As Husbands Go

by Susan Isaacs

  “Right.”

  “So we wind up responding to its pressures. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “I’m guessing here: a case that’s gotten a lot of publicity, or where the victim has . . . Detective Sergeant Coleman mentioned something about Jonah’s position in the community.”

  “Right. So this case, your husband’s murder, qualifies on both counts. The words ‘thorough investigation’ really mean something here. We interviewed the doorman, but he didn’t see anyone else come in. These doormen who work in rental buildings are pretty savvy. One look at a tenant like Dorinda Dillon—maybe the rental agent can’t figure it out or doesn’t want to, but the guys at the door know what she is before she even signs the lease. Same thing when they’re standing out front. They can see a man walking down the street and know ‘This one is going to the big dinner party in 6A,’ and that other man a couple of feet behind him, dressed pretty much the same way, has a date with the hooker.”

  The coffeemaker gave its last steamy hiss. I brought the carafe over to the table and started to pour, then worried that Paston could be saying to himself, I cannot believe she’s going to serve me from Pyrex!

  “So what you were asking about, whether we believe what she says: The answer is no. There’s nothing to back up her claim. No one else got past the doorman after Dr. Gersten asking to go to Dorinda Dillon’s apartment. No one who even looked like a client type came around. Also, the doorman was sure everybody who got into the building that afternoon and evening was either a tenant or had some legitimate business in one of the other apartments.”

  “I see,” I said. “Okay.”

  “The other thing is the closet.” I wanted to tell him fine, enough was enough. I believed him. I believed the police did their job. For someone who’d had such a need to know, I was rapidly becoming the don’t-tell-me type. Still, there wasn’t any way I could make Paston stop. “We didn’t find evidence that anyone had been inside the closet other than Dillon herself. There were some prints, a few hairs—long, dyed blond—that matched up with what was all over the apartment. The prints were hers, too. We have them on file because of her previous arrests.”

  It was weird, but I didn’t remember, in all the media coverage, seeing any photo or mug shot of Dorinda, though I must have. For whatever reason, I hadn’t imagined her as a blonde, not that I’d really had an image. That in itself was strange for me, because nearly all the time when people described something that had happened to them, or when I was reading, I got vivid mental pictures of what was going on. Jonah once told me, “You have an amazing visual intelligence,” which was such an ego-boosting compliment, even if I wasn’t totally sure what it meant: maybe my ability to visualize a design or room layout, or what wasn’t right about someone’s outfit, or why a piece of art didn’t work. He’d said it when we were at a Calder exhibit at the Whitney after I’d told him why I didn’t love Calder’s work, even though I respected it.

  “Now that she’s in custody, we’ll know for sure about the hair when the DNA tests come back,” Lieutenant Paston said, “but there doesn’t seem to be any reason right now to think it was someone else’s.”

  “I understand.” He took a sip of coffee and seemed to be waiting for something more, so I added, “Sounds right to me.”

  “Now, as far as the electric-broom thing is concerned.” At that point, I was hoping one of the boys—no, all of them—would come in and behave so obnoxiously that Paston would make his excuses and leave. He’d say, “I’ll e-mail you the details.” But obviously Kung Fu Panda was still entrancing. “The only prints on the broom were hers. There was no hair, no blood on it that would be consistent with someone using it to hit her over the head. Just the usual household dirt. Also, electric brooms are mechanical.”

  “Uh-huh.” I wasn’t sure what this had to do with anything.

  “They weigh something. But most of the weight—this one was eight pounds—is toward the base, where the mechanism is. Eight pounds doesn’t sound like much, but because it’s bottom-heavy, it would be hard to grab and raise up as a weapon when somebody opened the closet door. Possible but unlikely.”

  “Thank you. Thank you for all you’ve done.”

  “Please,” he said. “It’s what we do. Before I forget. Speaking of her hair, or what we assume is her hair. There was one of them on Dr. Gersten’s jacket, just to the left of the second stab wound.” I couldn’t really say thank you for that information, so I just nodded. “Oh, and there wasn’t any cash in his wallet.” I shrugged. All I remembered was someone saying the police had to hold on to his wallet, keys, and BlackBerry—“all Dr. Gersten’s effects”—as evidence when I’d asked if I could get back Jonah’s photos of me and the boys. “Not even one dollar,” Paston added.

  “I’m not sure how much he had. Most of the time, he never carries more than a hundred, a hundred fifty.” Then I said, “I mean ‘carried.’”

  “He did make a withdrawal from an ATM near his office late that morning,” Paston said.

  “How much?”

  His slight hesitation made me listen more closely than I might have. “Six hundred dollars.”

  “I see.” How could I not?

  “He had lunch brought into his office. Fourteen dollars and change. He doesn’t appear to have left there before . . . before he finally left for the day. Of course, he might have paid cash for something, but we didn’t find any receipts.” I didn’t ask what Jonah had ordered for lunch, even though I figured Paston probably knew. A couple of times over the years, Jonah and I had had that dumb conversation about if you knew something was your last meal, what would it be? Even though both of us hardly ever ate beef, I’d said a pastrami sandwich and a real Coke, not diet; he’d said a steak and hash browns from Peter Luger with their best bottle of cabernet.

  As Paston headed to his car, I glanced out the window and noticed he had the slightly bowlegged walk of an ex-jock. He’d said, “Call me if there’s anything more you want to know.” How about why? Maybe Jonah’s murder would always seem senseless to me, but right now I felt there were too damn many unanswered questions. I didn’t expect Lieutenant Corky Paston and the entire NYPD to share my passionate need to know, but didn’t the why of it make them at least a little curious?

  Chapter Eighteen

  I blessed the Tuttle Farm nursery school’s four-hour day, its “yummy, nutritious, all-organic lunch,” and its “wide range of exciting, individualized, optional after-school activities.” The wide range was two: Yay for Yoga or Creative Clay. My three boys went for clay. Each indulged his unique artistic vision by making humongous plates with SpongeBob and/or Squidward painted on them. So I was free, and with Ida and Ingvild off with another au pair to explore still more wonders of Long Island mall-dom, I had my Monday in front of the TV in the den watching Dorinda Dillon.

  Not that there was much to watch except the perp walk. There she was at JFK, handcuffed, with a quilted jacket too big to be hers draped around her shoulders. Two female detectives for whom the word “strapping” must have been invented led her past a lineup of photographers and reporters who shouted to get Dorinda’s attention: “Hey, look over here!” “Did you know him before that night, Dorinda?” “Over here, beautiful!” “Did you ever have plastic surgery?” “Yo! Dor! Why’d you kill the doc?”

  CNN and MSNBC had slightly different angles. I went with CNN’s because Strapping Detective #1’s shoulder wasn’t blocking the camera at the moment Dorinda turned her head to the shoving pack of journalists and rolled her eyes in Give me a break boredom. Her expression was more what you’d expect from a celebrity-hounded eighteen-year-old hip-hop star than a handcuffed hooker with no makeup except atrocious blackish-red lipstick, whose shoulder-length hair (not the roots but the part that was still blond) looked like the hay they fed hansom cab horses around Central Park. Too bad for her that her chances of getting near a stylist, or even a box of Clairol Champagne Blond, were iffy—at least for the next twenty-five years.
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br />   I couldn’t get enough Dorinda. I had recorded a bunch of evening and late-night local news shows so I could watch them first thing the next morning, the instant the boys left for school. After I’d seen them, there was nothing to do except wait for the perp-walk clip on CNN Headline News every half hour. Right after it ran, I’d race upstairs to my computer to check out online videos on a couple of Las Vegas TV websites.

  Since I’d spent extra on a high-quality color monitor for viewing flowers, I was able to check out the style and eye-burning purpleness of Dorinda’s halter sundress, which had been hidden under the borrowed jacket at the airport in New York. The purple had a sheen not just of the sleaziest polyester ever manufactured but also of newness.

  I played those Las Vegas news segments over and over. As I watched them, parallel videos ran in my head. I pictured Dorinda getting to Nevada in New York winter clothes and spending twenty dollars of Jonah’s fast-disappearing cash in a dreadful store with filthy linoleum on the dressing room floor. Maybe she thought she looked luscious in the dress. On the other hand, she could have felt miserable knowing such a trashy dress (all she could afford) would discourage the class of customer she wanted. Once or twice I imagined her shoplifting, stuffing the dress into her handbag, thinking she was smart: This’ll never wrinkle. When she pulled it out, though, it had creases even the hottest iron could never flatten.

  To add a little shame and disgust to my Dorinda imaginings—what fun was a fantasy without them?—I envisioned her running out of money and having to work: turning a quick trick, a hand job in an alleyway (assuming there were alleyways on the Strip), or a standup fuck in a place known to locals as the worst hotel in Vegas, beyond some slot-machine room in a corridor that still reeked from cigars smoked in the seventies.

  The quality of the Las Vegas TV footage wasn’t great. I tried to zoom in on her, see her expression, but even my high-res monitor couldn’t get me a decent picture. Still, I saw enough to decide Dorinda Dillon was definitely not pretty. And not just by my standards; she knew it. Even under arrest, a woman who was aware that she was appealing could get paraded and handcuffed and yet hold her head at least a quarter inch higher than someone who felt unattractive. A pretty woman would hope her good bones or shining eyes would please the cameras, tame the ferocious media.

  It didn’t help that Dorinda was also a mess. Besides the wreckage that was her hair, her crappy bright purple dress sucked the color from everything around it, including her face. Her posture was awful, shoulders slumped, back hunched, which I assumed was what happened when you were in heavy handcuffs attached by chains to your ankles—though I couldn’t see below her calves.

  It struck me that even if there were a charity benefiting homicidal whores that gave Dorinda the full Day of Beauty package at the best spa in town, she would still be wrong-looking. Her nose was both long and unusually broad, so it pushed her eyes far apart and took up so much space that the sides of her face, reserved for cheeks on other people, were flat. Forget being able to tell the color of her eyes; I could barely see eyes at all, because they were little more than slits. Dorinda reminded me of Dolly, that sheep who was cloned, except without the sheepy dreadlocks, which might have been an improvement.

  It took me a weirdly long time running between the TV and computer to stop trying to read her face, maybe even her thoughts, and start thinking, Oh, right, she’s a prostitute. Her body is what’s for sale. Let me see what that body looks like.

  It looked good. In the Las Vegas footage, I saw the sundress was short enough to show that unless something repulsive was going on around her ankles, she had great legs. The dress was tight enough to reveal a notably small waist. And not an ounce of fat stuck out over the top in back, unusual because the sad fact of life for most women, even thin ones with fantastic arms (which is maybe 3 percent of the world’s population), was that the tight-bodiced halter dress was meant more for a fashion spread than a body. In front, the dress was cut low enough to display Dorinda’s major boobs—maybe real, or at least well-done fakes, since Jonah had always said the soccer-ball look (those high, round mounds on either side of a canyon of cleavage) were the sign of a second-rate surgeon.

  A little before one o’clock, I decided I needed a break and sat down for my favorite lunch, cut-up apple and cheddar. I started leafing through the latest issue of Fleur Créatif, but I’d been on overload with “Idées pour Noël” since early December and hated trying to figure out half of the French words, which were probably on a second-grade reading level. I decided to get lunch over with, so I stuffed a whole bunch of apple slices and cheddar into my mouth.

  But I didn’t get up, and I didn’t chew. Instead, I slid my chair over to a small patch of sunshine. I sat in the warmth with a full mouth and tried to be objective about how people would react to Dorinda. Most of them, I decided, wouldn’t look at her and think, Two-bit whore. On the other hand, she wasn’t exactly exuding gentility. Most neutral observers would take a look and think, Cheap.

  I spat the apple and cheese into my hand and ate the pieces slowly. They were ooky, saliva-coated, and I wondered if I was already losing whatever polish I’d gotten by marrying up. But being a slob was better than having Ida and Ingvild get back from the Walt Whitman shopping center and find me choked to death on the floor. I ate the lunch in my hand tiny piece by tiny piece. As I did, I told myself, Trust your gut. Does Dorinda Dillon look like a killer? The answer seemed obvious at first. No. She did not look murderous. Just stupid.

  Then it hit me: The impression she made didn’t matter. Stupid or smart didn’t matter. Neither did whether she was groomed or disheveled and dirty. All I needed to figure out was this: Could this slitty-eyed, big-boobed, horrid-haired, badly dressed, handcuffed hooker be capable of murdering my husband? This time around, I decided, Of course. Now get on with your life.

  The next few days, I did get busy at work. Though our business was always slow from Valentine’s Day until the week before Passover and Easter, I wound up doing everything from super-scrubbing every flower bucket to scanning all the photographers’ proofs of Florabella decorations and arrangements that our clients had given us over the years. We’d tossed them into acid-free boxes and forgotten their existence.

  At home, I kept occupied, working with the boys to prepare a Saturday-night dinner party for the four of us. We made pasta by hand, did menus on the computer. I had them create table arrangements from leaves, three dollars’ worth of carnations, and things that should be thrown away from each of their rooms. Evan’s showed actual talent: He entwined leaves and a blue ribbon all around a sneaker he’d outgrown; stuck more leaves, carnations, and two curled-up baseball cards into the shoe; and hung his Johan Santana Mets key chain from one of the Velcro closings. I was amazed: four years old, and somehow he understood you had to have a theme.

  Even keeping busy on those Dorinda days, right after she was arrested and brought to New York, were rough. War, famine, economic convulsions: None of them made headlines like Dorinda Dillon. First her perp walk. Then TV and the Web got busy with clips from a couple of soft-core movies she’d been in during the late nineties. Networks and cable stuck shaded ovals or rectangles over tops, tushes, penises, and pudenda. I realized how often I’d watched the clips when I began seeing an abstract dance of geometric shapes.

  Maybe Dorinda had once dreamed of a film career. Forget about it. All she got to do was be naked, or almost; not a single line of dialogue. She was one of four pole dancers in a bar, an extra girl at what was supposed to be a Hollywood orgy, the second of two blondes climbing all over a guy in high pimp gear who went for the other girl while shaking off Dorinda as if she were a pesky, leg-humping golden retriever. Dorinda Dillon had played the porn equivalent of a wallflower. But a famous wallflower, at least for those few days.

  The scenes took on an almost comforting familiarity. They felt like old family movies you’ve had to watch too often. No more shock, any more than watching (for the fiftieth time) Cousin Mindy curl her l
ip in disgust as Aunt Edith demonstrates the twist, or watching baby Hannah do absolutely nothing at her first birthday party, an unsmiling Buddha in a frilly pink dress.

  The weird thing is, these home movies always take over and become the truest Truth. There may be a million memories in your head, but your mind’s basic definition of Mindy is COUSIN WHOSE LIP NEVER STOPS CURLING. For the rest of her life, Hannah will be BLAH PUDGY GIRL. And Dorinda Dillon—Dorinda Before, with long, silky, teased porn hair, and the hay-headed Dorinda After—would, first and forever, come to mind not as prostitute/accused murderer/coke-dealing robber of cash from a dead body who happened to be my husband, but as FORMERLY BARELY-ATTRACTIVE SLUT WHO FORGOT IMPORTANCE OF GOOD GROOMING WHEN ON THE LAM. Even weirder, the image with a lifetime lease that now resided somewhere near Mindy and Hannah would make it feel like Dorinda was somehow part of the family.

  Weirdest: A week to the day after Lieutenant Corky Paston dropped by to tell me Dorinda had been apprehended, my obsessive curiosity about her simply stopped. When I got back from Florabella after doing a few centerpieces for local dinner parties and sharpening all our knives, pruners, and deleafers, I switched the cable DVR list to find a Cook’s Country show I’d recorded. When I saw my endless lineup of local news shows starring Dorinda Dillon, I had one of those What was I thinking? flashes. Then I erased them all.

  Late that afternoon, my cousin Scott Rabinowitz came over, more to play with the boys than to keep me company. He was a couple of years younger than I was, but he had the social sophistication of a six-year-old. Naturally, that made him a favorite of the boys. The pleasure was mutual. Being an IRS tax examiner, Scott was accustomed to being detested by people. Also, being a pudgy accountant with a juicy lisp, he wasn’t a guy’s guy. As an extra attraction, he had a unibrow, so he was achingly familiar with the disdain of the glam women he was, unfortunately, attracted to. For a guy like Scott, being considered cool by Evan, Mason, and Dash was an ego-booster. I assumed that for him, a Saturday night building SpongeBob, Patrick, and a bunch of jellyfish from LEGOs was a small triumph and not a defeat.