by Susan Isaacs
“Susie?” Theo. “How’s it going?” His bedtime calls were becoming an unpleasant habit.
“Fine.”
“I hope I didn’t wake you.” Without giving me a chance to offer a polite “Oh no, you didn’t,” which I wasn’t going to, he went on, “I spoke to my parents after they dropped by your house on their way home from the Hamptons. They say you’re doing so much better.”
“It was a nice visit,” I said. Clearly, he wasn’t going to refer to his last nasty phone call.
“Susie, I know you’ll think what I’m about to ask is terrible. But I just want you to understand I really don’t mean it in any bad or selfish way.”
“Okay,” I said. Knowing Theo, I realized a little extra was necessary, so I added, “I wouldn’t think that at all.”
“Here goes,” he said in his smoothest voice. “A while back, Jonah and I were talking. It was around the time you guys asked me if I’d be the guardian for the boys if God forbid you died, and I said yes. Anyway, Jonah said that besides the guardianship thing, he was going to remember me in his will. So I was wondering—you haven’t said anything—if he left me any kind of keepsake.”
I still hadn’t shaken off all the sleep, so I almost said there wasn’t any particular keepsake. But I stopped myself, because I realized that when he said “keepsake,” he wasn’t talking about a memento. He was, as always, talking about money.
“Jonah didn’t have anything in particular as a keepsake for you,” I told him.
“Oh.”
“Is there anything of his you’d like to have?”
“You choose something,” he said, like he didn’t really care.
“How about his plastic bar mitzvah clock?” I wanted to ask. “Theo, let me think about it, look through his things. I want to choose something that meant a lot to Jonah and will mean a lot to you. I’ll get to it over the weekend, I promise you.”
Surprisingly, I fell back to sleep almost immediately, probably because my brother-in-law’s request was a total nonshock. Jonah and I had debated whether he was needy or greedy or both so many times that we’d finally stopped because we really didn’t care. The possibility of his guardianship of the boys had seemed so remote when we’d done our wills. I realized now that we hadn’t thought it through. I needed to make a new will. Soon.
My first call the next morning was to the delightful Joel Winters. I told him that I’d had a good interview with Dorinda and, shoveling a little more fertilizer onto his ego, asked what he would do if he could change the criminal justice system. While he talked, I sat in the bathroom in front of a magnifying mirror, holding the phone between my ear and shoulder, and tweezed my eyebrows. When he stopped to take a breath, I said, “I do need one favor from you. I know you can get a message to Dorinda. I really need to find out who referred the doctor, the plastic surgeon who was killed, to her. Unless you know offhand.” He didn’t. “Was it through one of her own clients? She said he was a private client. I’m a little rushed on this, so I appreciate you getting back to me as soon as you can. And by the way, I know my producer will love what you were just saying about mandatory sentencing.”
Since Grandma Ethel was not one of the early risers, I did something I should have done days before: I got out the CD Liz Holbreich had given me with all the materials she and her colleagues had collected during their brief investigation. I loaded it on the computer, but I couldn’t figure out how to search through the documents to see if I could find the Marty who’d shown up on Jonah’s calendar.
That wanting-to-throw-something rage that comes with computer frustration overtook me, but since I was down in Jonah’s study and didn’t want to damage anything, I tried to take deep breaths. It worked enough so that actual thinking could take place. I called Lizbeth Holbreich and asked her to help me find Marty.
“I’ve thought about you so often,” she said. “I’m glad you called, because I wasn’t sure whether or not to call you. I hope you’re doing . . . I suppose I should say ‘I hope you’re doing as well as can be expected.’”
“I am doing all right. The missing him is much worse than I ever imagined at the beginning, but the day-to-day stuff is coming along.”
“And your sons?”
“There are problems, but lots of times they’re fine, normal. I just want to strike the right balance between keeping their father as a good memory and not continually poking them and saying ‘Hey, don’t enjoy yourselves too much because you have a dead father.’”
We talked for a few more minutes, and while I would have loved to get Liz’s reading on my whole Dorinda on Rikers Island saga, I asked how to go about finding a name on the CD she’d given me. I made notes that seemed simple enough, but when she said, “Tell me what name you’re looking for. I have the information on our server and . . .” I waited under a minute.
“Marty,” I said. “The name was first on Jonah’s calendar last November, though I only searched back a year. The last time he was on it was eleven days before Jonah was killed.”
“No last name, I assume?” Liz asked.
“No last name, no address, no phone numbers. I checked Marty and Martin. There were Martins and a Martino who were patients, but patients were connected with the Manhattan Aesthetics database.”
“If you ever give up flowers, you could come and work for us. Give me a moment. Let me see what I can find.” This time she took a lot longer than a minute, but I had no desire whatsoever to tweeze my eyebrows. I thought about Theo and why someone with well-off parents, a good education, and an okay career as a casting director would expect his brother to leave him a “keepsake” of money in his will when the brother had a wife and three children. “There’s an Anello and Martin, Rare Books and Texts,” she said.
“He had started collecting some old medical books,” I said.
“And there’s a Martin Ruhlmann at a 212 number, no address. Hold on. I’ll check him out.” It didn’t take much longer than a few clicks of Liz’s mouse. “Martin Ruhlmann, certified public accountant. A forensic accountant,” she said. “But now that I look at the name, it’s vaguely familiar. We have forensic accountants here at the agency.”
“What do they do?”
“They’re auditors, but they bring an investigative mentality to an issue. A good one will have a combination of financial expertise, knowledge of fraud—and fraudsters, too, you might say—and real savvy about how businesses operate. You’d find them working on cases like Enron, or cases where a corporation is involved in a deal it has questions about.”
“Why would a plastic surgeon need a forensic accountant?” I asked.
“Any number of reasons, I suppose,” Liz said. “But . . . I’m just thinking out loud here. Maybe it was somehow connected to those e-mail exchanges Dr. Gersten was having with his office manager.” She must have clicked another couple of times because she said, “Donald Finsterwald. Did you read those e-mails on the CD?”
I hadn’t, but I would.
Chapter Thirty
The guard at the security desk in the lobby of Martin Ruhlmann’s building smiled at me and Grandma Ethel and said, “You girls must be sisters.” I guessed Grandma Ethel was thinking something close to what I was, like Cut the shit, you creep, but as he and an elevator were all that was standing between us and the forensic accountant, we smiled with delight.
Martin Ruhlmann and Associates might have been full of accountants, but it wasn’t a green-eyeshade sort of place. It had the English-club look, right down to a male receptionist in a suit and tie sitting behind a huge mahogany desk. The walls in the waiting room were covered with antique lithographs of what I thought were drawings of rooms in old English clubs. “You have good eyes,” Grandma Ethel told me. “Look. The stuff in the frames hanging on the walls. No, the pictures inside the pictures up there. Are they pictures of more rooms in English clubs? Are you supposed to think, Hey, maybe it goes on forever.”
“Maybe.”
“Like anyone gives a shit. Oh, I forg
et to tell you: Sparky says either this Ruhlmann is the one man in New York who hasn’t heard about Jonah getting killed, or he’s treating whatever information he had about whatever Jonah went to him for as confidential.”
“It’s possible that the police tracked him down already, and whatever he had to say wasn’t important,” I suggested.
“Maybe.”
A secretary, a woman in one of those dress-for-success suits from the seventies or eighties, except without the stupid little tie, led us into Martin Ruhlmann’s office. He stood and, like a proper English gentleman, did not try to shake our hands until we offered ours. Well, mine, because my grandmother was too busy eyeing a grandfather clock in a corner, barely managing not to sneer at it.
We spent the first few minutes on what a fine man Jonah had been. Ruhlmann was unreadable. He might have thought Jonah was terrific, or he might have loathed him, but his words said nothing except every cliché about someone who’d recently died. There wasn’t any body language to read, either, unless staying behind a desk with his hands in his lap said everything.
I decided to get to the point. “Could you tell us what the investigation you were doing for my husband was about?”
“This is a fairly complex, technical undertaking,” he said.
“Try us,” Grandma Ethel told him.
I couldn’t get over how his mouth moved when every other part of him remained frozen like a still photo with animated lips. “Essentially, I was asked to look into the use of the practice’s surgical suites. The use that was reported did not appear to be in keeping with the gross quarterly revenues.”
“Was it Jonah who hired you, or was it the partnership?”
“Just Dr. Gersten.”
“Do you want to explain what you mean by the use of the surgical suites?” my grandmother asked.
“I really wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Dr. Gersten had a legitimate legal interest in the business of Manhattan Aesthetics.”
“And doesn’t my granddaughter, who is Dr. Gersten’s sole heir, have a legitimate legal interest?” My grandmother, in her pink Chanel once again, looked like she should be wearing storm-cloud gray.
“I would have to look into that,” Ruhlmann said. “Or rather, have our attorneys look into it.”
“When can you do it?” I asked.
“I can have the answer for you within the week. Possibly a little longer, but I’m sure once they get going on it—”
Grandma Ethel cut him off. “Not good enough.”
“I’m afraid, Mrs. O’Shea, that while I can certainly appreciate your interest and your granddaughter’s, and your desire to know any details as soon as possible, I have to see that this is looked into in a proper manner as soon as possible.”
Grandma Ethel rose in one graceful swoop. “Mr. Ruhlmann, you’re obviously a gentleman, and I hope you think we’re ladies.” He nodded. “Good. Then let me tell you something about dealing with ladies of our caliber. Don’t fuck with us.”
As we got into the elevator, my grandmother asked me, “Coarse enough for you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
“Susie, I know you’re worrying that my behavior might be counterproductive. It might be. But dollars to doughnuts, sweetheart, it’ll work. I know how to deal with guys who think they can get away with repro grandfather clocks.”
By the end of the week, we still hadn’t heard from the forensic accountant. I couldn’t believe Jonah had called him Marty or anything less formal than Mr. Ruhlmann. Then it occurred to me that if he hadn’t put down an address or a phone number, maybe he’d been concerned that someone might be looking at his calendar. Donald, perhaps? Or someone else at the practice? Late Friday afternoon, I told Grandma Ethel I was going to call and prod Ruhlmann. She said, “Tell him you’ve got to see him Monday morning, and you’ll be there with your lawyer.”
“I don’t have a lawyer—except the one who did our wills, and her partner, who did the closing on our house. There is no way I can get a lawyer between now and Monday, so I’m not going to give any ultimatums like that.”
“Sparky will be here tomorrow morning. She can stay till Monday night or Tuesday, okay? You can’t ask for a better lawyer. NYU. Law Review. Need I say more?”
At a few minutes after ten on Monday, Sparky Burns was sitting in the chair closest to Martin Ruhlmann’s desk, but she leaned in even closer. “I admire prudence,” she told him. “But you and I know there is no professional privilege of confidentiality for accountants unless you were working under the direction of an attorney.” Ruhlmann cleared his throat, and she said, “What we are asking of you is not imprudent. Dr. Gersten paid you for your services. Mrs. Gersten would like to hear what you found.”
“You mean what he hired me to look for,” he said. Granted, my grandmother’s toughness might have put Ruhlmann off a tad, but even before that, he had been about as aloof as a guy can get without actually being nasty.
Sparky centered the large, round face of her wristwatch on her arm and studied it. “We can have this discussion now. We have no intention of staying for lunch. Or we can come back after an extended period of filings and depositions. You call it.” She sat back in the armchair and flashed a look at my grandmother that could not have meant anything but Keep quiet. My grandmother, without a word, opened her handbag, rearranged her wallet and compact, and snapped it shut.
Ruhlmann had perhaps hoped to outwait Sparky or give her the silent treatment, but finally, he said, “I have a meeting outside the office at eleven-thirty.”
“Shall we begin, then?” Sparky asked.
“A check arrived in the mail at Manhattan Aesthetics made out to Dr. Noakes for thirty-seven thousand dollars. No one could figure out where it came from, because the checking account belonged to something called the GP Fund. Dr. Gersten consulted with his partners, Dr. Noakes, of course, and later, Dr. Jiménez and the office manager, a Mr. Finsterwald. None of them had any idea what the GP Fund was or why it would have sent a check made out to Dr. Noakes. Apparently, the envelope was lost or thrown out, so there was no return address.” Ruhlmann took time to adjust the points of the linen handkerchief sticking out of his jacket pocket. “When Dr. Gersten was reported missing, and then found dead, I was still in the process of trying to track down who or what the GP Fund was.”
“Why didn’t Jonah give the check to the practice’s regular accountant to trace?” I asked. For a second I felt uncomfortable, like I had tried to steal Sparky’s scene, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“I believe he wanted to investigate the matter himself. He was hoping to discover where the check came from and whether its existence was some sort of a mistake, a bookkeeping oversight, or perhaps something—part of something—devious. He was curious about what the GP Fund was. He wanted to see if the check could be the tip of a very unpleasant iceberg.”
“So you were hired to explore where this thirty-seven-
thousand-dollar check came from?” Sparky asked.
“It wasn’t only the check that was troubling him. There seemed to be quite a bit of inventory shrinkage from the surgical suites in the practice’s office.”
“They did most of their surgery there, not at the hospital,” I told Grandma Ethel and Sparky.
“In retail sales, ‘inventory shrinkage’ can mean shoplifting or employee theft. But in a medical practice, Dr. Gersten was concerned with much more than dollars and cents. What was missing, as I found out, was not at all what he’d expected. It was not easily marketable drugs that had been stolen, but instruments, supplies, anesthesia itself. He couldn’t understand why and wanted to know if there was a black market for that sort of thing.”
“So no one else in the practice knew that he came to see you?” I asked.
“I don’t believe so,” he said. “I was to speak only with Dr. Gersten, no one else. My instincts tell me no one else knew, but my instincts don�
��t bat a thousand.”
“When you heard about Dr. Gersten’s murder, did you contact the police?” Sparky asked. Ruhlmann didn’t answer. “Did you get in touch with either of his partners?”
“No,” he said.
“I’ll tell you what I need from you before we leave,” Sparky said. “I need your notes on the inventory shrinkage. I want a copy of the thirty-seven-thousand-dollar check and whatever information you did manage to get on the GP Fund.”
“I have very little on the GP Fund.”
“I have a suggestion,” Sparky said. “You need to get cracking on the person or persons behind GP.”
“I’m really not interested in pursuing this matter beyond this meeting,” Ruhlmann said.
“You listen to me!” Sparky snapped. Ruhlmann moved. His head snapped back against his leather chair, and his jaw dropped. It was the equivalent of someone else having a major seizure. “There is no excuse—Don’t interrupt me with some line your lawyer fed you. There is no excuse whatsoever for your not notifying the police about Jonah Gersten consulting you. Interested or not, you are still on this matter. I might suggest it’s your highest priority.”
Chapter Thirty-One
When Martin Ruhlmann called that night, it was clear he regretted dropping his jaw. He sounded like he had such a stiff upper lip—to say nothing of his lower one—that I had trouble understanding what he was saying.
“The GP Fund is not an entity of any sort,” he said. “It’s the bank account of a woman named Phoebe Kingsley. I believe she’s a socialite. Her husband is Billy Kingsley.”
“Is that a name I’m supposed to know?” I asked, but very politely.
“He owns StarCom. He’s considered one of the great figures of the . . .” I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying because people don’t speak clearly when their jaws are clenched. I asked him to repeat it. “The telecommunications industry. I gather he and Phoebe Kingsley are separated and a divorce is in the works. But that’s neither here nor there. Does that conclude our business, Mrs. Gersten?”