2 Death of a Supermodel

by Christine Demaio-Rice

  Laura felt her bottom lip quiver, and as much as she tried to stop it, the snots came, and her eyes developed a mist that enraged her so much, they misted more.

  “Don’t get upset,” Sevion said gently. “I know it feels like this is happening especially to you. But it happens with every designer, every time. I have not once seen an exception. Very, very successful designers go through this struggle every season, not just their first line. Why do you think your friend Jeremy kept sleeping with his backer? Because money was easy to find? No, because he knew what he had in her. Ask him now what he goes through without her. I believe he would do it again in a second.”

  “I hate this,” she said, wiping away her tears.

  “I know. Everyone does. Don’t worry. You’ll do what you have to do. Just make sure your sister is the one in the showroom with Ivanah, and in the meantime, I’ll try to find you something else.”

  He got into the cab, and Laura watched it drive away.

  She didn’t know who else to call. The more she looked at her short list of contacts, the more his name jumped out.

  “Jeremy, I know you’re busy.”

  “I’m home,” he said. “Tiffany came in sick.”

  She had always thought Jeremy was oddly averse to sick people, until she learned he had cystic fibrosis, which meant that a case of the sniffles for a coworker could be nearly fatal for him. She was the only person in possession of his secret, and the only person he trusted to know.

  “We never really talked that much about Gracie.”

  “You want to talk about that now? Where are you?”

  She found herself walking toward the train station, but feared there would be no way to get the conversation done with before she reached it.

  “I know she had control over the line.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because she had the money.”

  “Right.”

  She paused. The station was right in front of her, and she wasn’t ready to walk down yet. Neither was she ready to ask him tacky questions. “Never mind.”

  “What?”

  “Do you miss her?”

  Silence. Then a cough. And another. Which meant he was working too hard. She could hear him breathing, and she wanted to cover her too-personal question with a string of jokes and denials. But she didn’t. She waited.

  Eventually, as she heard the train roll into the station downstairs, he said, “Sometimes. When I don’t know what direction to take. I have no one to ask. She could have managed this expansion brilliantly.”

  “But she never would have let you expand.”

  “I don’t miss that.”

  “Ivanah wants creative control.”

  There was another long pause. A wave of commuters trudged up the stairs, and Laura stood still, getting engulfed by them.

  Jeremy finally asked, “Do you trust me?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a simple question.” She’d obviously ruffled his feathers. “Do you trust me?”

  She watched a woman with a stroller in one hand and a baby in the other struggle to get down the subway stairs. Laura reflexively grabbed the front axle of the stroller and pulled without asking if the woman needed help. It filled the moments between Jeremy’s loaded question and her answer, which was, “No.”

  She expected repercussions, but got only, “You trust me, and you know it. Don’t worry about Ivanah. Forget her. Get out there and talk about the line. You have a shoot tomorrow?”

  “Thomasina’s dead.”

  “Forget her, too.”

  “That’s not nice.” She remembered Ruby’s reaction to her quick replacement of the dead girl.

  “Welcome to having your own business.”

  She smiled a little, wanting to tell him that even though she was just down the hall, she missed him and his rough edges terribly.

  CHAPTER 4.

  Home was no longer an apartment, but a house shared with her mother and sister, which was good. But it was also an hour outside Manhattan, which was not so good. The train ride to Bay Ridge, her new South Brooklyn neighborhood, took an hour, give or take, which was enough time for her to become intimate with every ad, poem, and public service announcement posted in the car. The train she was currently on was dedicated to the new lifestyle brand, Saint JJ, AKA, Jeremy.

  The ads overhead, the ads by the doors, and every bit of ad space in between belonged to Jeremy’s brand. The color was a washed out orangey-red that looked like the deepest part of a flame, and the logo, the bags, and hats, even Dymphna Bastille’s lipstick, all matched. Nothing in the ads was available yet, but they were already highly coveted items. Laura closed her eyes to shut him out, sure that complete world domination was his for the taking.

  Her shoulders drooped. The weight she’d been carrying in preparation for the show was lifted. She almost slept. The show had gone off well, despite the death at the end. The papers would run the story tomorrow, and her pasty face against Thomasina’s thoroughbred beauty would be all over the news tonight. Then Debbie Hayworth. And Ruby having a four-hour police interview for reasons that were completely opaque. Lastly, she was practically losing creative control of her own line because she didn’t have two nickels to rub together, and the last straw was Jeremy basically telling her to get over it.

  She ruminated on how she’d started on a high note, and the whole endeavor had taken a dive after Thomasina’s death, as if all the months as a muse for Ruby had just been building up to a fine screw you at the end, a lovely bookend to how their relationship began. On the train ride home, she vacillated between feeling sorry for Thomasina to despising her. On the walk from the train to her block, she wondered why Jeremy was so hot to nail down her trust, and as she crossed the last street, she was about to start beating herself up over Stu when she saw the news van in front of her house.

  Of course, they’d tracked her down. What surprised her were the police cars, one black and white, and one Crown Victoria with big lights. The house was a brownstone, connected to its neighbors on both sides, so there was no access from the back unless she wanted to go around the corner, scale a barbed-wire-topped wall, walk through someone’s begonias, and fight off the mixed-breed hound to land in her own backyard. That may or may not have been preferable to the knot of reporters that shone their lights in her eyes halfway down the block, but it was too late to know.

  She couldn’t see any one face past the glare. There seemed to be a microphone near her, which made her want to shut up more than anything. Questions were thrown at her.

  How do you feel about Thomasina Wente’s death?

  Was she taking any drugs during the show?

  Do you know who she was seeing?

  She ducked her head. “I really can’t answer any questions right now.”

  They repeated the same ones, making such an effort not to be in her way that they were completely blocking her from getting home. All she cared about was finding out what the police were doing at her house, so she barreled through, which caused them to make stronger efforts to follow, which, again, put them squarely in her way.

  She recognized Akiko Kamichura more by voice than face and heard the question loud and clear. “Did you know the police think there was foul play involved?”

  She stopped short, truly shocked. “No.”

  “Were you with Ms. Wente right before the show?”

  Her exhaustion and stress boiled to the top of her consciousness. She took a step toward Kamichura, forefinger raised, the picture of aggression. “That’s completely over the line, lady. Who the hell do you think you are? Do you have a badge? No? You don’t? Oh, that’s right. You have a second-rate journalism degree and enough silicone in your body to fill the kitchen utensil aisle at Target. It is not your place to ask me about my alibi. Do you understand me?”

  Kamichura had taken a step back, but her expression was pure satisfaction. “Any theories on why—”

  “I asked if you understood.”

&nbs
p; “… she might have been killed?”

  “Did you understand?”

  “She knocked your sister off a runway in the Jeremy St. James Fall show.”

  The horrible woman was trained to bulldoze her way to the most dramatic on-the-spot interview she could muster. She had no skin in the game. It had already been a win for her, and another emotional outburst wouldn’t make the reporter look stupid; it would get her a promotion.

  Laura smiled and said, “Excuse me,” right into the microphone, then stepped toward her house.

  Kamichura moved, but not really enough. The reporters shouted questions and shone their lights, but they could not trespass past the gate. She looked up at the stoop, which led to the middle and top floor where she and her mother lived. The door was closed. The lights were on, but she detected no activity in the windows.

  “Hey! You bastards!” The voice came from the top of the adjacent stoop, and she knew right away that it was Jimmy, their landlord. He lived next door and had bought the buildings on each side during the last housing depression. Standing above them with a crowbar and a voice so loud it ripped the time-space continuum, he was the picture of psychosis. “Get the hell away from my gate or your eyes are gonna be lookin’ out both sides of your head!”

  Kamichura pointed her cameraman, a guy in his fifties who stood at six-five and weighed in at about three hundred pounds, to shoot the nut at the top of the stairs.

  When Jimmy came to meet them on the sidewalk, in the light of the camera, they saw he had a weapon more dangerous than the crowbar. He had a phone to his ear. “They’re restricting access and blocking a fire hydrant,” he said.

  Kamichura indicated her van, which had enough satellite dishes for a Presidential dinner on the roof. “It’s legally parked!”

  Jimmy held his hand over the mouthpiece. “They don’t give a rat’s ass.”

  Laura interjected, “Retired cop. PVB comes if you wave a stick at an illegal space.” She rolled her eyes as if it annoyed her.

  “Why don’t you tell the dozen cops in the house?”

  “Those goons can’t call a tow truck,” Jimmy said. “You leave my tenant alone, and I go back inside.”

  Kamichura took a step back. Laura knew she hadn’t seen the last of the reporter, but next time she’d be prepared. “And my sister is ten times more gorgeous than Thomasina Wente, even when she’s flying off a runway.”

  Kamichura and her cameraman exchanged glances, and he lowered his camera. She pointed at Laura. “I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

  Ruby’s downstairs apartment, which she’d begged for, was private with its own kitchen and backyard access. Down a couple of steps, the door was open, and the flashing lights and hubbub of activity drew Laura in.

  “Carnegie,” Cangemi said. “Welcome.”

  “It’s my house. I’m supposed to be welcoming you.”

  “Fat chance of that happening,” he said. And he was right. The apartment, huge by New York standards, was dwarfed by the sheer number of people wiping surfaces, flipping cushions, and generally poking around where they didn’t belong.

  “Where’s my sister?”

  “In the bedroom with your mother. I need to ask you a few questions.”

  She ignored him. He was more pleasant to be around when he wasn’t fighting with his girlfriend, but his recent lack of humor forced her to keep the observation to herself.

  The apartment was a railroad, meaning one had to walk through either the bedroom or the bathroom to get to the kitchen, so both bedroom doors were open to allow people in NYPD bunny suits to get through. They had a wonderful view of Ruby crying on the bed where Mom multitasked by rubbing her daughter’s back while talking on her cellphone.

  “No, I know for a fact she has nothing to worry about, but I won’t have her caught short because you need to be hit over the head with a disaster to get your ass moving.” The tone of Mom’s voice betrayed nothing. The long sentences told her Mom was mad.

  She continued, as if the person on the other end didn’t get a word in edgewise. “I have never asked you for a goddamn thing. Even when I was raising two kids by myself in a godforsaken ghetto, I never asked you for a dime or a favor, but I made your girls Halloween costumes and taught them how to sew doll’s clothes, which was wonderful. I love them. And I need you to get your ass out of wherever you are, get down to Midtown South, and get me some answers with the same pleasure I had helping your kids.”

  Ah. That would be Uncle Graham, the cufflink lawyer.

  “I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to hear it!” Mom had graduated from long, rambling, calmly voiced sentences, to her prepubescent relationship with her brother. Fantastic.

  Laura snatched the phone.

  Uncle Graham was already speaking. “… charged with something.”

  “Uncle Graham? It’s Laura.”

  “Can you calm her down?”

  “Probably not.”

  “If I get involved before Ruby’s charged, it’s going to look like she’s hiding something.”

  She looked at her sister, who was falling apart in no uncertain terms, and Mom, who was trying not to, and felt as alone as she ever had. “Maybe you can come around after the cops leave and explain what just happened? Or maybe you have a contact in the NYPD you can prod a little? It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Just, you know, let them feel like they’re not swinging in the wind?”

  “I heard you got into some trouble a few months back and didn’t call me.”

  “I had it under control,” she lied.

  “Don’t tell your sister,” he said, “but you were always my favorite.”

  “Thanks, Unca Gee.”

  Cangemi walked in with a purposeful expression and motioned her out of the room.

  “I have to go.” Laura tossed the phone onto the bed and followed the detective into the backyard.

  Mom had started organizing the soil into borders and beds. A little overhang against the house sheltered a long metal table with boxes of bulbs, pots, and bags of soil and compost. It had all been moved out of Ruby’s kitchen after an epic freak-out about personal space and cleanliness versus the ease of using the garden apartment for the gardening. Mom’s eviction from her rent-controlled apartment had reawakened her love of flowers, and bulb-planting season would not go by unfulfilled, even if it meant traipsing through Ruby’s own little private Idaho.

  “You really upset my sister.”

  “We have a warrant.”

  She wanted to call him out for being an officious jerk, but it was hard to do that with a name like “Detective.”

  “You never told me your first name,” she said.

  “Detective is fine.”

  “So what do you want?” she asked. “It’s been a long day already.”

  “Did you see Thomasina taking anything? Pills? Shots? A snort?”

  “On or off the record?”

  “For now, we’re off, but I reserve the right to bring you in for an on-the-record talk if I think you have more to say.”

  Laura mentally reconstructed the morning. She reviewed all the times she’d seen Thomasina in the previous weeks for fittings and blah-blahing with Ruby in the office. She thought of all the times the model’s presence had annoyed her and how the gossiping had made Ruby squeal instead of work, times Thomasina could have been out partying, but instead hung around the office for an hour between gigs.

  “I think I saw her eat like three times in the past four months. She was a freak about what she put in her body.”

  “Ever notice what came out?”

  “Catty remarks in a German accent.”

  “Since this is the second murder to take place in a ten-yard radius of you, I’d keep the wisecracks to a minimum.” He really was more fun when his girlfriend did his laundry.

  “She puked. They all puke. It’s like a reflex. Their stomachs are temporary receptacles for lettuce and almonds.”

  “And you let them?”

/>   “What did you want me to do?”

  “You’re supposed to report it to MAAB.”

  “Oh, you know what? The whole model-babysitting thing is getting really old. Who reports high school football players who work out four hours a day to bulk up? Who reports Sumo wrestlers who eat so much they can’t wear pants? What about the actor who loses weight to play an Auschwitz victim? Who reports those people? Nobody.”

  “That’s because—”

  She’d heard it all before. “Because they’re professionals? And somehow these girls aren’t? They make five thousand dollars a day, and all they have to do for that money is walk back and forth and stay really, really skinny. That’s their job. But we let football players, at any age, mind you, turn into Mack trucks. Why are they allowed to distort their bodies for our pleasure, but the models aren’t?”

  “Don’t tell me. You have a theory.”

  “Because they’re men. We trust that men have control over their bodies, but women don’t. Women need nannies. And little girls are supposedly getting unrealistic ideas about body image because, again, they have no control over their own minds. But boys? Do we wonder if they’re going to turn their arms into bazookas? Or distort their upper bodies to look like football players? No! Because there’s an obesity epidemic at the same time we’re freaking out about what grown women do to their bodies for a buck. So did she puke? You bet she did. Did she starve herself? Yes indeed. Because that’s her job. If you don’t like it, you should take a long hard look at yourself the next time you cheer on a linebacker.”

  Samuelson, Cangemi’s partner, poked his head out and, with a nod, told them it was time to go. Cangemi nodded back and turned his attention back to Laura. “I’m not sure if you’re an original thinker or very stupid.”

  “When you figure it out, let me know.”

  Laura fielded a few late-night texts about the next day’s shoot: something about permits, which the safety team had, something else about Chase Charmain’s dietary needs, and plenty else about the model change. Rowena’s measurements were so close to Thomasina’s, no middle of the night fitting was required, and any problems could be adjusted with a little basting and cutting. She went downstairs to update Ruby, but found her on the couch fifteen minutes into a sleeping pill. The cops had taped off her apartment. Her sister would probably be borrowing her clothes for the duration.