Compliments of a Friend Read online

  “Precisely. She was so meticulous I can’t even imagine her willing to risk breaking a nail hooking up a hose to the exhaust of her car. No. Her kind of woman would probably check out the old-fashioned, ‘ladylike’ way—by taking sleeping pills. Right?”

  “Most likely,” she conceded, although reluctantly.

  “And what would happen then? She might just go to sleep forever. But she could also upchuck and choke on her own vomit.”

  “No need to be so vivid at the dinner hour, Judith.”

  “And why in God’s name would she choose to die in Bloomingdale’s?” I continued. “Why would she be buying shoes in the final moments of her life? Think, Nancy: If you were depressed and hopeless enough to actively consider suicide, would you be worrying about what to wear with your new spring suit?”

  “No.” She pushed back the chin-length wave of hair that had fallen over one eye. “Accessorizing is a life-affirming act.”

  “Also, if you’re one of these controlled types like Vanessa,” I went on, “are you going to risk dropping down dead over a display of Ferragamos and losing control of your bowels while you’re wearing an above-the-knee skirt?”

  With that, I waved the waiter over and inquired how much garlic there was in the ribollita.

  But after dinner, back home alone, I was still asking questions. So I hauled in the tied-up newspapers I’d put in the garage for recycling and sat in the kitchen. Intermittently, sleet struck the window, like thousands of long-nailed fingers tapping impatiently against a glass tabletop: Hurry up! Find something! I read and reread Vanessa’s obituary, the paid tributes, and all there was about her death. Then I went online. Nothing much except for the good-byes on the In Memoriam page on the Winston Bowles Funeral Home’s website: “The Puttermans are deeply saddened …” and, from Lila and Don McDougal, “Good night, Sweet Princess, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

  On- and offline, I couldn’t find much of substance. She’d been born Vanessa Compton in Rockville Centre, a town near the south shore of Long Island. She’d gone to Hofstra, also on the Island. After a brief stint (though I never heard of a stint that wasn’t brief) working at a gigantic employment agency in the city, she’d founded Panache while still in her twenties.

  Her clients ranged from the corporate, like Kluckers and a computer software giant, to individuals, like socialites and professional athletes. By the time she was in her early thirties, she had not only married Stan, but had also gotten him to build her a fifteen-room mansion on a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound, a place with such a surfeit of Doric columns it was clear that too many girlhood viewings of Gone with the Wind had caused a slight impairment to the region of the brain that governed her architecture aesthetic.

  One of the online pieces had an old Panache publicity picture of Vanessa; she was wearing a coatdress and perched on the edge of her Louis the Something-th desk. She was flanked on the left by a woman in a maid’s uniform and a man in a hardhat holding a clipboard; a man in a three-piece banker’s suit stood on the right and, beside him, another in a one-piece mechanic’s coverall. All four workers looked competent and content, yet Vanessa outshone them. Whether it was some inner glow or simply good lighting I couldn’t tell.

  In a long article in the Shorehaven Sentinel, I read: “Her former husband, Stanley Giddings, could not be reached for comment, although a Giddings family spokesman released a statement that said Mr. Giddings was ‘shocked and saddened to learn of Vanessa’s suicide.’ ” The shocked and saddened Stan, the paper noted, had married an artist, who went by the name of Ryn, three months earlier. They’d moved out of Shorehaven many months before the nuptials and were living in dandied-up waterfront warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The place had just been photographed for Architectural Digest.

  The next time I glanced up, it was long past eleven o’clock. Shit. Hurriedly, I made a pile of clippings and printouts about Vanessa’s death, arranged in chronological order. Why had I spent the night doing this when facing eighteen first drafts of term papers on New Deal agencies?

  Well, Vanessa had called me her friend. On the slim chance she hadn’t been full of it, that she was truly so friendless that she considered a near stranger a friend, maybe I owed her something. Or it could have been my gut reaction: her committing suicide was ninety-nine percent unlikely. Over the years, I’ve learned my gut is right more often than not. Who knows? It simply could have been that after dinner with Nancy, on yet one more bleak night alone, a mystery was just what I needed to put some life in my life.

  My husband was gone. True, Bob and I hadn’t had a fairy-tale marriage. Still, even when all that’s left is polite conversation and lackluster marital sex, you have to remember (I’d told myself all those years we were together) that once upon a time it had to have been a love story. I always half-expected the plot would get moving again. Some incident would touch off a great conflict and, lo and behold, not only would the air clear, but there’d be romance in it! Bob and Judith: we’d walk hand in hand into a sunset, happily ever after—or until one of us went gently into the night in our eighth or ninth decade.

  Imagine my surprise when he died before my eyes in the emergency room of North Shore Hospital. One minute, he squeezed my hand—a reassuring gesture—but I could see the fear in his eyes. As I squeezed back, he slipped away. Just like that. Gone, before I could say, “Don’t worry, Bob. The nurse told me Dr. Feinblatt—the cardiologist—was one of New York magazine’s Top Doctors.” Or just “I love you, Bob.”

  Not only no husband, no prospect of another one. I promised myself no more blind dates, not after the two most recent—whom Nancy referred to as Death Warmed Over and Mr. Piggy. Periodically, I went to the movies, the theatre, and even a couple of baseball games with Bruce, a psycho-pharmacologist I’d met through JDate. He har-har-ed, almost insanely, at the merest suggestion of humor. I suspected he was prescribing too much something for himself. Plus, he flunked my test for basic human decency. He was disrespectful to waiters. If a man needs an item of flatware, he absolutely cannot ask: How long do I have to wait before anyone brings me a salad fork? I should have told him to take a hike, but no one else was knocking at my door.

  My son and daughter loved me, but they both were grown, gone from the house, busy with their own lives. So who knows? Maybe I was fixated on murder because it was one of those dark and stormy nights, both without and within, when the notion of suicide—anybody’s—was so terrifying it had to be denied.

  I should have felt better the next day. A soft-yellow sun rose into an azure sky. Even in the cold air, I sniffed the first sweetness of spring. Actually, I did feel better. But that was probably not because of the imminence of daffodils.

  I was sitting across from Dr. Jennifer Spiros, the number-two pathologist in the Nassau County Medical Examiner’s Office.

  “I’m not authorized to give you a copy of the autopsy report,” she said, taking her time with each word.

  Her long, shiny Alice in Wonderland hair was tied back with a dainty blue ribbon with rickrack edges. That was the good news. The bad was she had a rectangle of a face, along with such a thick neck that she looked as if her mother had some hanky-panky with a Lipizzaner.

  “I understand you can’t hand over the actual report,” I replied. “But this is for Shorehaven Library’s oral history project.”

  We both glanced at the red light on the tape recorder I’d set on her desk between us. Dr. Spiros moistened her lips with her tongue.

  “It’s not a matter of documentation,” I explained. “What I’m trying to capture here is the reality of a single death, a view from all perspectives, of the passing of one citizen of Shorehaven. From Vanessa Giddings’s friends and colleagues to her minister who gave the eulogy to … well, to the officials charged with investigating that death.”

  Naturally, I didn’t add that if news of this little caper I was now on got back to Shorehaven Library’s administrator, Snively Sam, I’d be out of a job. I pressed on.
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  “I understand she left a note?”

  Dr. Spiros pressed her hands together, prayerlike, and held them demurely under her chin.

  “I’m not authorized …”

  Her nail polish was a purplish orangey-pink: to imagine the color, picture a plastic flamingo at twilight.

  I reached out and switched off the recorder.

  “On background,” I said boldly, crossing my legs, more Rosalind Russell–His Girl Friday than historian.

  Except two seconds later, my heart started to race. It demanded what my brain hadn’t permitted itself to ask: What the hell am I doing here? Each heartbeat was stronger than the one before until my entire chest was filled with what felt like a life-threatening pounding. I want to get the big picture, I was telling her. Am I nuts? Any minute, she’d come to her senses and toss me out on my ear.

  “The suicide note said something like ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ ” Dr. Spiros was saying. “ ‘It’s got to end.’ That’s about it.”

  “Was it signed?”

  “Yes. Signed ‘Vanessa.’ On her personal stationery.”

  “Was it handwritten?”

  She nodded.

  “Was she carrying it with her?”

  I got a Huh? look.

  “In her handbag or her coat pocket. When she was at Bloomingdale’s?”

  “No. It was …”

  She glanced at me, too suspiciously. But unable to figure out my angle, she finally went on.

  “In a manila folder right in her top desk drawer. I think the report said the drawer was open slightly. The file was marked ‘Personal Papers.’ Her marriage certificate was in there. Her divorce decree. In a sense, she’d assembled her whole relationship with her ex-husband in that file.”

  I turned on the recorder again.

  “I’d like to go over what’s been released publicly.”

  She nodded, then lifted her hair and let it fall back onto her shoulders. Clearly, and correctly, she considered it her best feature.

  “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?”