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My eyes search frantically through the sea of shocked faces, trying to find the shooter wearing the impeccable suit. But he is nowhere. The gunshots have stopped, the immediate threat seems to have passed, and already cops and emergency workers are flooding into the building. I look around to see if I can find Marguerite so I can tell her what I saw. But before I can get very far, a police officer steps into my path to question me. In the true style of New York City’s finest, he doesn’t bother to ask me if I’m okay and instead launches straight into questioning why I’m covered in blood. I suppose that’s fair, considering I do look like I just stepped out of a slasher movie. A medic saddles up beside him, waiting to be allowed permission to make sure I’m all right.
My mouth opens and words pour out of it in a nonsensical stream. I manage to get out the gist of it—how a model was shot dead backstage right next to me, and how a man in a charcoal gray suit carried the body away. The cop looks at me as if I have three heads sprouting from my shoulders. I almost fear for a second that he’s going to take me to the psych ward and have me admitted.
Thankfully, Marguerite appears and intervenes before any such thing can happen. “Forgive her, officer,” she says in a thick French accent. She’s not even French—she grew up in the Bronx, and just happened to be lucky enough to have her mother bestow a cool name upon her, to which she has molded her identity. “Harlow is just confused. She’s obviously shaken up and traumatized by what has happened.”
“Can you vouch for her whereabouts?” the cop asks, looking skeptical.
“Of course I can, she’s my intern,” Marguerite snaps, as if she finds the audacity of this man questioning her to be offensive. “You should run along and find whoever did this and ruined opening day of Fashion Week. Isn’t that what my tax dollars pay you to do?” Marguerite might have been a pain in the ass to work for during my senior internship at FIT, but she’s a force to be reckoned with, and right now that’s working to my advantage.
After the cop leaves, and I manage to wave the medic away, I turn to her out of sheer confusion. “What’s going on? Why was that cop looking at me like I was nuts? I just watched one of your models get shot in the head. Doesn’t anyone want to find out what happened to him?”
“What are you going on about?” she asks irritably. “No one was shot in the head. Whoever did this was simply trying to ruin the start of Fashion Week, probably that new designer out of Chinatown. He always seems to be causing trouble. Or maybe even those crazy people over at Racked. Sometimes I feel like they will doanything,just to steal the show away from the rest of us hardworking designers.”
“No Marguerite, listen to me,” I protest. “How can you not believe me? I saw it with my own eyes!”
She lets out an exasperated sigh. “Okay, then, which one of my models was it?” she asks, putting one hand on her hip as if I’m wasting her time. “Because I’m pretty sure they’ve all already been accounted for.”
“The male one I was dressing right before the gunshots rang out. The one with the platinum hair and the—”
“I think you need to go home and get some rest,” she interrupts, rolling her eyes at me.
Fashion Week isn’t for the lighthearted, although I must admit, this whole scene has definitely rattled me. “But Marguerite—”
“Enough!” she snaps. “My nerves are fried. I don’t know what it is you thought you saw, but it can’t possibly have been true, because I don’t evenhavea male model in my show this season. It’s a strictly female line.”
I feel my stomach lurch. I know what I saw. And I don’t know why the cops don’t believe me or where that male model came from. But I definitely just witnessed a murder.
Marguerite turns to leave, grabbing swaths of her fabrics as she storms out of the building at a furious pace, leaving me trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do now. Since Fashion Week is definitely not starting today after this violent chaos, I follow suit and head out to my car. But as I slide into the driver seat and instinctively lock the car doors, I am struck by two things.
The first is that I have just witnessed a man being murdered and no one seems to believe it happened. And the second is that I have just set my eyes on perhaps the most mystifying and brutally handsome man I’ve ever seen.
