Death Of A Supermodel Part 1

Death of a Supermodel.

Christine DeMaio-Rice.

CHAPTER 1.

"Why are your fists clenched?" Ruby asked.

Laura barely heard her over the grinding music. Experimental thumpy beats under what sounded like a stack of automobiles being crushed was du jour for the New York Fall shows, and though she'd fought it, her sister had demanded a trend, any trend and every trend, not be missed on their first season's show. The noise didn't seem to bother the attendees or the models, but Laura wanted to bore her own ears out with an awl.

"Where's Thomasina?" Laura hissed.

Ruby shrugged. She looked pale and drawn, still gorgeous, of course, with her curly blond locks that contrasted so well with Laura's blondish, brownish, curly-ish mop, but sick-no, hung-over, and she stayed that way the rest of the day, which placed most of the responsibility for the show's last minute details on Laura.

Dymphna Bastille presented herself in the Westchester s.h.i.+ft, a magenta wool crepe dress with a hemline that landed somewhere between public acceptance and private business. Laura took out a hankie and held it under Dymphna's chin. The model responded by rolling her eyes. Laura felt like a rhino looking up at a giraffe.

Dymphna spit her gum into the hankie, adding a little extra lipstick-stained string at the end with a barely discernible smile that was about as good as it got with any of these women. Laura pushed her into the runway's blinding lights.

"Does she seem eighteen to you?" Laura asked, watching the fabric drape over the model's perfect little b.u.t.t.

Ruby waved off the suggestion. "Mermaid's contract says-"

"What if they're lying?"

"Then this whole industry's in trouble."

Laura tried not to care, but she did. She'd signed a deal with the CFDA: no models under eighteen and none with a BMI under seventeen. She'd already seen the BMI thing slipping through the cracks when Thomasina had shown up for Monday's weigh-in at sixteen and a half, claiming she'd had a stomach virus. The dress swam on her at the fitting, and Laura had spent half the night altering it. The waist shouldn't fit anyone who hadn't had their liver, spleen, and large intestine removed, but it fit Thomasina. She looked like a wire hanger in that dress. Laura looked at the rack. The gown was ready with its eight matte gunmetal buckles at the bodice and hemat.i.te beads from waist to ankle. She scanned the rest of the back room. Giraffes flitting, flirting, and preening. Monty had a girl in the chair getting sprayed with some kind of aerosol epoxy. No Thomasina.

Beside her, Rowena Churchill-no relation-shook her arms and cracked her neck, prepping for her walk down the runway like a batter stepping up to the plate. She wore a maxi dress of the same wool crepe as Dymphna's, with a chain mail belt slung low on the hips. The garment would retail at fifteen hundred dollars no matter how hard the Carnegie sisters tried to get the price below a thousand.

"How old are you, Rowena?" Laura asked as she s.h.i.+fted the belt buckle half an inch to the left.

"Eighteen."

"Have you seen Thomasina?"

"No."

Without another word, Rowena hurled herself onto the runway, her walk matching the aggressive lights and music. Laura imagined her eating the audience on the walk to the end of the runway and spitting them out on the way back. She had superstar written all over her. In two seasons, she was going to be unaffordable.

Ruby nudged her with an elbow. "Penelope's here."

Laura scanned the audience, placing the faces she knew. Pierre Sevion, their agent, sat in the front row, looking at who was there instead of the runway. Ivanah Schmiller, wife of their startup investor, sat close by. Her husband, Bob, was nowhere to be seen. Jeremy St. James, Laura's ex-boss, who still brought a shock of heat to her throat, was three rows back, probably having given up his seat in the front row for someone else. His arms were folded, and his brown eyes focused on the clothes in front of him. The tilt of his straight shoulders leaned into Pierre, who was speaking into Jeremy's ear.

"I see her," Laura said.

Penelope Sidewinder, former model, top reviewer for WWD, and famed reformer of all things giraffe, sat with a notebook in her lap, pursing her thin beige lips tightly, the rest of her expression obscured by her tiny frameless gla.s.ses. A reporter from the Post photographed her instead of the model on the runway. She ignored him quite pointedly. The New York Post was well beneath her.

She was the architect of the new weight and age requirements for giraffes, bringing the whole industry to heel with a PR campaign funded by her ample savings account and SuperPAC-sized capital from MAAB-Models Against Anorexia and Bulimia-after Juanita June's collapse during a Vogue shoot. Laura feared she would look too closely at Dymphna's age and, G.o.d forbid, Thomasina's weight, without giving the clothes enough attention to review them.

On the runway, Rowena glanced at the fas.h.i.+on reviewer and swung her head away to look at some other wildly important person in the back row. Heather Dahl presented herself to Ruby for approval, stubbing her cigarette beneath her borrowed Blahnik.

"Do you think she'll review us?" Ruby asked as she popped up Heather's collar before pus.h.i.+ng the model onto the runway.

"If she does, we won't have to worry about buying fabric. We'll use the review as collateral on a loan."

The music changed, and the lights went dark. Laura approved another giraffe and sent her out, but her mind was on Ruby, who leaned like a drunk on a Sat.u.r.day night.

"Are you going to be sick again?" Laura asked as she primped the giraffe with a last name like alphabet soup, checking the buckles on the woman's shoes.

"No," Ruby said, but she coughed a little.

"Please do not puke on the clothes. It's our only sample set."

"I won't," Ruby said, looking as though she really wanted to puke on the Italian calfskin jacket crossing her path.

"What did you eat this morning?"

"A Momlette." A Momlette contained onions, potatoes, egg whites, no salt, white pepper, cream, and a little flour because Mom didn't know how to make anything without flour.

Ruby ran out of the room. She'd spent the previous night at a party while Laura hemmed and pressed. Making contacts, she said. More like making hay. Laura had no idea who Ruby was seeing, but her sister had been scarce enough over the previous weeks to really p.i.s.s Laura off. Ruby always cited her lack of skills and general fatigue, but the upshot was that fifty-hour weeks were not going to cut it. Fifty-hour weeks in their position weren't going to put the show on the runway. That was work/life balance, also known as luxury living.

Laura glanced into the audience and noticed that Jeremy was gone. A second later, the salty smell of his skin tingled her nose, and she felt him behind her.

"That was the last group," he whispered. "Where's the Hudson?"

Laura glanced back. The Hudson was still on the rack in all its s.h.i.+mmery last-dress-of-the-show glory.

"You have to keep on these women," he added.

She looked at his coffee eyes and unshaven cheeks, and knew it was no small thing for him to come up to Central Park to see her show. His own show was in three days, and he was undoubtedly working the same hours she'd been. His dark hair was mussed and needed to be cut, not that it wasn't perfect, but it looked the way it usually did the days before a show. She missed those weeks from seasons past, the two of them quietly pinning garments and scoring patterns while the rest of the city slept. She used to bathe in the smell of him, the sound of his voice, the tilt of his neck, until it all changed, and she had demanded an apology from him for counterfeiting his own work. It took two months, and he did, grudgingly stating that though his side business never impacted her directly, it did indirectly because he was using her patterns to lie to people. Then she'd admitted that he was recreating his own work, and that he paid for the patterns with her salary, and they called a truce.

The giraffes brushed by, coming in from the finale like a bus unloading. But there was no finale. Laura scanned the girls. They were all the same, but different in enough small ways that the Hudson wouldn't fit them. Any one of them could have been fit for that G.o.dd.a.m.n dress, but Ruby had insisted on Thomasina, her new best freaking friend. The lights flickered, and the music changed.

Which girl? She cast an eye on Rowena, and her mind ticked off measurements and shapes. Close. Close enough by a quarter inch in the bust and an irrelevant bicep shape from working out with free-weights.

She grabbed Rowena and pulled her to the back of the line.

"Send them out!" she shouted, and Jeremy herded the girls out for the final walk.

Rowena, understanding what was happening as if she'd read Laura's mind, hurled herself into the dress as if wrestling it into submission. The eight pewter buckles of the bodice clicked as she stepped in. Laura pulled them tight, flattening the model into a tube only slightly wider than a drinking straw.

"Your shoes," Laura said.

Rowena wore a pair of high-heeled elf shoes that added the right note of whimsy to the wool crepe dress. But with the Hudson gown, they were wrong, wrong, wrong. Laura checked under the rack for the hemat.i.te platforms that went with the gown, but they weren't there. She glanced at the exit. The last girl was on her way out, and Jeremy looked back, making a hurry up motion with his hand.

She checked Rowena's feet. They were a nine-and-a-half anyway. Rowena would never fit into those shoes even if Laura could find them.

"Take them off," Laura said.

Rowena kicked off her shoes, but that made the dress three inches too long, and the gunmetal beads dragged on the floor.

"Shoot," Laura hissed.

"Don't worry," Rowena said and bolted to the exit. She plowed through two rows of sashaying stick-figures like a barrel rolling down a hill, holding up the front of her dress and whipping the fabric around so it took the light and stayed out of the way of her bare feet, which now looked intended. Laura decided Rowena was one giraffe who needed to be a rock star as soon as possible.

Laura was so delighted, she forgot that, as the designers, she and Ruby were supposed to follow the last model out. Jeremy, on the other hand, hadn't forgotten and pushed her onto the runway.

"No!" she said like her life was on the line, because she was suddenly sure that if she went out there, she would die of stage fright.

"I'll pull you right out there, kicking and screaming."

"Ruby's in the bathroom. We have to skip it this time."

"Ruby already had her moment on the runway." He wrapped his arm around her waist and pushed her out.

It was bright, which she knew from the run-throughs. But her eyes hurt as her pupils contracted, and when she looked back, all she could see was Jeremy's pale blue sweater. She turned, trying to s.h.i.+eld her eyes with her hand, but the lights were everywhere. She didn't dare look at the faces in the front row-buyers, critics, and ladies rich enough to use Fas.h.i.+on Week as a shopping spree. Laura nodded and wondered if they were disappointed at what they saw. Mousy little her.

At the same time, she felt relief. The show was done. All she had to do was bask in the warm glow of it and clean up the mess. It was over, and all the fighting, worrying, and sc.r.a.ping for every last yard of fabric was done. This was her moment, not to absorb admiration, but to relax before the impending crisis of the fabric orders.

But even the happy moment and grinding music weren't enough to cover the scream from the back room.

That put a damper on things. The music continued because it was on a loop, but the murmuring and some sympathy screaming went on even as Laura hightailed it to the back room. What had been a hive of activity four minutes before was an empty s.p.a.ce in a tent with the litter of cigarette b.u.t.ts, seven-hundred-dollar shoes, and wooden hangers all over the floor.

Ruby stood in the middle of the s.p.a.ce with her feet together and her hands balled into fists, screaming.

"What?" Laura barked, feeling the presence of models, businesspeople, and whoever else barreling into her.

Ruby pointed to the back of the back, where the bathrooms were. Laura bolted past rows of empty racks and piles of clothes she'd spent months working on. The crowd followed like rats scurrying behind a guy with a flute.

Ruby didn't join them; she seemingly had already seen enough of whatever there was to see back there and felt no need to see it again. Fine. Laura would kill the spider, trap the rat, or whatever had to be done, and the whole incident would be the talk of the town. Maybe it would overshadow Dymphna Bastille's age. Or lack of it.

The bathrooms were the most luxurious port-a-potties money could buy. They were trucked in, attached to the tents, and cleaned four times a day, which Laura knew because the fee was a line item on her books. The white tiles and granite sinks were spotless but for a sprinkling of face powder and a streak of purple eye shadow on the mirror.

As she turned her head, she saw that Ruby's shrieking wasn't over a rat or a spider, but over her new best friend, the model with the body to launch a thousand high-end lines.

Thomasina Wente was sprawled on the floor in a pool of foul-smelling vomit.

CHAPTER 2.

Not again was the first thing that went through her mind. Please, G.o.d, if you're out there at all, not again. Not another body. Not another series of interviews at the precinct. Not this again.

She picked up a hemat.i.te platform at her feet, then dropped it. The cops would want it exactly where it was.

"Overdose," came a voice from behind her. Rowena had gotten in the door first, despite the fact that she wore a gown meant for an Oscar acceptance.

"Out!" Laura cried. "Unless you're a paramedic. Out, out, out!"

"Pee!" Rowena shoved herself and the gown into the stall next to Thomasina and clicked the door.

Laura had no idea whether Thomasina was dead or not and wasn't qualified to make that determination. She poked her cellphone and realized her hands were shaking. "I can't dial," she said.

"Ruby was calling," Rowena said.

Laura put away her phone and rubbed her eyes. She heard the toilet flush, and the door to the stall door opened with a clack. Rowena gathered her skirts and stepped out. She leaned over Thomasina. "This is bad."

"Just wait for the paramedics," Laura said. "Trust me. The police want everything where it is. If you spit when you talk, you'll mess up their scene."

Rowena stepped back, holding the skirt of her gown above the floor, and leaned against the back wall, still as an oak.

"Do you think she's dead?" Laura asked.

Rowena shrugged.

Apparently, Thomasina was as popular with the other giraffes as she was with Laura. "When the cops start asking questions, you shouldn't be so flip about it."

Rowena cracked her gum, and Laura resisted the urge to hold a hankie under her chin. "I'm not flip."

Laura's conversations with Rowena usually warranted little more than yes and no answers, or short statements about one's ability to walk in a tight skirt. She never spent much time talking to giraffes; she didn't have the s.p.a.ce in her schedule. Ruby was the one who extracted gossip and news. Ruby was the one who'd brought Thomasina back into the fold after the model knocked her off a runway. Ruby not only tolerated, but embraced Thomasina's haughty affectation.

And Ruby was the one who tapped on the door. "Can I come in?"

"No," Rowena snapped.

Laura felt trapped in the tiny room with a dead giraffe and a rock star model wearing a matte metallic ball gown. "Do you have a show after this?" Laura asked.

"Yes."

"You ever string more than four words together?"

Rowena cracked her gum. "Sometimes."

Laura tried not to stare too hard at Thomasina. Lying down, her arms and legs looked even more like chicken bones. Laura tried to determine if Thomasina was breathing by watching her chest. There was no movement that she could detect.

"Lancaster's tomorrow?" Rowena asked.

There was a huge rooftop shoot at the Lancaster Gla.s.s building with Chase Charmain at the crack of dawn, before the tent shows started at ten o'clock. Thomasina had bent over backward to get it into her schedule for Ruby. d.a.m.n. The photos had a chance to get into Black Book, and there was her model, sprawled on the bathroom floor like a fistful of jackstraws. Getting a last minute replacement during fas.h.i.+on week who could fit into clothes fit specifically for Thomasina would be impossible. Except that she was stuck in the bathroom with someone who might be just the one.