“Yeah,” chimed Birdie. “If there’s no chicken left, I’m going to cut your fucking throat.” She made a throat-slitting motion. All three girls started giggling and laughed themselves onto the floor.
“Birdie’s been saying that all night,” said Helen, delight plastered in her eyes as she wheezed with laughter. “She threatened to cut the throats of two bankers, grabbed one of their crotches like he was a bag of dough, and then he sent us home with his driver. In a Bentley!”
Looking at the three bombed and boisterous tenants, Sigrid, Cat, and Bess felt like elder stateswomen.
“You’re in luck, you monsters. It’s almost done; we haven’t had a bite,” said Sigrid. “Wash your faces, change your clothes, and drink water; then you can have dinner.”
Helen wobbled over to the staircase, hiked up her silvery, cocoon-like silk dress, and began to undo the oversized straps on her block-soled jelly sandals. “I’m totally cool,” she insisted.
Sigrid raised her eyebrows and pointed to the tangle of Birdie and Lottie, who were still slumped on the floor in hysterics. Birdie’s legs poked skyward out of her coral Bermuda shorts; no one made a move to help her get up. Helen looked momentarily sheepish.
“It was just one of those nights, you know?” Helen said. “Everything was free.” She yawned and stretched out, lying across the width of the staircase with her legs propped up against the wall. “We just need to have some water.”
“Everything is always free,” said Sigrid as Helen threw her sandals in the general direction of the hallway. “You have that distinct aura of youth. Men just look at you and they feel a vagina tightening around their penises like a phantom limb.”
Bess’s phone buzzed. “Hey, they ’grammed back.”
@loch_ness_bess @ragebeauty looks like a custom blend, bring in for exam and we can tell u more. happy 2 help w #beautymystery for #RAGEdetectives
Birdie poked her head out from under Lottie. “What’s the hashtag mystery? I’m hashtag mysterious. Put me on the case.”
Bess grinned. “The hashtag mystery is that we found a purse of Hillary’s—”
“That I’m keeping,” Cat interrupted before the terrible trio could get their hopes up.
“Cat is trading me for it,” retorted Bess, “but that’s not the point. It had this small bottle of drops in it from Bedford Organics and we Photogrammed them to find out what it is, but they didn’t know from the picture.”
Helen looked around for the bottle. “Is it small and clear and plastic?”
“Yes!” they rang out in reply. “What is it?” asked Bess.
“Eyedrops. Hillary was using them to make her eyes bigger or something. She said they made her look all manga.” Helen was triumphant.
The oven timer beeped. “Chicken!!” shouted everyone at once.
“We still have to set the table and it needs to rest out of the oven. Girls, go get cleaned up, okay?” Sigrid, ever the den mother, was helping Birdie and Lottie up and pushing them toward the stairs.
The three girls bounded up the steps in cheerful thumps and bumps as they scattered to their rooms. Sigrid, Cat, and Bess looked at one another with knowing grins. Once upon a time, they, too, had stumbled through 170 Ocean’s heavy wooden front door after parties, singing off-key and haphazardly shedding their clothes, Matt Keyes hitting the basement ceiling with a broom to acknowledge their arrival home.
“Should we text Matt, too?” asked Bess.
“I already did,” Sigrid said. “He’ll be up in fifteen minutes or so.”
Cat and Sigrid finished the sides of carrots, potatoes, and a huge French-style warm salad, while Bess set the grand rosewood dining table off the kitchen. Just as she was about to light some scattered votive candles, she heard the front door open, and a wry voice rang out.
“Hello, girls,” Matt called as he locked the door behind him and walked through the dining room doorway. His downy white hair poked out of his head in ten different directions; his tan skin and boiler suit were spattered with paint. But he looked, as always, like the happiest person in the world.
“Bless this mess,” he said jovially, gesturing to the table and setting down a bottle of Cabernet. “I brought some vino.”
Cat and Sigrid popped in and hugged Matt simultaneously. Bess had a final moment of inspiration; she pulled the white ribbon out of Cat’s braid (“Hey!” Cat cried) and tied it around a vase of hydrangeas into a textbook bow, worthy of any puppy.
“Bow classic,” she said with a sigh. “The table is ready! Let’s eat!”
Just after midnight, Detective Mark Hutton sat in his vintage Volvo, the door of the limestone at 170 Ocean fully visible through his rearview mirror, waiting for Cat to reemerge.
He hadn’t meant to stake her out. After visiting Cooper, he’d headed back to the precinct to compare the original Whitney file with his notes. There were no factual discrepancies: everything Catherine Ono said matched what she’d said two months prior. The background checks on the women who Hillary Whitney had reported to—Paula Booth, Constance Onderveet, and Margot Villiers—had come up clean, and so had the checks on other staff members, Elizabeth Bonner, intern Molly Beale, and, finally, Whig Beaton Molton-Mauve Lucas, the interim fashion director. Catherine Ono had been open, accurate, and consistent; he had absolutely no reason to continue pursuing her, though he found himself replaying the afternoon out loud at his desk, repeating the things he’d already said to her, like a lunatic, while he chewed through an entire bag of sunflower seeds and tried to resist googling her.
All afternoon he’d gone through the other paperwork, including Hillary Whitney’s credit report, most recent credit card statement, and phone records. Nothing stood out, but he shoved them in his briefcase anyway when he left the office at 5:00 p.m.
From there, Hutton went straight to the police gym, ran eight miles on the treadmill, doubled his ordinary weight-lifting circuit, and sat in the sauna for a while. After a postworkout beer in the Irish bar across the street, chatting idly with the other officers, none of whom he knew very well, he boarded the subway for home.
The train had been a mess. The air-conditioning was broken in the first car he boarded, so he changed cars at Twenty-Third Street, though pressing up against the glass at the end of the car wasn’t exactly comfortable. At Union Square he saw a tall woman with black hair and black clothes board the same train through the car’s filthy window, holding a large reusable shopping bag, her purse slung over her shoulder, reading a paperback as she leaned against one of the doors. When she reached an arm up to pull a section of hair away from her face, he realized it was Catherine Ono, and he felt suddenly self-conscious, though she didn’t look in his direction once. Sweat dripped down her brow in the hot car; commotion ensued at DeKalb when a rat got on the train. Though she glanced briefly at the rat with disdain, she kept her eyes on her book, and Hutton kept his eyes on her.