“I’m not the coroner,” he said plainly. “I can’t argue with you. I do think that the stress…is unique to this situation. I agree with you that ribbon for a”—he checked his notes—“‘holiday shoot’…seems profoundly trivial, though I admit I don’t completely understand how fashion magazines work. Why would that be stressful?”
“I don’t know why. That’s what I’m telling you. It wasn’t important. We do try to satisfy a select group of major advertisers with placement in our editorials, and using background elements—like textiles or ribbons and other kinds of notions made or licensed by advertisers—tends to meet that requirement in a way that doesn’t force us to change other, more major, parts of our editorial vision. But this wasn’t urgent, obviously. I don’t even know what the shoot was. I think it was scrapped after she died.”
He was still taking notes when she stopped talking. As she waited for him to ask another question, she eyed his hair, cut short on the sides, and the shape of his neck, his broad shoulders. He looked up and caught her staring. She dropped her eyes and looked back to her computer, trying to act like she’d been looking at the screen instead of evaluating him, her cheeks burning with embarrassment.
“What’s that?” Hutton lifted his head and asked, pointing at the PMS board.
“That’s the Plus-Minus Sign,” she said. “Cooper doesn’t believe in whiteboards—because they’re too ‘LinkedIn,’ you know what I mean?—so I painted the window.”
The detective raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you going to get in trouble for that?”
“No,” Cat said, looking at him like he was the dumbest man on earth. “If I wanted to wallpaper this room in vintage pornography and replace the carpeting with jet-black Astroturf, they wouldn’t care, as long as we closed our issues on time. This is a creative workplace. Cooper is not like other companies. We don’t have BlackBerries, if you get my drift. We have stock options vested after six months because if you stay that long you’ll generally stay for a decade. Not many people actually make it to six months. We are expected to work hard. And there aren’t that many staffers anyway, people like me who can paint the windows if they please—a lot of the people you see out there are permalancers.”
“What’s a permalancer?” Hutton asked.
“They’re freelancers on an open-ended contract, and they make up over eighty-five percent of the people who work here,” she said impatiently. “They are contract employees of a separate company, exactly like temps. They’re not allowed to work more than thirty-five hours per week, even though they all do. On the masthead they’re denoted by the word ‘contributing.’ It’s extremely competitive to become a staff employee here. The permalancers know that and tend to work extra hard, unless they’re interim, you know, truly temporary, and then they’re usually straight nine-to-five, hour lunch, no-bullshit kind of people.”
“Was Hillary a permalancer?” Hutton asked.
“No. Of course not,” Cat said. “She was on staff here for eight, maybe nine years. It could have been longer, actually. You’d have to check with Cooper HR.”
Detective Hutton straightened up in his chair. “Thanks. I’m meeting with them on my way out,” he lied. “What can you tell me about her replacement?”
“Lou Lucas? She’s interim. It’s temporary.”
“Temporary until what?”
“Until they promote me, I think, but Cooper would have to sponsor my green card because of all the travel involved…it’s kind of complicated. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“Don’t you think they should give you the job?”
Cat sighed. “I didn’t come to work for two weeks after Hillary died. They think I need time, which is decent and human of them, and probably accurate, and Lou…she’s a good distraction for everybody. It’s a big job, and it’s a hard hire. They’re right to be skeptical.”
When she finished talking, it was as though someone had let the air out of Cat’s body; she transformed. The silk and leather swaddling, the pointed fingernails, the horror-movie hair, the extra-sharp eye makeup—it all fell out of focus. Mark Hutton found himself staring into the face of a young woman, someone who could be one of his own friends—in pain. Her grief was unmistakable. It filled the room.
“How did you meet Hillary?” he asked.
“At boarding school—Miss Sawyer’s School in Connecticut—when I was in seventh grade and she was in tenth. She treated me like a sister. When I moved to New York six years ago, she hired me as her assistant. Then about two years ago, Bitsy, I mean Joan, Joan Peters, who used to be the fashion director, decided to open her own store and so she left, and then Hillary was promoted into her job and I was promoted into Hillary’s and we hired Bess, who also went to school with us.”
“Did Hillary Whitney have her own office, like this one?”
“Yes. Right next door. Why?”
“Why would she lock herself in a windowless closet when she had a perfectly functioning office with a perfectly functioning door?”
“Oh.” Cat laughed. “I guess that does seem weird. That’s…completely normal here. When we want to just put our heads down and work—and make ourselves unavailable—we use the workrooms. That way no one can disrupt you by knocking or ringing your landline or whatever. It gives us real privacy, in case we need to plan something that needs total secrecy, or whatever, because there are always a billion people coming through our own offices. It’s in our handbook. Hold on, let me find it.”
Cat swiveled around and pulled open a filing cabinet, then rooted around until she found a lavender suede binder labeled RFB HANDBOOK, and turned to the page titled “Managing Your Workflow.”
“May I have a copy of that?” Hutton leaned toward her to examine the pages.
Cat frowned. “I think you probably need to get that from HR,” she said.
Hutton leaned back and nodded. “Cooper has not been particularly helpful.”
“They wouldn’t be,” she agreed. “I should probably stop there, I guess.” She tried not to sound strained. “Not that it matters.”
“You don’t think it matters?”
“I think the damage is done.” Cat sighed. “Hillary’s death was undignified and humiliating. I guess emotionally, I do appreciate being able to complain about it to your face, but I know you won’t actually do anything.”
“Why won’t I?” He looked puzzled, but not insulted.
“It’s not personal,” she said apologetically. “I’m sure you’re a great detective. But I know this isn’t a priority. The other cops told me that two months ago.”
He looked at her, his mouth unmoving, holding his pen. A gaze, that’s what it was. He was gazing at her. Abruptly he dropped his eyes. Well, she thought, realizing she felt disappointed, that didn’t last long.
“I’ll be in touch.” Hutton stood up and tucked his pen in his pocket.
Cat grabbed a business card out of the drawer and wrote her cellphone number on the back.
“Here’s my number, if you need it.”
He took the card, nodded, and handed her one of his own before turning toward the door. Cat got up to follow him out. Right before he reached the handle, he turned around.