Dead is the New Black (2 page)

“Jeremy? Are you okay?”

He looked at her and opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“You’re catching flies, Jeremy,” she said, meaning to make him laugh. He didn’t. He looked at the floor.

Laura followed his gaze and almost dropped her scissors on the dead body.

CHAPTER 2.

No one heard it but her and Jeremy, as the body on the office floor no longer had functioning ears. With the face covered by a Beckerman greatcoat, it wasn’t immediately apparent for whom Laura screamed.

Jeremy cringed.

“What happened?” she asked, after she caught her breath.

“I just came in, and she was here.” When Laura looked at the fabric twisted in his hands, he added, “I took this off her neck. I thought it would save her. Taking it off.”

One of the woman’s pumps lay on its side a few feet away, the inner sole advertising for Via Spiga; the other still clung to the left foot. Tanned arms and legs, toned from hours with a personal trainer, lolled akimbo, giving her the look of a middle-aged doll left in the gutter. Her fur coat and matching hat were crumpled in the corner like a dead animal. Her hand clutched a cluster of shredded white paper, more of which covered the floor like sauerkraut.

Laura pushed the coat off the woman’s face, spilling a half-dozen Jeremy St. James logo buttons, and as they clicked to the floor, she saw dozens more dotting the tiles. It looked as if someone had opened a box of them and shook it hard.

“It’s Mrs. Pomerantz,” she whispered, feeling her neck for a pulse. She didn’t know if she was feeling in the right place, but the skin was cold and, when she saw Gracie Pomerantz’s eyes, with mascara caked around them and a contact lens slipping off the iris, she realized it didn’t matter if she knew where to find a pulse. “Did you call the police?”

“Get out,” Jeremy said. “We need to get out of this office.” He dropped the fabric as though it were made of warm dog leavings and pointed her toward the door. She couldn’t disobey. He followed her into the hall and gripped her arm, pulling her to the design room. He loosened his grip when they got there, and she went to her desk. The phone was covered in coffee, but she didn’t care anymore. She dialed 911 while Jeremy leaned on Carmella’s desk. She told the dispatcher everything he needed to know, but hung up when he asked for her driver’s license number. The police could take her info in person when they got there. She didn’t think she’d be penalized for rudeness.

“What happened?” she asked again.

“What do you mean, what happened?” His crossed his arms, his tone one he generally reserved for the rest of his staff, not her. He never gave her his short voice, and she was taken off-guard.

“Gracie is dead in your office.” Gracie had her own office upstairs, a fancy one she shared with Jeremy to entertain clients and buyers. Laura knew what Gracie did, in theory. As Jeremy’s financial backer, she was the source of cash flow in the tight times of the year, which always happened between fabric buys. She also added more cash when he wanted to grow and then took whatever percentage of profits they had agreed upon. In exchange, she had a say in what made the line, who they bought fabric from, where the money went, and—what seemed most egregious to Laura—everyone had to be super nice to her. She had abused that privilege on a daily basis.

“Here’s what I want you to do,” Jeremy said. “I want you to answer the police truthfully and candidly when they ask you a question, and I’ll do the same, okay? Outside that, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m sorry I was late today.” Laura tried to deflect the unpleasantness.

“Why? Did you kill her between seven thirty and eight?”

“No!”

“Then keep out of it. Whatever happens here today, we have to stay focused. There’s a show in two weeks, and it goes off the rails if we let it.” He was right, if not a little freakishly callous. His company was his life. She had never heard him speak of a love interest of any gender. He had friends, or people he knew in the business. The two were one in the same. His parents lived in Canada, and he never spoke of any other family. No pets even.

He travelled frequently and without notice. After arriving at work, Carmella or Laura would get a call in the morning from his personal assistant, Tinto Benito, a man they had never met, informing them that Jeremy would be traveling for two weeks or ten days or whatever, and Gracie was in charge. No calls. No emails. No nothing. Sometimes, Gracie would tell them Jeremy wasn’t coming in, and they were going to have to manage without their boss for a time. But when he came back, there was hell to pay. That was the side of him she saw now—terse and bitchy.

“Don’t worry,” she said. Before she could stop herself, she added, “I won’t let the business go off the rails.” It was a promise she had no idea how to keep.

“I’m counting on you,” he replied, making it much, much worse.

“I saw a fake Donatella,” she said. He raised an eyebrow. “Some lady on the train. I followed her. That’s why I was later than usual.”

“You followed her?”

“She said her mother got it in China. So someone’s knocking you off in Asia.”

He grinned. She focused on the beautiful little crease in his bottom lip that disappeared when he smiled.

“You stopped her and asked her where she got it?”

“Yeah. I figured you could tell Gracie, because I don’t want to. She’s liable to go bananas on me for not ripping it off her.” And then Laura realized she was speaking about Gracie as if she were still alive, which she wasn’t. She guessed Jeremy was now in charge of hunting down and suing counterfeiters, which Gracie did—no,
had done
—with relish.

Laura didn’t realize how tense she was until she jumped at the sound of the front doorbell. “I’ll get it.” She ran for reception.

Two uniformed cops stood outside the glass doors with two guys in cheap civilian jackets who Laura assumed were detectives. They needed a code to get in and looked ready to do whatever police officers did when they needed to open a locked door. She used her key to let them in and introduced herself.

“I’m Detective Cangemi,” the first detective said with a Brooklyn accent so thick he sounded like he had a pack of gum in his jaw. “This is Detective Samuelson, who else we got in the office?” The two uniforms blew past without even a ‘How-do-you-do.’

“Me and Jeremy St. James, I have no idea who else is here.”

“It’s Sunday. Why’s anyone here?”

“The show’s next Friday.” She didn’t mean to sound like a snotrag, but she probably did, anyway.

“Lent’s got four Fridays, but I ain’t going to Mass every Monday.”

“You do if you have to rebuild the church every Ash Wednesday.”

Detective Cangemi smirked. “Get inside,” he said, as if it were his office and she were the one visiting. She figured they learned they owned the city at the academy.

Jeremy walked Samuelson to the back, talking with graceful gestures, accentuating the fact that he was tall, slim, straight-shouldered, and lithe. When he walked like that, she had thoughts she quickly had to shut out before people saw them on her face.

When their voices faded, Cangemi sat her down on the leather couch in reception and had her recount her morning and her routine. In at 7:30 five days a week, six or seven days per week before a show. She left when she could, clocking fifty to seventy hours a week, depending on the time of year.

“And for this, you make how much?” he asked.

“Less than you, but nobody’s shooting at me,” she replied.

He smirked. “And you’re a designer, or what?”

“I’m a patternmaker.”

“You do the flowers and stuff on the fabric?”

It always amazed her that people wore clothes every day, but nobody had any idea what went into making them. “Did your mom ever sew anything for you at home?”

“Yeah. An Easter suit when I was seven. Light blue. Dumb-looking thing.”

“Before she sewed it, she had to cut the fabric, right?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Likely, she laid pieces of tissue paper down onto flat fabric, pinned them down, and cut. Well, the tissue paper was in the right shape, and it was in the right shape because a patternmaker drew it that way.”

“You make shapes,” he said.

“That’s right. I make the shape right so the garment fits. If it doesn’t fit, you’re screwed.”

He looked at her for a second as if to say ‘
That’s a job?
’ then got back to the business at hand. “This morning, tell me exactly what you saw when you walked into the office.”

“Okay. So, I put in my code and—”

“You got your own code?”

“Everyone does.” She tried to look at what he scratched into his little black pad. “And the lights were on, so I knew Jeremy was in, because Renee turns them off when she leaves at six.”

“Did you notice anything else out of place?”

“There was a napkin in the trash. A brown one from HasBean, where Jeremy gets his coffee.”

“Then, you went to your desk?”

“Right, and then I went to his office.”

“Why?”

“To thank him for the coffee.” She tilted her head, ready to say ‘
Duh
,’ but caught herself in time. “And so she was lying there, and Jeremy was there, too, all freaked out.”

“Describe ‘freaked out.’”

“He was standing there like…” She stood and mimicked Jeremy’s position.

Cangemi looked her up and down. “His hands were just like that?”

“Yeah.”

“In fists?”

“Yeah, like this.” She held her fists out and bent her elbows, just like she’d seen Jeremy do, as if flying a plane.

“Anything in them?”

“Zebra fabric. A long header.”

From Cangemi’s blank look, he didn’t know what a header was, so she explained, “Fabric salespeople, like Terry Distorni, who’s our major supplier, want you to use their fabric on the line. So they send you little pieces of what they have. They’re called headers, or swatches, depending on the size, and you get like a few hundred a season. And you design your line with those fabrics, or not. But a header is like a sample of what they can make for you in production.”

“And Jeremy had one in his hands when you saw him?”

“Yeah. He said he took it off her. To see if she was alive,” she added.

“And?”

“And, I checked her pulse. I mean, I put my fingers on her neck, and it was cold. There was no pulse, if I was even looking in the right spot. So then I called you.”

Cangemi sat back in his chair and flipped through his notes, leaning his left ankle on his right knee. He wore argyle socks. The left sock drooped like the elastic had been stretched.

“You shouldn’t do that to your socks,” Laura said, pointing. “You put them in a ball before you put them in the drawer, and it wears the elastic on one and not the other. Or both, if you’re not organized.”

“My girlfriend’s pretty organized.” He smiled, but there was no warmth in it. “Did you know the victim? And did you notice how she arranged her underwear drawer?” That time, he smiled like he meant it. He wanted to be the one making the jokes. Fine.

“She was Jeremy’s backer, Gracie Pomerantz. The money.”

“She usually here this early?”

“She comes in the weeks before a show, but no, not this early, and she’s never in the design area. She usually hangs around the showroom and the fancy office over on that side.”

“When did you see her last?”

“About fifteen minutes ago.” She smiled wanly, getting nowhere with the guy. “Okay, kidding. Last night, we were all here until about seven, and she came in at about… I don’t know, ten in the morning or something, and she and Jeremy were in the front office for hours. I have no idea what they were talking about.”

“What time did she leave?”

“I want to say two o’clock, but I was really busy. Could have been later. She said some really bitchy thing and walked out. But that’s normal for her, so, whatever.”

He nodded once, making eye contact, an expression meant to tell her to be more specific without actually nagging her. He probably learned that at the academy, too.

“I was working on this dress, and it was on the mannequin. She came by, and said ‘That looks like a potato sack, Laura. If you’re not going to do the job right, we can find another kid right out of school to do it.’ Which she said because Jeremy hired me right out of Parsons, and she didn’t like that. Anyway, I could like, feel the stress coming off her, so I said, ‘Do you mean the waist is too big, or is the length wrong, or what do you think?’ She grabbed my pins and started pinning all over, thinking she’s doing it right but instead, she’s making this terrible mess. So I just let her finish, and when she did I said, ‘Oh, okay sure, I can make it like that,’ which by the way, was a disaster, but I didn’t say that. She put my pins down and walked out. The whole thing was weird, except, you know, she always kind of acted like she could do my job better than me because she used to sew from Butterick patterns.”

“Did she say anything to anyone else before she left?”

Laura replayed those moments in her mind, imagining Gracie walking away from her. She had been wearing a lavender suit that fit like plastic surgery and matching stilettos that would surely necessitate actual surgery.