Cat let go of him, threw on her dress, and hit the buzzer while he buttoned his shirt. He kissed her on the top of the head and wandered off in a daze. By the time Bess knocked, he was already across the apartment, mostly dressed and mumbling into his cellphone.
Cat opened the door. Bess chucked a joint at her. “Let’s get stoned,” she said.
“I can’t,” Cat said, pointing to Hutton. “The hot cop is here,” she whispered. “I gave him Hillary’s eyedrops the other night. This morning I had to give a statement about them at the precinct.”
Bess looked shocked.
Hutton walked back over before she could say another word.
“I have some not-so-great news,” he said. “We need you to buy more drugs.”
Chapter Nine
Bess laughed in surprise and snatched back the joint from Cat’s limp palm. “More than this?” she asked, lighting up and blowing the smoke through the apartment’s still-open door. “I knew you were cool,” she said to Hutton.
He shook his head in disagreement.
Cat took the joint from Bess and hit it once before running the lit end under the tap. She stored the remainder in an oversized mason jar filled with grains of rice.
“Bad Bess,” she chided. “He’s trying to be serious.”
Hutton ushered Bess inside, closed and locked the apartment door, then ordered her to sit. “Give me your phone,” he demanded.
“Yes sir!” She answered and complied. “The dirty pictures are all in InstaCRT.”
“This isn’t a joke,” he said sternly. “I have to take you both to the Williamsburg precinct.”
“Why, do they want to get stoned with us?” Bess asked.
“That’s not funny,” he said.
“Oh, it’s funny,” Cat agreed. Bess nodded. Hutton indicated that Cat should sit, too, and the two women folded themselves on the sofa. He grabbed a chair from Cat’s dining table, flipped it down across from the coffee table, sat, and tried to look imposing.
“We’ve been planning a raid on Bedford Organics, but we’re concerned that the owner may be out of town, or on her way out,” Hutton explained. “No one’s been in the building for the last twenty-four hours. We need you to call and set up a meeting for our undercover officers.”
“That’s crazy,” Cat said. “She’s not going to agree to see two random women. My crowd is pretty…specific. We’re all googleable.”
“Don’t worry about that part. You need to call her and set up a time.”
“No, I’m serious,” she insisted. “They would need Photogram accounts, other forms of social media, something affiliated with Cooper.”
“We can generate that.”
“Seriously? They need real followers and tons of mentions. Good ones.”
“We can do that in an hour. The digital team will clone accounts similar to yours as believably as possible, then manually update the top five pages of the major search engines.”
“Wow.” Cat paused. “That’s fucked up.”
“It’s merely the dawn of modernity,” Hutton equivocated.
“If that’s true, I’d hate to see the sunset.”
“You won’t.”
Cat laughed. “Isn’t she going to know it was me, though?” she pointed out. “That I’m the tattletale?”
Bess nodded in agreement.
“Not if you get arrested,” Hutton said. “They’ll prep you for that, though it won’t be a real arrest, not exactly.”
“Oh.” Cat swallowed. “Okay.”
“Don’t worry about that part. You need to make the call,” Hutton insisted. “Then I’ll take you both to meet the undercovers.”
“Why me?” asked Bess. “I want to go to the park.”
“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” Hutton said. “This is serious. You showed up at the wrong place at the wrong time, Bess. I can’t risk anyone else knowing about this.”
Bess stuck out her lower lip. “Every time I come to Bushwick, something dumb happens. Ugh, remind me later to tell you about the DICKS party. It was called ‘The Bush.’” She grimaced.
Cat and Hutton ran through what she should say to Vittoria. She practiced a few times with Bess, trying to sound genuine, though Bess kept laughing. Finally, Cat pulled out Vittoria’s card and lit another cigarette.
“Now or never, right?”
Hutton nodded. “Just pretend you’re telling the truth.”
She made the call.
“Hi, Vittoria? It’s Cat from RAGE…No, no, it worked. I mean, really worked…I’m definitely hooked…I’m good for right now, you were so generous, but could I bring some friends over later?…Yeah, other girls from RAGE…What time works for you?…Okay, I’ll confirm with them. I’ll call you if we need to cancel but otherwise see you later…Yeah, okay…and Vittoria—thank you so so much!”
Hutton called Roth as soon as she hung up. “It’s done. Five p.m.,” he said.
“That was good timing,” Cat said. “She’s squeezing us in on her way to Teterboro.”
“Ready?” he asked, grabbing her purse and keys from the counter. “Let’s go.”
Cat paused. “What are the undercover officers wearing, if I may ask?”
“The secretary went to Zara, I think. Why?”
“We would never wear that,” Bess and Cat said in unison.
“I don’t think it matters.”
“It matters,” they said. Hutton looked skeptical.
Cat rolled her eyes.
Bess grinned at Cat, who nodded.
“We have an idea—” Cat said.
“They have to come over,” Bess finished, her voice excited. “We should dress them.”
“With what?” Hutton asked.
Cat flung open the door to the white box, where Hutton spied hundreds of pieces of clothing organized by color, most still in their plastic dry-cleaning shrouds.
“With this!” Cat explained.
Hutton considered the wrinkled polyester dresses Carol had snagged from Zara, which didn’t look even remotely close to the same quality as Cat’s floaty dress or Bess’s, what was that, overalls and a printed top? Basic, maybe, but the overalls were a fine light fabric, the shirt probably silk. Her sneakers were spotless neon-yellow running shoes that he’d never seen anywhere else, and her jewelry was an oversized ring in the shape of an elephant’s face whose trunk wrapped around her middle finger. Putting a middle-aged woman in an ill-fitting dress in front of either of them would only further serve to highlight how modest the police department’s budget was.
He picked up the phone. “Mary and Pat need different clothes,” he said. “Can you bring them to 239 Moore…Yeah…buzz Ono.” He hung up. “They’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”
“Operation Lady Cop Makeover is a go,” Cat said.
“This is the best day of my life,” Bess replied, her face glowing.
Cat and Bess were still pulling what looked to Hutton like a hundred dresses out of the enormous closet when the buzzer rang. A minute later, a swarthy uniformed cop, presumably Sergeant Roth, and two sturdy middle-aged women walked through the door.
“Oh man…this is going to be good,” Bess muttered as she and Cat walked over to introduce themselves.
“Hi, I’m Bess,” she said, shoving her hand in the officers’ general direction.
“Mary,” said the short one. “Patricia,” said the taller one.
Bess pointed to Cat, who shook their hands next. “This is Cat’s operation, or whatever. But I’m helping.”
Roth nodded at both of them but didn’t extend his hand, so Bess and Cat nodded before stepping back to study Mary’s and Patricia’s bodies, firm and thick-waisted under their polyblend suits and striped button-downs. The two female officers accepted their professional scrutiny without flinching.
“Mary, Patricia, are you wearing vests right now?” Bess asked.
“Of course,” the officers replied in unison. Everything separating them as individuals was removed from their appeara
nce and affect—understandable, considering their profession, thought Cat. You couldn’t pay me enough money to be a female cop in this city.
“Can you take those off? They’re too bulky.”
Roth spoke for them. “Go ahead,” he ordered. Cat immediately hated everything about him. She pulled the elastic out of Mary’s no-nonsense ponytail and ran her fingers through it, fluffing it out. Her hair was auburn, thick with a strong natural curl. Not bad. Bess, standing beside her, was already clipping Patricia’s bangs back with an alligator claw she’d pulled from her own bun.
“How much time do we have?” Cat asked Hutton.
“About an hour,” he replied, glancing at his watch.
Bess pointed to the white box in the middle of the room. “That’s the closet,” she said to Mary and Patricia. “You can change in there.”
Roth laughed nervously. “I don’t think you girls are the same size,” he said.
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Cat muttered reflexively, rolling her eyes.
The room fell momentarily silent. A stunned Roth glanced at Hutton, who gave a tiny shake of his head. Bess smirked. Mary and Patricia stared at the ground. Cat ignored everyone and grabbed a tape measure from her wall. She held it up to Mary, measuring her hips. Patricia wasn’t much bigger.
“Go into the closet, look into the blue tub on the floor,” Cat barked. “Find the smallest full-body shapewear you can squeeze into.”
Mary and Patricia filed into the closet and obeyed without question. Their gun belts hit the floor with a thud. Meanwhile, Cat chose a playlist on her phone and plugged it into the apartment’s speakers, then walked over to the bathroom and turned the shower on full force before closing the door. She glanced around the room, then gestured to Hutton and Roth. “Sit at the table,” she said. “Order takeout if you’re hungry. This is going to take a while.” The men sat down obediently. Danish electronica boomed out of the speakers, bringing the room’s vibe up a beat.
Bess cleared the section of the dining table opposite from where Hutton and Roth sat. She opened a black hard-sided suitcase and started pulling out dozens of shiny cosmetics tubes and pots, then laid them out in neat rows on the table.
“That’s a lot of beauty shit,” said Roth.
Cat stared at him. “Do you want our help?” she asked.
“I’m just saying, it’s a lot of shit. No offense. I’d rather spend my money on other stuff. That’s just me.”
She leaned forward, her eyes darting rapidly from side to side. “Is that a joke?”
He shifted nervously in his seat. “No, I mean, you gotta admit, it’s ridiculous.”
“No. I don’t have to admit that. Pretending that women are blind narcissists, instead of self-aware pragmatists, is just…dumb,” she said impatiently. “Let’s not.” She turned around and tried to ignore him.
Roth shook his head. “Like I said, I’m not trying to offend you.”
“And yet!” Cat sighed. “Listen. I, too, would rather spend my money on ‘other shit,’ as you so politely put it. Whether or not you recognize the extent to which you’re performing a sexist pantomime—the working-class guy who thinks ladies don’t understand how to spend money—you’re still doing it. And it’s still offensive.”
“Honey, if you want to be offended, go ahead,” Roth replied. “I’m not trying to be sexist either. I just think, it’s a lot of stuff. It seems kinda…over the top. That’s all I was trying to say.”
“Ohmigod. How else can I explain this,” Cat said slowly, putting her fingers to her temples. “Taste classifies. It classifies the classifier? No? Okay. This”—she waved her fingers around the room, at her body and at Bess’s body—“is a language. Today Mary and Patricia need to look like we look. It’s not simple. This is a job I get paid to do, same as you. You may consider it frivolous, but it’s profitable for a lot of people—people like the drug operation you’re asking us to help you bust, so maybe try to take it as seriously as we have to.”
Mary and Patricia had come out of the closet clad in matching robes. For the first time since entering the apartment their faces showed emotion: they wore matching smirks.
Roth cleared his throat. “Yes ma’am.”
Cat turned back to Mary and Patricia without a word. “Ladies, can you head to the bathroom for the next twenty minutes or so? The steam will open your pores. What are your shoe sizes?”
Hutton was astonished by the sheer volume of clothing they’d managed to produce. Cat had rolled out two metal racks from behind the closet, along with an industrial steamer. A clear spray bottle marked “vodka” and a very large one labeled “Property of The Standard Hotel” hung on the steamer’s rack.
“What’s the vodka for?” Hutton knew he probably wasn’t supposed to talk either, but he was getting curious.
“It’s for anything that hasn’t been dry-cleaned. Really cheap vodka—like, comes-in-a-plastic-bottle-cheap—takes the body odor out of anything. It’s a theater trick.”
She grabbed two tubes from the dining room table and ducked into the bathroom. He watched through the crack in the door as she applied a white goop with a thick brush to Mary’s clean face, and a green goop with her fingers to Patricia’s.
“She seems like a real bitch,” Roth whispered, nodding his head in Cat’s direction.
“You have no fucking idea,” Hutton replied with a genuine smile.
Their masks applied, the female officers stood and followed Cat out to the dining table. Roth, occupied with his cellphone, refused to look up, but Hutton stared shamelessly; he was fascinated.
Bess used hot towels, dampened and heated in the microwave, to pull the masks off the female officers’ faces before spraying them liberally with a large bottle marked “CARIBBEAN SEA WATER DO NOT DRINK.” Hutton inhaled deeply, recognizing the base of Cat’s sea-smell.
“Try on all the dresses we racked for you,” Bess ordered, following the two women into the closet. Hutton listened in amazement to a dialogue he didn’t understand—one punctuated with laughter and sarcastic comments and thoughtful hmms—until Mary reappeared wearing an oversized green shirtdress; Patricia was dressed in a pair of tiny pink silk shorts, matching jacket, and shiny gold top.
Bess and Cat fussed over the women’s hair and faces, and eventually held up a mirror. Mary and Patricia looked ten years younger than they had walking in, and the women nodded approvingly at their reflections.
“How’d you know to do this?” Patricia asked Bess.
“It’s daytime, so it would be too heavy to have both an eye and a lip,” Bess replied. “Your milkmaid braid is kind of…wide-eyed Amish virgin, so I went with a more space-age eye with the ultramarine liquid liner to balance it out. I think your more classic Brooklyn party girl would go with a dark lipstick, but I wanted you to look a little more sophisticated than that. And with Mary, it’s all about the hair,” she continued. “Mary, you have St. Vincent hair. It’s amazing. If you die today, I want you to know that I’m going to shave your head and make a wig out of your hair. From your dead body. Okay? So, anyway, we left the skin basically bare, but I added a little bit of lip stain to give your face some depth.”
“I’m so Williamsburg,” said Mary.
“I bet I can get three days out of this braid,” Patricia noted.
Roth finally looked up from his phone. “Holy shit,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t have recognized either of you.”
Bess checked the clock on her phone and interrupted before Cat could get another rant in. She really didn’t see the point in trying to argue with a middle-aged, white, male New York City police sergeant. “Hey, it’s already three,” she pointed out. “What time are we leaving?”
“We’ll all head over around four,” said Roth. “You ladies go ahead and take the subway, get a coffee as you walk over, do whatever you would normally do. Act like you’re going out tonight.”
“Do we need to wear wires or anything?” Cat had become so focused on the makeovers that she’d forgotten to as
k about the logistics.
Mary and Patricia laughed. “No,” Patricia said. “We don’t really do that anymore. The whole place is under surveillance already. They can record a sneeze from across the street. You just have to act like we work with you and try to have the same sort of conversation you had last time. Then we’ll all get arrested.”
Mary gave Cat’s arm a reassuring pat. “It’s easy.”
“Okay, so this is the part where you teach me. I’ve never, ever been arrested.” Roth looked shocked. “Do I…protest, act scared, what?”
“All the officers will be from the DEA. You won’t know any of them. It will be legitimately scary—I doubt you’ll need to act scared,” Patricia replied. “The hardest part is pretending you don’t know it’s coming. Say no a lot. Like, ‘Nonononononono, I can’t be arrested. Where’s my lawyer?’ Things you would actually say.”
“Okay. I can do that. You’re saying it’s like Sleep No More, but with martial law instead of public sex. Then what happens?”
“You’ll get brought into the precinct, and you’ll get your photo taken, fingerprinted, the whole thing. You’ll be held for an hour, max. We’ll have an attorney get to you quickly. Charges will never be filed, but it is an arrest.”
Cat was confused. “Wait…what? I’m actually going to be arrested arrested?” Her tone grew serious. “I’m not a citizen. My status here is contingent upon my employment. I have a morals clause. Cooper is a conservative company. I can’t risk getting in trouble, not legally.”
“I can see why that would concern you,” Roth said, a twinkle in his eye. “But at this point you really don’t have much of a choice. You purchased and possessed large quantities of—even, perhaps, considered distributing?—some very illegal drugs. It’s in your best interest to cooperate with us.”
“That’s such bullshit!” Cat snapped back. “I had that bag for ten minutes until I gave it to Hutton.”
Roth smiled. “The fact that you turned the products over to law enforcement is something we are absolutely willing to consider. I don’t see a reason to file charges or disrupt your status here in any way, provided, of course, that you help out today. I’d also like to remind you that we still don’t know how Hillary Whitney became connected to Bedford Organics—the one person in her life connected to them, that we know of, is you.”
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