After an hour of flipping through folders, though, such thoughts had been driven from her mind by the aching muscles between her shoulder blades, and by one simple certainty: however many of Sauveterre’s customers had succeeded in fleeing and however many had failed, the receipts showed that none of them had been an Albert Ochs. Across the table from her, Magda closed her final folder and massaged her lower back. She looked at Rachel and shook her head. No luck there either.
Outside on the pavement once more, Rachel ran a hand through her hair, dislodging imaginary dust that could never have hidden in an archive as clean as Sauveterre’s. But just as she was about to sigh, she stopped herself. If she knew from experience that there came a moment in each investigation where the case took over, didn’t she also know that there came a moment when the case seemed hopeless? And hadn’t experience shown her that such appearances were wrong? Neither of her previous hopeless cases had turned out to be hopeless. It turned out that the secret to solving a mystery was the same as the secret to any other success: just keep going.
“Let’s check out the hotel.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was one of Rachel’s firmest convictions that you could judge a mid-level hotel by its lobby floor. Hotels with carpeted lobbies invariably turned out to be two stars or below; hotels with marble or granite floors equally invariably turned out to be three stars or above. The Holiday Inn Elysées bore out this conviction. A three-star hotel, it had a stone lobby floor laid out in a pattern of alternating brown and cream-colored tiles. The lobby itself was immaculate and hushed, accessed by front doors that slid open and closed silently, shutting out the noises of the street outside. In fact only its reception desk, a construction of wood veneer and beige Formica, marked it out as three stars rather than four.
As they approached the counter, the woman behind it looked up from the computer terminal she’d been reading and smiled broadly. Her teeth were dazzling. “Bonjour! Can I help you?”
Rachel smiled back. “I hope so. We’re looking for information about one of your guests, Jack Ochs.”
“I’m sorry, the hotel doesn’t give out information about guests.”
“Well, he’s really a former guest. He stayed here in April.”
The smile remained in place. “As I said, the hotel takes the privacy of its guests very seriously. Even when they’re no longer in residence.”
“Monsieur Ochs is no longer in residence because he’s dead. He is the man who was killed in his room here a month ago. You may remember? We’re connected to his family, and we’re hoping to get answers to a couple of questions.”
“I’m very sorry, but as I said, the hotel won’t be able to answer them. If you wish to submit a complaint about our policies, I can direct you to the appropriate page on our website.”
Magda nudged Rachel aside. She had her wallet out and open, and she snapped down onto the counter one of the mocked-up business cards Rachel had made her at the end of their previous investigation. She rested her thumb so it covered the company motto Rachel had added as a joke.
“Stevens and Levis, Private Investigators. We’ve been retained by the family to look into the circumstances surrounding Monsieur Ochs’s murder. Working in conjunction with the police, we’re exploring the possibility that there is more to this situation than meets the eye. Now, I can call my associate Capitaine Guillaume Boussicault from the Commissariat Vaugirard, and he and his men can come down here with a warrant to commandeer your computers for as long as it takes to check every single file and find those that pertain to Monsieur Ochs, or you can help us out of your own accord, and no one will have to tell your gérante who caused all of that to happen.”
It was as if she had set herself the task of using every police show cliché in a single speech. Yet it worked. The woman’s smile wavered. She glanced quickly at the card, then toward the open office door behind her, and then back at Magda. “All right, all right.” She kept her voice low. “What do you need?”
“When did Monsieur Ochs check in?”
A quick clicking of the keys. “He arrived at ten AM on Thursday, the fourteenth of April. He’d arranged an early check-in.”
“And did he receive any telephone calls or messages while he was here?”
More clicking. “There were three phone calls. All were put through to the room and there were no messages left on room voice mail. One call the morning of his arrival from the USA, another one later that afternoon from 1 4076 85 85. Then another the next day”—she glanced up briefly—“that’s Friday the fifteenth, in the afternoon, from 1 4076 85 90.”
Rachel jumped. Magda half turned. “What?”
“Nothing, nothing.” She waved a hand. “It’s just that 4076 is the first four digits of Sauveterre’s general number. That must have been when Dolly called to confirm the meeting.’
But the other call had come after Guipure was dead. Had someone called to cancel the appointment? She pulled a piece of paper from her bag and wrote both numbers down. She would check later.
Magda had returned to the task at hand. “Were there any outgoing phone calls from the room?”
The woman scrolled down, then shook her head. “No. Although Monsieur Ochs did call down and ask for a wake-up call at six PM on Friday evening.”
“Any visitors?”
“We don’t record visitors.”
Magda sighed in a way that suggested this was a grave and outrageous failing. “Were you personally on duty for any portion of his stay?”
The woman glanced at the computer to check the dates. “Some of it, but I didn’t—that is, I wouldn’t have known who Monsieur Ochs wa—”
“Thank you.” Magda reached into her bag and brought out her case folder. She opened it and took out an enlargement of Gabrielle’s LinkedIn photo, which she put on the counter on top of the business card. “Have you ever seen this woman?”
A shake of her head—No.
“What about this man?”
Naquet’s author photo earned another shake.
“Or these?”
She laid down a photo of Lellouch and Guipure standing next to each other and grinning fixedly, obviously cropped from some larger publicity photo. The woman began to shake her for a third time, then leaned in closer.
“Is that Roland Guipure, the couturier?” Magda nodded. “Well, no, I didn’t see either of them, but why would Roland Guipure come to our hotel?”
Magda acted as if she hadn’t heard the question. “We’d like to see Monsieur Ochs’s room, please.” She stared at the receptionist, daring her to refuse.
Rachel held her breath. Surely, surely a moment would come when the bluff would stop working.
This was not that moment. “Well, I, uh—” Another furtive glance toward the office door. “Well, we can only allow that if the room is unoccupied.” Typing again, she frowned at the monitor. Then her face cleared. “Fortunately, room 532 is currently empty. I can—” She reached for the universal key card that lay on the desk in front of her.
Magda held up a hand. “No, thank you. We work better on our own. Faster.” As they waited for the key, she slid the fake business card back into her wallet before the receptionist could see the motto: We are shameless in the service of detection.
In the elevator Magda idly scanned the breakfast menu posted on the wall next to her. Rachel studied her face.
“How do you do that? How do you just … get people to go along with you?”
Magda shrugged. “It’s another version of what you do. You see that people have things they want to say, and you move them into a position where they feel they can say them. Like with Cyrille Thieriot. I do that with actions rather than words: I make it easy for people to feel okay about doing things to help us. Most people instinctively want to help; that’s why there are so many rules to keep them from doing it. I just do what it takes to make them feel comfortable breaking those rules. You’re patient, I’m aggressive, but it’s the same essential result.”
&
nbsp; Rachel was still evaluating the truth of these statements when the elevator doors slid open. They stepped out onto a corridor papered in cream, with a thick green carpet underfoot. A sign on the wall said “502–540,” with an arrow pointing left.
Ochs’s former room was a model of bland luxury. Decorated in brown and beige, it had a thick carpet, plump pillows, and a lustrous chenille spread artfully draped across its snowy, wrinkle-free duvet. Everything about it said that it was interchangeable with hundreds of other rooms in this building, and countless others around the world. It was a good choice for a modest traveler, though, one who valued comfort over individuality and neutral familiarity over artistic exuberance—which made Rachel all the more confused about how its occupant connected to the life of a man like Guipure.
“I really don’t think we’re going to find anything. The place has obviously been cleaned within an inch of its life.”
“No pun intended.” Magda’s voice sounded hollowly from behind the open door of the narrow wardrobe. “No, probably not, but …” She closed the door and headed for the bathroom. “Check under the bed. I know it’s one of your favorite places.”
“Ha ha.” The last time she and Magda had searched a hotel room, they had been forced to hide under a bed when housekeeping arrived unexpectedly. She thought of this as she crouched down and lifted the suede fabric bed skirt, and specifically of the used Band-Aid that had been inches from her nose while she lay on that room’s grubby carpet.
Fortunately, there was no Band-Aid. Less fortunately, there was nothing else either. The rug under the bed was a bit dusty, but that was all. She used a hand to lever herself up to a standing crouch, then ran the other between the mattress and the large wood-framed mirror that served as the headboard. She had once found a clue in the back of a locker, so she knew where things might get stuck, but this time there was nothing. She straightened up.
“Nothing here.” Magda emerged from the bathroom.
“Or here.”
Magda raised her eyebrows. “So much for the good omen of the granite floor.”
“That’s about the quality of the hotel, not the number of clues.” But Rachel said this distractedly. She was thinking that if Ochs had arrived on the morning of the fourteenth and told his wife he hadn’t left the hotel when they spoke on the fifteenth, that meant he must have either ordered room service or eaten at the in-house restaurant.
“Come on,” she beckoned Magda. “One more stop, just to be sure. Let’s go have something in the restaurant.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The hotel’s restaurant was open only for breakfast and dinner, explained a young man in a black vest who seemed to be standing guard on the dining room, but the bar was open. If they took a seat there, he would send someone to take their order.
Rachel smiled her thanks. “Could I see a dinner menu while we wait, please?”
“We don’t begin serving dinner until seven.”
Taking a lesson from the receptionist, she kept the smile on her face. “Still, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Whether he minded or not, he retreated to the dining area and, after some shifting and searching, returned with a dinner menu.
“What are you doing?” Magda asked as they settled at a table near the glass and wood bar and the young man went off to find a waiter for them.
“I’m looking for …” Rachel said, running her eyes down the first page of the menu, flipping it over, then laying it crosswise on the table, resting her finger halfway down the laminated page, “… this.”
Magda craned her neck to the side. “‘Delicious pork, slow-cooked, shredded, then mixed with a barbecue sauce, served on a brioche grilled golden-brown, with pommes frites.’ It’s a pulled pork sandwich—so what? They can’t make it for you now. The man just said they don’t serve dinner until seven.”
“It’s a pulled pork sandwich, but it’s also an almost exact description of what Jack Ochs had in his stomach. Remember, the autopsy showed that Ochs’s last meal was shredded pork, sauce, some kind of bread, and pommes frites. Not too many restaurants in Paris serve any form of shredded pork, never mind with sauce, on a bun, and with french fries. That’s food designed to appeal to Americans. I think this is where he ate his last meal.”
A young blond man, also in a vest but tying a long gray apron around his waist, approached their table. “Bonjour, mesdames. What can I get for you?”
Rachel ordered a coffee for Magda and a Coke Light for herself. “And may I ask you a question?”
He looked wary but nodded.
“Do you remember that a guest here died in his room last month?”
Another nod, firmer this time. “He was killed in a robbery, yes? I remember hearing about it when I came in for my shift.”
“We’re making some inquiries on behalf of the family. Do you know if anyone who was working then is here right now?”
“I will go and ask in the kitchen.” His eyes lit up as he hurried off.
Watching him, Rachel wondered why people were so eager to associate themselves with violent death. But she knew the answer. It was a form of celebrity, and who didn’t yearn for even the slightest brush with fame?
In a few moments the waiter returned, bringing with him their order and a small Asian man whose broad face was lightly marked with acne scars and whose hair, otherwise deepest black, stood up in small bleached spikes at the top of his head. Their waiter introduced him as Kento. He had been waiting on tables on Friday night, their waiter explained, and had served the man who had died. He would answer their questions.
Rachel tapped her portable screen, tapped it again, made the expanding pinch that magnified the display, and held it up. It showed Ochs’s photo from the passport Alan had scanned to her earlier. “First, is this the man you waited on?”
Kento leaned forward to look, then nodded vigorously.
“Thank you. Okay, can you tell me everything you remember?”
In a thick Parisian accent, Kento explained that Monsieur Ochs had come into the restaurant at around eight on Friday night. Yes, he had ordered the pulled pork sandwich—he remembered because in his experience only American customers ordered it, and sure enough when he switched into English after Monsieur had placed his order, Monsieur had obviously been relieved. He had asked Kento if he could recommend a restaurant near the hotel that was open late and reasonably quiet. Kento had recommended La Traboule, just around the corner on the Rue de Penthièvre, which was not quiet but was managed by Kento’s brother-in-law. In Kento’s experience tired people didn’t look for a second option no matter how unsuitable the first, and since Monsieur looked fairly tired, he figured this was a chance to send a bit of business his brother-in-law’s way. He gave him directions to La Traboule, and Monsieur had thanked him and given him an enormous tip. The last Kento had seen of him, Monsieur was heading toward the bank of elevators in the lobby.
“He asked for somewhere that would be open very late that night, Friday night? Not the next night, Saturday night?”
No, that night. “He never said anything about Saturday.”
“Thank you. That’s very, very helpful.” Rachel dug out her wallet and gave him her own enormous tip, along with fulsome compliments on his excellent English.
“What do you mean ‘very, very helpful’?” Magda asked when their own waiter had gone off to fetch their bill. “All he did was confirm that Ochs had the sandwich and tell us he tried to con him into going to the wrong kind of restaurant.”
Rachel put a finger to her lips. She felt certainty and its accompanying confidence rising inside her. “Wait, I’ll explain. But first I need to talk to the receptionist.”
She left their waiter a gigantic tip of his own, then crossed the four-star lobby to the three-star reception desk. The brunette was frowning at the computer screen once more.
“Excuse me.”
The receptionist looked up, and after thanking her for her help—yes, seeing the room had been very helpful, absolutely—
Rachel wondered if she’d be willing to answer just one more question. Well, re-answer it, really.
“I’m sorry to ask this again, but we need to be absolutely certain. Are you sure no one telephoned and asked to speak to Monsieur Ochs after the call on Friday afternoon? No one called on Friday night? Or on Saturday morning?”
The receptionist checked again. A shake of the head. No, there had been only the calls on Thursday and on Friday afternoon. By Saturday, of course, Monsieur Ochs was no longer—she shifted uncomfortably—using his room, but if any calls had come they would have been logged by the police.
Boussicault hadn’t mentioned any.
“And I’m sorry again—we should have asked you this before—but do you remember anyone coming in and asking for Ochs late on Friday night or on Saturday morning? Not just the people we showed you, but anyone at all?”
She looked upward, casting her mind back. No. Of course, once Monsieur Ochs’s body had been discovered, things had become very crowded and very busy, but exactly because of that she thought she would have remembered anyone asking for him, and she couldn’t. She was sorry she couldn’t be more helpful.
The twenty-euro note Rachel slipped across the counter seemed to cheer her up.
The pneumatic doors swept open, and once more there they were on the pavement. Rachel waited for the doors to close again before she spoke.
Designs on the Dead Page 18