As Husbands Go (13 page)

“Yes. We need to be able to weigh whatever evidence comes in, so it doesn’t make sense to close off our options.” He stood and walked around the coffee table and over to the fireplace mantel. He
was tall enough to lounge against it and rest his elbow on its ledge, but after a couple of seconds, he came back and sat beside me. “Had to stretch my legs,” he said. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” I shifted slightly to face him. When he spoke again, his voice was so soft I had to strain to hear it. Just the two of us: He wanted Coleman out. “Once we leave, a person going through what you have to deal with should have a friend in the house. A person to rely on. Sergeant Coleman says you have two Norwegian girls who work here. They’ll probably be busy keeping those triplets of yours under control, right?”

“Yes. And they’re teenagers. I wouldn’t . . .” I wanted to ask him what I should tell the boys. He would know the right thing.

“So what Sergeant Coleman suggested, you calling a friend or a family member, you need to do that. At some point you’re going to have to sleep. You’ll need somebody with a good head on their shoulders to answer the phone, do what needs doing.” I didn’t say anything. “Your parents are alive?”

“Yes. But not them.”

“Dr. Gersten’s—”

I shook my head. “I’ll call my business partner. She’s my best friend, too. I didn’t want to before because she can be . . . She’s a little much on the cool, calm, and collected side.”

“Got it. But some cool can come in handy at a time like this.” He took a card case from his inside jacket pocket and handed me two of his business cards. Lieutenant Gary McCorkle Paston, Manhattan North Homicide Squad. The NYPD shield was flat. I imagined some New York City budget gap that had needed closing decades before had meant the end of embossment. “You can reach me day or night. If for any reason I can’t come to the phone, there will be other detectives assigned to the case who can help you or get a message to me. If you think of anything that might help, or anyone it might be good for us to speak to, let me know right away. Don’t worry about bothering me or calling with some small detail. We need whatever you can come up with.” I nodded, although I didn’t realize I’d closed my eyes again until I got startled when he spoke. “This is a shock and
a terrible loss. Nothing I do can make it better for you. But I’ll do everything I can to find out who did this to your husband.”

“Thank you.” Before he could say “You’re welcome” or anything else, I added, “I feel confident having you on this case.” Before he could thank me and we’d wind up in some embarrassing gratitude match, I said, “One more thing: Jonah’s parents.”

“Right. I heard about them. He’s a big deal at Sloan-Kettering. She’s a big deal at some makeup company.”

He seemed to have gotten the picture before he even drove up to the house. Just to be clear, I said, “This is going to be devastating for them, too. They’re very fine people, wonderful grandparents to our kids. But they’re the types who are used to being in charge of stuff, respected. Also, they are very well connected. I’m sorry if this sounds obnoxious, but you should know: They probably know the chief of police and the DA and half the judges in the city. My father-in-law is involved with some charity with Mayor Bloomberg.”

“I understand.”

“Over the years they’ve come to like me, or at least have learned to live with me. Our relationship is . . . how would my mother-in-law describe it? Perfectly pleasant. But bottom line, they think Jonah could have done better, that I don’t have enough class for him and that I’m not smart enough—except for me having the brains to reel him into marriage while he was still too young to know better.” I was glad Paston didn’t go into the “Oh, I’m sure that can’t be true” business. “They may call you. No, they will call you. I’m telling you all this because although I’d appreciate it if you could talk to them, I don’t want them pushing me out of the picture. I want to feel free to speak to you and find out—”

“I understand. I’ll tell your husband’s parents the truth, that you’re the legal next of kin, and that means, while I’ll speak with them, I deal only with you.”

“Thank you.” I didn’t cry again. I just started to shake, pretty violently.

Coleman decided his help was needed, so he practically flew over and stood between the couch and the coffee table, so he was
right beside me. “If you give me your doctor’s name, ma’am,” he said, “I’ll be glad to call him or her. A sedative might—” He had sweat on his upper lip.

“Thank you, but no sedatives. I can’t take drugs with three little boys in the house.” He fell silent, though he didn’t move. He just stood next to me, his shins an inch from my knees, as if he had a front-row seat to some all-star nervous breakdown. I wanted Paston to tell him to get the hell away, but he didn’t.

After a few minutes, my shaking eased to mere trembling. My head cleared so I could remember Andrea’s number. I gave it to Coleman so he could call her and tell her to come over. Only then did he go back to his chair to get busy on his cell.

“I didn’t tell him the truth,” I murmured to Paston. “About drugs. I actually have enough Xanax to calm a herd of crazed elephants.”

“Good,” he said. “You’re going to need it.”

Chapter Ten

Andrea must have arrived soon after Detective Sergeant Coleman called her. I heard her voice at the front door, followed by the purr of small wheels. She’d brought the small Vuitton suitcase she always kept packed in case Fat Boy finished some hedging deal early and called her to join him in Shanghai or Dublin. I saw her as she stepped into the room, and I watched as she came over to pat the back of my hand—the Andrea equivalent of a regular person’s loving embrace. She said, “Oh, Susie, this is dreadful. I’m so sorry.” Maybe I nodded, and I think I retreated farther into the softness of the couch’s corner, where the overstuffed back met the fat arm. At some point the detectives left. For all I knew, they simply evaporated. I heard no goodbyes, no footsteps, no closing doors. “Tell me what you need me to do, Susie,” Andrea said.

“Calls.” I exhaled it more than I actually said it. “I need you to call . . . everybody. Not tonight. I think it’s too late.”

“Yes. It’s almost one in the morning.”

“Maybe you should go home, come back later. I don’t know. They told me I needed someone to be here. I can’t think clearly.” My arms were still crossed so tight over my chest that my shoulders ached, but I couldn’t seem to release them. “Do I have to call his parents now?”

“Yes, you do. Soon, I would think.”

“What?”

“They can’t hear this on the news.”

“They’re asleep at this hour.”

“But someone they know might hear of it and call them.”

“Oh God, I can’t believe I didn’t think about that.”

One of Andrea’s usual snotty retorts got to the tip of her tongue, but this time she stopped it before it came out. She didn’t even look like herself. She was wearing just lipstick. Without other makeup, her eyes were almost lost under puffy pink lids and uncurled blond lashes. Her face seemed magnified, a white oval with a glossy brick-red mouth that appeared glued on, as if she’d cut it out from a Chanel ad. “And you’ll have to call your parents. Unless you want me to do it.”

I shook my head. The movement loosened up some words. “No friendship could survive that kind of strain.”

“I can do it.”

“No, I’ll call them. Don’t worry. They won’t be able to cope with coming back out here. Most likely, they’ll wait till nine-thirty or ten in the morning. That way, they can get the car washed before they stop at GNC because they’re low on acidophilus. But then they’ll be on their way.”

“To offer their usual nonstop comfort,” Andrea added. We’d been partners and friends long enough that I knew, even before she did it, that she’d start to look up to heaven but quickly avert her gaze, knowing that when it came to my parents, even God couldn’t help.

“Well, when they do show up,” I said, “they’re bound to be wonderful with the boys.” I knew I sounded bitter.

That was when it hit me:
I have children.
It must have been too awful to think about the boys immediately after I heard the news. I just blocked them out. I wished I could do that again. The thought of Evan, Dash, and Mason missing Jonah while not truly comprehending what had happened was too sad to dwell on. And what about their growing up without a father? My head flopped down. I was defeated. “I can’t take this, Andrea.”

“You have to.”

“Take your stiff-upper-lip Wasp bullshit and shove it.”

“I’m not Anglo-Saxon, as you well know. I’m Dutch. And I don’t expect you to stiff-upper-lip it, Susie. You should know that. This is beyond horrible. I’m only saying that you’re eventually going to
have to find a way to take it because . . .” She swallowed. “You’re all the boys have now.” Her eyes closed for what was either a very long blink or a prayer:
Thank you, God, that it isn’t me
. “The good news is, they won’t be up until their ungodly wake-up time. You don’t have to think about them this second. You have other fish to fry now: your in-laws, your parents. And what about Gilbert John? Layne? You do have to call them tonight, don’t you? Or can I call them and you call the others?”

I made all the calls. It was worse than I’d imagined because I had to live through everybody else’s shock. I don’t recall having even a milligram of compassion. I wished I could get away with “Listen, I hate to tell you this, but Jonah’s been murdered. I’ll know more tomorrow. Speak to you then,” and hang up. Take three Ambien. No, two, because of the boys. Three wouldn’t kill me, probably, but I couldn’t risk even a little soothing brain damage.

If I could have made the calls and heard “You poor thing!” over and over again, I might have dealt with giving them the news. But I had to listen to my father-in-law’s terrible groan, like that of a lion gone mad with pain, and Babs screeching in the background, “What? What? Tell me! For God’s sake, tell me!” So I had to go into the whole thing, repeating large parts of it because they put me on speaker and then couldn’t understand half of what I was saying.

And of course it wasn’t “Your son was stabbed to death in the midst of performing some noble act.” The answer to their wheres and hows was “In the apartment of a call girl named Dorinda Dillon, aka Cristal Rousseau, who’d had a couple of arrests for cocaine.” With a pair of those long-bladed scissors you see in barbershops. All this interrupted by moans and cries and me saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” too many times to count.

Gilbert John Noakes, MD, FACS, didn’t scream or groan. In fact, he was almost speechless except alternating in a shaky voice between “Good God!” and “I’m sorry, Susie” a few times. He didn’t ask questions, and after I’d told him Jonah had been stabbed, I heard what sounded like a sigh filled with pain. “I don’t know what to say. It’s brutal.” He sounded so wiped out that I couldn’t bring myself to
tell him about the call girl. At the end of the conversation, he said he’d call Layne, but I told him I’d do it, since I figured they had to hear the Dorinda details that, barring some international tragedy or celebrity overdose, would be on the news.

I hadn’t realized Andrea had left the living room until I saw her coming back in. She handed me a mug and said, “You had some actual cocoa. This is true hot chocolate, not your diet shit. Drink it.”

“Thank you.” Andrea had to be thanked constantly, even at work, like when she was just handing you pieces of sphagnum moss every two seconds.

She said, “You’re welcome. I brought Xanax. Do you want any?”

I shook my head, then said, “No, thank you.” She gave me the raised-eyebrows, flared-nostrils look she gave to clients who were making a foolish decision, like wanting lollipops on ribbons in table arrangements for a First Communion luncheon. It worked 99 percent of the time. I added, “I don’t need anything. I’m numb.” I couldn’t say “What I’d like is an overdose of something so I can die and not have to face the rest of my life.” Not that I’d have done that: I knew I had to be there, as whole as possible, for the boys. But it would have been nice to say it and hear a passionate “I know it’s terrible for you, but you can’t even think that way!” Except Andrea would have added, or at least thought,
Don’t be a self-indulgent ass
.

When I called Layne, she was on the other phone with Gilbert John, but she was back to me within seconds. She talked for too long, but it was bearable because she spoke the way decent people are supposed to, the way you see in the older movies when you’re surfing channels. “What a horror for something like this to happen to such a fine, honorable man. A good man! My heart . . . my heart goes out to you.” She either swallowed a lot or cried for a few seconds. “And your wonderful boys. Susie, I don’t have to tell you how much he loved all of you. You know those office watercooler chats? Every single time Jonah and I would talk, a light would come into his eyes. I always knew the next sentence out of his mouth would be about one of the triplets. Or all of the triplets. He’d get this gleam—”

“Layne, thank you so much, but I have to tell you—”

“Jonah wasn’t just a partner and mentor to me. He was a great friend. When he was senior resident—”