A Dress to Die For (11 page)

“I am so sorry about the labels.” Heidi’s voice cut through her reverie.

But there was another dog on another leash that Laura was going to lose if she answered. “Shhh,” she whispered and pulled the dog to heel as she stared at the carpet and pulled at the hem of the skirt. A line of black limousines sat in front of that same building with the loading dock, and a young teen with an oxygen mask over the bottom of his face was getting out of one. Or in. The scene went blank as if the projector had run out of film.

There had been a time after Dad had left when she and Ruby had been under the care of Marisa, a delinquent middle schooler who put on an innocent face for adults. Marisa had a boyfriend just the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel, maybe a quarter mile from Mom’s apartment and a short way from the 40th Street factory. Every day, between school dismissal and Mom’s return at six thirty, Marisa hung out on her stoop and smoked cigarettes while Laura and Ruby ran around the neighborhood with the rest of the kids. Some played. Some didn’t. Some just showed up in the candy store occasionally. Laura had forgotten most of the names, if she ever knew them, and wouldn’t have recognized any of them if she’d crashed into them on the subway.

The kid with the mask had been one of the dozens of neighborhood kids. That kid, whose memory had been flushed with Dad’s, had been older. Sometimes he wore an oxygen mask. He didn’t play and didn’t have a name at the time because all the other kids were scared of him. They’d convinced themselves in the way of a mob that he was going to die soon, and if they touched him, they’d catch it.

How on earth had she forgotten Jeremy?

“Laura?” Heidi said. “Are you okay?”

Laura snapped out of the memory. They’d been talking about the center back origin labels. “Honestly,” Laura said, standing, “I’m a little annoyed the factory didn’t say anything.”

Her phone rang, and she checked the Caller ID. “Detective,” she said, “to what do I owe—”

“Can you come and get your mother please? I’m trying really hard to not put her in a holding cell.”

Laura was out the door before she even hung up. Her concern for Mom weighed on her as she cantered to Midtown South, so her attempts to jog more memories of Jeremy from her brain failed. By the time she got to the precinct, the clarity of even the memories she’d already loosened had faded into the collage of everything else in her half-remembered childhood.

**

Laura walked up to Cangemi’s desk, where Mom sat. “Mom? What did you do?”

“She’s like you,” Cangemi said. “But in a nicer package. You’d be in front of a judge right now.” He glanced around the room, and Laura followed his gaze. She saw nothing more than a bunch of cop-looking guys hunched over computers and stacks of paper.

“I need to know who had that dress,” Mom said, clutching her handbag. “And I wasn’t doing anything illegal, exactly. Or he’d have arrested me.”

“Nothing illegal,
exactly
?” Laura asked. “What
exactly
does that mean?”

“I was asking questions.”

“Of whom?”

“Stop talking to me like that, young lady.”

Cangemi pushed his chair toward Laura.

As she started to sit, she noticed his desk looked small and a few inches taller than a normal desk. And it didn’t have the right kinds of drawers. She peeked under it and saw a sewing machine hanging under there. “What the…?”

A tittering noise came from the rest of the room. She looked around at the coppish guys with their heads buried in their work, and all she could see of them were sets of shoulders shaking with laughter.

Mom chimed in, “They replaced his desk with a sewing machine.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s a Singer.”

Cangemi wore his more put-upon look. “Can we get this over with?”

“They left a tampon in the drawer,” Mom said. “Not nice!” She called it out to the room, as if scolding recalcitrant children.

“You’re avoiding telling me what happened,” Laura said before she addressed Cangemi. “You tell me, and we’ll be gone.”

He leaned against a filing cabinet that had been decorated with a pink bow. “We get a call from the doorman at the Iroquois telling me there’s a lady hanging around asking questions of tenants and employees. Specific questions about an orange dress. Which is why the call came to
me
.”

A murmur from across the room, “Detective Dress-up,” elicited cackles and outright hilarity across the board.

“This is why you don’t laugh at my jokes, isn’t it?” Laura asked. “You’re surrounded by comedians.”

“One lady saw a truck being loaded the morning of the opening,” Mom said.

“White truck?”

“White with a green stripe. And the guy working the back door said they have a new tenant on seven who had someone moving a crate.”

“In or out?” Laura asked.

“Out, of course.”

“You said they were new. They could have been moving it in.”

“It’s the Iroquois, honey. Six months
is
new.”

“You know who the dress’s donor was, right?” Laura asked Cangemi.

“It was an anonymous loan.”

A cop with shoulders like a circa 1983 Armani padded jacket rolled his chair up to Cangemi’s sewing machine/desk and held up a naked Barbie doll. “She just walked in and needs to fill out a report. Underpants missing.”

“Sir,” Mom said, “don’t you have something useful to do? Like maybe research a diet that will take the fat out of your head?”

Armani Shoulders rolled back, but he was laughing.

“Okay, Mom, let’s try not to make any enemies at the police department, okay?”

Cangemi held out his hand. “Let’s step outside the comedy club for one minute.”

He walked them into the waiting area, which had been festooned with cheap lights and a fake tree, making it look more institutional and old than if they had just left it alone. He addressed Laura while Mom stood by, tapping her foot and looking annoyed.

“Bernard Nestor called to let me know your mother was over asking him the exact same questions I did,” he said. “She seems like a nice lady.”

“You’re talking about me like I’m not even here,” Mom interjected.

Cangemi ignored the remark. “But she has the exact same habits as another person I know.”

“He wouldn’t answer me about whether or not the dress was ever left unsupervised,” Mom said.

Laura put her arm around Mom. “You know, as I do represent a company that’s a bondholder for the show, it’s within my rights to ask how the investigation is going.”

“It’s going fine,” he said. “Thanks for asking.” With that, he strode out of the waiting room and back up to his sewing machine.

Laura turned to her mother. “Stop. Just stop. My brain is fried with the whole Dad thing. I’m trying to keep three businesses from falling through the cracks. I have people asking me questions I can barely process most of the day, and I have to look like I’m not overwhelmed, which I am. Jeremy’s away, and I miss him, but I can’t get all gushy, or he’s going to think I’m losing it at work. So the last thing I need is to run over here to keep you out of jail. Okay, Mom? Can we agree to keep the shit in the bag for a week? Then I’ll have the time to chase you all over Manhattan.”

“Oh, well, I didn’t mean to inconvenience you, Miss Important Boots.” She stormed off, out the door, onto 35th Street like a whipping dervish.

Laura followed just as quickly, but with a full load of guilt. She was a selfish, selfish girl to worry about herself when Mom was trying to unload the twenty years’ worth of baggage she’d hidden from her children. She caught up half a block later. “I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m dragging you into this.”

“I tend to get involved where I don’t belong.”

“And I have to talk to the owner of the dress.”

Laura shook her head, realizing they’d been having two separate conversations. “I’m sorry? What did you say?”

Mom put out her hands. Her nose was wet and red from the cold, and the damp air matted her hair. Laura noted she’d need a winter accessory set for Christmas. It was just ridiculous that she could never remember the basics.

“Let them arrest me. So what? They’re going to put a sixty-one-year-old woman in the clink without giving her a chance to look contrite? I don’t think so. And hell, I can easily plead onset dementia. Right?”

“Uncle Graham’s not going to let you plead dementia. Give me a break.”

Mom held up a finger. “Happens to the best of us.” On that, she spun on her heel and walked away.

It was getting late already. Shadows lengthened across the street, and the air got just a hair snappier. “Mom, no!” Laura chased her, but the older woman kept a brisk pace east, to the train station, head cocked a little downward, hands balled into fists. Laura got in front of her and walked backward. “Do not go to the Iroquois. Do not, do not, do
not
.”

Mom stopped. “The entourage stayed there twenty years ago. Did I tell you that?”

“Yes, you did. You’re scaring the living daylights out of me. Did I tell you
that
?”

“Too bad.”

Laura had moved out when she turned eighteen, and while she packed up the contents of her closet, Mom came in and had a frank discussion with her about what it meant to be on her own, how she had to keep up with her bills, use birth control, eat right, and clean the house. When Laura had asked what her problem was, because, of course, all of that was obvious, Mom said, “You scare me sometimes.”

And Laura had replied, “Too bad.”

What she’d wanted Mom to do was to go away and leave her alone. Which Mom did, and Laura had missed her rent twice and a credit card payment for long enough to rack up a serious fee problem that had taken years to pay down. But the stakes seemed lower, because all that was gone, while the issue of Mom running uptown to stalk a tenant whose building manager had already threatened an order of protection seemed more urgent, more immediate, and more life-threatening.

“I’ll go,” Laura said.

“I thought you had seven businesses to run?”

“You going to tell me the apartment number or what?”

CHAPTER 8

Laura couldn’t say much about the Iroquois that hadn’t been said by wittier and more erudite folks. It was the best building in Manhattan, period. That was less a matter of opinion than accepted as fact. The building took up one square block at 86th Street, including the entire square between Broadway and West End—twelve stories of prewar stone and leaded-glass glory, courtyard in the center, glorious rococo finishing throughout the three-story entrance, twelve-foot ceilings, average apartment size of two thousand square feet. One could go on and on and never touch the fact that half the monster was rent controlled, while the other half was selling as condos for three thousand dollars a square foot or renting at fifteen dollars a month. One might hail it as economically diverse, or one might cry about the injustice of your neighbor paying ten percent of your rent.

What Laura realized as she got off the Westside train was that she couldn’t walk in the front door. That always seemed to occur to her too late. She walked past the courtyard entrance on Broadway, around 86th, past the second courtyard entrance on West End, then down 87th Street where the first pore appeared—a parking lot. The other pore was the pizza joint on Broadway, where she could feign stupidity and get lost on the way to the bathroom, hopefully finding some way into the residential part of the building through the kitchen or whatever. Both would let her into the correct part of the building. She flipped a coin: parking lot.

She’d left Mom at the Herald Square station, with promises to do everything she could to speak to the person in apartment 7Da. If Laura failed, Mom promised to do it herself, whether she got arrested or not. Her mother’s enthusiasm could be compared to that of a pit bull at an intruder’s leg, and Laura was convinced that Mom was trying to make up for some forgotten or neglected task of twenty years ago.

So failure was not an option. She had to report findings, or lack thereof, to Mom and get back to work. It already looked as though she was going to have to cancel her nightly conference call with Jeremy, and if that wouldn’t get his antennae up after her report about Barry’s offer, she didn’t know what would.

She walked under the Park sign, following the car ramp. She caught the eye of the valet and smiled, jingling her keys at him. There wasn’t a car key on it. She didn’t even have a license, but he was too far away to discern key from key and waved at her.

Keeping to the outer walls, she spotted a door. Finding it locked, she simply waited for someone who lived there to come through, which happened within a few minutes. The carpet was mustard and the lighting warm. She went up the elevator that opened to a hall much like the one she left. The walls were painted the creamiest cream from the ceilings to the six-inch-high moldings to the paneled wainscoting. She walked as if she knew where she was going.

She stopped in front of 7Da for a second, then knocked. And waited. And nothing happened. She knocked again, then checked her watch—6:40, twenty minutes to Jeremy. She was never going to make it. Maybe she could come back after the call because Mom wasn’t going to wait another twelve hours before putting herself into the sights of a cranky cop who wouldn’t want to play fashion police. She walked back down the hall, but got lost, backtracked, made a wrong left, then another left, and wound up in front of 7Ca. Somehow, she’d gone around the corner to the Broadway side. All the doors looked the same, and all the hallways were clones of one another.