“Thank you,” he said, finally taking a drink of the coffee and looking up at her. “I wanted to speak with you regarding the death of Hillary Whitney.”
“Why?” Cat asked, confused.
“I wasn’t here with the reporting precinct’s officers when”—he paused, searching for a tasteful word—“Ms. Whitney was found…and I like to get my own understanding of the people involved.”
“No, I mean, why now? We already did this. I spoke with the police months ago.”
“We’re reassessing some of our own conclusions. It’s something we do from time to time.”
“I don’t understand,” Cat said slowly. “I don’t understand what that means.”
“This is…not yet a formal investigation,” he said, his voice even. “I’m trying to determine whether it’s worth department time and resources, in a city that has over four hundred murders each year, to reinvestigate a death that was already determined to be from natural causes.”
Detective Hutton used a measured cadence. His vowels betrayed an accent; something local, she thought, but being foreign-born herself, she couldn’t quite be sure. Still, his tone was the exact opposite of every previous NYPD officer she’d spoken to: Hutton really and truly didn’t act like he was trying to intimidate her. His syntax hinted at an educated upbringing, he seemed intelligent, and his sprezzatura clothes indicated that he wasn’t just some blue-collar cop from Staten Island waiting for his twenty.
“We’re simply…having a conversation,” he said with an insistent, deliberate ease. “I want to know what you think.”
“Why?” Cat asked again.
“You worked for her for six years. You told the reporting officers you were friends from boarding school. You came back to the office when they found her body even though it was the middle of the night. I think you care,” he said. “I think you want to talk to me.”
Cat paused and tried to ignore how condescending he now sounded. Unlike Bess, Cat had a hard time making other people comfortable, knowing what to say or how to say it; she’d always told herself it was a language issue, a cultural issue, and that her abrasiveness and attitude was a price her friends occasionally had to pay to be close to a woman who was at heart very bright and very thoughtful. Hillary had been the only one in Cat’s life who had simply told her, flat out, what the right thing to say would be, trying to train Cat from a sharp-tongued know-it-all into someone gentler. Cat wasn’t sure how honest to be with this man, and she wished desperately that Hillary were here to tell her. She elected to speak her mind.
“Why do you care now?” she asked, curious and outraged. “You didn’t care before. Hillary died, and some guys with badges wearing too much Paco Rabanne showed up here, looked at our boobs, asked us about her eating disorder, and then told the New York Post she’d starved to death and sold the crime scene photos. New York’s finest. It wasn’t much of an investigation. And even if it was true, she was humiliated by the police for no reason at all.”
“So you don’t think that’s how she died,” he replied immediately, his tone encouraging her to continue.
“I was as shocked as anyone that her body was in such bad shape, but she didn’t always look like Karen Carpenter. I mean, she was an athlete, she skied, she ran, she kayaked. She looked like a socialite, like a well-dressed fashion editor. That’s who she was. She was never one of those people who talked incessantly about being vegan or gluten-free or corn-free, but she did drink a lot of juice I guess, and she did get a weekly colonic. She was thin, but here”—Cat gestured to the office around her—“it did not stand out as a capital-P Problem.”
Hutton nodded with an understanding that read as sincere. His big eyes peered out from behind his glasses, with a little thicket of eyelashes—like a baby deer’s, Cat thought—that brushed against the lenses when he blinked.
“Did anything about Hillary’s behavior stand out as a capital-P Problem to you?” he asked.
It certainly had. Over the past year, Hillary had become obsessed with her job, with double-and triple-checking their work, insisting everything be completed well before it was due. She arrived early and stayed late, worked hard at the gym, became overly concerned about her appearance in every possible way. Cat had brushed it off as the motivational paranoia of a single, childless, thirty-seven-year-old woman in a going-nowhere relationship with a married man—the kind of fire under the ass that occasionally builds empires.
But last month, when the estate probate hearing was held, it became apparent that Hillary had owned her apartment outright, had savings in good standing, and maintained positive relationships with her friends and family. The married man turned out not to be the only beau; two or three more men had shown up at the funeral, claiming to have been casually dating her, and to have been already, instantly, maddeningly in love with her.
Cat picked up her phone’s charge cord. She looked down at her hands and found that she’d woven part of it through her fingers into a net, a cat’s cradle. Until this very moment, she hadn’t admitted that the whole thing sounded very strange; that it wasn’t right and that it didn’t feel like an accident.
“She did…starve, I guess, if that’s what the coroner said,” Cat offered. “For six months before Hillary died, though, it seemed like she was upset about something, but she never told me what it was. And she did get super thin last year, but she died alone in a room with a box of ribbon, which didn’t make any sense at all. And I honestly don’t believe she was able to starve to death. That’s just crazy.”
Hutton drank his coffee, put down his pen, and looked directly at her. His eye contact was steady but not invasive.
“Ms. Ono, I appreciate that you work in an environment where excessive thinness is the norm. But there is absolutely no question that Hillary Whitney suffered from a physically devastating eating disorder that badly damaged her heart. The coroner saw years’ worth of damage to her arteries. Eating disorders don’t always result in excessive thinness,” he pointed out.
“Look around,” Cat snapped. “This isn’t a building full of bulimic teens getting rid of cookies. We’re grown women whose profession is deeply vested in excessive thinness. If that were what Hillary wanted, she’d have been a skeleton for much longer than the last six months, and she would have done it safely, honestly, probably with surgery. I knew her for twenty years. I am telling you, it doesn’t make sense,” Cat insisted.