As Husbands Go (38 page)

From the beginning, I’d known in my heart that Jonah was what I’d believed he was, loving and true. But along the way, my head had serious doubts. Okay: Not to feel overly guilty, most heads would do the same. Now I knew my heart had been smarter. But aside from feeling so grateful and relieved by my new knowledge, what could I do with it?

“I don’t want to hear any explanations,” Willie told me once he was free. “You got what to cry about, okay?” He looked around and handed me some green tissue paper to blow my nose in. I probably looked a little too directly into his eyes because I wanted to avoid seeing his arms. “Go ahead, honk away, but don’t blame me if you walk out of here with a green nose.” Then we did our Florabella business, Willie pushing a dark pink peony, the Edulis Superba, so hard I finally gave in.

Being in the flower market was usually the great joy of my job, in Manhattan in jeans and work boots, sipping coffee that got cold fast from the chill of all the refrigeration. The colors, the smells, the relationships that weren’t quite friendships but came close: It all made me feel part of the world where nature and commerce met, maybe what a farmer felt when he hauled his potatoes to market.

But when I stopped crying, the flower market held no charm for me. I could have been in an office with fluorescent lights and no windows. All I could think of was sheepy Dorinda talking in her flat 800-number voice, saying, “He heard I was a miracle worker.” And then “something about his hand.” Why hadn’t anyone asked her about this before? I knew the answer. They had all assumed Jonah was there for sex.

One thing I now was sure of: Dorinda Dillon had not killed Jonah. It simply didn’t add up, in either my head or my heart. I believed what she had said. He was a new client. They had hardly gotten beyond the hello stage. She had no reason to kill him. Sparky and I had pretty much demolished Grandma Ethel’s burglar theory, but did I have anything to replace it with? A random-intruder theory?

I finished with Willie and a couple of our other dealers and had the flowers and a couple of buckets of the floral preservative we
liked loaded into the Florabella truck that I’d parked in a nearby lot before taking the taxi to Rikers Island. It was an old Chevy panel truck we’d bought mostly for its color, a lovely celadon green, a case of foolish business thinking that had actually turned out well. I was heading toward the Midtown Tunnel when I decided to take a look at what I’d been picturing for so long: Dorinda’s apartment building. I headed up Third Avenue and turned past her apartment building, a large box with windows, probably badly built in the sixties. As I drove by, I noticed the side entrance about fifty feet from the front door. Just then a doorman walked out in a long gray military-style coat, looking like some character from
The Nutcracker
.

I drove into a garage a block away and talked the guy into taking the truck for fifteen minutes even though he said, “We don’t take trucks.” Charm and a twenty did it. Walking down the street, I felt at a loss because I was so used to being “done” when I went out: hair, makeup, nails, accessories. My casual was somebody else’s wedding day. Jeans, shirt, old quilted vest, hair in a ponytail wasn’t the way I dealt with any world except jail or the flower market.

“Hello,” I said to the doorman, knowing I couldn’t say “Excuse my outfit.” “My name is Joan Smith. I’m a social worker from Manhattan Human Services.” He didn’t look impressed, but on the other hand, he didn’t look unsympathetic. “I’m doing some background on Miss Dillon.”

“And?”

So he wasn’t exactly friendly. I didn’t know why, but I got the feeling that his “And?” had zero to do with me and a lot to do with Dorinda Dillon. “All I’m trying to do right now is get a sense of her.” I had a flash of worry that he wouldn’t believe the Bloomberg administration would be paying for a social worker to get a sense of an accused murderer, but he nodded like he had a parade of social workers dropping by every day looking to get senses. “Did you know her?”

“You might say that,” the doorman said. His sleeves were too long. They covered his knuckles, and I wanted to tell him to take his coat to a tailor and ask for a three-inch hem. “I was the guy on duty
when the doctor came.”

“Do you remember him?”

“Yeah, sure. Well dressed. An East Sixties kind of guy, except I heard he lived on Long Island.”

Since the doorman was in a chatty mood, I decided to check out what either Eddie Huber or Lieutenant Paston had told me. “Was he one of her regulars?”

“No. Never saw him before.”

I realized I had to start sounding like a social worker, except I wasn’t quite sure what one sounded like. “I’m trying to get a picture of her character.” He made a face that came close to a smirk but wasn’t. I gave him my mega-wattage plastic-surgeons’-convention smile and said, “I’m not asking about deep-down goodness or honor, just what she was like on a day-to-day basis.” He seemed a little hesitant, so I added, “Don’t worry. I’ve been at this job over ten years. I stopped getting shocked after three months.”

“Bottom line on the character?” he said. “Not so great. Didn’t even bother saying hello unless you said it first. Like who did she think she was? A duchess? And another thing: Like you said you’ve been doing your work over ten years. I’ve been doing mine for almost thirty.” I did the
Omigod!
You couldn’t be that old
gape, which he seemed to appreciate. “So over the years, in these rental buildings and condos, I run into a fair number of girls who do what she does. Most of them go out of their way to be friendly—friendly in a nice way—because they don’t want trouble, they don’t want a doorman hassling their johns or even being not polite. And Christmas? They’re right at the top of the good-tipper list. You can predict it. Big tip, nice card with a thank-you. You know what I got this year from Dorinda Dillon? Fifty bucks in old crumpled-up bills. The day after Christmas. She hands it to me like it was five hundred in nice crisp bills.”

“No card?” I asked.

“No card.”

I sighed and shook my head sadly.

“Doesn’t that say everything about her character?” he asked.

“Loud and clear,” I said. I waited while he let in a tenant with a
baby in a stroller, a shopping bag of groceries, and some forsythia branches in cellophane that looked like they had two more days to live. “So how did it work with her clients? Did they just come to the door and ask for her?”

“Right. And I have to ask all the time, ‘Who shall I say is calling?’ because I have to buzz her. And they all say they’re Mr. Johnson, which is what she has them say. And so I let them up.”

“Besides the doctor, did anyone else go up there that day?”

“A few hours earlier, the other doorman let in a regular. An old guy. Came and went. And another regular earlier in the day. But nobody else when I was on duty. Not even another girl for a threesome. Maybe I shouldn’t say that.”

“Please. You should hear some of the things I hear. I’m unshockable.”

He smiled. “You must have a tough job.”

“Sometimes. I love learning about people, about their lives, so overall, I enjoy the work. You know what the hardest part is?” I asked.

“What?”

“Walking and walking.” I lowered my voice. “And if you’ll excuse the expression, finding a bathroom.”

“Don’t I know it. Used to be, you could walk into a bar or restaurant anywhere in the city, do what you had to do, say thank you and goodbye.”

“Not these days,” I said. “Can I ask? What do you do?”

“Oh. It’s no problem. They have a toilet in the basement right by the elevator. They got a buzzer down there. I lock the front door, and if the tenants or someone needs me, they press the button. I’m gone for a minute, but at least it’s right here in the building.”

“I’m jealous,” I told him, and we smiled at each other.

I filled in Grandma Ethel after dinner but begged off her suggestions about researching hand fetishes on the Web or, as her alternate fun-filled evening activity, turning on some station that was having an Audrey Hepburn festival. Instead, I went to bed with a copy of
Vogue,
but I couldn’t concentrate on the articles, so I just looked at
ads. I must have fallen asleep about nine-thirty because when the phone rang a little after ten, the sound startled me awake. I grabbed it, and my “hello” came out like a chicken’s squawk.

“Susie?” Theo. “How’s it going?” His bedtime calls were becoming an unpleasant habit.

“Fine.”

“I hope I didn’t wake you.” Without giving me a chance to offer a polite “Oh no, you didn’t,” which I wasn’t going to, he went on, “I spoke to my parents after they dropped by your house on their way home from the Hamptons. They say you’re doing so much better.”

“It was a nice visit,” I said. Clearly, he wasn’t going to refer to his last nasty phone call.

“Susie, I know you’ll think what I’m about to ask is terrible. But I just want you to understand I really don’t mean it in any bad or selfish way.”

“Okay,” I said. Knowing Theo, I realized a little extra was necessary, so I added, “I wouldn’t think that at all.”

“Here goes,” he said in his smoothest voice. “A while back, Jonah and I were talking. It was around the time you guys asked me if I’d be the guardian for the boys if God forbid you died, and I said yes. Anyway, Jonah said that besides the guardianship thing, he was going to remember me in his will. So I was wondering—you haven’t said anything—if he left me any kind of keepsake.”

I still hadn’t shaken off all the sleep, so I almost said there wasn’t any particular keepsake. But I stopped myself, because I realized that when he said “keepsake,” he wasn’t talking about a memento. He was, as always, talking about money.

“Jonah didn’t have anything in particular as a keepsake for you,” I told him.

“Oh.”

“Is there anything of his you’d like to have?”

“You choose something,” he said, like he didn’t really care.

“How about his plastic bar mitzvah clock?” I wanted to ask. “Theo, let me think about it, look through his things. I want to choose something that meant a lot to Jonah and will mean a lot to
you. I’ll get to it over the weekend, I promise you.”

Surprisingly, I fell back to sleep almost immediately, probably because my brother-in-law’s request was a total nonshock. Jonah and I had debated whether he was needy or greedy or both so many times that we’d finally stopped because we really didn’t care. The possibility of his guardianship of the boys had seemed so remote when we’d done our wills. I realized now that we hadn’t thought it through. I needed to make a new will. Soon.

My first call the next morning was to the delightful Joel Winters. I told him that I’d had a good interview with Dorinda and, shoveling a little more fertilizer onto his ego, asked what he would do if he could change the criminal justice system. While he talked, I sat in the bathroom in front of a magnifying mirror, holding the phone between my ear and shoulder, and tweezed my eyebrows. When he stopped to take a breath, I said, “I do need one favor from you. I know you can get a message to Dorinda. I really need to find out who referred the doctor, the plastic surgeon who was killed, to her. Unless you know offhand.” He didn’t. “Was it through one of her own clients? She said he was a private client. I’m a little rushed on this, so I appreciate you getting back to me as soon as you can. And by the way, I know my producer will love what you were just saying about mandatory sentencing.”

Since Grandma Ethel was not one of the early risers, I did something I should have done days before: I got out the CD Liz Holbreich had given me with all the materials she and her colleagues had collected during their brief investigation. I loaded it on the computer, but I couldn’t figure out how to search through the documents to see if I could find the Marty who’d shown up on Jonah’s calendar.

That wanting-to-throw-something rage that comes with computer frustration overtook me, but since I was down in Jonah’s study and didn’t want to damage anything, I tried to take deep breaths. It worked enough so that actual thinking could take place. I called Lizbeth Holbreich and asked her to help me find Marty.

“I’ve thought about you so often,” she said. “I’m glad you called, because I wasn’t sure whether or not to call you. I hope you’re doing . . . I suppose I should say ‘I hope you’re doing as well as can be expected.’”

“I am doing all right. The missing him is much worse than I ever imagined at the beginning, but the day-to-day stuff is coming along.”

“And your sons?”

“There are problems, but lots of times they’re fine, normal. I just want to strike the right balance between keeping their father as a good memory and not continually poking them and saying ‘Hey, don’t enjoy yourselves too much because you have a dead father.’”

We talked for a few more minutes, and while I would have loved to get Liz’s reading on my whole Dorinda on Rikers Island saga, I asked how to go about finding a name on the CD she’d given me. I made notes that seemed simple enough, but when she said, “Tell me what name you’re looking for. I have the information on our server and . . .” I waited under a minute.

“Marty,” I said. “The name was first on Jonah’s calendar last November, though I only searched back a year. The last time he was on it was eleven days before Jonah was killed.”

“No last name, I assume?” Liz asked.

“No last name, no address, no phone numbers. I checked Marty and Martin. There were Martins and a Martino who were patients, but patients were connected with the Manhattan Aesthetics database.”

“If you ever give up flowers, you could come and work for us. Give me a moment. Let me see what I can find.” This time she took a lot longer than a minute, but I had no desire whatsoever to tweeze
my eyebrows. I thought about Theo and why someone with well-off parents, a good education, and an okay career as a casting director would expect his brother to leave him a “keepsake” of money in his will when the brother had a wife and three children. “There’s an Anello and Martin, Rare Books and Texts,” she said.

“He had started collecting some old medical books,” I said.

“And there’s a Martin Ruhlmann at a 212 number, no address. Hold on. I’ll check him out.” It didn’t take much longer than a few clicks of Liz’s mouse. “Martin Ruhlmann, certified public accountant. A forensic accountant,” she said. “But now that I look at the name, it’s vaguely familiar. We have forensic accountants here at the agency.”