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.”
Magda looked confused. Rachel couldn’t blame her. Her idea was one of those that strikes like a lightning bolt but only becomes clear slowly. She began trying to explain, as much for herself as for Magda.
“We can safely say that crimes arise from two kinds of motives, right? Recent and what we could call long-simmering.” Magda considered briefly, then nodded. “Okay. And when it comes to Lellouch we know that there’s something recent that could be a motive, but that also could not. Guipure’s return took away his chance at the top job, but a large raise can go a long way to balance out a sense of injustice.”
Magda still looked confused, but she also looked interested, and she nodded slowly. Rachel stopped for a second, trying to grasp her own line of thought as it whisked through her brain, then continued. “But we don’t know if there’s any long-simmering motive that might have influenced Lellouch as well. Maybe Guipure constantly belittled him, or maybe when he was high, he said Lellouch could have the creative director position, or … or maybe he asked Lellouch for pins in a way that drove him crazy.” Magda gave her a look. “I know, but people have killed for less. And it seems to me that while we don’t have sources to tell us anything more about recent events, at least until Mediouri calls us, we do have a source that could tell us more about the past and maybe about any long-simmering resentments.”
Magda frowned. “But it sounds like Dolly told you everything she knew in the cemetery. And Kiki doesn’t know anyone else connected with the Sauveterre label, does she?”
Rachel shook her head. “Not Dolly or Kiki. You’re right: I don’t think they’ll be any help to us with this.” She took a deep breath. “I was thinking of Cyrille.”
“Cyrille?” Magda’s voice bounced off the gold-tipped gates of the Palais Garnier. The allegorical statue representing Song looked shocked behind her. “Cyrille, as in our suspect Cyrille?”
“As in one of our suspects, Cyrille. And not even the best one now that we know about Lellouch.”
“He has just as much motive as Lellouch, if not more—spurned love and the pretty penny he could make from selling those sketches once Guipure was dead!”
“We don’t know how much he could make,” Rachel said warningly.
“Well, we know he’s the only person we know had contact with Guipure at the party. And who left the club at a run after he’d had contact!” Magda shook her head in disbelief. “What makes you think he’ll be a reliable source for information about another suspect? Why wouldn’t he just lie to steer us away from him?”
“He could,” Rachel acknowledged. “But if we ask him about events that occurred before Guipure went into rehab, I don’t think he’ll have any reason to be worried enough to lie. Also,” she said, making a rueful face, “he’s not that bright. And he’s a lousy liar. When he tried to fool us about his motivation for buying Guipure’s heroin or why he was in a relationship with him, all he did was make it plain that he was trying to fool us. I’m pretty sure we’ll see through him if he lies.”
Magda thought. The sky grew darker still; Rachel sucked the insides of her cheeks.
At last Magda said reluctantly, “Okay. But can we please meet him somewhere outside that tiny apartment? Another visit there and I’m going to end up claustrophobic.”
Rachel grinned. “As far as I’m concerned, we can meet him on a football field.”