Dead is the New Black (24 page)

Plate was no better than a diner. An upright aluminum napkin box shared a spot on the table with a porcelain box of sugar substitutes and a metal pole with a ring on top advertising the Belgian waffle special. The saltshaker had little bubbles of rice in it and needed a good wipe down. Only its wood and leather décor, not to mention its Chelsea address, elevated its status in life and, by extension, its prices—two eggs, eight dollars; glass of soda, three-fifty; burger, eleven seventy-five, twelve-fifty with cheese.

“So,” Laura said, “why did you drag me all the way here? Because I’m supposed to be convalescing.”

“Your problem is you try to do everything yourself, when you have everything you need right here.”

“Ruby, I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to save Jeremy or his business or anything. I just want to go home and try and be normal.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Ruby had an energy, a glow about her Laura hadn’t seen since she had called off her first engagement and decided to go to Parsons. Purpose. Vision. As if she finally had something to do that meant something to her, and Laura couldn’t take that away so soon.

“Listen,” Ruby began, “Jeremy swears he was in the factory. Did he tell you why he never goes in there?”

“No.” Jeremy’s condition was the one thing she had left out of the story.

“Here’s what I’m seeing. Sheldon wants the business, right? He found out about the affair, then about the IWU deal and wanted the deal. He could smell the money, so when Gracie says no way, they fight, right? Didn’t Nadal say there had been a fight? Okay, so we know that’s true and not something Jeremy made up. So, the shit has hit the fan with these three.” Ruby counted on her fingers as she spoke. “Jeremy wants the IWU deal and to be rid of Gracie, but his contract is rock solid. Sheldon wants the IWU deal, and he doesn’t want anyone to know his wife’s been cheating on him, but she’s not only going to squash the deal, she’s going public. Gracie holds all the cards. Both of these guys are screwed because of her.”

“So they both did it?”

“Either or both. All you need to do is prove Jeremy was in the factory that night, and then you know Sheldon’s your guy. If you can’t put him in that factory, then it may be both of them. That’s a totally cool answer. I love it.”

“I thought it was Carmella or Mario, I really did.” Laura sighed. Ruby’s exuberance exhausted her, and when she saw Stu lock his fixed gear to a parking sign, she felt even more tired.

She expected Ruby to blurt out the news that Laura loved Jeremy. It was just her kind of thing. As Laura remembered it, which of course made it true, Ruby had ruined Laura’s entire junior year of high school with just such an offhand comment to Otto Bennitowicz, who Laura didn’t have a deep liking for, but who was good enough, and funny, and who gave Laura enough attention to make her think that maybe he’d do in a pinch. Because she was tired of losing guys to Ruby and tired of not having a boyfriend and as lonely as any sixteen-year-old, which was pretty lonely.

But even then, thinking she had found someone to at least pass the time between Halloween and the junior prom, someone who Ruby couldn’t have the slightest interest in, Ruby managed to screw it up entirely. Because the assumption was that, as sisters, they shared every thought, feeling, and emotion. What one said about the other was true, not misinformed or made up, off-the-cuff, or even skewed by the individual’s perspective.

Laura had, of course, not told Ruby that she considered Otto boyfriend material. Ruby was still seeing Hank Dunbar and seemed quite content to leave Laura alone. But Ruby had a way of intuiting Laura’s interest and, during the fall book fair, had made a conspicuous effort to put Otto and Laura at the same table. When Otto made a funny remark about Ruby acting like the world’s only blond yenta, a remark at which Laura laughed loudly, Ruby said—and Laura would never forget it—“You shouldn’t need a yenta to see what’s in front of you.”

Laura was so embarrassed that she wouldn’t speak more than a few words at a time for the remainder of the book fair, and if Otto had been in the least interested in her, her puss face had soured him by the time they packed away the last dictionary.

So, as Stu slipped into the booth and ordered a cup of black coffee and toast, Ruby’s intimate knowledge of the goings-on between Laura and Stu and Jeremy terrified Laura into a tight-lipped watchfulness. And Stu seemed to be suffering from the same disease. Not that the grey mood at the table stifled Ruby one bit. She seemed committed to lifting the discourse with her sunny attitude, whether Stu and Laura liked it or not. She updated them on the wedding plans (no solid dates or places as of yet), showed off her ring (Stu was very polite even though he hated “consumer status trappings”), and babbled a little about work before thanking Stu for rescuing Laura from the ministrations of Jefferson and Hugo Boss.

“Now we have this issue with the TOP of that dress,” Ruby said.

“I have it,” Laura replied. “It’s perfect.”

“You have
a
TOP,” Ruby said. “You might not have
the
TOP. The last time I was in our factory in Guangzhou, I slipped off to go to the bathroom, which, by the way, was like a hole in the floor. I got lost on the way back and found this whole other sample room and, of course, no one spoke English. But as I was going through, I saw this t-shirt we had for the next delivery, and there was this guy swiftagging it with our TOP tag, right there. But, the t-shirt production was being finished in Panyu.”

“Seriously?” Laura asked.

“Totally,” Ruby said. “They’re on opposite ends of the province.”

“That’s messed up.” Laura shook her head.

“What?” Stu asked.

“Finished production was three hundred miles away,” Ruby said, going for a
duh
moment and getting nothing from Stu. “A TOP is supposed to come off the top of the box, finished, what’s going to the store. This way, we can see what’s coming and make sure it’s perfect. Or our technical designers, whatever. But these guys had a sample room where they made perfect TOPs so we’d approve them for shipping, which means the thousands that they finished in Panyu province were screwed up, and we would probably reject them, and the factory would be stuck with a bunch of T&C t-shirts and no money. So they made their own, for approval.”

Stu nodded, but waved his hand in a circle so they’d get to the point. Laura did it for her. “Ruby’s implying that Jeremy’s own factory created a perfect TOP to get an approval.”

“Exactly.” Ruby poured another packet of sugar into her coffee.

Laura continued, “Which is exactly
not
the reason his company is vertical. He maintains control of the factory so that doesn’t happen.”

Ruby wagged her finger. “Wrong. He’s not there. He doesn’t control anything. Who had something to gain from passing a bad TOP?”

“No one,” Laura said, frustrated. “You’re not getting it. There’s only Jeremy’s company. If the factory floor manager tried that, he’d get caught. If the production manager passed it, she’d get fired. The stores would return the goods, and he’d lose a fortune.”

“What if the floor manager didn’t know? What if some low man on the totem pole did it?” Ruby turned to Stu. “Did Ketchum deliver a TOP the night before the murder? Can you get their records or slip or whatever?”

Stu hesitated. “I think so.”

“You’re freaking me out,” Laura said.

Ruby laughed. “I love this. It’s like being on TV.”

“What’s amazing to me,” Stu said to Ruby, “is that you can’t find Kansas on a map, but you know the distance between two obscure Chinese provinces.”

“Are you getting the receipt or not?” Ruby asked.

“I’ll pursue it only if Laura’s okay with it.”

“I’m not okay with it. I’m not okay with any of it. I told you already that I wasn’t into chasing around for Gracie’s killer, and it’s like you didn’t even hear me. I’m the one who got beat up. I’m the one who’s been running around asking questions that piss people off. I’m the one who’s losing her job and, unlike you, I pay market rent. And now you brought Stu into this, which is going to make it impossible for me to say no. And who are you anyway? Sherlock Holmes?” Midway between “market” and “impossible,” it dawned on Laura that there was only one way to shake Ruby off, and that was to commit herself more fully to her sister, who stared at her, doe-eyed. “I saw Pierre Sevion yesterday,” she said. “He wants to find us a backer as a team. And that’s what I want to focus my energy on right now, not this crap.”

There was a pause while Ruby sipped her coffee. She seemed to ponder the offer, or maybe she was pondering Laura’s delay in telling her. Or maybe she was considering the offer, or how it was delivered.

Stu broke the silence. “Pierre Sevion?
The
Pierre Sevion?”

Ruby, who always seemed like the dim one, who always had her mind fixed on the smallest, pettiest thing, who worried about status and impressions more than anyone, who Laura had out-thought their entire lives, was unmoved, unimpressed, and unhurried. “Sevion can wait. We’ll be sisters after this whole thing is over. If you don’t clear Jeremy or prove he did it, it’s going to hang on you, and you’re going to make me crazy forever.”

Somehow, Ruby’s reluctance to be sucked into the possibility of having her own line softened Laura. It was almost like her interest in the case really was about helping.

“If you’re so interested in pretending you’re on CSI, we can talk to some more people, but I’m not getting beat up again, okay? That was the least fun I ever had.”

Ruby clapped as if she’d been asked to the prom by the captain of the football team. She threw a ten on the table and left, saying something about Michael, naturally.

She left a vacuum of enthusiasm behind, and without direction, Stu and Laura had nothing to do but think about all their frictions.

“Are you okay with this?” Stu asked.

“Yeah. I should finish what I started. I never thanked you for helping me out.”

“I shouldn’t have left you alone.”

Laura shrugged. She didn’t know where he got the sense of responsibility over her, and it rankled, then comforted her, then rankled again.

“About the other night,” he said, and she knew he meant the night he’d kissed her. “I’m not apologizing for it, but I think I shocked you or something.”

“I’m easily confused.”

“Can you not cover everything over with bullshit, please? You’re not easily confused. You were just surprised I didn’t keep it to myself. You knew for a long time, and you kept me around in case something else didn’t work out.”

She froze. Had Ruby said something? Even having seen her sister betray her a thousand times before, she was still shocked.

“So, who is he, and is he working out?”

“Stu, really.”

“I’ve been honest with you. I’ve told you how I feel, and you owe me the same honesty.”

“No, I don’t. I don’t owe you my relationship with anyone else just because you live in this world where we’re all so confident and secure that we can say what we feel. I can’t do that. Most human beings, in America, can’t do that. Most people have shame and hurt that they deal with, and they get really bummed if they have feelings that aren’t reciprocated.”

“I’m not that different than most people.”

He stunned her into silence. Of course, he hurt the same as anyone else. “Most people aren’t that brave. I’m sorry. That’s what I meant. And as far as anyone else, there’s no relationship. There’s one in my head, but that’s all. And I can’t figure out what I feel about you until my head catches up with my life.”

He shrugged. His shrug didn’t say, “I don’t care”; his shrug said, “You’re full of crap.” Instead of answering, she shrugged back, because a verbal answer would be long and include too many meaningless apologies. No rash decisions were forthcoming, and both she and Stu knew it.

“Am I checking for your TOP?” Stu asked.

“Do you want to?”

“Yeah, I kind of want to stick it to the Pomerantzes.”

Laura was glad Stu’s hatred of the wealthy class even trumped his feelings for her. She paid the rest of the check, citing feminism, regard for a favor, and her rescue from the patrons of a douchebag nightclub.

CHAPTER 24.

Laura felt partly responsible to Carmella, even though she was a dirty liar. If Mario decided to get angry about Laura’s visit, it was likely he’d come down on his mistress.

Carmella’s loft wasn’t really a loft in the 1970s meaning of the word. It had never been a warehouse, nor had it been a factory or industrial space. She hadn’t had to polish the floors or scrape the walls when she moved in. She didn’t subdivide the space herself. There was no fixture fee, nor had she ever fought to rezone the space as residential. She lived in a prewar building that had gone co-op in the nineties. The owners had taken advantage of the high ceilings by exposing some brick, taking out some walls to create an open floor plan, and selling the results as live/work lofts. Carmella said she got it because unfinished lofts were no longer available in Manhattan. Period. But Laura knew she lacked the stomach for a real loft with its decades-old grime and drafty windows.

Carmella shouldn’t have been home, either, but Laura had the feeling that with Jeremy in the hospital that morning, the office had deteriorated enough that people stopped showing up. And she was right. The doorman called Carmella and sent Laura up to the fourteenth floor.