2 Death of a Supermodel

by Christine Demaio-Rice

  Code: I was born hipper than you.

  Stu didn’t give Tofu a chance to retaliate, even if he saw what was going on between the women. “This is the second time I’m escorting you to an outer borough on a murder investigation.”

  “You’re supposed to demand full access and exclusive rights to the story.”

  “I demand it.”

  “You have it.”

  Code: You have nothing to offer, bitch.

  Tofu rolled her eyes. “It’s all about work for you guys.”

  Code: Game. Set. Match, to the soaking brick of calcified vegetable protein.

  Bad neighborhoods in New York could be identified by a few key factors. Laura didn’t know if those factors translated anywhere else in the world, but to her, they were starkly clear. Strip malls. Wide streets. Tall, matching apartment buildings spread far apart. There were other markers for the denser neighborhoods in the Bronx, but in Brooklyn and Queens, those were the rules.

  East New York, which was in the southeastern-most part of Brooklyn, had all of the above and a landfill to the south. There was really nothing else that could have been done to make it worse except maybe a jail nearby or a training yard for roosters and pit bulls. Every street had a strip mall, and every strip mall had a check-cashing place, and every check-cashing place seemed pretty busy. Starrett City towers peeked over the low horizon like the few last teeth of a rotted-out jaw. The planned community for working class tenants had turned into a low-rent housing project in spite of itself.

  Like any war zone in the city, artists had found it by simply looking at a map and drawing lines of acceptability from Manhattan outward. The first affordable place they hit where generous space could be had became a target for the bravest.

  Since there were no warehouses or light industrial zoning, East New York had escaped the wedge of gentrification. Moving there would require more imagination than most people had, but it only took one person to have an idea and thousands to follow, and strip malls were the last big idea. They had space, big windows up front, and small backyards where one could spray paint a sculpture or smoke a cigarette. The parking lot in front could be used as a loading dock for huge objects, or well, just to park the cars and pickups that had become more hip and acceptable since Manhattan had become inaccessible. That so many had been vacant after a few domino financial crises that hit the poor first and left the poor last made them cheap. Many were owned by foreign investors who would fix up the bathroom and floors but never check to make sure the tenants weren’t living illegally in the back room.

  The store that owned the address Laura had been given used to be a photocopy-slash-fax joint. The one next to it rented little brass mailboxes, which if you looked through the fogged window, still resided there. Walls had been broken down between the stores, making a huge space.

  Stu yanked on the front door, and it opened with the violent creak of metal on concrete. Laura entered first, while Stu and Tofu followed. The room probably hadn’t looked as big when filled with copy machines. From her quick count of the clean spots on the industrial carpet, there had been twelve in all. She felt a slap of sadness as she thought of a once-thriving business unable to keep up with technology, or the neighborhood, or the rent, or whatever it was that had killed it, then shooed the feeling away with the idea that the owners might have expanded and moved to a better location.

  “Hello? Susannah?” she called out, walking deeper into the abandoned store.

  “Maybe she went to lunch,” Tofu said.

  “Laura,” Stu said, “this doesn’t seem right.”

  The smell of a thick Turkish cigarette came from an open back door. The yard out back was wide, and she could see a little crabgrass patch where a few dandelions had found a home. Laura figured Meatball Eyes must be getting a smoke, so she picked up the pace. “Susannah?”

  No answer. Probably on the phone.

  When Laura got outside, she thought a store mannequin had been thrown on the ground. But mannequins didn’t smoke thick Turkish cigarettes or drop lit ones nearby, and they didn’t bleed from holes in the chest.

  In the second before she fell apart, she saw that the one eye that hadn’t been beaten closed was brown and as big as a meatball.

  Falling apart was too kind a term for what happened. Complete emotional collapse would have been a better term, except that the description didn’t encompass the physical. Stu practically caught her with one hand on her way to the glass-dusted ground, missing the opportunity to help Tofu, who screamed like Laura had the first time she’d tripped over a murder scene.

  Three dead people in six months. All women. Who did that happen to? Didn’t most people live their whole lives without seeing a murder? The details of all three marched across Laura’s mind’s field of vision, and she was attacked by grief emanating outward from her sternum. It was too much. Too much death. Too much hurt. Too many people on the floor with physical harm done to them. She knew she was crying, maybe for the women, none of whom she’d liked or known very well, maybe for herself and her foul luck. Maybe she was just crying because she could. Stu was somewhere far away, asking her to get hold of herself, though without an ounce of impatience, and she wanted to answer, but her grief had turned into colors that appeared before her eyes. A salty taste that couldn’t have been anything but tears dropped into her mouth.

  Bright, angled light came from the horizon, which must have been from the setting sun in the front parking lot. There was a little cool breeze because even crappy neighborhoods got the benefit of good weather. She then saw flashing lights. She was getting cold, but didn’t have much else on her mind, even as the water she found she was drinking made its way down her throat, into the wrong pipe, making her cough.

  When she came back to herself, the sun was gone, and the sky was graded shades of teal and cyan. She sat on the back bumper of a police car with a bottle of water in her hand. Stu was talking to a guy in a jacket that had bulges all around the waistline. A cop. Not Cangemi. Weird. He seemed like the only cop in the world until Stu stood there, talking with another as if they were compatriots or college roommates.

  The cop, a super young guy of no less than six-four, wearing a bulletproof vest under his jacket, looked like a gargantuan monster, but when he came closer and she saw the proportion of his head to his shoulders, she knew he was just a normal size under all that gear. She figured she could make a fortune custom tailoring suits for plainclothes cops.

  “I’m Detective Yarisi, with the sixty-ninth. Are you okay?”

  Her eyes hurt, and her mouth was fighting a coating of phlegm and spit, but she nodded anyway.

  “Your friend tells me you’re Laura Carnegie? You got the sister all over the news?”

  She shot a look at Stu. They hadn’t looked at a TV or a phone in hours. “We pissed off a reporter.” She pointed at the ambulance with the closed back doors. “Her name was Susannah,” she said, then had to fight back a crying jag. She held out the catalog for the White Rose foundation. “And you have to figure it out. Because I can’t do two at the same time, okay?” The overwhelmed feeling made her want to fall down, and she was relieved to find Stu right there to hold her up. “I can’t keep finding people and then trying to find out what happened because it’s making me upset. Do you understand me?”

  “Sure.”

  “You have to do this yourself, okay? You have to call Ivanah and explain to her and you have to find out how Susannah got here and you have to do all that stuff because if I try to find another killer, I’m going to find more bodies. And what I’m saying is, if I’m not being clear, just in case, that I am going home and not making any stops, and I’m not asking any questions, and I’m not even going to crack a single joke with you because I am cursed to find dead people, and I’m afraid the next person I find is going to be someone I care about, and then I’m really going to have to ask questions. Are you understanding? Because I see you nodding, but I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means I un
derstand. The paramedics are here. They can give you something to help you calm down.”

  “No! I don’t want anything.” She turned to Stu. “Where’s Tofu?” She said the name with her thick New York accent that had no time for mediation and made his girlfriend sound like bland, greyish food.

  “She went home.”

  “I want to go home, too.”

  Alas, she had found another body, which meant another round of questions. She already knew what they were going to ask before they did, so she answered clearly, thoughtfully, and in great detail, careful to explain any contradictions. She and Stu were in a gypsy cab an hour later.

  Their driver, by his own admission, was from a village in southern Sudan, and Laura steeled herself for another horrifying childhood story, which could put her right over the edge. But he talked to himself, and then into his headset in a constant musical patois. He didn’t expect answers or validation. He was just doing his own thing, man, and if she was okay with it, he was too.

  “I don’t have a lead,” Laura said. “I know that sounds heartless.”

  “Why don’t you ask her boss?” Stu asked.

  She glanced out the window. She recognized nothing in the blackness, but could smell the salt of the ocean, which reminded her of Jeremy.

  “Because I think she might have done it.”

  “You think she beat and stabbed her assistant?”

  “No, poisoned Thomasina. I don’t know what happened to Meatb—Susannah. I almost hope it was just the neighborhood. But Thomasina, that was premeditated and done so the killer wouldn’t be near her when she died. And also to mimic a popular diet pill the girls are taking. So it was a practical matter. Not some crime of passion.”

  “Passion can be very cold.”

  She huffed, then hoped he wouldn’t ask her what she was huffing about because she didn’t want to tell him the statement made her think of their short-lived relationship. “Whatever killed her was given in the morning. She saw my sister in the morning is all we know, and I think she saw Rochelle Rik at Marlene X. Rochelle was involved; she had Susannah’s scarf right there in her office, even if she denies it. So yeah, there could have been some conflict. Like Thomasina was signing the girls into an exclusive thing with Pandora instead of putting them with Mermaid, which would have made Rochelle bare her teeth. But kill her? No way. She wouldn’t harm a hair on that woman’s head. Thomasina was a cash cow, so to speak. The Mermaid Agency was built on her skinny back, and yeah, they’ll survive without her, but she brought in serious bank.” Laura turned fully toward Stu. “But Ivanah? Now think about this. She’s a real business shark. Her business manager talks about her like she craps Krugerrands. So listen to my theory.”

  “This is going to be awesome.”

  “Thomasina approaches Ivanah about getting involved in White Rose because she knows the drill over there in the former East Germany, and she’s a closet tycoon, which is important because either Thomasina just felt comfortable around her own kind or needed money.”

  Stu gave her a quizzical look.

  She held up her hand. “Yeah, I know Thomasina has a buttload of money, but go with me here, because for some reason rich people never use their own money to do anything. They always have to tap someone richer or just someone else. I don’t know why.”

  “I think it’s a tax thing.”

  “Whatever.” She rubbed her eye and noticed how much it hurt. It was incredible how quickly she’d put the pile of bodies out of her mind. “So anyway, Ivanah’s like, all right, I’ll help the people. Young girls? Sure, I was one once, and she gets involved, and her husband flies out there to check out the deal and make sure it’s clean. But it isn’t.”

  “Like how?”

  “Use your imagination. They’re selling babies. Or they’re just shipping out random women. Or the government isn’t getting their kickbacks. Or the girls have swine flu. Or they’re addicts. I have no idea. Let’s just say Bob calls Ivanah and says, ‘This thing is a no-go. It stinks to high heaven, and we need to bail immediately.’”

  “You better wrap this up before we get to Williamsburg.”

  She had him, body and soul, leaning forward at full attention. “They can’t bail.”

  “They can’t bail?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Thomasina’s dead.”

  “You’re twisting this into a knot, Carnegie. Murder is rarely this complicated.”

  “Ivanah and Bob are involved with White Rose and possibly Pandora, and they’re not saying a word, Stu. Don’t you think something’s wrong with that?”

  They pulled up to his row house on North Seventh. He flipped her two twenties. She didn’t take them, and he didn’t open the door. Tofu was upstairs, and Laura was in the cab. She had a few hours left in her, and in a moment of honesty with herself, she wanted to be with him.

  She looked at the twenties and slid the glass back on the cab. “How much to 48th and Park?”

  Manolo shrugged. “Another twenty-five.”

  “What are you doing?” Stu asked. “You said you wanted to go right home before someone else died.”

  “Go home to your girlfriend. I’m wide awake and chasing geese.”

  “What’s the name of the goose on Park Avenue?”

  “What about your girlfriend?”

  “What about the goose?”

  “The White Rose Foundation.”

  He looked down, sharpening the crease in his twenties. “You’re a world of trouble, you know that?”

  “I have to work tonight, so either you’re coming or not, but I have to go.”

  Stu rapped on the glass. “Go ahead. Wherever the lady says.”

  “Okay!” Manolo took off for the Williamsburg Bridge.

  CHAPTER 18.

  Two Seventy-Seven Park Avenue had a three-story atrium in the front with actual trees and recordings of non-actual birds singing. Her mother told her the atrium once had real birds, but the poop situation had forced management to turn to the recorded loops. Laura never knew whether someone had lied to Mom or if she’d just made it up to get her and Ruby to take lunch with her there, as it was right between the Scaasi offices and the actual garment district, but Laura doubted a live bird had ever been brought into a New York office building.

  The atrium was a refuge for workers in the neighborhood the way Bryant Park was for the garmentos in her neighborhood. The chirping blasted even louder at eight at night, apparently, because the squeak of their sneakers was drowned out by the aural, if not corporeal, presence of multiple bird species. She and Stu didn’t speak, such was the cacophony of the atrium. They browsed the directory and found neither Pandora nor White Rose. The elevator ding sounded like an incongruous technological leap, and a lady in a business suit exited, whispering into her phone as if she too wanted to respect the majesty of the absent birds.

  Laura hit the button for the seventeenth floor, and the doors whooshed closed behind them. Birds, out.

  “We’re going to go up there and find a locked door,” Stu said.

  “Then I can go finish Jeremy’s pattern, and you can go home to your girlfriend.”

  “I have a deadline, so infer what you will.”

  The hallways were much like those in any other building in the city, with rows of doors and placards marking the company or entity. Since the building had been erected in the ‘70s, there were fewer vestigial pipes and conduits, and the layers of paint didn’t encroach on the width of the halls, but there was the sense that the building was at the turning point of its life, the style falling between “updated” and “vintage.”

  Laura didn’t have a suite number for the Pandora offices. The brochure had only contained a floor number, giving readers the impression that the company took up the entire thing, window to window. But there were just endless rows of doors.

  “I think we have to go back down,” she said. “Process of elimination. We’ll see what numbers are missing from the directory.”


  “Waste of time. Some companies take up two suites.” But even as he dismissed her idea, she saw his attention drawn elsewhere, like a bloodhound catching a scent.

  Then she caught it, too, a tingling vibration in the walls.

  Music.

  Throbbing stuff that hummed in time. The beat wasn’t loud or close enough to rattle the sconces, but it was palpable enough to follow, which they did, without speaking, like Green Berets in enemy territory. The sound got ever louder, or deceptively smaller, hitting a fever pitch behind a lonely door in a cul de sac of a hallway. Neither number nor name hung on the door, just a doormat on the floor in front of it, with a border of decorative white roses woven into the hemp. It could have been a closet, but apparently wasn’t because it was surely the source of the thumpy-thump music and voices. Many voices. Too many for a closet.

  “It’s Thursday,” she whispered. “Haven’t these people heard of weekends?”

  “Weekends are for amateurs.”

  “Could this possibly be the only entrance?”

  Stu reached for the doorknob and picked off a dust bunny. “Apparently not.”

  Laura had no real sense of direction without the island of Manhattan to follow. Seventh and Broadway went South. Sixth and Eighth went North. The rest followed. Once inside a building without traffic to guide her, she could be anywhere.

  Luckily, Stu didn’t have the same problem. Like a force of nature, he took off with the same bloodhound instinct, around corners and through stairwells, until she feared they were hopelessly lost. But then the music got thumpier again. The voices came through loud and clear as she walked up a secret flight of stairs Stu said might get them past a locked door in a newer wall on the seventeenth floor.

  The stairwell was little used. She’d seen filthier in her life, but it was narrow, beige, and utilitarian, the kind of place where one might just hurry up the concrete stairs to get to the next place, so quickly, in fact, that a person might just barrel into three half-naked people doing… Laura covered her eyes, but burned into her memory were a middle-aged male butt, a woman’s bare back pushed against a fire extinguisher, and another woman on her knees, her face buried somewhere Laura didn’t want to think about, at all, ever again.