Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

  Besides, Greg was too intriguing looking to be conventionally handsome. His eyes and cheekbones slanted upward, and his nose had a slight northerly tilt that gave him the delicate quality I’d spotted on the front page of Newsday. In the illumination of a brass chandelier, all that kept his heart-shaped face from being downright girly was his end-of-day stubble and his eyebrows—the crazed, curly kind that look like a pair of invertebrates creeping across a forehead.

  I tried to look at him without appearing to stare. Despite Greg Logan’s valentine of a face, the word “effeminate” did not come to mind: The delicacy of his features was more than countered by a tough-guy physique. He had a thug’s thick neck, barrel chest, legs like two giant sequoias. He looked like a man who had to work out double-time to transform the family flab to muscle, and who only seemed to be managing time-and-a-half. His heft made him a presence you had to look up to. Not that I actually had to look up all that far; he wasn’t more than five-nine or -ten.

  The encounter was moving from uncomfortable to disturbing. I swallowed hard. Whatever gland pumps adrenaline was working overtime; a wave of nausea was accompanied by tingling skin and a spike of heat that sent perspiration washing down my cleavage.

  The silence was broken at last by the deafening tinging of a wind chime. Immediately after, I heard Greg Logan’s breathing, noisy, rapid. I vaguely remember praying, Oh please let this be his adenoids and not some prelude to frenzy, a mere awkward silence with both of us mute from the paralyzing dread that we’ll start blithering at the same instant. But his nonresponse was lasting too long. If I hadn’t been frozen by his stare I would have squeaked Whoops, wrong house and made a break for my Jeep. How the hell could I not have rehearsed anything beyond “I’m Judith Singer”?

  At last, thankfully, Greg took a deeper, quieter breath. A flicker of hope: Maybe the deadness in his face was because he was so taken aback by having a visitor that he was in shock. Social shock. He was, after all, the prime suspect. After Courtney’s disappearance on Halloween, through winter and early spring until this very instant in the month of May, I doubted that few, if any, Shorehavenites had stood on his doorstep offering kind words or homemade gingersnaps. Those who had rung his chimes most likely had been more bad news—cops, journalists, crackpots.

  But that instant, Greg Logan showed me that no matter if he was murderer or victim, he was still clearheaded enough to recall the suburban motto: Congeniality now, congeniality forever. Even at this moment, just one week after the discovery of his wife’s body, he was able to flash me a mechanical and inordinately white smile. Once more, time could march on.

  Exhaling so loudly with relief I almost whinnied, I decided this was not the moment to get distracted figuring out whether Greg’s teeth were capped or bleached. I forced up the corners of my mouth and declared brightly: “I’m on the board of the Shorehaven Public Library.” This was true.

  “Oh,” he replied. He opened the door wider and stepped back into the house, letting me come in.

  The house smelled of macaroni and cheese which someone had sought to mask with room spray—not the sort that spritzes fake strawberries but the expensive kind that has the scent of genuine apricots. Greg Logan and I stood two squares apart on the dark-green-and-white marble checkerboard floor of the entrance hall beneath the chandelier. I glanced up, beyond his face. Each flame-shaped bulb at the ends of the chandelier’s brass arms had its own miniature celadon lampshade, which in turn was edged with a deeper green trim—sort of like rickrack, except instead of zigzags it was scalloped, so it seemed an unending chain of teeny-weeny smiles.

  “Is there anything I can help you with?” Greg inquired, too politely. He was plainly expecting me to ask for a donation. Or to make some grotesque pronouncement: Your wife borrowed The Lively Art of Pumpkin Carving in October and it’s seven months overdue.

  “I’m sorry to be dropping in like this, Mr. Logan. I know you’ve had a family tragedy—and still must be going through a terrible time.” I waited for him to say Thank you for your concern, or something. But all I got from him was a bigger dose of nothing. I managed to say: “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes.”

  I stared boldly at him once more. This didn’t seem to bother him, but once again, the lifelessness in those eyes unnerved me. I averted my glance and peered down, until I got nervous he would think I was staring either at his personals (which I wasn’t, not that you could see anything with those baggy khakis) or at the swirls of hair on top of his feet that looked unnaturally plopped down, like two tiny toupees. Then, ever hopeful, I looked up again. I shouldn’t have. His stare was still as dead as Courtney.

  I quickly glanced over at four gilt-framed botanical prints hanging from satin ribbons just to have something other than eyes and foot hair to concentrate on. Was Greg thinking I was some kind of nut? That silent voice inside me started screeching again: Get out, you jerk! He’s the nut! A smiley, Ivy League psycho whose dead eyes are going to be sparkling with merriment as he squishes your hacked-up body parts into his compost bin. At which point my intellect’s sweet voice of reason inquired: Judith, is there any need to make yourself crazier than you already are?

  Greg gave me a quick once-over. I’d gotten dressed to look more stereotypical library board member than casual neighbor: a navy skirt, a powder blue cotton sweater, a complementary blue silk scarf with butterflies, and only enough makeup so as not to look gruesome. My blue trustworthy look was evidently working because at last Greg said, “Please come inside.”

  He led me down the long center hall into a living room so expansive it had four seating areas, like the lobby of a Ritz-Carlton. The house, with its grand rooms and soaring ceilings, seemed precisely the sort of place that would be built by the upwardly mobile too young to remember the 1973 Arab oil embargo. He switched on a lamp or two and offered me a seat on a long, fat-armed couch covered in green, cream, and yellow striped silk—that heavy, nubby stuff. Unfortunately, the couch was heaped with so many throw pillows that despite its vast length, there was only room for a couple of anorexics to sit. I wound up with a giant, overstuffed yellow square on my lap. Each of its four corners had a big tassel, the kind strippers twirl from their nipples (a talent, like playing the xylophone, I’ve always vaguely wished I possessed). Another pillow, a thickly fringed rectangle with a petit-pointed yellow dog, competed for space with my right hip.

  “Professionally, I teach history at St. Elizabeth’s College. I was thinking that an oral history from you—” In that instant, Greg Logan froze, his backside inches from the dark green wing chair cater-cornered to the couch. “I understand my being here may seem an intrusion, but I was hoping you might have something important to tell the community about how the criminal justice system operates—or fails to operate.”

  He did sit, but his bushy, dark eyebrows were now raised so skeptically high they came close to being curly bangs. “I don’t understand,” he replied, still courteous. Or at least not discourteous.

  From the depths of my shoulder bag I pulled out a copy of my curriculum vitae in a clear plastic sleeve—along with a bonus, a petrified wad of Trident wrapped in an ancient shopping list. As I slipped the gum gob back into my bag and handed over my CV, I answered his unasked question. “It seems to me you’ve been the victim of leaks to the press, of knee-jerk assumptions that have more to do with prejudice than reality.”

  Greg’s eyes didn’t mist in gratitude, as I suppose—subconsciously, arrogantly—I’d hoped they would. Instead, he responded to my proposal pretty much as he’d been responding from the instant he opened the door. You could say it was the way you’d expect a guy with an MBA to respond—with polite neutrality that really was no response at all. Or else you could say it was the behavior of a well-mannered psychopath. He glanced down at the CV. He was less tentative now, more the businessman. His eyes darted back and forth at an astounding rate. I hoped he wasn’t one of those entrepreneurs who take up speed-reading because they have time for nothing. Obviously h
e was: In seven seconds he knew what I had to offer and didn’t want it. “This is all very nice, Ms., Dr. Singer.”

  “I don’t use the ‘Doctor,’” I told him. “And please, call me Judith.”

  He didn’t call me either: “A Ph.D. in history from NYU. I’m sincerely impressed.” He was neither sincere nor impressed. I felt so letdown. He was talking like a well-programmed android: “And I appreciate your sympathy. Although I don’t really understand what an oral history would do.” He gave what was supposedly an apologetic shrug, which was nothing more than a brief, robotic shoulder lift.

  “It might elicit some understanding of what you’re going through. Maybe even some empathy that could translate into community support.” I kept waiting for him to start nodding in comprehension. But he sat unmoving, neck frozen, arms bonded to the arms of the wing chair, so I went on. “It seems to me you’ve gotten a raw deal. You’ve been convicted without even being tried.” He did nod then, but barely, merely to indicate he was listening as he tried to figure out the real reason why I was there, and who’d sent me. “I’m also here because I don’t believe you had anything to do with your wife’s murder.” As I said the word “murder,” his right hand slid across his lap to his left and he began to twist his wedding band around slowly. My mouth went dry. My tongue stuck to my palate, which made my next words sound gluey. I managed to say: “You’re too smart to have done it so stupidly.”

  “I’m sorry,” he snapped. At last he had an expression. Disdainful. His nostrils flared in impatience, as if I had come to his door peddling a frivolous product. “I don’t have time for this.” With each word of the sentence, his voice grew louder and more contemptuous. His fingers curved until his hands turned into fists.

  “Don’t you see?” I pleaded. “The police have only been focusing on you. And while they are, they’re not looking for the person who did commit the crime. Also—please hear me out—I’m a first-rate researcher. If you’d like I can look into it, see if I can find anything that might lead to someone else.”

  Now he was shaking his head. No. A definitive no. Worse, he was standing. “My lawyer has hired a private investigator.” I could hear the contempt behind his words.

  “Please, give me one more minute,” I pleaded, looking up at him. “When I say look into it, I’m not talking about canvassing the neighborhood and asking who saw what on Halloween. Or what, if anything, your neighbors told the police. That’s a legitimate job for your private detective. What I can do is go deeper, follow a paper trail, search into people’s pasts. Also, I have some small experience investigating homicide and—”

  It’s so mortifying, to watch someone who’s been trying to dope you out finally conclude Shit! A wacko! So I stood as well. I was on the verge of grabbing him by his golf shirt, shaking him and shouting, Please believe me. I am not a wacko! Which probably would have been as convincing as Nixon announcing he was not a crook.

  We were saved from whatever—maybe only another agonizing silence—by the clomp-squeak, clomp-squeak of heavy rubber soles, through the dining room, across the center hall, clomp-squeak, clomp-squeak until their noise was hushed by the lush wool of the Persian rug. For an instant he and I glanced at each other, embarrassed, as if we’d been caught doing something illicit.

  A tall, rawboned woman crossed the living room and stood before Greg. She looked like Janet Reno in a henna-rinsed pixie cut. Her tan shoes, laced up, had inch-thick, orange rubber crepe soles. Her slacks and matching T-shirt were the hue of canned salmon. The phrase “older woman” sprang to mind, along with the word “polyester,” until I realized she was not that much older than I, albeit dressed in some unnatural fabric that did not reflect kindly on her.

  “Mr. Logan, sir?” A bizarre speech impediment? A heavy Scottish burr?

  “Yes, Miss MacGowan?” Burr. He made no attempt to introduce us.

  “The little ones are asleep.” She offered a professional nanny’s benevolent smile, which didn’t last long. So, I mused, the au pair did not seem to be part of the Logan household anymore. What had made her leave? Had she been fired? Could the au pair and Greg actually have been lovers and were now playing it cool? Or had her departure been due to something else—like fear of Greg Logan? Was I nuts to keep dismissing my own fear of him? I’d watched enough TV news to know: The most dangerous people weren’t maniacs with eyes that swirled like pinwheels. They were the guys who looked virtuous enough that you would invite them over for dinner. “I thought I might drive to Dairy Barn,” the nanny was saying, “and buy those berry pops Morgan’s been asking for.”

  “Great!” Greg declared. His eyes were no longer dead; they were sparkling at her. His manner was vigorous. It was as if Greg Logan had vanished and instantly been replaced by an extroverted identical twin. “Excellent! Thank you very much.” Miss MacGowan pursed her lips, a gesture that might have been Scottish for “you’re welcome.” Then, with barely a glance at me, she hurried off. The only sound was the clomp-squeak of her shoes.

  In those few seconds of silence, my eye drifted to the table beside the chair in which Greg had been sitting. On it was an artful juxtaposition of a pile of antique leather-bound books beside a bottom-heavy onyx vase. Their dark browns and greens glowed in the gold light spilling from a lamp fashioned from a porcelain urn festooned with dragons. On the other side of the lamp, in an old tortoiseshell picture frame (the shell probably yanked off the back of some luckless Edwardian-era tortoise) was a photo of Greg and Courtney Logan. They wore tennis whites. Their arms were around each other, pulling each other close so there was no space between. Her blond head, bound in a terrycloth headband, rested against the chest of his cable-knit sweater. His darkness was a pleasing contrast to her pastel prettiness. They weren’t merely smiling for the camera, they were laughing: two people made for each other, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that formed a picture of marital happiness. God, what a sickening loss he’d sustained.

  Suddenly Greg switched off the lamp and said, “I have a great deal to do, Ms.—”

  “I wish you’d call me Judith,” I urged. But Greg Logan didn’t say anything. The light from the front hallway was more than enough for me to see that he was shaking his head. No.

  And good-bye.

  I passed that night squirming in my dark bedroom, feeling my face flame again and again as I cringed over my visit to Greg’s. Over and over I asked myself What in hell possessed you to try such an idiot move? Forget humiliating yourself. He’s Fancy Phil’s boy. Daddy could arrange to have someone dispatched to take care of Singer, J., 63 Oaktree Street. Your address right there for all to see in the Shorehaven Nynex Community Directory. And even if he were to turn out to be a sweetie, the world’s most benevolent man, he obviously thinks you’re a major creep, to say nothing of a loser. You’ve blown the whole damn investigation.

  I tried not to tune into house sounds: the clunk as the refrigerator switched off downstairs, the creak of absolutely nothing on a floorboard. I hated being alone at night. In bed. In life, come to think of it. I didn’t feel so bad when I was working, or out with my kids or a friend. But dating, at least with the major and minor drips I’d met, only made my loneliness feel not just painful, but pathetic. Postmodernist Geoff wasn’t even a nice guy; he was merely the least dreadful. He had asked me to go to the English Lake District with him in June (“Naturally we’ll share expenses,” had been his second sentence). But I’d said no. Having made out with him on Long Island, I knew there was no point in taking the show—this time with three complete acts—on the road to Windermere.

  The truth was, yes, sure, I was a person in my own right. Historian. Mother. Friend. Reader. C-SPAN junkie. Movie lover. Library board member. Nassau County Coalition Against Domestic Violence volunteer. But what I yearned to be was a wife again, to hear Bob’s sleepy voice murmuring “G’night” as he turned over, to sense the warmth of a man’s body across a few inches of bed, to inhale the homey bouquet of the fabric softener on his pajamas, to know we’d have bo
ring sex every other week. Of course, if I’d left Bob and married Nelson, I thought, he and I would still be in a state of postcoital ecstasy, sitting up in bed discussing the Courtney Logan case and—Stop!

  Over the years I’d become my own tough cop, policing myself from crossing the line from the occasional loving or lustful memory of Nelson to hurtful fantasy: What is he doing this minute? Is he happy? Would it be so terrible to call him and offhandedly say, You just popped into my head the other day and I was wondering how you ... Stop! An hour later I finally managed to lull myself to sleep by thinking about who could have killed Courtney Logan.

  The next morning, I had some business to attend to: detective business. I hunkered down at the end of my driveway pretending to be preoccupied by the fate of a dwarf juniper or malnourished baby yew to which I actually had very little emotional attachment. Look, I was desperate for some kind of lead and knew this was the time for Chic Cheryl, my next-door neighbor, to come careening home after driving Spike (husband) to the 8:11. Sure enough, her Mercedes wagon, capacious enough to transport a Schutzstaffel battalion, was roaring down the street. Chic Cheryl had to race home in order to have quality time with TJ and Skip (children) and Danny, Colleen, and Bridget (Irish water spaniels) before she had to floor it to get to her nine A.M. golf lesson on time.

  Her brakes didn’t squeal as much as give a squawk of panic as she slammed them on when she was a foot away from me. “Ju!” she blared. Then, modulating her usual roar, she shouted at me: “How are you?”