2 Death of a Supermodel

by Christine Demaio-Rice

  Mom stood behind her, arms folded. “Don’t do this.”

  “I’ll help,” Ruby said, arms out.

  “No, I got it.”

  But Ruby would not be deterred, and Mom, seeing that her daughters were about to do exactly what she told them not to do, emitted a resigned sigh.

  Laura scanned the mess in the hallway and found the cordless drill. She checked the charge, which was 65 percent dead, or 35 percent charged if you were a glass half-full type. The tool whirred like a seven-pound cricket when she pulled the trigger. She passed the drill to Mom.

  Mom crouched as the drill groaned when she jammed the bit into the screw holes that had been there for sixty years, give or take. Naturally, pulling up all the screws revealed nails, which needed to be pried up with a screwdriver, or the back of a hammer, or a butter knife. Some required all three, and Laura bumped backs with her mother in the closet removing them. The last one was in so tight, Mom chiseled the plywood around it until she could use pliers on the entire thing.

  They were sweaty, and exhausted, and in too deep to give up. Mom used a crowbar to pry up the wood, which she couldn’t do while standing inside the closet, so she did it from the hall, which had become a wild junkyard of crap from the broom closet and pieces of linoleum they’d scrapped.

  The plywood came up, then slapped back down with a huff of stale air. Mom pried it up again so they could get their hands under it, then shoulders. Mom yanked it toward the door, which got her nowhere because it was bigger than the frame at that angle. So Laura, who was shorter, got in and twisted, and turned, and called on more strength than she actually had to turn the wood around and gently ease it toward the door. It wasn’t coming out, but she’d made enough room so she could look at what was under there.

  Ruby’s broom closet was as neat as everything else in the house. The cleaning products, which were used on a regular basis, lay like sleeping children in cute plaid boxes. If Laura went into the corners, she was sure she wouldn’t see sixty years’ worth of someone else’s dust.

  Mom had flashlights ready. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “I don’t want any part of this.” She walked upstairs as if she could make that statement true retroactively.

  Ruby was ready to go. Laura stepped down, kicking boxes of cleaning things out of the way before she opened the closet door. They didn’t dare turn on any lights or point the flashlights out the windows, where the snoops in the news van could see. Her sister grabbed her hand and pulled her into the bedroom.

  Ruby yanked a polka-dotted box from under the bed and, kneeling in front of it, threw off the lid. She pulled out a pile of paper and handed half the stack to Laura. “It’s in here,” she said, flipping through her half. “Somewhere. Ah! Here.” They huddled in the corner and held their flashlights close to the paper. The brochure was an eight-page full-color foldout for the White Rose Foundation, an organization dedicated to moving girls sold into prostitution in Eastern Europe out of harm’s way.

  “Flip to the back,” Laura whispered. There, they saw Thomasina’s picture over a plea for donations, with a signature that was boldly capped and broadly finished, and mention of an unpictured co-chair, Randolf Fosh. “Rolf?”

  Ruby shrugged and flipped over the brochure. On the cover, a pretty young thing, smiling and gloriously backlit, unselfconscious about her simple hair and tattered clothes, looked at them with big, meatball eyes.

  Laura recognized her immediately. “This is Thomasina’s foundation, which Ivanah and Bob are involved in. I saw Rolf with this girl the other day, and she was also in the Pandora modeling catalog. She’s the link. She can tell us what all these things have to do with each other.”

  “Okay. Like what?”

  “Someone is pissed at someone else for something to do with this, and if they were pissed enough to kill Thomasina, your problems are over.” She was making it up as she went. Her mind was a pure blank. She was tired, frustrated, and restless, and her thinking was a web of nonsense.

  Ruby, for having had one of the worst days of her life, was on the ball. She snapped up the brochure and stuffed it in the box. “Let’s bring it all upstairs. We need to look at everything.”

  Laura nodded, but knew she wasn’t going to make it. If she didn’t sleep, she was going to collapse in her own spit and sweat. Mom, who was waiting for them in the hallway, walked her up to bed while Ruby gathered makeup, shoes, and other necessities from her closed-off apartment. The sheets were cool and dry, and Mom pulled the covers over her as if she were seven years old.

  “Mom?”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “I kissed Jeremy today.”

  “The one you used to work for?”

  “Him.”

  “That you still work for?”

  “Just sometimes.”

  Mom paused as though she wanted to say something. Laura knew what her mother would say. Jeremy was a user and manipulator. He’d never be with her unless he wanted something from her. But she was quite willing to give it. She’d pined after him for six years and finally had the opportunity to be with him. If he wanted to use her, she was his. And manipulation was barely required.

  Mom closed the door softly without saying a word. Laura didn’t tell her about the wool crepe order tack on because she was tired. But Mom would be proud to know Laura had found as much use for Jeremy as he could find for her. Maybe more. She fell asleep to the sounds of the cordless drill whirring as the floor to the broom closet was replaced as if nothing had ever happened.

  CHAPTER 14.

  Laura wasn’t one to act on dreams. She didn’t cuddle crystals or entertain talk about past lives. No tarot cards, palm readings, or talk of Jesus. She worshipped at a sewing machine and prayed to the pattern. Even the idea of “style” or “fashion” was hard to get her head around because it was ethereal and subjective. She preferred an out-of-style jacket that fit beautifully to an up-to-the-minute garment from H&M, a chain that would put intricate beading and embroidery on an armhole shaped like a highway off-ramp.

  But insofar as dreams were catalogs of the previous day’s events, a meatball made an appearance. No, it was the idea of a meatball, because she and Stu had been searching Central Park for it, but finding only globs of horse poop that looked like meatballs.

  She went downstairs to find Ruby sleeping on the couch and her polka dot document box on the dining room table. Last night’s observations had happened quickly and in low light. The documents could have said anything. The girl on the back of the brochure could have been anyone.

  Right?

  No. It was Meatball Eyes, definitely the best looking of the bunch. A picture was emerging. Thomasina chaired an organization to help young women, bringing them into the country and getting them jobs as models. How Roquelle Rik allowed it with her territorial leanings was the source of Laura’s bafflement. She snapped up her phone and dialed the number on the back of the White Rose brochure.

  She heard a couple of harsh beeps and a notice that the number had been disconnected.

  Behind her, Ruby stirred and sat up, groaning.

  “Good morning,” Laura said.

  Ruby threw herself in a dining room chair and put her head down. “I don’t want to go into the showroom today.”

  “You have to, sorry. And you have to play it like you’re annoyed by the whole thing. You can manage. Ivanah’s PR people are out there screwing you anyway.”

  Ruby hugged her pillow and groaned as if hung over. “We saw the eleven o’clock news. I was on at eleven fifteen, falling off a runway. They didn’t even mention my shoes weren’t buckled. They blamed it all on Thomasina.”

  “And you for the murder.”

  Ruby got up and stood beside her, looking over her shoulder as she shuffled through the papers. “Are you going to work on this while I’m in the showroom?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ruby hugged Laura from behind. “Thank you.”

  “For you, anything. If it was just about Thomasina dying, I’d b
e working on Summer and letting the police do their job.”

  Ruby, maybe half as gorgeous as usual on account of exhaustion and worry, poked through the papers, which Laura organized across the table. Modeling contracts for runway. Modeling contracts for fit. Modeling contracts for print. Invoices for each.

  “You saw her the night before?” Laura asked. Ruby nodded. “Dinner?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you make?”

  “We ordered DiBennedetto’s.” That made sense. Ruby didn’t cook if it could be avoided.

  “Did anything happen? Did she say anything? Get a phone call? Did she talk about anyone bothering or annoying her?”

  “She got a call. She was talking in German. Kept saying ‘nicked,’ which I think is German for something. She was pissed.”

  “What time did she leave?”

  Ruby didn’t answer, so Laura plowed on. “Because whoever she saw afterwards could have poisoned her. Or there could have been some kind of fight or business meeting or something. Did she say where she was going, even?”

  Again, Ruby said nothing.

  “I can’t reconstruct Thomasina’s movements without you.”

  “She was poisoned from the pills in her bag, right? So doesn’t that mean someone put the pill in there before, like weeks maybe? So what’s the difference what she did the night before?”

  “What are you hiding?”

  “Nothing, I’m just saying—”

  “What time did she leave?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think I look at a clock all the time?”

  “Did she leave at all?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Did she stay the night?”

  Ruby looked stricken for a second, and as she and Laura looked at each other, an understanding passed between them. The sudden attached-at-the-hip friendship. The knee-jerk defensiveness. The giggling in the office late at night. The truncated work hours. Jeremy asking how she was holding up. He’d seen it a mile away.

  “Goddamn it, why didn’t you tell me?”

  In answer, Ruby stormed into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

  Fantastic. Ruby and Thomasina were doing it. No wonder the police swabbed her.

  Laura knocked on the door, then banged. “Rubes, come on! Did you tell the cops?”

  “Of course I did, and it makes it look like I did it even more.”

  “Did she see anyone else between you and the show? Did she say she was going anywhere? Ruby? Come on. Please.”

  There was a sniffle and a shuffle that sounded like a body moving against the other side of the door. “I made breakfast, and I sat and ate by myself. I don’t know if she was mad at me or what, and now I can’t even ask her or apologize.”

  “You don’t know where she went?” The question seemed inappropriate, but Laura didn’t know what else to say.

  “She bitched that she had no cash in her wallet, and I offered, but she wouldn’t take it. She had a total breakdown over it, and I couldn’t even do anything.”

  Laura felt as if she’d missed a whole era of her sister’s life because she had no idea there had been a relationship. So she had a hard time relating to Ruby’s pain. Of course, she first had to come to terms with the fact that Ruby had been with a woman, then that she’d apparently fallen in love with said woman. Then, worse, that her sister hadn’t told her. The murder seemed paltry in comparison.

  Ruby didn’t come out of the bathroom, and Laura felt there was no point in trying to squeeze more out of her without a couple of glasses of wine and a nice dinner. She tucked a folder of choice documents under her arm and walked to the train. Yoni called as Laura was coming out of the Italian deli with her coffee.

  “What do you have?” Laura asked, dispensing with a greeting.

  Yoni, who was perfectly comfortable without niceties, replied, “Your pill. It’s made of alkaloids. Not enough to kill you. Maybe if you took twenty or thirty. It is used to induce vomiting.”

  “Perfect for bulimic models.” She tried to keep her voice down, but a bus went by, and she had to yell.

  “Yes, and amateur-made, too, which I could have told you just by looking at it. The clear part anyone can get at a health food store. They stuff it with herbs. But this powder? Not amateur.”

  “So you’re saying the powder comes from some place, and then someone put it into the capsules?” Laura pressed her finger to her opposite ear to close out the ambient sounds.

  “Yes.”

  “And the powder, any guess where it’s from?”

  “We could guess, but—”

  “Czechoslovakia?”

  “Oh. You’ve been busy. Yes. It’s made from a daffodil bulb grown mostly in Eastern Europe.”

  “Anything else?”

  “My ankles hurt. I want to shoot them off. I will bleed water, my God.”

  “Thanks, Yoni.”

  “Get me fabric orders.”

  “The wool crepe is taken care of. I’m tacking onto Jeremy’s.”

  Yoni took in a sharp breath through her teeth. “Our Jeremy?”

  “Yes, of course. Who else?”

  “I don’t know what you did, little girl, but Jeremy, our Jeremy, never tacks on his fabric orders. He thinks it can hold him up, and he doesn’t like entanglements. He must like you more than I thought.”

  “Maybe he trusts me, is all.”

  Yoni, who enjoyed goodbyes as much as hellos, hung up unceremoniously.

  Jeremy liking her more than Yoni thought was good news, she guessed, but it made her feel as though he’d agreed to do it for the wrong reasons, because he liked her, which gave her a weird sense of power and made her uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. She wanted to call him and tell him he didn’t have to tack the order, and she’d asked him at a really bad time.

  She heard the train pull in underground as she was dialing, and she had to run down the stairs or miss it. Luckily, she couldn’t get a signal underground.

  The person Laura really wanted to find was Meatball Eyes. The model could tell where she was from, who represented her, how she got to New York, and whether or not she’d been saved by a goddess in shining armor named Thomasina or Sabine, or whatever. The girl could also tell all about Rolf, and his involvement with the foundation.

  But Laura had no access to the girl outside of Rolf, who never left a phone number or slip of information anywhere. And she wasn’t about to stand outside Baxter City, waiting for him to show.

  Roquelle Rik was the only connection Laura could make at the moment. A modeling agency, be it U.S.-based or otherwise, did not open its doors without Roquelle knowing about it, and the prettiest girl in any such agency would be immediately poached like an egg at Sunday brunch.

  The offices of The Mermaid Agency stressed sexuality and sexual power, without yield or surrender. The women plastered over the walls, floor to ceiling, were aggressive, confident, and as inaccessible as the mythical creatures after which they were named.

  Thomasina’s face gazed at Laura from behind the reception desk, with grainy black and white eyes literally as big as stop signs. Piercing. Perfect. She looked angry and hungry, like a tiger that hadn’t eaten in weeks. Fresh flowers, lilies, orchids, in wickedly expensive arrangements, dropped petals on the floor beneath her chin. Soon, their dead star’s picture would be gone, replaced with another angry thoroughbred who had to have the busted capillaries under her nose Photoshopped out of existence.

  Laura was intimidated for a second, as always when she walked into the office. Then she reminded herself that those eyes were dead, and she was there to avenge the death on behalf of her sister, who had been having sex with the owner of the stop sign eyes.

  The receptionist smiled with lovely, natural teeth that were the product of good genes and better habits. Her eyes lit up the room with an approachability that must have been planned to counter the aggression in Thomasina’s snarl. “Ms. Carnegie, how are you?” She had obviously been hired for a cracke
r-jack memory in addition to the sunny disposition.

  “I’m good. Is Roquelle available?”

  Sunny’s brows knitted, and her gaze went to her computer screen. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “I need to ask her about the Pandora Agency.”

  “I’m sorry. It seems she’s in a meeting.”

  “I’ll wait.” Laura sat on the leather bench with a seat higher than any other bench she’d sat on. She could only guess it was because of the height of the women coming through there. She texted Roquelle:

  —I’m in recep. Need 2cu re a White Rose girl

  Then she waited. Thomasina stared at her, and Laura imagined the snarl turning into as much of a smile as one could get from a giraffe within ten feet of a camera. The smile said, Your sister fell in love with me, and she didn’t even tell you. She was scared of you. She did whatever I told her. She dropped all that work in your lap because she was with me. And I was with someone else, too. Because I could.

  The taunts were circular, running from subject to subject, and cause to effect, and cause to cause in no productive order. In fifteen minutes, Laura went from hating the heiress, to feeling sorry for her, to being mystified, to curious, to disgust, to rage, to sympathy, to intimidation, to intimacy, and all the way back again.

  And where it landed was: You should have seen it, but you were too busy working.

  She hadn’t been too busy to miss a new pair of shoes, however, especially not a pair of Jimmy Choos on Ruby’s very own living-off-her-savings feet. They weren’t a pair of vintage Choos, either, but that season’s, spanking new from not even the back of Otto Tootsi Plohound on Fifth where the size elevens went to die.

  Laura had stopped being surprised or excited when Ruby walked in with some new, wildly expensive accessory, so she just looked at her and said, “Nice Choos.”