Dead is the New Black

by Christine Demaio-Rice

  Laura had no idea she was being seduced, even after she was told Jeremy needed a temp patternmaker, a job Laura could do but did not, under any circumstances, want, because he had such a temper, no one as young as she could do it without crying every day. Before she knew what was happening, Laura had accepted the appointment with the famous Jeremy St. James, a stroke of good fortune that sent her friends giggling and cheering. Her sister only reminded her that she was in danger of making patterns the rest of her life, instead of designing.

  Which kept her up all night, worrying.

  The appointment had taken all day, even with Jeremy dispensing with the interview portion of the hiring process and standing her in front of the pattern table with a swatch of fabric and a sketch. He watched her score the lines, fold the pleats into the paper, and cut the corners of the pattern. He was absolutely still, which made her nervous enough, but it turned her on, because being nervous in front of a good-looking man was a feeling she associated with being in love. When the pattern was done, he refolded a dart, adding another sixteenth of an inch to the depth. He told her to cut and sew it, because no patternmaker was worth a good goddamn if they couldn’t cut and sew.

  He corrected the angle of the scissors with a gentle push, then demanded she sew it. She made the shirt, with Jeremy kneeling next to her, forcing her to breathe hard through her nose to catch his scent, a salty brine of the beach in early summer that she could smell in her clothes even after she got home. He put his hand over hers when she slid a little bit, checking the seams, unthreading a particularly tough curve, and making her start over. When the shell was done, he held it up and looked at it in the light, checking for the needle holes.

  He held out his hand. “You’re hired. Your pattern was near perfect. You can’t sew worth a shit, but you know how it’s done. You learn fast and take direction. Come in on Monday.” The vision of a lovely long-backed straight-shouldered male specimen turned away, tossed the shirt in the trash, and went into the design room, closing the glass door behind him.

  But that was just their first encounter. It had only gotten worse from there.

  He smelled good. He patted her on the back when things fit. He never yelled at her or gave her a hard time, because designers, merchandisers, and their ilk were a dime a dozen, while patternmakers were worth their weight in gold. She certainly was neither immune from the anxiety that she was one mistake away from Jeremy jumping down her throat and pulling her lungs out, nor from the fear that she would never express herself creatively. But when offered a full-time position, she took it anyway, because the famous Jeremy St. James had become just ‘Jeremy’ to her, and she couldn’t imagine working without him.

  Jeremy was in a foul mood. She felt it through the glass. Not that she could blame him. He wore ridiculous slip-on sneakers and a green work shirt with matching pants. He snapped up the phone. She picked up hers.

  “This is absurd,” he said, referring to the phone. “What am I going to do? Strangle you?”

  Benito picked up the phone on their side of the booth. “I’d shut up if I were you.”

  “Tinto,” Jeremy said, pointing through the glass. “You get me out of here.”

  “Bail hearing’s day after tomorrow, JJ, take it easy.”

  “You know what? Best thing that ever happened to me is someone taking her out. I’m in jail, but I’m free.”

  Benito knocked on the window as to wake Jeremy up. “Didn’t I tell you to can it?”

  Laura imagined this unraveling quickly unless she changed the subject. “I need to know what to do at work.”

  Jeremy still focused on Benito. “Did anyone else from my company come to you?”

  “Not yet.”

  Jeremy turned to Laura. “This is what I’m saying. I have one competent person in that office. The rest of them are looking for an excuse to search the want ads all day.”

  Laura said, “Jeremy, everyone’s freaked out. They don’t know if they should work like the show is going on, or if they should just go home.”

  “Fifteen minutes!” boomed a guard’s voice from the corner of the room.

  “Make a list,” he said. “Tell me what’s missing.” Then, he turned to Benito. “Download me,” he said, in full this-is-my-company-don’t-waste-my-time mode.

  Laura made a list of what wasn’t prepared for Friday. Seventy percent of the line was in the process of being fit or created. That was normal for the last week before a show. She scribbled him a list with the stubby pencil she’d used to fill in the form on the way in, while Tinto Benito told Jeremy how crappy his life was.

  “Your alibi’s in question. Nobody saw you at the factory, and there are no cameras in the building.”

  “We had two hundred dresses with hems that looked like snowdrifts. How do you think they got fixed? Magic?”

  “Your floor manager says there was nothing wrong with them in the first place.”

  Jeremy sat back in his chair and held up his hands. “I left the TOP at reception last night. Where is it?”

  Laura stopped writing and looked up at Jeremy, flicking her pencil between her fingers. Before she could wonder if she should speak up, Jeremy addressed her in a brusque way he never had before Sunday morning. “Speak.”

  “A detective came to my house last night asking about TOPs. What they were and stuff.”

  Benito and Jeremy asked together, “And?”

  “And I told him. And he thinks a TOP was lost.”

  “It was the Mardi dress. Make a note. Yoni finds it. Today. It was in the reception area last night, and it looked like hell.”

  “Should I tell Cangemi that?” Laura asked.

  “That’s why I have a lawyer. What else did he want?”

  Laura swallowed hard. “He wanted to know if you went to the factory to fix things on a regular basis.” There was dead silence as Laura sensed her relationship with Jeremy changing. She looked for a harmless way to say the truth. “I told him you don’t usually go to the factory.”

  Benito spoke up, “What exactly did you say?”

  “That he avoided it like a skin disease.” She couldn’t look up from her list. And when she realized she’d forgotten to write down the fittings for the Amanda Gown, she didn’t have the heart to pick up her pencil.

  “Two minutes!” the guard shouted.

  Jeremy knocked on the window, and she realized she’d let the phone drift from her ear.

  “Let me see the list.”

  She held it up to the window and, while he scanned it, she noticed the red rings around his eyes and the dryness of his lips.

  “Anything we don’t have fabrics on today is dropped,” he said. “And kill the Pauline dress. Finish up the production orders and complete that list. I want pictures after every fitting. And you are not to talk to the police again without Tinto.”

  “You never go to the factory, Jeremy. You hate it.”

  He hung up the phone without looking at her. She felt as if he had severed a lifeline.

  From their morning conversations, Laura had pieced together Jeremy’s history.

  According to him, he was born on a cutting table. He wasn’t always ‘the famous’ or ‘the great.’ He wasn’t born into a celebrity family, nor was he otherwise rich, lucky, or storied.

  After school, before after-school programs and liability insurance for workplace injuries to children existed, Jeremy went to his father’s factory on 40th and Eleventh. At first, he drew trucks on the back of dotted paper, then epic war scenes, while his father managed the floor and his mother took care of the paperwork and bookkeeping. Bored of the wars, he started tracing discarded patterns. The cutters found him adorable and placed a foot-long pair of fabric scissors and some satin pins in his tiny hands. They put him to work on make-believe garments. He cut himself more than once, which was greeted with a tisk and a band-aid, but he knew what a pattern notch was for before he had memorized his multiplication tables and, much like his brother, who was twelve years his senior and statione
d in the Gulf—a war from which he would never return—Jeremy wasn’t afraid of a little blood.

  He grew into the business without thinking about it. He earned his allowance by sweeping the thread scraps from the floors for two hours after school and, later, helping his mother with the books. With nothing much to do after that, he hung around the cutters and sewers. When he became a fixture, the patternmakers paid him mind.

  The 40th street factory made uniforms for schools and the food service industry. Civilian orders came in small test runs, but the bigger reorders never materialized. What Jeremy learned about making beautiful things came from the frustrations of the artisans around him, who would say, “We put the notch here so we can ease the sleeve in, but when we send the pattern to Hong Kong, we take them off. They wouldn’t know what to do with them, anyway.” That became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually, those frustrations became his own, and he made things in his spare time by modifying old pattern blocks and sewing them using good fabrics left on the bottom of the racks. His mother brought the samples to Bendel’s, and he had his first sale before he passed Algebra 1 with a C minus.

  His parents moved to Vancouver when he was nineteen and, soon after, he got the backing of Gracie Pomerantz. The factory was his. Did he hate going to the factory, or was it something she assumed because he was always sending Yoni? Did something happen there? Or did he just hate remembering the hours sweeping threads?

  Laura knew the Mardi dress. It was silk chiffon. Sleeveless. It had a full-circle skirt with a raw edge carefully fringed by hand, making it difficult to knock off exactly. What could have been wrong with it that would have made Jeremy go to the factory? Hems like a snowdrift, he had said. Circle skirts were very difficult to hem, but the previous spring, 40th street had produced a Margaret dress with the same skirt—no problem. When the TOP arrived, it looked perfect and was approved.

  Laura sat on the bus, volleying between the problem with the Mardi dress and Jeremy’s longstanding hatred of the factory floor. Or, what she assumed was a longstanding hatred. What had changed?

  Unlike the police, she believed him. If he said he was at the factory, he was.

  Maybe, if she could show Cangemi he was there, Jeremy would have an alibi, and he’d be back at work in no time.

  Problem solved.

  CHAPTER 7.

  The bus from Rikers took forever. By the time Laura got to work, her fingers were frozen, and she was concerned about telling everyone of her trip to the Bronx. She wasn’t the leader of the team. She had no authority. No one respected her in that way, yet she had been asked to pull them together.

  The easiest thing would be to tell Carmella what Jeremy wanted and let her blab it all over the office. But that wouldn’t assert her authority. As a matter of fact, it would assert Carmella’s access to the truth, and Carmella was a notorious liar of convenience. If Laura was going to live up to Jeremy’s expectations, she would have to tell everyone what he wanted, in person.

  Renee sat at the reception desk, fielding a fully lit phone bank with aplomb. At twenty-two, she had perspective, poise, and a body perfect enough to fit-model in a pinch.

  “No, his publicist isn’t answering any questions about the case,” she said into the phone, while waving at Laura. “You can contact his lawyer if you need any information.” She rolled her eyes. “No ma’am, we’re not giving away any clothes. Thank you.” She hung up.

  “Sounds like fun,” Laura said.

  Renee shrugged. “People are always looking for the silver lining in someone else’s trouble.”

  “Hey, you have a TOP come in from Ketchum last night, maybe yesterday afternoon?”

  She checked her log. “Didn’t sign for anything.”

  “Can I look on your rack?”

  “Of course.” She seemed unflustered by Laura’s questioning her ability to sign in the TOP.

  Laura went behind Renee’s desk, past a fake wall. Renee kept the samples and packages there, after emailing the person for whom the package or sample was addressed. Nothing was supposed to be back there more than twenty-four hours.

  Laura flicked through the rack three times. No Mardi dress. She checked once more. Nothing. It had to be somewhere. If Jeremy saw it that night, it may have arrived late and gone without a signature. He must have left it on the reception desk, where it was found by the person it was addressed to. That would likely be Yoni, who first had to check the trims before Laura or the sample makers checked the construction and measurements. Laura headed back to her area.

  Carmella fell into step with her as she came from the restroom. “I have a thing with this gown,” she said without a greeting. “The Amanda. We’re doing crochet beading. You know someone, from school maybe, who can do this?”

  “Yeah, I have someone, but she’s expensive.”

  “Call her in.” Carmella plopped her bag on her desk. “We’ll spend a dead woman’s money.”

  Tony, the other patternmaker—or modelmaker, as his Corsican blood demanded he name it—returned from lunch just as she arrived at her table. He put on his white jacket, flattened his comb-over, then tested the snap of his scissors, the slap of his oaktag, and the sharpness of his number twos. His cheeks were rosy from the February air and would remain so until he left promptly at six.

  “Good afternoon!” he exclaimed. “So glad you could make it in today.”

  Tony had a competitive streak a mile wide, and Jeremy told her that if he was going to be relegated to creating patterns for forgiving knit shirts and soft dressing, while Laura got to do the most challenging jackets and dresses, he was going to take the opportunity to torment her.

  “I’m glad to see you, too.” She put her bag over the coffee stain she still hadn’t had time to remove. “I saw Jeremy this morning.”

  Like ants coming onto the sidewalk for a dropped lollipop, the design room staff gathered around her. Carmella entered smelling of cigarettes. Tiffany dropped her want ads. Tony turned and put his hands on her table, ready for the latest insult to his manhood and his career.

  “Okay, well,” she started, “Jeremy’s at Rikers.”

  A gasp. A murmur.

  “What do they make them wear?” Carmella asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

  Laura shook her head. She wouldn’t humiliate him by telling. “I have a list of what to do. The show is on for Friday, but we’re dropping some stuff. I have to photograph everything and bring it back to him.”

  “Why you?” Tiffany asked.

  “Because I got up early this morning and went up to the Bronx.” Having confronted that challenge head-on, Laura continued without pause, “The Amanda gown is on, for now, but we have to get close-ups of all the trims and beadwork, because I know he wasn’t happy with it. Anything with a fabric delay is out. Don’t bother with it. That includes the matte jersey group.”

  “Not acceptable!” Tony exclaimed. “That group was beautiful.” It was also Tony’s product, and he was territorial and jealous of his categories.

  “He needs you on the Stone Rocker group; that’s what he said.”

  Jeremy had said no such thing, but if she was going to be shuttling between the Garment District and Rikers Island all week, she would have to pass her work around, and she needed Jeremy’s authority to do it. Stone Rocker was two soft jackets, four tees, a pair of pants so tight and embellished that any number of sins could be hidden, and two skirts a student could do. Tony could handle it and, judging from the silence coming from the Corsican, he was mollified. The members of the design room walked away to their chores, all except Carmella.

  “Making brownie-nose points I see?” she said with a wink. She seemed more pleased than envious. “Going to be in charge here soon, I bet.”

  “Me? I just want to get past this. Don’t worry; I don’t want your job.”

  “Neither do I.” Carmella nudged Laura a little. “And the matte jersey group, he said this, really? To remove it from the show?”

  “Anything with a fabric delay.
” Laura pulled out her next pattern.

  Carmella leaned over Laura’s table. “How did he look, our Saint J? Was he sad? Or mad?”

  “You know how he is.”

  “Do you think he did it?”

  “Carmella!”

  “No, really. Think about it. His life is this company. What else does he talk about? Money and fashion. Maybe he goes out on the odd weekend, but we never see him date a man. He runs to vacations and comes back with no voice. I don’t know why.” That was true. Whenever he went away, he called every day or every other, sounding like he’d run with the bulls in Pamplona.

  “That doesn’t make you a murderer.”

  “No, but it makes you a little crazy, no?”

  “It makes you American. We can’t all shut down the city for a nap, you know.”

  Carmella smirked and walked out to the reception area, undoubtedly on her way downstairs for another smoke break.

  Everyone thought Jeremy did it, or entertained the thought. She remembered that she was on her way to Yoni’s desk to look for the TOP, and headed over.

  The offices took up the entire floor and were shaped like a donut, with the elevators and public hallway in the hole. Reception and the restrooms were right outside the elevator. Left out of reception were Jeremy’s office, the design room, then Laura’s history closet, a vault to which only she and Jeremy had the code.

  If you went right out of reception, you hit the nice part, passing Jeremy’s dressed-up office and then the showrooms, which were dolled up like a Chihuahua before a dog show. You had to go past the showroom to get to the production area and, in a design decision that aimed to give the best window space to the showroom and reception, the designers had to go around the world to get to the sample room to check on the pieces for the show.