Dead is the New Black

by Christine Demaio-Rice

She was joined by others. People tended to work on the weekends before the show. It was expected, and it was necessary. Buyers from all over the world came, and salespeople entertained them all week. However, paperwork still had to be processed, fabric had to be ordered from the mill, and purchase orders still came in. Those things were managed on the weekends, or from home.

  André passed through after his interview, even though the design room wasn’t on the way to the showroom. “So,” he said, swaggering, “you found her. How did she look?”

  “Dead,” Laura said without inflection.

  “Of course, but…” He stopped on a Frenched wet “t” and opened his palm as though there were a piece of information he wanted Laura to drop into it. She said nothing. Seeing that she had no inclination to unravel what he meant, he dropped it.

  “Hello, don’t they have cameras in the lobby?” Tiffany asked. “They shouldn’t even need to ask.”

  “Gold star,” André said. He patted her on the head like a kindergarten teacher. “Where’s Chilly? How is the graphic artist not here?” He looked at Chilly’s desk, where the computer flashed a screensaver of the Coachella show, and then looked at Laura and Tiffany as if they had somehow failed in life because Chilly wasn’t in on a Sunday. “Show is in two weeks, and I have no look books. So why is this chair empty?” The look books, which featured photographs of the Spring outfits as they were meant to be worn, were handed out before the show. They were always late, but André was doing what he usually did, giving everyone else anxiety attacks because he had something on his mind.

  “Do you want me to call his cell?” Tiffany asked.

  “Where’s Jeremy?” he demanded.

  “I have him locked in the tower,” Laura answered, and Tiffany’s lips got thin as she tried not to laugh. André was not amused. The bags under his eyes told the story of a long night, and Laura’s desire to bait him could backfire in a blink. She had to remind herself that, though André was a bully and a jerk, he and Jeremy were very, even weirdly, close. Jeremy never denied or confirmed that they were lovers, but neither Laura nor anyone else had ever asked, either.

  André strode out of the design room, one hand in his pocket, looking at everyone’s computer screen to make sure they weren’t on Facebook or something. Bad habit. Jeremy didn’t care if you went on Facebook, as long as your work was perfect. André’s last job was at a clearinghouse for discount retailers like Centennial and Mitzi’s. Working there must have been a real freaking joy.

  Tiffany caught up whomever else strolled in, adding her own speculations about what they would do on CSI, the terrible security in the office, and the less than savory characters hanging around 38th and Broadway on weekends. Every woman in the office knew where to get a can of pepper spray, and there were more than a few takers for a self-defense class.

  But nothing was getting done, and Laura despaired of Jeremy’s reaction when he came in tomorrow. By the time she finished the jacket, a crowd had gathered around Tiffany’s desk. There was talk of the lazy night watchman, the regular homeless guy who opened the door for people in the morning, the valuables around the office, and the creepy feeling everyone claimed to have when walking by the police tape in Jeremy’s doorway.

  No one had a kind word or remorseful feeling for Gracie Pomerantz, except the old ‘I wouldn’t wish that kind of death on anyone.’ Few of them had ever been charmed by her. There were no sweet stories of this or that nice thing she did that one time, because that one time had never happened. Gracie was famous for philanthropy—an expert ribbon-cutter at school playgrounds and inner-city hospital wings. On a slow week, she even responded to the occasional hard-luck story, using her relationship with the mayor—they both went to Cornell—to stand up for the poor and downtrodden, acquiring enormous prominence for herself, eating her fame like soft cookies still warm from the oven.

  But she cared for no one within arm’s reach.

  No one entertained the thought that Jeremy had strangled her with a silk zebra-print header. He was a jerk, impatient, and an absurd perfectionist, but he was not a murderer. On that, they agreed. He would most certainly be in tomorrow, first thing, breaking everyone’s ass over the lost half-Sunday of work.

  When the news vans pulled up outside at 11:30, lipstick was applied, and the room cleared. It was interview time.

  Laura was alone in the office once again and wondering about getting some pepper spray herself. The walls were closing in on her, and she feared putting her headphones on because she might not hear the murdering bastard creep up behind her. Every noise was magnified tenfold, every snap of paper, every click of scissors, every scratch of a pencil. She draped a muslin for the Emily skirt, pinned the fabric, turned it, and snipped around the waistline until it fell across the mannequin’s thighs in big, looping flares. When the side-seams matched, she unpinned it. The squeaking of the mannequin echoed against the walls of the empty office. When she laid out the fabric to trace the shape for her pattern, she clicked her pencil—out of lead. She took that as a sign that her day was over. She couldn’t score another line. The drape was done, but the pattern would have to wait.

  Laura waited for the elevator, tracing the steps the killer might have taken. Jeremy St. James was on the fourth floor, on the border between guilt for taking the elevator instead of getting an ass-kicking workout. Typically, Laura chose guilt over the workout. She wondered if the murderer had done the same. And how did Gracie Pomerantz get upstairs? And why?

  While waiting, she looked down the hallway. It was an old building. The brass and glass mail tubes still ran between floors. There were sconces and old paint. The other side of the hall had glass doors with Jeremy’s name painted on them, and wooden opaque doors behind led to a non-functioning back entrance with the hum of the sample floor behind it.

  The elevator dinged, and Laura got in. She stood alone in one of two elevator cars. Remembering what Tiffany had said about cameras, she looked for one on the ceiling and was greeted by a glass orb smeared with marker and another substance she was at pains to name. She hoped the police weren’t depending on the elevator cameras to find the killer.

  The lobby wasn’t much to speak of, except for the marble floors with a compass rose in the center. She had no idea what the compass was supposed to achieve. Everyone knew Seventh Avenue ran south. Once you were out the door and saw which way the cars drove, a short spate of deductive reasoning made the compass rose redundant.

  There was a more modern counter for the doorman, who didn’t work on Sundays. Closed circuit monitors flashed at his desk, even in his absence. Laura did a quick scan of the lobby and found the camera. Thankfully, it was in better shape than the one in the elevator. That would get Jeremy off the hook and expose the killer before tomorrow, for sure.

  Encouraged, she stopped by her apartment, then went to her mother’s for a laundry run. She’d forget the whole thing before the spin cycle started.

  CHAPTER 4.

  Laura’s mother never let the fact that she couldn’t cook keep her from charming her daughters home. The meals were hot and salty, and occasionally solid, but little else. The functioning Whirlpool washer/dryer combo, an aging tin box stuffed in a precious closet of her tiny Hell’s Kitchen two-bedroom, was what brought Laura and her sister Ruby back to the apartment weekly.

  Laura remembered the worst shame of her adolescence—the clothesline hung in the hallway, dripping on the decades-old paint that the landlord, Moshe, would not renew, and that Mom scraped, replastered, primed, and painted herself in an effort to stay under the radar and, thus, keep the place rent-controlled. The “wonderful euro wet/dry box,” which cleaned and dried clothes in a swoop, as well as her “dishwashing wheeled thingy,” were illegal in the building because Moshe paid the water bill, and therefore, they could get her evicted. Laura suspected the water-hogging appliances served the dual purpose of drawing her and her sister back to the apartment periodically, as well as letting Mom flirt with eviction, like having an affair so your h
usband would leave you.

  That’s what Ruby had likened it to on her last visit to the euro wet/dry box. Everything went back to men. Ruby could be as interesting as a lump of dried gum. Laura wondered if it was that flatness that attracted good fortune to her sister who, at ten months older, was as close to a twin as you could get without actually being one, and who was as far away from Laura as possible in just about every other respect.

  For instance, right out of high school, Ruby had found an illicit rent-controlled two bedroom in SoHo that required little more than a paint job and three-digit rent checks made out to the legal lessee in Parsippany, New Jersey. Laura had ended up with two roommates and a loft bed hung over a doorway in a Lower East Side studio. Ruby had offered her second bedroom to her sister like alms, and Laura had counteroffered that Ruby should kiss her flat white ass, to which Ruby’s best and final response was a set of puckered pink lips sucking the air between them.

  Laura could not deny the satisfaction she felt upon hearing that, a scant three years into her lifetime rent-controlled tenure, Ruby had been forced out when the landlord, on a random walkthrough, had busted her taking out the garbage like she actually lived there.

  By then, Laura had bitten the bullet and left Manhattan for the somewhat slightly cheaper rental market of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and was in a position to offer Ruby a spot on her couch. But Mom countered that Ruby had spoken with the landlord, spilled the Parsippany address, and negotiated herself a good price on a vacancy he had on Sullivan Street. “And seriously, Laura,” Mom asked, “what would Ruby do in Brooklyn for Christ’s sake? Date coosheens and eat gabbagole and mootzadel?”

  “And me, Ma? Why is it okay for me to be boroughed?”

  Mom shrugged in a way that let Laura know there was a natural order of things, and that only those that understood it could love two very different daughters the same. But Laura wasn’t hearing it. She was feeling petulant and cranky. Her neighborhood hadn’t seen a cugine since the early ‘80s. It was wall-to-wall butter-skinned art students who had a seemingly endless trove of accessories and the knowledge of how to wear them. Even the lady behind the counter at the Korean market wore bracelets and earrings that didn’t match, but went perfectly together. Gabbagole, her ass.

  Laura, a native Manhattanite, lasted a full year in Brooklyn before she found a way-too-expensive apartment on East Broadway. It was a haul to the train, and the rent made ramen noodles her main nutritional source, but she had never habituated to crossing water every day just to go to work.

  A month after Laura’s move, Ruby had called Mom to complain about the lady upstairs, whose two little yippy dogs had peed on the floor until urine soaked right through the paint in Ruby’s ceiling. As Ruby’s luck had it, Laura’s upstairs neighbor, Mr. Colella, decided to move to White Plains. He didn’t tell Laura that his apartment was rent-controlled, or that he was offering it as an indefinite sublet, at rent-controlled rates with a few hundred dollars tacked on so he could pay for the utility bills on his Cape Cod. Otherwise, she would have snapped it up. He told Ruby instead, who now lived directly above Laura at less than half the rent.

  Ruby had taken a year off of school to give her attention to an engagement with a budding lawyer named Samuel. That put them in the same class at Parsons, as well as the same building.

  Which was great, just great, as it coincided with their last year of school—a pressure cooker, especially when she worked full-time at Jeremy St. James and her sister upstairs partied like a musician and seemed to pull magical design projects out of her ass until she graduated with honors. Laura graduated in a pile of sweat, spit, and exhaustion. By that time, the comparisons between them were constant, except Ruby was also two-and-a-half inches taller, two sizes smaller—depending on the time of the month—and had better hair. If justice existed in the world, Laura was at pains to find it.

  She knew a Sunday evening wasn’t going to come and go without Ruby and Mom, so she wasn’t disappointed when Ruby texted her—Do you have a load in?—sixty seconds before she blew into the apartment. Laura didn’t even have a chance to text back.

  Ruby peeled off her jacket and placed it on a hook by the front door. Her stylish and not-too-unwieldy laundry bag trailed behind her and, when she smiled, the room lit up like noon at the equator.

  “Your sister has a load in,” Mom said, pecking Ruby on the cheek. “So, eat first.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Ruby responded, poking her head into a steaming pot of whatever. “Wow. Jeremy St. James killed his backer. It’s like the goose with the egg.”

  “He didn’t kill anyone.” Laura kept her tone professional. Ruby did not, and never would, know how Laura felt about her boss.

  “Hey, are you going to work tomorrow? Is there even a job? We don’t use patternmakers at T&C, but they’re always looking for tech designers.”

  It was an open-handed slap in the mouth, followed by a backhand. After Parsons, Ruby wound up designing for Tollridge & Cherry, a huge operation with retail stores, a full-color magazine that showed up in mailboxes constantly with the same products rearranged, and a web presence that kept China in business. Laura ended up a patternmaker at Jeremy St. James, forever a patternmaker, according to Ruby, shut out of designing like a kid with her nose pressed against the candy store window.

  “He’ll be in tomorrow,” Laura said. “The show’s next Friday, and I haven’t heard anything about a cancellation. By the way, do you need tickets?” Laura got her own backhand in there. T&C didn’t have shows, naturally. They sold ski caps, pea coats, and striped sweaters in winter. They ran the same khaki pants eleven out of twelve deliveries. The invitation meant Laura felt no fear that Ruby would be able to steal a thing from Jeremy.

  “Oh, those shows.” Mom spooned the thick white something into bowls. “They put you girls under all this stress, and then what? You’re just behind on Monday. It’s like a wedding.”

  “Speaking of,” Ruby said, clapping her hands together, “I brought my sketch book.”

  “Yay,” Laura mumbled. She tried to be upbeat about Ruby’s wedding, and the dress she had committed to make, but as the date approached, the feeling of dread grew like cheap leather pants.

  It wasn’t that Laura wasn’t happy for Ruby. Her envy didn’t go that deep. She could be happy for her sister’s rent-controlled apartment, for the better job, and the two inches and twenty pounds difference between them. But she could not be happy that Ruby was tying herself to a possessive douchebag working ad sales for Fortune magazine.

  Ruby ate two bowls of what turned out to be salty potato soup while she flipped through the sketchbook, which had wedding gowns from Martha Stewart Bridal pasted in it and her penciled interpretations on the facing page. The three of them talked construction and fabric for two hours, until the laundry finished and their bellies were full of nondescript starch.

  When the doorbell rang, Ruby jumped up to answer the door, giving Michael a big hug he didn’t deserve. He strolled into the kitchen in a storm of navy blue poly/wool blend. He enjoyed working out and preferred to work on his upper, rather than lower body. As a result, his jackets were four sizes bigger than his pants.

  “Hey, Ma.” He held the back of Mom’s head when he kissed her on the cheek, which was one of the millions of things Laura hated about him. “I asked one of the lawyers at work, and that bike they got out there in the hallway? That’s against the fire code.” He hated the junk in the hallway, like he hated everything about the poverty Ruby grew up in.

  “It’s been there six years, Michael. I’m not telling them to move it now.”

  He punched Laura in the arm with a “How you doin’?” He didn’t ask Ruby how she was doing. He loosened his tie and sat with his legs spread. “So who’s this band we’re seeing?”

  Laura’s heart sank. There was a show tonight at the Orb, and it looked like Michael would be joining them. Great. She’d managed to forget about the scene at the office only to spend the evening with Super Douche.
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br />   Since Michael hated seeing squalor and Ruby was embarrassed by it, and since the last thing Michael wanted was potato soup, they left to go to the club after promising to pick up the laundry the next day.

  The Orb was a warehouse once and, sometimes, if you stood in a corner long enough in summer, and the drafts blew the right way, you caught a whiff of the boxes of food that had been left to rot after the building foreclosed. However, it was the stink of Michael’s cologne that choked Laura and set her on edge. He probably wasn’t so bad. It was probably her own intolerance. She vowed to try harder to like him, but was oddly attracted to every place in the room where he was not.

  Stu was there, thank God. She’d seen him standing by the stage as the band set up, his blond hair glowing in the stage lights. She excused herself and beelined through the crowd. When he saw her, he took her hand and pulled her into the back hallway. She let him, eyes on his tight biker’s bottom. Stu was a messenger, and they’d met when he delivered her the wrong package two years ago. Since then, she’d discovered he had many talents. He was the lighting guy for the Orb, writer for culture-busting magazines, aspiring journalist, and the owner of property upstate. There were more jobs hiding somewhere in his day. She was pretty sure she’d never count them all.

  He stopped in the hallway to the bathrooms. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What happened?”

  “Look, I didn’t invite him, and it’s not like I can tell him to go away.”

  “You’re pretending you don’t know I’m talking about the murder.”

  There was no denying him. He had a sharp mind and a hippie heart. He’d coddle her until she told him the story, from the beginning. So she told him about her morning, about the dead woman, Jeremy—omitting the way he moved, the way he rubbed his eyes with his fist in the morning like a three-year-old, the way he looked in her face when he laughed—the cops, the rumors in the office, and the pepper spray she had dug out of the back of her junk drawer.