As Husbands Go (12 page)

The detectives’ silence lasted way too long, and I realized they were waiting for me to say something. I uncovered my face and put my hands in my lap. A second later, I was crossing my arms and clutching them tight against my ribs: holding myself together. “What happened?” I asked Paston. His first few words didn’t register because I got lost staring at the red blood vessels in the whites of his eyes. They were thin and twisty, like the lines indicating bad country roads on a map.

“. . . in the chest.”

“What? Sorry, I didn’t hear what you said.”

“Dr. Gersten appears to have been stabbed in the chest with a long, pointed pair of scissors.”

I heard the words, but all I could say was “I’m sorry. I forgot to take your coats.” Lieutenant Paston took off his scarf and stuck it in the sleeve of his coat, but it must have been Trauma Time, like during a car crash, when everything slows. I saw his hand grasp the scarf near his collarbone and imperceptibly make an arc behind his neck until three feet of black wool hung from either side of his hand. He slipped out of one coat sleeve, then another, in what seemed to be a series of jerky pictures—more like primitive animation than fluid motion.
Funny,
I thought, because he looked graceful, like one of those extra-large men who surprise you by moving like Fred Astaire on a dance floor. It was only as I got mesmerized watching him snake the scarf into a sleeve that Coleman’s sheepskin jacket suddenly appeared in my hands. With that, time returned to its normal speed.

“Surgical scissors?” I asked Paston.

“No. More like the ones barbers use,” he said. “Your husband seems to have been stabbed twice.” Paston had even more of a New York accent than I did—his “more” came out like “maw.” “It’ll be clearer once an autopsy is performed.” He lowered his voice to a funeral-parlor hush. “We’ll let you know when that will be.” I watched as he took a deep breath. I knew something I didn’t want to hear was coming. “Then you can make your arrangements for . . . whenever you want to. I know at this point nothing can comfort you, but you ought to know—the doctor from the medical examiner’s office at the scene indicated that after the second wound, it couldn’t have been long at all.”

I’ll treasure that thought, shmuck,
I thought. “I don’t understand,” I said. “A barber’s scissors? Did it happen—”

“No, no.” Coleman cut in so fast, it was clear that Paston running things wasn’t sitting well with him. “That’s just a description of the kind of scissors.”

“Well,” I snapped at him, “where did it happen, then?”

“Let me start at the beginning,” Paston said, flashing Coleman a
This happened on my turf, so shut up
look. The little cop’s lips pressed together to show a slash of resentment. “Naturally, we’d been working on your husband’s being missing. But a call came in to the NYPD around six tonight,” Paston continued. “Someone living in an apartment on East Eighty-seventh Street got home from work and called the building’s superintendent. Said there might be a problem in the apartment next door.”

One half of me wanted to stick my fingers in my ears and go
la-la-la
real loud so I wouldn’t have to hear any of what he was going to say. The other half urgently needed to know every detail. “What kind of a problem did the neighbor report?” I asked.

“I haven’t had a chance to speak to the individual, so I can’t say for sure. In any case, the superintendent tried to contact the tenant but wasn’t successful. He didn’t want to enter the premises without permission, so he called the police. Two patrolmen came from the Nineteenth Precinct. He let them in. They found Dr. Gersten just past the front hallway.”

“Was anyone else there?” I asked.

“No.” Maybe he sensed Coleman was about to say something, because he turned, flashed him a beady-eyed glance, then continued, “The apartment is sublet to someone named Dorinda Dillon. Do you know her?” I shook my head. “Ever heard the name mentioned?”

“No. Who is she?”

“Actually, that’s only one of her names. She changed it a few months ago. Before that, she was known as Cristal Rousseau.”

“What?”

“Cristal Rousseau.” He spelled it out. “That probably isn’t her real name.”

“What kind of a person would call herself Cristal Rousseau?” My voice was so loud it made me sit up straight. I tried to think of something more to say to show I was in control, but nothing came to mind.

“Ma’am,” Coleman cut in, “would you like me to call somebody for you? A friend or family member? You know, just to have some
one with you.”

It sounded like the right thing to do. Except I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to be with me. No one in either of our families. Not any of my you-know-I-am-always-there-for-you Shorehaven friends who would try to hold my hand or hug me. If I’d said anything, they’d murmur “I hear you.” Of course, the whole time they’d be making mental notes so their “I was with Susie Gersten the night she found out” story would be filled with rich insights and examples of their sensitivity.

“No one,” I said.

“Are you a hundred percent sure, ma’am?”

No, not Andrea. She’d offend Coleman with a single blink of contempt at his low-end shoes; Paston by eyeing his slightly over-the-belt gut. The cops might forgive her bad manners if they got distracted by her body—basketball-sized boobs stuck on a lean, boyish frame. Once that happened, they’d quickly turn into admirers, especially once they realized her excessive blondness was natural. Andrea was okay for sexy comedy, but she wouldn’t fit into a horrible dark story.

I shook my head. No one. But I realized they hadn’t seen my dismissal because they were eyeing each other. Maybe glaring. Any second it could escalate into NYPD/Nassau County, black/white, big guy/mini-man hostility. I cleared my throat. “There’s no one I want here now.” Except Jonah. An insane thought flew through my head: Once he came home, I’d feel so much better. “Please, for God’s sake, just tell me everything. Who is this Dorinda Dillon?”

Coleman opened his mouth to speak but then realized he didn’t have anything to say. Lieutenant Paston leaned forward in his chair. “She’s an escort,” he said. I didn’t react. Maybe I was trying to think of a way to ask him what he meant by “escort.” Could it be a new term for someone who took around Europeans looking for plastic surgery bargains? But he dissolved any potential for sugarcoating: “By ‘escort,’ I mean a call girl. A prostitute.”

I shook my head hard—no, no way!—even as I understood he was telling the truth. Jonah had been murdered in a call girl’s apart
ment. “She did her work . . . ? Was that apartment her place of business?”

“Yes.”

“East Eighty-whatever,” I said. “That’s a good neighborhood.” Paston didn’t say anything, and Coleman flexed his ankles to study the Velcro closings on his little brown shoes. “I don’t mean that it’s better to get killed on the Upper East Side than, say, someplace else.” I realized I was babbling, but I didn’t want Lieutenant Paston to get the idea that I was thinking,
Oh, God forbid! To be stabbed to death in Harlem
. “What I meant was that Jonah’s office is in that area, so maybe he dropped in to see her on his way home. Maybe she was post-op. If there was some minor problem, he could check up on her without her having to go to the office.”

“It’s only been a few hours since we found him,” Lieutenant Paston answered. Either he hadn’t heard or didn’t care about my “good neighborhood” comment. I decided that mentioning that Jonah had switched from Hilary to Obama early on would be tacky. “First thing tomorrow,” he went on, “I’ll ask someone at Dr. Gersten’s medical office to check if she ever was a patient.”

My mind kept going to stupid things. Should I offer them coffee? Could I ask Paston to tell my in-laws about Jonah so I didn’t have to call them? Even if he did, I realized, I’d still have to let Gilbert John and Layne know.

Soon everyone would know. Soon everyone would be shaking their heads and saying, “Susie Gersten won’t believe Jonah went to a hooker for sex. Is that willful ignorance or what? So sad.”

Part of my mind must still have been functioning because I surprised myself by suggesting: “You might want to check at Mount Sinai, too. Jonah and his partners were sometimes on call for victims of domestic violence—” But then I cried some more. One of the cops must have gotten up; a moment later, the tissue box from the downstairs guest bathroom was set on the coffee table. I felt a couple of tissues being tucked between my thumb and index finger. I blew my nose and went on, “They do pro bono work for victims of domestic violence, women and children whose faces . . . Prostitutes,
you know, they get abused. So if Jonah had any dealings with someone like that, I’m sure it was to help her.”

“It’s definitely a possibility,” Lieutenant Paston said. His eyes moved from me to the table beside him, to an old green Derby tureen I’d filled with preserved yellow Dendrobium orchids and pale orange roses. I could tell he wanted to touch the flowers to feel if they were fake. “We’ll look into it.”

“Lieutenant Paston, if I could only listen to myself, I’d probably be saying, ‘Poor thing. She is
so
trying to deny reality, swearing her husband wouldn’t go to a prostitute for sex.’”

“Not at all,” Detective Sergeant Coleman said.

“Except this is the thing,” I explained to Paston, “I know my husband. You don’t.” He nodded. “But maybe, in a way, you know more than I do.” Believing Jonah wouldn’t cheat on me, especially with a call girl capable of calling herself Cristal Rousseau, was one thing. But now, to ask a specific question . . . I saw it as a test. Was my faith in Jonah the real thing? Or was it self-deception to keep the horror to a manageable size, as in “Sure, my husband may have been stabbed to death in a whore’s apartment, but he was there for severe facial trauma, not a blow job”?

“Jonah had his clothes on, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

I don’t think I said “Thank God” out loud. “It wasn’t like he was killed without clothes and someone dressed him.”

“No,” Paston agreed, “the wounds were made through his shirt. Mrs. Gersten, I’ll be glad to talk to you about the crime anytime. But maybe this isn’t the moment. Let me explain. Dr. Gersten’s been missing for several days, so there must have been moments when you expected the worst. But no wife is prepared for the cops to knock on the door late at night and tell her that her husband has been the victim of a homicide. You’re in a state of shock. It may be better to skip the details now. You don’t need images of graphic violence in your head. Tomorrow, next week, next month: All you have to do is call and you have my word, I’ll describe—”

“No. I’d like to know now.” I crossed my arms again, tight. I
needed my own embrace because the mere thought of not being held together, of resting my elbow on the arm of the couch or setting my hands in my lap, made me feel sick. “Let me try to explain,” I said. “I’m a floral designer. My work is getting images in my head.” Paston glanced at the orchids and roses in the tureen and turned back to me. I went on, “If I know what happened to Jonah, I can deal with it. I have to. But if there’s a blank, I’ll need to fill it in. I’ll create a thousand images in my mind, and a lot of them will be more horrible than anything you can tell me. I don’t want to go through that again, because I’ve been there since he’s been gone. That’s all it’s been. I can’t live through hundreds of wide-awake nightmares anymore. Let me deal with just one.”

Coleman had been eyeing me, expressionless. Now the side of his mouth formed a curlicue of doubt. Not a good idea, he was guessing, giving details to the victim’s wife. But he couldn’t signal to Paston because the Manhattan detective was too busy thinking and nibbling tiny bits of skin off his chapped lips. Finally, Lieutenant Paston sat back in the chair. “Dr. Gersten was stabbed through his shirt. He was fully dressed in a tie and suit jacket, though the jacket was open. He may have been holding his overcoat because it was found near him on the floor.”

“Doesn’t that back up what I was saying?” I asked him. “About Jonah not being there as a customer?”

“You say you want to deal with reality now, so I’m going to take you at your word,” Paston said. “If you’re looking for the truth, you have to keep an open mind at this stage. We’re just hours into the investigation. We know only a small percentage of what we need to know. It’s too early for conclusions. For us, that’s a definite. Naturally, how open-minded you want to be is up to you. Being fully
dressed may be evidence that your husband wasn’t using Dorinda Dillon’s professional services. But the homicide might have occurred as he was entering the premises. Or as he was leaving.”

I began nodding to show I was comprehending, though I was so tired I was still processing what he said. At last I asked, “When you say ‘leaving,’ you mean he might have been leaving after having sex with her and getting dressed again?”

“Yes. We’ll know more once we get the medical examiner’s report.”

“You mean if he . . .”

“Yes.” I was grateful to Paston for not saying “ejaculated” in front of Coleman. I wouldn’t have minded if Paston had said it five hundred times—if Coleman hadn’t been there. But there was something about the Nassau County cop’s prissy politeness, and his looking at me like I was a piece of sculpture with jade eyes, that made me uncomfortable in my own living room. “I’ll keep an open mind,” I told Paston.

“Good,” he said. I doubted he believed me.

“So you haven’t found Dorinda Dillon?”

“No. It looks like she left the building the night Dr. Gersten was killed. We haven’t found anyone who has seen her since. Her normal pattern is either working—men coming and going days, nights—or being up there by herself. The only time she seems to go out is in the afternoon, to have her nails done or to pick up a few groceries. Maybe get drugs, too. She’s had two arrests for possession. Cocaine. Charges dropped the first time. The second time she pleaded guilty to a Class C nonviolent felony and got a suspended sentence.”

“Do you think she was the one who killed him?”

“We don’t know at this point.”

“You’re keeping an open mind,” I said. Coleman’s brow furrowed, but Paston didn’t take it as a sarcastic remark, which was good, because I hadn’t meant it to be.