“Scream like a tropical bird is what,” she said. “The smell makes him crazy.”
He slid open the doors and winked at her. “Eleven. Coffee to the left.”
Coffee was exactly what she had on her mind. She mixed herself a cup, then went directly to the roof, where the shoot was to take place. At some point, she may even have drunk a little, but the next hour was lost in preparation and details with interns, makeup with Monty, clothing with Maria and Carlos from the sample room, accessories that arrived in trashed wheeled suitcases, and Ruby, who showed up a minute before Rowena came from behind the curtain.
“You all right?” Laura asked.
“They taped off my apartment. I can’t even get in.”
“Did they tell you anything about why they were there?”
“No.” She shook her head as if trying to loosen the gears. “How is Chase doing?”
The photographer, with his signature long mop of curly black hair and pageboy cap, was doing what he always did before a shoot, holding his camera at his chest, standing directly in the way, and staring into space. He spoke to no one, having briefed his all-female team beforehand by whispering instructions in their ears. They set up a net over the edge of the building, and then another, larger one a few stories down, and a dangling shelf for Chase and his silent camera.
“He’s not happy about Rowena,” Laura said. “Thomasina worked with him a hundred times. She could read his mind. Rowena, he’s going to have to speak to. And she was obviously out last night.”
He stood there until the sun was in the right place in the sky, and his team, like a well-trained squad of assassins, stopped talking and puttering when he held out his hand. The person in charge of the music started the thumpity-thumps, and Rowena stepped out from behind the curtain in a silk tulle dress that looked like twenty yards of fabric wrapped around her and sewn shut.
“She can’t walk,” Ruby said.
“That’s the point.”
“You did that because you didn’t like Thomasina. Now how do you feel?”
“I feel like she looks exactly like Thomasina, but with a different face and an accent I can understand most of the time.” Laura took the purple capsule out of her pocket. “You ever seen one of these before?”
Ruby barely glanced at it before she said, “It’s probably a vitamin.”
“Vitamins don’t come in lilac.”
“How would you know?”
“It looks like someone emptied grape Pixy Stix into a clear capsule. And what’s with you getting defensive about a pill that you don’t even know where I got it?”
“I just feel bad for Rowena, and it’s your fault she can’t walk.”
Laura suspected there was more to it, but Ruby was sour and puckered, so she let it drop.
The shoot was simple. The model stood over the ledge in the dress she couldn’t walk in and tipped over so the view to the city spanned below her. The imagery was going to be gorgeous, hashed out between the four of them: Laura, Ruby, Thomasina, and Chase, who nodded, grunted, or hissed. There would be a net, safety gear, and a dress so tight the tension of the scene would be palpable enough to make the pages sweat. The key to that had been Thomasina’s agreement to look as though she were falling twenty-five stories, which Laura didn’t realize until Rowena came out of dressing in an ankle-length skirt that she expected to be able to walk in, but couldn’t.
Chase motioned with his hands, and Rowena moved all six feet of her fabric-bound legs as far as she could, while looking completely inaccessible to either gender for sex, friendship, or a two-dollar cup of coffee. She turned sideways, and Laura noticed the bones in her arms and thought she might actually be thinner than the last show, as if some internal organs and musculature had been removed so her skin could adhere better to her bones. But what stood out the most was that, for all her lack of preparation, Rowena was dishing it out. If Chase was doing his job, the shoot was going to send girls all over the country tumbling over rooftops.
Laura turned just in time to see Roquelle Rik walking over to her.
“This was slick,” Roquelle said, sipping creamy coffee from a vintage chintz cup. Laura was pretty sure the coffee and the cup had come from Marlene X, the breakfast joint on Third that was filled with models, wannabe models, agents, producers both real and fake, fashion hangers-on, and the occasional hot designer seeking an undiscovered look.
Laura fondled a nondescript paper cup holding her now-cold coffee. She’d been to Marlene X once and had been caught without cash, which was all they took. She had been mortified and never returned.
Roquelle seemed to sense Laura’s thoughts, like a cat, and played on them, like a bitch, when she said, “My girl dies, and you two don’t miss a beat.”
Mortification notwithstanding, Laura’s mouth functioned fine as she snapped, “Please, if I’d died on Saturday afternoon, Thomasina wouldn’t have missed a Sunday brunch over it.”
Roquelle clicked her cup into the saucer, and they watched things progress at the building ledge. “Nobody would, but she wouldn’t have been so public about it.”
Laura turned to Roquelle to see her expression because the tone was too flat for her to make out the sentiment.
The modeling agent smiled. “She was a class act. And lots of people knew it. Oh, and don’t start with the whole Ruby-runway thing. It was a moment of pique. I hear you’ve had your own.”
Laura turned back to the shoot, her shoot. Rowena swung her arm up, then down, and made a big circle with her other arm. Laura was sure the woman was headed over the edge. Even with the net, it was scary, and her instinctual mind refused to believe Rowena would be caught. But the model righted herself, swung left, and growled at the camera, which clicked. Even Chase made a shocked sound. Rowena seemed to be getting tired, and he held up a hand. His team dropped everything and scuttled around, picking things up, and one brought Chase a container full of something brown and gritty. Someone handed Rowena a small bowl of almonds.
“Nicely done,” Roquelle said. “You make them beautiful, then throw them off buildings. You’re playing on public disdain. Everyone else is doing aspiration.”
“That wasn’t my intention.”
“Of course not.” Roquelle went over to Rowena. She spoke in a soft voice and stroked the model’s hair.
Laura felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Monty, Jeremy’s special style guy, and now hers by dint of the fact that she apparently had no career outside of her old boss. They air-kissed, but she somehow did the wrong side first, and they wound up pressing cheeks together.
“You were brilliant yesterday,” he whispered.
“Maybe you can help me with today?”
“How is Ruby holding up?”
“Great.”
“Can I do something with your face?” Monty asked, continuing a line of badgering that had been going on for at least two years. “Please?” His cartoonish pleading wasn’t new, but Laura was feeling dish-raggy from the picture in the paper, so she sat in his chair.
The first thing he did was put drops in her eyes. “Your eyes are red as a lobster. Didn’t you sleep?”
Laura didn’t feel like answering any questions about her insomnia. “How’s Rowena behaving?”
“She’s forever in the bathroom. Like a diva already.”
“Chase is going to freak out if he smells puke on her.”
“Rowena? Never. Darling, she just doesn’t bother eating in the first place.” Monty flicked his brush over Laura’s cheeks and said, “Dymphna eats her portions. She just chews gum because there’s nothing worse than a pretty girl’s breath after a trip to the bathroom. Especially after cheese. They all pretend they’re like your sister. Eats like a sow at a trough and loses weight anyway, but no way, honey.”
“You know all about these girls.”
“Of course. They get to my chair on time from the bathroom or not, so I have to know.”
She reached back for the lilac pill, almost getting a mascara stic
k in her eye.
“You have to hold still,” Monty said.
“Wait, have you seen these before?” She held it out.
He glanced at it and went back to work. “Where’d you find that?” His whispered tone was so serious that she slipped the capsule back into her jacket.
“What is it?”
“Diet pill,” he said. “It’s from Amsterdam or the Netherlands or something.”
“Amsterdam is in the Netherlands.”
He shrugged. Apparently, geography wasn’t his thing. “It’s supposed to make you allergic to food. They say, anyway. But it’s not like any of these magpies are scientists, if you know what I mean. Where did you get it?”
“I found it on one of the girls.” It was the truth, but a truth that might get her a little closer to a little more information.
“Don’t tell me,” he said, falling right into her evil trap, “Dymphna Bastille.”
“Nope.”
“Really? I’m surprised.”
“Why?”
“She has fat fingers. Ever notice? There’s a fat girl inside her waiting to get out, and she’s just fighting it tooth and nail.”
She was about to ask him what exactly he meant by fat and what exactly he saw when he looked at her fingers, but Rowena came into view. She wore a matte black body stocking meant to go under the next dress. The dressing order went: undergarments, makeup, hair, overgarments. If the hair was bigger than the opening of the clothes, the hair was finished while the girl stood in her final outfit. Rowena was going to wear an origami number spitefully close to the dress that had almost gotten Laura a failing grade on her Parson’s thesis. No small neck on that thing, it was basically a trapezoid with darts and ties.
Rowena held it out. “This works how?”
“It’s like math,” Laura said as she tucked, folded, and tied. “You wear it according to the first three axioms of Euclidean geometry.”
“I missed that class,” Rowena mumbled. Monty squirted something in her hair, and she swatted him away. He ignored her and finished the job.
Laura tied the last knot and flipped the back panel up into a hidden hood. “Not like getting an A in the class would have helped, anyway. I was just being pedantic with this group.”
“Honey,” Monty said, flicking the hood to the side. “I don’t know what that means, but you can fuss with the dress when I’m done here, okay?”
Dismissed, Laura found her sister fussing with a paper bag full of bracelets.
“Silver?” Ruby asked.
“Yeah. Gotta be with the heather grey.”
“I planned for a lot of them on the left arm, but now I’m thinking…” She held up two.
“That’s fine. Hey,” Laura said as if some interesting topic had just occurred to her, “I was wondering, do you think Thomasina took some sort of diet pill that was laced or something?”
“I don’t know, but here’s a great idea. Oh, my God, this is genius! Wait. I have it.” Ruby had Laura’s full attention to such a degree that she forgot she was supposed to be looking at Rowena. “Uhm, how can I say this so you get the full impact? Okay. This solves the whole thing. What if… you minded your goddamn business for a change?”
“She was your friend. You don’t care?”
“I do care. Really I do. But since finding her killer means you try and make her out to be evil, I’d rather let the police do it.”
“Taking diet pills is evil? Come on. These girls have to do it or their thighs won’t fit in skinny jeans.”
“Today it’s diet pills, tomorrow, who knows what you’re going to find out?” She held up a slight silver charm bracelet that tinkled in the morning sun.
It was perfect, and Laura gave it the thumbs up. “You mean that she was sleeping with Bob Schmiller?”
Ruby froze, and her eyes got imperceptibly wider. She might have answered in the affirmative, but they were interrupted by a scruffy-looking guy with brown hair mussed to perfection, leather pants worn in exactly the right place, and a sharpness to his green eyes and accented voice that left no room for further gossip.
“Which one of you found Thomasina?”
Laura could tell by Ruby’s open mouth that she was about to volunteer information. It could have been his good looks, or maybe the roughness to his voice, but the very things that inspired Ruby to answer immediately inspired Laura to step forward and break her sister’s train of thought.
“I’m sorry? Who are you? And why do I care?”
Behind him, one of Chase’s assistants, empowered not by her age, but by the orders of Chase himself, stepped in and said, “Mr. Charmain needs you to leave right now.”
But Leatherguy wasn’t having any of it. He didn’t move an inch from Laura. “My sister was missing some items when they found her. If you stole them, I can offer a reward and no questions asked.” He offered it like a ticking time bomb.
Laura wasn’t insulted by the implication that she had stolen something because, in fact, she had. She was, however, attracted to the open door of opportunity. The guy was an emotional wreck and might say something unwise. He was also Rolf, the guy on the phone screaming, “Wecken wecken.” She hadn’t recognized him with hair.
“A bag?” she asked.
“A wallet.”
“I didn’t steal it, but I know where it is.”
“How much do you want?”
Chase snapped his fingers so loudly they could hear him from halfway across the rooftop. Rowena stood by the ledge with all of Manhattan spread before her, waiting for accessories as the sun rose and rose, changing the light with every second.
“I want to know who Sabine Fosh is.”
Ruby jumped in. “Who the—?”
“It’s not important,” Rolf said.
“I agree,” Laura said, holding up the bracelets as if she had decided to move on to a conversation about the merits of silver versus platinum.
Rolf stepped around to get in front of Laura. He spoke in a quieter voice, more pleading and less demanding. “Where we’re from, we can’t go anywhere. We can’t leave the estate. Everyone knows us, and there are those who would do away with us very quickly. She needed another name. So did I.”
“So she could go to the grocery store, I guess?”
“Sure,” he said, as if conceding the point.
She checked her watch as she walked over to Rowena with the bracelets. Over her shoulder, she said, “I had it this morning, but it should be with the police by now.”
He paused for a second, as if he wanted more from her, then left.
The shoot had two more hours, and most of that time was spent perfecting Rowena’s hair, makeup, and clothing. Chase used real film, not digital, and didn’t change it once. Everything shot in those three hours fit on a single roll, which concerned Laura. Photographers tended to press the shutter and keep their finger there, blowing through hundreds of frames to get one shot. Laura asked one of his assistants about it.
The girl, who couldn’t have a been a day over the dewiest weeks of nineteen, responded, “He needs five for the spread and takes ten just to give the editors something to choose from. But he always knows the shot, and he always gets it. He’s amazing.” Her eyes practically welled with tears.
One accessed the roof from a nine-foot-tall shed with a metal door that sat atop the inside stairs. The last bit of the shoot had Rowena sitting on top of that structure with her legs spread as if daring someone to look up her dress, a dark grey rubberized poly draped and rigid at the same time. She ate the camera alive, turning to make sure the red stitching at the hem was visible.
A tinkling noise went off on some glass-covered phone somewhere, and Rowena stepped off the top of the little shed and down the portable steps to the building roof. It was over. She said goodbye in passing, rushing to Central Park for the shows, taking her platform heels for a canter as she hurled herself to the elevator.
Ruby looked concerned as she watched Chase pack up his camera and leave.
&nb
sp; “They say he can get everything in fifteen shots,” Laura said.
“Yeah.”
“And Rowena looked great.”
“Yeah.”
“Except for the brown smear on her ankle.”
“Yeah.”
“Ruby. What’s on your mind?”
“Where did you hear that name? Sabine Fosh?”
Laura didn’t want to admit she had poked around Thomasina’s bag twice, so she hewed close to the truth without admitting that she had turned a corner and driven down Busybody Street at full speed. “I found her bag with the rental shoes and opened the wallet.”
“Is that how you found out about Bob?”
“Yes.”
Ruby turned and looked her in the eyes. “You always seem like such a cold-hearted bitch, like you don’t care about anything but business. But you’re not. You say every horrible thing about Thomasina and you go on with your life like she never mattered. But you’re going to find out why she died, aren’t you? You’re going to get justice for her.”
Laura rolled her eyes. Ruby held her shoulders at arm’s length and said, “Stu!”
“What about him?”
“He knows everyone and everything. We can ask him what he thinks.”
“Ruby, we have work to do. Corky’s in the showroom by himself.”
“Everyone’s at the shows. Come on. It’s not like anyone has any money to buy anything until next month, anyway.”
“An hour ago, you were telling me to mind my own goddamn business.”
But Ruby, the fickle fiend, pulled her out into the street and east to Bedford Avenue, where the hipsters roamed, and the artists and unemployed played.
CHAPTER 6.
Nine in the morning was early for some people, if the bleary eyes and slow gaits down the Avenue were to be believed. A line of bearded boys and persimmon-haired girls staring at their phones curled out the front door of the artisanal coffee joint. After the swill of the craft services table, Laura was tempted to get at the end of the line, but knew she was only avoiding the inevitable. Ruby, sensing her slowed pace while passing the long, trend-forward coffee line, walked faster.
2 Death of a Supermodel Page 7
