As Husbands Go (30 page)

We talked for almost three hours once the boys went to bed. The good news was that both they and she seemed to find meeting each other interesting. They vaguely understood that someone called Great-grandma Ethel was a member of their family. I was pretty sure they realized I looked like her because their eyes did the “Mommy Great-grandma Mommy” trip at least a dozen times. She gazed at them with some admiration, not hard, since they went from cute (Evan) to beautiful (Mason and Dashiell). She probably credited her genes for their good looks. I was amazed how unrattled she was by their noise and perpetual motion, though from time to time she looked apprehensive, as if she expected them to turn into vicious little monsters, like the Mogwais in
Gremlins
.

That night’s talk comforted me. It felt relaxed, warm, fun at times, like a pajama party with your best friends in middle school. Mostly, we discussed what I should do about Dorinda Dillon.

“Do you know anything about ethics?” I asked her.

“Ethics?” Grandma Ethel repeated it like a new vocabulary word. “What about it? Yeah, I guess so. Someone on my show, a rabbi I guess, told a story about some medieval scholar. Jewish. Anyway, some evil king or an anti-Semite hooligan said to the scholar, ‘Tell me about the Torah’—or maybe he said the Talmud—‘while standing on one foot.’ I guess what that meant was he’d have to stand for a long time, so it would be torture. But listen, it’s not getting burned at the stake. So okay, the scholar stands on one foot. And you know what he says? ‘What is hateful to you, don’t do to others. The rest is commentary.’ I forgot what happened to the scholar, but it probably wasn’t good. It never was. So, Susie, there you have it: everything I know about ethics. It’s the ‘Do unto others’ thing.”

“Well,” I said, “even though I talked to the prosecutor, I still don’t feel comfortable about the case against Dorinda. I’m not saying she didn’t do it. I’m sure it will come down to finding out that she definitely did. But what do I do with this being uncomfortable business? I told you about that meeting with the head of the DA’s Homicide Bureau. Her bottom line is Dorinda did it. I don’t see her—the prosecutor—being corrupt or lazy or anything.”

“So she’s got ethics?” my grandmother asked.

“I guess. But I wasn’t worrying about Eddie Huber’s ethics as much as mine. What do I do? Do I have to do anything? If the cops and the DA’s office say that this hooker killed your husband, that they did the investigation and have determined X, Y, and Z is what happened to Jonah, then I told them what was bothering me and they said, ‘Okay, but she did it . . .’ Isn’t that enough? If I still think something feels wrong, even though I could be thinking it because I don’t want to admit certain things about Jonah to myself, where do I go with that?”

“You mean, what should you do ethically? I don’t know,” Grandma Ethel said. “I’m at a loss. Frankly, when people think ethics, the name Ethel O’Shea doesn’t usually leap to mind, as you might well imagine. It’s a hard thing to think about, that’s for sure. But listen, I’ll tell you one thing: Don’t be put off by authority. Now, call me a taxi and get some sleep or you’ll get dark circles. God
forbid.”

That talk with my grandmother gave me the courage to call Eddie Huber the next morning and ask for a meeting—though I quickly assured her I wasn’t bringing my in-laws or their lawyer.

After a long pause, but without any audible sigh, Eddie Huber agreed to my request. Only then did I add, “Oh, I forgot. My elderly grandmother is in from Miami. There’s a very slim possibility I might have to bring her along. But she’s going to be eighty on her next birthday, so don’t worry about her giving you any trouble.” Naturally, that conversation—with the word “elderly”—didn’t take place in front of Grandma Ethel. I picked her up at her hotel an hour and a half later. By then, she’d had her fill of watching power brokers at the Regency schmoozing and brushing whole-wheat toast crumbs off their ties.

I needed Grandma Ethel along on my visit to the DA not just because her arrival had given me the courage to ask for another meeting, but also as a witness: Had Eddie Huber said what I thought she’d said, or was I misinterpreting? Was she telling the whole truth, a half-truth, or was she full of shit? Was she playing a game with me, and if the answer was yes, what was it?

“Boy, this place stinks like an unwashed twat!” Grandma Ethel announced as we waited to go through the metal detector in the lobby of the DA’s office. In the same loud voice, she asked me, “Did I offend your delicate sensibilities or something?”

“A little bit with the volume,” I whispered, praying we wouldn’t be noticed. Talk about unanswered prayers: An almost-eighty-year-old blonde wearing a pink Chanel suit trimmed in black patent leather and wearing three-inch stiletto heels that showed off still-great legs could not go unnoticed in a hallway filled with lawyers, cops, and assorted shifty-eyed, slobby individuals who might or might not be criminals—especially when she said “twat” loud enough to be heard in all five boroughs. “It doesn’t stink
that
much. It’s just old.”

“I’m old. This stinks. But I’ll lower my voice.” She did to the point that I could barely hear her. “I’m only here to make you happy,” she said.

Of course, the danger of taking Grandma Ethel was that I couldn’t predict how she’d behave; I didn’t really know her. Having been the professional charmer hosting
Talk of Miami
meant she could be both smooth and savvy, but saying “stinks like an unwashed twat” in front of fifteen or twenty people, including the cop at the security desk, was neither. Still, part of her job had been knowing a little about almost everything; in a potentially hostile environment like the Homicide chief’s office, having someone truly savvy and totally on my side was a plus.

Eddie Huber’s jaw went momentarily slack at the sight of the “elderly grandmother” in bubblegum-pink Chanel, still a hottie at seventy-nine. Fortunately, she had no cause for complaint about Grandma Ethel’s behavior. Neither did I, but it was only a couple of minutes into the meeting.

“I guess this must be a tough part of your job,” I told the prosecutor. “Dealing with the families of homicide victims who need a lot of dealing with, when you have so many cases, so much legal work to do.” I was trying to be ingratiating.

“This is as much a part of the job as going to court, and just as important to all of us,” she said.

I tried to believe her. “Well, I’m very grateful, because I can see how I might be a pain in the neck.” Using “ass” wouldn’t have felt right. I glanced at Grandma Ethel nervously, grateful for her silence; her legs were crossed, and she was swinging the top one like a metronome, so at least she was occupied.

Eddie Huber was wearing the same bland green sweater she’d worn the time before. I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for her or admire her. If someone like me had a second appointment to see me in my office, I would be constitutionally incapable of wearing the same thing. Maybe she genuinely didn’t remember what she’d worn, or possibly, she didn’t care. Or it could be Eddie Huber’s way of sneering at me and my navy Prada pantsuit, which I didn’t have on at this second meeting—it was now a white silk shirt and olive gabardine pants, since I’d realized the Manhattan DA’s office was a dress-down kind of place.

I noticed I was twirling my wedding ring nervously, so I clasped my hands. “It might help me if I could find out more precisely what happened to Jonah once he got to Dorinda Dillon’s.” Eddie Huber’s eyes moved to Grandma Ethel. “It’s fine to speak freely in front of my grandmother,” I assured her, just as Grandma Ethel offered her an encouraging smile.

“Can you give me an example of what you’d like to know?” Eddie asked.

“Do you have any idea how long he was there?”

“Difficult to say. When Dorinda was interviewed in Las Vegas, she was asked, and I believe her words were ‘I don’t know. Not that long.’ Beyond that, without witnesses, there isn’t enough evidence to make that determination.”

“So it’s not clear whether ‘not that long’ is two minutes or, whatever, a half hour or more?”

“We don’t know. The natural assumption is that since Dorinda was going to the closet near the front door to get his coat for him, he was leaving after whatever business between them had transpired. What that was and how long it took, we simply don’t know. Her interview with our detective and the representatives of the Las Vegas police was cut off after her lawyer arrived.”

I took a deep breath. “In the autopsy,” I said, “or in the evidence you found, was there anything that showed if . . . whether Jonah had ejaculated?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the pointy toe on my grandmother’s shoe stop moving.

“It’s not that simple,” Eddie Huber said. I sat back, deflated. “I assume you mean was there an ejaculation following a sex act?”

“Yes.”

“There was semen found on the meatus of the penis. The meatus is the opening of the urethra in the top thing on the end, the glans penis. But besides an ejaculation in a sexual situation, it’s also part of what’s called the autonomic nervous system. According to the medical examiner, finding semen is common. When someone dies, especially in a sudden, violent death, there is an ejaculation.”

“But does that mean he didn’t ejaculate before he was stabbed?”

Eddie Huber eyed my grandmother for a second and apparently decided she could handle the subject matter. She looked back to me. “From what I’ve learned in my experience with homicide cases, there is a little bit of truth in that if there’s no ejaculate found, it may mean the man recently ejaculated—before death. But finding semen around the meatus doesn’t guarantee Dr. Gersten did not have some sort of sexual experience with Dorinda Dillon. That’s especially true in the case of someone being dead for several days at normal room temperature before being autopsied. When there is such a wait between death and autopsy, it usually cannot be determined when the last ejaculation took place. It might have been during a recent marital sex act. It might have been with Dorinda Dillon. An individual can die violently without any ejaculation at all before death and still show no evidence of semen on his glans penis.”

I was working so hard trying to keep any thoughts about Jonah close up and impersonal, like cross sections in an anatomy text, that when Grandma Ethel did speak up, I was incredibly grateful. “Susie talked to me about the case in some detail,” she said to Eddie Huber. “And on the flight up from Miami, I was reading some press accounts. I forgot where I came across this, but there was a mention about Dorinda getting clunked on the head with an electric broom when she went to get Jonah’s coat. That’s her alibi, that she was unconscious when Jonah was killed.”

“Yes, that’s her alibi.”

“And you don’t believe there’s any truth to that?”

“No, we don’t believe it. When such a heavy object is used as a weapon, it would have traces of blood and, considering it has bristles, a lot of hair. There was dirt, and I believe a couple of her hairs, which the lab said would be consistent with normal human hair loss. You know, picked up by the electric broom during regular cleaning.”

Grandma Ethel rocked her head from side to side as if she were a balance scale weighing what Eddie Huber had said. “What if someone cleaned the blood and hair off the broom after they clopped her?”

Eddie Huber tapped the edge of her desk with her fingertips,
either a sign of extreme irritation or a long-suppressed desire to play the bongo drums. “Then the broom would show signs of that cleaning. But there was only normal household dirt on it.”

“If Jonah is dead and Dorinda is lying on the floor like a lox,” my grandmother said, “would it take a genius to run the electric broom someplace not too obvious, like under a couch or a bed, to get it nice and normally dirty again?”

“It’s possible, of course, but not credible. Believable.”

“Thank you, but I am functionally literate. I know what ‘credible’ means.” Grandma Ethel kept going, not giving Eddie Huber a microsecond to respond. “Did anyone check her head? If a blow was severe enough to knock someone unconscious, there could be a bruise. Assuming, for a moment, that what Dorinda claimed is true.”

Eddie Huber didn’t answer immediately. Maybe she was counting to ten. She either did it very fast or stopped at five. “There actually was a bump on the right side of her head, near the crown,” she said, giving her own head a light tap to show the precise location. “But—and this is a big but—it could have come from any knock, and she wove it into her story. Prostitutes do sustain quite a few injuries because of the simple fact that a lot of men are abusive to them. On the other hand, the bump could have been self-inflicted.”

“It’s hard to imagine anyone being able to hit themselves on the head that hard,” I said. “I mean, they could think about it, but doing it is something else.”

“That is not the case, as it so happens,” Eddie Huber said. “Suspects have been known to crack their own skulls to fake an alibi.”

Grandma Ethel curled the side of her mouth into a
give me a break
expression, then shook her head slowly, as in
I’m not buying it
. “That must have been one hell of a crack, to still be there when Dorinda was found so long after.”

“Or it could have been one hell of a crack sustained when Dorinda Dillon looked out of her motel window, saw she was surrounded by the police, and banged her own head. Let me explain something, Ms.—”

“Just call me Ethel. Everyone does.”

“All right,” Eddie Huber said cautiously. “What I want to say, Ethel, and to you, Ms. Gersten, is that there is no pristine case. Details crop up. One piece of evidence seems to contradict another piece of evidence, yet both seem solid. What we do, in addition to applying the law in an evenhanded manner, is we rely on the experience and judgment of our law enforcement team, cops, lawyers, forensic experts. It’s not that we are ignoring the bump on Dorinda Dillon’s head. It’s that we’ve considered it and decided it was just that, a bump. None of her hair or blood was found on the electric broom, so there’s nothing to back up her contention that she was knocked out after being assaulted with it. The bump has no meaning to us. It certainly cannot be used to exonerate her. It simply cannot deflect the evidence we have implicating her in the murder of Dr. Gersten.”