Dead is the New Black (21 page)

All the guys looked the same to her in their tracksuits and short hair. There wasn’t going to be some sort of arranged chance meeting between her and Mario. She would have to ask about him.

The bartender was way out of hailing distance, laughing it up with a guy in a Hugo Boss coat that had the little woven label on the left cuff, the label with the brand name that they stitched on so that, in a store, when you looked at a rack of coats, you could pick out the Hugo Boss or the Armani or whatever without having to flip open the lapel. You were supposed to take off the label when you got home. Those people were just too stupid. She sipped her drink and guessed that half the women in the place had hanger tape drooping from their necks.

When Stu slid in next to her, she asked, “When you buy a suit jacket and you can’t get your hands into the pockets, do you assume you just bought a jacket with non-functional pockets, or do you rip the stay stitch out like you’re supposed to?”

“I don’t wear those kinds of jackets.” He picked up his drink. “There’s a bunch of guys in a back room.” He indicated the hallway to the bathroom. “I bet he’s in there.”

“I want to go home.”

“It’s a long ferry ride back. You may as well do what you came here to do.”

He was right, as usual. She had come to find out who Carmella was, and what she was fighting about the night of the murder, and that was what she was going to do. Laura finished her whiskey and stood up.

“What’s your plan?” Stu asked.

“The bulldozer method. Go in and ask questions. If they don’t answer, ask again. If they want an explanation, ask more questions.” Before he could follow up, she walked toward a little hallway with a restroom sign. She didn’t check to see if he followed, but could feel his presence behind her like a guardian angel. If he hadn’t been with her, she would have found a way to avoid that back room like Jeremy avoided the factory floor.

CHAPTER 20.

The lighting got brassy in the little hallway—another missed detail. But should she attribute it to a simple lack of taste? Or was it a general carelessness? That was important, and would inform how she managed herself in the room.

Before she had a chance to change her mind, she burst through the open door to the sloppy back room, another blemish on an already imperfect
mise en scene
, and felt a whizzing slip of wind by her face, like a moth traveling at Mach four. Then, she heard a little
thup
, and a cheer from a group of four Staten Island boys, with Mario right there in the middle. His eyes were glazed from God knows what, and an elbow jutted into the ribs of the tall guy with the Hugo Boss label on his sleeve. A pipsqueak in a white satin shirt open to the navel leaned into a blond hipster who looked like he’d gotten lost on the way back from Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Mario had two darts in his hand and held his arms out as if to say “come at me,” then he saw she wasn’t a threat. “Did I hit the bullseye or miss it? I can’t tell.”

Laughter and high fives all around. Laura looked to her right and saw a dartboard with a dart buried smack in the middle. It must have missed her by millimeters.

“That’s a dumb-ass place for a dartboard,” she said.

And Mario laughed. She didn’t know if he was on drugs, or if he was just so relaxed that anything she said would have added to his good time. She had anticipated a lot of things about him, but she wasn’t ready for him to be so self-assured. Confidence came off him like smoke off a block of dry ice. Carmella was no dummy. An insecure man wouldn’t have tolerated her.

“It goes there,” he said. “Keeps crazy girls out.”

“Apparently not,” she said, stepping into the room. She felt more than heard Stu standing behind her.

“All hot girls are crazy,” Pipsqueak said. “So sit yourself down.” He nudged a chair. It was the aluminum folding kind with that wide plastic weave she’d seen in photographs of porches in the ‘70s. She was disinclined to sit in it, as everyone else was standing.

“You’re Mario?” She glanced back at Stu, who leaned in the doorway. He was going to just let her do whatever she had to. She didn’t know if he was being respectful, or a journalist, or both.

“I know you.” Mario pointed at her, pivoting his hand at the wrist, with his other fingers at every ugly angle he could bend them. “That party in the City. Last Saturday night.”

When an outer-borough type said “the City,” and you heard the capital C at the head of the word, they meant Manhattan.

“On 36th street? I don’t remember meeting you.” It wasn’t a lie. She and Carmella hadn’t gone to the party together, so no one was under any obligation to do introductions.

He held out his hand and pulled the chair out less like a cartoon thug and more like a businessperson. “What brings you out to the Island?”

Laura sat down. “I heard you knew Carmella Ulfanti, and I wanted to track her down outside of work.”

“Carmella, yeah,” he said, as if they’d met once or twice at a party. He pressed his two darts into the Hipster’s hand. “What are you drinking?”

“I’m fine.”

“You work with Carmella?” He was being incredibly cordial, considering she had just strolled in and criticized his dartboard placement. Behind her, the game continued as if nothing had changed.

Mario threw himself into the chair behind the big oak desk and flung his feet onto the top, over a well-worn groove in the edge. He snapped up a short string of blue plastic beads and swung them around his finger. He wore a wedding band. Laura didn’t know much about Carmella’s life, but as far as she knew, the designer wasn’t married or, if she was, she sure acted single.

“I live on the East Side,” she said, which gave away nothing about her actual pedigree.

“And you work with Carmella? What do you do?”

“I’m a patternmaker.” She expected to have to explain, but he nodded as if he knew exactly what that was. “I’m really sorry to bother you, but the cops showed me a video of Carmella going up into the elevator the morning Gracie Pomerantz was killed. And I don’t know if she knows that they know.”

Mario just stared at her for a beat, flicking the string of blue beads with his fingertip, calculating something, but Laura didn’t know what.

“Who’s this guy?” He indicated Stu.

“He’s with me.”

Mario tilted his chin up to Stu. “Hey, you wanna sit down or you gonna wear out the floors?”

“I’m good here. Got a cramp in my leg I’m trying to work out.”

“Man’s got a cramp.” Mario turned to the hipster. “Hey, Jefferson, I hear you got good hands. Give this guy a thigh rub so’s he can cramp his ass on a chair.”

Apparently, that was wildly amusing, and Laura glanced at Stu. He shrugged. She turned her attention back to Mario. He clicked his beads and stared at her, saying nothing, obviously a graduate of the Sheldon Pomerantz School of Intimidation.

“So, is Carmella around, or can you relay the message? Because the walls have ears at work, and the cops are all over, and I’m scared like, all the time that the guy who killed Gracie’s going to come back or the cops are going to start taking more people away. I mean, they had me in a dark room looking at video of the lobby from that morning, and I’m like, look, I don’t know. Just leave me alone!”

Mario didn’t move a muscle except to rub on those goddamn beads. Then, he shrugged. “The cops can call her if they want to talk to her, right?”

“I guess.”

“You know, I’m in the rag trade, too. You see this jacket?” He flopped his lapels. “This is my stuff I got in stores all over Brooklyn. I had them copy Armani from a picture, but you know what? This ain’t Armani. An Armani’s two thousand dollars. Do I look like I have two large to spend on a jacket? What am I? An asshole?”

Laura didn’t answer the question, but looked at the jacket. It was some type of rayon-linen blend. The inside of the jacket flopped open as he sat, and Laura could see the overlock edging. The cuffs twisted, and the stitching around the lapel was crooked because the machine tension was set too tight. It was a wreck. Giorgio Armani might let his maid use it to clean the bathroom floor.

“It’s a nice jacket,” she said. “I think you and Carmella should work together. She has great taste.”

“Yeah, I think so, too. Little hoity-toity sometimes, but pretty good.”

“I know Gracie was trying to back her, but I guess that won’t be a problem any more.”

“That offer was bullshit.” Mario kicked his feet off the table and pointed his finger at Laura. “That bitch wasn’t parting with a dime for Carmella.”

“There was no harm in trying. And since Pierre Sevion’s repping her, who knows? Sky’s the limit, right?”

“So long as you don’t get so high you can’t breathe. Girl like Carmella tends to forget where she’s from.”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t have left you behind completely,” Laura said, tensing for impact.

Mario slapped his hand on the desk, clacking his ring against a pen, sending it flying, “There was no
leaving behind
. I was the goddamn money. I had her shit set up from here to Viet-fucking-Nam. I got enough money, but not the ‘right’ money. And she tells me not to take it personally. You tell me how that’s not
personal
.”

That must have been the fight at the loft party, and he was obviously still pissed about it. Whether or not he was pissed enough to kill Gracie was another thing.

“Maybe she didn’t want to partner with her boyfriend?” Laura suggested. “Or maybe she wanted someone in the business already?”

“I’m in the goddamn business.” He flicked the lapel of his Not-Armani. “I told you.”

“I saw you on that tape,” she said.

Mario snapped his fingers. “Jefferson.” Hipster looked around from his dart game. “Get her a refund and get her a cab. I got no time for this.” He took the darts from Jefferson and casually threw them at the board.
Bang-bang-bang
. Right in the middle.

Laura wanted to say something, but only good-bye and thank you guaranteed not to offend. He ignored her.

She followed Jefferson out. Stu leaned against the doorjamb with his arms crossed, and as Jefferson passed him, he brushed him to knock him off balance. Stu shrugged it off. Laura knew he’d been the skinniest guy in the room his whole life and had dealt with hallway pissing matches throughout high school.

The wait for the ferry seemed to take forever. Laura jumped up and down to keep warm. Stu sat on a bench with his arms over the back as if it were seventy degrees.

“Why would he do it?” Stu asked. “If he believed her money was bullshit he had nothing to fear.”

“Maybe it wasn’t fear. Maybe he just got mad that he was being out-financed, and maybe she just said the right thing to piss him off, and he did it.”

“Come on, Laura. You said he didn’t even go up the elevator.”

“I only saw part of the tape. He could have gone up before the fight with Carmella. Maybe when Carmella went upstairs Gracie was already dead. Or maybe he went up in a crowd, and the cops can’t see him.”

“Or maybe he scaled the walls,” Stu said. “Listen, I wasn’t going to mention anything because you’re cute when you’re curious, but we pay taxes for police.”

“Letting the police find killers? Mainstream, Stu. Mainstream.”

“You’re very invested in this murder, and I don’t know why.”

“This part of your story?”

“Maybe.”

She didn’t want to tell him that she was a suspect, because that would lead to her telling him that the cops thought she was having an affair with Jeremy, which was exactly what she was trying to do. So she gave the other reason. “I feel good when I’m doing this. I feel really… I can’t explain it.”

He considered her a second. “Alive? Powerful? Like your life has meaning? Like you’re not just making things for people to buy and throw away?”

What Laura wanted to say was that people didn’t just throw Jeremy’s things away. But that wasn’t true. Of course, they did. And there was truth in what he said, because this season’s fabulous jacket was next season’s tired old thing. And it was exhausting. And it was why people bought counterfeit goods and cheap China garbage. Because, what choice did they have?

“Gracie got between them,” she said. “And Carmella sold him out for backing.”

“Use more words,” Stu said.

“Carmella knew there was a counterfeiting ring going on, and she suspected Mario, because isn’t he just copying stuff? Who’s to say he wasn’t just putting labels in? So, she went to Gracie and told her, and Gracie promised to back a Carmella Ulfanti line. And then Mario comes down on Carmella at the party for dumping him.”

“And then he killed Gracie?” Stu flicked a leaf off Laura’s seat before she took it.

“Yes.”

He looked at her a long moment. “If this piece is going to break my career, you’re going to have to offer up more than that.”

Someone in the inner deck caught Laura’s eye, and she craned to see.

“What?” Stu asked.

“I thought I saw that Jefferson guy.” She half-stood to get a better view, but it was dark.

“Paranoia’s not the instrument of an original mind.”

“It is if someone’s after you.”

But she didn’t really mean it. She didn’t think anyone was after her, and she didn’t think Jefferson was actually on the ferry. She thought she had enough information on Mario to get the cops off her back. She thought the boat rocked just enough, and Stu was sweet, and the wind on her face was salty and wet and delicious.