As Husbands Go (42 page)

“He said it was a huge improvement. He was so grateful.”

After I thanked Danny and said goodbye, I turned to my audience. “Osteoarthritis,” I told Grandma Ethel and Sparky.

“Are you going to call that Eddie back?” my grandmother asked.

“And say what? ‘It turns out my husband had arthritis, and that’s what he was talking about to Dorinda Dillon when he was complaining about his hand, a conversation I know about because I talked my way into Rikers Island and interviewed her under false pretenses’?”

“So what are you going to do?” Sparky asked.

For a while, all I could think of was picking at the welting on the arm of my chair. Then I went to find my handbag and returned.
I searched until I found the card Lieutenant Corky Paston had given me. He answered the phone with “Lieutenant Paston.”

“Hi. This is Susie Gersten. I know you probably think I’m crazy, at least if you’ve been talking to Eddie Huber. But let me tell you what I found out.”

He wasn’t having any of it. “Mrs. Gersten, you’re a really nice woman. No one could have handled the situation you were in any better.”

“Thank you, but—”

“To be perfectly honest, I think you need psychological counseling.”

“I’m getting it.” Then I told him what I’d gotten from College Girl, the copies of printouts with Gilbert John Noakes’s name on them.

“Are you crazy?” The way he said it, it wasn’t a half-humorous question equivalent to “Are you kidding?” “You actually went there?”

“Who else was going to do it? Now, listen, please, Lieutenant. You seem like a nice person, too. And definitely not crazy. Reasonable. Down-to-earth. So do me one favor.” I heard the muffled sound of a phone being covered and him muttering to someone else. “Can’t you have someone go back to Dorinda Dillon’s building and take the picture of Dr. Noakes from the practice’s website? Besides the doorman, there might be a porter or some other building employee who might have seen Gilbert John or dealt with him.”

“I’m sorry. I really can’t,” he said. “The case isn’t in my hands anymore.”

“It can be your case if you’d just—”

He cut me off. “I honestly wish you well, Mrs. Gersten.” At least he sounded regretful. But that was the end of the conversation.

After I related what Paston had said, Sparky got to wondering out loud how to get around him—there had to be a way. Grandma Ethel, on the other hand, took his “I honestly wish you well” to mean “You have my blessing in whatever you do, even though I can’t officially condone it.”

Fifteen minutes after Sparky’s “You’re beyond absurd, Eth” rejoinder, she was behind the wheel of my car, driving my grandmother and me into the city. As she pulled into a space beside a fire hydrant one block from Dorinda’s apartment, Grandma Ethel told her, “Sit tight, because if you pull into a garage, it’ll wind up costing fifty dollars, and it might have security cameras, so there would be proof we were in the neighborhood. Stay in the car, because you don’t want to be anywhere near us. In case there’s any unpleasantness, Susie and I have a fallback: We can say she’s mentally unbalanced and I’m senile. But you could wind up getting disbarred in Florida for pulling a fast one in New York.”

My grandmother and I strolled up and down Dorinda’s block between the corner and the alleyway with the service door, trying to appear casual when turning midblock to avoid passing the doorman. After ten minutes, it began to get boring. After twenty, when all we’d done was decide the only passerby with any style savvy was an Asian deliveryman with a smartly tied black bandanna riding a bike, we began rethinking our plan. Fortunately, as we were approaching the alleyway for the thousandth time, we saw a guy in a janitor’s uniform hauling out a huge can of bottles for recycling.

“Okay, you take him,” Grandma Ethel said. “I’ll distract the doorman.” As she hurried toward the front door, walking as sure-footedly in dagger-heel leather pumps as if she were wearing Nikes, I headed down the alley to meet the porter halfway.

“My name’s Ethel O’Shea,” I said, and flashed my grandmother’s press ID open and shut. Maybe I sounded nasal, because I wasn’t breathing through my nose. Though the recyclables were in clear plastic bags, the janitor’s hands were in giant leather trash-hauling gloves. I knew all I needed was one whiff of decomposing V-8 juice
and I’d gag—not the best way to make friends. “I’m a reporter,” I added. He had time to give me only one shake of his head—
No way I’ll talk to you
—before I went on, “Sir, I truly want to keep you out of trouble.”

“What do you mean?” His eyes moved beyond me toward the street, as if expecting trouble with a capital T to be loitering on the sidewalk. He looked like he was from some unhealthy Eastern European country, heavyset and pasty, with skin dotted by the faded mauve of bygone pimples.

“Look, I found out some of the details about how you let that guy into Dorinda Dillon’s apartment. If you tell me the whole story, I won’t name names.” It occurred to me that he might not have done anything, that there might be some alternate porter or building employee. It didn’t help that I couldn’t read his expression, because there was nothing yet to read: He appeared to be a majorly slow thinker. “I’m sure whatever help you gave him, you didn’t mean any harm by it. You seem like a very decent, honorable man.”

“It didn’t have nothing to do with the doctor getting killed,” he said. He was hard to understand both because he was a
natural-born mumbler and because his accent squished words: “Din ha’ noth’ t’ do.” “It happened at least a week before that.” I nodded sympathetically. “Seven, eight, maybe ten days. And this guy—”

“
This
guy,” I said, and showed him the picture of Gilbert John Noakes that I’d downloaded from the Manhattan Aesthetics website. I had a few others in my handbag, photos taken over the years at various conventions and parties, in case the formal portrait drew a blank. I’d made copies for Grandma Ethel, too. But this one was all I needed. The porter was already nodding.

“Yeah, that guy. A hundred-buck haircut if I ever saw one. But I felt sorry for him. He was panicked. He left some important papers up in Dorinda’s apartment. I didn’t call her Dorinda to her face. I’m just using that with you.”

“Right.”

“The guy was scared. What if she threw them out? The papers, I mean. What if she tried to sell them to the competition? I felt bad
for him, and I said, ‘Okay, wait till she goes out for her walk. Tell me where they are, and I’ll run up to get them.’”

“Did you?”

“No. He said not to because he didn’t know where she could have put them. If he looked, he’d recognize the envelope they were in right away, but I wouldn’t, because it didn’t have no writing on it. So could he please just get the key, and he’d go in and out fast. He swore if it took longer than three minutes, he’d come back down even if he didn’t find them. He said, ‘Trust me. I’m very neat. She’ll never know I was there.’ I did trust him because, you know, he was a really class act. Expensive coat. That’s how you tell. Some guys pay a thousand bucks for a suit but buy a crap coat. Not him.”

“So he waited there until—”

“No,” the porter said. “I told him, ‘She goes out every day late afternoon, so get back here at a quarter to four, and you’ll be okay.’”

“So he came back?” I asked.

“He came back. Said he might not recognize her if she had clothes on . . .
kind of funny, but I understood what he was saying, you know? So I should be on the lookout and signal him when she went out the front door and down the block. He stood across the street, but like right opposite here, because he couldn’t go through the front door, past the doorman. He had to use the service entrance. It was better anyway, because I could go right to the room where we keep the apartment keys and give him Dorinda’s and then take him up in the service elevator.”

“Did you wait for him in the service elevator on her floor while he went in with her key?”

“Strange you should say that. That’s what I wanted to do. But give him credit: He was shrewd. He said I should wait outside the service door, right at the end of this alley here, by the sidewalk. That way I could watch the front door, in case she came back early. I told him she never did, but he said, ‘You can’t be too careful.’ Anyway, he gave me his cell number and said I should call him if I saw her.”

“Do you still have the number, by any chance?”

He gave a loud “Huh!” like he was reading an instruction:
Insert laugh here
. In case I didn’t get the humor, he added, “You gotta be kidding.”

“No, I’m not. I even think I could convince my editor to come up with something for it if you do.”

He considered the proposition by resting his mouth on the back of his hand—which was covered with the garbage glove. Finally, he said, “No. I threw it out. I mean, the guy came back down in two, three minutes. What did I need it for?”

“Did he find his papers?”

“Yeah. In a plain white envelope, so I wouldn’t have found it unless it was the only envelope in her apartment. But he said he knew it right away and it was where he’d left it.”

I nodded. “Just out of curiosity, did he give you something
for the trouble you went to?” He didn’t say anything. I smiled. “You said he was a class act.”

He smiled back. “A little something.”

I’d already used a smile, a tossing back of hair as it fell into my eyes: your basic Flirting with Repulsive Guys When You Need to Get Something from Them Fast 101. But now, before the porter lifted the giant can filled with recyclables and started shlepping it toward the street, I had to get beyond the fundamentals to practically graduate-level. That meant a longing gaze that would display the wonders of pale green eyes and long, thick lashes and also would communicate the realization that I was so amazed by his masculinity, I was on the verge of falling in love. Add to that some nibbling of the lower lip to express a mix of hesitancy and embarrassment. It was a feminist mother’s worst nightmare.

After the nibbling business, I said, “I don’t know how to ask you this.”

With something approaching grandeur, the porter said, “Go ahead.”

“I’ve gone totally blank on your name.”

“Oh. Pavel. Pavel Ginchev.” He even spelled it for me.

Five minutes later, Grandma Ethel and I were walking back to the car. “I got bubkes from the doorman,” she announced. She sounded
both dispirited and surprised, as in
Life should offer more in the way of excitement
.

“I got a little something,” I said. “Like Gilbert John getting the key to Dorinda’s apartment and going in there alone.”

“Wasn’t it one of those special security keys you can’t get copied unless . . .” She paused. With a great smile, she added, “. . . unless you’re a high-class guy who can intimidate a locksmith—and make him your friend for life with a few hundred bucks. Or a few thou.
That
would get you the key to anywhere you want to go.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

“Nothing’s wrong,” I told my cousin Scott Rabinowitz the following night. “I’m healthy. I’m strong. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said. Whatever the gene was for drama, he did not have it.

“But I need to ask you a favor . . . with you knowing I’m in really good shape.”

“Okay.”

“I need to make out a new will.”

“Right. You should. Whenever circumstances change—”

“This is a huge thing I’m asking, Scott, so take as much time as you need before answering. You don’t need to tell me now.”

“Okay.”

“Right now, if anything should, God forbid and all that, happen to me, the boys would go to Theo, my brother-in-law. I don’t think he’s steady enough to take on a responsibility like that.”

Scott shrugged. “I don’t really know him, but if that’s what you think . . . Oh, you mean you’re asking me to take the boys?”

“Yes. But I need you to feel free to refuse if you can’t see
yourself in that role, or if you can’t take that kind of responsibility because you have other plans for your life.”

“You think I could handle it?”

“Not counting me, you handle them better than anyone.” What I left out was that I’d called Liz Holbreich and asked her to look into my cousin’s background—and told her the reasons I was asking. When she got back to me, she said she’d found absolutely nothing to rule him out. I went on, “The chances of anything bad happen
ing to me are . . . Well, you’re the accountant, so you’re better with numbers.”

“You’re likely to stick around for a while,” Scott said.

“Please take time and think about it. And if you say no, I’ll find someone else, so don’t let that be a concern.”

“I’d have to take off a few pounds,” he said. “So I don’t strain my heart. I couldn’t afford to be one of those guys on the D train who drops dead standing up during rush hour because there’s no place to fall.”

And then he said he was honored that I thought so much of him. He was crazy about the boys. And I should live and be well, but yes, he was willing.

Late that week, I decided I was going to see if Eddie Huber and the forces of justice would take the copies of Gilbert John’s MasterCard payments to College Girl seriously enough to check them out. I knew that having told Lieutenant Paston, he wouldn’t keep it a secret. He was a pro. He’d want to look into it. So what was going on? Bureaucratic constipation? Being pathologically afraid to commit a mistake? Could Eddie possibly think I was so crazy that I’d made up a story and forged the statements? I needed to do something to get her to move. If not, I would have to hand over my information to my underemployed family press spokesperson, Kimberly Dijkstra, and let her make it public. I had to act.