“Can you take those off? They’re too bulky.”
Roth spoke for them. “Go ahead,” he ordered. Cat immediately hated everything about him. She pulled the elastic out of Mary’s no-nonsense ponytail and ran her fingers through it, fluffing it out. Her hair was auburn, thick with a strong natural curl. Not bad. Bess, standing beside her, was already clipping Patricia’s bangs back with an alligator claw she’d pulled from her own bun.
“How much time do we have?” Cat asked Hutton.
“About an hour,” he replied, glancing at his watch.
Bess pointed to the white box in the middle of the room. “That’s the closet,” she said to Mary and Patricia. “You can change in there.”
Roth laughed nervously. “I don’t think you girls are the same size,” he said.
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Cat muttered reflexively, rolling her eyes.
The room fell momentarily silent. A stunned Roth glanced at Hutton, who gave a tiny shake of his head. Bess smirked. Mary and Patricia stared at the ground. Cat ignored everyone and grabbed a tape measure from her wall. She held it up to Mary, measuring her hips. Patricia wasn’t much bigger.
“Go into the closet, look into the blue tub on the floor,” Cat barked. “Find the smallest full-body shapewear you can squeeze into.”
Mary and Patricia filed into the closet and obeyed without question. Their gun belts hit the floor with a thud. Meanwhile, Cat chose a playlist on her phone and plugged it into the apartment’s speakers, then walked over to the bathroom and turned the shower on full force before closing the door. She glanced around the room, then gestured to Hutton and Roth. “Sit at the table,” she said. “Order takeout if you’re hungry. This is going to take a while.” The men sat down obediently. Danish electronica boomed out of the speakers, bringing the room’s vibe up a beat.
Bess cleared the section of the dining table opposite from where Hutton and Roth sat. She opened a black hard-sided suitcase and started pulling out dozens of shiny cosmetics tubes and pots, then laid them out in neat rows on the table.
“That’s a lot of beauty shit,” said Roth.
Cat stared at him. “Do you want our help?” she asked.
“I’m just saying, it’s a lot of shit. No offense. I’d rather spend my money on other stuff. That’s just me.”
She leaned forward, her eyes darting rapidly from side to side. “Is that a joke?”
He shifted nervously in his seat. “No, I mean, you gotta admit, it’s ridiculous.”
“No. I don’t have to admit that. Pretending that women are blind narcissists, instead of self-aware pragmatists, is just…dumb,” she said impatiently. “Let’s not.” She turned around and tried to ignore him.
Roth shook his head. “Like I said, I’m not trying to offend you.”
“And yet!” Cat sighed. “Listen. I, too, would rather spend my money on ‘other shit,’ as you so politely put it. Whether or not you recognize the extent to which you’re performing a sexist pantomime—the working-class guy who thinks ladies don’t understand how to spend money—you’re still doing it. And it’s still offensive.”
“Honey, if you want to be offended, go ahead,” Roth replied. “I’m not trying to be sexist either. I just think, it’s a lot of stuff. It seems kinda…over the top. That’s all I was trying to say.”
“Ohmigod. How else can I explain this,” Cat said slowly, putting her fingers to her temples. “Taste classifies. It classifies the classifier? No? Okay. This”—she waved her fingers around the room, at her body and at Bess’s body—“is a language. Today Mary and Patricia need to look like we look. It’s not simple. This is a job I get paid to do, same as you. You may consider it frivolous, but it’s profitable for a lot of people—people like the drug operation you’re asking us to help you bust, so maybe try to take it as seriously as we have to.”
Mary and Patricia had come out of the closet clad in matching robes. For the first time since entering the apartment their faces showed emotion: they wore matching smirks.
Roth cleared his throat. “Yes ma’am.”
Cat turned back to Mary and Patricia without a word. “Ladies, can you head to the bathroom for the next twenty minutes or so? The steam will open your pores. What are your shoe sizes?”
Hutton was astonished by the sheer volume of clothing they’d managed to produce. Cat had rolled out two metal racks from behind the closet, along with an industrial steamer. A clear spray bottle marked “vodka” and a very large one labeled “Property of The Standard Hotel” hung on the steamer’s rack.
“What’s the vodka for?” Hutton knew he probably wasn’t supposed to talk either, but he was getting curious.
“It’s for anything that hasn’t been dry-cleaned. Really cheap vodka—like, comes-in-a-plastic-bottle-cheap—takes the body odor out of anything. It’s a theater trick.”
She grabbed two tubes from the dining room table and ducked into the bathroom. He watched through the crack in the door as she applied a white goop with a thick brush to Mary’s clean face, and a green goop with her fingers to Patricia’s.
“She seems like a real bitch,” Roth whispered, nodding his head in Cat’s direction.
“You have no fucking idea,” Hutton replied with a genuine smile.
Their masks applied, the female officers stood and followed Cat out to the dining table. Roth, occupied with his cellphone, refused to look up, but Hutton stared shamelessly; he was fascinated.
Bess used hot towels, dampened and heated in the microwave, to pull the masks off the female officers’ faces before spraying them liberally with a large bottle marked “CARIBBEAN SEA WATER DO NOT DRINK.” Hutton inhaled deeply, recognizing the base of Cat’s sea-smell.
“Try on all the dresses we racked for you,” Bess ordered, following the two women into the closet. Hutton listened in amazement to a dialogue he didn’t understand—one punctuated with laughter and sarcastic comments and thoughtful hmms—until Mary reappeared wearing an oversized green shirtdress; Patricia was dressed in a pair of tiny pink silk shorts, matching jacket, and shiny gold top.
Bess and Cat fussed over the women’s hair and faces, and eventually held up a mirror. Mary and Patricia looked ten years younger than they had walking in, and the women nodded approvingly at their reflections.
“How’d you know to do this?” Patricia asked Bess.