“Ruby’s thinner and taller,” Laura said. “Everybody loves her, and she always gets the guy she wants. I’m the one who has to live with that, whether we hang out together or not.”
“And you can make things. You have competencies and talents no one else has. You’ll never starve, Laura. You think that’s easy to live with?”
“She can learn all that stuff. I’m not getting any taller.” But even as she said it, she knew how hard Ruby had tried to learn to sew and draft patterns. From the time Laura started cutting sleeve cap shapes out of newspapers, to their years at Parson’s, she had struggled.
Mom shook her head and washed the dishes, piling them up on a towel because she didn’t have a drying rack. “I love you both the same,” she said as a point of immutable fact, before pointing to Laura’s laundry. “You better go before rush hour.”
Mom was right, as always. They hauled the dishwasher out to the curb and left a handwritten sign on it that read, “I WORK!” By the time Laura came back down with her laundry bag slung over her back, and the newly-hemmed Margaret dress hooked on her other hand, it was gone.
When she got home, she stuffed the laundry bag in the closet and tried to call Jeremy to tell him the TOP was still missing. Just as he answered, Ruby gave the door a courtesy knock and burst in like she was on fire.
Laura hung up the phone, then immediately regretted it.
“Ruby! You’re supposed to wait until I say to come in.”
Ruby just turned on the TV, flipping to the local news. “Damn, we missed it.”
“Missed what?”
Ruby flipped around to Channel 1 and found what she was looking for. Sheldon, flanked by police, jacket over his clasped hands, looking at the pavement as he was escorted out of the Gramercy Park townhouse. Laura found it surreal to see someone she knew in such a clichéd scene.
“He did it,” Ruby said, “and the cops caught him because of us. Isn’t that cool?”
“Sure.”
“Now.” Ruby sat across from Laura. “Let’s talk about Pierre Sevion.”
“The offer’s fake,” Laura said. “It has to be. Why would I catch anyone’s notice? As a designer, especially.”
“Isabel Toledo was a patternmaker for a long time before she got backing.”
“One, I haven’t been a patternmaker for a long time. Two, I’m not Isabel Toledo at all. Even a little bit. I live in a one-bedroom apartment a half a mile walk from the train. I don’t have a cool accent, I don’t know any of the right people, and I don’t know how to do the double-kiss thing.”
Ruby put her feet on the coffee table and stretched her arms out over the chair. “Give me a break! I know the right people. I’m a designer. I work a room. This is all stuff I do. You’re the one who knows how to make the clothes, and I can’t do it without you.” It was as if Ruby knew that Mom had told Laura about Ruby’s insecurities, and Ruby had decided to use them to her advantage.
“It’s a bullshit offer,” Laura said. “Sheldon or someone put him up to it to keep me quiet.”
“So what? You’ve got something better going on?”
“Jeremy’s back.”
Ruby looked as if she had a lot to say, so much, in fact, that her face looked just about ready to explode. She leaned forward in the chair, and her mouth opened to speak, but instead she stormed out and slammed the door behind her.
CHAPTER 28.
Laura got into the design room about nine o’clock the next morning. Carmella’s desk was empty, but Tiffany stood by the foamcore boards, pinning furiously. Chilly leaned so far into his screen he threatened to fall in.
By Laura’s desk, where no one should have been, Jeremy stood, walking a sleeve head curve against an armhole. She watched him as he screeched a piece of tape from the dispenser, snapped it off, and taped one piece to the next. He glanced up and saw her, then looked back down and smiled.
“Carnegie, get over here and help me pin this. We have a show on Friday.”
She dropped her bag and coat and headed for her table. “Where’s Carmella?”
“You’re too busy to worry about it.” He indicated the rack behind him, which was crowded with samples and patterns. “If you finish it in time, we go to dinner Friday.”
“And if I don’t?”
“You still get dinner, but I’ll be terrible company.”
Laura didn’t know how to answer. She felt her face break out in prickly heat, and a smile forced its way onto her cheeks. She stared at the pattern, unable to look into his face at the moment. She noticed he’d moved a sleeve notch, and she didn’t care.
“I hope you’re taking me somewhere nice,” she said, trying to keep her voice down. “I make a ton of money now, and I won’t accept anything less than four-star.”
“Naturally. Fitting is in one hour.”
His fingertips grazed the top of her hand before he walked over to Tiffany to check on the boards. It was like warm electricity. She watched him walk with a different kind of longing than ever before. He was hers, at least for this week, at least until dinner, when she’d splash something on her shirt or spit while she talked. This week, she was dating Jeremy St. James.
That felt great until, as she was shortening the Devon Pant, Mom’s voice came into her head. Jeremy used Gracie for her money for nine years. Was it possible, knowing that she could walk out any time, that he was using her to work until after the show? Or was it worse? Was the date a fact-finding mission to find out what she knew? What questions she had asked? Was the promise of a date there to cement her loyalty so she would stop asking questions? The doubts gnawed at her, and every time she tried to shut them out by looking over at him, they got worse.
The fitting started, and the giraffes gaggled around him, asking questions about his time in jail. They were so much more beautiful, and now they all knew he was straight and available. Why was he looking over toward her and rolling his eyes? Why did he even recognize her existence around those women? As she pinned, tucked, and made notes, she grew more convinced it was all a lie, and Jeremy had ulterior motives. He had to keep his hands off Thomasina Wente for a week, long enough to keep Laura hooked and see what she’d been asking about the murder, and then Laura would find herself with no job and no Jeremy, reading about his engagement to the German supermodel heiress in US magazine.
“Hey,” Noë said, as Laura pulled the waist of a corset too hard. “If it’s too tight for me, it’s too tight.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Noë replied. “You’re losing and gaining bosses all over, huh? Crazy time.” Laura had one eye on Jeremy as he fit a skirt with Thomasina. Was he touching her warmly? Was he enjoying himself? She suddenly wished he was gay again.
“Carmella’s gone, too.” Feeling generally catty, Laura added, “Bet you’re not weeping over that one.”
“I weep for no one.” She shook her head and raised her arm to let Laura work on the armhole. “Except now… Gracie. To be killed by a man who is supposed to love you.” Laura immediately thought of Jeremy before she realized Noë was talking about Sheldon.
By the time the fitting was over, darkness bit the sky at the edges. The giraffes dressed and gaggled. Laura and Tiffany hung up the cut and pinned garments, trying to keep them in order of priority. There wasn’t nearly enough. Jeremy was going to have to pick up the slack by reinstating the matte jersey group, or the show was going to be short. Newsworthy short. Gossip short. Bad review short.
Nonetheless, the fact that they were a week behind and short-staffed meant that what they had might be just enough to for them to finish by Friday night. Laura made a list of corrections and planned out how to get it done on time.
Renee buzzed her to the front. Someone wanted to see her.
Stu was there, without a package, just a slip of paper in his gloved hand. He wore a ridiculous outfit—red biker pants and a tight orange shirt that said “Ketchum” in the biggest, splashiest letters possible. He motioned for her to sit down on one of th
e brown leather couches. Stu never sat. He never had time.
“You okay?” she asked, not mentioning the blinding shirt.
“I could get fired for this, not that I care.” He showed her the slip of paper. She scanned the receipt. It was for the delivery of the Mardi dress from the 40th Street factory to 1410 Broadway, signed by Gracie Pomerantz. Not just that, there was a rack of twenty-five garments that had a style number she didn’t recognize.
“Do you know what this means?” she asked. “Gracie and Jeremy saw the dress, together, here, that night.”
“Yeah, the dress was sent here. But if you look here, Gracie called in and had the twenty-five garments rerouted. This is the original destination in Brooklyn, and she had them sent to her place in Gramercy Park.”
Stu let her keep the receipt, such was his disdain for his employer, and left to run some more of the corporate machine’s errands.
With a French curve in one hand, a pencil in the other, and the phone cradled between her ear and shoulder, she called Detective Cangemi.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Work.”
“I thought they canned you.”
She sighed. “Jeremy’s back, so I’m here, which will make you think we were in on it together or something, right?”
“Since your boss isn’t a suspect, I really don’t care what you do with him.”
“I got the delivery receipt for the TOP.”
“How does the hem look?”
“You know, you should do standup on weekends.”
“How do you know I don’t?”
“It was delivered with a rack of twenty-five garments that I don’t even know what they are.”
“Really?” She felt like she had his interest, not just his wit. “And are they in the office?”
“No, there’s not twenty-five of anything here. I promise you, with the show going on, every corner’s occupied. There’s nowhere to hide them.”
“Twenty-five, you say?”
She looked at the receipt. “Five small, twelve mediums, eight large. Which is weird because our customers are weight-conscious, so we don’t need that many larges.”
She’d never gotten so many words in edgewise with Detective Cangemi. And even when she stopped, there was silence on the other end. “Hello?” She braced herself for another accusation or another request to come in and look at video tapes.
“Can you tell a counterfeit when you see it?” he asked.
“A dollar bill, no. A jacket, yeah. Probably.”
“I need you to meet me at the Pomerantz house. But you can’t say anything to anyone.”
“Even Jeremy?”
“Let’s let the fake desk handle that.”
“As opposed to the real one?”
“As opposed to my desk, where we handle real crimes, not counterfeits,” he said. “Can you be at Gramercy Park in half an hour?”
Laura had no time to poke around the Pomerantz house. She had a pile of work to do and a show in four days. But the secrecy of the meeting intrigued her, and finding out what the super-rich kept in their refrigerator was a tempting proposition.
So she agreed to meet Cangemi at the Gramercy Park townhouse at eight that night if he paid for the cab ride there and back. He made a comment about traipsing all over the city on the taxpayer’s dime, and she made a crack about being marginally employed because he had nabbed the wrong suspect. Then she hung up.
Cangemi stood on the Pomerantz’s stoop with a pin-neat woman whose ability to stand perfectly still, even in the cold, made her look dead. She wore a long, straight ponytail that had the help of some type of gel or mousse and a pair of earmuffy things. Her dress was so conservative it was nondescript. She grasped her clipboard in both hands and looked up to the top floor of the brownstone.
“Laura Carnegie,” Cangemi said, “this is Dana Buchanan from the fake desk.”
Buchanan’s eyes narrowed just enough to tell Laura she did not enjoy his little jibe. “Can we go in now?” she asked.
Cangemi pulled out a key with a thick label on it and broke the seal on the door.
The house was everything Laura thought a rich couple’s place should be. It had nothing to do with the expensive beaux-arts furniture, the gold and burgundy striped wallpaper, the stainless steel appliances, or the granite countertops. Even the inlaid frescoes and marquetry flooring and mosaic detailing in the dining room weren’t the biggest clue.
The corners were clean. Spotless. Not a book, jacket, or bowl was out of place. It was like they lived there and, a minute behind them, someone came and erased all traces of their presence, so that if they turned around, it looked like an empty house.
“I think I’m going to get them some dust bunnies for Christmas,” Laura said.
Buchanan and Cangemi seemed to have a spot in mind. They went through perfectly manicured hallways and rooms, up two stairways, and down another hallway.
“Seventh bedroom,” Buchanan said without a trace of irony.
Laura opened the door to a huge room, as big as the design room, lined with shelves and racks. Shoes. Jackets. Dresses. One wedding gown whose white silk trail made it out to the center of the room. “This is her closet,” Laura said, stating the obvious, unbelievable truth. The woman had a closet with three stained cedar walls jutting into the center of the room. Each wall had racks on either side. An architect or designer or someone had managed this, because the walls were placed asymmetrical to the windows, but pleasing to the eye, and finished to increase the natural light, while diffusing it in order to keep colors from fading. Every corner and surface shone with a scrubbed, unselfconscious cleanliness.
Laura touched the clothes as she passed, her fingers knowing silk from wool from cotton blends, and her eyes ticking off the designers. The Row. Dior. Chanel. The modernists: Marc Jacobs, Balenciaga, Red Velvet. The deconstructed Rodarte. All so different, but Gracie had managed to pull it off, day after day, with just the right accessory or color pairing.
“Over here.” Cangemi pointed to a rack lined with rust-colored jackets. Twenty-five, give or take.
They were all the same, and Laura recognized it immediately. “It’s the Teresa jacket.” She pulled one off the rack. “It was the first production pattern I worked on.”
“These aren’t Jeremy St. James,” Dana said. “There’s no label.”
“He used to not have a label. Look.” Laura pointed out a tiny French knot on the corner of the lapel. It was the same color as the jacket, and the size of a poppy seed. “This knot was how you knew, because he said if the garment was perfect, you didn’t need a label. He was the anti-label guy for the first years. One knot for small. Two knots for medium. Three for large. Which would seem like a bad idea, but then of course, his customers started taking knots out so everyone thought they were a small.”
“Buttons are missing.” Buchanan flipped open the front to show the four bound buttonholes that were for hidden buttons.
She opened the jacket to look for the care label, and found it. “This is wrong.”
Buchanan looked over her shoulder to see the big black satin label printed with the contents and care sewn to the left sideseam. “Sure is.”
Cangemi shrugged. “Okay, I give up.”
“Jeremy’s stuff is made in the U.S., so it doesn’t need a big label like this.”
Buchanan, not to be outdone, interjected, “He uses a cotton twill label and sews on the satin care and content instructions.”
“Yoni says those labels cost a fortune, and no one can even see them,” Laura added.
“So these are…?” Cangemi let the question float.
“Fake,” Laura said.
“Counterfeit,” Buchanan added.
“In Gracie Pomerantz’s closet?” Cangemi asked. “What the hell for? She was copying her own line? Come on.”
“No,” Laura said. “Not Gracie. Never.” Laura dropped out of her down coat and slipped the rust jacket on. It felt perfect at the shoulders and armhol
e, exactly like the Teresa. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw the vent at the back flipping up a little and pointed to it. “Fake. This back here, the way the vent is hiking? Bad sewing. We’d never let that ship.”
“So…” Cangemi said. “If not Gracie, Sheldon?”
“He was the one who wanted to run a cheaper line,” Laura said. “Maybe he was already doing it, and Gracie caught him.”
“So he killed her,” Cangemi added.
Laura twisted around to get a look at the hangtag. The tag, preprinted with the name of the store, read $1099. “Centennial’s, and a third of the real price.”
“The store in Brooklyn?” Cangemi asked, as Buchanan wrote something in her book.
“They’re all over the northeast now,” Laura explained. “And the online business is huge.”
“I grew up in that neighborhood.” Cangemi sounded wistful.
Buchanan closed her notebook. “Well, we’ll take these into custody.” She looked at the receipt from Ketchum. “Are you familiar with this ‘from’ address?”
Laura leaned over to look. It was Jeremy’s factory on 40th Street.
Laura should have been relieved, but she wasn’t. The Teresa fake jacket was her pattern, no doubt, and that bothered her. Ephraim, having only started the year before, wouldn’t have had access to the production pattern, as they had been destroyed to prevent just this sort of thing. The only pattern in existence for delivered styles was the one in the history closet.
When she got back to the office, she didn’t say hello to a soul, but made straight for the closet. Pushing past last season’s stuff, past Tony’s patterns, back five years, past all the lovelorn, heartbroken days and seasons, back to the day she first fell hard for Jeremy. Against the back wall, where the filthy window got so stingy with the night sky and so generous with drafts, leaned a rack.
There hung the Teresa jacket in all its dated glory. The sample on hand was the blue meant to complement the rust in that so very five-years-ago way and, behind it, on the same hanger, was a pattern hook. And on the pattern hook was nothing.
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