2 Death of a Supermodel (23 page)

“She went home.”

“I want to go home, too.”

Alas, she had found another body, which meant another round of questions. She already knew what they were going to ask before they did, so she answered clearly, thoughtfully, and in great detail, careful to explain any contradictions. She and Stu were in a gypsy cab an hour later.

Their driver, by his own admission, was from a village in southern Sudan, and Laura steeled herself for another horrifying childhood story, which could put her right over the edge. But he talked to himself, and then into his headset in a constant musical patois. He didn’t expect answers or validation. He was just doing his own thing, man, and if she was okay with it, he was too.

“I don’t have a lead,” Laura said. “I know that sounds heartless.”

“Why don’t you ask her boss?” Stu asked.

She glanced out the window. She recognized nothing in the blackness, but could smell the salt of the ocean, which reminded her of Jeremy.

“Because I think she might have done it.”

“You think she beat and stabbed her assistant?”

“No, poisoned Thomasina. I don’t know what happened to Meatb—Susannah. I almost hope it was just the neighborhood. But Thomasina, that was premeditated and done so the killer wouldn’t be near her when she died. And also to mimic a popular diet pill the girls are taking. So it was a practical matter. Not some crime of passion.”

“Passion can be very cold.”

She huffed, then hoped he wouldn’t ask her what she was huffing about because she didn’t want to tell him the statement made her think of their short-lived relationship. “Whatever killed her was given in the morning. She saw my sister in the morning is all we know, and I think she saw Rochelle Rik at Marlene X. Rochelle was involved; she had Susannah’s scarf right there in her office, even if she denies it. So yeah, there could have been some conflict. Like Thomasina was signing the girls into an exclusive thing with Pandora instead of putting them with Mermaid, which would have made Rochelle bare her teeth. But kill her? No way. She wouldn’t harm a hair on that woman’s head. Thomasina was a cash cow, so to speak. The Mermaid Agency was built on her skinny back, and yeah, they’ll survive without her, but she brought in serious bank.” Laura turned fully toward Stu. “But Ivanah? Now think about this. She’s a real business shark. Her business manager talks about her like she craps Krugerrands. So listen to my theory.”

“This is going to be awesome.”

“Thomasina approaches Ivanah about getting involved in White Rose because she knows the drill over there in the former East Germany, and she’s a closet tycoon, which is important because either Thomasina just felt comfortable around her own kind or needed money.”

Stu gave her a quizzical look.

She held up her hand. “Yeah, I know Thomasina has a buttload of money, but go with me here, because for some reason rich people never use their own money to do anything. They always have to tap someone richer or just someone
else
. I don’t know why.”

“I think it’s a tax thing.”

“Whatever.” She rubbed her eye and noticed how much it hurt. It was incredible how quickly she’d put the pile of bodies out of her mind. “So anyway, Ivanah’s like, all right, I’ll help the people. Young girls? Sure, I was one once, and she gets involved, and her husband flies out there to check out the deal and make sure it’s clean. But it isn’t.”

“Like how?”

“Use your imagination. They’re selling babies. Or they’re just shipping out random women. Or the government isn’t getting their kickbacks. Or the girls have swine flu. Or they’re addicts. I have no idea. Let’s just say Bob calls Ivanah and says, ‘This thing is a no-go. It stinks to high heaven, and we need to bail immediately.’”

“You better wrap this up before we get to Williamsburg.”

She had him, body and soul, leaning forward at full attention. “They can’t bail.”

“They can’t bail?”

“Nope.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Thomasina’s dead.”

“You’re twisting this into a knot, Carnegie. Murder is rarely this complicated.”

“Ivanah and Bob are involved with White Rose and possibly Pandora, and they’re not saying a word, Stu. Don’t you think something’s wrong with that?”

They pulled up to his row house on North Seventh. He flipped her two twenties. She didn’t take them, and he didn’t open the door. Tofu was upstairs, and Laura was in the cab. She had a few hours left in her, and in a moment of honesty with herself, she wanted to be with him.

She looked at the twenties and slid the glass back on the cab. “How much to 48th and Park?”

Manolo shrugged. “Another twenty-five.”

“What are you doing?” Stu asked. “You said you wanted to go right home before someone else died.”

“Go home to your girlfriend. I’m wide awake and chasing geese.”

“What’s the name of the goose on Park Avenue?”

“What about your girlfriend?”

“What about the goose?”

“The White Rose Foundation.”

He looked down, sharpening the crease in his twenties. “You’re a world of trouble, you know that?”

“I have to work tonight, so either you’re coming or not, but I have to go.”

Stu rapped on the glass. “Go ahead. Wherever the lady says.”

“Okay!” Manolo took off for the Williamsburg Bridge.

CHAPTER 18.

Two Seventy-Seven Park Avenue had a three-story atrium in the front with actual trees and recordings of non-actual birds singing. Her mother told her the atrium once had real birds, but the poop situation had forced management to turn to the recorded loops. Laura never knew whether someone had lied to Mom or if she’d just made it up to get her and Ruby to take lunch with her there, as it was right between the Scaasi offices and the actual garment district, but Laura doubted a live bird had ever been brought into a New York office building.

The atrium was a refuge for workers in the neighborhood the way Bryant Park was for the garmentos in her neighborhood. The chirping blasted even louder at eight at night, apparently, because the squeak of their sneakers was drowned out by the aural, if not corporeal, presence of multiple bird species. She and Stu didn’t speak, such was the cacophony of the atrium. They browsed the directory and found neither Pandora nor White Rose. The elevator ding sounded like an incongruous technological leap, and a lady in a business suit exited, whispering into her phone as if she too wanted to respect the majesty of the absent birds.

Laura hit the button for the seventeenth floor, and the doors whooshed closed behind them. Birds, out.

“We’re going to go up there and find a locked door,” Stu said.

“Then I can go finish Jeremy’s pattern, and you can go home to your girlfriend.”

“I have a deadline, so infer what you will.”

The hallways were much like those in any other building in the city, with rows of doors and placards marking the company or entity. Since the building had been erected in the ‘70s, there were fewer vestigial pipes and conduits, and the layers of paint didn’t encroach on the width of the halls, but there was the sense that the building was at the turning point of its life, the style falling between “updated” and “vintage.”

Laura didn’t have a suite number for the Pandora offices. The brochure had only contained a floor number, giving readers the impression that the company took up the entire thing, window to window. But there were just endless rows of doors.

“I think we have to go back down,” she said. “Process of elimination. We’ll see what numbers are missing from the directory.”

“Waste of time. Some companies take up two suites.” But even as he dismissed her idea, she saw his attention drawn elsewhere, like a bloodhound catching a scent.

Then she caught it, too, a tingling vibration in the walls.

Music.

Throbbing stuff that hummed in time. The beat wasn’t loud or close enough to rattle the sconces, but it was palpable enough to follow, which they did, without speaking, like Green Berets in enemy territory. The sound got ever louder, or deceptively smaller, hitting a fever pitch behind a lonely door in a cul de sac of a hallway. Neither number nor name hung on the door, just a doormat on the floor in front of it, with a border of decorative white roses woven into the hemp. It could have been a closet, but apparently wasn’t because it was surely the source of the thumpy-thump music and voices. Many voices. Too many for a closet.

“It’s Thursday,” she whispered. “Haven’t these people heard of weekends?”

“Weekends are for amateurs.”

“Could this possibly be the only entrance?”

Stu reached for the doorknob and picked off a dust bunny. “Apparently not.”

Laura had no real sense of direction without the island of Manhattan to follow. Seventh and Broadway went South. Sixth and Eighth went North. The rest followed. Once inside a building without traffic to guide her, she could be anywhere.

Luckily, Stu didn’t have the same problem. Like a force of nature, he took off with the same bloodhound instinct, around corners and through stairwells, until she feared they were hopelessly lost. But then the music got thumpier again. The voices came through loud and clear as she walked up a secret flight of stairs Stu said might get them past a locked door in a newer wall on the seventeenth floor.

The stairwell was little used. She’d seen filthier in her life, but it was narrow, beige, and utilitarian, the kind of place where one might just hurry up the concrete stairs to get to the next place, so quickly, in fact, that a person might just barrel into three half-naked people doing… Laura covered her eyes, but burned into her memory were a middle-aged male butt, a woman’s bare back pushed against a fire extinguisher, and another woman on her knees, her face buried somewhere Laura didn’t want to think about, at all, ever again.

Stu gripped her arm, which was held rigidly straight in order to keep her eyes from seeing anything else she wouldn’t be able to unsee. She just let him drag her wherever he wanted. She heard grunting and smelled smells, as if her presence was of no consequence to the grunters or smell-makers. The stairwell door clacked, and the voices got louder. The music was still coming from someplace else; however, a layer of voices became clearer. They stopped. It was dark behind her hands, but she wasn’t ready to move them.

She felt Stu move to stand in front of her and take her wrists. “You’re committed now,” he said. But when he moved her hands, she kept her eyes closed. “It’s just a club. Come on, we’ve seen some crazy stuff. Remember the night Heyday was all pornos all over the walls? Just pretend you paid thirty at the door.”

“Can I pretend we were on the list?”

“If that helps you function, then fine. Just let’s go. If this is the Pandora office, I’m going to have another story to pitch to the
New Yorker
.”

Nothing soothed discomfort like doing a favor for someone else. Someone she cared about. Someone she’d still like to date, except he had a girlfriend too pristine to discover a sex club in an office building. And Jeremy, of course, whose kiss should have erased any feelings for Stu.

“Am I getting back to work tonight?” she asked.

“Not likely.”

She opened her eyes. It was dark. No, that was Stu’s face filling her vision, looking at her as if to let her know everything was going to be okay if she would just chill. So she nodded, letting him know that she was totally chilled, the very vision of chill, that if he looked up “chill” in the dictionary, depending on the dictionary, he’d probably find the definition of a transitive verb for cold, but anyway… she was calm.

“I’m not taking my clothes off,” she said.

“I agree.” He took her hand, and she checked out the scene.

Like any New Yorker, she looked at the windows first, since they defined place, affluence, and orientation. The view was of the office building across Park Avenue, on one wall only. So they were in the middle of the building because she didn’t see any passage to a corner office, and the proximity to the offices across the street, where someone was probably working late, increased the excitement of what was going on in the windows. Against the walls, pushed akimbo as if in a hurry, stood folded cubicles and oldish computers. Half the grey fabric chairs were pushed under the desks. The other half were being used.

She has once seen a Tom Cruise movie where he entered a sex club he’d been trying to get into for most of the movie. It was supposed to be the hottest, sexiest scene ever. People were doing it on pool tables and in threes and fours, wearing big masks, but no one looked as if they were having any fun. So the scene wasn’t sexy. It was boring. She thought that the lack of sexiness was intentional. She didn’t know if the same could be said for the Park Avenue office.

Stu scanned the room and pointed to an unappealing door with a red EXIT sign. That was the front, with the rosy doormat, the door no one used.

“So it’s got a door through a back hallway and another up utility stairs?” she asked.

“Yeah, but people work here.”

“Apparently.” She was making a joke about the work going on right then, which she took great effort not to see. “We’re sticking out.” They were the only two fully clothed people.