Dead is the New Black Read Free Page A

week, six or seven days per week before a show. She left when she could, clocking fifty to seventy hours a week, depending on the time of year.
    “And for this, you make how much?” he asked.
    “Less than you, but nobody’s shooting at me,” she replied.
    He smirked. “And you’re a designer, or what?”
    “I’m a patternmaker.”
    “You do the flowers and stuff on the fabric?”
    It always amazed her that people wore clothes every day, but nobody had any idea what went into making them. “Did your mom ever sew anything for you at home?”
    “Yeah. An Easter suit when I was seven. Light blue. Dumb-looking thing.”
    “Before she sewed it, she had to cut the fabric, right?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Likely, she laid pieces of tissue paper down onto flat fabric, pinned them down, and cut. Well, the tissue paper was in the right shape, and it was in the right shape because a patternmaker drew it that way.”
    “You make shapes,” he said.
    “That’s right. I make the shape right so the garment fits. If it doesn’t fit, you’re screwed.”
    He looked at her for a second as if to say ‘ That’s a job? ’ then got back to the business at hand. “This morning, tell me exactly what you saw when you walked into the office.”
    “Okay. So, I put in my code and—”
    “You got your own code?”
    “Everyone does.” She tried to look at what he scratched into his little black pad. “And the lights were on, so I knew Jeremy was in, because Renee turns them off when she leaves at six.”
    “Did you notice anything else out of place?”
    “There was a napkin in the trash. A brown one from HasBean, where Jeremy gets his coffee.”
    “Then, you went to your desk?”
    “Right, and then I went to his office.”
    “Why?”
    “To thank him for the coffee.” She tilted her head, ready to say ‘ Duh ,’ but caught herself in time. “And so she was lying there, and Jeremy was there, too, all freaked out.”
    “Describe ‘freaked out.’”
    “He was standing there like…” She stood and mimicked Jeremy’s position.
    Cangemi looked her up and down. “His hands were just like that?”
    “Yeah.”
    “In fists?”
    “Yeah, like this.” She held her fists out and bent her elbows, just like she’d seen Jeremy do, as if flying a plane.
    “Anything in them?”
    “Zebra fabric. A long header.”
    From Cangemi’s blank look, he didn’t know what a header was, so she explained, “Fabric salespeople, like Terry Distorni, who’s our major supplier, want you to use their fabric on the line. So they send you little pieces of what they have. They’re called headers, or swatches, depending on the size, and you get like a few hundred a season. And you design your line with those fabrics, or not. But a header is like a sample of what they can make for you in production.”
    “And Jeremy had one in his hands when you saw him?”
    “Yeah. He said he took it off her. To see if she was alive,” she added.
    “And?”
    “And, I checked her pulse. I mean, I put my fingers on her neck, and it was cold. There was no pulse, if I was even looking in the right spot. So then I called you.”
    Cangemi sat back in his chair and flipped through his notes, leaning his left ankle on his right knee. He wore argyle socks. The left sock drooped like the elastic had been stretched.
    “You shouldn’t do that to your socks,” Laura said, pointing. “You put them in a ball before you put them in the drawer, and it wears the elastic on one and not the other. Or both, if you’re not organized.”
    “My girlfriend’s pretty organized.” He smiled, but there was no warmth in it. “Did you know the victim? And did you notice how she arranged her underwear drawer?” That time, he smiled like he meant it. He wanted to be the one making the jokes. Fine.
    “She was Jeremy’s backer, Gracie Pomerantz. The money.”
    “She usually here this early?”
    “She comes in the weeks before a show, but no, not this early,