Dead is the New Black (36 page)

“Bloomingdale’s never asked for those buttons.”

“But did you notice how it was perfectly logical that they would? Like I’m the button man? Like I’m their slave? Laura, tell me. You haven’t lost it? Ever? You haven’t felt shaken?”

With that, he took her shoulders, gripping her so hard it hurt. “Tell me some rich bitch never shook your world.”

He shook her, and she realized how strong he was. “Okay, André. You’re upset.”

“You’re damn right I’m upset!” He shook her again. “You want to ruin it. Everything I worked for.”

His hands moved from her arms to her neck, and it was suddenly too late to scream. “It’s not okay for you to ruin everything. Not okay!” It happened so fast she couldn’t twist away. She could only grab at his forearms and open her mouth for air that never came.

She heard the front doorbell ring in a faraway place. She wondered, as her throat got dry, if the painful feeling was what Gracie had felt when the header tightened just a little too much, and she wondered who was at the door, and she remembered Ruby, when she was eleven and there was no heat in the apartment, freezing, naked behind the locked door of the downstairs laundry room, and the buzz of the doorbell became the buzz of the dryer, and the heat on her face became the heat Laura felt when Ruby opened the door and put on her hot clothes, giving Laura a scarf for her neck. That warmth. That short-lived comfort was good enough to get them through the walk to school.

She smelled Jeremy’s salty skin and heard his voice barking an order. For the first time, she wasn’t delighted, or even relieved, because as a reaction to being told to stop, André’s hands closed tighter. Jeremy stepped forward as if he could do something. There was a sound like her brain shattering into a thousand tinkling points of light.

And then it was over. Her throat hurt, her head throbbed, and her elbow ached where she’d been dropped. There was scuffling, and voices far away, and after what felt like an eternity, she heard a matter-of-fact voice that sounded exactly like Detective Cangemi. “One day, maybe you’ll shut the hell up.”

CHAPTER 35.

The washer was broken, nothing else for it.

Laura pushed it again, and the water swished around the tank, but the motor didn’t click on. Mom shook her head. “I think the balance went off. We have to rearrange the clothes.”

Laura opened the lid and stuck her hand in. Laundry water always seemed more viscous. She didn’t know if it was the soap and dirt, or the hollowness of the tub, but there was a heaviness that didn’t come in a glass.

Ruby came in with the May
Vogue
opened to an editorial and shoved a picture of a satin wrap skirt in front of Laura. “Can we do this in that Fuji silk? But above the knee? And with pleats here and a rib waistband?”

“You mean nothing like the picture at all? Sure.” Laura took out the jeans first, and Mom played with the knobs. They rearranged the heavy stuff and turned the washer on. It swished contentedly for a few seconds before buzzing with a loud fart and stopping completely.

“There’s all of three pairs of jeans in there!” Laura shouted. Mom pulled it away from the wall and scanned the back panel for screws and bolts, assessing how she was going to take it apart.

“We can just have the landlord get us a new one.” Ruby continued flipping through the magazine, as if the washer was of no concern to her, which it was, because it was as much her machine as Laura and Mom’s and, since quitting her job, she was as broke as the rest of them.

But she couldn’t have continued at T&C, anymore than Laura could have continued at Jeremy’s. Pierre Sevion’s offer had been real, and once that had been established, she and Ruby took him up on it. But that meant six months of work getting a line ready, while Sevion locked in enough financing to put together a show, a marketing strategy, and fulfill the first season’s production orders. After a month, they were in sketch and fabric stage, and Sevion was still talking and taking meetings. Worse, once fabrics were bought, they were going to need space to put together a sample line, and they were going to have to do it themselves, even if Ruby thought she couldn’t sew. They could only afford to live together, with Mom, in a brownstone in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, about five blocks from Centennial. Laura had become more seriously boroughed than she’d ever imagined. She couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a
cugine
. But they stayed focused, except when the washer went on the fritz.

“Johnny’s going to say it’s because of the way we load it,” Laura said, invoking their landlord, a forty-five-year-old retired cop who had scooped up half the neighborhood in the last financial crash.

Ruby sighed, her eyes still on the magazine, probably formulating a plan to charm a new washer out of him. She flopped the magazine across her hand, exposing an editorial page of a girl in a snowstorm. “Isn’t this your jacket?”

Laura looked closely. It was indeed the last garment she had worked on with Jeremy, the one from Terry Distorni’s incredible stiffening boucle. Laura read the caption, “
Superwashed boucle swing coat by Jeremy St. James - twenty three hundred dollars
.” She handed the magazine back to Ruby. “That guy can turn crap into chocolate sauce at every turn.”

It was true.

After the revelation that Jeremy had been counterfeiting himself at a fat discount, something that should have been a devastating blow, sales of the real and the “fake” skyrocketed. It appeared that the overseas and online customers had already suspected they weren’t getting the real deal, but then discovered that their closets were full of genuine St. James clothing. People resold their counterfeits for the same prices as the authentic, driving the market through the roof. Jeremy continued to sell his counterfeits at a measly ten percent discount and, since he had proven he could run a lower-priced line, he negotiated a deal with Sin-Ton Industries to put up freestanding stores to compete with H&M.

As far as the police were concerned, he was a criminal, but the lawyers couldn’t touch him. There was no real law against counterfeiting yourself. Sheldon could have sued under Gracie’s estate, but two weeks after Cangemi broke the front door to the office and arrested André for Gracie’s murder, Jeremy and Sheldon announced their partnership. They were new best buddies. Laura wondered if he had told Sheldon about his cystic fibrosis, and if Sheldon had put some knob in their contract that would benefit him in the event of Jeremy’s untimely demise.

Cangemi couldn’t care less, either. He’d had André for the murder when Laura mentioned the seven-dollar cup of coffee. He knew André lived near Jeremy, and thus HasBean, which led him to surmise that the coffee spilled all over Laura’s scissors could have been André’s. They’d slipped into his apartment on some cop technicality and found not only a one-way ticket to some exotic land and the numbers for a Haitian bank account, but the missing TOP, which André had apparently taken from Gracie after he’d killed her, because he thought it was a sample of one of their counterfeits.

The Haitian bank account led to Noë’s father, which led to Noë getting picked up on the morning of the show. She’d flipped on everyone and, though she hadn’t known that Andrë had killed Gracie, she put him in the office the night before.

“I couldn’t get you on the phone,” Cangemi had told her. “I knew you were close to figuring it out. I also knew you couldn’t keep your mouth shut if you ran into André. Figured I’d put a scare into you to keep you from going back to the office, but you’re just too fast for me.”

“Thanks for saving me,” she’d responded. “I mean, except for the part where I had to do half your job for you.”

“Any time you want to get killed, just butt on in.”

They had hung up on that friendly note. She hadn’t heard from him since, and she admitted she kind of missed the challenge of getting him to acknowledge when she’d made a joke.

Laura stood by the stacked washer/dryer thingy, while Mom did the actual grunting and sweating with a full washing machine.

Mom had some kind of mechanical screwdriver in her hand. “You should be nicer, dear.”

“Who?” She’d lost track of what they were talking about.

“Jeremy St. James.” Mom raised her eyebrow, looking over the edge of the washer at her newly flighty daughter.

“I don’t want to date him.”

The screwdriver buzzed and rattled the back of the machine. “It’s good business to make friends. You’re his equal now.”

That was true in theory, but not in practice, not until a few successful seasons. But that wasn’t the reason she didn’t return his calls. She just couldn’t bear the sight of him. He wasn’t the person her mind had created to love, and she was too ashamed of her own fantasy world to see the object of it.

“She’s right,” Ruby said, tearing a page out of the magazine. “We could use him.” Which was exactly what Laura didn’t want to hear.

She went outside, to the stoop, and watched the goons go by, burnishing her cell phone with her thumb, pretending she didn’t know what call she was going to make.

Until she made it.

“I’m getting into an elevator,” Stu said by way of greeting.

“Call me back.”

“Nope. It’s just me in here.”

“We decided on a name,” she said.

“Oh? Something grotesquely mainstream, I bet.”

Stu had been in on the lengthy, late night discussions over the name of Laura and Ruby’s new company. They began with LR, L&R, and Carnegie and moved to Sisters Carnegie, LR Carnegie, and every tiresome permutation of the same, until Stu had gotten another beer in him and called them the two most boring people on the planet, then asked, “What are you trying to do? If it’s just your names, you opened your doors to glorify yourselves. If you’re doing that, okay, but if you’re adding something to the sartorial arts, then call it that.”

“Sartorial?” The question could have come from either Ruby or Laura, and because of their half-drunk haze, they never later remembered who had asked it.

“Clothing. Anything to do with clothes is sartorial. Didn’t you learn anything in design school? Jesus. Look, just decide what you want to be and be that, fully and completely.”

That brought about another discussion, which lasted weeks. What were they trying to do? As they pulled swipes and talked about what they liked, a common theme arose. They wanted to pair opposites. Things that didn’t make sense until you saw them. Complementary colors. Rips with fine tailoring. Sexy and studious. Vintage and postmodern.

So when Laura told Stu the name, she knew he’d be pleased. “Sartorial Sandwich.”

“You’re serious?”

“Why not? If they can name a company Freedom for Mankind, we can name our company Sartorial Sandwich. And when we do the lower-priced line, we can call it Sartorial Soup, or something like that.”

Stu laughed. “That is so not mainstream.”

Soon after, they hung up. They would see each other, and soon. He was becoming less of a consolation prize and more of a first choice, which was what Laura needed him to be.

Finally, she was catching up.

This book is dedicated to Alexander, my own personal dhervish.

Acknowledgements

I would like to start by thanking my husband for standing by me while I pursued my goal of writing. There were the big life-changing sacrifices that can drown out the daily. But it’s the gift of an hour in the mornings that made this happen, and the drama-free attitude in which those hours are gifted. Also, my children, who take me away from writing all the time, but also inspire me to continue.

And then, there’s my mother, whose steadfast emotional support pales in comparison to the constant riding I got growing up, that I could do better, be better, create better if I worked harder. My persistence comes from my desire to live up to the potential she believes I have.

On a less squishy note, I’d like to thank my editor, Lynn O’Dell. All of the usual compliments afforded great editors go here. This book would be unreadable without her.

I’d like to thank Mardi Caruso for the circle skirt and Margie Geisen for the technical pearls she dropped at my feet on a daily basis.

Kudos to Nicole Kristal for subtly talking me out of writing this as a zombie book called Skin City.

Margaret Dunlap turned me on to J. A. Konrath’s blog, and since then I have never once considered asking a stranger’s permission to make or sell my work.

Thanks to every coffee shop in LA that let me sit around with a small latte, most especially the huge conglomerate, Starbucks, with that damn free wifi. Whether or not it’s intentional, they’ve built a creative office for the neighborhood. Also, The Curious Palate, Cafécito Organico, and Intelligentsia Coffee.

And lastly, I’d like to thank my online support fellowship at IWU. They are simply sausage.

About the Author

Christine DeMaio-Rice lives with her family in Los Angeles. She has been in the fashion industry for over twenty years, but would rather not talk about it.

Find Christine online at
http://fashionismurder.blogspot.com

Email her at [email protected]