Nice phrase, Rachel thought. Not that it was much help to them.
Magda said something similar once they were out on the street. They had left Foucher’s company with as many cheek kisses as they had entered Thieriot’s the previous day. He had tried to press on them some of the various pieces of clothing and accessories that had been sent to him by designers hoping for a favorable mention, but each woman had declined—Rachel dimly felt there might be an investigator’s code of ethics, so she turned reluctantly away from a Sur Le Banc military-cut wool coat that she was certain would transform her into the person she’d always wanted to be. Now, as they strode empty-handed back up the Rue des Vinaigriers, Magda said grimly, “Mediouri better hurry up and call. Without him we’re going nowhere.”
* * *
Then, two days later, Mediouri did call. In the end, though, the conversation Rachel had waited for in agony took all of fifteen seconds.
“Madame, your dry cleaning is ready,” Mediouri said. “Tomorrow is our late closing day, so you can come collect what you need at eight PM.” Then he broke the connection.
Rachel stared at her phone’s dark screen. “Sick!” she muttered.
Chapter Twenty
The back room of the pressing was very warm, and this, combined with the racks of plastic-shrouded clothes that lined its walls, gave it a claustrophobic feel, although not an entirely unpleasant one. A fluorescent strip light hummed overhead, thick air pressed against Rachel like soft cotton, and the room was full of the smell of hot fabric. In other circumstances she might have pulled one of the duvets out of its cellophane wrapper and used it to take a quick nap on the floor. The current circumstances and company, however, did not encourage sleep.
The man sitting at the white-painted wooden table in front of them looked so much like the stereotype of a drug lord that Rachel nearly laughed aloud. His bullet-shaped head was completely bald and appeared to sit directly on his stocky shoulders, his thin mouth a line drawn across its lower half. He wore a leather blazer over a black T-shirt, and the fattest, goldest, ugliest watch she had ever seen. No doubt it was worth thousands.
“A former associate,” Mediouri said. It was obvious there would be no further introduction.
The man stared at them impassively. The silence lengthened and widened until Rachel realized Mediouri was waiting for her to introduce Magda.
“This is Magda.”
“Ah, the second investigatrix! Pleased to meet you, pleased to meet you!” Mediouri pumped Magda’s hand and gave his dentist-enhanced grin. It could have been an introduction at some pleasant social occasion if it hadn’t been for the man behind them, whose expressionless face spoke of purposes that could never be pleasant. As Rachel watched, he lifted his thick hands from his lap and rested them softly on the tabletop, as if to put them in a better position to turn into fists.
Mediouri gestured, and the two women sat down across from the man. This time there was no offer of tea, no charming little spoon. Instead, Mediouri took a seat across from them, next to the man, and cleared his throat. “My friend didn’t want to me to talk about this over the telephone—”
“No phones,” the man agreed.
“—so I thought it would be simplest to meet here, where we don’t have to worry.”
The man dipped his head in a single nod. “No phones,” he repeated. It took Rachel a second to realize this was not for emphasis; he meant that she and Magda should surrender their phones. They shared a quick look, then slid their portables to the center of the table. The man picked up each in turn, switched it off, and returned it to the same spot. The silence and his total lack of expression gave the task the feeling of a strange ritual.
When the man finished, Mediouri left a moment’s pause before he said, “Someone did buy l’heroïne for Guipure during the time you asked about.”
Rachel felt her excitement rising. Would it be Naquet or Lellouch? Lellouch now seemed the more plausible suspect, but Naquet was so unpleasant … She dug her fingernails into her palms. “Who was it?”
“She said her name was Gabrielle.”
“Gabrielle?” She and Magda said it together.
“Are you sure?”
Mediouri nodded. “Yes. She picked up a delivery at the Sauveterre offices.”
“She did. Not a man. Not a man named Lellouch or Keteb? Maybe at the same address?”
The leather-clad man opened his mouth and spoke. “On the second Monday in April, at night, I made a delivery to a woman in the foyer of 21 Rue la Boétie. I remember because it had been a long time since we had an order from that address, so I made the delivery myself.” He shrugged. “It’s always good to reconnect in person with a customer who’s been away for a long time. A little giton used to handle everything, but this time the caller said the name was Gabrielle. She was waiting in the foyer when I arrived. I asked her name. I always ask the name. And she was”—he grunted appreciatively—“bandante. Red hair, white dress, high heels, legs that wrap around you twice.”
Rachel hadn’t noticed Gabrielle’s legs, but the rest of the description was a perfect match. Pulling her lips between her teeth, she looked at Magda.
“I don’t doubt you.” Magda leaned forward, one hand slightly raised as if to calm the man’s temper before it flared. “But in our business we need to be sure. You’re certain you went to 21 Rue la Boétie, and you’re certain the person waiting for you was a woman.”
The man barked a laugh. “In my business you also need to be sure, and I am sure I delivered to a woman at 21 Rue la Boétie.” He too leaned forward. “Red hair. White dress. High heels.” He looked at Mediouri. “Une moule serrée.”
A tight pussy. Rachel flinched; she saw Magda flush. But it wasn’t a time for feminist objections. “And you didn’t make any delivery to anyone else at the same address around the same time?” She clutched at a passing hope, “Or to the LaLa Lounge?”
He turned his bullet head so he was looking her full in the face. “I made one delivery, and no one else on my team made any other deliveries there that week or any other week.” He sat back. “As for the LaLa Lounge, that’s outside my area. Maybe you want to ask Matti to talk to some of the other service providers.”
The overhead fluorescent light hummed softly, and somewhere nearby a machine clicked. Finally Rachel said, “How much did she buy, this red-haired girl?”
He held up three fingers.
How much was that? Was it enough to kill someone? Rachel saw how completely ill-equipped she was to move in this world.
The man scraped back his chair and stood up. There was no bell attached to the back door, so when it closed behind him, all that was left was a click and the five indentations Rachel imagined she could see where his fingers had pushed into the tabletop.
“Is that fifty milligrams?” Her voice came out small.
Mediouri nodded. “More than that. Did you learn what you needed?”
“I guess so. I mean, yes. It wasn’t what we expected.”
She explained, and when she finished, he widened his eyes and made the hard little puffing noise that the French used to indicate surprise, exasperation, or a mixture of both. “This detection is hard work, hein? You answer a question, and that answer leads you to another question. I think I liked my side of the law better. The only question I ever answered was ‘How much?’ and all it led to was money in my hand.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“He’s actually kind of nice,” Magda said as they came out into the Rue St. Paul. In half an hour the sun would set, and the air around them was a pale blue tinged with pink.
“I’m going to assume you don’t mean Mediouri’s associate.”
They made their way down the street. At its bottom end it opened out into a small paved semicircle. If you turned left, this led you to the Pont de Sully; if you turned right, it led you to the Pont Marie, the Pont Louis Phillipe, and eventually to Notre Dame. The semicircle itself was outfitted with a single wooden bench overhung by a thin t
ree planted in a small square of grass. It was a curious respite, an urban area that faced the thick traffic of the Quai des Celestins but nonetheless felt like an oasis. In the cool pre-twilight, it seemed like the ideal place to rest.
One of the tree’s leaves had fallen onto the bench. Rachel picked it up, rolling it between her fingers. She felt it soften against the pressure.
“There’s a restaurant in there.” She pointed the little cigar at the squat neoclassical building across the street, which looked like nothing so much as a derelict boathouse. “Around the back. It faces the river, and they put on events.”
Magda didn’t reply, but Rachel hadn’t expected her to. She had just wanted something to fill the space, a moment of normality while they processed their astonishing news.
“This should be exciting, right?” She said at last. “It’s the kind of development that breaks a case wide open. So why do I feel like someone’s let all the air out of our tires?”
“Because it doesn’t make sense.” Magda stressed the last four words as if the two of them had been discussing the topic for hours. “We had two suspects with strong motives and logical narratives of guilt, and now all of a sudden we’ve got someone with no discernible motive, committing a crime with no discernible reason or means behind it.” Her voice rose in mystification. “Why would Gabrielle do it? How would she do it?”
“Yes, that’s it. That’s exactly it.” For a second Rachel felt the satisfaction of being completely understood. Then almost immediately it struck her that maybe they’d both understood wrong. “Except … except she was in love with him. And people do kill for love.”
“Except that we’ve been over that, right? People who kill for love usually do it because they’ve been rejected, or they kill a rival. And Thieriot is still alive and there was no need for rejection, because Gabrielle knew from the start that Guipure was gay.”
There was another long silence, then Magda said, “Except what if it’s more convoluted? What if Gabrielle both loves and hates Guipure? People are complicated. Let’s say … let’s say something happens that pushes her over the edge. Maybe she tells him she loves him, and he reminds her he’s gay. A clear rejection that means she can’t daydream anymore. She’s humiliated, but she can’t stop loving him, which makes her even more humiliated. And people hate people who’ve humiliated them.” She glanced over; Rachel nodded. “So she makes the call and buys the heroin. She knows that if the police ask any questions, she can say she bought it at Roland’s order. There’ll be proof that he used someone to buy for him before. She’ll probably get in trouble for the buying, but the police won’t suspect her of anything more sinister.” She grabbed Rachel’s wrist, and her voice sped up. “Then she takes the heroin to the party. Or maybe she prepares the syringe beforehand and takes it to the party, however you do that. Then somehow she injects him. He feels faint, goes outside to clear his head; next thing you know, he’s dead on the doorstep. And no one suspects anything because—hey!—he used to be a heroin addict.”
Rachel waited to be sure she was finished, then gently detached her wrist. She shook her head. “No. It has too many holes.” Magda looked affronted. “Think about it. We have to assume a rejection; we have to assume it’s shatteringly humiliating. Then we have to assume that someone who’s never bought heroin before calls up a dealer. How does she know his number? How does she know how to make the arrangements, what to ask for, how to get the delivery?”
Then she stopped. It was the word delivery that did it. “Except—oh my God!” She crushed the green cigar between her fingers.
“What?”
“Remember when we were talking to Naquet?” An eye roll and a nod. “He said that when he first went to see Guipure, when the protective army, or whatever it was, was around, Gabrielle would come in and ask if Guipure wanted lunch, and she would bring in deliveries.” Magda frowned and looked upward, trying to remember, then nodded again. “And then he said that when he interviewed Guipure while Cyrille was there, at one point Guipure started to—well, come down, I guess, and Cyrille asked him if he wanted lunch. Oh, what did he say exactly?” She closed her eyes, then opened them. “Can you tell me?”
“What makes you think I know?”
Rachel smiled. “Because I know you. I know you’ve transcribed all your recordings and put the transcriptions all neatly in your folder. And you’ve got the folder with you right now.”
For a second Magda looked as she would like to argue. Then she gave up, reached into her bag, and drew out the folder. She flipped through its contents until she found the right page. “‘The kid suddenly asked if he wanted lunch,’” she read out. “‘Asked him for some money, then went off and came back a while later, saying he had a delivery.’”
“That was Guipure’s code!” Rachel gritted her teeth. How obvious it seemed once you knew. “Asking if he wanted lunch must have been asking if he wanted more heroin, and saying you had a delivery must have been telling him it had arrived. Otherwise, why would Gabrielle and Cyrille have used exactly the same wording? And we know from Dolly that Guipure had been using before Cyrille ever since he came on the scene. It stands to reason that he would have needed a courier then too. Who better than an employee who loves you so much that you can easily exploit her?” She grimaced. “Then imagine how that employee would feel if she found herself replaced. No more special relationship; no more hope that if she did his bidding long enough, he might suddenly realize how wrong he’d been …” She met Magda’s eyes.
A pause. “Except …” Magda squinted. “Except again, that’s a really good reason to kill Cyrille, not Guipure.”
Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Rachel bit her thumbnail for a minute. Then in a flash she saw it. She reached out and grabbed Magda’s wrist. “Except what about this?” She leaned forward. “Gabrielle and Lellouch work together. They’re work friends, like Dolly said. Lellouch has a reason to want Guipure dead, and he knows what happened between Gabrielle and Guipure once Cyrille showed up. So he spends a few months working on her, seeming like he’s commiserating but actually reminding her what Guipure did; suggesting how her life might better if she didn’t have to be reminded of her humiliation every day when she comes into work.” She waved a hand. “Something like that. Who knows what he actually said? But gradually he wins her over. He persuades her that working with him is to both their benefit. He gets her to buy the heroin, knowing she won’t be under suspicion because she can always tell exactly the story you just suggested. She passes it to him and at the party he finds some way to inject Guipure. Maybe he does some sneaky maneuver at the bar when it’s crowded and no one will notice. Anyway, he does it. And the rest happens just as you said.”
Magda considered, then wrinkled her nose. “No.” At Rachel’s exhalation of annoyance, she said, “It’s just as full of holes as mine. We have to assume that Lellouch and Gabrielle are close; we have to assume that he cooked up a nefarious plan. And then they have to collaborate … No,” she said again, “we’re both just making conjectures based on stuff we want to be true, or stuff that could be true, but we have no evidence.”
Rachel bit her lip. She had thought Mediouri would sort everything out because he knew people on the inside, but it turned out it was the wrong kind of inside.
Magda stood up. “I’m going home to research Gabrielle. People aren’t doing much for us at the moment, so let’s see what the web can do.” She nodded goodbye and turned crisply left toward Sully–Morland station.
Although surprised by the abruptness, Rachel didn’t disagree with the determination, and she shared the frustration. How could it be that a month had passed and she was no closer to solving this murder? Neither of the other cases had taken so long. As she turned right and walked along the Seine toward Pont Marie station, the houses of the Île Saint-Louis across the Seine seemed to mock her. Given the smallness and insularity of the fashion world, their glittering lights seemed to say, shouldn’t it be easy to track down a murderer in it?
&nbs
p; Except, she pointed out to herself, the smallness and insularity were the very things that made finding the murderer so hard. As her shoes patted against the pavement and the water of the river slapped against itself, she relaxed into this explanation. The smallness of the fashion world, its feuds and infighting, meant a vast array of suspects to be sorted through.
Except, her conscience responded, she and Magda hadn’t found any feuds and infighting; in fact, they’d found nothing dramatic enough to point clearly toward anyone. Except, she responded back, for Gabrielle, now. Except, another part of her pointed out, that there was no discernible reason for that efficient girl in that spotless dress to buy a class-one narcotic to kill someone she believed was, in Dolly’s phrase, “the eighth wonder of the world.” Except, she reminded herself, that they didn’t have enough information to be sure of that.
She sighed aloud. “Except,” she said. Except, except, except. She crossed the road toward the lighted métro sign.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The next morning at eight AM Rachel’s portable rang on her bedside table.
“I spend three hours last night trying hack Sauveterre’s e-mail network,” said Magda, “and another three hours this morning.”
“And you’re calling me now because you finally managed to do it.”
“No. I’m calling you because I managed to hack into the Sauveterre calendar. And there I found out that Roland Guipure had a meeting scheduled with a Jack Ochs the week that he died. That’s the name of your mother-in-law’s friend’s husband, right? Jack Ochs?”
Rachel threw back the covers and grabbed for her robe. “I’m coming over.”
Designs on the Dead Page 15