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Cath nodded. “All hail the maker who figures out how to get paid. I know this woman at the V and A who’s selling these pieces of slate and wood for putting across your tub? Like, just a piece of stone, or wood, with grooves in the bottom, so you can get in the bath and have a place to set your votive candle and your book and your vibrator, I guess, but she takes the best pictures, makes it look like if you have this piece of slate on your tub it’s going to turn bathing into an orgasmic experience like none you’ve ever had, and they go for a hundred and fifty pounds. Her boyfriend makes them for five, ten pounds in materials, plus shipping. They’ve earned enough to buy a flat in Kensington.”
Chasity sighed and tapped furiously at the screen of her tablet. She’d taken three calls and consumed two double espressos on the house since her arrival. Winston had begun to doubt she would remain long enough for Bea to get to the point of their meeting.
“Allie takes great pictures,” May said. And then, when no one replied, she clarified, “For her listings. On Etsy, and on her websites. Is that how you get more money?”
Allie looked uncomfortable. “It helps.”
“Tell me more about these photographs,” Winston said. “This is your primary form of marketing?”
“It’s one, yeah. But it’s not so much marketing as…I don’t know. Paying attention to what people want, I guess. People who shop for vintage clothes want the fantasy of the past. That’s what they’re spending money for—not the dress, but the way it makes them feel. So I wear the clothes or pay models to wear them, with period makeup and hair and accessories, and I create a tableau in my studio with vintage furniture and accent pieces.”
“She did this one with a flapper dress,” May said, “slinking on a chaise longue with seventeen strings of pearls and a cigarette in a holder.”
“How much were you paid for the dress?” Winston asked.
Allie blushed. “Seventeen hundred dollars.”
“How much over market value?”
“Nine hundred. Ish. It was missing some of the beadwork, which I disclosed in the listing, and that should’ve kept the value down, but…” She shrugged.
Cath whistled. “Damn. That is impressive. Write down your websites for me, I want to see this shim-shammery of yours.”
“That isn’t shim-shammery,” Nev said. “That’s good business, love.”
Bea bounded back over and slid a pastry in front of May. “It’s apple. You seemed like an apple danish kind of person.”
“I love them.”
“World’s best barista.” His daughter hooked her thumbs into the suspenders she wore over a ratty men’s T-shirt to hold up a pair of enormous Bermuda shorts that looked as though she’d pulled them from the bottom of some laundry pile. She had dark circles under her eyes and a line of dark blue stars trailing up her forearm he’d never seen before.
A tattoo? He hoped it wasn’t a tattoo. It looked as though she’d inked it with a Biro, except the skin all around it was disturbingly pink, as though she’d drilled the ink into her own flesh.
Winston began to wish her boss would turn up and fire her. Then perhaps she would run out of money and move into her apartment, where he could keep an eye on her and prevent her from mutilating herself further.
“Nice stick and poke,” Cath said.
“I know, right? I love it.”
“What’s stick and poke?” Winston asked.
Bea turned three-quarters away from him and asked her uncle, “So where were we?”
“You have a friend,” Chasity prompted.
“Oh! Right. I have a friend who works as a caterer nights, and he got a gig through a temp agency that’s going to pay him twice the usual rate, in cash, on Saturday morning. He’s supposed to get a text on Saturday by six A.M. telling him where to go, and it’s going to be in Manhattan, accessible by subway. So I’m thinking that’s got to be Justice.”
“Can we get him to tell you when he finds out where it will be?”
“He signed a confidentiality thing, but yeah, I think he’ll do it for me.”
“Confidentiality agreements with temp caterers who don’t know what they’re catering for or where?” Chasity said. “This guy is begging for leaks at this point.”
“Well, he’d need them,” Cath said. “He wants press and crowds. He can’t afford to keep secrets well, just well enough to keep an air of mystery around the unveiling.”
“So, wait,” May interrupted, “you’re saying Justice wants people to know he’s planning something.”
“That’s how these things build,” Cath explained. “Probably there’s press that already knows it’s happening. If Bea knows, and her friends are talking about it—”
