Stu was there, somewhere, collecting facts and impressions for his column in CullChahBusted New York. It would be smart, witty, erudite, and sharp. Laura looked around for him, but the crowd was thick. As she watched the procession of limos go by, she felt the pull of Gracie’s funeral.
The killer would be there, pretending to mourn, and she’d know, and she’d nail him, and the nightmare would be over. But the train to Queens was behind her and, as she pushed through the crowd to get to the stairs, the two cops drew a line of plastic tape across the railings, closing the station.
Like a woman trapped in a fire, Laura pushed her way back through the crowd. She crawled under a blue sawhorse and lurched into the street, running to the center, hell-bent on catching the limo.
The crowd, seeing someone break into the zone of cops and news people, broke into wild cheering. It took a second for the chaotic ovations to take on a form, and shape the words, “Go! Go! Go!” She was just running for the train and didn’t care about the closed street or income inequality. Laura found herself in the middle of a circle of flashing lights and yelling police officers. The crowd was wild, and she was surrounded by uniforms. She froze, and her mind cleared. She waved and tried to scuttle into the path of an oncoming limo, but it was not to be. In a flash, they had her arms pinned, her feet off the ground, kicking. They pulled her off the street and back into the crowd. She felt heat and noise, and couldn’t control her body as her face was turned toward the sky.
They took her across the street, but she was all turned around and couldn’t tell if she was going north or south. Then there were voices, and her direction changed. She didn’t know if she should be happy about that or not.
Carmella’s face was before her in a blur, and David’s, which she barely recognized away from the reception desk. She longed for Jeremy’s to appear in the dream, too. Even sick. Even with the flaking bald spot and rheumy eyes. She shut her eyes and thought of him as someone yanked her into a closed space.
Slam.
Quiet. A gentle rumble beneath where she sat. Laura kept her eyes closed and sank into what felt like the seat of a car. She opened one eye. She was in a limo, a small one with only two back seats, driving slowly through the river of emptiness between the shores of sawhorses.
“What happened?” Carmella’s Italian accent and wide eyes gave the moment far more drama than it warranted.
“I missed the pickup.” Laura brushed herself off as if this were a completely normal way to catch your limo. “Sorry,” she said to David, who sat across from her. He closed a nine-by-twelve brown portfolio with red piping. She glimpsed fashion illustrations and aesthetically arranged fabric cuttings, before he slipped it into his bag.
“It’s a good thing I stepped out and grabbed you,” David said. “They were ready to taze you.” Laura didn’t remember that, but it had been a very confusing thirty seconds. He continued, “If I thought you were just late for the limo, I would have waited.”
“Laura’s never late,” Carmella said, waving David off. “In Milano, the funeral is at home. You put a notica on the door, and people come.”
David chimed in unexpectedly, “In Milan, they put it in the paper. In the villages, it’s on the door.” He stared at Carmella, and she stared back, mouth open to disagree, but something held her back. “Right?”
“Right,” she said softly. Looking at Laura she added, “I meant in Umbria, where my family is from.” Carmella tugged on Laura’s skirt. “You’re wearing brown to a funeral?”
“It’s the new black.” Laura smoothed the maxi skirt. It had survived the jamming action and manhandling by the police, but was wet where it had soaked up sludge. She glanced up at David, who tapped on his phone, lips pursed, avoiding her gaze. She’d just used up a favor with him, for sure.
“Have you been to Queens?” Carmella asked.
“Of course,” Laura replied. She had once picked up Ruby from a disgusting warehouse club in Hunter’s Point when she ditched her date. There were other times. Parties. A friend seeking cheap rent. A detoured train.
“Did you see Jeremy this morning?”
“Yeah, he’s having some court thing today.”
“How did he look?”
With David sitting there, the truth wasn’t an option. “Same as always. But grouchier.”
“You have my iPad?” Carmella asked. “Or did you break it chasing the car?”
She pulled it out. “I guess you want to go over the notes later?”
“Let’s kill some time together.”
Laura opened up the photos and notes and reviewed them with her. Carmella made notes on Jeremy’s yellow legal pad, interjecting his loose pencil marks with her neat ballpoint print. When they got to Noë’s bare back, she took a breath.
“That will be an incredible turn,” she said, referring to the model’s last spin at the end of the runway, showing the glittering white crochet against Noë’s black skin.
“She’s going to be beautiful,” Laura replied.
“Have you ever seen her without makeup?”
“I can’t tell.”
Carmella leaned closer and dropped her voice. David tapped something on a laptop and, in all likelihood, listened to every word. “I saw her at this dinner with Pierre Sevion, at Grotto. Saturday night.”
“Oh, my God, Carmella. What time was that? Did the police ask you about it?”
“Of course they did. It was nothing, really. But what I was telling you was that Noë was crying in the bathroom, and all the makeup came off. You cannot believe she is a model.”
“You can hardly decide that when someone’s crying.”
“Yes, because these models must have tough skin, Gracie called her a licorice stick to Pierre, and he laughed, and you cannot believe how she reacted.”
“That was mean,” Laura said.
Carmella shrugged. “So she goes to the bathroom for half the night, and Gracie sends me in after her, like we are in school. She has a hundred balls of napkins on the sink with this makeup on it. She won’t even look at me, but I have to stay in there, because of Gracie and, you know, and I have to be nice. She was such a bitch.” In her Italian accent, the “i” in bitch sounded filthy.
“She’s crying because Gracie makes a racist remark in front of Pierre Sevion, and how is she a bitch?”
“She was awful. I don’t even want to talk about it.” Carmella’s face blanched just a little. She really didn’t want to talk about it. There must have been some real ugliness in the bathroom at Grotto.
Laura glanced at David with his ample nose and tiny yarmulke, to see if he had heard any of that. Apparently, he hadn’t. She wondered why he would get his own limo with Carmella. “Nice limo for a receptionist.”
“We both have big job descriptions.” David smiled.
She made a mental note to be more cautious around him, which made her feel diligent, which made her shoot off her mouth. “What is Sheldon looking for, David?”
“What do you mean?”
“Laura!” Carmella exclaimed. “Really!”
“Really, nothing. His wife is murdered one day, and the next day he’s going through the books? What’s he looking for? Loose change? I mean, come on. Don’t you think that if you tell me, I might be able to help you?”
“I thought you were just a patternmaker?”
“Maybe that’s what you need. Because whatever he’s looking for, it’s not something he knows how to find. He can’t be looking for the contract, because he’s a lawyer, so he’d have it or he’d have access to it. Same for his wife’s taxes. The company books are with the accountant on Madison Ave, and even if he found them, what is he looking for? A loss? A gain? A reason to close us? A reason to keep us open? What’s there that’s so important that he comes in two seconds after Jeremy is arrested? Is he trying to pin something on Jeremy? And if he is, what is he trying to pin on him with what’s going to be on a computer hard drive? Listen, David, I’m just curious. This guy comes into the office and thr
eatens to close us because he’s having a bad day, and I start to wonder what he’s after, okay? Because, you know, I want to help him find it so he’ll just go away and let us work.”
David leaned back in his seat and tapped his long finger to his lips. “Have you considered that he loved his wife?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with it.”
“No, I can see you don’t. His wife is murdered in the office. Of course, he does a forensic accounting of Gracie’s business. What would you do?”
“Drink. Go out with my friends. Sleep at my mother’s house, lots of things.”
“No. If you’re Sheldon Pomerantz, you look for a reason why you lost her.”
“Ok, well, that’s not in the ledger.” The car stopped at some anonymous road in a cemetery in Queens.
“You’re right,” David said. “You’re a patternmaker.”
The remark didn’t sound cruel or ill-humored, but the punctuation of the car door opening made it feel like a challenge.
The funeral could have been a scene from a movie. Everyone wore black. Prada. Thakoon. Poppy Delevigne. Not a hair stood out of place, even in the frigid dampness. No one shivered or jammed their hands in their pockets. Except Laura, of course. She hadn’t finished her makeup or hair in Tinto’s car, and felt like a glob of jam on a white blouse whenever she was in a room full of rich people.
The coffin hovered over the grass like a spacecraft. Its details evoked a Victorian mansion, and the shine of the wood and silver handles suggested a sports car. She looked for a label, thinking some architect or designer must be licensing out coffin rights, and found none.
David beelined to Sheldon’s side at a line of mourners. Sheldon looked everything a distraught husband should. She considered approaching him—they knew each other, after all—then thought better of it. He had never seen her face before the killing, and she was pretty sure he didn’t need her condolences.
As more cars arrived, Laura stood near Carmella, hoping some of her graciousness would rub off, some habit that made the double and quadruple air-kiss seem as sincere as Carmella made it look. She wished for some level of comfort in her skin, some training she’d missed from her single-mother’s rent-controlled apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.
Carmella knew people Laura had only read about in the papers, and interjected herself in their whispering and gossip like a drop of chocolate in a marble cake mix. So complete was her integration into the crowd, that Laura soon found herself standing alone, hands in her coat pockets, wondering about silk fibers and the timing of a murder, and wondering if the police had as many questions as she did.
When a man came up to her, she jumped, and he laughed with perfect capped teeth. She had to take a second to recognize Pierre Sevion. His hair was a little thinner than the last time she’d seen him, and he had let the grey at the temples go without dye. He had on a black, four-button wool suit that was a half-inch short in the sleeves, as they had come down the Paris runways only a month before.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I think I recognize you.”
“You mentored my sister Ruby, at Parsons. We have the same hair.” Patently untrue. Laura’s hair had unenthusiastic waves no matter the weather, and Ruby had lustrous curls no matter what she did, or didn’t do, in the morning. They did, however, have the same wheaten color that didn’t require the help of a bottle. “We’re ten months apart, so we ended up in the same class.” She held out her hand for a shake. “Laura Carnegie, no relation to the guy with the music hall.”
“Very pleased. I remember you now. Yours was a sort of origami dress, I believe?” He referred to her fourth-year project at school, a rectangle of crisp gauze and a string that when folded a certain way was a dress, or a shirt, or a poncho. It was completely unsalable without an instruction manual, and she almost failed her thesis.
“I’m sorry to meet you again under such unpleasant circumstances,” Sevion said.
“Yeah. We’ll miss her,” Laura lied. Seeing Pierre’s quizzical look, she added, “I work at Jeremy St. James. I’m a patternmaker.”
“I heard that St. James is sick.”
Like a mother bear, she defended him, “I saw him this morning, and he looked fine.”
“I ask because, I’m sure you’ve heard, Sheldon Pomerantz is taking a controlling share of the company.”
“He can’t do that!”
“If Jeremy’s sick, he can. It’s in the contract.” That goddamn contract again.
“Well, I have first-hand knowledge. Jeremy’s fine. He’ll be at the bandshell on Friday for the show.”
“I’ll see him there, then.” Sevion smiled as if she’d just handed him an invitation he didn’t already have.
A woman with long, straight white hair tapped him on the shoulder and spoke to him in French. Their little side conversation went on forever, with Laura looking more and more like an idiot who didn’t want to let go of the company of Pierre Sevion, which was unexpectedly true today. She wanted to ask him about the dinner where Noë had cried and Carmella had turned into an evil jerk, but feared she would find no sly way into the conversation.
The woman with the straight hair looked eerily familiar. Laura couldn’t place her, but she was sure she had seen her before. In order to stop staring, Laura glanced around to look for someone else to talk to, but everyone was engaged and too far away. Sheldon, whom she had avoided, was receiving condolences from Carmella, who wasn’t afraid of anything social. Then, a short woman with a Midwestern hairdo and a suit that fit her top-heavy frame so well it could only be custom made put her arms around the lawyer. Carmella smiled at her, and the three spoke a few words before Mrs. Top Heavy strolled away with the designer.
Just when Laura thought she was going to get a polite “Excuse me,” Sevion turned back to her.
“Who is that?” she asked, pointing at Mrs. Top Heavy. Her pointing was rude for any number of reasons, but she was too curious to care.
“She owns that store in Brooklyn. The designer outlet…” He snapped his fingers in a way that made Laura imagine the name jumping from the tip of his tongue like a trained puppy.
The woman with the white hair spoke up in a thick eastern European accent, “Centennial. That’s Shonda Grovnitz.” Laura realized that standing on a hill was throwing her. The lady with the straight hair reached no higher than four-eleven, if that. She only carried herself as though she stood a foot taller.
Laura nodded as if she knew Shonda Grovnitz, which she didn’t. But everyone knew about Centennial, the big box designer outlet in Brooklyn. People who shopped at Centennial didn’t need fancy service or a superior shopping experience. People who shopped at Centennial needed clothes. Nice clothes. Clothes they could tell their friends about. Clothes they wanted people to believe they could afford, but couldn’t. Centennial bought overstock, damages, out-seasoned, and outlet-grade designer clothes and resold them to high school students, working mothers, and old ladies who bragged about a bargain before, or concurrent with, a label.
Shonda adjusted her scarf, a cashmere Hermès job that cost a pretty penny. But it was brown, and the absolute wrong shade of brown with the navy coat.
“This is my wife,” Sevion presented the lady with the straight white hair, “Hortensia.” Hortensia showed no sign of recognizing Laura. Just as Laura was about to ask where they might know each other, Sevion continued, “I’m glad Jeremy is well.”
“Totally. He gave me two pages of notes on the Friday show, and then talked to his lawyer about the bail hearing or whatever. Couldn’t shut him up, actually. He’s going to be at the show if they let him out and, if not, it’s going to be amazing anyway.” She knew she was babbling, so she was grateful when Sevion picked up the thread.
“You have spunk and loyalty. I like that in a designer.”
“I’m a patternmaker.”
“It was very nice to meet you, Miss Carnegie.” He held out his hand. She admired his charm and grace, and could see why he was Pierre Sevion, and she
was just Laura With-a-fancy-last-name. He handed her a card before he left to join the crowd gathered around the coffin. Laura looked at it. It only contained his name, the name of his company, PSH Talent, and a phone number in orange on an apple green background. She didn’t know when she would have a reason to use it, but she put it in her pocket anyway.
The funeral was long on talking and short on excitement, with plenty of incense in the outside air. The priest spoke. People whispered and pretended to pay attention. Sheldon showed nothing of the man who had burst into her fitting the day before. She couldn’t bear to watch him break down. She tried to catch Carmella’s eye, but she was texting. Apparently, all the international flair in the world didn’t teach you manners.
Laura debated with herself, then realized there wouldn’t be another opportunity to do what she wanted to do. She ducked behind a tree and stared at her phone. She was sick of hearing about that contract and being in the dark about it.
Who would be at work today? Her mind wandered around the office. The showroom was next over, and the sales people might be in, but her distrust of the sales force in general brought her to the other side of the office, the side behind the big white doors. There was only Yoni.
Yoni was shrewd, ambitious, and a professional. She had also given Laura a good going-over when she had visited Jeremy the first time. But Laura knew it wasn’t personal. Suddenly, the only person in the office she could call was Yoni.
“Production,” Yoni said tersely, when she picked up.
“It’s Laura.”
“What can I do for you, Laura?” Yoni sounded bored already.
“Well, you know, I keep hearing about this contract between Jeremy and Gracie Pomerantz.”
Dead is the New Black Page 10
