I closed the front door and turned to the reporter.
“Let’s sit for a minute,” I said.
She walked over and sat on the edge of the sofa, and I positioned myself in a chair across from her. Lord Berkeley scampered around the corner and, sensing there was an intruder in his midst, brandished a mouthful of clenched teeth.
The reporter folded her arms over her knees and leaned back on the couch.
“Your dog—is he umm, going to attack me?” she said.
I shook my head.
“He just wants you to know he’s aware of your presence.” I patted the corner of my chair with my hand. “Come here, Boo.”
He hopped up on the chair and rested his head on my thigh but didn’t take his eyes off the intruder.
“Who do you work for?” I said.
“The Park City Beat. They wanted me to write an article about your sister so I drove over to talk to you, but I had no idea so many people would be here.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll give you the article you want if you agree to print one thing for me.”
She smiled and reached into her shoulder bag and retrieved a pen and a pad of yellow-lined paper. “Name it.”
“To be honest, I’m not interested in an article that rehashes what I went through a few years ago,” I said. “I want you to send a message to the killer for me.”
Her eyes widened like they’d been propped open with toothpicks.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life,” I said.
She bobbed her shoulders up and down.
“Alright then, what do you want to say—do you want to address him directly?”
I nodded.
“Tell him this: I’m coming for you, and this time, I won’t stop until the only life you have left is behind bars.”
Chapter 4
Maddie had left and turned her post over to Nick who entered the house with a displeased look on his face.
“I’m coming for you, you’re kidding me—right?”
“I hoped Maddie would keep that to herself,” I said.
He slid his hand into his back pocket and pulled out his cell phone and flipped it open.
“I assume they haven’t run the paper yet since that girl was just here a few minutes ago,” he said. “One quick call and I can have it taken out.”
I shook my head and placed my hand over his phone and pushed it down.
“It stays,” I said.
“Are you trying to put a target on your back?”
“If that’s what it takes to get his attention, then yes,” I said.
“Even if that means you’d put yourself at risk?”
I sighed. He was in one of those moods where it didn’t matter what I said. He couldn’t be reasoned with, and it almost took more effort than it was worth to try.
“Maybe it would be best if we didn’t talk about this right now,” I said.
Nick walked over to me and placed both hands on the sides of my shoulders and looked me square in the eye.
“This guy is out there killing women, and he could be anyone. Hell, he could be your next door neighbor for all you know. We don’t even have any good leads yet. All you’re asking for is trouble.”
“I’m asking for justice, and I thought we both wanted that—for Gabby and all the other victims. This creep has gotten away with a slew of murders. He walks free while the women he murdered live in eternal unrest inside a coffin, knowing the man who killed them is still out there. They’ve been robbed, all of them, from the opportunity of a full life. And if I have even the slightest chance to catch the guy this time and send him straight to hell, I’m going to take it.”
“You shouldn’t be anywhere near this. You’re too emotional. Can’t you see that?”
“It’s too late for that,” I said. “I was involved from the moment he took Gabby from me.”
Nick shook his head.
“By the end of the week I bet we have a dozen guys on this, not to mention the FBI. That’s why it would be best for you to let us do our job.”
“Don’t you mean it would be better for you?” I said. “That’s what you believe, isn’t it? Just because you’re a detective doesn’t mean you have the right to make decisions for me.”
He grimaced and detached his hands from my shoulders and then walked into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Crown Royal out of the cabinet and a glass. He poured himself a drink and took a nice long swig and then hammered it down on the counter. The glass made a ringing sound when it hit and a portion of the liquid flew up into the air and sloshed down on the counter. I wanted to say: I’m not cleaning that up, but I didn’t.
After a minute of silence where Nick downed the rest of his drink and I tried not to focus on the liquid that had spread in two directions and trickled like a diminutive stream toward the edge of my counter, he looked over at me and said, “I understand your feelings for the guy, or the lack thereof, and you have every right to hate him for what he’s done—no one disputes that. But if you go after him on your own, you’ll put yourself at risk and I can’t allow that.”
He couldn’t allow it?
“Maybe you should go,” I said.
“I just got here.”
I grabbed my keys off the counter.
“Then I’ll go. It’s been a long day. I need some time to think.”
He started to say something, but it was too late. I was already out the front door, and it had shut itself behind me. And for the first time in ten minutes I remembered what it felt like to breathe again.
Chapter 5
In the years that had elapsed since Gabrielle’s death, not a single day went by when I didn’t think of her or him, whoever he was, and though I hated the fact that the killings had resumed, him being back on the prowl gave me the second chance I needed; once again he was within my grasp. The first time around I was too wrapped up in my emotions with the loss of Gabby to concentrate on catching her killer. I left it to the homicide unit to do that, and I thought they’d come through and find the piece of trash responsible for the brutal killings. But they didn’t, and I wasn’t about to let that happen again. Not this time.
I hopped out of bed and walked to the front door and opened it. The morning sun blasted its rays across my face, and I held my hand in front of my eyes to shield myself from it while I reached down with the other and retrieved the paper. I shut the front door and carried it to the kitchen. Lord Berkeley trotted past me and yawned and then went over to his water bowl and peered in. When he didn’t see what he wanted, he stuck one paw in the bowl and moved it back and forth which produced a sound like a quarter being dropped into a glass jar.
“Your mommy is going to be the talk of the town today,” I said to him.
He looked at me and then at his bowl and then back at me again. His only concern seemed to be whether what I just said had anything to do with him getting what he wanted, now. I gripped his bowl in my hand and topped it off and set it back down. He did a few spins to show his eternal gratitude and then buried his face in the bowl and savored his reward.
I made some tea and pulled the rubber band off the paper. It fell open, and the headline of the day was revealed for all to see in bold capital letters:
SISTER OF MURDER VICTIM GABRIELLE MONROE VOWS REVENGE!
It was a bit on the dramatic side, but the paper had done its job. The headline was followed by an article that chronicled the events in the order in which they happened three years earlier. The past had come back, and I’d been given a second chance. I leaned back in my chair and smiled. Ready, set—go.
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Christine DeMaio-Rice
How A Big Yellow Truck Changed My Life
(for the better)
An orange peel grapple is a big machine. Excavator on the bottom. Long arm in the middle. And a
metal grapple on the end that looks like a horror movie claw. The base spins. The arm moves up and down. The grapple grabs stuff like SUVs and big piles of metal.
You may come across one while driving, and if you have a little boy in the car, you may have to pull over to watch the thing move cars into a tractor trailer. Otherwise, nothing about this machine will rock your world.
But an orange peel grapple changed my life.
My life was a complete disaster at the time. Though I had a beautiful baby boy and a good husband, I had a job in an industry I swore I would never return to, at a company that wanted nothing more than to suck the blood directly from my heart with a curly straw. This, after I had already sold all the blood in my heart to the film industry, which after a few meetings and screenwriting awards, looked like it might want to take a sip from that straw.
A sip, because as good as things were looking, I saw a long road in front of me. My work was not “commercial enough,” and my manager had made it clear that years would pass before I would be able to convince anyone that this lack of commerciality was a quality that was, well, commercial.
But no. My husband lost his job, and I found work in the fashion industry soon after. What I rapidly discovered was that, though out-of-towners could schedule meetings back-to-back all over town, Angelenos were expected to take a meeting at the last minute, or blithely accept a rescheduling. My boss, on the other hand, had no interest in moving around my personal days, and my sick days dwindled in my first three months on the job. It took only a few months for the meetings to dry up and for me to start writing a Santa Claus script out of desperation.
So, the blood-sucking fashion job with the inflexible hours was right next to a scrap yard, which apparently opened at the crack of dawn because when I got there at seven thirty every morning, the orange peel grapple was already grabbing away. If I had a minute, I watched it go up and down as I clutched my coffee, and I thought, one day I should get a video camera and film this because my son would love it. Really love it.
My son was about eighteen months old and just learning to talk. I missed him while I was at work, adored him when he was awake and with me, and the rest of the time, I found room to resent him for taking me away from writing. He was then, and has remained, a fireball of energy. His teacher alternated between calling him a Jack Russell terrier and a buzz saw. He is also obsessive. Right now, he has a room full of Legos. Before that, it was Thomas the Tank Engine, and before that, it was trucks. Big yellow trucks. He wouldn’t fall asleep unless he gripped a toy truck in each fist. When he received a Tonka loader for Christmas, it was love at first sight. He called it “lolo.”
One morning, with the vision of that big ‘lolo’ that I would later know as an orange peel grapple dancing in my head, I dialed a friend’s number. I’d known this man from Brooklyn, and he’d come to Los Angeles a few years earlier to attend the American Film Institute. Most importantly, he had a camera. When I got his answering machine, instead of asking him for the camera, I said something else entirely, something like, “Hey, wanna produce a kid’s video together? Here’s the pitch. Trucks. Okay, bye.”
That moment may not seem pivotal, but most turning points don’t when they happen. That moment, I took control of my creative life. My friend called me back the minute he got up, and we began the journey toward becoming business owners. We did not pitch the idea around town, and we did not ask permission to bring the work to the public. We put the DVDs on Createspace, and eventually had to hold inventory to meet the demand.
Lolo Productions and the Totally Trucks series have had ups and downs, but the process taught me two things. One, my concepts need to be simple. If I can’t pitch it in five words, it’s not a concept I should develop. My second lesson is that I can be in control of my product and my creative life. If I think something is worthwhile, I can bring it to my customers. Becoming the producer and publisher of my work means I understand now what agents and studio executives meant when they said “commercial.”
Without my son, I never would have taken the life-sucking job. And without that job, there would have been no orange peel grapple. And without that scrapyard, there would have been no Totally Trucks. No eye for the commercial and no control of self-publishing. Who knows what I would have made without all the things that pissed me off for interrupting my work.
About the Chick
Christine lives in Los Angeles with her family, though her accent is pure Brooklyn. She has been involved in the fashion industry for over 20 years, and though she protests that she’d rather not talk about it, she complains about little else.
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Dead Is the New Black
Christine DeMaio-Rice
An Excerpt
Chapter 1
Laura was late.
Not so late that she’d walk into work after everyone had arrived, and it wasn’t as if she’d missed a conference call or a fitting, or anything like that. More like, conceptually late, because she usually arrived at seven thirty every morning so she could chat with her boss—winner of the CFDA award two years running and subject of more Vogue editorials than she could count. Prodigy. Wunderkind. Fashion icon. Jeremy St. James. Whom she loved. And who, naturally, was gay. So Laura wasn’t late for work so much as she was late for a casual conversation with a love interest incapable of loving her back.
As she got into the elevator at eight thirty on that particular Sunday morning, joining a woman with a perfectly highlighted blond ponytail and a sales guy who smelled as though he’d had an eventful Saturday night, she knew it was worth it, or at least, that it couldn’t have been helped. She couldn’t have let the girl in the pink coat just walk off the R train without being questioned, because she was either the greatest home sewer in the tri-state area, or she was in possession of a first-class knockoff.
Whichever the case, the girl needed either a job offer or an interrogation, because the pink coat in question was the bestselling, four-hundred-of-a-kind Donatella coat which, in a major flub by two well-paid, and soon to be unemployed, editors, was on the cover of both Bazaar and Elle simultaneously, two months ago, in their December issues. Thus, once the initial four hundred units sold out at Bergdorf’s and Bloomingdale’s, it became more expensive to buy the coat used than new.
But the woman, who wasn’t a second over twenty-three and not an inch over five-two, with hair dyed a little too black, a straightening job a little too thorough, and a skirt about four inches past the point of flattering, wasn’t wearing a Donatella coat. Not by a long shot. She knew because the button thread on Ms. Hipster’s jacket matched the pink of the fabric. When Laura inched closer to the little hipster, acting as if she wanted to share door-leaning privileges, she caught the unmistakable aroma of a well-loved dog and saw that the pink thread was not only specious in that it was pink, but it was also cotton permacore.
Laura knew for a fact that the rhinestone buttons on the Donatella coat were sewn on with thread that matched the silver of the button. And she knew because she and an assistant designer had chosen the thread from a rayon thread sample card. They had two shades of grey rayon twisted together to match the color depth of the metal, effectively making the thread disappear.
However, she had seen no other imperfections in the faux designer coat. The fabric was the same. The collar lay straight on her neck. The stitching was to the St. James standard. Only the button thread gave it away.
The train had stopped, and Ms. Hipster apparently thought she was just going to walk out at 31st Street with a knockoff of a Jeremy St. James coat.
Laura had followed to find out where the girl had gotten it, because whomever she bought it from was selling counterfeit merchandise, the bane of the fashion industry, the huge sucking vortex that swallowed millions and left poor patternmakers like Laura without jobs. The black market of inf
erior-quality goods violated every trademark, copyright, and intellectual property law put into place to protect artists and artisans.
Ms. Hipster was not just going to walk away, even if, as she approached 31st Street, Laura despaired of a way to ask the woman a polite question, a problem that didn’t rectify itself by the time she followed her to 29th Street, too far away from work just to turn back.
No, once Laura saw her walk into a Korean market on Broadway, she knew she had passed the point of no return. She was committed to discovering the origins of the pink jacket. Best case scenario, Ms. Hipster’s dog, undoubtedly a smelly, drooling thing she kept in her studio apartment in Bushwick, had chewed off the buttons, and she replaced them with whatever thread she had in her sewing kit. Worst case, she was the mastermind behind a counterfeiting ring, and Laura was putting her life in danger by coming close to her.
Laura blew into the Korean market and spotted Ms. Hipster at the coffee bar. Laura headed over there and poured herself the smallest size. It smelled stale, even for a Sunday, so Laura felt zero guilt about the wasted brew as she intentionally mismanaged the paper cup.
“Oh, geez!” Laura exclaimed, as Ms. Hipster arched her back away from Laura’s flying coffee. “I’m so sorry! Did it get anywhere?” A spot of coffee clung to the fabric hairs on the front, about to soak in. The woman had to go ballistic. Who wouldn’t? A Donatella coat cost four thousand dollars. The girl didn’t look like she could afford more than a vintage find from Goodwill.
Ms. Hipster daubed it with a napkin. “It’s all right. I think it’s mostly off.”
Mostly? She was either loaded—that was out, judging from the rest of her ensemble—or the coat was cheap. Laura held out more napkins, and they moved out of the way of the cashier line. “I think there’s a little on the button, too.” Ms. Hipster looked, but of course there was nothing. Laura continued, “If the button is stained, I saw the same ones at Harry’s. I don’t know where you’d get the thread to match, though.”
Laura waited. Ms. Hipster looked at her button, “No, it looks okay. And the thread is just pink. No big. I can buy that anywhere.” She gave a noncommittal smile and backed into the cashier line.
Indie Chicks: 25 Women 25 Personal Stories Page 43
