“I think so.”
“Well, there you have it. Next, he couldn’t create another line unless she okayed it, even with his own name. She owned his name. She had veto power on all design and marketing decisions, then there’s another page here where she owns 55 percent, but I can’t see anything else.” She closed the portfolio. “I can’t believe he signed this.”
“Me, neither.” Laura also couldn’t believe Yoni was being this helpful. “Did they offer you a contract today?”
Yoni tied the portfolio strings. “It was a lot of money. I don’t trust it. I’ve gone through my brain to see if I know something about Sheldon Pomerantz that makes him want to keep me close, but I came up with nothing. When you called, I thought, maybe the answer is in the contract. But if it is, it’s on another page. This page is all about how Jeremy is screwed.”
“You don’t trust Sheldon?” Laura asked.
“Not as far as I can throw him. Is that what you say?”
“He has an alibi. Poker game. And I saw tapes of the lobby from that morning. He never went upstairs.”
She huffed and sipped her tea. “You can keep this,” Yoni said, pointing to the portfolio. “But this is as far as I go. I can’t have eyes on me.”
“Thanks, Yoni.”
Yoni stood to leave. “I know they offered you a contract, too. How was the money?”
“I didn’t even look.”
Yoni rolled her eyes and headed for the door. After she left, Laura watched her walk down the street into the thickening snowfall.
CHAPTER 19.
Duomo.
A church tower.
Laura had been to the one in Florence in her senior year of high school. Every year, there was a trip that the Carnegie girls never dreamed of affording, and every year, the West Manhattan Italian Club sponsored one senior’s journey. There was one scholarship available, and Laura had won it in a grueling competition, where the students had to read aloud an essay, in Italian, describing why they wanted to go to Italy. Laura learned by hanging out in the pizza joint with the old men three nights a week, reviewing pronunciations of the words that appeared in her essay. Words like sarta (dressmaker), lavorazione (workmanship), and squisito (exquisite). She complemented the work of Italian tailors so highly, and so fluently, that she received a standing ovation, and many of the judges approached her speaking Italian, as if she could say anything outside of the essay.
Going on the tour had done nothing for her as a designer, though she was at pains to know what she had expected. She strolled around Milan as if a runway was going to drop in front of her, and John Galliano would come out of his office, shake her hand, and offer to take her around the design room.
She followed the rest of the class and saw the sights. That included the Duomo in Florence, where the steps were worn from a few hundred years of tourists. The stone balconies, high above the city and undoubtedly the sturdiest things built in the past thousand years, made her feel so vulnerable she got vertigo.
When she returned home, she had discovered Ruby was dating Bennet Mattewich, a Trinity School kid Laura had a major crush on.
Stu listened to all her associations with the word duomo over a whiskey and soda at an Irish after-work dump on Lexington. They sat at the bar, surrounded by people in suits and short haircuts who jammed limes into their beers or clocked the exact pour time of their stouts. Everywhere she looked, something looked back at her. A moose head. A wooden sign of a guy with googly eyes laying on a table, under the words Farringer’s Butcher and Surgeries. There were big eyeballs with lashes looking at the ladies restroom, and lashless eyeballs for the men’s room.
“You’re rambling,” Stu said. “None of this is relevant.”
“I don’t want to go to a club in Staten Island, at least not alone. But I feel like I have to.”
“You’ll be cleared eventually, you know. They’re just grasping at straws, and you happened to be in their reach.”
“What if he’s a mobster? Carmella’s boyfriend. What if he’s dangerous?”
“Would that stop you?”
She had to admit it wouldn’t. It would just give her something to worry about.
“It’s right over the bridge,” she said, “not too far from the ferry. The club.”
“Are you trying to get me to go out to some dago club on Staten Island? I grew up in Brooklyn, and I’ve been to Staten Island twice in my life.”
“And if you don’t include the school trip to the Statue of Liberty?” He’d never mentioned a school trip to the statue, but everyone took one.
“Once, then.” He ordered another drink for both of them. “Here’s how I see it. You want to go out there because, one, you’re curious, which I respect. You can’t just wait for someone else to figure out who killed Gracie Pomerantz. They’re all too slow for you.”
Laura nodded, and Stu continued, “And you have a predilection for wanting things to be right. You think there’s justice, and then there’s everything else. Which is beyond cute.”
Was he going to try and kiss her again? He was sober, but Stu had never been one to do things because he was drunk in the first place. No, he was just brave enough to try again before he got his fourth whiskey in him.
“Are you coming or not?”
“I want the story,” he said. She understood that was what he’d been leading up to. Not another kiss, but a business proposal. “I want access to you, any documents you find, and anything you uncover. When this breaks, I’m your exclusive contact to the press, and I have full rights to sell the story wherever, and for whatever, I can.”
“Do I get a cut?”
“That would be unethical.” He sipped his drink, watching her over the rim of the glass. He had a sharky look that was totally unlike him.
“How’s the Happy Meal lady?” she asked.
“I didn’t go to J-school to service lonely rich women.”
“Unless they have a story.”
He swished his whiskey around his glass. “Do you want to talk about the other night?” With the sharky look gone, she was less sure of how to manage him. The spontaneous kiss in the middle of Broadway was an event that deserved more than passing attention, which was all she could offer at the moment.
“No. I don’t want to talk about it at all.”
“Do I need to apologize?”
A good question, but one she wasn’t prepared to answer, which made her think he didn’t need to apologize. He hadn’t hurt her feelings. He hadn’t done any physical damage. If nothing else, she admired his courage.
“You have complete access to me,” she said, not acknowledging the double entendre. “Interviews until the end of time if you want. And you can even print my picture. But you have to come with me tonight.”
“You’re cheap, Laura.”
“Okay, but one more drink and no kissing. And on the boat, you’re going to tell me how I claim unemployment.”
“What?”
She waved him off and gulped her drink, nearly swallowing an ice cube whole. He did the same, without choking. Before they knew it, the drinks were drained, and they had a ferry to catch.
Only a crazy person would ride on the ferry’s outside deck in late February. And if you asked them how, by mutual, unspoken agreement, Laura and Stu decided on the cold, wet benches rather than the warm squishy ones inside, they couldn’t have told you. But there they were.
“I don’t think you’re actually fired,” Stu said, after she had told him the whole story, from lunch to the moment they met at the douchebag bar. “Normally, there’s at least a negotiation period with a contract. They can’t make you just sign it. You have to show it to a lawyer.”
She looked out onto the river and the floating icy slush. Of course, he was right. She wasn’t fired. David hadn’t said she was fired necessarily, just that she had to accept the deal or walk. The deal, however, had not been well-defined. She took out her cell phone, which had been on silent so she could be depressed without interruptio
n.
Seven calls from work.
She bowed her head and laughed. She laughed because the floor was back under her feet, and she didn’t want it there, because somewhere in the course of the day she had not only accepted her fate, she had embraced it. She felt free. Frightened, because she and poverty had made acquaintance early in her life, but free. And she found she wanted that freedom back more than she wanted the security of her job.
Stu guessed at what she was feeling. “I don’t know if you get unemployment for refusing a contract.”
“I was thinking, actually, why did they offer me a contract in the first place? Patternmakers don’t get contracts. Designers and like, heads of production. Yoni makes sense. Carmella would make sense. Not me. At least not at this point in my career. I mean, the only thing I can think is they did it because people are leaving in droves, but I’m replaceable. And then, Pierre Sevion’s offer. What was that about? Why should he offer to represent me? He represents the best in the business.”
“You’re probably answering your own question.”
“Don’t be a jerk,” she said, not considering that he might be sincere. “Two things like this don’t happen in six hours unless something’s up. Something with the murder. Like someone, or maybe more than one person, wants to keep me close.”
Stu stood as the ferry drifted into port. “Maybe you know something you don’t realize you know.”
She searched her mind for the one thing she knew that she didn’t know she knew, but by definition, it was a waste of time. Her thoughts were far away when she lined up with the other passengers as they filed out from the inside deck, bringing their warmth with them. Stu put his arm around her, and she didn’t shake him off as they strolled into the freezing night and the biting island wind.
They got out of the cab on a street that could have been anywhere. Stu described it as light industrial. Laura described the windowless box of a building as potentially hip if it weren’t on Staten Island.
“You’re a real snob, you know that?” Stu said, as they walked up to the lonely velvet rope and the three-hundred-pound gorilla manning it. “It’s that attitude that drove Carmella to lie about where she was from.”
“Would you live out here?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. She knew he wouldn’t.
The gorilla unclipped the rope and ushered them to a woman behind a red-lit cage. Her hair was piled on top of her head like yellow cotton candy. After looking them up and down, she gave her gum a long crack before she said, “Thirty each.”
Laura and Stu looked at each other. It was a lot of cash, at least for them. Laura considered trying to talk her way in. Or saying she really didn’t want to go in at all. She just wanted to talk to Mario. But as she was organizing arguments in her head, she felt movement behind her, and Cotton Candy smiled and waved at six people behind Stu. They were classic bridge and tunnel, with fringed bags and leggings and hair ‘til Tuesday. Four women had their boobs hanging out, and two men looked like they couldn’t put a sentence together.
One of the men waved to the gorilla and stepped aside to let the ladies pass. They didn’t cough up any percentage of thirty dollars each. And Laura, realizing they were completely out of their league, opened her bag and hoped she had enough, even if she had to count the quarters she was saving for the bus.
Stu stepped in front of her and extracted a wad of cash pressed into a big paper clip. “I don’t want to give you some kind of complex that I’m paying because I have some patriarchal idea about woman touching money. I just have to piss, and I can’t wait for you to get your shit together.”
“You just used piss and shit in the same sentence.”
“I’m sorry, did I offend your delicate sensibilities?”
He handed Cotton Candy a fifty and a ten while Laura closed her bag and acted like he wasn’t just a little bit right about how his paying made her feel. She watched Cotton Candy slide the money into the tray and rip two tickets off a roll, as if they meant anything, as if management was going to count money against tickets against an official tally of who was there, and then report it on their taxes. It was a show put on for the “out” crowd, so it looked like their thirty dollars paid for a scrap of paper with a stamped number on it, instead of what it really was. Pocket cash. She seethed. If she lived in a comic strip, there would have been a black scribble over her head.
Stu held his arm out to let her go past the curtain first. For all his hipster airs, he was only a first generation Midwesterner, so she should have forgiven him. But he was so goddamn unflappable. She could never date him. Never ever. Even with his yellow hair glowing in the nightclub lights. Even with his angular jaw, or his sweet eyes, or the fact that he made her feel calm and safe. She was done with him, and the way he handed the gorilla their tickets as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Like those tickets didn’t brand them as uncool.
She sat at the bar while Stu went for a bathroom run. She ordered two Jameson’s on the rocks and paid the bartender with her credit card. He was balding in that way that left a swirl at the top of his crown and a ring of hair between his ears. His teeth were capped, and his breath stank, and she hated him to the core of her being. But she smiled at him, because he knew where this Mario person was and she didn’t. He didn’t seem inclined to start a conversation with her; he just took his two-dollar tip to the other side of the bar.
Laura had to give the place credit. It tried. The recessed lighting didn’t glare on the cement floor, and the dark wood of the bar was the right shade. The tables stood at chest height, and the stools had the right minimalist curve. But the wainscoting had that Home Depot veneer, and the ceiling was bare white sheetrock. The mural on the south wall had the right idea, an ‘80s unicorn/Pegasus and a half-naked woman with green eyes and a shredded cave girl bodice. But it was somehow too sincere to really work, like they really thought it was cool, and not a joke on their parents’ tastes. And there was nothing special there. No special treatment of water, like a pool or a fountain. No wall of glass. It was as though everything could be swapped out when another decorating trend hit hard enough.
Laura’s internal critique made her feel better, and she scanned the crowd for the man she had seen the night of the murder. It was a good crowd for a Thursday night. About twenty people milled around the dance floor, the men with longneck bottles swinging in the crook of their thumb and first finger and the women with stereotypical Wallbanger glasses filled with yellow, pink, or orange stuff.
All the guys looked the same to her in their tracksuits and short hair. There wasn’t going to be some sort of arranged chance meeting between her and Mario. She would have to ask about him.
The bartender was way out of hailing distance, laughing it up with a guy in a Hugo Boss coat that had the little woven label on the left cuff, the label with the brand name that they stitched on so that, in a store, when you looked at a rack of coats, you could pick out the Hugo Boss or the Armani or whatever without having to flip open the lapel. You were supposed to take off the label when you got home. Those people were just too stupid. She sipped her drink and guessed that half the women in the place had hanger tape drooping from their necks.
When Stu slid in next to her, she asked, “When you buy a suit jacket and you can’t get your hands into the pockets, do you assume you just bought a jacket with non-functional pockets, or do you rip the stay stitch out like you’re supposed to?”
“I don’t wear those kinds of jackets.” He picked up his drink. “There’s a bunch of guys in a back room.” He indicated the hallway to the bathroom. “I bet he’s in there.”
“I want to go home.”
“It’s a long ferry ride back. You may as well do what you came here to do.”
He was right, as usual. She had come to find out who Carmella was, and what she was fighting about the night of the murder, and that was what she was going to do. Laura finished her whiskey and stood up.
“What’s your plan?” Stu asked
.
“The bulldozer method. Go in and ask questions. If they don’t answer, ask again. If they want an explanation, ask more questions.” Before he could follow up, she walked toward a little hallway with a restroom sign. She didn’t check to see if he followed, but could feel his presence behind her like a guardian angel. If he hadn’t been with her, she would have found a way to avoid that back room like Jeremy avoided the factory floor.
CHAPTER 20.
The lighting got brassy in the little hallway—another missed detail. But should she attribute it to a simple lack of taste? Or was it a general carelessness? That was important, and would inform how she managed herself in the room.
Before she had a chance to change her mind, she burst through the open door to the sloppy back room, another blemish on an already imperfect mise en scene, and felt a whizzing slip of wind by her face, like a moth traveling at Mach four. Then, she heard a little thup, and a cheer from a group of four Staten Island boys, with Mario right there in the middle. His eyes were glazed from God knows what, and an elbow jutted into the ribs of the tall guy with the Hugo Boss label on his sleeve. A pipsqueak in a white satin shirt open to the navel leaned into a blond hipster who looked like he’d gotten lost on the way back from Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
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