against it. His final remark in the restaurant rankled. So she tried to occupy her mind by walking in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The benches started to fill with workers on their lunch breaks and young mothers taking a rest from guiding poussettes; the kissing couple that seemed to be required scenery in every Parisian park changed their winter coats for spring jackets, but to Rachel it all merely showed that the world was moving on from Guipure’s murder. The food kiosks took down their shutters and began serving again, but she ate her favorite mango gelato wanly, thinking of Cyrille Thieriot, former waiter and possible murderer.
This was the problem with the reality of detecting, Rachel thought: it wasn’t very speedy and it wasn’t very cool. No teenager was going to mutter “Sick!” when you described how you’d found your murderer by using shoe leather and good old-fashioned interview techniques, or when you finished your story about contacting a former drug dealer for information by admitting that you had to wait by the phone for him to call you back. And while age forty-six might seem (to her) embarrassingly advanced in life still to be worrying about being cool, it was (also to her) not.
In a belated attempt to be at least a little more state of the art, on Wednesday night she set up her phone for news alerts. As her key words she selected Roland Guipure, Sauveterre, and—after some thought—Gédéon Naquet and Cyrille Thieriot. Let the pings ring out! Even if the only teenager around to be impressed was the one who still lived inside her.
It should have been cheering, then, that the next two days passed in a symphony of pings. But Rachel had reckoned without technology’s lack of discernment. Her phone notified her that Sauveterre items would be included in the spring sales at all three of the most expensive department stores in Paris; it told her that Naquet’s biography of Johnny Halliday was included in Amazon.fr’s €1.99 Kindle book offer; it informed her that Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology would hold a retrospective exhibition of the designs of Roland Guipure. Her mood wasn’t improved by the fact that, having managed to set the alerts up, she had forgotten how to turn them off.
Her only useful digital communication arrived by e-mail on the next Thursday afternoon: the announcement of Guipure’s memorial service. To the extent that she had remembered Antoinette’s promise, Rachel had been anticipating an actual invitation, something involving heavy cardstock and a thick black border, but she supposed the times were changing even for funerals. The e-mail simply said that the memorial service would be held in the Église Saint Roch at eleven am on Sunday, May 15, with a reception to follow at Restaurant Le Taillevent. Those needing further information or assistance should contact Gabrielle Aubert, whose contact information was at the bottom of the e-mail. Rachel forwarded the message to Magda.
On Friday afternoon, just as she reached the final chapter of Vidocq’s memoirs, her phone pinged yet again. With a mixture of hope and anticipatory disappointment, she picked it up from the coffee table and woke the screen.
Sauveterre Names New Head
The fashion house Sauveterre announced today that Head Pattern Cutter Keteb Lellouch will succeed Roland Guipure as Creative Director. “Keteb has been with Sauveterre from the early years,” said CEO Antoinette Guipure. “He’s thus perfectly placed to continue our tradition of excellence and innovation grounded in love of the female form.”
Sauveterre’s licensing arrangement with Chieko, Ltd., of Japan, is unaffected by the new appointment.
Well, that was to be expected. He knew the business from the inside; he’d probably been trained in its ways by Guipure himself. And promoting from within would reduce the risks to the company. She thought of Dolly’s remark about the egos and narcissism of fashion designers—Sauveterre would undoubtedly benefit from avoiding that
not once but twice.
A quarter of an hour later the portable chimed again, this time not a ping, but an actual ring. It would be Magda, of course, calling to inform her of this latest development.
But she didn’t recognize the number on the screen, and when she accepted the call, the voice that spoke was Dolly Fauré’s.
“Rachel, I’m sorry if I surprised you. I retrieved your number from my landline, but I’m calling you from my portable. I don’t know if you saw, but Sauveterre just announced that Keteb Lellouch will be their new creative director.”
“Yes, I saw.”
The line went quiet; then an inhalation rasped through. “Are you free to speak? Could we meet at the Starbucks near Le Grand Comptoir, on the Boulevard de Rochechouart?”
* * *
Rachel liked the Starbucks on the Boulevard de Rochechouart very much. All glass and warm lighting, it was a serene pause in the middle of a busy city intersection. But Dolly, shifting from foot to foot outside the entrance when she arrived, was clearly in no mood for calm. She suggested they get their order to take away.
Today Dolly was wearing a sanded black silk blouse over black silk jeans (both Sauveterre 2012, Rachel recognized) that covered the tops of a pair of shiny leather ankle boots. Rachel, who had dressed in a hurry after Dolly’s phone call, chose not to compare their outfits, although, since she was wearing a white shirt with blue jeans, she would at least win on brightness. Dolly’s only concession to color was her red lipstick, and Rachel wasn’t surprised when she ordered a black coffee. She was surprised, though, when instead of turning back toward her home arrondissement, the ninth, Dolly led Rachel down the busy boulevard and deeper into the urban sprawl of the eighteenth.
Whereas turning off onto the Rue Lepic would have led them up into the maze of winding lanes and stucco houses for which Montmartre was known—and which seemed to Rachel an excellent background for a walking conversation—Dolly firmly led the way down the Boulevard Rochechouart until it turned into the more pleasant Boulevard de Clichy. Here, as if acknowledging the improved scenery, the sun suddenly came out. It glittered the droplets on the leaves of the trees that lined the boulevard’s central island, and it brightened the colors on the restaurant awnings and the advertising kiosks. Rachel saw it turn into a silver blaze the steel sculpture of an apple that decorated the intersection of Clichy and the Rue Caulaincourt.
Designs on the Dead Page 11