Compliments of a Friend Read online

  “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.

  I probably did something humiliating, like nodding and smiling at him—Good idea!—because I recall how relieved I felt that the window had gotten frosted over.

  All right, what about Tony? If he hated Vanessa, he could simply stop going out with her … unless, of course, she knew some dark secret about his business dealings or his sexuality and was blackmailing him.

  If Nelson were really beside me, he’d be shaking his head: Far-fetched. Keep him on your list, but put him way at the bottom. Move on.

  Polly Terranova? From the bit of research I’d done, it seemed that nothing—not even the doofus accountant and the doped-up assembly line workers sent out by Panache—could stop the inexorable march of Sveltburgers into America’s freezers. Polly might be angry, but she could get even much more effectively by taking away her business than by offering Vanessa a Xanaxburger.

  Stan Giddings? He might have wanted to get rid of Vanessa in order to marry Ryn, but that had been months earlier. It had probably cost him above and beyond what his prenuptial contract specified. But she hadn’t bankrupted him, not by a long shot: he was still loaded enough to give Ryn a five-carat ring and to be refurbishing Giddings House.

  Ryn? Again, she might have wished to get rid of the second Mrs. Giddings so she could become the third sooner rather than later. But for once, I thought, Mary Alice was right. It probably wouldn’t matter to someone like Ryn whether a child was born in or out of wedlock. Admittedly, if Vanessa had dug in her heels and tried to sue Stan over the prenup claiming whatever about-to-be exes usually claim, the baby could be born and Stan might have second thoughts. Sure, he’d support the kid, but support didn’t mean a five-carat rock and a house with the family name. So it was in Ryn’s interest to marry Stan as quickly as she could. Since she had done that, there was no reason to risk killing Vanessa Giddings.

  I turned on the windshield wipers. The snow was fluffy and dry, a benevolent end-of-winter snow, sent to remind the impatient who are yearning for their first crocus how ravishing winter can be. I felt one of those familiar waves of sadness crash over me, being alone, with no one to share the beauty. Sure, at the end of the day, I could call one of my children, or Nancy, and describe the fat, silent snowflakes descending around Starbucks, but the Oh, nice! that I’d get would be syllables of charity. Well, to tell the truth, Bob would not have been seized by ecstasy, either. I put on the rear wiper, shifted the Jeep into reverse, and backed out to go home.

  Until I thought of the first Mrs. Giddings. Barbara. Who, according to Siri, lived at 37 Bridle Path West in Shorehaven Acres. Shorehaven Half-Acres would be more exact. And as for the so-called bridle path—like the Cotillion Way and Andover Road that crossed it—an allusion to a way of life that the residents themselves had probably never experienced. Still, it was a pleasant development of neocolonials and putative Tudors. The pathetic little saplings planted in the 1960s had grown into fine oaks and healthy Japanese maples. It all looked perfectly nice—except for Barbara Giddings’s house.

  Even the camouflage of snow couldn’t hide the neglect. The driveway had deep gouges; chunks of asphalt lay around these holes as if the driveway had been strafed. The house itself was even more forlorn, its white-painted clapboard peeling. Once it must have been a dark red because carmine patches blotched the white facade like some dreadful skin condition.

  Barbara Giddings wasn’t in such good shape, either. At two in the afternoon, her frizz of bleached hair was flattened on one side. Her eyes had the frantic flutter of someone ashamed of being caught napping. Nevertheless, she hadn’t had the energy to pull back her slumping shoulders. Her blue eyes and small, pouty lips indicated she had probably once been pretty, although her face was now so puffy it was impossible to tell if it had been in a Meg Ryan or Kim Basinger way. If I went into my now-familiar why-I-am-here speech—library, oral history, important contribution—I felt it would overwhelm her. So I just whipped out a pad and muttered something about just having only a few questions about Vanessa Giddings.

  “I don’t think … I should call my lawyer,” she said.

  Surprise. I had expected a voice of the living dead, but she had the rich, cultivated tones of an announcer on a classical music station. So I tried to rise to her level, offering my library speech, minding my diction. And she invited me inside.

  After ten years of wear and a couple of kids, the house was more rundown than neglected. We sat on her living room couch covered with one of those cream-colored slipcovers you see in catalogs that are supposed to look fashionably shabby, as if your great-grandparents had old money, but which, sadly, look as though you have a battered couch you can’t afford to replace.

  “Would you mind if I record …”

  She shook her head vehemently, so I quickly said, “Just for background then,” and sat forward, hands in my lap.

  “Were you surprised by Vanessa’s death?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  Her lips compressed in disapproval until they looked like a pale prune.

 
“She was always a pill-popper.”

  “Vanessa?”

  A quick, dismissive, almost cruel laugh—Heh!—meant to tell me how uninformed I was.

  “Yes. Vanessa. You know those jumbo-size, Monday-to-Sunday pill cases?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “She carried two of them in her purse. And that was in the days, let me tell you, that she should have been flying high on her own accord. That was when she was carrying on with Stan—lunch, dinner, no wonder she never had a weight problem. She never ate, just banged her brains out.”

  Barbara’s words may have been coarse, but her voice sounded so cultivated you expected to hear Haydn’s Symphony no. 96 in D major next, so what she did say was doubly jarring. But she made me feel sad, too. With her defeated posture and straw hair, Barbara Giddings had the despondent air of a welfare mother who no longer has the energy to hope. All her aspects didn’t add up. It was like a game show, and I couldn’t figure out which contestant was the real Barbara.

  “Do you know what kind of pills?” I asked. “Did she have some illness?”

  “Illness?” she laughed. “Diet pills. Amphetamines, I suppose. And downers. And who knows what else? But two pill cases. A blue and a yellow.” She was so specific it was not just suspicious, but creepy.

  “Do you believe her death really was suicide?” I asked, trying to sound offhand.

  “Do I believe it was suicide?” she demanded, irritably. Her pasty cheeks suddenly bloomed scarlet. “Do you think I give a good goddamn?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no, I’m sorry,” she quickly apologized, trying to comb her hair behind her ears with her fingers. “Funny, how something so long ago can still get you worked up. What can I say? It’s one thing to take someone’s husband away. Fair and square in the game of love and all that.”

  She managed a small smile, but her combing grew more intense, so she was almost raking her scalp.

  “I mean, Stan had it all: looks, charm, intelligence. And money.”

  I made myself keep looking at her and not at the graying rug under our feet that had once been some cheerier color.

  “Money,” Barbara Giddings said. “There’s a reason they call it the root of all evil.”

  “That’s for sure,” I muttered, just to have something to say.

  “She wasn’t going to settle for Stan and his … his wealth and social position. No, Vanessa had to have everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything.”

  “How did she go about it?” I inquired.

  I was a little nervous that all of a sudden she’d come to her senses and think: Why in God’s name am I talking like this to a stranger? Instead, she seemed relieved I was there, to sit on her couch and be a witness to the outrage that had been perpetrated against her.

  “How? She manipulated Stan—trust me, he was a babe in the woods and she knew just how to take him over. She got him to con me into signing a divorce agreement that gave me next to nothing. You couldn’t bring up two hamsters, much less kids—one who just happens to have ADHD—on what I’m getting. Stan gave me a song and dance about how he wanted to give me the money off the books, you know, like under the table. For tax purposes. What did I know? I was just the ex-maid.”

  “You’d been working as a …”

  “No!” It was somewhere between snarl and growl, and displayed so much spirit it seemed as though some psycho doppelgänger had supplanted Barbara on the couch. “I was going to Stony Brook! Studying botany. I got a summer job after sophomore year helping out their gardener. Not in a lab, but what the hell, at least it paid. But the story got out that Stan had eloped with the maid. I could never shake it.”

  “How come your lawyer allowed you to go along with the money under the table business?”

  “Please. Stan got me my lawyer. A kid from one of the law firms that Atlantic Hosiery used. Atlantic is Stan’s family’s company. Need I say more?”

  I shook my head, but that didn’t stop Barbara Giddings’s rant. For the next three-quarters of an hour, I heard how Stan’s visits to his children dwindled from twice a week to once every month or two … because of pressure from Vanessa. How Vanessa got Stan to hire an architect from Los Angeles to design a new house in Shorehaven Estates. How Vanessa had Stan employ a chauffeur and how the chauffeur would drive in her personal shopper from Manhattan with trunks full of clothes. On and on: Viktor & Rolf. Size six. Comme des Garçons. Carine Gilson … that’s couture lingerie. Alligator handbags with gold clasps. A wall of shoes, size seven and a half. How Vanessa was much too much for Stan. How she’d made him over, from the tips of his once-machine-made shoes to the top of his beginning-to-bald head. Italian hand-made loafers. Hair plugs. Private wine-tasting lessons. How she’d taken an ordinary rich Joe whose greatest joy had been his fifty-yard-line box at Giants games and yearly golf weekend at Pebble Beach and transformed him into croquet-playing Social Man who either dined out every night with friends who weren’t really friends or who hosted dinner parties in his new waterfront mansion for corporate types who were—here, Barbara stopped to take a breath to propel the words out—Vanessa’s clients!

  At last, I drove off, relieved to be out of a house that smelled like dirty laundry, grateful to get away from Barbara’s fixation. Not on her ex-husband, the man she’d presumably loved, the man who’d bamboozled her. But on the Other Woman. Vanessa loomed huge over Barbara’s life. It was one thing to be aware of a rival’s key asset, a law degree from Harvard or a hand-span waist. Quite another to know she had fourteen size-six Rodarte dresses in her closet.

  Two hours later, I demanded: “Could Barbara Giddings be gullible enough to believe that a man who’s cheated on you with another woman, who’s leaving you for her, who’s sticking you and your children in a house that probably costs about the same as the Hepplewhite breakfront in your former dining room … could she honestly believe he would honor an agreement to pay up under the table?”

  I was sitting beside Nancy’s desk at Newsday watching her perform microsurgery on somebody’s op-ed essay on government subsidies for the arts. I’d never been to see her at work before and was both dazzled and comforted that the newsroom I’d walked through still looked like all the newsrooms in movies.

  “You know what the answer is,” Nancy replied, but gently.

  She understood I had not dropped by to shoot the breeze. With three clicks of her mouse, she highlighted a paragraph on her computer screen and, with one dismissive tap of a key, deleted it.

  “Yes. Barbara Giddings could be that gullible,” she replied. “If all you’re offered is a lie and you’re desperate for hope, when you get fucked up the ass, you tell yourself you’re queen of the May and that thing in your rectum is a maypole.”

  “I know,” I conceded. “But is she telling the truth? Could she actually have been given a generous settlement and blown it at the racetrack or on some bad investment? And as far as Vanessa goes … Barbara has a dull, lost look, like ‘What do I do now that Vanessa’s dead? Whom can I hate?’ What I want to know is if what I saw was an act or the real thing.”

  “You mean if Barbara’s really a conniving, murdering bitch?”

  “I mean: Was she telling me the truth? Was Vanessa so into drugs? Could you just ask the reporter who’s—”

  “Fuck off, Judith! Enough!”

  But after glaring at me, she picked up the phone.

  Two minutes later—and some whispered prompting by me—she hung up and declared: “The only drug they found in her system was the Xanax that killed her. Yes, she did have two pill cases in her handbag. Mostly those big mothers, megavitamins. And a couple of Xanax. The only prescriptions in her name were for Xanax and Ambien, the sleeping pill.”

  “Did they find the Xanax bottle?” I demanded.

  “I didn’t ask. I am not going to call him again and have him think Lord knows what—that I’m after his job, or him.”

  “Then call the cops,” I said softly. />
  Nancy shook her head.

  “I swear to you, Nan, I’m not using this as a devious way to get to Nelson.”

  “You’re so full of shit your eyes are brown.”

  “The police must have a PR person. Just find out if they found the bottle. Also, get the prescription dates and anything else about her drugs.”

  It’s often eye-opening to watch a friend doing what she does for a living: her authority is startling. You forget the complex and occasionally vulnerable woman while you view the champ in action. For someone calling cold, Nancy was amazingly adroit. Hi! Nancy Miller from Newsday Viewpoints. We’re thinking of running a piece on suicide with a mention of the Vanessa Giddings case. Direct, businesslike, but still, she was laying on the Georgia-peach jam so thick I could tell she was talking to a man.

  When she hung up, she reported: “No Xanax bottle. They surmise she must have thrown it out on her way to Bloomingdale’s.”

  “That’s one hell of a surmise.”

  “The original prescription for Xanax was from last March. She had it renewed once, in September. The Ambien is from this January.”

  “Call him back.”

  “No.”

  “Please. Find out where Stan and Tony Marx and Barbara Giddings … and Ryn were the day she died.”

  “In a pig’s eye.”

  Call-Me-Mike, Nancy’s new conquest in the Nassau County Police Department’s PR office, phoned her back a half hour later, during which time I watched her eviscerate the essay on her screen and call the writer to inform her of having made a couple of minor edits. Call-Me-Mike told her—off the record—that Ryn had gone to her obstetrician in the morning, then had Stan’s chauffeur drive her into the city, to the Acadia-Fensterheim Gallery in SoHo where, presumably, she could admire her own work.

  Tony Marx went from his condo to his Volvo dealership, a fact which did not square with what Connor the Trainer had told me about seeing Tony’s car drive up to the house. Stan was on a plane coming back from Palm Beach where he had spent the previous day looking at real estate. As for Barbara, well, she had not been interviewed.