Death Of A Supermodel Part 20

"What if I made out with you right now? Could I lecture you then?"

"No. First, you need to tell me what you want from me because it can't be all business sometimes and... something else... other times."

He let her hands go, and she felt the loss of his touch deeply. "What do I want from you? It hasn't been obvious since the day we met? I treated you different from anyone else from the minute you walked in the door. We hung out for how many hours in the mornings? Do you think I wanted to show up at seven thirty every day? h.e.l.l, no. But you were there, so I was there. Jesus, I'm expanding all over the place, but I found a way to cut you a piece of my showroom. We're tacking orders and sharing staff. What the f.u.c.k, Laura? You want something stupid like a card or flowers?"

"But it's always business."

"If I'm letting you into my business, I'm letting you into my life. You know that."

There was a moment when they looked at each other and an understanding pa.s.sed between them. This was who he was, and she could love him or leave him, but she knew what she was getting into.

Emira walked in before Laura had a chance to wiggle out of her predicament. "JJ, Carlos cut himself." Seeing them so close seemed to catch her up short. "Oh. Ah, never mind? It's not serious. He just wanted you to see it."

Jeremy stood and helped Laura up so her cast wouldn't catch her off balance. Then he took her left hand, knotting their fingers together. She squeezed with everything she had. He pulled her into the hallway with their hands knitted together for everyone in the design room to see.

As they stood waiting for the elevator, she said, "You don't get to yell at me. I don't like it."

"I know."

"You're a real a.s.shole. You've been toying with me for years."

"What was I supposed to do? I took you any way I could have you." The elevator doors slid open, and they stepped in.

"I can't stand the sight of you," she said.

When the doors shut, he put his arms around her, and he kissed her and said, "Sorry, sorry, sorry," until she kissed him back.

CHAPTER 20.

The cab was clean. Probably the cleanest she'd seen in years. But wasn't it just like Jeremy to stroll outside with a shaking girl and barely have his arm up before the cleanest cab in the city appeared for him? He was a magical person, but did she love him?

Her face burned from the fifteen minutes of kissing lips surrounded by stubble, fifteen minutes of pure thoughtless heaven, where it all went away. She defined "it" as the murder she'd seen that morning, or would have seen if she'd shown up ten minutes earlier. "It" was her sister in trouble and not allowed to go back to her own apartment without pulling up a closet floor. "It" was losing her business. "It" was Stu and his n.o.body-seems-to-mind-that-I'm-named-after-a-grocery-item-but-you girlfriend.

For fifteen minutes, all that mattered was his lips, his smell, and his hands on her neck and back.

He never joked about her broken "humorous" or pressed for any more information about why she'd broken it. He considered it a distraction from what she should be doing and didn't want to encourage her by asking questions. Or so he said. In the back of her mind, she feared he really didn't care.

Or maybe he was right. How could she be great at anything if she kept spreading her energy around? Maybe she should leave the investigating to the lawyers and cops, who knew what they were doing.

"Drop me at the corner," she said. She could walk a block to the house. For some reason, getting out of a cab with a cast on her arm and with a news van right there felt embarra.s.sing.

She could see the van in the dark, a hulking white and blue thing with a satellite dish on top. As she made her way to the house, she found the big vehicle had a gravitational pull. She thought briefly about her deal with Stu and promised herself she would honor his exclusive right to the story, but she knew that the only people with more information, besides lawyers and cops, who were sworn to silence, were reporters.

Jeremy had told her to forget about it and go to bed, and she would, as soon as she did one thing. Then she was going to drop it like a bar of soap in the bathtub. She knocked on the back door of the news van.

Roscoe Knutt answered in a windowpane cotton shirt unb.u.t.toned to his belly, revealing a marginally clean crewneck T-shirt. He was chewing a green sweet pea crispy salty thing when he said, "You're making it too easy for me."

"I aim to please."

"What happened to your arm? Don't tell me. Something to do with that kerfuffle on Park and 48th."

"I don't remember a kerfuffle."

"Smoking too much pot, I'll wager. Rots the short-term memory. Reduces your RAM." He tapped his head so hard with his second finger she feared he'd make a hole. "Come on in if you're coming in."

The van was not what she expected. Sure, there were short circuit monitors and the requisite complete lack of s.p.a.ce and dials and k.n.o.bs all over the place. What she didn't expect was the big screen propped up high with multiple Twitter feeds and flashing social media windows.

"Hanging out on Facebook?" she asked.

"They don't let me. Honesty is not the best policy in journalism, apparently. It landed me here in a box in the middle of the night."

"What do they have you looking for?"

"You."

"You should get a promotion now."

"Not if you came knocking looking for Snap Peas." He held out a bag of green crunchies.

She was starving.

"Who you been kissing?" he asked.

Her hand shot to her mouth, but she ended up getting green snack dust all over her cheek.

"Raw lips." He chuckled. "Big tell. We know you don't have a boyfriend besides that kid who writes for the New Yorker. You know he's sleeping with the Caston Bleach heiress, right?"

Oh, Tofu was an heiress. That was just freaking rich.

"Yeah. He's not my boyfriend."

"Huh. If you say so."

She could almost see him making a note in a little book in his head. "So, what made you think I was involved in the Park Avenue kerfuffle?"

"Your boyfriend's name came up in the arrest records. We get all that on the ticker." He pointed at something on the screen that looked like a Twitter feed. "He's been arrested before. Never misses a 'nonviolent' protest neither. His commie lawyer'll have him out in the morning. Don't worry."

"I'm not worried."

He tilted his head like she must be lying or crazy or both. But in the world of people she knew or had ever met, Stu was the person she was least likely to worry about. He brought self-sufficiency and practicality to new levels daily.

"Stu really got Rolf Wente good," she continued. "Even though he's a size or two bigger. Rolf, I mean."

"That's the only lick you're ever gonna get. That guy's got some lawyers, and they ain't pinkos. They're barracudas." He rubbed his fingers together to indicate that they were the most expensive predatory fish in the city. "Family, you know. They kicked him out, but funnel him cash. My kid did what he done, I woulda thrown a nickel at him, then kicked him to the curb. Possibly I'd've killed him myself if no one held me back."

"What did he do?"

"You could look it up yourself. It ain't no secret. Least not in East Germany. Eastern Germany."

"I've never been."

"Want a soda? I got Manhattan Special and Manhattan Special."

"No, thanks."

He pulled a bottle of chocolate soda from the mini fridge and bent the cap back with a little metal opener he had attached to his wrist with a plastic spiral. "Nasty business, it was. And dumb. Just unnecessary. Skinhead gang breaks into a family house, ties the father down, and makes him watch as they rape the wife and daughters. Which is ugly enough. Then they're about to kill the lot when they realize there was a brother, who had gone and got the police. So, that didn't go well for them. Whole country wants to string them up. And they did. You look a little green, there. You all right?"

She had been considering her broken arm and how meaningless and stupid it was, and how little it hurt. She'd forget it in a couple of months. "Rolf was one of them?"

"Well, no. But the father, who was Jewish, so you know it all looked like regular skinhead nonsense, had some business with Rolf. And Rolf, who was all skinhead, had this habit of beating girls near to death as it was. Got off not once, but twice. He happened to be in charge of those guys, more or less. Now Rolf denies he put in the order to kill or rape anyone, but the prosecutor's just uncovering more and more connections with the Jewish dad."

"Wait. What kind of business?"

"That was the funny thing. It was flowers out of The Netherlands. But not the flowers. The whaddya call it?" He made a fist.

"Bulbs?"

"Supposedly. The prosecutor's getting his suit on for a big press conference because he says he's got him. The cops are outside the mansion waiting for him to say they got Rolf on murder and the business, which is so bad, by the way, the Jewish dad is talking about dropping charges against the skinheads. Then, dontcha know?"

"The prosecutor is dead."

"Found him in a pool of vomit."

Laura gasped.

Roscoe continued, "But it was ruled an accident because they found his dinner from the night before, and the onions in it were chopped up bulbs. Accident. Supposedly happens all the time."

Laura suddenly remembered the boxes of bulbs in her backyard. The last time she had seen them, she was beating up Cangemi for not respecting a woman's right to starve herself. "Narcissus bulbs are poisonous."

"Right. But before you go pulling a rabbit out of your a.s.s, there's not enough to kill a person in what he had there. The Wente family pulled strings to get it ruled an accident, then they disowned Rolf with a few mil' in a bank account. He blew through it already. We don't know how he's surviving."

Laura sat stock-still, staring into the distance.

Roscoe leaned forward. "Now, you wanna tell me what you was doin' on Park Avenue at ten at night when you'd usually be at work?"

She felt she owed him something for unabashedly giving so much information she did not have the brains or resources to find for herself. "Rolf and the Jewish dad weren't trading bulbs. The flowers were girls. Women. People. Look into the Pandora Agency. I have to go."

Laura tore into the house. Ruby was sleeping on the couch in her clothes, and Mom was nowhere to be seen. She went into the broom closet and took things out with one arm, dropping brooms, throwing catalogs, flinging a metal pail, pushing too many bottles of cleaning products out of the way at once. She made so much racket, Ruby woke up.

"Finally," Laura said. "I thought you were dead in there. Help me with the floor."

"What are you looking for?"

"You made Thomasina breakfast the morning she died?"

"Yeah?"

"You made her a Momlette?"

"Yeah?" Ruby said. "She puts this stuff called Maggi on them. Put. In the past."

"And you ate some?"

"Yeah?"

"Which is why you were sick. You've got a basket of shallots in the pantry. Could one of them be one of Mom's bulbs? The ones she was planting? Because if you accidentally cut one up and put it in the Momlette, there would be poison on your counter."

"Wait. Okay. I have leftovers in my fridge. They'll be there tomorrow. So stop."

Laura froze, realizing she was trying to satisfy her own curiosity instead of taking the best care of her sister.

Ruby helped put everything back as it was, then closed the closet door with a final snap. "Go to bed," she said. "Your eyes have big black circles under them, and your skin is green. And you have a broken arm. Go."

"Let me call Cangemi first."

"I'll do it. Go. You make me crazy. Please." Ruby pushed her up the stairs, to the bedroom.

Laura didn't have the energy to resist.

CHAPTER 21.

Laura was awakened at 8:11 by the squawk of radios downstairs.

For reasons she couldn't quite pin down, she didn't want to go down in her pajama pants and yesterday's shirt. She got out some fresh clothes. That made her realize how much she needed a shower after yesterday, which had gone on forever. But she couldn't bathe because her waterproof cast was days away.

She sponged herself off and dressed in something sleeveless, knowing the reason she didn't want to look like a slob was because Detective Cangemi was probably down there, and the more wisecracks she could avoid, the better. That was the story she told herself, and she was sticking to it.

By the time she got downstairs, the squawking had ended, and any extra personnel in the house were gone. Laura knocked on Ruby's door. The keys were in the lock, and the police tape was gone.

The smell of cleaning fluids pinched the inside of her nose. Ruby was still scrubbing the counter in abrasive chemicals, her four-inch stilettos giving her that extra angle she needed to really take the finish off the countertop.

"Here are your keys," Laura said.

"Thanks."

"You're in full makeup and a Halston jacket. Why are you cleaning?"