2 Death of a Supermodel

by Christine Demaio-Rice

  “You think she’s doing it to the next in line,” said Stu.

  “I know Penelope was at Marlene X this morning, but I don’t know about Rowena. If Penelope started asking too many questions or trying to get her pulled off this season’s roster because she’s too young, that’s a career-killer.”

  “Call Pierre,” Ruby injected. “See if she was there this morning.”

  “He won’t pick up if he’s at a show,” Laura said. “Come on. Let’s get out. Rolf’s not going to do anything with all these cops around.”

  Stu didn’t budge, blocking the way. “Roscoe Knutt’s one of the greatest investigative journalists of all time, and you’re handing him this story?”

  Ruby pulled the opposite door handle, but it snapped back with a clack. “I can’t open this side.”

  “What is it, Carnegie?” Stu asked, still not moving.

  “Would you stop? It’s you, okay. All you. He cornered me. Can we go find Penelope before she chokes on her own vomit please? Because there’s not a cop in this city right now who would a, believe me, and b, give a crap.”

  She pushed him with her cast, and he got out of the car.

  They decided to stick together by dint of the fact that there was a psychopath around, and both Laura and Stu had pissed him off in the recent past.

  “Everyone saw her last at Ricardo Ofenhelb,” Ruby said. “It was in the same tent as we had ours.”

  The tent was close by, and they stood outside, hearing the music thumpity-thump inside and seeing the security guard who was done checking tickets, but not done keeping people out.

  They collectively decided, without speaking about it, to go around to the back.

  Voices came from behind the fence. A woman said, “You don’t cross me, and you don’t threaten me. You don’t get in my goddamn way.”

  Stu opened the gate, and the voice stopped. Just as she was about to head in, Laura rammed face first into Rowena, who was running like a bat out of hell in one of Jeremy’s calf-length dresses for Fall.

  “Sorry, I have to go!” Rowena tried to move toward the bandshell, but Ruby got in her way. After they slammed together, they paused and seemed to wonder what the other knew about their intentions. Rowena snapped out of it first, trying to get around Ruby.

  “No, you don’t,” Ruby said and tackled the model with blunt force from her shoulder.

  Rowena fell into the mud. Laura cringed at the soiling of Jeremy’s seventy-seven dollar a yard (plus duty) fabric. “You killed her.” Rowena was apparently not concerned with the fabric or with the accusation because she grabbed Ruby’s ankle and twisted, sending her flying, then scrambled to her feet while her opponent was still stunned in shock at being felled so easily.

  Laura was about to jump in when she heard Stu call her name from behind the gate.

  She glanced at Ruby, who had Rowena down again and was using all the fighting skills she’d learned in the back alleys of Hell’s Kitchen to keep the model down. Laura knew her cast made her useless, so she ran to check on Stu, who was picking Penelope Sidewinder up from a grassless patch behind the generator.

  “She’s not good,” he said.

  Laura ran back to Ruby, who had wrestled Rowena to the ground, belly down, and had one arm at the small of her back. “Why? Why did you kill her?” Ruby cried for her lost lover, twisting Rowena’s elbow until she screamed.

  The model saw Laura and said, “Get her off me. Jeremy starts in seven minutes. Come on. I was calling the cops when I saw Penelope was sick.”

  “Why?” Ruby twisted again.

  “I didn’t.”

  “You did,” Laura said. “She was just one peg above you and the same measurements, and when Penelope came after you for being underage, you had to take her out, too. You’re just too ambitious, Rowena.”

  “Like you’re one to talk,” Rowena said.

  Laura swung her cast around and clocked the model in the head.

  CHAPTER 25.

  Laura didn’t put any distance between herself and the police until midnight. Apparently, the fact that Rowena “allegedly” killed Thomasina and “allegedly” almost killed Penelope Sidewinder didn’t play into Laura’s favor, nor did the fact that Rowena was sixteen, meaning she’d assaulted a child. Cangemi read her her rights with no little relish. Then Uncle Graham had slowly (to her) and methodically (to him) secured her release.

  She was approaching the train station and so very tired when Jeremy called.

  “You didn’t come,” he said. She heard noise and music on his end. Must be a party. Must be swell.

  “I was keeping Rowena Churchill from your show. I’m sorry.”

  “She was in a secondary set anyway. Where are you?”

  “Outside the Times Square Station.”

  “Meet me at my place, would you?”

  Twenty-Fourth Street and Second Avenue used to be a haven for drug addicts and prostitutes until the artists moved in during the 1970s with their plants and their handy habits and their eyes for making things pretty and nice. Jeremy had told her all about the place over five years of early-morning coffee. The building had been a chair factory until it went out of business for all the usual reasons and had been sold for fixture fees floor-by-floor over the next seven years. Jeremy moved in after Catherine Cayhill had departed, leaving paint blobs on the wood floor, a loft contraption that had to be dismantled, and windows so lovingly kept that light streamed in unfettered.

  The lobby harkened back to the industrial roots of the building with exposed brick and aesthetically chipping paint, big lights hanging from the thirty-foot ceiling, and exposed vent work. The elevator was an automatic job, but the brass fixtures from the days of elevator men stayed, as well as the exposed wood frame of the freight lift. She thought it amazing that a perfectly functioning elevator could still be scary in the twenty-first century, but there it was, creaking as if the co-op board had paid more for that extra bit of tension in the ride, which Laura didn’t need at all. Not even a little. Because she was going to see Jeremy St. James on a social call, which was enough to give her a heart attack. No one was ever invited to Jeremy’s place. Business associates who had known him for years complained they’d never seen his fabulous loft.

  She looked down at her outfit: striped maxi, black blouse, and a cast in a dark pink sling. It had been a long day.

  The hall was short and had only two doors. She went to the one with the welcome mat. She stood at the door and waited. Breathed. Put her fist up to knock. Dropped it. Touched the red door. She steeled herself to knock, and Jeremy opened the door before her knuckles even touched it.

  The top three buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing a little black hair on his chest. He pressed a phone between his ear and shoulder, and the fact that he was distracted, yet still had his eyes on her rendered her speechless. He motioned her in, and she tried to smile when she walked past him because she thought she was going to stop breathing.

  She saw immediately why she’d never known anyone who’d been to the loft. Yes, it was gorgeous in all the usual ways. It had a huge open space with perfectly managed furniture, fat, full-color art books in the bookcases, and a fully functional kitchen that looked out into the bigger room. Just-right drapes in an inconsequential color because of the beauty of the texture hung over factory-sized windows. Exactly-as-they-should-be area rugs in the right plums and mosses lay on the cement floor. Not-too-warm-or-cool lighting illuminated the right knickknacks everywhere. Everything was so perfect that the thing that was wrong stuck out like a mutton chop sleeve on a dropped shoulder. Vents in ugly, flat white vinyl, horrible louvered things blasting white noise, marred the walls, so many she couldn’t count them. Two were cut into the floors that she could see below, and above, she saw big vents ducting on the ceiling. By a doorway, she spotted a control panel with blinking lights and approached it cautiously.

  “Look,” Jeremy said into the phone, “every season you treat me right, and I’m grateful, but I think this way it w
ould help both of us. It’s where we can test new technologies. It fills out the high end side of the brand.”

  Laura glanced back at him, and he held up a wine glass, giving her a quizzical look. He was asking her if she wanted wine. God, it was too much. She was going to hurl herself out the window, but she nodded instead.

  The blinking control panel was about the size of a sheet of paper and had a label that read Aire-pur 2100. There were buttons, dials, and little gauges with numbers she didn’t understand.

  “Yes, that’s what I want. You let me know if you need any more information. I’m always here for you.” He clicked the phone and dropped it on the counter. “Sorry about that. I couldn’t be at the party another second. Too many people.”

  She drifted over to the kitchen area, where he was rummaging around under the counters, wondering if he had to be there to be with her, or if it was the Aire-pur 2100 he needed.

  “I don’t have anything decent,” he said. “I had no time this week.” He held out two bottles by the necks. The labels were a color, and they had words on them. And the humming of the machines drilled her brain and the salted smell of him was so close she wanted to close her eyes so she could breathe it in just a little deeper.

  But she had to choose. Light label or dark. Smooth curve at the neck or not. Both blackened red. She looked at his hands on them and noticed the callous inside his right thumb where scissors rested as he cut thousands of yards of fabric. Before he was anyone. Before the shows. Before Gracie, probably. She reached out and touched his hand, looking for the place on his index finger where pins were pushed to cut, to drape, to sew, to bring dimension to flat fabric. And he let her. He let her touch his hand.

  He put the bottles down, because who cared, really, which wine she wanted? And she didn’t want wine. She wanted to look at his hands and touch the rough spots, and she did something that surprised her because one, she never imagined she’d be actually doing it. Two, she never made a conscious decision to lift his hand to her lips and kiss the cutting callous inside his thumb. But she did.

  It was wildly forward for her, and it opened a floodgate. As her lips touched his hand, he grazed his face against her neck. Her knees went from under her, and he put his arm around her waist to hold her up. Was that why she had come? Yes, she knew it right away. It was what she came for and what he invited her for. It didn’t feel ugly, but like the natural culmination of their friendship, finally.

  They banged into furniture that had seemed so sparse a minute ago, with him steering her toward a room behind a closed door. My God, she thought, the bedroom. It was happening. With Jeremy. Happening. She doubted she could stop, pause, or slow it, but she had to.

  “Jeremy?”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “No, Jeremy, really.”

  He had her pressed up against the doorjamb with her legs around his waist and his face buried in her neck, when he whispered, “I can’t have kids, from the CF. Don’t worry.”

  She wasn’t thinking about that at all, though she knew she should have been.

  He must have felt her stiffen. “Speak,” he said, though she barely could.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t start that way.”

  “I have to tell you something.”

  “I don’t care about the cast.”

  “Not that.”

  “Tell. Quickly. You’re mine today, no matter what you say.” His hands ran up her thigh and under her skirt.

  Somehow, she made words. “I’ve never… you know…”

  He actually stopped kissing her long enough to ask, “Really?”

  She felt things cooling a half a degree and spoke quickly so they could get back to it. “My sister stole all my boyfriends, so I gave up and then… then there was you.”

  “You want to wait.”

  “No! I just don’t want you to be surprised.”

  “Noted.”

  The bedroom door made a whooshing sound when he opened it.

  He was nice. Very nice. Nice in a way that was not saccharine or cynical or fake. Just nice, even with her cast totally in the way. So nice, in fact, that she wondered who the hell she was dealing with. She wondered how that nice person had developed the cutting professional demeanor that was his trademark. In the next hours, he demonstrated a hundred little kindnesses. He got her water. He covered her when she was cold. He made sure her pillow was fluffed. He laughed a lot. In the six years she’d known him, she’d never seen him laugh as much as he did in those first hours of intimacy.

  Jeremy, she thought, I never knew you.

  “I shoulda just clonked you on the head and dragged you in here years ago, after this one day,” he said. “It was seven thirty in the morning, and you were already in. I brought you coffee. I was pissed about something. Probably Gracie putting limits on me. We fought about that all the time. More than anything else. And there you were with the Harmony blouse on the form.”

  “The little stand ruffle collar.”

  “Yeah, you were working on the muslin because the collar wouldn’t do anything.”

  “You wanted the impossible. It couldn’t stand up and sit down at the same time.”

  “You were frustrated as hell. And I wanted to show you how to do it.”

  “Oh, God, I remember that! I thought you were going to fire me.”

  “I never had an employee slap my hand before.”

  “And I yelled.” She buried her face in the pillow. “I’m sorry.”

  “You said something like, ‘If I wanted the Shell answer man, I’d go work in a goddamn gas station.’”

  “You just left the coffee there. I thought I was finished.”

  “I went back to my office, and I thought, my God, she cares. She really cares. And I started thinking of ways to keep you. I gave you that raise.”

  “Thank you.”

  He waved her off. “It wasn’t what I really wanted to do, but when I saw Gracie again, I thought, if Laura were with me, she wouldn’t keep me down. And by the way, you’re beautiful. I always knew it, but after the hand slapping? You were it. You were the one. But it was impossible. For one, Gracie made sure everyone thought I was gay.”

  “Are you?”

  “Shut up.” He kissed her. “And for two, Gracie. And for three, do you have somewhere to be tonight? I don’t want to keep you. But I’m not going in to the office for a couple of days.”

  “I’m going to have to call my sister at some point. We have a meeting with a backer in the morning.”

  “Ah, a magic backer. Someone to hold you down while lifting you up.”

  “I’m okay with it. I decided.”

  CHAPTER 26.

  They didn’t sleep. The sun came up, and he pulled some old samples from his closet. She fit into a sleeveless thing and a pair of cotton twill trousers that were only a little out of style. He helped her get her cast through the armhole, and he walked her to the street in sweatpants. He took off for his daily run, and she went to Marlene X.

  She made an effort not to think too hard about Jeremy or the previous night. She kept her hopes high and her expectations low. She tried not to worry about the assault and battery charge against her. Or that Rolf Wente was still at large. She only wanted to think about how much money they needed to continue, whether or not she could get Yoni and Corky back online, and how much damage had been done with the Thomasina Wente affair.

  There was the matter of time as well. The women who had been found in Washington Heights all officially worked for her, and though she could cut them loose, she intended to give them jobs. But she needed a company, and she needed it to happen fast, before they got deported or picked up by someone else who wanted to hurt them.

  Ruby was already waiting in line. The other girls looked as though they’d been partying all night, while Ruby looked as if she’d just stepped out of an editorial spread.

  “Where were you last night?” Ruby asked.

  Laura must have blushed fifteen shades of red beca
use her sister raised her eyebrows. “Tell me about your night first.”

  “I was out at a few parties. No one knows who our potential backer could be. They’re all saying there’s no money for fashion anymore. They’re all going into movie production to take a loss.”

  “I feel totally unprepared.”

  “Do you feel like you haven’t slept? Because that’s how you look.”

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Where did you get those pants?”

  They found Pierre already at the superstar corner table, tapping on his phone. He looked Laura up and down, then waved them to their seats. “Good morning,” he said, “nice to see you.” That was a completely ridiculous opener, and Laura was about to say something about it when he continued, “Your job is to be charming, as usual. But today, Laura will speak, and Ruby, dear, try to watch and not say anything too forward. There will be no flirting. Yes?”

  “Yes,” Laura said, gratified.

  “Why?” Ruby asked.

  “This individual is concerned with how things are made. Quality. I am sure commerciality will be important, but this person has been in the business a long time and knows the difference between something made beautifully and something made with expediency. This is why Laura should do most of the talking. Okay?”

  They nodded.

  “You’re still wearing that absurd color on your arm.”

  “Sorry, I was busy.”

  “What on Earth is more important?”

  The door behind her opened, and she was saved from having to answer. Pierre smiled and waved, and Laura clenched her fists and unclenched them, trying to release the tension before she looked at him or her, so she could be her most charming, sharp, erudite, and professional self.

  She caught Ruby’s smile and looked around. Jeremy stood behind her, wearing a jogging suit and a wide grin. She wondered what he was doing there, when she’d told him she’d be there and why, then she realized. Jeremy was her new backer.