by Susan Isaacs
He gave a loud “Huh!” like he was reading an instruction: Insert laugh here. In case I didn’t get the humor, he added, “You gotta be kidding.”
“No, I’m not. I even think I could convince my editor to come up with something for it if you do.”
He considered the proposition by resting his mouth on the back of his hand—which was covered with the garbage glove. Finally, he said, “No. I threw it out. I mean, the guy came back down in two, three minutes. What did I need it for?”
“Did he find his papers?”
“Yeah. In a plain white envelope, so I wouldn’t have found it unless it was the only envelope in her apartment. But he said he knew it right away and it was where he’d left it.”
I nodded. “Just out of curiosity, did he give you something for the trouble you went to?” He didn’t say anything. I smiled. “You said he was a class act.”
He smiled back. “A little something.”
I’d already used a smile, a tossing back of hair as it fell into my eyes: your basic Flirting with Repulsive Guys When You Need to Get Something from Them Fast 101. But now, before the porter lifted the giant can filled with recyclables and started shlepping it toward the street, I had to get beyond the fundamentals to practically graduate-level. That meant a longing gaze that would display the wonders of pale green eyes and long, thick lashes and also would communicate the realization that I was so amazed by his masculinity, I was on the verge of falling in love. Add to that some nibbling of the lower lip to express a mix of hesitancy and embarrassment. It was a feminist mother’s worst nightmare.
After the nibbling business, I said, “I don’t know how to ask you this.”
With something approaching grandeur, the porter said, “Go ahead.”
“I’ve gone totally blank on your name.”
“Oh. Pavel. Pavel Ginchev.” He even spelled it for me.
Five minutes later, Grandma Ethel and I were walking back to the car. “I got bubkes from the doorman,” she announced. She sounded both dispirited and surprised, as in Life should offer more in the way of excitement.
“I got a little something,” I said. “Like Gilbert John getting the key to Dorinda’s apartment and going in there alone.”
“Wasn’t it one of those special security keys you can’t get copied unless . . .” She paused. With a great smile, she added, “. . . unless you’re a high-class guy who can intimidate a locksmith—and make him your friend for life with a few hundred bucks. Or a few thou. That would get you the key to anywhere you want to go.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
“Nothing’s wrong,” I told my cousin Scott Rabinowitz the following night. “I’m healthy. I’m strong. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said. Whatever the gene was for drama, he did not have it.
“But I need to ask you a favor . . . with you knowing I’m in really good shape.”
“Okay.”
“I need to make out a new will.”
“Right. You should. Whenever circumstances change—”
“This is a huge thing I’m asking, Scott, so take as much time as you need before answering. You don’t need to tell me now.”
“Okay.”
“Right now, if anything should, God forbid and all that, happen to me, the boys would go to Theo, my brother-in-law. I don’t think he’s steady enough to take on a responsibility like that.”
Scott shrugged. “I don’t really know him, but if that’s what you think . . . Oh, you mean you’re asking me to take the boys?”
“Yes. But I need you to feel free to refuse if you can’t see yourself in that role, or if you can’t take that kind of responsibility because you have other plans for your life.”
“You think I could handle it?”
“Not counting me, you handle them better than anyone.” What I left out was that I’d called Liz Holbreich and asked her to look into my cousin’s background—and told her the reasons I was asking. When she got back to me, she said she’d found absolutely nothing to rule him out. I went on, “The chances of anything bad happening to me are . . . Well, you’re the accountant, so you’re better with numbers.”
“You’re likely to stick around for a while,” Scott said.
“Please take time and think about it. And if you say no, I’ll find someone else, so don’t let that be a concern.”
“I’d have to take off a few pounds,” he said. “So I don’t strain my heart. I couldn’t afford to be one of those guys on the D train who drops dead standing up during rush hour because there’s no place to fall.”
And then he said he was honored that I thought so much of him. He was crazy about the boys. And I should live and be well, but yes, he was willing.
Late that week, I decided I was going to see if Eddie Huber and the forces of justice would take the copies of Gilbert John’s MasterCard payments to College Girl seriously enough to check them out. I knew that having told Lieutenant Paston, he wouldn’t keep it a secret. He was a pro. He’d want to look into it. So what was going on? Bureaucratic constipation? Being pathologically afraid to commit a mistake? Could Eddie possibly think I was so crazy that I’d made up a story and forged the statements? I needed to do something to get her to move. If not, I would have to hand over my information to my underemployed family press spokesperson, Kimberly Dijkstra, and let her make it public. I had to act.
At some point while driving between Shorehaven and Park Avenue early that Saturday, maybe I came up with a plan. I could have had one before I left. But a few minutes after ten, as I was picking through Jonah’s key ring and trying each one on the private entrance into Manhattan Aesthetics’ office, I suddenly wondered, What am I doing here? It wasn’t reassuring that I couldn’t come up with an answer. Except for emergencies and treating politicians and celebrities who didn’t want to risk being seen within a mile of a plastic surgeon, the offices were closed on Saturdays.
The private door, down the long corridor and around the corner from the official entrance, was for the doctors, so they could avoid walking through the waiting room and getting waylaid. Naturally, it was the exit of choice for bandaged post-op patients who looked like they were starring in Revenge of the Mummy; they could be led out without traumatizing prospective surgical candidates.
The keys jingled as if they were trying to get the attention of all New York. Finally, the fourth one I tried not only fit into the lock but turned it. I was in. The buzzing alarm that greeted me was no big deal, because whenever I went into the office with Jonah, he’d mutter 3-3-3-3, his passcode. I’d once said, “You’d think someone would figure out a guy with triplets would use threes.” His answer had been tight lips.
Only after the third 3 did it occur to me: Oh God, what if they deleted Jonah’s passcode from the system? The alarm kept ringing: one second, two seconds, much too long. There I was, in some bizarre fight-or-flight paralysis, when . . . at last, silence. By the time I could breathe again, I had already turned the corner and was walking through the long corridor toward Jonah’s office. The usual lights, a gentle, flattering pink, were dimmed to near-darkness, giving the pale peachy-beige walls a spooky glow, as if they were alive.
I didn’t know what to expect once I opened Jonah’s office door. I was clutching the keys in my fist so they wouldn’t jangle, and I slid out one key with my thumb. As I put it into the lock and grasped the knob, the door opened so fast that I stumbled inside. I ran my hand along the left wall for the light switch, the standard place, but all I felt was a wall sanded to a baby-skin finish appropriate for a plastic surgeon’s workspace. The dim light from the corridor didn’t shine into the room, but I could see the big things were still there: Jonah’s Eames desk with its multicolored panels, chairs, a computer monitor so thin it looked two-dimensional.
I patted and stroked the wall for what seemed like hours until I discovered the light switch, ridiculously low on the right-hand side, as if it had been designed to be reached by preschoolers. As I switched it on and closed the door behind
me, I had one of those irrational widow moments when I said to myself, Don’t forget to ask Jonah why the switch is in such a crazy place.
When I walked over to the desk, I knew immediately that other people had been there. Of course the police would have. The pens in the cylindrical wire cup leaned this way and that; for Jonah, they’d stood at attention. There were papers, too, in reasonably neat piles, though if Jonah had ever left papers on the desk—a dubious proposition—the outer edges of every side of every sheet would have been in perfect alignment. I couldn’t make myself sit in his chair, but I stood leaning against the narrow oak rectangle that was the top of the desk and checked out the papers. Nothing unusual: printouts of his notes on patients, a report from a journal about impending thrilling developments in dissolvable sutures. The desk had only one drawer, for files, but even though I looked carefully from A through Z, I found nothing but the alphabetical file dividers themselves.
I’d made up my mind before I got to the office that if Jonah’s computer was still there, I wouldn’t turn it on. Too big a risk, because there might be some record on the server or network or whatever they called it that would flash an alarm: Dr. Gersten’s computer has been accessed by unauthorized person or persons unknown, but I’ll bet you a hundred it’s the wife. I walked around the cool, modern office, angular and spare, so unlike our house, but Jonah always said that his office was like his work, precise and carefully thought out—though he hoped that, unlike his surgery, it wasn’t sterile. He said it was great, returning to the warmth, tradition, and layered complexity of the house. I’d laughed and said I’d always dreamed of a husband who could say “layered complexity” and not sound like an ass.
I barely looked at his walls because I didn’t like the painting, some streaks of color and scribbles by an artist trying and failing to be an abstract expressionist like Cy Twombly; when I said something diplomatic like “It’s pedestrian,” Jonah told me he’d already paid for it and told me I was hypercritical and should understand there was a difference between office art and personal art. I’d said something like “bullshit,” and that was the end of the discussion.
The only thing left to look at was his narrow built-in closet, a woodworking craftsman’s elegant interpretation of a high school locker. I stood before it, I guess looking a little bit like the apes staring at that big black monolith in 2001. It looked so plain, spare even, yet so scary. There was no knob, but as I reached out to the door’s edge to pull it open, my heart was pounding, as if to warn me: Don’t! Maybe I half expected a dead body to keel over, or a jack-in-the-box with a giant U of a smile painted on his face. When I did pull the door outward, all I found was an umbrella and the pair of black rubber pull-on boots Jonah kept there in case it snowed. God, I hated that he’d died in the winter and never gotten to see the spring.
Just so I wouldn’t be angry at myself later, I felt inside the boots. Jonah had been a great one for hiding cash or keys under the orthotics of his sneakers, on the theory that even second-rate burglars wouldn’t look in smelly places. The boots were empty. Then I took the umbrella and, turning it right side up, opened it only a little because of the superstition that it was bad luck to open an umbrella indoors. I was thinking, Yeah, I never opened an umbrella inside in my whole life. Did it bring me lots of luck in the husband-longevity department? As I started to close it, something floated out: a news clipping from The Wall Street Journal. The headline read, REDLEAF CAPITAL’S GRAYSON ASKED TO RESIGN. The dateline was—even I could do the math—six days before Jonah was killed.
It was no big story, just another financial hotshot getting payback for making lousy investments with hundreds of millions of dollars of other people’s money, though at one point Redleaf Capital’s holdings were “well over $1 billion.” As far as I knew, there was no Grayson in Jonah’s life. Still, that didn’t mean very much, because why would Jonah—if it was indeed Jonah who’d neatly cut out the article—want to hide something like it in an umbrella?
In one of those out-of-the-clear-blue-sky moments, it hit me that when I’d been taking Detective Sergeant Timothy Coleman around the house, I’d looked in the Einstein biography on Jonah’s night table. He’d had a list, with razor blades and shoe polish on it and a note, check red cap. I’d assumed it meant red capsules.
I pulled out my cell and called Andrea’s house. I knew she would be at Florabella, but I didn’t care, because I also knew it was the one phone line Fat Boy would answer.
“Hey, Hughie,” I said, “it’s Susie. Did you ever hear of something called Redleaf Capital?”
I realized I should have said “How are you?” but my lack of graciousness did not appear to be noticed. “Hey, Susie, my wife’s working while you’re lounging around eating chocolate truffles? How y’doing? Redleaf? Fucking loser hedge fund, one of the greatest of the great Greenwich loser hedge funds. Something in the Connecticut water, maybe. Or all those Irish Catholics and Jews trying too hard to be Wasps up there caused massive brain damage.”
“You know how Jonah and you sometimes talked about investments?”
“Sure.”
One of the things I liked about Fat Boy was that he made no attempt to think of what he should answer about a guy who’d been murdered. He just said it right out. “Did he ever say anything about investing in Redleaf?”
“No, why would he do such a stupid thing? Anyone who knew shit about money would have the brains to stay away from that stinker. Even when it was good, it was bad. Not that it ever really was good.” Fat Boy took a fraction of a second for a diplomatic pause. “He didn’t put his money there, did he?”
“No, not that I know of. Not from anything I’ve seen from the accountants or that Jonah ever mentioned.”
“So why are you asking me about a fund that was headed for the crapper two, three years ago and everyone knew it except the fund manager and the investors?”
“Did that guy Grayson do anything criminal?” I asked.
“No. Just dumb, arrogant—the usual stuff. So fucking predictable. Listen, I’d be shocked out of my mind if Jonah—”
I said, “I have to go,” because just then the door opened. And there was Gilbert John Noakes.
Even under the best of circumstances, he had a right to be livid about my being there without consent. I, of course, had a right to be scared shitless over what might happen. For too long a moment, nothing did.
Just as he was saying “Susie” and taking a deep breath, I became more alert than I’d ever been in my life. Every cell in my body, simultaneously, was on duty. There was just him and me, which I knew was really he and I, but either way, that added up to only two. His words, all but frozen solid, came out: “Is there any possible explanation for you . . .” I realized two wasn’t a good number because it was Gilbert John against me. If he had nothing to do with Jonah’s murder other than a history with Dorinda Dillon, then I was destined for more boring, elderly chicken dinners with Coral and him. If all the law-enforcement people were wrong and I was right, I was in major danger.
Something inside me told me I had to up the number from two to three. So I brought in somebody else and talked so fast I might have taken lessons from Fat Boy: “I was talking with the forensic accountant Jonah went to see.” That got Gilbert John’s attention. It also let him know there was at least one more person in the equation. “He was telling me about a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar check that turned out to be from—”
“Phoebe Kingsley,” Gilbert John said. “I would like to discuss that with you.”
“Fine.”
“Might we go, sit perhaps, someplace else. Unless you would be more comfortable here in Jonah’s office. I would understand completely.”
On one hand, I was scared that if we walked into the corridor together, he might have a couple of hired goons waiting to do something terrible. He might even hit me over the head with one of his exquisite mosaics that lined the walls. Naturally, my mouth went dry with that dirty-penny taste, even though I couldn’t reme
mber ever sucking a penny, so how would I know? On the other hand, could he possibly let anything happen to me if he realized somewhere out there was a forensic accountant who knew about a check made out to him by Phoebe Kingsley? And I did want to get out of Jonah’s office. It felt wrong to be in here talking with this man, almost in a religious sense, a desecration, like when you drop the Bible on the floor.
No goons, no Attack of the Mosaics. We wound up in the employees’ lunchroom, a small area with a table and chairs, refrigerator, and a soda machine I’d always felt was cheap—Manhattan Aesthetics could offer employees free sodas—but Jonah said they had to charge fifty cents each or . . . I couldn’t remember what, just that it had sounded lame.
Gilbert John sat in a not too terrible plastic scoop chair and said, “I have to confess to something.”
I nodded and managed to say, “Please, go ahead.” I wished more than anything that Grandma Ethel could be sitting beside me, squeezing my hand, signaling, You’re doing fine.
“The last discussion I ever had with Jonah was an argument about that check. I was sick at heart after it happened, and when Jonah went missing, and then we found out . . .” Gilbert John was pale, that greenish white people turn when they’re sick and dizzy. Still, if he had started crying or gotten really emotional, I would have almost laughed. Instead, he said, after swallowing hard and seeming to get a grip on himself, “Jonah was a very balanced individual and a very responsible one. But he was also under a great deal of pressure. Sometimes I felt I was adding to his pressure by not being as active in the practice as I had been. But more and more, Jonah had a tendency to rush to judgment—though fortunately, not when it came to his patients. He was a fine, thorough surgeon.”
“What was the argument about? What do you think there could have been about the check that made you think he rushed to judgment? Because I’ve known him longer and better than you have, I’ve seen him in every possible situation, and I never once witnessed a rush to judgment.”