Of course it wasn’t as easy as that. Guipure might have been ambidextrous, Magda pointed out. Even if he wasn’t, injecting oneself didn’t require much in the way of fine motor skills; he could have done it with his nondominant hand. Or, in a pinch, he could have injected his left arm with his left hand—she folded her arm in half and demonstrated, jabbing uncomfortably but still accurately into her bicep. He could even have had someone else inject him. He was a famous man in a profession known for its hangers-on: someone at the party would no doubt have been delighted to help him out, and then could have vanished when things went wrong.
“In that case, why didn’t they use a vein?” Rachel widened her eyes and spread her hands.
“I don’t know.” Magda’s voice was a shrug. “But I don’t have to know. If a junkie is found dead of an overdose with an injection mark on his arm, the simplest answer is that he did it himself, with his dominant hand, his subordinate hand, or whatever hand he could manage it with. And how often have you said, ‘Occam’s Razor’ to me and insisted that the simplest answer is most likely to be the right one?”
Many times, Rachel acknowledged. But this time was different. This time there was something …
Her dissatisfaction must have shown on her face because Magda said, “What’s going on here? I understand that this is like Edgar’s murder, when no one but you believed it was murder. But there you had evidence that suggested he hadn’t just died accidentally, and here you have none. And you don’t know Roland Guipure, so it can’t be that. Your only connection to him is fifteen minutes spent staring at a dress he made. So why does it matter if he was murdered?”
Because I know, Rachel wanted to shout. But it would have gained her nothing. Although Magda had plenty of time for sudden convictions and illuminations (which she put under the heading of inspiration), she’d never shared Rachel’s faith in the validity of feelings, her belief that sometimes instinct is telling you a truth that will only be proved later.
Still, Rachel gave it a try. “I know.” Her voice sounded weak, even to her. “I just know.”
Magda shook her head. “Well, I don’t.” She crossed her arms mutinously.
Rachel was silent for a long time. Then she said, “Remember that time when you said you could pierce my ears with an ice cube and a needle, and I let you?”
A reluctant nod.
“And remember that time when you insisted that you’d seen Alain Delon go into the supermarket across the street, and we ended up following that man who was not Alain Delon all around the store?”
“You thought he was Alain Delon too,” Magda said sulkily.
“I did not. But I said I did because I knew you loved Alain Delon. Just like I still know Alain Delon’s birthday and the names of all his children. I learned them because it was important to you.”
Magda bit her lip, but she didn’t say anything. Rachel leaned across the table and looked at her so intently that she actually felt her eyes hurt. “Give me two weeks. Give me two weeks because the ice cube did not numb the pain, and the holes in my ears are lopsided, and Alain Delon’s birthday is—”
“The eighth of November. Fine.” Magda inhaled through her nose. “Two weeks. I’m with you for two weeks. But after that, if there’s nothing, you’ll give up?” Rachel nodded. “Okay. But what I said still applies. You don’t know Roland Guipure. Or any of his friends or family. So I don’t know how you’re going to be able to find anything out.” She gave a little shake of her head. “This isn’t like our last case, where you found the body, or even like Edgar Bowen’s murder, where you already knew the victim and his family. You don’t know any of these people, and they don’t know you. Our lives and the life of the alleged victim don’t intersect anywhere.”
Now that was a good point. And a fair one. Or—wait. Magda’s mention of Edgar Bowen reminded Rachel that she did have one possible source for inside information on Roland Guipure, a source that she’d used when Edgar died. Her friend Kiki Villeneuve knew everyone in the Paris haute bourgeoisie, that world of old families whose names and connections stretched back for centuries. Hadn’t one of the articles she’d just seen mentioned something about Guipure’s grandfather being a war hero?
She flicked back once again. There it was: “a quiet hero in France because of his fair dealings with Jewish customers during World War II.” Okay, not really the same thing—what exactly was a “quiet hero”?—but if Maximilien Sauveterre had enough money that his grandchildren only needed to cash in some of it in order to start a multimillion dollar business, it was just possible that he had entered Kiki’s world at some point, in some way.
Besides, she concluded, she had nowhere else to start. And if she wanted to prove to her best friend that her instincts were sound, she had to begin somewhere.