Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

  “When did this happen?”

  “Around this time last year,” Fancy Phil replied.

  “Let me be clear about this.” I stood, got my shopping-list pad and pen from near the telephone, and came back to the table to do the arithmetic and make a few notes. “Courtney’s fiddling with their money happened about a year ago. But about two weeks before she disappeared—and was murdered—Greg transferred forty thousand dollars from a jointly held money market account into an account that was in his name only.”

  “Yeah. A coincidence. I mean, him moving the money and then Courtney getting killed. He needed another loan from his bank in October.”

  “Let’s go over the math. If she’d helped herself to fifteen out of the money market account, that meant originally they had fifty-five thousand.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And how much was in their Smith Barney brokerage account?”

  “Eighty minus twenty. Plus the ten she put back.” He watched patiently until I wrote 70,000, Smith B. “You don’t got a doctor in arithmetic, do you?”

  “No. So tell me, Phil, do you sense Greg was very angry about Courtney’s money manipulations?”

  Fancy Phil shook his head vehemently, as if the words “Greg” and “angry” could not occur in the same sentence. “Nah. Upset. Like he knew Courtney was going through a tough time, being home with the kids, trying to get used to going from being on the fast track to being a mother. And a businesswoman, but not in the city. What she couldn’t get through her head was that now Gregory was the breadwinner. He couldn’t let her keep sticking her hand in the till for a business that was—I hate to say it of the dead—stupid. Every young married couple has one of those video cameras. All they do is take pictures, like they invented babies and they’ve gotta show the world. Little Buster in the high chair. Little Buster out of the high chair. Little Buster in the grocery store. They take their babies out at night, for God’s sake, to restaurants, so everybody can share their joy. So there’s Little Buster screaming and puking that milky lumpy stuff all over the polenta and making everybody else crazy, and they’re still taking pictures. ‘That’s Little Buster breching in Mario’s.’”

  “But you think Greg and Courtney’s marriage was basically sound? They were just going through a rough time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re sure? No serious trouble?” Fancy Phil raised his right hand as if taking an oath. His palm was oily from the popcorn. “What about the au pair?”

  “What about her?” he snapped. “A hundred different languages in the world and they pick a girl who speaks German. Teaching the kids: Auf Wiedersehen, Grossvater.’ And she had a face that could stop a clock and probably did.”

  “Maybe. And maybe she had a great figure or a sweet vulnerability that attracted your son. I don’t know. The police and half of Shorehaven obviously believe there was something between her and Greg.”

  “Well, there wasn’t. Cross it off your list. Gregory loved Courtney. He didn’t step out.”

  Fancy Phil’s nostrils dilated. I sensed this was not a sign of pleasure. So I decided to skip any more questions about the au pair. Still, considering I was alone in a house with a gangster convicted of aggravated assault, I felt remarkably comfortable. There he was, my first client, sitting at the head of my narrow kitchen table. Fancy Phil was clearly a man who expected respect, or at least not condescension, much less a hard time. Still, even if I gave him an argument, I sensed I probably wouldn’t wind up bloated, bobbing in the East River, a New York moment for the folks from Toronto on a Circle Line tour. But I felt I had to say: “Phil, from time to time I may ask you questions you don’t like.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Good. I don’t want to have to be concerned you’ll hold a grudge.”

  “What are you worrying about?”

  “I wouldn’t say worrying. It’s just those two and a half years you spent upstate because of an aggravated assault on a fellow—”

  “Chicky Itzkowitz?” He snorted a dismissive laugh. “That’s what I call history. Plus I told you, I retired. A new man. Anyway, with Chicky it was a business matter.”

  “Well, you and I are doing business even if I’m not taking money.”

  “Hey, Dr. Judith.”

  “What?”

  “You got nothing to worry about.”

  He did look relatively benevolent, a hoodlum Buddha. So I asked: “What did you think of Courtney?”

  “Me, personally?” I nodded. He thought for a minute, then shook his head sadly. “ Lukshen. You know what that is?”

  “Noodles?”

  “Yeah, but the thing is, lukshen without butter, without salt and pepper ... What’s the word? Blah. A b word.”

  “Bland?”

  “Yeah! Bland.” He put his elbows on the table and rested his chins on the heels of his hands. “You send your kid to an Ivy League college because you want him to be better than you. But he winds up bringing home a bowl of lukshen from the West Coast with blond hair and blue eyes who went to another Ivy League college and is an investment banker and plays tennis and is even cute looking if you like cute looking. Looks like a great package. But then you look for a personality and it’s not there.”

  “There is a kind of West Coast low-key style.” Well, I wasn’t about to interject that his son wasn’t exactly a live wire either, although in fairness, I had met Greg under strained circumstances during a terrible period in his life.

  “Excuse me, Doc,” Fancy Phil said, “but bullshit. Low-key, laid-back, loafers without socks—that’s how they are. But people from the West Coast still have a personality.”

  “Was she a good mother to the kids?”

  “Yeah. Fine. I mean, she could talk your ear off about Travis’s teething. She was always saying to Morgan, ‘I need a huggy-buggy,’ and Morgan would go running to her.” With his thumb and index finger he massaged the bridge of his nose. An altered nose, the broad-bridged, slightly upturned schnozz many got in the fifties and early sixties, in the era of frantic assimilation, a nose which made thousands of second-and third-generation American Jews look as if they’d descended from Porky Pig. “And she was good to Gregory, too, except for putting her hand in the till. Always calling him ‘sweetie’ or ‘honey’ or ‘Greggy,’ but listen, she was a good wife. You saw their house?”

  “It was lovely.”

  “She fixed it up herself. No interior decorator or nothing.”

  “On the other hand ...” I prompted.

  “On the other hand,” Fancy Phil went on, “if she’s quitting her job to stay home with the kids, how come she’s not staying home with the kids? She’s out all the time. Call the house and you got that kraut. ‘Mizzus Logan is at her exercise class,’” he mimicked in what I assumed he believed to be a German accent. “A class? What kind of crap is that? Someone’s gotta teach you to touch your toes? Or she’s at a meeting, or having lunch with her girlfriends, or taking a run, or in her office—”

  “Did she have an office outside the house?”

  “Nah. She took over a bedroom. Anyway, she’s in her office doing business and cannot be disturbed.”

  “Did you meet Courtney’s family?”

  “Yeah. They’re what you’d expect. Lukshen comes from lukshen.”

  “Where do they come from?”

  “Washington. The state. Olympia. It’s somewhere, but I don’t know where.”

  “Are both parents alive?”

  Fancy Phil gave an exaggerated sigh of boredom. “You want to call that alive, then they’re alive. The old man’s a comptroller of some two-bit lumber company. The old lady designs flowers. Puts them in bowls or something.”

  “Did they come east to the funeral?” He nodded. Not one of his fleshy features moved, yet I sensed a change in his expression. “How did they act?” He shrugged. “Phil, I’d like to get a sense of the people Courtney came from. Was the finding of the body a shock to them? Or do you think they had a sense she was dead in the
months before, when she was missing?”

  “They think it had something to do with me,” Fancy Phil said, his tone so flat it might have been one of those computer-generated voices. “At the funeral. Episcopal. But I go over to the mother and try to hug her.” He lowered his arms so they were rigid against his sides. “She goes like this. It was like hugging a little block of cement. She’s short, like Courtney. And neither of them—her or the husband—would look in my direction. And not one word.”

  “What made them think you had something to do with it?”

  “Just—you know, what I was supposed to be.”

  “You never had any arguments with Courtney? Or with Greg about Courtney?”

  “No!”

  “Did they think Greg had anything to do with it?”

  “I don’t know. At least they talked to him.”

  A night breeze blew through the open kitchen door and gave me a chill. One of my neighbors’ dogs began that hysterical staccato bark you hear from nutsy dogs or from dogs with nutsy owners. Fancy Phil glanced at his beer bottle and seemed surprised to find it empty. “Did they put up any kind of a fuss about Greg having custody of the children?”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, annoyed. Then he answered his own question: “You mean, if they thought Gregory did it, they would want to get the kids away from him. No. They didn’t say a peep about custody.”

  “Right. Okay, the first few days after Courtney disappeared: Did the cops ask Greg to see if anything of hers was missing?”

  “Yeah, and as far as he could tell, nothing was. The only money that was touched was the money Gregory took out of their joint account two weeks before. The sapphire earrings he got her for her thirtieth birthday were where she kept them, in a little safe they have in a closet. Some other jewelry. Her mink was in the closet.”

  “Did she have an engagement ring?”

  “Yeah, sure. She was wearing it, you know, when they found her. And her Rolex, too.”

  “So all that was missing was the twenty-five thousand she’d taken from the money market and stock brokerage accounts months before she disappeared?”

  “Right,” he agreed.

  “So now what I’ve got to do is find out if she paid out twenty-five thousand dollars for video equipment and advertisements.”

  “And if she didn’t?”

  “Then I’ll need to figure out what was going on in Courtney’s life right before her death.”

  Chapter Five

  STARBABY’S VIDEOGRAPHER, ZEE Friedman, bent over the railing on the landing outside her fifth-floor walk-up. “Just one more flight!” she called out encouragingly. She lived in a run-down neighborhood just north of the grand, high-ceilinged apartments around Columbia University and south of the renovated brownstones of Harlem’s latest renaissance. The stairwell of her building exuded that Old New York smell which has nothing to do with Henry James and lavender; for nearly a hundred years, the yellow-brown walls had soaked up garlic and onion vapors from the various ethnic groups that had used the place as their first step up from New York’s bleakest tenements. Now optimistic twenty-somethings and disillusioned thirty-somethings paid nearly a thousand bucks a month rent for each room.

  Zee graciously ignored the mewling sounds that came from my throat with each breath as I made my way up the fourth flight of ridiculously steep stairs that seemed designed for a longer-legged species than Homo sapiens. In her leaning over, cascades of her black hair fell forward, forming a curtain around her face. It wasn’t until I finally clomped up to her landing that I got a good look at her. Zee definitely outclassed her surroundings. She had the pudgy apple cheeks of one of those Victorian bisque dolls, except instead of the expected vacant blues, her eyes were alert, sparkling black. “Hi!” Her handshake was like a stevedore’s, although she wasn’t much more than five feet tall.

  “Hi,” I gasped.

  “Half Chinese, half Jewish,” she replied to my unasked question as she led me into her studio apartment. I nodded, not yet trusting myself to speak two consecutive words without snorting. “Twenty-four. Years old, I mean. The Zee’s for Zelda. After Zelda Fitzgerald. Why, you may ask, did my parents think it was a good idea to name me after some poor demented woman who burned to death in a mental hospital? The answer is: I don’t know.”

  Her not-very-large studio was divided into three areas: a kitchen that was simply some shelves above a sink and a two-burner stove; what I assumed was the bedroom, although it was hidden behind a curtain that looked fashioned from hula skirts; a five-by-five square that was the living room. Zee escorted me in and gestured toward a Baby Bear-size club chair. It was covered in one of those sage green, one-size-fits-all slipcovers that are better in catalogs than in life, although on her chair it had the schleppy charm of a child playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. She sat across from me on a love seat draped with three or four flowered fringed shawls, the ones you see on pianos and fortune-tellers. None of the floral prints matched.

  Obviously Zee Friedman possessed that gift I’d always longed for, flair, the intuitive sense of when less is less and when less is more. Her outfit, plain black cotton pants cut off mid-shin and an ordinary white T-shirt, was stylishly minimalist. I, on the other hand, was in navy slacks, my perpetual blue sweater with butterfly scarf, and gold button earrings. Hopefully she’d think my retro look was intentional.

  I’d spent the two previous days doing research and making calls. At last, through a friend of a friend of a neighbor of Jill Badinowski, I came up with another StarBaby client who had taken down Zee’s phone number. “Sorry to bother you on Memorial Day weekend,” I told her.

  “No problem,” Zee assured me. She had the voice of a more imposing woman, the contralto the Statue of Liberty would have if she could speak. She pulled her feet up on the cushion of the love seat so her heels touched her backside. She hugged her knees. Her toenails were the pale blue of bleached denim. “Are you a detective?” she asked hopefully.

  “Let’s just say I’ve been hired to see what I could find out about Courtney.” Zee gave me an enthusiastic nod. Her dark hair bounced cheerfully, as if eager to know more. “Do you have any idea how many other people she employed?”

  “At least one other guy, but I can’t say for sure if there were any more. I worked for her freelance, on weekends.” Between us was her coffee table, an old wood toy chest with peeling decals of the Little Misses Muffet and Bo-Peep.

  “Only on weekends?” I asked.

  “Well, that’s when both parents are home. You want the two of them interacting with the baby, since the video’s at least partly to prove to the kid how great his parents were, no matter what he remembers. Anyway, I work full-time, so Saturday and Sunday were it for me.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a production assistant for Crabapple Films.”

  I nodded respectfully, as if to say, Oh, but of course, Crabapple, though I’d never heard of it and prayed they didn’t make movies about adolescent girls being chainsawed. “What do you do there?”

  “The stuff nobody else wants to do,” Zee replied, smiling happily. She seemed inordinately content, one of those people miraculously missing the resentful gene. Not only was her voice big, her smile was also: overwide, the grin you’d see in a nursery school drawing. “Like I get permits from the mayor’s office, copy and file stuff, run back and forth to the set. That’s how I got onto Courtney. One of the guys on the set was filming for her and he moved to L.A. He passed the job on to me.”

  “Do you want to be a cinematographer?” I was tempted to drop the fact that my son was a movie critic, but decided it sounded undetective-ish. Also, just in case her cheeriness was a sham and she’d pumped two bullets into Courtney, the less she knew about me the better.

  Zee shook her head definitively. “Actually, I enjoy the managerial stuff a lot more—knowing where the money’s going, making sure a seventy-foot crane is at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn Tuesday at six A.M.” She had
managed to get her legs into a knot so complex all but one pale blue toenail was hidden. Her arms, meanwhile, were stretched out along the back of the love seat, as if about to embrace two invisible friends. “As far as Courtney goes—eeesh, sorry ... As far as Courtney went, I was surprised she stuck with me. I’m just another Columbia film major whose parents got her a digital camera for graduation.”

  “Did Courtney ever talk about her background with you?”

  “No. After you called I started thinking. I realized how much I don’t know about her. Except like obvious things. Married, two kids. She’d been an investment banker. I mean, we talked a little. Like how much we’d loved college and hated high school. But who loved high school? Maybe one dumb jock and an Epsilon semimoron Most Popular. Anyone who still has a clear memory knows how awful it was.”

  “Why did Courtney hate it?”

  “I think ... The usual. You’re either skinny or fat or puny or a giant and you don’t have a boyfriend. And you like to read. Courtney was sawed off and scrawny, although she said she filled out by college. But most of the time she was all business with me.”

  “Was she good at her business?”

  “She definitely didn’t have a cinematic eye—which was why she decided I was a good videographer. She seemed nice, I guess.”

  “What do you mean, ‘I guess’?”

  Zee pursed her glossed lips and gave it several seconds of thoughts. “It’s terrible to sound New Age-y,” she said slowly, “especially when you have tendencies. But some people emit niceness rays. You know?”

  “Did Courtney emit not-niceness rays?”

  Zee shook her head. “No. Not at all. But at the beginning I thought, Wow, what a woman! I mean, this bundle of energy. She’d talk about StarBaby and make it sound like I was joining her on some kind of crusade: Courtney and Zee’s Excellent Adventure. That StarBaby would really do something. People would be able to see themselves as they were, as their parents and siblings were. Maybe an idealized version, because they were being filmed, but at least not filtered through fantasy or an imperfect memory. Courtney was going to franchise it all over the country. And probably the world—though she didn’t say that.”