Designs on the Dead Page 2

  Indeed, Mediouri didn’t seem surprised by her confirmation. He just gave a second shrug and nodded. “Makes sense. You solved two already; why not make a job out of it?”

  Having been so easily accepted, she now felt she needed to be completely honest. “Well, I’m not quite there yet. At the moment I’m—”

  The bell over the door rang, and a harried-looking woman came in, her arms full of silky fabric. She paid no attention to the teacups or to Rachel, just dropped the pile onto the countertop. “Can I have these by Monday morning?”

  Instantly Mediouri became a smooth service professional. “Of course, Madame. Any spots we should know about? Special care instructions?”

  As he groped under the counter for his receipt book, a magazine flopped out. It was a copy of Oops!, its cover decorated with a picture of Roland Guipure frowning as he altered the pleats on a gown. The huge headline read, “Sad Last Days of Fashion’s Comeback Kid.” Rachel picked it up.

  “You can have that. I’m done with it.” The door closed behind the customer as Mediouri spoke. The woman’s entrance had broken their spell of intimacy, and now he picked up the pile of clothes. “I better start on these. But”—his tone softened; he groped in his pocket—“private detectives, they need connections, yes? And you and I, we have a connection.” He leered, a touch of the old Mediouri. “So please …” He held out a business card. “In case I can ever help.”

  Rachel looked at the card. The only connections her previous investigations had given her were a society matron and a book restorer, and while both had proved surprisingly useful, they weren’t exactly links to the city’s seedy underbelly. She slipped the card into her bag.

  Outside, the air had changed again, and it was too chilly to continue walking. She headed down into the Pont Marie métro. Once on a train, she opened the magazine.

  Designer to the stars Roland Guipure seemed to have pulled his life back from the brink. He had completed désintox last autumn, and his most recent collection for the Sauveterre label was hailed as a perfect return to form. On top of that, he had just signed a licensing deal that would earn him up to €100 million a year.

  But behind closed doors all was not well with Guipure.

  “Roland was tense about the licensing deal,” says a source speaking exclusively to Oops! And it seems that, despite the good reviews, Guipure was also concerned about his future: “He was worried that without heroin he would have no creative stimulus. He wondered if this most recent show was just a fluke.”

  Then there was his upcoming milestone birthday. “Getting older is difficult for anyone in fashion,” said a friend close to the designer. “And forty is a big number. You could see he was bothered by it.”

  So maybe it’s not so surprising that three days ago, this once-confident fashion genius was found dead of heroin overdose—

  So it had been an overdose.

  —a heroin overdose outside the exclusive nightclub LaLa Lounge, where he had been celebrating his birthday with a lavish party. The left sleeve of his €300 white Armani shirt was dotted with blood where he’d stuck the needle in his bicep.

  While patrons can pay as much as €35 for a cocktail at—the LaLa Lounge, it’s also in an area known for its access to street drugs. “It would have been easy for Roland to buy heroin there,” said one of last night’s gue—

  Wait. What was that about the injection? Rachel moved her eyes back up the page.

  —the LaLa Lounge, where he had been celebrating his birthday with a lavish party. His €300 white Armani shirt was dotted with blood where he’d stuck the needle into his bicep.

  As part of her education in detection, Rachel had been reading Knight’s Forensic Pathology, and she half-remembered the section on death from an overdose. There was something about the antecubital fossa and the dorsum of the hand, but what was clearest at that moment was the book’s assertion that no matter how hard it was to find a vein, addicts preferred not to inject into muscle because it slowed the effect of the hit. What was Guipure doing injecting into his bicep, then?

  “Nôtre Dame des Champs,” announced the metallic voice of the métro. She stuffed the magazine in her bag, stood up, and when the doors opened, nearly ran down the platform to the escalator that would take her to street level and a cell phone signal. She needed to talk to Magda.

  Chapter Three

  They sat across from each other in Rachel’s kitchen, the creased copy of Oops! between them. Although the séjour had begun to look a little the worse for wear, Rachel had made an effort to keep the kitchen clean, so the oilcloth on which their mugs rested was freshly wiped, and behind Magda’s curly head the olive oil and spice jars gleamed when the light hit them. It would have been a cozy scene if they hadn’t been discussing a murder.

  But it became clear that as far as Magda was concerned, it was only a possible murder. She was normally the more excitable of the two, with cautious Rachel trailing behind her warily, but when it came to murder, Rachel had noticed before, they seemed to change places. This had happened with their first case, when she’d refused to believe that Edgar Bowen’s death was murder, and here it was happening again now.

  As if to prove this point, Magda said, “I did the background research you asked for. But I have to say, I don’t see anything.”

  Rachel wrinkled her nose. “I hate it when people say they have to say. What they really mean is they want to say.”

  “Okay, I want to say I don’t see anything.” Magda pursed her lips. “Because I want to say that, as you will see, this has accidental overdose written all over it. The man was an addict. Less than six months out of rehab. On his birthday. It would be more surprising if he hadn’t shot up. But he did, and he misjudged the effect that four months of being clean would have on his tolerance, so he overdosed.” She mimed dusting her hands. “Case closed.”

  Not for me, Rachel thought. Aloud she said, “Except that he injected into his bicep.”

  “Again, he was an addict. Their veins collapse all the time, and they need to find new places to inject. Between the toes, into the thigh …”

  But while waiting for Magda to arrive Rachel had re-read her copy of Knight’s Forensic Pathology. “The obituary said he’d used heroin for two years. That’s nowhere near long enough to use up your veins. And anyway, veins turn unusable because they’re clogged with whatever the heroin’s cut with, but given the kind of price he could pay, his heroin would be pretty pure. And even if his other veins were clogged, the vein in your groin never collapses. He could have used that before his bicep.”

  “Yeah, but would he have wanted to risk being photographed shoving a needle into his groin? That’s exactly the kind of thing someone would sell to the tabloids. He’d want a more discreet way of getting a rush.”

  Rachel sighed with exasperation. Magda’s stubbornness could be useful, but now that it was holding her back, it was just irritating. “Yes, but he wouldn’t get a rush. Intramuscular injections enter the bloodstream more slowly. He’d get more like a slow-building reaction.”

  “He was at his birthday party. Maybe he wanted a nice relaxing buzz.”

  She sighed again. “Let’s leave aside the fact that, according to what I read, heroin doesn’t give you a nice relaxing buzz. You take it because it makes you feel fantastic, and you shoot up because you want that feeling as soon as possible. And all right, I’ll imagine that an addict who’s so driven that he decides to shoot up at his birthday party also cares about being caught doing it in an ungainly position. That still leaves the fact that injecting your own upper arm is very awkward. Try it.”

  Magda mimed holding a syringe in her right hand, reaching it over to her left bicep.

  “Look at your hand.”

  Her fingers were curled into a fist. She relaxed them, but even so, the best she could do was hold her imaginary hypodermic flat against her upturned palm and depress her imaginary plunger with a cramped thumb. She grunted. “Okay, it’s hard. But it’s not impossible. And i
f it’s hard to inject yourself in the bicep, it’s also hard for anyone else to do it. You can’t stab someone with a syringe in public without other people noticing.”

  “It doesn’t need to have happened in public. He died outside, but he could have been injected inside. Especially since it would take a while for the dose to kick in.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment. Then Magda exhaled and reached into her bag. She pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Just read these, okay? Then see how you feel.” She handed them across the table.

  The first sheets were printouts of photos, all showing a man Rachel recognized as Roland Guipure. In most of them, he was with a woman, and from the way she shared his dark hair and wide, full mouth it was easy to guess she was his twin, Antoinette.

  Guipure was one of those people who would always have—had always had, she corrected silently—a boyish face, and the progression of the photos could be charted not only by the date Magda had written at the top of each but also by the gradual wear and tear that turned him from an actual near-boy into a disconcertingly fresh-faced, middle-aged man. There was Roland Guipure, recently named Best New Designer by Nouveau magazine, with his sister Antoinette Guipure, with dark hair flopping in his face in 2001; there were Roland and Antoinette Guipure, the twins taking fashion by storm, at the Met Ball, Roland rake-thin in an electric blue tuxedo, in 2002; there were Designer Roland Guipure and his sister Antoinette, with Alexander McQueen at the launch party for McQueen’s collaboration with MAC cosmetics in 2007, Guipure’s face leaner and his features more defined; there was Roland Guipure at his company’s induction into the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, France’s exclusive club for the best haute couture houses in the country in 2010, gray just beginning to show at his temples. Last in the pile were two photos of Guipure with a young man. Both were dated 2015, and in both the younger man’s face was beautifully made up, first (Roland Guipure and a male companion at Nüba on Thursday) with smoky eyes and black mascara, and then (Roland Guipure and a friend at Paris’s exclusive Le Montana club) with aquamarine eyeshadow and carefully applied cosmetic glitter, set off by pale peach lips. In both Guipure looked tired, his face pasty and the beginning of bags under his eyes.

  “Male companion?”

  Magda shrugged. “Presumably a boyfriend. I couldn’t find a name.”

  Rachel put the photos to one side and began to work her way through the pages beneath. They were a collection of articles from various sources, the first from fifteen years before.

  Elle, July 2001

  Fashionistas of all ages are hearing about newcomer House of Sauveterre. Designer Roland Guipure’s first prêt-à-porter show two months ago was bought out after an hour, and now his A/W haute couture is creating the kind of buzz we haven’t seen since Galliano. One to Watch.

  “Why is he showing winter clothing in July?” Rachel asked.

  “Ah!” Magda held up an index finger. “You ask that because you don’t know fashion.” She shook her head. “You and I might think we know fashion because we know the names of designers and famous models and read the reviews of collections in the papers, but we do not know fashion. It’s a world all its own, and that world has its own calendar. If it’s snowing, it’s spring; if it’s hot out, it’s winter. Haute couture runway shows happen the season before the season for which the clothes were designed—so spring/summer shows in January, and autumn/winter shows in July. Prêt-à-porter shows happen two seasons before the season they’re designed for, which means that spring prêt-à-porter clothes are shown in the winter of the previous year and autumn ones are shown in January.” Seeing the look on Rachel’s face, she reached into her bag once more and produced a piece of slightly wrinkled, lined notebook paper. “I know. This will help. I had to make it to keep the dates straight.”

  “SCHEDULE,” the page said at the top. Then neatly spaced out underneath:

  January

  Spring/summer haute couture shows

  March

  Autumn/winter prêt-à-porter shows

  July

  Autumn/winter haute couture shows

  October

  Spring/summer prêt-à-porter shows

  Armed with this, Rachel turned her attention back to the printouts.

  The BoF: Business of Fashion, 7 January 2002

  First Time’s the Charm

  Paris, France—Roland Guipure may be a new name on the catwalk, but his label, Sauveterre, is already having the kind of impact more established designers would kill for. Sauveterre’s wittily deconstructed dresses and impressive Lognon pleating appeal to both the youthful customer looking to move toward more sophisticated pieces and the older woman who knows her style but wants to enliven it with unexpected fabrics and quirky details. As a result, Sauveterre had a net income of €500,000 at the end of the last fiscal year, its first as an established house.

  Style Magazine, The Sunday Times, 26 October 2006

  Fashion’s Wonder Twins

  Antoinette Guipure wasn’t known for taking gambles. A graduate of the London School of Economics and a vice president of Major Finance at BancFLAN, she had a reputation as a cool financial head when her twin brother, Roland, came to her six years ago and asked for her support.

  Roland wanted to start a fashion house, and he wanted to use principal from the family trust to do it. Anyone else would have said no, but on this occasion Guipure let family feeling prevail.

  Or did she? Seated in her office at the highly successful House of Sauveterre fashion label, Guipure insists it wasn’t an emotional choice, but a careful decision based on the detailed plan her brother drew up. “We had a very clear idea of what we wanted Sauveterre to be right from the start,” she says. “A family business. We wanted our customers to feel that we would welcome them at any and every stage of their lives, and we wanted our employees to know we would be as loyal to them as they were to us.”

  Such loyalty makes sense coming from two members of a family known for its conscience. Antoinette and Roland’s grandfather, the art dealer Maximilien Sauveterre, is a quiet hero in France because of his fair dealings with Jewish customers during World War II. After his death his daughter, the twins’ mother, Danielle, sold the art gallery and used the profits to found a nonprofit that supports numerous philanthropic organizations.

  You could say, then, that House of Sauveterre—named in honor of their grandfather—is just following family tradition when it lavishes care on its customers and workers. At the same time, this strategy has been the recipe for a flourishing brand. The business that began with a seed investment of €1m five years ago is rumored to have earned around €2m in profits this year. It seems keeping it in the family has paid off handsomely for the Guipures.

  Antoinette Guipure wears a sleeveless knit top, Sauveterre, £320, black silk trousers, Sauveterre £820, mock crocodile slingback brogues, Salvatore Ferragamo £1,450.

  Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis, France, April 2008

  Sales of Note

  Sauveterre Couture, SARL, has purchased 21 Rue la Boétie for €3,990,000. The parcel (Parcelle 13—Feuille 000 BL 01—Commune: PARIS 08 [75]) was formerly owned by Malraux Financiel and rented as individual offices. Before that it was the art gallery and home of Maximilien Sauveterre (the well-known Second World War philanthropist). It will now be redeveloped as the House of Sauveterre headquarters.

  quelles.nouvelles, September 4, 2014

  www.quelles.com/latest/gui/2015104

  Which fashion designer has been lacing his system with something stronger than silk thread? Out and about looking drowsy, with his sleeves rolled down in the middle of a Paris canicule, we hear that he’s using more poudre than a model with a pimple.

  The New York Times, March 7, 2015

  Walking, Wounded

  Paris—Last night Sauveterre’s Roland Guipure sent down the runway his A/W 16 ready-to-wear fashions. It grieves me to report that not only was it not fashionable, but it was also anything but ready to wear
.

  Guipure is known for his almost-but-not-quite outré ruffles, his delicate folds, and his keen eye for the kinds of charming details that keep clothes fresh. But this show offered none of those. Instead, what Sauveterre showed was a series of dull looks in drab fabrics. Guipure’s palette for this year seems to run the gamut from muddy green to mud-brown, while the dresses made repeated—one might say too much—use of wrist-length sleeves and exaggerated Peter Pan collars. The models appeared to take their cue from the clothes, their expressions so sullen that they looked like dissatisfied escapees from some school that required its pupils to wear camouflage.

  A design house is entitled to try something entirely new. After all, only by such attempts do designers emerge from old forms and into new ones. Unfortunately, here Mr. Guipure seems to have dressed his models in the leftover cocoons.

  The Fit, August 10, 2015

  This morning the House of Sauveterre announced that its chief designer and Creative Director Roland Guipure has entered a rehabilitation facility. “I’m pleased that my brother has decided to confront his demons,” Chief Financial Officer Antoinette Guipure said in a written statement. “Everyone in the House of Sauveterre family wishes him well and looks forward to the day he returns.”