2 Death of a Supermodel (5 page)

“I saw Ivanah Schmiller. What did she think?”

“That could be a problem for us,” he said, using the royal pronoun as if he was any more than a jester in that court.

“If it’s about money, there’s nothing you can tell me that Yoni hasn’t.”

“Your backer is not happy with you. Or to state it more plainly, his wife called your clothes boring.”

“To whom? The circus?”

“I don’t want you to underestimate her pull in this business. She is the wife of a billionaire and quite the designer herself. People listen to her, so no matter who she said it to, it wasn’t
nobody
.”

Laura crossed her arms, knowing she was about to get hit in the gut. “Okay, tell me what I have to do.”

“First, you need your sister here, immediately. You cannot continue to work the showroom.”

“What if I like it?”

“You’re selling two-thousand-dollar jackets. This is not a game. Get Ruby from wherever she is and take her to Isosceles for a dinner with Bob Schmiller at eight. You can come if you like, but you are not to speak.”

There must have been a dark cloud over her face because Sevion leaned forward and put his hand over hers. “This regards a few hundred thousand dollars and the future of your business. It requires personality, not genius. I cannot put it more plainly or kindly.”

“Yes, you could.”

He glanced into Jeremy’s reception area again, holding up a hand for Renee, as if telling her to be patient. His French accent got thicker as the truth got closer. “Hortensia will give me hell. She’ll say I treated you unkindly. She has a place in her heart for you that’s a mile wide.”

Pierre’s wife was a notorious silly gossip and gadabout, but Laura had never heard of her speaking a negative word about either sister. She was not so kind with all of her husband’s clients.

Maybe she should be thankful Sevion was so frank with her. Of course, Ruby was the face of the business. Laura knew that, and they’d discussed it repeatedly. Why should she be so surprised that Sevion wanted to enforce what was right for them?

“Naturally,” Laura said. “Let me go find my sister. After that, I’m calling Hortensia to tell her you uninvited me to dinner and called me low class. See if you get laid this week.”

“See if I don’t.” He smirked, checking his phone.

Hers blooped at the same time, and since he was being rude, she decided to return the favor. But they both got the same message from two different sources.

Thomasina was dead.

CHAPTER 3.

Ruby was a perfect grouch when Laura met her outside the precinct. She could tell as soon as her sister grumbled a hello.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’ve been in the precinct for hours, and all they gave me to eat was donuts. They treated me like I was a criminal or something.” Ruby ran to the next subject like flipping through a magazine of things that bothered her. “And Thomasina, she’s dead. Oh, man, I really am going to miss her. She was such a good friend.” Ruby stopped walking as if grief took the coordination right out of her.

“I’m sorry, Ruby. I know what she meant to you.”

“No, you don’t.” Ruby put her head down and walked faster, then abruptly stopped. “She has a shoot with us tomorrow.”

“Rowena’s doing it,” Laura said.

“You replaced her?”

“Yeah! Lucky thing because—”

“Who made you? Did you hatch?”

“What? It’d cost a fortune to cancel.”

“I’m going home.” Ruby stormed toward the subway.

Laura tried to follow, but found herself falling behind. “You’re going to Isosceles with Pierre and Bob,” she cried. “Pierre needs you to be nice.”

“No.” Ruby stopped before descending the stairs. “I cannot deal with meaningless talk right now. I can’t talk about money and clothes and stuff that doesn’t matter. So you go, okay? Can you go for me?” Laura caught up, and Ruby took her lapels, pulling down as if to drag her to the sidewalk. “Please. Go for me. All you have to do is make sure Bob’s wife stays out of it, okay? Just whatever he wants her to do, say no and you’re good.”

Laura had never met Ivanah Schmiller face to face, so she’d never come upon that rule, and she had no idea how to enforce it.

“Please,” Ruby implored, “I’ll do something so nice for you.”

“You have to go. Pierre said.”

Ruby stopped talking as they went into the subway. Her face was dark and closed, lips pursed, eyes slightly scrunched. When they got past the turnstiles, Laura headed for the stairwell to the uptown platform, and Ruby went toward the downtown, where a train rumbled into the station.

“Ruby!”

“I’m going home.”

“You can’t!” Laura shouted over the noise of the train. She followed Ruby and grabbed her sleeve, but her sister yanked herself free without even looking back and got onto the downtown R before the doors snapped shut. Laura watched the train pull out of the station.

Ruby sat in a window seat and put her head in her hands.

Laura returned to the showroom to find Corky in a huff.

“I need someone here,” he said. “I’m not an octopus.” He held up the Rye and Rockland blouses, rocking them back and forth to illustrate how hard it was to take things off and put them on the racks at the same time.

“I’m sorry. Is anyone else coming?”

“Unlikely.” He threw himself into a chair and took out a cigarette.

“You are not lighting that in here,” she said.

“Ruby and I had a whole shtick set up. I can’t shtick by myself.”

“She’ll be back tomorrow. She’s just having drama time.” Laura looked around for something to do, but everything seemed in pretty good order. “Where are the shoes?”

“Back behind.” He waved his cigaretted hand. “I had no time.”

Back behind
were the words used to describe the sliver of storage space behind the display cubbies. It only held one rack and probably violated every safety code in the book. She went back behind and found hangers askew on the bar of the rack, tangled in waterfalls of grabby knots. She hated hangers. If she could reinvent them, she would, but had no better arrangement.

“Did you not show any of these styles?”

“Yeah, because when they came back late from the Ghetto, I had time to steam them, put them out, and pimp them by myself.”

“You’re being a real snot.”

He got up and helped her yank out the rack from back behind. Hangers clacked, bent, dropped, and pulled the clothes out of shape. The shoes were tangled in boxes on the bottom two bars, and one box spilled rented Louboutins all over the floor. She bent to retrieve them.

“I have to get these back before dinner or they start dinging our deposit.” She paired them off and put them on the table.

Corky, for all his huffiness, was the picture of helpfulness, and they had the first box sorted in record time. He pulled the shoeboxes from the top of the cabinet and packed while she untangled the hangers.

A phone buzzed.

Laura and Corky sprang into action, rifling through bags and pockets for their personal devices. After checking her phone, she dropped it back in her bag, then saw Corky sliding his own back into his front pocket.

But a phone definitely buzzed. They looked at each other, then around the room as though they were in a haunted house and had just heard a phantom behind the picture frame.

“It’s by the rack!” Corky exclaimed.

The buzz stopped a second after she located the source in a box of shoes under the rack. At the bottom of the box was a leather Lacroix tote with uptrending bellows pockets all over it.

“Cute,” he said. “One of the girls, probably.”

“Should I open it?”

“No, you should leave it and let it draw the owner here by the power of Christian Lacroix.”

She rolled her eyes and opened the bag. It was spanking clean. Amazing. Not a dustball, wadded-up tissue, a hair, a crumb, or even a book of old, useless matches. In comparison, her bag looked like a repository of human detritus.

She located a jar of lavender face cream (no label), a worn leather wallet (no brand, oddly), a cellphone (the latest), a notebook, and a bag of makeup. “It’s the wallet or the cellphone. Which is less intrusive?”

“Oh, honey, be intrusive. The cellphone.”

She opened the wallet. It was old style, with a little folder for pictures and cards, a billfold, and a display for credit cards. She slipped a black American Express card out of the pocket. “Sabine Fosh. Jewish? Did we have any Jewish girls?”

“Only Catholics,” he joked, bagging and boxing shoes like a factory worker.

Laura knew he couldn’t stand visible disarray in the showroom. She flipped through the wallet: pictures of no one she recognized, all towheads, a wedding photo from the seventies, an old couple in front of a cake, a frequent flier card for an airline she couldn’t identify. One guy in his twenties appeared twice.

She poked at the cellphone screen. She recognized Roquelle Rik’s number. “Her agent, repeatedly. She called Ruby a lot. Jeez.”

“How’s she holding up?”

“Bad.”

“I’ll take her for a manicure after this week. Cheer her up.”

“We have seven hundred left in the bank. It’s on Sartorial.”

Corky looked pleased.

The phone blooped with a message from Bobcat. She had no idea who Bobcat was, and there was only one way to find out. Without consulting Corky, because she was ashamed to be doing it, she listened to the message.

“What are you
doing
?” he exclaimed.

“Being intrusive.”

“Baby Bean. I’m back, and I missed you. You’re right about everything. I sent something home for you.”

He trailed off with a last “I know…” and that was it. Not helpful. She was down in the mire of intrusiveness, so she figured she might as well listen to another message. There was only one more. Obviously, the girl didn’t save a year’s worth of messages until her box overflowed like Laura did. She tapped and listened.

It was in another language, and the guy talking was stompin’ mad.

“Do you know what language this is?” She held it up for Corky. It sounded like
wecken ick eeber eer.

“Not Spanish,” Corky said.

“I think it’s German. This has to be Thomasina’s.”

She tossed the phone back inside and stuffed the bag in an overfull drawer. “I’ll call the cops and have them come and get it. Just leave it out here. I have a nightmare dinner at Isosceles in twenty minutes.”

“Oh, chic. Can I come?”

“It’s with Bob Schmiller and his wife.”

“Have a great time,” he said, handing her a box of rented shoes.

Isosceles took up half the first floor of the Flatiron Building and, seen from above, was shaped like its name. It was so dark that the staff left little lights by your fork so you could read the menu. Pierre had gotten a seat by the ice fireplace, a pit of broken glass with blazing gas jets underneath that looked like the Arctic Circle on fire. Laura thought it was absurdly on-the-nose and decorator-y, as though designed to be designed, instead of placed where necessary as part of an organic whole. It was cool so that people would say “cool,” not because it was necessary. But that was the problem with half the designs she had seen since opening SartSand. Her mind started pulling things apart only seconds after her eyes saw them, and the constant critique in her head got on her nerves and impinged on her enjoyment of details like a stupid pit of flaming tempered glass.

Also, her mood was soured by the whole Ruby/Pierre/Bob/Ivanah debacle that was about to occur and the raised eyebrow Pierre gave her as he stood to say hello.

“Ruby’s not coming,” she said.

Bob Schmiller, who looked more like a linebacker than an angel backer, stood up when Laura approached. He’d been a heartthrob receiver for USC, then a heartthrob rookie receiver for the New York Giants, then a player with a busted collarbone, then a bootstraps tale of a master’s degree in finance and a way of sniffing out the right stock market bets. Laura figured the collarbone was the best thing that ever happened to him.

Ivanah didn’t stand. She patted her yellow hair, which stood high on her head with painted enamel clips and combs, and smiled at Laura in such a stiff, perfunctory way it came off as a snarl.

Bob leaned over, the bulk of his upper body the result of too many hours in the gym, maintaining the football player build. He smiled like the charming guy he was and poured her some wine.

Pierre sat and placed his napkin on his lap. “So, did Laura tell you that they’ve been writing orders all day? Barneys co-op spent how long in your office?”

“About two hours.” She didn’t mention that most of it was spent stabbing Ruby in the back, and no orders had been written that day. Not one pair of pants. Not one jacket. Not even one of the scarves they cut out of extra fabric ends left on the marker. That wasn’t how the business worked. The way it worked was you broke your brain telling someone about the clothes and talking about production lead times, and then you sat around for a month while they sorted their money. Because buyers were given a certain amount of play money to assort their floors, and they wanted to see everything before they gave you a dime. The best Corky was going to be able to do by Monday, after all the shows were done, was to get promises. Those were the projections Yoni was waiting for, and apparently, Sevion thought Bob didn’t know that.