Dead is the New Black

by Christine Demaio-Rice

  “You’re welcome,” Laura said, deflated. She wasn’t helping herself at all.

  “You’ll read in the papers today that Sheldon’s denying he killed Gracie. And the guy at the freight elevator, what’s his name?”

  “Olly?”

  “Olivero, yeah. He didn’t recognize our man. So Sheldon couldn’t have gone up that morning.”

  “Show him a picture of me.”

  “Why? You finally admitting you did it? That would make my life easy.”

  “I only used the freight once. And supposedly, Sheldon only used it once. If Olly doesn’t remember me, then that just means he’s likely to forget someone he hasn’t seen a lot.”

  There was a long silence, during which Ruby sat next to Laura and sniffled too hard for post-nasal drip.

  “You’re good,” Cangemi said. “You know, if I wasn’t taken and you weren’t having an affair with St. James—”

  “You’d still be a pain in my ass,” Laura completed. “I have to go.” She hung up without saying goodbye, which probably made Cangemi feel like he’d said something inappropriate, which he had, but it wasn’t hang-uppable.

  Laura nudged Ruby with her elbow and got no response.

  “Okay, what?” Laura asked.

  “When someone loves you, shouldn’t they want to help you no matter what? Shouldn’t they be proud of you when you do something good, or defend you when you do something bad?”

  “Possibly,” Laura said. “That’s a little simplistic.”

  Ruby wiped a tear with the back of her hand. “What if, one day, something happens, something bad. And, what if it’s my fault?”

  “Like?”

  “Like, let’s say I live in the suburbs, and I have a car.”

  “You don’t even have a license.”

  “Right, but if we move to Jersey or something, I’ll get one. And let’s say we have a cat.”

  “I don’t like where this is going.”

  “Let’s say I’m bringing the kids to school one morning, and I’m in a real hurry. And let’s say it’s an indoor cat, so maybe I’m not looking, or maybe it’s an outdoor cat, but I still don’t look anyway, and so maybe I squish it.”

  “The cat.”

  “The cat. And maybe the windows are closed, and the kids are doing whatever kids do that’s loud, and I don’t hear the cat meow or whatever when I squish it, and so I realize I forgot something like maybe one kid’s homework, so I pull back up and—”

  “I get it. Really.”

  “Okay, but, how does it work if I’m afraid to call my husband and tell him what I did? Even if what I did wasn’t my fault, but even if it was? Even if I came out here when he told me not to because I wanted to help you, and I admit it. I’m just curious. And I like doing this with you because it’s different and exciting. Is that so wrong that I should be left here in south Brooklyn in the snow?”

  Ruby then spilled what had happened, even though Laura had pretty well surmised it from the first part of the conversation. Michael wasn’t happy to hear from Ruby, at least not from a police station, again. Especially not one in Brooklyn. And he especially didn’t want to hear from her from a police station in Brooklyn with her in such a joyous good mood. He threatened to let her rot there. She told him she wasn’t being arrested and only wanted to know if he wanted to come and get her. But as a matter of fact, not only could she get just about any guy in the neighborhood to take her anywhere she wanted, she could just as easily get on the freaking train herself, thank you.

  Laura nearly burst with pride. “Way to tell him to fuck off, Rubes.”

  Ruby nodded, but didn’t seem to share Laura’s enthusiasm. “Don’t you want to get married?” Ruby asked.

  “I want to be married, you know, have a life partner and all, who’s not an asshole. The whole wedding thing, not so much.”

  “You make me feel like an idiot when you say things like that,” Ruby said. “Because, one, you’re implying that Michael is an asshole, which he’s not, and two, it’s like you’re above wanting the party and the dress and being the only thing for one special day. You know, you’re so sensible it makes me want to puke. Because for your information, it’s not just about the party and the dress. For your information, it’s about being married. Like, not having to date or look for guys any more. I can just be done with it and live my life.”

  Laura should have shut up, and a little voice in her head told her to do just that. But she was still on an adrenaline rush from knocking Carmella over. “What kind of life is it with a guy who won’t let you come shopping?”

  “Shopping? I’m in a police station in South Brooklyn.”

  Laura shrugged. “If we go buy something, it’s like something happened while we were shopping.”

  “I’m not feeling funny right now,” Ruby said, standing up. “And it’s not my boss having his stuff knocked off. So, I don’t know why I even cared in the first place.” She gathered her scarf and hat. “I tried to help you, and now I’m a step and a half toward breaking up with my fiancé, and this is just not cool.”

  She stormed out before Laura could offer to join her on the train. When Laura ran outside after her, she was gone.

  CHAPTER 31.

  Laura did something she had never done before. She ran down to the newsstand in her pajama bottoms, bought all three papers and read them while watching the TV news.

  Centennial was up poo-poo creek without a rowing apparatus for creating and selling counterfeit goods. There were racks of Fiona skirts, from Spring last year, in the back room, ready for shipment to one of their New Jersey stores. According to the owner, Shonda Grovnitz, who had been dragged from her son’s wedding rehearsal dinner, the sewing floor was ostensibly for repairing damaged goods and replacing labels that had been ripped out. She adamantly declared that Centennial did not, would not, and was currently, most emphatically, not selling counterfeit goods, as proven by the fact that the items in question were made on 40th Street, and not in the store. The St. James labels had been put in the wrong garments, for which everyone was heartily sorry.

  Carmella wasn’t charged with anything, as she had done nothing worse than carry around a bunch of buttons she designed, even though the thirty blue Teresa jackets on the floor had no buttons. She implicated no one, in a perfect practice of omerta, which was the habit of keeping your mouth shut because your secret boyfriend was a small time mobster with a wife and kids.

  All the action was going to distract from the quality of the show and affect Jeremy’s reviews. Laura got in at nine o’clock like any good freelancer and found a sour puss on him, as he railed at Tiffany to get out the trims for the matte jersey group, which, as Laura recalled, was dead as of last week. Jeremy looked sick and drawn, and Laura feared another hospital visit for her boss and future husband. She barely said hello, just sat down to her work like a diligent employee and didn’t pick her head up until noon.

  Jeremy was gone by then. His office was empty, and the halls lacked his grace and temper. André paced outside his office with a worried look.

  “Have you seen him?” he asked.

  “No.” She’d been looking for him to tell him the new code to the closet. “Maybe out to lunch, or at the bandshell?”

  André left, tapping on his cell phone. Five minutes later, he was back, chest puffed out as if he wore an inflatable suit. “Did you do the matte jersey group?” He poked around in her rack. It felt as though he was looking in her underwear drawer.

  “Soft dressing is Tony’s.” She slapped her patterns away.

  Undeterred, he went through Tony’s rack with the same sense of purpose, hooking the patterns and samples around his fingers when he found them.

  “You should wait until he gets back from lunch.”

  “There are four here. Should be five.”

  “What on God’s green earth do you even need them for?”

  “I don’t appreciate being questioned.”

  She had no time for yet another pissing match. �
��Check in the box under his table. It’s where he keeps the stuff he’s not finished with.”

  André pulled out the pinned sample and uncorrected pattern. “He has to finish that before the show,” Laura said, but André just kept walking.

  Bothered by the fact that Jeremy was going to judge that last piece prematurely, she followed André into the hallway.

  Noë, who should have been busy as hell that week, who should have been at some fitting, at some designer’s showroom, or walking down some runway in Central Park, strode down the hallway, looking more like a regular person than she ever had, and whispered something to André. They walked down the hall together, their hushed voices creating a cocoon around them.

  CHAPTER 32.

  On Thursday night, Laura went home at about ten with only a couple of things to do in the morning before heading to the bandshell to do any hand-basting or fitting that needed to be done on the fly. They had had a run-through the night before, which went well except for Noë tripping on the gown, to the delight of the other giraffes. She had seemed distracted and angular, as if her curves had been the expression of her goodwill and positive attitude.

  The Amanda gown still fit, but not in that slam-dunk way, and Jeremy made a point of telling Laura it wasn’t her fault. “They traced the counterfeiting money back to her dad in Haiti.” He looked worried, slicked with a satiny sheen, coughing and huffing, which he never did until after the show. It didn’t bother her aesthetically, but she did wonder if he was getting sick because he worried about Noë, or about the Amanda Gown, or some other undefined something.

  “She’s not in trouble is she? She has to do the show. That dress isn’t going to fit any of the other girls. None of the stuff, actually.”

  “What’s on her rack?”

  “Besides the Amanda gown? The Karen cardigan with the Sophie pants. The Hannah dress, and I can’t think of what else.”

  “It’s fine. I think she’s fine.” But he didn’t seem convinced.

  That night, when Laura approached her apartment door, she found it already open, which meant she was in the process of getting robbed, had been robbed, or Ruby was waiting for her. Thankfully, the latter turned out to be true, but regrettably, as Ruby was bawling her eyes out in front of an infomercial.

  “Laura!” she shouted as she ran into her arms. She looked puffy and drawn, and Laura knew only one thing could have happened.

  “That asshole broke it off, didn’t he?”

  “No,” Ruby said, holding up her bare hand. “I did. He’s such a dick! I can’t even believe I ever wanted to be with him.”

  Laura, whose relationship experience was only on one side of a breakup, stood in the middle of her living room wondering where her sister’s tears came from, exactly. “Okay, so, do you want to go out or something?”

  “I went to Mom’s, but she’s not home. She went to look at apartments. She didn’t even ask me to come. And you’re at work all day and night. And Michael’s gone. He said he never wanted to see me again. You know what he called me? He called me a slut and a bitch and everything in the book. Which is, why? It’s not like I ever went with anyone else. That is so not fair. And I was the one who had to sit there and take it because I was leaving him, when you know what? He was a real asshole. He thought he owned me, and he didn’t like you, not one bit. He thought you were stuck up.”

  “I’m stuck up?” Laura found herself too stunned to let it just roll off her back for her sister’s sake.

  “Yeah. He thought you never listened to me, and that you hated him.”

  “He’s right about the second part.”

  Ruby looked back at Laura with red-rimmed eyes and a quivering lip. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What good would it do?” Which wasn’t really an answer. The opportunity to do any good at all would have made the resulting rift tolerable. But Laura had chosen the easy way out for solid, if morally reprehensible reasons. One, if Ruby got married, she’d be off the dating radar. Two, there was an element of revenge for all the stolen crushes. Three was the most evil, so evil, it hurt Laura to admit to herself. She wanted Ruby to suffer. “I’m sorry. I should have told you what I thought.”

  “Next time.” Ruby dabbed the loose mascara from under her eyes and sniffled.

  “Next time,” Laura concurred.

  “I think Stu is good for you,” Ruby said. “And I’m only telling you because, from now on, we’re not not telling each other stuff, right?”

  “So by extension, Jeremy’s not good for me?”

  “He hides things. You can see it all over him.”

  Laura convinced herself Ruby only saw him hiding his disease, and that comforted her.

  “Should we go out?” Laura asked.

  Ruby looked down at her clothes, the sweatpants that made her look shapely in the back, the t-shirt with the neck so stretched out it fell off one shoulder, and the little slip-on shoes.

  Laura threw an extra coat at her and said, “Let’s go, before you start changing clothes.”

  And they went.

  Stu was at Tinker Tailor already, hanging with Nadal. He was out of his Ketchum uniform and in his usual attire, a rock t-shirt with a cardigan and skinny jeans. Laura immediately picked on Ratt, the object of the t-shirt’s affection, as too mainstream, and Stu gifted her with a smile and a hug that seemed to deny all her rejections.

  “I’m back at Blazing Saddles!” He held up his beer to toast himself.

  “Wow, where’s your route?”

  Nadal broke in, “Me and Kimmy split, so I gave up the route.” Laura noticed that his eyes were puffy and red.

  “They came begging back,” Stu said. “No one knows that route like I do.” He turned to Nadal. “And that Kimmy bitch was an STD waiting to happen, my friend.”

  “Well,” Laura said to Stu, “I’m glad to have you back from the jaws of the corporate beast.”

  Then, she surprised herself by putting her arm around Stu’s waist and squeezing. His arm went around her shoulder, and the feeling was at once comforting and disconcerting. She had a date with Jeremy on Friday, and having her arm around Stu felt like cheating. Or was the Friday date cheating?

  Ruby would tell her not to get ahead of herself, but she was busy trading breakup stories with Nadal.

  “So,” Stu said, and Laura braced herself for some relationship talk she wasn’t ready for—not until Saturday morning. “Sheldon’s getting tried for murder, you broke up a counterfeiting ring, and you’re unemployed.”

  “Marginally employed.”

  “Any other plans for the week? Like taking down the mob? Or Middle East peace talks in your apartment? We’ll call it Camp Carnegie.”

  “You’re too good for that joke.”

  “I’ll let you take me out to dinner.”

  “I might,” she said, her mouth running ahead of her morals. “Can it wait until after the show? Next week?”

  She didn’t know what she would do if her dinner with Jeremy went well. She’d just have to cancel with Stu and tell him she was taken. But until then, for a few days, she’d have neither, and both.

  CHAPTER 33.

  Laura awoke early with a mouth full of cotton and a brain that felt like a lead weight. The night had ended only a few hours before. The four of them had hopped from bar, to diner, to bar, and she and Stu had made up a song called “Mainstream Dogs” as they ran down Fifth Avenue arm-in-arm. Ruby and Nadal had been in and out of the picture all night. Or she and Stu had dropped in and out. She couldn’t recall the details, only the tone, which for her was one of a last hurrah. A war cry before entering the breach. A held breath before the plunge.

  So the hangover on Friday morning was kind of a letdown. She should have felt exhilarated. The show was happening because she had kept the office alive while Jeremy was gone. Pierre Sevion might have made a fake offer she didn’t know the source of, but he knew who she was, which was about ten steps above where she had been a month ago. And she had a date with Jeremy. And
Stu wouldn’t wait forever, but he’d wait a few days.

  She took two of something strong, chose an outfit slightly dressier than she might on a normal day, and got out the door.

  Everything in the design room—desks, boxes, racks, bookshelves—was pushed against the walls except for the sewing machines, which clattered and buzzed like drills at a construction site. Garment racks hunched in the center of the room, each with a piece of paper taped to the end with a model’s name Sharpied across it. On each rack hung complete outfits zip-tied together at the necks of the hooks, with necklaces, purses, shoes and assorted doodads in a plastic bag looped onto the zip-tie—Jeremy’s special method to keep the bottoms and tops from separating in the chaos. The hangers were in order, with the hanger behind the giraffe’s name for the opening of the show, and the hanger at the other end for the finale. Each giraffe had about three outfits, and, on average, six minutes to change, have their makeup checked by a stylist, pout, act entitled, and get onto the runway.

  Laura, Tiffany, Chilly, and a handful of interns swarmed around, moving outfits, accessorizing hangers, checking and double-checking, because one skirt out of order meant the wrong thing on the runway. Or, worse, an empty runway while a giraffe got out of her outfit and into the correct one.

  Laura barely had a chance to finish half of her coffee. She put it on her desk, then didn’t take another sip. Every time she craved it, she was hanging or steaming or doing some other hand-intensive chore. The headache gathered like a thundercloud.

  The racks were pushed out the wooden doors by Yoni’s desk, and into the freight elevator. Olly was having a busy day, but recognized Laura immediately, which perturbed her. She was certainly no more memorable a face than Sheldon. But the worry fled, as she watched a month of labor get wheeled into the back of a truck, to be driven two miles, up Seventh, into the guts of Central Park.

  Laura went back up to gather her things. She was one of the last ones, and so the only one to see that André’s desk had been cleared of everything but a stapler and a box. She approached cautiously. The computer was off. The box was sealed poorly and hand-delivered, judging from the lack of stamps. Laura peeked and found about ten yards of Delphi green twill, enough for maybe five shirts. She slid open a drawer. Empty. Another drawer. Nothing but a handful of pattern hooks.