As Husbands Go (21 page)

After a couple of minutes on hold, a woman’s voice came on. “Mrs. Gersten, Sergeant Maureen Ferrari. I’m sorry about your loss.”

“Thank you. I know it’s late, but I haven’t heard anything in a couple of days. Maybe I should have waited until the morning to speak to Lieutenant Paston, but—”

“No problem.” Her voice was smoky, like one of those babes in old detective movies whose hair dips over an eye. But she spoke in a fast staccato, so she didn’t come across as babelike. “I wish I had something solid to report. So far, none of our leads to Dorinda Dillon has panned out.”

“She’s the only one you’re looking for?” I asked. “I mean, was there any evidence that somebody else was involved? Her just disappearing: You don’t think she had an accomplice to help her get
away? Or else—this may sound far-fetched—maybe somebody did her in because”—even to myself, I was coming across like an overambitious rookie detective on
Touching Evil
—“if she was caught, she could be persuaded to talk?”

“There’s really nothing to make us think anyone else was involved,” Sergeant Ferrari said. “But I promise you, Mrs. Gersten, this case is our top priority. We’ll find her. She left in a hurry.”

“How do you know?”

“Because we found a salable amount of drugs, cocaine. In a plastic bag in a frozen pizza box. She glued the box shut, so it looked unopened.” She took a deep breath. I sensed an announcement. “If Dorinda had a personal phone book or a PDA, she took it. But she did have a pad in the kitchen with a list of her . . . appointments for that day. It said six-forty-five Jonah. I’m sorry to say this, but it’s written in the same way as with all her clients—first names and the time they were coming.”

I closed my eyes. “How many names were on the list for that day?”

“Dr. Gersten was her third,” she said. “Third and last.”

Chapter Sixteen

The end of the week of mourning coincided with the travel agent calling to remind me that Presidents’ Week was two days away and, “Heavens,” she said, “this is sooo awkward to have to say, but did you happen to remember that Dr. Gersten got plane tickets and put down a deposit for a ski vacation in Utah?”

“Oh my God, I forgot! And he kept reminding me about some new ski wax with Teflon . . .”

Every time I was doing something ordinary and mindless—like at that moment, making tea and answering the phone—and Jonah’s name came up, my heart stopped. It beat
lub,
but then I kept waiting for the
dub,
except it felt like it was never going to happen and my life wouldn’t go on. My final act on earth—in this case, bobbing a Dragon Pearl jasmine tea bag in and out of hot water—seemed both commonplace and so magical that Vermeer should have captured it:
Woman Dunking Tea Bag
. I held the phone between my ear and shoulder and wrapped my hands around the hot mug. As I lifted it, the jasmine went straight up from my nostrils and saturated my brain with sweetness.

Utah? It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to get away for a few days, give the boys a change of scene. Maybe I’d be smart to take some of the unasked-for advice people kept giving me: Do a Variety of Activities with the Kids to Create a More Meaningful Bond; No Major Challenges the First Year, but Do Take on Small Ones; Time Heals; Don’t Let Your Exercise Routine Go Because You Need Those Endorphins.

In the time it took to tear open a packet of Splenda, I decided
the combination of a twelve-hour-long altitude headache, seven days of anxiety over Evan feeling abandoned in ski school, and me schussing down a mountain, sobbing so hard I wouldn’t see the ponderosa pine four feet ahead and—whoops!—leaving
three orphans, did not sound enticing. Even Jonah had been having second thoughts about the boys being too young and also (being a surgeon) about his hands after a day skiing in fifteen-degree temperatures. I suggested to the travel agent that considering the circumstances, a refund seemed the way to go.

Her call back showed that all the revolting publicity did have one upside: The reservations departments of both the Deer Valley Resort and Delta Airlines had heard about Jonah’s murder and, as my travel agent put it, “How could they not understand?” It also helped that the boys had only a vague concept of time—Mason and Dash still believed that “tomorrow” meant any time in the future—and wouldn’t understand that the ski vacation Jonah had been going into raptures about was supposed to be happening now. So we spent Presidents’ Week at home.

I had tiny flashes of fun, although in terms of elapsed time, they lasted as long as the flare when a match is struck. I discovered an ice rink nearly an hour farther east on the Island and signed up the triplets for Tots on Ice lessons. Ida and Ingvild came along. Considering they were Norwegian, it wasn’t a shock that they skated. But as I watched them swirl around the ice, I was amazed: With their round faces and red down-filled jackets, they were roly-poly Frosty the Snowgirls. Who knew they had been on a synchronized-skating team in high school? They wowed everyone at the rink with their athleticism, including a routine that involved skating backward, then somehow, spinning faster and faster with the tops of their heads touching—while doing arabesques.

They even talked me onto the ice, not easy after I’d spent twenty-five perfectly happy years off. Within a half hour, I recovered whatever ability I’d had when I was ten. Rhythmic movement—running on a treadmill, sex, gliding around the rink—almost always suckered me in. For moments at a time, I forgot I had on rented skates
that had been worn by strangers whose unwashed socks reeked from toe cheese and sweat. Once, the movement of my freezing cheeks even let me know I was smiling. (Of course I immediately felt ashamed and punished myself with a flash memory of Jonah’s grave just before they lowered the coffin; I’d been transfixed by the horrid nakedness of a tree root sticking out from the cold, packed dirt.)

We went back to the rink twice that week. On another day, I let each of the boys invite a friend over, gave them charcoal and paper, and had them draw portraits of one another. One morning we took graph paper and diagrammed a vegetable and herb garden for the spring and taped it to a window that overlooked the garden.

Grief is supposed to take you over. A bright memory may break through, but mostly, it’s full-time misery. One thing’s for sure: The pain doesn’t kill boredom. I was so bored. Other than the months I took off just before and after the boys were born, I’d been working since I was eighteen. Floral design was never nine-to-five, but there was always something to keep me engaged.

But after what was no doubt the hysteria of Valentine’s Day, which obviously I missed, Florabella was completely quiet. In a good year, Presidents’ Week meant seven bud vases of red, white, and blue flowers at six bucks a pop for the Lions Club luncheon. So when Andrea said, “Don’t you dare show your face at the shop,” I’d felt grateful and nearly guilt-free. Except that being bored at work would have been better than having nothing to do in a house where Jonah’s anorak was on a peg by the back door and his
J
was monogrammed on every towel.

I wound up watching a couple of runway shows from Milan on Fashion TV. Just as I was thinking I could probably give Dolce & Gabbana a pass forever, it dawned on me that the accountants still hadn’t given me the word on my financial future. Even if I was as economically secure as they were “quite confident” I would be, Italian couture—or any couture—was unlikely to find its way into my closet or my life.

At the thought of money, a memory of the retainer I had sent to the investigator at Kroll popped up.
Twenty thousand dollars shot to hell,
I thought. Grabbing a Diet Coke—decaf, since any financial uncertainty fried my nerves—I headed for the golden calm of Jonah’s study to call the investigator, Lizbeth Holbreich.

“I am so terribly sorry it turned out this way,” she said southernly. While her style was too formidable for honeyed charm, there was something in the way she was speaking that kept me from my post-Jonah robotic response: Wait for the person to finish their condolence spiel, then offer a “Thank you, I really appreciate, blah, blah, blah,” as if their expression of sympathy was not just profoundly moving but also amazingly original.

Not knowing what to say when I actually was touched, I went with “Thank you.”

“Is there anything at all we can do for you?” she asked. “I was going to call, but I didn’t want to intrude quite yet.” Her “quite” came out “quaaat.”

“I appreciate that.” I was thinking she and I were both business types. In my work, if the bride or groom didn’t show at the wedding, I’d feel terrible, but I couldn’t give a refund. Florabella had paid for the flowers and done the labor. In Lizbeth’s case, I had hired her company to find out whether there was some secret part of Jonah’s life that had led to his disappearance—and where he could have gone. Since only a couple of days had passed before he was found, murdered, I couldn’t imagine they could have had time to do much investigating. “At the risk of sounding cheap,” I began.

“Your twenty-thousand-dollar retainer.”

“I was wondering . . . can I get any of it back, Ms. Holbreich?”

“Call me Liz, please. Some of it, I’m fairly sure. I’ll need to check. But we did do some work on your behalf. I took it upon myself to go ahead and write a preliminary report. I’d be happy to sit down with you and review everything. I’ll gladly drive out so we can talk. Of course, if you’d rather, I could messenger it to you with a detailed letter. Once you read it—”

Considering this was my second phone conversation ever with
Lizbeth Holbreich and that I’d never been comfortable with letting anything, from bra straps to emotion, hang out, I surprised myself by blurting, “Listen, I’ve
got
to get out of this house. It’s like there are bars instead of walls here.” My volume went too high. In a quieter voice, I added, “Sorry. I’m usually not like this. Would it be all right if we met in your office?”

“Of course.”

“I promise, no big emotional displays.”

Lizbeth Holbreich’s office was austere yet comforting. The walls were covered in a pale gray sueded paper, a hue to soothe. If its texture was as luxurious as it looked, it was thick enough to absorb all clients’ shrieks of outrage and crying jags. Liz’s lacquered black desk was one of those midcentury designs, asymmetrical, somewhere between an artist’s palette and a boomerang. The only part of her computer that was visible was the monitor, a black rectangle jutting from the wall on a jointed steel arm; it could be angled up, down, or side to side if you pressed the edges of a quarter-sized control to the right of the mouse. It was so high-tech, I would have believed it could access the Internet via mind control from a teeny Bluetooth device embedded in the frontal lobe. But Liz pulled out a hidden drawer in front of her desk that held a keyboard.

Liz Holbreich was younger than her voice, which sounded at least fifty. She was probably my age, mid-thirties, slightly imposing but not scary. She wore what I was 98 percent sure was an Escada, a peacock-blue suit, with pointy-toed pumps that had princess heels. Her shiny dark hair was cut chin-length. She had the powerful-woman-politician look. However, being small-boned in the extreme, she looked less Nancy Pelosi and more a modern-dressed version of the elf Viggo Mortensen married in
Lord of the Rings
.

“This way we can literally be on the same page,” Liz said as she pressed a control and the screen angled more toward me. “Naturally, before you leave, I can give you a printout. And a CD if you’d like.”

I nodded, but then I realized she was typing. “That would be fine,” I said.

“Let me explain. What I’m showing you represents the work we did so far.” I raised my head slightly to read what was up there: a table of contents with listings for items like addresses, names of relatives, education, employment history, professional associates, personal associates, credit report. “What isn’t up there,” she continued, “though the fact is noted in the intro, is that there is absolutely no evidence that Dr. Gersten had hidden any sort of criminal record or used any Social Security number other than his own legitimate one.”

It bordered on hilarious, the thought of Jonah hiding a criminal record. But how could I laugh when, if anyone had told me my husband was going to stop at a call girl’s place before he drove home to Long Island, I would have . . . well, laughed.

Liz Holbreich continued her rundown. “No record of litigation, either—no pending lawsuits, including malpractice, which, considering his specialty, is amazing.”

“One of his patients did threaten to sue about a year ago,” I said. “I mean, it happened just three weeks after surgery. She claimed one of her eyes was higher than the other. She even got a lawyer. Jonah told her it would be fine once the swelling went down. It was, and the lawyer called him to say they weren’t going to pursue the matter. Like two months later, that same lawyer wanted to hire Jonah as an expert witness in one of his cases.”

Liz didn’t show any signs of being impatient, but I began to feel I was wasting her time with unnecessary talk. This business was all business. Floral design was so much about major events in people’s lives that, along with showing pictures of centerpieces and pulling together a fast nosegay to demonstrate an idea for the cocktail tables, you heard the saga of the bar mitzvah boy’s triumph over developmental arithmetic disorder. You and the client chatted about wonderful weddings and tacky ones; confirmation parties that should have
worked but fell flatter than the crabmeat crepes; the issue of themed bat mitzvahs; the etiquette of floral displays at funerals. A bride, noting your style, sought your advice about what shoes to wear with a tea-length dress, while her mother asked how to get rid of slugs in her hostas. You, in turn, admired the groom-to-be’s riding boots but knew not to ask where he stabled his horse. In my world, business rarely felt like business. In Liz’s, it definitely did.