2 Death of a Supermodel (2 page)

Laura was so delighted, she forgot that, as the designers, she and Ruby were supposed to follow the last model out. Jeremy, on the other hand, hadn’t forgotten and pushed her onto the runway.

“No!” she said like her life was on the line, because she was suddenly sure that if she went out there, she would die of stage fright.

“I’ll pull you right out there, kicking and screaming.”

“Ruby’s in the bathroom. We have to skip it this time.”

“Ruby already had her moment on the runway.” He wrapped his arm around her waist and pushed her out.

It was bright, which she knew from the run-throughs. But her eyes hurt as her pupils contracted, and when she looked back, all she could see was Jeremy’s pale blue sweater. She turned, trying to shield her eyes with her hand, but the lights were everywhere. She didn’t dare look at the faces in the front row—buyers, critics, and ladies rich enough to use Fashion Week as a shopping spree. Laura nodded and wondered if they were disappointed at what they saw. Mousy little her.

At the same time, she felt relief. The show was done. All she had to do was bask in the warm glow of it and clean up the mess. It was over, and all the fighting, worrying, and scraping for every last yard of fabric was done. This was her moment, not to absorb admiration, but to relax before the impending crisis of the fabric orders.

But even the happy moment and grinding music weren’t enough to cover the scream from the back room.

That put a damper on things. The music continued because it was on a loop, but the murmuring and some sympathy screaming went on even as Laura hightailed it to the back room. What had been a hive of activity four minutes before was an empty space in a tent with the litter of cigarette butts, seven-hundred-dollar shoes, and wooden hangers all over the floor.

Ruby stood in the middle of the space with her feet together and her hands balled into fists, screaming.

“What?” Laura barked, feeling the presence of models, businesspeople, and whoever else barreling into her.

Ruby pointed to the back of the back, where the bathrooms were. Laura bolted past rows of empty racks and piles of clothes she’d spent months working on. The crowd followed like rats scurrying behind a guy with a flute.

Ruby didn’t join them; she seemingly had already seen enough of whatever there was to see back there and felt no need to see it again. Fine. Laura would kill the spider, trap the rat, or whatever had to be done, and the whole incident would be the talk of the town. Maybe it would overshadow Dymphna Bastille’s age. Or lack of it.

The bathrooms were the most luxurious port-a-potties money could buy. They were trucked in, attached to the tents, and cleaned four times a day, which Laura knew because the fee was a line item on her books. The white tiles and granite sinks were spotless but for a sprinkling of face powder and a streak of purple eye shadow on the mirror.

As she turned her head, she saw that Ruby’s shrieking wasn’t over a rat or a spider, but over her new best friend, the model with the body to launch a thousand high-end lines.

Thomasina Wente was sprawled on the floor in a pool of foul-smelling vomit.

CHAPTER 2.

Not again
was the first thing that went through her mind.
Please, God, if you’re out there at all, not again. Not another body. Not another series of interviews at the precinct. Not this again.

She picked up a hematite platform at her feet, then dropped it. The cops would want it exactly where it was.

“Overdose,” came a voice from behind her. Rowena had gotten in the door first, despite the fact that she wore a gown meant for an Oscar acceptance.

“Out!” Laura cried. “Unless you’re a paramedic. Out, out, out!”

“Pee!” Rowena shoved herself and the gown into the stall next to Thomasina and clicked the door.

Laura had no idea whether Thomasina was dead or not and wasn’t qualified to make that determination. She poked her cellphone and realized her hands were shaking. “I can’t dial,” she said.

“Ruby was calling,” Rowena said.

Laura put away her phone and rubbed her eyes. She heard the toilet flush, and the door to the stall door opened with a clack. Rowena gathered her skirts and stepped out. She leaned over Thomasina. “This is bad.”

“Just wait for the paramedics,” Laura said. “Trust me. The police want everything where it is. If you spit when you talk, you’ll mess up their scene.”

Rowena stepped back, holding the skirt of her gown above the floor, and leaned against the back wall, still as an oak.

“Do you think she’s dead?” Laura asked.

Rowena shrugged.

Apparently, Thomasina was as popular with the other giraffes as she was with Laura. “When the cops start asking questions, you shouldn’t be so flip about it.”

Rowena cracked her gum, and Laura resisted the urge to hold a hankie under her chin. “I’m not flip.”

Laura’s conversations with Rowena usually warranted little more than yes and no answers, or short statements about one’s ability to walk in a tight skirt. She never spent much time talking to giraffes; she didn’t have the space in her schedule. Ruby was the one who extracted gossip and news. Ruby was the one who’d brought Thomasina back into the fold after the model knocked her off a runway. Ruby not only tolerated, but embraced Thomasina’s haughty affectation.

And Ruby was the one who tapped on the door. “Can I come in?”

“No,” Rowena snapped.

Laura felt trapped in the tiny room with a dead giraffe and a rock star model wearing a matte metallic ball gown. “Do you have a show after this?” Laura asked.

“Yes.”

“You ever string more than four words together?”

Rowena cracked her gum. “Sometimes.”

Laura tried not to stare too hard at Thomasina. Lying down, her arms and legs looked even more like chicken bones. Laura tried to determine if Thomasina was breathing by watching her chest. There was no movement that she could detect.

“Lancaster’s tomorrow?” Rowena asked.

There was a huge rooftop shoot at the Lancaster Glass building with Chase Charmain at the crack of dawn, before the tent shows started at ten o’clock. Thomasina had bent over backward to get it into her schedule for Ruby. Damn. The photos had a chance to get into
Black Book
, and there was her model, sprawled on the bathroom floor like a fistful of jackstraws. Getting a last minute replacement during fashion week who could fit into clothes fit specifically for Thomasina would be impossible. Except that she was stuck in the bathroom with someone who might be just the one.

“Maybe you can do it?” Laura asked timidly.

“I’ll be tired.”

“Yeah, never mind.”

They paused. Rowena looked in the mirror, and Laura stared into the middle distance, thinking of every model she knew or had known. Ruby might be able to do it. She was certainly gorgeous enough, if three inches shorter than Thomasina, but she was loath to ask her sister to cross from designing into modeling again. She simply didn’t have the temperament.

Rowena piped up. “If I skip a party tonight, I guess I can make it.”

“Are you sure?”

Rowena shrugged, staring at Laura with heavy brown eyes, as if she meant to squeeze eight hours of sleep into three because she was that powerful and her dreams were that big.

“Call is at six thirty,” Laura said, “and if Thomasina makes it, you’ll be getting up for nothing.”

“Good.”

They were interrupted by a perfunctory knock, followed by the door opening and a parade of competent people pushing through the entry.

“Carnegie,” Detective Cangemi said, “shoulda known.”

Paramedics descended on Thomasina. From their reaction, Laura surmised that the woman still had life in her as they pressed, pushed, and shouted for things.

Cangemi gently led Rowena and Laura out of the room.

“What were you thinking?” Cangemi asked after Laura described what had happened and how she’d contaminated the scene. “Of all people to know better.” He’d moved everyone who had seen the body to a corner of the back room. He’d rolled full garment racks around an area with two folding chairs, so they couldn’t be seen, but there was no sound protection, and they spoke quietly. The tent would be closed down for the rest of the day, which would disrupt just about everyone but the cops.

“It was a borrowed shoe, and I was just thinking I had to return it or I was going to have to pay for it.”

“You don’t buy your own shoes?”

She rolled her eyes. “We rent them. They’re like eight hundred dollars a pair.”

“I thought you were a big, successful designer now.”

“I don’t even know how I’m paying my rent next month.”

“Did you touch anything else?”

“I don’t think so.”

“How have you been?”

Laura sighed. She hadn’t seen him since a week after she’d discovered André, Jeremy’s VP of sales, had killed his backer, Gracie Pomerantz, over a counterfeiting ring. They had a follow-up lunch to tie up some loose ends, and she agreed never to try to chase killers all over town again. He’d solved the case, and she’d only succeeded in nearly getting herself killed.

“In the last six months or since Thomasina dropped dead in a luxury port-a-potty?”

“We don’t know if she’s dead yet,” he said.

“You’re a monumental hairsplitter.”

“I think the last time I saw Thomasina Wente was on a runway with her elbow in your sister’s ribs. How did she end up doing your show?”

Such a straightforward question, yet fraught with side meanings.
What happened that killed her at your show? How pissed were you? Tell me a good story because I’m looking for the cracks in it
.

“Ruby doesn’t like conflict. So when Thomasina went down the runway crying, and then apologized in like three magazines and took out that full-page ad in
Women’s Wear
, Ruby finally picked up the phone for her. Then they became best friends, like…” Laura crossed her index and middle fingers and held them up. “And then she started showing up at the office late at night to pick Ruby up for whatever, and trying on the clothes, so then she became like, my sister’s muse or something.”

“How do you feel about her?” he asked.

“In general, I don’t trust people who didn’t make their money honestly. But Ruby likes her, so she kind of grew on me. And she’s a professional, even when she’s bitchy. And she knows her way around a garment. A lot of these girls act like we’re imposing on them. She never did.”

Cangemi made a note. She leaned forward to see what he was writing, and he glanced up at her without moving the book because he must have known she couldn’t read it. Either the words were in shorthand or his handwriting was so bad it was unreadable.

“How is it going with the blond guy?” he asked. “I let him interview me. Didn’t like it.”

Stu had pitched the tale of Gracie Pomerantz’s murder to the
New Yorker
and, much to his surprise, had been offered a feature. He’d just been happy to get in the room; getting paid to write the article was a dream come true. Then the interviews started. Every conversation with him became an interrogation. Every question was loaded. He was much more fun when he was a bike messenger.

“It’s fine,” she said, because Stu was none of his business.

“And the company? How is it going?”

He seemed genuinely interested and warm, and Laura needed a friend after the show, the stress of prepping for it, then the episode with Thomasina. “We got a backer through our agent, Pierre Sevion, and that was okay, but it was only enough to pay for everything up to the show, which was today. After that, there was supposed to be matching backing from somewhere. I don’t know where, Pierre wouldn’t say. But if we get favorable reviews from a major, or any kind of celebrity placement, which is when they wear our stuff to an event and mention it, we get some vague amount of matching dollars that might, and I’m saying
might
, cover our production. Except in order to get the review and the placement, we had to go all out whole hog on the show, and that means the fabric is super expensive, and the matching backing may not cover it. And here’s the other thing. Without that matching money, we have to crawl back to the initial investor, Bob Schmiller, whose wife is Ivanah Schmiller, who according to Ruby, has been telling everyone she wants more say in the line.”

“Ivanah Schmiller, the interior designer?”

“Decorator. She’s a decorator. And yes. If you like vomiting animal skin prints on crushed velvet and chrome, she’s an interior decorator. Can you imagine what she’d do to my line? We’re built on simplicity and solid workmanship, and she’s about rhinestone zipper pulls. So here we are, and Penelope Sidewinder, the most important reviewer in the land, is in the front row, looking at a bunch of models from the dregs of the headshot book who can’t be a day over fourteen. Nice, right? Please, shoot me in the face.”

He smirked. “How many hours a week you put in here?”

“That’s the same thing you asked me the first time we met.”

“You look even more tired.”

“It’s worth it. Having my own line is worth every bit of it.” She was determined to believe that, even though her problems hadn’t ended, but begun with, Sartorial Sandwich. And it wasn’t just her line, but Ruby’s, too. Even if she was putting in fewer hours, Laura had to admit she was of equal value. The time spent clubbing and glad-handing might look like hell on a financial spreadsheet, but the general goodwill and chit-chatty publicity had created enough buzz to earn them a two-thirds full tent and a little discount with Mermaid, the modeling agency.