2 Death of a Supermodel (19 page)

“You have to, sorry. And you have to play it like you’re annoyed by the whole thing. You can manage. Ivanah’s PR people are out there screwing you anyway.”

Ruby hugged her pillow and groaned as if hung over. “We saw the eleven o’clock news. I was on at eleven fifteen, falling off a runway. They didn’t even mention my shoes weren’t buckled. They blamed it all on Thomasina.”

“And you for the murder.”

Ruby got up and stood beside her, looking over her shoulder as she shuffled through the papers. “Are you going to work on this while I’m in the showroom?”

“Yeah.”

Ruby hugged Laura from behind. “Thank you.”

“For you, anything. If it was just about Thomasina dying, I’d be working on Summer and letting the police do their job.”

Ruby, maybe half as gorgeous as usual on account of exhaustion and worry, poked through the papers, which Laura organized across the table. Modeling contracts for runway. Modeling contracts for fit. Modeling contracts for print. Invoices for each.

“You saw her the night before?” Laura asked. Ruby nodded. “Dinner?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you make?”

“We ordered DiBennedetto’s.” That made sense. Ruby didn’t cook if it could be avoided.

“Did anything happen? Did she say anything? Get a phone call? Did she talk about anyone bothering or annoying her?”

“She got a call. She was talking in German. Kept saying ‘nicked,’ which I think is German for something. She was pissed.”

“What time did she leave?”

Ruby didn’t answer, so Laura plowed on. “Because whoever she saw afterwards could have poisoned her. Or there could have been some kind of fight or business meeting or something. Did she say where she was going, even?”

Again, Ruby said nothing.

“I can’t reconstruct Thomasina’s movements without you.”

“She was poisoned from the pills in her bag, right? So doesn’t that mean someone put the pill in there before, like weeks maybe? So what’s the difference what she did the night before?”

“What are you hiding?”

“Nothing, I’m just saying—”

“What time did she leave?”

“I don’t know. Do you think I look at a clock all the time?”

“Did she leave at all?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Did she stay the night?”

Ruby looked stricken for a second, and as she and Laura looked at each other, an understanding passed between them. The sudden attached-at-the-hip friendship. The knee-jerk defensiveness. The giggling in the office late at night. The truncated work hours. Jeremy asking how she was holding up. He’d seen it a mile away.

“Goddamn it, why didn’t you tell me?”

In answer, Ruby stormed into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

Fantastic. Ruby and Thomasina were doing it. No wonder the police swabbed her.

Laura knocked on the door, then banged. “Rubes, come on! Did you tell the cops?”

“Of course I did, and it makes it look like I did it even more.”

“Did she see anyone else between you and the show? Did she say she was going anywhere? Ruby? Come on. Please.”

There was a sniffle and a shuffle that sounded like a body moving against the other side of the door. “I made breakfast, and I sat and ate by myself. I don’t know if she was mad at me or what, and now I can’t even ask her or apologize.”

“You don’t know where she went?” The question seemed inappropriate, but Laura didn’t know what else to say.

“She bitched that she had no cash in her wallet, and I offered, but she wouldn’t take it. She had a total breakdown over it, and I couldn’t even do anything.”

Laura felt as if she’d missed a whole era of her sister’s life because she had no idea there had been a relationship. So she had a hard time relating to Ruby’s pain. Of course, she first had to come to terms with the fact that Ruby had been with a woman, then that she’d apparently fallen in love with said woman. Then, worse, that her sister hadn’t told her. The murder seemed paltry in comparison.

Ruby didn’t come out of the bathroom, and Laura felt there was no point in trying to squeeze more out of her without a couple of glasses of wine and a nice dinner. She tucked a folder of choice documents under her arm and walked to the train. Yoni called as Laura was coming out of the Italian deli with her coffee.

“What do you have?” Laura asked, dispensing with a greeting.

Yoni, who was perfectly comfortable without niceties, replied, “Your pill. It’s made of alkaloids. Not enough to kill you. Maybe if you took twenty or thirty. It is used to induce vomiting.”

“Perfect for bulimic models.” She tried to keep her voice down, but a bus went by, and she had to yell.

“Yes, and amateur-made, too, which I could have told you just by looking at it. The clear part anyone can get at a health food store. They stuff it with herbs. But this powder? Not amateur.”

“So you’re saying the powder comes from some place, and then someone put it into the capsules?” Laura pressed her finger to her opposite ear to close out the ambient sounds.

“Yes.”

“And the powder, any guess where it’s from?”

“We could guess, but—”

“Czechoslovakia?”

“Oh. You’ve been busy. Yes. It’s made from a daffodil bulb grown mostly in Eastern Europe.”

“Anything else?”

“My ankles hurt. I want to shoot them off. I will bleed water, my God.”

“Thanks, Yoni.”

“Get me fabric orders.”

“The wool crepe is taken care of. I’m tacking onto Jeremy’s.”

Yoni took in a sharp breath through her teeth. “Our Jeremy?”

“Yes, of course. Who else?”

“I don’t know what you did, little girl, but Jeremy, our Jeremy, never tacks on his fabric orders. He thinks it can hold him up, and he doesn’t like entanglements. He must like you more than I thought.”

“Maybe he trusts me, is all.”

Yoni, who enjoyed goodbyes as much as hellos, hung up unceremoniously.

Jeremy liking her more than Yoni thought was good news, she guessed, but it made her feel as though he’d agreed to do it for the wrong reasons, because he liked her, which gave her a weird sense of power and made her uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. She wanted to call him and tell him he didn’t have to tack the order, and she’d asked him at a really bad time.

She heard the train pull in underground as she was dialing, and she had to run down the stairs or miss it. Luckily, she couldn’t get a signal underground.

The person Laura really wanted to find was Meatball Eyes. The model could tell where she was from, who represented her, how she got to New York, and whether or not she’d been saved by a goddess in shining armor named Thomasina or Sabine, or whatever. The girl could also tell all about Rolf, and his involvement with the foundation.

But Laura had no access to the girl outside of Rolf, who never left a phone number or slip of information anywhere. And she wasn’t about to stand outside Baxter City, waiting for him to show.

Roquelle Rik was the only connection Laura could make at the moment. A modeling agency, be it U.S.-based or otherwise, did not open its doors without Roquelle knowing about it, and the prettiest girl in any such agency would be immediately poached like an egg at Sunday brunch.

The offices of The Mermaid Agency stressed sexuality and sexual power, without yield or surrender. The women plastered over the walls, floor to ceiling, were aggressive, confident, and as inaccessible as the mythical creatures after which they were named.

Thomasina’s face gazed at Laura from behind the reception desk, with grainy black and white eyes literally as big as stop signs. Piercing. Perfect. She looked angry and hungry, like a tiger that hadn’t eaten in weeks. Fresh flowers, lilies, orchids, in wickedly expensive arrangements, dropped petals on the floor beneath her chin. Soon, their dead star’s picture would be gone, replaced with another angry thoroughbred who had to have the busted capillaries under her nose Photoshopped out of existence.

Laura was intimidated for a second, as always when she walked into the office. Then she reminded herself that those eyes were dead, and she was there to avenge the death on behalf of her sister, who had been having sex with the owner of the stop sign eyes.

The receptionist smiled with lovely, natural teeth that were the product of good genes and better habits. Her eyes lit up the room with an approachability that must have been planned to counter the aggression in Thomasina’s snarl. “Ms. Carnegie, how are you?” She had obviously been hired for a cracker-jack memory in addition to the sunny disposition.

“I’m good. Is Roquelle available?”

Sunny’s brows knitted, and her gaze went to her computer screen. “Do you have an appointment?”

“I need to ask her about the Pandora Agency.”

“I’m sorry. It seems she’s in a meeting.”

“I’ll wait.” Laura sat on the leather bench with a seat higher than any other bench she’d sat on. She could only guess it was because of the height of the women coming through there. She texted Roquelle:

—I’m in recep. Need 2cu re a White Rose girl

Then she waited. Thomasina stared at her, and Laura imagined the snarl turning into as much of a smile as one could get from a giraffe within ten feet of a camera. The smile said,
Your sister fell in love with me, and she didn’t even tell you. She was scared of you. She did whatever I told her. She dropped all that work in your lap because she was with me. And I was with someone else, too. Because I could.

The taunts were circular, running from subject to subject, and cause to effect, and cause to cause in no productive order. In fifteen minutes, Laura went from hating the heiress, to feeling sorry for her, to being mystified, to curious, to disgust, to rage, to sympathy, to intimidation, to intimacy, and all the way back again.

And where it landed was:
You should have seen it, but you were too busy working.

She hadn’t been too busy to miss a new pair of shoes, however, especially not a pair of Jimmy Choos on Ruby’s very own living-off-her-savings feet. They weren’t a pair of vintage Choos, either, but that season’s, spanking new from not even the back of Otto Tootsi Plohound on Fifth where the size elevens went to die.

Laura had stopped being surprised or excited when Ruby walked in with some new, wildly expensive accessory, so she just looked at her and said, “Nice Choos.”

Jeremy followed from the hallway with a fabric swatch for a stretch panel and glanced at the expensively shod feet. “You got the red,” he said, tossing Laura the fabric. She caught it in midair.

Ruby tilted her leg so Laura could see the shoe from the side. It was a stiletto, naturally, with straps shaped like an art deco window panel and a heel curving at an angle made possible by some technology that had been unavailable two years before. “The black was too serious,” she said.

He stepped behind her and looked from behind. He and Ruby had developed an odd relationship, like siblings who tolerated each other because Mom was watching.

“There were five pairs of those in the entire city,” he said, “in your size, I mean.” That was a lovely taunt. Ruby wore size eight and a half, big even for her height at five-seven, which Jeremy knew from the gold shoe-buckle incident six months prior. “Did you hear?” He slipped the pattern Laura was working on across her desk. “Dymphna Bastille had them special ordered, and Thomasina Wente went to Plohound and managed to get them instead. There was a scene at Grotto.”

Laura spread out the foot-square of fabric. He stretched the fabric, and she measured it, punching the number into a calculator.

“Oh, a scene at Grotto,” Laura said dryly. “Imagine.” She handed Jeremy a ruler.

He measured across the widest point of the bust. “I don’t know how either one of them got the spoon out of their nose long enough to fight about shoes. Add another quarter here, and I think we’re okay.”

Ruby chimed in, “Don’t say stuff like that.”

“She not bothering with the spoon anymore?” he asked.

“It’s not right, Jeremy. You shouldn’t spread rumors.” Ruby’s sense of social right and wrong wouldn’t let it drop as a joke.

Laura glanced at Jeremy, hoping he wouldn’t make another cutting remark because she couldn’t stop her sister from being who she was. Laura needed his help, and she needed things to be pleasant between the two of them. He took a second to regard Ruby, looking at her a little sideways, pursing his lips slightly as if he had to keep words from tumbling out.

Laura couldn’t stand the silence. “Oh, Ruby, come on! You know Thomasina gossips with the worst of them and spends forever in the bathroom like all the other girls. And Jeremy, you know better than to say anything to Ruby about her friends. I mean, my God, just try and say anything bad about me, even if it’s true, and she’ll take your eye out with one of those heels. Now, get out of here. I have work to do.”

Maybe that last bit took it too far. He didn’t like being told what to do even if she was half-joking. Or maybe she’d given him the moment he needed to think of a way to make his point and, quite possibly, he was making that point for her benefit, because she was blind, dumb, and tired.

“Thomasina’s an eight and a half, isn’t she?” Without waiting for an answer, he winked at Laura before heading back to his own factory floor, which she knew he managed to keep going by taking handfuls of drugs while no one was looking and maintaining a five- to ten-mile a day running habit to strengthen his lungs.

He had been trying to tell her something. Either Ruby was borrowing Thomasina’s shoes, or the model had snapped them from under Dymphna because Ruby couldn’t afford full-price limited-run Jimmy Choos. Nor did her sister have the connections to get them. Anyone could see that. Anyone could see that the relationship between the designer and the supermodel had gone rogue, except Laura. She had just put her head back into the pattern and thanked the stars above and the gods of geometry that the tension had left the room.

“Laura Carnegie!” Roquelle interrupted her reverie, standing over her, a bit too close, with a smile a little too stretched. “You left before the cleanup yesterday. I was looking for you.” To Sunny, she said, “Push my nine up half an hour and shift the rest. Shift my eleven thirty to tomorrow lunch and move that to the usual breakfast at Marlene X.” Without waiting for a response, she led Laura past reception, into the guts of the agency with its matching cubbies and equally well-coordinated assistants.