2 Death of a Supermodel (6 page)

He was wrong. Bob smiled at Sevion and turned right back to Laura. “Let’s stop with the bullshit.” She was initially very relieved to hear that because it was what she wanted to say from the beginning. “You’re asking for more money. But I bought this company for my wife, and she’s not happy. And if she’s not happy, I’m not happy.” He put his arm around his wife. Ivanah tried to look coy, but came off looking predatory.

Sevion shifted in his seat, and she wondered if he was thinking, as she was, that it might not be the best day for a business dinner, with or without Ruby. But Laura preferred laser attention and direct questions to obfuscation and social dancing. “How can we make you happy?” she asked, choking on the words.

Pierre made a last ditch effort to wrest control of the conversation from her. “Ms. Sidewinder is excited to review us. She said it’s in the cards for the next issue, which is tomorrow.”

Bob ignored him. “I’m concerned about my ROI. We charted this out, and since your matching backing fell through, I’m looking at a loss.”

“Can’t you take it off your taxes?” Laura had no idea what she was talking about, and Bob knew it.

“I already have tax efficiency built into my business.”

Ivanah put down her glass and spoke in her thick Eastern European accent. “This wastes time.” She pulled a small leather folder from her bag. “My husband invested in your little company because he thought it would complement my interiors. He did not invest because he believed in you, in particular. This was not for you to do whatever boring thing. You already started, so he let you do what you wanted, but that stops today. Now you will follow my sketches.”

The ridiculous charade of Laura’s good mood shattered. There was only one road, the road of flashy crap, the road Jeremy had walked with Gracie, where she got to dictate what was what because of her money. Laura didn’t know whether to let things take their course, which everyone seemed to do, and let Ivanah have what she wanted at the expense of her vision or hold fast to her vision and lose the company.

Ivanah opened the file and handed it to Laura. The only surprise was the skill with which the sketches were drawn. They were gorgeous depictions of velvets, damasks, and sparkly trims in jeweled pinks, purples, and blacks. She could see before she even picked up a piece of paper that it was a beautiful line, just not for her.

“This is what you want my company to be?” Laura asked.

“My husband’s company.”

“I’m thinking globally,” Bob said. “As a business driver, we may have to restructure to improve our value.”

“Why don’t you start your own company?” Laura tried to sound encouraging instead of surly, as though she’d just had the most awesome idea, ever. Pierre kicked her under the table.

“It’s too late,” Bob said. “It is what it is.”

Ivanah’s body language told Laura just how annoyed she was with her husband. “He told me he was buying a company that did things close to what I need. But he has no sense outside the numbers. He thought you were attached to Jeremy. This is what I wanted. And here we are.”

“Well, no,” Laura said, “that’s not how it was told to me. And the fabric’s ordered already.” She lied before she even thought about it, and then built on the lie. Dangerous. “We have an eight-week lead time on some of this stuff. We can’t change it now.”

They all looked at Pierre Sevion, who had been texting his little heart out. He glanced up with a blithe look on his face. “I don’t think there’s anything here we can’t work out. A touch here and a touch there can bring all of these to the next level. We add a few pieces that represent luxury and indulgence. And next season, we start from scratch with a new, fantastic vision that is a collaboration between extravagance, craftsmanship, and commerciality.”

“Commerciality stayed home,” Laura said, referring to Ruby, who had the sharpest sense of what would sell.

For the rest of the dinner, Bob stayed upbeat about the “new organization,” Ivanah tried not to look like a gloating victor, and Pierre tried to make lemons into peach pie.

Laura felt as though she was giving away the farm.

Laura didn’t turn on her agent until they were outside. “You
didn’t
just do what I think you just did. You didn’t just give Ivanah Schmiller the right to say what goes on the line.”

“You seem to think a few million dollars will be easy to come by, because that’s what you need.”

“Ivanah
Schmiller
? Have you seen her stuff? Have you ever even been in a room she designed? It’s like a three-ring circus of crushed velvet and chrome. It’s like someone vomited animal skin prints. The place she did for the Flusher penthouse? Did you see? She just took a handful of rhinestones and sprayed them all over the marble floor.”

“Calm down.”

“No. I will not
calm down
. Sartorial is not about carved teak buttons and chrome belt buckles. It’s not silk animal skins. It’s not about tinsel fringe. That’s what Jeremy’s for. It’s about beauty on the inside. It’s about not being obvious. You’re going to kill this line before it even takes its first breath.”

Sevion was unflustered as he hailed a cab. “There are two things you need to consider. One, at your prices, you need more beauty on the outside.” A cab stopped, and he opened the door. “Two, your sister would have gotten that money without the histrionics.”

Laura felt her bottom lip quiver, and as much as she tried to stop it, the snots came, and her eyes developed a mist that enraged her so much, they misted more.

“Don’t get upset,” Sevion said gently. “I know it feels like this is happening especially to you. But it happens with every designer, every time. I have not once seen an exception. Very, very successful designers go through this struggle every season, not just their first line. Why do you think your friend Jeremy kept sleeping with his backer? Because money was easy to find? No, because he knew what he had in her. Ask him now what he goes through without her. I believe he would do it again in a second.”

“I hate this,” she said, wiping away her tears.

“I know. Everyone does. Don’t worry. You’ll do what you have to do. Just make sure your sister is the one in the showroom with Ivanah, and in the meantime, I’ll try to find you something else.”

He got into the cab, and Laura watched it drive away.

She didn’t know who else to call. The more she looked at her short list of contacts, the more his name jumped out.

“Jeremy, I know you’re busy.”

“I’m home,” he said. “Tiffany came in sick.”

She had always thought Jeremy was oddly averse to sick people, until she learned he had cystic fibrosis, which meant that a case of the sniffles for a coworker could be nearly fatal for him. She was the only person in possession of his secret, and the only person he trusted to know.

“We never really talked that much about Gracie.”

“You want to talk about that
now
? Where are you?”

She found herself walking toward the train station, but feared there would be no way to get the conversation done with before she reached it.

“I know she had control over the line.”

“Yeah.”

“Because she had the money.”

“Right.”

She paused. The station was right in front of her, and she wasn’t ready to walk down yet. Neither was she ready to ask him tacky questions. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“Do you miss her?”

Silence. Then a cough. And another. Which meant he was working too hard. She could hear him breathing, and she wanted to cover her too-personal question with a string of jokes and denials. But she didn’t. She waited.

Eventually, as she heard the train roll into the station downstairs, he said, “Sometimes. When I don’t know what direction to take. I have no one to ask. She could have managed this expansion brilliantly.”

“But she never would have let you expand.”

“I don’t miss that.”

“Ivanah wants creative control.”

There was another long pause. A wave of commuters trudged up the stairs, and Laura stood still, getting engulfed by them.

Jeremy finally asked, “Do you trust me?”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a simple question.” She’d obviously ruffled his feathers. “Do you trust me?”

She watched a woman with a stroller in one hand and a baby in the other struggle to get down the subway stairs. Laura reflexively grabbed the front axle of the stroller and pulled without asking if the woman needed help. It filled the moments between Jeremy’s loaded question and her answer, which was, “No.”

She expected repercussions, but got only, “You trust me, and you know it. Don’t worry about Ivanah. Forget her. Get out there and talk about the line. You have a shoot tomorrow?”

“Thomasina’s dead.”

“Forget her, too.”

“That’s not nice.” She remembered Ruby’s reaction to her quick replacement of the dead girl.

“Welcome to having your own business.”

She smiled a little, wanting to tell him that even though she was just down the hall, she missed him and his rough edges terribly.

CHAPTER 4.

Home was no longer an apartment, but a house shared with her mother and sister, which was good. But it was also an hour outside Manhattan, which was not so good. The train ride to Bay Ridge, her new South Brooklyn neighborhood, took an hour, give or take, which was enough time for her to become intimate with every ad, poem, and public service announcement posted in the car. The train she was currently on was dedicated to the new lifestyle brand, Saint JJ, AKA, Jeremy.

The ads overhead, the ads by the doors, and every bit of ad space in between belonged to Jeremy’s brand. The color was a washed out orangey-red that looked like the deepest part of a flame, and the logo, the bags, and hats, even Dymphna Bastille’s lipstick, all matched. Nothing in the ads was available yet, but they were already highly coveted items. Laura closed her eyes to shut him out, sure that complete world domination was his for the taking.

Her shoulders drooped. The weight she’d been carrying in preparation for the show was lifted. She almost slept. The show had gone off well, despite the death at the end. The papers would run the story tomorrow, and her pasty face against Thomasina’s thoroughbred beauty would be all over the news tonight. Then Debbie Hayworth. And Ruby having a four-hour police interview for reasons that were completely opaque. Lastly, she was practically losing creative control of her own line because she didn’t have two nickels to rub together, and the last straw was Jeremy basically telling her to get over it.

She ruminated on how she’d started on a high note, and the whole endeavor had taken a dive after Thomasina’s death, as if all the months as a muse for Ruby had just been building up to a fine
screw you
at the end, a lovely bookend to how their relationship began. On the train ride home, she vacillated between feeling sorry for Thomasina to despising her. On the walk from the train to her block, she wondered why Jeremy was so hot to nail down her trust, and as she crossed the last street, she was about to start beating herself up over Stu when she saw the news van in front of her house.

Of course, they’d tracked her down. What surprised her were the police cars, one black and white, and one Crown Victoria with big lights. The house was a brownstone, connected to its neighbors on both sides, so there was no access from the back unless she wanted to go around the corner, scale a barbed-wire-topped wall, walk through someone’s begonias, and fight off the mixed-breed hound to land in her own backyard. That may or may not have been preferable to the knot of reporters that shone their lights in her eyes halfway down the block, but it was too late to know.

She couldn’t see any one face past the glare. There seemed to be a microphone near her, which made her want to shut up more than anything. Questions were thrown at her.

How do you feel about Thomasina Wente’s death?

Was she taking any drugs during the show?

Do you know who she was seeing?

She ducked her head. “I really can’t answer any questions right now.”

They repeated the same ones, making such an effort not to be in her way that they were completely blocking her from getting home. All she cared about was finding out what the police were doing at her house, so she barreled through, which caused them to make stronger efforts to follow, which, again, put them squarely in her way.

She recognized Akiko Kamichura more by voice than face and heard the question loud and clear. “Did you know the police think there was foul play involved?”

She stopped short, truly shocked. “No.”

“Were you with Ms. Wente right before the show?”

Her exhaustion and stress boiled to the top of her consciousness. She took a step toward Kamichura, forefinger raised, the picture of aggression. “That’s completely over the line, lady. Who the hell do you think you are? Do you have a badge? No? You don’t? Oh, that’s right. You have a second-rate journalism degree and enough silicone in your body to fill the kitchen utensil aisle at Target. It is
not
your place to ask me about my alibi. Do you understand me?”