Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part I: July Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part II: September Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part III: October Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
Newsletters
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Barbara Bourland
Reading Group Guide Copyright © 2017 by Barbara Bourland and Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Cover Design by Lisa Forde. Cover Photography by George Kerrigan. Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Grand Central Publishing
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First Edition: May 2017
Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Credit for John Berger quote in chapter 1 from Ways of Seeing, copyright © 1972 by Penguin Books Ltd. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bourland, Barbara, author.
Title: I'll eat when I'm dead / Barbara Bourland.
Description: New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016029303| ISBN 9781455595211 (hardcover) | ISBN
9781478915577 (audio download) | ISBN 9781455595228 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Murder--Investigation--New York (State)--New York--Fiction. |
Detectives--New York (State)--New York--Fiction. | Fashion editors--Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3602.O89272 I44 2017 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029303
ISBNs: 978-1-4555-9521-1 (hardcover), 978-1-4555-9522-8 (ebook)
E3-20170321-NF-DA
To all my friends: I wrote this for you.
Prologue
It was not impossible for a thirty-seven-year-old woman to starve to death in Manhattan, less than a mile from the nearest Whole Foods, though it was unusual.
When the NYPD opened the locked workroom at the offices of RAGE Fashion Book, where Hillary Whitney’s body lay dead on the floor, most of the officers placed their bets on a cocaine overdose. The still-perfect hair and makeup, the bleach-white Dior pumps, the long, manicured red nails; it could all have been part of one of the magazine’s photo shoots, if not for the way her limbs sprang—unnatural, akimbo—from her mint-colored dress. It was the officers’ collective experience that women who died at work in clothing this expensive were partying themselves into eternity.
Yes, cocaine was a solid bet, but still: one optimist had chosen aneurysm. “She looked like a nice girl,” he’d said, “and her skin was in great shape.” Another risk-taker bet meningitis, “because you never know.”
Yet, in the end, Carol, Midtown South’s senior secretary and most enthusiastic bookmaker, was the sole profiteer: the coroner’s autopsy reported that Hillary Edith Whitney had experienced a fatal coronary as the end-stage event of starvation, which no one had thought to bet on. In a zip code where the average net worth topped a million dollars, starvation hadn’t been recorded as a cause of death for an able-bodied woman under sixty since the previous century.
The unmistakable signs of a lifetime of disordered eating, chronic malnutrition, and various muscle tears and strains from an intense daily exercise regimen—along with a clean standard toxicity screen—buttressed the coroner’s conclusion, and so the precinct’s detectives saw no reason to dispute his theory that with the right combination of stress and a diet of alkaline-only green juices, a fatal heart attack could’ve happened anytime.
Clues, too, were in short supply. The only things discovered in the workroom with her were one half-empty juice bottle, an oversized and overturned box filled with thirteen yards of “luxury” ribbon, a pile of blank index cards, and a pen. It appeared she’d suffered the heart attack before she had the opportunity to write anything down. An attorney for Cooper House, RAGE Fashion Book’s publisher, confirmed that Hillary Whitney was working on a shoot involving ribbon. He helpfully offered that she was probably taking notes on the texture and provenance, which he insisted was a “low-stress” activity—though Cooper’s reputation as a high-stakes workplace preceded his remarks, but that in and of itself wasn’t technically a crime—and so, the case was closed in eleven days.
Eventually, like all things do, the death of Hillary Edith Whitney faded out of public consciousness.
Two months later the odors of new paint and new carpet were almost gone from the workroom where she’d died. The funeral was long over, her ashes scattered in Old House Pond on Martha’s Vineyard, when her boyfriend went back to his wife and her parents stopped crying first thing in the morning. Her estate was processed, her apartment was put on the market, and an interim fashion director was hired to replace her. It seemed to everyone that the ripple of her death had run its course.
Naturally, they were wrong.
Part I
July
Chapter One
Every weekday morning, as the sun rose above Sixth Avenue, a peerless crop of women—frames poised, behavior polished, networks connected, and bodies generally buffed to a high sheen—were herded by the cattle prod of their own ambition to one particular building. They streamed as if by magic from all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, through streets and subways teeming with sweaty crowds and heavy traffic, to work at Cooper House, the only remaining major magazine publisher in New York.
Some, like Bess Bonner, a twenty-eight-year-old associate editor at RAGE Fashion Book, arrived earlier than others. Though her colleagues frequently staggered in around noon after long nights spent drinking fistfuls of sponsored celebrity vodka in yet another chartered barge or pop-up school bus, never Bess, who took pride in being punctual. Monday through Friday she stuck to the same routine: First, she walked her bike, a large Dutch commuter, through the West Village streets to pick up her coffee at Joe. Second, she stood on the sidewalk and drank half the cup, no matter the weather; finally, she took diligent mental notes
on the outfits of pedestrians who were, like her, freshly pressed to meet the promise of the day.
One Monday in July, in attire that was stylish but functional (trousers clipped back with midnight-blue leather bands, her buttery navy kid-leather backpack stuffed in an orange milk crate affixed firmly to the back with neon cable ties, and a waterproof oilcloth bag that held an emergency poncho tucked beneath her seat), Bess drank her coffee, took her notes, and hopped on her bike, pedaling toward Cooper. After a few minutes of glorious, uninterrupted speed through Chelsea, a rush of adrenaline kicked in, and she smiled; that final mile of her morning commute both boosted her mood and set the tone for the long day ahead, working at the magazine she’d worshipped her entire life.
Today, that work meant sorting bracelets into velvet trays.
She hung a left on Thirty-Ninth Street, crossed Broadway, and pulled smoothly into the Cooper garage. Gina, the usual attendant, took her bicycle and wheeled it into the rectangle of her personal parking spot, a privilege for full-time employees, as Bess took off her helmet and shook out her tangled mess of dark blonde curls.
Shouldering her backpack, she walked up to the aluminum post outside the service elevator and waved her phone in front of it. A large blinking F appeared briefly on a previously invisible screen. Ten seconds later, the F disappeared and the post became a mere metal column once more.
Bess walked into the elevator and examined herself in its mirrored walls. Not too bad, she thought, looking down at her electric-blue Pappagallo flats for rips, tears, or smudges, smoothing her ankle-length silk tuxedo trousers, and tucking her deliberately threadbare men’s white V-neck into the side of the waistband. Her jewelry today was simple and bright: a stack of rose-gold pyramid-stud bracelets from Hermès covered one wrist, and a pair of dangling yellow-gold earrings—from the Egyptian section of the gift shop at the Met, purchased long ago with her fifth-grade allowance—hung casually from her ears.
When the elevator stopped on the forty-sixth floor, Bess walked into the main entrance of RAGE’s offices. The reception area still gave her a thrill every time she entered: RAGE’s front lobby walls were made of a creamy-white marble, shot through with jagged bolts of mint and lavender, seamlessly paneled between a polished black concrete ceiling and floor. RAGE Fashion Book was etched in three-foot platinum-leafed letters across the wall opposite the elevator bank.
The front “desk” was a sculpture by the architect Maya Lin, made of stacked gradient disks of a now-extinct ash tree suspended on four thin wires. There was a silver rotary telephone in place of a receptionist, as Margot Villiers, RAGE’s editor in chief, had decided long ago that the first face of RAGE should never, ever, be a person—just this empty, Lynchian room with a single telephone, through which you could dial a two-digit extension for any of the seventy-five women in the office.
There were no obvious doors save for the elevators. Bess crossed the floor and waved her phone again, this time in front of a brass plate set into the far-left corner of the back wall. The north and south walls of the lobby were made of marble so thin that the light shone through them, and when prompted by an authorized phone like Bess’s they split down the middle, slid back on tracks, and functioned as automatic doors. Margot called them the Beinecke doors, after the rare books library at Yale, walled in the same tissue-thin rock.
The walls slid away, revealing the magazine’s offices—open plan, like a newsroom. Bess made a beeline through the custom black Lucite cubicles for the southwest corner. Her own cube was stacked high with boxes, jewelry, invitations, gift bags, flowers, and a precariously perched laptop, on which she recorded who sent what object where and whether or not it was featured in a shoot. She tossed her backpack behind her chair and set her phone on top of the contact charging dock wedged into the corner of her desk.
Today, a Monday, was an accessories day for Bess. A total of 342 bracelets had been sent in the weeks before—solicited and unsolicited—and she had to account for each one in a spreadsheet, giving it a genre, a color-coded price point, a possible assignment for any of the upcoming shoots scheduled in the next five months, and then, finally, handwrite a thank-you note to the jeweler on RAGE stationery before putting the bracelet in one of the velvet trays that would eventually wind up in the office of Catherine Ono, her boss, close friend, and senior editor at RAGE. She sighed, thinking, I need more coffee for this. Bess walked over to a vintage Coca-Cola dispenser, popped in a quarter, and pulled out a squat, sweating black bottle of cold-pressed coffee. After diluting one-third of the bottle in a glass of ice water, she walked back to her desk and set her phone to silent. It was time to get to work.
Bracelet, rose gold, hinged band, with raised white enamel dots.
Very Julianne Moore in A Single Man.
Price point: Green ($5,000+).
Possible shoots: Day Drinking, January issue; Astronauts’ Wives, December issue; or Dotty for It, the Sylvia-Plath-in-a-mental-hospital-themed feature for the October issue, shooting in three weeks.
Bangle, lavender Lucite and bronze, laser-cut etchings à la Stargate.
Pat Cleveland goes to a garden party in 2035.
Price point: Mint ($10,000+).
Possible shoots: FUTURAFRIQUE, November issue; Gone Yachting (A Gowanus Story), October issue.
Bracelet, chartreuse ½-inch-diam. rope and platinum Monopoly playing pieces.
Rich children.
Price point: Yellow ($15,000+).
Possible shoots: Tea Party All Night: A Celebration of Suri Cruise, October issue; 1% (and Rising!), December issue.
Bess was so focused that she hardly noticed the office filling up around her when the clock struck eleven o’clock. The Beinecke doors parted over and over as RAGE staffers spilled onto 46, their near-uniform of summer silks in post-neon colors filling the office with little glowing blocks of color and activity as they poured into their Lucite cubes. That summer, the women of RAGE favored filmy sundresses with modish hems and lurid accessories; the shorter girls stomped around in oversized sandals, soles heavy and dense, while the taller ones, like Bess, leaned toward slipper-style flats. Makeup was out this year, so no one wore any. Skin care was in. The only embellishment Bess had on her face was a thick set of individually applied mink lashes that cost $900 per application, giving her the look of a soft-focus Twiggy.
Intern Molly eventually whirled in on a pair of six-inch leopard-print calf-hair pumps, their two-inch baby-blue platforms trimmed in red and gold. Her royal blue minidress had an extended trompe l’oeil collar in black, and her pile of hair was tinted in shades of the same baby blue as the platforms on her pumps.
“HiBessI’mSoSorryI’mLateIMissedTheTrainAndThereWereNoCabs,” blurted Molly as she hung her Céline handbag—this season’s, Bess noticed—from a hook on the side of Bess’s cube.
“That’s fine, Molly,” Bess replied kindly. “You can stay a bit later. Cat and I have to leave early. We’ll get a to-do list to you this afternoon. For now, please finish addressing those envelopes from last week.”
Molly visibly relaxed. Her hairstyle—an intricate series of plaits that ended in an extension-boosted fishtail—must have taken at least two hours at Barrett’s Braid Bar, and she was grateful that Bess didn’t comment on it. Bess knows that it’s more important to look right and be a little late, Molly thought, than to be ugly and be on time. This was a certainty that Molly would carry with her throughout her entire life.
Bess, indeed, had no intention of embarrassing Molly or anyone else, under any circumstance. The middle child of four, Bess adjusted cheerfully to the people around her, and going out of her way to make others more comfortable made Bess more comfortable in turn; she was the rare Manhattan native who grew sweeter with each passing year instead of more calcified. Still, it was true that some part of her natural ease came from her family’s astonishing resources, a fact she rarely, if ever, admitted. Bess instead devoted a significant amount of time each day to calculating the exact ratio of basic to bitch—placin
g the threadbare cotton T-shirt, for example, next to the Hermès bangles—in a misguided attempt to tone down the gleam of her family’s wealth.
After studying peace and world security at Hampshire College, she’d once intended to join the State Department, but her first job out of school—a paid internship at the teen magazine Filly, another Cooper title—set her on a different path. Bess had worked her way up to senior editor at Filly before taking a title cut two years earlier to work at the far more prestigious RAGE Fashion Book, where, like everyone else, she was more than overqualified for the general responsibilities of her position.
But Bess didn’t mind, for RAGE was so much more than just a magazine: it was the most successful women’s title in the history of print publishing. Distributed in thirty-four countries worldwide through seventeen international editions, with four million domestic subscribers, it was the gold standard for women’s lifestyle publications, print or digital, and held a moral high ground that few others could claim: all the apparel featured in RAGE was manufactured by living-wage workers. Yet it was as high-fashion as any quixotic editorial in W or Harper’s Bazaar had ever been—before their parent companies had gone bankrupt, anyway.
Bess came to the office every day with a serious commitment to the work they did there, no matter how trivial, but she didn’t expect everyone else to have the same energy; certainly not an unpaid intern like Molly, so she let the girl’s lateness slide, just as she would the next day, and the day after that.
Besides, after what happened with Hillary, everyone in this office could use a little slack.
Catherine Ono opened her eyes. Fuck, she thought. Fuck you, morning. She fumbled around in her sheets until she found her phone and held down a button.
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