Compliments of a Friend Page 5

  “Would you stop it now?” Nancy snapped.

  Well, not quite snapped, but I could sense she was less than delighted with me.

  “Vanessa killed herself. Period. She was not your friend. You owe her nothing! She was a woman who was losing her husband, losing her big client, probably losing her looks if you got up close enough. Would you want to spend the rest of your life finding jobs for steamfitters and sleeping with a guy who calls his car a Vulva? No! You’d OD and be done with it.”

  “I would not,” I said as I stood. “And even if I were going to, would I take thirty Xanax in the morning and then go shopping?”

  I put on my coat.

  “Where are you going?” Nancy grilled me, in the manner of a parent sensing her child is about to do something reckless.

  I gave her head a comforting pat.

  “Relax. I’m going to Mineola to look up some records.”

  “What kind of records?”

  “Martha and the Vandellas. Public records, to see if there’s any information about Stan’s divorces. I want to find out if the house Barbara is in now is the one she got stuck with ten years ago when Stan left … or if she had something better and lost it. Then I’ll go back to the library to run a more thorough search on Ryn and Tony. They subscribe to all the search engines you have to pay for.”

  “Why are you wasting your time?”

  “Why? Because they seem like the sort of people who could possibly have checkered pasts. And because the alternative is my book group and they’re doing The Golden Notebook, which I’ve successfully avoided my entire life.”

  I drove west on the Long Island Expressway listening to a National Public Radio interview with an expert on lichens. The scientist explained how lichens are formed by a fungus and an alga living together “intimately.” The intimacy must have gotten to me because instead of driving to the county clerk’s office, I found myself heading for police headquarters.

  This is nuts, I told myself. What if Nelson sees me? He’ll think I’ve been stalking him for twenty years. Get out while I still can. Except I had an idea. I gripped the wheel.

  Cool it, I ordered myself as I pulled into the parking lot. It’s just a glimmering. Now what was the name of the guy from the police conducting the investigation?

  I’d only heard it from Dr. Horse Face and come across it a hundred times in the newspaper accounts, but naturally at the moment I wanted it, the particular brain cell that had this detective’s name on it refused to give it up.

  Well, I could walk right in and ask. And they’d say, Oh, it’s Detective-Sergeant Whatever, and I’d go to his office and just say, Hi, I’m a neighbor of Vanessa Giddings’s and what do you think about this? I know it’s just a theory but …

  Kim! That was his name! Maybe Detective-Sergeant Kim had enormous intellectual curiosity and would reopen the case. On the other hand, maybe he’d think I was demented. Or I’d go inside headquarters, and my heart would be in my throat at the thought that I could possibly see Nelson, so I’d stand before Detective-Sergeant Kim and make hideous gurgling noises.

  Naturally, I was an utter wreck, wanting, not wanting, so I won’t even describe my walking in there and finally being directed to Detective-Sergeant Kim’s office, which took me maybe four minutes but which felt like four years. It normally would have taken half that time, except I kept my head down just in case Nelson walked by, and I had to wait until I sensed the halls clear before I could look up and check out the numbers on the doors.

  “It’s an interesting theory,” Detective-Sergeant Kim remarked fifteen minutes later.

  He was a large man in his late thirties who looked as if he’d gained twenty pounds since the time he’d bought his suit.

  “And I appreciate your sharing it with me, Ms. Singer. Except for one thing …”

  “No one had any reason to want to kill her,” I replied.

  He smiled, a gracious, be-nice-to-upper-middle-class-citizens smile.

  “At least no one had any reason at the time she died. On that score, you’re absolutely right. But what about four or five months before that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He looked less impatient than perplexed, which I took as a hopeful omen.

  “If she wanted to kill herself, why would she take pills from an old prescription? She had a prescription for Ambien, so if she wanted to go to sleep permanently, why not swig them down with a big glass of vodka?”

  He waited. He crossed his arms over his chest and tried to lean back, except his chair didn’t want to. He gave up and rested his elbows on his desk.

  “Look,” I went on, “say you want to kill Vanessa Giddings. Make it look like a suicide. What do you do? Well, you could slip a compromising letter on her notepaper into a file marked personal papers. ‘I can’t take it anymore. It’s got to end.’ With her signature.”

  “Doesn’t that sound like a suicide note to you?” he asked, still patient.

  I couldn’t tell if he was a naturally easygoing man or a canny cop who used pleasantness as an investigatory technique. If not for the wee wobble of a second chin, I noted, he’d have been handsome.

  “It’s a note that could mean anything has got to end. It could have been to her housekeeper, that she’s ironing on too high a heat and burning pillowcases right and left and it’s got to end. To her secretary, that she’s calling in sick too often. To her boyfriend, that it’s over. Or to her husband, that his philandering or his lying or his late nights have got to end.”

  Kim took a deep breath that looked as if it were meant to propel a sentence, so I talked faster.

  “To her husband’s lover, to end the affair. To her husband’s ex-wife-who seemed more than a little fixated on Vanessa—to stop snooping around town about what she’s doing.”

  “So you’re saying someone got her note and, if it wasn’t the maid with the iron, they snuck into her house and stuck it into her folder?”

  Kim had a square, manly face with intelligent black eyes, and he was even able to raise one eyebrow with the skepticism of a film noir antihero, though the jiggle of his chin subtracted from his coolness quotient.

  “I’m saying whoever put the note in that folder did it months ago, when he or she had easier access to Vanessa’s things, like her file of personal papers.”

  Kim waited. The smile vanished. On the other hand, it wasn’t replaced with a snarl.

  “It was done before the prescription for Ambien was written, before Vanessa’s marriage was over. Was the note on top of the papers in the folder?”

  “No,” he said cautiously.

  “So in the ensuing months, she just stuck other papers in there—like her divorce decree—and maybe never saw the note.”

  “Okay, then what?” he asked slowly, trying to see where I was going, but I hadn’t generated enough light for him to make it out.

  “Look, if someone dies a suspicious death what happens?” I asked. “Guys like you look into it. You’ll find out what people close to the victim were doing around the time of the death. So if you want to make a murder look like a suicide, the best thing to do is to distance yourself from the place and time of death as much as possible.”

  “So then what do you think happened?” Kim Detective-Sergeant asked.

  It was less a request than a demand to put up or shut up.

  “I’m not sure.”

  He was starting to look—not quite bored, but uninterested.

  I talked fast: “Tony Marx lied to me and probably to you about not seeing Vanessa on the day she died.”

  Before he could interject another question, I explained: “Vanessa’s personal trainer, a guy named Connor, saw Tony driving up to her house that morning.”

  His mouth opened slightly, that how-do-you-know-that? signal of an unasked question.

  I kept going: “My guess is Tony had some trouble in the past and got frightened about being part of any investigation. That’s why he lied about when he last saw her.”

  I
waited.

  Kim finally said: “It’s a matter of public record. An arrest for insurance fraud, second degree. Suspended sentence.”

  “Tony seems to have genuinely loved her.”

  No reaction. I wished I could say, Isn’t it odd, how often unlovable, unloving types are able to attract people who truly do love them? But Detective Kim didn’t seem the sort to welcome the Fascinating Digression.

  “On the other hand, Barbara Giddings definitely didn’t love Vanessa, although she is obsessed with her. Knows the precise number of suits in her closet, which is pretty weird.”

  “So you’re saying she had access?”

  “I don’t know. Vanessa and Stan lived in a huge, multimillion-dollar house, which must have a sophisticated alarm system. It would be hard to break in, although I concede Barbara might have been able to con a housekeeper or someone to give her access. But have you met Barbara?”

  Kim didn’t respond, so I kept going.

  “She seems too dispirited to be able to pull off a maneuver that would require guts and inventiveness. My guess is she’s mostly got highly sensitive antennae that pings when it detects any snippet of information about the second Mrs. Giddings.”

  “And the third Mrs. Giddings, the artist?” Kim inquired. He was listening, that was for sure. Sitting motionless: no paper clip bending, no pen chewing. But it wasn’t the kind of benevolent lack of motion that indicated Hey, I’m riveted by what you’re saying. Yet neither was it an icy silence that accompanies contempt while you make an ass of yourself. For all the vibes he gave off, I might as well have been across the desk from a life-size photo of a man in a chair. The complete neutrality of him now was beyond unnerving, so you just wanted to blurt out the rest of your story, get the meeting over, and rejoin life. Maybe for a second I wondered if this was his personality or a technique to undermine a person’s defenses, but I was too uncomfortable to think about it for long.

  “Well, for Ryn …”

  I was babbling much too fast.

  “The clock was ticking. She was having a baby. Not that she’d be worried about it being born out of wedlock. Her concern was getting Stan to marry her. Once the baby was born, it would be a fact of life. Clearly, Stan would support it. But would he be willing to go through another divorce? Another marriage? There’s no way Vanessa would have let him off cheap the way his first wife, Barbara, got conned into doing.”

  “Slow down,” Kim said. “You’re talking too fast.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Anyway, Ryn was running the risk that if a divorce dragged on for too long, Stan would lose interest. She’d wind up with a kid and child support. Sure, that would keep her in finger paints, but it wouldn’t buy her a five-carat ring, a family estate , and a husband with the wherewithal to make her career happen.”

  I was so wiped from all that talking that I actually put my head back and rested it against the chair, something I never did outside the house since Joey’s fourth-grade class’s 100-percent head lice attendance.

  “Any other suspects?”

  Kim was changing gears, I realized. It began with him actually moving and scratching the bottom of his short sideburn. And then, unless I’d become so nervous as to be delusional, his question wasn’t neutral. It sounded curious in a pleasant way, though it would be madness to call it playful.

  I sat forward in the stiff-backed chair and rested my arm on his desk as if we were two colleagues shooting the breeze.

  “I don’t know the other people in Vanessa’s life,” I told him. “Did anyone strike you as having a motive? Anyone who might have wanted to get Vanessa out of the way?”

  Kim caught himself before he answered, but not before he had swiveled his head to the right, a prelude to a shake that would have told me No, no one. He was so annoyed at his lapse of control that he glanced at his watch, did a damn-I’m-late-for-a-meeting pushback from his desk.

  “I really have to go. Listen, Ms. Singer, what you told me: interesting.”

  He stood and inhaled to close his jacket.

  “Creative. Believe it or not, there’s a lot of creativity in police work. But you have no evidence for your theory that it was a homicide. On the other hand, we have evidence—the note, people saying how depressed she was, the fact that the drug that killed her was one prescribed for her. All our evidence adds up to one thing—”

  “The pills in those two cases she carried were mostly vitamins,” I said, cutting him off. “Megavitamins. Big capsules, a lot of them. Gelatin, or whatever for the outside, that dissolves in the stomach. With some of them, you can pull the two gelatin halves apart. You’ve seen that. It wouldn’t take a pharmacological genius to grind up thirty Xanax, stick the grindings into a capsule, and slip it back into her pill case. Then go out of town, or do something to give you a good alibi just in case there was an investigation. But this is the thing. Vanessa didn’t take that pill. How come? Maybe she read a squib in the Times that too much Vitamin X leads to liver disease or dry skin. Or maybe she was beside herself because she knew her husband was cheating on her, or maybe he’d actually asked for a divorce, and she stopped taking care of herself. Meanwhile, the killer is waiting for the kill. Except it doesn’t happen. So what does he or she conclude?”

  “What?” Kim asked, walking me to the door, but slooowly.

  “That Vanessa took it. That she probably then took one of the longest naps on record, but it didn’t kill her.”

  “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.”