Dead is the New Black

by Christine Demaio-Rice

  “Money, men, drugs?”

  “None of that seems like enough to murder her over. I mean, if Carmella’s an Italian countess, like she says, money and drugs shouldn’t be an issue. And men? Unless Gracie had another one hanging around, there’s not much to fight over… unless she was banging Jeremy, too.”

  Laura felt her hand tighten around her drink. “You don’t have to say it like that.”

  Ruby’s eyes narrowed. “What’s it to you? He’s gay anyway.”

  Laura backpedaled, “It’s just a gross thought.” Ruby sipped her drink, looking over the top of her glass at her sister. Laura had the sudden paralyzing fear that Ruby would ask her right then how she felt about Jeremy, and Laura knew that she’d be unable to lie.

  “What would you commit murder over?” Ruby asked.

  Laura thought for a second, then said, “To protect you or Mom, definitely.” She leaned forward to match Ruby’s posture. “Would you kill to protect Michael?”

  Ruby was saved from answering by dinner’s arrival. Laura refused the cheese and accepted the black pepper. Ruby had a big plate of linguini in a white sauce with tiny balls of meat and a green vegetable Laura couldn’t identify.

  “So, I saw David with Carmella’s portfolio, in the limo.”

  “Who’s David?”

  “Sheldon Pomerantz’s right-hand guy,” Laura answered, picking at her tartar, which was good, but her mind was elsewhere. “So, she’s been working on her portfolio. I mean, she has the right to look for a job. But why would David have it in his briefcase?”

  Ruby twirled her linguini, apparently disinclined to answer. So Laura kept answering her own questions. “But Noë told me Gracie Pomerantz was looking for another designer to back. Maybe it was Carmella. And maybe after the fight in the bathroom, that was Noë’s way of throwing Carmella under the bus, because she figured I’d run back and tell Jeremy.”

  “Would Jeremy fire her?”

  “Probably,” Laura said, knowing Jeremy could be cutthroat bastard. “I mean, to be put in a position of losing your designer on the one hand and sharing your backer on the other. Yeah, he’d cut her loose. So she’d have no job and, obviously, Gracie ditched her, anyway.”

  “High and dry,” Ruby said, rolling wine around her glass. “Really nasty, if you think about it. Like, spiteful. Like, I wonder if she was ever really interested.”

  “Like,” Laura continued, “was she trying to piss off Jeremy?”

  “Just saying.” Ruby ate the last of her linguini, shrugging coyly. Laura wondered if she was taking any of this seriously, or if it was just a storytelling game to her. “You eating your rice?”

  She pushed it toward Ruby. “Carmella was in the office when Gracie was killed.”

  “Seriously?” Ruby’s eyes opened a little, as if it were gossip, not lives on the line.

  “Seriously.”

  “What are those things you need to be the killer? That the police say?”

  “Motive and opportunity, but she wasn’t there that morning. I mean, she was in, then out again. What was she doing?”

  “Killing someone? I don’t know. Why isn’t she a suspect? Did they say?”

  “Didn’t have the strength, apparently, and I think Jeremy was just too convenient not to arrest. He came into the lobby at the right time to kill her. His hands had fibers from that swatch on them. He was holding it when I saw him. They had just had…” She paused. It was going to be hard to say. Not only that he was straight, but that he’d been with Gracie in the two days before the murder. So, instead, she changed her sentence. “A fight that night.”

  Ruby joked, “They bickered like lovers.”

  “Shut up, Ruby.” Her reaction was too strong, and Ruby must have caught it, but to Laura’s gratitude, the waiter came by asking about coffee before she could pursue it. Laura swung the conversation back to Carmella, but the steam had gone out of it, and they were only rehashing.

  They surmised that Gracie had considered backing Carmella. Every designer’s dream. No kid left Parsons or F.I.T. without dreaming of that magical backer. They got jobs at the most expensive houses, got paid nothing, just for the opportunity to meet someone who could possibly back them.

  No pressure.

  Ostensibly, that was why Laura would have taken the job at St. James—access to Gracie Pomerantz, her friends, and her money. Those connections weren’t made in interviews. There were no ads in the paper, no whisperings that so-and-so was looking for someone to back. You needed to be at the right parties and dinners, and you needed to create the desire to back you in the moneyed person in a way that was non-threatening, casual, and passionate—all at the same time.

  Laura explained the story to Ruby as they walked home, significantly poorer for the bill and the tip.

  In the beginning, Jeremy had made small orders of couture garments in his parent’s factory, but the numbers didn’t make sense. The more he sold, the more money he had to front for production orders, and the further behind he fell. He borrowed from his family. He used credit cards. He robbed Peter to pay Paul. But Peter squawked, and at one point, he couldn’t buy enough fabric for his first big Bendel’s order. The bank, upon looking at his books, found him sorely lacking in the cash flow department.

  That was why he needed the loan in the first place. But the bank, in pure bank logic, refused to fund him because he had a cash flow problem. Then, Bendel’s hired a new buyer, who had her own pet projects and decided against making the necessary introductions.

  So, Jeremy sat in the dingy factory and wept on the cutting table. And like an angel, she appeared—Gracie Pomerantz, just another lawyer’s wife looking for the Herve Leger showroom so she could buy the right dress for her husband’s career, just another dissatisfied middle-aged woman who made a wrong turn down a nondescript hallway and ended up in a room full of sewing machines and pressers instead of a scrubbed showroom floor. She had a heart, and asked the man, no, the boy, why he was crying, and he told her. She bought a dress and, two months later, fifty-five percent of the business.

  He was backed. It was pure luck. No portfolio. No interviewing.

  Which made Carmella’s updating of her work seem so off-base. Gracie would know damn well what Carmella could and could not do. No portfolio necessary.

  Laura had assumed David had Carmella’s portfolio because he was picking up Gracie’s old leads and seeing what her business had been. But maybe Carmella had gotten Gracie out of the way so she could get to Sheldon. And Sheldon, not knowing the fashion world at the high-end, had done what any good schmatta guy would do—he asked for a portfolio. Carmella played along.

  She unlocked her door and found her apartment in the same disheveled state. With a few hours to kill, she thought she might mop a little, or give the toilet a squish. Instead, she put on her pajamas and sat at the edge of her bed, mulling everything over. She couldn’t believe she was imagining Carmella—party girl, designer, disowned Italian countess—as a murderer. She was just Carmella. The nearest she’d ever gotten to killing anyone was herself, when she smoked two packs of Gitanes in a day.

  Laura turned on the news. Snowstorm next week. Just in time for the show, which would go on, of course, but with the possibility of soaked clothes, late models, wet floors, and grouchy buyers. She remembered the last words she’d heard spoken to Gracie. Jeremy saying, “Don’t you dare go.” She’d assumed he didn’t want her to leave the office at that moment. The tension between them that day had been thick as a Brooklyn accent, and they’d spent much of it behind closed doors. What if Jeremy had meant, “Don’t you dare go to that dinner.” What if Jeremy had actually talked Gracie out of backing Carmella, and Carmella had gotten so angry at the turnaround that she killed Gracie in a rage?

  Somewhere during the sports report, while trying to shut out self-recriminations, Laura fell asleep and dreamed of Jeremy back in the office, pinning a wedding gown on her while Sheldon stood next to her in a tuxedo.

  CHAPTER 17.

 
Laura needed to clear her name and Jeremy’s. She desperately wanted things to go back to normal, but every time she met with another person, or asked another question, normal got less and less likely. She had no idea how happy she had been before she found Gracie Pomerantz strangled on the floor of Jeremy’s office. She might have listed a thousand ways to improve her life, but she never thought to list the things that could make it so much worse.

  Such as: Sheldon and Carmella speaking earnestly behind a closed door in the conference room; Mom in the design room, crocheting while on the phone with Ruby, talking about that damn wedding dress; Tony not having done a single thing to the Stone Rocker group because he was working on the matte jersey nightmare.

  “Hi, Ma,” Laura said, when Mom hung up.

  “You were at the funeral yesterday, I heard. Was it okay?”

  Laura lowered her voice. “Nothing about yesterday was okay, Mom. I just can’t talk about it here.” Laura looked up and saw respect in her mother’s face.

  “You should call your sister today,” Mom suggested, before returning to her needle.

  She looked down at her own work, and for the first time in her life, was hard-pressed to care one way or the other. She called Yoni to find out if she’d dug up the contract, but she was out sick. So it was back to her job, which she still wanted to avoid. She didn’t want to make patterns, and she didn’t want to call her sister. All she wanted to do was find out what was on Carmella’s mind.

  “How’s it coming Tony?” she called out. She looked over the room as she passed by Carmella’s desk. Her bag hung on the back of the chair and, inside, the red-rimmed portfolio.

  “Good,” he answered, pulling out his scissors.

  “How’s that satin blouse coming? Did you get good fit notes from yesterday?” Laura fingered the portfolio, keeping the pages open with two fingers.

  “Needs to be tighter.”

  “Watch the fabric,” she said, as she looked in Carmella’s bag, noting Jeremy’s look books from the past two years, with sales numbers. “The stitches slip.” She spotted a little apple-green card with orange writing Laura didn’t need to read to comprehend. Carmella was repped by Pierre Sevion.

  Of course, she was. Sevion was like a humpback whale, and Carmella was like fat, juicy krill. Hence, the invitation list at Grotto. Sevion wanted to interject himself between Carmella and Gracie because money was about to flow. He’d take his fifteen percent to negotiate a contract and make sure all the right hands were shaken.

  How much of this had Pierre instigated? Carmella might have had an idea to subvert the wife and go to Sheldon, the husband, who had more background in the business than Gracie herself. The question was, did she loop in Sheldon before, or after, Gracie was killed? Was it after the insult, or after the murder? Or did Carmella’s contact with Sheldon bring about the round of insults at Grotto? Which begged the question of how long Carmella had been jockeying for Jeremy’s backer.

  No wonder Carmella had supported Laura taking over when she returned from Rikers. It wasn’t a lack of ambition. She was backstabbing Jeremy the whole time.

  “What are you doing over there?” asked a voice from behind her. It was Carmella.

  Laura’s first reaction was to make an excuse and apologize, but she clamped it down. “What are you and Sheldon meeting about?”

  “Not about anything that’s your business. Go pin something,” Carmella snapped up her cigarettes, then turned to Tiffany, who stared wide-eyed. “Keep this bitch out of my things.” She spun on her heel and headed for the door.

  “Someone got up on the wrong side of the curb this morning,” André said.

  Carmella pushed past him, her bag nearly knocking him over. He shrugged and handed Laura a piece of paper. “Bloomie’s is having an issue with that JSJ button on the gabardine suit. They’re saying it’s antique nickel instead of pewter.”

  “Civilians can’t tell the difference unless one of us told them.”

  “I need seven dozen. You don’t have that from sampling?”

  She might, in the history closet, but that was hardly the point. “This is a production issue. You have to go to Yoni.”

  “She said to come to you.”

  “Yoni’s not in today.”

  André paused before he answered, “This was yesterday.”

  Laura knew Yoni had been in yesterday, but she still didn’t believe she would refer André to her. These were JSJ logo buttons—under lock and key. They weren’t meant to be tooled all over town. He was obviously trying to expedite the matter for his customer.

  Laura handed him back the paper. “Ask Yoni.”

  André snapped the paper away. “This is a lot of people to piss off before ten a.m.”

  Laura shrugged. “If Yoni tells me to get the buttons, I’ll be happy to do it. Until then, either Bloomie’s has to wait, or you have to break into the storage closet and steal them.”

  “Which closet?”

  She couldn’t believe his gall. “The one I have the code for. Do you want Yoni’s cell?” She reached for her notebook, which held a disorganized pile of cards and scraps stapled to page corners. Yoni’s number was in there somewhere. “Call her and explain, then transfer her over to me when she says yes,” Laura continued, rifling through the notebook. When she found it, she wrote it down for André. He and his sour puss left. No gold star and a pat on the head for her today.

  Laura, creature of habit, did what she always did when she opened her notebook. She checked her pockets for cards and numbers that were in danger of getting lost in the laundry or the lining of her bag. Checking also had the additional advantage of creating another distraction from making patterns.

  She was just stapling Pierre Sevion’s card to the corner of a page when she heard the phone ring.

  Tiffany clicked her pen and scribbled something before saying, “You’re not coming back? Who’s going to prep the—” She stopped suddenly, then said, “Okay,” before hanging up.

  “She coming back?” Laura asked.

  “No, and so now I have to do all the boards? How is that cool?” Tiffany stormed out.

  Normally, Laura would have assumed Carmella was either preparing for, or coming down from, a party. But today felt like dirty dealings and, when Laura clacked the staple into the business card, she thought it might be a great time to call Mr. Sevion.

  She picked up the phone, put it down, then breathed through her nose three times.

  That didn’t help at all.

  She was obviously out of her mind. That man had no desire to speak to her. He had just given her his card because, well, she didn’t know why. But the reasons didn’t matter, did they? The prestige of the card wore off as hours and days passed. He had other things on his mind, and he would forget her like a mediocre meal. She needed him. He knew Carmella, traveled in the right circles, and had access to information that she could acquire if she asked the right questions in the right order, without revealing anything, of course. She imagined every worst-case scenario. One, he asked her who she was repeatedly until she just got off the phone in shame. Two, she accidentally revealed that she was a suspect in the murder of his friend. Three, he didn’t know anything about the party Carmella attended the night of the murder, and she looked like an idiot for asking.

  What the hell? They were all pretty bad in different ways. She dialed his number. Then, she hung up. Then, dialed again, expecting a secretary or an assistant to put her off for between one minute and one week.

  “Sevion,” he answered in full French accent.

  She had called his cell phone. There was no way around it now.

  “Hi, Mr. Sevion, this is Laura Carnegie. We met at Gracie’s funeral?” She stopped there, because she could go on with endless, unflattering descriptions of herself.

  “Of course, the Irish twin.”

  She’d heard that expression before, but never with a French accent. “I just wanted to talk to you about something.” She realized she’d talked herself into a corn
er and, in order to get out, she had to make it worse. “My sister is starting a bridal line, and I wanted to get your advice on it.”

  “I’m having lunch at Lanky Dove, shall you join?”

  “Well, Ruby’s at work.”

  “Just you is fine. Be there at twelve-thirty.”

  And he hung up, just like that.

  Laura had no time to worry about what she would wear to Lanky Dove. It was lunch, so less pressure. It was also a hipster café in a basement, not a cavernous nightspot full of the rich and gastronomically selective. And she had patterns to do. Lots of them. She really had no business leaving the office for lunch at all, much less stepping out for a meal twelve blocks away.

  She was gathering her coat and bag when Tinto called with the number for a lawyer. She scribbled it onto a scrap of paper and stuffed in her pocket.

  “How is Jeremy?” she asked.

  “He’s a pain in my ass,” Tinto answered.

  “I need to see him about the show.”

  “I’m sorry, No Relation.” Apparently, that was his new name for her. “You can’t see him again until I get the go-ahead. Let someone else handle the show.”

  That someone would be Carmella, typically. But since Laura was beholden to not talk, she couldn’t tell him why the designer was fully unqualified for leadership at the House of Jeremy St. James.

  They were going to have to muddle through. Mom’s needles clicked as she knotted her crochet beading, humming jingles from commercials. Tony muddled through his Stone Rocker patterns without direction. Tiffany listlessly put little sketches onto foamcore, and Chilly worked up illustrations for the look book. André was selling non-existent colors and dreaming of redistributing buttons. Carmella was who-knows-where. Yoni was out. Ephraim didn’t have the TOP, and Laura plowed through what she could of her work, leaving at 12:15 without a word about her lunch with uber-fashion agent and talent-sucking humpback whale, Pierre Sevion.

  CHAPTER 18.

  No matter how often she told herself to relax, Laura found her back stiffening and her hands clutching the strap of her bag as if someone wanted to take it. She had been five minutes late, thinking that was fashionable enough, but she was the first one there, in a restaurant without reservations, with no idea of how big a table she should save. So she sat in the window seat and played with her phone, pushing aside the T&C catalogs that lined the sill, trying to look nonchalant. She wished she had a standby switch that would put her into a sort of fully relaxed fugue state.