The Crasher

by Shirley Lord

Genres: Police Procedurals

Synopsis

Ginny Walker always had one dream: to be a great clothing designer, the next Calvin Klein or Bill Blass. She will do anything to succeed. She does happen to have a cousin (male) in New York; he is an investment banker of some sort, with lots of contacts, so she sets off for the Big Apple. Starting in a lowly job on 7th Avenue, she begins the life too many young New Yorkers know: a cramped living space, a dead end job with a sleazy boss, a wonderful set of friends, and a great amount of talent. Part of this talent is put to use designing evening attire for aw hot young model and partly used in dressing herself: Ginny Walker is wearing her own creations to the best parties in town, parties to which she is not invited, parties she crashes. Along the way Ginny falls in love, is gravely misused by the people she thought cared for her and does a great deal of growing up. But, it is only when she witnesses a murder that she needs to make the most important decisions of her life and become the kind of adult -- and designer -- she always knew she could be.

Release date: November 29, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

He obviously hadn’t remembered her name.


“Madame Designer,” he’d mockingly called her, through thin, spoiled lips.

She’d made a point of telling him she knew who he was. “Mr. Stern,” she’d said more than once, with obvious deference.

“Arthur—call me Arthur,” he’d replied, with the leer she remembered from their first meeting.

What a big-headed fool she’d been, sipping champagne at the reception, her confidence climbing as no one challenged her right
to be there.


She’d congratulated herself that once again, despite increased nerves, she’d managed to crash this important party so successfully,
the party she’d hoped would change her life and put an end to her crashing forever.


The young girl shuddered. It had changed her life all right, in a way that even in her worst dreams she could never have foreseen.

False smiles, arch movements. There had been plenty of both, as she’d tried to impress the fashion magnate. She’d even walked
in a certain way to emphasize the sensual swirl
of silk around her legs, as she’d accompanied Mr. Stern so lightheartedly to the darkened upper hall.


In total control, she’d thought she was, her body the perfect mannequin to show off the dream of a dress she’d designed for
the evening’s grand affair.


Who cared that there might be an invitation in the way she turned her shoulder to allow one of the pale slender straps to
slip slightly, but not too far, onto her pale, cool arm? Not she. Mr. Stern would recognize her style, her flair, the cunning
construction of her dress. That was all that had mattered then.


Who cared that he was married? That was the point, or rather his wife, Muriel Matilda Stern, was the point; the influential
wife who really held the purse strings, who was known to prefer to stay home, allowing her husband to roam to discover new
talent for their fashion empire.


This new talent had been so sure she could handle the passes, the leers, the suggestive innuendos of all the Arthur Sterns
of the world. She’d encountered enough of them at events she’d crashed in the past. Hadn’t she always handled them before?


But no, not this man she couldn’t; not this time she hadn’t.

She gagged as she thought of her futile struggle as Stern had pinned her to the wall, ripping her precious dress as if it
was a rag, wasting no time in his fierce attempted rape.


But then had come the startling distraction—shouts from the end of the hall, a gunshot. Stern had turned; they’d both turned
to see two men violently fighting, one using maniacal strength to push the other over the balustrade. There had been a high
scream of fear and a horrifying crash of body, bone, matter on the marble floor below. It had all happened in a matter of
seconds.


Could the victim still be alive? The girl cowered back in her hiding place, the scream again filling her head. She was shivering
so much, she felt she could go into convulsions, like the homeless woman Johnny had made famous in his columns. Johnny. She
sobbed silently. He would never forgive her.



She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to calm down, but it was impossible.


Where was Stern now? Looking for her or denying her existence as he rearranged his perfect tuxedo and restored his sangfroid?

And where was the other man in the fight, the perpetrator, the shadowy figure who’d disappeared so quickly through the narrow
door she herself was now hiding behind? Who was he?


She had to be wrong about his identity. She was imagining things; she’d only seen him in silhouette, and yet there was something
that tugged at her memory, something significant she knew she should remember. What was it? And where was he now? Waiting
for her below, in the darker dark?


Stop the panic.

Her dress felt wet. With sweat? Or was it semen, blood? How long did she have before her hiding place was discovered? Not
long. She was in shock, but she had to get out—now. But how?


Wait, you know this place, the warrens, the maze of corridors, the doorways that never held doors, the unexpected exits around
forgotten corners.


A week, a carefree lifetime ago, came to mind, when she’d worked as a volunteer for Vogue’s One Hundredth Birthday Party. Sulkily she had gone in and out, indoors and outdoors, like a slave laborer, fetching, carrying,
backward and forward. Yes, she knew this place.


She tensed, hearing voices, footsteps getting closer. Heels. Her stiletto sandals were off in seconds. She maneuvered herself
down the narrow inside stairwell, one, two, three flights down into the old giant of a building, the grating hurting the soles
of her feet.


A door at the bottom screeched as she pushed it open. She froze, as still as an owl. A solitary dim lightbulb hung in the
corridor stretching ahead. Was anyone waiting in the shadows? She saw figures who were not there, but slowly, as she
inched along, hugging the wall for protection, recognition was coming back.


Twice left, past a row of wooden filing cabinets, which carried a sad, old smell of cedar and wallpaper primer, immediately
right past a thin tall door, another long corridor, left, left again and there was the fire door.


She had been warned before, it would set off an alarm if she tried to open it, but it was the only way out for her now. She
knew she would find herself in Bryant Park, no longer covered by the huge fashion tent, the tent from which she had been ignominiously
rejected the year her dreams had been so optimistic and fresh.


The door was heavy and awkward, but it opened without a sound. She looked to the left, to the right. No one. She came out
running, across the park with a blustery rainy wind blowing a sense that the ocean wasn’t far away.


Some island

With the sea’s silence on it.

Browning, Pippa Passes.

One of her father’s favorite poems. Why was it suddenly in her head? Crazy. She was running in Manhattan, the noisiest island
on earth. The noisiest, nosiest, and yet, please God, let it be true, the most private, too.


Her breath was a continuing sob, her feet were getting cut. She ran on and the rain helped hide her wild flight. She stopped
for a second to put on her sandals. Even in this neighborhood people would remember a sobbing young woman running in a torn
silk dress. But no one stopped to stare; no one turned around.


She had no idea how long it took her to reach her walk-up loft apartment, so beloved only a few hours before.

She double-locked the door and threw herself, still panting, groaning with a leg cramp, across her white divan. The pain in
her feet and the thought of dirt and blood spoiling the immaculate piqué surface brought her back to reality.



She staggered to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and wept again. She was disfigured, disgraced, swollen with crying, her
eyes small slits in a face she hardly recognized.


She ran a hot bath, pouring in the expensive bath oil she usually rationed out drop by drop, but as she soaked, the terror
came back.


Had the man who crashed on the marble floor lived? How could he have lived?

Who had pushed him?

Would they find her? But how could they know who she was?

She wasn’t on the guest list. As usual, she had gate-crashed the party, but this time with a definite purpose: to put an end
to her problems.


Her mother had often said her raging ambition would lead her into real trouble one day. Now it had come true.

She was finished. She would move to Florida to be near her parents. She would work for her father as he had always wanted
her to do. She would never design or make another piece of clothing in her life. She would sell her sewing machine. She would
live simply, quietly. She was finished.


Limping back to the divan, she saw one of her sandals, but not the other. It must have fallen off on the way home, but she
had no memory of it happening. Somehow she had managed to bring back her tiny evening purse. There it was, damp, carelessly
thrown on the hall table as if she had just returned home like a normal partygoer.


She opened it and saw her best lace handkerchief. Beneath it was a cloakroom ticket.

It was only then, as the phone began to ring, Ginny remembered her cloak, the spectacular one-of-a-kind Napoleonic cloak she
had spent weeks making, for what was to have been such a momentous occasion.


She had arrived wearing the cloak. She had left it behind in the cloakroom of the New York Public Library.

“How old was Ginny when she stole the sheepskin car seat, Virginia?”

“Oh, Graham, don’t say that. She didn’t steal it; she…she borrowed it to make a lamb’s costume for the school’s nativity
play…”


Outside the living room door Ginny fumed. That old story! She couldn’t believe it. She’d been planning to give them a surprise
and add a little sparkle to their evening, but as so often happened she was getting a rude surprise herself. What exactly
was her father trying to prove this time?


“Borrowed, stole. What’s the difference? She cut it up so it was unusable afterwards. Hey! I’ve got gin!”

“Damn! Graham, you’re not fair. You take my mind off the game by talking so much and telling us all your stories, then you
always win.” Ginny heard Lucy Douglas giggle, but she bet she wasn’t really amused. Her mother had told her Lucy hated to
lose and so did her drab husband.


Since moving to Dallas in ‘88, her parents had drifted into these Sunday night gin games with the Douglases. Her mother wished
they hadn’t, although it had started because
Dad loved playing the game and so did Lucy, who worked at Neiman Marcus, where her mother also worked as a fitter.


A chair squeaked and Ginny heard her mother say in the cheery-trying-to-be-pleasant-at-all-costs tone she knew so well, “Let’s
have some coffee, shall we?” Ginny clenched her teeth. Please, Dad, don’t go on with the car seat story. She didn’t have much
hope.


“So what was I saying? Oh yes, well it was when we were still in San Diego, so I suppose Ginny was about ten, eleven.”

“Nine and a half,” Ginny murmured.

On the way to the kitchen Virginia shot Graham a warning sign to shut up. Everything he said would be all over the alterations
department in the morning. She’d warned him before, but as usual he took no notice.


“Seems Ginny didn’t get the part of Mary or even one of the angels in this nativity play, so what did she do? She didn’t sulk
or moan. She got the car seat—she’s like her mother, good with the needle—made it into this lamb’s costume, then, plucky kid,
went uninvited to a rehearsal wearing the damn thing and one, two, three, convinced the teacher that to add authenticity to
the stable scene she should bleat her way throughout the performance, right in front of blessed Mary, too.” Graham whacked
his leg with gusto. “How’s that for chutzpah? How’s that for showing initiative, something, I might add, Ginny knows I always
highlight in my courses as one of the crucial elements for success.”


Initiative! Virginia groaned. So that’s what he was calling it now.

Lucy screamed with laughter. “What a character. If she was like that at ten, what will she get up to at twenty?” Virginia
wanted to hit her. “Where is Ms. Sweet Sixteen, anyway? Out on a date, I s’pose?”


Ginny had had enough. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door.

“Here I am, evening Mr. Douglas, Mrs. Douglas…”

She struck a pose in the doorway, hand on one hip, cane in the other, five feet seven inches and still growing. She tossed

her head back and winked, before giving the startled group the benefit of her most mischievous grin.


Her mother gasped, “What on earth…?”

With every strand of her generally tousled chestnut hair hidden out of sight under a curious black turban, her slanted cheekbones
made more so with powder blush, her dark eyes—inherited from her Italian grandmother—made still darker with kohl, Ginny Walker
was wearing—could it really be possible—the jacket of her father’s old-fashioned tuxedo. Belted tightly around her tiny waist,
the jacket ended well above her knees, her lanky legs in shiny black tights looking as if they reached up to her armpits.


Trouble, she looked like nothing but trouble. A line from her favorite Bette Davis movie, All About Eve, came into Virginia’s mind. “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night”


Sure enough, even as Graham was giving Ginny his usual mixed signal of aggravation and reluctant admiration, half smiling
a fatuous smile while shaking his head sorrowfully, Ginny plumped down on the sofa and said, ‘That’s right, Mr. and Mrs. Douglas.
I learned everything I know about initiative from Dad. Did you tell them, Dad, about that other time in San Diego, when the
Von Karajan concert was sold out and you, eh, pretended to the old Mother Hubbard at the box office you’d given the tickets
to me and I’d lost them?”


As her father’s face reddened, Ginny rocked backward and forward, a determined look on her face. There was no stopping her
now. “Of course, I didn’t know then Dad was pretending, that there never had been any tickets, otherwise I wouldn’t have bawled
my eyes out as he made me empty my pockets to find nothing there… and the kind old Mother Hubbard wouldn’t have taken pity
on us, would she, Dad? She gave us some standing room tickets meant for others in the line just to shut me up.”


The smile was gone from Graham’s face. “Ginny, watch that loose tongue of yours.” He suddenly realized what she was wearing.
“And who gave you permission to wear my
jacket? What do you think you’re doing? What d’you think you look like anyway?”


“Practicing for my audition in Ginger and Fred, Dad… I’m the tallest in the class, so I’m trying out for Fred.” She gave him a coquettish look. “I wanted your opinion about
the look before I asked permission to borrow it for the big night…”


As Graham growled something about putting the cart before the horse and the Douglases made polite titters, Ginny got up and
tap-danced around the room, the taps on her shoes and the tap of the cane on the wooden floor reverberating through Virginia’s
head. When she reached the door she bowed low to the ground. “Good night, ladies and gentlemen.”


Jim Douglas made a halfhearted attempt to applaud, but when nobody else joined in, he stopped. There was an awkward silence
as they heard Ginny run upstairs. “I’ll get the coffee,” said Virginia, and “Where’s that coffee?” said Graham, simultaneously.


“Ginger and Fred?” Virginia didn’t need to look at Lucy Douglas to know she thought her daughter belonged in a straitjacket.

“Ginny’s in a modern dance class at Dallas High,” Virginia snapped over her shoulder.

“Oh, does she want to be in show biz now? I thought she wanted to be a dress designer?”

Graham’s face was still red. “Certainly not.” He struggled to regain his composure. “She’s top of her class in math. When
she graduates, she’s going to business school, to get a degree in business administration.” He straightened his shoulders.
“She’ll eventually join me.”


“Over my dead body,” Virginia murmured. She was so upset, reaching up for the precious coffee cups she only used when they
had company, she dropped one, the handle breaking off as it hit the countertop.


Upstairs, at the small sink in her bedroom, a lifesaver in the rented house with only one bathroom, Ginny slowly,
painstakingly, began to remove the kohl with Johnson and Johnson’s Baby Oil. Before she was halfway finished, her tears were
helping the job along.


What a fool she’d made of herself… and in front of prissy, gossipy Lucy Douglas, of all people. How could she have let her
mother down like that, giving away the family secret that her father had always conned his way through life?


Ginny stared at the black streaks on her face. Not half an hour ago she’d felt so excited, applying the newly acquired kohl,
managing to stuff her unruly hair into a skintight, olympic-style bathing cap that gripped her skull so tightly, it made her
cheekbones look more prominent, tying her pièce de résistance on top, the black turban she’d made out of the control tops
of her mother’s old panty hose.


She’d set out to make everyone laugh with her Fred Astaire act, to help her mother, who wasn’t that keen on playing gin—or
for that matter having the Douglases over. As usual, because of her father, it had turned into a nightmare.


Why did he constantly humiliate her with his well-worn stories? Why was he always illustrating his own cleverness with stories
about escapades her mother believed showed up her worst trait, an overpowering determination to get her own way, no matter
what, rather than flashes of brilliant initiative learned at her father’s knee?


She was spent, worn out, the way she always felt after any confrontation with her father. There were more and more of them
these days as the subject of Her Future loomed nearer.


She knew when it was coming. Usually at breakfast. Often on a Monday, her father’s favorite day for making pronouncements,
the day the fathers of most kids she knew were in a rush to get to work, dashing to their cars or the subway, or a seven-thirty
or eight o’clock bus to get to an office, a plant, a business.


Her father was different, and how she’d grown up hating that fact.

It was her mother who went to work. Her father worked from home—wherever home happened to be—and most
Mondays he acted the way she supposed most wage earners did, sighing about the onset of another week of toil ahead, sitting
at the breakfast table as if he was the chairman of the board.


What bullshit as Toby, her best friend at Dallas High, would say. Monday was no different from any other day of the week for
her father. He would go into whatever room of the house he’d designated as his “office” and dictate his daily output of words
of wisdom into his “Memory Minder.” Later he would take hours, starting and stopping the machine, to listen, before finally
typing out, almost word for word, what he had already dictated.


It was a terrible waste of time, but Ginny had long ago given up hope of trying to persuade him to type his thoughts directly
onto the typewriter.


“Think of the correspondence course as a classroom,” he would pontificate. She could repeat it word for word. “When the material
arrives through the mail, it is essential the pupil can ‘hear’ as well as read what the teacher is teaching. So I must first
hear what I am going to teach—the tone is almost as important as the information.”


Quentin Peet, the nationally acclaimed columnist, her father’s idol, would then be brought into it. “I am sure Peet must dictate
his pieces,” her father would say. “Every word resonates like no other writer’s in the world. I am sure that’s his secret.”


Well, bully for Mr. P. As far as Ginny was concerned dictation was for secretaries, but there had never been enough money
around in their lives for that kind of luxury.


California, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas. During her short life they’d lived in four different states and seven different cities.
Toby thought it sounded terribly glamorous and she’d let her think it, but it wasn’t, no sirree. It wasn’t glamorous at all.
It was hell on earth.


Just before moving to this dreary house near the Marsalis Park Zoo, they’d been living in Denver, and that was where
the horrible, lurking suspicion that had been building inside her turned into reality.


Her mother, trying to hide the fact, had been crying over the electricity bill, and like a thunderbolt, as if God himself
had spoken, Ginny had suddenly known, absolutely known for certain that the Walker School of Advanced Learning was a failure,
if not a sham, that despite growing up hearing over and over again that it was their passport to prosperity, it never had
been, nor would it ever be.


Heavy rain began to beat against the window. At least that would drown out the smell of the monkey house for a few hours.
Ginny threw off the tuxedo jacket, undressed and jumped into bed to finish her math homework. At ten o’clock at night, still
only in October, she was shivering, dreading another Dallas winter, with only a gas fire in her room.


“It rarely rains and is never cold in Texas,” her father had said two years before as he outlined the reasons for their move
to the area of his “new opportunity.”


As she turned out the light Ginny’s resentment and anger returned. Just like the Walker School of Advanced Learning, that
had been a lot of bullshit, too.


When the Douglases left, Virginia could just imagine what they were saying as they drove home. “Is that what he teaches in
his How to Succeed in Business or whatever he calls his courses, to lie and steal and crash? No wonder his daughter’s such
a kook. He probably cheated at gin, too. He probably always cheats, then calls it chutzpah or initiative.”


The car seat story was all too true. Virginia hadn’t been amused or impressed when it had come out. On the contrary, she’d
wanted to punish Ginny, to make her realize that taking someone else’s property was stealing, that to go anywhere where she
wasn’t wanted was undignified. To her fury, before she could do anything, Graham had not only told Ginny he was proud of her,
he’d rewarded her with a wonderful present, her first sewing machine, using some of the money they’d put away for medical
emergencies.



Ancient history though it was, Virginia thought about it as she washed up the supper plates, and it made her boil all over
again. As if the sewing machine hadn’t been enough. As usual, she’d been the one paying for the lease on the car and so, of
course, for the car seat, too.


It was all uphill and tonight it was all too much. How could she ever give Ginny a normal life, growing up with a peripatetic
father who had itchy feet as soon as responses to his local ads ran dry, whose “School of Advanced Learning” would have led
them into an advanced stage of poverty without her paychecks?


On the wall was the set of kitchen knives Graham’s sister Lil had sent them last Christmas. How horrified Lil would be if
she knew what she, Virginia, wanted to do with them right now.


After “Dear Friend,” Graham Walker’s opening letter to new subscribers began with the homily, “We don’t wake up on the wrong
side of the bed. We wake up on the wrong side of the brain.” Ever since she could remember Ginny had always tried to sleep
flat on her back.


Now it was one of the few left of her father’s many dictates she thought might contain an element of truth. Certainly on this
day of days, when she’d woken up on her stomach, with her head buried in the pillow and the wrong side of her brain definitely
in control, not cooperating in any way with what she had to do.


Two weeks had passed since the stormy morning-after-the-Douglases-night-before. She’d apologized profusely to her father,
more to please her mother than anything else, knowing she could twist him around her little finger, providing he never suspected
how she really felt about his “life’s work.”


It wasn’t her father she worried about. It was her overworked, overburdened, wonderful mother, who didn’t deserve a brat like
her for a daughter, or a control freak like her father for a husband. Toby knew how much she needed her mother, particularly
now, when her support would be so essential
when the Big Showdown finally came: business school versus liberal arts at the community college or, her most longed-for dream,
allowing her to become an intern, apprentice, gofer, or whatever the lowliest job was called in the world of fashion design.


How crazy her mother would think she was if she knew that was what today was all about.

For the third time, Ginny squeezed hard with finger and thumb the small tube of adhesive in her left hand, as in her right,
she held, trembling between tweezers, a set of Supreme Sable Lashes. Again nothing came out of the tube.


As she had been expecting with every tick of her bedroom clock, her mother called from the bottom of the stairs, “Are you
nearly ready, Ginny?”


Her brain suddenly gave her a break. Of course, the stupid tube needed to be pierced. The explicit instructions, propped up
against the mirror, that she could probably recite because she’d read them so often, had omitted that obvious piece of advice,
because it hadn’t been written for morons like herself.


As she was about to use the thin end of the tweezers to go to work, her mother called again. “Ginny!” She got the message.
Her mother was about to take off without her.


“I’m coming… I’m coming.”

It was too bad. There was no time left to add the Supreme Sables. She should have given them a trial run, but she’d been too
concerned that once on, they wouldn’t come off, and she couldn’t see herself getting away with them at Dallas High, where
patience for her “originality” was definitely wearing thin.


As the car horn blared outside, Ginny looked again in the mirror. It only showed her down to the waist, but she thought she’d
accomplished what she’d set out to do.


With the Fred Astaire turban again covering her hair, this time worn with an electric blue velvet sheath she’d made, Scarlett
O’Hara style, from curtains she’d found in a yard sale, large round herringbone earrings made from overcoat buttons, and a
lightly penciled brown mouth, she did look different,
perhaps even “head turning,” which was cousin Alex’s greatest compliment.


The Supreme Sables, at the considerable investment of five dollars and seventy-five cents, would have added the perfect finishing
touch, but the sarà, sarà. She had learned—literally at her mother’s knee—when to stop crying over spilt anything and when
to get on with life.


Because Alex had told her more than once that you don’t have to be a Boy Scout to know how important it is to Be Prepared,
she popped the lashes and adhesive into her small black sewing kit, which today would double as her purse.


One more look in the mirror.

Would the most famous designer ever produced in the United States—well, at least in Texas—notice how the turban emphasized
the shape of her head? If so, it would be worth the headache it was already creating. Would Paul Robespier, once Paul Roberts,
back in Dallas with his first American collection after ten successful years in Europe, realize how original her cut-on-the-bias
sheath was? If he didn’t, the day still held plenty of promise. Thank goodness it was a school holiday. There had never been
a day to match this one.


She felt the same nervous excitement she’d had before diving from the top board in the school diving competition. She’d won
then. Diving into something totally different today, she told herself, she’d win again. Her hands were shaking as they’d been
up there on the board. Surely, a good omen?


The car horn blared once more and she raced down the stairs of the boring little beige house, light-years away from the world
to which she was headed. It was a world, Ginny knew, where women thought nothing of spilling their breakfast orange juice
on ermine bathrobes that cost seventy-five hundred dollars a throw, where every stitch her mother made to fit colossally wealthy
(often colossally overweight) Texas matrons into colossally expensive creations cost more than her father usually earned in
a day.