"How did you know about me and my sister?" she asked.
Buck slowed down, and they took the rest of the journey through the house at talking-pace.
"I do Miss Ivanah"s books. I have for twenty years. Your company is on her ledger."
"Really? I thought Bob-"
"Oh, yes, of course. But it"s her company on paper."
"No, actually..." She stopped walking. "It"s my company."
Buck just smiled and held out his arm to escort her up a windowless staircase. "These were built as the maid"s stairs."
"What are they now?"
"Much the same." They went up the stairs, which were alabaster because these maids were apparently too good to walk on wood.
"So you manage her design business?" Laura asked.
"No, no. Ivanah"s designing concerns aren"t under my purview. I"m more of a manager, if you will. I move what needs moving and make sure the gears are turning smoothly. It"s a full-time job."
"You said twenty years? She hasn"t been married to Mister Schmiller more than ten years, I think." They exited onto an expansive roof deck with a wall of pink orchids to the right, a greenhouse to the left, and modern, dark wood benches everywhere. It was the most gorgeous corner of New York City she had ever seen.
Ivanah stood at the edge of the roof, letting her dog sniff a purple orchid. She was done up and perfect, and Laura saw something in Buck"s eyes that was a little more than respect for a long-time employer.
"Ivanah started as a model and invested very wisely. She never makes a wrong move."
"Never?"
"Never. She has magic in her."
Such a statement didn"t fit with the name or image of the man in front of her, but she took it at face value. When the ex-model-turned-investor saw them and put down the dog, Laura felt a little warmer inside, thinking about how the woman, who never misjudged the success of another enough to make a bad investment, had invested in her. Maybe Ivanah wasn"t such a hideous b.i.t.c.h. Maybe she had a few redeeming qualities. Maybe she"d seen something worthwhile in Sartorial, even financially redeeming, that Laura could extract and use and highlight. By the time she reached them, she had forgotten that she thought Ivanah was a hack, and that her goal was to collect information to exonerate her sister. All she felt was the white heat of her now-worthwhile, somehow magical validation.
She handed the flowers over as soon as Ivanah was in arm"s reach.
"These are lovely," Ivanah said. "Thank you. Come sit." She motioned to a table overlooking the Park. It was a.s.sembled from twisted metal wires, meant to look like a bird"s nest. The chairs had cast iron stems across the back, and tiny birds perched on them. The seat, for being a ma.s.s of twisted iron, was comfortable.
"I came to tell you we"re starting on Fall in the next couple of weeks, and if you want to look at the boards, we can set up an appointment."
"Oh, how nice." Ivanah looked over the expanse of the Park. "I can look at your boards. Then what? I hate those things. They"re a waste of time. Sticking last season"s magazine pages on a piece of cardboard with some fabrics you might use? Silly."
She had a point, as Ruby"s description of the inner working of big companies sounded much the same. Every season, design teams created boards, some floor-to-ceiling with cutouts, sketches, trims, and fabrics arranged in an aesthetically-pleasing manner so CEOs, company presidents, creative directors, and investors would say "oooh" and "aaah" and string together clumps of relatively intelligent questions that didn"t matter a G.o.dd.a.m.n. The boards were for mood and tone only. What was someone supposed to say? "I don"t want to "fun in the sun" this year?" "Too much brown?" No. Because none of it mattered. It didn"t matter what was on the fun in the sun board; it was going to turn out the way it turned out. The colors weren"t set in stone. Nothing on the boards was intended for production. It was just to make the bosses feel like they had their mitts in the design process, so nothing was getting past them and there were "no surprises." But they learned about boards in school, and Ruby had produced scores of them at Tollridge & Cherry, a catalog-driven company with executives strolling the cubicles, pretending they knew what to tell people to wear. Laura had only ever worked at Jeremy"s, and what was he going to do, make them for himself? He only worked with actual bodies and fabrics. Every day, Laura realized the luxury she had worked under when she was at the house of St. James.
"I also wanted to thank you," Laura said, "for coming today. We could use your help. I really want to make this work."
"I am so glad to hear you say that," Ivanah said. "You need it. I hope you don"t take this the wrong way, but you are on the brink of having no company."
"Yeah, the Thomasina thing was bad luck."
"And your sister? Is she still at the police station?"
Laura was past worrying about how her backer knew. She was sure it was all over the gossip channels. "Yeah."
"I have Greyson on it already. They"re talking to that newswoman. You must have really thrown her a good bone sometime in the past, no?"
"I got mad when she was outside my house."
"She smells a story. We"re using this to our advantage. We"re letting her paint it like Ruby killed Thomasina. It"s brilliant. Your name will be on everyone"s lips."
"What? No! You can"t do that."
Ivanah looked at her as if she had just gotten upset that it was going to rain tomorrow. "How else would you do it? Boring denials? No, no. If she didn"t do it, there"s no problem. It"s a PR firm. The P is for public. This is who they influence."
Laura couldn"t shake the feeling that the plan was a bad idea for Ruby. Her sister was being used like a dishtowel, and even if for her own good, it was too risky. What if Rolf got wind of it and flew off the handle? What if his skinhead side got the better of him and he decided on a little vigilante justice? How long would that strategy keep Kamichura and Roscoe Knutt on their doorstep with their little p.i.s.sing match over the story?
"I was at the precinct today," Laura said. "They wouldn"t even let me see her. I"d want to run this by her first."
"It wouldn"t matter what she says, darling. You can do it yourself any way you want. When you ask me to do it, I can do it any way I think is best. And this is best. The best in the business are doing it this way. So that"s what it will be."
"How can letting the public blame her for a murder, even for a second, be to her benefit?"
Ivanah must have seen Laura"s hurt and confusion because she reached out and grabbed her hands, which shocked Laura so much she didn"t move them. "Sometimes, blame is the best thing to take."
"Not if you didn"t do anything."
"In Czechoslovakia, we were so poor, my mother made us dinner with this little piece of meat." She let go of Laura long enough to hold her fingers two inches apart. "She cut it into pieces and made it in a sauce so all of us could taste it. Also, it was so my two brothers wouldn"t eat everything and leave me with nothing. But my oldest brother worked all day in a lamp factory, and he had no lunch, so one day, he ate all the meat while my mother was out. I saw him there, standing over the counter, with this tiny piece of meat on a stick, burning it on the stove and shoving it all in his mouth. The juice dripped off his chin, and I thought, "Oh, he had better lick that, or it"s going to go to waste." He saw me watching, too. And how do you think I felt? He was a big man, even at thirteen, and when mother saw the meat was gone, I told her I ate it because she would beat my brother, but she wouldn"t touch me. Oh, my G.o.d, it was like a bomb hit the house when my father found out. Throwing this and that, and my other brother hiding in the corner. I got the beating of my life. I thought I"d never breathe out of my left nostril again. See? Look." She pressed her right nostril and took a breath. Her left nostril squeaked slightly.
Laura nodded.
"My mother picked me up and left. Just like that. She carried me to the church, and after one good night"s sleep and bandaging me up, she picked me up in her arms, and we started walking. We walked forever, days and nights. We slept on the side of the road and ate whatever we found growing. One day, she stopped in a small town, and she started our new life. Shall we compare that to this? I took the blame for something I didn"t do and look." She flung out her arms to encompa.s.s the brutally expansive piece of real estate. "You can"t take the hard things too seriously, really. It all works out in the end."
Laura had lots to say about that, so much in fact that the words got jumbled up in her throat, and nothing came out. That may have been considered complicity in thinking that because Ivanah"s bad times had been temporary, they were thus potentially temporary for everyone. Or that it was okay to perpetuate a lie because telling one years ago had happened to work out for her. Or that the lie a person told out of his or her own choice and the lie a person told about someone else was, in fact, related in any way whatsoever.
Mostly because the story was told in good faith, she was really sorry about what happened, she was in the woman"s house, and she still wanted to ask about Bob"s last business trip, Laura paused. She couldn"t find a way to call Ivanah a bunch of names fast enough.
Bob strolled into the garden. "Carnegie," he said, sounding truly happy to see her, "the truth teller. What brings you up here? You ruining our surprise party?"
Ivanah folded her arms and looked up at him crossly. "You..." she said with mock rage, then she turned back to Laura. "He forgot my birthday is coming this Sunday and planned exactly nothing. He will pay." Laura could see from her face that he wouldn"t pay any more than he could afford. Despite the fact that she knew Bob had been sleeping with a supermodel, the couple really seemed to love each other.
"I wanted to talk to you about your trip," Laura said. "We"ve been thinking, we"re so limited in the quant.i.ties we can produce on 40th Street that we"re having a problem making the production line worthwhile. The way to slice this thing might be to move production overseas so we can make more. I heard you just got back from Shanghai." She came up with the city very fast, and almost said "Milan" instead, so it came out more like Mi"Shanghai.
Instead of diving in and correcting her a.s.sumption that he had gone to China, he said, "If you"re producing more, it"ll cost more to do the run."
She had to remember he was in hedge funds, rows of numbers, not manufacturing. "The biggest cost of producing anything is the set-up. So the more you make, the more the cost is spread out. The thousandth pair of pants costs less to make than the fifth."
"But your desirability takes a beating."
She swallowed. He was right, and it was what she"d argued from the beginning, when Ruby wanted to call in every Chinese, Turkish, and Pakistani factory she"d ever done a favor for at T&C. "I"m just looking into it. Did you make any good contacts?"
He sat down and put his arm around his wife, who draped her hand over his knee. "I was in Northern Europe. You can"t afford to produce a glove out there."
"Bobby was taking care of some business with a foundation I help from my home country. They help girls leave very ugly situations," Ivanah said.
"Oh." Laura didn"t know which question to ask first. She caught a mention of Thomasina"s White Rose foundation before it left her lips. She didn"t want to be too forward. "In Czechoslovakia?"
"That place is dead," Ivanah said. "He was in my real home."
Laura nodded. "Right, you were saying-"
Bob jumped in with half a laugh. "Was Ivanah regaling you with her mother"s walk to East Germany? Good times, baby. Good times."
Ivanah slapped his knee.
Laura thought that in her twenty-five years in one of the most international cities in the world, she had never met more than two people who had lived in East Germany.
She almost fell asleep on the train.
It would have been nice, actually, because home was going to be unpleasant at best, and dramatic at worst. Unless they were both out and the house was empty. Maybe Ruby was still at Midtown South and Mom was in the waiting room, twisting tissues into knots. Then it would be quiet, and Laura could stare at the ceiling, worrying, without either one of them turning a sleepless night into a drama-fest.
There were too many strands floating around the web, and none tied together. A German foundation that both Thomasina and Ivanah had their fingers in. Pandora modeling. Rolf, the brother of the dead woman, showing up with a meatball-eyed girl from the catalog. And Ruby, of course, with poison all over her sink, which could not have been less like her. If Ruby were going to kill someone, she"d charm a guy into doing it. She"d never do the chemistry herself, and Cangemi must have known that because there was no arrest pending, from what she could see, just a seemingly indefinite holding pattern.
CHAPTER 13.
Laura avoided the news van parked across the street. The police tape was still across the garden apartment door. She walked up to Mom"s apartment and there they were, sitting at the dining room table, looking sad and dim, with two sets of puffed eyes and a general att.i.tude of the put-upon.
Ruby ran into her arms, and Mom went back into the kitchen for another teacup.
Neither Laura nor Ruby cared much for tea, outside the odd red African variety served at a thirty-grand-per-year social club, but they warmed their hands on the cups and let Mom give them as much sugar as she thought they wanted.
"They swabbed me," Ruby said. "Do you know how humiliating that was? They wore gloves and sc.r.a.ped the insides of my cheeks, and Uncle Graham let them." She worked herself up into crying.
Laura put up her hand. "If you"re going to make this into a CBS drama event, I"m going to bed."
Shockingly, she got no resistance from Mom or Ruby, and she realized it was because they were utterly rudderless without her. She was in charge. Talk about putting the blind guy behind the wheel.
"Rubes, I just need to ask you," Laura said, needing to get some preliminaries out of the way, "were you running a modeling agency of underage girls with Thomasina?"
"Where would I find time to do that? I was working on Sartorial, like, all the time."
As far as Laura was concerned, one could easily work Ruby"s hours and run an agency or two on the side: a few phone calls, some air kisses at a party, have a lawyer draw up a contract or two. "What about Thomasina?"
Ruby shook her head. "Nope."
"What about the White Rose thing? For the orphans in Eastern Europe? It was in Thomasina"s obit, and I just found out the Schmillers were involved."
Mom fussed with the teaspoons and sugar. "I don"t want you upsetting your sister, dear. She"s had a bad day."
Laura was never one to be deterred by Mom. "Did she do it alone, or was there someone else in with her? Or was it you?"
Ruby answered tersely, like someone who had no choice but to comply for her own good. "I don"t know, I don"t know, and no."
"Didn"t you give to that foundation or something?"
Ruby sniffed and nodded, noisily sipping less than a drop of hot tea. "We both did."
She"d almost forgotten-a dinner and a speech, before Ruby and Thomasina had kissed and made up, back when Laura carried a forty-pound grudge in the door and laid it on the table like a sack of lard. The model, having suffered the barbs of the public and nearly losing Roquelle as an agent after knocking Ruby over, had taken them to dinner and laid out her case. Thomasina wasn"t evil. She had a lot on her mind, specifically the situation in Eastern Europe for beautiful young women. The horrible suffering. The rapes. The killings. The aftermath of wars, and the worst, of course, being the economic distress that the western world ignored because the victims were white and beautiful. The suffering of young girls in the third-worldish parts of Hungary and Slovakia was brutal, even compared to what was happening in Africa and the Arab world, apparently. Laura, who had walked in sour and was determined to stay that way, pushed her food around on her plate. Ruby, bless her, love her, misted over like a fast-moving low cloud, and as coldhearted as her reputation had her, Laura could not stand her sister"s tears. Laura had gotten roped into writing a check.
"There was a brochure, wasn"t there?"
"I have it." Ruby waved her hand toward the floor. "It"s in a box in my apartment."
"Well, that takes care of that," Mom said, picking up all three teacups in one hand. "The police taped it off. Uncle Graham can help you get down there. We"ll call him tomorrow."
When Laura looked at Ruby, she knew Uncle Graham could sleep in late for all they cared.
Mom protested every inch of the way. In the name of a good night"s sleep. In the name of protecting themselves. In the name of their security deposit. In the name of the law.
There was only one way down to Ruby"s apartment that wouldn"t break police tape, and that was through the broom closet. The house had been built as a vertical living s.p.a.ce with a kitchen in the bas.e.m.e.nt, living s.p.a.ce in the middle floor at the top of the stoop, and a top floor with bedrooms. It was meant for one family with a dumbwaiter to move food around. When the bottom floor had been converted into a separate apartment sometime during the Great Depression, the stairs had been closed off. The s.p.a.ce under the steps to the top floor was converted by adding a floor, a door, and some wall. In Ruby"s downstairs apartment, she had two closets, the original one that had been under the stairs coming from the top floor, and one over the stairs. When she opened the door to the closet, there were steps she used as shelves. Had Jimmy taken them out, Ruby would have had one long closet. But he didn"t, and that was to their benefit.
Laura stormed into the broom closet and removed dozens of cleaning products, nondescript s...o...b..xes, a set of vintage Samsonite luggage no one would ever travel with, and rolls of shelving paper. Once the floor was clear, she looked at the edges of it. The 1950s abstract linoleum curled up at the corners where the glue had lost its stick power, and she was sure the dirt she brushed away had settled on a clean floor fifty years ago. She grabbed the most promising corner and yanked it as far back as she could. Then she did the next corner, and the next. The last corner was tough, and she used a pair of pliers to pry the linoleum from its place. That was so successful, she used the tool on the other three corners, making a ripping, cracking, grunting racket that made her glad the walls between the buildings were stone. By the time she"d hit all four corners and the cutouts at the doorframe, there was nothing but a two-foot piece of linoleum stuck to the center of the closet and a curling ma.s.s of aged flooring making it nearly impossible to get in there.
Mom stood behind her, arms folded. "Don"t do this."
"I"ll help," Ruby said, arms out.
"No, I got it."
But Ruby would not be deterred, and Mom, seeing that her daughters were about to do exactly what she told them not to do, emitted a resigned sigh.
Laura scanned the mess in the hallway and found the cordless drill. She checked the charge, which was 65 percent dead, or 35 percent charged if you were a gla.s.s half-full type. The tool whirred like a seven-pound cricket when she pulled the trigger. She pa.s.sed the drill to Mom.
Mom crouched as the drill groaned when she jammed the bit into the screw holes that had been there for sixty years, give or take. Naturally, pulling up all the screws revealed nails, which needed to be pried up with a screwdriver, or the back of a hammer, or a b.u.t.ter knife. Some required all three, and Laura b.u.mped backs with her mother in the closet removing them. The last one was in so tight, Mom chiseled the plywood around it until she could use pliers on the entire thing.
They were sweaty, and exhausted, and in too deep to give up. Mom used a crowbar to pry up the wood, which she couldn"t do while standing inside the closet, so she did it from the hall, which had become a wild junkyard of c.r.a.p from the broom closet and pieces of linoleum they"d sc.r.a.pped.
The plywood came up, then slapped back down with a huff of stale air. Mom pried it up again so they could get their hands under it, then shoulders. Mom yanked it toward the door, which got her nowhere because it was bigger than the frame at that angle. So Laura, who was shorter, got in and twisted, and turned, and called on more strength than she actually had to turn the wood around and gently ease it toward the door. It wasn"t coming out, but she"d made enough room so she could look at what was under there.
Ruby"s broom closet was as neat as everything else in the house. The cleaning products, which were used on a regular basis, lay like sleeping children in cute plaid boxes. If Laura went into the corners, she was sure she wouldn"t see sixty years" worth of someone else"s dust.
Mom had flashlights ready. "I"m going to bed," she said. "I don"t want any part of this." She walked upstairs as if she could make that statement true retroactively.
Ruby was ready to go. Laura stepped down, kicking boxes of cleaning things out of the way before she opened the closet door. They didn"t dare turn on any lights or point the flashlights out the windows, where the snoops in the news van could see. Her sister grabbed her hand and pulled her into the bedroom.