Dead is the New Black

by Christine Demaio-Rice

  “Uh, oh.”

  “He looked the other way.”

  “Guilty,” Ruby said.

  “As sin,” Laura concurred. The light turned green, and they held back a little before they started on again. Sheldon never got a leg up on them, proving yet again that a brisk walk in New York was as fast as an uptown cab ride, at least when snow dusted the ground. He turned the car into a lot at Central Park South. Laura and Ruby staked out the exit, sucking on their coffee and sandwiches. Laura felt as if she hadn’t eaten in days, but didn’t complain of fatigue or hunger, or mental weariness. She was exactly where she wanted to be, and when she glanced over at Ruby, she saw the same look of contentment.

  Sheldon came out, glancing around as if checking to see if someone was tailing him, which could have been Laura’s imagination, but maybe not. They followed him behind a group of four tourists walking abreast, hidden behind their bulk and bundles.

  “He’s going into the park,” Laura said.

  “Maybe he’s going sledding.”

  “He’s supposed to be playing poker.”

  Ruby shrugged.

  Central Park South swam with people—rushers and dalliers and shoppers. The brassy golden statue fronting the Plaza Hotel, its color chosen by Ivana Trump while she was a Trump, shone even at night with only the streetlights for illumination. The clopping of horses mixed with the honking of car horns, as the horse-drawn carriages waited for a fare, poop stinking up the joint worse than the stink of car exhaust and boiling hot dogs.

  They kept up, striding past the hot pretzel guys and the knish sellers and t-shirt hawkers, down Central Park South half a block, hugging the stone wall as they walked, where the park was a ten-foot drop-off behind it, into a wooded ravine.

  Sheldon approached a closed park entrance, blocked by heavy plastic barricades striped in orange and white. Yellow signs said DANGER in four languages. But he stepped over them with authority, pushing a cone out of the way with two fingers and brushing by in time for it to bounce back. He didn’t look back, and no one stopped him. Laura knew that behind the barricade was a set of staircases down into a stone path, leading to ill-conceived bathrooms that may or may not have been open at some point in her lifetime.

  “We can’t go down,” Laura said. “I don’t want to get into trouble.”

  Ruby pulled her toward the park entrance. “I just walked like, a hundred blocks.”

  Laura tugged back. “They think I killed Gracie. I get busted following her husband past pylons, they’re going to hang me.”

  “Now, who’s being dramatic?” Ruby touched the pylon with a fingertip and pushed it to the side, raising a foot to get over the police tape.

  The cop came out of the crowd like a bird of prey, swooping from a place no one would ever look, with a voice of authority that didn’t need to be raised, making “Hello, there” sound like a gavel smacking wood. Ruby let the pylon fall back into place, and Laura froze as solid as the gutter water.

  The cop was greying under his hat, ruddy-skinned and blue-eyed beneath the wrinkles of his forehead. The decades of experience he brought to the job reflected in the way he spoke. “Where are you going?” he asked, though the question sounded more like, “Are you crazy?” Laura searched her mind and had nothing, only the knowledge that there were bathrooms down there at some point in history, and there was no way he could prove she didn’t have a full bladder. She opened her mouth with that excuse, but Ruby was quicker, and she had a way with people that was more than the batting eyelashes and pouty lips.

  “My sister lost her engagement ring!” she said. “Jeremy is going to absolutely kill her.”

  Laura didn’t know how she felt about needing to pretend she was engaged to Jeremy, or that her sister would choose that name out of every name in her lexicon.

  “Really?” the cop said, turning to Laura. “How did that happen?”

  Laura held out her bare left hand, to show that there was no ring. “We were walking, and I was telling her something.” With that, she flung her hand forward. “And I guess it’s cold, so my fingers got smaller.”

  “Also, she’s on a diet to fit into her gown, and she’s doing a great job,” Ruby interjected.

  Laura shot Ruby a death glare, but the cop just nodded. His brass nameplate read, “Dodson.” “My daughter, same thing. Picks at salad like her fiancé wants to climb on top of a skeleton.”

  “Well anyway,” Ruby said, “It flew down these steps, and it’s like a carat and a half so I’m sure we’ll find it easy.”

  “A carat and three-eighths,” Laura corrected, and Ruby rolled her eyes in response.

  After a pause that seemed to last hours, Dodson moved the pylon and let Laura and Ruby pass, then he let himself past and replaced the barrier. “These stairs aren’t safe. We’re finding the ring in five minutes, or we come back. Got it?”

  They agreed easily, though Laura wondered what she and Ruby intended to do when there was no ring and they had to walk back up. Sheldon certainly wasn’t down there to pee in a bunch of non-working toilets and was undoubtedly using the stairs as a passage to something else. She wished Ruby had told Officer Dodson that she had to use the facilities, then he would have just chased them away. But she knew Ruby’s mind. Ruby wasn’t content to assume Sheldon was lost. She remembered when Ruby got out of school and started looking for a design job. She sent out two hundred and fifty resumes, went on fifty interviews, and turned down God-knows-how-many second interviews. She wanted to work in a big company, with security and benefits, and she intended to chase down that job if it was the last thing she did.

  Now, Sheldon was the recipient of her tenacity.

  Poor Sheldon.

  Dodson walked ahead on the stone steps. They closed every winter because they got icy and slippery, and he held out his hand to guide them over the rough spots. Laura and Ruby dutifully kept their eyes down, scanning the stone and ice. Ruby even crouched to look at a sparkly bit in a drift of greying sludge that had piled up on the side of a step. But no. There was no carat-and-three-eighths diamond ring there. And Ruby grimaced like she was disappointed.

  The men’s room door stood ajar and, though Laura and Ruby glanced at each other to acknowledge that they had both seen it, they officially ignored it and kept their eyes glued to the wet ground. Ruby paced closer to the door to make sure Dodson didn’t miss it.

  “Stand back, ma’am,” he said in his best authority voice. Ruby managed to look at him quizzically and point to the door, as if to say, From where? Here?

  Dodson didn’t like the pause. In Laura’s estimation, he saw an open door that should have been locked. He saw people, objects, projectiles, and explosions coming through it. So when he grabbed Ruby by the upper arm and yanked her away, Laura understood why. Ruby on the other hand, as the recipient of the grab, didn’t understand, so she shrieked like she was being attacked, twisting herself away, which made Dodson yank her harder, and she went flying into the stone wall. Laura ran for her sister, fearing a cracked skull.

  Dodson had his gun out in a flash, holding it by his ear with one hand and holding the other palm out to Laura and Ruby to tell them to stay in their locked and crouched positions, concussion, blood, or no. He called out, “Come on out of there,” which echoed against the bathroom chamber.

  A muffled voice came from behind the door, and Laura surmised what was said based on Dodson’s reaction of, “I don’t give a rat’s ass what you’re wearing, get out here now.” He pushed the door, and it opened with a creak and a squeal. A shaft of blue light shot into the bathroom. In the corner of the doorframe, Laura saw a triangle of fabric that was probably from a camel-colored cashmere coat. She looked at Ruby, whose head was apparently fine. They held hands, crouching against the cold stone wall.

  Laura whispered, “Get in front of me so he can’t see me.”

  When Sheldon came out with his hands in the air, Laura saw something she didn’t want to see—his pants crumpled around his ankles, underwear and all, as
sets swinging and shrunken. He shuffled his feet so he wouldn’t trip. A youngish woman with dyed red hair and a down-filled jacket came out behind him, with her hands also up. The knees of her skinny jeans were wet.

  Laura tried to head up the stairs, but Dodson shouted, “Stay there, lady.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re a witness.”

  Laura hid her face in her hands, not only to avoid seeing Sheldon’s shrunken member, but to avoid being seen. It was too late, however, as she heard Sheldon mutter, “Great, the Mouth.”

  Back at the precinct, she and Ruby tried to keep their story together. That lasted about fifteen minutes. It fell apart when the detective asked about a man named Jeremy, who was supposed to be her fiancé. Laura couldn’t corroborate that even to save herself an unpleasant evening. She told them everything, which was good, because Sheldon spent half the night cursing her name.

  As Laura and Ruby headed out into the cold to navigate a staircase that hadn’t been de-iced, Cangemi and Samuelson showed up, looking tired and put out.

  “Carnegie. What are you doing here?” Cangemi asked.

  She didn’t want to answer. As a matter of fact, she would rather have been dead than explain a word about her fiancé, Jeremy.

  Luckily, Ruby was there with her quick wits and eye for keeping up appearances. “Sheldon’s in custody. Seems like poker night was a scam, and he’s got a hooker habit.”

  Cangemi looked at them for a second before taking his leave and jogging up the stairs into the precinct.

  CHAPTER 27.

  It had happened just in time for the Sunday papers, which Laura and Ruby usually only bothered with when there was a style pullout. Today, however, Sheldon was on the front page of the New York Times, all the way down, to the left, in a little box. The Post had him on Page Six, with his section being heavy on a photograph and short on meaty facts. The paper had gone to press before Sheldon was released on his own recognizance at midnight. Laura had to give the reporters credit; they could make something interesting without knowing anything at all about it.

  What Laura learned during her own questioning, and what the news outlets had yet to discover, was that Sheldon Pomerantz was a member in good standing of Manhattan’s most exclusive poker club. The purpose of the club wasn’t to win chips, smoke cigars, or even spend a night away from the kids. The purpose was to provide alibis to men who needed them, not for murder, but adultery. And though Sheldon didn’t have a regular mistress, he did have a penchant for call girls in bathrooms.

  Every Saturday night, one man stayed behind in the synagogue and fielded calls as necessary. That responsibility rotated amongst the members. The rest did whatever the hell they wanted, no questions asked, and the other members were sworn to say, “Yes, he was playing poker with me. He lost thirty-four dollars and left at such-and-such a time.” Members had been frequently called upon to witness someone’s presence, but not before the police, and the strain that caused the club had almost led to its dissolution. Sheldon had argued that it would all go away very soon, since he wasn’t the murderer, and the club still served a good, and not illegal, purpose. The members had agreed to keep it going, though eyes were open and hackles were raised. The legal lies meant wives and girlfriends were going to be exposed, and more than one marriage would probably tumble for it.

  Jeremy was still indicted until further notice, but Laura had the feeling he would be exonerated before the sun set. Over cup of coffee number two, Laura felt like she needed to talk to Jeremy, but he wasn’t at the office, and Tinto wasn’t picking up either.

  She trimmed the hem on the Margaret dress so that it was straight all around. She had no idea if it would stay, but it had been hanging for a year, and it was unlikely to grow more. When she tried to hem it, the threads of her machine tangled and caught. She called her mother.

  “Can I come over and use your machine? My timer’s busted.”

  “Well, fix it,” Mom responded cheerfully, as if Laura were still in the market for life lessons in self-sufficiency.

  “I’ll be there in an hour,” she said, gathering her laundry. Two birds, one stone. Three, actually. Hem. Laundry. Probably lunch.

  Now that was self-sufficiency she could get behind.

  When she got there, she understood Mom’s terseness. The dishwasher was pulled into the center of the kitchen while Mom mopped up a brown mess. Laura swallowed the urge to tell Mom to “fix it,” and instead offered condolences for the dishwasher’s unplanned obsolescence.

  “It’s not the dishwasher,” she said. “It’s the goddamn landlord. He found out.” Laura gasped. That was a disaster that could lose her mother the rent-controlled status that had kept her in that apartment for twenty-five years. “My lawyer says if I disconnect it, I might have a case, but when I pulled it out, I got this mess.”

  Something in Laura’s head clicked, and she ran to the hallway closet and opened the door. The Euro wet-dry box was gone.

  “Ma!”

  “I see you brought your laundry, too,” she called in from the kitchen a second after Laura started banging her head on the molding. “I sold the machine on Craigslist last night.”

  “You don’t have a computer.” This was a devastating turn of events.

  “Ruby did it for me. Do you want to see this crochet? I don’t know what to do with it now, but it’s nice.”

  Laura trudged back to the kitchen, dragging her laundry bag behind her. She was going to have to use the laundromat like everyone else. She calculated how long she could go on her current clean wardrobe, then added a day for re-wearing, and added another day.

  Mom held up the white crochet piece. It was seven feet long to create a train of delicate, shimmering crystals.

  “I’ll drop it to him tomorrow. How much does he owe you?” Laura asked.

  “A lot. And I need it, too. I’m going to have to put a security deposit on something.”

  Mom glanced around her apartment, the one she’d first rented with her gorgeous, if errant, husband, the home in which she’d raised her children. Her eyes welled up a little, which was too much for Laura to bear.

  “Come on,” Laura said, tossing her laundry bag back into the hall. “I’ll make you lunch.”

  Laura cleaned up the mess under the dishwasher then pushed it out the door. She’d get someone to help her get it down the stairs later. For now, it was sunnyside eggs on toast, a meal Mom fed them for dinner three nights a week for much of their childhood.

  Mom asked if Laura knew Sheldon and, after a short debate in her head, she told the whole story of the night before, which led to telling her about the reason they had followed Sheldon in the first place, which led, like a freight train, to telling Mom about the hospital, and on and on, backward, until the remaining yolky residue hardened on Mom’s plate and the sun shot a full-strength shaft of warmth across the table, casting shadows on crumbs and salt grains.

  Mom pressed her fingers to the table, picking up the salt and crumbs and brushing her fingertips over her plate. “I don’t think this Jeremy person is for you. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go with him for a time but, he’s not good. Not at all.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Laura’s hackles stood on end. That was why she didn’t tell Mom anything. She expected to hear something like, “He’s more Ruby’s type,” or “He’ll cast a long shadow over you.”

  But she didn’t. Instead, her mother said, “He used this woman for money. I don’t like that. I don’t think he’s capable of just being with someone unless he has some use for them. I don’t know what he’s using you for, honey, but it’s something.” Laura tried to hide the look of disappointment on her face, but when Mom backpedaled, she knew she’d done a bad job. “There’s nothing wrong with that. We all use each other for something. But what use do you have for him?”

  She had a hundred “uses” for Jeremy. His business acumen, his skill, his very presence in a room was powerful, but that’s not what she wanted from him. She wanted som
eone to go out with. Someone to eat breakfast with. A boyfriend. No more, no less.

  “Do you say these kinds of things to Ruby?”

  “What kinds of things?” Mom answered, picking up her plate and fork.

  “Implying that someone isn’t right for her, or that she doesn’t have any control of her life, or that someone’s trying to get one over on her? Or do you reserve these talks for just me?”

  Mom didn’t answer. She placed the plates in the sink and ran the water. “I don’t have any dish soap,” she muttered, as she looked behind the Cascade under the sink. She shrugged and shook a flurry of dishwasher soap into the sink. Laura thought she had forgotten or ignored her question, but then she said, “I don’t like Michael. He’s too uptight for your sister, but she always wants security, and what Ruby wants, Ruby finds. And yes, I told her that.”

  “You still managed to insult me in there, though.”

  “How’s that?”

  “By saying, ‘what Ruby wants, Ruby finds,’ you imply that I can’t find what I want because I’m incapable.”

  To Laura’s surprise, her unflappable mother slapped the box of Cascade onto the counter, sending a trail of soap smoke puffing out the opening. “Everything about your sister is not a reflection of you, Laura Priscilla Carnegie. You’re two separate people. Get out of the womb already.”

  Laura felt chastened, then justified, but just as she was about to send up her own cloud of smoke, her mother continued, “I could have been more sensitive when you were growing up, but I can’t walk on eggshells with you your whole life. You’re a woman now, and so is your sister, and you have a choice. You can be with each other and be your own people at the same time, or you can stop having a relationship and figure out who you are. But you both cannot keep living like you’re each other’s enemy and still be together. That’s just a habit, and I won’t watch it anymore.”

  Laura sat back in her chair. Was Mom implying Ruby had baggage with Laura’s name on it? She hadn’t even considered that, and she wanted to ask Mom what it was that Ruby found superior about Laura. She had to know, or she would be up all night, staring at the ceiling.