Now, she walked around to her own side of the desk and sat down to face him. Upon closer inspection of his nose, an oversized Roman affair, she could see a scar, and his hair had some gray in it. He was her age, maybe older, and he sat upright in his chair with his arms and legs folded up, in the awkward way tall people always seem to arrange their bodies.
He stared back at her dispassionately, with what seemed like an almost scientific curiosity, and flashed a quick smile—more professional, detached, than anything, she thought.
“I need just a second to get myself in order here,” he said. “Do you have coffee?”
She turned to her computer and summoned coffee from Molly. Detective Hutton pulled a flip-top notebook and a felt-tip pen out of his breast pocket and turned the pages, staring intently, almost as though he was deliberately refusing to look at Cat or her surroundings, so she opened her email and pretended to read something important. Irrational panic forced her into racking her brain: Is this really about Hillary, or something else? Had she messed up her taxes? Missed a credit card payment? Did they send the police for that? She’d gotten a traffic ticket on a bicycle, but it had been paid; if that was what he was here for, she’d just write a check. Don’t freak out, she told herself. You’re just mildly hung over. Get a grip.
Ninety long seconds later, Molly opened the door and placed a steaming mug of French-pressed coffee in front of Hutton on a black soapstone coaster before wordlessly exiting. Cat expected him to turn his head and check out Molly’s nearly exposed baby-blue rear end, but he kept his head down, flipping the pages for another agonizing minute. He seemed surprised when he looked up and saw the cup of coffee in front of him. Cat grabbed a fountain pen and a rose-colored legal pad from a pile next to her computer to keep her hands busy.
“Thank you,” he said, finally taking a drink of the coffee and looking up at her. “I wanted to speak with you regarding the death of Hillary Whitney.”
“Why?” Cat asked, confused.
“I wasn’t here with the reporting precinct’s officers when”—he paused, searching for a tasteful word—“Ms. Whitney was found…and I like to get my own understanding of the people involved.”
“No, I mean, why now? We already did this. I spoke with the police months ago.”
“We’re reassessing some of our own conclusions. It’s something we do from time to time.”
“I don’t understand,” Cat said slowly. “I don’t understand what that means.”
“This is…not yet a formal investigation,” he said, his voice even. “I’m trying to determine whether it’s worth department time and resources, in a city that has over four hundred murders each year, to reinvestigate a death that was already determined to be from natural causes.”
Detective Hutton used a measured cadence. His vowels betrayed an accent; something local, she thought, but being foreign-born herself, she couldn’t quite be sure. Still, his tone was the exact opposite of every previous NYPD officer she’d spoken to: Hutton really and truly didn’t act like he was trying to intimidate her. His syntax hinted at an educated upbringing, he seemed intelligent, and his sprezzatura clothes indicated that he wasn’t just some blue-collar cop from Staten Island waiting for his twenty.
“We’re simply…having a conversation,” he said with an insistent, deliberate ease. “I want to know what you think.”
“Why?” Cat asked again.
“You worked for her for six years. You told the reporting officers you were friends from boarding school. You came back to the office when they found her body even though it was the middle of the night. I think you care,” he said. “I think you want to talk to me.”
Cat paused and tried to ignore how condescending he now sounded. Unlike Bess, Cat had a hard time making other people comfortable, knowing what to say or how to say it; she’d always told herself it was a language issue, a cultural issue, and that her abrasiveness and attitude was a price her friends occasionally had to pay to be close to a woman who was at heart very bright and very thoughtful. Hillary had been the only one in Cat’s life who had simply told her, flat out, what the right thing to say would be, trying to train Cat from a sharp-tongued know-it-all into someone gentler. Cat wasn’t sure how honest to be with this man, and she wished desperately that Hillary were here to tell her. She elected to speak her mind.
“Why do you care now?” she asked, curious and outraged. “You didn’t care before. Hillary died, and some guys with badges wearing too much Paco Rabanne showed up here, looked at our boobs, asked us about her eating disorder, and then told the New York Post she’d starved to death and sold the crime scene photos. New York’s finest. It wasn’t much of an investigation. And even if it was true, she was humiliated by the police for no reason at all.”
“So you don’t think that’s how she died,” he replied immediately, his tone encouraging her to continue.
“I was as shocked as anyone that her body was in such bad shape, but she didn’t always look like Karen Carpenter. I mean, she was an athlete, she skied, she ran, she kayaked. She looked like a socialite, like a well-dressed fashion editor. That’s who she was. She was never one of those people who talked incessantly about being vegan or gluten-free or corn-free, but she did drink a lot of juice I guess, and she did get a weekly colonic. She was thin, but here”—Cat gestured to the office around her—“it did not stand out as a capital-P Problem.”
Hutton nodded with an understanding that read as sincere. His big eyes peered out from behind his glasses, with a little thicket of eyelashes—like a baby deer’s, Cat thought—that brushed against the lenses when he blinked.
“Did anything about Hillary’s behavior stand out as a capital-P Problem to you?” he asked.
It certainly had. Over the past year, Hillary had become obsessed with her job, with double- and triple-checking their work, insisting everything be completed well before it was due. She arrived early and stayed late, worked hard at the gym, became overly concerned about her appearance in every possible way. Cat had brushed it off as the motivational paranoia of a single, childless, thirty-seven-year-old woman in a going-nowhere relationship with a married man—the kind of fire under the ass that occasionally builds empires.
But last month, when the estate probate hearing was held, it became apparent that Hillary had owned her apartment outright, had savings in good standing, and maintained positive relationships with her friends and family. The married man turned out not to be the only beau; two or three more men had shown up at the funeral, claiming to have been casually dating her, and to have been already, instantly, maddeningly in love with her.
Cat picked up her phone’s charge cord. She looked down at her hands and found that she’d woven part of it through her fingers into a net, a cat’s cradle. Until this very moment, she hadn’t admitted that the whole thing sounded very strange; that it wasn’t right and that it didn’t feel like an accident.
“She did…starve, I guess, if that’s what the coroner said,” Cat offered. “For six months before Hillary died, though, it seemed like she was upset about something, but she never told me what it was. And she did get super thin last year, but she died alone in a room with a box of ribbon, which didn’t make any sense at all. And I honestly don’t believe she was able to starve to death. That’s just crazy.”
Hutton drank his coffee, put down his pen, and looked directly at her. His eye contact was steady but not invasive.
“Ms. Ono, I appreciate that you work in an environment where excessive thinness is the norm. But there is absolutely no question that Hillary Whitney suffered from a physically devastating eating disorder that badly damaged her heart. The coroner saw years’ worth of damage to her arteries. Eating disorders don’t always result in excessive thinness,” he pointed out.
“Look around,” Cat snapped. “This isn’t a building full of bulimic teens getting rid of cookies. We’re grown women whose profession is deeply vested in excessive thinness. If that were what Hillary wanted, she’d have
been a skeleton for much longer than the last six months, and she would have done it safely, honestly, probably with surgery. I knew her for twenty years. I am telling you, it doesn’t make sense,” Cat insisted.
“I’m not the coroner,” he said plainly. “I can’t argue with you. I do think that the stress…is unique to this situation. I agree with you that ribbon for a”—he checked his notes—“‘holiday shoot’…seems profoundly trivial, though I admit I don’t completely understand how fashion magazines work. Why would that be stressful?”
“I don’t know why. That’s what I’m telling you. It wasn’t important. We do try to satisfy a select group of major advertisers with placement in our editorials, and using background elements—like textiles or ribbons and other kinds of notions made or licensed by advertisers—tends to meet that requirement in a way that doesn’t force us to change other, more major, parts of our editorial vision. But this wasn’t urgent, obviously. I don’t even know what the shoot was. I think it was scrapped after she died.”
He was still taking notes when she stopped talking. As she waited for him to ask another question, she eyed his hair, cut short on the sides, and the shape of his neck, his broad shoulders. He looked up and caught her staring. She dropped her eyes and looked back to her computer, trying to act like she’d been looking at the screen instead of evaluating him, her cheeks burning with embarrassment.
“What’s that?” Hutton lifted his head and asked, pointing at the PMS board.
“That’s the Plus-Minus Sign,” she said. “Cooper doesn’t believe in whiteboards—because they’re too ‘LinkedIn,’ you know what I mean?—so I painted the window.”
The detective raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you going to get in trouble for that?”
“No,” Cat said, looking at him like he was the dumbest man on earth. “If I wanted to wallpaper this room in vintage pornography and replace the carpeting with jet-black Astroturf, they wouldn’t care, as long as we closed our issues on time. This is a creative workplace. Cooper is not like other companies. We don’t have BlackBerries, if you get my drift. We have stock options vested after six months because if you stay that long you’ll generally stay for a decade. Not many people actually make it to six months. We are expected to work hard. And there aren’t that many staffers anyway, people like me who can paint the windows if they please—a lot of the people you see out there are permalancers.”
“What’s a permalancer?” Hutton asked.
“They’re freelancers on an open-ended contract, and they make up over eighty-five percent of the people who work here,” she said impatiently. “They are contract employees of a separate company, exactly like temps. They’re not allowed to work more than thirty-five hours per week, even though they all do. On the masthead they’re denoted by the word ‘contributing.’ It’s extremely competitive to become a staff employee here. The permalancers know that and tend to work extra hard, unless they’re interim, you know, truly temporary, and then they’re usually straight nine-to-five, hour lunch, no-bullshit kind of people.”
“Was Hillary a permalancer?” Hutton asked.
“No. Of course not,” Cat said. “She was on staff here for eight, maybe nine years. It could have been longer, actually. You’d have to check with Cooper HR.”
Detective Hutton straightened up in his chair. “Thanks. I’m meeting with them on my way out,” he lied. “What can you tell me about her replacement?”
“Lou Lucas? She’s interim. It’s temporary.”
“Temporary until what?”
“Until they promote me, I think, but Cooper would have to sponsor my green card because of all the travel involved…it’s kind of complicated. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“Don’t you think they should give you the job?”
Cat sighed. “I didn’t come to work for two weeks after Hillary died. They think I need time, which is decent and human of them, and probably accurate, and Lou…she’s a good distraction for everybody. It’s a big job, and it’s a hard hire. They’re right to be skeptical.”
When she finished talking, it was as though someone had let the air out of Cat’s body; she transformed. The silk and leather swaddling, the pointed fingernails, the horror-movie hair, the extra-sharp eye makeup—it all fell out of focus. Mark Hutton found himself staring into the face of a young woman, someone who could be one of his own friends—in pain. Her grief was unmistakable. It filled the room.
“How did you meet Hillary?” he asked.
“At boarding school—Miss Sawyer’s School in Connecticut—when I was in seventh grade and she was in tenth. She treated me like a sister. When I moved to New York six years ago, she hired me as her assistant. Then about two years ago, Bitsy, I mean Joan, Joan Peters, who used to be the fashion director, decided to open her own store and so she left, and then Hillary was promoted into her job and I was promoted into Hillary’s and we hired Bess, who also went to school with us.”
“Did Hillary Whitney have her own office, like this one?”
“Yes. Right next door. Why?”
“Why would she lock herself in a windowless closet when she had a perfectly functioning office with a perfectly functioning door?”
“Oh.” Cat laughed. “I guess that does seem weird. That’s…completely normal here. When we want to just put our heads down and work—and make ourselves unavailable—we use the workrooms. That way no one can disrupt you by knocking or ringing your landline or whatever. It gives us real privacy, in case we need to plan something that needs total secrecy, or whatever, because there are always a billion people coming through our own offices. It’s in our handbook. Hold on, let me find it.”
Cat swiveled around and pulled open a filing cabinet, then rooted around until she found a lavender suede binder labeled RFB HANDBOOK, and turned to the page titled “Managing Your Workflow.”
“May I have a copy of that?” Hutton leaned toward her to examine the pages.
Cat frowned. “I think you probably need to get that from HR,” she said.
Hutton leaned back and nodded. “Cooper has not been particularly helpful.”
“They wouldn’t be,” she agreed. “I should probably stop there, I guess.” She tried not to sound strained. “Not that it matters.”
“You don’t think it matters?”
“I think the damage is done.” Cat sighed. “Hillary’s death was undignified and humiliating. I guess emotionally, I do appreciate being able to complain about it to your face, but I know you won’t actually do anything.”
“Why won’t I?” He looked puzzled, but not insulted.
“It’s not personal,” she said apologetically. “I’m sure you’re a great detective. But I know this isn’t a priority. The other cops told me that two months ago.”
He looked at her, his mouth unmoving, holding his pen. A gaze, that’s what it was. He was gazing at her. Abruptly he dropped his eyes. Well, she thought, realizing she felt disappointed, that didn’t last long.
“I’ll be in touch.” Hutton stood up and tucked his pen in his pocket.
Cat grabbed a business card out of the drawer and wrote her cellphone number on the back.
“Here’s my number, if you need it.”
He took the card, nodded, and handed her one of his own before turning toward the door. Cat got up to follow him out. Right before he reached the handle, he turned around.
They were less than eight inches apart. He smelled like something clean and sharp—grass, maybe. Does he smell like cut grass?
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for your loss,” he said with genuine compassion.
Cat’s mouth dropped open with surprise. She meant to say “Thank you,” but she couldn’t get anything out. Her heartbeat sped up, a deafening wave of sound cycled through her eardrums, and her mouth fell open, but she said nothing. Seconds passed while they stared at each other in silence.
And then Molly knocked.
Hutton opened the door. Before Cat could compose hers
elf, he’d already walked out the door and closed it behind him.
Bess was finishing up for the day. She had cataloged 184 bracelets—not too shabby—and tonight she was going to dinner with her friends. Lou had already left to pick up her daughters from school, and Molly was trapped on a long-distance phone call with a factory in Shanghai, tracking down electric-blue slub silk made from an ultramarine dye that had to be buried underground for months to reach its pigment potential. Bess grabbed her helmet, unplugged her phone, and walked over to Cat’s office.
“You ready?”
After a beat, Cat looked away from her laptop and nodded.
“Yes. Okay. I’m doing it. Closing computer.” She closed her laptop and grabbed her bag.
“I’m dying to know,” said Bess as Cat closed her door and they walked in the direction of the elevators. “Who was that guy? He looked really familiar, but I honestly couldn’t place him. Is he from Barneys?”
“No. I’ll tell you later,” Cat whispered as they passed a gaggle of permalancers. “Are you going to take the train with me?”
Bess shook her head. “Bike. I need the exercise.”
They stepped into the elevator and chatted idly about the bracelets Bess had been working on that day. Cat seemed closed off and distracted when she got off on the main floor.
“See you at Sigrid’s in a bit,” said Bess.
“Yeah…see you there,” Cat mumbled quietly as she walked away.
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