Laura looked at Ruby and could feel a big apology, or compassion that came right from the gut. But she didn’t want anything more than to run away from the whole conversation.
Like a blessing from above, they reached the end of the line. She ordered something, but forgot what it was, then babbled about old lady stylings in the hipster set before Ruby could offer a dose of saccharine or sympathy.
CHAPTER 7.
Ruby knowing about Jeremy had not worked in Laura’s favor. She dealt with constant winking and nudging, especially after Stu turned out to be such a dud. The innuendos and coy looks drove her up a tree, and more than once, Jeremy had pulled her to the side and asked if Ruby was okay or if she had a case of Tourette’s that would damage her usefulness in the showroom. Of course, once he introduced them around and saw how Ruby took control of the situation, how she was inviting, warm, personable, and made immediate friends, he respected her professionally. After that, the favors streamed in, but he never really warmed to her. Laura thought it a pleasing turn of events. Even though she officially wasn’t interested in her old boss any more, she still harbored a slight, annoying possessive streak, at least where Ruby was concerned. Her sister had stolen enough boyfriends over the course of her life to convince her that if Jeremy wanted Ruby, her sister would be willing to meet him halfway. And everyone wanted Ruby. She was like a force of nature.
It wasn’t even just men. Women craved Ruby’s friendship as well. Thomasina had been no different. It was always Ruby’s choice to be a friend or a lover or not. Even Bob had purred the first time he met Ruby. Married men were over the line for her, and apparently, she took his vows more seriously than he did. Laura couldn’t imagine how Bob thought he had the energy to have an affair with Ruby as well as Thomasina.
What had been in it for Thomasina? Money seemed too easy an answer. She had more than most people would see in a lifetime. He had no prestige, no special knowledge outside of a football field, no access to people she didn’t. Laura refused to believe there was some deep attraction there. People like Thomasina didn’t go near people like Bob unless there was money or connections to be had. Actually, Laura had pinned her as the kind of woman who would only have affairs with guys like Bob because they saw money and connections as the point of having affairs.
It was a long walk out to Tudor City, where her, and Jeremy’s, production person was laid up, and she spent that time worrying about whether or not Bob would shell out another dime, with or without Ivanah’s interest in the design end, if a certain supermodel wasn’t alive to encourage him.
Yoni was not a woman who stood still. She was wildly productive, accurate to a fault, sharp, detail-oriented, and big-picture conscious. She could be running her own company, but seemed too busy to start one.
So Laura imagined the worst when she went up to see her in her Tudor City prewar co-op, and because being around someone who idled at a hundred miles per hour made her forget her problems just so she could keep up. There was no way Yoni was actually sitting still, even if the doctor ordered it, even if the doctor strapped her down. That was why she was freelancing for Laura while on maternity leave. No one could keep a good woman and her fetus down.
A stout woman with skin like a boiled pierogi led Laura to a back room without really looking at her. The apartment went around corners and hallways, where little tables held little doodads that looked perfectly proportioned and painted to be next to the little things beside them.
Yoni lay in the bed with her feet up, her seven-months-pregnant belly barely distended. Her fingers tapped, and her toes wiggled. The TV displayed some relaxing music and ambient abstract shape-changing thing that wasn’t actually meant to be watched actively. Books lay everywhere, open a third of the way through, bookmarked, upside down. Yet there was a certain aesthetic order that made even a mess seem somehow right.
“What did you bring me?” Yoni asked when she saw Laura with the cardstock sheets.
“Approvals.” Laura moved some books from a chair that was shaped like a brick. The tomes were titled Taking Down the Enemy and Infiltration Techniques for a Better Tomorrow. No surprise. Yoni’s dad had been in Mossad, and there was no proof she wasn’t following in his footsteps. Laura plopped in the chair and slouched enough so her legs were straight and her heels touched the hardwood.
“You have projections, I hope.” When she saw Laura’s face, she slapped the cardstock to the bedspread. “You want your delivery, or no? Tell me now.”
“Yoni. You know the calendar better than I do, and you know—”
“We’re behind.”
“How can we be behind already? We designed the line a year ahead of delivery.”
Yoni closed her eyes for a second, obviously trying to remain calm. “How long did you work for Jeremy? Did you think he kept to the calendar for fun? The buyers expect to see product when they expect it, no sooner or later, and the delivery calendar was set by God, so this is your personal hell.”
“No,” Laura said. “My personal hell is Ivanah Schmiller having editorial power over the line, a dead model in my bathroom during the show, getting in trouble for replacing her for a shoot the next day, and a sister-slash-partner being borderline non-functional because she was friends with the dead model, who has a brother who is totally hot, by the way, who I don’t trust at all, showing up at the shoot. Oh, and the cops totally dusted down my sister’s place last night.”
Yoni looked up from her cardstock. “Why?”
Laura shrugged. “They wouldn’t say.”
“They would have lied if they did. Listen to me. You of all people should know better. They came because they think your sister is a murderer.”
“No way!”
“Wente dies how? Gunshot? Strangled like the other bitch? No. Poison. Why, then?”
Laura shrugged.
“Get out,” Yoni said. “You make the baby annoyed. She wants to come out and slap you.”
“Yoni!”
“I’m having a contraction right now. Stress. From you.” She pulled a plastic gallon of distilled water from the night table and drank right from the container.
“Do we call the doctor?”
“Why do you kill someone with poison? Why don’t you just shoot them?”
“Guns are messy and loud and hard to get.”
“Strangle the bitch.”
“She’s too strong.”
“Use a knife.” Yoni poured her water instead of gulping from the jug.
“Messy again. And it’s hard to kill someone that way. Too easy for them to live and lurch off.”
“You can hold your hand like this…” She bent her hand in half so the first knuckles of the fingers stuck out like a wedge. “And hit them hard in the Adam’s apple. This breaks the trachea.”
“I don’t think a normal person could do that in just one shot. I mean, if they tied her down and got a couple of shots at it, maybe.” She imagined herself straddling Thomasina, popping away at her trachea while she said, “A little to the left. No, my left.”
“So,” Yoni said, “you’re saying they needed to poison them because they’re strong and you don’t want to make a mess. The killer didn’t have a gun. So, not a professional. Someone personal. But not an accident. Oh, no. If it were an accident, you wouldn’t be seeing that detective at your house. What was his name?”
“Cangemi. I don’t know his first name.”
“I think he likes you.”
“He only likes his own jokes.”
Yoni’s water sloshed when she put the glass on the night table. “Do you want to feed the poison, inject it? Maybe a pill? This person is maybe on some medications they can mix up?”
“Diet pills, but I’m not sure if they’re hers.”
Yoni wagged her finger at Laura. “The next time you come to me with questions like this, you should have the details worked out. I don’t have time to walk you through what you should know already.” She snapped up the pile of swatches stapled to the cardboard, givin
g the wool crepe a tug. Then she looked at the writing on the cardboard and tugged again.
She waved the cardstock page at Laura. “They used the wrong denier lycra. I cannot stand it.” Pulling out a red sharpie like a cowboy reaching for a pistol under her pillow, she scribbled “REJECTED” across the top of the page and signed it. “Tell me something,” Yoni said, scribbling more notes on the other cards. “You want to poison someone. Do you force them to eat something they don’t usually? Or inject them? How do you get it inside them? Maybe she took drugs already?”
“If I were going to poison someone,” Laura said, “I’d put it on the food she was already eating. But I’d need access to her food.”
“Correct! Who fed her last?”
“She doesn’t eat, Yoni. That’s her job. But if she did, it would have to be breakfast. Or dinner the night before.” Laura was frustrated with her own answer. “Or a snack, I don’t know!”
Yoni held up her hand, and Laura immediately felt calm. She had a window into what kind of parent the production manager was going to be. A stern mother who made her child feel safe and in good hands, as though she knew the location of all the answers and was waiting for the person to meet her there. The exact opposite of Laura’s own mother.
“Before that,” Laura said, “when I saw her, she looked kind of green, and Monty made a comment about her skin color being off. So she must have come in sick. But she didn’t say she was sick all night or suddenly or anything.”
“So?”
“So she must have been poisoned already, but I don’t know for how long.”
“Get me that book right there.” Yoni pointed at an art deco table.
Laura placed the fat tome carefully on Yoni’s lap because it was about as thick as it was tall.
Yoni flipped through it. “Tell me more about what happened that morning, please. What did she say? How did she act?”
“She was normal. Just a little sick.”
Yoni clenched her fist. “More.”
“She was cranky, as usual, and Ruby sided with her.”
“Cranky about what? My God, you can try a woman’s patience.”
“She wanted to wear sunglasses on the runway. And Ruby said okay? I mean, really? Not only is it douchey, they weren’t rented or signed off. So we could still get killed for infringing copyright.”
“How was she breathing?”
“Didn’t notice.”
“Were her pupils dilated?”
“I missed my second year of med school.”
“Was the black part big?”
“The sunglasses… hello, she wouldn’t take them off. I was arguing with her, and she was barely even answering, just making this clicking noise in her throat, which must be East German slang for ‘entitled tall rich person can do whatever she wants.’ And get this, Monty was trying to work on her, and she wouldn’t take off the sunglasses. She’s ready to walk down the runway with flaking skin because why? I don’t know because he finally just took them off her, and it wasn’t like she had a black eye or anything.”
“You didn’t see her pupils then?”
“There’s no eye contact. She’s like seven feet tall, so I’m constantly looking up her nose.”
Yoni slapped the book closed. “It’s too obvious.”
“What?”
“You haven’t earned answers.” Yoni swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “We agree she was murdered because your homicide detective was lurking around, yes?”
“Yes.”
“People are murdered for only a few reasons. Love. Revenge. Money. Politics maybe. Poisoning is good for some of these. For politics. Yes.”
“Thomasina? The only politics she cared about happened in the fit room.”
“Don’t exclude it too fast.”
“Well, forget revenge or love,” Laura said. “Because what’s the point of revenge if you’re not standing over them, telling them they’re dying for something they did? And love, same thing. No one’s getting killed for love unless the killer’s there to hear the last words. Because they’re hoping for apologies or regrets. No. It had to be money.”
Yoni hoisted herself and her belly to a standing position. “At least you’ve turned on your brain. So I’ll tell you. The sunglasses were for light sensitivity. The skin was dry. The clicking in the throat was because she couldn’t swallow. She was very sick, my dear. You should have been nicer.”
Laura pursed her lips. She could have been nicer, just in general. But what was she supposed to do? She had three giraffes puking in the back room, two who looked as if they hadn’t gotten their first period yet, a partner as green as a jalapeno, and rumors that Penelope Sidewinder was outside with her eagle eye. So yes, the whole argument over the sunglasses had gotten cruel with words like “entitled bitch” getting thrown around in the heat of the moment. The guilt made her hold her arm out for Yoni as the pregnant woman trudged across the floor. Her offer was rejected, but Yoni made slow progress toward the bathroom.
“It was alkaloids,” Yoni said. “All the symptoms. She was already poisoned when she came. You’re lucky she didn’t drop on the runway. MAAB would have been on you like bombs on a strategic target. You now figure out how they got into her. You can do that?”
“I think I know already.”
Yoni raised an eyebrow. They were right outside the bathroom. Laura ran to her bag and fished out the capsule. “Can we find out if this is alkaloid?”
“I thought she didn’t take pills?”
“I found it in her bag.”
“You didn’t give this to the police?”
“I gave the rest to them. But if they’re going to start accusing my sister of something and not telling me anything about it, I need to do my own legwork. Don’t you think?”
“I am very impressed.” Yoni took the pill. “Give me a couple of days.”
“You bet.” Laura bathed in validation as she let the pierogi take her to the door.
Once in the lobby, Laura realized she hadn’t told Yoni about the receipts, missing a huge opportunity to gain esteem with her. She pulled the copies out of her bag and headed back toward the elevator, questioning the maturity of her motivations, the practicality of bothering when she hadn’t even looked at them, and the benefit of waiting for a later moment when she actually needed something from Yoni. Right about when she started looking at the pages, she realized loneliness had driven her back to the elevator. She had no one else to talk to. Ruby was too emotionally involved to keep in the loop. Stu was with a processed protein product. Corky was entertaining buyers. Mom was over some kind of emotional edge about Ruby. Jeremy was too close to the business; he’d invariably tell her to back off and sew.
Yoni was a great person to talk to, and she appeared very available where sleuthing was concerned, but she was pregnant and on bed rest. So by the time the elevator dinged, Laura was staring at her copies of receipts and thinking she should just leave. She turned away, but then saw a little scribble on one of the scraps of paper.
The copy machine had done a butcher job, but she could make out a phone number, which had the old school 212 area code. The Kiel’s store receipt was dated the day before the show. Before she could talk herself out of it, Laura stood at the curb, dialing the number. And before she could come up with an excuse for calling besides, ‘Sorry, I dialed the wrong number,’ someone answered.
“Sidewinder here.”
It was most certainly not a wrong number.
“Hi, Penel… I mean, Ms. Sidewinder. I… uh… this is Laura Carnegie? From Sartorial Sandwich? I’m sorry to bother you?” She was disgusted with the question-asking lilts on the ends of her sentences. She kicked people like that. They were weak and worthless, and there she was in their company.
“Yes, Ms. Carnegie. I’m heading into a showing. Is there something I can help you with?”
Oh, God. Laura had nothing. “You saw my show yesterday?” Stupid, stupid, stupid girl. It sounded as if she was leading in to a request fo
r a review, which was exactly what Sidewinder expected and the reason for her beleaguered, formal tone. Before Laura could get cut off, she blurted, “I wanted to say, some of the girls in my show, I don’t think they were of age. And I don’t know what to do about it. I feel so bad, and I don’t want to get into trouble, but if I don’t speak out, well, that’s worse. And my Mom looked sixteen until she was twenty-five so… I don’t want to make accusations.”
The background noise on Sidewinder’s side disappeared, as if the reviewer had walked into a nearby closet. “Where are you, darling?”
“Tudor City area-ish.” God, had she just given away Yoni’s location or something? What a crappy spy she’d make.
“Have you ever been to Baxter City? Do you know where it is?”
Those were two totally different questions. No, she had never been to Baxter City because it was members-only and impossibly exclusive, but yes, she knew where it was. But before she could explain that she wasn’t a member, she found herself agreeing to meet the reviewer there in half an hour. She called Corky to let him know she wouldn’t be in the showroom for a couple of hours and was preparing excuses when he answered the phone in full panic mode.
“Where are you?” he hissed.
“I was dropping approvals to Yoni, then—”
“I’m all alone here.”
“Where’s Ruby?”
“Not here. I got buyers coming out the wazoo, no time to steam anything. No time to refill the water jugs. I’ve eaten brunch four times. Bloomingdale’s ran an hour late, and where the hell are you guys?”
“Corky, I don’t know where Ruby is. I assume you called her. But I can’t get there for a few hours, and there’s nothing I can do about that right now. I’m sorry, but there are things happening, and it’s not like I’m any use in the showroom anyway.”
“Is this Thomasina drama?”
2 Death of a Supermodel Page 9