The Job (27 page)

“Hope you also don’t object to these?”

I dug around in one of my overcoat pockets until I found my Winstons.

“Fellow addict,” I said, inserting a cigarette between my lips.

“We’re going to get along just fine,” Detective Kaster said, pushing in the car’s cigarette lighter.

We pulled out into traffic and followed the signs for downtown.

“This is going to be a three-stop trip. First the morgue, which is in a suburb called Farmington, around ten minutes from here. After you make the identification, then we’ll move on to Mr. Dolinsky’s apartment before heading over to his office at Home Computer Monthly. His boss… ,” she flipped open a little black notebook, “… a Mr. Duane Hellman, asked if he could see you. I think he’s kind of upset about what happened.”

“What exactly did happen?”

“Mr. Dolinsky went up the pipe.”

“He what ?”

“Gassed himself. In his car.” She reached for the notebook again, flipped it open, read from her notes as she drove.

“A nineteen eighty-seven Toyota Corolla, found in Elizabeth Park at two-thirty-three A.M. last night by a patrol car on a routine nighttime beat. The deceased had parked in a wooded area near a little lake. The two officers found a garden hose taped to the exhaust pipe, the other end of the hose inserted into the right front passenger window, all car windows taped shut, the engine running, the car filled with fumes … In other words, your classic ‘up-the-pipe’ suicide. Must get one of these a month.”

I sucked hard on my cigarette and stared out the window. Judging by the preparations Mr. Dolinsky made, this was no cry for help. The officers found a receipt from a WalMart on the front seat. From the time on the receipt”-another glance at the notebook-“five-thirty-eight P.M. yesterday, it seems Mr. Dolinsky bought the the tape and the garden hose at the WalMart in nearby New Britain, then drove straight to Elizabeth Park.”

5:38. On a dark, bleak, winter night. If, on the way to that WalMart, Ivan had been delayed by just twenty-two minutes, then the store would have been closed by the time he arrived. Forcing him, perhaps, to put off his death for another day. And maybe, come morning, the all-encompassing sense of hopelessness would have passed.

“Bet I know what you’re thinking,” Detective Kaster said. “

“If only he’d called me. If only I’d known just how bad he was. If only…” Am I right?”

I shrugged.

“Worst thing about suicides is the way it punishes those who were left behind. But… can I be blunt here? He obviously wanted to go. Because we found a bottle of whiskey and an empty bottle of Valium on the seat next to him. It was his own prescription, which makes me wonder, Did he have a history of depression?”

I explained about the death of his daughter, the collapse of his marriage, the problems at work, the way CompuWorld was suddenly killed off.

“Sounds like Mr. Dolinsky was juggling some pretty big problems,” Detective Kaster said.

“What gets me is that six, seven weeks ago, Ivan was in the best shape I’d seen him for years. He’d just landed this new job, he was really upbeat about the future…”

“You speak to him since that time?”

“Nah, I’ve been kind of preoccupied. Did he leave any note, any explanation?”

Back to the notebook.

“There was a letter on the dashboard. Short and sweet: your name and phone number, and a personal message for you: “Tell Ned I’m sorry for making him tidy up after me again.” That was it.”

I exhaled loudly, and felt my throat contract as it stifled a sob.

“Was he erratic on the job?” Detective Kaster asked quietly.

“After the death of his daughter, yes.”

“And you had to cover for him a lot?”

“I suppose so.”

“Then he considered you his friend.”

My eyes began to well up.

“Yes. I was his friend.”

We entered the town of Farmington, then drove on to the campus of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and Dentistry. The office of the Hartford medical examiner was located in an off-white concrete building. We parked the car. As we approached the front entrance an ambulance swung by us, heading toward the rear of the building.

“The back is where they make the deliveries,” Kaster said quietly. Then she added, “We’re going to make this as fast and simple as possible. The Hartford M.E. prides itself on its streamlined service.”

Inside the building a uniformed cop was talking with the morgue’s receptionist. Detective Kaster approached the front desk, flipped open her badge, pointed in my direction. Then she nodded for me to follow her into the “family room.” Simple, functional furniture. A coffee machine. A notice on one of the walls giving the extension numbers for assorted hospital chaplains.

Without thinking, I had pulled out a cigarette and had it at the ready between my fingers. So had Kaster.

“No smoking in the hospital, please,” said the white-coated official who entered the family room. He glanced at a clipboard.

“Mr. Allen, we’re ready for you now.”

I expected the usual cop-show morgue scene. The meat-locker room with a wall full of shiny metal doors. Some Peter Loire-type attendant pulling open one of the refrigerated compartments. A blast of cold air hitting me in the face as the attendant grabs a handle and pulls out a slab on which a body lies covered in a white sheet. Then, after asking me if I’m ready, he slowly uncovers the face….

But the Hartford M.E. had sanitized the experience of identifying a body. We were brought into what appeared to be a lounge-with a blue couch and two chairs, and a video monitor (its screen draped with a white cloth) positioned on a small table. The official introduced himself as Dr. Levon and said that he had conducted the postmortem examination on Ivan. He asked if I had any questions before the identification began. I shook my head. He approached the set. I couldn’t help thinking, This is like a sales conference, and the guy in the white coat is going to use some audiovisual materials to make his pitch. He asked me to sit down. I found a chair, stared straight ahead at the monitor.

“Ready?” Dr. Levon asked. I nodded. He lifted off the cloth. The set was already on-and I found myself staring at the ashen face of Ivan Dolinsky.

The shot was a closeup. The harsh lights gave Ivan’s blue-gray skin a spectral glow. Unlike the face of my cancer-victim dad-who looked like some Amazonian shrunken head by the time he died-Ivan’s features hadn’t been ravaged by the carbon monoxide and Valium cocktail that killed him. He looked at rest, his haunted, burdened face finally free of the multiple torments that had stalked him in the last few years. I found myself stifling another sob. We all try to plan our lives so carefully, don’t we? We’re like kids with a set of building blocks-methodically putting one brick atop another. The job, the home, the family, the crap we buy-brick upon brick, we pile it high, praying that this is a stable, lasting construction. But if adult life teaches you anything, it’s this: Nothing is fixed, solid, durable. And it doesn’t even take a cataclysm for the entire edifice to come crashing down on you. Just one small jolt will do.

Dr. Levon asked, “Is that Mr. Ivan Dolinsky?”

I nodded. And felt like adding, You want to know the real cause of death? Failure to close. That’s what killed him. Closing was the yardstick by which he measured his personal worth. After the death of Nancy, after his divorce, his ability to sell was the one thing that kept him afloat. It was his trade, his craft, the thing he was good at. Until that skill abandoned him as well. And then… maybe, it was just a matter of time.

Catastrophe is such a random business, isn’t it? Ivan was a hostage to happenstance. Like the rest of us.

Referring back to his clipboard, the doctor asked a few general questions. He then informed me that the body would be ready for release to a funeral home at nine the next morning, and did I know to whom Mr. Dolinsky’s remains should be sent? I said that, to the best of my knowledge, there was no family-only an ex-wife, now living (if my memory served me well) somewhere near Naples, Florida.

“Would you mind getting in touch with her and finding out what sort of arrangements she wants to make?” the doctor asked.

“We’ll give her a call from my office,” Detective Kaster said, then sharply asked, “Does that wrap it up, Doc?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said, handing me the clipboard to sign the official identification. Then he hit the off button on the remote control, and Ivan Dolinsky faded to black.

On the drive over to Ivan’s office Detective Kaster said, “You hanging in there?”

“It’s kind of a strange experience, isn’t it? Seeing it on TV.”

“Yeah,” she said, lighting up a cigarette, “you almost expect them to cut away for commercials. We’ll be right back with the body after this message from …”

Ivan’s final home was a tiny one-bedroom unit in a 1960s motel-like building off a gasoline alley in a grubby corner of West Hartford. Having earlier retrieved the key from the landlord, Detective Kaster let us in. The apartment was just two cramped rooms-a living room with a galley kitchen, a metal table and chairs and a cane sofa with smudged floral cushions; the bedroom with nothing but a queen-size bed with a floral headboard, ac heap white veneered chest of drawers, a pocket-size bathroom, badly tiled, with an avocado-colored sink and toilet. There was Woolworth’s art on the apartment walls. A stack of cheap paperback thrillers by the bed. Aside from a couple of suits and shirts hanging up in the closet, the only personal touch that Ivan had brought to this dump was a half dozen framed photos of Nancy, positioned throughout the apartment so she’d always be in his sight.

The detective turned to me.

“Any idea where he’d like his personal possessions to go?”

Personal possessions. When he moved to Hartford, he sold what little furniture he had in his West Eighty-third Street studio. So now, the sum worth of Ivan Dolinsky was two suitcases full of clothes, a pile of Tom Clancy and Ken Follett novels, the ten-year-old Toyota in which he took his life, and a half dozen pictures of his dead child.

“Give everything to charity,” I said, gathering up the framed photos.

“I’ll get these to his wife.”

We made a lengthy pit stop at the Hartford precinct where Detective Kaster had a desk. It was a two-step cinch to find the phone number of Ivan’s ex-wife, Kirsty, in Florida. She was listed under her married name in Naples. I let Detective Kaster break the news to her. About three minutes into the conversation, Kaster put the call on hold and said, “She wants to speak with you.”

I’d only met Kirsty Dolinsky twice before: once at some CompuWorld family outing by a lake in the Poconos around four years ago; the second time at her daughter’s funeral. I tried to conjure up my initial impression of Kirsty-a small, angular woman, around ten years younger than Ivan (making her now close to forty), highly strung, and super-anxious about keeping an eye on Nancy, especially whenever she wandered near the lakefront.

When Detective Kaster handed me the phone, Kirsty was sobbing.

“Oh, Jesus, Ned. Lie to me. Say he didn’t…”

“I’m sorry, Kirsty. I’m so sorry.”

Her sobbing escalated. When she got a grip on herself, she said, “How’d he do it?”

I told her about the car. This prompted another long torrent of tears. As quietly as possible, I said, “There are a couple of, uh, practical matters we need to discuss.” And then, through gentle interrogation, I found out that Ivan wanted to be cremated, that he’d probably like his ashes sprinkled on the Gulf of Mexico (where they often vacationed during the early years of their marriage), and could I get them sent on to her (I scribbled down her address), because, no, she wouldn’t be coming north for the funeral.

“I have this new job here-receptionist at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples. Not exactly glamorous, but it pays the rent. I’m on nights the next three days, so it would be kind of hard to take the time off….”

She broke off again, crying.

“You know what I keep thinking?” she said.

“If Nancy had lived, if that fucking meningitis hadn’t shown up…”

She couldn’t finish that sentence. Her sobbing was now out of control.

“Kirsty,” I said, “is there anyone there to look after you right now? Your husband, maybe…” I’d heard from Ivan that she’d married a local tennis pro shortly after moving to Naples.

“That ended ten months ago,” she said, her voice now steely, semi controlled

“I’ve got no one.”

I didn’t know what to say. She knew that.

“I’ve gotta go, Ned. Thanks for dealing with everything.”

Click. She was gone.

As I turned to explain the gist of that conversation to Detective Kaster, it struck me that I’d probably never speak to Kirsty Dolinsky again. She would now vanish from my existence. A blip. Like so much in life.

Detective Kaster sprang into action. Within fifteen minutes she found a funeral home that would take the body and prepare it for incineration the next day. The first available slot was 3:30 P.M. at a crematorium on the outskirts of Hartford. They’d also provide a reverend to say a few words.

“Ask them to get a rabbi,” I said, remembering that Nancy was buried at a Jewish cemetery in Queens.

“Are you going to be the only mourner?” she asked.

I picked up the phone, found the number for PC Globe in Manhattan, and asked to be put through to Debbie Suarez.

“Mr. Allen! This is incredible! I was gonna call you today. See if you was free for lunch or something’. How ya doin”?”

“Could be better. They treating you right at PC Globe?”

“It’s not like old times with you, but hey, a girl’s gotta make a living, right? You okay, Mr. A.? You don’t sound okay.”

I told her exactly why I wasn’t okay. For perhaps the first time in her life, Debbie Suarez was at a loss for words. After around thirty seconds of silence, I asked, “You still there, Debbie?”

“Just about,” she said, her voice barely audible.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he never really got over the Nancy business. Maybe he just gave up. I just don’t know.”

I could hear her swallowing hard.

“When’s the funeral?”