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.”
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.”