by Susan Isaacs
three orphans, did not sound enticing. Even Jonah had been having second thoughts about the boys being too young and also (being a surgeon) about his hands after a day skiing in fifteen-degree temperatures. I suggested to the travel agent that considering the circumstances, a refund seemed the way to go.
Her call back showed that all the revolting publicity did have one upside: The reservations departments of both the Deer Valley Resort and Delta Airlines had heard about Jonah’s murder and, as my travel agent put it, “How could they not understand?” It also helped that the boys had only a vague concept of time—Mason and Dash still believed that “tomorrow” meant any time in the future—and wouldn’t understand that the ski vacation Jonah had been going into raptures about was supposed to be happening now. So we spent Presidents’ Week at home.
I had tiny flashes of fun, although in terms of elapsed time, they lasted as long as the flare when a match is struck. I discovered an ice rink nearly an hour farther east on the Island and signed up the triplets for Tots on Ice lessons. Ida and Ingvild came along. Considering they were Norwegian, it wasn’t a shock that they skated. But as I watched them swirl around the ice, I was amazed: With their round faces and red down-filled jackets, they were roly-poly Frosty the Snowgirls. Who knew they had been on a synchronized-skating team in high school? They wowed everyone at the rink with their athleticism, including a routine that involved skating backward, then somehow, spinning faster and faster with the tops of their heads touching—while doing arabesques.
They even talked me onto the ice, not easy after I’d spent twenty-five perfectly happy years off. Within a half hour, I recovered whatever ability I’d had when I was ten. Rhythmic movement—running on a treadmill, sex, gliding around the rink—almost always suckered me in. For moments at a time, I forgot I had on rented skates that had been worn by strangers whose unwashed socks reeked from toe cheese and sweat. Once, the movement of my freezing cheeks even let me know I was smiling. (Of course I immediately felt ashamed and punished myself with a flash memory of Jonah’s grave just before they lowered the coffin; I’d been transfixed by the horrid nakedness of a tree root sticking out from the cold, packed dirt.)
We went back to the rink twice that week. On another day, I let each of the boys invite a friend over, gave them charcoal and paper, and had them draw portraits of one another. One morning we took graph paper and diagrammed a vegetable and herb garden for the spring and taped it to a window that overlooked the garden.
Grief is supposed to take you over. A bright memory may break through, but mostly, it’s full-time misery. One thing’s for sure: The pain doesn’t kill boredom. I was so bored. Other than the months I took off just before and after the boys were born, I’d been working since I was eighteen. Floral design was never nine-to-five, but there was always something to keep me engaged.
But after what was no doubt the hysteria of Valentine’s Day, which obviously I missed, Florabella was completely quiet. In a good year, Presidents’ Week meant seven bud vases of red, white, and blue flowers at six bucks a pop for the Lions Club luncheon. So when Andrea said, “Don’t you dare show your face at the shop,” I’d felt grateful and nearly guilt-free. Except that being bored at work would have been better than having nothing to do in a house where Jonah’s anorak was on a peg by the back door and his J was monogrammed on every towel.
I wound up watching a couple of runway shows from Milan on Fashion TV. Just as I was thinking I could probably give Dolce & Gabbana a pass forever, it dawned on me that the accountants still hadn’t given me the word on my financial future. Even if I was as economically secure as they were “quite confident” I would be, Italian couture—or any couture—was unlikely to find its way into my closet or my life.
At the thought of money, a memory of the retainer I had sent to the investigator at Kroll popped up. Twenty thousand dollars shot to hell, I thought. Grabbing a Diet Coke—decaf, since any financial uncertainty fried my nerves—I headed for the golden calm of Jonah’s study to call the investigator, Lizbeth Holbreich.
“I am so terribly sorry it turned out this way,” she said southernly. While her style was too formidable for honeyed charm, there was something in the way she was speaking that kept me from my post-Jonah robotic response: Wait for the person to finish their condolence spiel, then offer a “Thank you, I really appreciate, blah, blah, blah,” as if their expression of sympathy was not just profoundly moving but also amazingly original.
Not knowing what to say when I actually was touched, I went with “Thank you.”
“Is there anything at all we can do for you?” she asked. “I was going to call, but I didn’t want to intrude quite yet.” Her “quite” came out “quaaat.”
“I appreciate that.” I was thinking she and I were both business types. In my work, if the bride or groom didn’t show at the wedding, I’d feel terrible, but I couldn’t give a refund. Florabella had paid for the flowers and done the labor. In Lizbeth’s case, I had hired her company to find out whether there was some secret part of Jonah’s life that had led to his disappearance—and where he could have gone. Since only a couple of days had passed before he was found, murdered, I couldn’t imagine they could have had time to do much investigating. “At the risk of sounding cheap,” I began.
“Your twenty-thousand-dollar retainer.”
“I was wondering . . . can I get any of it back, Ms. Holbreich?”
“Call me Liz, please. Some of it, I’m fairly sure. I’ll need to check. But we did do some work on your behalf. I took it upon myself to go ahead and write a preliminary report. I’d be happy to sit down with you and review everything. I’ll gladly drive out so we can talk. Of course, if you’d rather, I could messenger it to you with a detailed letter. Once you read it—”
Considering this was my second phone conversation ever with Lizbeth Holbreich and that I’d never been comfortable with letting anything, from bra straps to emotion, hang out, I surprised myself by blurting, “Listen, I’ve got to get out of this house. It’s like there are bars instead of walls here.” My volume went too high. In a quieter voice, I added, “Sorry. I’m usually not like this. Would it be all right if we met in your office?”
“Of course.”
“I promise, no big emotional displays.”
Lizbeth Holbreich’s office was austere yet comforting. The walls were covered in a pale gray sueded paper, a hue to soothe. If its texture was as luxurious as it looked, it was thick enough to absorb all clients’ shrieks of outrage and crying jags. Liz’s lacquered black desk was one of those midcentury designs, asymmetrical, somewhere between an artist’s palette and a boomerang. The only part of her computer that was visible was the monitor, a black rectangle jutting from the wall on a jointed steel arm; it could be angled up, down, or side to side if you pressed the edges of a quarter-sized control to the right of the mouse. It was so high-tech, I would have believed it could access the Internet via mind control from a teeny Bluetooth device embedded in the frontal lobe. But Liz pulled out a hidden drawer in front of her desk that held a keyboard.
Liz Holbreich was younger than her voice, which sounded at least fifty. She was probably my age, mid-thirties, slightly imposing but not scary. She wore what I was 98 percent sure was an Escada, a peacock-blue suit, with pointy-toed pumps that had princess heels. Her shiny dark hair was cut chin-length. She had the powerful-woman-politician look. However, being small-boned in the extreme, she looked less Nancy Pelosi and more a modern-dressed version of the elf Viggo Mortensen married in Lord of the Rings.
“This way we can literally be on the same page,” Liz said as she pressed a control and the screen angled more toward me. “Naturally, before you leave, I can give you a printout. And a CD if you’d like.”
I nodded, but then I realized she was typing. “That would be fine,” I said.
“Let me explain. What I’m showing you represents the work we did so far.” I raised my head slightly to read what was up there: a table of contents with listing
s for items like addresses, names of relatives, education, employment history, professional associates, personal associates, credit report. “What isn’t up there,” she continued, “though the fact is noted in the intro, is that there is absolutely no evidence that Dr. Gersten had hidden any sort of criminal record or used any Social Security number other than his own legitimate one.”
It bordered on hilarious, the thought of Jonah hiding a criminal record. But how could I laugh when, if anyone had told me my husband was going to stop at a call girl’s place before he drove home to Long Island, I would have . . . well, laughed.
Liz Holbreich continued her rundown. “No record of litigation, either—no pending lawsuits, including malpractice, which, considering his specialty, is amazing.”
“One of his patients did threaten to sue about a year ago,” I said. “I mean, it happened just three weeks after surgery. She claimed one of her eyes was higher than the other. She even got a lawyer. Jonah told her it would be fine once the swelling went down. It was, and the lawyer called him to say they weren’t going to pursue the matter. Like two months later, that same lawyer wanted to hire Jonah as an expert witness in one of his cases.”
Liz didn’t show any signs of being impatient, but I began to feel I was wasting her time with unnecessary talk. This business was all business. Floral design was so much about major events in people’s lives that, along with showing pictures of centerpieces and pulling together a fast nosegay to demonstrate an idea for the cocktail tables, you heard the saga of the bar mitzvah boy’s triumph over developmental arithmetic disorder. You and the client chatted about wonderful weddings and tacky ones; confirmation parties that should have worked but fell flatter than the crabmeat crepes; the issue of themed bat mitzvahs; the etiquette of floral displays at funerals. A bride, noting your style, sought your advice about what shoes to wear with a tea-length dress, while her mother asked how to get rid of slugs in her hostas. You, in turn, admired the groom-to-be’s riding boots but knew not to ask where he stabled his horse. In my world, business rarely felt like business. In Liz’s, it definitely did.
She swiveled her chair to face me and leaned back. Not the usual leather office throne but a fifties-style chair that resembled one of those nut scoopers at Whole Foods. She rested her elbow on her desk, which I took to mean the meeting wasn’t over.
“You gave us authorization, so we were able to get a preliminary look at Dr. Gersten’s office and home hard drives, along with his e-mails and Internet use,” she said. “Our findings and conclusions are in the report. There’s also a good deal of backup data on the CD that I’ll give you before you leave. Now, do you want the bottom line?”
Whatever “a state of suspended animation” actually meant, I was suddenly in it—a cone of silence that wouldn’t lift until she spoke. Would I hear “He had no secret life”? Or would it be something that would change everything, like “Dr. Gersten secretly operated on bin Laden and made him look like Calvin Klein”? “Yes,” I managed to say. “Bottom line.”
“Nothing major,” she said. I realized how tight I’d been clasping my hands only when I eased up; my knuckles ached from where my fingers had been pressing on them. “No evidence of an affair or sexual liaisons.”
I couldn’t feel relieved. “Anything with prostitutes?” I asked.
“Nothing we were able to find.”
“Isn’t that kind of a lawyerly answer?” I asked.
“I’m not a lawyer,” Liz said. “But if you mean it sounds qualified, I’d go with that. Look, the conclusions in the report don’t exist in a vacuum. We have to take into account real-life circumstances. Dr. Gersten was killed in a prostitute’s apartment. It’s entirely possible he was there for a purpose that had nothing to do with sex.”
“But you don’t think so.”
Liz was wearing a large aquamarine ring on her right ring finger. She twisted it around a few times, more thoughtful than nervous. “Let’s put it this way: Is it more likely for a man to be visiting a prostitute for sex or for an undetermined reason—perhaps a benevolent reason? And if the reason was to help her rather than to use her services, why would this particular prostitute, a woman with a criminal record, go into her own medicine cabinet, take out long-bladed scissors, and stab him?”
“But that’s what I don’t get. Isn’t her criminal record for drugs? I mean, she wasn’t in trouble for anything violent. I didn’t hear she was ever involved in something where anyone got hurt.”
“True,” Liz said. “In any case, there is one more point I should make. An entry was added to Jonah’s office computer calendar around eleven-thirty the morning of the day he was killed. According to the police, his calendar hadn’t yet been synced when he died, because the event wasn’t on his BlackBerry. But ‘D.D.’ was put in the office calendar for six-forty-five that evening.”
“Was she on his calendar at any other time?”
“No. Unless it was under an alias both we and the NYPD didn’t come up with in our database searches. We contacted the authorities once we heard about Dr. Gersten’s death. They understand that in a case like this, private investigative agencies are there to support them, not work against them. The cops passed along the information they and the FBI had because we did the same for them.”
“Do you know anything about Dorinda Dillon? Her background, where she comes from?”
“No. Not because we wouldn’t be able to get that information. But because you hired us to try to find Dr. Gersten. Not to investigate his murder . . .” She stopped.
A second later, I realized she was waiting because my eyes had filled up. “It’s okay,” I assured her. “I get teary at least ten times a day. I’m so used to it that half the time I’m oblivious. Well, almost oblivious. Anyway, sorry for the interruption.”
“On my own, no charge to you, I ran a quick search on Dorinda Dillon. It’s on the CD. But since this case went from being a missing-person case to a homicide, we wouldn’t go much further—and keep drawing down against your retainer—without your go-ahead. Actually, I did call you once or twice.”
I swallowed and recrossed my legs, all the minor movements to cover social embarrassment. Beneath Liz Holbreich’s businesslike courtesy, I sensed sweetness. I said, “I vaguely remember you leaving a message or two. But once I knew Jonah was dead, murdered, plus with dealing with the boys and his family, and then all the publicity. I wasn’t . . . I couldn’t return phone calls. I started making a list and then stopped. I even stopped checking voice mail.”
“Please. No explanation necessary.” A small sigh escaped from deep in Liz’s chest.
I realized I could be wrong about her. Maybe Liz Holbreich wasn’t a sweetie pie, just a cool and extremely mannerly investigator. With all that southern stuff, I could be misreading courtesy as compassion. How could I tell? In the past, I’d trusted my gut because, as guts go, mine was excellent. Now I was too messed up to rely on myself.
“She had just changed her name to Dorinda Dillon a few months before. From Cristal Rousseau. But Cristal’s name had come up in a drug case. When the cops got to her apartment to question her—ultimately, it turned out that time she wasn’t involved—the super told them Cristal hadn’t moved away, just changed her name.”
“I’m assuming what you told me is all there is,” I said hopefully. “Right? There wasn’t anything else?”
“If our investigation had run its course,” Liz replied, “there were a few avenues we might have explored.”
Now I didn’t have any choice except to ask, “Like what?”
“Nothing to be concerned about.”
Had I looked concerned? Even after all her reassurance, was I still fearful that she’d spring Percocet addiction, spying for Russia? From the moment of Jonah’s disappearance, I’d left no nightmare unimagined—except for some horror I lacked the capacity to conceive of, the one that could kill my love for him. If he was capable of going to a prostitute, was he capable of something much worse? If a husband is alive and
a wife learns something awful, she can confront him with “I’ll never be able to trust you again.” What about a great guy who was maybe not so great and who was dead?
“We found a few e-mails indicating . . .” Liz tilted her head to the side. Shrugged. Get it over with! I wanted to scream. “I wouldn’t even call them fights,” she said at last. “Squabbles. The routine disagreements anybody could have in business or family life. They might be overlooked in the normal due-diligence investigation. But if an individual inexplicably disappears, we need to go the extra mile.”
“Can you give me an example of a squabble?”
“Everything’s on that CD,” she said. She touched the edge of the desk with the heel of her hand, and the bright computer monitor faded to black.
Being an executive at an international investigation agency, Liz Holbreich clearly understood the world in a way I never would. So although I was a reasonably chic, très-upscale sophisticate in my black Proenza Schouler skirt and jacket, I was feeling more like a hick in a purple velour warm-up suit.
“I get the impression there’s a lot of stuff on the CD,” I managed to say. “So I’d appreciate some guidance. Maybe you can tell me ‘I would have looked into this’ or ‘I wouldn’t have wasted my time on that.’”
“Sure. I wasn’t trying to blow you off. I’m genuinely sorry if I seemed abrupt. If I was holding back, it’s because I was hesitant about giving too much detail,” Liz said. “You’ve been through such hell. It would have been one thing to look over your husband’s shoulder in the normal course of events, watch him typing an e-mail, and say to yourself, Wow, is he pissed. It’s quite another to read or hear about that same e-mail if it was written in the last couple of days of his life. It has a great deal more weight.”
“If Jonah had dropped dead of a heart attack, it would be one thing,” I said. “But because he was murdered, murdered in a place where I would never in all my life have believed he would go, I need to understand what was going on in his head—and in his life.”