She’d had a coffee before dressing carefully, trying to forget about the night before, to focus on her day, grateful for the chance to get to work early. Cat desperately needed to prep for the weekly editorial meeting that Paula Booth ran every Tuesday at eleven, and at today’s meeting Margot would be back from Paris to make one of her increasingly rare appearances.
She smoothed her outfit, a red lace bodysuit topped with a starched and slightly oversized white Comme des Gar?ons shirtdress. Cat found herself imagining Detective Hutton reaching between her legs, unsnapping the gusset, and bending her over her desk; then she blushed so hard it looked like she was having an allergic reaction. Self-consciously she turned her face down to her white leather slip-on sneakers and let her mind run through the events of the night before for what already felt like the hundredth time.
When Sigrid, Birdie, Helen, and Cat had walked into Hutton’s apartment, they had lost it. The apartment was indeed a true classic eight, but instead of the prewar medallions, crown moldings, and pocket doors that Sigrid had been expecting, they’d discovered the half-excavated remains of Lorelei Hutton’s sixties bachelorette paradise. No proper widow’s den this: the formal dining room had been transformed into two distinct areas of low seating on either side of a central river-rock fireplace, and of the five original bedrooms, only Hutton’s and the master still fit their intended purpose; he showed them his room briefly as he pulled on a T-shirt. The other three bedrooms had been converted into a library-slash-reading-room, an elaborate closet, and a bar. Boxes and power tools were scattered everywhere between piles of wood and plaster dust. Hutton had updated many of the light fixtures, but he was clearly working on stripping the wood and reincorporating more traditional details throughout.
Most of the furniture had been removed and several of the walls were half destroyed, but the bar was pristine. It held a full bar top in polished elm, matching stools, and standing bronze ashtrays. Hutton led them directly in there.
“Sorry—this is the only room I haven’t taken apart yet,” he said. “But it’s where everyone wants to be, anyway. Let’s have a drink, then maybe one of you can tell me what I should do with the place.”
Birdie nodded in agreement. She opened both bottles of wine and lifted five exquisite lead crystal wineglasses down from one of the bar’s shelves, emptying the first bottle between them with a heavy pour.
“Is it hard for you to get your girlfriend to come to this side of Prospect Park?” she asked sincerely, dumping the other bottle into a decanter.
Hutton laughed. “Maybe that’s why I don’t have one. But my grandmother didn’t seem to have a problem, so I don’t know, maybe it’s just my personality.”
“Did you spend a lot of time with her?” Birdie, a bartender, was highly practiced at ferreting out potential murderers, mama’s boys, narcissists, and dilettantes. The other women sat quietly while he lobbed back the correct answer.
“Not until I was out of college. She wasn’t hugely interested in children. When she died last year she left this apartment to me, and I moved in a few months ago. I meant to finish renovating before I got here, but…it didn’t work out that way.”
Cat was looking at the framed linear prints on the wall of the bar—all signed lithographs, she thought. There was a series of curvy lines that looked like a Lichtenstein; another, with straight lines, looked like the work of Donald Judd; and a series of triangles drawn in the signature style of Sol LeWitt.
“Are these genuine?” she asked Hutton. He handed her a glass of wine.
“I think so,” he said. As he turned toward the LeWitt, Cat allowed herself to look at him again, to really stare at the muscles in his arms and legs, and she felt an urge to run her fingers across his skin. He looked back to catch her staring at him, openmouthed, for the second time that day—but this time he smiled.
“Cheers,” he said, touching his wineglass to hers. “Nice to meet you.”
An hour later the group was settled in the living room, nursing Calvados out of oversized brandy snifters. They all fit on the enormous sectional he’d wedged into the conversation pit, a tiny amphitheater that looked as though it had originally housed dozens of floor pillows.
Cat hadn’t sat down right away. Instead, she’d wandered into every room, looking in closets and at light fixtures and asking about his plans for each space. Hutton had followed her around as she explored, eventually pulling on an old Hampshire College hooded sweatshirt.
“Bess went there,” she said. “Did you know her?”
“Oh,” he said, looking surprised. “No, sorry, I don’t remember her.”
She did learn that he’d been a member of the Peace Corps in Mauritania before going into Columbia’s journalism program. Then, after five years working the night shift at CBS, trying to “make violence go viral” as he put it, he’d given up journalism and joined the NYPD.
“What prompted that?” she asked when they finally settled into the sofa with the others. “I mean, I get leaving journalism; it sucks, there’s no money. It’s a giant pyramid scheme where we make the Coopers and Martins richer by using our half-million-dollar educations to distill meaningful human experiences into regrams. But joining the NYPD seems like something a Scared Straight kid from Queens would do, not someone like…you.”
“I’m a New Yorker,” he explained. “This is my home. It’s the biggest cliché there is, but I genuinely wanted to make a difference. I honestly think that law enforcement does that, makes a difference, keeps us safe,” he said.
Oh no. He’s a total idiot, she thought.
“Stop-and-frisk isn’t keeping us fucking safe, it’s putting another generation of young black men behind bars for loitering.” She couldn’t help herself. “And writing parking tickets is an important part of the municipal revenue structure, I’ll give you that, but it’s not exactly noble.”
“Stop-and-frisk isn’t technically still legal, but yes, it sucks,” he said, agreeing with her. “Writing tickets is what robots are for, but that’s not what I do all day.”
“Not all day. Sometimes you flirt with girls,” Cat pointed out.
“Okay, fine.” He threw up his hands. “I’ll give you an example. Look at the Boston Marathon bombing. Five days after it happened, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was linked to a triple homicide in Waltham that happened two years prior. The Times, the Journal, CNN, CBS, everybody, asked the same question: Would the marathon bombing have happened if he’d been arrested, tried, convicted, imprisoned? No. Of course it wouldn’t have. In that case, dragnet federal surveillance didn’t keep us safe—good police work, two years beforehand, is what would have kept us safe.”