I'll Eat When I'm Dead

by Barbara Bourland

  I should have known better than to play games with policemen, Cat thought, suddenly feeling extremely bitter. All they want is to dominate. If they can’t do that, they don’t even stay in the same room as you. She glanced over at Hutton, who stared at the floor and refused to make eye contact. He didn’t have any power here; even Cat could see that.

  “Why do I need to be arrested arrested, anyway? Aren’t I bait?” she pointed out, trying to pivot the basis of the entire argument. “Can’t we just say, ‘Hey, the jig is up’? It’s not as though I’m trying to be a repeat customer.”

  “We’re talking about a potentially significant amount of money,” Roth said, his voice firm. “This company is an LLC. The shares could be owned by anyone. It’ll be a series of shells within shells within shells. We don’t know who these people are. I assure you that it’s very much in your interest to suffer the potential embarrassment of detainment—it’s a tremendously small price to pay for your own safety.”

  “So,” Cat argued back, “you don’t protect your informants at all.”

  “We do protect our informants,” Roth replied, “by making sure no one ever knows they’re an informant. And I mean no one—not my wife, not your employer, not anyone. It’s really that simple. You have two choices today: Participate, and be arrested without charges. Don’t participate, and I’ll arrest you and charge you right here and now with possession and intent to distribute. It’s up to you.”

  Cat felt tears well up automatically, which she resented almost as much as she resented Roth. The sergeant was so aggressive, so dominant, so satisfied; it broke her. This man has no idea what he’s asking me to do, she thought. A fat tear streamed down her cheek. Bess looked horrified. Hutton whispered something to Roth.

  “Just…calm down for a minute. I’ll call the FBI about your visa. Let me see what they can do,” Roth said before he turned around and began muttering into his cellphone.

  “I know you cared about Hillary Whitney,” Hutton said to Cat quietly. “These are the people who were responsible for her death. You have a chance to do something about that.” He wiped the tears off her face with his thumb, a gesture both intimate and kind. Bess, Mary, and Patricia all looked away, momentarily embarrassed by the obvious closeness between detective and informant.

  Cat shook her head. “No, of course not. I want to help; I…I hadn’t realized what I could lose.”

  Bess waved her hands furiously, her face suddenly alight.

  “Hello…what am I, chopped liver?”

  All four police officers turned to look at her. “I don’t give a shit about being arrested. I already work at RAGE, I’m a real human being, and the Bedford Organics people probably already know who I am because I run our Photogram feed—and most importantly, Cooper won’t fire both of us, Cat. Honestly. We do so much work, but Margot is so particular about who to hire—they can’t fire us because they can’t replace us. I know we were going to pretend these two were freelancers or whatever—”

  “Were going to? You still are,” said Patricia. “It’s obviously better to have you both in there, but we need an undercover officer in with you.”

  “Okay…fine,” Bess agreed. “But I’m going, too.”

  “The FBI says you’re fine to get arrested. They’ll take care of it, no matter what,” said Roth, putting his phone down on the table.

  Cat took a hard look at Mary and Patricia. “I think we need to go with freelance stylists from Los Angeles,” she said to Hutton. “They have that ‘too many accessories’ look. Can we invent credits for them somehow on IMDB?”

  Mary nodded. “The FBI can add our names to anything that’s online. Old photo shoots, celebrity profiles, literally anything.”

  In a matter of minutes, Mary and Patricia had an entirely new internet history that went on for dozens of pages.

  “Cat? It’s time,” Hutton said. “I’m supposed to walk you all to the subway.”

  “We need our phones,” she demanded. He handed them back, saying, “Don’t do anything stupid with these, okay?” while Cat grabbed a pair of square black Prada sunglasses and ignored him. Patricia, Mary, and Bess were lined up next to the door. Not bad, Cat thought. Nobody will mistake them for anything but party girls.

  On their way to the subway they walked past a mural of a robot sodomizing a pickup truck. Cat gave Hutton her phone and ordered the girls to line up. Patricia grabbed Cat’s phone from Hutton and substituted her own.

  “I’ll post the original,” Patricia insisted. “You can regram it. It’ll look more real.”

  Cat smiled and felt her energy returning. “Okay. Let’s make this look fun.” She backed up and leaned against the mural, putting her hand on the robot’s butt in an obscene gesture. The other three posed dramatically.

  Hutton snapped a few images. Cat inspected them quickly. Hmm. Fun, but uninspired. She looked around for a prop. A plastic bag caught on the razor wire above their heads, errant medical waste from the clinic around the corner, read “speculum: extra large.” She got back into her pose and pointed it out to the group, asking, “Did anyone misplace their bag of extra-large speculums, or is Brooklyn just an actual toilet?” right before Hutton hit the capture button again; the resulting photo had all four women laughing out loud, their bodies twisted toward the plastic bag flying above their heads. It was genuine, spontaneous, and actually funny.

  Cat wrote the caption and posted it to Patricia’s account, @patt_the_bunni:

  plastic bag reading “speculum xl” begging for us to play with it under this #throatneck mural. bk weekend with my @cooperny girls from @ragebeauty @loch_ness_bess @catono @mar_bear_stare #badgirlsgoeverywhere

  “‘Patt the bunny,’” Cat said to Patricia. “Is that supposed to sound perverted?”

  “Yes,” Patricia and Mary replied in unison.

  “It’s the FBI. You think Roth is bad, wait until you add an Ivy League education.” Patricia rolled her eyes. “The smarter they are, the more disgusting they are. But whatever—the FBI’s not in charge until they can prove this is organized crime. Right now they’re just an amazing resource that’s extremely annoying.”

  “You know what,” Mary said, “fuck them. At the end of the day, I have my health, it’s nice outside, and there’s a gun in my purse. Let’s go arrest some criminals.”

  At the L train entrance, Cat hung back for a moment and grabbed Hutton’s arm. Bess, absorbed in her phone, ambled down the steps without looking up.

  “Can we get a drink after this drug bust?” she asked as soon as the other women were out of view. Hutton leaned her against the wall and wrapped his body around hers.

  “Let’s go back to your apartment first,” he said before kissing her. “See you later.”

  “That’s good enough for me.” Cat grinned and turned away, dancing down the stairs.

  Chapter Ten

  Three hours later, Cat and Bess found themselves handcuffed in the back of a police car that was driving the wrong direction down the BQE.

  “You’re supposed to take us back to Midtown South,” Bess said politely through the screen. “The Williamsburg Bridge is much faster than taking the Manhattan this time of day. You can turn around at the Wythe exit.”

  The freckle-faced officer driving the car ignored her.

  Cat looked at Bess and shrugged. “So much for fuel efficiency,” Cat said, loud enough for the officer to hear. “I guess he just wants to sit in traffic.”

  “Would it be possible to get the keys for these handcuffs?” Bess tried. “We’re not super comfortable back here.”

  The officer continued to ignore them, raising the volume on the radio and turning on the siren as he sped toward downtown Brooklyn. The only time he spoke was when a squirming Cat tried to dig Bess’s phone out of her pocket.

  “Sit down and stop moving,” he’d growled. “Now!”

  “Jesus,” Cat said, turning to face forward before she could get Bess’s phone out. “Give up the ghost, dude. We’re not the enemy.”
>
  It wasn’t until he skipped the exits for the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges that Cat started to get nervous. When he turned onto Atlantic Avenue, she tried attitude.

  “We don’t want to go with you to Fairway,” she said, referring to the Red Hook grocery store famous for its aisles of olive oil. “Take us to Midtown, or you’re going to get in huge trouble.”

  “Ladies,” he finally snapped, “I don’t know what your deal is. But in this city, when you have an outstanding warrant in Brooklyn, you go to detention in Brooklyn.”

  The officer pulled up in front of Brooklyn Central Holding, threw the car in park, and escorted them inside.

  Hutton couldn’t believe his luck.

  The DEA had seized over five hundred sample- and full-size bottles loaded with illegal ingredients matching the samples already in evidence. They’d also seized an additional thousand twenty-four-ounce bottles of overpriced full-size creams, lotions, and potions that contained no illegal drugs and would be distributed to every officer in the precinct—bottles smelling like flowers, fruits, mint, essentially every kind of perfume imaginable. Rupert Whitney agreed to follow through on his donation to the policemen’s union. In a single week, he’d gained not only a career-making case, but the gratitude of every single person at Midtown South.

  The case was deeper than he’d thought possible. Vittoria Cardoso owned just thirty-five percent of the shares in Bedford Organics, LLC, a New York State entity that also purchased the building three years earlier—a process requiring an attorney, whom they’d subpoenaed immediately. The company’s visible assets totaled more than $10 million, including the entire property at 400 South Bedford. Once the NYPD discovered the names of the remaining shareholders, they’d have a money trail running a mile wide.

  Bedford Organics, LLC wasn’t just a legitimate business; it was a healthy, thriving direct-sale beauty manufacturer and retailer whose products had a relatively transparent production process, save for the final—and most profitable—“special blends” brought in on limited import from Brazil. Cosmetic products and ingredients, not subject to FDA approval, were given only a cursory and occasional inspection in customs to ensure that a box of moisturizer wasn’t really a plastic bag of cocaine. An established business like Bedford Organics would have no trouble smuggling drugs in their own sealed and branded boxes of product.

  Hutton’s only real problem was Cat and Bess, who were still in Brooklyn.

  At 6:12 p.m. on Friday, Cat, Bess, Mary, and Patricia had been standing near the parlor door on the third floor of 400 South Bedford with overflowing bags of product, all of it lovingly wrapped in blue ribbon and brown butcher paper by Kate the assistant while they had received their hour-long consultation with Vittoria. Their faces were flushed and glowing, their eyes sparkling, when five DEA agents barreled through the door with guns drawn.

  At first they’d all feigned ignorance, protesting when their bags were snatched from their hands and the product on the shelves around them was shoveled unceremoniously into duffels. Vittoria had sighed and waited calmly behind the desk while Cat and Bess tried to convince the agents to let them leave, saying, “Excuse me, but we really need to get going,” as though they were being detained by a waiter who was too distracted to bring the check.

  Mary and Patricia followed their cues, acting slightly more wide-eyed and afraid when Vittoria and her assistant, Kate, were handcuffed. Cat and Bess transitioned from disbelief and irritation into full-on entitled outrage, screaming that their rights were being abused and they’d be suing the DEA for every penny the government had. Cat had to be dragged downstairs by force. When the agent struggling to get her into a Crown Vic bound for Midtown pulled her hair, Cat—high from her special facial—responded by spitting in his face.

  That’s when their luck changed. A rookie officer from the Ninetieth Precinct—who happened to be eating a bagel down the block at the time—had watched the entire arrest from the driver’s seat of his car before stepping in and offering to transport the two women. “Cadet Lewis reporting for duty,” he’d said to the DEA agent. “I can take those two off your hands.” The agent, busy cleaning Cat’s saliva off his face, nodded with exasperation before uttering the unfortunate words “They’re not my goddamn problem.” Cat and Bess incorrectly assumed that Cadet Lewis was their ride back to Hutton and allowed themselves to be shoved into the backseat of his car.

  Zealous Cadet Lewis ran their licenses and turned up two outstanding warrants for Catherine Celia Ono and Elizabeth Folsom Bonner. He took them to Brooklyn Central Holding and processed them into the detention center with such remarkable speed and efficiency that by the time Hutton got there at 8:30 p.m. it was too late; they’d been shuffled into the thick stack of trespassers, drunks, vagrants, and loiterers whose triplicate paperwork was still filled out on old-school carbon-copy forms. Hutton was helpless to even locate them within the building, much less get them out before Monday without seeing a judge, the holding facility’s only requirement for egress.

  He prayed they’d be smart enough not to make any friends or tell anyone why they were there. He’d spent two hours trying to talk his way into the facility to retrieve them, but the bureaucrats running their borough’s detention center had no interest in helping a second-year detective from a tony Manhattan precinct violate their only rule. Finally, so distressed that he could feel himself skirting the boundaries of unprofessional behavior, he gave up and drove back to Midtown South, where he attempted to convince his superiors to step in and interfere with the detention center on Cat’s and Bess’s behalf, but Roth was unwilling to make any moves that would indicate their cooperation.

  “They’ll have to sit it out,” Roth said with absolute certainty. “You can’t risk interfering—it doesn’t look good—but they’ll be fine in there. Don’t act like they’re special, and they won’t be.”

  Roth inclined his head toward Vittoria Cardoso’s attorney. Donal Windsor, a senior partner at the white-shoe British firm Cavendish Crane, waited in the hallway with the patience of a man who made $2,500 an hour.

  “You see that guy? He’s a shark. I’ve met him a dozen times. He’s never rude, never impatient, nothing. These people are so calm…I can taste the blood in the air, kid. We’ve got something big.”

  Mary and Patricia had been dragged back to the station in a car following Vittoria Cardoso and Kate, and Roth made sure they were seen getting thrown into an interrogation room down the hall from where Windsor sat with his beatific, compensated smile. They had sobbed dramatically, making a scene in the hallway, while Hutton watched Windsor give Mary’s handbag an approving glance. Cat and Bess had dressed these women well; never in the history of the precinct had there been such perfectly attired undercover officers. The FBI’s online cloning would ensure that their phony identities remain unquestioned until the trial, and possibly through it, depending on how liberally they might apply the Patriot Act. Cardoso’s status as a foreign national gave them considerable prosecutorial leeway.

  Prosecute. The very word made his dick hard.

  Hutton spent the next five hours watching through one-way glass as various FBI and DEA agents tried to crack Cardoso, each without success. Around 1:00 a.m. her attorney finally entered the interrogation room and the team took a break. Roth told Hutton to head home for the night. “You did good, kid. Go home, get some sleep. Tomorrow we have a shitload of work to do.”

  Hutton practically sprinted out of the building, sticking the portable flashing siren on top of his Volvo to speed through traffic. He was exhausted. He’d been on pins and needles since the labs had come back on Cat’s original samples, feeling jumpy, focused, terrified, full of anticipation, and neurotic all at once for days.

  But this evening’s denouement, when the woman he’d been naked with this morning was arrested at gunpoint at the exact moment his career soared, had pushed him in so many emotional directions that he was almost delirious. Nothing positive would come from returning to Brooklyn holding, so Hutt
on went straight home, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and crawled into bed, trying to repress how bad he felt for Cat and Bess.

  Six hours later, he woke up to the sound of someone banging on his door repeatedly, a noise he tried to ignore until he was awake enough to wonder if the building was on fire. He quickly wrapped a towel around himself and ran to the front door, flinging it open only to find Sigrid Gunderson standing there in leggings and a hoodie, accompanied by a tall, clean-shaven young man in a spotless suit. She shoved past Hutton into the apartment. “This is Grant,” she barked. “He’s Bess’s brother, and their lawyer.”

  “Grant Bonner,” the young man said politely, introducing himself with the easy confidence of inborn privilege, his handshake held out at a side angle, a manipulative fraternity gesture.

  “Mark Hutton,” he replied, shaking Grant’s hand with a crushing firmness before waving him into the foyer where Sigrid was already pacing.

  “What did you do?” she asked. “Cat and Bess called me collect two hours ago from a pay phone in Brooklyn Central Holding. I made Grant come out here so you can tell him exactly what you did. They wouldn’t tell me, but it’s obviously your fault. You have to get them out.”

  “How did you get in here?” he asked. “Did you shoot my doorman?”

  “I told him I was your ex-wife and that Grant was my attorney,” Sigrid said distractedly. “He sent me straight up. I think you need to tip him better. But don’t change the subject.”

  “I’m not,” he said, yawning. “Make some coffee?” He pointed to the kitchen. “And we’ll figure out what to do. Let me put on some pants and brush my teeth. I’ll be right back.” He walked back to his bedroom and shut the door before Sigrid could protest.

  When he came back out, Sigrid and Grant were sitting at his kitchen table. Hutton felt her vibrating with anger from across the room.