Dead is the New Black (17 page)

“This was Saturday,” the lady said, holding up a magenta pashmina job with rhinestones.

Laura shook her head. “No, that’s not it.”

“Two ladies fighting was Saturday.”

“Tall woman with dark skin?”

“Yes. Black lady telling white lady off. White lady cries. Her nose uses seven napkins. I have to pay to launder these.” Codruta held up a yellow silk Hermès knockoff with horses on it. Not a carousel.

Laura shook her head again. “I caught some of it in the dining room. It was really bad, but I think it was over a man. Usually is.”

Codruta tisked. “It was over a woman. Kept saying ‘Gracie, Gracie,’ which is a woman’s name in America, no?”

“They were gay?” Laura expressed mock shock.

“I don’t know. I see the black one plenty, with men.” Codruta pulled a blue scarf from the bottom of the basket. “No, the one with the nose must have been gay. Because the black one kept saying, ‘She don’t want you, she don’t want you, she screw you, big time and everyone knows,’ then bitch this, bitch that. Oh, these rich ladies have no idea how to behave.” Codruta looked at Laura meekly over the blue scarf. It was Hermès, and it had carousels. It was a different colorway of the pattern she’d seen in Bergdorf’s.

“Mine was pink,” Laura said. “I guess you don’t have it.”

“Take it,” Codruta said, pushing it into Laura’s hands, “it sits in here for three weeks already. No one takes it. No one cares. These bitches think everything is garbage.”

Laura took umbrage for a second. Wasn’t she, in theory, one of the rich ladies? Apparently not. Apparently, Codruta could tell the difference between the rich bitches and the poor bitches. Codruta slapped the basket shut and slid it back under the sink.

“Thank you,” Laura said, deciding not to make a scene over a beautiful scarf no one wanted.

Codruta pulled a card from her little vest. “My sister does nails and hair. Private in your house. Cheap. Some time, you see her. She rescued me from much trouble when I left my country, so I try to get her some business. Okay?”

Laura took the card as a gaggle of girls, drunk, not a minute past their nineteenth birthday, bounced in. They were perfect in that Dalton School way, moving through space like they owned it. Codruta sat in her chair. Laura thanked her and left a ten in the silver bowl.

When she went out to the dining room, she found Ruby sitting at a deuce, buttering her bread. There were two cucumber mojitos dripping condensation onto the tablecloth.

“How did you get a table?”

“Just sit down, would you? I ordered you the ahi tartar. Nice scarf.”

Laura told her the story of the scarf and Codruta, and Ruby got right to the point. “So Gracie screwed Carmella out of what?”

“Money, men, drugs?”

“None of that seems like enough to murder her over. I mean, if Carmella’s an Italian countess, like she says, money and drugs shouldn’t be an issue. And men? Unless Gracie had another one hanging around, there’s not much to fight over… unless she was banging Jeremy, too.”

Laura felt her hand tighten around her drink. “You don’t have to say it like that.”

Ruby’s eyes narrowed. “What’s it to you? He’s gay anyway.”

Laura backpedaled, “It’s just a gross thought.” Ruby sipped her drink, looking over the top of her glass at her sister. Laura had the sudden paralyzing fear that Ruby would ask her right then how she felt about Jeremy, and Laura knew that she’d be unable to lie.

“What would you commit murder over?” Ruby asked.

Laura thought for a second, then said, “To protect you or Mom, definitely.” She leaned forward to match Ruby’s posture. “Would you kill to protect Michael?”

Ruby was saved from answering by dinner’s arrival. Laura refused the cheese and accepted the black pepper. Ruby had a big plate of linguini in a white sauce with tiny balls of meat and a green vegetable Laura couldn’t identify.

“So, I saw David with Carmella’s portfolio, in the limo.”

“Who’s David?”

“Sheldon Pomerantz’s right-hand guy,” Laura answered, picking at her tartar, which was good, but her mind was elsewhere. “So, she’s been working on her portfolio. I mean, she has the right to look for a job. But why would David have it in his briefcase?”

Ruby twirled her linguini, apparently disinclined to answer. So Laura kept answering her own questions. “But Noë told me Gracie Pomerantz was looking for another designer to back. Maybe it was Carmella. And maybe after the fight in the bathroom, that was Noë’s way of throwing Carmella under the bus, because she figured I’d run back and tell Jeremy.”

“Would Jeremy fire her?”

“Probably,” Laura said, knowing Jeremy could be cutthroat bastard. “I mean, to be put in a position of losing your designer on the one hand and sharing your backer on the other. Yeah, he’d cut her loose. So she’d have no job and, obviously, Gracie ditched her, anyway.”

“High and dry,” Ruby said, rolling wine around her glass. “Really nasty, if you think about it. Like, spiteful. Like, I wonder if she was ever really interested.”

“Like,” Laura continued, “was she trying to piss off Jeremy?”

“Just saying.” Ruby ate the last of her linguini, shrugging coyly. Laura wondered if she was taking any of this seriously, or if it was just a storytelling game to her. “You eating your rice?”

She pushed it toward Ruby. “Carmella was in the office when Gracie was killed.”

“Seriously?” Ruby’s eyes opened a little, as if it were gossip, not lives on the line.

“Seriously.”

“What are those things you need to be the killer? That the police say?”

“Motive and opportunity, but she wasn’t there that morning. I mean, she was in, then out again. What was she doing?”

“Killing someone? I don’t know. Why isn’t she a suspect? Did they say?”

“Didn’t have the strength, apparently, and I think Jeremy was just too convenient not to arrest. He came into the lobby at the right time to kill her. His hands had fibers from that swatch on them. He was holding it when I saw him. They had just had…” She paused. It was going to be hard to say. Not only that he was straight, but that he’d been with Gracie in the two days before the murder. So, instead, she changed her sentence. “A fight that night.”

Ruby joked, “They bickered like lovers.”

“Shut up, Ruby.” Her reaction was too strong, and Ruby must have caught it, but to Laura’s gratitude, the waiter came by asking about coffee before she could pursue it. Laura swung the conversation back to Carmella, but the steam had gone out of it, and they were only rehashing.

They surmised that Gracie had considered backing Carmella. Every designer’s dream. No kid left Parsons or F.I.T. without dreaming of that magical backer. They got jobs at the most expensive houses, got paid nothing, just for the opportunity to meet someone who could possibly back them.

No pressure.

Ostensibly, that was why Laura would have taken the job at St. James—access to Gracie Pomerantz, her friends, and her money. Those connections weren’t made in interviews. There were no ads in the paper, no whisperings that so-and-so was looking for someone to back. You needed to be at the right parties and dinners, and you needed to create the desire to back you in the moneyed person in a way that was non-threatening, casual, and passionate—all at the same time.

Laura explained the story to Ruby as they walked home, significantly poorer for the bill and the tip.

In the beginning, Jeremy had made small orders of couture garments in his parent’s factory, but the numbers didn’t make sense. The more he sold, the more money he had to front for production orders, and the further behind he fell. He borrowed from his family. He used credit cards. He robbed Peter to pay Paul. But Peter squawked, and at one point, he couldn’t buy enough fabric for his first big Bendel’s order. The bank, upon looking at his books, found him sorely lacking in the cash flow department.

That was why he needed the loan in the first place. But the bank, in pure bank logic, refused to fund him because he had a cash flow problem. Then, Bendel’s hired a new buyer, who had her own pet projects and decided against making the necessary introductions.

So, Jeremy sat in the dingy factory and wept on the cutting table. And like an angel, she appeared—Gracie Pomerantz, just another lawyer’s wife looking for the Herve Leger showroom so she could buy the right dress for her husband’s career, just another dissatisfied middle-aged woman who made a wrong turn down a nondescript hallway and ended up in a room full of sewing machines and pressers instead of a scrubbed showroom floor. She had a heart, and asked the man, no, the boy, why he was crying, and he told her. She bought a dress and, two months later, fifty-five percent of the business.

He was backed. It was pure luck. No portfolio. No interviewing.

Which made Carmella’s updating of her work seem so off-base. Gracie would know damn well what Carmella could and could not do. No portfolio necessary.

Laura had assumed David had Carmella’s portfolio because he was picking up Gracie’s old leads and seeing what her business had been. But maybe Carmella had gotten Gracie out of the way so she could get to Sheldon. And Sheldon, not knowing the fashion world at the high-end, had done what any good schmatta guy would do—he asked for a portfolio. Carmella played along.

She unlocked her door and found her apartment in the same disheveled state. With a few hours to kill, she thought she might mop a little, or give the toilet a squish. Instead, she put on her pajamas and sat at the edge of her bed, mulling everything over. She couldn’t believe she was imagining Carmella—party girl, designer, disowned Italian countess—as a murderer. She was just Carmella. The nearest she’d ever gotten to killing anyone was herself, when she smoked two packs of
Gitanes
in a day.

Laura turned on the news. Snowstorm next week. Just in time for the show, which would go on, of course, but with the possibility of soaked clothes, late models, wet floors, and grouchy buyers. She remembered the last words she’d heard spoken to Gracie. Jeremy saying, “Don’t you dare go.” She’d assumed he didn’t want her to leave the office at that moment. The tension between them that day had been thick as a Brooklyn accent, and they’d spent much of it behind closed doors. What if Jeremy had meant, “Don’t you dare go to that dinner.” What if Jeremy had actually talked Gracie out of backing Carmella, and Carmella had gotten so angry at the turnaround that she killed Gracie in a rage?

Somewhere during the sports report, while trying to shut out self-recriminations, Laura fell asleep and dreamed of Jeremy back in the office, pinning a wedding gown on her while Sheldon stood next to her in a tuxedo.

CHAPTER 17.

Laura needed to clear her name and Jeremy’s. She desperately wanted things to go back to normal, but every time she met with another person, or asked another question, normal got less and less likely. She had no idea how happy she had been before she found Gracie Pomerantz strangled on the floor of Jeremy’s office. She might have listed a thousand ways to improve her life, but she never thought to list the things that could make it so much worse.

Such as: Sheldon and Carmella speaking earnestly behind a closed door in the conference room; Mom in the design room, crocheting while on the phone with Ruby, talking about that damn wedding dress; Tony not having done a single thing to the Stone Rocker group because he was working on the matte jersey nightmare.

“Hi, Ma,” Laura said, when Mom hung up.

“You were at the funeral yesterday, I heard. Was it okay?”

Laura lowered her voice. “Nothing about yesterday was okay, Mom. I just can’t talk about it here.” Laura looked up and saw respect in her mother’s face.

“You should call your sister today,” Mom suggested, before returning to her needle.

She looked down at her own work, and for the first time in her life, was hard-pressed to care one way or the other. She called Yoni to find out if she’d dug up the contract, but she was out sick. So it was back to her job, which she still wanted to avoid. She didn’t want to make patterns, and she didn’t want to call her sister. All she wanted to do was find out what was on Carmella’s mind.

“How’s it coming Tony?” she called out. She looked over the room as she passed by Carmella’s desk. Her bag hung on the back of the chair and, inside, the red-rimmed portfolio.

“Good,” he answered, pulling out his scissors.

“How’s that satin blouse coming? Did you get good fit notes from yesterday?” Laura fingered the portfolio, keeping the pages open with two fingers.

“Needs to be tighter.”

“Watch the fabric,” she said, as she looked in Carmella’s bag, noting Jeremy’s look books from the past two years, with sales numbers. “The stitches slip.” She spotted a little apple-green card with orange writing Laura didn’t need to read to comprehend. Carmella was repped by Pierre Sevion.

Of course, she was. Sevion was like a humpback whale, and Carmella was like fat, juicy krill. Hence, the invitation list at Grotto. Sevion wanted to interject himself between Carmella and Gracie because money was about to flow. He’d take his fifteen percent to negotiate a contract and make sure all the right hands were shaken.