Compliments of a Friend (7 page)

“So how come she finally did take the pill?”

The question was tossed off casually enough, but he wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, he lounged against the doorframe.

“Maybe she read another study that said the earlier study was based on false methodology. Or maybe she was feeling better and getting back to her old health-conscious routine. The point is: the killer wasn’t going to try again because he or she got what he or she wanted.”

“Which was?”

“Vanessa let Stan go.”

He smiled, a how-amusing smile.

“Tell me, Sergeant Kim, who’s your money on?”

“What?”

The smile disappeared and he stood straight. Seeing he was about to step out into the hall, I stood in the doorway, blocking his way.

“Is it on Barbara Giddings?” I asked. “She was obsessed with Vanessa. She knew about the two pill cases. But she didn’t know there were vitamins in them. She thought they were full of uppers and downers, or at least that’s what she’s saying now. And then there’s the problem of access. Could Barbara really have gotten into Vanessa’s handbag not once, but twice: to get the capsule, then return it to the pill case?”

Kim decided to revert to amusement. It was as if he’d left all traces of his former neutrality back at his desk.

“The new wife? Is that what you’re going to say next?”

He waited, a pleasant, anticipatory expression on his face, as if he were waiting for a comeback from a standup comic.

“Same problem of access. How could she have done it without Stan’s complicity?”

“Then you’re saying …”

He waited again.

My problem wasn’t whether Kim was interested. I could see he was, if only to the extent that, if he were the diligent type, he’d review the case the instant I left. The problem was that if he were a shrewd department politician without a conscience, he wouldn’t now holler murder, not when he’d already gone public and declared it a suicide.

“Listen,” I told him. “I teach history on the college level. Plus, I work in a public library that serves a population of thirty thousand.”

“I assume you’re trying to make some point. What is it?”

“I know from a bureaucracy standpoint,” I told him, “it might seem to you that saying it’s a homicide now is like announcing ‘I goofed.’ But it doesn’t have to be viewed as your mistake. More than likely, it could be sloppy work by the medical examiner’s office, or by the first cops on the scene, or something. And you could be the hero because you had doubts and the courage of your convictions and went after the truth.”

“And what is the truth?” Kim asked.

Before I could answer, a voice from behind me, in the hall, called out to Kim: “How’s it going, Andy?”

Oh God. I knew whose voice that was. I could not bring myself to turn around and look.

“Not bad. How’re you doing, man?”

“Not bad, either,” the voice said. The footsteps continued down the hall for another second or two. Maybe it wasn’t extrasensory perception that made Nelson stop, but a cop’s sensitivity to some infinitesimal motion. For all I know, it could have been my telltale heart.

Nelson looked lousy. He looked wonderful. His salt-and-pepper hair had turned white, a cool white, the hair that tycoons have on a better class of TV series. His skin, however, had lost its luster, and he now had the chalky color of a lifelong civil servant. But at least, though I didn’t dare give him the once-over, his body still seemed fine. His eyes were still gorgeous, large and velvety brown. For that instant, they did not leave my face. Naturally, I immediately thought there was some hideous flaw he’d spotted, one of those imperfections of middle age I couldn’t see because my eyesight has gone to hell: a giant hair growing out of my nose, my entire jawline covered by a Texas-shaped liver spot. I held my hands tight to my sides so I wouldn’t reach up and feel for what was wrong and swallowed hard. And nothing more happened. Nelson gave me a barely perceptible nod and walked on.

Now all I wanted was to get out of police headquarters. But I forced myself to talk to Detective-Sergeant Kim.

“You and I both know who had access to Vanessa’s things a few months back.”

“You’re talking about Stan Giddings?”

“We know Vanessa …”

Was trying to hold an intelligent conversation too much stress on my heart? Would I say Here’s what I think and then simply drop dead? Poor Kate. Poor Joey. Both parents’ hearts couldn’t take the stress they were under. But I had to say something to Detective Sergeant Kim.

“We know Vanessa was too much for Stan Giddings. Pushing him farther than he wanted to go socially. Making him over, from his shoes to hair plugs for a bald spot. He couldn’t take the implicit condescension. He was to the manor born, a guy used to unquestioning acceptance, a guy used to people moving earth and sky for him. He wanted someone better than Barbara. But he didn’t want a wife who not only outshone him, but who drove him. A man like Stan must have realized he needed someone with a cute career, not an important one. Plus, he wanted someone who could have a baby, so he could have a do-over—the way so many men do when they hit middle age. He wanted to live in Giddings House, be lord of his manor. He wanted to do rich man’s things, like winter in Palm Beach. What was he doing the day Vanessa died? Coming home from Florida after looking at real estate. And what was the only thing that kept him from living the life he wanted? Vanessa.”

“Why couldn’t he just wait till the divorce was over? Why push it?”

“Because he is spoiled worse than rotten. He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. He wanted out of the marriage and he wanted a baby, so he got Ryn pregnant. Except Vanessa wouldn’t cooperate with him. Somehow she got wind that the baby was coming. Maybe he even told her. But she started holding him up for more than what the prenuptial agreement stipulated. That kind of chutzpah wasn’t in his calculations, and he became enraged. He wanted out, and fast, and if Vanessa was going to make it difficult for him, she’d have to go. Why don’t you check? I bet there’s a period of time when he was out of town. That would be the days or weeks when he expected her ‘suicide’ to happen. Except it didn’t.”

Kim stuck his hands in his pockets.

Finally, he asked: “And how am I supposed to prove this?”

Kim called me that night. The medical examiner’s findings reported that the stomach contents had included a trace amount of gelatin, enough for a large dissolved capsule.

I waited. In a whodunit, I would have been Kim’s partner, leading him (carrying the search warrant) to a dusting of Vitamin X and Xanax mixture in the pocket of Stan Giddings’s cashmere sports jacket. Or I’d be luring Stan into an Edward Hopper diner for a coffee and then snatch the cup and … Aha! … The dribblings on the so-called suicide note turned out to be a match for Stan Giddings’s DNA on his cup.

But, in life, the scales of justice hardly ever achieve the exquisite balance that they do in a whodunit.

To give Detective-Sergeant Kim credit, he did his homework, albeit a little late. Two artist friends told him how Ryn had given Stan an ultimatum: a month to finalize his divorce. If he couldn’t, she would get an abortion. As to having a child out of wedlock, they laughed. Ryn? No, Ryn knew what she wanted. Having a baby was simply the means of getting it. No “it,” no kid.

And yes, Stan had gone to his house in Maine for a month in October with Ryn, around the time he left Vanessa, around the time he was waiting for her to kill herself so he and Ryn could come back and get married. But nothing happened. So Stan wound up giving Vanessa an extra three mill to ease her pain in getting cut loose so fast.

Finally, the cops did find Stan Giddings’s fingerprints on a brown amber bottle of Sunrise Antiox Detox in a bathroom adjacent to Vanessa Giddings’s workout room.

“What does that prove?” Stan’s lawyer screamed to the district attorney of Nassau County.

And the DA conceded grudgingly: “It means maybe he took an antiox pill.”

Thus, Stan’s longstanding policy of giving campaign contributions not just to right-wingers but to the local candidates of all parties, even the most marginal, was vindicated. And, sad to report, Stan Giddings himself was vindicated.

It was too late for true justice, although the New York Post somehow got wind that the Vanessa Giddings’s suicide was once again under investigation, as was her former husband, Stanley Giddings. Suicide … or murder? Xanax in a big, fat antioxidant capsule? A dandy photograph of Stan and Ryn ran on the front page, along with insets of old-money Giddings House and Vanessa’s nouveau-riche-but-somewhat-tasteful Tara. And when you turned to page 47 to continue reading, there was a photo of a Sunrise Antiox Detox bottle with a scattering of large brown gel caps, some of them pulled apart, presumably to show how easy they were to open.

“Good enough for your friend Vanessa?” my friend Nancy Miller demanded that morning.

I held the phone away from my ear as she made one of those hideous Georgia ya-hoo sounds, half yell, half screech.

“I whispered a few words into the shell-pink ear of a reporter pal at the Post. If I’d given it to Newsday, there was a chance it might be handled tastefully; sometimes they’re such prissy fucks. But the Post, bless their darling, vulgar hearts. None of that ‘respected businessman’ shit. ‘Did Sox Heir Slay Ex for Sex?’ ”

“Nancy, thank you! God bless you! I held the paper at arm’s length and smiled at the front page paparazzo-style photo of a sullen Ryn and an infuriated Stan leaving church the previous Sunday. They held their baby, wrapped in a pink blanket, awkwardly between them, as if it were a football hand-off neither wanted to accept.

“Are you okay on the Nelson front, kiddo?” Nancy quizzed me.

“Fine.”

“Being so close to him and not having him even say hello really got to you.”

“He kind of gave me the teeniest nod, but it wasn’t a nod filled with significance, if you know what I mean. Basically, it was your typical, indecipherable cop nod.”

“He really got to you, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not going to do anything profoundly stupid, like call him.”

“No,” I assured her.

“Or fax him Bob’s obit.”

“That’s an elegant idea! God, I wish I’d thought of it. No, no, don’t worry.”

“Hey, aren’t I a good friend?” she asked.

“There’s none better!” I told her.

“No. You’re better. There’s none better than you, Judith. To me and even to that tedious clotheshorse, Vanessa, poor thing. I just don’t want you getting hurt, is all and—”

“Call waiting. Hold on.”

I never got back to her that day. It was Nelson Sharpe.

He said, “Judith,” and then …

But that’s another story.

Afterword

ONCE UPON A TIME I WAS FORCED TO WRITE A SHORT STORY AND …

All right, “forced to write” is an overstatement if your idea of coercion is the muzzle end of a pistol an inch from one of your sinuses. In fact, the mood in that restaurant couldn’t have been more amiable. There we were, way back in the 1990s, my writers’ group, the Adams Round Table, at our monthly first-Tuesday get-together. As usual, we sat around the table, downing tough-guy whiskey or Chardonnay or teetotaler’s club soda. The first two minutes were taken up with publishing news. Then a healthy half-hour was spent on the most urgent writers’ gossip. After that, with plates of pasta or the joint’s weekly special—invariably a flat, flaccid white thing the menu persisted in calling Dover sole specially flown in (we assumed from the Bronx)—each of us took turns speaking about our writing lives.

We covered all the territory. The real downside of first person is the reader knows the narrator’s not going to die, but I tried the omniscient third and, boy, did it suck the big one. Then the next member would relate how Warner Brothers said they were definitely going to option Dead, Dead, Dead, but they never called back and I’m not sure if they’re playing hard to get or, you know, maybe … Could they have lost interest? They really seemed to love it.

As the newest member of the group, I reveled in the congeniality, the shoptalk, the mutual trust. All these terrific mystery and suspense writers: gifted and articulate, some cheery, some morose, and one or two who appeared to have overdone it at some controlled-substance happy hour. But they were all talking the talk I was aching to hear. We spoke in confidence. Not that we were sharing dark secrets, but it was comforting knowing whatever you said about your agent or some other writer would not pop up on Page Six of the New York Post. Being a novelist meant a professional life of isolation, sitting alone in a room telling yourself a story. This monthly dose of collegiality always invigorated me.

The next person who spoke said, “[Our editor] called. The publisher wants another anthology from us. Something like Murder Among Friends.”

“Anthology?” I asked.

“Yeah. Every few years, we put together an anthology of short stories, all with a similar theme.” I must have looked either dubious or stricken, because he or she added, “It doesn’t have to be a long short story.”

“It’s always fun,” someone else added. “You know, the variety: seeing what everybody writes, plus we make a couple of bucks.”

I confessed: “I’ve never written a short story.”

Okay, there weren’t exactly gasps, but nearly all the other members looked a bit surprised. Not only do many novelists start with a short story form, but among mystery and thriller and horror writers, getting into the genre magazines, the pulps, was step one on the career path.

I, on the other hand, had been an editor at Seventeen magazine and also a freelance political speechwriter. After that, aside from the occasional article, I’d been a stay-at-home mom, reading so many whodunits during my kids’ naptime or preschool that I may have become somewhat unhinged. But at some point, I told myself: “I think I can do this.” The “this” was writing a novel. Not a novella, not a short story. Truthfully, I rarely read short fiction. I wanted a universe, not a galaxy, not a solar system.

But I wanted to be a true part of the group, so I settled for maybe being able to come up with an asteroid. “Okay,” I said breezily, even though, that very second, my intestines were tightening into a figure-eight knot: “I’ll give it a shot.”