As Husbands Go (27 page)

Chapter Twenty

“You know the chief of the DA’s Homicide Bureau’s a woman?” my in-laws’ lawyer, Christopher Petrakis, asked me.

“Yes,” I said. My father-in-law also nodded. My mother-in-law acted as if all she’d heard was silence.

“Just so you know, because her name is Eddie Huber. It’s a nickname, but I forget what her real name is.” Christopher Petrakis adjusted his French cuffs by holding them at the very edge. This gave us a view of one of his gold scales-of-justice cuff links; a single diamond chip rested on only one pan of the scales, yet the two were in balance. “I call her Eddie Hubris. Obviously, not to her face.” He seemed a little surprised that none of us chuckled. You’d have thought that, having once worked in the DA’s office himself, he’d figure the parents and widow of a murder victim, who were about to go in to discuss the case against the accused, would not be given to chuckling.

The four of us stood outside the door to the chief’s office. A secretary had met us as we got off the elevator, walked us through the hall, then told Petrakis, “She’ll send somebody when she’s ready to see you.” The whole building was so run-down, I felt like I was breathing in not just dust but decades of suspended dirt that normal air currents could not pass through—mildew, tracked-in shoe crud, sneeze droplets from a 1967 flu outbreak.

When I’d called Babs and Clive to tell them I wanted to talk with someone in the DA’s office, I didn’t mention any of my assorted qualms about Dorinda Dillon. Still, from the moment Babs had
asked, “Would you mind terribly if one or both of us come?” I’d said, “Of course not. I was hoping you would.” That was immediately followed by Clive on speakerphone responding, “Excellent,” but in a tone he might use to offer a dismal prognosis. So I knew meeting with the chief of the Homicide Bureau would be a snap compared to dealing with Babs and Clive.

Babs had called me from her office three days in a row with variations on “Don’t you think you should wait until someone from the DA’s office calls
you
?” I mumbled some bullshit that included “proactive” and “engaged in the process.” She told me she was concerned that if we pushed too hard, the prosecutors might get the impression that we weren’t satisfied with their handling of the case. “As you know, Susie my dear,” she said, “they’ve been wonderfully cooperative about keeping us informed. But consider this: If we were seen in the building, word could leak out that the family was putting pressure on the district attorney’s office!”

Pressure for what? I wanted to ask. To get them to railroad a poor, innocent hooker? Unlikely, since they were absolutely certain Dorinda Dillon killed Jonah.

My mother-in-law’s calls were followed up by one from Clive, wanting to know if I’d have any objections if they brought along a lawyer. “We’ve got a first-rate man. Fine, fine reputation. He himself used to be with the DA’s office. With a midtown firm now. Comes highly, highly recommended.”

Their concerns about not wanting me to start trouble seemed over-the-top, especially because they had no clue about my agenda, to the extent that I had one. I wasn’t about to confide in them how plagued I was by the small doubts that kept popping up, only to disappear into
How could I have been thinking that?
—moments when my own craziness made me cringe. But later, in those dull-witted hours between the kids’ bedtime and mine, the doubts would pop up again, more powerful than ever.

Dr. Twersky, defying my principle (which, thankfully, I’d never mentioned to her in therapy) that women over fifty should never wear leather pants, had uncrossed her legs with a squeak and suggested
my in-laws might be overcome with grief and anger at Jonah’s death, made worse by the horrible publicity, even the social humiliation. Babs and Clive saw any questions about the case against Dorinda Dillon as . . . overstimulating, overwhelming, oversomething. The Gerstens wanted to let it be. They were older and more fragile than I was and therefore were at their breaking point.

It wasn’t until I was driving home from Dr. Twersky’s office that I’d considered she might be telling me I was being cruel to subject them to this; I was young enough to be resilient. I could eventually get over Jonah. The Gerstens didn’t have that going for them. I’d asked Dr. Twersky if, when someone was feeling fragile, was the remedy to call a criminal lawyer? She’d gone on about them viewing a lawyer as a wise guide or perhaps a protector. Now I thought,
Protection against what? Me?

I’d pulled over to the curb and parked in front of a tiny house dwarfed by a giant copper beech. I cried for a few minutes until I saw someone coming out of a house two doors down, walking one of the fifty thousand Labrador retrievers in Shorehaven, a community of thirty thousand people. Reasonably sure all my windows were closed, I’d yelled, “Go fuck yourself!” to either Dr. Twerksy or my in-laws, pulled out, and driven home.

Petrakis centered the gold Rolex on his wrist. Other than the watch and the scales-of-justice cuff links, he wasn’t a flashy guy. His suit was a gray box, his tie black with unassertive white dots, his shoes black lace-ups that were neither scuffed nor shined. It looked like one person took charge of his jewelry, while another did clothes. “Any minute now,” he told us.

“Thank you,” Clive said. He turned to inspect the wall next to him. It was peeling, and long pieces of paint hung down like the drooping leaves of a spiderwort. But he was staring, intent, examining the strips of paint as if they were hung in an up-and-coming gallery.

My father-in-law’s attire was a lot more elegant than the lawyer’s, but then only one person—Babs—was in charge of dressing him. Jonah once complained his father looked like an assistant fash
ion editor’s idea of a successful Manhattan doctor rather than an actual doctor. He’d laughed when I told him it was hostile to make it an “assistant editor.”

Petrakis’s arm made a sweep of the hall. “You can see for yourself. All the doors are open, so Hubris must be up to her eyeballs in work, or in deep conference with her door closed.”

Clive and I nodded. Listening, I could hear the drone of conversation from the other offices, the clicks of keyboarding, phones that honked like geese. Babs didn’t seem to have heard Petrakis and also seemed unaware of the noise of business. She stood pale and motionless, swathed in black. It was probably less for mourning than for the simple reason that black was the official color in her set, the Upper East Side’s red, white, and blue. The outfit was by a designer whose work I didn’t know: black pants that were almost leggings and a great deal of black jersey, somewhere between a dress and tunic, which fell several inches below the knee. All she needed was the face-veil thing to look like Mrs. ibn Saud, but I decided to compliment her on it to get some conversation going.

I was about to go over to her, but her posture stopped me cold. Her arms were rigid, as if she didn’t have elbows, and tight against her sides. Maybe she sensed I was going to take a step toward her because her eyes, which had been staring ahead at nothing, now shut tight. Someone facing a firing squad, hearing “Ready, aim . . .” would stand like that.

I felt awful, sick to my stomach that I was making her go through this, because she really did look fragile. Both she and Clive seemed to have lost weight since Jonah died; in fact, they appeared diminished in every way. Then it hit me that coming to the DA’s office wasn’t a command performance. Babs had asked if one or both of them could come, and there was only one answer I could have given.

The door opened, and three lawyers—well, two women and a man, all wearing glasses and carrying binders—whooshed out of the office and flew down the hall.

“Come in, come in,” a voice called. Petrakis tried ushering us all, but Clive held back to put an arm around Babs’s rigidity and lead
her slowly. He motioned to me to go ahead.

Eddie Huber was already up and circling her desk to greet us. “I apologize for keeping you waiting,” she said. By this time, Clive had steered Babs into the room. Eddie approached her first, extending a hand.

I was nervous that Babs would continue with the catatonia business, but my mother-in-law shook Eddie’s hand and said, “That’s quite all right. It’s kind of you to see us.” She said it so graciously that I took a closer look at Eddie to see what could bring out that response from Babs. I didn’t get it. Not that I had a mental image of the chief of a homicide bureau, but what I saw looked more like a woman in her mid-forties who taught Latin in high school in suburban Boston. She wore a plain sweater in a washed-out green that was probably called sage in the catalog she bought it from. The sweater was tucked into a wool A-line skirt in a wishy-washy color that didn’t deserve a name.

After shaking hands with Babs and telling her how sorry she was about Jonah, Eddie did the same with Clive, then me. Her handshake was strong, but if I’d been wearing a ring on my right hand, it wouldn’t have gotten squished. As she and Petrakis did the “How are you, Chris?” “Keeping out of trouble, Eddie” ritual, I noticed that her ballet flats looked like the ones from the fifties you see in vintage clothing stores—great leather but a little clunky in the sole-and-heel department. I wondered if she had some preppy/schoolmarm-style thing going. I might even have thought nun who works in the world except she didn’t have a cross, and she wore minimal makeup: a touch of mascara and a hint of beigey-pink lipstick. Why she would go that far and not spend fifteen more seconds putting on a little foundation was a mystery.

My in-laws were seated, but Petrakis had to move a pile of file folders from a chair to the floor so I could sit. Eddie, meanwhile, went back to her desk, sat, picked up the phone, and said, “Now. One more chair.” The words were snippy, but her tone was neutral, like that of an NPR voice announcing the time.

“Ms. Gersten,” she said, looking at me and not Babs, “asked for
this meeting so she could have a sense of how we’re proceeding on the case.”

Even though she wasn’t short, it was hard to see more than her head when she was sitting behind her desk. Besides an old, bloated computer monitor, it was covered with piles of files, notebooks, legal documents with metal clasps, newspapers, and panda tchotchkes—wood, ceramic, metal, plastic—not one with any artistic merit as far as I could see. There were yellow legal pads and loose papers, some stained with circles of coffee. A few cardboard cups were balanced atop the piles. One lay on its side; the remains of the coffee left in it made a little pond on one of the few areas of actual bare desk.

“As you know, Dorinda Dillon is in custody. Everything points to her as the perpetrator. We expect her to be indicted soon, and she’ll probably be brought to trial within sixty days.” Before I could ask “Are you sure?” she continued, “Her prints are on the scissors that were used as the weapon.”

“The scissors definitely were hers?” I asked. The door opened. Someone rolled in a secretary’s chair for Petrakis, then left.

“At the time she was interviewed in Las Vegas, she wasn’t asked. However, forensics has established that the scissors came from the medicine cabinet in her bathroom. The shelves there were full of dust from the compressed powder used in makeup, as well as regular dust and so forth. We found significant traces of that mix on the shank and around the finger rings of the scissors.”

Eddie Huber glanced across her desk wreckage at my in-laws, who were seated directly opposite her. Then she looked at me to see if any of us had questions. We didn’t. I was slightly off to the side and had to look past Clive to see Babs. What I saw was not encouraging. She was staring right at me, as if she’d been doing it for a while. Somehow she’d decided I merited more attention than the business at hand. Her hands, scarily white as they emerged from her long black sleeves, were gripping the sides of her chair as if she had to restrain herself from grabbing me.

I looked back at Eddie Huber and prayed for her to start talking again. She obliged. “We found what we posited was a strand of
Dorinda Dillon’s hair near the second wound, as if she bent over Dr. Gersten’s body to examine it closely.”

I expected a gasp from my mother-in-law just because she was a basket case. The phrase “Dr. Gersten’s body” was pretty ugly, especially under the fluorescent lights in that pigsty of an office. But Babs was silent, and I was afraid to check again in case she was still staring at me.

“Are the DNA results in?” Christopher Petrakis asked. I got the impression that he wasn’t as much genuinely curious as feeling the need to speak up and justify his five-hundred- or one-thousand-dollar-an-hour fee.

“Yes, we have the results,” Eddie Huber said. “And the hair found was Dorinda Dillon’s. All right, as I was saying . . .” While the two lawyers didn’t seem to dislike each other, they didn’t look to have great chemistry. She peered at a piece of yellow legal paper off to her right. “The doorman who was on duty that evening is willing to swear that no one came into the building whom he cannot account for. Ms. Dillon’s last, uh, visitor left the building a few hours before Dr. Gersten’s arrival.”

“Did the doorman describe what that guy, the previous visitor, looked like?” I asked.