As Husbands Go (32 page)

“Yes, I do. Usually my tongue and the roof of my mouth. Under my tongue at night. But we’re having a conversation.” I rinsed and went on, “But what is Eddie Huber covering up?”

“That the cops and the DA didn’t do all that needed doing. They focused right in on Dorinda and said, ‘Screw peripheral vision. We don’t have to look anyplace else.’ I’m not saying they’re railroading her. I’m only saying that Eddie is one smart cookie. She’s using her
legal smarts to fend off any doubts about the case, because they’re all committed to it. I admit it’s a case that does make sense. And the sense is backed up with evidence. Our Ms. Huber is not going to open it up for more investigation based on your questions, your hunches. She made her argument to convince you, keep you on the reservation, put a million doubts in your mind about what you’d been thinking. But she also made it to convince herself because—it’s just possible—some of your doubts sparked doubts in her.”

I ran a brush through my hair, then we walked downstairs. “So in making the case to me, she’s also working to convince herself how solid it is?”

“Right. She wants to believe their case is solid gold. She wants to show that asking why a call girl would up and kill a nice, paying client with hairdresser’s scissors is a stupid question, like all the ones you’ve been asking. She’s convincing herself the victim’s wife has gone off the deep end and shouldn’t be listened to. Heard out? Definitely, but that’s all.”

I was going to make a pot of coffee, but Bernadine was still sterilizing the kitchen. She beamed at my grandmother and offered to make us a pot and bring it into the library—a room everyone, including Bernadine, always called the den. She obviously was impressed with Grandma Ethel. I wondered if it was a new crush and if she’d stop watching FOX, waiting for a glimpse of Bill Hemmer.

“Listen, some lawyers do that,” my grandmother went on. “They have to convince themselves of the rightness of their cases because that’s how they do their best arguing. Sparky isn’t like that. She’s so cynical about everything. The only thing she believes in is the system. She can argue anything, any side of a case.”

“It doesn’t bother her when she thinks someone’s wrong?”

“Absolutely one hundred percent not. Before she went into public interest law, her civil liberties stuff, she worked in a big law firm representing newspaper publishers, shitheads like you wouldn’t believe. She says some of the people she represents now are no better, but it’s
justice
she fights for, and these clients can’t pay for it, like the newspaper shitheads can. She says everyone who deals with the
system has to have someone arguing for them with passion, using everything the law allows. But your Eddie doesn’t think like that. She needs to be Good fighting Evil. So when she believes ‘Dorinda bad, Dorinda guilty,’ she’ll stay with it till her dying breath.”

“If it turns out, which is a real possibility, that it was Dorinda, then I guess I’m lucky to have Eddie Huber on my side.”

“On the case, toots, not on your side.”

So where do I go from here?
I thought. I looked over at a little settee Jonah and I had bought in Vermont the first time we went away without the kids. It had been pretty much a wasted weekend because we spent it reassuring each other that everything was fine with them, and if there was any trouble, his parents and the au pair we had then would call us. But we’d gone into an antiques store and seen some of those old pieces of furniture made for children, teeny rockers, itty-bitty tea tables. We’d spotted a Federalist settee, as much bench as couch, with a back made of three separate panels. We got it for half the asking price because the store owner said a lovely young couple with triplets deserved a piece like this, and also because sometime between, say, 1810 and 2005, it had been broken, glued, and repegged many times, something Jonah noticed and politely pointed out. I’d been so proud of his classiness that day, that he was direct but low-key and never made anyone feel he was backing them into a corner.

The boys used to love sitting in it together, but now it was becoming a little tight for them, and most of the time they grabbed throw pillows and watched the room’s big TV from the floor. Soon it would be a settee for two, then one, then, off in a corner, something they could reminisce about to their friends. “Yeah, believe it or not, we all used to fit in it—with room to spare.” Or maybe “Can you believe my mother paid good money for that fucking ugly piece of crap?” Or “That little couch thing was from before my father was murdered.”

“Well,” I said, “if Eddie Huber is Good versus Evil, and also right, then by the time the boys grow up and graduate from college, Dorinda will still be in jail.”

“And I’ll be dead,” Grandma Ethel said. “Stop! Don’t tell me ‘You’ll still be boogying at a hundred.’ Dead. Or demented and tied into my wheelchair with surgical tape. The only attractive part of me will be my dental implants, and that’s because they’re made of titanium. But let me tell you something about then, Susie. I’ll be gone, you’ll still be gorgeous—and even if Eddie Huber was absolutely wrong, and Dorinda is telling the truth, she’ll still be rotting in jail.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“What are we looking for?” I asked.

“The truth,” Grandma Ethel said. “Or let’s call it proof.”

We’d finished our coffee in the den and then went into Jonah’s study with a plate of uncategorized food Bernadine had put on the tray. The bottom line of the stuff on the plate seemed to be
small,
so maybe it was the Bernadine Pietrowicz version of teatime canapés: string cheese cut into one-inch lengths; half an English muffin with peanut butter sliced like a pie into six pieces, a dab of grape jelly on each; leftover mini–Danish pastries she’d frozen after the shiva, and now had almost defrosted; some almonds.

“Proof of what?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” my grandmother said.

I sat in Jonah’s chair, and as I tried to think of something, I ate a couple of the canapés. They were an odd combination, but either it was inspired catering or we were starved: The plate was empty in under a minute. “How about . . .” I said very slowly because I had no idea what I was thinking. “Maybe we should see what there is to be seen.”

“That means nothing!” my grandmother said. “What are you, a fortune-teller at a carnival, mouthing gobbledygook? ‘See what there is to be seen’?”

“No, seriously. Don’t be a . . . whatever that word for old and cranky is.”

“Curmudgeon?” Grandma Ethel asked.

“No, something else. Forget it. What I want to do is look at the
stuff other people already looked at.”

“You mean the cops?”

“The cops, but also that investigative agency, Kroll. I hired them when Jonah didn’t come home. They only worked on it for a couple of days, but the woman who’s like, whatever, my personal private detective or account executive—she gave me a ton of stuff they put on a CD. I’ve never looked at it.”

“Okay,” she said cautiously.

“I want to see if, when we look at all the information, we wind up with lots more questions that the cops should have asked, or if it’s a collection of unrelated data. Because what you said about them deciding too fast that Dorinda’s guilty, that rings true to me.” I added, “We can do something else if you’d rather.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, if you want to talk, go for a drive, look at stores. There’s a really upscale shopping center about fifteen minutes from here, with Van Cleef and Arpels, Bottega Veneta—”

“Stop! There are two things in life, style and substance. Okay? Do you think I’d drop looking into Jonah’s death to go see those bronze woven-leather handbags? Well, you might think that. What the hell, I might do it. But not today. Not to you. So for now, I’m all substance.”

Everything Jonah had on him when he was killed was still with the police or the DA, being held as evidence. That included his BlackBerry. I knew his password for it, f-a-c-e-s. I turned on his computer but soon realized I could access his office calendar only through the Manhattan Aesthetics website. Except f-a-c-e-s didn’t work to enter the site.

Suddenly I had a
ping!
of irrationality, that all I had to do was call Jonah and ask what his password was. He’d tell me. I didn’t know whether it was the subconscious or the unconscious popping up with such a thought, but it weirded me out that somewhere in my head a dopey smiley-face of a wish just kept rolling along, no matter how many times it crashed into reality.

After f-a-c-e-s, I tried other word-and-number combos we’d used
over the years for our alarm system and ATM accounts: the boys’ birth date, the last four digits of our phone number in New Haven, G-i-a-n-t-s because he loved football. I was getting into a sweat that all my tries would kick in a security warning to their webmaster. I’d wind up on a speakerphone call with Gilbert John and Layne saying, “Susie, you simply could have asked us.”

Then I remembered before our wedding, when Jonah and I were discussing whether or not monograms were cool, he’d given me a wicked smile and drawn my married name in mock embroidery script with lots of ridiculous curlicues: SBARG, Susan B Anthony Rabinowitz Gersten. Sometimes he’d even e-mail me, “Hey, SBARG . . .” Those initials got me into the website. I brought around another chair so Grandma Ethel could see the monitor. While she went to get her reading glasses, I sat in the quiet room and looked at the calendar for the day he died.

I had no clear memory of our last time together. When I’d woken up and Jonah wasn’t lying beside me, I’d gotten so caught up in fear that I’d lost any recollection of our breakfast together on the last day of his life. He said all my breakfasts were the same, that I had zero breakfast imagination—always Cheerios with a quarter cup of trail mix. But Jonah was his own creative breakfast chef. I didn’t know why it was important to me to recall whether he’d made scrambled eggs or Irish oatmeal that final morning, but knowing would be a comfort.

I scrolled down to the early evening of his last day. Liz Holbreich had told me that Kroll’s computer expert had discovered Dorinda’s name and Jonah’s appointment with her hadn’t been entered until around eleven-thirty that morning; his BlackBerry had been synced earlier, so the Dorinda appointment was missing. Even though I knew it would be on his calendar, I shivered when I saw it:
6:45 pm D.D.
I double-clicked on the entry to see if there was anything under Notes. There wasn’t, but I noticed he’d allotted one hour for the appointment, not that he had anything else on the schedule for that evening. I used Search to check the rest of the calendar, but there were no other entries for Dillon, Dorinda, DD, or D.D.

As Grandma Ethel returned with a pair of turquoise reading glasses that looked more old Miami than new, I switched from Day view to Month, as if I needed to minimize Jonah’s disloyalty, though I did point out Dorinda’s initials to her. As I clicked through each month, starting with the year before his death, I saw that nearly all his early-evening appointments were linked to the practice’s patient database. The remainder I either knew about or could figure out.
Mac & Danny-drinks-YC,
YC being Yale Club.
Clean-Eileen,
an appointment with the hygienist in our dentist’s office.
See Danny C,
his sports orthopedist, probably for his tennis elbow. Committee meetings, talks—a fair number to the men’s groups that basically boiled down to “What to do when your double chin hangs over the knot in your tie.” The clinic work he did at Mount Sinai, repairing facial injuries on victims of domestic violence.

“The more I look,” I told my grandmother, “the more it confirms that he didn’t have a secret life.”

“Okay,” she said, drawing out the word.

“You mean he may have had a secret life that he didn’t put on his calendar.”

“That
was
what I was thinking,” she said. “But then it hit me that he did put ‘D.D.’ on it. Of course it was interesting that he only used her initials.” Her lipstick had caked on the corners of her mouth, and she kept wiping them with her thumb and index finger. From the repetition, I sensed she was as deep in thought as she got and not doing a quick lipstick fix. “Okay,” she finally said, “let’s assume Jonah had a clean bill of health marriage-wise—except for Dorinda in the early evening.”

“All right,” I said. “Then we ought to go through the calendar and see what else he was doing during his days that wasn’t linked to patients or something medical-surgical-business. But there are a lot of entries, and it’s hard to tell what’s what.”

“You know what I’m thinking?” my grandmother asked. “I’ll tell you. I’m thinking it’s hard to interpret the calendar because even though you knew what Jonah did, you probably didn’t know the minutiae of plastic surgery, the medical aspect—and the details of a
surgical practice’s business procedures.”

“No. I mean, I have some general knowledge of the flower business just because I’m a partner in Florabella, but Andrea is the super-organized one, so I’m not up on the fine points. And Jonah’s practice was so big and complex in comparison.”