As Husbands Go (41 page)

“Maybe she’ll offer you a job,” Andrea said brightly.

“Maybe I’ll take it.” Not so bright.

We’d gone to a luncheon at a private club in Manhattan for a client’s fiftieth birthday. Now Andrea was dropping me at a brownstone on West Fiftieth: not one of those pretty places with geraniums in window boxes. Crummy, in fact. College Girl Companions was upstairs. A nail salon a few steps down looked like a place to go if you were interested in taking home a toenail fungus.

The building was not a place that had seen better days ever, though it might have watched its final tolerable ones fly out a dirty window in 1908. Now it was just another sad subdivided space badly in need of a sandblasting it was unlikely to get. This wasn’t a block for gentrification. On one side was a locksmith. On the other was an Italian restaurant; its canopy was torn, and the ripped piece flapped crazily in the wind.

College Girl probably needed a midtown address to reassure tourists, but I couldn’t imagine many people set foot on the premises. Why would a client want to go to a place like that, much less be seen there? And despite the “College Girl,” I couldn’t picture a bunch of academic whizzes like Dorinda Dillon sitting around a lounge and reading
Paradise Lost
.

“I’ll find a place to park and wait,” Andrea said.

“Don’t bother. I don’t know how long this will take, and you’ll wind up getting stuck in rush-hour traffic. I’ll grab a cab and get home by train.” Our ride into the city, and then being at the same table at the luncheon, had been enough of Andrea for me for one
day.

“You are not going home on the train during rush hour.” Andrea wrinkled her nose like I’d suggested taking a bath in a vat of pig shit.

“It’s okay,” I murmured, opening the door of her latest car, a Jaguar convertible.

“It’s not okay. I’m going to stay here. You’re going to a whorehouse.”

“I’m going to the offices of an escort service. What do you think, it’s like a dorm and they have cubicles with beds up there? Go on. Go home.”

“Susie.”

“Andrea.” I got out of the car. So did she. “Hey, you’re double-parked,” I said. “You’re holding up traffic.”

“I want you to keep your phone on. I’m going to call you in fifteen minutes. If you don’t answer, I’m coming in with the police.”

“What police? You’ll go running to the corner screaming for a cop? You know what will happen? You’ll get a ticket for double parking. I’ll be fine. And please don’t go calling me, because my phone may not work in there, or if I’m talking to someone and getting information, I don’t want to be interrupted.”

She put her hands on her hips. She’d looked so cool at the luncheon—killer stilettos, a Carolina Herrera dress and coat in gray—but having a snit beside her convertible on this seedy street, she looked bizarre, a deranged rich lady from another neighborhood who’d taken a wrong turn. “Hear me!” she said. “I do not want you to do this.”

“Andrea—”

“What? You don’t give a rat’s ass what I want? Too bad. You can’t go.”

“Let me explain one last time. I’m trying to get some information so I can have something to push the cops and the DA to reopen the case. The only way I can think of—”

“Forget that I’m your business partner and have a strong financial interest in keeping you alive,” she said.

“You can stay here and block traffic if you want.” I turned to go
upstairs. “I can’t worry about you now.”

“I don’t want you risking your life!” The idea of me risking my life by going to an office was so over-the-top that I wound up smacking myself in the forehead, that
I can’t believe it
gesture lusty ethnics do in old movies. But Andrea wouldn’t let up. “Susie. You have three children. What if something happens to you? Who are you going to leave them with? Theo, that ridiculous, selfish Munchkin bastard? And if
I’m
calling someone selfish, you can just imagine!” I really couldn’t. “Listen to me, Susie.”

“I’m listening, and I understand what you’re saying. But the only possible danger I can imagine is that they won’t let me in. If I thought for one momen—”

“I’m going up there with you,” Andrea said.

“No, you’re not.”

“I swear on all that’s holy, I’ll behave like the lady I am. I’ll even keep my mouth shut.”

“No. Anyway, you can’t leave your car here.”

“Do you think I give a shit about getting a ticket?”

“They’ll tow it!” I was shouting as she came around the Jag to stand next to me on the sidewalk.

“So what? Fat Boy will send somebody to get it back. And if it gets dented, I’ll get another one. Don’t pretend to be appalled. That’s the kind of girl I am.” She grabbed my upper arm and pulled me toward the brownstone’s stairs. “Come on. Let’s see if we can make the cut at College Girl.”

Once I had seen that College Girl was in a brownstone with a locked door, I’d come up with some sketchy excuses I could use after I pressed the button near the outside door. I needed to be prepared when a voice called out, “Who is it?” The inner door, probably warped, was closed, but the latch hadn’t engaged completely. After we read
COLLEGE GIRL COMPANIONS
and
SUITE
3 on the nameplate, we simply hurried up two flights of stairs. Despite our heels, neither of us touched the banister, probably sensing it was coated with decades of secretions from the palms of prostitutes not given to hand washing.

When we knocked on the door, a voice called out, “Who is it?” It was low-pitched, a woman’s voice.

“Hi,” I called back. “It’s Susie.”

I heard a chair scraping along a floor. Then the door opened a crack. I did my high school flutter-fingered wave. I must have appeared sufficiently adorable and nonthreatening because she opened the door.

“Hi,” I said again. Andrea seemed to be taking her vow of silence seriously; all she did was smile.

The woman holding the door open about four inches was neither a college girl nor an escort anyone but a Boy Scout would touch. She looked like she was past forty and flooring it to forty-five. A fringe of deep vertical scratches radiated from her lip liner, a too thick band of crimson. Her saggy skin seemed to be pulling open her pores. “Are you Cle . . . ?” I asked, dodging the end of the name, not sure if it ended with an
O
or an
A
.

“No,” she said. “Who are you?” She glanced at Andrea but decided she didn’t need an
S
on “you.” Then she looked back at me.

“I was hoping to speak with her for a minute.”

“You’re who?” she asked.

“I know she’s so busy. I won’t keep her long.”

Without consultation, obviously, Andrea and I broke into our client-winning “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” act with so much fervor it would have been impossible for the woman not to smile back. Actually, she began to, but it quickly disappeared into an “Ooh!” of recognition.

“I know who you are,” she said to me. “You’re his wife. I saw you in the papers. And on TV in an evening gown at some party. With him.” Just as it occurred to her that the door would be better off closed—with me and Andrea on the outside of it—I pushed. Not a hostile push, like a break-in. More like a
I know you want me to come in except you’re not moving fast enough
push.

“Honestly,” I said, “I just want to speak to her for a minute. A quick question and I’m out of here.”

“You know, the police thanked Clea for her cooperation on the
case.” Her voice was soft, a little husky but not a phone-sex voice. More business than pleasure. “Maybe they didn’t tell you that, but she cooperated. They made a special call just to thank her.”

“They did tell me. I really, really appreciate it. Look, I don’t want to make trouble. I swear to you. You know the story: I’m a widow with three little boys. If I make trouble, what’s going to happen to them?”

I felt sorry for her. She was overwhelmed. Maybe she’d been coached on how to deal with an obnoxious client, but she clearly didn’t know what to do with me and Silent Andrea. “I’m not lying,” she said. “Clea’s not here. She hardly ever comes in. She monitors the calls sometimes, that’s all.”

“I’m told you keep records on customers.” She was already shaking her head. “I know for a fact that the records are pretty extensive—for Clea’s own protection.”

“The records aren’t here,” she said, but ever since that body-language article, I’d watched out for the rampant blinking that signals a lie.
Blink, blink, blink.

“They are here,” I said calmly.

“No, they’re not.”

I wasn’t going to get into a “They are, they’re not” game that even the triplets were too sophisticated to play. On the other hand, I couldn’t think of what to say next.

Not that I was conscious of it, but I must have been thinking what Grandma Ethel would do in the situation, because what I finally said was so not me: “I want to find out if at some point you might have done business with a certain gentleman. I could give you the gentleman’s name, and if you would—” She was shaking her head. “If you can get me that name and show it to me and give me a copy . . . Come on, stop shaking your head. Let me finish. You can make an easy five hundred. We’ll leave. Then you’ll leave, say, a couple of minutes later. Just tell me which ATM to meet you at, and I’ll be there. Bring a copy of whatever record you have with you, watch me withdraw five hundred dollars, and we’ll do the exchange right there.”

She took a long, quavering breath. She wanted the money. But then she started shaking her head again. “I can’t risk it.”

That was when Andrea decided not to keep quiet. “Another five hundred from me,” she said. The woman barely had time to draw in her lower lip to chew on it in indecision when Andrea added, “Forget the thousand dollars. Within a few minutes, you can have
two
thousand in cash. Or a long afternoon to think of all the things you could have done with two thousand dollars. You decide.”

“What’s the gentleman’s name?” she finally whispered.

“Gilbert John Noakes,” I said. “Dr. Gilbert John Noakes.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Andrea and I nearly had twin heart attacks waiting for Ms. College Girl to show at the ATM. When she finally scurried in, head down, obviously avoiding the security cameras as if she were there to rob money rather than receive it, she opened a giant faux–patent leather tote bag that made horrible plastic-on-plastic squeaks. She handed me copies of three MasterCard statements for August, October, and November 2006 with a list of payments to College Girl. Talk about naming names: Noakes, Gilbert John. Twice he had paid five hundred and once seven hundred. I didn’t want to know why the price had gone up.

That night, after a dinner featuring brisket I’d found when cleaning out the freezer, frozen after Rosh Hashanah 2008 but that everybody had loved, I put the boys to bed and met Grandma Ethel and Sparky in the den. While they watched me from the couch as if I were a one-woman play, I called Danny Cromer, the orthopedist Jonah had used for his tennis elbow, a guy he’d gone to medical school with; his name had been on Jonah’s calendar. I spent a few minutes, too many, thanking him for the beautiful condolence letter he’d written. I sensed he was on the verge of telling me he had an emergency on the other line, so I said, “Danny, the last time Jonah went to see you . . .”

“Yes,” he said cautiously, as any doctor in his right mind would.

“It wasn’t about the tennis-elbow business, was it?” Counting on all the years of friendliness that would make him reluctant to give me the usual confidentiality speech, I quickly added, “It was the thing with his hand. He told me about it.”

“Right.” Still cautious.

“I don’t want to put you on the spot, but I’d like to be able to reassure his parents. He told us it was nothing to be concerned about, since it wasn’t anything like, whatever it’s called, that bad-hand thing. But they keep talking about it. It’s not exactly rational, but none of us have been lately.”

“Rheumatoid arthritis? Is that what they’re worrying about? I know his father’s a physician. Rheumatoid arthritis can be passed down from parent to child. He’s probably worried about your boys. No, this was osteoarthritis. Look, it can be a problem, especially for a surgeon who does the kind of work Jonah did.”

“I didn’t sense he thought it was affecting his doing surgery.” I thought,
I can’t believe he didn’t tell me,
but then I thought,
I can believe it
. Jonah would want to know the whole picture before letting me in on it. Control. And knowing I was an anxiety queen, he wouldn’t want me to agonize unless there was a need to agonize. Also, he’d been so smart about people. Not that we’d ever talked about it, but he would have known I worshiped him a little. Maybe he was afraid to seem vulnerable. Gods didn’t get arthritis.

“I didn’t find any loss of mobility,” Danny Cromer said. “I gave him a shot and some medication for the pain. He was supposed to come back . . . Oh, Susie, I hate to be saying this. He was due to come back. We were going to go over options for treatment. Did he mention anything about how it was feeling after he saw me?”