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After Lunch

by Susan Isaacs
Publishers Weekly Online

"Okay, ladies!" the chairwoman of the luncheon shrieked in her most refined manner. The microphone responded to her voice (and to the seventy gold chains clanking around her neck) with a scream of feedback. "The second prize raffle is..." She took a deep breath. "... a one-day total makeover at Bellezza e Verità Salon! And it goes to..." Her chest rose in her bronze silk dress which was cut low to allay hot flashes or display implants the size of Uranus. She stuck her hand into what looked disturbingly like a dual-use fishbowl/ punch bowl and pulled out a slip of paper. "Can you believe this?" she squealed. "The one person in the world who doesn't need a makeover! Vanessa Stoneburg!"

I waited. The half of the two-hundred-fifty Long Island ladies who hadn't tippytoed out of the luncheon right after the chocolate-covered mini-scoop of vanilla surrounded by berries waited, too. Vanessa did not rise. All eyes moved toward her table in the front, to the right of the microphone.

Father Tom and Rabbi Marc, who had given a joint invocation, were standing on either side of a seated woman. Actually, Rabbi Marc was a bit farther back to make room for a friend of Vanessa's who was squatted beside her. The threadbare skirts of the woman's expensive deconstructed black dress (one my great-grandmother wouldn't have been caught dead in on the Lower East Side) formed a dark island around her. "Vanessa, wake up!" she commanded. Seconds later, she wailed: "Oh God!"

Father Tom called out to the chairwoman. She grabbed the mike and yelled: "Is there a doctor here?"

I had my Ph.D. in history, but there are times when expertise in the agencies of the New Deal won't cut it. Like everybody else, all I could do was hope. Nothing. Not one doctor in the house. At our table, my friend Nancy, seated beside me, was a journalist. There was a lawyer, two corporate types, and six mommies, four of whom had giggled and whispered during the speakers' presentations as if the last feminist thought in the America had dwelled in the mind of a suffragette.

"Who the hell is Vanessa Stoneburg and what the fuck is wrong with her?" Nancy demanded, standing. The South bred two types of women: those who say "Oh fudge!" and those like Nancy. She was an editor at Newsday, and her natural reporter's curiosity demanded she ask what was going on. Was she imagining: Newsday Editor Watches Sands Point Woman Die from Heart Attack. "Vanessa Stoneburg of Sands Point, 38, wife of Barry Stoneburg, practically-billionaire hedge fund genius and Long Island philanthropist was unable to claim her raffle prize yesterday at the Interfaith Coalition for the Homeless luncheon..."

Nancy turned and strode across the Island Imperial Hotel ballroom. I followed. "She's on the library board with me," I remarked as we scooted along. Nancy was a mercilessly fast walker. Then I added, rather unkindly, "She hardly ever comes to meetings."

Up close, Vanessa, the prize winner, looked utterly vulnerable. She was slumped in her gilded chair in a Prada suit and Gucci shoes, though my grasp of fashion was shaky and it could have been the other way around. Sadly, her legs were splayed like a roast chicken's. Her head was down, chin against chest, and her blond hair–the expensive kind that gave off glints of platinum and gold–was flung forward, covering most of her face. Her eyes were closed.

Within two minutes, Nancy had flashed her Newsday ID and was chatting up Vanessa's friend with the shredded hem. Father Tom and Rabbi Marc were kneeling on either side of Vanessa talking gently. Presumably, good nature and interfaith harmony kept them from each grabbing an arm and having a tug of war.

Not ten minutes later, an ambulance and Dr. Lane, an otorhinolaryngolist whose office was a few blocks away, arrived at the same time. An EMT said "Oy." I heard Dr. Lane murmur to Rabbi Marc that Vanessa looked comatose.

She passed from the world shortly after midnight. I heard about it at seven-thirty when my husband Nelson Sharpe came into the kitchen and inquired: "The woman at the luncheon you went to? Was her name..." He glanced down at the pad he always carried. "... ‘Vanessa–"

Now it was my turn to say "Oh my God!" Nelson was with the Nassau County Police Department. Even our dog Lulu, who resembled a large black bath mat, looked up, concerned. It is not good news when the chief of the local homicide department jots down a name during his first phone call of the day.

"The head of the ER at North Shore suspects barbiturates," he told me. "We're bringing her in for an eleven-thirty autopsy." He picked up the bagel I'd toasted for him. "You okay, Judith?"

"Yes. Sure. Just... a little taken aback. How could it be suicide? Who takes an overdose of sleeping pills and goes to a luncheon?"

"Maybe someone gave them to her without her knowing." I nodded. "See anything suspicious?" he asked offhandedly.

"Nope."

"Okay, this is where I officially warn you not to do any of your cute stuff." Cute stuff referred to my having made some inquiries into a few local homicides. My shocked and chagrined look wasn't convincing because he added: "No investigating."

He meant it, though he did smile. Though fifty-somethings, we were, after all, newlyweds. And Nelson had a radiant smile, to say nothing of soft brown eyes that could keep you feel warm and protected for hours. They worked equally well on women and homicidal maniacs. Both wanted to tell him everything..

Adorable as he was, I was practically tapping my foot with impatience as he sipped, sloooowly, a second cup of coffee. The instant I heard the little bump signifying car going from driveway to street, I grabbed Lulu's leash and jogged over to Nancy's to catch her before she left for work.

I took the key wedged under a terra-cotta pot of begonias and let myself in. "It's me!" I bellowed, though I knew it should have been It's I. "So?" I demanded, when I got to her dressing room which was the size of the apartment in which I grew up. "What did you find out?"

"About what?" Nancy inquired in her baroque Southern accent, an accomplishment considering she'd barely been back to Georgia in thirty-five years. I watched as she put on mascara, practically one eyelash at a time. I grabbed her big blush brush and started trying to give myself the look of cheek hollows. Finally she went on: "I didn't learn much. Father Tom sat next to her and said she didn't talk at all, though she was conscious through the entrée. He noticed her taking a couple of sips of water. Didn't eat. Of course, that stuffed chicken breast tasted like a golf ball, so why should she eat? Oh, she didn't say one single word: He assumed she was shy."

"Vanessa was shy like Mardi Gras in Buenos Aires is shy," I said.

"Was? Judith Singer, do you know something I don't know?"

Regretting my slip, not wanting to betray Nelson's confidence, I replied: " You saw what I saw. It looked as if she was on the verge of checking out even before the ambulance got there." I put the brush back into a large silver cup. "Who was the friend she was with? The one in the black dress with the moth-eaten hemline?"

"Yamamoto. The dress, not the friend. The friend is Dana Black."

"What did Dana have to say?"

Nancy put the wand back into the mascara tube and agitated it back and forth at an such an insane speed that it made me glad women didn't have penises. Then she started on her lower lashes. "She couldn't understand it. Vanessa's the fittest person in the world, has two personal trainers. Isn't that the most obscene abuse of wealth you ever heard of?"

"Did she mention the husband?" I asked. "Hedge fund guy?"

"Yes, she said his name used to be Steinberg. Now you know what we Wasps talk about when there are no Jews around. It's a second marriage." I knew that, but I let her go on. "The starter wife still lives in their house in Garden City. Très fâché, according to Dana."

"What?"

"Very angry, you semi-literate."

"I'm not semi-literate. I just can't understand French with a Miss Georgia Peach Pit accent."

"Anyway," Nancy went on, "the Vanessa is so archetypically second wife: fabu body, blonde, worldly. She diminishes every woman around her. Dana says that between marriages, Vanessa lived in Venice with a count or something. Obviously not a rich count because she glommed on to Stein-Stone pretty quickly."

Nancy got busy putting on lip primer. Even though she was a great looking woman–auburn hair, green eyes, and a no-diet, no-exercise Scarlet O'Hara waist–she insisted that since she could no longer rely on youth and beauty, she had to be glamorous. I'd suggested she might try substantive, but she told me not to be ridiculous.

"Did you happen to ask Dana what Vanessa's first husband is like?"

"Of course," Nancy said. It was a little hard to hear her as she was keeping her mouth open to let her lip primer dry. "In the words of kindly Dana, ‘Salesman. Not meaningful money.' Oh, first husband and Vanessa had a daughter, a teenager. Guess who got custody of the kid?"

"Mr. Not Meaningful Money?" She nodded, then tentatively touched her lips with her index finger. "When Vanessa walked out, she left the kid with him, took off for Europe supposedly to get her head together. Instead of coming back, she settled down with the count and said ‘You keep the kid.'"

"Wow!"

"Also, last night at my book group, they weren't buying Dana's caring act at the luncheon, said she was never had anything good to say about Vanessa. Apparently, there's a huge difference between being married to a millionaire and a billionaire."

"Besides more money?"

Nancy picked up a very intense red lipstick. "Once the rumor got around that Barry's eye had started to rove, Vanessa and Dana went after him, even though he has more warts on his face than a toad and a personality to match. Vanessa won, probably by sticking out her foot and tripping Dana. So Dana had to settle for her second husband, Clive Black, who's only worth about ten mil. Sad."

I walked Lulu home slowly, figuring our twenty-minute trot to Nancy's would suffice aerobically. Now it was time to commune with nature. Nothing but crisp fresh air, but there was just so much exuberant inhaling a girl can do. Before I knew it, my hand slipped into the pocket of my khakis, pulled out my cell phone, and I was asking Information for the address of Dana and/or Clive Black.

*

The Black residence was white, one of those shingle-style cottages with so many wings it looked more like a thriving country inn than a house. I parked my car around the corner and hefted eighty pounds of dog out of the car.

When I rang the doorbell; its chime sounded as if it came from a hymn sung by people with freckles in Minnesota. Dana Black was still in her bathrobe, albeit a cashmere one. She stood in the open doorway, her brow furrowed: Did she know me? Not giving her time to think, I took out the plastic-banded digital watch I'd taken from my Egregious Shopping Errors drawer and, with a neighborly smile asked: "Is this yours? I found this on your lawn." Would she say yes, thus displaying a sociopathic character to which murder was no big deal? Then I chirped: "Oh! You were at the luncheon yesterday, with Vanessa. Do you know how she's doing?"

Dana had the tight mouth of the nasty person, but seemed to lack the brains to come up with a scathing remark. She said: "Uh, I haven't heard. Barry... Vanessa's husband–"

"Oh I know," I lied amiably. "I tried getting him last night, but of course he was at the hospital. I didn't want to try his cell phone." Thus establishing myself as someone to whom a billionaire gives his private number, I went on: "You know Barry. Can you imagine..." Not knowing Barry, I couldn't imagine even enough to finish the sentence.

Fortunately, Dana could: "He must be beside himself!"

"I know how he feels about her." I hadn't a clue.

"The man is besotted!" Her nostrils flared. Contempt for besot-ment.

I tried to look contemptuous, too. "Do you think he got in touch with Vanessa's daughter, what's-her-name?"

"Alexis. Alexis Morgan. Frankly, I doubt it," Dana said. "She is such a total pain..." She hesitated, so I gave her a knowing nod as if to say Go ahead and say something cruel and I'll agree with it. "But considering the way Vanessa–"

"Just dropped her with the father... I'm going totally blank on his name."

"Ian. Ian Morgan."

Dana Black didn't seem to know Vanessa was dead. Of course, if she were cool enough to have done the barbiturate-vitamin switch, she could manage an innocent act. As I hoisted Lulu onto the back seat, I realized homicide was still only a possibility. But what was wrong with a little pre-investigating? Since the autopsy wasn't scheduled until eleven-thirty and my US from 1918 -1929, Between War and Depression seminar met at noon, I had time for a few more questions. Ten minutes later was I was parking around the corner from Vanessa's first husband's house.

*

The disdainful phrase, "not meaningful money" came to mind as I neared Ian Morgan's house. Definitely modest, situated on a plot for more long than wide. No doubt the family next door could read the ingredients on the Morgans's Cheerios box. Still, it was a pretty pale yellow Cape Cod with dark green shutters, with tightly packed yellow chrysanthemums along the path to the front door.

Just as I was about to cross the street, the front door opened and a teenage girl– Alexis Morgan, I assumed–came out, slammed the door viciously, then walked down the street, head down, feet dragging. She looked like one of those hostile, sad kids adults stopped sniggering about after Columbine. Dressed in counterculture black. A Gothic cross appeared to be weighing her down, though in fact she was bent from the weight of the books in her backpack. She was heavy, less fat than blockish. My being a woman of a certain age (i.e., not hers) with a dog who was urinating on a neighbor's lawn rendered me invisible to her.

When Alexis was a safe block away, I crossed the street and rang the doorbell. I had Lulu on her leash in one hand, the watch no one wanted in my other. A petite woman with brilliant dark eyes and black curly hair opened the door. I surmised her high color was due more to a recent screaming fight with Alexis than exuberance. I held up the watch and began. "No." She shook her head. "It's not anyone here's."

"Are you Alexis Morgan's stepmother, by any chance?"

She nodded hesitantly. "Dawn Morgan." She had a tinkly, childish voice. Her body was girlish. But her orange T-shirt was heavy with sequins, her stone-washed jeans studded with grommets, and her silver mules were the clothes of a thirty-something with little money. Her flash was less an assertion of confidence than merely tastelessness, which made it endearing.

"I must have seen you up at school," I said. "I'm Kate's mom." I offered my version of a young, bright-eyed smile to deter her from thinking Suspiciously old to have a teenage daughter. "I heard about Alexis's mother, Vanessa. How's she doing?"

"My husband spoke to Barry Stoneburg–Vanessa's husband–around eleven last night. Said he sounded a wreck. She hadn't regained consciousness. The doctors were very concerned. We haven't reached him today and the hospital won't give out any information." She took the slow, deep breath exhausted people take in the vain hope of clearing their heads. "I wanted to drive Alexis over to the hospital, but she didn't..."

"I know. Girls that age can be a handful," I said.

"I guess you heard about Alexis's mother not wanting her." I nodded. "Alexis can be a handful," she acknowledged, "but I can't think of any worse way to grow up than knowing nothing you do will make your mother love you. My husband has always tried to make it up to her. He's a total sweetie, never gets angry, pays for everything. He won't ask Vanessa for a dime. Deep down, I think that means a lot to Alexis."

*

Although my seminar got into a fiery discussion about the League of Nations, my thoughts kept straying. Autopsy hour. What if Vanessa Stoneburg had merely died of a heart attack? It wasn't pleasant to realize I was the sort of person who would be rooting for homicide over natural death. The instant class was over, I turned on my cell phone: "Hey," the message said, "this is your husband. Call me."

"Barbiturates," Nelson said sweetly. "Probably Nembutal. Definitely enough to kill her. Stomach contents raw celery, broccoli–"

"They served middle-aged crudités during cocktails," I said.

"–and a few traces of gelatin. Probably capsules that didn't dissolve completely. The husband says she took megavitamins by the handful."

"Oh." How disappointing.

"Ask me what color capsules Nembutal comes in,' Nelson said.

"Not the color of the gelatin that they found in her."

"Right. Someone probably put the Nembutal in a vitamin capsule."

"Any suspects?" I inquired casually.

"Angry teenage daughter. Vanessa dumped her onto the father. Barely sees her. The kid supposed to be troubled. And she has the alarm code. Big-time security system. We'll also check out Barry Stoneburg's first wife, the one he dumped, Vanessa's first husband, who's the kid's father. They're all a stretch."

"Anyone could have put the Nembutal into a megavitamin capsules anytime knowing that sooner or later, Vanessa would take one!"

"Judith, calm down. Listen, it's not a homicide yet. Even if it is, we may not find evidence pointing to anyone."

"I know in my gut it was murder!"

I guess I sounded a little too fervent, because Nelson said: "Gotta go, sweetheart. You do salad, I'll buy a bread and grill something when I get home."

*

It was getting late. I drove straight to the house of Mary Alice Goldfarb. Nancy and I had known her since our college days at the University of Wisconsin. Malice talked more than anybody in the tri-state area and said less. Was she annoying? Usually. Vacuous? Indubitably. Stupid? Probably. However, somehow her pea-brain was optimally structured for the absorption and retention of every item of local gossip that flitted through the ether. Naturally, she'd already heard Vanessa had died and that the police had visited the Stoneburg house, which was more than I knew.

"Vanessa Stoneburg didn't shave under her arms!" Malice announced, as usual going for the gold in irrelevance. She had become a redhead since the last time I'd seen her and it looked as if a stranger had borrowed her face. "Can you believe a man whose net worth could've gone up to one billion dollars as we speak could find that sensuous?" She shivered at this horror and rubbed her skinny, bare upper arms to get warm.

"What's her house like?" I inquired.

"Beyond huge. It's the old Astor estate, but not Vincent. Right on the Sound. Stables." Just in case I didn't get the import of her disclosure, she added: "Horses."

"What about servants?"

She twisted the massive diamond ring Dr. Lance Goldfarb, her latest husband, had given her. "Of course servants."

"So there's always someone there?" I inquired.

"Well, Vanessa runs the place... ran it like they did in the old days. Servants get off Thursdays and every other Sunday." I flashed her an Exploitation of the working class look, but she wasn't receptive. "You pay, you get," Malice declared.

Words to live by. "What about her daughter? Did she visit Vanessa?"

"Vanessa made a big deal about the door always been open to Alexis, except the kid never slept over, not even once, and they have, like, a million guest rooms."

"Alexis didn't have her own room there?"

Malice shook her head. "Well, I know it sounds terrible, but she called Vanessa a C-U-N-T in the middle of Barney's shoe department and threw a boot at her and takes drugs. Well, I bet she finally has a smile on her face today. Doesn't a parent have to leave a child some percentage of their will?"

I left Mary Alice's so I wouldn't have to try her Blue Curacao martini. I pulled into the parking lot of Whole Foods and called Nelson. "I heard the police paid a visit to the Stoneburg house," I said pleasantly.

"I heard the same thing." His playful voice, which meant he was open to hearing what I had to say. Probably more than open: They probably didn't have a clue beyond that Alexis was a hostile kid.

"Have they questioned Alexis Morgan?" I asked.

"Not yet." Clipped, but then I'd recently gotten him to watch a season of Prime Suspect with me.

"Well, before you put her in leg irons and send her to Guantánamo, you might ask if she ever gave the Stoneburgs's alarm code to anyone."

"Come on."

"Please."

There was silence. Then he said, "I'll be home around seven-thirty. Remember, I hate chicory."

I remembered. We were just sitting down to arugula salad with lemon-pepper dressing when Nelson's cell rang. After a minute of Mmm-hmmms, he said: "Gotta go. Would you turn the chicken? Four minutes." He was almost out of the house when he said: "They found the kid's fingerprints on a bottle of Vanessa's megavitamins. See you whenever."

I filled up on salad and bread, thought about marking some papers on the Tennessee Valley Authority, and decided not to. Instead, I said "Shit" several times.

The phone rang a little before nine. "Meet me at the Morgan house," Nelson said. "Just park and have someone give me a call."

A uniformed cop gave made the call, but I had time to listen to too much of the audiobook of Anna Karenina on my iPod. By the time Nelson knocked on the car window I was in nineteenth-century Russia, ruminating on the cultural underpinnings of passive aggression. I decided not to try it myself since he got into the car and kissed me. "Are you worried about that kid, Alexis?" he asked.

"If you really think it's a homicide, she's a natural suspect, but–"

"I got your question asked."

"And?"

"There'll be a couple of cars leaving soon. Check out the back seat of the SUV."

It took forever, which was about ten minutes, yet as a dark SUV turned out of the driveway and passed, all I could see was someone in the back. Man? Woman? Girl? Couldn't tell. "Alexis?"

"Not Alexis," Nelson said. "We'd been talking to her on and off for hours while her father was trying to scare up a lawyer. We asked her your question, if she'd given the alarm code to anyone. She said no. So we kept going at her about how she got on with her mother, about the vitamins–she admitted going through the medicine cabinet and grabbing a few of anything resembling a pill. Then all of a sudden, she remembered: A couple of years ago, she gave the code to her stepmother.'

"Dawn Morgan," I said quietly.

"Dawn wasn't up to anything then. She just went in on a Thursday night, when the staff was off and they were out. She'd bought a scarf and had Alexis write a note to Vanessa: ‘Belated birthday gift, Mom. Hope you like it.' She said it would help Alexis get her mother to see her in a whole new light. "

"Except it didn't."

"Of course not."

"Two months ago she went back and left five capsules loaded with Nembutal in a big jar of Vanessa's vitamin B."

"Was it hard to get her to confess?"

"After a few hours with Alexis, we had a chat with Dawn. About three seconds after she gave us her date of birth, when we told her it wasn't looking great for Alexis, she got hysterical. She tried to give the kid an alibi. We said the capsules could have been doped any time. Then she cried, blew her nose, and told all." He took my hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it. "What made you think to ask if the kid had given someone the alarm code?"

"I didn't want it to be Alexis. I know you can't afford to think that way, Nelson, but just the way she walks –"

"You saw Alexis?" He was deciding whether to be outraged.

"You still think you married an historian. Anyway, my heart ached for her. Right after seeing her I talked to Dawn. Something didn't compute. Here was a pretty young wife married to an older guy, stuck with a difficult teenager. All I could see in Dawn's future were Alexis's shrink bills, college tuition, and being broke. Okay, as JFK said, life is unfair, but it struck me that if Vanessa were dead, life would be much rosier for her husband and for Alexis."

"And for her."

"Definitely for Dawn. All it would take was a little money. There's something sweet but weirdly childlike about Dawn. I bet she could kill without understanding the moral dimension."

Nelson was quiet for a minute. Then he nodded and started the car. "How's my chicken?" he inquired.

I told him it was done to perfection.