As Husbands Go

by Susan Isaacs

  “Fair enough. As I said, no matters of great consequence. There were a number of e-mails between Dr. Gersten and . . . I believe it’s the manager of the medical practice. A Donald Finsterwald.”

  “Yes. Were there problems?”

  “Basically that when the going got tough with the economic downturn, Dr. Gersten thought Finsterwald was turning to mush. Doing less marketing, less PR rather than more. Your husband discovered Finsterwald had turned down an offer for one of the three partners to go on Today in New York because it was a local show, not national. Finsterwald e-mailed back to Dr. Gersten apologizing profusely. Had there been a history of friction between them?”

  “No. Jonah thought Donald was the ultimate suck-up with physicians but too uncaring with staff. Jonah didn’t like him personally, but I didn’t realize he was so annoyed.”

  “More than annoyed, I think. Sometimes it’s hard to get a reading just from e-mail, because in any office setting, there are always conversations taking place between correspondence. But the last few days, it looked as though your husband was downright angry.”

  “Anything else with Donald?”

  “Yes. Apparently, part of his job was tracking financial performance. Finsterwald sent several e-mails apologizing for not having weekly reports done, saying it was difficult getting numbers, what with Dr. Noakes doing so much pro bono work and traveling. The records were incomplete.”

  “Gilbert John was good with his medical notations,” I said. “But he practiced by himself for so many years before taking on Jonah and then Layne that he couldn’t deal with being accountable to partners. And with the practice’s businessy computerized systems, he was technologically lame.”

  The light coming through Liz’s window was beginning to soften. Instead of looking overbright, like an HDTV test pattern, her black hair, blue suit, and aquamarine ring were starting to appear washed out, almost fuzzy, more like one of those fifties movies you rent that was done by some cheaper process than Technicolor. “Does everybody call Dr. Noakes ‘Gilbert John’?” Liz Holbreich asked.

  “Yes. At least, I’ve never heard him called anything else. It’s weird, because he’s probably the most boring guy at Mount Sinai, which takes doing, but everyone plays up to him. Part of it is that he’s a really good-looking man. But there’s something truly formidable about his manner. Jonah always said Gilbert John had a brilliant reputation as a surgeon, and the grand style to go with it.”

  “Is he a nasty kind of guy?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “He just has—pardon me—a permanent stick up his ass. And Layne is just the opposite: ‘I’m just a down-to-earth gal from Albuquerque, and don’t bother calling me Doctor because, gosh, all that formality just isn’t me, and now, is there anything I can do to make you feel better about yourself because you’re a wonderful person?’ My guess is that’s why Jonah was so upset with Donald Finsterwald, because he’d been hired to ease the pressure and make it easy for the three partners not to have any issues.” My left foot started falling asleep. I wriggled my toes, but as I was wearing pointy stilettos, all I could do was rotate my ankle slowly so Liz wouldn’t notice. “You mentioned avenues you might have gone down if you had more time to investigate. Besides Donald and the practice, does anything else come to mind?”

  “Let’s see.” Liz shut her eyes, doing a major I’m thinking.

  “Please don’t be concerned about hurting me. I do flowers. I don’t have the background, the way you do, to evaluate what’s potentially investigatable.”

  She nodded and did the pushing-back-cuticle-but-really-looking-at-watch business. Maybe she was thinking her shot at leaving early to check out the shoe sales at Saks would be lost if I dissolved into tears.

  “You’re absolutely right to ask for a professional’s opinion, though in this case, I don’t know what it’s worth. I was only hesitating because it involves family,” she said. I almost laughed because my first thought of family was my parents and assorted cousins, whose existence seemed way too mind-numbing to merit investigation, except by researchers into the nature of boringness. “Dr. Gersten’s brother, Theo.”

  “Theo?” Definitely an interesting life. And a self-centered one. Aside from their being siblings, I couldn’t imagine his life and Jonah’s crossing in any significant way. Years earlier, when Theo was still trying to be an actor, he kept sending his friends to his brother for consultations, though they seemed to believe Jonah would not only work on them for free but take care of the anesthesiologist and OR costs. After Jonah told them—and Theo—all he could give was a discount, Theo stopped the referrals, but only after telling Jonah that he was appalled at the cheap fuck he had become.

  “He recently asked your husband for ten thousand dollars,” Liz said.

  “He did? Like ‘Hey, can you give me ten thou?’”

  “He needed it to pay for some fire damage to his apartment building from a sauna he’d had installed. Illegally, it turned out.”

  All I could do was shake my head. It was so Theo. “Jonah didn’t tell me about that one.”

  “I must say, you don’t seem surprised,” Liz said.

  “I’m not. Unless Jonah gave him the money.”

  “No. He sent him . . . I wouldn’t call it angry, but it was a strongly worded e-mail. Essentially, it said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding, asking me.’ Theo came back with ‘If you can’t see your way to helping me out, could you loan me the money?’” I felt that tennis-volley anticipation, waiting for Jonah’s response. “He refused,” Liz said.

  “How did he put it?”

  “Something about Theo already owing him the equivalent of the national debt. Obviously, I don’t know if he was being ironic or if Theo did owe him a large amount.” Natural curiosity made her pause, hoping for an answer, but I didn’t have one. I hadn’t a clue that Theo owed him—us—money. “Us” because everything we had was joint. Still, I couldn’t think up a way to make it sound like “Oh, Jonah told me everything.” For whatever reason, that was what I wanted Liz to believe. “Dr. Gersten suggested if Theo couldn’t get a loan from a bank, he should ask their parents. Then it was a great deal of back-and-forth: Theo writing that Jonah should go F himself and Jonah asking him why, since they’re both in their thirties, he should have any responsibility for Theo.”

  What I couldn’t get over was Jonah not saying a word about this to me, not even “Theo’s being a pain in the ass again” or “Can you believe my brother put in an illegal sauna and it burned a ten-thousand-dollar hole in his apartment?” Maybe he’d gotten so angry at Theo’s immaturity that he couldn’t even talk about it—plus, he knew I’d get furious and then he’d have to listen to me, like an echo of his anger.

  I took a deep breath. “When did all this e-mailing happen?” I asked.

  Liz’s voice was soft. “A couple of weeks before Jonah was killed.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Forget about Get a life. It had been almost a month, and even though I’d OD’d on reality, part of me still held on to the primitive, pathetic belief that Jonah would be found alive. “That wasn’t your husband in the Gersten plot, three feet away from Grandpa Ben, after all!” I’d be told. There’d be some jaw-dropping explanation involving amnesia, but seeing me would cure it. All the papers and magazines would write editorials apologizing for their gross misreporting, and Rupert Murdoch would send a handwritten letter saying how sorry he was about FOX News and The New York Post being the most disgusting media about Jonah, and he’d offer his private jet to take me and the boys anywhere in the world for a healing vacation; we’d know he wasn’t truly sorry, just afraid of a libel suit because Jonah hadn’t been a public figure till his tabloid notoriety had made him one.

  If I couldn’t get a life, I at least had to muddle on. Those he’s-not-dead fantasies were scaring me with their seductiveness. I had to deal. So, having done the only decent thing, giving Ida and Ingvild three days off after their above-and-beyond, day-and-night selfless devotion, I was dealin
g—and proceeding to go insane.

  Worse, it was Saturday morning. I’d been all alone with the boys only eighteen hours. “Evan, get back here! Don’t you dare open that door!” I screeched from the kitchen. I heard the shoosh, shoosh of his Power Ranger slippers skimming along the marble checkerboard floor of the front hall as he raced to answer the bell. Mason and Dash, lacking their brother’s gregarious nature, were still parked on the rug in the den, yukking it up as they watched Kung Fu Panda for the fiftieth time.

  So much TV. I was afraid of a call from the accountants saying, “We’ve been going over your expenses, and sad to say, we were overly optimistic. You can no longer afford video on demand. In fact, you can no longer afford any luxury in your life.” Whenever I called Wollman & Rubin, LLP, Certified Public Accountants and Profitability Consultants, they tried to soothe me with voices practically dripping in anesthesia: “Not to worry, Susie,” “Jonah seems to have been on top of things,” “We’re almost ready to sign off.” But until they did—

  “Evan, dammit, if you open that door, you can forget your playdate with Josh! Cross it off your to-do list because there’s no way in hell—” Still screaming that last sentence, I careened around the corner and skidded into the front hall.

  Lieutenant Gary Paston stood framed by the open door. He was telling Evan, “You shouldn’t open the door unless a grown-up tells you it’s okay.”

  “Into the den!” I ordered Evan, who ignored me. He was riveted as Paston flipped shut his gold shield with one hand. Paston obliged him by flipping it open and shut a few more times. “Evan.” I forced myself to use my reasonable voice. “You know your brothers won’t rewind. You’ll miss the best part.” He took off.

  “Please come in, Lieutenant Paston,” I said. It came out too ladylike, the tone you resort to when trying to make someone forget how you’d been shrieking like a shrew. A second later, any notion of graciousness vanished. Normality, as in “Can I take your coat?” was out of the question. Instead, I stood mute, staring at his black fringed wool scarf. It was the same one he’d worn on his other visit. An ordinary knit scarf, but seeing it brought back the moment I’d found out. It was like that guy in Proust who dunked a cookie in tea and got not just a memory but a total five-senses replay. All that hand-tied fringe bursting from Paston’s scarf, and I was back in that awful night, when my hope had turned to dread and dread to despair.

  A six-feet-something, football-player-sized African-American guy in a gray overcoat was standing framed by my front door, but I couldn’t see him. All I could take in was the fringe on his scarf, the fringe of his eyelashes, and the knowledge that in a couple of seconds, he was going to tell me Jonah had been murdered. Post-traumatic stress? Maybe. Probably.

  It wasn’t until he said, “Mrs. Gersten? Are you okay?” that I realized I was rigid—like in the game the boys played, where one kid yelled “Red light!” and everybody froze. Despite my asking him in, I was blocking his way. “I owe you an apology,” he said. “I should have called to see if it would be okay if I drove out. I just thought, Well, it’s a Saturday morning and—”

  “No, it’s fine. Really. Please come in.” We had an awkward couple of seconds of me wanting to hang up his coat, him saying not to bother, he could put it down somewhere. Then he noticed there was nothing in the front hall except a bombé chest, a mirror, and two antique Chinese chairs that looked like they’d break into smithereens with one good sneeze.

  We wound up in the kitchen, where he put his coat on a chair and I got to make a fresh pot of coffee so he would think I was a decent person and not an alternatingly shrewish, catatonic homicide victim’s widow. I pushed the button on the coffee machine, and as I turned back to him, he said, “We found Dorinda Dillon.”

  “Oh.” That was all I could think to say.

  “That’s why I drove out. I wanted to tell you personally and also answer any questions you might have before . . .”

  He stopped. Suddenly, I realized that was because I’d turned my back on him again. “Sorry. I just wanted to get down a couple of mugs. What do you take in your coffee?”

  “Milk.”

  I set up the mugs and Splenda, and poured milk into a small pitcher. Then I took a mason jar of gerbera daisies from the windowsill over the sink and set it on the table. “I’ll sit down now,” I announced. “Sorry I cut you off.”

  “No problem,” Lieutenant Paston said. I sat across the table from him. For an instant we looked at each other. The only sound was the dribbling of the coffeemaker. We had an ESP moment, or at least I think we did: Each of us found the other a decent, likable person, so we took time off—maybe five seconds—not to speak. We wished we could avoid the single awful subject we had in common. Then he said, “She was arrested around three this morning. Midnight in Las Vegas. I’ll give you the whole story in a minute, but the department wanted you to be the first to hear it. There’s supposed to be a joint announcement of the arrest, us and the Las Vegas police, but these things can leak. I wanted you to be prepared in case there were phone calls or reporters showing up wanting you to comment.”

  “Thank you.” The coffee was still dripping. I was eager for the big hiss that came at the end of brewing so I could jump up to get the pot, not to get away from the table but to have something to contribute. “How did you find her?” I asked.

  “We got cooperation from all three of the escort services she occasionally worked with.”

  “Occasionally?”

  “They’d call her if their regulars were booked, away, whatever. If she had free time, she’d take the job, or if things were slow with her, she’d call asking for work. Anyway, none of the services had heard from her. But yesterday afternoon she called College Girl Companions—the one she did the most business with. She told them she needed the name of a criminal lawyer in New York and tried to get them to advance her some money. She was broke.”

  “Advance her some money?” I asked. “They do that kind of thing?”

  Paston shook his head. “I doubt it, especially when they know she’s a person of interest in a murder investigation and isn’t likely to be getting anything in the way of income for the next twenty-five years plus. We had advised the owners of all three escort services to stall her, talk, get whatever information they could. Luckily, the girl who spoke to Dorinda was smart, told her to wait a couple of hours, that she’d come up with the names of some lawyers and try to convince the owner to wire some money. We had a recording device on the phone. I heard the conversation. The girl did a great job: very sympathetic, finally got Dorinda to a comfort point where she gave the number of the motel she was at.”

  “You couldn’t trace the call?”

  “We did, to a pay phone in a Laundromat. I had one of the guys in my squad fly out to Las Vegas right away. By the time the local cops got to the pay phone, she was gone. No big surprise. But they staked out the motel and arrested her two hours later.”

  “Did she say anything? About what happened?”

  “Initially, she claimed not to know about the killing.” He shifted the knot of his tie about a millimeter to the left, then shifted it back. I didn’t know why, but I trusted Paston more because he dressed nicely: no shirt gaping between the buttons; no strangely stiff tie that looked lined with cardboard; no fluffed-out mustache like those of detectives on TV shows—and in real life, on the news. A subdued rep tie, white shirt, and a dark gray suit. Not badly cut or old guy, but not trendy either. “She claimed she was in Vegas for a vacation, hadn’t been watching TV, and was shocked to hear someone had been murdered in her apartment.”

  “And then?”

  “They didn’t question her formally until my guy got there. It went back and forth for a while: she saying she didn’t know a thing, my guy telling her, ‘Do yourself a favor by cooperating.’”

  “Did she have a lawyer by that time?”

  “No. Listen, most jurisdictions videotape any questioning of someone involved in a homicide case. So don’t worry. Whatever w
e have is solid. It’s on tape, her being read her rights. She did ask for a lawyer—Legal Aid, public defender, whatever they call it out there. One of the Las Vegas cops made the call, and meanwhile, my guy and one of their detectives kept talking to her.”

  More than anything, I wanted to ask if Dorinda admitted knowing Jonah, but I didn’t want Paston to think my only concern was that my husband had gone to a whore and I didn’t give a shit about justice. So I didn’t interrupt.

  “What got her talking a little was my guy. Irish, blue eyes, thinks he looks like Brad Pitt when he smiles, which he doesn’t, but women are crazy about him. I’m sure it’s on the tape, him smiling and saying ‘Give me a break’ to everything she said.”

  “Did she confess?”

  “No. She claims she doesn’t know anything about what happened. It was when she went to the closet near the door of her apartment to get your husband’s coat.” He said it matter-of-factly, as if there had never been any doubt in the world that Jonah was her customer. If Paston hadn’t been with the NYPD, but a private detective paid by me, he might have told me a little more gently, allowing me a couple of seconds more to hold on to an illusion, but this was the no-frills, publicly funded truth. “She said when she opened the closet door, someone who had been hiding there smashed her in the head with an electric broom she kept in a corner behind the coats. She claimed she was knocked unconscious. She didn’t see her assailant. When she came to, Dr. Gersten was on her living room floor. He was dead.”

  “Do you believe any of what she says?”

  “Absolutely not. But let me give it to you straight. If we’re going to believe or disbelieve based on someone’s status, we’re not going to solve many cases. Prejudice gets in the way. So it doesn’t matter if Dorinda Dillon is . . . what she is or if she’s ambassador to the UN. And it doesn’t matter if the victim is a homeless psycho or a high-class plastic surgeon. Those of us who investigate homicides really believe the old ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ We see our job as putting the scales of justice back in balance.” Corky Paston rested his hands on the edge of the table. “But you know and I know we live in the real world. Right?”