Dead is the New Black

by Christine Demaio-Rice

  “Yes?” Yoni’s voice took on a decidedly un-bored edge.

  “But I’ve never seen it. Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Sheldon and his staff are here at the funeral.”

  There was a long silence where she wondered if Yoni thought she was giving her a hard time. Then, Yoni said, “They wouldn’t just leave it lying around, you know.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “They’re more careful than that, I hope. For their sake.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I’m being silly.” Laura glanced up and saw Detectives Cangemi and Samuelson approaching. Of course they came to a murder victim’s funeral. The TV said so.

  “Take care,” Yoni said. “I’ll see you Monday.”

  She cut the connection just as Cangemi and Samuelson came within range.

  “Miss Carnegie, we wanted to ask you some questions.”

  She looked at the man with Cangemi. “There’s a funeral going on, you know.”

  “You’re not exactly participating,” Cangemi pointed out.

  She wished she hadn’t ducked off to make that phone call. “Maybe I’ll throw myself on the coffin and rend my garments.”

  “We’d wait around to see that. Wouldn’t we, Samuelson?”

  “Yup.”

  She looked around and decided that, while there was nothing to be gained by staying, a ride back to the city would be gained by going.

  CHAPTER 15.

  Laura rolled the paper cup of water in her palms, sipping it more from boredom than thirst. It had been offered as a substitute for the stale coffee in the precinct kitchen. She sat in a dark room before a video monitor. Cangemi’s cologne filled the tiny room. Was that normal for detectives? Cologne? She gave him a glance. His eyes were swollen, and his movements were slow and thoughtful, as if he were underwater. So, she figured it was last night’s scent. Good for him. Why should Carmella have all the fun?

  He flipped on the monitor. It was a black and white shot taken from the ceiling. She recognized the compass rose from the lobby of her office building.

  “Is that the time?” She pointed to a row of numbers at the bottom of the screen.

  “Yeah. Don’t worry about that. I need you to help with some IDs.”

  He rewound the tape to show a woman standing outside the elevator. The time stamp said 1:06 a.m. Laura recognized the woman as Gracie Pomerantz from her fur hat and coat, but the image was so vague and blurred, it could have been anyone. Gracie wiped her eyes frequently with a balled-up tissue.

  “That’s Gracie,” Laura said. “She’s crying because… did you hear about the fight at Grotto?”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged off what she had thought was a tasty nugget of information. “She had a fight with her husband the night before, too.”

  “And you don’t think Sheldon did it?”

  “No. We have four people putting him at an all-night poker game after the fight, and we don’t have tape of him in the lobby. It’s hard to kill someone when you’re not in the building. “

  Onscreen, Gracie disappeared into the elevator. Cangemi fast-forwarded to 1:43 a.m. A man exited in a long, dark wool coat.

  “That’s…” she paused, and he stopped the frame. “Jeremy or Chilly or I don’t know. Could be anyone.”

  “We believe it’s your head of sales,” Cangemi said. “French guy.”

  “Belgian.”

  He let the video roll again, to 1:54 a.m. Gracie came back down, bedecked head to toe in fur. She stopped, paused, and went back into the elevator.

  “It’s like she forgot about something,” Cangemi said.

  “She’s wearing her hat wrong,” Laura noted. “She’s got it all jammed on her head. She must have been trying to cover puffy cry-eye or something.”

  3:15 a.m. Another woman appeared in a short down bomber, high boots, and leggings. She recognized her from her outfit.

  “That’s Carmella!”

  “Yes.”

  “What was she doing there at three in the morning?”

  “We have her there for ten minutes. She used the bathroom. We can corroborate her at a party three blocks away that was so crowded the toilets overflowed. And we don’t usually suspect women in strangulations. It takes too much upper body strength.”

  “What if it was a surprise?”

  “No difference. Gracie Pomerantz was an older lady, but she was in excellent physical shape.”

  Laura crossed her arms, highly annoyed. It was bullshit. All of it. Half the office was going to show up before eight, and Jeremy was going to be the one getting nailed up for it.

  “Hey.” She pointed to the screen again. A man in his twenties, wearing a white tracksuit and sneakers, strolled into the lobby and leaned against a wall.

  Cangemi stopped the tape. “This guy. You know him?”

  “He was at the loft party. I saw him fighting with Carmella.”

  “About what?”

  “I couldn’t even hear myself scream in that place. No way I could hear what Carmella was fighting about half a room away. But she was pissed. Had her finger up in his face like she was telling him what’s what. No wait, I remember.” She scrunched her eyes together, trying to recall what Carmella had told her. “He was driving when she was crossing Eighth, and he almost hit her. That’s what she told me. Is he stalking her, or what?”

  “We have no idea.” Cangemi’s admission didn’t carry any shame, only curiosity. He started the video again.

  On the screen, the man paced around the lobby, looking at everything, getting behind the doorman’s desk, shadowboxing the wall, finger brushing his hair. He was hunched. Bored. He had a short haircut and jowls waiting to happen. He twitched and moved like his life depended on constant movement. He looked directly at the camera, then strutted out.

  Another minute later, Carmella walked out of the elevator, bouncing her way back to the party. The video started skipping around, and the time code at the bottom flipped faster. Before Laura knew it, the time code read six a.m.

  A maintenance guy walked across the lobby wheeling a bucket behind him. A few women with ponytails followed, and then a man alone, wearing a wool coat and carrying a cup of coffee in each hand. A scarf covered the bottom half of his face, to protect him from the elements. Laura found that totally unconvincing, With the quality of the tape being what it was, she couldn’t tell if the man was short or tall, fat or skinny, much less if it was Jeremy or not.

  “One of those spilled on your desk, I believe.”

  “You still have my scissors.”

  The creepy thing was that Laura knew that by the time that guy got into the elevator, Gracie was already dead. So, it had to be either Carmella, some random person, or Sheldon.

  “It’s 7:28,” she said, pointing to the time code on the bottom of the screen. “Can you pause it?” He did. Laura put her face closer to the monitor. Even without the scarf, it would have been impossible to distinguish the guy with the two coffee cups from anyone else with a caffeine-loving co-worker. “Are you sure that’s Jeremy?”

  Cangemi didn’t answer.

  “That’s the problem isn’t it? You can’t pin that as him or not. All you have is a missing TOP sample and some fibers. And even if it is him, so what?”

  As if he had expected her reaction, he flipped a switch on another monitor, and the compass rose appeared again. A light crowd stood by the elevator at 7:37 a.m. on what she guessed from the code was the week before. Then, he froze it.

  He pointed to two figures. “Recognize them?”

  “The short one’s me. Jeremy’s the other.”

  He fast-forwarded to a different day. People zipped in and out. Then, the lobby was empty. At 7:28 a.m., he stopped again. “These two?”

  “Me and Jeremy again.”

  He pressed the button on another deck, and another river of people flowed in and out of the elevators, stepping over the compass rose. Then, the nighttime stragglers, followed by an increased flow at 7 a.m. the next day. It wa
s depressing, really, when you looked at it that way. The predictability of it. The reality of it. As many times as they went in and out of that elevator, from above, it looked as though nothing ever changed.

  Cangemi froze the tape at 7:31 a.m. and pointed to two darkened figures. “Seeing a pattern here?”

  She folded her arms. Could he really be implying what she thought he was implying?

  “I know he’s your boss,” he said, diddling with the knobs on the monitor, “but he’s what? Four or five years older than you?”

  “No one told you he was gay?”

  “Everyone did, except Gracie Pomerantz’s coroner. He was pretty clear on St. James’s DNA being where no gay man could get.”

  She kept her eyes closed for half a second longer than a blink, needing that time to hear what Cangemi just said.

  “You’re saying…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Since he was nineteen, apparently. He never told you?”

  She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. He studied her with brutal, uncomfortable attention, and she felt that her every movement and tic amplified itself.

  “Here’s what I got,” he said, planting his elbows on his knees. “I have you two coming in together at the crack of dawn about three mornings a week, and coming in within ten minutes of each other the rest of the time. I have you visiting him at Rikers. I have everyone in that office telling me he’s a prick and a half, except you.”

  “Why would anyone let the world think they’re gay when they’re not?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I don’t even know what to say.”

  “Maybe you have some DNA you want to tell me about?” He looked up at her with a smirk, and she didn’t know if he was making a joke to soften the question, or if he was really and truly gross.

  “I don’t have to listen to this,” she replied.

  “Do I have to ask you a direct question that’s going to embarrass you?”

  Laura couldn’t speak. That was certainly as close as she was ever going to come to having a relationship with Jeremy St. James and, though she wanted to savor the moment, she also wanted to keep herself off the suspect list.

  “I am not sleeping with my gay boss.”

  He leaned back. “St. James was ending it with Mrs. Pomerantz. She was looking to ruin him. We can get him down to manslaughter if he’d man up.”

  “Did you know,” Laura challenged, “that the night before, Carmella had a huge blowout with Noë over Gracie? Did you know Gracie insulted one or possibly both of them in front of a table full of Pierre Sevion’s friends?”

  “She pissed a lot of people off, we know.”

  “She was a vindictive, spiteful bitch. Jeremy was probably the only person that gave a shit about her, and she screwed him. Even from the grave, she’s still screwing him.”

  “Tell me about the Noelle Gown.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Your coworker said he heard yelling behind closed doors a couple of weeks ago.”

  André. That yapping bitch. She was going to shove some Delphi Green twill up his ass but, until then, she had to tell the story exactly as it happened, leaving nothing out. If they wanted to accuse her of something, let them. They could accuse her of a long torrid affair with her gay boss. They could accuse her of murdering his lover. They could put her away for anything, but not for lying like a five-year-old with her hand in the cookie jar.

  She drank her water and fondled the empty cup. The room was still dark. The light from the monitor lit half of Cangemi’s face, which made him look like he listened actively, with no sign of boredom. His notebook remained closed on the table, as if he were memorizing everything she said.

  “You saw the front office?” When he nodded, she continued, “It gets a complete redesign every six months. Right now, it’s got a Matisse they rented because that matches what’s in the stores for this delivery. But it’s not like I’m in there too much. It’s for buyers and job interviews and sales people who need to be motivated. And Gracie, because it’s the nicest. So, that day, Gracie calls me in there on the intercom thing on my phone, which makes everyone look up at me like, ‘Uh-oh, what did she do now?’ So anyway, I go in there, and draped over the chair is this zipped-up suit bag with a little bit of grey tulle hanging out the bottom, and I know it’s the Noelle Gown, which is something Jeremy made for her years ago. It’s one of a kind, and it’s a masterpiece, even though it weighs twenty pounds in glass beads.

  “So, she’s in there when I get in, and she practically throws it at me, and she’s like, “I need this taken down to a size four,” but I already took it out twice. The fabric can’t take much more, and I tell her so. And in the middle of me explaining, Jeremy walks in. Which, I’m like, forget it because I know he’s going to take her side, and the dress is going to be ruined, and it’s going to be my fault, even though it’s not. And I’m like, she’s not a size four, she’s closer to a six, but only in the morning because, by afternoon, she looks sloppy, and she carries enough water to make her closer to an eight.”

  Cangemi broke in, “You can tell that from looking at her?”

  “It’s my job.”

  “And you told her she looks sloppy in the afternoon?”

  “No, of course not. I told her I could fit it on her after lunch. That way I’d fit on the bigger side, and it would fit okay, but there was no way I could just make it a size four by guessing. And, by the way, she knew damn well I can’t just change the size that way. So she says ‘If you can’t, someone else will.’ And she looked at Jeremy like, ‘Back me up here,’ and I figured I was doomed, but Jeremy says, ‘She really can’t Gracie. The shape’s already distorted. It’ll never fit right again.’

  “And then she goes freaking wild, and says, ‘You’re calling me distorted?’ which is not what he meant at all. But she was red in the face, and I’m like, hello, hot flash or something because she’s not being reasonable. So I try and slip out, but she picks up this twenty-pound dress and hurls it at me, and says, ‘I need it done by Saturday.’ Which I’m like, ‘What? I already have a job right?’ So I tell her that, and that it doesn’t include tailoring antiques.”

  Cangemi smirked. “You antagonized her pretty good.”

  Laura shrugged, ashamed of her behavior. Mom always told her, ‘You can’t argue with a crazy person or a menopausal woman,’ and there she was explaining how she did both. Worse, she was going to have to own up to the other half of it before André did it for her.

  “After that, she told me my job was to make her happy because she was signing my paycheck, and I said ‘You know, I have this job so I can eat, like most people. And there are rules. Such as, we’re not your slaves just because you blew the right law student in the seventies.’”

  Cangemi laughed, but it gave Laura no pleasure. She felt herself blushing at her immaturity. “I feel like a jerk for saying that.”

  “What happened next?” he asked, still smiling.

  “André walked in with some piece of paper to ask a question, but he was probably just being a busybody. Gracie got real calm, and she said, ‘Take the dress and make it a size four, or Jeremy will get one of a hundred others to do it.’ But then Jeremy says, and I can’t believe it, ‘There are no hundred other Lauras. There’s not one other Laura. Money’s generic. I can build a business around her talent.’ Meaning me. My talent.” Laura paused to let that sink in, then said, “That was maybe the second-to-last time I saw her.”

  “You did the gown?”

  “Didn’t sleep for two nights. Never even got a thank you. She just sent some guy to pick it up and, when I saw her in the halls a week later, I asked her about it. She said it was tight in the bust and walked away. You know, it’s impossible to alter something without having a body to fit it on.”

  Cangemi nodded and shut the monitor.

  “I didn’t kill her over the Noelle gown.”

  “You’re implying you killed her over something else?”<
br />
  “I’m implying that that’s the worst she ever did to me, and it’s not worth murder.”

  “Do you want to tell me how the coffee spilled at your desk?”

  “It was spilled when I got there. I told you.”

  “Or why you were late that day? Where were you before you came in?”

  “Chasing a counterfeit coat down 29th street.” At his quizzical look, she continued, “It was a fake St. James, and I had to find out where she got it.”

  “Is there anything you want to tell us? About your relationship with St. James, or about the morning you found Gracie Pomerantz?”

  Laura suddenly had the desire to shut the hell up, which was a new feeling, because there were words and sentences bubbling up inside her, things she thought would excuse her. Things she thought would reveal what was wrong with Jeremy. But the urge to be quiet won out, and she took a cue from the late-night cop shows she’d seen.

  “Are you arresting me?”

  “No.”

  “Are you telling me not to leave town?”

  “You read my mind.”

  “Do you have any more questions?”

  “Isn’t that the point of you staying in town?”

  “I won’t answer them without my lawyer.”

  “Do you need more water?” he asked, pointing to her paper cup.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Caught you answering.” He smiled, as if it were a charming faux pas on her part. “But we can’t use it in court.”

  She crumpled the cup and tossed it in the trash. She was in no mood for cop charm.

  Laura took the train home in a daze and, as she looked out the window at the blackness of the tunnel, big, fat, stupid tears fell from her eyes, and they made her angry. Because she was idiotic and immature and a real bonehead. Jeremy was having an affair with his backer. Of course, he was. Why shouldn’t he? That was his business.

  She did what she always did when her mind insisted on thinking about unpleasant things. She did pattern corrections. Opening up a dart. Shaping a side panel. Moving shapes in her mind to banish the pictures of Jeremy and Gracie’s bodies twisted together.