She could smell Rolf’s guilt. He was a man rotten to the core, selling young girls into prostitution, laundering them through her company, probably with info stolen from Bob and Ivanah through their involvement with White Rose. He would pick them up at LaGuardia Airport and take them God-knew-where.
Laura hurled herself up the stairs, her heavy bag ten pounds lighter in her mind, broken arm tap-tapping against the banister as she ran, too impatient for the elevator. Spring was easy. Update last season and shorten the skirts, lighten the fabric, and brighten the colors. Short sleeves became sleeveless, and long sleeves went half sleeve. Switch pockets and collars until they looked new. Let Ivanah design something outrageous in every group, choose sparkly buttons, and trim with silly fabrics. Tell her she’s brilliant, and they’re done. Backing secured. Line perfect. Branding protected. Everyone happy.
In the middle of all that, she was going to ask pointed questions about Ivanah’s relationship with White Rose and Pandora Modeling. About Meatball Eyes. About how Rolf could have gotten his hands on their EIN and the corporate paperwork needed to sponsor foreign workers without her knowledge. It was going to be a super-productive morning.
She was sure the sun shone right out of her ass when she stepped into the little studio. Her pattern table was clear because she was done with everything, and Ruby’s drafting table was the usual orderly clutter. Ivanah and the new Eastern European assistant she expected were nowhere to be found. Two men stood in the middle of the room, talking softly about something she didn’t have a chance to hear because they shut up as soon as she entered.
“Pierre?”
“My dear.” He gave her the double kiss. “My goodness, what happened?”
“You should see the other guy.”
Pierre indicated the man standing beside her cutting table. “Do you know Mister Stern?”
Buck nodded and sat down in her chair.
“Hi, Buck,” she said, using the first name as if she didn’t hear the formality Pierre had suggested with his introduction. “What’s up? Is Ivanah okay?”
“She is attending to other business,” Buck said. Laura imagined her getting a manicure, but business took many forms.
Pierre cleared his throat. “Mister Stern wanted to let us know that Sartorial Sandwich will have to proceed without the backing of the Schmillers.”
“What?”
“All present contractual agreements are still in force, of course,” Buck said, “including payment with whatever profit sharing we previously agreed upon. Nothing new should be required. The Schmillers just wanted you to be told in person, rather than through your agent.” He nodded to Pierre, and Pierre nodded back, like two old boys sucking each other off.
“But I agreed she could work on the line with us!”
“Mrs. Schmiller will be pursuing other opportunities in the fashion world.”
Laura looked at Pierre for an answer, or a way out, but there was nothing. He just shrugged. Just another line losing its money midstream.
“I can work harder,” Laura said, and almost immediately regretted it. She sounded every bit as desperate as she was. “And I can get Ruby in more often. She was distracted last season. We’re selling. Barneys Co-op is in the showroom right now, writing an order. We just need enough for fabric. I’ll sew the whole damn line myself to save money.”
She could have gone on, but Pierre put one hand on her shoulder while holding the other out to Buck. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “Tell the Schmillers we appreciate the courtesy.”
“My pleasure.”
They shook hands, and Laura knew she was expected to show the same kind of professionalism. She didn’t know if she had it in her. Luckily, her right hand wasn’t available for shaking because either she would have refused, or he would have felt the sweat on her palms, or she would have tried to break his fingers.
Buck saw her inability to shake his hand and, not understanding what a blessing it was for everyone involved, took her by the shoulders in a brotherly grip. “It was nice to work with you. I hope to see you again sometime.”
“Sure,” was the best she could offer.
He nodded to Pierre and left.
“What the hell just happened?” she asked.
Pierre sat halfway on Ruby’s chair, one tasseled oxblood loafer swinging and the other pressed to the cement floor. “It would help going forward if you spoke more as a businesswoman and less like a teenager.”
“What the heck just happened?”
“You’re closed. You cannot make your orders.”
She fell into her chair before she lost the support of her knees. “But it’s not fair.” She heard the ridiculous whine in her voice. She must have sounded like a child. When she and Ruby were eleven and twelve, Mom had sent them to a two-week sleep-away camp that had gotten some state-funded grants for poor kids. If there was a scholarship to be had, Mom found out about it and applied. Laura had no idea how many application rejections Mom slogged through, but the benefits of her tenacity always fell on the girls. The camp was a wooded ten acres on Long Island’s gold coast, and as usual, Laura and Ruby were the freaks of the camp with their secondhand designer clothes and worn out shoes, before secondhand designer was a thing. When the bus dropped them at the outdoor amphitheater for orientation, she saw a sign draped over the stage. It read, “Camp Is Not Fair.”
And it wasn’t. The sign was meant to warn the kids that things wouldn’t always go their way, and they’d have to be okay with it, because the type of kids at the camp always got their way. But camp was going to be a change for them. It was going to be like the real world. Sometimes you got away with stuff, and sometimes you got nailed for standing up to a mean girl who made fun of your shoes, and sometimes you pulled her Calvin Klein socks off and held her down while your sister shoved them down her throat. And when Mom came to get them a week and a half early because they were kicked out, maybe the fair thing would be for them to get in trouble, but maybe she’d laugh and get them vanilla ice cream for not taking any flak from a senator’s daughter. But she wouldn’t actually say that. She didn’t advocate violence. She wouldn’t actually say her daughters had made things fair by doing what they’d done. She’d say maybe the sisters were better off urban hiking, chain-link fence climbing, and camping out in the living room.
Even though an adult definition of fairness had been a mystery before camp, but after camp, Laura still felt she knew it when she saw it, and she was not looking at it. She’d worked hard up until recently. Really hard. Day-and-night hard.
As if he could read her mind, Pierre said, “I think they decided this before the show.”
“Then what was the whole dinner at Isosceles about?”
“Feeling out their options is my guess. Who can say? At the end of the day, your destiny is not yours to write.”
“Destiny? Are you serious?”
“How else do you explain? You work very hard for this line and have it taken from you, and them? They don’t work so hard and have the power to take it. It is not equitable. It’s this type of thing that makes me miss France. At least there, we try, and we take not so much glee when we succeed at the expense of others.” She felt an odd kinship to him until he said, “Well, onward and upward! My guess is you have the weekend to clean out. You may be able to sell some of this to pay your debts, if you choose to remove the Schmillers from your life. Or you may wisely wish to elongate a bankruptcy process to keep them close. We can discuss further on Monday. I have a client show in fifteen minutes.”
He kissed both of her cheeks. “Trust me. I’m not abandoning you. There are things in the works.” Before she could ask him what he meant, he left. Another day in the life of super ninja fashion agent, Pierre Sevion, who couldn’t protect them from a flame-out.
She thought one thing might go right. There was one place where she could show a little competence and dignity. She sat alone in an office that wasn’t hers, with sewing machines silent just on the other side of the door.
Owning nothing, in charge of nothing, with little to call her own, she called Cangemi.
“Carnegie, what now? Leg caught in a thresher?”
“Rolf did it!” She told him the whole story in a single breath.
“You copied the receipts before handing them over? Claiming her expenses on your taxes is illegal, far as I know. Dunno what else you thought you were doing with them.” She was cowed into silence. “But I appreciate you calling me to tell me what I know. Except the part you don’t know, which is Rolf was in a meeting all morning, and it checks out.”
“Was he at LaGuardia? Maybe picking up a girl from a German airline?”
She was sure that if he just told her, the pieces of the puzzle would fit together with an audible click. But her optimism did not meet reality.
“Ask him the next time you’re chasing him down a stairwell, okay?”
“Please?”
“Go get a coffee, Carnegie.”
He hung up on her.
CHAPTER 22.
She wanted Jeremy. She wanted to tell him everything through a veil of tears. She wanted him to tell her everything was going to be totally cool, that he’d hire her back and she shone with a brilliance only matched by his own spectacular light. But his show was in eight hours, and there was a pretty good chance of blood on the walls, burned-out sewing machine motors, overflowing steamers, and frayed nerves and seams.
Then she thought of Ruby, sitting in a tight little room with Debbie Hayworth, being nice to her to the point of supplication. Debbie would be making her grovel, Corky not understanding any of it. Even if she didn’t feel like she could make a success of the day, Laura figured at least she could keep it from being the very worst day on record, and she could get some nibble of satisfaction. So she ran down to 38th and across town to Broadway, until her veins and lungs constricted and her arm ached from holding up that goddamn, inconvenient stinker of a cast.
The elevator took forever even though it was right there. Jeremy’s reception area was full of racks on the way to the freight elevator, but she didn’t care. She wanted to get to Ruby. She wanted to rescue her sister from past foibles with other people’s boyfriends and dalliances with supermodels, because if she couldn’t save herself and her company, goddamn it, her sister was the next best thing. Maybe even the next better thing.
Debbie sat at the table, alone, writing on what looked like an order sheet. There wasn’t a Binder Girl in sight. Corky had the look of a man who’d just gotten beaten with a tired stick. He smiled because that was his default setting, but his eyes said something else was going on.
“Hi,” Laura said, slipping into a chair. “Where’s Ruby?” The tension in the room was as thick as a blizzard. Why was no one talking?
“Oh, my God,” Debbie squeaked. “I thought you weren’t even coming.”
“I’m sorry.” Laura glanced at Corky because Debbie appeared to be actually writing an order. In ink.
Corky looked diffident where he should have been bursting at the seams. “Co-op wants a wool crepe dress. Like this one, but—”
Debbie finished writing and chimed in, “No belt. No pocket. Take off the sleeves and get it to a four-fifty retail, and we can put it on the floor.” She ripped the P.O. out of the pad and slid the paper to Laura. She had crossed off the company name and written “Laura Carnegie.”
Laura looked at the number at the bottom. “This is a big order for us,” Laura said.
“We can do it,” Corky said. “I’m sure we can figure it out.”
“There’s nothing to figure out.” Debbie smiled. “We need this immediately to fill a space where someone can’t deliver. It’s an all-door buy. I’ll bring you our colors.”
“This is private label?” Laura asked. “Or does it have a Sartorial label?”
“Barneys,” Debbie said.
“And you want us to take the belt off, make it sleeveless, and do it in your colors for a four-fifty retail? I think we can.” She knew they could. It was Jeremy’s tack on fabric, and it was coming early, undyed. So it could be put in Barneys colors using a dye house in North Carolina that Yoni liked. She couldn’t have asked for anything more perfect. Outstanding news. There were enough dresses on that order form to keep them in business another season. It was a private label deal, which meant a Barneys label, Barneys rules, and Barneys colors. But that was fine. Better than fine. It was a godsend.
“Great! Wow, I don’t know if we can still do this dress for our line since it’ll be so close, but we’ll figure it out. Thanks, Debbie. We’re not going to let you down.”
“So it’s okay that it’s just you and not Ruby?”
“What do you mean? How can it not be Ruby? She designed it.”
“If you say so,” Debbie said, slipping a binder in her bag. “Except that we’re changing the colors, the belt, and the sleeves. I mean, if she has a lock on every sleeveless wool crepe dress in the world, well, that’s one for the record books.” She wrinkled her nose. “I know I can count on you to execute. Okay? You just figure it out, and thanks!” She tiptoed out of the room as if she knew how much of a mess she’d just made.
Laura and Corky stood in silence, looking at each other and wondering what the hell had just happened.
“Did you offer this? Did you tell her we could cut out Ruby?”
“It was her idea from the beginning.” Corky started hanging garments. “She came in with an attitude problem about how she only needed you because you were the one who knew how to do things. And asking then about how Ruby liked it in jail, and how involved she’d be, and blah, blah, blah. Ruby tried to make the best of it, but girl, it was ugly. Real ugly.”
“Where is she?”
“I think she went next door.”
Laura found Ruby in Jeremy’s office, looking through his swatches as if there was a Fall line to develop for. The design room was dead, and reception had been cleared, so she had the place to herself. It had been repainted and re-floored since Gracie Pomerantz’s body had been found there. The owner of the office was not one to fall on ceremony or sentiment. He did not believe Gracie’s spirit lingered, and though the incident had upset him enough to earn a month off for everyone, once it was over, as far as he was concerned, it was over.
“Does Jeremy know you’re here?”
Ruby stacked the fabric samples by color, which Jeremy would never do. He could make orders big enough to dye his own colors, and thus he organized everything by concept. And he was going to be unhappy to see everything reorganized. Ruby, who knew Jeremy well enough to know that, but apparently didn’t care, continued messing around while she spoke. “He sent me in here like he was sending me to my room. I was crying, and I think it embarrassed him. How did you ever work for him?”
Laura wanted to get the conversation off Jeremy’s rigid social demeanor and onto the reason Ruby was in his office in the first place. “I heard about Barneys Co-op.”
“I let her write the order because Corky chased me out, but we can’t do it. I know you think I didn’t work hard for all this, but I did, and she can’t decide to kick me out. She doesn’t know what a favor I did her. That guy, whatever his name was—”
“Darren.”
“He kissed like he wore a neck brace. I mean, do you know how hard it is to kiss someone who refuses to tilt his head?” She held up a burgundy voile, as if she didn’t know if it went with the reds or the purples or the browns.
“We need to figure this out,” Laura said.
“Figure what out?”
“How to take that order.”
Ruby’s face melted like a ball of wax in the sun. She gripped the cardboard at the top of the header, bending it.
Laura jumped in. “I went to meet Ivanah this morning, and she wasn’t even there. They pulled our backing. Everything. Even the seven hundred dollars we had left over. Pierre has nothing else lined up. We don’t have a business at all, period. But if we take this order, it’s for winter, and we can deliver it and have enough money to star
t small again without a backer. I mean real small.”
“You mean you can start again.”
“No, I’d pick it up again with you.”
“Do you think she’s going to let that happen? She’s always going to have more orders for you. As long as I’m anywhere near, she’s going to come to you for the Laura exclusive, and it’s always going to be easy, and it’s always going to be just enough to keep you going. Maybe a little more each season, so you think, ‘Oh, next season we’ll start Sartorial together again.’ I’m sorry, but you can’t see that?”
“What if I promised you, just this once? Then you’re back. Scout’s honor.” Laura used her left hand to hold up the cast a little, so Ruby would see two fingers twisted together, even if it was impossible to get them up to her forehead. That may or may not have been a scout salute, but it was all they ever had.
Ruby folded her arms, the burgundy voile draping from her armpit. “You can do what you want, but she’ll have control of you.”
“There’s always someone in control, isn’t there? Either it’s the boss, or the buyer, or freaking MAAB with their rules. Who’s not controlled by someone else?”
“Thomasina wasn’t. She just did what she wanted. I admired that.”
“Tough luck being rich and beautiful.”
“It got her murdered.”
But Laura was already lost in thought. “Everyone’s controlled by somebody, Ruby. Everyone’s afraid of something someone else will do. Who was she afraid of?”
“Oh, God, are you doing this again?”
“She wasn’t afraid of her sociopath brother?”
“He was a kitten with her.”
“What about MAAB?”
“In her pocket.”
“Roquelle Rik?”
“Give me a break.”
“Younger models?”
“Never.”
“Old age?”
“You’re being an idiot now.”
2 Death of a Supermodel Page 21