As Husbands Go (33 page)

“I had a private investigator on my show a couple of times. Really easy to talk to, Cuban background, ran her whole operation herself. One of the things that struck me was she tried to learn as much as she could about whatever business she was investigating—wholesale jewelry, outboard motors, gift shops. She said the more she knew, the more comfortable she was in one world or another, the clearer she could see if there was any event or pattern that looked strange.”

“That’s interesting.”
Must have been a riveting show,
I thought as I got busy aligning the keyboard with the edge of the shelf it sat on. “I’d feel awkward calling Gilbert John or Layne or the office manager to tell me about the ins and outs of running a plastic surgery practice. Anyway, Jonah was really unhappy with the office manager not being on top of things, so it would be doubly sticky.”

She started working on the sides of her mouth again, even though there were no traces of dried lipstick anymore. When she pulled down, I could see how thin her skin was, how it was so much more loosely attached to her face than a younger woman’s would be.

“I still have a little heat on in the house,” I said. “It gets dry. Do you want some lip balm?”

“No, don’t need it. But you’re wasting your money on lip balm. Vaseline. It’s the answer to a maiden’s prayers. So tell me, what was the trouble with the office manager?”

“Jonah wasn’t crazy about him to begin with. The guy’s name is Donald Finsterwald. Jonah didn’t like the way he sucked up to the doctors but basically didn’t care if the rest of the world dropped dead. As far as I knew, he seemed all right at what he did, and he wasn’t terrible with the staff. Just patronizing. I really didn’t hear that much about him. But Liz—”

“The investigator,” my grandmother said.

“Right. She said Jonah thought Donald was doing a lousy job and was really upset. Jonah had e-mailed him about it. With the economy, they needed to do more marketing and PR, but Donald was doing less. And Liz found e-mails from Jonah to Donald about him doing a bad job tracking the practice’s financial performance.”

I gave her a fast rundown on the personalities: Gilbert John Noakes, the Founding Father, who now expected to pull out major money for traveling to professional conferences and doing pro bono surgery around the world. “Jonah said when Gilbert John took him in, and then Layne, he made a speech about someday wanting to do less for himself and more for the world, but someday came sooner than Jonah anticipated. Gilbert John was doing more for the world, but he never got around to expecting less for himself.”

“And the other doctor, Layne, didn’t take Jonah’s side?” she asked.

“No. She’s a good surgeon and a sweetie socially, but she seems violently allergic to confrontation in any form. Jonah used to imitate her in this kind of high-pitched gentle voice: ‘Isn’t it pleasant to be pleasant?’”

“So,” Grandma Ethel said, “you know more about his practice than you thought you did.”

“But I didn’t get it all from Jonah. I don’t know whether he was keeping some of it to himself, so as not to upset me, or because by the time he left the office to come home, he was sick of it.”

“The point is, you have some knowledge. It doesn’t matter where it comes from. Let’s see if anything on his calendar jumps out at us. Print out a set of monthlies so I don’t waste what’s left of my eyesight on the computer screen.”

Jonah had only a couple of pens with dark blue ink, so I hit the boys’ art supply basket and came back with a flat box containing a rainbow of thin-tipped markers. We decided to circle any questionable entry on the printed calendar pages. After a couple of minutes, Grandma Ethel found she had too many questionables and insisted I print out another set of calendar pages so we didn’t have to share. She wound up finishing ahead of me because as I came to an appoint
ment I couldn’t make sense of, I’d switch to Jonah’s contacts list and see if I could find something that came close.

I made pretty good progress, although even when there was a listing for the “Jun” who was on his calendar the first week in January at ten-thirty in the morning, it had only a Manhattan phone number. It looked as if Jonah was between surgeries at that hour, but I couldn’t get up the courage to pick up the phone. Maybe I was thinking “Jun” was a “We’ll gladly come to your office” prostitution ring.

Grandma Ethel reached across me, dialed the number, and asked for Jun. “Hello. This is an official call,” she said. I had no idea what that meant and neither did she, but it sounded important. “We found your name and number in the records of Dr. Jonah Gersten. You’ve heard . . .” The person on the other side of the line talked, then talked some more. Finally, Grandma Ethel said, “I see. Thank you. We appreciate your cooperation,” and hung up.

“Who was it?” I asked.

“The guy who made Jonah’s custom shirts. He heard about it, he’s really sorry, and he made the shirts but decided not to send them because that might—I forgot his exact words—cause offense or hurt. There’s no deposit or refund because Jonah had been a customer for five years. Jun would come to Jonah’s office with fabric swatches. He said Jonah stayed the same size, never gained weight or got flabby. That’s it in a nutshell.”

“What are you not telling me?”

“Aren’t you Little Miss Cross-examiner,” she said. “What makes you think there’s something I’m not telling?” I didn’t have time to answer. “Nothing. In fact, it was complimentary in a way. Something to the effect that a fine gentleman like Dr. Gersten should not have to die that way. My first thought was,
If a guy was a redneck slob, he deserved to be stabbed to death?
But like Sidney, my second husband, said once too often, ‘Ethel, that remark is beneath you.’ Anyway, I wasn’t keeping anything from you. I say whatever comes into my head. It’s part of my charm. See? I tried to do something unnatural—censor myself—and you picked it up in two sec
onds flat.”

One name started popping up early in November: Marty. The last Marty entry was eleven days before Jonah was killed. I couldn’t tell whether the appointments were in or out of the office, but they were all between noon and one in the afternoon. Grandma and I each circled five Martys, which struck us as possibly pertinent, especially when I couldn’t find any Marty or Martin in Jonah’s personal contacts. There were four Manhattan Aesthetics patients whose last name was Martin, one with Martin as a first name, and a Martino. Of them, only Brigitte Martin and Denise Martino were Jonah’s patients, and I couldn’t think of a way to call and ask “Did you have lunch or something else five times with my husband?”

Grandma Ethel was almost as tired as I was, so we called it quits. Bernadine’s teatime goodies hadn’t been enough, so I made us tuna-fish wraps on whole-wheat tortillas. By the time we were finishing, the boys and the twins had arrived. My grandmother looked from one to the other, not seeming at all appalled, but after being Fun Great-grandmother for fifteen minutes, she had me call a car service to take her back to the city.

As she left, I was on the verge of saying “See you tomorrow,” when I realized I might be overstepping my bounds in assuming she’d be around. There probably weren’t any such bounds with a sweet old granny you’d known forever. But Ethel O’Shea was not in that category. Besides, she had a life and a lover in another city, and whenever she mentioned Sparky, I could tell she missed her. Maybe I’d soon be on my own in finding the truth about Jonah’s murder.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The next morning, since I was stuck in thinking-about-partners mode anyway, I called Gilbert John. I thought both he and Layne would be in on a Thursday morning, operating and seeing patients. I asked if I could come into town and meet with them. Gilbert John said, “Of course!” in his most mellifluous voice, but I could hear he was baffled about why I wanted to stop in. He asked if there were any papers or documents I wanted to look at that they could have ready for me. I was clearly an unscheduled annoyance, though he didn’t intimate that. I told him I had no agenda. I wanted to see the two of them, talk with them.

Since Grandma Ethel’s habit seemed to be hiring a car and driver to bring her out to Long Island and simply ringing the doorbell, I called her and told her I’d be in the city meeting with Jonah’s partners. “Don’t ask them directly,” she murmured, as if she were cupping the mouthpiece with her hand to avoid being overheard by a crowd of paparazzi just dying to listen in on the conversation of a seventy-nine-year-old.

“Don’t ask them what?”

“Don’t rush me, I’ll work cheaper. What I’m saying is you shouldn’t ask them up-front if there were any serious bad feelings between Jonah and that Donald person. It would only put them on guard. Can you be subtle?”

“I’ll give it my best shot.” Then I added, “Even if there was genuine hatred, which I can’t imagine being the case on Jonah’s part, how could that translate into Jonah getting killed at Dorinda’s place?”

“Are you having qualms?” my grandmother asked. “You know what I mean. Qualms about questioning the whole rush-to-judgment process.” Apparently, being a person with qualms wasn’t an asset in my grandmother’s book. While she didn’t sound pissed at the possibility, her inquiry couldn’t be called neutral.

“No, no qualms. I just want to be clear in my head where I’m going.”

“Where else would you be clear if not in your head?” I was getting the impression that eight-forty-five
A.M.
was not Grandma Ethel’s finest hour. “All right, I’ll tell you what. Call me on my cell when you’re finished with them. I’ll either be out walking or having my nails done. I’ll tell you, I shouldn’t have moved from New York. A nail salon on every block, and so cheap compared to Miami.”

Moved? I was tempted to ask. Like her leaving was a job transfer or a yen for a warm climate? How about ran from New York, abandoning your child to Lenny the Loser? Yet here I was, hoping this woman who had done something I considered perfectly dreadful wouldn’t fly out of my life. As for the woman she’d done the dreadful thing to, who happened to be my mother, I gladly would have given her all my frequent-flyer miles if she’d move someplace else. Arizona, maybe, or some expat town in Mexico for retirees with allergies and personality deficiencies.

“Whenever I’m done,” I promised, “I’ll call.”

Manhattan Aesthetics looked like most other Park Avenue upscale, highly touted plastic surgery practices: modern furniture that went for wood over metal (warmth, genuineness); muted colors, mossy green and cream (tranquil, gender-neutral, conveying confidence that the patients weren’t slobs prone to staining furniture); and soft classical music (elegant, calming, as in “Your tummy tuck will be as marvelous as Bach’s Air on the G string”). In other words, it was somewhere between chic and inoffensive, but since every plastic surgeon I’d ever met thought he or she was in the ninety-ninth percentile of some Exquisite Taste aptitude test, the only opinion I’d
offered was saying “Fabulous!” when their decorator was done.

Gilbert John Noakes and Layne Jiménez must have been buzzed the instant I opened the door because they swept into the waiting room together and gave me a duet of “Susie! Good to see you! Susie! We were so touched you decided to come in!” before I got halfway across the room.

I’d been so focused on talking to the two of them that it hadn’t occurred to me how affected I’d be going to the place not just where Jonah had worked five days a week, but to the practice he’d helped sustain and grow. I knew nearly all the staff from holiday parties and from dropping in when I was in the city to meet Jonah, or just to use the bathroom and leave my packages between shopping and a museum. There were kisses, hugs, a gamut of handshakes and “How are you doing?” asked politely or with concern. Because Jonah must have had at least a thousand pictures of the boys and me in his office, everyone asked after them. Mandy, the woman I thought of as the supply/coffee lady although she had some other title, took my hands in hers and said, “There’s a hole in my heart.” Normally, that sort of comment made me want to stick my index finger in my mouth and mimic retching, but I could only squeeze her hands. If I’d tried to say thank you, I would have broken into sobs.

Since the hallways were big enough for two people walking side by side, or one and a gurney, Gilbert John fell behind and let Layne take me into the conference room. It wasn’t really for conferences. The table could seat six and was covered in leather, so in spite of the decorator swearing it was treated, any emphatic gesture near an open can of Diet Coke would probably equal disaster. It was set for lunch with mirrored place mats, octagonal plates I was sure I’d have recognized if my tastes had gone to late-twentieth-century modern,
and a platter of sandwiches. I looked at the seven- or nine-grain bread and wondered whether Jonah’s death had freed them to give up salads or, if in the less than two months since he’d been gone, there’d been a revolution in Upper East Side lunch thinking.

After my “The boys are doing great, considering” and ten sentences on their spouses plus Layne’s children, the conversation began to go slo-mo. Before it could stop totally, leaving us in unbearable silence, I said, “I should be the one giving you lunch, or giving you something. The two of you have been so decent throughout all this. I know it’s been an ordeal for you, too, not just because of your professional and business ties to Jonah, but because when you lose someone you really care about at work, there’s no kind of formal mourning process that helps you get over it. I just want to thank you for being so strong and so there for me.”