Loose Screws

Mine, the gesture says, and I am sorry for it.

I am now the only person still under the shelter, although dozens of people swarm the intersection like lethargic ants. The other bus waiters, undoubtedly relieved that I’ve been singled out and they can breathe more easily—literally—hug the curb and storefronts a few feet away, still close enough to easily catch the bus when it comes.

The man creeps closer, forcing me to look at him. He is filthy and unshaven, his posture stooped. Nearly black toes peer out from rips in athletic shoes only a shade lighter, a good two sizes too large. I cannot tell his age, but behind his moth-eaten beard, I can see how thin he is.

He holds out his hand. It is shaking. From the heat, hunger, the DT’s…? I have no way of knowing. I do, however, feel his embarrassment.

Nedra would have emptied her wallet into that hand, I know that, without a moment’s hesitation. But then, my mother’s crazy.

I glance away, my mouth dry, then back.

“Are you hungry?” I ask, the words scraping my throat. I notice a well-dressed Asian woman a few feet away turn slightly in our direction. But I only half see her frown, her head shake, because my gaze is hooked in the gray one in front of me, buried under folds of eyelids. Hope blooms in those eyes, along with a smile. He nods.

The rational part of me thinks, I should take him to a cheap restaurant, feed him myself. If I just give him money, what will he spend it on?

And then I think, who am I to judge?

But before I can make up my mind, a cop comes along and hustles the protesting man away, at the same time my bus squeals up to the stop. I board, behind the disapproving Asian lady, who asks me, as we take seats across the aisle from each other, if I was afraid. I say no.

The bus is air-conditioned and nearly empty, and I feel some of the tension that’s wormed its way into my head over the past few days slink away. We pull away from the stop; outside the man shuffles off toward Amsterdam Avenue, and my insides cramp.

As unsettled as I feel, as unhappy as I am, I still have a job. I still have a home. I still have my friends and my shoe collection and even, I have to acknowledge, my family. Life might be a little bizarre at the moment, but it’s far from horrible.

I pull out my novel, try to reimmerse myself in Gunther and Abigayle’s trials and tribulations, which has the unfortunate effect of only yanking my thoughts back to the men-and-women discussion of earlier. At the moment, I have to admit I’m inclined to side with Terrie on one thing: men are expendable. Their sperm might not be, but they are. I personally don’t need one to survive, or even flourish. I guess, if push came to shove, I could even go without sex. Nuns do. And it’s not as if I haven’t had my share of dry spells. And then there’s my mother, who’s gone without for, gee, how long is it now? Fifteen years?

I mean, really—are they worth the aggravation? Because, much as I’m inclined to agree with Terrie’s theory about how things should be between men and women, I think Shelby’s the realist. Oh, maybe there are true equalitarian male-female relationships out there, but by and large, women do have to defer to the men in their lives in order to keep harmony, don’t they? At the moment, I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, it just is. And right now, I don’t have the energy to be a feminist. I’m having enough trouble dealing with being a woman.

I give up on the book, stick it back in my purse. The Asian woman gets off at Central Park West; I settle in for the short ride through the Park, as I mentally settle in for the next phase of my life. Tomorrow, I go back to work. Tomorrow, I resume my normal, predictable, pre-Greg life. Selecting wall colors, I can handle. Sketching window treatments, I can handle. Charming the pants off a new client, I can handle. Granted, I’m not exactly eagerly anticipating the idea of facing Brice Fanning—my egomaniacal boss of the past seven years—and his inevitable snideties, but at least my work is one area of my life I can count on. I bring in a helluva lot of business, so we both know I’m not going to leave, and he’s not going to get rid of me. So. My plan is to reimmerse myself in my work, which, if not exactly exciting, is at least fulfilling and stimulating. Or at least it was.

And will be again, I vow as another layer of tension shucks off. After all, what’s the point of missing what I’ve never had, right? What do I know about being married anyway? Let alone about living in Westchester? I’m not only used to being single, I think I’m pretty damn good at it.

As of this moment (she says without the slightest shame whatsoever) I’m burrowing so far into my comfort zone, nothing on God’s earth is going to blast me out of it.

Not even the memory of a brief, hopeful smile beneath discouraged eyes.

Five

So here I am the next morning, clicking smartly down 78th Street in my tobacco-colored linen sheath (short enough to be chic but not slutty) and my new Anne Klein pumps, my fave Hermes scarf billowing softly in the breeze, when I notice a small herd of police cars clogging the street about a half block away. Which would, coincidentally, place them just outside the building where the offices for Fanning Interiors, Ltd., reside. It is not, however, until I notice the trembling band of yellow police tape stretched from one side of the entrance, around the No Parking sign out by the curb, on around the Clean Up After Your Dog sign, then back to the other side of the steps that I get that awful, knotty feeling in the pit of the my stomach that this does not bode well for my immediate future.

Still, I’m doing okay until I see the chalk outline on the sidewalk. Somebody screams—me, as it turns out—which garners the attention of at least three of the cops and one sanitation engineer across the street. Okay, so maybe my reaction is a bit over the top, but just because I live in Manhattan doesn’t mean I stumble across body outlines on anything resembling a regular basis. Besides, I haven’t had my latte yet. Not to mention that it’s barely eight-thirty and the temperature/humidity index is roughly equivalent to that on Mars. And I was already in a bad mood because my hair looks like Great-Aunt Teresa’s wig, which, trust me, is not a good thing.

“Jesus, Ginger,” I hear a foot away, which makes me scream again. I pivot, my purse smacking into some gawker who is dumb enough to come up behind a hysterical woman, to see Nick Wojowodski frowning at me. “What the hell are you doing here?”

His rough voice, the creases pinching his mouth, give me a pretty good idea he’s not having a wonderful morning, either. My shaking hand clamped around my still-lidded latte, I stare at him, but all I can think of is that outline. And the dark red stain I saw ooching out from it. I shudder, then say, “I work over there.”

“Oh,” he says, a world of meaning crammed into two letters. By now, onlookers are beginning to clot around us, including a couple of the other designers, the receptionist, the lady who does most of our window treatments.

“Would everybody who works here please go check in with Officer Ruiz?” Nick says, his baritone piercing the burr of voices beginning to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. I hear a gasp or two, but more out of surprise than actual shock. Or dismay. I don’t hear what Nick says next, or what anybody else says, either, because my stomach has just dropped into my crotch and I’m thinking that shape of the outline was suspiciously…familiar. Like it might have belonged to a shortish, balding gay man of about sixty or so who took great pleasure in regularly making my life a living hell. Next thing I know, Nick is hauling me off to one side, encouraging me to take a sip of the latte. I nearly gag on it, but I manage. It’s at this point that I notice the guy who owns the brownstone next door talking to one of the cops. He doesn’t look so good.

Nick follows my gaze, turns back to me. “You know that guy?”

“Nathan Caruso. Lives next door.”

“He positively ID’d the body,” Nick says softly. My eyes shoot to his, dread making my stomach burn.

“Who—?”

“Brice Fanning. Your boss, I take it?”

“Shit!”

Nick’s expression goes a little funny, which I guess isn’t too surprising, considering my reaction.

Oh, God. I am a horrible, horrible person. A man is dead, most likely not from natural causes, and all I can think is, “This is so freaking unfair!” Okay, so Brice was a mean, petty little man and I couldn’t stand being in the same room with him for more than five minutes—which made weekly meetings a bit problematic—but he was still a human being and thus deserves some respect, at least, if not an indication of sorrow.

I hold my breath for a second or two…nope, sorry, not gonna happen. Didn’t like the guy when he was alive, don’t much care that he’s dead.

If you want to leave now, I’ll completely understand.

But, God. Brice was Fanning Interiors. I was just a minion among many, one of the small army of designers Brice’s prestige and reputation were able to keep busy. I’d recently begun to get a serious leg up on establishing my own rep apart from Fanning’s, but there is not a doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t be living the lifestyle I was today had it not been for Brice’s taking me on seven years ago. In many ways, I was indebted to the man.

And now he’s nothing but a schmear on an East Side sidewalk. Oy. That poor guy who found him…

“How did he die?” I ask over the constant squawking of the police radio nearby.

Nick’s face undergoes this whole impersonal-police-mask thing, but his jaw is stubbled, as if he hasn’t had time to shave, and there are bags under his eyes. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

For some reason, this irks me. So I tuck one of the many curls that will spring forth like snakes from my French braid over the next fourteen hours and say, “I saw the blood, Nick. Somehow I doubt he was pecked to death by a rabid pigeon.”

Nick gives me this look. “Pigeons don’t carry rabies. And besides, you’re just assuming that was blood.”

I give him a look back. Then he sighs and says, “He was shot.”

I visibly shudder. I don’t much care for guns. Especially when they’ve been used on people I know. I take another sip of latte. “When?” I whisper.

“Real early this morning.”

I look up. “Any witnesses?”

“No.”

“The man was shot in the middle of 78th Street and there were no witnesses?”

“Another assumption. We found him in the middle of 78th Street. Doesn’t necessarily mean that’s where he was shot.”

“Oh,” I say, then frown in concentration, which earns me another heavy sigh.

My brows lift. “What?”

“Please don’t tell me you dream about being an amateur detective.”

“Not to worry,” I say. “I don’t even like to read murder mysteries.” He looks relieved, at least until I ask, “I don’t suppose you know who?”

Nick shakes his head, rubbing the back of his neck. “Nope. Which means we’ve got a lot of questioning to do. Starting with everybody who worked for him.”

“Today?”

“Yeah, today. What did you think?”

I shake my head. “Sorry, but I’ve got a ten o’clock, then appointments straight through the day—”

“Ginger,” Nick says, patiently. “Your boss is dead. Trust me, none of you are going to be doing any decorating—”

I bristle. “Designing.”

“—whatever, 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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