Satin Doll

Maggie Davis

The author wishes to thank the Paris office of Condé Nast/Vogue for their help with some background details, and also the staff of Grès, la première couturière classique de Paris. Also, the Rt. Hon. Patrick Baker and Steven Baker, Wokingham, Berks.

Prologue

Paris, 7:12 a.m.
 

She came down the great space-age plastic tube that enclosed the escalator of the international arrivals building at Charles de Gaulle air terminal, and even the customs agents stopped to stare at her.
 

“Houston,” the first passport inspector muttered under his breath.
 

The other agent shook his head. She didn’t look at all like the oil-rich Houston ladies in their Oscar de la Rentas from Neiman-Marcus, with their Mark Cross luggage and their jewels from Peter Brent. As she came up to the desk, they could see a leather designer label on the breast pocket of her denim jacket of a girl swinging a lariat and under that the words “Sam Laredo.” The name on her passport was Samantha Whitfield. Birthplace: Shoshone Falls, Wyoming.
 

“
Une vraie
cowgirl,” the second passport inspector murmured. Wyoming was better than the mixed bag of Houston, any day.
 

She was beautiful enough, he thought as he stared, to be some American film star. Or perhaps a country and western singer, although there were not enough sequins and beads on her costume for it to be that wonderful American art form. Even her passport photo was
très ravissant
, unlike the usual which is so cruel to the ordinary traveler. She had been photographed with her shimmering mane of pale gold hair loose and trailing over her shoulders like a delectable schoolgirl’s. And in the passport photograph her great earnest gray eyes viewed the camera lens with a dead-level, faintly disarming expression that was so unaffectedly sensuous that they both sighed.
 

The first passport agent smiled as he gave her passport back to her. “Welcome to Paris,” he said in English. And then because she was so beautiful, “
Et bonnes vacances, mademoiselle.
”
 

She actually jumped in awkward surprise. Then she gave them a look from those wide gray eyes that was uncertain, tremulous. After a moment, she shifted the black duffel bag over her shoulder and turned away.
 

The younger agent could not resist following her with his eyes as he took passports from the hands of an elderly couple in Bermuda shorts and with a mountain of aluminum suitcases. She knew, he realized, absolutely no French. In fact, she looked stunned when he had wished her a good vacation. But she was so enchanting, what did it matter?
 

“Ah, lucky Paris,” he murmured under his breath.
 

New York, 12:17 a.m.
 

From the fortieth floor of the condominium tower the sweep of the night skyline of New York was a fabulous geometric pattern of lights, cube on glittering cube of shadowy concrete and glass against a velvet black sky. The small woman in front of the glass panel that formed one wall of the room had been studying the spectacular view for several long minutes, a frown on her face. She was not looking forward to this meeting. Jackson Storm hated being a bastard, and he was going to be one now.
 

She turned quickly when she heard him enter the room.
 

“She’s in Paris?” The big, silver-haired man in his elegant hand-tailored suit was abrupt, the strain in his voice carefully hidden. He was already loosening his tie as he strode toward the desk in front of the wall of plate glass.
 

Mindy Ferragamo watched Jackson Storm drop the tie on the polished surface of the desk. She couldn’t guarantee him anything, especially that this problem was taken care of satisfactorily, and that was what he wanted—guarantees. She sighed and made a point of checking her wristwatch. She had to lift her wire-rimmed spectacles to peer somewhat farsightedly at the tiny, diamond-encrusted dial. “She’s probably just landing at Charles de Gaulle.”
 

He grunted noncommittally. He sat down in the white leather and chrome desk chair, a man not yet in his fifties, with a leonine mane of silver hair that had become his famous fashion-world trademark—that and the urbane elegance of his tanned, rather fleshy, good-looking features. He unfastened the top buttons of his custom-made silk shirt, while with the other hand he flipped through the pages of a leather-bound appointment book. Behind him, the panorama of sparkling city lights winked and glittered against the velvet sky.
 

The woman in her black business suit waited patiently. Jack knew his appointments for the next twenty-four hours like the back of his hand; he was playing for time.
 

It was typical of Jackson Storm’s life-style that he was in his private study in his midtown Manhattan condominium at midnight and that she, his executive vice president, was there waiting for him. For years now both his business and his personal life had meshed with complicated precision. This evening a corporate Lear jet had delivered him to New York after a six-hour flight from San Francisco. His chauffeur-driven Mercedes limousine had then speeded him to his Manhattan condo tower, where a cocktail party for fashion buyers from Midwestern department stores was in progress, and after playing host to the retailers for exactly forty-five minutes, the head of the Jackson Storm empire had turned his guests over to a public relations team and retired to his private study to get some work done.
 

It took power, money and unlimited physical stamina to maintain a schedule as tight as that of English royalty, and Jackson Storm thrived on it. The stack of papers waiting for him on his desk had been neatly assembled, labeled in order of priority and ready for his inspection, as they always were when he had been out of town for any length of time. This evening he kept his shoulders hunched, his handsome head lowered, staring at the papers but not making a move to go through them, apparently waiting for the woman at his side to tell him what he wanted to know without his having to ask for it.
 

This means more to him than he thought it would, Mindy Ferragamo was thinking. She had assumed this episode would be just like the others.
 

There had been a fairly long parade, in Jackson Storm’s career in the mass fashion market, of beautiful women known as the Storm King’s “discoveries.” And most of them, it could be said to Jack’s credit, had profited by the association. Several former Storm King models had gone on to successful careers in television and films, and another, a titled young European aristocrat with ambitions to become a designer, now had her own successful fashion house. But, Mindy told herself, he should have known Sammy Whitfield was going to be different. For one thing, this one thought she was in love with him.
 

“She was expecting you to see her off at the airport. That really disappointed her, Jack.” Disappointed was a mild word for it.
 

She saw the famous brilliant blue gaze fix on the stack of folders in front of him as though he hadn’t heard her. There was little or nothing now in this assured magnificent man that even faintly resembled the Jacob Sturm that she had once known, the brash Seventh Avenue tie salesman, the relentless wheeler-dealer who had fought his way to the top of the heap of the cutthroat New York mass-market fashion world. But there were times like this when she saw a little of the old Jake showing through. His silence was ominous.
 

The big man pulled the first plastic-bound file on top of the pile toward him. Inside the folder were the four-color proofs of the Sam Laredo Western wear ads scheduled to run in the fall. “What did she say?” he wanted to know.
 

Say?
Mindy tried to think.
The flowers,
she remembered. The armful of red roses, several hundred dollars’ worth, had been delivered to the TWA VIP lounge in place of Jack’s coming in person. “She liked the flowers,” she said carefully. “Three dozen red Duchess of Kent, yard-long stems. I wrote ‘Love,’ no name, on the card.”
 

He gave another grunt as he picked up the advertising agency’s proof sheet.
 

The large glossy photographer’s print was that of an engagingly leggy model in cowboy boots with her back to the camera. The blonde girl was nude from the waist up, presenting a provocative view of a tanned, silky bare back down to the waistband of her jeans. The logo, an embossed cowhide label with the figure of a girl swinging a lariat and with the words “Sam Laredo,” were plainly visible on one denim-covered hip.
 

“Jesus, what a bomb.” He glared at the ad agency proofs. “What
drek
! Are we supposed to buy this stuff?”
 

The layout wasn’t all that bad, as they both knew. The shot had been taken by one of New York’s top-flight fashion photographers, a slick, atmospheric frame of a girl and the Arizona desert with a sere background of rocky desert and mountains slightly out of focus—a very artsy, appropriately low-key sell. In the same vein, Calvin Klein was using very trendy ads in
W
and
Vogue
of girls in frayed, worn-out jeans with holes in the knees.
 

In the Sam Laredo layout the model’s head, partly turned to look over her shoulder at the camera, was not Sammy Whitfield, but it could have been. The girl had the same mane of straw-colored hair chopped short and straight around her face and long in back, a clear, finely delineated profile with a tangle of black eyelashes brushing satiny cheeks, a short straight nose, the full upper lip of her mouth lifted innocently over small white teeth. She was part lanky child-woman, part sensuous, gray-eyed siren. Almost Sammy, but not quite.
 

It had taken weeks to find a duplicate model for the Sam Laredo ad campaign, all done in absolute secrecy, even though they had all known it was going to be a lost cause. The ad campaign roughs, sure to be killed, were only an exercise in futility.
 

For a long moment the silver-haired man at the desk said nothing. Then he snarled, “Jesus, what a fake. It’s shit! How much money did we spend on this crap?”
 

Money, Mindy thought, sighing. When hurt, he always goes back to that. “It’s not so bad,” she said neutrally.
 

“Bad? It’s not even bad—it’s a fake! It even looks like a fake. In case you should forget, Jackson Storm has never put out a fake in his life.” He allowed himself the gesture of skittering the photograph across the desk. It sailed into the air and fell on the floor. Mindy made no move to pick it up.
 

He grabbed the next sheet, the cost figures the advertising agency had attached. “Christ, these are even worse!” In the privacy of his study he was allowing himself the luxury of dropping Jackson Storm, the urbane, unflappable emperor of the mass-market fashion world, for the more satisfactory role of Jake Sturm losing his Seventh Avenue temper. “So tell me, what are we spending this goddamned fortune for, when this quarter we can’t give Sam Laredo sportswear away? I couldn’t sell her jeans off a pushcart on Forty-second Street during lunch hour, but the goddamned bill for this
drek
busts my balls! Who the hell,” he demanded, raising his voice, “do these slick agency bastards think they’re dealing with?”