Read Online Compliments of a Friend by Susan Isaacs - Free Book Online Page A

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.”
    “Why couldn’t he just wait till the divorce was over? Why push it?”
    “Because he is spoiled worse than rotten. He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. He wanted out of the marriage and he wanted a baby, so he got Ryn pregnant. Except Vanessa wouldn’t cooperate with him. Somehow she got wind that the baby was coming. Maybe he even told her. But she started holding him up for more than what the prenuptial agreement stipulated. That kind of chutzpah wasn’t in his calculations, and he became enraged. He wanted out, and fast, and if Vanessa was going to make it difficult for him, she’d have to go. Why don’t you check? I bet there’s a period of time when he was out of town. That would be the days or weeks when he expected her ‘suicide’ to happen. Except it didn’t.”
    Kim stuck his hands in his pockets.
    Finally, he asked: “And how am I supposed to prove this?”
    Kim called me that night. The medical examiner’s findings reported that the stomach contents had included a trace amount of gelatin, enough for a large dissolved capsule.
    I waited. In a whodunit, I would have been Kim’s partner, leading him (carrying the search warrant) to a dusting of Vitamin X and Xanax mixture in the pocket of Stan Giddings’s cashmere sports jacket. Or I’d be luring Stan into an Edward Hopper diner for a coffee and then snatch the cup and … Aha! … The dribblings on the so-called suicide note turned out to be a match for Stan Giddings’s DNA on his cup.
    But, in life, the scales of justice hardly ever achieve the exquisite balance that they do in a whodunit.
    To give Detective-Sergeant Kim credit, he did his homework, albeit a little late. Two artist friends told him how Ryn had given Stan an ultimatum: a month to finalize his divorce. If he couldn’t, she would get an abortion. As to having a child out of wedlock, they laughed. Ryn? No, Ryn knew what she wanted. Having a baby was simply the means of getting it. No “it,” no kid.
    And yes, Stan had gone to his house in Maine for a month in October with Ryn, around the time he left Vanessa, around the time he was waiting for her to kill herself so he and Ryn could come back and get married. But nothing happened. So Stan wound up giving Vanessa an extra three mill to ease her pain in getting cut loose so fast.
    Finally, the cops did find Stan Giddings’s fingerprints on a brown amber bottle of Sunrise Antiox Detox in a bathroom adjacent to Vanessa Giddings’s workout room.
    “What does that prove?” Stan’s lawyer screamed to the district attorney of Nassau County.
    And the DA conceded grudgingly: “It means maybe he took an antiox pill.”
    Thus, Stan’s longstanding policy of giving campaign contributions not just to right-wingers but to the local candidates of all parties, even the most marginal, was vindicated. And, sad to report, Stan Giddings himself was vindicated.
    It was too late for true justice, although the New York Post somehow got wind that the Vanessa Giddings’s suicide was once again under investigation, as was her former husband, Stanley Giddings. Suicide …