today…”
But before we can pursue this conversational track, another cop calls Nick over and I’m left entertaining a sickening sense of foreboding.
People are milling about, looking more put out than concerned. I let out a heavy sigh of my own, then take a tissue out of my purse, spread it on the step of the town house next door, and plunk down my linen-covered tush. Perspiration races down my back.
My poor little brain goes positively berserk. Dead people tend to do that to me. Especially dead people who had help getting that way, even if I couldn’t stand them. Brice Fanning might have been a brilliant designer, but he drove his employees nuts. I have never met anyone whinier, or pickier, or less inclined to give the people who worked for him the respect or recognition they deserved. The only reason most of us put up with him was for the money, as well as that reputation thing. But I think it’s safe to say once the shock wears off, he won’t be missed.
Except then, because my brain is already on overload and I tend to have an overly active imagination anyway, I think, gee, what if Brice didn’t bite the big one because somebody simply hated his guts? What if there’s some crazed person running around who has it in for interior designers? A client displeased with her faux painting job? A homophobe? An architect?
Or maybe his murder is even more random that that. Maybe somebody just did him in for his Rolex or something?
Carole Dennison, Brice’s top designer, joins me, although she doesn’t sit, out of deference to her vintage Chanel suit, I imagine. How can she not be dying in that jacket? She digs in her LV purse for a cigarette, lights up.
“Great way to start the week, huh?”
“Might rain later, though,” I say. “Maybe cool it off a little.”
She laughs, a raspy, braying sound that always makes me feel better. Carole has worked for Brice for about a hundred years, although, if the lighting is subdued and her makeup is thick, she only looks sixty. Ish. I like Carole a lot. She’s a tough, ballsy broad who doesn’t take anything off anyone, while instilling the unshakable conviction in her clients that nothing is impossible, given enough money. I started out at Fanning’s as her assistant, in fact, and learned more from her in one month than I’d learned in all my years of design school. We’re fairly close, enough that I’d even invited her to my wedding. So I’ve known for a long time that one of her major gripes was that, even though she brought in more business than any three of us put together, Brice refused to make her a partner. She’d also confided in me that she didn’t dare go out on her own, that Brice threatened to make her life a living hell if she did.
She crosses her arms, squints over at the herd of police cars. “If you ask me, I think it was that last lover of his.”
I’m not sure what to say to that, so I leave it at, “Oh?”
“Yeah. Bet you anything. Jealousy, pure and simple, since Brice took up with someone new about a month ago.” She looks at me. “Did you know?”
I shake my head. If I didn’t care about the man, I sure as hell wasn’t interested in his love life. Then, for a couple minutes, we make appropriate noises about how shocked we are, how stunned, how grossed out, both of us avoiding the one question hovering at the forefront of our thought:
What does this mean, job-wise?
Finally, because I can’t stand it anymore, I say, “So. Do you have any idea how the business is set up? I mean, in the eventuality of, um…” I gesture lamely toward the chalk mark.
Carol thoughtfully pulverizes the cigarette stub beneath her twenty-year-old black-and-beige Chanel slingback. To my shock, a tear streaks down her carefully foundationed cheek.
Uh-oh.
One acrylic nail—a subdued cinnamon color, square-tipped—flicks away the errant tear before it leaves a visible track in her foundation. She struggles for obvious control for a minute, then says, “Max told me—”
(Max Sheffield, Brice’s accountant. And I think Carole’s lover at one time, although I can’t confirm that.)
“—that he’d tried for years to get Brice to make provisions for the business to continue in the event of his death or incapacitation, especially after it took off the way it did in the late eighties. He suggested making the business a partnership with his senior designers, if not a corporation, or at least leaving it to someone in his will. A friend or family member, anybody.”
She lights up another cig and shakes her head, her Raquel Welch auburn hair shimmering in the hazy sunlight filtering through the buildings. “He refused. Said when he died, the business died with him.”
My immediate future flashes before my eyes, and it is bleak. “Which means?”
“Which means, as far as I understand it, we’ll all get whatever is currently due us and that’s it. Whatever’s left goes to pay outstanding bills, and if there’s anything left after that, the money goes to some obscure charity.”
My blood runs cold. “But what about our clients?”
Pale, glossed lips quirk up in a humorless smile. “They’re outta luck. And so are we, unless we all manage to find jobs with other firms.” She shrugs. “Get out your cell, honey, and start making calls.”
A great tiredness comes over me, followed almost immediately by a lightbulb flashing on in my head. “Hey—why don’t you start your own firm?”
Carole huffs out a stream of smoke that mercifully blows away from me. “Even ten years ago, I might have. But I’m going to be sixty-five in November. Way too old to start a business now. But why don’t you go into business on your own, designing accessories or something? The Jorgensons are still talking about that set of iron and marble tables you designed for them, Jesus—how long ago was that? Four years? You know your talent is wasted picking out wall colors.”
I smile wanly. “Hell, I haven’t designed anything in probably two years.”
“Well, you should.” She hisses out her smoke, tosses the second butt out past the curb. “You want to work for someone else the rest of your life?”
“Forget it, Carole. This gal doesn’t do Struggling Artist.”
“Chicken,” she says.
“But a chicken who eats.”
Of course, after today, that may not be true, which is why I suppose we both go silent for a little bit. Then Carole says quietly, “This hasn’t been a very good week for you.”
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