Lou Lucas had spent the last thirty-six hours in a state of complete exhilaration, communing fully with her computer as she wrote with a fury she’d never known possible. At 5:00 p.m. on Saturday she was still in her office while Molly and Rose scoured wire services, catalogs, agents’ records, and photographers’ archives. Lou was nearly done with the text for the November issue, which would be closing the next week; all that was left was to present the whole thing to Paula and Margot.
After Callie had overdosed in her apartment on Thursday night, Lou momentarily considered jumping off the terrace. Watching the coroner examine the girl’s body—that stupid, thoughtless girl dying in Lou’s own office—all she could think was, They’ll never make me staff.
There is no way RAGE will be able to run the shoot I worked so hard to produce, Lou had realized, shaking with fear as she watched the police invade her beautiful penthouse. It would be repellent to run the photos after Callie’s accidental death, purely and openly exploitative; she wasn’t, frankly, well-known enough for her “final photo shoot” to be seen as a celebrity story, and so, November would tank. Come December Lou’s contract wouldn’t be renewed, and she would have officially failed. She nearly threw up right then and there but swallowed the bile back down, holding herself together long enough to instruct the caterers and servants to clean up.
She’d paced nervously in front of the office, watching the officers like a hawk. When they found a small black notebook behind the chaise, she’d claimed it immediately, for no reason other than wanting them out of her apartment as soon as possible. “It’s mine!” she’d snapped. “This is my office. So are you done now?” They’d rolled their eyes and stayed put for another hour.
When it finally looked as though everyone, including the police, the domestic laborers, and the last phonily sympathetic gossip hounds, had finally gone, Lou had poured straight vodka into a tumbler, walked out onto the terrace, and opened the barbecue drawer where she kept her secret spare pack of Sobranies, fat, gold-tipped cigarettes packaged in a heavy rectangular box.
She smoked half of one and finished her vodka before she remembered the little black notebook she’d claimed as her own. She refilled her drink and examined it.
The notebook, Callie’s diary, covered the last three or four years of her life, and it was surprisingly well-written, chronicling her professional successes and failures, her weight fluctuations, her feelings about her body, and her ongoing, on-again, off-again relationship with a policeman named Mark. It turned out Callie had been the woman in the Valentino campaign that had been plastered all over the city for the past six months, that she had a Raven contract, that there were more videos that would come out from Jonathan Sprain. This woman was an absolute volcano of content.
Lou found herself out on the terrace with the bottle for the next hour, smoking and drinking and reading the entire diary in one greedy gulp. When she was done, she picked up the phone and called Margot.
“I think I can resolve this whole fucking thing,” Lou sputtered as soon as Margot picked up. “I think I’ve got it. We don’t need to trash the photos. There’s a story. We can keep them.”
“That seems unlikely,” Margot had responded, sounding almost bored. But Lou managed to convince her. “This is a story about feminism,” she insisted. “This is a story about a woman betrayed. This is a story about a woman doing everything she can for the attention of one man who could care less, a woman whose career was, sadly, about to take off. There’s oceans of content around her. We’re just the first to break it.”
“Let me ask you a question,” Margot replied. “Do you want to be on staff at RAGE permanently?”
“Absolutely,” Lou replied earnestly. “That’s the only thing I want.”
“Then I’d appreciate it if you could explore this, in five thousand words, by Monday morning. It needs to be compelling.”
“I’m on it,” she’d said to Margot. “You can count on me.”
So Lou had spent the last two days in her office, fueled by a half-dozen bottles of cold press from the old Coke machine and some Adderall that she stole from Cat’s desk drawer, composing a glorious and elaborate obituary for Callie Court, weaving the strands of Callie’s love affair with Detective Mark Hutton as if it had been her own. Who was to say that Callie hadn’t told these things to Lou herself? No one would ever know the difference, and Cooper’s lawyers would surely be satisfied with the diary as her unnamed source.
Cat wouldn’t be happy about the article, seeing as how it ended with her breaking a fingernail off in the girl’s throat—a fact that hadn’t yet made it out of the police department—but that woman had long ago sacrificed her right to a personal life, Lou thought, done it the second she agreed to put her personal photos of Hillary Whitney in RAGE after her “friend” had died so horribly; done it the very first time she put on a dress and stepped in front of a camera on RAGE’s behalf, eager for the attention. In fact, she’d done it the second she posted her first image on Photogram for the whole world to see. Yes: Cat has done it all to herself, Lou thought. What difference will one more issue make?
For the impoverished working women of the world—working their little fingers to death in some sweaty country in the East—whose incomes are protected by feminists at RAGE, feminists like me, she told herself as she typed, it will make a huge difference. It will all be worth it.
Part III
October
Chapter Sixteen
Cat stared at herself in the mirror of the cramped restroom on the plane that was flying them all to Paris. She rubbed her hand back and forth over the top of her head, relishing the soft bend of the remaining stubble. The clean whites of her scalp matched the wan tone of her pallid cheeks. Two weeks ago, the morning after Callie died, she’d cut off all her hair in her bathroom at home, shearing it half an inch from the skull before informing Paula and Margot via email that she wouldn’t be making any more appearances until Paris, but that she’d be in the office if they needed anything.