2 Death of a Supermodel (24 page)

No, there were two more dressed people across the room, a man in a leather jacket and another man in a suit. A woman in a gold string bikini hung on Leather Jacket as he and Suit shook hands. When Leather turned his face to the light, Laura recognized him.

“Rolf?” Because of the music, she said it louder than she meant.

Rolf looked up and directly at her. She was on his turf, safeguarded by the skinniest guy in the five boroughs, surrounded by people who had something to protect, and she was terrified. Stu squeezed her hand, which told her one, to be calm, and two, that he wasn’t feeling too cozy himself. She couldn’t see Rolf’s face too well, as the windows were behind him, so she was surprised when he shot toward the rosy doormat exit.

She was even more surprised when she went after him.

She couldn’t help it. She hadn’t just seen a woman’s face buried in some guy’s ass so she could walk away and say something like, “Wow, Rolf was there. How interesting.” No, she was going to catch the asshole and rip information out of his throat, the fifty pounds he had on her notwithstanding.

She’d seen people in movies run down halls and flights of stairs, and it always seemed quite easy. When Rolf took a turn, she took it. When he barreled down a long hall, she ran at top speed, noting the minty gum scent he left behind. But there was the matter of her slippery vintage Via Spigas to consider, and in the three seconds she took to wipe out on the shiny floor, right herself, and kick off the shoes, she almost lost him. He cut a hairpin turn to the elevator bay and seemed gone. When she caught up, the stairwell door was clicking shut, and the elevator buttons were lit. She headed for the door at full speed, her bare feet giving enough traction for her to launch herself toward the stairwell door. She noted the elevator ding in the back of her mind.

Her velocity worked against her when Rolf, obviously having planned the little trick, opened the stairwell door all the way and dodged her thrust. It was too late for her to stop, and the full weight of her body slammed against the bottom corner of the fire extinguisher box. The glass shattered and, when she rebounded, stuck in her arm as it was smashed against the cinderblock wall. Glass shards rained as she
oofed
, the air exiting her lungs.

She didn’t go fully unconscious. The fire alarm could be heard in The Bronx. The stair door clicked shut. The elevator motor churned through the wall she had her back against. The room turned sideways.

No. That was her, falling.

He was getting away. From what, she didn’t know. But she wanted to know, and he would disappear like a phantom, with his billions of dollars and his dead sister, and whatever was going on with White Rose, Pandora, and the threesome in the back stairwell would go with him.

Stuff was broken. Bones, perhaps. Skull, maybe. But it was too soon after she lost a fight with a stack of cinderblocks to feel it, and she functioned enough to get herself to the next elevator and crawl into it.

Lying on the floor, staring at the lit-up metal mesh at the top of the elevator, she wished she’d taken a look at some of the girls she’d seen in the White Rose offices. The girl with her back against the fire extinguisher, the one with her face where no face should be, the gold bikini chick, they were all blank to her. If she’d seen just one, she could at least look for them in the catalog she’d found under Ruby’s bed eons ago.

The connection between White Rose and Pandora didn’t seem so farfetched anymore. They found girls in scrubby, impoverished parts of Eastern Europe, brought them to Germany, which was part of the European Union, and somehow brought them to the U.S. to be prostitutes. Maybe they promised them modeling jobs, and the girls jumped at the chance.

But Thomasina wouldn’t have gone for it. How could she? And more importantly, why would she? She had enough money to do whatever she wanted; she didn’t need to operate a prostitution ring to put food on the table. So, Rolf. He tried to sneak his sister’s foundation away from her. Maybe he seduced the girls and maybe that was what Bob had seen on his trip. When Thomasina found out and tried to stop Rolf, he killed her.

But where was Rolf going now?

The elevator stopped with a ding, and with a whoosh, the doors opened to the cacophony of the fire alarm. The birds chirped, buzzed, whistled, and grunted.

No. There were no grunting birds, at least not in the atrium’s audio loop.

She dragged herself out of the elevator. Her legs seemed okay, but her right arm had lost its ability to hold her weight, so she got her feet under her. The grunting was close, right under the elevator button. Two men were wrestling and one was Stu, who had blood all over his forehead. She didn’t think about who the other guy was, so strong was her impulse to protect her friend.

As she was lining up her shot, maybe a hundredth of a second, Stu, getting a micro-moment of upper hand, got on top. She saw her opportunity and raised her right foot. Rolf’s face flashed red when the fire truck pulled up outside, and Laura brought her foot down onto his trachea.

One thing for sure. Laura wasn’t a covert Mossad operative. Rolf was stopped for only half a second, but that time gave Stu enough of a leg up to wrestle him face down—the fifty pounds of weight difference between them notwithstanding.

Laura stepped on Rolf’s head so he couldn’t move. He cursed in German, and she moved her foot a little so his mouth was squished. No more guttural garbage from him. The cops and firemen arrived like a brigade, turning keys and talking into their black boxes. The siren wailed, and the birds chirped, and Stu put his arm around her to keep her from falling down again. She leaned into him and would have laughed if the whole thing wasn’t so ridiculous.

CHAPTER 19.

“A broken humerus,” Cangemi said with a smirk. “You sure it wasn’t cracked at birth?” He had a captive audience, in the so-very-public-corridor of the ER, with some battle-ax of a nurse placing Laura’s right arm on a stack of pillows.

“You’ll note my inability to even get your stupid joke.” She was tired, work was piling up, and the bastard was after her sister. “Where’s Stu?”

“On four getting an MRI. I couldn’t believe how many questions that guy can ask when he’s concussed.”

“He’s a journalist.”

“What’s your excuse?”

She didn’t answer right away, deciding instead to wonder how she was going to make patterns, or use a pen even, with her arm in a cast. When she did speak, she bypassed blabbermouth and instead took a page from Stu’s book. “What did I just see?”

Nurse Battle-ax had no interest in either lively banter or manners and jumped in without a how-do-you-do, asking, “You comfortable?”

“Yes.” Laura’s tone fell somewhere between blunt as a falling coconut and sharp as a scalpel.

“I’ll be in with a technician to plaster this up. Can you sign with your left?” She held out a clipboard and put a ballpoint in Laura’s left hand. She signed without reading anything, something she had to stop swearing she never did.

Unfazed, Cangemi continued his questioning. “What do you think you saw?”

Nurse Battle-ax flipped pages, and Laura signed where she pointed.

“Okay, my mom did that when I asked her if there was a Santa Claus. She said, ‘Do
you
think there’s a Santa Claus?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I believe in Santa Claus,’ and I did until I was like, ten, which is too old, in case you don’t know. So when someone asks a question like that, basically, that means they’re hiding some kind of lie they’ve been telling for years.”

He pointed at her broken funny bone. “You really broke that thing, huh?”

“That’s it. No more answers until I get a first name.”

He held both hands up in surrender, but she put on an expression meant to tell him no treaties would be brokered. She probably looked constipated, but she did her very best to appear serious and mean. The nurse left with her papers.

“Calogero.” He said it with rolling Rs and lilting Ls.

“I like it. Can I call you Cal?”

“Detective is fine.” He dragged a chair over with a loud scraping noise. “We don’t know exactly what you saw yet. We have some people in custody, and some are talking, but we can’t hold anyone because there wasn’t nothing illegal going on. We got a lotta girls and guys doing it, no laws against that. As far as Rolf goes, he’s got some lawyer and ain’t talking. Can’t arrest him neither.”

“What about trespassing?”

“He rented the unit. Legally. You guys were the ones trespassing.”

“And the girls? Were they maybe prostitutes you’ve arrested before?”

He leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees and acting like there was some crossword question he really couldn’t guess for the life of him. “See, this is the thing we can’t figure out. They were all here on legal green cards, and we got three of them working for you.”

“For who?”

“You.”

“What?”

He took a tiny envelope out of his breast pocket and slid out wallet-sized photos. “You hire this girl in April?” He showed her a photo of a blonde of about twenty.

“No. Are you serious? We’re on a total shoestring.”

He flipped to another picture, a girl with light brown hair and green eyes. “This one? Around mid-June?”

“No. Do you think I’d be working nights and weekends if we could afford to hire people?”

“Yes, I do.” He held up a picture of Meatball Eyes. Her lips were closed straight across her face as if she was afraid to beam too hard for the camera. “How about this one?”

She felt a pang of regret, sorrow even, for a girl she’d met once in an annoying circumstance. “I kind of know her.”

“And she worked for you when?”

“You know goddamn well she worked for Ivanah Schmiller before she was beaten and stabbed out in East New York. In an abandoned strip mall? Hello? Don’t you people talk to each other?” She choked back a sob that must have been left over from earlier in the day. “I mean, and for Chrissakes, a room full of prostitutes and you’re going to sit there and tell me you can’t pin any of them for anything? You can’t arrest anyone?”

“I arrested your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Irregardless…”

“That’s not even a word.” She paused because she didn’t care that much about Cangemi’s vocabulary. “Why did you arrest him?”

“Assault. And once we had him on that, he took all the blame for the trespass, which we can choose to ignore or not. But he’s a real nice guy. Are you sure you’re not dating?”

She wanted to cross her arms but couldn’t, so she just curled her lips so tightly she felt the texture of her teeth.

He leaned back and crossed his arms and ankles. “It’s late. So I’m going to ask nicely instead of getting all subpoena on you. What were you doing up there?”

“I was—”

“Don’t leave anything out.”

“Can I talk?” He answered by taking out his pad, and Laura continued, “I’m worried that you think Ruby killed Thomasina, which she didn’t. Okay, I want to get that out of the way. She didn’t do it, but when I found out she and Thomasina were… you know… I know how you guys think. And I know the poison was in her house, but I don’t care. Ruby’s no chemist. And I don’t know if you know that, and I don’t know what you’re doing. You could be working day and night to find reasons to put her away instead of trying to find out what really happened.”

He looked up from his pad with a raised eyebrow.

She knew she’d said something wrong and began backpedaling almost immediately. “I’m not saying you’re dishonest. I’m just saying you have a job to do, and you’re going to do it. And your job is to put people away and get stuff off your desk is all.”

“One day we’re going to talk about my job and your job, okay? But not now.”

Grateful for the reprieve, she said, “We found this brochure in Ruby’s stuff that we’d forgotten about. For the White Rose Foundation. Thomasina was the founder, or Sabine, who is her brother, but whatever. It’s a thing where they get orphaned and in trouble girls in Eastern Europe and help them out of the life of prostitution or whatever it is that happens.” She felt her cheeks get warm. Would she always be so weird about sex? Her embarrassment was… well, embarrassing.

“Okay, so this girl on the White Rose cover here, she was also in the Pandora catalog you showed me, and she was also with Rolf at Baxter City. So we went looking for her, and I found out she’s Ivanah’s assistant, which is weird, but you can put two and two together. I wanted to talk to her, and when I went to see her in East New York…”

“Most people go their whole lives without seeing a murder.”

“Well, yes, and it was really upsetting. So I figured we should go and see the address on the brochure. I mean she was right on the cover. And it just happened to be nighttime. I wasn’t looking for what I found.”

Cangemi rubbed his eyes. “I got a life, you know. I got this girlfriend who, we’re breaking up, then we’re not, and then I get home, and she’s leaving me notes about what a dick I am. See, I’m always working because it’s life or death, every time. If I don’t go meet the crazy fashion girl in the hospital, and the next day she’s dead, that’s on my head. But then I get here, and guess what? You’re crazy.
Botz
, okay? I know you think you broke the Pomerantz case. And I let you think that because you’re cute and you have an honest heart. But I gotta tell you, we had him, and we were going to get him. I mean, we were on the way. And we got him because we have the tools to do the job, and we don’t sit around cooking up crazy ideas.”