Compliments of a Friend (3 page)

“How many pills did she take?” I asked.

“Our estimate is about thirty of the most common dosage.”

“Do you actually see them when you do the autopsy?”

“The pills? No. They were dissolved. But we can ascertain from the blood chemistry …”

“How can you tell if someone didn’t just grind up thirty Xanax and sprinkle them over her oatmeal?”

Her patronizing smile was barely more than a puff of air blown past compressed lips.

“That’s where the police investigation comes in,” she explained, too patiently. “They tell us there was a suicide note on her own paper, in her own handwriting—believe me, that was checked out—signed by her. They tell us her friends reported she was depressed over the breakup of her marriage. They find out she was having serious business reverses. And she had a new boyfriend, except she’d broken a series of dates with him.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s often a sign of depression,” Dr. Spiros said.

“Maybe it’s a sign he was a creep and she wanted to lose his number,” I replied, thinking for a moment what a weenie I was not to cut it off with har-har Bruce.

The doctor inched forward in her chair. I sensed she was about to lose my number.

“If you wanted to end it all,” I asked quickly, “would you do it in a public place?

Empathy did not seem to be Dr. Spiros’s strong suit, which made her specializing in pathology a splendid decision. Instead of looking contemplative, her horse face grew even longer with concern. Had she made a bureaucratic boo-boo by agreeing to talk with me?

“Lots of suicides in public places,” she asserted. “They jump from buildings and bridges, they—”

“They die in a shoe department, holding a sling-back?”

“The effects of the barbiturate aren’t immediate. She might have decided to distract herself from the consequence of what she’d done, rather than lying down just, you know, waiting for it to happen.”

“Who from Homicide is in charge … ?”

Suddenly, I had such a lump in my throat I could not complete the sentence.

“Detective-Sergeant Andrew Kim,” she replied, and gave her hair a declarative flip. Interview over.

I suppose an explanation of my emotional reaction at the mention of the Nassau County Police Department’s Homicide Bureau is in order. All right, it goes like this: Twenty years earlier, shortly before I passed over to the other side of thirty-five, at a time when my now-lawyer daughter and film-critic son were little more than toddlers, a local periodontist named M. Bruce Fleckstein was murdered. I heard about it on the radio and wondered: Who the hell would want to kill a dentist? The next thing I knew, I was investigating. Before too long, I was actually instrumental in determining just who the killer was.

In the course of that detective work, I came into contact with a real detective, Lieutenant Nelson Sharpe of the Nassau County Police Department.

To shorten a long story, I had an affair with him. That was it. Six months of faithlessness in a twenty-eight-year marriage. Even for a historian like me, aware of the significance of the past, it should have been ancient history—except I fell in love with Nelson. And he with me.

For a time, we even discussed leaving our spouses, getting married. We simply couldn’t bear being without each other. Not just for the erotic pleasure, but for the sheer fun we had together. But even more than my secret belief that a marriage that rises from the ashes of other marriages is doomed from the start was our mutual, acknowledged awareness of how our leaving would hurt our children. At the time, my daughter, Kate, was six, my son, Joey, four. Nelson had three kids of his own. Was breaking up a tolerable marriage to seek joy a legitimate reason? Separately, and together, we decided it wasn’t. And so he stayed with his wife, June, and I remained with Bob Singer. Nelson and I never saw or spoke to each other again. Twenty years.

“If you want my opinion,” Nancy Miller began later that evening.

“No,” I said. “I definitely do not.

“Hush,” she commanded Southernly.

Her telephone voice was splendid, pure magnolia blossom, the sort that, in her reporting days, induced in any interviewee, female or male, an overwhelming desire to brag, tell secrets—anything to get into her good graces.

“My opinion is that you’re going to the medical examiner’s office to interview Dr. Horseface was just an excuse.”

“Right,” I said. “A ploy to get closer to Nassau County law enforcement so I could somehow contrive to see Nelson Sharpe and rekindle a twenty-year-old flame that still burns brightly despite the pathetic depletion of the estrogen that fueled it?”

My usual six-thirty, end-of-the-workday hour of fatigue had hit. Bad enough when you have a husband for whom you have to prepare the eight thousandth dinner of your marriage. Worse when you didn’t and you lack the energy to even dump the egg drop soup from its single-serving cardboard container into a bowl before you microwave it.

“Give me a break, Nancy.”

“You don’t deserve a break on this. Except I’ll give you one. I spoke to the reporter on the Vanessa suicide. He heard something about her business reverses.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that the authorities are so quick to label a high-powered woman’s death as a suicide?”

“Might I remind you that your friend Vanessa left a note? Might I remind you as well that her beloved Stan, he of the power pecker, had only recently deserted her for a younger woman? Might I also add I have information about her business problems that could prove to be the final nail in her coffin as far as your murder theory is concerned? Might you be interested?”

“Go ahead.”

I held my excitement in check. Pretty calmly, I thought, as I stuck the soup in the microwave and cradled the phone against my shoulder while I worked to get the wire handle off the carton of sautéed tofu and broccoli so I could zap that, too.

“Vanessa lost Sveltburgers.”

“What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“Sveltburgers. Sveltburgers!” Nancy repeated. “They’re famous.”

“Not in my universe.”

“They’re veggie burgers, you ignoramus. Made around here. In Commack or Center Moriches, Cutchogue or one of those C places I’ve never been to. Instead of being those flat things that look like a hockey puck, they’re thick, so they look like a real hamburger. You never heard of Sveltburgers?”

I hate when the person I’m talking to acts stunned by my ignorance, like when my son, Joey, a movie critic for the très chic, near-insolvent website for tony criticism called Night, had gasped and demanded: “You call yourself a movie lover and you never heard of H. Peter Putzel?”

“I don’t know,” I muttered. “Sveltburgers? Maybe I have.”

“I thought you were a historian. Sveltburgers are a Long Island legend.”

“Clearly, I’m not as good a historian as I think I am.”

“This woman, Polly Terranova—how’s that for a mixed metaphor?—built Sveltburgers into a multimillion dollar company from something she started in her kitchen in Levittown.”

Nancy waited for me to say, Oh, yeah, right. I’ve heard of her. I didn’t, so she continued.

“She signed on with Panache for some kind of package deal—office help, factory workers. Anyway, her complaint is the accountant Vanessa got for her was totally incompetent and now she’s in trouble with the IRS. Also, Polly’s saying the factory workers were dropouts from some drug rehab program and kept nodding off when operating the machinery. The FDA health inspectors found pieces of a finger in the Sveltburgers.”

“Then they’re not actual veggie burgers.”

The bell dinged, and I took the container of soup from the microwave.

“Right. Anyway, Pissed-off Polly told our reporter that Vanessa was completely unresponsive to her complaints because she was too busy obsessing over the failure of her marriage.”

“If Vanessa was obsessed with the failure of her marriage, then losing the Sveltburger account wouldn’t make her OD on Xanax. And while we’re at it, if Power Pecker’s leaving her was so devastating, how come she had herself a new boyfriend?”

“I’m only repeating what the reporter told me,” Nancy snapped. “According to him, Polly told the cops that when she pulled her business out of Panache, Vanessa was shattered.”

Shattered? Fine, shattered. For the next few days, having other fish to fry, I gave the cops the benefit of the doubt and let Vanessa rest in whatever peace suicides are permitted. I taught my three classes at Saint Elizabeth’s, then put on my other hat and recorded an interview with a retired gardener, an eighty-five-year-old man who had come to Shorehaven from Calabria to work in the greenhouses of one of the grand old estates in nearby Manhasset.

But by Saturday night of that week, sometime after watching Radio Days for the hundredth time and discovering (and devouring) seven miniature Mounds bars left over from Halloween, as well as reading an article in a history journal on the formation of the Women’s Trade Union League in 1903, I decided Vanessa Giddings’s demise still needed looking into.

So on Sunday, I went into the city, to the Acadia-Fensterheim Gallery in SoHo.

GROUP SHOW proclaimed a banner hanging outside. The group in question included two finger paintings by Ryn, the newest Mrs. Giddings—a tidbit I’d come up with after going through a half-dozen issues of ARTnews at the library.

I hate when people contemplate a work of art, say an abstract-expressionist painting, and then make nincompoop remarks like “My three-year-old could do the same thing.” Nevertheless, I spent five minutes in the high-ceilinged, white-walled gallery studying Ryn’s Purple Opinion and saw nothing in the swirl of four fingers and one thumb that Kate or Joey could not have brought home from the Temple Beth Israel Nursery School.

“Like it?” a man’s voice inquired.

He was in his twenties, with the requisite SoHo shaved head and unshaven face, so I concluded his question was not a pickup line. He was either an Acadia-Fensterheim employee or an admirer of Ryn’s oeuvre. I nodded with what I hoped was a combination of enthusiasm and reverence.

“Are you familiar with Ryn’s work?” he asked.

“No. Is her name some reference to Rembrandt van Rijn?”

He glanced around: It was only the two of us. “The truth? Her name’s Karyn with a Y. Her last name is—was—Bleiberman.”

“And now?

“Now it’s”—he lifted his head and pursed his lips to signify snootiness, although he did it in an appropriately ironic Gen-Whatever manner—“Giddings.”

I gave him an I-get-it nod and inquired: “How much is the painting?”

Apparently, it wasn’t de rigueur to actually speak of price, but he was kind enough to hand me a list. Purple Opinion was going for sixteen thousand.

I said: “I hope this doesn’t sound incorrigibly crass, but …”

“You’re saying, isn’t that somewhat high for a painting made with fingers? She’s not Chuck Close, right?”

He looked to see if I’d gotten his reference, so I nodded in comprehension of what I was not comprehending.

“It’s not high at all, to tell you the truth,” he went on. “Ryn spends an incredible amount of time prepping the canvas to give it the appearance of paper.”

I offered some vague sound of comprehension, like “Aaah.”

We both gazed respectfully at the purple whorls.

“Is she from around here?” I asked.

“Well, she has a studio in Red Hook, but these days”—he smiled and shook his head with a clearly unresolved mix of disdain and awe—“she’s living on Long Island. She’s married to a rich older guy …”

He hesitated for an instant, perhaps unsure whether it was chivalrous to say “older” to someone as old as I.

“They have a mansion,” he confided.

“A mansion?” I repeated, wowed in the coolest manner I could muster.

“It has a stable!” he said. “And he gave her a five-carat diamond ring. Like, is that a statement or what? Not that any of those things would make a dent in Ryn’s consciousness. You know? She’s like almost overly ethereal. But so real. I mean, when I spoke to her after she first saw the place, you know the only thing she mentioned? The quality of the light.”

“So she works out there?”

“Well, right now she’s not working.”

“Taking a rest after this?” I inquired, waving my hand toward Purple Opinion and Green Certainty.

“Getting ready to have a baby. She’s due any second. I mean, when we had the opening two weeks ago, we were all praying she wouldn’t …”

He shuddered as if envisioning a pool of amniotic fluid on the gallery’s polyurethaned oak floor.

I thanked him and, price list neatly folded in my handbag, hurried off to catch the 4:18 back to Shorehaven.

It wasn’t until eleven that night—defeated by the lower left-hand corner of the Sunday Times crossword puzzle—that it occurred to me that when Stan Giddings married Ryn, she had been close to six months pregnant. A pregnant piece of information, but what did it mean? Having spent twenty-eight years married and only two widowed, I still wasn’t used to having some late-night question pop into my head and not be able to ask, What do you make of this? Even if the reaction was the usual, mumbled, nocturnal I dunno, or even an antagonistic What business is it of yours, Judith?—it was a response. I could then begin either to start silently speculating or to think, Beats the hell out of me, and drift off to slep.

Plainly, Bob would not have taken well to my inquiring into the death of Vanessa Giddings. Like the last time around, twenty years earlier, when I got involved in investigating the Fleckstein murder: At his best, he’d been exceedingly aggravated with me. At his worst, enraged and downright nasty. For him, my business was to be his wife. A historian? Why not? He lived in an era in which powerful men’s wives did not churn butter. They held jobs, the more prestigious the better. A PhD in history lacked the cachet of a doctorate in neuroscience, but it was, on the whole, an asset. But a wife who fancied herself a gumshoe? That was barely a step above whoredom.

But even if I couldn’t have asked Do you think Ryn’s six-months-pregnant marriage means anything? without getting a snide rejoinder, I still couldn’t bear the loss of him. Late Sunday nights hurt the most. I yearned to be a wife, to hear Bob’s sleepy voice murmuring “G’ night” as he turned over, to sense the warmth of his body across a few inches of bed, to smell the fabric softener on his pajamas. Of course, if I’d have left Bob and married Nelson? He and I would be riveted, sitting up discussing … Stop!