Bess, in turn, had been Sigrid’s Little, and by the time she graduated, moving into Sigrid’s was a path already forged by a dozen girls before her, a tangled litter of Bigs and Littles making their way together until one by one, they struck out on their own. Bess had lived here for five years, until her family had given her a brownstone apartment.
She pulled a metal stool up to the breakfast bar at the back of the kitchen. Sigrid handed her the joint and they took deep drags, cranking open the leaded multipaned window and exhaling out into the summer air, chatting about everything and nothing at all. Sigrid, an actress, had recently finished filming an indie movie on the North Shore of Long Island she was sure no one would ever see; her tenants were a whole new crop of recent Sawyer girls, fresh out of college. Bess’s latest housemate at her brownstone in the West Village was doing a lot of coke and wearing a lot of unfortunate outfits when she showed up to work three hours late. They laughed over her 5:00 a.m. tweets reading “I love tacos.” They admired each other’s jewelry. They finished the NYT crossword and eventually stubbed out the joint.
The sound of a key turning in the lock finally interrupted their reverie, and Cat walked in with an enormous, clownlike scowl on her face.
Chapter Three
The subway could not be more disgusting,” Cat complained as she tromped through the parlor. “The train took forever, the AC was broken in my car, the guy sitting next to me threw his chicken bones on the floor, and at the DeKalb stop a rat actually got on the train, picked up one of the bones, then exited at Atlantic—presumably to share his bounty with whatever rat king is balled up underneath the platform. Also, I stopped at Whole Foods.”
“I got here almost an hour ago,” Bess pointed out.
“I would’ve CitiBiked, but I was so hung over today,” she said, shifting from scowl to grimace to smile as she turned to Sigrid. “Sig! What’s up!!”
The women hugged and tumbled back into the kitchen. Sigrid pulled some extra-large mason jars down from a shelf, filled them with ice and halfway with vodka, and sliced a cucumber. As she pulled a bottle of rosemary-infused seltzer out of the refrigerator, Bess turned on the stove and Cat pulled two raw organic chickens out of her Whole Foods tote. Once a month since they’d moved out of Sigrid’s house, the friends returned to drink vodka and roast chickens in the oversized Gunderson Dutch oven. Bess chopped and crushed herbs for the butter, Cat rinsed and patted the chickens dry, and Sigrid mixed the drinks. It was a routine that brought them back to the easy years of their mid-twenties, when Bess had just graduated and was working at Filly, Cat was an assistant editor at RAGE, Sigrid had been in the corps of a cheesy Broadway show, and Hillary had been joyfully shopping for apartments in the wild west of the postcrash market.
Sigrid raised her drink. “To vodka,” she began, a familiar toast.
“To chicken,” Cat continued.
“To friendship!” they said together, clinking their jars.
Cat pulled out her cigarettes and seated herself next to the window. “Okay, so, today’s story, and I know Bess is dying for me to get into this: a hot, and I mean so, so hot, guy came into my office today.”
“And?” Bess asked.
Cat lit a cigarette. “He’s a police detective who’s looking into Hillary’s death.”
Sigrid, shoving pats of herbed butter underneath the skin of the chickens, stopped short with her hand halfway up one of the birds. “What?” she asked.
Bess looked horrified. “Seriously?”
“Yeah,” Cat said. “I know. It’s crazy.”
“Why?”
“He wouldn’t say. He said it wasn’t official—he just wanted to know what I thought.”
“I bet you held back,” Sigrid said sarcastically.
“I wasn’t a huge asshole, actually,” Cat said. “I merely pointed out that they didn’t have to call the newspapers or sell the pictures of her dead body. Her life didn’t have to end in ridicule.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Not much. I felt so upset about it all day, so unsettled, but on the way here, I just thought, You know what, this is what happens. People die and there’s a million details to handle. It never ends. And I’m so sick of being sad.”
“I’m sick of being sad, too,” Sigrid admitted. “Hillary wasn’t a sad person.”
Bess sighed. “I know.”
“At first I had this totally irrational childish principal’s-office panic, that he was going to arrest me for that bike ticket and throw me in jail and I’d get fired and my life would be over,” Cat admitted, “and then I had a whole series of terrible thoughts about Hillary, like oh my god, what if someone killed her? And we live in a horror movie? And then I thought, That’s ridiculous. It’s the same pantomime police bullshit they pulled before. It’s more pointless paperwork. They never actually do anything.”
“I paid the tickets on Friday,” Bess said. “It’s all taken care of.”
“Why are you paying Cat’s bike ticket?” Sigrid asked.
“Because I insisted it was fine for her to learn to bike on the sidewalk, and I was wrong,” Bess explained. “Annnnd…I kind of already owed her fifty bucks.”
Cat nodded.
“Okay, whatever,” Sigrid said, waving her hands. “But how exactly did the cop get into your office?”
Cat lit a cigarette, rearranging her body in a storytelling perch. “He walked into Cooper, no appointment,” she said approvingly, “flashed his badge at security, and asked for me. He asked how I knew her, what our history was, and why she was so stressed out over a box of ribbon…obviously, the million-dollar question. I said she’d been acting weird for five or six months and that, you know, I didn’t know, I didn’t get it,” Cat said. “His questions were basically the same as the cops’ before, and I gave him my number, and he gave me his card. Honestly, he was…nice and easy to talk to.”
“You mean he’s hot,” Bess pointed out. “Wedding ring?” Cat shook her head.
“Let me see his card!” Sigrid demanded. Cat dug it out of her bag, and Sigrid immediately typed his name into her phone. “Okay, Mark Hutton…is…an insurance salesman’s name. I assume he’s not this doughy guy in a crewneck. Detective Mark Hutton NYPD gives us…nothing. There’s an NYPD listing with his name, but…there’s no photo. Huh.” She switched the phone over to image search and flipped the screen to face Cat. “Is he any of these guys?”
Cat scanned the thumbnails. “No…no…no.”
“He’s a million feet tall,” said Bess, “and I think he was wearing all Rag & Bone.”
“When a man’s outfit is composed of a single brand, he’s either divorced or gay, right?” Cat asked.
Bess and Sigrid both shrugged before nodding their assent.