Shadows from the Grave (45 page)

She might be late but, as Laura got into the elevator with the other Sunday workaholics, she knew there was most certainly going to be a meaty conversation with Jeremy. Her reflection in the shiny brass of the elevator doors showed a woman who didn’t look as confident as she felt. She straightened her hair and, struck by the futility of it, pulled her wooly cap further down.

The mission of the house of Jeremy St. James was to clothe women who were ashamed of neither their bodies nor their discretionary income. If there was a breast to push up, a patch of skin to expose, or a waist to accentuate, Jeremy’s clothes pushed it up, exposed it, or sucked it in. If there was a straying husband, the clothes were meant to bring him home. If there was a lover to attract, Jeremy St. James had a five-hundred-dollar shirt that would inch you toward that goal.

Jeremy’s clothes simply looked too good, too sexy, too gay to be the work of a heterosexual mind. That intensified Laura’s crush. He was gorgeous, brilliant, and safe. Otherwise, she’d be too nervous even to talk to him, and talking to him was why she got up early and dragged herself to the office.

Eight in the morning was still too early for just about everyone but Laura and Jeremy to be at work. The reception area glowed from the concealed lighting, warming the white walls, dark woods, and rare red orchids. The cement floor was tinted a grey only a shade warmer than a city street. The glass and wood reception desk sat unmanned, but the crumpled environmentally friendly napkin from HasBean in the wire garbage can told her Jeremy was already in, and that there would be a cup at her desk. She put in her code and rehearsed the counterfeit Donatella story in her mind.

Laura dropped the lousy Korean convenience store coffee into the trash. It had been a prop, and now it was a cold prop. She didn’t need it any more than the pisswater gurgling like a well-fed baby in the break room.

Every morning, Jeremy brought her some fancy brew from the artisanal coffee joint by his co-op, surprising her with something different every couple of weeks, a new syrup or foamy treatment. The attention was delicious, but nerve-wracking, because he would sometimes stop and chat at her table for ten minutes about the neighbor downstairs or a new restaurant. Other times he’d drop it in front of her with little more than a “good morning” and walk away, wrinkling her heart like a raisin.

When he got in first, like today, her coffee would be waiting with a stirrer and two kinds of sweetener on top, and he’d be in his office already, yelling at their goddamned factory, or hunched over those son-of-a-bitch spreadsheets. He’d wave her off when she went to thank him for the coffee. On those days, she had to remind herself that he was gay. He liked female friends and big dicks. She was wasting her time. She should just give up on men entirely.

She got to her table and, before she could even put her bag down, she noticed that her coffee was spilled. That in itself was a shock. Jeremy wasn’t a mess-maker. He couldn’t abide negligence in any form. Her paper scissors were wet, so she snapped them up and wiped them with a half-soaked napkin. The rest of the damage was manageable, but irritating. Her pattern weight and her rabbit would need to be dried thoroughly, as they were iron and prone to rust. The nice clean oaktag needed to be changed, but her patterns hung safely to the left of her chair.

She pulled a dripping pushpin out of the puddle, then didn’t know where to put it. Jeremy had put the pin on her desk yesterday when he’d seen the head designer’s Fall sketches pinned to a foamcore board. He’d swaggered past Carmella, the designer in question, and barely looking at her whole presentation, focused on one item, a shirtwaist jacket. He snapped the scrap of paper off the board, sending the pushpin flying, held it up in front of Carmella, and yelled, “Does anyone want to bang this woman? Is she on the kitchen floor fifteen minutes after her date rings the bell? What happened? Did we just transport this whole goddamn office to
Tenne-fucking-see
?”

Gracie Pomerantz, the money behind the company, stood there in her Chanel suit and Brazilian blowout, giggling. Laura knew the coquettish squirt of laughter was meant to humiliate Carmella, but it still seemed inappropriate coming from a middle-aged woman.

Jeremy pretended he didn’t hear Gracie. He picked up the pin and placed it on Laura’s table, then pointed at Carmella, saying, “Stop wasting time. We have a Spring show in two weeks, and you don’t have time to piss around for Fall,” or something like that, something scary that made the world sound bigger than any one woman could manage. But Carmella did, every time. The more stressed out Jeremy got, the more creative she became.

“Jeremy?” Laura called out. She didn’t know whether to clean up the mess or find him first. She guessed the coffee wasn’t going to get any more spilled, so she took the short walk down the hall to Jeremy’s office. She brought her scissors along to wipe as she walked. Having coffee on them would drive her insane, and they had to be tended to immediately. She could hear Jeremy breathing, which was unusual, and she quickened her step down the hall.

Jeremy’s office was an unholy mess, with fabric swatches, mood boards, and trims all over the floor. The desk was uncharacteristically bare. Then she noticed Jeremy, still gorgeous even when looking like a stunned animal, chocolate eyes huge, brown hair a little more disheveled than usual. He wore a knit blazer and Henley, his usual attire for weekends. His fists hovered in front of him as if he were landing an invisible plane. He clutched a zebra-printed charmeuse cutting that he was considering for the Spring line.

“Jeremy? Are you okay?”

He looked at her and opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“You’re catching flies, Jeremy,” she said, meaning to make him laugh. He didn’t. He looked at the floor.

Laura followed his gaze and almost dropped her scissors on the dead body.

No one heard it but her and Jeremy, as the body on the office floor no longer had functioning ears. With the face covered by a Beckerman greatcoat, it wasn’t immediately apparent for whom Laura screamed.

Jeremy cringed.

“What happened?” she asked, after she caught her breath.

“I just came in, and she was here.” When Laura looked at the fabric twisted in his hands, he added, “I took this off her neck. I thought it would save her. Taking it off.”

One of the woman’s pumps lay on its side a few feet away, the inner sole advertising for Via Spiga; the other still clung to the left foot. Tanned arms and legs, toned from hours with a personal trainer, lolled akimbo, giving her the look of a middle-aged doll left in the gutter. Her fur coat and matching hat were crumpled in the corner like a dead animal. Her hand clutched a cluster of shredded white paper, more of which covered the floor like sauerkraut.

Laura pushed the coat off the woman’s face, spilling a half-dozen Jeremy St. James logo buttons, and as they clicked to the floor, she saw dozens more dotting the tiles. It looked as if someone had opened a box of them and shook it hard.

“It’s Mrs. Pomerantz,” she whispered, feeling her neck for a pulse. She didn’t know if she was feeling in the right place, but the skin was cold and, when she saw Gracie Pomerantz’s eyes, with mascara caked around them and a contact lens slipping off the iris, she realized it didn’t matter if she knew where to find a pulse. “Did you call the police?”

“Get out,” Jeremy said. “We need to get out of this office.” He dropped the fabric as though it were made of warm dog leavings and pointed her toward the door. She couldn’t disobey. He followed her into the hall and gripped her arm, pulling her to the design room. He loosened his grip when they got there, and she went to her desk. The phone was covered in coffee, but she didn’t care anymore. She dialed 911 while Jeremy leaned on Carmella’s desk. She told the dispatcher everything he needed to know, but hung up when he asked for her driver’s license number. The police could take her info in person when they got there. She didn’t think she’d be penalized for rudeness.

“What happened?” she asked again.

“What do you mean, what happened?” His crossed his arms, his tone one he generally reserved for the rest of his staff, not her. He never gave her his short voice, and she was taken off-guard.

“Gracie is dead in your office.” Gracie had her own office upstairs, a fancy one she shared with Jeremy to entertain clients and buyers. Laura knew what Gracie did, in theory. As Jeremy’s financial backer, she was the source of cash flow in the tight times of the year, which always happened between fabric buys. She also added more cash when he wanted to grow and then took whatever percentage of profits they had agreed upon. In exchange, she had a say in what made the line, who they bought fabric from, where the money went, and—what seemed most egregious to Laura—everyone had to be super nice to her. She had abused that privilege on a daily basis.

“Here’s what I want you to do,” Jeremy said. “I want you to answer the police truthfully and candidly when they ask you a question, and I’ll do the same, okay? Outside that, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m sorry I was late today.” Laura tried to deflect the unpleasantness.

“Why? Did you kill her between seven thirty and eight?”

“No!”

“Then keep out of it. Whatever happens here today, we have to stay focused. There’s a show in two weeks, and it goes off the rails if we let it.” He was right, if not a little freakishly callous. His company was his life. She had never heard him speak of a love interest of any gender. He had friends, or people he knew in the business. The two were one in the same. His parents lived in Canada, and he never spoke of any other family. No pets even.

He travelled frequently and without notice. After arriving at work, Carmella or Laura would get a call in the morning from his personal assistant, Tinto Benito, a man they had never met, informing them that Jeremy would be traveling for two weeks or ten days or whatever, and Gracie was in charge. No calls. No emails. No nothing. Sometimes, Gracie would tell them Jeremy wasn’t coming in, and they were going to have to manage without their boss for a time. But when he came back, there was hell to pay. That was the side of him she saw now—terse and bitchy.

“Don’t worry,” she said. Before she could stop herself, she added, “I won’t let the business go off the rails.” It was a promise she had no idea how to keep.

“I’m counting on you,” he replied, making it much, much worse.

“I saw a fake Donatella,” she said. He raised an eyebrow. “Some lady on the train. I followed her. That’s why I was later than usual.”

“You followed her?”

“She said her mother got it in China. So someone’s knocking you off in Asia.”

He grinned. She focused on the beautiful little crease in his bottom lip that disappeared when he smiled.

“You stopped her and asked her where she got it?”

“Yeah. I figured you could tell Gracie, because I don’t want to. She’s liable to go bananas on me for not ripping it off her.” And then Laura realized she was speaking about Gracie as if she were still alive, which she wasn’t. She guessed Jeremy was now in charge of hunting down and suing counterfeiters, which Gracie did—no, had done—with relish.

Laura didn’t realize how tense she was until she jumped at the sound of the front doorbell. “I’ll get it.” She ran for reception.

Two uniformed cops stood outside the glass doors with two guys in cheap civilian jackets who Laura assumed were detectives. They needed a code to get in and looked ready to do whatever police officers did when they needed to open a locked door. She used her key to let them in and introduced herself.

“I’m Detective Cangemi,” the first detective said with a Brooklyn accent so thick he sounded like he had a pack of gum in his jaw. “This is Detective Samuelson, who else we got in the office?” The two uniforms blew past without even a ‘How-do-you-do.’

“Me and Jeremy St. James, I have no idea who else is here.”

“It’s Sunday. Why’s anyone here?”

“The show’s next Friday.” She didn’t mean to sound like a snotrag, but she probably did, anyway.

“Lent’s got four Fridays, but I ain’t going to Mass every Monday.”

“You do if you have to rebuild the church every Ash Wednesday.”

Detective Cangemi smirked. “Get inside,” he said, as if it were his office and she were the one visiting. She figured they learned they owned the city at the academy.

Jeremy walked Samuelson to the back, talking with graceful gestures, accentuating the fact that he was tall, slim, straight-shouldered, and lithe. When he walked like that, she had thoughts she quickly had to shut out before people saw them on her face.