Dead is the New Black Read online

  Yoni sat in production, between the fabric buyer and the trim buyer. Her desk was piled with paper, swatches, mockups, and buttons stuck to cards. She had label approvals, hangtags and laces. She had a pile of purchase orders so precariously tall, it could only be staying up by the sharing of electrons between layers of dust. But if you wanted something, whether a button from 2009 or tomorrow’s purchase order, she handed it to you in three seconds flat.

  Of course, she was impeccable—Israeli by birth, Parisian by migration, and Upper West Side by marriage. She ate what she wanted and never gained an ounce except for the fifteen pounds during her pregnancy, which didn’t seem to affect her emotionally or physically. She had taken a week off after the birth before resuming her sixty-hour weeks. Jeremy had called her a machine, and once hid her desk chair to force her to take a day off.

  She hung up the phone as Laura approached.

  “Hi, Yoni,” Laura said. “Do you have an approval on the Tate Poplin?”

  “Yes,” Yoni replied. She ran her finger down a pile of indistinguishable papers and stuck her finger in the middle, drawing out a piece of cardstock with a cutting of poplin stapled to it. She handed it to Laura, who really didn’t need it.

  “It’s approved for fabric not color,” Yoni continued, leaning back in her chair. “I heard you saw him this morning?”

  “Yeah. I’m usually up early, so I went before work.”

  “Never imagined you were so ambitious,” she said, downgrading the whole trip to Rikers from “travelings of an important person” to “manipulative gesture.” She raised a perfect eyebrow. Laura didn’t read hostility into Yoni’s manner, only a warning that she wasn’t going to answer to a patternmaker, no matter where she spent her mornings.

  “You know me,” Laura said, stating the obvious by stating the opposite. “He wanted to know if you picked up TOP for the Mardi dress? He said he left it in reception.”

  “Of course I did,” she said, standing. She strode to her rack and flicked through it.

  “You’re at the 40th Street factory a lot, right?”

  Yoni nodded, but gave no indication that she felt inclined to answer.

  “Do you ever need any help?” Laura asked. “I mean, with Jeremy gone, temporarily, but who knows for how long, I started thinking, are you in the lurch at all over there?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Was Jeremy going over there with you, and do you need help managing it if he’s not doing it anymore?”

  A smirk played on the corner of her perfectly lined lips, as she picked through the season’s production. Laura suspected she knew exactly where the Mardi dress TOP sample was, but was stalling to see what Laura would say next.

  “I worked in a seamless factory in Tel Aviv when I was fifteen. That was about twenty-five years ago. How old are you again?”

  “Twenty-four,” Laura squeaked.

  “And you think you have something to offer me?”

  “I can make sure you get help, if you’re in a spot. But listen, if you’re okay without Jeremy here…” Laura foundered. She wanted an answer, but felt the conversation spinning into a territorial pissing match.

  “You will not interpose yourself on my department,” Yoni said, slipping the soft pink sleeveless dress from the rack.

  “I’m not trying to interpose myself.”

  “Nor will you nose around my work. If Jeremy needs to know something about his business, he will call me. He will not get his information from a novice patternmaker, no matter how talented. Do we understand each other?”

  “I’ll tell him to call you if he needs anything.” Laura took the dress and draped it over her arm. She wanted to get away from Yoni immediately and look at the hemline.

  “Good girl,” Yoni replied, seemingly unthreatened by Laura’s implication.

  “You can go over to 40th without him,” Laura said, stepping backward.

  “I always do,” Yoni replied, returning to her work.

  It wasn’t the best news in the world, but it was what she had come to Yoni’s desk for. Laura walked back to her side of the office. The unpleasantness of the conversation with Yoni was just sinking in when she walked through the showroom and heard André’s most cutting voice.

  “Do you have an answer? You don’t, do you? Because I want you to tell me how that makes any sense.” André sat at the conference table with his three salespeople. “We presold it to Federated. What should I do? Tell them non?”

  Tiffany stood at one end, clutching her binder and looking as if she’d just been slapped. “But Jeremy said to?”

  “And I said not to. Does this bother you? Because this is how I work.” Rage fogged his Gucci glasses. Everyone stared at their binders, not wanting to cross André, as he headed their department and no one knew what that inexplicably close relationship with Jeremy was all about. Laura was in no position to judge or understand. She was, however, in a position to save Tiffany from being bullied.

  André saw her approach. “Here’s our little mouthpiece.” He swung to face her. “The matte jersey group is in.”

  “We have no fabric,” she said.

  “Wrong!” He leaned in like he did when he knew he was right, and he was going to stick the knife in real deep so he could watch you bleed. “We have four rolls of black at the factory.”

  “They’re damaged.” She had no idea how she had gotten into a defensive position with him, but every chemical in her blood told her to run. “There’s barre all over it.”

  He paused. Apparently, he didn’t know barre was a flaw in knit fabrics that created an uneven, striped effect, and Laura was pleased to hold her knowledge over him for a second.

  “No, it’s not. Besides, it’s presold to Federated. It’s gorgeous. If you can’t get the fabric from the factory, I’ll do your job for you.”

  “Did they write purchase orders? Or shake your hand?” Laura asked.

  Pause. “They wrote it. Of course.” He held up his palms and looked at everyone, as if to let them know he was dealing with a complete idiot.

  “Get me the paper, and I’ll show Jeremy when I see him. I’m sure it’ll be fine. Worst case, we sell it, but don’t show it.”

  “Are you telling me how to do my job?” He slung his shoulders back and spoke a hair more slowly, as though he knew he had her where he wanted her. “I want to see Jeremy tomorrow.”

  Laura wanted to tear off his face, but refrained. “You can call his lawyer.”

  “I want his number on my desk in five minutes.” He sat down again, dismissing her by the repeal of his attention. She could do nothing but take her pride and walk away. He’d have the number and everything else he wanted, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Running the office while Jeremy was gone wasn’t going well at all.

  She and Tiffany walked back to the design room.

  “Thanks,” Tiffany said. “He’s such a jerk.”

  “I don’t know why Jeremy even keeps him around. He’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

  “I found this place on Canal?” Tiffany always made everything sound like a question. “They have pepper spray for like, four dollars? I got some extra if you want to buy one off me?”

  “Sure,” Laura agreed. “I guess we can’t be too careful with a killer around.”

  As they passed Jeremy’s working office with the yellow crime scene tape across the door, she remembered why she had been on the production side of the company in the first place. For the TOP hem. She held the Mardi dress up and looked at the hem.

  “What?” Tiffany asked.

  Laura didn’t have the heart to explain why a perfectly even hem was a bad thing.

  CHAPTER 8.

  “It was perfect,” Ephraim said, the sound of his cold audible over the phone. “I’m sorry, Laura. I told the police the same thing. The shipment was perfect when I left on Friday, and it was perfect when I put it on the truck this morning.”

  “Are you sure, Ephraim
?” Laura had called the floor manager at the 40th Street factory as soon as she saw the hem. “Maybe half of it was wrong, and the other half looked good?”

  “Miss Laura,” he said, and Laura suddenly realized she had stepped on yet another set of toes. “I look at the whole shipment. Every garment. We have the best garment makers in New York working this floor, so please.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to be thorough.” She rubbed her head. This wasn’t going well. “You run the best floor in the city; everyone knows that.”

  “I run the only floor left in the city.” He was right.

  Ruby beeped into the call, saving Laura from yet another apology. “Are you going to Mom’s tonight for the laundry? I want to go over these sketches with you guys. Michael gave me a budget, and I don’t know if I’m going to make it.”

  Laura eagerly agreed to spend the evening talking about someone else’s problems.

  “I can do it.” Mom took bags of vegetables out of a fridge she had found on the street sometime in the nineties. “I’ll dig out my crochet needles.”

  “I’d really appreciate it.” Laura folded her laundry into a neat cube. “André won’t drop this group Jeremy said to drop, and I feel like I can’t do what Jeremy asked me to do. So if you come, it’ll be like I actually did something right.”

  “He’s going to get out soon.” Mom rinsed a bouquet of leafy greens as she talked. “So, it’s not going to matter if André puts that group back or not.”

  “I don’t know.” Laura glanced at Ruby, who hovered over a sketchpad, taking fourteen yards of fabric out of her wedding dress sketch. “I found the TOP that was supposed to prove his alibi, and it doesn’t.”

  “How does a TOP prove an alibi?” Ruby didn’t even look up from the black paper she used to sketch with white chalk and pencil. “You can’t put it up on the stand or anything.”

  “Jeremy said he was in the factory all night trimming the hems on this shipment because he saw a bad TOP on Saturday. But we can’t find the bad TOP, only a good one. With no bad TOP, it just looks like everything was perfect in the first place.”

  Mom shook off the salad, while the kitchen sink popped and whined, shaking the pipes so hard it seemed like the wall would burst in a spray of plaster and lath. Mom made it a habit to crawl under there with a monkey wrench and a rag, and nothing had burst. And even if it had, the landlord wouldn’t have fixed it without a subpoena.

  “Have you considered that he might have done it?” Mom asked, matter-of-factly.

  “Yes,” Ruby said.

  “No!” Laura shouted.

  “Well,” Mom started, as she slid into her tiny, handmade kitchen nook with the girls. “He did have a lot to gain from her death, what with her having so much control of his business.” Mom made many statements that were ridiculous and poorly informed, mostly because she watched the news all day.

  “So, he strangled her in the office with a zebra-printed silk swatch? How does that make sense? If he wanted to kill her to help his company, he would have made it look like an accident or a robbery or something.”

  “So you think it was a crime of passion?” Ruby blew eraser crud off her paper. “Like he killed her in a lover’s rage?”

  “He’s gay,” Laura said triumphantly.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Mom mumbled, ripping into the romaine. There was silence for a second. Their father, a musician so heartbreakingly handsome he could make money playing spoons on a street corner, had left Mom when Laura was six months old. Mom had heard, years later, that he was seen dancing on a float in San Francisco’s Pride parade.

  “Well,” Ruby said, artfully changing the subject while keeping on point, “I’d give the husband a good look. He’s been like hands-off with the fashion business but, to me, that means he might have looked at it one day and found out something he didn’t like.”

  “And he killed her?” Laura was incredulous. “In the office?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  Mom interjected, “What goes on between married people, Laura, I promise you, it’s always complicated.”

  As if she finished just in time to break an unbearable tension, Ruby held up her sketchbook, and they looked.

  “It’s gorgeous,” Laura said, already making the pattern in her mind. “That bustle alone is like, eleven yards.”

  “Maybe we can get some cheap poly from Harry’s?”

  Mom crossed her arms. “I’m not sewing your wedding gown in some garbage.”

  “But, Mom…” Ruby flipped the book around and looked with big doe eyes at her gown. “I can’t afford it in nice fabric.”

  “You can buy a designer one from Centennial.”

  “You can alter it to be totally different,” Laura said.

  Ruby got red-faced. “You know I can’t do any of that stuff.”

  “Well, duh.” Laura pointed to herself. “You know I’m doing it, right?”

  Ruby softened and looked at her sketch. “He’s never going to go for it.” She slid the pad into her bag, along with her vision of the perfect dress. “He’s spending everything on the band.”

  Laura couldn’t look at Ruby for the crime of cheapening everything about herself, every beauty, every gift, every blessing. She wanted to choke her more at that moment than she ever had before. And since she’d wanted to choke her for most of their lives, that was saying a lot.

  CHAPTER 9.

  Tinto called at six thirty the next morning to let Laura know she wasn’t going to Rikers. After one visit, it had become a regular date he had to break. He said something about an arraignment or an indictment that she didn’t understand, and something else about a grand jury. He closed with, “I think he’ll be back at the office slave-driving you guys by the end of the week. But be up early tomorrow, wouldja? Because he’s going to start talking about dresses and crap, and I don’t care.”

  Laura contemplated the ceiling for a good long time. Since Jeremy wouldn’t be there at seven thirty with fancy coffee and simple conversation, she had every reason to stay in bed, thinking about the office. There was a fitting at two, and none of the prep was done, so she couldn’t call in sick.

  She was going to have to keep it together for the rest of the week. She wasn’t used to dealing with inter-office politicking, and now she had to be an expert at it, when all she wanted to do was sit and do her work. She had faced challenges from all sides yesterday and felt like she’d flubbed every one.

  She counted her blessings. Yoni had been up front about how she felt. Laura knew what to expect from her and, gratefully, she could expect her to continue managing production without guidance from Jeremy, which meant Laura could go about her business on the other side of the office and not worry about having to tell Jeremy something had fallen through the cracks.

  Carmella and André, on the other hand, had been less forthright. Carmella had buddied up, and André had bullied. Most likely, she’d cut André loose and let him do whatever he wanted, since he ran his department, anyway. Carmella was something different entirely. Jeremy expected Laura to make sure the show came off well, which was Carmella’s responsibility. She could easily go off the rails and spend her days in front of the building keeping R.J. Reynolds in business. She seemed to have zero territorial instinct, yet Laura didn’t want to take that as permission to use her contact with Jeremy as a reason to make the designer feel as though a patternmaker was co-opting her department. She had to assume it could all backfire, and Jeremy could return to the office to find Laura sitting at her table in a chicken suit.

  That wouldn’t do. It didn’t matter that Jeremy was out of her league on the one hand, and homosexual on the other. She would not be humiliated. Period.

  Laura met her mother out front at nine fifteen and took her into the elevator.

  Mom carried a burlap bag full of crochet needles. “I didn’t know what size needle you needed, so I brought all of them.” She opened her bag, revealing needles as thin as wires and as thick as Sharpies,
and everything in between.

  “You’ll need a few. We’re going multi-gauge.”

  As soon as the elevator doors opened, she felt something different in the office. Renee’s smile didn’t glow. The halls were empty. The music that usually drifted in from the showroom was silent. As she approached her table, the prep for the fitting was in full swing. Seventeen models were coming to have their garments pinned, tucked, and re-sewn so they flowed like magic on the runway. Usually, Jeremy and Carmella would redesign, add, drop, and change until everything looked perfect. They would accessorize and coordinate into the night. The prep, which included measuring the garments, sewing up the last of them, organizing outfits by model, and sundry yelling and screaming, was usually loud and vibrant. Today, it seemed as though the air had gone from the balloon. It was going to be a disaster.

  No one said hello. No one noticed she was about two hours later than usual. No one mentioned the matte jersey group. They just hunched like monks over an illuminated manuscript. Laura checked to make sure she wasn’t wearing a chicken suit. She led Mom to a chair and showed her the crochet graphs, keeping her voice lower than usual for reasons she only intuited. She nodded and asked questions. Anyone else would have panicked. Their freelance sweater technician had drawn a graph so complex it required four different sizes of grid paper and more stitches than most people had learned in a lifetime. Mom, though in her sixties, still had a nimble mind and fingers. Each box in the grid had an “X,” a slash or a dot, which denoted the direction of the yarn and the needle. She knew where to interpret the graph literally, and where to let complexity go. She got the idea, and Laura knew she could hand her the yarns and the beads and get to work without worrying that she would have nothing to show Jeremy the next day.

  Then, she heard it. A bellow. A raging roar like a cornered lion.

  “Why is this on a scrap of paper?!”