Dead is the New Black (22 page)

CHAPTER 21.

Despite enough floodlighting to illuminate Shea Stadium, the ferry terminal was pretty scary at midnight. Unless you were a mugger or a rapist, then it was a warren of opportunities. Laura and Stu feigned blithe, but had eyes on every corner and turn. Laura relaxed when they got outside and onto the street. Once there, nothing could happen to her. Even in the dead streets of the Financial District, she was empowered.

So when they exited onto South and Whitehall, she let down her guard. This was home base, after all, and required no more diligence than simple navigational tricks. The first thing she did was release Stu to the yellow trains, the N or R, so he could go north to 14th Street and catch the L to Williamsburg. He protested that it wasn’t safe, and she protested back that her femaleness didn’t make the world into a war zone, nor did it change the fact that the island of Manhattan was the safest landmass in the world. In the end, she headed a block over alone to catch the East Side green trains.

She spaced out a little as she descended into the subway system, tying things together in her mind, committing what Mario had said to memory. Her worst feeling was hurt over Carmella. She considered the designer her friend, a friend who travelled in high-end circles, a polished woman with connections and a smooth way around a party. She knew Carmella lied and exaggerated, but still, she had gone to Duomo expecting Mario to debunk the whole myth that Carmella was his girlfriend. But no, Carmella had a whole separate life. No disowned royal family. No romantic strolls along the beach in Sicily. Was she ever even at LVMH? Did Jeremy know it was all a big fabrication?

She pushed her card through the train turnstile. Thinking of her first dinner at Carmella’s loft, the one with the Bolognese that Carmella swore she made, it hit her. Not an idea. An object. Something that made her head feel hard and hollow.

It happened so fast that Laura only had a second to notice the taller man’s dark sideburns and Hugo Boss wool coat with the label still tacked onto the left cuff. The
bonk
to the head blurred her vision, but she knew it was Jefferson. After the first hit to the head, she started to get mad, but her body wouldn’t move or do what it was told. She thought she flailed her arms. She thought she might have tried to run, barreling into Hugo Boss as a result, but she had no clear recollection of anything but a series of blows, and the realization that they didn’t hurt so much as rattled her head and made her feel generally insecure about the stability of her own body. And she saw stars and was convinced her skull would explode from the pressure.

“Unless you’re enjoying this you can back off. You got it?” The voice was close to her ear, as hands rifled through her pockets.

She opened her eyes as much as she dared, and found them looking behind a fog. She tasted blood, like a warm tea compared to the bitter cold outside. She moved her lips to say, “Yes,” but was unsure if anything actually came out. Nor was she sure she didn’t say what was really on her mind, which was,
You’re supposed to remove the cuff label.

“What? I didn’t hear you.”

She smelled a Quarter Pounder on his breath and realized she was hungry. Then, she screamed. She screamed in one long vowel sound from the bottom of her lungs, in an octave deeper and louder than her singing voice. She screamed to reach Whitehall Street and the token booth. Her scream was a physical thing. A brick. A tidal wave. A wall of sound meant to throw him back ten feet. And it worked. He was blown back a good eighteen inches before he got irritated enough to bring his boot to her head in a swift, brutal motion.

She heard a grunt and a scuffle a second before she lost consciousness.

CHAPTER 22.

At first, she didn’t recognize all the voices. Some were male, some female. Her sister and her Mom were obvious, but the men blurred together. It wasn’t until she opened her eyes and saw a cap of blond hair through the fog did she know Stu was in the room. She smelled him, a mix of bicycle grease and another dry aroma she couldn’t pin down. Wood or smoke, or a little of something burning in the toaster. A comforting smell. A smell she recognized from her last seconds in the alley. He must have come and driven them away with his skinny little ass all in a twist. She knew she smiled because her face hurt.

“She’s coming around,” a female voice she did not recognize said. “Everyone without a badge, get out.”

She knew Stu left because he took his smell with him. She opened her eyes and saw Cangemi, with his fuzzy brown hair and freckles, tie loosened, argyle-clad ankle on his knee as if he did this every day. The nurse took her blood pressure, hovering like a crow pecking at a cadaver, tap-tapping it all into a computer while Cangemi just sat there watching Laura regain consciousness.

Laura ran her tongue over her teeth.

“They chipped it,” Cangemi said. “It adds character.”

“Just what I needed,” she replied.

“Her brain works,” he said to the nurse, who ignored him. He turned back to Laura. “You’ll miss a few days’ work.”

“I don’t know if I have a job.”

“Is that why you went to Staten Island?”

She tried to sit up, but the room went upside down, so she put her head back on the pillow. “Carmella’s boyfriend killed Gracie.”

“Mario Olliveri?”

“He was trying to do a line with Carmella, but she ditched him for Gracie.”

The nurse tapped a little more, then left. Apparently, the detective had been waiting for her to leave, because he leaned forward and got serious. “You shouldn’t be poking around. You’re pissing people off.”

“No, I’m pissing you off. Everything else is just business as usual. In Crazyland.”

“You never told me how you spilled that coffee.”

“It was a seven-dollar cup of coffee. If I’d spilled it, believe me I would have remembered it. Okay? And you’re probably going to say that proves I’m sleeping with Jeremy because he buys me such an expensive cup every day. And what I’m saying is that to people that live in that neighborhood, a seven-dollar cup of coffee isn’t a big deal.”

Cangemi didn’t answer for a second. He stared at the middle distance between himself and a tiny corner of her bedsheet as if remembering some long-forgotten event.

“Hello?” she said.

He snapped out of it. “Just back off. We’re cops, remember? This is what we do.”

She considered for just a second, not mentioning her place on the suspect list. “Stu was here?”

“Skinny light-haired guy? Yeah. He almost got himself killed for you.”

“Did you catch them?”

“We’re after them. They deny being there, and they have an alibi.”

“Mario.”

“We’ll get them. Don’t worry.” He patted her shoulder. “Don’t go trying to get them yourself. Speaking of which…” He paused long enough for her to interject.

“Speaking of which, stop asking questions and go sew something, right?”

“Something like that.”

“You accuse me of murder, and then you tell me I shouldn’t ask around to clear my name. How does that work? Is that even legal?” Anger made her face hurt even more. She wondered what she looked like, if she was a hideous exploded monster or a lady with a little black eye and a chipped tooth.

“I didn’t accuse you of anything. I asked you to stay in touch, but now that you’ve rattled the cage, it looks like you have something to hide, and we have to investigate. So thanks for the extra work. Anything you’d like to tell me so I can get home at a decent hour tonight?”

She considered telling him she was a cold-blooded killer, just for fun. That she had loved Jeremy from afar for as long as she had known him. That she found out about his affair with Gracie and was enraged, calling her into the office early to tell her she had to reveal some dirty dealings with the business, and killing her right there and then. With a silk header. Then, she framed Jeremy, one, as punishment for loving another woman when everyone thought he was gay, and two, to keep him in jail while she charmed him into doing what he should have done from the start, love her.

It was a beautiful plan except that it was too plausible to speak aloud.

“If I had something to tell you, I would.”

“I like you. You’re a good person. Good people get into trouble when they’re not where they belong.”

“Can you leave, please?” she asked, staring at the ceiling.

“I want to tell you something first.” He got up and slung his jacket over his shoulders. “St. James made bail, then was immediately hospitalized.”

She sat straight up, leaning forward. He was stone, watching her, unmoving and unmoved, waiting for her reaction. Somehow, she felt she’d given him exactly what he wanted.

He smirked as if he saw directly inside her, with a microscope, and what he found there was somehow funny in a condescending way. He shuffled out, and she was alone. Just her and her two black eyes and chipped tooth and swollen cheeks. Maybe a busted lip. Potentially, a big meaty bruise on her forehead. She wanted to know what her face looked like, but was having a better time imagining the worst, knowing that it wouldn’t be as bad as she could make it in her head, where she was a monster.

Laura stared in front of her as the room caught the morning light. A flat-screen TV hovered above her and, under that, a whiteboard with the name and number of her assigned RN scribbled in erasable marker—Maelle, extension 5492. At the top, the whiteboard told her where she was, which hadn’t concerned her until that moment. NYU Medical Center. It rang a bell. There was something important about it. As she started to drift off to sleep, another bell rang. Then, a chorus of bells went off in her head, bringing her fully awake.

She rang Maelle, a slim black woman with a fully professional demeanor who might give Laura the straight story about finding another patient in the hospital.

“Dial zero and ask,” the nurse said, tapping her blood pressure into the computer.

Laura found the phone. “Yes,” the operator said, “he’s being discharged today.” She gave the room number, and Laura crumpled the paper in her hand when she hung up and turned to her nurse.

“Do I look bad?” she asked.

“It’ll heal, if your chart has anything to say about it.”

“Can I have a mirror?”

“Something wrong with your legs?” Maelle asked.

She guessed not. But as she got up and made her way to the bathroom, she decided not to look. What good would it do? She had no makeup and no way to hide. She didn’t need to be any more insecure.

Once Maelle was gone, Laura slipped into the hallway in her hospital gown and slippers. His room was in another wing, but she found it. After all her trekking along cold corridors and elevators, the closed door almost deterred her completely.

But she knocked, and so softly she hoped he couldn’t hear it.

“Come in,” she heard, and resisted the urge to run away. She stepped inside.

Jeremy wasn’t there. Just a rumpled bed with the head raised above the feet and instruments everywhere. She stopped by a clear plastic cylinder with a yellow accordion thing inside it. She heard a huffing, like a person saying
ha ha ha
over and over, but it wasn’t coming from the machine. It was coming from the bathroom.

“Jeremy?” she called out.

“In a second.”

She panicked. She still didn’t know what she looked like. She had a second to leave before he saw her. But no, she had come too far already, and the closed door between them was more of a convenience than a hindrance, if she wanted to be optimistic about it.

“It’s me, Laura,” she said, and the huffing stopped immediately. The doorknob turned. “No, just, stay there, okay?”

Silence.

“I don’t want to freak you out,” she said.

“Would you stop?”

“Just don’t come out.”

“All right.”

“Jeremy, I—” She paused. “I tried. But I couldn’t clear you. I thought it was Carmella, and I think it may be Sheldon, but I couldn’t find out who did it. I’m sorry. I failed.”

“I didn’t ask you to solve the murder, Laura. I asked you to keep the office together.”

“It seemed like the same thing at the time, but now Sheldon’s selling the company, and I got beat up for asking too many questions.”