I'll Eat When I'm Dead

by Barbara Bourland

  She caught her own reflection in a shop window, found it in the next, and one across the street and then another. Surrounded by a prismatic army of her own form, their dresses starched and white like hers, she moved her arms to the sky and reached for the sun; they did the same. She put on her headphones, and the other Cats did, too. Hello, Window Cats, she thought happily.

  She selected the Beatles’ “Blackbird” from her playlist, skipping down the north side of Broadway and ducking down Driggs. Window Cats followed her wherever she went. The sunshine dripping on her arms began seeping into her body, filling her up from the outside in with a soft, airy gold. By the time she reached Leicester, tears of happiness were blooming on her cheeks, and she wiped them away with her fingertips. You were only waiting for this moment to arise, McCartney sang.

  Hutton was waiting outside the restaurant wearing his work uniform of rumpled button-down, unstructured jacket, lightweight trousers, and battered brown oxfords. She barreled toward him, wrapping her arms under his jacket, feeling his muscles through his shirt, pushing her face into his chest, smelling his bell-pepper scent, listening for the big drum of his heartbeat.

  “Wow, hi,” he said, surprised.

  Cat looked up, then stepped back, realizing what she’d done. She blushed.

  “I just got the nicest facial. I must be relaxed. I guess that doesn’t happen very often. What’s new, Detective? Catch any murderers today?”

  “No.” He grinned, shaking his head. “Just crazy women.” He stared at Cat, studying her. Her hair—long and loose in big, lustrous hanks—gleamed. Her skin was rosy and flushed, her brown eyes even more enormous than they’d been the day before. He could see a wide strap of red lace peeking out from beneath her stiff white dress, and she carried a big straw bag filled with boxes wrapped in brown wax paper and tied with navy ribbon. She had a magic, easy quality to her that hadn’t been there yesterday, like she’d suddenly been unwrapped on the inside.

  “I’m not crazy. I’m…investigating. Like we talked about.”

  “What do you mean, investigating?” he asked. A group of Italian tourists split and passed around them like a school of fish.

  “Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you all about it.” She smiled as the chorus of melodic Italian voices swept over her. “Come on. Let’s go. I love this place.”

  Cat skipped into Leicester. Her long limbs bent every which way as she followed the hostess to their table. The air between them became magnetic, a force field, and Hutton followed, inhaling her floral-scented wake with every step. This is fun, Cat thought. Vittoria had been right. All her inhibitions were gone. All her self-confidence had bubbled to the surface. There’s power in these jars, she thought, feeling the heavy weight of the bag of product at her side.

  After the waitress led them to a secluded wooden nook carved out of the patio in the ivy-covered backyard, Hutton ordered two gin cocktails. Just like the day before, when Molly had brought him coffee, Cat waited for him to give the beautiful and very young waitress an approving look, but he kept his eyes focused on the table’s wooden slats when she returned with their drinks.

  “Tell me about yourself,” she demanded. “I want to know who you are.”

  “No, it’s your turn,” he replied, grinning. “All I did last night was talk. Tell me about you.”

  She twisted her mouth up in thought. “Okay,” she said, nodding, “I’ll talk.”

  “What’s your first language?”

  “It’s Flemish. It’s like…an antique Dutch.”

  “Can I hear it?”

  “Dat is een ander paar mouwen,” she said, reaching for his arms. She took out his cuff links and folded the sleeves of his shirt up and over his linen jacket.

  “What does that mean?” he asked. “Your face is different.”

  “Dat is een ander paar mouwen means…” she said slowly, her face changing back, the muscles rearranging themselves to match the current of self flowing into her body, “‘to have another matter.’ Paar mouwen, ‘to have a new pair of sleeves,’” she said insistently, tugging on his cuffs. “It’s an idiom from medieval tournaments. The knights wore tokens on their sleeves.”

  She took the cuff links—two plain, silver knots—and set them into the sleeves of her own white cotton shirtdress.

  “Are you stealing those?” he asked.

  “It’s not stealing,” she explained. “It’s borrowing. It’s my new pair of sleeves.”

  “So you’re the knight.”

  “I’m the knight,” she said and nodded, laughing easily, her voice melodic and open. “You got it.”

  “Is it hard for you to speak English all the time?”

  “It’s not hard exactly. It’s different. I do feel sometimes like I’m only playing with half the deck. I have to dive under the ocean, kind of, to speak English. Or, I have to dive back, maybe, now, to speak Flemish. It’s one or the other. Not both.”

  “That sounds sad.”

  “It’s not. I have lots of oceans this way. I…contain multitudes.”

  “I bet you do,” he said, reaching out for a piece of her hair, holding it between his fingertips before he caught himself and pulled back.

  “You know, I was investigating, earlier,” she said. “Like we talked about.”

  “I still don’t know what you mean by that.” Hutton looked concerned.

  “I think I got something,” Cat said. “But…I’m wondering what you’re gonna do with it.”

  “That depends. In the most basic terms, anything that’s recorded as evidence could make a difference, but I don’t know what you’re going to say.”

  Cat smiled broadly. “Okay. That sounds good.”

  Hutton tapped her hand, a tiny reminder to keep going. She tried to look serious. “Before we saw you at Sigrid’s, we found a handbag of Hillary’s. It contained what turned out to be custom eyedrops from this company, Bedford Organics. I went by this afternoon to check them out, and they gave me kind of a makeover.”

  “Custom eyedrops? I don’t understand what that is.”

  Cat didn’t answer. “I still can’t believe we ran into you last night on the street,” she said, changing the subject. She stroked his palm with her fingers, running the edges of her pointed blue nails along his heart and life lines, looking up at him with a cartoonish expression, full of a happiness and longing that he found himself wanting to believe was real.

  Hutton reached past her and pulled the Bedford Organics bag onto the table. He took out some of the samples and unwrapped them from their butcher paper. Cat watched his long fingers as he expertly untied the ribbons with a few strategic pulls.

  “How much was all this stuff? It doesn’t have any labels or price tags.”

  “It was free,” Cat said, picking up one of the ribbons and tying it around her wrist.

  “Is that common?”

  “Sure. Beauty companies are always giving us free stuff, hoping that we’ll put it in the magazine, put it on Photogram, whatever kind of association they can get. But this company is direct-sale-by-referral only. She didn’t even ask about a feature, actually.”

  “That’s interesting,” he said, turning over some of the bottles in his hands. “Is that a viable business strategy?”

  “I guess so.” Cat shrugged.

  “So which of these products was Hillary using?” Hutton’s tone grew serious as he turned each sample over, looking for clues.

  “Other than the eyedrops, I don’t know.” She dug the small bottle out of her purse and handed it to him, unconsciously obeying his officious manner. “What do they test for when people die?”

  “A standard toxicology screen would look for opiates, amphetamines, barbiturates, alcohol, marijuana, check for any prescription medication found in the home or near the body to confirm the amount taken, and anything that the body was reacting to, producing antibodies for, basically.”

  “Would they have done anything else?”

  “In her case, no. We didn’t have any reas
on to—until now.”

  The waitress interrupted them to drop off another round of cocktails. Once again, Hutton kept his eyes on Cat; she realized he was deliberately ignoring every other woman in the restaurant. His focus on her was so steady that she found herself wondering if it was a show for her benefit.

  She filled Hutton in on the remaining details of her experience at Vittoria’s shop in fits and starts, between poetic asides on the beauty of the ivy draped overhead, the beams of sunshine breaking through the spaces between the leaves—Doesn’t he see how beautiful it is?

  “I think I should call you a doctor,” he said when she finished.

  She looked confused.

  “Cat, you’re very charming. But you’re not sober,” he explained gently. “Whatever’s in this”—he shook the metal tube of hand cream—“got you high. How do you feel?”

  Cat felt a rush of blood hit her cheeks, pooling in bright round circles of embarrassment as it drained from the back of her head. Holy shit, she realized. He’s right. Her jaw fell open slightly and her eyes grew even wider.

  “Oh shit…I am high. Am I in trouble?” she whispered, her embarrassment turning to panic. “I…I didn’t mean to…I would never…not on purpose, not in front of a police officer.”

  “I know,” he said gently. “If it wasn’t for this,” he said, holding up the Bedford Organics bag, “I would have just thought you had a mood disorder.”

  She laughed, her embarrassment briefly alleviated. “I have flaws, but not that.”

  “Good,” he said, smiling. “I think…I think I should take you home, though. Unless you need a doctor.”

  Cat shook her head. “I’ll be fine,” she said, feeling rejected and humiliated, despite his considerate tone.

  “Okay, beautiful,” he said, and he took her hand to help her up, knowing that he should take her into custody right now and get a blood sample. “I’m taking you home.”

  Hutton threw some cash on the table and shoved the Bedford Organics products back into their bag before leading her out onto the street and hailing a taxi. She trailed behind him into the car’s backseat and stared listlessly out the window as they rode silently back to her apartment.

  After helping Cat into her building, Hutton caught the train back to Manhattan. He’d taken the whole bag of Bedford Organics products, despite Cat’s attempt to keep the bottle labeled “Happiness” (“Please! I’m going to be so sad when this wears off!”), intending to get the case back in gear as soon as possible.

  As he exited the subway and waited to cross Thirty-Fourth Street, he thought about Cat: the wide strap of red lace cutting into her shoulder, the ribbon she tied around her wrist, the way she popped the collar of her exaggerated shirtdress like a Japanese teenager imitating a frat boy. Her big brown eyes, both kind and sharp. He’d never met someone so…studied, who was also smart. He felt like she was daring him to solve a puzzle he didn’t yet understand.

  It was 8:00 p.m. The lab would be open until midnight. Hutton pulled open the double doors to the Midtown South Precinct, nodded to the patrolman on night duty at the desk, and buzzed his way through several more sets of doors before he arrived at his office. He divided the products, labeled them, processed requests for each analysis into the computer, and then ran them across the street where the lab assistant pointed wordlessly to a deposit tray.

  Back in his office he searched for more details about Hillary Whitney that might help him gain access to her belongings. He punched her address into Google and found a current sale listing for the apartment from the Cormorant Group; it was still on the market. Jackpot.

  He dialed the number on the listing. Though it was already after ten, a sharp voice answered right away.

  “Betty Cormorant,” a voice squawked after just two rings.

  “This is Detective Mark Hutton, NYPD. I’m calling about an apartment you have listed for sale, from the estate of Hillary Whitney.”

  “You wanna see it? I can set something up for the morning. I think ten percent above asking and it’s yours before noon.”

  “I need to see the belongings you took out of it, actually. Any chance you put a hold on the personal effects for the family?”

  “Shit,” she said. “Get a warrant.”

  “Listen, Betty, you know how it is. I got so much paperwork. I’ll get the warrant, but first I need to know if the personal items are in storage. Can you take a look for me?”

  “So what?” Betty snapped. “I just lost my seat at the bar to take this call. I thought you were a buyer. Paperwork sounds like a you problem.”

  “The next body I get in a good building, you’re the first one I call.”

  “What precinct?”

  “Midtown South. I got a few blocks of Park below Grand Central and all of NoMad.”

  “Deal,” she said. “I’ll call you right back.”

  Five minutes later, his phone rang. “You’re lucky,” she said. “The personal effects are all in a storage facility on the West Side.”

  “You got keys to the unit?”

  “That I don’t know. But I can give you the address and the contact. You’re gonna have to make the warrant for the unit anyway or they won’t let you in.”

  “I take it this isn’t your first rodeo.”

  “How do you think we find listings in the first place? You’re the third cop I’ve talked to this week.”

  He laughed and hung up, then spent the next two hours filing paperwork. At midnight he finally locked up his office and hustled down the stairs and out the front door of the precinct, hailing a cab within seconds.

  “Hey boss,” said the driver. Three separate cellphones were attached to his dash, all running different hailing apps.

  “Hi. Good evening. Brooklyn, Lincoln and Ocean, please.” The television screen embedded in the divider blared as a doe-eyed waif wearing an NYC-branded T-shirt pretended to eat a hot dog on the Staten Island Ferry. Hutton jammed his finger into the screen, eventually turning it off.

  “Okay, no problem.” The driver popped his earbud back in and resumed laughing and joking in a language wholly foreign to Hutton as he lurched and surged the cab over to Brooklyn.

  He briefly fell asleep in the cab, waking up when his own phone buzzed.

  You free tonight?

  He let the text from Callie Court—his longtime close friend and frequent hookup—float on the screen. Callie had lately been tending bar at three different places, singing in two bands, and working for the avant-garde and occasionally outré designer Jonathan Sprain as a “muse,” in addition to her dwindling modeling gigs, and she had more energy than anyone he’d ever known.

  Another text popped up.

  B/c I have an extra ticket to see guantanamo baywatch / hoodie & the blowjobs @ Grasslands, done with my shift in 20.

  Shit. I would so go to that. But he desperately needed to go to sleep. He texted back:

  I need to sleep Cal, I’m two feet from bed

  Ok but set time is 1 am! So soon?

  Before he could reply, the cab screeched to a halt in front of his apartment. Hutton pocketed his phone and dropped two twenties through the partition. “Keep the change,” he said, hopping out the door. He waved to his doorman, climbed the stairs two at a time, and collapsed on the couch next to his laptop.

  Chapter Six

  While Hutton slept, Cat was perched in a makeshift toilet at King’s Landing, the cramped bar around the corner from her apartment, using her keys to snort cocaine out of a tiny blue plastic bag she’d found in her closet. Sigrid leaned over the sink, reapplying a matte red lipstick. The walls that surrounded them were made from plywood sheets recently hammered into some two-by-fours; the door was a ribbed panel of plastic roofing with a large hole drilled for a handle. Swedish house music shook the room.

  “I totally fucked it up,” Cat was yelling. “Hot Cop looked so sad when he brought me home. I don’t know if he believed me, you know? That it was an accident.” She sniffed, tasting cocaine on the back
of her throat.

  “I almost don’t believe it either, that you managed to get high from beauty products, but I know you. You, Catherine Celia Ono, get high on purpose,” Sigrid said, blotting her lipstick on a square of toilet paper. “Either way, that’s fucking hilarious.”

  Cat offered up a little pile of cocaine on a key. Sigrid pinched a nostril and huffed it back with a practiced snort.

  “What do you think is going to happen to the bag of product from Bedford Organics?” Sigrid asked.

  “Uh…nothing?” Cat replied hopefully. “Fuck. I don’t know.”

  “Tell him you want to be anonymous.”

  “Right?” Cat agreed. “I gave him my bag of awesome free drugs. The least he can do is make it anonymous.”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t want to get you in trouble. He totally likes you,” Sigrid said confidently. “Send a cute text.”

  “I texted him twenty minutes ago and he hasn’t texted back,” Cat admitted, frowning.

  “What’d you write?”

  “Just, thanks for taking me home, you’re sweet. do-over?”

  Sigrid pinched her other nostril and took in another little stack of cocaine off Cat’s keys. “That’s not time-sensitive. He’ll write back tomorrow. Don’t worry. He’s probably asleep.” She passed the bag and key back.

  Cat dipped her finger into the coke and rubbed it on her gums. “Thanks for coming up here. I was just feeling so mortified. And I was way too high to go to bed.”

  “Girl, I don’t give a shit. I had a second audition today for that series on the CW and I completely fucked it up. Whatever, I’m too fucking old anyway to play a teenage lesbian.” She wiped excess lipstick from the corner of her mouth with a practiced flick. “Let’s get wasted.”