Compliments of a Friend Read Free Page B

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.
    “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