Compliments of a Friend (4 page)

Over the years, I’d become my own tough cop, policing myself from crossing the line from the occasional loving or lustful memory of Nelson to hurtful fantasy: What is he doing now? Still married? Is he happy? Would it be so terrible to call him and offhandedly say, “You just popped into my head the other day and I was wondering … Stop!

The next morning, on my way to Saint Elizabeth’s, I dropped by the house of my semi-friend Mary Alice Mahoney Hunziger Schlesinger Goldfarb—the woman who talked more than any other in Greater New York and said the least. Annoying? Truly. Vacuous? Definitely. Stupid? Indubitably. However, somehow her pea brain was optimally structured for the absorption and retention of every item of Shorehaven gossip that wafted through the atmosphere, no matter how vague.

So I asked her: “How come Stan Giddings waited until Ryn was six months pregnant to marry her?”

“It’s a looong story,” Mary Alice began.

Awaiting the arrival of her personal trainer, she was decked out in cornflower blue Spandex shorts and tank top with a matching cornflower blue terry headband. Clearly, and of course irrationally, she was proud of her body. Her arms had the approximate diameter of the cardboard tube inside a roll of toilet paper. Her hip bones protruded farther than her breasts.

“A very long story.”

“I have to get going in ten minutes, Mary Alice. I have a class.”

“My trainer is due then. Connor? You know him?”

When I shook my head, she rolled her eyes to let me know how unhip I was.

“I mean, he’s only the most well-known trainer on the North Shore. God, you’re an intellectual in an ivory tower! Vanessa used him, you know.”

She sighed. Not a mere exhalation of air, but the drawn-out vocalization of a lousy actress reading [sighing] in a script.

“What can I tell you? Vanessa knew Ryn was”—Mary Alice gazed ceiling-ward, searching for the right words—“avec child, like the French say.”

Toujours.

“She wanted to put the pressure on Stan.”

“To get a good settlement?”

“Well, of course,” she responded, a bit impatiently.

Ours was not a natural friendship. Like cellmates, Mary Alice and I had come together while doing time—in our case, as class mothers two decades earlier.

“Naturally,” she went on, “Vanessa signed a prenup.”

Mary Alice, on her fourth marriage—this one to Lance Goldfarb, urologist to Long Island’s best and brightest—obviously knew about prenuptial agreements. She took the blue sweater that had been draped over a chair and arranged it artfully around her skeletal shoulders.

“I mean, someone with Stan’s resources isn’t going to go into a marriage without protection, is he?”

“He obviously went into Ryn without protection.”

“Can you believe that? Well, I can, as a matter of fact. He’d had two kids with his first wife but they weren’t working out. Bulemic or dyslexic or something. And Vanessa couldn’t have any. Or wouldn’t. Whatever. Anyhow, Stan was absolutely dying for a family.”

“Isn’t that a little risky? I mean, getting your girlfriend pregnant while you’re still married to someone else.”

Mary Alice blew out an impatient gust of air.

“Grow up, Judith.”

“What am I being pathetically naive about?”

“About that. Sooner or later, he’d get out of the marriage without fatal damage because he had an airtight prenup. And that if Ryn had the baby before they were married, big damn deal. She’s an artist. Do you think artists care about having a child in or out of marriage?”

“You’ve got a point,” I conceded. “But Stan’s not an artist, so he would want the baby to be born in wedlock. Ergo, Vanessa would have figured time was on her side.”

Mary Alice gave a weary nod that said: Finally, she’s getting it. It’s annoying to be patronized by a birdbrain.

“Right,” she said. “Ryn didn’t need her lawyer to tell her it was time to put the squeeze on Stan. Trust me. Vanessa got the picture, too. And she wound up with the house and the pied-à-terre on Central Park West and enough cash to choke a horse, except she needed it because she was going to redecorate plus get the works: face lift, tummy tuck, tush tightening, and lipo, lipo, and more lipo. Maybe implants. Cheekbones, I think. Could have been boobs. I can’t remember which.”

“Did she get all that done?” I asked.

The last time I’d seen Vanessa, a couple of months before she died, she hadn’t looked as if she needed anything tightened or implanted, though for all I know I might have been looking at the results.

“No, no, no. She met someone.”

“Who?”

“Do you want some ginger tea?”

“No thanks. Whom did she meet?”

“His name is Tony. Like in the Tony awards.”

Mary Alice’s white-blonde hair was pulled up into a pretty topknot, and she twisted a loose strand around her index finger, a gesture that led me to believe Tony was not unattractive.

“What’s Tony’s last name?”

“Tony Marx.”

“As in Karl?”

“What?”

“M-a-r-x or M-a-r-k-s? Never mind. Did you ever meet him?”

“No. I mean, yes. See, Vanessa also got the country club membership as part of the settlement, which I hear just about killed Stan because his grandfather had been a founder. Very, very rare for the wife to get the membership, which shows you how much Stan was willing to give to get out of that marriage. He and Ryn still have the loft—like eight thousand square feet—in some fabulous part of Brooklyn, but they’re living in the grandfather’s house now. He’s dead. The grandfather. Father, too, I think. Way out in Lloyd’s Neck. Practically a château I hear. It’s called Giddings House, but it needs major fixing up. It’ll take years. That’s why Vanessa never wanted any part of it. Anyhow, I know someone like you with a PhD. doesn’t take country clubs seriously, Judith, but they mean a lot to people. Anyhow, Lance and I were there as Jim and Ellen Shay’s guests …”

She gave her wedding band, a knuckle-to-knuckle diamond dazzler, a twist. “They don’t accept Jews as members, you know.”

She paused, waiting for a response.

I offered none, so she explained: “Lance is Jewish.”

“I guessed it, Mary Alice. The ‘Goldfarb’ was a clue.”

“That’s why we were there as guests.”

“So you just happened to see this Tony there with Vanessa?”

“Right. Well, we chatted for a few minutes. He was wearing a sports jacket in the teeniest houndstooth. I mean, when you first looked at it, you’d think charcoal gray, not black and white. Cashmere. Stunning detail. You could tell—”

“What does Tony do?”

“He owns a car dealership.”

“What kind?”

“Volvo. He kidded around and called it Vulva. Well, I guess not to his customers.”

“Is it here on the Island?”

She nodded.

“How serious was Vanessa about him?”

“How serious?”

Mary Alice chewed her thin but well-glossed lower lip, then smoothed over the chewed area with her pinky.

“It’s serious in that he’s very, very attractive. But not so serious because he only owns one dealership.”

I must have looked confused because she exhaled impatiently: “Forget that he’s not in Stan Giddings’s league money-wise. He wasn’t even in Vanessa’s league. So how serious could she be about a man who couldn’t earn as much as she could? No, she’d let the relationship play out, which might take her through the summer. That way, she’d have someone for mixed doubles, then in September she’d just get busy with her business or whatever, then go away after Christmas and come back and get her plastic surgery over with so that by the next summer she could really be a contender. You know very well what I mean, Judith, so don’t look like ‘Duh?’ Contender: be eligible for a really important guy.”

“So then why did she kill herself?” I asked.

Mary Alice shrugged.

“Maybe what everyone’s saying is right. Losing Stan and Sveltburgers just took too much out of her. When all you want is to die of a broken heart and you don’t, what do you do?”

“What?” I asked.

“Commit suicide!” she said brightly.

Just as I opened the door to leave, Connor the trainer ambled in. He was an exceedingly muscular but very short man, not much longer than his gym bag. Yes, he said slowly when I asked him, he had seen Vanessa the morning of her death. Not only had she not been in the zone, she’d actually cut their session short when she looked out the window of her workout room and spotted a silver Volvo, an S80, pulling into the driveway. When I asked if he’d seen who was driving the car, Connor gazed up at me suspiciously. Fortunately, Mary Alice gave him a she’s-okay pat on the deltoid, so he conceded: the boyfriend.

“Tony?” I asked.

“Yeah, Tony.”

That afternoon, I got stuck in a particularly noxious history department meeting, which ended with Medieval European shaking her fist at Modern Asian. The day after that I had three weeks’ worth of oral history videos at the library to contend with, so I didn’t get to Volvo Village until the following morning. I felt I was losing not only time, but ground. If there was anything fishy about Vanessa’s death, the person or persons responsible had had more than enough time to execute an exquisite cover-up.

I suppose dealing with the American public in the highly emotional arena of car buying can make someone inured to surprise. So Tony Marx did not think it at all odd that I wanted to trade in my 2012 Jeep for a 2013 Volvo or that I wanted to talk about Vanessa.

“I don’t know if Vanessa ever mentioned me …” I said.

“Of course she did,” he lied courteously, clearly never having heard my name.

“I’m so upset,” I told him. “I still can’t believe it.”

“I know.”

Except for a bit of a paunch, he was a sleek man in his early forties, with the sort of lifelong, worked-at tan that ultimately transmutes skin into leather. In Tony’s case, it was still a soft, not-too-creased leather, pecan colored.

“You’re looking to unload the Jeep for a T6 AWD, Judy?” he asked.

“Pardon me?”

“All-wheel drive.”

“Right.”

His dress was conservative-gray suit, white shirt, maroon rep tie—the getup someone selling safety and solidity would put on. He—though, tall, slender, graceful, and sloe-eyed—had to keep his inborn flash under control. He should have been selling Maseratis.

“Vanessa told me you were the man to see about a car.”

He nodded.

“She seemed to think the world of you,” I went on.

I expected him to nod again and move on to the turbo charger, whatever that was, but instead he swallowed hard.

“Was she … ?” I began. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t ask.”

“It’s okay,” he responded. “Depressed? Yeah. But not like, you know, depressed-depressed.”

“Not suicidal?” I asked softly.

“No! I mean, when they told me, I thought it was some sick joke. Except I knew it was real because it was a couple of cops who came and told me. Asked me questions. They had to. Because she died at Bloomie’s, not, like, in a hospital.”

“Was she depressed about the Sveltburger business?”

His head rocked up and down, a single, emphatic Yes.

“Depressed, angry. Why shouldn’t she be angry?”

The showroom lights that brought out the gleam of his Volvos made his dark brown hair shine. His eyes appeared moist, too, but I couldn’t tell if it was the lighting or a glaze of tears.

“It was so unfair. Like what was Vanessa supposed to do? Run Polly Terranova’s business for her?”

He answered his own question.

“No. Vanessa did her job—got top of the line employees. Polly or whoever Polly picked was supposed to supervise them.”

“That was unfair,” I agreed.

Then, lowering my voice, I said: “Was Vanessa still that upset about her divorce?”

“No! At least, not to me she wasn’t.”

“When was the last time you saw her?” I inquired.

“The night before.”

Tony touched his paunch gently as if it helped him recollect.

“We went out to dinner. She was watching my weight. High protein, low carb. She said diets come and go, but it always comes back to that.”

His eyes grew damper. A tear formed in the corner of his left eye and meandered down his cheek.

“She told me I was getting”—he stopped and took a deep breath to compose himself—“insulin-resistant. That’s how come the protein was so important.”

He seemed to want a response, so I nodded slowly, as if still dazed by such godlike wisdom, and in the softest echo, said “protein.” Then, as gently as possible, I went on: “The explanation I’ve heard about the suicide doesn’t feel right to me. Could she have been upset about something else? Some other business thing? Could someone she knew have been giving her a hard time?”

“No,” he said firmly. “She would’ve said something to me. We had a completely …”

He blinked back another potential tear.

“I know.”

“We talked all the time.”

On the way back to Shorehaven, having vowed to think about the all-wheel drive’s viscous coupling, I bought myself a cup of coffee and sat in my Jeep in the parking lot of a Starbucks. A soft snow began to fall, just enough to frost the windshield, so I gazed into its soothing whiteness. Tony’s deal wasn’t good enough to tempt me. Neither was Tony, cute though he was. However, I was touched by the tear that trickled down his cheek—although my sentiment was tempered by the fact that he’d lied to me about when he’d last seen Vanessa. On the last morning of Vanessa’s life, she had told Connor the trainer to leave because she’d seen Tony driving up. Connor himself had seen Tony. Yet Tony had told me the last time he’d seen her was at dinner the night before, with Vanessa monitoring his diet. Unless Connor was the one who wasn’t telling the truth.

I warmed my hands on the cup and sipped the coffee. Tony seemed genuinely distressed by Vanessa’s death. Still, I remembered Nelson telling me that if he had a buck for every tear shed by killers he’d be the richest guy on Long Island. But why would Tony want to kill Vanessa? Actually, why would anyone? For once, I stopped being my own bad cop and let myself think about Nelson. In my mind, I asked him, Okay, what was to be gained by her death?

He counseled, Approach it by thinking about each person she had a relationship with.