2 Death of a Supermodel (7 page)

Kamichura had taken a step back, but her expression was pure satisfaction. “Any theories on why—”

“I asked if you understood.”

“… she might have been killed?”

“Did you understand?”

“She knocked your sister off a runway in the Jeremy St. James Fall show.”

The horrible woman was trained to bulldoze her way to the most dramatic on-the-spot interview she could muster. She had no skin in the game. It had already been a win for her, and another emotional outburst wouldn’t make the reporter look stupid; it would get her a promotion.

Laura smiled and said, “Excuse me,” right into the microphone, then stepped toward her house.

Kamichura moved, but not really enough. The reporters shouted questions and shone their lights, but they could not trespass past the gate. She looked up at the stoop, which led to the middle and top floor where she and her mother lived. The door was closed. The lights were on, but she detected no activity in the windows.

“Hey! You bastards!” The voice came from the top of the adjacent stoop, and she knew right away that it was Jimmy, their landlord. He lived next door and had bought the buildings on each side during the last housing depression. Standing above them with a crowbar and a voice so loud it ripped the time-space continuum, he was the picture of psychosis. “Get the hell away from my gate or your eyes are gonna be lookin’ out both sides of your head!”

Kamichura pointed her cameraman, a guy in his fifties who stood at six-five and weighed in at about three hundred pounds, to shoot the nut at the top of the stairs.

When Jimmy came to meet them on the sidewalk, in the light of the camera, they saw he had a weapon more dangerous than the crowbar. He had a phone to his ear. “They’re restricting access and blocking a fire hydrant,” he said.

Kamichura indicated her van, which had enough satellite dishes for a Presidential dinner on the roof. “It’s legally parked!”

Jimmy held his hand over the mouthpiece. “They don’t give a rat’s ass.”

Laura interjected, “Retired cop. PVB comes if you wave a stick at an illegal space.” She rolled her eyes as if it annoyed her.

“Why don’t you tell the dozen cops in the house?”

“Those goons can’t call a tow truck,” Jimmy said. “You leave my tenant alone, and I go back inside.”

Kamichura took a step back. Laura knew she hadn’t seen the last of the reporter, but next time she’d be prepared. “And my sister is ten times more gorgeous than Thomasina Wente, even when she’s flying off a runway.”

Kamichura and her cameraman exchanged glances, and he lowered his camera. She pointed at Laura. “I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

Ruby’s downstairs apartment, which she’d begged for, was private with its own kitchen and backyard access. Down a couple of steps, the door was open, and the flashing lights and hubbub of activity drew Laura in.

“Carnegie,” Cangemi said. “Welcome.”

“It’s my house. I’m supposed to be welcoming you.”

“Fat chance of that happening,” he said. And he was right. The apartment, huge by New York standards, was dwarfed by the sheer number of people wiping surfaces, flipping cushions, and generally poking around where they didn’t belong.

“Where’s my sister?”

“In the bedroom with your mother. I need to ask you a few questions.”

She ignored him. He was more pleasant to be around when he wasn’t fighting with his girlfriend, but his recent lack of humor forced her to keep the observation to herself.

The apartment was a railroad, meaning one had to walk through either the bedroom or the bathroom to get to the kitchen, so both bedroom doors were open to allow people in NYPD bunny suits to get through. They had a wonderful view of Ruby crying on the bed where Mom multitasked by rubbing her daughter’s back while talking on her cellphone.

“No, I know for a fact she has nothing to worry about, but I won’t have her caught short because you need to be hit over the head with a disaster to get your ass moving.” The tone of Mom’s voice betrayed nothing. The long sentences told her Mom was mad.

She continued, as if the person on the other end didn’t get a word in edgewise. “I have never asked you for a goddamn thing. Even when I was raising two kids by myself in a godforsaken ghetto, I never asked you for a dime or a favor, but I made your girls Halloween costumes and taught them how to sew doll’s clothes, which was wonderful. I love them. And I need you to get your ass out of wherever you are, get down to Midtown South, and get me some answers with the same pleasure I had helping
your
kids.”

Ah. That would be Uncle Graham, the cufflink lawyer.

“I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to hear it!” Mom had graduated from long, rambling, calmly voiced sentences, to her prepubescent relationship with her brother. Fantastic.

Laura snatched the phone.

Uncle Graham was already speaking. “… charged with something.”

“Uncle Graham? It’s Laura.”

“Can you calm her down?”

“Probably not.”

“If I get involved before Ruby’s charged, it’s going to look like she’s hiding something.”

She looked at her sister, who was falling apart in no uncertain terms, and Mom, who was trying not to, and felt as alone as she ever had. “Maybe you can come around after the cops leave and explain what just happened? Or maybe you have a contact in the NYPD you can prod a little? It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Just, you know, let them feel like they’re not swinging in the wind?”

“I heard you got into some trouble a few months back and didn’t call me.”

“I had it under control,” she lied.

“Don’t tell your sister,” he said, “but you were always my favorite.”

“Thanks, Unca Gee.”

Cangemi walked in with a purposeful expression and motioned her out of the room.

“I have to go.” Laura tossed the phone onto the bed and followed the detective into the backyard.

Mom had started organizing the soil into borders and beds. A little overhang against the house sheltered a long metal table with boxes of bulbs, pots, and bags of soil and compost. It had all been moved out of Ruby’s kitchen after an epic freak-out about personal space and cleanliness versus the ease of using the garden apartment for the gardening. Mom’s eviction from her rent-controlled apartment had reawakened her love of flowers, and bulb-planting season would not go by unfulfilled, even if it meant traipsing through Ruby’s own little private Idaho.

“You really upset my sister.”

“We have a warrant.”

She wanted to call him out for being an officious jerk, but it was hard to do that with a name like “Detective.”

“You never told me your first name,” she said.

“Detective is fine.”

“So what do you want?” she asked. “It’s been a long day already.”

“Did you see Thomasina taking anything? Pills? Shots? A snort?”

“On or off the record?”

“For now, we’re off, but I reserve the right to bring you in for an on-the-record talk if I think you have more to say.”

Laura mentally reconstructed the morning. She reviewed all the times she’d seen Thomasina in the previous weeks for fittings and blah-blahing with Ruby in the office. She thought of all the times the model’s presence had annoyed her and how the gossiping had made Ruby squeal instead of work, times Thomasina could have been out partying, but instead hung around the office for an hour between gigs.

“I think I saw her eat like three times in the past four months. She was a freak about what she put in her body.”

“Ever notice what came out?”

“Catty remarks in a German accent.”

“Since this is the second murder to take place in a ten-yard radius of you, I’d keep the wisecracks to a minimum.” He really was more fun when his girlfriend did his laundry.

“She puked. They all puke. It’s like a reflex. Their stomachs are temporary receptacles for lettuce and almonds.”

“And you let them?”

“What did you want me to do?”

“You’re supposed to report it to MAAB.”

“Oh, you know what? The whole model-babysitting thing is getting really old. Who reports high school football players who work out four hours a day to bulk up? Who reports Sumo wrestlers who eat so much they can’t wear pants? What about the actor who loses weight to play an Auschwitz victim? Who reports those people? Nobody.”

“That’s because—”

She’d heard it all before. “Because they’re professionals? And somehow these girls aren’t? They make five thousand dollars a day, and all they have to do for that money is walk back and forth and stay really, really skinny. That’s their job. But we let football players, at any age, mind you, turn into Mack trucks. Why are they allowed to distort their bodies for our pleasure, but the models aren’t?”

“Don’t tell me. You have a theory.”

“Because they’re men. We trust that men have control over their bodies, but women don’t. Women need nannies. And little girls are supposedly getting unrealistic ideas about body image because, again, they have no control over their own minds. But boys? Do we wonder if they’re going to turn their arms into bazookas? Or distort their upper bodies to look like football players? No! Because there’s an obesity epidemic
at the same time
we’re freaking out about what grown women do to their bodies for a buck. So did she puke? You bet she did. Did she starve herself? Yes indeed. Because that’s her job. If you don’t like it, you should take a long hard look at yourself the next time you cheer on a linebacker.”

Samuelson, Cangemi’s partner, poked his head out and, with a nod, told them it was time to go. Cangemi nodded back and turned his attention back to Laura. “I’m not sure if you’re an original thinker or very stupid.”

“When you figure it out, let me know.”

Laura fielded a few late-night texts about the next day’s shoot: something about permits, which the safety team had, something else about Chase Charmain’s dietary needs, and plenty else about the model change. Rowena’s measurements were so close to Thomasina’s, no middle of the night fitting was required, and any problems could be adjusted with a little basting and cutting. She went downstairs to update Ruby, but found her on the couch fifteen minutes into a sleeping pill. The cops had taped off her apartment. Her sister would probably be borrowing her clothes for the duration.

Laura went to bed, but she hadn’t taken a pill, and she was too buzzed to close her eyes. So she memorized the cracks in the ceiling and wondered what the hell was going on in her own house. The police had been looking for something in Ruby’s apartment, and Thomasina had been poisoned. Obviously, they thought Ruby had some of the poison in the apartment. But they didn’t know her sister. Ruby wouldn’t know poison from a vitamin. Laura was completely confident that they had found nothing in the downstairs apartment, except maybe Thomasina’s fingerprints, which was to be expected.

Why would they suspect Ruby in the first place? Someone must have said something. No evidence pointed to her besides the fact that she’d found Thomasina in the bathroom, but since Ruby had been sick, she’d had every reason to be there. It was kind of poetic that Thomasina had collapsed in a bathroom and Ruby found her there. Those two had spent more time together in bathrooms than any other two people Laura knew.

She sat awake as the clock ticked to midnight because she remembered that though she’d been staring Cangemi in the face not two hours ago, she’d never told him about the bag she’d found, and she’d never called the cops to tell them she had it because her mind was elsewhere. Sabine Fosh’s credit cards notwithstanding, the bag was definitely Thomasina’s. Laura still had access to it, and she wasn’t about to let it slip through her fingers without a second look.

Laura called a cab, got dressed, and went to the showroom because she didn’t have a choice. Well, she
did
have a choice. She could have called the cops and told them everything, and they’d pick up the bag in the morning. But that would mean she’d never get her eyes on it. She’d never be able to protect her sister if the police got something stupid in their collective heads. Mostly, she’d never
know
what was in the bag, and if she wasn’t going to sleep no matter what she did, she was going to satisfy her curiosity.

When she went outside to meet the cab, she saw police tape stretched across her sister’s front door. Jimmy was slumped in his doorway, with a crowbar in one hand and a phone dropping out of the other. She could hear his snoring in the silence of the night. She felt a pang of gratitude for him. He cared about the three women who rented the house next door more than any conglomerate could. As she got in the cab, she noticed the big cameraman standing across the street, leaning on an unmarked van. He sipped from a bottle of soda and nodded at her as the cab pulled away.

She’d been in the office at one in the morning before, so the overall desolation and creepiness had no effect on her. The reporters had gone to report something else and might very well be back in a few hours, but it was quiet at the moment.

The elevators exited in front of Jeremy’s showroom. The lights were on, so someone was home. Likely, Jeremy was talking to some new factory in China or prepping for his show, which would begin his drive toward total lifestyle brand domination. She resisted the urge to knock on the door to see how he was doing. He was probably engrossed in something, and her visit would not be welcome.

She walked down the hall to her showroom. In the darkness, she almost knocked over Corky’s Danish Modern table trying to unlock the door.

The bag was in the drawer where she’d left it. She slapped it onto the table, the buckles clattering against the lacquered wood. Under that noise, she heard another sound, like a clicking, but she couldn’t place it. She was aware that she was putting her fingers all over what could be evidence, and Cangemi would give her a hard time. But she’d already put her mitts all over the bag’s contents yesterday, so there didn’t seem any harm in doing it again.

She started by carefully unloading the objects onto the table, one thing at a time: face cream, cellphone, wallet, three pens, makeup kit to be unzipped and emptied later, three packets of gluten-free Tamari, a little Coach wallet full of receipts.