2 Death of a Supermodel (3 page)

“Maybe you can tell me something.” He leaned forward. “What’s this all about, these shows? This stuff, it’s all summery-looking, and we’re headed into the coldest part of the year. Who’s buying?”

“Well, if you want something in the stores in March, you have to have it in the warehouse in mid-February. And if you want it in the warehouse in mid-February, you need a month to pack and ship it, so you have to start making it in early December, in which case you need to…” She paused, counting on her fingers as she was wont to do whenever she had to wrap her mind around the calendar. “… order fabric in something like October because it has to be spun and dyed and shipped and so… what is it now?”

“Second week of September.”

“Right. So now is when everyone shows the stores what they’re going to make. We do one of everything and present it at a show, and then the buyers come to the showroom and look at it and negotiate quantities and prices. Then we make stuff to send to the stores, and you do that whole thing I just did, but frontwards.”

“Sounds like a great way to go nuts.”

“I’m sure your job is easier.” As usual when talking to him, she felt as though she had revealed everything, and he’d revealed nothing. “How have you been?”

He lifted his pant leg to show her his socks. The elastic clung to his leg. The last time they’d met, one sock drooped at the top edge.

“Your girlfriend stopped rolling them into balls, I see,” she said.

“She just stopped doing my laundry.”

“Ah, sorry. Wasn’t over the management of the socks, was it?”

“She says if I’m gonna answer the phone at two in the morning, I can do my own chores.”

“I want to ask you something else, but it’s really personal.”

He grinned. “This should be interesting.”

“Do you have a first name?”

Cangemi looked as though he was about to answer when a woman in head-to-toe Italian black tailoring strode up in bootie black heels and pushed a rack out of the way—Roquelle Rik, owner of Mermaid Modeling. She had turned straightforward hostility into her own personal brand, and it sold like hotcakes. Her attention was a wall of will, making Laura shift in her seat.

“What happened to Thomasina,” Roquelle said as if stating a fact. Laura had learned the woman never spoke in a question, even when she asked one.

Cangemi broke in to ask, “Who are you?”

“All these models are mine. I’m responsible for them. So—” She let the sentence hang off a cliff as if that was exactly where it belonged.

“So?” Cangemi seemed amused, which would invariably make Roquelle boil.

“So if someone hurt my assets, they’ve run counter to my interests. I’m going to need to know who they are. I have a legal team.” She turned to Laura. “What was happening here? What were the girls taking?”

“What do you mean
taking
?”

Roquelle snapped open a green microfiber cloth with an embroidered X in the corner, took off her glasses, and wiped them. “You were watching them for drugs and alcohol, or not.”

“I’m not a babysitter,” Laura said.

The other thing Roquelle was known for was fixing things. When Thomasina had knocked Ruby over on Friday, Roquelle was the one who got the full-page apology in
WWD
on Tuesday, and the interviews with the
Today
show. She also arranged for the German heiress and the designer from Hell’s Kitchen to meet at Grotto, where they could be photographed, leaving not a whit of hostility in the public imagination.

Cangemi moved to stand between the women and indicated Laura’s seat. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“I don’t need to sit,” Roquelle said. “I have a life to clean up. I have a family to call. Tell me what I’m telling them.”

“She doesn’t have any family,” Laura said, then was immediately cowed by Roquelle’s laser gaze.

“I’m glad you know her so well,” Roquelle said before turning back to Cangemi. “So.”

“So. I’m just a detective. You might want to talk to our media liaison.”

“Oh, that’s just rich.” She spun on her heel and took two steps toward the exit.

Cangemi, who did not like to be outdone in anything, called out, “Excuse me, ma’am?”

Roquelle turned.

“Why don’t you sit down so I can ask you a few questions?”

Thus, Laura was dismissed.

September was unseasonably seasonable. Almost a cliché of itself. Snappy breezes that were just mild enough to avoid being called a wind slipped under the leafy drifts that spotted the sidewalks, lifting them like souls carried to heaven.

The thought brought Laura to Thomasina, the big bummer ending at the end of the show. Or was it? Gracie Pomerantz’s murder hadn’t hurt Jeremy one bit, once he was exonerated, of course. Maybe Thomasina’s collapse could be turned into a positive. It would put the name of the brand in front of everyone for a while. And when she got better, the name would be out in front again. And who better to have something horrible happen to them than the awful heiress giraffe, Thomasina Wente?

By the time Laura got to 38th Street, she’d convinced herself the incident was an incredible stroke of luck. The show was done. The clothes looked good. Everyone had behaved, and the room was three-quarters full, not bad for the single worst slot of the week in the smallest tent. It was also not bad for two newbies who were running out of their backing money too fast even to know where it was getting spent. All they had to do was sell to the buyers, and they were set.

Jeremy had been almost too good to be true, and Laura spent nights looking at the ceiling and wondering why. When the cutting table and cabinets had grown out of the dining room of her house in Bay Ridge, he offered the closed counterfeit floor of his 40th Street factory, with the machines right there. When they needed a showroom space, they started looking for a sales agent to take them on. But he waved off the idea and gave them a corner in his own showroom, constructing an entryway so there would be no confusion from buyers.

All of that created more confusion for Laura. Learning that he had been counterfeiting his own line and using her patterns to do it had shut something off in her. As if he sensed that, he pursued her friendship almost constantly. When she needed something, someone in the industry heard about it and relayed it to him like one of a swarm of carrier pigeons, and he would call with the exact solution. At first, she’d wanted nothing to do with him or anything he had to offer, but Ruby was not one to reject the straightest point between where she was and where she wanted to be. So they had the factory floor at 1970s rent, a tiny, but adequate showroom space at a terrific address, and they had Yoni, Jeremy’s production genius, part time, which was the last gift she was accepting. That was it. Really it.

Once Gracie’s killer had been put away and Jeremy no longer had a backer with a control problem, he set his heart on complete world domination. Without Gracie to keep the size of the business small so she could hold Jeremy down to her level, he set about exploding it into a lifestyle brand, complete with overseas production and package deals from factories. He found pent-up demand for his clothes, and the glamorous murder that had put the spotlight on him hadn’t hurt either. Jeremy carefully orchestrated the company’s wildfire growth, slowing it by missing the Winter shows in order to pull the whole operation together. His Spring show coming up on Friday was highly anticipated, possibly overblown, and for the first time in four years, in the second-best time slot, in the afternoon. He’d lost the coveted evening spot to Barry Tilden, a travesty he shrugged off. He had bigger steaks to grill.

There were too many steaks, and she was right next door. She needed money, so she found herself picking up the odd patternmaking job from him to keep the rent checks flowing. Her fee was obscenely high, and he paid without complaint, which made it very hard for her to stay mad at him.

Working for him and prepping for her own show had been crippling, but all she had to do was hold it together until the next season needed to be designed. Two weeks of eight-hour days was going to feel like a month on the beach to her.

She crossed 49th in her reverie, where she felt the weight of the world lifting off her shoulders. She felt a pressure on her leg, then a little burning sensation. She caught sight of something very large and very close out of the corner of her eye. A bicycle messenger turned his front wheel away from her abraded calf, and the moment she registered her surprise and gasped, he apologized and sped away.

“Well,
go to hell
!” she shouted.

Reverie broken. Bike messengers reminded her of Stu, which reminded her that her life was turning into a series of missed opportunities at the tender age of twenty-five. She thought about him just about constantly, and when she wasn’t, she was working, which was most of the time.

Which had been the problem.

Exiting the subway, she realized her ringer had been off. She had eight messages: five from Corky, their salesperson, two from Ruby, and one from Yoni, who had gone on emergency medical leave when her secret pregnancy went bad and she was put on bed rest.

Laura returned Yoni’s call as she walked. “You rang?”

“I need my projections.”

“Yoni, you’re just bored. You’ll get them after the buy date.”

“Let me tell you something, little girl.” She sounded terse, which meant she cared, but she was still bored. Laura took the attitude because the hourly rate for a production person was the best she’d ever get. “You talk like you never looked at a calendar before. The wool crepe you insisted on for the Upstate group is spun in China, shipped to a mill in Italy, and finished and dyed in North Carolina. You can hand carry it yourself, and it would still take months, especially if we don’t order. If we don’t order it early, the mills will not make the opening to do the work. That means even if we order a hundred or a hundred thousand yards, they’re going to have other customers’ fabrics on the machines, and they have no
time
to put you in. I have to make reservations for
time
in three places, and to do that accurately, I need to know if they’re going to spend a week on a thousand yards or a day on a hundred. Do you understand?”

“How can we order fabric if the buyers don’t have to put in POs for another month?”

“Projections, Laura. Wake up. I need
projections
by Friday. And by the way, the Chinese won’t spin any order less than five hundred yards or they charge you an extra twenty percent. I simply cannot have this conversation anymore.” Yoni hung up.

Laura made a mental note to never get pregnant, then remembered Yoni was always like that.

She started to listen to the first of Corky’s messages, then stopped. Laura hadn’t wanted to hire a sales guy, since André, Jeremy’s head of sales, had been a counterfeiter and a killer, and even without all that, he was a real asshole even on a good day. But Corky couldn’t have been more different. She and Ruby had known him from Parsons, where he majored in merchandizing and was known to regale the student crowd at Valerie’s with tales of his cat. Ruby had kept in contact with him and pulled him up from the gutter of the last financial meltdown to offer him the crappy job at Sartorial. He’d taken it, and despite their ridiculously small showroom and a staff that could fit around a dinner table, he showed up every day as though he were the head of sales at Donna Karan.

When Laura walked into the tiny back hallway that led to their showroom, she saw that Corky had put out a narrow Danish modern table with flowers and candy. A scented candle held onto its flame for dear life. André had usually just put out a box of donuts and a travel box of Starbucks, grudgingly at that.

Corky was on the phone, which was his job, but his voice was loud, and she could hear him cackling down the hall.

“Oh, honey, he was on
fire
. That man. And he had the whole inaccessible thing going on.”

She knew he was talking about Jeremy. Corky made no secret of his crush. She could sympathize with the sentiment, but not the lack of secrecy. Between Corky’s declarations of the obvious, she heard the bubbling of the steamer. They could only afford to make one sample of each style, so the clothes the giraffes had worn, stepped on, and stretched out were also their showroom samples, and when she entered the showroom, he was steaming out the wool crepe that was giving Yoni such a heart attack.

The rest of the room, which was no bigger than a Manhattan studio apartment, was set up with a big table in the middle, a wire grid to hang garments on one wall, cabinets on another, and two other walls built so quickly into Jeremy’s showroom, they were afraid to hang anything on them. Corky had hung prepped samples on the grid. Everything looked wrong. He had a big drapey shirt with the wide pleated pants—red with red, which was impossible to match in production. He’d co-opted the accessories from the show and incorporated them into his presentation, which promised more than the sisters of Sartorial Sandwich could deliver.

Corky spotted Laura and flapped his hands around his face. “It’s an
oven
in here.” Then, into the phone, “I’ll see you later, honey. Text me your lunch order.” He hung up and turned back to Laura. “I have Barneys Co-op coming in fifteen minutes, and I swear if I put a piece of raw chicken on the table, it’ll be cooked by the time they get here.” He pulled off his corduroy jacket and slung it over a chair, fanning himself with his hands. “How’s the German bitch?”

“I think she just overdosed.” She reordered the red with the brown and put the steeply priced leather jacket on its own rack.

Corky made a
pfft
sound and flung his hand at her. He put the Westchester dress with the black Rockland cape. “She didn’t use when she was working. I saw her get out of the cab before the show. She was walking straight in seven-inch heels.”

“Maybe she puked one too many times and her body just had enough.”

Corky shrugged. “Where’s Ruby?” Ruby and he had rekindled their best buddy friendship, as happened with Ruby all the time.

“She’ll get here when she’s done.”