Dead is the New Black (30 page)

“Can you tell a counterfeit when you see it?” he asked.

“A dollar bill, no. A jacket, yeah. Probably.”

“I need you to meet me at the Pomerantz house. But you can’t say anything to anyone.”

“Even Jeremy?”

“Let’s let the fake desk handle that.”

“As opposed to the real one?”

“As opposed to my desk, where we handle real crimes, not counterfeits,” he said. “Can you be at Gramercy Park in half an hour?”

Laura had no time to poke around the Pomerantz house. She had a pile of work to do and a show in four days. But the secrecy of the meeting intrigued her, and finding out what the super-rich kept in their refrigerator was a tempting proposition.

So she agreed to meet Cangemi at the Gramercy Park townhouse at eight that night if he paid for the cab ride there and back. He made a comment about traipsing all over the city on the taxpayer’s dime, and she made a crack about being marginally employed because he had nabbed the wrong suspect. Then she hung up.

Cangemi stood on the Pomerantz’s stoop with a pin-neat woman whose ability to stand perfectly still, even in the cold, made her look dead. She wore a long, straight ponytail that had the help of some type of gel or mousse and a pair of earmuffy things. Her dress was so conservative it was nondescript. She grasped her clipboard in both hands and looked up to the top floor of the brownstone.

“Laura Carnegie,” Cangemi said, “this is Dana Buchanan from the fake desk.”

Buchanan’s eyes narrowed just enough to tell Laura she did not enjoy his little jibe. “Can we go in now?” she asked.

Cangemi pulled out a key with a thick label on it and broke the seal on the door.

The house was everything Laura thought a rich couple’s place should be. It had nothing to do with the expensive beaux-arts furniture, the gold and burgundy striped wallpaper, the stainless steel appliances, or the granite countertops. Even the inlaid frescoes and marquetry flooring and mosaic detailing in the dining room weren’t the biggest clue.

The corners were clean. Spotless. Not a book, jacket, or bowl was out of place. It was like they lived there and, a minute behind them, someone came and erased all traces of their presence, so that if they turned around, it looked like an empty house.

“I think I’m going to get them some dust bunnies for Christmas,” Laura said.

Buchanan and Cangemi seemed to have a spot in mind. They went through perfectly manicured hallways and rooms, up two stairways, and down another hallway.

“Seventh bedroom,” Buchanan said without a trace of irony.

Laura opened the door to a huge room, as big as the design room, lined with shelves and racks. Shoes. Jackets. Dresses. One wedding gown whose white silk trail made it out to the center of the room. “This is her closet,” Laura said, stating the obvious, unbelievable truth. The woman had a closet with three stained cedar walls jutting into the center of the room. Each wall had racks on either side. An architect or designer or someone had managed this, because the walls were placed asymmetrical to the windows, but pleasing to the eye, and finished to increase the natural light, while diffusing it in order to keep colors from fading. Every corner and surface shone with a scrubbed, unselfconscious cleanliness.

Laura touched the clothes as she passed, her fingers knowing silk from wool from cotton blends, and her eyes ticking off the designers. The Row. Dior. Chanel. The modernists: Marc Jacobs, Balenciaga, Red Velvet. The deconstructed Rodarte. All so different, but Gracie had managed to pull it off, day after day, with just the right accessory or color pairing.

“Over here.” Cangemi pointed to a rack lined with rust-colored jackets. Twenty-five, give or take.

They were all the same, and Laura recognized it immediately. “It’s the Teresa jacket.” She pulled one off the rack. “It was the first production pattern I worked on.”

“These aren’t Jeremy St. James,” Dana said. “There’s no label.”

“He used to not have a label. Look.” Laura pointed out a tiny French knot on the corner of the lapel. It was the same color as the jacket, and the size of a poppy seed. “This knot was how you knew, because he said if the garment was perfect, you didn’t need a label. He was the anti-label guy for the first years. One knot for small. Two knots for medium. Three for large. Which would seem like a bad idea, but then of course, his customers started taking knots out so everyone thought they were a small.”

“Buttons are missing.” Buchanan flipped open the front to show the four bound buttonholes that were for hidden buttons.

She opened the jacket to look for the care label, and found it. “This is wrong.”

Buchanan looked over her shoulder to see the big black satin label printed with the contents and care sewn to the left sideseam. “Sure is.”

Cangemi shrugged. “Okay, I give up.”

“Jeremy’s stuff is made in the U.S., so it doesn’t need a big label like this.”

Buchanan, not to be outdone, interjected, “He uses a cotton twill label and sews on the satin care and content instructions.”

“Yoni says those labels cost a fortune, and no one can even see them,” Laura added.

“So these are…?” Cangemi let the question float.

“Fake,” Laura said.

“Counterfeit,” Buchanan added.

“In Gracie Pomerantz’s closet?” Cangemi asked. “What the hell for? She was copying her own line? Come on.”

“No,” Laura said. “Not Gracie. Never.” Laura dropped out of her down coat and slipped the rust jacket on. It felt perfect at the shoulders and armhole, exactly like the Teresa. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw the vent at the back flipping up a little and pointed to it. “Fake. This back here, the way the vent is hiking? Bad sewing. We’d never let that ship.”

“So…” Cangemi said. “If not Gracie, Sheldon?”

“He was the one who wanted to run a cheaper line,” Laura said. “Maybe he was already doing it, and Gracie caught him.”

“So he killed her,” Cangemi added.

Laura twisted around to get a look at the hangtag. The tag, preprinted with the name of the store, read $1099. “Centennial’s, and a third of the real price.”

“The store in Brooklyn?” Cangemi asked, as Buchanan wrote something in her book.

“They’re all over the northeast now,” Laura explained. “And the online business is huge.”

“I grew up in that neighborhood.” Cangemi sounded wistful.

Buchanan closed her notebook. “Well, we’ll take these into custody.” She looked at the receipt from Ketchum. “Are you familiar with this ‘from’ address?”

Laura leaned over to look. It was Jeremy’s factory on 40th Street.

Laura should have been relieved, but she wasn’t. The Teresa fake jacket was her pattern, no doubt, and that bothered her. Ephraim, having only started the year before, wouldn’t have had access to the production pattern, as they had been destroyed to prevent just this sort of thing. The only pattern in existence for delivered styles was the one in the history closet.

When she got back to the office, she didn’t say hello to a soul, but made straight for the closet. Pushing past last season’s stuff, past Tony’s patterns, back five years, past all the lovelorn, heartbroken days and seasons, back to the day she first fell hard for Jeremy. Against the back wall, where the filthy window got so stingy with the night sky and so generous with drafts, leaned a rack.

There hung the Teresa jacket in all its dated glory. The sample on hand was the blue meant to complement the rust in that so very five-years-ago way and, behind it, on the same hanger, was a pattern hook. And on the pattern hook was nothing.

Her pattern was missing.

CHAPTER 29.

Typically, Ruby was still in her pajamas at seven thirty, but Laura had been up all night and couldn’t wait another minute to talk to somebody. She only had ten minutes because Michael was in the shower, and Laura didn’t want to talk to him, in front of him, or around him. She blurted out the story of the counterfeits, dodged Ruby’s questions about what the house looked like, then was peppered by a barrage of questions that proved her sister didn’t care about designer knockoffs any more than she cared about the rainfall west of New Jersey.

“You need something to wear on Friday,” Ruby said, as she puttered around her kitchen, making coffee.

“I’m so not worried about that right now.”

“You’ve been waiting for this date for five years, and you can’t get a new pair of jeans or something? Do you want to get laid or not?”

“There won’t be any of that.” The bathroom door opened with a creak, and Laura panicked to change the subject. If Michael knew about Jeremy, the shame might kill her. “I don’t know what to do about the counterfeits either. Do I tell Jeremy? I mean, if everyone who was doing it is in jail or dead, I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“Everyone? How do you know who’s involved? Seriously, you were even involved if you think about it. They’re using your patterns.”

Michael came out in his tie and wet hair, clean-shaven, wearing a cologne that made Laura want to puke. He mumbled greetings to his future wife and poured himself a cup of coffee.

“What brings you up here?” he asked Laura. “She’s not going to any more expensive dinners with this thing you’re doing.”

“Good morning to you, too.”

“She can’t pay for a wedding dress and a three course meal at Grotto anymore. It’s not okay.”

“We didn’t have appetizers, and we split a dessert.”

“We have plenty of food in the fridge if you’re hungry.” He turned his back on her, letting them know that that was that.

Ruby stood behind Michael and made goofy faces like she was eight years old, pooh-poohing his words with her hand. When he glanced back, she put her arm around his overbuilt shoulders and kissed his cheek.

“Isn’t he sweet?” she asked.

“Just looking out for our future, babycakes.”

Laura had to leave before she threw up.

But Ruby had given her an idea, and it stuck in her mind even to lunchtime. She had to be finished by tomorrow, or there would be no time to sew up the samples for Friday’s show. But once she did finish, what stopped her from tracking down the counterfeits? It was her work being stolen. Her patterns, her talent.

As the day crested into night, she grew more honest with herself. She did care that someone stole her work, but that wasn’t the reason she wanted to look for fake JSJ jackets. The explanations the police had given themselves for thinking Sheldon had killed Gracie were too pat, and somewhere in the web of trouble these people had woven, there were strands of this counterfeit business.

And, she had to admit the real reason she cared. She needed to believe that Gracie, on some level, had been using Jeremy as much as he was using her. She needed to vilify her and bring her down, because Laura couldn’t believe Mom was right about Jeremy.

She looked across the street. Ruby was at her desk, head buried in her Mac monitor. Laura called her, watching her sister pick up across the street.

“This is going to piss Michael off,” Laura said.

“I love it already.”

“The hangtags were Centennial. And the messenger receipt was for the Brooklyn store.”

There was a pause, and Laura heard Ruby’s mouse clicking. “It’s one train,” she said.

Then, like a gunshot in a tin can, came the sound of something crashing from the showroom side of the office. Everyone looked up from their work.

“What was that?” Ruby asked. “I don’t know if I heard it over the phone or from across the street.”

“Bull
shit
!” André, two rooms and a hallway away, screamed as if he’d stubbed his toe on a box of razorblades. “How is that possible? Get him on the phone, immediately.” She heard some mumbled words and then, “Do you want to do this job or not?”

“I’ll meet you outside.” Laura told Ruby, then slid the phone back into the cradle and slipped out before she had to witness more of André’s tantrum.

On the way out, she saw Renee, who sat near enough to the showrooms to hear everything. Her eyes opened wide, and her skin looked just a little taut over her cheekbones.

Laura mouthed, “What happened?”

Renee held up four fingers, made a zero with her hand, then drew it across her throat before pointing her thumb back in the direction of André’s voice. She glanced back before making the spiral “crazy” sign with her forefinger.

Laura nodded and got out of there.

Laura met Ruby on 38th Street. The snow had melted down to wetness, with a crunchy sprinkling of salt, on the sidewalk. In doorways, at the edges of buildings, and inside the curbs where the flow of rushing thaw didn’t reach, grey sludge gathered, defying the odds and reminding everyone that it was still cold enough to freeze your toes. The wetness rose into the air, like a reverse gravity blown apart by the cabs splashing the sidewalk, the manhole covers spitting out condensation and the drip, drip, dripping of melting icicles from thirty stories above. It was the weather of something ending, weather that told you there was going to be no more snow, only the occasional freezing, charmless rain, followed by a warm week in March before the return to bitter cold and a gentle dance toward spring.

Ruby rushed out in a beret, matching scarf, and leather boots with three-inch heels. Her smile was perfectly white and straight and, for the first time, Laura thought about the work Ruby put into looking the way she did, work Laura wasn’t willing to do. In that moment, she respected Ruby for the first time in as long as she could remember.