Dead is the New Black (26 page)

They pinned without talking, changing the raglan sleeves to set-in, keeping the style the same otherwise, and touching and pulling the washed boucle. They didn’t need to talk about the jacket. They knew what they were thinking.

Then, Laura stood back and looked at the new style. “This mannequin can’t hail a cab without ripping her fifteen-hundred-dollar St. James.”

“This fabric is crap.”

“That kills the whole group. Between that, the matte jersey dying, and the staff you’re losing, you can sell your Friday slot to Zac Posen.”

“I’d rather stick a fork in my eye.”

“That’ll make the cover of
Women’s Wear
.”

“It’s better than going out of business, which is what’s going to happen if we don’t have a show.”

They pinned in silence, then Jeremy asked, “Why did you walk out?”

“I don’t want to tell you. I’m not ready.” It was the most honest answer she could come up with. It wasn’t
Stu
honest, but it was close.

“Once Gracie’s murder goes away or kills me, you and I have a lot to talk about.” He slipped the ruined jacket off the mannequin’s shoulders.

She looked at him as he held the jacket with one finger at the collar, staring at her intently as if he wanted to say what needed saying now rather than later. She joined him in wanting to say it all right now. What stopped her was the specter of his former backer and her widower.

He continued, “I need you to know I’m not a murderer.”

“I know you’re not.”

“No, you don’t.”

He was right. She hadn’t let herself think it, but there was always a spark at the back of her mind that suggested he might have done it, that she could be wrong, or that there was something the police knew that she didn’t.

“He’s going to get away with it,” Laura said. “And that’s what’s really burning my ass.”

“I keep thinking about that TOP, Laura. The one you got from Yoni. It was perfect, right?” She nodded. “That was from the shipment I fixed. I brought it back and put it on the desk for Yoni to pick up. I thought the bad one was still behind Renee’s desk.”

“Well, it’s gone. Are you sure you didn’t bring it back to 40th street?”

He nodded and turned back to the jacket. “This is a dead issue. We have to resurrect the matte jersey group, or it’s going to be a three-minute show.”

André came in and said Jeremy’s name. Laura’s former boss put the pins down and excused himself, shuffling toward the head of sales with purpose. She grabbed her rabbit and her metal rulers, scraping them on the desk as she moved them.

The sound drew Jeremy’s attention, and he turned back around. “We need you.”

“I’m not signing a contract.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I’m not working for Sheldon, either.”

“Work for me on an hourly basis until this gets sorted out. Name your price.”

“I’m expensive.”

He spun and walked out with André.

Laura stayed. Tiffany showed up, with Chilly right behind. The sewers and cutters followed. She drafted a pattern and left it on the cutter’s table with a cut ticket. She logged her start and finish times and decided she needed some lunch.

As she headed for the west side, she wondered if she should have told Jeremy how she felt when the opportunity presented itself. He was right in front of her, asking. It wasn’t going to get any easier than that.

The blizzard had stopped, and she decided to walk a block for a burrito. She deserved it for kind of getting back her job or maybe because her tooth was chipped. But she put on a sense of gastronomic entitlement and headed down to the Mexican joint.

Which was closed because of the weather.

She looked around and traced her steps down 39th, searching her mind for all the eateries down that way, and west, and a block east where she’d never normally go, and she thought about how one traces one’s steps and wondered again how Jeremy had lost that bad TOP and failed to mention it until just recently.

Because when you lose something that important, don’t you usually retrace your steps?

She found herself heading out for Japanese, which happened to be on 39th and Eighth, and then when she found that, yes, they were open, but she had forgotten how expensive they were. She headed over to Tenth. It was turning into an epic walk, but there was another Mexican place over that way, which she decided not to go to, in favor of the Deli on 39th and Eleventh.

All of that took about forty minutes and, in the end, she bought a bag of peanuts from the Korean grocery and went where she had wanted to go in the first place—the last production floor in New York, on 40th Street and Eleventh Avenue.

The factory floor was more than a floor—five stories and storage in the basement on a fifty-year lease, signed back when it seemed like the garment industry would be the center of New York’s financial life forever. Showrooms and offices occupied the other floors, tolerating the
bzzt bzzt
of sewing machines from upstairs or down.

Laura saw dust bunnies in every corner, hairy with multicolored threads, peeking out from under tables and clinging to chair casters. She saw the grime in the door grooves, and the worn part of the brass buttons where the hands of all the other elevator riders had rubbed the metal away. How a child with cystic fibrosis had survived his afternoons there, with its ancient wool and silk in every corner, was a miracle. The factory floor had made him sick, and he’d stayed home from school, learning patterns and sewing and pressing, making himself sicker as the fibers of the years of fashion built up, until he could stand it no more.

At least that was what she let herself think as she walked up to the glass door. The reception area on the third floor was little more than a front room with an empty metal desk. There might have been someone sitting there when the St. James’s ran their uniform business exclusively from the factory but, when Laura looked in, it was no more than a way station to the sewing floor. She rang the bell and waited a good three minutes before Ephraim shuffled out, waving an apology as he cracked open the door. He was in his fifties, hunched from decades sitting over industrial machines, and sallow from a life under fluorescents.

“I’m sorry. I was at the other side.” He touched his face where the mirror image of her bruised cheek was, and asked, “What happened?”

“Had to take Mike Tyson down, and he got one in.” She rolled her eyes. Ephraim smiled noncommittally. “Jeremy sent me over for some enamel logo zipper pulls we used last October delivery. We thought you might have some leftovers?”

“Come, come.” He opened the door all the way. “I don’t know if they put them on the fourth yet.” He meant the fourth floor, which was exclusively for storage and inaccessible without code and key. “But you can check back here.”

He guided her onto the sewing floor, with its rows of green industrial machines, pressers, irons, finishing tables, and boxes of garment pieces on pallets, toward a wall of thread colors, another of fabric bolts, and a window-walled office.

It looked like a dump, like a third-world charnel house of debris and forgotten detritus. It worked, day and night, through time-and-a-half and double-time hours, an island of regulations on the Wild West Side. Steam hissed from the irons all weekend long, while the plastic water jugs hanging above cultivated a brown patina that would eventually clog the valves. The iron pads needed new muslin, and the tubes were sealed with duct tape, not because no one would pay for parts, but because replacing parts on ancient things took time. The iron would have had to be shut down for a day to make the replacement, and someone released for a day to search eBay or some other schmatta guy’s basement for the discontinued part. No one had a minute to spare because, once the sewing line was moving, there was no stopping it—not for sickness, and barely for death.

A graveyard of machines huddled behind the racks of fabric rolls, waiting for the golden days to return. Sergers with busted timers, pleating machines waiting for styles to change, braiders that were too slow, snap fastening machines from a denim line Jeremy had killed after one season. They all waited for the war of attrition to end, when they would be pulled out, dusted off, oiled, and used, only to be put back again, when pleats and braids and snaps died another death of consumer boredom.

Two Saturday ladies hunched over the machines. Twenty years ago, they would have been Italians with Our Lady of Carmel taped to their thread spool stands, but these ladies were Mexicans who liked to look up and see Our Lady of Guadalupe, instead. They pushed fabric through the feeders, then smoothed the seam, or shirred it, or dealt with a knotted thread, with a glance over to the clock, the clock, the clock, ticking to the next break when they could make a call or eat their
tamal
before it got cold.

They were the lucky ones, the union workers, in New York. The last of a profession killed by a corrupt union that cost millions in kickbacks and bribes, a real estate boom that made floor space prohibitively expensive, and a consumer who expected fresh fashion every season, but didn’t want to pay for it.

Ephraim, a nervous man by habit and birth, led Laura into the storage closet, even though he said he wouldn’t. She scanned the floor-to-ceiling plastic boxes filled with buttons, buckles, studs, and labels, reaching so high a library ladder with wheels and runner at the top had been attached to the upper shelf.

“You need to look around here. I’m sorry I don’t know exactly where they are.” Ephraim indicated a spot in the middle distance. “How is Jeremy? He all right?”

“He’s upset,” Laura said, in an attempt to draw him out. “He worked with Gracie nine years. And now, Sheldon wants to sell the whole thing to a Chinese company.”

Ephraim looked like his heart had stopped. “What can we do?”

“I don’t know. Sheldon owns fifty-five percent of the business, so I guess he can sell off his shares, or not. Look, I’m not an expert at these things. And having a murder charge against him doesn’t help at all.”

“He wasn’t here,” Ephraim said, a little too defensively. “The skirt was perfect Friday when we left. There’s no reason he would have come here to fix anything.”

“I’m not accusing—”

“The police came and looked at this place up and down. Why, tell me, would I lie? To protect my job? Ridiculous. I lose my job and my reputation, and what good is my job now unless I move to China? You don’t understand. This is the last production facility in Manhattan. The last. If I lose this job, there’s not another one somewhere else. It was a miracle when I found this one a year ago. Now what do I do?”

He was near tears and, though she was inclined to let it drop to protect his feelings, she also needed to pry information from him. “Don’t be upset. He’s working on figuring this out.”

“He’s calling me a liar.”

“No, Ephraim, you’re calling
him
a liar.” The truth of that statement seemed to calm him. His breathing slowed, and the tears that hovered in his eyes finally fell. He tried to back out of the closet with a wave, but Laura stopped him. “You said they were perfect on Saturday. So, they were ready to ship on Friday?”

“Bagged and hanging. A day early, too. When I worked at Girl Starz, that was a bonus for me, but no more.” Girl Starz was a t-shirt maker that used to have a floor on 32nd. “I’m sorry, but do you know how much money I saved this company getting this done when I did?”

She nodded. It wasn’t an inconsequential feat. “And the TOP?” she asked. “You sent it when?”

“Friday night by Ketchum.”

“Ephraim, I’m sorry about all this. But, the hems looked okay on the skirt when you left Friday? Really? I mean, it’s not like you have to worry about getting let go over a hem at this point, right?”

“I swear to God, Laura. Those hems were perfect.” He drew his hand flat across the air.

Despite everything, she believed him. He excused himself to catch up on some paperwork and she made a show of looking for the enamel zipper pull. She found a dozen in a plastic container and slipped into the adjacent closet, which held racks of history, sew-bys, and construction samples. She found the TOP of the Margaret dress from the previous year. It had the same skirt and hem, and had sold so well, it had begged to be redesigned into the Mardi.

She pulled it out. The tag had REJECTED stamped across it and was signed by Yoni. She hung the dress on the end of the rack and found out what Jeremy had meant by a snowdrift hem. It drooped between the gores all around.

A circle skirt was cut into pizza slices and sewn together. It was on the grain at the seams, meaning the weaving threads were parallel to the stitching, and at the center of the pizza slices, the threads were on the bias, meaning the weaving threads were perpendicular to the seams. Bias stretched. It stretched across the body, and it stretched from gravity. If a shirt was cut on the bias, meaning the pattern piece was diagonal to the edges of the fabric, it would stretch. It would be comfortable, but it would also be unstable and difficult to work.

What Laura saw in the Margaret dress was that the center of the slices, where the bias was most unstable, gravity had pulled the hems down half an inch, while at the six seams, the hem had retained its length. It looked ridiculous.

Is that what the Mardi had looked like? Why?

She turned over the card and saw another signature—Roberto, the floor manager before Ephraim. From the stamp below, she could see that he’d rejected it, too, but either sent it to Yoni for confirmation, or Yoni was in the factory, and they looked at it together. He’d moved to Honduras to run a textile mill. She could contact him, if she wanted to.

She took the rejected TOP out to the front and asked Ephraim if she could bring it back to the design room. He agreed without even looking at it.

In the hall, she met Yoni coming out of the elevator.

“What’s that?” Yoni pointed at the sample.

“It’s the Margaret from last year. Look at the hem.”

Yoni sighed. “Floor managers.” She rolled her eyes like everyone knew the common problems a production manager had with a floor manager. “Always want to get an approval so they can ship early. Roberto sent the TOP before he hung it. I had his ass.” When Laura looked at her blankly, Yoni filled in the blanks. “Circle skirts must be hung for twenty-four hours before they’re hemmed, or you get this. We had to unpack all of them and retrim the hems.”