Dead is the New Black (5 page)

Since Michael hated seeing squalor and Ruby was embarrassed by it, and since the last thing Michael wanted was potato soup, they left to go to the club after promising to pick up the laundry the next day.

The Orb was a warehouse once and, sometimes, if you stood in a corner long enough in summer, and the drafts blew the right way, you caught a whiff of the boxes of food that had been left to rot after the building foreclosed. However, it was the stink of Michael’s cologne that choked Laura and set her on edge. He probably wasn’t so bad. It was probably her own intolerance. She vowed to try harder to like him, but was oddly attracted to every place in the room where he was not.

Stu was there, thank God. She’d seen him standing by the stage as the band set up, his blond hair glowing in the stage lights. She excused herself and beelined through the crowd. When he saw her, he took her hand and pulled her into the back hallway. She let him, eyes on his tight biker’s bottom. Stu was a messenger, and they’d met when he delivered her the wrong package two years ago. Since then, she’d discovered he had many talents. He was the lighting guy for the Orb, writer for culture-busting magazines, aspiring journalist, and the owner of property upstate. There were more jobs hiding somewhere in his day. She was pretty sure she’d never count them all.

He stopped in the hallway to the bathrooms. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

“Look, I didn’t invite him, and it’s not like I can tell him to go away.”

“You’re pretending you don’t know I’m talking about the murder.”

There was no denying him. He had a sharp mind and a hippie heart. He’d coddle her until she told him the story, from the beginning. So she told him about her morning, about the dead woman, Jeremy—omitting the way he moved, the way he rubbed his eyes with his fist in the morning like a three-year-old, the way he looked in her face when he laughed—the cops, the rumors in the office, and the pepper spray she had dug out of the back of her junk drawer.

“You don’t think he did it?” Stu asked.

“No!”

“Whatever, Laura. Do you want me to go with you tomorrow to clear your desk?”

“Stu! We got the last runway slot. It’s the best space, and Jeremy practically had to stab Zac Posen in the back to get it.”

“You sure he didn’t?”

Jeremy was ambitious to a fault, and she’d just admitted as much. “You’re being so mainstream,” she said, citing their favorite joke. Whenever one of them thought in simple terms, or acted “unhip”—Laura was usually the guilty party—the stock accusation was “mainstream.” But this time, she meant it. She walked out of the hallway. She didn’t care about the band, Michael, or Ruby. They weren’t going to help her forget. She wanted to go home.

It was a three-block walk that Stu insisted on making with her. The show didn’t start for half an hour, and his part of the lighting was done.

“We all know how you feel about your boss,” Stu said.

She had a sudden pain in her chest. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You think he can’t do anything wrong, and maybe you’re right. Maybe when it comes to the business you’re in, he makes really good decisions, every time. But you’re blinded by it.”

“Thanks for setting me straight,” she said, as they turned the corner.

“You can be pissed at me if you want.”

“I’m not pissed at you.”

He looked at her slyly. “You’re honesty-challenged right now.”

“Well, I had it up to my eyeballs today with this, and no one will let it drop.”

Stu slowed in front of her building. There was a man in a jacket leaning against the mailboxes. “Who’s that guy in your lobby?”

“Detective Cangemi.”

Stu took out his cell phone. “Bart?” he shouted. “I’ll be late. Can you manage it? I programmed everything. Okay. See you later.” He snapped the phone closed.

“You can go back,” Laura said. “He’s a cop, after all. I think I’m safe.”

“If you tell me to go away, I’ll go away.”

“Chivalry noted.” But even though she’d just called him mainstream, he stayed. She knew he would. She wanted a second set of ears on whatever conversation she was about to have, and she could think of no better witness than Stu.

CHAPTER 5.

Laura let Cangemi and Stu into her apartment, which was a pigsty. She decided not to care. It was impossible to clean right before Fashion Week, and she had neither the heart nor the cash to hire someone to do it. Cangemi refused a beer but asked for water. Stu did the opposite. She sat next to Stu on the couch, while Cangemi leaned forward on what Laura called the “Big Chair.” Laura thought he’d get to whatever was bothering him, but it seemed he wanted to make small talk.

“When I saw you lived in my neighborhood, I figured I could come by tonight instead of tomorrow. Hope that’s okay.”

“It’s fine.”

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything.” Cangemi glanced between her and Stu. She wanted him to believe he was interrupting an epic make-out session, but she didn’t want Stu to think one was on tap for later, either.

“Okay, what can I do for you?” Laura asked.

“Your production manager sent me to you,” Cangemi said. Yoni didn’t like the police. She had some sort of history she wouldn’t discuss. “She said you’d be able to explain what a…” He looked in his notebook. “What a top sample is.”

“Tee Oh Pee,” she corrected. “It stands for ‘top of production.’ It’s the first pressed and tagged sample off the sewing line.”

“Take me through it.”

“It’s really boring.”

“That’s okay. I’m used to being bored.”

She glanced at Stu, who didn’t seem to regret his decision to come up. “Okay. Well, you go through the whole process, then you send a TOP for approval.”

“What’s the process?”

“Oh, Jesus, you’re kidding, right?” From his expression, he wasn’t kidding. There had to be a way to shorten her description of the yearlong procedure to get a garment from idea to store. “Well, say it’s a jacket. We get the pattern right. The sewing. The pressing. Even the way the button is sewn on can be its own thing. So we get it just so and make one perfect jacket from the bulk fabric in the sample room.”

“That’s the place on 38th?”

“Yes, the sewing floor’s behind the big doors in the hallway. Okay, so we take that perfect sample, with a list of instructions that we write on a card called the cut sheet.”

“You write that?”

“Sometimes, if I’m the patternmaker. We have another guy for soft wovens.”

“And that is?”

“Blouses, drapey things. You with me?”

“I’m with you.”

“Stu? You want another beer?”

“It’s not that boring.”

“Right. So, that perfect sample and the cut sheet goes to the factory, which in this case is Jeremy’s parents’ old sewing floor on 40th and Eleventh. But in the case of just about everyone else, it’s sent to China. I don’t know how any of that import stuff works.” Seeing that Cangemi wasn’t interested in Chinese production, Laura continued, “The floor manager sets up the sewing line based on his cut sheet, the sample, and his staff. So, like, if the jacket has a lining, you set up people to cut the lining, people to sew the lining, people to sew the shell, and pressers for interfacing. You set up a place to put the pieces. Then, you have to either reconfigure the sewers so that the lining and the shell go to the back of the line where they’re sewn together, or continue to the end. This is huge. You have to know how long things take. You have to know all the steps, and you have to know which of your people can do what, like setting in a sleeve is a lot different than hemming a lining. I am so losing you right now.”

“No, no. I was just thinking.”

Fine. If he wanted to be in a coma, that was his business. “Then the floor manager makes one garment on the line and sends it back to Yoni for approval. This is how you find out if you missed any steps, or if the cut sheet was complete. Stu totes these around a lot, right?”

“Yep. I ride for Blazing Saddle Messenger.”

“That’s called a Pre-Production sample. Once that’s approved, they start the sewing line and, once they start bagging, they send us a TOP.”

Cangemi turned to Stu. “Did you deliver a TOP from the factory on 40th to St. James’s office yesterday?”

“The factory sometimes uses a West Side service,” Stu replied, with no little disdain. “Ketchum Couriers. Big corporate assholes.”

Cangemi wrote that down and turned back to Laura. “And if something is going to be wrong with the shipment, it’ll show up on the TOP?”

Laura nodded. “Unless the floor manager’s full of it and just puts his best person on a whole garment, which is not going to happen, because Jeremy owns the factory.”

“What if a TOP didn’t make it to the office? What then?”

“Stop using Ketchum,” Stu tossed out. Laura punched him in the leg. She was glad he was there.

“Well,” she said, “since the line’s already set up, he’s going to start anyway and catch mistakes as he goes. So if the TOP doesn’t show up, Yoni would have to go to 40th and check the line.”

“Not St. James?”

“He avoids the factory like a skin disease.”

Cangemi closed his notebook. “I’m sorry to keep you here so late.”

“It’s fine,” Laura said, though she was quite tired. “Will Jeremy be back tomorrow? We really need him.”

“No,” Cangemi answered, as he headed out the door. “Not tomorrow, for sure.”

Laura was disappointed, but the wheels of justice moved slowly, or so she’d heard. She didn’t have to kick Stu out. He left after a pit stop, and Laura was finally alone in her apartment.

Above her, she heard Ruby and Michael get home, followed by laughter, then quiet, then the bed squeaking. She went into the living room with her blanket and pillow and sprawled on the couch. She couldn’t hear Ruby and Super Douche from there.

She hadn’t thought one second about Gracie Pomerantz, real-live human being. She remembered her first sight of the body, which was a Via Spiga pump half off its bloodless foot, then the face—the swollen tongue, the black-and-blue on her neck, and the bird nest of hair. She’d had mascara and lipstick smudged across her face like the Joker. And her eyes. Laura remembered how they bulged, but couldn’t remember the color. Brown? Blue? Green? One of those indiscriminate mood-ring colors? How could she forget that? How many murdered bodies did she see? How could her mind have been so crowded that she forgot the color of Gracie’s eyes?

She was sad. Not for any reason she could pin down, but just sad in a general way that was like a thick cloud around her head. She tried to forget about it and think about Jeremy under the covers with her, or of the vacation she needed to plan. But the sadness was thick and pervasive, and it won the battle for her thoughts.

She remembered the time Gracie had lost six pounds and demanded Laura alter the Noelle Gown, a one-of-a-kind couture masterpiece Jeremy had built for her; she wanted it by the weekend. It had been a busy week, and Laura had stayed up three nights in a row to do the alterations. And Gracie wore a de la Renta, instead. Gracie had never thanked her, either, but Jeremy did, and in such a way that she could feel the sincerity coming from deep within his gut. Whatever it was that made Jeremy care about her enough to gift her with gratitude like that also somehow made him seem a worthwhile person.

Laura went to sleep knowing that if there was anything she could do to help Jeremy, or anything she could do to find out who killed Gracie, she would.

CHAPTER 6.

By morning, Gracie Pomerantz’s death by strangulation with a zebra-printed header was all over the news. Roberto Moses carefully explained what a header was for, besides strangling someone. Joanne Mulroney acted perky. Chuck Scantfield had earnest feelings, though it was difficult to discern exactly what those feelings were. They played at shock, then they played at eulogizing a woman they didn’t have the displeasure of knowing. The police commissioner, using a hundred words or less, said they were working on it. Gracie’s husband, Sheldon Pomerantz, a hotshot lawyer with his name on the door and a reputation for raking in money, managed to fast track Gracie through the autopsy process so street closures could be arranged for what promised to be the funeral of the century. Laura had never met him but, from his clipped tone with the newscaster as he got into his red Mercedes convertible, she imagined he was one of those highly effective types everyone hated.