As Husbands Go

by Susan Isaacs

  The guards said in less than trusting voices, “You forgot your wallet?”

  I told them I’d intentionally left my handbag at my hotel but forgotten to put the wallet in my jacket. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “But what can I tell you? I swear, this is not your usual ‘I forgot my wallet’ story. I came up from Miami to do background for a big piece, except my plane was late. Once I got to the hotel, I was in such a rush I wasn’t thinking.”

  They weren’t buying it. I asked to speak to their supervisor. Though she was wearing a uniform, she reminded me of female guards in concentration-camp movies, big and boxy, with weird, watery, bulgy eyes, as if they were staring out from a fish tank. I wasn’t going to win her heart or her mind with a smile. So I didn’t smile. I told my story and said I had to catch the four o’clock plane back to Miami, so there wasn’t time to go to the hotel and return.

  Maybe she caught my exhaustion and frustration, maybe she liked the cut of my True Religion jeans, maybe she was a racist and was giving me points for being light-eyed and white. At least she didn’t catch my desperation and near-hysteria. But after a blessedly fast glance at the ID and a check that Ethel O’Shea was on the visitors list, she finally ordered the guards to pat me down, give me my own special tag, and let me through.

  I’d been picturing movie scenes with prisoner and visitor sitting opposite each other, separated by bars, and talking into a phone or a stub of a mike. Or another scene where a guard stands blocking the door, legs apart, arms crossed over chest, face like a particularly stupid bulldog’s, while prisoner and visitor sit on stools or crummy chairs across the bare room from each other.

  I got something else entirely. Teleconferencing. I was so unprepared for being stuck in a tiny room in which someone had recently sneaked more than one cigarette that I almost cried to be let out. The guard turned on a TV monitor and said, “They’ll be bringing her into the booth in a minute. Have a seat. If you get any trouble with the audio, bang real hard on the door. This here is soundproof, so even if you yell, I won’t hear you. And bang when you’re done.”

  A couple of minutes later, some movement on the screen made me look up. Dorinda Dillon came in, sat, and stared at me. The only thing keeping my heart from rocketing out of my chest was that it didn’t seem to be a stare of recognition. Just a dumb stare. Without makeup, her eyes seemed not only less human but even farther apart than in her pictures. Her hair had been cut short since her arrest and was mostly brown except for the bottom couple of inches. At first it looked like she had a rosy glow, but then I saw her face was chapped. Still, she looked . . . not exactly like a little lost pink lamb, but a lost sheep, one who definitely did not look pretty in pink.

  “Hello, Ms. Dillon. My name is Ethel O’Shea. Did your attorney explain why I wanted to see you?” I asked.

  “I got a message,” she said. I don’t know what I had expected, but what struck me was that it was such an ordinary voice, not breathy or husky. She just sounded out of town, like an operator at an 800 number.

  “Would you like me to explain what my piece is about?” I took out my notebook and pen. She shrugged, so I went into my story about how prosecutors leap to judgment when—I said “someone with your background”—is involved in a serious crime.

  “I am not a call girl,” she said. “They kept calling me a call girl on TV.”

  “What do you like to be called?”

  “An escort. Right now I don’t look my best, but I’m a real escort.” Except for a whine, her voice had no emotion. “A guy can take me out and be glad to be seen with me on his arm.”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” I said.

  “Not that I’m arm candy.”

  “No, I’m sure you’re more than that.”

  She was wearing a short-sleeved blue coverall, not the orange I’d expected, and once she said “arm,” she started rubbing her right arm just above the elbow. “Some bitch pinched me,” she said. “Last week, and it’s still bruised. Look.” She put down her hand and pointed. I thought there might be a black-and-blue mark, but I couldn’t be sure. “It still really, really hurts.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Can you see it?” she asked.

  I hoped she was too dense to set a trap for me, but I wasn’t sure. “Yes. Awful,” I told her. She nodded, as in Awful is right. “With all this happening, are your friends standing by you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have they been visiting?”

  “Not yet.” It seemed clear that she didn’t have friends, but also that she didn’t feel terrible about it. She gave her arm another gentle rub to soothe herself. I thought that somebody who complained so much about a several-day-old pinch was a major kvetch. Considering what prostitutes were supposed to do, she probably could take some kinds of pain. But I couldn’t imagine her hitting herself hard enough on the head to cause a bump that would last for weeks. “You’d think that shit lawyer Winters would visit, but all I get is messages. He said we’d spend time together when they set a trial date. Like, what the fuck? What am I paying this guy for?”

  “Tell me about the bruise on your head. I heard that when they arrested you in Las Vegas, you had a big bump.”

  “That’s because I got hit. I got hit when I opened the closet door. Someone was in there, and they got my electric broom. The next thing you know, I was out cold. And when I came to, the guy was dead.”

  “Had you ever been with him before?” I asked. My mouth was completely dry. I truly would have given a year’s income for a sip of Diet Coke.

  “No. He was new. He was a very big plastic surgeon. I guess you know that.”

  “Yes. He told you he was a plastic surgeon?” I couldn’t believe Jonah would give out information about himself like that. He was so discreet about talking about what he did, mostly because people were always asking his opinion on the work they wanted to have done, or whether he thought they needed a certain procedure. He hated being out for an evening and getting cornered by someone displaying arm flab. Also, he said that in most people’s minds, plastic surgeons were fabulously rich, and especially when we were out with the boys, he didn’t like people thinking of him as wealthy. He said it was simple discretion. I’d always thought he was afraid someone would kidnap the triplets. Possibly even demand a triple ransom.

  “Maybe he told me. I forget. I don’t think he talked about it, but maybe he said something.”

  “Did he pay cash?”

  “Yeah. Private clients always pay cash. Up-front. With an escort service, they can charge.”

  She looked more annoyed at her situation than fearful or angry or anything else a person in a blue prison outfit might be feeling. “What did he want done?” I asked.

  “He was kind of crazy,” Dorinda said. At that moment, I didn’t dare ask anything. If she had a train of thought, I wanted her to stay on it. So I kept looking at her. Then I made some scribbles on the pad. “He kept saying he heard I was a miracle worker. A miracle worker? What the fuck? So I asked him what kind of miracle he wanted. And he said something about his hand.”

  “His hand?” I asked. “What about his hand?”

  “I don’t know. So I went over, and he started acting funny. I told him not to be scared, to let me help him.” She caressed the bruise on her arm again. “Then I brought him into the bedroom and said, ‘Why don’t you take off your shirt?’ So he unbuttoned a couple of buttons.”

  “And then?”

  “He was slow, so I started to help. All of a sudden he got really snotty and shitty and said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I thought it was part of his game, so I slipped out of my dress. Then he said, ‘Get me my coat,’ like he was the biggest big shot in the world. And he started buttoning his shirt, so I went out to the hall to get his coat.”

  “And?”

  “And then nothing. I got hit. When I came to, when I finally stood up, there he was. Dead. With scissors.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  So Jonah hadn�
�t had sex with Dorinda Dillon. Thank God! The news I’d been hoping for!

  Except he was dead.

  Every once in a while, like now, waiting in the wholesale flower market later that afternoon while my favorite peony dealer finished haggling with Miss Northern Westchester Floral Design Queen—who was doing everything except carrying a riding crop to show where she was from—I would discover a new way of missing Jonah. This time it was looking at Willie, the exasperated peony guy, sleeves rolled up, punching numbers into his calculator, trying to make the sale and get rid of Miss NWFDQ. It was late for the market, midafternoon, and he’d probably lost most of his patience by nine in the morning.

  The hair on his forearms, wet from working with unboxed flowers, looked dark red against his ruddy skin. Seeing it transported me right to our pool. Jonah and I were in the deep end facing each other, our arms crossed and resting on a white float. Just talking. I reached out and smoothed the hair on his arm so it would all go in one direction.

  Another punch in the gut. I started crying, not just tears, but with my shoulders going up and down, like I was bouncing. I turned the other way so Willie wouldn’t see. Except I was face-to-face with some Dutch bulb mogul I’d seen at a lot of the New York flower events, a young guy with a face full of brown polka dots that looked like age spots. So I turned back and cried facing Willie’s face and his customer’s horsey ass.

  From the beginning, I’d known in my heart that Jonah was what I’d believed he was, loving and true. But along the way, my head had serious doubts. Okay: Not to feel overly guilty, most heads would do the same. Now I knew my heart had been smarter. But aside from feeling so grateful and relieved by my new knowledge, what could I do with it?

  “I don’t want to hear any explanations,” Willie told me once he was free. “You got what to cry about, okay?” He looked around and handed me some green tissue paper to blow my nose in. I probably looked a little too directly into his eyes because I wanted to avoid seeing his arms. “Go ahead, honk away, but don’t blame me if you walk out of here with a green nose.” Then we did our Florabella business, Willie pushing a dark pink peony, the Edulis Superba, so hard I finally gave in.

  Being in the flower market was usually the great joy of my job, in Manhattan in jeans and work boots, sipping coffee that got cold fast from the chill of all the refrigeration. The colors, the smells, the relationships that weren’t quite friendships but came close: It all made me feel part of the world where nature and commerce met, maybe what a farmer felt when he hauled his potatoes to market.

  But when I stopped crying, the flower market held no charm for me. I could have been in an office with fluorescent lights and no windows. All I could think of was sheepy Dorinda talking in her flat 800-number voice, saying, “He heard I was a miracle worker.” And then “something about his hand.” Why hadn’t anyone asked her about this before? I knew the answer. They had all assumed Jonah was there for sex.

  One thing I now was sure of: Dorinda Dillon had not killed Jonah. It simply didn’t add up, in either my head or my heart. I believed what she had said. He was a new client. They had hardly gotten beyond the hello stage. She had no reason to kill him. Sparky and I had pretty much demolished Grandma Ethel’s burglar theory, but did I have anything to replace it with? A random-intruder theory?

  I finished with Willie and a couple of our other dealers and had the flowers and a couple of buckets of the floral preservative we liked loaded into the Florabella truck that I’d parked in a nearby lot before taking the taxi to Rikers Island. It was an old Chevy panel truck we’d bought mostly for its color, a lovely celadon green, a case of foolish business thinking that had actually turned out well. I was heading toward the Midtown Tunnel when I decided to take a look at what I’d been picturing for so long: Dorinda’s apartment building. I headed up Third Avenue and turned past her apartment building, a large box with windows, probably badly built in the sixties. As I drove by, I noticed the side entrance about fifty feet from the front door. Just then a doorman walked out in a long gray military-style coat, looking like some character from The Nutcracker.

  I drove into a garage a block away and talked the guy into taking the truck for fifteen minutes even though he said, “We don’t take trucks.” Charm and a twenty did it. Walking down the street, I felt at a loss because I was so used to being “done” when I went out: hair, makeup, nails, accessories. My casual was somebody else’s wedding day. Jeans, shirt, old quilted vest, hair in a ponytail wasn’t the way I dealt with any world except jail or the flower market.

  “Hello,” I said to the doorman, knowing I couldn’t say “Excuse my outfit.” “My name is Joan Smith. I’m a social worker from Manhattan Human Services.” He didn’t look impressed, but on the other hand, he didn’t look unsympathetic. “I’m doing some background on Miss Dillon.”

  “And?”

  So he wasn’t exactly friendly. I didn’t know why, but I got the feeling that his “And?” had zero to do with me and a lot to do with Dorinda Dillon. “All I’m trying to do right now is get a sense of her.” I had a flash of worry that he wouldn’t believe the Bloomberg administration would be paying for a social worker to get a sense of an accused murderer, but he nodded like he had a parade of social workers dropping by every day looking to get senses. “Did you know her?”

  “You might say that,” the doorman said. His sleeves were too long. They covered his knuckles, and I wanted to tell him to take his coat to a tailor and ask for a three-inch hem. “I was the guy on duty when the doctor came.”

  “Do you remember him?”

  “Yeah, sure. Well dressed. An East Sixties kind of guy, except I heard he lived on Long Island.”

  Since the doorman was in a chatty mood, I decided to check out what either Eddie Huber or Lieutenant Paston had told me. “Was he one of her regulars?”

  “No. Never saw him before.”

  I realized I had to start sounding like a social worker, except I wasn’t quite sure what one sounded like. “I’m trying to get a picture of her character.” He made a face that came close to a smirk but wasn’t. I gave him my mega-wattage plastic-surgeons’-convention smile and said, “I’m not asking about deep-down goodness or honor, just what she was like on a day-to-day basis.” He seemed a little hesitant, so I added, “Don’t worry. I’ve been at this job over ten years. I stopped getting shocked after three months.”

  “Bottom line on the character?” he said. “Not so great. Didn’t even bother saying hello unless you said it first. Like who did she think she was? A duchess? And another thing: Like you said you’ve been doing your work over ten years. I’ve been doing mine for almost thirty.” I did the Omigod! You couldn’t be that old gape, which he seemed to appreciate. “So over the years, in these rental buildings and condos, I run into a fair number of girls who do what she does. Most of them go out of their way to be friendly—friendly in a nice way—because they don’t want trouble, they don’t want a doorman hassling their johns or even being not polite. And Christmas? They’re right at the top of the good-tipper list. You can predict it. Big tip, nice card with a thank-you. You know what I got this year from Dorinda Dillon? Fifty bucks in old crumpled-up bills. The day after Christmas. She hands it to me like it was five hundred in nice crisp bills.”

  “No card?” I asked.

  “No card.”

  I sighed and shook my head sadly.

  “Doesn’t that say everything about her character?” he asked.

  “Loud and clear,” I said. I waited while he let in a tenant with a baby in a stroller, a shopping bag of groceries, and some forsythia branches in cellophane that looked like they had two more days to live. “So how did it work with her clients? Did they just come to the door and ask for her?”

  “Right. And I have to ask all the time, ‘Who shall I say is calling?’ because I have to buzz her. And they all say they’re Mr. Johnson, which is what she has them say. And so I let them up.”

  “Besides the doctor, did anyone else go up ther
e that day?”

  “A few hours earlier, the other doorman let in a regular. An old guy. Came and went. And another regular earlier in the day. But nobody else when I was on duty. Not even another girl for a threesome. Maybe I shouldn’t say that.”

  “Please. You should hear some of the things I hear. I’m unshockable.”

  He smiled. “You must have a tough job.”

  “Sometimes. I love learning about people, about their lives, so overall, I enjoy the work. You know what the hardest part is?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Walking and walking.” I lowered my voice. “And if you’ll excuse the expression, finding a bathroom.”

  “Don’t I know it. Used to be, you could walk into a bar or restaurant anywhere in the city, do what you had to do, say thank you and goodbye.”

  “Not these days,” I said. “Can I ask? What do you do?”

  “Oh. It’s no problem. They have a toilet in the basement right by the elevator. They got a buzzer down there. I lock the front door, and if the tenants or someone needs me, they press the button. I’m gone for a minute, but at least it’s right here in the building.”

  “I’m jealous,” I told him, and we smiled at each other.

  I filled in Grandma Ethel after dinner but begged off her suggestions about researching hand fetishes on the Web or, as her alternate fun-filled evening activity, turning on some station that was having an Audrey Hepburn festival. Instead, I went to bed with a copy of Vogue, but I couldn’t concentrate on the articles, so I just looked at ads. I must have fallen asleep about nine-thirty because when the phone rang a little after ten, the sound startled me awake. I grabbed it, and my “hello” came out like a chicken’s squawk.