I'll Eat When I'm Dead Read online

  Bess set off down Thirty-Ninth Street before turning south, riding all the way to Canal where she hung another left and pumped her way up and over the Manhattan Bridge, all the while dodging the city’s crazy traffic, occasionally smacking the hood of a taxicab with the bottom of her fist.

  Once she hit Grand Army Plaza, she let out the tension she was holding in her shoulders and turned off into the park to cruise downhill, riding countercurrent over to Lincoln Road. There were no cars allowed in the park during this time of day. The summer evening was hot, its steamy air settling around her like a duvet, but Bess didn’t mind: she was, as always, just happy to be moving forward. What was up with Cat? She was dying to find out about the handsome—and vaguely familiar—stranger who had sat in Cat’s office for almost an hour. Both women consciously tried not to get too personal at the office. They didn’t want to look unprofessional, or inadvertently share too much of their lives with their colleagues; Cooper was simply too competitive of an environment to take the risk.

  Bess turned down Ocean and coasted for two blocks until she reached Sigrid’s five-story limestone, walking her bike inside the familiar gate at 170 Ocean Avenue and locking it to the fence with a heavy Kryptonite chain before bounding up the steps. She rang the bell, a round, filigreed pewter button, and waited.

  Until about two years ago the neighborhood had been genuinely terrible. The surrounding blocks were littered with mansions whose once open-air porches were all bricked in, first to protect from the seventies riots, then for the eighties riots, and, finally, the nineties riots. The eastern section of Prospect Park that the Gunderson family town house overlooked had been riddled with crime for years. But like the rest of Brooklyn, the neighborhood had changed, importing young, self-consciously hip, mostly white professionals seemingly overnight, shipped in from Ohio or Minnesota or Colorado via Sarah Lawrence or Colgate or Swarthmore. The B and Q trains were now fully stocked with WNYC tote bags and Warby Parker eyeglasses, and the prewar apartment inventory, always gorgeous, had been renovated by eagle-eyed landlords. Something was in the air, and this neighborhood felt safe, even if the police blotter said otherwise.

  Sigrid answered the door in her usual attire: a white silk tank tucked into black high-waisted cigarette pants and little red pull-on sneakers from France. A joint was balanced between her clean, bare fingernails; her only makeup was a large swoop of black liquid liner. The four dots tattooed across the cheekbone under her left eye moved up in a half-moon when she smiled. Her brown hair was tied back and teased at the crown in a fifties’ ponytail. Sigrid’s toothy grin was the friendliest thing Bess knew.

  “Bessie, helloooo, you’re here!” she trilled, gracefully exhaling pot smoke out the door as Bess stepped through it.

  In the tenth grade, while Sigrid was boarding at Sawyer’s, her musician parents and two younger sisters had died in a train accident on the Hudson Line. There were no survivors, and Sigrid Gunderson was left all alone in a matter of moments.

  A friend of the family, a painter named Matt Keyes, was named as her legal guardian. Matt gave up his rent-controlled studio in SoHo and moved into the downstairs garden-level apartment and watch over Sigrid. The mortgage had been paid off—and then some—by the Gundersons’ life insurance policies and a settlement from Metro North, leaving Sigrid with money left over to cover Sawyer’s, college, and maybe graduate school someday, but she wasn’t rich by New York standards. Some would have sold the house during the insane highs that the real-estate market brought, even to this part of Brooklyn, but Sigrid was a city girl with nowhere else to go. She knew what this house could be: it could give her a life if she put some life back into it. The house had become Sigrid’s livelihood and lifelong project.

  Throughout the remaining summers of high school and college, Sigrid finished the renovations her parents had started in 1990 when they’d first bought the giant town house. Matt remained in the basement to watch over her and her friends. Hillary had been Sigrid’s Big—the older girl responsible for mentoring her, a Sawyer tradition over a hundred years old—and she’d moved in after graduating from college, helping Sigrid to figure out right away how to turn the place into a boardinghouse for Sawyer girls. They worked on different rooms between waitressing shifts and acting auditions and Hillary’s job at RAGE, repairing floorboards and sourcing antique fixtures, and slowly the house had become perfect.

  Bess, in turn, had been Sigrid’s Little, and by the time she graduated, moving into Sigrid’s was a path already forged by a dozen girls before her, a tangled litter of Bigs and Littles making their way together until one by one, they struck out on their own. Bess had lived here for five years, until her family had given her a brownstone apartment.

  She pulled a metal stool up to the breakfast bar at the back of the kitchen. Sigrid handed her the joint and they took deep drags, cranking open the leaded multipaned window and exhaling out into the summer air, chatting about everything and nothing at all. Sigrid, an actress, had recently finished filming an indie movie on the North Shore of Long Island she was sure no one would ever see; her tenants were a whole new crop of recent Sawyer girls, fresh out of college. Bess’s latest housemate at her brownstone in the West Village was doing a lot of coke and wearing a lot of unfortunate outfits when she showed up to work three hours late. They laughed over her 5:00 a.m. tweets reading “I love tacos.” They admired each other’s jewelry. They finished the NYT crossword and eventually stubbed out the joint.

  The sound of a key turning in the lock finally interrupted their reverie, and Cat walked in with an enormous, clownlike scowl on her face.

  Chapter Three

  The subway could not be more disgusting,” Cat complained as she tromped through the parlor. “The train took forever, the AC was broken in my car, the guy sitting next to me threw his chicken bones on the floor, and at the DeKalb stop a rat actually got on the train, picked up one of the bones, then exited at Atlantic—presumably to share his bounty with whatever rat king is balled up underneath the platform. Also, I stopped at Whole Foods.”

  “I got here almost an hour ago,” Bess pointed out.

  “I would’ve CitiBiked, but I was so hung over today,” she said, shifting from scowl to grimace to smile as she turned to Sigrid. “Sig! What’s up!!”

  The women hugged and tumbled back into the kitchen. Sigrid pulled some extra-large mason jars down from a shelf, filled them with ice and halfway with vodka, and sliced a cucumber. As she pulled a bottle of rosemary-infused seltzer out of the refrigerator, Bess turned on the stove and Cat pulled two raw organic chickens out of her Whole Foods tote. Once a month since they’d moved out of Sigrid’s house, the friends returned to drink vodka and roast chickens in the oversized Gunderson Dutch oven. Bess chopped and crushed herbs for the butter, Cat rinsed and patted the chickens dry, and Sigrid mixed the drinks. It was a routine that brought them back to the easy years of their mid-twenties, when Bess had just graduated and was working at Filly, Cat was an assistant editor at RAGE, Sigrid had been in the corps of a cheesy Broadway show, and Hillary had been joyfully shopping for apartments in the wild west of the postcrash market.

  Sigrid raised her drink. “To vodka,” she began, a familiar toast.

  “To chicken,” Cat continued.

  “To friendship!” they said together, clinking their jars.

  Cat pulled out her cigarettes and seated herself next to the window. “Okay, so, today’s story, and I know Bess is dying for me to get into this: a hot, and I mean so, so hot, guy came into my office today.”

  “And?” Bess asked.

  Cat lit a cigarette. “He’s a police detective who’s looking into Hillary’s death.”

  Sigrid, shoving pats of herbed butter underneath the skin of the chickens, stopped short with her hand halfway up one of the birds. “What?” she asked.

  Bess looked horrified. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah,” Cat said. “I know. It’s crazy.”

  “Why?”

  “He wouldn’t
say. He said it wasn’t official—he just wanted to know what I thought.”

  “I bet you held back,” Sigrid said sarcastically.

  “I wasn’t a huge asshole, actually,” Cat said. “I merely pointed out that they didn’t have to call the newspapers or sell the pictures of her dead body. Her life didn’t have to end in ridicule.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Not much. I felt so upset about it all day, so unsettled, but on the way here, I just thought, You know what, this is what happens. People die and there’s a million details to handle. It never ends. And I’m so sick of being sad.”

  “I’m sick of being sad, too,” Sigrid admitted. “Hillary wasn’t a sad person.”

  Bess sighed. “I know.”

  “At first I had this totally irrational childish principal’s-office panic, that he was going to arrest me for that bike ticket and throw me in jail and I’d get fired and my life would be over,” Cat admitted, “and then I had a whole series of terrible thoughts about Hillary, like oh my god, what if someone killed her? And we live in a horror movie? And then I thought, That’s ridiculous. It’s the same pantomime police bullshit they pulled before. It’s more pointless paperwork. They never actually do anything.”

  “I paid the tickets on Friday,” Bess said. “It’s all taken care of.”

  “Why are you paying Cat’s bike ticket?” Sigrid asked.

  “Because I insisted it was fine for her to learn to bike on the sidewalk, and I was wrong,” Bess explained. “Annnnd…I kind of already owed her fifty bucks.”

  Cat nodded.

  “Okay, whatever,” Sigrid said, waving her hands. “But how exactly did the cop get into your office?”

  Cat lit a cigarette, rearranging her body in a storytelling perch. “He walked into Cooper, no appointment,” she said approvingly, “flashed his badge at security, and asked for me. He asked how I knew her, what our history was, and why she was so stressed out over a box of ribbon…obviously, the million-dollar question. I said she’d been acting weird for five or six months and that, you know, I didn’t know, I didn’t get it,” Cat said. “His questions were basically the same as the cops’ before, and I gave him my number, and he gave me his card. Honestly, he was…nice and easy to talk to.”

  “You mean he’s hot,” Bess pointed out. “Wedding ring?” Cat shook her head.

  “Let me see his card!” Sigrid demanded. Cat dug it out of her bag, and Sigrid immediately typed his name into her phone. “Okay, Mark Hutton…is…an insurance salesman’s name. I assume he’s not this doughy guy in a crewneck. Detective Mark Hutton NYPD gives us…nothing. There’s an NYPD listing with his name, but…there’s no photo. Huh.” She switched the phone over to image search and flipped the screen to face Cat. “Is he any of these guys?”

  Cat scanned the thumbnails. “No…no…no.”

  “He’s a million feet tall,” said Bess, “and I think he was wearing all Rag & Bone.”

  “When a man’s outfit is composed of a single brand, he’s either divorced or gay, right?” Cat asked.

  Bess and Sigrid both shrugged before nodding their assent.

  “He’s probably divorced. But he could also be lazy and have female friends,” Bess offered. “And he’s definitely attracted to women,” she insisted. “He was blushing when he walked out of your office. The man couldn’t look at any of the women on the floor, he was so mortified. It was like seeing a teenage boy in a women’s locker room. He just looked so…shocked.” All three women cackled with delight. It was refreshing to think of a heterosexual man who didn’t automatically view a crop of young professional women as a desperate geisha buffet there for the taking.

  Cat sighed. “I mean, whatever, I’ll probably never see him again. What’s tomorrow, Tuesday? Is it weird to ask him out? Should I wait until Thursday?”

  Sigrid’s face clouded over as she slid the chicken into the oven. “I keep thinking on Thursdays that I have to meet Hillary for a drink on Twenty-First Street.” On Thursday nights in Chelsea, rivers of free wine flowed gently from most major galleries, and Hillary had loved to trip from bottle to bottle, canvas to canvas, cheek to cheek.

  “I know what you mean,” said Bess. “We keep having weird moments at work where we realize before we make a decision that we’re waiting for her input instead of just moving forward. I feel bad for Lou. We don’t really need anything from her, you know? She’s just kind of doing her ‘small bones, hearty breeding, expensive upholstery’ thing on two or three pages per issue.”

  “Are people still talking about it?” Sigrid asked.

  “Kind of,” Cat replied. “The workroom where she died was totally redone, new carpet, new paint, new furniture. No one really talks about it to us, although I’ve definitely heard some ‘don’t stress or you’ll die’ kinds of jokes. In theory we have to hire someone new once Lou’s contract is up in December. But I’m pretty sure they’ll promote me.” She smiled at Bess, an expression both sad and proud. “Then I can promote you.”

  Bess gave her the same sad, proud smile back.

  Sigrid yelped and hopped up. “I almost forgot. I found a handbag of Hillary’s! She left it here after that dinner party we had in April. Anyway, when I emailed her about it she said there were ‘just cigarettes in it’ since ‘we’d done all the cocaine.’ And she’d get it next time.”

  All three women looked briefly heartsick.

  “But…I didn’t check inside,” Sigrid continued. “So make more drinks and I’ll get it!” she yelled, walking backward through the hall before bounding up the staircase.

  Cat and Bess doubled the vodka. Sigrid returned with a diminutive black Perspex cube dangling from a solid-gold handcuff strap. “I cannot believe she left this here. It is so b-a-double-d.”

  “Me-ow,” said Cat. Bess purred. They both reached for the bag. Cat snatched it first and popped it open.

  “Well, Hillary was definitely wrong about the cigarettes and cocaine,” she said. “There’s cocaine and something else, but no cigarettes.” Cat pulled out a small brown glass bottle, half-full of cocaine, and a clear plastic bottle with a handwritten label reading only “Bedford Organics.”

  Sigrid pounced on the cocaine. “I’m hiding this from the ducklings,” she announced, referring to her tenants, as she popped open a plastic bottle labeled “Glucosamine” and buried it inside. “I have never seen anyone open this. I think they’re dog vitamins. Don’t forget where I hid it.”

  Cat, meanwhile, was examining the bottle and smelling its eyedropper. “I wonder what this is…maybe it’s MDMA?”

  Bess laughed. “Don’t test that. We have to go to work tomorrow.”

  Sigrid was already typing Bedford Organics into her phone. “This is an actual company. They make some kind of organic skin-care bullshit in Williamsburg. But I don’t see anything in this shape and size…maybe it’s custom?”

  “Probably, but…does it make sense to bring cocaine, cigarettes, and face oil to a party?” asked Cat.

  “Yes!” Sigrid said. All three girls laughed.

  Cat grabbed a saucer and squeezed out some drops to examine them. “It doesn’t smell like anything. It doesn’t look like oil, either. Should I lick it?”

  “It’ll probably taste disgusting, but yeah, I dare you,” challenged Bess. Cat pinched her nose, pulled out the dropper, and dramatically lowered a drop onto her tongue. She suddenly tasted a sharp, clean numbness, followed by an intensely bitter aftertaste.

  “Guys, this is definitely drugs.” But by the time Cat was done with her sentence, the slight numbness had already vanished. “It doesn’t seem to be very strong. I estimate…one cocaine per drop.”

  “Catlock Holmes, on the case,” Sigrid cracked. “By ‘one cocaine’ do you mean one dust speck of cocaine?”

  “Yeah. A particle. There’s something else in it, too, something bitter. It’s gross. I don’t think it’s for eating. Maybe it really is a skin oil. I bet there’s some process whereby the cocaine acts—”
r />   “Like capsaicin?” asked Bess.

  “Exactly!” responded Cat.

  Sigrid looked at them quizzically.

  “Capsaicin comes from chili peppers. It’s included in skin creams and ointments meant to relieve muscle pain, arthritis, stuff like that. The burning sensation overwhelms the nerves and temporarily blocks them from feeling pain,” Bess explained. “Maybe you can use cocaine in the same way.”

  Sigrid was nodding. “Okay, but…what was wrong with Hillary?”

  “Neck pain?” Cat proffered. “Eye twitch?”

  “Teeth grinding?” posed Bess.

  “It has to be something small, because this bottle is small. I like teeth grinding and eye twitch; maybe…ear infection?” Sigrid’s face rose with excitement. “Who wants to take it on the gums? Either of you have a toothache?”

  “I don’t taste anything,” said Bess after placing a drop in her mouth. “It’s just bitter. Also I veto ear infection. She’d get Cipro.”

  “You don’t taste anything because you only smoke pot, Bess. You don’t have the vocabulary for it. Let me try.” Sigrid motioned for the bottle and dropped some on her own tongue. “Oh…that’s really subtle. It’s kind of sharp, then bitter, then nothing. Weird.”

  “Why don’t we just Photogram them and ask what it is?” asked Cat. “I don’t really want to put this inside my ears or my eyes. At least now that I know I can’t really get high from it, anyway. Use Bess’s account, though.”

  Sigrid moved the bottle into a clean spot on the counter so Bess could snap a photo; in no less than thirty seconds, they’d sent it from @loch_ness_bess and @ragebeauty with the caption:

  @bedford_organics: found in our beauty ed’s pile of magic ointments. label long gone—what’s inside? #RAGEdetectives

  “I love it when you can’t google something,” said Sigrid with glee. She drained her mason jar and raised the vodka bottle. Cat and Bess nodded and slid their glasses toward her.

  Before she had a chance to pour another round, they heard a key turning clumsily in the lock. After a brief struggle, three of Sigrid’s tenants reeled through the doorway singing “Hakuna Matata.”