Free 2 Death of a Supermodel by Christine DeMaio-Rice Page B

Expansive floor space. A description of the building sounded like Realtor ad copy before the first busted window was replaced.
    Developers discovered that there was a rub, naturally, because if it was easy, it would have been done already. The property had three lienholders, all of whom wanted to sell or develop immediately, and an heir, Katherine Lancaster, who didn’t. Katherine wanted to bring glassmaking back to Brooklyn. She was the only reason the building had not been converted into condos, though the activists who believed New York didn’t need one more luxury condo liked to think they had something to do with scuttling deal after deal. The developers, for their part, were patient. They just waited for Katherine to die. In the meantime, she collected nice checks by renting out the space for fashion shoots and movies.
    Laura followed South Second to the water. The Lancaster Glass building stood in the middle of an empty waterfront like a big erection at the edge of the earth. Yellow signs with arrows that said, cryptically, LAMPPOST, directed her to the waterside entrance. The elevator operator had a clipboard. She knew him, so he let her in and clicked the doors behind her. Olly was a good guy with a crackerjack memory for faces. He loved operating elevators more than anything in the world, and even put on his uniform for his two-hour moonlighting gig in Williamsburg.
    “Hey, Olly,” she said. “Who’s here?”
    “Craft services is on eleven. Safety people. They’re the ones with the ropes and nets, right?”
    “I guess.”
    “Your photographer and his assistants got here. He’s a little…” Olly rotated his index finger around his ear.
    She nodded. “Yeah.”
    “The model came early, and he smelled her breath. Like a puppy, he did it. Then he whispered in this other girl’s ear, and she said, ‘Chase thanks you for not puking before the shoot and wants you to know it won’t be allowed.’ I tell you, I wanted to puke a little on his shoes just to see what he’d do.”
    “Scream like a tropical bird is what,” she said. “The smell makes him crazy.”
    He slid open the doors and winked at her. “Eleven. Coffee to the left.”
    Coffee was exactly what she had on her mind. She mixed herself a cup, then went directly to the roof, where the shoot was to take place. At some point, she may even have drunk a little, but the next hour was lost in preparation and details with interns, makeup with Monty, clothing with Maria and Carlos from the sample room, accessories that arrived in trashed wheeled suitcases, and Ruby, who showed up a minute before Rowena came from behind the curtain.
    “You all right?” Laura asked.
    “They taped off my apartment. I can’t even get in.”
    “Did they tell you anything about why they were there?”
    “No.” She shook her head as if trying to loosen the gears. “How is Chase doing?”
    The photographer, with his signature long mop of curly black hair and pageboy cap, was doing what he always did before a shoot, holding his camera at his chest, standing directly in the way, and staring into space. He spoke to no one, having briefed his all-female team beforehand by whispering instructions in their ears. They set up a net over the edge of the building, and then another, larger one a few stories down, and a dangling shelf for Chase and his silent camera.
    “He’s not happy about Rowena,” Laura said. “Thomasina worked with him a hundred times. She could read his mind. Rowena, he’s going to have to speak to. And she was obviously out last night.”
    He stood there until the sun was in the right place in the sky, and his team, like a well-trained squad of assassins, stopped talking and puttering when he held out his hand. The person in charge of the music started the thumpity-thumps, and Rowena stepped out from behind the curtain in a silk tulle dress that looked like twenty yards of fabric wrapped around her and sewn shut.
    “She can’t walk,” Ruby