Death Of A Supermodel Part 18

Two Seventy-Seven Park Avenue had a three-story atrium in the front with actual trees and recordings of non-actual birds singing. Her mother told her the atrium once had real birds, but the p.o.o.p situation had forced management to turn to the recorded loops. Laura never knew whether someone had lied to Mom or if she'd just made it up to get her and Ruby to take lunch with her there, as it was right between the Scaasi offices and the actual garment district, but Laura doubted a live bird had ever been brought into a New York office building.

The atrium was a refuge for workers in the neighborhood the way Bryant Park was for the garmentos in her neighborhood. The chirping blasted even louder at eight at night, apparently, because the squeak of their sneakers was drowned out by the aural, if not corporeal, presence of multiple bird species. She and Stu didn't speak, such was the cacophony of the atrium. They browsed the directory and found neither Pandora nor White Rose. The elevator ding sounded like an incongruous technological leap, and a lady in a business suit exited, whispering into her phone as if she too wanted to respect the majesty of the absent birds.

Laura hit the b.u.t.ton for the seventeenth floor, and the doors whooshed closed behind them. Birds, out.

"We're going to go up there and find a locked door," Stu said.

"Then I can go finish Jeremy's pattern, and you can go home to your girlfriend."

"I have a deadline, so infer what you will."

The hallways were much like those in any other building in the city, with rows of doors and placards marking the company or ent.i.ty. Since the building had been erected in the '70s, there were fewer vestigial pipes and conduits, and the layers of paint didn't encroach on the width of the halls, but there was the sense that the building was at the turning point of its life, the style falling between "updated" and "vintage."

Laura didn't have a suite number for the Pandora offices. The brochure had only contained a floor number, giving readers the impression that the company took up the entire thing, window to window. But there were just endless rows of doors.

"I think we have to go back down," she said. "Process of elimination. We'll see what numbers are missing from the directory."

"Waste of time. Some companies take up two suites." But even as he dismissed her idea, she saw his attention drawn elsewhere, like a bloodhound catching a scent.

Then she caught it, too, a tingling vibration in the walls.

Music.

Throbbing stuff that hummed in time. The beat wasn't loud or close enough to rattle the sconces, but it was palpable enough to follow, which they did, without speaking, like Green Berets in enemy territory. The sound got ever louder, or deceptively smaller, hitting a fever pitch behind a lonely door in a cul de sac of a hallway. Neither number nor name hung on the door, just a doormat on the floor in front of it, with a border of decorative white roses woven into the hemp. It could have been a closet, but apparently wasn't because it was surely the source of the thumpy-thump music and voices. Many voices. Too many for a closet.

"It's Thursday," she whispered. "Haven't these people heard of weekends?"

"Weekends are for amateurs."

"Could this possibly be the only entrance?"

Stu reached for the doork.n.o.b and picked off a dust bunny. "Apparently not."

Laura had no real sense of direction without the island of Manhattan to follow. Seventh and Broadway went South. Sixth and Eighth went North. The rest followed. Once inside a building without traffic to guide her, she could be anywhere.

Luckily, Stu didn't have the same problem. Like a force of nature, he took off with the same bloodhound instinct, around corners and through stairwells, until she feared they were hopelessly lost. But then the music got thumpier again. The voices came through loud and clear as she walked up a secret flight of stairs Stu said might get them past a locked door in a newer wall on the seventeenth floor.

The stairwell was little used. She'd seen filthier in her life, but it was narrow, beige, and utilitarian, the kind of place where one might just hurry up the concrete stairs to get to the next place, so quickly, in fact, that a person might just barrel into three half-naked people doing... Laura covered her eyes, but burned into her memory were a middle-aged male b.u.t.t, a woman's bare back pushed against a fire extinguisher, and another woman on her knees, her face buried somewhere Laura didn't want to think about, at all, ever again.

Stu gripped her arm, which was held rigidly straight in order to keep her eyes from seeing anything else she wouldn't be able to unsee. She just let him drag her wherever he wanted. She heard grunting and smelled smells, as if her presence was of no consequence to the grunters or smell-makers. The stairwell door clacked, and the voices got louder. The music was still coming from someplace else; however, a layer of voices became clearer. They stopped. It was dark behind her hands, but she wasn't ready to move them.

She felt Stu move to stand in front of her and take her wrists. "You're committed now," he said. But when he moved her hands, she kept her eyes closed. "It's just a club. Come on, we've seen some crazy stuff. Remember the night Heyday was all p.o.r.nos all over the walls? Just pretend you paid thirty at the door."

"Can I pretend we were on the list?"

"If that helps you function, then fine. Just let's go. If this is the Pandora office, I'm going to have another story to pitch to the New Yorker."

Nothing soothed discomfort like doing a favor for someone else. Someone she cared about. Someone she'd still like to date, except he had a girlfriend too pristine to discover a s.e.x club in an office building. And Jeremy, of course, whose kiss should have erased any feelings for Stu.

"Am I getting back to work tonight?" she asked.

"Not likely."

She opened her eyes. It was dark. No, that was Stu's face filling her vision, looking at her as if to let her know everything was going to be okay if she would just chill. So she nodded, letting him know that she was totally chilled, the very vision of chill, that if he looked up "chill" in the dictionary, depending on the dictionary, he'd probably find the definition of a transitive verb for cold, but anyway... she was calm.

"I'm not taking my clothes off," she said.

"I agree." He took her hand, and she checked out the scene.

Like any New Yorker, she looked at the windows first, since they defined place, affluence, and orientation. The view was of the office building across Park Avenue, on one wall only. So they were in the middle of the building because she didn't see any pa.s.sage to a corner office, and the proximity to the offices across the street, where someone was probably working late, increased the excitement of what was going on in the windows. Against the walls, pushed akimbo as if in a hurry, stood folded cubicles and oldish computers. Half the grey fabric chairs were pushed under the desks. The other half were being used.

She has once seen a Tom Cruise movie where he entered a s.e.x club he'd been trying to get into for most of the movie. It was supposed to be the hottest, s.e.xiest scene ever. People were doing it on pool tables and in threes and fours, wearing big masks, but no one looked as if they were having any fun. So the scene wasn't s.e.xy. It was boring. She thought that the lack of s.e.xiness was intentional. She didn't know if the same could be said for the Park Avenue office.

Stu scanned the room and pointed to an unappealing door with a red EXIT sign. That was the front, with the rosy doormat, the door no one used.

"So it's got a door through a back hallway and another up utility stairs?" she asked.

"Yeah, but people work here."

"Apparently." She was making a joke about the work going on right then, which she took great effort not to see. "We're sticking out." They were the only two fully clothed people.

No, there were two more dressed people across the room, a man in a leather jacket and another man in a suit. A woman in a gold string bikini hung on Leather Jacket as he and Suit shook hands. When Leather turned his face to the light, Laura recognized him.

"Rolf?" Because of the music, she said it louder than she meant.

Rolf looked up and directly at her. She was on his turf, safeguarded by the skinniest guy in the five boroughs, surrounded by people who had something to protect, and she was terrified. Stu squeezed her hand, which told her one, to be calm, and two, that he wasn't feeling too cozy himself. She couldn't see Rolf's face too well, as the windows were behind him, so she was surprised when he shot toward the rosy doormat exit.

She was even more surprised when she went after him.

She couldn't help it. She hadn't just seen a woman's face buried in some guy's a.s.s so she could walk away and say something like, "Wow, Rolf was there. How interesting." No, she was going to catch the a.s.shole and rip information out of his throat, the fifty pounds he had on her notwithstanding.

She'd seen people in movies run down halls and flights of stairs, and it always seemed quite easy. When Rolf took a turn, she took it. When he barreled down a long hall, she ran at top speed, noting the minty gum scent he left behind. But there was the matter of her slippery vintage Via Spigas to consider, and in the three seconds she took to wipe out on the shiny floor, right herself, and kick off the shoes, she almost lost him. He cut a hairpin turn to the elevator bay and seemed gone. When she caught up, the stairwell door was clicking shut, and the elevator b.u.t.tons were lit. She headed for the door at full speed, her bare feet giving enough traction for her to launch herself toward the stairwell door. She noted the elevator ding in the back of her mind.

Her velocity worked against her when Rolf, obviously having planned the little trick, opened the stairwell door all the way and dodged her thrust. It was too late for her to stop, and the full weight of her body slammed against the bottom corner of the fire extinguisher box. The gla.s.s shattered and, when she rebounded, stuck in her arm as it was smashed against the cinderblock wall. Gla.s.s shards rained as she oofed, the air exiting her lungs.

She didn't go fully unconscious. The fire alarm could be heard in The Bronx. The stair door clicked shut. The elevator motor churned through the wall she had her back against. The room turned sideways.

No. That was her, falling.

He was getting away. From what, she didn't know. But she wanted to know, and he would disappear like a phantom, with his billions of dollars and his dead sister, and whatever was going on with White Rose, Pandora, and the threesome in the back stairwell would go with him.

Stuff was broken. Bones, perhaps. Skull, maybe. But it was too soon after she lost a fight with a stack of cinderblocks to feel it, and she functioned enough to get herself to the next elevator and crawl into it.

Lying on the floor, staring at the lit-up metal mesh at the top of the elevator, she wished she'd taken a look at some of the girls she'd seen in the White Rose offices. The girl with her back against the fire extinguisher, the one with her face where no face should be, the gold bikini chick, they were all blank to her. If she'd seen just one, she could at least look for them in the catalog she'd found under Ruby's bed eons ago.

The connection between White Rose and Pandora didn't seem so farfetched anymore. They found girls in scrubby, impoverished parts of Eastern Europe, brought them to Germany, which was part of the European Union, and somehow brought them to the U.S. to be prost.i.tutes. Maybe they promised them modeling jobs, and the girls jumped at the chance.

But Thomasina wouldn't have gone for it. How could she? And more importantly, why would she? She had enough money to do whatever she wanted; she didn't need to operate a prost.i.tution ring to put food on the table. So, Rolf. He tried to sneak his sister's foundation away from her. Maybe he seduced the girls and maybe that was what Bob had seen on his trip. When Thomasina found out and tried to stop Rolf, he killed her.

But where was Rolf going now?

The elevator stopped with a ding, and with a whoosh, the doors opened to the cacophony of the fire alarm. The birds chirped, buzzed, whistled, and grunted.

No. There were no grunting birds, at least not in the atrium's audio loop.

She dragged herself out of the elevator. Her legs seemed okay, but her right arm had lost its ability to hold her weight, so she got her feet under her. The grunting was close, right under the elevator b.u.t.ton. Two men were wrestling and one was Stu, who had blood all over his forehead. She didn't think about who the other guy was, so strong was her impulse to protect her friend.

As she was lining up her shot, maybe a hundredth of a second, Stu, getting a micro-moment of upper hand, got on top. She saw her opportunity and raised her right foot. Rolf's face flashed red when the fire truck pulled up outside, and Laura brought her foot down onto his trachea.

One thing for sure. Laura wasn't a covert Mossad operative. Rolf was stopped for only half a second, but that time gave Stu enough of a leg up to wrestle him face down-the fifty pounds of weight difference between them notwithstanding.

Laura stepped on Rolf's head so he couldn't move. He cursed in German, and she moved her foot a little so his mouth was squished. No more guttural garbage from him. The cops and firemen arrived like a brigade, turning keys and talking into their black boxes. The siren wailed, and the birds chirped, and Stu put his arm around her to keep her from falling down again. She leaned into him and would have laughed if the whole thing wasn't so ridiculous.

CHAPTER 19.

"A broken humerus," Cangemi said with a smirk. "You sure it wasn't cracked at birth?" He had a captive audience, in the so-very-public-corridor of the ER, with some battle-ax of a nurse placing Laura's right arm on a stack of pillows.

"You'll note my inability to even get your stupid joke." She was tired, work was piling up, and the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was after her sister. "Where's Stu?"

"On four getting an MRI. I couldn't believe how many questions that guy can ask when he's concussed."

"He's a journalist."

"What's your excuse?"

She didn't answer right away, deciding instead to wonder how she was going to make patterns, or use a pen even, with her arm in a cast. When she did speak, she bypa.s.sed blabbermouth and instead took a page from Stu's book. "What did I just see?"

Nurse Battle-ax had no interest in either lively banter or manners and jumped in without a how-do-you-do, asking, "You comfortable?"

"Yes." Laura's tone fell somewhere between blunt as a falling coconut and sharp as a scalpel.

"I'll be in with a technician to plaster this up. Can you sign with your left?" She held out a clipboard and put a ballpoint in Laura's left hand. She signed without reading anything, something she had to stop swearing she never did.

Unfazed, Cangemi continued his questioning. "What do you think you saw?"

Nurse Battle-ax flipped pages, and Laura signed where she pointed.

"Okay, my mom did that when I asked her if there was a Santa Claus. She said, 'Do you think there's a Santa Claus?' and I said, 'Yes, I believe in Santa Claus,' and I did until I was like, ten, which is too old, in case you don't know. So when someone asks a question like that, basically, that means they're hiding some kind of lie they've been telling for years."

He pointed at her broken funny bone. "You really broke that thing, huh?"

"That's it. No more answers until I get a first name."

He held both hands up in surrender, but she put on an expression meant to tell him no treaties would be brokered. She probably looked constipated, but she did her very best to appear serious and mean. The nurse left with her papers.

"Calogero." He said it with rolling Rs and lilting Ls.

"I like it. Can I call you Cal?"

"Detective is fine." He dragged a chair over with a loud sc.r.a.ping noise. "We don't know exactly what you saw yet. We have some people in custody, and some are talking, but we can't hold anyone because there wasn't nothing illegal going on. We got a lotta girls and guys doing it, no laws against that. As far as Rolf goes, he's got some lawyer and ain't talking. Can't arrest him neither."

"What about trespa.s.sing?"

"He rented the unit. Legally. You guys were the ones trespa.s.sing."

"And the girls? Were they maybe prost.i.tutes you've arrested before?"

He leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees and acting like there was some crossword question he really couldn't guess for the life of him. "See, this is the thing we can't figure out. They were all here on legal green cards, and we got three of them working for you."

"For who?"

"You."

"What?"

He took a tiny envelope out of his breast pocket and slid out wallet-sized photos. "You hire this girl in April?" He showed her a photo of a blonde of about twenty.

"No. Are you serious? We're on a total shoestring."

He flipped to another picture, a girl with light brown hair and green eyes. "This one? Around mid-June?"

"No. Do you think I'd be working nights and weekends if we could afford to hire people?"

"Yes, I do." He held up a picture of Meatball Eyes. Her lips were closed straight across her face as if she was afraid to beam too hard for the camera. "How about this one?"

She felt a pang of regret, sorrow even, for a girl she'd met once in an annoying circ.u.mstance. "I kind of know her."

"And she worked for you when?"

"You know G.o.dd.a.m.n well she worked for Ivanah Schmiller before she was beaten and stabbed out in East New York. In an abandoned strip mall? h.e.l.lo? Don't you people talk to each other?" She choked back a sob that must have been left over from earlier in the day. "I mean, and for Chrissakes, a room full of prost.i.tutes and you're going to sit there and tell me you can't pin any of them for anything? You can't arrest anyone?"

"I arrested your boyfriend."

"He's not my boyfriend."

"Irregardless..."

"That's not even a word." She paused because she didn't care that much about Cangemi's vocabulary. "Why did you arrest him?"

"a.s.sault. And once we had him on that, he took all the blame for the trespa.s.s, which we can choose to ignore or not. But he's a real nice guy. Are you sure you're not dating?"

She wanted to cross her arms but couldn't, so she just curled her lips so tightly she felt the texture of her teeth.