“It’ll be okay,” he ventured.
“I don’t think you understand how bad this is,” she said quietly.
“It’s not that big a deal,” he scoffed. “They’ll be out on Monday. The story will blow over.”
She pulled up Cat’s mug shot on her phone. “This is not a joke. You can’t make mistakes like this after thirty. It’s not cute or rebellious: it’s seen as irresponsible and unprofessional. This,” she said as she pointed to Cat’s picture, “is how you become a pariah. And I won’t let that happen to my two best friends.”
“Come on, Sigrid, they’ll be fine,” he insisted. “Everyone will forget about this next week.”
“How do I explain this to you?” Sigrid asked, her voice breaking. “This is a public shaming. It’s different for women. If you’re not married and you fuck up like this—hell, even if you are married, let’s face it, in this day and age, your husband can still just leave you with absolutely no consequences; someone else will climb right back on in a heartbeat—you’ll never be someone that somebody wants to be with. New York is so competitive, for everything. Who’s going to hire two washed-up party girls? Who’s going to take them home for Thanksgiving? Nobody. Nobody.”
The room was quiet.
“What, no response?” Sigrid asked desperately. An awkward moment passed until Hutton finally spoke, filling Sigrid and the young associate in on the details of their arrest and the protocol at Brooklyn holding. Grant finished up their discussion with professional courtesy, but an obvious distaste—almost a hatred, Hutton thought—shone through his eyes, and Hutton knew then he was an interloper: a bad-boy-bad-influence who had quite possibly ruined the lives of two perfectly nice women for his own gain. When he shook Grant’s reluctantly extended hand a second time and they walked out the door, he felt truly ashamed of himself.
Cat and Bess perched awkwardly on the edges of two metal chairs, their hands still cuffed behind them, while Grant Bonner sat across from them.
“Are you okay?” he asked immediately.
Bess looked at him sheepishly. “We’re fine, just uncomfortable. Thanks for coming.”
“I spoke with the DA,” he replied. “They aren’t pressing drug charges pending further cooperation, but your custody was deviated to Central Holding because of outstanding arrest warrants. You both got tickets for biking on the sidewalk in April. Because the fine wasn’t paid, it turned into an arrest warrant.”
“We figured that part out over the last ten hours,” Bess said. “When can you get us out of here?”
“The officer who originally arrested you both wasn’t aware that you were already cooperating with the department—he was from a different precinct. He ran your licenses and took you here. I checked with Citibank and they confirmed the payments went through last Friday, but the NYPD’s credit card processor hadn’t updated their system. We still need to get you in front of a judge and show them the bank’s confirmation before you can go home.”
“What?” Their jaws dropped open.
“Yeah,” Grant said, shaking his head and holding his palms to the sky. “This is the system. You’re in it now.”
“You can literally show it to them on your phone,” Bess pleaded. “Let me log in.”
“It doesn’t matter if you show it to a guard,” he explained. “You need to show it to a judge, and there are no judges here between 5:00 p.m. on Friday and 7:00 a.m. on Monday.”
“How much longer are we going to be here?”
“Again, the judges aren’t in chambers until Monday at 7:00 a.m.”
Bess thought she was going to burst out crying then and there. “That can’t be possible. Today is Saturday. We’re not safe in here. What if one of their henchmen decides to shank us or something?”
“You should be happy to know that nothing actually indicates this was more than a beauty company. Sure—they used Schedule I felony substances in the manufacturing of their products—but the organization appears to be pretty narrow. It wasn’t a drug front so much as a clever business plan with a healthy revenue stream. Plus, the women in your cell are two old prostitutes, a pregnant woman who stole a car, and a nineteen-year-old from Park Slope who let her dog off leash. I think you’ll be fine.”
“Do the Bedford Organics people suspect anything? To be fair to us, they did get us pretty high before we got arrested.”
“I doubt it. Someone videoed the arrest on Bedford. Bess, you were yelling ‘They’re trashing our rights,’ whatever that means; and Cat, you hissed like an animal and spit on the officer who handed you off to the clown that brought you here.”
“Matthew Lillard yells that in Hackers. It’s all I could think of,” Bess replied.
Cat was shaking her head and laughing. “I forgot about that. Verisimilitude, man. Look it up.”
“You weren’t exactly protesting in Birmingham.” He laughed, too, but nicely. “You were arrested for buying face cream with ecstasy in it.”
“Have you seen our mug shots?”
“Cat’s is pretty cute, actually,” he said, winking at Cat, who rolled her eyes. “Very defiant. Bess, yours looks like a class picture.”
“Is there any way you can get them deleted?”
“No. They’re already online.”
An officer knocked on the door and called out, “One minute.”
Cat started to panic. “Find Detective Mark Hutton and Sergeant Peter Roth. They got us into this. They have to fucking get us out of here.”
“I did,” he answered. Cat’s heart sank.
“Look,” Grant continued, “I know it’s frustrating, but you’re in holding in Brooklyn, not in Midtown South. There’s nothing anyone can or, frankly, should do until a judge releases you. This is all in your best interests. I’ll be back first thing Monday morning. You’ll be out in less than forty-eight hours, I promise.”
Two officers opened the door, barking, “Time’s up.”
“I brought you some snack bars.” Grant stood and held up a paper Whole Foods bag, which he handed to one of the officers. Cat and Bess were led back to a tiny cell, where they were given the bag after a cursory search.
Cat chewed on a bar as she sank to the floor, but she didn’t cry.
If she started crying, she was afraid she’d never stop.
Paula Booth had planned to spend this rare and peaceful Saturday morning doing absolutely nothing. She’d turned off her phone, slept late, had her coffee in bed with her cats, and was considering taking a long walk across the street in Central Park when her doorbell rang unexpectedly.
She threw on a cashmere robe over her cotton pajamas and walked to the door, peering through the spyhole as she twirled her long white hair up into its signature bun. Both her assistants stood in the hall. She cracked the door open warily.
“It’s Saturday, girls. My phone is off for a reason,” she hissed.
Izzy and Liesl pushed right by her, coming all the way into the apartment and closing the door. “Bess Bonner and Catherine Ono were arrested last night,” Izzy said, holding up a copy of the New York Post with Bess’s and Cat’s incredibly flattering mug shots on the front page.
Paula snatched the paper.
LIVING THE HIGH LIFE screamed the headline in hundred-point font, followed by RAGE BABES SNATCHED IN LUXURY DRUG RING.
Last night’s raid of a high-end drug ring on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg swept up two RAGE employees buying beauty creams loaded with prescriptions from a Brazilian Doctor Feelgood. The business, Bedford Organics, had been under surveillance by the NYPD, DEA, and FBI for weeks in relation to an as-yet-unspecified Manhattan overdose. It was shut down last night when the DEA seized over two thousand pounds of creams, lotions, and serums that were allegedly loaded with street drugs like opium, ecstasy, heroin, ketamine, amphetamine, and cocaine.
The article went on to wildly speculate about the backgrounds of the six women who were arrested. The little information they did have about Cat and Bess was peppered with so much hyperbole and sexi
sm that they were rendered as little more than caricatures of two slutty rich girls trying to get high on their beauty supplies. Their Photogram post from earlier in the evening was reprinted in full color. A Cooper House rep had provided a succinct “No comment.”
Paula didn’t recognize the names of the two other women, who were reported to be freelance stylists from Los Angeles. She checked her email. There was nothing from Margot. Paula would have to deal with this herself—as usual. She’d hate to fire Cat and Bess considering the sheer volume of work they accomplished, but this kind of public embarrassment was well beyond her comfort zone. Her first instinct was that RAGE couldn’t support this kind of attention, not while they were in such a weak position. She started playing the voicemails that had racked up from Cooper’s senior publicists asking for clarification, deleting them one by one.
Paula had been putting out Margot’s fires since 1987. As she finished an MBA and intended to go work for IBM, her whole life was derailed, forever altered, by the speech that Margot gave at her commencement to the biggest graduating class of women that Harvard Business School had ever had. Margot had argued that without mandatory equal pay and a global economic floor for women, the leaders in front of her—these freshly minted uber-elite empowered feminists—would be nothing but a flash in the pan. You have an obligation, Margot had said, her voice resonating powerfully, to the women of the world, because there but for the grace of God go you. You must use your privilege for good and for nothing else, because you will always be fine. You will always have enough; you will always be able to provide for your families. So you must be responsible, powerful capitalists, though there is no incentive for you to be this way aside from your own moral compass; in fact, the greater incentive is to disregard the costs of our values. As such, you must be the economic change you wish to see in the world, or it will fall apart. There is something very rotten at the core of a society that increases in its wealth without diminishing its miseries. Do not lie to yourselves. We have too much, while everyone else has too little.
Paula had shown up at the magazine’s offices three days later, résumé in hand and statistics about domestic production rates for polyester, lamb’s wool, leather, cotton, and silk on the tip of her tongue. She’d argued that pushing an Idaho-based hosiery company to establish a minimum wage would ripple through the state’s economy, and that the sock company’s board members, who also had interests in a handbag manufacturer, could be tempted by a feature in RAGE. She’d advocated for a strategy of winning at all costs, for cajoling and bullying the world around them into meeting their requirements, and pitched the idea that would eventually become the system of auditors who doled out the RAGE seal of approval. Margot had hired her on the spot and fired her current assistant midsentence, forcing the young woman to clear out her desk and leave immediately so that Paula could have a place to stash her handbag while they continued that first exceptional conversation.
Her first two decades at RAGE had changed the world; the wage gaps between the cottage industries of Lake Como and the factories of Sri Lanka had been forced to narrow by Paula’s and Margot’s sheer forces of will, and their own employment policies, which included six-month paid maternity leave followed by paid child care for children ages six months to twelve years, had been aped by dozens of companies who were trying to recruit women of the same caliber as the RAGE staff.
But for the past twenty issues, RAGE had been in free fall, and now Paula faced a very specific choice: fire Cat and Bess, or figure out a way to use them to boost circulation. She read and reread the Post article before calling Maddie Plattstein, the author of the Skin Deep in Their Pockets beauty industry regulation piece they had scheduled for September. This plan was possible, Paula insisted to Maddie, rapidly calculating the hours to their production deadline for September. They could turn this around. She was certain. Maddie finally agreed, and they hung up.
“Izzy!” Paula barked. “Liesl! Make lunch. We have work to do.”
At 6:00 a.m. Monday, the buzzer finally sounded in the dank cell where Cat and Bess had spent the last thirty-six hours. “Back away from the door,” the intercom crackled. The door swung open.
“Ono, Bonner,” said a female voice. A uniformed officer led them through a maze of hallways to a windowless waiting room where they sat with dozens of other male and female prisoners queuing to see the judge. The room’s plastic chairs were badly scuffed and cracked. The air reeked of body odor, cigarettes, stale beer, and bad breath—the accumulated stink of a hundred people who had spent the weekend in jail without toilet paper or a shower.
Brooklyn was represented in full force. There were skinny college kids with ironic stick-’n’-poke tattoos who looked terrified; shifty-eyed middle-aged men in shabby clothes who looked resigned; old women who looked disoriented; and dozens upon dozens of young men.
Cat and Bess found two seats together and sat quietly, trying not to make eye contact with anyone. Thirty minutes later, the first set of names were called.
“Diaz. Johnson. Moses. Kwan. Ono. Bonner.”
They stood up and made their way through the crowd to the guards as quickly as they could without bumping or touching anyone else.
The guards waved their hands impatiently. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go, ladies, hurry it up,” one said forcefully.
Grant was waiting on the other side of the door, where they were uncuffed and directed down a hallway.
“Don’t say anything unless you’re spoken to by the judge directly,” he said.
They walked into another windowless room with three metal desks. An older woman in a pantsuit and black robe sat behind the desk opposite.
Grant handed her two printouts. She looked over her glasses, squinted briefly at Cat and Bess, then signed a third piece of paper and handed it back to Grant before calling “Next!”
“That’s it?” Bess whispered to Grant as he led them through another door.
“That’s it,” he replied. “Go sign for your things.”
They waited in line at a window covered in bulletproof glass for their handbags. Cat checked the contents; her wallet, phone, keys, and cigarettes were all still there. She signed the release as quickly as she could and Bess did the same.
“There’s some photographers outside, but I have a car waiting. Just walk straight behind me and don’t speak to anyone,” he said. Cat and Bess turned to each other automatically, trying to wipe the dirt and smeared makeup off their faces and hands.
Cat dug a full-coverage liquid foundation designed to cover up surgical scars out of her purse. “Thank god,” she said, patting the opaque porcelain cream all over her face before handing it to Bess, who did the same. Grant tapped his toes and sighed.
“Let’s go,” he said impatiently as Bess clipped her hair into a topknot.
“Well, this is some A-game hot mess,” Cat said to Bess, ignoring Grant completely. “We are epic.”
“Put your sunglasses on,” Bess commanded, sliding a pair of oversized aviators onto her own face. “Now we can go.” She set her jaw and marched to the building’s exit, flinging the metal doors open while Cat and Grant tried to keep up.
A pack of photographers descended upon them immediately, snapping thousands of frames before they even got close to the waiting Suburban. Cat tried to keep the look of shock off her face but felt her jaw drop open. Both girls had spent their time in jail trying not to cry, not to make a scene, to be small and friendly to everyone they encountered; they’d deliberately avoided thinking about the real-world repercussions of what they’d done. Now, as the gaggle of men in cheap T-shirts and bedazzled jeans took their photos and screamed their names, Cat and Bess both felt their stomachs plummet. They fought their way into the SUV and slammed the doors.
Cat looked at her phone, which had miraculously stayed on all weekend and still had eight percent of its battery life. She had 49 missed calls, 23 new voicemails, 207 text messages, and 142 new emails. Not good. Cat realized, for the very first time i
n her life, that maybe it really didn’t matter how much Berger she threw in anyone’s face or how much theory she tried to bury inside the magazine; the rules of the world were real, and they were not hers to alter.
“We are so fucking fired,” she said.
“No, we’re not,” Bess insisted. “This is totally to our advantage. You’ll see.”
Chapter Eleven
Monday evening Hutton stood on Sigrid’s stoop, stabbing the pewter bell with his index finger. He peered through the channel of bottle-green glass lining the door but saw no signs of movement within. He leaned over and tried to see through the wooden shutters, but they were shut tight and the drapes were closed behind them. If anyone was home, they certainly weren’t acting like it.
He’d spent the past three days chained to his desk transcribing statements from all the agents and officers present during the raid and interrogations, leaving messages during his breaks for Cat, Grant, Bess, and Sigrid. No one returned his calls, so he’d left the office at 5:00 p.m. sharp and come straight to 170 Ocean from the subway.
He pulled a thin piece of paper out of his briefcase and studied it. Roth had been thrilled with his work, even implying that he was sure to be promoted. But when Hutton had insisted that none of this resolved the problem presented by the note Hillary had mailed to Idaho—the ribbon is the key to everything—Roth had turned surly and told him in no uncertain terms to forget about it, that it didn’t matter. Cardoso’s status as a foreign national had given them a fair amount of leeway under the Patriot Act to manufacture a story that implied a long-term investigation. Not only did they no longer need the note, Roth pointed out, but its very existence could impact the prosecution of the case. He’d actually taken the note and thrown it into the garbage before sending Hutton back to his desk with a sneer.
When Roth had gone to the bathroom Hutton dug the note out of the trash, and now he sat on Sigrid’s steps, smoothing the index card flat and wishing desperately that Cat, or Sigrid, or Bess, or someone who’d known Hillary would come out and talk to him about it. He didn’t know what to do.
I'll Eat When I'm Dead Page 17