The Crasher
Authors: Shirley Lord
If you’re an unknown fashion designer,
you live by taking risks…
to get noticed…
to get famous…
or maybe to get murdered.
“True to her roots, Shirley Lord has Calvin and Donna and Oscar, not to mention Bloomingdale’s and Barney’s and Saks, put
in cameos…. It all sounds like the stuff of which ‘major motion picture’ are made.”
—
Vogue
“A delicious read.”
—
Newsday
“A dizzying mix of murder… old-fashioned gumption.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“Glitz and glamour.”
—
Library Journal
“Lord takes you behind the scenes of fashion and into Manhattan’s most exclusive parties, revealing a world of glamour, intrigue,
and murder.”
—
Philadelphia Inquirer
“A satisfying thriller.”
—
Southern Pines Pilot
(NC)
“An informal, fresh, and fascinating picture of how New York’s elite conduct themselves.”
—
Neshoba Democrat
(Philadelphia, PA)
Small Beer at Claridges
The Easy Way to Good Looks
You Are Beautiful and How to Prove It
Golden Hill
One of My Very Best Friends
Faces
My Sister’s Keeper
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, incidents, and dialogues, except for incidental references to public figures,
are imaginary and are not intended to refer to any living persons.
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1998 by Shirley Lord
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: November 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-57105-0
Contents
To my husband
I am indebted to the late, great, brave Brandon Tartikoff, who inspired this book. Thank you, Brandon. It was a joy to know
you.
My thanks to Maria Quiros, the San Francisco design consultant, for the excellent crash course on fashion designing she gave
me one lovely Labor Day weekend in the Napa Valley; to Eliza Reed, vice president, business development, Oscar de la Renta,
for her advice and diligent fact checking; to Michael Gross, author of
Model,
aninformed guide to the world of modeling; to
Washington Times
correspondent Elaine Shannon, author of
Desperados, Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen and the War America Can’t Win;
to Tom Constantine, DEA administrator, for facts and figures about international drug trafficking; to Ann Landers for her
words of wisdom; to Washington attorney and author Ronald Goldfarb, and Adam Zion, assistant district attorney, Kings County,
for their patience and help in ensuring certain portions of this book are legally correct; to Beth Harmon, marketing manager
of the New York Public Library for her guided tour; to my son Mark Hussey, professor of English, Pace University, and his
wife, Evelyn Leong, adjunct instructor, women’s studies, for help with Ginny’s early education.
I also especially want to thank my dedicated agent, Owen Laster, my brilliant editor Maureen Egen (both of whom know how to
guide and spur a writer on… and on and on to better work) and my powerhouse of an assistant Zina Berthi-aume, who typed and
retyped this manuscript so perfectly without once losing her radiant smile.
The last person I want to thank is the most important. It is fair to say this book owes the most to my husband, A. M. Rosenthal,
for his encouragement, support, and always (being the genius of an editor and writer that he is) insightful advice.
ROLOGUE
He obviously hadn’t remembered her name.
“Madame Designer,” he’d mockingly called her, through thin, spoiled lips.
She’d made a point of telling him she knew who he was. “Mr. Stern,” she’d said more than once, with obvious deference.
“Arthur—call me Arthur,” he’d replied, with the leer she remembered from their first meeting.
What a big-headed fool she’d been, sipping champagne at the reception, her confidence climbing as no one challenged her right
to be there.
She’d congratulated herself that once again, despite increased nerves, she’d managed to crash this important party so successfully,
the party she’d hoped would change her life and put an end to her crashing forever.
The young girl shuddered. It had changed her life all right, in a way that even in her worst dreams she could never have foreseen.
False smiles, arch movements. There had been plenty of both, as she’d tried to impress the fashion magnate. She’d even walked
in a certain way to emphasize the sensual swirl
of silk around her legs, as she’d accompanied Mr. Stern so lightheartedly to the darkened upper hall.
In total control, she’d thought she was, her body the perfect mannequin to show off the dream of a dress she’d designed for
the evening’s grand affair.
Who cared that there might be an invitation in the way she turned her shoulder to allow one of the pale slender straps to
slip slightly, but not too far, onto her pale, cool arm? Not she. Mr. Stern would recognize her style, her flair, the cunning
construction of her dress. That was all that had mattered then.
Who cared that he was married? That was the point, or rather his wife, Muriel Matilda Stern, was the point; the influential
wife who really held the purse strings, who was known to prefer to stay home, allowing her husband to roam to discover new
talent for their fashion empire.
This new talent had been so sure she could handle the passes, the leers, the suggestive innuendos of all the Arthur Sterns
of the world. She’d encountered enough of them at events she’d crashed in the past. Hadn’t she always handled them before?
But no, not this man she couldn’t; not this time she hadn’t.
She gagged as she thought of her futile struggle as Stern had pinned her to the wall, ripping her precious dress as if it
was a rag, wasting no time in his fierce attempted rape.
But then had come the startling distraction—shouts from the end of the hall, a gunshot. Stern had turned; they’d both turned
to see two men violently fighting, one using maniacal strength to push the other over the balustrade. There had been a high
scream of fear and a horrifying crash of body, bone, matter on the marble floor below. It had all happened in a matter of
seconds.
Could the victim still be alive? The girl cowered back in her hiding place, the scream again filling her head. She was shivering
so much, she felt she could go into convulsions, like the homeless woman Johnny had made famous in his columns. Johnny. She
sobbed silently. He would never forgive her.
She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to calm down, but it was impossible.
Where was Stern now? Looking for her or denying her existence as he rearranged his perfect tuxedo and restored his sangfroid?
And where was the other man in the fight, the perpetrator, the shadowy figure who’d disappeared so quickly through the narrow
door she herself was now hiding behind? Who was he?
She had to be wrong about his identity. She was imagining things; she’d only seen him in silhouette, and yet there was something
that tugged at her memory, something significant she knew she should remember. What was it? And where was he now? Waiting
for her below, in the darker dark?
Stop the panic.
Her dress felt wet. With sweat? Or was it semen, blood? How long did she have before her hiding place was discovered? Not
long. She was in shock, but she had to get out—now. But how?
Wait, you know this place, the warrens, the maze of corridors, the doorways that never held doors, the unexpected exits around
forgotten corners.
A week, a carefree lifetime ago, came to mind, when she’d worked as a volunteer for
Vogue’s
One Hundredth Birthday Party. Sulkily she had gone in and out, indoors and outdoors, like a slave laborer, fetching, carrying,
backward and forward. Yes, she knew this place.
She tensed, hearing voices, footsteps getting closer. Heels. Her stiletto sandals were off in seconds. She maneuvered herself
down the narrow inside stairwell, one, two, three flights down into the old giant of a building, the grating hurting the soles
of her feet.
A door at the bottom screeched as she pushed it open. She froze, as still as an owl. A solitary dim lightbulb hung in the
corridor stretching ahead. Was anyone waiting in the shadows? She saw figures who were not there, but slowly, as she
inched along, hugging the wall for protection, recognition was coming back.
Twice left, past a row of wooden filing cabinets, which carried a sad, old smell of cedar and wallpaper primer, immediately
right past a thin tall door, another long corridor, left, left again and there was the fire door.
She had been warned before, it would set off an alarm if she tried to open it, but it was the only way out for her now. She
knew she would find herself in Bryant Park, no longer covered by the huge fashion tent, the tent from which she had been ignominiously
rejected the year her dreams had been so optimistic and fresh.
The door was heavy and awkward, but it opened without a sound. She looked to the left, to the right. No one. She came out
running, across the park with a blustery rainy wind blowing a sense that the ocean wasn’t far away.
Some island
With the sea’s silence on it.
Browning,
Pippa Passes.
One of her father’s favorite poems. Why was it suddenly in her head? Crazy. She was running in Manhattan, the noisiest island
on earth. The noisiest, nosiest, and yet, please God, let it be true, the most private, too.
Her breath was a continuing sob, her feet were getting cut. She ran on and the rain helped hide her wild flight. She stopped
for a second to put on her sandals. Even in this neighborhood people would remember a sobbing young woman running in a torn
silk dress. But no one stopped to stare; no one turned around.
She had no idea how long it took her to reach her walk-up loft apartment, so beloved only a few hours before.
She double-locked the door and threw herself, still panting, groaning with a leg cramp, across her white divan. The pain in
her feet and the thought of dirt and blood spoiling the immaculate piqué surface brought her back to reality.
She staggered to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and wept again. She was disfigured, disgraced, swollen with crying, her
eyes small slits in a face she hardly recognized.
She ran a hot bath, pouring in the expensive bath oil she usually rationed out drop by drop, but as she soaked, the terror
came back.
Had the man who crashed on the marble floor lived? How could he have lived?
Who had pushed him?
Would they find her? But how could they know who she was?
She wasn’t on the guest list. As usual, she had gate-crashed the party, but this time with a definite purpose: to put an end
to her problems.
Her mother had often said her raging ambition would lead her into real trouble one day. Now it had come true.
She was finished. She would move to Florida to be near her parents. She would work for her father as he had always wanted
her to do. She would never design or make another piece of clothing in her life. She would sell her sewing machine. She would
live simply, quietly. She was finished.
Limping back to the divan, she saw one of her sandals, but not the other. It must have fallen off on the way home, but she
had no memory of it happening. Somehow she had managed to bring back her tiny evening purse. There it was, damp, carelessly
thrown on the hall table as if she had just returned home like a normal partygoer.
She opened it and saw her best lace handkerchief. Beneath it was a cloakroom ticket.
It was only then, as the phone began to ring, Ginny remembered her cloak, the spectacular one-of-a-kind Napoleonic cloak she
had spent weeks making, for what was to have been such a momentous occasion.
She had arrived wearing the cloak. She had left it behind in the cloakroom of the New York Public Library.
