by Susan Isaacs
“I’m listening, and I understand what you’re saying. But the only possible danger I can imagine is that they won’t let me in. If I thought for one momen—”
“I’m going up there with you,” Andrea said.
“No, you’re not.”
“I swear on all that’s holy, I’ll behave like the lady I am. I’ll even keep my mouth shut.”
“No. Anyway, you can’t leave your car here.”
“Do you think I give a shit about getting a ticket?”
“They’ll tow it!” I was shouting as she came around the Jag to stand next to me on the sidewalk.
“So what? Fat Boy will send somebody to get it back. And if it gets dented, I’ll get another one. Don’t pretend to be appalled. That’s the kind of girl I am.” She grabbed my upper arm and pulled me toward the brownstone’s stairs. “Come on. Let’s see if we can make the cut at College Girl.”
Once I had seen that College Girl was in a brownstone with a locked door, I’d come up with some sketchy excuses I could use after I pressed the button near the outside door. I needed to be prepared when a voice called out, “Who is it?” The inner door, probably warped, was closed, but the latch hadn’t engaged completely. After we read COLLEGE GIRL COMPANIONS and SUITE 3 on the nameplate, we simply hurried up two flights of stairs. Despite our heels, neither of us touched the banister, probably sensing it was coated with decades of secretions from the palms of prostitutes not given to hand washing.
When we knocked on the door, a voice called out, “Who is it?” It was low-pitched, a woman’s voice.
“Hi,” I called back. “It’s Susie.”
I heard a chair scraping along a floor. Then the door opened a crack. I did my high school flutter-fingered wave. I must have appeared sufficiently adorable and nonthreatening because she opened the door.
“Hi,” I said again. Andrea seemed to be taking her vow of silence seriously; all she did was smile.
The woman holding the door open about four inches was neither a college girl nor an escort anyone but a Boy Scout would touch. She looked like she was past forty and flooring it to forty-five. A fringe of deep vertical scratches radiated from her lip liner, a too thick band of crimson. Her saggy skin seemed to be pulling open her pores. “Are you Cle . . . ?” I asked, dodging the end of the name, not sure if it ended with an O or an A.
“No,” she said. “Who are you?” She glanced at Andrea but decided she didn’t need an S on “you.” Then she looked back at me.
“I was hoping to speak with her for a minute.”
“You’re who?” she asked.
“I know she’s so busy. I won’t keep her long.”
Without consultation, obviously, Andrea and I broke into our client-winning “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” act with so much fervor it would have been impossible for the woman not to smile back. Actually, she began to, but it quickly disappeared into an “Ooh!” of recognition.
“I know who you are,” she said to me. “You’re his wife. I saw you in the papers. And on TV in an evening gown at some party. With him.” Just as it occurred to her that the door would be better off closed—with me and Andrea on the outside of it—I pushed. Not a hostile push, like a break-in. More like a I know you want me to come in except you’re not moving fast enough push.
“Honestly,” I said, “I just want to speak to her for a minute. A quick question and I’m out of here.”
“You know, the police thanked Clea for her cooperation on the case.” Her voice was soft, a little husky but not a phone-sex voice. More business than pleasure. “Maybe they didn’t tell you that, but she cooperated. They made a special call just to thank her.”
“They did tell me. I really, really appreciate it. Look, I don’t want to make trouble. I swear to you. You know the story: I’m a widow with three little boys. If I make trouble, what’s going to happen to them?”
I felt sorry for her. She was overwhelmed. Maybe she’d been coached on how to deal with an obnoxious client, but she clearly didn’t know what to do with me and Silent Andrea. “I’m not lying,” she said. “Clea’s not here. She hardly ever comes in. She monitors the calls sometimes, that’s all.”
“I’m told you keep records on customers.” She was already shaking her head. “I know for a fact that the records are pretty extensive—for Clea’s own protection.”
“The records aren’t here,” she said, but ever since that body-language article, I’d watched out for the rampant blinking that signals a lie. Blink, blink, blink.
“They are here,” I said calmly.
“No, they’re not.”
I wasn’t going to get into a “They are, they’re not” game that even the triplets were too sophisticated to play. On the other hand, I couldn’t think of what to say next.
Not that I was conscious of it, but I must have been thinking what Grandma Ethel would do in the situation, because what I finally said was so not me: “I want to find out if at some point you might have done business with a certain gentleman. I could give you the gentleman’s name, and if you would—” She was shaking her head. “If you can get me that name and show it to me and give me a copy . . . Come on, stop shaking your head. Let me finish. You can make an easy five hundred. We’ll leave. Then you’ll leave, say, a couple of minutes later. Just tell me which ATM to meet you at, and I’ll be there. Bring a copy of whatever record you have with you, watch me withdraw five hundred dollars, and we’ll do the exchange right there.”
She took a long, quavering breath. She wanted the money. But then she started shaking her head again. “I can’t risk it.”
That was when Andrea decided not to keep quiet. “Another five hundred from me,” she said. The woman barely had time to draw in her lower lip to chew on it in indecision when Andrea added, “Forget the thousand dollars. Within a few minutes, you can have two thousand in cash. Or a long afternoon to think of all the things you could have done with two thousand dollars. You decide.”
“What’s the gentleman’s name?” she finally whispered.
“Gilbert John Noakes,” I said. “Dr. Gilbert John Noakes.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Andrea and I nearly had twin heart attacks waiting for Ms. College Girl to show at the ATM. When she finally scurried in, head down, obviously avoiding the security cameras as if she were there to rob money rather than receive it, she opened a giant faux–patent leather tote bag that made horrible plastic-on-plastic squeaks. She handed me copies of three MasterCard statements for August, October, and November 2006 with a list of payments to College Girl. Talk about naming names: Noakes, Gilbert John. Twice he had paid five hundred and once seven hundred. I didn’t want to know why the price had gone up.
That night, after a dinner featuring brisket I’d found when cleaning out the freezer, frozen after Rosh Hashanah 2008 but that everybody had loved, I put the boys to bed and met Grandma Ethel and Sparky in the den. While they watched me from the couch as if I were a one-woman play, I called Danny Cromer, the orthopedist Jonah had used for his tennis elbow, a guy he’d gone to medical school with; his name had been on Jonah’s calendar. I spent a few minutes, too many, thanking him for the beautiful condolence letter he’d written. I sensed he was on the verge of telling me he had an emergency on the other line, so I said, “Danny, the last time Jonah went to see you . . .”
“Yes,” he said cautiously, as any doctor in his right mind would.
“It wasn’t about the tennis-elbow business, was it?” Counting on all the years of friendliness that would make him reluctant to give me the usual confidentiality speech, I quickly added, “It was the thing with his hand. He told me about it.”
“Right.” Still cautious.
“I don’t want to put you on the spot, but I’d like to be able to reassure his parents. He told us it was nothing to be concerned about, since it wasn’t anything like, whatever it’s called, that bad-hand thing. But they keep talking about it. It’s not exactly rational, but none of us have b
een lately.”
“Rheumatoid arthritis? Is that what they’re worrying about? I know his father’s a physician. Rheumatoid arthritis can be passed down from parent to child. He’s probably worried about your boys. No, this was osteoarthritis. Look, it can be a problem, especially for a surgeon who does the kind of work Jonah did.”
“I didn’t sense he thought it was affecting his doing surgery.” I thought, I can’t believe he didn’t tell me, but then I thought, I can believe it. Jonah would want to know the whole picture before letting me in on it. Control. And knowing I was an anxiety queen, he wouldn’t want me to agonize unless there was a need to agonize. Also, he’d been so smart about people. Not that we’d ever talked about it, but he would have known I worshiped him a little. Maybe he was afraid to seem vulnerable. Gods didn’t get arthritis.
“I didn’t find any loss of mobility,” Danny Cromer said. “I gave him a shot and some medication for the pain. He was supposed to come back . . . Oh, Susie, I hate to be saying this. He was due to come back. We were going to go over options for treatment. Did he mention anything about how it was feeling after he saw me?”
“He said it was a huge improvement. He was so grateful.”
After I thanked Danny and said goodbye, I turned to my audience. “Osteoarthritis,” I told Grandma Ethel and Sparky.
“Are you going to call that Eddie back?” my grandmother asked.
“And say what? ‘It turns out my husband had arthritis, and that’s what he was talking about to Dorinda Dillon when he was complaining about his hand, a conversation I know about because I talked my way into Rikers Island and interviewed her under false pretenses’?”
“So what are you going to do?” Sparky asked.
For a while, all I could think of was picking at the welting on the arm of my chair. Then I went to find my handbag and returned. I searched until I found the card Lieutenant Corky Paston had given me. He answered the phone with “Lieutenant Paston.”
“Hi. This is Susie Gersten. I know you probably think I’m crazy, at least if you’ve been talking to Eddie Huber. But let me tell you what I found out.”
He wasn’t having any of it. “Mrs. Gersten, you’re a really nice woman. No one could have handled the situation you were in any better.”
“Thank you, but—”
“To be perfectly honest, I think you need psychological counseling.”
“I’m getting it.” Then I told him what I’d gotten from College Girl, the copies of printouts with Gilbert John Noakes’s name on them.
“Are you crazy?” The way he said it, it wasn’t a half-humorous question equivalent to “Are you kidding?” “You actually went there?”
“Who else was going to do it? Now, listen, please, Lieutenant. You seem like a nice person, too. And definitely not crazy. Reasonable. Down-to-earth. So do me one favor.” I heard the muffled sound of a phone being covered and him muttering to someone else. “Can’t you have someone go back to Dorinda Dillon’s building and take the picture of Dr. Noakes from the practice’s website? Besides the doorman, there might be a porter or some other building employee who might have seen Gilbert John or dealt with him.”
“I’m sorry. I really can’t,” he said. “The case isn’t in my hands anymore.”
“It can be your case if you’d just—”
He cut me off. “I honestly wish you well, Mrs. Gersten.” At least he sounded regretful. But that was the end of the conversation.
After I related what Paston had said, Sparky got to wondering out loud how to get around him—there had to be a way. Grandma Ethel, on the other hand, took his “I honestly wish you well” to mean “You have my blessing in whatever you do, even though I can’t officially condone it.”
Fifteen minutes after Sparky’s “You’re beyond absurd, Eth” rejoinder, she was behind the wheel of my car, driving my grandmother and me into the city. As she pulled into a space beside a fire hydrant one block from Dorinda’s apartment, Grandma Ethel told her, “Sit tight, because if you pull into a garage, it’ll wind up costing fifty dollars, and it might have security cameras, so there would be proof we were in the neighborhood. Stay in the car, because you don’t want to be anywhere near us. In case there’s any unpleasantness, Susie and I have a fallback: We can say she’s mentally unbalanced and I’m senile. But you could wind up getting disbarred in Florida for pulling a fast one in New York.”
My grandmother and I strolled up and down Dorinda’s block between the corner and the alleyway with the service door, trying to appear casual when turning midblock to avoid passing the doorman. After ten minutes, it began to get boring. After twenty, when all we’d done was decide the only passerby with any style savvy was an Asian deliveryman with a smartly tied black bandanna riding a bike, we began rethinking our plan. Fortunately, as we were approaching the alleyway for the thousandth time, we saw a guy in a janitor’s uniform hauling out a huge can of bottles for recycling.
“Okay, you take him,” Grandma Ethel said. “I’ll distract the doorman.” As she hurried toward the front door, walking as sure-footedly in dagger-heel leather pumps as if she were wearing Nikes, I headed down the alley to meet the porter halfway.
“My name’s Ethel O’Shea,” I said, and flashed my grandmother’s press ID open and shut. Maybe I sounded nasal, because I wasn’t breathing through my nose. Though the recyclables were in clear plastic bags, the janitor’s hands were in giant leather trash-hauling gloves. I knew all I needed was one whiff of decomposing V-8 juice and I’d gag—not the best way to make friends. “I’m a reporter,” I added. He had time to give me only one shake of his head—No way I’ll talk to you—before I went on, “Sir, I truly want to keep you out of trouble.”
“What do you mean?” His eyes moved beyond me toward the street, as if expecting trouble with a capital T to be loitering on the sidewalk. He looked like he was from some unhealthy Eastern European country, heavyset and pasty, with skin dotted by the faded mauve of bygone pimples.
“Look, I found out some of the details about how you let that guy into Dorinda Dillon’s apartment. If you tell me the whole story, I won’t name names.” It occurred to me that he might not have done anything, that there might be some alternate porter or building employee. It didn’t help that I couldn’t read his expression, because there was nothing yet to read: He appeared to be a majorly slow thinker. “I’m sure whatever help you gave him, you didn’t mean any harm by it. You seem like a very decent, honorable man.”
“It didn’t have nothing to do with the doctor getting killed,” he said. He was hard to understand both because he was a natural-born mumbler and because his accent squished words: “Din ha’ noth’ t’ do.” “It happened at least a week before that.” I nodded sympathetically. “Seven, eight, maybe ten days. And this guy—”
“This guy,” I said, and showed him the picture of Gilbert John Noakes that I’d downloaded from the Manhattan Aesthetics website. I had a few others in my handbag, photos taken over the years at various conventions and parties, in case the formal portrait drew a blank. I’d made copies for Grandma Ethel, too. But this one was all I needed. The porter was already nodding.
“Yeah, that guy. A hundred-buck haircut if I ever saw one. But I felt sorry for him. He was panicked. He left some important papers up in Dorinda’s apartment. I didn’t call her Dorinda to her face. I’m just using that with you.”
“Right.”
“The guy was scared. What if she threw them out? The papers, I mean. What if she tried to sell them to the competition? I felt bad for him, and I said, ‘Okay, wait till she goes out for her walk. Tell me where they are, and I’ll run up to get them.’”
“Did you?”
“No. He said not to because he didn’t know where she could have put them. If he looked, he’d recognize the envelope they were in right away, but I wouldn’t, because it didn’t have no writing on it. So could he please just get the key, and he’d go in and out fast. He swore if it took longer than three minutes, he’d come
back down even if he didn’t find them. He said, ‘Trust me. I’m very neat. She’ll never know I was there.’ I did trust him because, you know, he was a really class act. Expensive coat. That’s how you tell. Some guys pay a thousand bucks for a suit but buy a crap coat. Not him.”
“So he waited there until—”
“No,” the porter said. “I told him, ‘She goes out every day late afternoon, so get back here at a quarter to four, and you’ll be okay.’”
“So he came back?” I asked.
“He came back. Said he might not recognize her if she had clothes on . . . kind of funny, but I understood what he was saying, you know? So I should be on the lookout and signal him when she went out the front door and down the block. He stood across the street, but like right opposite here, because he couldn’t go through the front door, past the doorman. He had to use the service entrance. It was better anyway, because I could go right to the room where we keep the apartment keys and give him Dorinda’s and then take him up in the service elevator.”
“Did you wait for him in the service elevator on her floor while he went in with her key?”
“Strange you should say that. That’s what I wanted to do. But give him credit: He was shrewd. He said I should wait outside the service door, right at the end of this alley here, by the sidewalk. That way I could watch the front door, in case she came back early. I told him she never did, but he said, ‘You can’t be too careful.’ Anyway, he gave me his cell number and said I should call him if I saw her.”
“Do you still have the number, by any chance?”