Dead is the New Black

by Christine Demaio-Rice

  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.

  “She said something to Jeremy I didn’t hear. And he said, ‘Don’t you dare go.’ I couldn’t hear the rest. They were at each other’s throats all day, about what, I don’t know.”

 
; “You’re very frank,” Cangemi said. “I like that in a witness.”

  “Thank you.” Unable to resist, she continued like a vaudevillian, “And don’t call me Frank.”

  He nodded, acknowledging the joke, but not the fact that it was hilarious. Cangemi closed his little notebook and promised more questions as they arose. As she walked back to her desk, she passed what used to be Jeremy’s office, but was now a crime scene. Camera flashes blazed. Handheld radios buzzed. Tall men shouted orders. A lady in a blue uniform slid Laura’s paper scissors into a plastic bag.

  “I need those,” she cried.

  Cangemi saw her distress. “You’ve got only one pair of scissors?”

  “I have fabric scissors. If I cut paper with them, they’re ruined.”

  He looked at her as though she had lost her mind. She tried to remember he wasn’t a cutter. He lived like the rest of the population. Scissors were tools you bought at Target while you were there for something else, then lost immediately, and found in a drawer a year later. To her, they were an extension of herself. She wanted to ask him if he’d use just any gun he found in the back of the drawer, but she needed her scissors and didn’t want to risk out-joking him again.

  “They were on the scene,” he replied. “We gotta log them in.”

  “I can’t work without them.”

  “What were they doing in here?”

  “I was drying them off. They had coffee on them.”

  “You spilled coffee when you got here?” He made a note.

  “It was already spilled.” She pointed in the general direction of her workspace.

  When Laura saw Cangemi make another note, she knew she’d just opened up a world of trouble.

  CHAPTER 3.

  The police took Jeremy to the precinct for questioning. She didn’t get a chance to say goodbye or get detailed instructions, and she didn’t know what it meant to be brought in, anyway. Was it the same as an arrest? Were they accusing him? She became frustrated with her own ignorance. She watched the occasional crime show and blew through the headlines as she walked by newsstands, but the ins and outs of criminal procedures had never mattered to her.

  They covered the body before they hauled it away in a black bag. They made phone calls and picked up stuff with tweezers. They photographed the coffee stain on Laura’s desk from four angles. Once they had secured the crime scene with yellow tape, they all left, except for the detectives, who stayed and waited for the rest of the employees to show up.

  Laura figured she’d be able to continue working until this all cleared up, and that the show would proceed as normal next Friday. But when people started showing up at ten, they needed briefings, recounts, and storytelling.

  The first person to arrive was Carmella. Her alibi checked out by the reek of cigarettes, alcohol, and stale sweat. It was Sunday morning, after all, so the cops let her go to her desk and get to work. Laura remembered crossing paths with her at a loft party the night before, which had been conveniently located less than three blocks from work. Carmella’d had some kind of altercation with an outer-borough-looking guy Laura had never seen before and, somehow in the noise and heat and press of bodies, she’d lost Carmella and just gone home early.

  Jeremy had told Laura he’d hired Carmella as a senior designer from a dead division at the LVMH offices in Milan. He said all her talent was in her nose, which was a compliment, since the protrusion at the center of her face required its own zip code. She wore it like an asset, and it was, because everything else about her physical appearance was perfect. She was five-nine, size six, with flawless skin, a cute little pixie cut, straight teeth, long neck, etcetera, etcetera. Laura would have traded that nose for half her physical assets.

  “What happened last night?” Laura asked, “Who was that guy?”

  Carmella waved a hand dismissively, her red-rimmed eyes swollen like rising dough. “Some guinea asshole who almost hit me when I crossed Eighth,” she said, likely elaborating for the sake of drama. “I called him a testa di cazzo, but I didn’t know he could speak Italian. He followed me three blocks to let me know he had understood me, and then asked for my number.” She fished a bottle of eye drops out of her bag. “So, the witch is dead?”

  Laura nodded, trying to figure out how she was going to slash a shoulder seam without scissors. “They took Jeremy for questioning. He’ll be back.”

  “They told me they arrested him.” Drop, drop. Blink.

  Laura’s breath hitched a little. “Well, that’s ridiculous. Why would he kill his backer? It’s like the goose with the golden egg.”

  Carmella sidled up to Laura’s table, apparently giving up on the idea of getting anything done today. She wasn’t known for her work ethic, which was why Jeremy’d had the pushpin-flying tantrum over the shirtwaist jacket. If Carmella would get her work done on time, Laura could sit home watching TV on Sundays.

  “Did you ever see their contract?” Carmella asked.

  “Why would I look at Jeremy’s contracts?”

  “Well, everybody knows it was the worst in the business. It practically forced him not to make money. And you know how our St. James is about the making of money.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  Carmella rolled her eyes. Because Laura had unfettered access to Jeremy, she didn’t participate in office gossip or spread rumors. If she wanted to know something, she went to the source, as Jeremy had mandated. “My patternmaker is my vision,” he had said on her second day. “If you’re not the eyes and ears of the design room, I’m blind.” She thought patternmakers always enjoyed such contact with the company founder.

  “Darling, this lady handcuffed him,” Carmella said, pulling out a pack of Gitanes. Laura could feel the jones coming off her as she counted on the fingers of her non-Gitanes-clutching hand. “He couldn’t even start another line with his own name. He couldn’t take orders over a certain number without her signing it, and he had to sell only to certain stores, or she could take over the business. And it was a twenty-year contract that she could renew if she wanted to, but he couldn’t get out of.”

  “He’d never agree to that.”

  “He was nineteen. What did he know?”

  The thought of anyone taking advantage of Jeremy shocked Laura. He was an arrogant, cocksure prick when he wanted to be, which was most of the time, and good business practice was nearly a religion to him.

  Carmella eyed Jeremy’s office. The smoking section—AKA the balcony—was past it, but the door was closed. A sticker with dire warnings was fixed in the seam between door and jamb.

  “But, killing her? Doesn’t that seem a little extreme?” Laura asked.

  “Did I say he planned it? Darling, please. I’m only suggesting he had a reason to be pissed off. Listen, I need to go down for a smoke. You want one?”

  “No, thanks. You coming back?”

  Carmella shrugged and tapped something into her cell phone. “I have to do some things. Then, I’m going home to sleep. That party last night wouldn’t end. If I go back, it’ll still be going, I swear.” In an incredible act of multitasking, she did a little dance with her skinny butt and put on her coat while pressing her cell phone to her ear. She probably would go back to the party.

  Laura was alone again, with only the two detectives waiting in reception, and no scissors to slash the shoulders. A dress form held the jacket she was correcting, a tweedy thing with rhinestones and a plunging neckline, meant to be worn with a see-through lace camisole. The sideseam was too long, and she had to shorten it by creating a fold in the paper under the arm, then opening the shoulder and adjusting everything else so the fabric was still cut straight. It was Patternmaking 101, if you were paying attention and had your supplies.

  She stole a pair of scissors from Tiffany’s desk just as the assistant designer came in.

  “Those have my name on them?” Tiffany asked. Though only a couple of years younger than Laura, technically, as assistant designer, Tiffany was three rungs below her on the of
fice ladder. But as a designer, Tiffany could one day become Laura’s boss.

  Laura explained why she took the scissors. Tiffany betrayed no emotion in that ‘I’m not thinking or feeling anything but a general sense of pleasantness’ Midwestern way, with her slightly tucked in cheeks and small puckering of the lips. She slipped Friday’s Women’s Wear Daily from a pile on Carmella’s table and went to her chair. She didn’t mention the scissors again and made no complaint when Laura borrowed her ruler.

  Some of the sales people came in to catch up on paperwork. André, the head of sales, showed up first. He was a slicked-back metrosexual from some backwater in Belgium. He puffed his chest out like a peacock on most days, and bullied his staff on the rest. He was married to a stockbroker named Inge, who was naturally submissive and quiet, except at work, apparently, because her bonus checks were a matter of public record. If someone really wanted to piss him off, all they had to do was mention her name and the number published next to it in the Wall Street Journal. His whole body would turn into a closed fist at the mere thought of it.

  Unlike Tiffany, who shrouded everything under an innocent stare, he took the news hard, saying, “Dead? Really dead?” a few times before Cangemi called his name and brought him into the reception area for his interview.

  Sniffling, Tiffany spoke softly on the phone. “No, Mom. Please, don’t freak out, okay?” More tears, then, “I’m not coming home. I’m fine.” Which Laura thought was inevitable, since Tiffany’s little town in the great state of who-even-knows-what wasn’t accessible without a compass and a biplane, and she’d tasted New York. She was finished. She was most certainly not going home outside of Christmas break, even if office carnage became a daily occurrence.

  Eve, the fabric buyer, came in to fax some purchase orders and threatened to quit on the spot. “My husband’s gonna pick me up and drop me off every day if he hears about this.”