I'll Eat When I'm Dead

by Barbara Bourland

  Bess and Cat both loaded up on salad and bread. Molly got a half-serving of sushi. Lou pulled her lunch out of her purse, grabbing just a coffee from the barista. After they swiped their cards to pay and sat down, Cat pointed to Lou’s Tupperware.

  “I didn’t know you liked to cook, Lou.”

  “Oh! I don’t, really. I did have cooking classes at school in Switzerland. It’s all very Victorian over there—I can draw and play and sing and make soufflé. ‘Don’t worry: Britain’s women can always entertain,’” she said in her poshest baritone. “I didn’t cook this. I have a service that delivers all my meals. It’s pure bliss. This is some superfood with eight kinds of seeds and so forth.”

  She dug her fork into what looked to Cat like plain brown rice with red onion and carrot mixed in.

  “Very practical,” Bess commented. “I should be so organized.”

  Cat spread butter on her two baguette slices. “I can’t bring my lunch. Every time I’ve tried, the Tupperware winds up rotting for months in the bottom of my desk drawer. I just had to commit to buying it every day.”

  When they’d finished eating, Cat collected all of their empty plates and containers, positioned them in a quadrant, and snapped a picture for her Photogram account, captioning it no food just plates #garfield #lasagna #cleanplateclub @loch_ness_bess @mollybeans @lou_lucas and tagging the Cooper House building.

  Molly looked at her quizzically.

  “It’s my Photogram rebellion,” Cat explained. “I want to remind everyone on the Cooper feed to go eat lunch. I’m daring them to consume carbohydrates.”

  “Even though we didn’t eat lasagna.”

  “I ate bread. It’s basically lasagna.”

  The women cleared their table and filed back up to the office. Bess and Molly started racking the clothes Cat had selected for the following week’s shoot of Dotty for It, the Sylvia Plath–themed spread for October. Cat retreated into her office and set out a fresh legal pad; she still hadn’t planned out all the shots.

  Although her Tuesday afternoon adventure had taken her off the rails and completely embarrassed her, Cat was now feeling gratitude for the accidental trip. Her mind was loose; she kept noticing groups of colors where she hadn’t seen them before, like a yellow car parked in front of a yellow bicycle chained next to a yellow rosebush; three red baseball caps in the crowd; the explosive green of the city’s summer trees. Maybe the world really is big and wide and open, she thought.

  She put on her headphones, turned her white noise generator to “Thunderstorm,” and logged into the Dotty for It shoot’s badge board. As she clicked through the clothes, moving and sorting the scans, Polaroids, and screencaps that made up the possible inventory, she had a moment of inspiration.

  They could pose the model facing mirrors distributed throughout the background; get the angles right, and the model would be surrounded by prismatic images of herself. Little armies, like the Window Cats that followed me down Broadway and Driggs. What could make you crazier than looking only at your own reflection?

  She remembered changing at her gym in Chicago and watching a passel of teenage girls measure the circumference of each other’s thighs with the spans of their fingers as they stood in front of the mirror—yours are the smallest, they’d declared to their leader, who smiled in satisfaction. Cat’s heart had broken watching them. She’d wanted to slap the girls, to scream: You are prisoners in a jail you’re too young to see. The images you see everywhere of tiny thighs are a lie. You are more than your bodies. Don’t give in. But at the time she’d said nothing; just looked out the window, gone back to her apartment, and doubled down on research. Deep inside, Cat thought that if she could just help people understand the images that were supposed to inspire them to spend all their money on their bodies instead of on their futures, she could break the invisible bars that held women everywhere back. She kept writing, sketching out the shots and sorting through the scout’s Polaroids and notes to determine the order, and had just pinned a white index card labeled DOTTY to the sheaf of paper when Lou called Cat into her office.

  “I’m a bit nervous, so you’ll just have to tell me if this is wrong,” Lou said, pointing at the InDesign file she’d prepped with Hillary’s tribute. “Obviously Production will make it look better. I’m garbage at fonts.”

  Cat started clicking through it. The layout was spectacular. Through Lou’s strategic crops, cuts, highlights, and pull quotes, Hillary’s life appeared glamorous, effortless, and even—timeless. Cat barely recognized the person illustrated in front of her. Still, it would be the perfect premiere edition of the MATRIARCH section. She realized for the first time exactly how Hillary Whitney could fit into the pantheon of powerful American women: she was a strong, athletic, well-mannered woman from a good family—socialite classic in those respects—but her personal style managed to express cleverness without being whimsical or explicitly sexual. Lou had chosen all the right images and edited the chumminess out of Cat’s voice in the captions.

  “This is perfect, Lou.” She clicked back to the beginning of the layout, scrolling through it once more. “Really, truly perfect. She’s…she’s an icon, just like Margot wants. You can send it in now, if you want.”

  Lou smiled with satisfaction. “I’m just going to let it marinate over the weekend. It either needs one more thing, or I need two days to forget that I think that.”

  “Thanks,” Cat said softly as she ducked back into her own office. “See you tomorrow, Lou.”

  She sat down at her desk and got right back to work on Dotty, productive magic lulling her into a happy rhythm while the sun sank in the sky behind the PMS board. Soon Bess was knocking on her office door.

  “It’s almost eight. I’m going to that party for DICKS tonight. Wanna come?”

  DICKS, the men’s magazine for practicing consumers, threw parties in Williamsburg famous for their wild stunts, all-metal bands, designer drugs, and regrettable photography. Founder Dick Soloway, the neighborhood’s preeminent pervert, was the kind of man who wore basketball shorts to business meetings and openly snorted cocaine at the ballet. His merry band of lost boys—metalhead dope addicts, amateur tattoo artists, and rich kids who were both—had become a cornerstone of the city’s media scene. But instead of becoming more corporate on their decade-long journey from fringe to mainstream, they insisted on pushing the boundaries of transgressive bad taste, getting rowdier with each passing year. Cat had heard their last party was called “Literal Animal Sacrifice.” A night with the DICKS crew was something to never, ever, ever remember again.

  “Oh god, I forgot about it,” Cat replied. “I don’t know if I can handle that tonight.”

  “I’m not going to drink anything. I’m just going to ’gram from there for the RAGE feeds. I’ll be an hour, max.”

  “Did you hear about the goat?”

  “I heard the goat was already dead. Molly said it had a terminal illness and they were just pretending to kill the corpse.”

  “God, their poor interns: Get me a dead goat.”

  “Yeah.” Bess laughed and shook her head. “The things those boys can get away with is beyond.” She shouldered her backpack. “Are we still on for tomorrow afternoon, by the way?”

  “Absolutely. I have so many things to tell you, I’m really looking forward to it. I just want to smoke pot, bake a cake, and try on clothes. God, I love summer Fridays.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Bess said, closing the door. “Catch you tomorrow.”

  Cat stayed in the office for another hour before heading home. After a tired walk from the subway, she hung her bag on a hook, microwaved old Chinese food, shed her clothes haphazardly along the floor, pulled up season three of The X-Files on her laptop, curled up on her velvet sofa, and inhaled her dinner at a land speed record. Queuing up another episode, Cat rotated her laptop on the coffee table to face the bed and crawled under the covers. Mulder’s and Scully’s voices were the last thing she heard as she drifted off.

  In the past
twenty-four hours, Hutton had discovered a raft of evidence—much more than he could have hoped for. He’d spent all day testing, confirming, and writing up his findings, and now, sitting alone in his office, he was certain that it would pay off: tomorrow, they were going to raid Bedford Organics, and it would be a success. The lab’s assessment of the Bedford Organics products turned up varying amounts of cocaine; methamphetamine; MDMA; a variety of opiate compounds; and atropine, derived from Atropa belladonna—more commonly known as deadly nightshade—in all of the smaller samples, the ones with Cat’s name written on them, and in the bottle of eyedrops she’d taken from Hillary’s purse. The coroner’s wife, a cosmetics chemist, informed them that belladonna had been used as a pupil-enlarging cosmetic by Italian women during the Middle Ages. The larger bottles, which he had guessed were sold off the shelf and then customized later, contained nothing but garden-variety herbs and essential oils—hardly worth the price tags he found on their website. Two hundred dollars for a bottle of moisturizer that smelled like a rotting bouquet of flowers seemed insane.

  Sergeant Roth, his superior, had immediately contacted the FBI and DEA with the good news: they had what looked like a multimillion-dollar drug operation on their hands. Hutton couldn’t understand how Bedford Organics had kept their business under wraps for so long—unless Cat had been the only client to ever walk into the building without explicitly understanding what the products contained.

  After he’d searched the Cormorant storage locker for the Whitney apartment, he’d found a bottle of contact lens solution that turned out to contain traces of the same ingredients in the eyedrops: more Atropa belladonna. Hutton theorized that Hillary Whitney had dumped half the small bottle into her contact lens solution, diluting it for daily use with the colored contacts she wore. The contact lens case contained the same solution, indicating that the lenses were soaked overnight—every night, he guessed—doubling or even tripling the daily dose she intended, which would have seeped into her eyes throughout the day. He suspected that all of the custom samples were intended to be used in the same way, to expand their effects over time, keeping rich women on a constant low simmer of wrinkle-free euphoria.

  Hillary Whitney’s body, cremated and crumbled into an ivory urn, was unavailable for further autopsy, but the tissue samples held in the coroner’s office, thankfully preserved in cold storage, had been retested. By midafternoon Thursday they’d concluded that Hillary Whitney had died from cardiac arrest prompted by an overdose of Atropa belladonna.

  Hutton still wasn’t sure what to make of the postcard she’d sent to the family cabin in Idaho on the morning of her death. Roth had chalked it up to the drug’s effects, and pointed out that they didn’t need a motive or a suspect, because their drug case now had at least one confirmed homicide and a soon-to-be-unimpeachable chain of evidence. The note might have started his case, but it no longer mattered, and Roth had encouraged him to forget it.

  Whether she intended to or not, Cat had given the NYPD what they craved most: a case that was prosecutable. Someone would go to prison, the seizure would be in the newspaper, and other sophisticated drug traffickers—he was sure there were dozens of other schemes—would momentarily panic and shut down. Law and order would be enacted in public in real time. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked, mostly.

  “All you need is a statement from the girl to ratify the chain of custody,” Roth had barked. “Get it done first thing in the morning.”

  Chapter Eight

  On Friday morning, Cat woke up at 6:45 and laced up her sneakers. She jogged through Bushwick and up to Troutman Street in time for her usual Pilates mat class. The workout was grueling, and Cat was determined to fully extend in every posture, pushing her muscles until they screamed as a personal penance for her party-heavy week. She ran home, showered, dressed, and grabbed the subway into the city for work. Today was a summer Friday, which meant the office closed at 1:00 p.m.; she had only a few hours of work to do, and then she and Bess could spend the afternoon getting stoned before finding out what the night had in store for them.

  When she pulled her phone out to summon the Cooper elevator, she saw three missed calls from Hutton’s cellphone, along with two text messages asking her to return his call immediately. She stepped to the side of the lobby and dialed.

  “Hi,” he said, picking up on the first ring.

  “Hi,” she said. “Is everything okay?”

  “I need you to make an official statement,” he explained. “You’re not in trouble, but we need you to come in.”

  “I have a ton of work to do before I leave today,” she said, annoyed. “Does this have to happen right now?”

  “Yes. The precinct is on Thirty-Fifth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Ask for me at the front desk and someone will escort you up.”

  Cat sighed, agreed, hung up, and turned around to see Lou coming up the escalator.

  “Hey, Lou, I have to run out,” Cat explained quietly. “I thought I was fine, but now I definitely think I have a UTI.”

  “Oh, poor bunny. Take care of you, Kit-Oh. I’m back out in an hour, so I’ll catch you Monday?”

  “Thank you. Catch you Monday.” Cat bounced back down the escalator and headed west toward the precinct, texting Bess to come straight to her apartment after work.

  The behemoth concrete building surprised her from a block away; even in Midtown, the brutalist architecture of the Lindsay-era police precinct stood out like the butt of a handgun. She strode confidently through the glass doors only to run smack into a long line of irritated Manhattanites queued at the desk. Fridays at the NYPD must be like lunchtime at the DMV, she thought, everybody pressing charges so they can enjoy the weekend.

  She tried to wait patiently, but the line didn’t seem to be moving. She read the newspaper on her phone, considered posting to Photogram from inside the precinct—#badbadgirl—but thought better of it.

  Time went on.

  The line remained immovable.

  The clock on her phone now read 10:26.

  The line didn’t budge.

  She texted Hutton.

  I got here at 10. I’ve been waiting in line at the front desk. Happy to keep waiting if that’s the protocol but wanted you to know I’m here.

  Nothing popped up on his side—no ellipses bubbles, no message. She waited two minutes, then checked her phone again. Still, nothing. She looked down at her cowboy boots and felt a self-conscious flush come over her cheeks.

  “Ah-know,” came a muffled voice over the intercom. “Ah-know to the window.”

  Cat looked up and made eye contact with the officer monitoring the line. She raised her hand meekly; he pointed to a bulletproof window on the side, where another officer leaned over and hit a buzzer. “Go through the door to my left and then stop.”

  She obeyed. He met her on the other side and gave her handbag a cursory glance before waving her through another set of doors. “Sit on that bench. Someone will be with you in a moment.”

  She nodded and sat, gathering her dress around her. Emboldened this morning by adrenaline and endorphins, she’d decided on an eggplant-toned silk and linen dress from last season’s Phoebe collection that evoked Xena, Warrior Princess. The halter neckline dipped in an exaggerated curve, displaying a keyhole of flesh around her left rib, where she’d pasted a small strip of gold leaf; the open back was broken up by heavy silk tassels hanging from the strap around her neck. A rose-gold men’s watch was her only jewelry. Her hair, brushed straight, hung in a black curtain across her pale shoulders, and her repainted nails—still filed into points—matched her matte tangerine lipstick.

  She sure didn’t feel like Xena now. When Hutton opened the door and stared at her dispassionately, motioning for her to stand up and follow him without so much as a hello, she wished she’d worn a burka.

  Cat didn’t say anything when he motioned her through the door—not even “Hi”—and he found himself sweating nervously as he led her down the Plexiglas-walled hallw
ay to one of their interrogation rooms. He held open the door for her, and as she swept through it, a gust of sea-scented wind invaded his personal space. Hutton glimpsed a hole in the side of her dress and a streak of what looked like gold body paint. Trouble. This woman is nothing but trouble.

  Cat sat down in one of the interrogation room’s steel chairs and put her arms on the table, running her fingers over the handcuff loops embedded in the surface. Hutton picked up her handbag, took out her cellphone, pocketed it, then placed his recorder faceup in front of her.

  “I need you to give a complete statement regarding the substance you found in the personal property of Hillary Whitney, and how you came to report that to the department.”

  She nodded.

  “I did try to classify your information as an anonymous tip, but it wasn’t…possible,” he continued, trying to speak clearly and deliberately. “Without a recorded chain of custody, we’ll have a difficult time prosecuting. You’re now technically a confidential informant. You may be called upon to testify in a court of law.”

  Cat shivered. The room was freezing, she realized, and her skin had turned paler than usual, almost green.

  “I’m going to turn on the recorder. Do not state your name or any identifying details about yourself.”

  “Okay.” Cat continued to run her fingers over the handcuff loops, betraying no emotion.

  “This is Mark Hutton, NYPD, recording a statement from CI 25401, for case file Halo-Alpha-Niner-Niner-Seven-Oscar. Today is Friday, July 14, 2017. State how you came to contact the department and submit evidence.”

  “I found a bag of Hillary’s with some drops in it on Monday, July 10. I contacted the company that made the drops and met with them on Tuesday, July 11. After trying the samples myself, I suspected that they contained illegal drugs. I gave Detective Hutton everything I had, that same day.”