As Husbands Go (28 page)

While she seemed surprised at the question, she answered in a polite way, which made me feel, despite my pounding heart, that it wasn’t an unreasonable query. “An older man. Longish gray hair. The doorman thought he looked either theatrical or Eastern European, though he didn’t notice any accent. He believes he’s seen the man a fair number of times over the last year or two. Goes up, stays for a half hour or forty-five minutes, then out. Also, he saw no one else during his shift, four in the afternoon until midnight; no one else had any business in Ms. Dillon’s apartment. She went for her usual late-afternoon walk and came back under an hour later—alone.”

Petrakis spoke up quickly, as if afraid I’d beat him to asking something else. “Was the doorman who was on duty earlier that day also questioned?”

“Yes. He says she had no deliveries, no repair people of any kind.
The only client was a regular—a man in his mid- to late seventies—who got there around ten o’clock and was out before eleven. That early-shift doorman saw Dorinda a little later, when she came down to check the mail, but she didn’t go out.” Eddie Huber had either a trace of a New England accent or that studied way of saying some words—“re-pay-ah” for “repair”—that I’d noticed with a couple of Jonah’s friends at Yale. Jonah said it was the last gasp of what used to be the New England boarding school accent, the way Franklin Roosevelt and upper-class people used to talk.

I leaned forward to run my finger inside the back of my shoe, as if it were digging in near my Achilles tendon, but really to look at my mother-in-law. Thank God, her eyes were now on Eddie Huber, and though she was still holding the sides of her chair, her grip didn’t seem as desperate. My guess was she had somehow determined the chief of homicide was an aristocrat, not someone working-class from New Hampshire. That was keeping Babs on her best behavior.

“Who’s representing Dorinda?” Petrakis asked. “Legal Aid?”

“No. A lawyer named Joel Winters.”

“Never heard of him.” Petrakis rubbed his forehead. He would have been a nice-enough-looking guy except for his forehead and scalp, a few inches north. Earlier in his life, he must have had a low hairline, but what was left were tufts of fuzz, like bits of brown cotton balls, randomly growing between his forehead and the top of his skull. “Is he any good?”

Eddie Huber shrugged, which I thought was a pretty classy way of saying someone sucked. Maybe she actually was one of those blue-blood types, the kind who behaved as if they’d signed some code of behavior in Ms. Pomfret’s penmanship class as soon as they learned script. I’d found that most people who considered themselves American aristocrats were no more honorable than anybody else. Some, in fact, flying first-class through life on family and school connections (not in a middle seat in row 37, where their own abilities would get them), had the moral code of hyenas. Even Andrea Brinckerhoff acted as if eight of the Ten Commandments were too annoying to be taken seriously.

“What’s Dorinda’s defense?” Petrakis asked, making me glad for the first time that he was there. Lieutenant Paston had given me some details, but I’d been so rattled when he dropped by that I wasn’t sure I’d even heard everything he said, much less remembered it.

“She was unconscious. She opened the closet door to get Dr. Gersten’s coat; someone was in there with Dorinda’s electric broom and hit her over the head with it.”

“When she says she opened the closet door,” Petrakis said, “did she mention whether whoever was supposedly in there had the broom raised in readiness? Or did the person pick it up when the door opened?”

“I don’t think . . .” Eddie Huber raised herself a few inches out of her chair and leaned forward to one of the higher piles on her desk. She found what she was looking for a few inches from the top, papers held together with a large butterfly clip. Wetting her middle finger, she leafed through them, then put them down. “That was never asked,” she said. “And now her lawyer won’t let us near her. All right, so she claims she was unconscious. When she came to and discovered Jonah’s body, she called a lawyer she had used on the drug charges: Faith Williams.”

“Never heard of her, either,” Petrakis said.

“Doesn’t matter. Williams wasn’t in, Dorinda left a message. While she waited for Williams to phone back, she threw a few things into a bag—just in case—though it’s on the police video that when she was asked ‘In case of what?’ she was unable to say. She waited an hour. When Williams hadn’t gotten back to her, she put on a pair of gloves, took whatever cash there was in Jonah’s wallet, then left. She withdrew an additional four hundred dollars from her account at an ATM and took the subway to Forty-second Street, then the shuttle to Times Square. She stopped in a store, bought a curly red wig. Then she walked over to Port Authority and took the next bus to Las Vegas.”

“Did the doorman see Dorinda leave?” I asked.

“No,” Eddie Huber said. “Sorry I didn’t mention it: Dorinda said she left the building via the service entrance that’s off to the side.”

I tried to picture it. “Is it, like, around the corner from the entrance to the building?”

“Sort of.” I thought I heard the ultra-bland tone in her “sort of” that people put on when they’re pissed, but maybe it was two-thirty in the afternoon and she needed another cup of coffee. “The front door of the building is mid-block, so the service entrance is technically on the same street as the front entrance. But it’s a fairly large building, and the service door is set in a gap between that building and the one next to it. You go about six feet down an alleyway between the buildings to access the service door.”

“So the doorman can’t see it from where he stands,” I said.

“It’s monitored.” Eddie Huber barely moved her lips as she said it, so much like a ventriloquist that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see an assistant DA dummy perched on her lap. “The doorman has a console at his front desk with closed-circuit TV screens for the elevator, the lobby-level staircase behind the fire door, the service elevator, and the service entrance and alleyway. So he would see whatever is going on.”

“Unless he’s helping someone with packages or hailing a cab,” I said.

“According to the building’s management and all the doormen, the service entrance is always locked to the outside by a deadbolt. Of course, it can always be opened from the inside. When someone needs to get in that way, the doorman buzzes the porter. If he has any question about whether to let someone in, he calls the building superintendent.”

“But Dorinda got out without anyone seeing her,” I said.

Eddie Huber nodded. “Yes, she must have gone down the service elevator.” Her thin, straight hair bobbed along with the motion of her head.

“So if the door is unlocked from the inside, it’s possible that she or anybody else in the building could have let somebody else in earlier,” I said.

“Technically, yes. Technically, anything could have happened. But we have overwhelming evidence, physical and circumstan
tial, that Dorinda committed the crime. We believe we have proof beyond a reasonable doubt. We wouldn’t bring the case if we didn’t think so. We also believe she was alone at the time of the murder, had no accomplices, and that’s what we’re going with.”

Didn’t you ever hear of anybody taping a lock? Or breaking it so they could get in from the outside?
I was taking a deep breath to ask some modified version of that question when I heard the softest “Shh,” like an exhalation through clenched teeth. And that’s what it was, air through teeth. Not Petrakis, who I figured was annoyed that I was mixing in when he was there; it was my father-in-law, looking straight at me and shaking his head, warning me again to keep quiet.

“We wouldn’t be proceeding with our case unless we thought it was not only strong but just,” Eddie Huber said, making me realize I hadn’t been quite as subtle as I’d thought.

“I think I can speak for all the Gerstens when I say we appreciate and value that,” Petrakis said. “All we ask is that you keep us informed, either directly or through me. As I’m sure you understand, Eddie, the family has had more than its share of shocks and surprises.”

“Absolutely,” Eddie Huber said.

“Mrs. Gersten,” he went on, “Mrs. Jonah Gersten, has been through an unimaginable nightmare . . .”

He babbled on, and at first I got steamed by the “Mrs. Jonah” thing. Every time we got an invitation saying “Dr. and Mrs. Jonah Gersten,” I’d say something to Jonah, like, “This is enough to get me to put on one of my mother’s T-shirts!” He’d start to laugh, and I’d go on, “Give me a break! Aren’t I entitled to a name of my own? Is this 1907 or something? How much extra would they have to pay
a calligrapher for a Susan?”

“. . . a highly developed ethical sense.”

I assumed Petrakis was talking about me. He was, because Eddie Huber gave me a nod of recognition, like
Good ethics. Mazel tov.
I nodded back, even though I’d never been totally sure what ethics meant (not counting medical ethics, which had been a huge deal at Yale) and whether they were different from morals.

Practically like the Rockettes, Petrakis and Clive made the same move simultaneously, inching to the front of their chairs, putting their right foot forward and leaning on it as they began to get up. So I said, “One quick question, Ms. Huber. Why would one of Dorinda Dillon’s hairs near the second stab wound be proof of her, you know, examining Jonah to see if he was dead? Wouldn’t it be even more likely to have gotten there in the course of . . . a prostitute cozying up to her client? I’m not saying you don’t have a really good case against her, but—”

Maybe Babs would have yelled or cursed or even smacked me if she didn’t believe Eddie Huber was the second coming of Katharine Hepburn, which struck me as showing she really was a total wreck and possibly delusional. Instead, she stood so fast Clive didn’t even have a chance to get out of his chair before she was in the hall. My father-in-law hurried after her. I left more slowly because I sensed what fun awaited me. I knew I had gone too far for my in-laws. But not for me.

“How dare you!” Babs shouted at me as I came through the door. “What kind of sick, attention-getting game is this you’re playing?”

“What . . . ?” It was such a blast that I staggered backward. It wasn’t just her shouting in a public place, it was her shouting, period. The loudest she’d ever been was saying “Damn!” when she couldn’t open the clasp of a bracelet. And while I was as familiar with her hostility as with her Gigi de Lavallade Ingénieux scent, it was always in the background, barely noticeable or low-level annoying, like elevator music.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. It sounded like a lame question, because most of the time when you ask it, you know very well what the person is talking about. But I hadn’t a clue. A sick, attention-getting game?

“‘What are you talking about?’” she mimicked, and the “talking” came out not only loud enough to bounce off the walls but as the meanest imitation of a New York accent I’d ever heard.

“Come on, Babs,” Clive urged. He held her arm with one hand and placed his other on her back to maneuver her toward the elevator. “It’ll be okay.”

“How will it be okay?” she shouted. “Tell me—”

“Mrs. Gersten,” Christopher Petrakis said quietly, “why don’t we all go downstairs? We can talk outside.”

“Why don’t you go?” she snapped back. “This doesn’t concern you.” I was hoping she’d keep at him for a minute or two so I could get out of there, but at that moment she turned back to me. “You realize, I suppose, that your idiot questions could make them rethink the case against that disgusting whore. ‘Oh, the poor little widow wants to be sure all the i’s are dotted.’ And for what? To keep the scandal in the news!”

“You really have to get her out of here,” Petrakis told Clive.

“Don’t you think I know that?” Clive snapped back. My father-in-law put his arm around Babs and drew her close. “Come, my dear. Let’s go home. There are offices all around here, and they might think this is a security situation. We don’t want them picking up the phone, calling the police, and saying—”

“You’re raising questions about any stupid detail you can think of,” Babs kept going at me. “You are in such denial. You really think you had the fairy-tale marriage, princess. You’ll do anything to convince yourself that ‘Ooh, Jonah loved me sooo much he wouldn’t put his life in jeopardy without realizing it by going to a vile, druggy whore. It must be some CIA plot. Or he wandered into that apartment by mistake, and she just happened to be holding scissors and stabbed him.’” The door to Eddie Huber’s office slammed shut, but my mother-in-law didn’t take the hint. “You turned his life into a
hell.”

“If you can’t deal with this,” Petrakis said to Clive, “I’m going to have to escort Mrs. Gersten, the younger Mrs. Gersten, out of—”

But the older Mrs. Gersten wouldn’t be stopped. “It was
you
who insisted on going through with having triplets. The doctor made it very clear to you that the pregnancy could be reduced to one or two. I saw the exhaustion in Jonah’s eyes every single time we were together. There was
nothing
but tumult in his life. Demands and more demands. What I don’t understand is how you can delude yourself that he wouldn’t go elsewhere, just for a quick release, just to get away from the constant turmoil. And now you’re rewriting history. You’re asking questions to—”

I cut her off. “I have a question for you. Mason, Dash, Evan: Which one or two would Jonah have wanted to get rid of? And while we’re at it, I’ve got another question. Did he ever once complain about our marriage? Or me? Or are you the one believing your own fucking fairy tale?”

I left as fast as I could. Only when I was outside did I realize that I had failed to ask Eddie Huber why Dorinda Dillon would have stabbed Jonah only twice.

Chapter Twenty-One