Dead is the New Black (6 page)

Jeremy’s lawyer came on, with talk of trials and grand juries that made Laura want to change the channel. But she didn’t. She watched, and was stunned when she heard his name. Tinto Benito, the guy who called to let them know when Jeremy took an unexpected vacation, was actually Jeremy’s lawyer. How did a lawyer double as a personal assistant?

He was huge, with a full head of hair and a beard to match. He bellowed the facts of his client’s innocence, waving a hand to ward off the accusations, switching his briefcase and waving with his other hand, like both right and left wanted a piece of the action.

She turned off the TV and considered a shower, but found herself distracted by her computer. She checked the online newspapers and found more information, none of which helped. Jeremy insisted he was at the factory the night before, correcting a shipment, but no one saw him. Gracie’s husband was stunned to get home from an all-night poker game and find his wife gone. He intended to get justice via hell or high water, whichever came first.

She shut off the computer. It was plain depressing.

Was it worth going into work early if Jeremy wasn’t going to be there? If no artisanal coffee or fifteen minutes of attention beckoned? If she’d just be alone? Working? There was a lot on her table after the drama yesterday but, without him in the office with his mussed hair and his saltwater smell, her enthusiasm for the job dried up.

She called Benito’s office. It was six in the morning, and she expected to leave a message, but someone picked up without saying hello.

“I’m not giving interviews.” She recognized Benito’s voice. He must have come in before the receptionist.

She knew she had less than a second. “I work for Jeremy St. James, and I need to see him. It’s about his business.”

“What’s your name, young lady?”

“Laura Carnegie.” Habituated to the inevitable follow-up question, she added, “No relation.”

“Well, Ms. Carnegie-no-relation, can you tell me what you do for him, what the issue is, and your phone number?”

She was caught unprepared. She started with the phone number and her position, then started making stuff up. “We have this interfacing on that huge order, and they replaced the UFS-51 with UFN-72. I want to show him the test press.”

“If you were a second worth your salt, you’d know you can’t swap a stretch with a non-woven,” he bellowed. Well, she had to scrap that. Who knew the fat lawyer was a closet garmento, as well as a personal assistant?

“Look, we don’t know if he’s coming back, and we have a lot to do for next Friday. I have no idea if we should cancel the show, and I don’t know if anyone else is asking.”

“I don’t think he cares right now.”

“Then you don’t know Jeremy St. James.”

He paused. She heard his breath on the phone and knew it reeked of black coffee. “You know how to get to Rikers?” he asked.

“No.”

“Well figure it out, and let me tell you before you do, it may be a wasted trip.”

The thought of Jeremy in the Bronx was surreal enough. The thought of him in Rikers was chilling. If Central Park was the city’s backyard, Rikers was the haunted house down the block that your mother told you to stay away from.

She took the L to the F to Queensbridge, where she got on a bus that felt like it went to the end of the earth. Signs in bold sans serif warned against picking up passengers, carrying firearms and explosives. She walked inside, toward the checkpoint, wondering if they called sharp objects shivs or shanks. She saw Tinto Benito at the counter. He pointed to her, and Laura was sure she’d be on the bus home in less than ten minutes.

She took a deep breath and approached the desk with her head high and her heart pounding.

“This is Laura Carnegie,” Benito said to the guard, who was seven feet tall at the outside and maybe two hundred pounds and change. Benito winked at her. She decided to shut up and let the lawyer talk. “A relation. I just put her on the list for eight o’clock.”

“How are you related to the incarcerated?”

Tinto spoke before she could, “Cousin.”

Laura felt the heavy pause and clamped her mouth shut so there would be no jabbering on her part. No “my mother’s brother” this or “second twice removed” that. The next words would come from the guard if she had to stand silent like an Indian chief.

“No cell phones,” the guard stated. “No sharp objects. No credit cards. No firearms or incendiary devices. No bags. No perishables. Lockers are in the waiting room. Please use them.”

“Okay.” She showed him her driver’s license, gave her fingerprint, signed a list of rules she’d never remember, then went to the waiting room. She expected to see hardened criminals with their hands hanging out of their cells, banging tin cups against the bars, but the waiting room looked like a post office in a bad neighborhood. It was clean, but well-used by loud children and bored adults. Some were dressed as if for a special occasion. Some were dressed to do laundry. Nobody wanted to be there.

Tinto slid into the seat next to her. “He said to get someone from the office, and I looked like a hero when I said you were on your way. I owe you one.”

“I thought you were Jeremy’s assistant, with the phone calls about the vacations and all.”

“Nope.” Tinto leaned back and poked at his cell phone. He apparently had no intention of clearing up his muddy job description.

“What do they have him on?” She tried to peek over at his phone, but he put it down.

“You trying to sound like you know what you’re talking about?”

“On what evidence are they holding my boss? That better?”

He smiled and shook his head a little. “Not much. I think they just need to look like they’re doing something.”

“Detective Cangemi came to my house last night.”

Tinto shut his phone. “What did he want?”

“First, you tell me what they have Jeremy on.” She felt like she just crossed into an abyss. Of course, a lawyer would have a way around her stupid game.

Instead, he answered, “They got fibers from the murder weapon on his hands, they got him on tape coming into the office the night before, and they got him fighting with the victim all day Saturday. They think the paper shredding was all about him trying to cut her out of the business.” He made a face as if that were the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. “And he has no alibi, which is the damnedest. So what did that little Flatbush prick want?” He had obviously met Cangemi a few times before.

Laura was about to answer when a buzzer went off, jolting everyone in the room into a heightened state of awareness.

It was eight o’clock.

It began at their first meeting, arranged by Carmella after she mentored Laura at Parsons. Though Carmella had little of note to say about Laura’s designing, she saw her muslins and was duly impressed by her ability to translate three-dimensional ideas into flat shapes. The next week, she brought her a double grande no-foam latte with three hazelnut pumps in a venti cup, an exact twin to her own, and wooed her with tales of life as the daughter of a disowned Italian Countess in Milan. That Saturday, Laura had gone to Carmella’s pseudo loft for an it-took-all-day Bolognese served with the company of three of the most accomplished people whose names Laura would never remember. The spell began with Carmella’s story of the son of a Monaco gambler chasing her up the Duomo in Florence, culminating in a kiss at the top, and ending with her strolling topless on the beach in Sciacca with a construction worker who left her heartbroken. After that, she cut her hair into a pixie and wouldn’t let it grow out until she found love again. It was a heart-tugging tear-jerker over the zabaione.

Laura had no idea she was being seduced, even after she was told Jeremy needed a temp patternmaker, a job Laura could do but did not, under any circumstances, want, because he had such a temper, no one as young as she could do it without crying every day. Before she knew what was happening, Laura had accepted the appointment with the famous Jeremy St. James, a stroke of good fortune that sent her friends giggling and cheering. Her sister only reminded her that she was in danger of making patterns the rest of her life, instead of designing.

Which kept her up all night, worrying.

The appointment had taken all day, even with Jeremy dispensing with the interview portion of the hiring process and standing her in front of the pattern table with a swatch of fabric and a sketch. He watched her score the lines, fold the pleats into the paper, and cut the corners of the pattern. He was absolutely still, which made her nervous enough, but it turned her on, because being nervous in front of a good-looking man was a feeling she associated with being in love. When the pattern was done, he refolded a dart, adding another sixteenth of an inch to the depth. He told her to cut and sew it, because no patternmaker was worth a good goddamn if they couldn’t cut and sew.

He corrected the angle of the scissors with a gentle push, then demanded she sew it. She made the shirt, with Jeremy kneeling next to her, forcing her to breathe hard through her nose to catch his scent, a salty brine of the beach in early summer that she could smell in her clothes even after she got home. He put his hand over hers when she slid a little bit, checking the seams, unthreading a particularly tough curve, and making her start over. When the shell was done, he held it up and looked at it in the light, checking for the needle holes.

He held out his hand. “You’re hired. Your pattern was near perfect. You can’t sew worth a shit, but you know how it’s done. You learn fast and take direction. Come in on Monday.” The vision of a lovely long-backed straight-shouldered male specimen turned away, tossed the shirt in the trash, and went into the design room, closing the glass door behind him.

But that was just their first encounter. It had only gotten worse from there.

He smelled good. He patted her on the back when things fit. He never yelled at her or gave her a hard time, because designers, merchandisers, and their ilk were a dime a dozen, while patternmakers were worth their weight in gold. She certainly was neither immune from the anxiety that she was one mistake away from Jeremy jumping down her throat and pulling her lungs out, nor from the fear that she would never express herself creatively. But when offered a full-time position, she took it anyway, because the famous Jeremy St. James had become just ‘Jeremy’ to her, and she couldn’t imagine working without him.

Jeremy was in a foul mood. She felt it through the glass. Not that she could blame him. He wore ridiculous slip-on sneakers and a green work shirt with matching pants. He snapped up the phone. She picked up hers.

“This is absurd,” he said, referring to the phone. “What am I going to do? Strangle you?”

Benito picked up the phone on their side of the booth. “I’d shut up if I were you.”

“Tinto,” Jeremy said, pointing through the glass. “You get me out of here.”

“Bail hearing’s day after tomorrow, JJ, take it easy.”

“You know what? Best thing that ever happened to me is someone taking her out. I’m in jail, but I’m free.”

Benito knocked on the window as to wake Jeremy up. “Didn’t I tell you to can it?”

Laura imagined this unraveling quickly unless she changed the subject. “I need to know what to do at work.”

Jeremy still focused on Benito. “Did anyone else from my company come to you?”

“Not yet.”

Jeremy turned to Laura. “This is what I’m saying. I have one competent person in that office. The rest of them are looking for an excuse to search the want ads all day.”

Laura said, “Jeremy, everyone’s freaked out. They don’t know if they should work like the show is going on, or if they should just go home.”

“Fifteen minutes!” boomed a guard’s voice from the corner of the room.

“Make a list,” he said. “Tell me what’s missing.” Then, he turned to Benito. “Download me,” he said, in full this-is-my-company-don’t-waste-my-time mode.

Laura made a list of what wasn’t prepared for Friday. Seventy percent of the line was in the process of being fit or created. That was normal for the last week before a show. She scribbled him a list with the stubby pencil she’d used to fill in the form on the way in, while Tinto Benito told Jeremy how crappy his life was.

“Your alibi’s in question. Nobody saw you at the factory, and there are no cameras in the building.”

“We had two hundred dresses with hems that looked like snowdrifts. How do you think they got fixed? Magic?”

“Your floor manager says there was nothing wrong with them in the first place.”

Jeremy sat back in his chair and held up his hands. “I left the TOP at reception last night. Where is it?”

Laura stopped writing and looked up at Jeremy, flicking her pencil between her fingers. Before she could wonder if she should speak up, Jeremy addressed her in a brusque way he never had before Sunday morning. “Speak.”

“A detective came to my house last night asking about TOPs. What they were and stuff.”

Benito and Jeremy asked together, “And?”

“And I told him. And he thinks a TOP was lost.”

“It was the Mardi dress. Make a note. Yoni finds it. Today. It was in the reception area last night, and it looked like hell.”

“Should I tell Cangemi that?” Laura asked.

“That’s why I have a lawyer. What else did he want?”

Laura swallowed hard. “He wanted to know if you went to the factory to fix things on a regular basis.” There was dead silence as Laura sensed her relationship with Jeremy changing. She looked for a harmless way to say the truth. “I told him you don’t usually go to the factory.”

Benito spoke up, “What
exactly
did you say?”

“That he avoided it like a skin disease.” She couldn’t look up from her list. And when she realized she’d forgotten to write down the fittings for the Amanda Gown, she didn’t have the heart to pick up her pencil.

“Two minutes!” the guard shouted.

Jeremy knocked on the window, and she realized she’d let the phone drift from her ear.

“Let me see the list.”

She held it up to the window and, while he scanned it, she noticed the red rings around his eyes and the dryness of his lips.