Chapter Twenty-Three

For Rachel, the rest of that day and the morning of the next seemed to inch by, all of the hours filled with questions about Elisabeth. Could she be on vacation? She dismissed that as too much of a coincidence: the timing of her disappearance connected it clearly to recent events. But how? This was the question that drummed in her head. Was Elisabeth, conniving fraudster and murderess, on the run? Or was Elisabeth, unwilling partner in crime and unexpected heiress, the victim of a ruthless killer? Was this Godard’s Breathless or one of those documentaries where the victim lay buried under the floorboards?

And as the hours went by, she began to face up to other, more complex, questions. If Elisabeth was a victim, whose victim was she? Parisians noticed their neighbors, watched them. Look at the two they’d spoken to at Catherine’s. Mathilde could never have passed up Elisabeth’s stairs without comment; her clothes alone would have made her the subject of gossip. She supposed it was just possible that she’d arrived when all the neighbors were looking the other way, but admitting that this was only a possibility meant acknowledging that there must be other possibilities too. Who else would want Elisabeth out of the way? And Catherine? Who else would want Elisabeth and Catherine out of the way? Her head began to spin.

Then, very softly, a thought began to make itself known. There was someone else who might have committed all these murders. She and Magda had been working on the assumption that Mathilde’s financial woes and wounded pride lay at the bottom of everything, but someone else might have needed money too—in fact, someone had lost his home because he didn’t have enough money. What if the person they should be considering wasn’t Mathilde, but David?

As Magda had said, he’d gained the most from Edgar’s death. Catherine had told her he’d been evicted for nonpayment of rent; Edgar’s death solved that problem. And the only visitor Catherine’s neighbor had remembered was a dark-haired man. They had assumed that was Edgar, but now she realized that they hadn’t asked whether he’d been seen before or after Edgar’s death. Catherine could have been blackmailing David over some slip, and her visitor could easily have been him, arriving to pay his blood money or to—she swallowed. And David was young enough not to attract much attention among Elisabeth’s neighbors. He could have been taken for someone’s boyfriend or a new tenant. In fact, she suddenly realized, Elisabeth might have been blackmailing him too—who knew what she’d unearthed in Edgar’s papers or what David had accidentally given away? After all, they saw each other daily in the appartement.

What if, a niggling voice whispered, Magda were right?

But there are certain things a mind, even the mind of a natural detective, shrinks from. The toddler Rachel had known, his hands held up to his father when he was too tired to walk anymore, his face rapt while that same father read him a bedtime story—that toddler could not have killed that father. And hadn’t Catherine displayed only boredom at her mention of David? Surely if she’d been blackmailing him, she’d have shown some greater reaction to his name. Good points, Levis, she applauded herself. She scoffed at the voice that was cynically suspicious, that knew David less well than she did.

She was assisted in this dismissal by her portable, which rang out the “Imperial March” from Star Wars: Magda. She swiped the screen. “Hello?”

“Do you want to look at dresses before we eat or afterward? Only, before might be better if we want to have flat stomachs.”

Rachel had no idea what she was talking about. Eat what? What dresses?

“Oh, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. You can’t have forgotten!”

It came back to her in a rush: they were going to buy dresses for the Bal Rouge. Magda had been asked as Benoît’s guest, and they’d decided to add lunch to the shopping. “I haven’t forgotten,” she said. “We’re going dress shopping for the bal.” She flared her nostrils. It had completely slipped her mind that the charity gala was this weekend. Looking at her book-chipped nails, she wondered if she had time to fit in a manicure before the big event, as well.

“Let’s start at Galeries Lafayette.” Magda’s excitement was barely contained.

After her first experience of it, the bal had never loomed large on Rachel’s horizon. She was no fan of listening to performances by Opéra apprentices and speeches from titans of international finance, all the time wishing it were polite to ask for a second dessert or a larger glass of champagne. But like most things, the bal shone more from a distance, and for years Magda had listened yearningly to her morning-after descriptions. Now at last she was attending, and her joy at the prospect of experiencing it for herself was dizzying.

“Galeries Lafayette would be excellent.” Rachel reflected that, if nothing else, the process of preparing for the bal would free her mind from thoughts of Elisabeth and attendant troubling questions. “I’ll meet you there in a couple of hours.”