Designs on the Dead

by Emilia Bernhard

  But before they reached the sculpture, Dolly took a sharp right and led Rachel up a completely anonymous street, the chief feature of which was a huge funeral parlor with racks of decorous bouquets and potted plants outside. As they reached the far end of this mournful superstore, Rachel understood both its size and its flowers: at the end of the road a pair of gates opened off two stone pillars, one of which bore a neat brass sign that read Cimetière du Montmartre.

  The cemetery appeared to be deserted, and Rachel began to worry just a little. She tried to remember if Dolly had said anything that, coupled with Keteb Lellouch’s promotion, could somehow be incriminating. Hadn’t she once read a mystery in which the murderer left the body in a cemetery? If only Dolly would say something!

  Then, as they passed into the first lane of graves, she did.

  “I’m sorry. I haven’t been honest with you.”

  Rachel relaxed. She didn’t think someone who was going to leave you dead on a gravestone would start by apologizing.

  “As I told you,” Dolly continued, “I signed an accord de non-divulgation when I joined Sauveterre. It’s standard. The accord remains binding even after severance. That, too, is standard. When we last spoke, I left out some information, information that the accord covered. But now, with this announcement about Keteb …”

  She turned and began to walk down the cobbled path.

  “I understand,” Rachel said. She didn’t, but she knew something big was coming. She hurried a little so she was at Dolly’s side.

  They walked silently, for a few more seconds, until Dolly said, “I’d like to tell you what I know, but the accord presents a problem. Of course, if what I tell you isn’t important, then we can forget it, and it will be as if the accord were never broken. But,” she said, speaking more slowly, and Rachel could tell she was choosing her words, “if it is important, you would need to promise me that you would find a way to use it without … without …”

  Now she did understand. Dolly was trying to see if Rachel could say she found the information some other way. “Yes, I could,” she said firmly. “And I would.”

  They took the sharp right turn that ended the path. Dolly stopped to look at Rachel, checking her face for a moment. Then she nodded. “Bon.”

  Dolly took a deep breath. Over her shoulder, Rachel could make out the grave of the Goncourt brothers, the nineteenth-century diarists who had recorded the secrets and scandals of literary Paris. In front of the tomb of these two relentless gossips, Dolly began her story.

  “Alors. I’m sure you remember that Gédéon Naquet had a couple of initial meetings with Monsieur Guipure two years ago, before he started his background research?”

  Rachel did.

  “Well, what Naquet didn’t know was that at that time Monsieur Guipure was already taking heroin. He’d been using it for about two years by then.”

  Rachel’s heart jumped. That explained the three-month stay in rehab. For an addict of a year or so, it seemed excessive, a rich man’s self-indulgence. But two years of heroin use that no one noticed suggested a maintenance addiction, and that could be very hard to kick.

  “He was smoking it,” Dolly said. “That’s how he started. Antoinette caught him in the atelier one day—it must have been in 2013—and he told her it was just an occasional thing. Whether it was or not, it didn’t seem to be damaging his health, or his design skills, so she let it go.” Rachel just had time to remember Naquet’s remark about addiction and the bottom line before Dolly went on, “She didn’t know anything about addicts—none of us did—or else we would have known where things were heading.” She looked chagrined. “Which is, of course, where they went. At some point Monsieur Guipure stopped smoking and started injecting, and then at another point he got Cyrille Thieriot to do his buying for him, and things were worse still. But he kept saying he was fine, it was all fine, until the January and March 2015 shows.”

  “Yes. I read the reviews.”

  “Then you know. And that’s how Antoinette persuaded him to go into désintox, by reading him the reviews. But by that time, given the length of the addiction, the Eirini Clinic recommended a stay of at least a month.”

  She tried to take a drink, but it seemed there was nothing left in her cup. Popping the plastic top off, she flattened the cardboard container in her hand, then looked around for a trash bin. There was none, so she held the cup awkwardly in one hand, top in the other, as she continued.

  “You must understand. A defilé isn’t the work of a couple of weeks or even a couple of months. It was late July by the time he agreed to go, and Spring prêt-à-porter was in October. Monsieur Guipure should have been cutting the toiles and booking the venue, but he’d done nothing. Nothing. And we had sold scarcely anything from the March show, and buyers were reporting to us that what they had taken wasn’t leaving the stores. We couldn’t afford to go dark for six months with those terrible clothes as everyone’s last memory of Sauveterre. I mean we literally couldn’t afford it. A design house is a huge business; many people depend on Sauveterre for their jobs.”

  She paused, and the pause became a silence. Now they were coming to it, Rachel thought.

  “In August, Antoinette called me in for a meeting. When I arrived, Gabrielle was there as well. Right at the start Antoinette reminded us that we’d signed accords. Then she said that Eirini was recommending that Monsieur Guipure stay for at least another month, and we knew what that meant for spring prêt-à-porter.” The flattened cup bent a little as Dolly tightened her grip. “Except there was a solution. She’d found some sketches Monsieur Guipure had left behind, things he’d half finished, and she’d taken them to Keteb. She’d shown them to him, and he’d agreed to work with them for the October show. He would finish the designs, fit them on the mannequins, curate the defilé … everything. According to her it was the ideal solution. As Chef Modéliste Keteb knew Monsieur Guipure’s preferences and trademarks. He could use the sketches to produce true Sauveterre pieces, and since the finished looks would be based on Monsieur Guipure’s original ideas, it would be perfectly correct to call them Monsieur Guipure’s work.”

  Rachel wasn’t a lawyer, but she could recognize fraud. No wonder design houses had their employees sign nondisclosure agreements! But she couldn’t see why Lellouch had agreed. If he wasn’t allowed to claim the finished garments, what did he gain? She said as much.

  Dolly nodded. “I wondered the same. So the next time I saw him alone, I brought it up.” She bit her lip. “We were friends. Well, work friends. So I told him what I knew and asked him why he’d agreed.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said Antoinette had told him that the last season had almost ruined the business, and that she was afraid that if she announced there would be no spring shows or that we would show designs that weren’t Monsieur Guipure’s, it would mean the end of Sauveterre. And then he told me not to say anything to anyone, but Antoinette had confided to him that she didn’t think Monsieur Guipure would be coming back. Eirini already thought he needed to stay longer, and she was afraid that even if they could cure him, the heroin might have destroyed his talent. Or if it hadn’t, he wouldn’t be able to manage working in fashion anymore because of all the stress and temptation. Keteb said that she had promised him that if he did this, if he created the show, as soon as the maison was back on secure footing, she would name him creative director.”

  Rachel was shocked. Had she understood right? Never mind trashy biographies and pilfered sketches: this was a motive. This was an Agatha Christie–sized motive! To have been promised the top spot and then have it snatched away …

  But maybe she was wrong. Maybe she had missed something. She swallowed to wet her dry throat and said, “But Guipure did come back. And then Keteb was just left empty-handed?”

  “Well, he took that risk. But, yes.” Dolly’s tone grew speculative. “I never knew if Antoinette had expected that all along or if she made her promise in good faith. I do know that Keteb recei
ved a huge raise after Monsieur Guipure returned. And of course he’d signed an accord de non-divulgation, too, so what could he do?”

  What could he do? What could he do? Rachel left the path and sat down heavily on the flat slab of a tomb, covering her mouth with her hand. She needed to talk to Magda.

  “It’s not uncommon,” Dolly said, standing over her. “In every house at least some of what goes out under the label name is the work of other people. That’s why there are titles like junior designer. I suppose Keteb was just doing a form of that.”

  Maybe. But labels were open about the fact that some of what they produced was designed by juniors. And a junior designer wasn’t promised he’d be made Creative Director if he did a good job. Rachel swallowed again.

  “And Gabrielle? Did she have anything to say about this plan? Or about what happened afterward?”

  “She’d signed an agreement as well. And anyway, she was in love with Monsieur Guipure. She wasn’t going to object to anything that preserved his reputation or helped him once he was back.”

  Gabrielle had been in love with Guipure? Rachel was beginning to feel it was all too much. “I’m sorry?”

  “Oh, I thought you would know. Everybody knew. She thought he was the eighth wonder of the world. Before Thieriot arrived, she was the one at his beck and call. No matter how much she had to do for Antoinette, she would drop everything to get his lunch and pick up deliveries of samples he needed. And even after Thieriot came on the scene, she would look at Monsieur Guipure in meetings and—” Dolly winced. “It’s hard seeing that much love on someone’s face.”

  “Didn’t she know he was gay?”

  “Does it make a difference?” Dolly pulled a face. “When has rational knowledge ever controlled romantic yearning?”

  Rachel had to agree. She added Gabrielle’s feelings to the list of things to tell Magda.

  Chapter Seventeen

  They arranged to meet on the steps of the Opéra Garnier, midway between the cemetery and Magda’s apartment. While Rachel waited for Magda to arrive, she scrolled through the alerts on her phone. She had once been told that Friday afternoon was the worst time to release news, since it virtually guaranteed that it would be ignored until Monday, but apparently fashion didn’t pay attention to the rules: her screen was filled with headlines that varied in tone from serious to breezy, depending on the source.

  Keteb Lellouch Made New Creative Director at Sauveterre, Formerly Head Pattern Cutter

  Sauveterre Keeps It in the (Fashion) Family: HPC Is New CD

  New Head Is Old Hand: Sauveterre Names Head Pattern Cutter Creative Director

  In Keteb Lellouch, Sauveterre Makes Exotic but Familiar Choice

  Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Keteb Lellouch, Sauveterre’s New Creative Director

  Lellouch? All the Deets on Sauveterre’s New CD

  “Hey.” Magda stood over her.

  “Hey.”

  “Do you want to go somewhere? We could walk to the Starbucks on Boulevard des Capucines.” She tilted her head in that direction.

  Normally Rachel would have jumped at the chance to go to this gold-swagged, ceiling-muraled extravaganza, but her stomach was still full of the tea from half an hour before. “No, let’s just stay here.” She glanced around. “No one can hear.”

  “Okay.” Magda sat down, putting her bag between her knees. “So, Lellouch. You said on the phone that Antoinette promised him the top job months ago?”

  “Not exactly.” Rachel repeated everything Dolly had told her.

  When she finished, Magda said nothing for a moment. Then, “What a business!” She barked a laugh. “This one is bribed to stay quiet about doing the other’s job, then the other comes back and takes the job this one was promised. Fashion is even worse than I thought.”

  “Well,” Rachel qualified, “Lellouch was promised the job only if Guipure didn’t come back.”

  “With the barely hidden subtext that he wouldn’t.”

  “I know.” She looked at Magda. “It’s enough to drive someone to murder, don’t you think?”

  But Magda didn’t seem to think so. Rather than answering, she stared out over the Avenue de l’Opéra as if trying to see the Louvre at the other end. At last she said, “Four months is a long time to wait to kill someone. Guipure came back in December, and he wasn’t murdered until April.”

  Rachel considered. “Maybe it took that long for the resentment to build. It took some time for him to stop seeing Guipure’s return as just a disappointment and to start seeing it as a roadblock that needed to be overcome. And to make a plan to overcome it. That’s the definition of premeditation, right?”

  “Yes. But that outline also suggests that all it took was this one disappointment to turn a loyal employee into a rage-fueled murderer—Naquet said he was protective, right? And Dolly makes it sound as if he agreed to do what Antoinette asked, at least partially out of devotion to the company.”

  “Well, it was quite a disappointment!”

  “Or, in the world of fashion, garden-variety treachery. And Dolly did say he got a big raise after Guipure’s return. Not a bonus: a raise. That’s long-lasting compensation.”

  Rachel set her jaw. She’d actually done a decent bit of real detecting, meeting a connection, extracting information. She’d spent the métro ride over imagining Magda’s face when she heard the whole story, her excitement matching Rachel’s own. And now … “Why are you trying to take my suspect away from me?”

  “I’m not! It’s just …” Magda opened up a little space between them so she could get to her bag, then reached in and took out her neatly labeled folder. “Before I left the apartment I looked him up on LinkedIn.”

  “LinkedIn?” This never would have occurred to Rachel.

  “Sure, it’s a professional networking site, and he’s a professional, right? I mean, I know fashion doesn’t seem like a profession, but it is.”

  “And what did you find?”

  Magda opened the folder. “He graduated from the Institut Français de la Mode in 1993 and started an apprenticeship at Dior the same year. He was at Dior until 1996, moving up the ranks. Then in 1997 he joined a company called AuSecours—I looked it up; it was a small label that folded about five years ago. He joined them as senior pattern cutter, and according to his profile, he did a little design work for them too. In 2005, the original creative director of AuSecours left, and so did Lellouch. He joined Sauveterre as head pattern cutter. And that’s it until … well, until what happened today.”

  “And ‘what happened today’ is his possible motive.”

  “Yes, it could be. But his résumé shows that he’s perfectly capable of leaving a job if he’s unhappy. The creative director of AuSecours retires and Lellouch leaves. That can’t be a coincidence, right?” Rachel nodded wary agreement. “Presumably he didn’t like the new CD, or something like that. But he didn’t kill anyone; he just found another job. Which he could’ve been doing this time, too, in the four months since Guipure came back.” She closed the folder. “Did Dolly tell you anything else?”

  “Nothing that’s relevant to this.”

  “That means she told you something. What?”

  Rachel repeated what Dolly had told her about Gabrielle’s feelings for Guipure.

  “Even though he was gay?”

  She repeated what Dolly had said about that too.

  “She’s right there.” For a moment Magda looked overwhelmed by the mystery of human feelings. Then she said, “Do you think Gabrielle’s feelings for him are important?”

  Rachel thought. “Love is one of the most common motives for murder, but it’s usually murder of a rival or murder after you’ve been rejected …”

  “And in this case, Gabrielle knew from the start that her feelings were unrequited, and Thieriot is still alive,” Magda finished.

  Rachel generally gave more weight to emotion than Magda did, but in this case her summary would have been just as brisk. Gabrielle hadn’t been cheated
of Sauveterre’s top position; she hadn’t been cut out of Guipure’s life without a word of warning. “Unless she’s in cahoots with Lellouch for some reason, I don’t see it either. Although it does explain why she was always ordering Guipure’s lunch and collecting his deliveries. Given that she was Antoinette’s assistant.”

  “No one ever loved someone because they acted as their lackey,” Magda said. Rachel thought how true that was, and how little difference it seemed to make to human behavior.

  Still, it wasn’t human behavior in general they were dealing with here; it was the specific behavior of a group of people about whom they persistently knew very little, no matter how hard they tried. This was the problem that had prompted her to take Matthieu Mediouri’s card all those weeks ago. They had no real sources outside the usual ones. If what they wanted to know wasn’t mentioned in the press (or in this case the gossip sites) or couldn’t be found on the internet, their options were very limited. Would the private detective certification program offer a course on How to Build a Network of Snitches? She wished suddenly for a hundred more Mediouris, scattered around Paris, insiders in every area, waiting to whisper their truths to her.

  Absent an army of mini-Mediouris, though, in the real world as it currently existed, what did she have to work with? She bit her thumbnail again. She sucked her cheeks in and gripped them lightly with her teeth. The sky began to darken. She squinted ahead of her at nothing. Then at last she said, “Maybe the way to move forward is to work not with what we know about this case specifically, but with what we know about crime generally that we might be able to apply to this case. After all”—she held out an explaining hand—“we do have some experience.”