By a Spider's Thread: A Tess Monaghan Novel (12 page)

But there were no protesters here on this bright fall morning, and no evidence that they had been here anytime recently — no splashes of red on the pavement, no leaflets proclaiming “Fur Is Murder.” There was nothing here but cars, expensive ones, with women of all ages coming and going as if it were the most normal thing in the world to shop for a fur coat on a day when the temperature would probably reach eighty degrees. Tess pushed through the doors and entered a place as hushed as a temple — and as cold as a meat locker. She wondered if the overly chilled air was for the furs or the menopausal customers.

“May I help you, miss?”

If the salesman thought Tess, in black trousers and white T-shirt, an unlikely customer, nothing in his manner betrayed this fact. He clasped his hands behind his back, his tone polite and helpful, yet not in the over-the-top style of a salesperson who hopes to drive someone away.

Tess decided to test his mien before asking to see Mark Rubin.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, giving her voice a Valley Girl whine. Greenspring Valley, that is, or perhaps Worthington, a place where Baltimore’s rich WASPs and Jews lived in an uneasy truce. “I’ve always thought of fur coats as being something my mother and grandmother wear, but after the last couple of winters, I can’t help wondering if it might be a good idea.”

“A fur is a wonderful investment,” the salesman said, sizing her up. She eyed him back. Tall and slim, with thinning hair, he could have been anywhere from forty to sixty, married or single, straight or gay. “I don’t see you as the mink type —”

“Why not?” Did she look poor? Movie stars shopped in T-shirts, after all, and her loafers were Cole Haans. Not as expensive as some designer brands, but not inconsequential.

“I’m not talking about price,” he said, remaining smooth and un-ruffled. Oh, he was a salesman through and through, but a salesman suited to luxury goods, a man who understood that moving minks and Mercedes-Benzes and Bose stereo systems meant long, drawn-out courtships — and much higher commissions. “But if your clothes today are indicative of your preferred look — what I like to call the casual sophisticate — a mink would probably be too formal. Have you thought about beaver?”

Tess figured she could keep a straight face if he could.

“Not really,” she said. “I have to admit, I’m so overwhelmed by the process that I don’t know where to begin. How can I know if I’m getting my money’s worth?”

“Trust your sense of touch.” He pulled a jacket from a nearby rack and held its sleeve toward Tess, which she stroked dutifully. “We call the top hairs ‘guard hairs.’ These should be silky, while the underfur beneath should be even in texture. Now, how does this feel to you?”

“Nice,” Tess said. It felt like a dog, although a better-cared-for one than either of hers, whose short coats shed alarmingly.

“Try this.” He brought out another jacket, which felt a little softer and seemed to shine with more subtle variations. It was like switching to a top-line colorist after relying on Nice ’n Easy.

“What’s the difference?”

“About two thousand dollars.” The salesman smiled. He was onto her, he had to be, but the charade seemed to be as amusing to him as it was to Tess. “The second one was made from female pelts, which requires more pieces, and comes from a name designer. All those things add to the price, although not necessarily the quality. Try it on.”

“No,” Tess demurred, but the salesman was already shrugging it up over her left arm, as if she were a balky toddler who didn’t want to put on her snowsuit.

“There,” he said. “Look how nice you look — although with your hair I think you’d want to go with ranch instead of wild.”

Tess turned reluctantly toward the full-length mirror behind her. She had worried she would look like a furry butterball, but he had picked out a sleek coat with the furs placed in a gently curving pattern that flattered the figure. She looked pretty, glamorous even, not that she had ever aspired to glamour.

Yet her image disturbed her, too. It was so matronly, so grown-up. The vision in the mirror was the woman she might have been if she had taken a few different turns in life. More accurately, this would be the Tess who had taken no turns at all, just embarked on that greased chute of marriage and motherhood. For while most of her friends had started out on a gung ho career path, Tess noticed something odd happened when the babies started coming. Female friends who never would have dreamed of leaving their jobs at their husbands’ insistence had clamored for the stay-at-home-mommy gig when it became a kind of status symbol.

It was, of course, undeniably good for the kids to have a parent at home. Tess didn’t even like to put her dogs in a kennel, so she understood women who were nervous about day care. Still, it was creepy, this voluntary army of Stepford wives who didn’t look quite as happy as they insisted they were. Tess had a theory that Botox had soared because so many thirty-something women were frowning. What was the source of their anxiety? They had money, as evidenced by their cars, shoes, and purses, and they clearly spent time on their appearance. Hair, nails, skin — all just so. They were the women she had glimpsed at Adrian’s, the ladies who lunch, only these days it was the ladies who
didn’t
lunch, who dutifully followed the diet of the moment and trudged to the gym, then came home to drive the SUV around in the going-nowhere circles necessitated by car pools and soccer matches and gymnastic classes.

A sudden wheeze gripped Tess, and she felt a horrible, messy sneeze coming on, which she decided to stifle rather than risk spraying across a twelve-thousand-dollar coat.

“Fox might be good for you, too,” the salesman said thoughtfully. “Or shearling.”

“What about the…issues?”

“What issues?” he asked sharply. One thing to be a shopping dilettante, Tess supposed, another to be a PETA activist scoping the place out.

“Well, you know, the humane issues.”

“Oh.” His expression couldn’t have been blander. “I suppose that is a consideration for some people. Certainly I would never recommend a fur to someone who couldn’t reconcile her personal beliefs with the industry’s practices, any more than I would serve a vegetarian friend a steak. Here at Robbins & Sons, we don’t
proselytize
for fur. But what I’ve found is that most people realize that nature is hierarchical, and while we try to coexist peacefully with other living things, we have created a world where people come first. At least I hope we have. We eat animals — you do eat them, right? I couldn’t help noticing you were wearing leather shoes.”

“Yes, I eat meat and wear leather. I kill cockroaches, too, but I always give them a shout-out before I go into the kitchen at night, so they have a sporting chance to flee.”

“Hmmm. So, really, for you, the question isn’t whether this should be done but how others might react to you?” He let his voice scale up, but Tess sensed he wasn’t really asking a question. “You care what people think.”

He was good, in some ways better than the psychiatrist that the state of Maryland had forced Tess to see up until recently. “I guess I do.”

“Consider this. What do we tell older women about avoiding street crime? We tell them to walk with confidence, heads held high, purses clutched firmly under their arms. Well, I tell my customers the same thing, especially women such as yourself, who buy their own furs. Walk with your head high. You have purchased a fine garment, a timeless garment, an investment that enhances your beauty. You walk like that, you don’t have to worry about other people.”

Tess looked in the mirror again. She did look pretty. And, really, she couldn’t argue against the fur business on principle. The image still bothered her, but it wasn’t the source of the coat’s materials, more its message, an announcement of consumption and self-indulgence. Tess could happily blow hundreds of dollars buying a piece of outsider art that her mother assumed she trash-picked, or thousands on a new computer just to go a few seconds faster on the Internet. But she could not make peace with any adornment, any object, that invited others to envy her relative comfort. It was an invitation to the evil eye, and the Weinstein side of her never wanted to provoke the evil eye. Crow had never gotten that, but then Crow had the cheerful optimism that came from being born into money and comfort.

A soft chime sounded, indicating that the front door had opened, and Mark Rubin entered the store. He did not seem impressed by the sight of Tess in mink.

“You find Mrs. Gordon’s lynx?” the salesman asked.

“Yes, Paul, I’ve handled the ‘emergency’ as I’ve handled it every year for the past decade when Mrs. Gordon has scheduled one of these trips and forgotten to call ahead to get her coats out of storage. This year it’s a Scandinavian cruise.”

“She’s such a —” Conscientious Paul remembered he was standing next to a potential customer. “She’s such a sweet lady, but a little forgetful.”

“Well, that’s why we have our own storage vault. I can always get a coat for a valued customer, as long as it’s not on the Sabbath.”

“You have your own storage facility?” Tess was trying to cover up the awkwardness she felt, as if she had been caught at something.

Mark nodded curtly. “The other locals use a warehouse in northern Virginia. I’ll take over from here, Paul. Miss Monaghan came to see me.”

“Certainly, Mr. Rubin.” The salesman disappeared with the practiced discretion of a man who knows how to make himself invisible.

“He’s good at his job,” Tess said as soon as Paul was out of earshot.

“He’s excellent. So why were you wasting his time? Not to mention bringing my personal business into my workplace. I hope you don’t squander your own time as carelessly as you used my salesman’s. After all, I’m paying for it.”

“I was curious about your business,” she said, taking off the coat and returning it to the rack. Rubin reached out and gave it a few smoothing strokes, as if Tess had defiled the mink in some way. “Right now I’m curious about everything you do. Somewhere in your life, there’s got to be a clue, a hint, as to where your wife might have gone, and why. For example, is there anyone else in your life who disappeared about the same time?”

“What do you mean?”

“An employee, for example. Someone from your street. The guy who delivers your newspaper. Natalie had to have some help. She only had a few thousand dollars, right? At least that’s what I just learned from the Baltimore County cops. You didn’t trust your wife with cash, so she had to figure out a way to sneak it. But she was scared enough to pay most of it back, with a check written by a manicurist who happens to be her oldest friend. But for some reason you didn’t think to tell me about your household accounting or to give me Lana Wishnia’s name as a lead. I had to pay Natalie’s mother a hundred dollars just to find out she existed.”

Mark Rubin looked around the store. “Let’s go back to my office. I’d prefer not to have this conversation out here, on the floor, where customers come and go.”

His office was utilitarian, a windowless room with a messy desk stacked with catalogs. The only personal touch was a bright red shelf filled with photographs of his children and his wife. This long mantel was mounted to the wall behind Rubin’s desk, almost like a credenza, so Tess ended up facing all those photos when she sat opposite him. The photos made her feel guilty, as if the children’s faces were pleading with her to bring them back to a place where they had smiled and laughed as they did in these photos. Their mother, however, was somber — lips together, eyes downcast. But there was a kind of calculation in the look, too, a sense that Natalie Rubin was striking a pose, her eyes sliding away from the camera’s lens lest it glimpse her secrets.

“I never knew this little shopping center existed,” Tess said, making conversation. “Have you always been here?”

“My father opened the store in this location about thirty-five years ago. Like most merchants, he started off downtown, but he was quick to figure out that the customers were moving farther and farther away and that the stores needed to follow them. He was already making plans to relocate when the riots came. But we always lived out here in Pikesville. We had to.”

“Why? It’s not like those old real-estate covenants barring Jews were still in effect in the other neighborhoods.”

“I have to live within walking distance of my shul,” he said, his voice patient, yet a little patronizing. It was becoming a familiar tone to Tess. Had he spoken to his wife with these same inflections? That would explain a lot.

“Right. So where’s the other son?”

“What do you mean? Have you learned something about Isaac and Efraim?”

“No, no — the store is called Robbins &
Sons
. I figured out that Robbins is simply Rubin, anglicized. But you’re the only son here. Did you have a brother?”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “The name goes back to my father. The other furriers in town — Mano Swartz, Miller Brothers — had such impressive-sounding names. And he had a partner in the beginning, when he was downtown, but they went their separate ways. So Robbins & Sons, two lies for the price of one. Only one son, and the name is Rubin. But if my boys…if my boys…well, perhaps we’ll make the name true yet.”