As Husbands Go (44 page)

“Did you ever explain that to him?” I asked.

“Of course I did. In that last conversation. Alas, Jonah’s so-called forensic accountant discovered Phoebe Kingsley had some sort of secret fund, and from there the matter took on a life of its own in Jonah’s mind. By the time he came to me for an explanation, he did not want one. All he seemed to want to do was accuse me of dirty dealings.” Gilbert John rose from his plastic chair in his elegant fashion, as if from a throne. “All through this talk now,” he went on, “I’ve wanted to say to you, ‘Jonah was like a son to me.’ I held back
because it sounded so fatuous, so histrionic. The truth of the matter is, he was like a son to me.” He seemed about to come toward me, but then he turned, nodded goodbye, and hurried from the room as if on the way to an emergency.

What began as a morning head-clearing walk the next day, Sunday, while the boys were at a birthday party, ended with me ringing Andrea’s doorbell, the chimes of which would have been appropriate to Westminster Abbey. When I heard the heavy tread coming down the stairs, I almost turned and ran. Either I flaked out for a few seconds, or Fat Boy was faster on his feet than I’d thought.

He opened the door and said, “She’s at some hotel, Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, in the city because some old ladies from France who embroider things come every year and she has to pick out new linens. What is that, sheets or tablecloths?”

“Probably both,” I said.

“Economic stimulus. Who needs the Treasury or the fucking Fed when Andrea Brinckerhoff gets going?” He scratched the gargantuan belly beneath his lavender Polo shirt and invited me in.

We sat upstairs in his office in front of all his TV screens, Fat Boy in his recliner, his bare feet with little curlicues of blond hair on top of each toe hanging over the footrest. I sat a foot away, in a smaller chair that also reclined, although I didn’t take advantage.

I filled him in on what had happened with Gilbert John and asked him what he thought. He said, “It’s like this with coincidences. One, okay. More than one, a James Bond movie. Get what I’m saying?”

“Not totally,” I said.

“Not at all, you mean. So let me explain. The Phoebe check, okay, maybe, could be. But then College Girls and Dorinda? Then add to that Redleaf Capital, because ten minutes after I got off the phone with you, what do I have up on my monitor but a list of Redleaf’s investors, past and present. Not to toot my own horn, because I don’t have to with you, you knowing I’m . . .” He shrugged.

“What are you going to say?” I asked. “‘Aw shucks, well, I’m
darn smart’?”

“I was trying to be charming. That well-socialized-modesty shit. Forget it. I’m brilliant. You know it, I know it. But brilliance is one thing, and getting a confidential list like that in ten minutes on the weekend is fucking off the charts. You’ve got your dumb look on. You probably lost your train of thought, which people do all the time with me, so this is where I’m at. I looked at the list. Jonah was never a Redleaf investor. No Gersten in the history of the world was ever an investor with them, which speaks well for the family. Now, I’ll tell you who was and is an investor in Redleaf Capital: Gilbert John Noakes. Not a high-rolling investor like a lot of the shmucks who sank their money into that fund. But Noakes’s original investment of two point five mil has a current value of three hundred thousand and change. With a guy like him, that’s real money, a real goddamn fucking hit. And for a guy like me, this information is just another deposit in Gilbert John’s ever growing coincidence account. The guy is feeling short of cash. Desperate, maybe.”

“But there was something very believable when he said that Jonah was like a son to him.”

“Susie, ever hear of filicide?” He didn’t give me time to answer, which I might have in an hour or two. “Filicide. The killing of one’s child.”

Two days later, Eddie Huber finally called to say my copies of Gilbert John’s MasterCard payments to College Girl checked out. The last time he had used the service was 2006. But two weeks before Jonah died, Gilbert John had called and said he’d wanted a new girl, someone he hadn’t used before. He’d arranged to pay cash. He
didn’t want anything charged to a credit card, even though it would appear as College Data Research Services.

They got him Dorinda Dillon. A few hours before their scheduled date, Gilbert John called the service to say he couldn’t make it. However, there was a 20 percent cancellation fee, so he had a street-level messenger service deliver an envelope with the cash. He hadn’t gotten any sex from Dorinda. He hadn’t even met her. But he had her name and address.

“We’ll keep you advised on the progress of the case,” Eddie Huber said to me. Not that I was expecting a thank-you note, but she could have said something like “Good work” or “We would appreciate your not mentioning our little investigatory oversights to CNN.”

The life that I was stuck with and blessed with went on. I worked at Florabella, went back to my book group, where, luckily, I’d missed the session on
The Idiot,
interviewed several nannies from what Babs called “the only possible agency” in an effort to replace Ida and Ingvild when they went back to Norway. One nanny seemed really great, but after she met the boys, she said she didn’t want to work on Long Island.

After Passover at my in-laws’, where Dashiell climbed their bookshelves to toss down a few pre-Columbian statues so the three of them could play a Baby Moses game, I took them and Ida and Ingvild to a hotel in South Beach for the rest of the vacation. We spent half the time at Grandma Ethel and Sparky’s. I fantasized, briefly, about opening a Florabella Tropical, but I knew I had to go home. Before I left, I tried and failed to convince my grandmother to have some sort of reconciliation with my mother.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll call and say, ‘Hello, Sherry, this is your mother. I’m sorry I left you with Lenny. Have a nice life. Goodbye.’”

“Don’t you feel—”

“No,” she snapped. “I don’t feel.”

Grandma Ethel came to New York a week later and sat with me
in Eddie Huber’s office. Gilbert John Noakes had agreed to plead guilty. But as part of the deal, he had to sit with me, face-to-face, and tell me what had happened. The other part of the deal was that during his fifteen to twenty-five years in prison, he would be allowed to do mosaic work for four hours a week, as long as he maintained good behavior.

Grandma Ethel and I were led to chairs across from Eddie Huber. Her desk was bare, and she seemed vulnerable, like a soldier without a weapon. I guessed it was a security precaution. Gilbert John was seated on one side of the room, about eight feet from us. His posture had initially appeared relaxed, close to lounging, especially considering that besides being handcuffed to the arms of the chair and wearing irons on his ankles with a very short chain between them, he had a cop on either side of him, another in front of the window, and a fourth guarding the door. But something in his head must have pinged,
Ladies present!
and his back reflexively straightened.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this,” he told me in his rich, gentlemanly voice.

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

“Where to begin?” Maybe he had an inner voice-over saying,
Everyone leaned forward expectantly,
because when no one reacted, he sighed and said, “It’s like this. Over the years, Jonah and I had talked about holding all our tension in our hands.” He folded his hands into fists and squeezed them. I had no idea if he was aware of what he was doing. “I saw Jonah rubbing his hand in the offices several times and could see he was in pain.”

“Did you know Jonah was suspicious of you?” I asked.

“I wasn’t sure. But I pride myself in being perceptive. I knew he was concerned about our inventory shrinkage. And then there was the check from that dreadful Phoebe woman. Do you know what she told me the GP Fund stood for? Gorgeous Phoebe. I knew it would be only a matter of time before . . . I suppose there’s no need to go into detail. I realized Jonah was putting it all together, which, as you can imagine, was quite troubling to me. I had no idea he had already begun looking into it in such an organized fashion. In passing, I told
him I knew a brilliant massage therapist who had studied in India and did ayurvedic hand massage on the top surgeons of New York. I said I myself had just been to her and that I couldn’t stop raving. No one could.”

“And then,” Grandma Ethel said.

“I bribed the building’s porter to get in and get the key. I made an imprint in modeling clay. I knew it would be dangerous to tape a door latch closed. That’s how the Watergate burglars were discovered, taping back the locks—a piece of historical trivia. But I did use a high-viscosity skin adhesive to glue the latches of the doors on both the service entrance and the room where they keep the tenants’ keys. Marvelous stuff. And it readily cleaned off with a solvent, acetone. However, the debossment of the key in the clay was sufficient, though at the risk of sounding crass, it cost me a fortune to get a copy.” He leaned forward to me. It burned me that they had allowed him to put on his own clothes, that they hadn’t brought him to the DA’s office in a prison jumpsuit. “I know you think I’m terrible. You’re right.”

“Keep talking,” I said.

“I told Jonah I had my secretary make an appointment for him, but I did it myself and entered it on his calendar. I was terribly nervous he might refuse to go, or might not show up. The day before Jonah’s appointment with Dorinda, when she went for a walk—the porter told me she went out once a day—I let myself in and looked around.”

“Weren’t you worried you’d run into the porter?” Grandma Ethel asked.

The small smile that made its appearance and quickly vanished was one I’d seen so often during the years of Jonah’s partnership with him: Gilbert John, self-satisfied. “One has to take risks in this sort of enterprise, but risks can be minimized. I called the doorman from my cell phone, taking care to press star-six-seven. That blocks the caller ID, you know. I told him, ‘You need to get the porter up to the tenth-floor trash room this minute!’ in a very irate manner. I waited three minutes and then took a deep breath and hurried in via
the service door. No porter, as I’d expected . . . or at least hoped.”

“All right, so you got up there,” I said. “Then what?”

“I found her scissors. I sharpened them. The following afternoon, when she went out again, thank goodness, I waited down the street a bit, coat collar up, brim of an old felt fedora lowered so I was not recognized. Finally, I saw the porter. I knew I would eventually. Again a risk, but he was slow-moving, to say nothing of slow-thinking. When he came out the service door with a huge can of recyclables and was setting it on the curb, I rushed down the alleyway, let myself in, and took the service elevator upstairs, taking care to send it back down. I secreted myself in Dorinda’s front closet. I’d planned on sneaking up on them, knocking her out with a stun gun, then quickly slitting Jonah’s carotid artery with a blade of the scissors.” He paused. “I’m awfully sorry to burden you with these details, Susie, but I was told that I had to be completely forthright. What surprised me was that Jonah caught on so soon to what Dorinda actually was. He was so quick-witted. Dorinda came back to the closet incredibly fast to get Jonah’s coat. The stun gun fit too tightly in my coat pocket, and I couldn’t get it out fast enough. Instead, I knocked her out with the bottom of the electric broom.”

“You cleaned off the broom, didn’t you?” Grandma Ethel said. “And then vacuumed somewhere it wouldn’t show to get the brush dirty again.”

“Yes!” He sounded pleased that someone was recognizing his cleverness. “Actually, I dumped out the vacuum’s contents and swept them up again.” Then his eyes returned to me. “Certainly, I have no expectation that you will approve of me in any way, but I hope someday you recognize that was fast thinking.”

“It was fast thinking,” I agreed. “But it wasn’t good thinking. If it had been good, you wouldn’t be in leg irons now, facing four hours a week of mosaics followed by . . . what? Freedom after twenty-five years with no money and jailhouse dentures? Death.” He tried for a nonchalant shrug, but the handcuffs threw off his balance so only one shoulder rose. I went on, “You’ll have your art. But most likely, they’ll give you cheapo grout.”

I sketched that picture, if unconsciously, knowing Gilbert John was at least as visual as I was. He wouldn’t be able to resist coloring it and filling in the details: the inferior, gritty grout; the no-deodorant-for-me prison guard coming to take him back to his cell even though he had hardly begun to work.

“Come on,” Eddie Huber said to him, “you know the parameters of our agreement. Tell Mrs. Gersten what happened after you struck Dorinda Dillon with the electric broom.”

I was annoyed to see Gilbert John’s back relax into a slumped C in relief at her interruption. He said, “After hitting the woman, as you might imagine, I was very shaken. Jonah was strong, younger, but he was not prepared. As it turned out, neither was I. I was unable to open the scissors to slit his throat. So I had to stab him. Is there anything else you’d like to know?”

I didn’t answer. I just gave him a look I hoped he’d never forget, though I knew he would. I couldn’t manage a thank-you to Eddie Huber, but I gave her a nod. Together, Grandma Ethel and I walked out.

Outside, in the bright sun of early spring, I said, “This knowing doesn’t make anything better.”

“Did you think it would?” my grandmother asked.

“No. But I had to hear it.”

“Please, you don’t have to explain to me. How could you allow that sociopath in bespoke suiting to get away with murder and not have to face you? Not just you, the wife. You, the person who wanted to know the truth about what happened to Jonah.”

“It wasn’t so much truth-seeking as I couldn’t stand the thought of that repulsive, stupid, useless, innocent hooker rotting in jail . . . not that she’ll ever do any good on the outside. But I had to do something.”

“I guess that’s what ethics are,” she said. “Or is it ‘what ethics is’?”

“I think it’s ‘are,’” I said, “but I’m not sure.”