They could pose the model facing mirrors distributed throughout the background; get the angles right, and the model would be surrounded by prismatic images of herself. Little armies, like the Window Cats that followed me down Broadway and Driggs. What could make you crazier than looking only at your own reflection?
She remembered changing at her gym in Chicago and watching a passel of teenage girls measure the circumference of each other’s thighs with the spans of their fingers as they stood in front of the mirror—yours are the smallest, they’d declared to their leader, who smiled in satisfaction. Cat’s heart had broken watching them. She’d wanted to slap the girls, to scream: You are prisoners in a jail you’re too young to see. The images you see everywhere of tiny thighs are a lie. You are more than your bodies. Don’t give in. But at the time she’d said nothing; just looked out the window, gone back to her apartment, and doubled down on research. Deep inside, Cat thought that if she could just help people understand the images that were supposed to inspire them to spend all their money on their bodies instead of on their futures, she could break the invisible bars that held women everywhere back. She kept writing, sketching out the shots and sorting through the scout’s Polaroids and notes to determine the order, and had just pinned a white index card labeled DOTTY to the sheaf of paper when Lou called Cat into her office.
“I’m a bit nervous, so you’ll just have to tell me if this is wrong,” Lou said, pointing at the InDesign file she’d prepped with Hillary’s tribute. “Obviously Production will make it look better. I’m garbage at fonts.”
Cat started clicking through it. The layout was spectacular. Through Lou’s strategic crops, cuts, highlights, and pull quotes, Hillary’s life appeared glamorous, effortless, and even—timeless. Cat barely recognized the person illustrated in front of her. Still, it would be the perfect premiere edition of the MATRIARCH section. She realized for the first time exactly how Hillary Whitney could fit into the pantheon of powerful American women: she was a strong, athletic, well-mannered woman from a good family—socialite classic in those respects—but her personal style managed to express cleverness without being whimsical or explicitly sexual. Lou had chosen all the right images and edited the chumminess out of Cat’s voice in the captions.
“This is perfect, Lou.” She clicked back to the beginning of the layout, scrolling through it once more. “Really, truly perfect. She’s…she’s an icon, just like Margot wants. You can send it in now, if you want.”
Lou smiled with satisfaction. “I’m just going to let it marinate over the weekend. It either needs one more thing, or I need two days to forget that I think that.”
“Thanks,” Cat said softly as she ducked back into her own office. “See you tomorrow, Lou.”
She sat down at her desk and got right back to work on Dotty, productive magic lulling her into a happy rhythm while the sun sank in the sky behind the PMS board. Soon Bess was knocking on her office door.
“It’s almost eight. I’m going to that party for DICKS tonight. Wanna come?”
DICKS, the men’s magazine for practicing consumers, threw parties in Williamsburg famous for their wild stunts, all-metal bands, designer drugs, and regrettable photography. Founder Dick Soloway, the neighborhood’s preeminent pervert, was the kind of man who wore basketball shorts to business meetings and openly snorted cocaine at the ballet. His merry band of lost boys—metalhead dope addicts, amateur tattoo artists, and rich kids who were both—had become a cornerstone of the city’s media scene. But instead of becoming more corporate on their decade-long journey from fringe to mainstream, they insisted on pushing the boundaries of transgressive bad taste, getting rowdier with each passing year. Cat had heard their last party was called “Literal Animal Sacrifice.” A night with the DICKS crew was something to never, ever, ever remember again.
“Oh god, I forgot about it,” Cat replied. “I don’t know if I can handle that tonight.”
“I’m not going to drink anything. I’m just going to ’gram from there for the RAGE feeds. I’ll be an hour, max.”
“Did you hear about the goat?”
“I heard the goat was already dead. Molly said it had a terminal illness and they were just pretending to kill the corpse.”
“God, their poor interns: Get me a dead goat.”
“Yeah.” Bess laughed and shook her head. “The things those boys can get away with is beyond.” She shouldered her backpack. “Are we still on for tomorrow afternoon, by the way?”
“Absolutely. I have so many things to tell you, I’m really looking forward to it. I just want to smoke pot, bake a cake, and try on clothes. God, I love summer Fridays.”
“Sounds perfect,” Bess said, closing the door. “Catch you tomorrow.”
Cat stayed in the office for another hour before heading home. After a tired walk from the subway, she hung her bag on a hook, microwaved old Chinese food, shed her clothes haphazardly along the floor, pulled up season three of The X-Files on her laptop, curled up on her velvet sofa, and inhaled her dinner at a land speed record. Queuing up another episode, Cat rotated her laptop on the coffee table to face the bed and crawled under the covers. Mulder’s and Scully’s voices were the last thing she heard as she drifted off.
In the past twenty-four hours, Hutton had discovered a raft of evidence—much more than he could have hoped for. He’d spent all day testing, confirming, and writing up his findings, and now, sitting alone in his office, he was certain that it would pay off: tomorrow, they were going to raid Bedford Organics, and it would be a success. The lab’s assessment of the Bedford Organics products turned up varying amounts of cocaine; methamphetamine; MDMA; a variety of opiate compounds; and atropine, derived from Atropa belladonna—more commonly known as deadly nightshade—in all of the smaller samples, the ones with Cat’s name written on them, and in the bottle of eyedrops she’d taken from Hillary’s purse. The coroner’s wife, a cosmetics chemist, informed them that belladonna had been used as a pupil-enlarging cosmetic by Italian women during the Middle Ages. The larger bottles, which he had guessed were sold off the shelf and then customized later, contained nothing but garden-variety herbs and essential oils—hardly worth the price tags he found on their website. Two hundred dollars for a bottle of moisturizer that smelled like a rotting bouquet of flowers seemed insane.