Design for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “Oh, Jessica, I hope I’m not interrupting anything important.”

  “Your timing is good, Maggie. I think I may have missed the hair and makeup demonstration this morning, but there’s still ten minutes before the next lecture I’m signed up for.”

  “I wonder if I could prevail upon you to skip the lecture and help me out.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Not wrong exactly, but awkward.” There was a long pause.

  “What is it, Maggie? Can you tell me?”

  “It’s just this. Polly Roth wants to go to Rowena’s apartment to gather up that poor child’s things, and she asked me to accompany her. I hate the idea. I’m never good with these maudlin scenes. Just ask Sandy. Or maybe you shouldn’t. Anyway, I lied and told her I couldn’t because I was meeting you for lunch.”

  “Well, you’re welcome to meet me for a late lunch,” I said. “The lecture is over at one.”

  “Thanks, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She said to bring you along and she’d buy lunch for the three of us. I didn’t know how to get out of it.”

  “So you need me to accompany you to Rowena’s apartment?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind. I’d be so grateful.”

  “Are you certain Polly is comfortable sorting through Rowena’s belongings with a stranger?”

  “I think she simply doesn’t want to do it alone. That I understand. I wouldn’t have wanted to do it myself either. I still don’t want to do it, but I couldn’t turn her down.”

  “Where did Rowena live and what time should I be there?”

  I wrote down the address and instructions for finding the building. Maggie said Rowena shared her apartment in Brooklyn with two girls who were working and not going to be home. At the party, Babs had pointed them out as Isla and Janine, two other models who’d been in the show.

  Before leaving the Fashion Week venue, I stopped at the table outside the room where the sold-out lecture on the role of luxury goods in the modern world was to be held. I turned in my ticket, explaining to the woman sitting there that I was called away unexpectedly, but that she was welcome to give away my seat if anyone wanted it.

  “Too bad you can’t make it, but thank you,” she said. “That’s our hottest ticket. A Parsons professor is speaking. I have a long waiting list for that one. Someone will be delighted.”

  Back on the street, I consulted a city subway map and concluded that I’d better take a taxi if I didn’t want to get lost in the labyrinthine streets of Brooklyn. Getting around Manhattan is fairly easy as long as you stay north of Fourteenth Street, where the even-numbered streets run east, the odd-numbered streets run west, and the avenues alternate north and south. The exception is Broadway, a winding cow path in the days when the Dutch ruled New Amsterdam. It still wanders at an odd angle.

  New York’s outer reaches are not as well plotted out, and only those who live in those environs can claim enough familiarity to find their way from one place to the next. I don’t qualify. When I lived in a West Side high-rise, my days were spent mainly in Manhattan, what New Yorkers from the other four boroughs call “the city.”

  My cabdriver dropped me off at the door of a four-story brick building in Red Hook, across the street from a dilapidated wharf on the Buttermilk Channel. The neighborhood appeared to be in the process of gentrifying—several buildings sported scaffolding—but hadn’t reached that exalted status yet. There wasn’t a store in sight, and parked out front was an abandoned jalopy with a sheaf of tickets tucked under the windshield wiper.

  I pushed the button next to a piece of masking tape with three names on it, one of them Rowena’s, and an answering buzz released the lock on the door.

  “Is that you, Jessica?” a voice called down.

  “Yes,” I replied. “Where do I go?”

  “The elevator’s on the fritz. I’m afraid you’ll have to walk up.”

  “I can manage. What floor are you on?”

  “The fourth.”

  Grateful for my regular exercise routine, I climbed the stairs, walked down the cracked white tile of each landing to the next flight, and climbed again until I reached the fourth floor. There had been two apartments on each floor, and I headed for the one with the open door.

  “Maggie?” I called as I entered the apartment.

  “In the kitchen.”

  I walked through a narrow room, lined on either side with an assortment of what must have been cast-off furniture from relatives. There were two couches, and across from them three chairs, one of them a desk chair on wheels, and a small table so piled with papers that I doubted it had ever been used for dining, or even as a desk in its current location. A thin-screen television set was mounted on the wall opposite the sofas that, unless I missed my guess, were probably where the roommates took their meals—whatever models actually eat—while they watched their favorite shows. At the back of the room, on the left side, were three doors, one to the bedroom, one to the bathroom, and the last to the kitchen, a small box of a room barely accommodating a sink, hot plate, tiny refrigerator, and my friend Maggie emptying a grocery bag.

  “Polly’s in the bedroom packing up,” she whispered. “I just got our sandwiches. Thank you so much for coming.”

  “Don’t even think about it. What can I do to help?”

  “Why don’t I introduce you first?” She took off the dish towel that had been slung over her shoulder and draped it across the faucet. “Polly,” she called out. “Jessica’s here.”

  Maggie led me to the door of the bedroom, but we didn’t go in. From what I could see, the beds and the floor were covered with clothing. More clothes were hung on a rack that likely came from one of the Garment District showrooms. The only light fixture was a bare bulb in a ceiling socket. A narrow window provided some additional dim lighting.

  “These girls were—are—absolute slobs,” Polly said, wiping her hands on a white coat similar to what Sandy’s employees wore at his studio. “I’m sorry this is your introduction to my niece.” She thrust out her hand and I shook it. “But I appreciate your giving up your lunch date so Maggie can help me.”

  “Actually, I met Rowena the day of the show. She was a beautiful girl. May I offer you my sincerest condolences?”

  “Thank you. I almost remember seeing you there. I was so frazzled that day, I’m not sure of anything I saw.” She ran a shaky hand through her blond hair and sighed. “My sister-in-law in Ohio couldn’t face coming East to pack up Rowena’s things, and from the looks of this place I’m grateful she made that decision. How could I ever face her again if she saw how I allowed Rowena to live? Of course, you didn’t allow Rowena to do anything. She just decided what she wanted and did it.”

  “Why don’t you take a break now that Jessica is here? Are you ready to eat?” Maggie asked. “I was about to put out the sandwiches.”

  “I’m not very hungry.”

  “Even so, you need to keep up your strength, and so do we.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry, Maggie. I seem to be thinking only of myself today.”

  “Go wash up while Jessica and I set the table.”

  Polly closed the door to the bedroom and went into the bathroom.

  “Set the table?” I mouthed to Maggie, and cocked my head toward the masses of paper covering its surface.

  “I can take care of that mess,” she whispered back. She retrieved the grocery bag from the kitchen and began filling it with the papers from the table.

  “Let me do that,” I said. “You take care of the sandwiches.”

  I made a separate pile of magazines and catalogues, and stacked them on the floor between the sofas. I would have attempted to sort the mail by recipient if the envelopes were there, but when Maggie carried in two plates, I just swept off what was left on the table, dumping it in the paper bag, which I dropped on top of the magazines. Two cards
had floated to the floor in my hasty cleanup, and as I gathered them up I noticed one was a business card from the medical office of Dr. Edmund Sproles. The other looked as if it had accompanied flowers or a gift. A message in red crayon read “R—Sorry for the disappointment! Hope this cheers you up.” It was signed “Love, P.” Without thinking, I tucked them both in my jacket pocket, intending to write down the pertinent information about Dr. Sproles when I had a moment.

  Polly emerged from the bathroom, her nose pink and her eyes red-rimmed. She stuffed a tissue in her pocket and rolled the desk chair over to the table. “Where did you get these?” she asked Maggie, who was placing a third plate on the table.

  “I found a deli, Defontes, up Columbia Street,” she replied. “Their sandwiches are huge, so I only got two and cut them in thirds. One is corned beef and Swiss and the other is eggplant. Figured I’d give you the whole New York experience, Jessica.”

  “They look delicious,” I said.

  Maggie put out three bottles of water but no glasses. I wondered if the girls who lived there even possessed any. Given how carelessly they kept the apartment, Rowena and her roommates probably did little or no entertaining there. Where did young people in the city spend their leisure hours? Was all their social time passed in clubs and bars?

  We sat quietly and ate, each of us caught up in our own private thoughts. I was wondering how a seventeen-year-old had managed to manipulate her parents and her aunt into allowing her to move to New York City to pursue a modeling career. Had she even graduated from high school? From Polly’s remarks, I gathered that Rowena was a willful young woman. She was not particularly sensitive to others’ feelings, given what Babs had related about Rowena’s relationship with Dolores and other models. I had witnessed her speak disrespectfully to the makeup artist and the executive from New Cosmetics, but was her behavior just an adolescent showing off in front of adults? My train of thought raised many questions and I decided I would never have a better opportunity to find out about Rowena than while I was in the company of her aunt.

  “I understand Rowena lived here with two other models who were in the show with her,” I said to Polly.

  Maggie answered for her. “Isla and Janine. Isla was the one wearing the emerald gown—green is such a good color for redheads—and Janine was the brunette in the ruby dress.”

  Polly started as if she suddenly realized there were other people at the table. “I convinced them to let her live here,” she said. “It was a mistake. I see that now. She would have been better off living alone or with girls in another business.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “I think they were jealous of her, of her connection to me, and of how easily she got a job in their field, you know, waltzing into Manhattan and being in a show during Fashion Week your first time out. Not many who can do that. Oh, they were happy to have someone to share the rent, but they weren’t nice to Rowena.”

  “How do you know?” Maggie asked.

  Polly wiped her mouth with a napkin and seemed to weigh her response. “She told me. She complained that they helped themselves to her clothes—‘stole’ was actually the word she used—without permission. And they ate her food and never repaid her, used up her toothpaste without replacing it. Just little annoyances, but it showed they didn’t respect her.”

  “Three is a difficult number,” I said.

  “You’re right, Jessica. Two against one is always hard,” Maggie put in.

  “Well, Rowena got some of her own back,” Polly said with a wry smile. “She made a play for Janine’s boyfriend, not that she was really interested. And she confided in me that Isla Banning, whose model card says she’s twenty-one, is actually twenty-five. I don’t know how she found that out, but she was quite pleased with herself about it.”

  If Rowena let Isla know that she’d discovered her secret, it was not bound to endear her to her roommate, I thought.

  “It sounds to me like she was able to hold her own,” Maggie said.

  Polly paused. “I guess. But I was hoping that if Rowena lived with girls in the business who were a little older, they would mentor her and maybe settle her down a bit. I was lobbying to have her chosen as ‘the new face of New Cosmetics.’ It would have been so good for her self-confidence. She was such a beautiful child—but difficult. I always attributed it to, well, insecurity, and was sure that once she found a little success she would blossom. But she didn’t seem to appreciate all that had been done for her. She kept expecting more.”

  “She was very high-strung; lots of artistic people are,” Maggie said diplomatically. I had a feeling that she was thinking of Sandy.

  My first impression of Rowena had been that she was a spoiled young woman, and nothing I was learning from her aunt changed that view.

  “Did she have other friends here,” Maggie asked, “people who would support her when she was feeling down?”

  Polly shook her head. “She could come to me, but she rarely did. Babs Sipos was nice to her, but Rowena didn’t take to her. As a child, she always had difficulty making friends. I think she rejected them before they could reject her, but perhaps that’s just my armchair psychoanalyzing. I never had any children of my own.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?” I asked.

  Polly hesitated. “Not that I knew of. Unfortunately, she was always attracting older men. She said boys her own age didn’t interest her, but, frankly, I think she frightened them away. There was someone. She was wearing a fur coat last week that I know she didn’t bring with her from Ohio. When I asked her about it, she said it was a ‘parting gift’ from a friend.”

  “Lots of young girls bask in the attentions of an older man, especially if he comes along with gifts,” Maggie said.

  “Come to think of it, I didn’t see that coat in the bedroom,” Polly said, looking over her shoulder. “I wonder where it is.”

  Since we were speaking so easily about Rowena, I ventured to ask what had been on my mind since I arrived. “Do you know what caused her death? Have you heard anything about the autopsy?”

  Polly shook her head. “It’s a mystery. There’re no heart problems in my family, not that I can remember anyway. I can’t speak for my sister-in-law’s family.”

  “Was she anorexic? Could she have starved herself?”

  Polly chuckled. It was the first break in her somber mood. “No way. That child could outeat you and me and Maggie together when she wanted to. Not that she wanted to very often, but she was one of the lucky ones. If she splurged, she’d just cut back for a day or two and was down to her fighting weight.”

  “Have the police said anything to you?” I asked.

  “Only that these things take time.”

  Maggie lowered her voice even though it was just the three of us. “Could she have taken something for her nerves that day? She looked a little anxious to me.”

  “Well, give her a break. It was her first appearance. But Rowena had nerves of steel. Plus, she hated pills of any kind, so I doubt she would have taken anything.”

  “Babs mentioned that Rowena had been a little sick to her stomach before the show,” I said.

  “Maybe she was more nervous than you thought,” Maggie said.

  “Or maybe she ate something that disagreed with her,” Polly said, dusting her hands. “Thanks for getting the lunch, Maggie. How much do I owe you?”

  “Not a penny,” Maggie replied. “I’ll clean up. Then you can tell us what you’d like us to do.”

  “Yes,” I said. “How may I help?”

  “I wasn’t going to put you to work, Jessica,” Polly said, “but if you’re volunteering—”

  I raised my hand. “Whatever you need.”

  “Give me five minutes in the bedroom to sort things out and I’ll let you know.”

  I followed Maggie to the kitchen, carrying the plates, but she sent me back to
the table. “I don’t have room for those yet,” she said, turning on the water. “I’ll sing out when you can bring them back.”

  I turned around to see a tall young woman with red hair standing in the open door of the apartment. I recognized her as Isla, one of the models from the show. She was wearing a full-length mink coat over a white angora sweater and black pencil skirt. She eyed me warily. “Who are you?” she said, pulling off her leather gloves. “And what did you do with my mail?”

  “I’m Jessica Fletcher, a friend of Polly Roth.” I set the plates back on the table. “Everything that was on the table is over there,” I said, gesturing to the paper bag and pile of magazines and catalogues. “My friend Maggie and I are here to help Polly pack up Rowena’s things.”

  “Well, you’d better not pack up anything of mine,” she said, shrugging out of the coat.

  “Is the coat yours?” I asked.

  She thrust the coat into my arms as she rushed past me toward the bedroom. “I only borrowed it for my go-see.”

  Maggie was standing outside the kitchen, the dish towel over her shoulder again, her lips pursed. “In case you were wondering, a go-see is like an open casting call for models.”

  “I gathered as much.”

  As I draped the fur coat over the arm of one of the sofas, I glanced at the label. Chi-Chi Quality Furs. I don’t own a fur coat because I don’t believe in killing animals for a woman’s vanity, but that’s a personal feeling that I don’t impose upon others. I had seen newspaper ads for Chi-Chi Furs featuring beautiful women wrapped in expensive mink and sable fur coats. It obviously carried high-end furs for those who could afford them.

  “I guess she thought no one would find out if she borrowed her dead roommate’s fur coat,” I offered.

  “Makes me wonder what else she’s wearing of Rowena’s,” Maggie said, turning back to the kitchen.

  Made me wonder if Detective Aaron Kopecky’s “funny feeling” about Rowena’s death had merit. For a newcomer to New York, the young woman had managed to alienate an awful lot of people.