Compliments of a Friend Read Free

leaving wouldn’t have sent Vanessa over the edge.”
    “I heard something about other reasons,” Nancy muttered to her wine.
    “Like what?”
    I probably sounded a tad overeager because she responded with an elegant flaring of her nostrils. I leaned forward, rested my hands on the annoying, chic sheet of butcher paper the restaurant was using instead of a cloth, and demanded: “What other reasons?”
    “Vanessa was having serious business reverses.”
    “Where did you hear that?”
    She took a slow sip of wine.
    “I suppose as I wafted through the city room.”
    “How serious was ‘serious’?”
    Nancy peered into her glass once again. She seemed taken aback to find it empty, as though someone had sneaked over and slurped it up while she was talking. Shrugging, she poured herself another glass. I took my third sip of the night and, for the umpteenth time in the thirty-three years since we’d been in college together, worried about her liver.
    “Nancy, how bad were Vanessa’s business reverses? She did get through the recession in one piece. Why was she having reverses now?”
    “Why are you so interested?” she demanded.
    “Something’s fishy,” I said. “I can practically smell it.”
    “Nothing’s fishy.”
    “I don’t buy this suicide story.”
    She gripped the stem of her glass.
    “You’re not thinking of doing a little detecting, are you, Judith?”
    “Please!”
    I tried to act amused, but the derisive chuckle came out as if I were having some esophageal unpleasantness involving excessive phlegm.
    “I only did the detecting thing once. Twenty years ago. A blip on the radar screen of my life. It’s just …”
    “Just what?”
    “Hear me out. I value logic. Suicide doesn’t make sense. Say you want to kill yourself. But your whole persona is being cool, elegantly put together, always in control. Someone like that wouldn’t do it violently because violence is messy. Can you imagine her leaping off an overpass into rush-hour traffic on the Northern State and getting smashed by a BMW X5?”
    “She didn’t,” Nancy said.
    “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