* * *
Very early in her relationship with Magda, Rachel had wondered how a person who took such intense pleasure in keeping her space immaculate could be friends with someone like her, for whom there was always something more important than cleaning. Very soon after that, she had decided to stop wondering and just enjoy it. So when Magda opened her door forty minutes later, Rachel took a moment to admire the room in front of her: the gleaming kitchen countertops, the dust mote–free air, the plump sofa cushions, with books neatly alphabetized by author on the bookshelves opposite them. Sniffing the air lightly scented with lemon furniture polish, she seated herself at the recently wiped kitchen table and let Magda explain what she had discovered.
“This is the central calendar.” Magda wiggled the mouse so the cursor hovered over the grid on her screen. “It’s a standard shared office calendar. My books say that usually you can get into company e-mail by going through the calendar, but in this case that didn’t work. So I decided to have a look at the calendar itself instead.” She circled the cursor around a green rectangle on the grid. “Each person’s appointments are in a different color. Antoinette is green; Guipure is blue; Lellouch is orange, etcetera. Red is for absolutely vital meetings that both Guipure and Antoinette are expected to attend. Now look.” She rested the cursor on Saturday, April 16. “There. At two PM.”
The bar next to 14.00 was blue, and typed inside it was RB—J Ochs (HIÉ).
“Now look at this.” She scrolled up to mid-February and hovered over Friday the 12th. Next to 17.00, a blue bar read Télé—M. Jack Ochs.
Magda anticipated Rachel’s question. “Telephone. And RB is Rue la Boétie. Which means a Jack Ochs had a scheduled phone call with Guipure at five PM on March fifteenth, and he was scheduled to meet him in person at Sauveterre’s headquarters on April sixteenth. Which means Guipure was killed two days before he was supposed to meet with the husband of your mother-in-law’s friend, and her friend’s husband was killed the day after Guipure.”
Rachel stared at the screen. “Could it be some other Jack Ochs? There’s more than one in the world.”
“More than one who traveled to Paris that week and stayed at the Holiday Inn Elysées?” Magda scrolled back down to April 16 and rested the arrow on HIÉ. “I doubt it.”
“But he was killed in a robbery! Boussicault said they’d seen those kinds of robberies before!”
“What about if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it’s a duck?” This was one of Magda’s favorite expressions. “Did Boussicault say the thieves routinely killed anyone in those kinds of robberies? Because if not, I think we have to consider the question of what possible connection there could be between Roland Guipure and your Jack Ochs.”
He’s not my Jack Ochs, Rachel wanted to say. But before she could, Magda said, “You need to talk to Ochs’s wife.”
Rachel laughed in astonishment. “No. Absolutely not.”
“Why not? She’s the only one who can tell us what was going on, and your mother-in-law is her best friend.”
“A friend. She’s a friend. And Mrs. Ochs has only been a widow for three weeks. She doesn’t even have her husband’s body yet.” With a twinge Rachel remembered she still needed to deal with the roller bag under her foyer table. “Didn’t you learn anything from what happened when we went to Sauveterre?”
Magda thinned her lips. “If we want to know anything, we need to talk to a source that might know.”
“Well, then, what about Dolly? What about Boussicault? Either of them would be a good source.”
“Okay,” Magda said so swiftly that Rachel realized she’d been lured into a trap. “How about Boussicault and Mrs. Ochs?” She added graciously, “And Dolly, if you think she can help. In whatever order they call you back.”
* * *
Counting on the complexities of distance, time zones, and the personal interconnections involved, Rachel assumed that she would speak to Mrs. Ochs last, if at all. But Boussicault was closeted once more with his inter-arrondissement liaison committee, Dolly didn’t respond to Rachel’s voice mail, and most surprising of all, Alan told her that Ellen Ochs was eager to help. So two days later at seven PM, she clicked on the Skype camera icon and found herself staring at an unknown woman seated on her in-laws’ sofa, Alan sitting next to her.
Because her mother-in-law had described Mrs. Ochs as “my friend from the community center,” Rachel had expected a woman of Jean’s own age, a well-preserved septuagenarian or the more dowdy, white-haired figure she associated with the words “community center.” But her mother-in-law’s friend seemed to be around Rachel’s age. Stray strands had escaped her blonde ponytail and hung lank around her face. Her eyes were ringed with shadows, and Rachel recognized in them the same sheen of shed and not-yet-shed tears that she’d seen in Antoinette Guipure’s. Still, when Rachel asked if she was sure she wanted to go through with the interview, Mrs. Ochs nodded firmly. “Alan tells me you’re a detective, and I want to help.”
Rachel caught her husband’s eye for a moment and flashed a look of gratitude. Then she began in the way she thought might make it easiest for Mrs. Ochs to talk without pain: by making her feel she was being of help without bringing up her husband’s death directly.
“Thank you so much for agreeing to do this. I don’t know if Alan told you, but at the moment I’m investigating another death, also in Paris. Going through the victim’s calendar, I came across your husband’s name. Apparently they had a meeting scheduled for April fifteenth.
“So what I’m wondering is, did your husband ever mention the name Roland Guipure to you?”
Ellen Ochs looked—what? Wary? Doubtful? Unnerved, Rachel decided.
“Roland Guipure is the man Jack said he needed to see while we were in Paris.” Guipure is the man Jack said he needed to see while we were in Paris.”
“We? You were supposed to be in Paris with him?”
The other woman nodded. “Originally it was a trip for the two of us.” She smiled, remembering. “While we were clearing up from dinner one night, Jack asked me out of the blue, what would I say to a long weekend in Paris? He needed to go there to see someone, but he said that except for a couple of hours while he was doing that, we could spend all the time together.” Rachel could see that she was twisting her hands in her lap. “I asked him who he needed to see in Paris. We’ve never been abroad in our lives, and the companies Jack does accounting for don’t do any international business. He told me the meeting wasn’t about business; he had to go see someone named Roland Guipure about his grandfather.”
“I’m sorry.” She really was. But— “His own grandfather, or Guipure’s grandfather?”
Just for a second, Ellen Ochs grinned. “Both, actually. He said, ‘I need to go see a fashion designer named Roland Guipure about my grandfather.’ And when I asked what on earth his grandfather could have to do with a Parisian fashion designer, he said no, no, the connection was between his grandfather and the designer’s grandfather. He said it was about someone they both knew before the war. And then he laughed and said he wasn’t going to tell me anything else until he was sure there was something to tell. That was so Jack.” She teared up again. “He always loved to make a mystery.”
Rachel waited while Mrs. Ochs dried her eyes with the end of her sweater sleeve, but once she seemed to have collected herself, Rachel pressed on. “Why did he end up making the trip alone?” She didn’t add that by not going Ellen had quite literally dodged a bullet.
“We were just about to make the reservations when our son broke his leg.” She shook her head. “He fell out of a tree, of all things. We couldn’t leave him on his own, so I said I’d stay and Jack should go. After all, he had an actual reason.”
“Do you by any chance remember when he first suggested the trip?” Had it been before he’d even spoken to Guipure, or had the phone conversation on Guipure’s calendar given Ochs a reason to visit Paris?
“Uh, well, let me think. Bert broke hi
s leg in early March, and it would have been around ten days before that.” She gave a watery smile. “That’s a terrible name for a fifteen-year-old in this day and age, I know. He hates it. But he’s named after Jack’s grandfather, actually. He’s Albert Ochs the second.”
Mntiond trip rt. afr date of S’terre call, Rachel jotted on a piece of paper next to the computer. And just in case she would need reminding, Grandfather Albert Ochs.
“Had he been acting differently during the period before that? Had anything changed?”
“No, not that I—oh, wait, yes. He’d started going through his father’s books. My father-in-law died two years ago, and we boxed up his books and brought them here. We put them in the garage for Jack to sort through when he had the time, and, well, you know how that goes. It was only this January that he finally made a start.”
“What kind of books are they?”
She tried to remember, but all she could come up with was, “Just ordinary books, I think. I haven’t seen them for two years, but I don’t remember any that looked especially odd. My father-in-law tended to read Dick Francis–type things.”
“Would it be all right if Alan came over and had a look? And maybe made a list of the titles for me?” Sorry, Alan.
“Yes, sure.” The various looks of worry, concern, and sorrow had now ceded to confusion. “Do you think my husband was killed over a book?”
It wouldn’t be the first time, Rachel wanted to say. But instead she answered straightforwardly, “I really don’t know. I’m just trying to explore every avenue.” She took a deep breath. “And in light of that, your husband didn’t mention talking to anyone at Sauveterre named Gabrielle, did he?” She shifted in her chair. “Or even just mention the name?”
Ellen’s blank expression provided the answer before she spoke. “No. Who’s that?”
“She’s the assistant of Roland Guipure’s sister.” Then, realizing that would make no sense to someone unaware of the link, she added, “The assistant to the chief financial officer of Guipure’s company.”
“What’s her last name? Maybe he mentioned her by that.”
“Aubert. She’s Gabrielle Aubert.”
Once again Ellen Ochs looked blank. “No. I’ve never heard that name before. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, please don’t trouble yourself. But just let me ask you one more time … you’re quite sure your husband didn’t say anything, anything at all, about why he was meeting with Guipure?”
The other woman shook her head. “No. I’m sorry. He just promised that he’d explain everything when he came back.” She began to cry, then apologized in an almost exact echo of Antoinette Guipure three weeks before. “Oh, I’m sorry; please forgive me. It’s just … I can’t get used to the idea that he’s never coming back. I bought mint chocolate chip ice cream for us all to eat together.”
A great detective might have pressed on, but if so Rachel was no great detective. She was tired of intruding on women in pain, tired of making them seek forgiveness for their perfectly natural reactions. So she apologized, apologized again, thanked Ellen Ochs for her time, and ended the call.
* * *
The next day brought a call from Boussicault. He would have time to meet Rachel that afternoon. But could she come to his office? He had only the afternoon free from attempting to deal with the mess at Rue du Faubourg-St. Honoré, and he needed it to go through his own paperwork.
Boussicault’s home police commissariat on the Rue Vaugirard looked just as sad as it had the previous summer, when Rachel had last seen it. If she wasn’t much mistaken, she thought as she waited in the gray and wood-grain veneer lobby, the copies of Voici and Closer on the table were the same ones she had flipped through before their first meeting in 2013. As Boussicault had done that time and all the times after, he collected her at reception, then led her through the labyrinth of corridors to his own office, a strange three-sided glass box jammed up against one edge of a squad room. He gestured at her to sit down in front of the desk, then sat down behind it.
The desktop was covered in open and closed files; in front of his desk chair lay a stack of sheets with a fountain pen on top. He picked it up and used it to point to the stack. “Incident logs.” From underneath them he pulled out a beige manilla folder.
“There isn’t much progress on Ochs,” he said. “Just the autopsy results, which came in last week, and the crime scene report.”
“May I read them?”
As he had also done before, many times, he put his elbows on his desk, steepled his fingers, and held them over his mouth, staring at nothing. After a few minutes in that position, he stood up, walked to one side of his aquarium and pulled the gray vertical blinds closed.
“They’ll think we’re having an affair,” Rachel joked.
“Better that than thinking I’m sharing information with a civilian. Again.” He sat back down at the desk and lifted the folder. When he spoke, his voice was very precise. “Madame Ochs asked you for this information, is that correct? She asked you to act as her liaison with the police because she feels the investigation is proceeding too slowly for her liking.”
Rachel bit her lip for a moment. “Absolutely,” she said stoutly. She leaned forward and took the folder.
The crime scene report was on top. The police had received a call to the Holiday Inn Elysées at eleven thirty PM on Friday, April 16. Shortly after eleven, the occupants of room 318 had called the front desk to report a loud noise in the room next door. Twenty minutes later the hotel had sent someone up, and when no one responded to their knocks they opened the door and found a white male lying across the room’s writing desk, the remains of a cushion and its stuffing discarded on the floor. The man was dead. The report stated that his suitcase hadn’t been unpacked, and he was fully clothed.
“His wallet was gone,” Rachel said.
“As you might expect from a robbery.”
Or a murder staged to look like a robbery. Rachel turned to the autopsy report. Jacques Ochs, as the coroner spelled it, had been a healthy male between forty-five and sixty years old, a touch overweight for his five feet nine inches. He had been killed sometime between nine and eleven PM by one shot from behind. The killer had used a 9mm bullet and shot from a distance of forty centimeters or more. When shot, the victim was standing fully clothed at the desk, onto which he collapsed, as shown by postmortem blood pooling in the arms and forehead. The shooter was either a very good shot or standing very close or both, because the bullet hit Ochs almost dead center at the base of the skull. It had a slightly upward trajectory, and it had not exited. The victim died instantly.
In the space below the autopsy diagram, with its neat little dot drawn at the base of the male figure’s skull, was a box headed “Stomach Contents.” Ochs’s last meal had been shredded pork with some sort of sauce, bread, pommes frites, and about two liters of water.
Rehydrating, Rachel thought. Then, darkly, Not that it did him any good.
There were no more pages. Rachel finished making notes and handed the folder back to Boussicault. He tossed it onto a pile next to him, then steepled his fingers once again. He leaned backward in his chair. “Rachel.” He spoke seriously. “This information is confidential, and this crime did not occur in my compétence. You and I both know that this is—” he nodded at the closed blinds. “But you must also know that I can be of limited help to you if you—er—if Madame Ochs finds herself in any kind of difficulty.”
Rachel nodded. “I understand.” She smiled reassuringly. “I don’t see that happening.”
Boussicault didn’t look as sure, but he said nothing.
She met Dolly at Le Grand Comptoir d’Anvers a couple of hours later. Each ordered a glass of wine, but only Dolly drank from hers: Rachel was too focused on the task at hand to pay attention to anything else.
Dolly did remember arranging the phone call between Guipure and Ochs. In fact, she even remembered Ochs’s initial contact. He had sent Guipure a letter in early February. She remem
bered because it was marked “Personal and Confidential” and had a US stamp. She hadn’t read it, hadn’t even opened the envelope, but simply placed it in with the rest of the mail she gave to Guipure in the morning. A few hours later he had emerged from his atelier and asked her to put a telephone call with a Monsieur Jack Ochs on his calendar for five pm that Friday. He had still been on that call when Dolly left the office at six; she had seen the red light next to his extension number. But she knew nothing about the conversation. She hadn’t heard Ochs’s name again until a month later, when Guipure asked her to add a meeting with Ochs to the calendar for Saturday, April 16, at two in the afternoon. She remembered the time because, as was Sauveterre policy, she’d called Monsieur Ochs to confirm two days before the meeting. She’d spoken to him in his room at the Holiday Inn Elysées.
“I think I woke him up. He sounded very tired. And he had a Southern accent.”
But these crumbs were an embarrassment of riches compared to what she could offer about Gabrielle. “She was already working for Antoinette when I arrived. Even then she ran that office like a Swiss watch.”
“But she would’ve had access to Guipure’s calendar?” Rachel was already sure of the answer but, as with Ellen Ochs, she wanted to be doubly sure.
“Of course.” Dolly was dismissive. “Everyone at the company’s top tier could see everyone else’s appointments: Keteb, our office, Antoinette’s office, the head seamstress …”
“So she would’ve seen that Guipure had a meeting with Jack Ochs.”
“Yes, but she never said anything about it to me. And she would have. She loved America. She studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, and any time anything to do with America came up, she loved to linger over it.” She snorted. “Once, we were working together on the arrangements for the banquet to follow spring/summer haute couture 2012. That was the ‘Pearls’ collection, and the banquet was pearl themed. We were trying to calculate how much white caviar to order, and of all things, she told me caviar always made her think of America. She had this great-great-uncle or something, Septime—I remembered the name because it was so old-fashioned; you don’t hear names like that anymore. Anyway, Oncle Septime had moved to America right before the war, she said, and on the ship over they’d had caviar at dinner. Septime had never even seen caviar before, never mind eaten it, and the story was that after dinner, he’d taken the steward aside to warn him that someone in the kitchen had added too much salt to the black beans. This was a famous story in her family, apparently. She told me he’d been dead for years, but they still told it.” Dolly took a sip of wine. “So, you see: anything that would allow her to squeeze in the US.”
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