He nodded once, making eye contact, an expression meant to tell her to be more specific without actually nagging her. He probably learned that at the academy, too.
“I was working on this dress, and it was on the mannequin. She came by, and said ‘That looks like a potato sack, Laura. If you’re not going to do the job right, we can find another kid right out of school to do it.’ Which she said because Jeremy hired me right out of Parsons, and she didn’t like that. Anyway, I could like, feel the stress coming off her, so I said, ‘Do you mean the waist is too big, or is the length wrong, or what do you think?’ She grabbed my pins and started pinning all over, thinking she’s doing it right but instead, she’s making this terrible mess. So I just let her finish, and when she did I said, ‘Oh, okay sure, I can make it like that,’ which by the way, was a disaster, but I didn’t say that. She put my pins down and walked out. The whole thing was weird, except, you know, she always kind of acted like she could do my job better than me because she used to sew from Butterick patterns.”
“Did she say anything to anyone else before she left?”
Laura replayed those moments in her mind, imagining Gracie walking away from her. She had been wearing a lavender suit that fit like plastic surgery and matching stilettos that would surely necessitate actual surgery.
“She said something to Jeremy I didn’t hear. And he said, ‘Don’t you dare go.’ I couldn’t hear the rest. They were at each other’s throats all day, about what, I don’t know.”
“You’re very frank,” Cangemi said. “I like that in a witness.”
“Thank you.” Unable to resist, she continued like a vaudevillian, “And don’t call me Frank.”
He nodded, acknowledging the joke, but not the fact that it was hilarious. Cangemi closed his little notebook and promised more questions as they arose. As she walked back to her desk, she passed what used to be Jeremy’s office, but was now a crime scene. Camera flashes blazed. Handheld radios buzzed. Tall men shouted orders. A lady in a blue uniform slid Laura’s paper scissors into a plastic bag.
“I need those,” she cried.
Cangemi saw her distress. “You’ve got only one pair of scissors?”
“I have fabric scissors. If I cut paper with them, they’re ruined.”
He looked at her as though she had lost her mind. She tried to remember he wasn’t a cutter. He lived like the rest of the population. Scissors were tools you bought at Target while you were there for something else, then lost immediately, and found in a drawer a year later. To her, they were an extension of herself. She wanted to ask him if he’d use just any gun he found in the back of the drawer, but she needed her scissors and didn’t want to risk out-joking him again.
“They were on the scene,” he replied. “We gotta log them in.”
“I can’t work without them.”
“What were they doing in here?”
“I was drying them off. They had coffee on them.”
“You spilled coffee when you got here?” He made a note.
“It was already spilled.” She pointed in the general direction of her workspace.
When Laura saw Cangemi make another note, she knew she’d just opened up a world of trouble.
Dead Is the New Black
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You can visit Christine DeMaio-Rice’s blog at fashionismurder.com or email her at [email protected]
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