“It has real cocaine in it,” Bitsy Peters had whispered to Bettina Simpson-Travers, Lou, and Ilsa Ravenshall. “It’s this woman that I played tennis with in Portofino last summer. She’s from Brazil, but she’s opening up shop here. She’s going to make a billion dollars.”
Lou, still married at the time, had just caught Alex getting pegged by a cocktail waitress in their guest bedroom during Jane’s third birthday party. He’d apologized with some sincerity, but in the end Lou’s attorney at Cavendish Crane had needed to step in to resolve it.
Now, thanks to Donal Windsor, Esquire, Lou—or rather, the LLC registered to a storage unit in Jane’s name on the west side of Manhattan—owned four percent of Lucas Holding, BV, free and clear. The shares, a payment for that onetime forgiveness, were hers to do with what she liked. She’d been looking for ways to invest and—bam! Bedford Organics and its marvelous hand cream—so much better than a cup of coffee, no calories whatsoever—had fallen right into her lap.
So Lou sold a tenth of a percent in Lucas Holding, BV, and used Donal to invest anonymously in Bedford Organics. She’d paid $6 million to buy five percent of Vittoria’s company, then watched her fellow socialites get hooked left and right, while Vittoria slowly bought her shares back from Lou at nearly double the price. Vittoria was just another single mother trying to make it in the world, she’d rationalized; who knew how long Lou’s own marriage would last, or what would become of her when it was finally over. She would need her own money someday, so that she could really and truly be set free with an investment that Alexander couldn’t touch. Vittoria had been the perfect opportunity: someone who had just as much to lose as she did. For nearly three years Lou was very careful never to actually touch Vittoria’s product, enter the premises, or call her on the phone—until the day she started working at RAGE.
Lou simply hadn’t anticipated how stressful it would be to work. After day one, she definitely needed a little pick-me-up, but she felt self-conscious about asking her doctor for a prescription. Surely this kind of stress was something she could handle on her own. So she’d asked Donal to contact Vittoria, who enthusiastically messengered over everything—dozens of boxes of the entire line for her mystery investor to choose from at her leisure. Lou had squirreled it away, storing the boxes in the panic room that Alex had once built into their apartment, taking out two bottles once a week and a tube of hand cream every other month: the jasmine lotion for energy, the honeysuckle for happiness, and the wonderful eucalyptus hand cream to suppress the appetite, and sometimes the juniper, just at night, for comfort.
“Is it possible to overdose on this stuff?” Lou had once overheard Hillary ask Constance Onderveet at Hillary’s ski cabin back in Idaho, through the door of a bathroom that reeked of jasmine and honeysuckle. They had all flown there for a girls’ weekend last March.
“Margot gave it to me,” Constance had assured her. “It’s perfectly safe. It’s simply South American.”
Three days later, Hillary had been so gloriously high that she’d told Lou all about her wedding dress idea for the Christmas issue, about the special 3-D printer she’d found. Lou had thought that was simply marvelous, and she’d also felt a teensy-weensy bit jealous that Hillary just really goddamned had it all—beauty, brains, respect. Lou hinted to Hillary that she’d love to work at the magazine, too. Just a thought—if anything opens up, I could really help with the wedding shoot; we could use my hotel in Paris. That kind of thing. And they’d made a deal to use the hotel, but then, months later…Hillary died.
I know where she got that face cream, she’d whispered to a jasmine-scented and red-eared Margot at the funeral. Do you think it had anything to do with her death?
The following week, Lou had Hillary’s job, though she wasn’t a staffer. Look, you’ve never had a job, Margot had said. I can’t make you staff right away, everyone else will resent you. Work with me here. All I can do is give you the chance to earn it. Come the end of her contract, Lou thought she might be able to leverage it into a staff position, but then Bedford Organics had gone tits-up in July, and Lou had very briefly felt depressed, though she’d already made back double her initial investment. After a quick call to Donal—who assured her that her company was a shell within a shell within a shell, that Vittoria had never known her name, that the only way to associate her would be for him to break attorney-client privilege, which would never happen—well, then she’d simply put the whole thing out of her mind. It had been easy to pretend to herself that none of it had really happened, that none of it was connected to her or to the lotion she slathered on every morning—and by September, every night. The whole office depended on it: Margot and Constance Onderveet had reeked of jasmine all summer, Rose Cashin-Trask of honeysuckle, and Janet Berg of both, with some juniper thrown in. They all pretended together. It was easy.
The panic room where Lou kept her stash was concealed behind a bookcase in her private study. When Callie had died right there in front it, she’d been simply terrified that they’d somehow find her cache, that it would get taken away, that she’d lose her job and go to jail, that she’d be shamed.
But Cat had fixed it all; I saw Callie sniffing drugs, Cat had reported. And I saw her choking. Nothing anyone could do. Certainly nothing about the bookcase and nothing about the juniper-scented lotion.
When Lou got back to her apartment, she checked the Eurydice Suite one more time, just to be sure, but the lights were off. The girls were still out somewhere, embarrassing themselves. Perfect. Lou coated herself in her evening application and climbed into bed.
Detective Mark Hutton sat in Premiere Classe berth number 4—the last seat available for purchase on the entire goddamn flight—and stared at Mania. There were hundreds of pictures of Cat on the map. She looked increasingly thin and disoriented, including a series where she was covered in paint and kissing—were those mimes?—yes, kissing mimes. The photos made him uncomfortable. He knew this wasn’t like her. Something was wrong.
But there was no way to resolve this on the flight, and so he clicked off the phone, cracked his briefcase, and opened envelope after envelope, trying to distract himself with a backlog of banal paperwork. He flipped the pile over and started from the oldest first, adding his signature to dozens of hardcopies bound for interoffice mail upon his return before filling out an updated insurance form and reading through two new manuals on handgun protocol. It was meant to be reassuringly tedious. He looked at every scrap of paper in the briefcase, including the white index card covered in Hillary Whitney’s handwriting:
the ribbon is the key to everything