Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

  “I don’t know.” Trying to appear blasé, she pretended to be absorbed in a cuticle, although knowing Malice, she could have been genuinely engrossed.

  “And then?” I demanded.

  “Well, it could be they buried the body someplace. Everyone said the police had a dog and they looked in the wooded area in back between the Logans’ and—I think it’s the Lanes’ house, Judy and Ed. He’s the ear, nose, and—”

  “But they didn’t find anything.”

  “The other theory,” she said, recovering quickly, “is that Greg’s father, Mr. Big, did something with the body. I mean, that’s his meat and potatoes.” Mary Alice had the gift of unfortunate metaphor. “Or ... But not too many people believe this one.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a psychoanalytic theory. You’ll probably laugh.”

  “Tell me, Mary Alice.”

  “That Courtney was, you know, traumatized. She just ran off when she saw them together. And it was so traumatic she got amnesia. She could be anyplace, not knowing who she is. You’ve got to admit, that’s better than being beaten to death or knifed or strangled or something by your own husband and a foreign au pair, for God’s sakes, who then gets free range to your scarf drawer. And everything else, if you get what I mean.”

  “How about this: Maybe Courtney went outside and met up with someone weird. Halloween’s the one night of the year you have lots of people—a lot of them in masks—roaming around, even in the quietest neighborhoods.”

  “But everyone says in this kind of thing, it’s usually the husband. Isn’t it?” Mary Alice reached over to her Thanksgiving centerpiece and tapped a sprig of bittersweet forward an eighth of an inch. “Isn’t it?”

  Isn’t it? Sleeping with a homicide cop for six months does not qualify one as an expert on criminal detection. Neither does reading Maj Sjöwall/Per Wahlöö and Ed McBain police procedurals. Not even once having helped solve a murder. Still, if I hadn’t distracted the ever-distractable Mary Alice Mahoney Schlesinger Goldfarb by inquiring what, as Thanksgiving hostess, she was going to wear (and then listening to her pleat by pleat description of an Issey Miyake skirt), I would have had to say yes, absolutely, it usually is the husband they suspect when the wife suddenly and inexplicably disappears.

  Throughout that winter, I heard whispers and mutterings that Greg Logan’s arrest was imminent. None of the rumors panned out. It wasn’t that I forgot about Courtney. One bitter night, when the snow on the spruce outside my bedroom window grew so heavy that my light sleep was broken with the ominous crack of a limb about to crash, I lay in bed knowing in my heart that she hadn’t been grabbed by some monstrous Halloween deviate and was being held against her will, but that she was lying in some shallow, icy, suburban grave. I’d think about her children: One day they’d had a mother who adored them. The next day she was no more. Were these poor kids told Mommy will be back, or Gosh, honey, we don’t know where Mommy is but we hope she’ll call? Were they told anything?

  But because it seemed there would be no conclusion to the Courtney case, it was easier to push it from my mind. I threw myself into work and lived for the times I’d see Kate and Joey or my friends. When I was by myself, mostly I thought about Bob. True, he and I hadn’t had a fairy-tale marriage. Still, even when all that’s left is polite conversation and low-wattage marital sex, you have to remember (I’d told myself during those years we were together) that once upon a time it must have been a love story. I guess I always half expected the plot would get moving again: Some incident will touch off a great conflict in our relationship. Then, lo and behold, not only will the air between us finally clear, but there’d be romance in it! The two of us will walk hand in hand into a sunset, happily ever after—or until one of us went gently into the night in our eighth or ninth decade. Imagine my surprise when he died before my eyes in the ER of North Shore Hospital.

  So not only no husband. No prospect of another one. Not one more blind date, that was for sure, not after the two geriatric wonder boys Nancy had dubbed Old and Older. After Christmas break, I began to go out occasionally with Geoff, a postmodernist from the English department at St. Elizabeth’s. I rarely understood what he was talking about, his clothes smelled as if he patronized a discount dry cleaner, and unfortunately he had a healthy sex drive. No one else was knocking at my door.

  I had long before disciplined myself not to think about Nelson Sharpe. And to dwell on the Courtney Logan case would be to invoke him: What would he make of all this? Would he be putting pressure on the husband? Would he be investigating other leads?

  I didn’t want to jeopardize again the life I’d fashioned for myself because, whatever it was, it worked. I had kids, friends, library and Blockbuster cards. I had a job that evoked remarks like, Gee, or Ooh, how intellectually stimulating. The truth was, my work occasionally had my mind. Never my heart.

  So winter warmed into spring and early one evening in the middle of May I came home from St. Elizabeth’s and raced straight to the garden to cut lilacs. When I came back inside, in the way of so many people who live alone, I reflexively turned on the radio for company. My face was buried in my armful of lavender, purple, and white blooms and I was getting dopey on those first ecstatic sniffs. So it took a few seconds before I actually tuned into the sandpaper voice of Mack Dooley, the Logans’ pool man. He was telling WCBS radio: “Like, this morning, about eleven, I’m taking off the Logans’ pool cover with this kid who works for me—you know, pump it out, acid-wash it, get it ready and—” The reporter did attempt a question but Dooley kept going. “So listen. The cover’s fine, tied down real tight like I left it in the middle of September when I closed them up. The kid and I are kind of rolling it back and I see something. I say, Holy— You know how big raccoons can get? Except for the life of me I can’t figure out how even a raccoon could work its way under that cover. Well, that second I see, you know, it’s ... It’s a body! Jeez. Believe it or not I’m still shaking.”

  Chapter Two

  THE NEWS ABOUT the body in Greg Logan’s swimming pool consumed local TV and radio, a tristate info-blob engulfing any news about Al Gore’s plummeting poll numbers or the raging wildfires in Los Alamos. Everyone was broadcasting: I heard about it at teeth-grinding length from my next-door neighbor, Chic Cheryl, in her skintight silver racewalking getup that highlighted each buttock as if it were a separate trophy. Mary Alice Mahoney Schlesinger Goldfarb left three breathless messages on my answering machine, during which I sent up three prayers of thanks for the invention of Caller ID.

  I also heard from two of my colleagues at St. Elizabeth’s, from my doctoral adviser at NYU, and from Bob’s college roommate, Claymore Katz, a criminal lawyer. Needless to say, postmodernist Geoff called; he wanted to know (a) Was it not beyond irony that the paradigmatic suburbanite was found dead in a backyard swimming pool, and (b) Did I want to see a revival of Krapp’s Last Tape? I called his voice mail and retorted (a) I wasn’t sure what lay beyond irony, and (b) No thanks. Nancy phoned from Newsday, but that was to verify I was actually home, not skulking about in Holmesian drag in a pathetic attempt to attract the attention of a certain member of the Nassau County PD. Not one of them could add a single factlet to what I’d initially learned on the radio, although that didn’t stop them (or me) from discussing it.

  Late the following morning I was at my kitchen table grading my classes’ final exams, determined to dismiss all thoughts of murder, mostly because I felt obliged to give my students a fair shake. The majority were either good kids or hardworking get-a-college-education retirees. None were born scholars. (The most elementary of my four essay questions, “Describe the programs Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first administration put forth to help ‘the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,’” evoked answers as exhaustive as Darci Lundgren’s “FDR’s Brain Trust” and Seymour Myron Bleiberman’s “emerg. banking bill + hire men for govt relief projects + helping farmers.”) In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that on
ce I achieved my goal, teaching history on the college level, I discovered a disturbing truth about myself: I didn’t like to teach. What I wanted was to read history, or talk history, preferably with someone who knew more than I did.

  After an hour I gave myself a coffee break, hopped onto the Web, and discovered that the Nassau County medical examiner had already completed the autopsy. He had determined (no doubt employing a procedure so revolting I wouldn’t even begin to contemplate it) that the woman in the Logans’ pool had died from a bullet in the head. The condition of the body indicated that death could have occurred around the time Courtney disappeared on Halloween night. Furthermore, his examination of dental records confirmed what all of us would have been glad to tell him: The body was indeed that of Courtney Logan. Then, thank God, the phone rang.

  “Hey!” My son had such an astounding basso voice that, on hearing it, you half expected him to burst into “Some Enchanted Evening.” Clearly this wasn’t to be. Joey was not a Rodgers and Hammerstein kind of guy. “Mom, did you hear? They found that woman. She was in her own pool, over in Shorehaven Farms!” For a cineaste and ironist who never wore a color inappropriate for a state funeral, he sounded remarkably cheery. “Did you know her?”

  “No,” I said regretfully. “I don’t think I ever even saw her.” I set down my red pen atop a blue book on which I’d written a large C. Then—what the hell—I picked up the pen and added a conspicuous plus sign after the C. “Isn’t there some movie that begins with a body in a pool?” I mused.

  “Sunset Boulevard,” he suggested in an overly gentle manner.

  “It’s just mild senility.” I chuckled but received not even a polite heh-heh in response. “With ... You know who I mean. William what’s-his-name.”

  “Holden.” An offspring’s sigh of tedium is inaudible to all human ears except a parent’s. Boring your child who, at one point in his or her life, found you unspeakably delightful is humbling. “So what do you think?” Joey asked, slickly changing the subject before I could blurt out that the director was William Wyler instead of Billy Wilder and further humiliate myself. “I mean, about the woman they found.”

  “Her name was Courtney Logan,” I said.

  “Who did it? The husband?”

  “Only if he’s a total moron.” Chewing the top of the pen for a moment, I debated whether to self-censor all talk of murder. I would probably become excessively enthused and knew from experience that giddiness in the postmenopausal was generally less than appealing to the recently postpubescent. Nevertheless, I found myself bubbling, “Listen, kiddo, the minute a wife is missing, there’s speculation about the husband’s guilt. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Greg Logan, Brown graduate, is not self-destructive. And that he’s smarter than Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity. Okay? And let’s also assume he plans a murder.”

  “Okay,” Joey said in bright anticipation, the way he had when he was ten and I’d allowed him to see Return of the Jedi yet again.

  “Now, I don’t mean Greg actually sat down and plotted anything. Let’s say it was a spur-of-the-moment crime of passion. But tell me, why would he stash his wife’s body in the one spot where—guaranteed—she would be found the following May, if not earlier? And on his own property? Why not simply let her stay missing? Even if everyone assumed she was dead, no one would have the foggiest notion where she was.”

  “So if there wasn’t any body ...” Joey thought aloud.

  “Where’s the physical evidence a murder was committed? Nowhere, that’s where. All there’d be is a belief Courtney was dead. Everything I’ve ever read says it’s very hard to get a conviction without a corpus delecti. But now her death—her murder—is a fact.”

  “Except maybe this Greg guy is a total jerk,” Joey mused. “Or some kind of psycho. Or okay, maybe it was temporary insanity but then he panicked and just wanted to get rid of her. Except once he calmed down, he couldn’t figure out a way to fish her out of the pool.”

  “Maybe,” I submitted, “he didn’t do it.”

  “Maybe,” he countered, “he did do it because it was part of some scheme.”

  “Are you giving me an Oliver Stone conspiracy theory?”

  “No. Listen, Mom. Maybe he was willing to take a huge risk, because he needed the body to get insurance money—except he needed a few months to make sure he’d covered up all his tracks. Or maybe it wasn’t the husband. Maybe it was his old man, Gangster Guy, who ordered the hit.”

  “Why? Because Courtney forgot to send him a birthday card? Joey, even if Fancy Phil Lowenstein wanted his daughter-in-law dead, is he going to deep-six her in the one place sure to incriminate his son?”

  “Maybe Fancy Phil has issues with Greg.”

  “Still, would he stash her where, God forbid, his grandchildren could conceivably see their mother’s body?”

  “You’re talking as if Fancy is a normal human being. What if he’s an animal? Do you think he’d care about his grandkids’ mental health?”

  A few minutes later, after tossing a few more theories back and forth and discussing whether the plot of The Big Sleep made any sense and agreeing that it probably didn’t, we said our good-byes. I must have flaked out for a minute because when I glanced down, I noticed that pen was still in hand. Mine. And it had jotted:

  Greg Logan?

  au pair?

  did Courtney have boyfriend???

  enemy from Courtney’s investment banking days?? or earlier??

  Greg girlfriend??? + was she jealous???

  stalker/psycho???

  mob hit by Fancy Phil/Fancy Phil’s enemies???

  It was only then that I realized I’d been scribbling on an exam booklet of one Amanda Gerrity, a whispery, milk-white young woman with a distressing number of body parts pierced by studs and hoops. I ripped off the cover with my notes, transferred the C+, jotted an apology about spilled coffee. Trying not to think about the process of getting a silver ball embedded in one’s tongue, I studied my list of possible perps. Back to work, I finally commanded myself. Crumpling Amanda’s blue-book cover, I strode purposefully across the kitchen and lobbed it into the garbage.

  Three hours later, by the time my daughter Kate called, I had lunched on suspicious three-day-old deli tuna salad and survived, and graded seven more exams.

  “Mom,” Kate began efficiently. The law firm for which she worked billed two hundred and sixty dollars an hour for their second-year associates; as she’d always been an honorable child, she dispensed with gratuitous words like “hi” when calling on office time.

  “Hi, sweetheart!”

  “I cannot believe you haven’t called me,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “About who done it.” Kate sounded playful, a quality I was sometimes afraid she would lose practicing corporate law; Johnson, Bonadies and Eagle’s clients did not sound like a pack of merry madcaps. Stretching the telephone cord until its curlicues became an almost straight line, I retrieved the red-penned list from the garbage. It smelled, not surprisingly, like suspicious three-day-old deli tuna salad. Holding it as far from my nose as I could, I read off the possibilities. “What do your detective instincts tell you?” my daughter inquired.

  “Hard to say. I have no sense of what the husband’s like. Do you have time to talk now?”

  “No problem,” she said, indulgent, generous.

  “Well, there’s an au pair, German or Austrian. Maybe she’s gorgeous. Maybe she’s Voof-voof the Dog-faced Girl. Who knows? But people are definitely gossiping about her and the husband. So far, though, no one’s described her in any way except to say she’s twenty-two.”

  “Not a capital offense in New York,” Kate suggested leisurely, as though the debt restructuring of Southeast Pulp and Paper she’d been slaving over fourteen hours a day including weekends was a trivial detail she could attend to at her leisure.

  I was about to continue down my list of possible perps when I had one of those belated “aha!” moments. It was no co
incidence, my children calling on the same day, wanting only to chat about Courtney Logan’s murder. They’d had a conference, Kate and Joey, and had obviously concluded that with semester’s end at St. Elizabeth’s imminent, there was nothing to keep me amused. Amused? More likely, the last time they’d seen me, a few days before on Mother’s Day, they’d intuited the limitations of psychopharmacology. So here they were, my two good kids, demonstrating a way for me to get some life back in my life: get revved up about a murder. A few minutes later I gave my firstborn what I hoped was a reassuringly upbeat good-bye. Then I went searching for the Yellow Pages.

  Two days later, Mack Dooley of Pools, Etc. was standing in my backyard, a very short man with a very long tape measure. “I hope you’re talking gunite, Mrs. Singer.” As he spoke, he kept flapping back his hand again and again, ordering his assistant, a blond, buzz-cut, blank-eyed kid to move farther back with the tape measure to give me an idea of the length of the pool.

  “Well, Mr. Dooley—”

  “Call me Mack,” he said cheerfully. For such a short man, he had remarkably long arms. Except for the lack of hair, he resembled those jolly chimpanzees in baseball caps who are perpetually being trotted onto TV by anthropologists to prove that human beings aren’t the only primate with language and tool-making skills.

  “As I told you on the phone,” I told him, “I’m only considering a pool right now. I’m not ready to commit to—”

  “Sure, sure, but with a place like yours—” Mack Dooley glanced back at the house. It’s a Tudor-style of brick and stone with a fine mullioned bay window. It’s not imposing, but solid, the sort of house Henry VII’s favorite furrier might own. “—how could you go with vinyl?” He was not entirely successful in suppressing a shudder at that thought. “Now, you’re probably talking a lap pool, about four feet deep, right?” I nodded. “And fifty feet long, although you could do sixty here easy and in the end you’d say, ‘Mack, thanks for pushing me to sixty.’”