“Not personally. But—”
“Cyrille told us all about him when they were involved,” the first woman broke in. “Where they went, what they did, what he said …”
“You were close to Cyrille.”
Something about this sentence put the second woman on alert. Before her friend could answer, she said, “Why do you want to know?” She stepped forward so she was standing slightly in front of her colleague. “Who are you?”
“My name is Rachel Levis. And this is my partner, Magda Stevens. We’re private detectives, and we’ve been hired by Cyrille Thieriot’s family to investigate his murder.” Oh, how easily the lie came! “Would you like to see my carte d’identification?” Not that this would provide any evidence that she was a detective of any sort, but previous investigations had taught Rachel that an offer to show ID made most people believe you were trustworthy.
“That’s all right.” The second woman shook her head. “As long as you’re not reporters or loan sharks or something like that.”
Why would she think of loan sharks? But Rachel decided to hold that question. Instead, she simply said, “Your colleague was saying that Cyrille talked to you about Roland Guipure. So you must have been good friends?”
The first woman, Miriam, spoke again. “Oh yes. I mean, not at first. At first he just came in as a customer. He was our first man. We still don’t get many, at least not for maquillage, but I think he made such an impact on us at first because he was the first. Isn’t that right, Carla?”
The other woman nodded, then picked up the thread. “After his first couple of visits he started coming in regularly because I told him we could do special orders. He knew exactly what he wanted, you see. He must have read every fashion magazine every month, because he knew the names of all the shades and exactly which marque did which one. We would place the orders, and when they came in, he picked them up on his way home. And we just got to chatting.”
“He had a marvelous life!” Miriam teared up again. “He worked at Bespoke—you know, the restaurant—and the most amazing people used to come in … Or, at least, he made them sound amazing. He had a way of telling stories so that everything seemed exciting. And then he met Roland, and everything really was exciting. He told us how Roland wanted to introduce him to all his friends and how he made Cyrille come with him to all these trendy places so that he could show him off. Cyrille met Karl Lagerfeld—can you imagine?” Rachel remembered the photos on Thieriot’s wall and nodded again. “And he brought us the most amazing goody bag from one of Sauveterre’s runway shows. Do you remember that bronzer, Carla? Much too expensive for Marionnaud to stock, and beautiful coverage. It went on like silk, didn’t it?” Carla agreed that it did. “And of course we knew all about how he persuaded Roland to go into désintoxification—”
“And then what happened after he came out.” Carla’s tone made it plain what she thought of Guipure’s post-rehab treatment of Thieriot.
“But he knew that might happen.” Miriam switched her gaze back to Rachel. “He told us that even when he suggested Roland should go to the clinic in Greece, he’d known that often when people come out of désintox, they push away old friends and partners, but he’d been willing to accept that risk if it meant saving Roland’s talent.”
Carla pursed her lips and clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “Yes, but Roland could have at least acknowledged all Cyrille did for him. Introducing him to Cyrille’s avant-garde friends, stimulating his imagination in new ways … But Roland just cut him off. No thanks, no support.”
“Oh, Carla!” From Miriam’s sigh of exasperation, Rachel understood that she was the soft heart to the other woman’s hard head. “Love isn’t about expecting payback or acknowledgment. Cyrille did those things because he wanted to share his life with Roland, just like he encouraged him to go to the désintox because he was genuinely worried about him. He didn’t want anything in exchange.”
Uh-huh, Rachel thought, irritated at Thieriot’s self-serving restructuring of the story. But she felt a stab of sympathy too. Having done it herself, she wasn’t going to fault anyone who tried to smooth their path through a break-up; every jilted lover had the impulse to reconfigure their story so it became less painful. She drew the conversation back to a remark buried in Carla’s complaint. “You say Guipure didn’t offer Cyrille any kind of support when he ended the relationship. Do you mean financial support? Did Cyrille need money?”
Carla shrugged. “He was a waiter, poor boy. And special-order eyeshadows don’t come cheap. Guipure paid for everything while they were together, and Cyrille became used to a nicer level of everything than he’d had before. It’s hard to break that habit.”
“He was having money troubles?”
“I couldn’t say. But lately he’d been coming in to talk more than to buy.”
“Until last week.”
Miriam tightened her lips as Carla shot her a warning look, but it was too late: Magda had her in her sights. “What do you mean?”
“Well, only that last week he mentioned that he was thinking of buying an apartment. They’re building new ones for sale just down there”—she pointed in the direction of the Rue des Francs Bourgeois a block away—“and he told us he was planning to view the show apartment. He said that the layout would be the same for all the trois-pièces units, and he thought he’d have a look.”
“Trois pièces?” Three rooms plus a kitchen and bath in the Marais would cost much more than Thieriot’s little studio.
“We were surprised too,” Carla said. “We didn’t know he had that kind of money.”
“And when Carla said that,” Miriam explained, “he said that he didn’t have it yet. But he would have it by the time the apartment was finished. He said he’d been thinking since Roland died, and he had some things of his worth selling. Mementoes.” Warmth flooded Rachel. The sketches. It had to be the sketches. “He said he’d held onto them for the sentimental value, but he knew Roland would have wanted him to be well cared for after his death, so he was going to sell them now.”
“Did he say to whom?”
Miriam shook her head.
From behind her Carla said, “You could ask his friend Gabrielle.”
“GAB—”
But Magda grabbed Rachel’s arm and squeezed it. “Gabrielle?” Her voice was smooth. “We’ll check with the family to see if they know anyone by that name. Do you know a surname?”
Carla shook her head. “Unfortunately not.”
“What makes you think that this Gabrielle would know, in particular?”
“To be honest, I don’t have a reason. The name just occurred to me because, well … last week Cyrille loaned me his portable to call my husband. We have to keep our phones in our lockers while we’re on the shop floor, and I needed to tell him to pick up a poulet roti on his way home. Cyrille’s phone was on the ‘Recents’ screen, and Gabrielle was the first name on the list. I’m just assuming they must be close because it showed he’d called her five times in a row.”
Chapter Thirty
“Gabrielle is a very common name,” Magda said when they were back out on the pavement. Her voice made it clear she was reminding herself as much as Rachel. “We need to bear in mind that the fact that he called a Gabrielle doesn’t mean that he called Sauveterre’s Gabrielle.”
“True, true. But bearing that in mind, how do we find out which Gabrielle he was calling?”
“Oh, I know how to do that.” She waved a hand. “But before we do …” She turned and waited at the crossing onto the Rue des Francs Bourgeois. “Anyone can dream about buying an expensive apartment. You and I used to do it all the time when you lived in that little room, remember? Anyone can even go to see an apartment and pretend they’re going to buy it. The question is whether he actually did anything material about it. Did he write a check or anything like that? That would show he was confident he was coming into some money.” She took her phone out of her bag and started poking the screen.
“What are you doing
?”
“Checking to see if there are specific hours for viewing or if we can just drop in.”
It turned out that the viewing agent was at that very moment sitting in the building’s lobby. When they arrived, she turned out to be as polished and gleaming as the decor that surrounded her. She nodded her smooth brown head when Rachel showed her the photo. Oh yes, Monsieur Thieriot. He’d come to tour the show apartment the previous week. She remembered because she’d enjoyed his tour so much. Most potential buyers didn’t have much to say beyond asking about the various options for taps and kitchen appliances and wanting to know what the building maintenance fee would be, but he’d been full of conversation. Did they know he’d been the partner of the fashion designer Roland Guipure?
“Yes, we know.” Once again Magda gave their story about being private detectives. Then she asked if Thieriot had said anything about moving forward with the sale after he’d finished his walk-through?
Oh, more than said: he’d filled out a formal declaration of intent. Seeing their blank expressions, she explained. Because they’d had so many walk-ins from the street, the company had started to ask each viewer who expressed interest to sign a formal declaration of intent. She looked slightly abashed. Of course it didn’t really mean anything, but the word “formal” was very effective in scaring off dreamers and time wasters. But Monsieur Thieriot hadn’t been scared off at all. He’d signed the document, given his contact details, and said he just needed to talk to his money manager and would be in touch. “In fact, I was going to call him today, to check in to see if he was ready to make an offer.” She looked sad. “Is there somewhere I could send flowers?”
“I’m not sure when the funeral will be.” Rachel thought of Jack Ochs, still lying in a drawer in the police mortuary, waiting for his case to be investigated and closed. Presumably Thieriot’s funeral couldn’t proceed either until his murder had been solved. “But if you give me your card, I’ll contact you as soon as we know anything.”
Magda slipped a brochure into her bag as they left.
“So he wasn’t just dreaming,” she said when they had settled at a table in a café down the block. “And look at this.” She slid the brochure across the table, tapping the price list. Trois Pièces: €500,000.
“It must be the croquis,” Rachel said, smiling at their server as she put a lemon tart on the table in front of her. “That must be why he was so intent on asking about them the last time we met. He must have decided to sell them.”
“But to whom? Gabrielle doesn’t have the kind of money he would’ve wanted. Maybe an art dealer? Would an art dealer be interested in a fashion designer’s sketches?”
“Some would, I think, but I doubt they’d kill for them. And if he was trying to sell them to a dealer, what was he doing calling Gabrielle? He never mentioned that they had any kind of personal relationship.”
“If it was her.” Magda took a sip of her coffee. “Maybe he had a friend named Gabrielle, and he was calling her.”
“Calling her five times in a row?”
“It’s not outside the realm of possibility. But I grant you it’s strange, so eat up and let’s go back to my place.”
Rachel didn’t see the connection, and she said so.
“I said I could find out who he was calling, and I can. According to one of my books, all you need is the portable number and a computer, and it should be a straightforward process.”
“‘Should’ like you should have been able to access Bespoke’s reservations system, or ‘should’ like you should have been able to hack Sauveterre’s e-mail?”
Magda looked around and signaled to their server for the bill. “We’ll never know until we try.”
On the métro heading toward Cadet, Rachel suddenly turned in her seat.
“You don’t think it’s my fault he’s dead, do you?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“He asked me if I thought the sketches would be worth anything, and I said they might. That makes me the reason he was trying to sell them, and if his trying to sell them is why someone killed him, that makes me the reason he’s dead.”
“I have some issues with that reasoning.” But Magda’s voice was kind. “If I tell you that you look good in red, then you buy a red dress and spill something on it, I’m not the reason you spilled something on your red dress. The chain of events is essentially the same. You told him a fact: the sketches probably are worth something. But you didn’t make him go on and try to sell them. That was his choice.”
“Okay.” Rachel turned and looked out her window. She knew it was silly, but still she felt relieved.
“By the way,” Magda said after a second, “you don’t look good in red.” She jabbed Rachel lightly with an elbow. “See? I just saved you from spilling something on a dress.”
* * *
An hour later Magda was slumped over the laptop on her kitchen table, her elbow holding open one of her hacking manuals, while Rachel sat across from her, researching art dealers on her portable. Tuning out Magda’s soft mutterings, she googled and scrolled to see if there were dealers or auction houses who took consignment of design sketches.
There were several, but none of them were interested in a croquis on its own. If there was a swatch of fabric attached, or if the sketch had been made for a specific customer and included a note addressed to them, or even if it had been done on the maison’s official stationery, a dealer was happy to take it and ask for what seemed to her to be exorbitant price, but on no website did she find a sketch that had been dashed off by a designer on whatever paper was handy and sent off into the world unaccompanied by a textile. She was sure the drawings Cyrille collected didn’t have swatches attached, but had they been made on Sauveterre stationery? For a moment she regretted confronting Naquet—he might have been able to tell them.
“Oop!” Magda sat up straight. “Here we go.”
“It worked?”
Rachel moved to sit next to her. On the laptop’s screen she saw a column of numbers.
“What’s Gabrielle’s number at Sauveterre?”
It took her a few seconds to find the e-mail about the memorial service with Gabrielle’s phone number at the bottom. She watched as Magda typed it into the search box. A split second later there it was, staring back at them from the computer screen, highlighted in blue. Another tap of Magda’s finger on the touchpad, and it was highlighted again, further down, five times in a row. One more and there it was again, now four times in a row.
Rachel swallowed to wet her throat. “What dates?”
“Does it really matter?”
Before Rachel had a chance to say that if the most recent call was made on the day of Thieriot’s death it might matter very much indeed, her own phone rang. The screen showed Boussicault’s name.
“Allo, Capitaine Ça va?”
Boussicault apparently shared Magda’s attitude toward phone etiquette, for he brushed right by the question. “I promised I would contact you when I had details. There hasn’t been time for an autopsy, but the scene of crime officers had some preliminary findings. Monsieur Thieriot was found face down on his bed, with four wounds in his back. Nothing in the room was disturbed; there were no signs of any struggle. He had two wounds in his lower back, one on each side of the spine, puncturing his kidneys. The two in his upper back, again one on each side, punctured the lungs. All were clean stabs, quick in and out, made by an extremely sharp but shallow blade just long enough to puncture the organs.”
“He was killed by someone he knew.”
“That was my conclusion as well. He either turned his back on the killer or preceded them into the room, and that suggests he was comfortable with them. Moreover, you need to be very close to someone to stab them like that, and you need to be calm to be that precise. This wasn’t a murder during a struggle or a frenzy. These two people knew each other well enough for Thieriot to have his guard down.”
She glanced at Magda, whose face showed that she u
nderstood the gist of the conversation. The sketches, she mouthed at Rachel.
“Did the crime scene technicians catalogue the scene yet?”
“It wasn’t very big, so … Just let me check …” She heard pages turning. “Yes, here’s the inventory.” Only then did he remember that he was a policeman and she was a member of the public. “Why? What was in there that I should know about?”
“Nothing. Or at least, not much. Guipure gave Thieriot some design sketches, and we wondered if they were still there. They’re the kind of thing a thief wouldn’t know to take, but someone close to him might.”
“D’acc.” There was the sound of more pages turning. “It says ‘twenty drawings of women.’ Found in a drawer under the bed. Could that be them?”
It could. In fact, she couldn’t see how it could be anything else, and she said as much to Magda after the capitaine hung up.
“So if Gabrielle killed Cyrille for the sketches,” Magda said, seemingly dismissing the possibility even as she asked the question, “why would they still be in his apartment?”
Rachel tried to think of another connection between the croquis and the call. “Maybe he was calling her to see if he could get some money for giving them back to Sauveterre?”
But Magda didn’t buy that either. “He wouldn’t have called Gabrielle about that. He’d have called Antoinette. And look.” She pointed at the digits next to Gabrielle’s repeated number that indicated the length of each call: .15; .15; .45; 1.00; 1.00; 5.00. “He spoke to her for longer each time. That must mean som—”
There was a ping. Rachel looked around for her portable. This time, though, the noise came from Magda’s phone. She glanced at her screen, frowned, tapped through, and after a moment handed it to Rachel, wearing what Rachel thought a novelist would call “a significant look.”
BoF Careers: Business of Fashion
said the web page.
New Hires and Promotions, May 9–13
ALaMarche—Maude Benedet—VP Sales
Designs on the Dead Page 21