Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

  Except as I sat there, watching two middle-aged male hotshots vying to say something so insightful it would stun the other into silence, watching the exquisitely cleavaged Heather, this litigator who confronted for a living, say “Um” three times in an attempt to join the conversation only to have her husband and Dan reflexively raise their voices so her “Um” could be ignored without blatant discourtesy, I realized there was nothing I could say or do that would entice Dan Steiner.

  Someone might ask: Why the hell would I even be tempted to entice a guy I wouldn’t want even if he exhibited the politesse of a Lord Chesterfield and a schlong that went from here to Cleveland? Well, because he was a prime catch, what someone like me ought to go gaga for. Smart enough to get into Yale, or so astoundingly rich he could buy his way in. Definitely rich enough—from the sheen of perspiration on Clay’s forehead to the gleam in Heather’s insignificant hazel eyes—to be the sort of magnate revered for his cool instead of being blown off as the cold fish he was.

  What saddened me most was that in his snazzy pale gray pinstripe of exquisite summer-weight wool so painstakingly cut it (almost) concealed the mini-love handles no exercise or diet could expunge, Dan was precisely the man my late husband had always yearned to be.

  The worst of the worst was, a sweetie pie smile kept trying to take over my face in a pitiful attempt to win the favor of the man who was ignoring me. Two more seconds and I’d be batting my lashes, complying with Article Two of the Girl Constitution: If he rejects you, try harder. I actually had to command myself: Wipe off that sycophantic smile. “Excuse me,” I said to Dan in an Elizabeth Cady Stanton voice. “There was a murder in my town on Long Island. I was asking Clay and Heather about how they would defend the chief suspect.”

  “A murder?” he echoed. There followed an instant of silence during which we could hear the clink of fork against plate as a waiter deboned a fish at a nearby table. Dan seemed to recognize another sentence was required of him, which he evidently found vexing. For him, this was a dismal evening after a rough day in Washington. His cheeks inflated, prelude to a petulant exhalation. Clearly he knew intuitively (as well as from studying the Houses of Rurik and Romanov) that, as a rich and powerful person, he had an absolute right to behave badly. Finally, however, he exhaled his pissed-off sigh through his nose and in a resigned voice inquired: “Who was killed?”

  So while the waiter dashed off to get him a Salad of Baby Greens with Four Variations on Duck, nothing else, thanks, which was no doubt how Dan the Man kept himself slim to trim, I offered a précis of the Courtney Logan case. “Clay told me the lawyer for Greg, the husband, should be hiring a forensic accountant. The goal seems to be to follow the money.”

  “No one knows where the twenty-five thousand she took went to?” Dan asked. His suit was one of those trendy, three-button numbers that expose shirt and tie only to mid-sternum. It had the effect of making him look straitjacketed, and the impression was underscored by his stiff bearing and the way he held his upper arms close to his sides, even when he reached for his water glass and took a sip. It was not the posture of a guy who could, in any way that counted, be fun.

  “From what I’ve heard, all Courtney said was that she needed the money for her business,” I replied.

  “If she didn’t hide it really well, that should be easy enough to find out,” Clay interjected. “I mean, for the husband’s lawyer.”

  What I was thinking was: No one had actually seen any expensive cameras, had they? Zee Friedman had told me she’d used her own stuff: Could the equipment Courtney told Zee was at the Wesleyan graduate’s house be a fiction? If so, then what could she have used the money for? Why would she lie about it? “Just out of curiosity,” I inquired, “what would a woman in her position need thousands and thousands for if not the business?” I halted for what I hoped was a meaningful pause, although it was probably a little overdramatic. “Blackmail?” I proposed. No one said no. On the other hand, I didn’t hear any resounding yeses.

  “Face-lift,” Heather offered to break the silence. “Seriously, the works can easily be around thirty-five thou. Or could she have had a jewelry habit?”

  “She didn’t seem the type.” Could the Wesleyan student himself be a fiction?

  “Drugs?” Clay was asking.

  “Courtney seemed to function very well—at everything,” I told them.

  All I wanted to do was ransom my Jeep from the overpriced Manhattan garage, tool back to Long Island, and again read over my notes on the case. Maybe this time they would tell me something. Yet I kept talking to Dan, trying to get something out of him, at least some snippet of financial expertise that might shed some light on the Courtney Logan case. “You were a businessman before you became a scholar?” He nodded, a single nod, clearly not being profligate in the nod department. Still, he seemed gratified enough by the word “scholar” that I half regretted using it. (The other half, sad to report, was preening that I’d finally done something to please him.) I went on: “Let’s forget what the murder victim needed the money for. Let’s just say she needed it, ostensibly for the business. If she’d been turned down for a loan by the banks but still needed more money, where would she get it?”

  “Family money?” Dan suggested. I shook my head, which seemed to disconcert him. He rubbed his shovel of a chin and, after a few seconds, “Money in the market?” emerged from his pale lips.

  “There was some. I think eighty thousand in one particular account.” Dan blinked, probably in shock at such a chicken-feed number. “She took out twenty, but put ten back. Her husband wouldn’t let her get at the rest.”

  “Well, maybe she only needed a small amount,” he replied in a rather hushed tone. “She did have a small business.” He appeared slightly dazed to find himself in a discussion whose subject he hadn’t set.

  “But she had big ambitions for it,” I explained. “Franchising, stuff like that.”

  “Maybe a loan shark?” Clay ventured. “Someone whose name she heard bandied about by her father-in-law?”

  “She’d been an investment banker at Patton Giddings,” I explained to Dan.

  “Could she have used the money for on-line trading?” Heather chimed in. “Or for day-trading?”

  “Possible,” Dan replied, “but only barely. Most of these people, even the so-called sophisticates ... Cocksure of themselves. They wind up losing it far easier than they run it up. She’d have had to be very, very good just to break even over the long term. Day-traders are addicts, no better than the blue-collar guy who squanders his salary on off-track betting week after week.”

  “But with her background in finance?” I reminded him.

  “Please,” he said, in the overly patient manner of someone who is trying to appear open-minded rather than supercilious. He pointed his fork straight at me. I pulled my eyes away from the drippy leaf of baby spinach woven between the tines and looked right at him. His lips were compressed into a hyphen. Despite his mush face, the flesh above and below his lips was protuberant, well muscled, evidence that his disdain for me was almost nothing personal, that Dan’s native expression was one of scorn. “Ask yourself,” he said. “If she were really first-rate, would she have quit Patton Giddings? To live in the suburbs? To be a mommy?”

  Dan was so odious I actually skipped dessert. The worst thing about the evening was that it would be too late to call Nancy and recount it, thus giving her the chance, in her role as official best friend, to rage against Claymore Katz’s ill breeding and sexism in fixing me up without asking my consent, to orate on Heather’s self-victimization, and to offer a diatribe about Dan Steiner’s boorishness, egotism, pomposity plus, naturally, several scathing, southernly accented sentences about how teeny his penis must be—that being the universal and official female put-down. Alas, I’ve always felt it a form of vengeance (while not without its immediate satisfactions) that is sadly impotent.

  Driving home on the Long Island Expressway, I put Dan out of my mind, tried not to devote even one
neuron to Nelson, and didn’t waste a microsecond on post-modernist Geoff. Musing over murder most foul, I decided, was far more comforting than contemplating the unholy trinity of me, men, and my future. Except I found little comfort. I was beginning to feel uneasy about the case. The more I learned, it seemed, the less I knew, not the sort of progress I wanted to report to a client like Fancy Phil.

  What could I tell him? That I’d spent the day at the library searching databases for all variations on Courtney Bryce Logan, Courtney Bryce, StarBaby, Courtney AND Princeton, and Courtney AND “Patton Giddings.” All that popped up was a wedding announcement, the fact that Courtney had been treasurer of Princeton’s Class of ’86 Fund, and an article from The Olympian in Washington state, Courtney’s hometown paper, reporting her murder with quotations from a few of her Summit High classmates, one of whom had used the adjective “shrewd” where “smart” might have been more seemly.

  And when I’d gotten home from the library in the late afternoon, there had been a message on my voice mail: “The clock’s ticking. You got anything yet?” No name of course, but there was no doubt it was Fancy Phil. With more than a hint of strained patience in a gravelly baritone unaccustomed to expressing forbearance. “You got anything yet?”

  Did my client simply and sincerely want to discover the truth? Or had he wound me up and sent me searching to find out all that was find-outable, that is, to see if there was any evidence the average detective might miss that could lead back to Fancy Phil himself, or to Greg, evidence he could then destroy—along with the historian who’d dug it up?

  Nelson Sharpe hadn’t warned me about Phil Lowenstein just so I could swoon and throw myself into his arms. Basically, Nelson was saying: This guy doesn’t just have a nasty temper. This guy can order a murder, although if he likes you, he’d probably ask one of his associates just to maim. What kind of lunacy or presumptuousness had led me first to knock on Greg Logan’s door, then after that let me think I could handle his old man?

  So the next morning, feeling a little shaky, I phoned Mary Alice Mahoney Schlesinger Goldfarb and my next-door neighbor, Chic Cheryl, to try to track down some of Courtney’s friends. Mary Alice said she knew “tons” of them, but, under not very rigorous cross-examination, was unable to come up with any names. On the other hand, Chic Cheryl blared out not only names, but net worth and country-club memberships. Also, according to CC, the explication I’d gotten from Jill Badinowski of the social stratification among younger, stay-at-home mothers was in error: They formed cliques not based on the status of their occupations in their former lives—cosmeticians vs. bankruptcy lawyers—but on the wealth of their husbands, a notion that would have desolated me for weeks had I not been so eager to gather enough information that I could get to Fancy Phil before he decided to get to me.

  After writing down Chic Cheryl’s candidate for best friend, Kellye Ryan, I must have had some “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” stereotype in the back of my head, because the tall, tan, slender, long-limbed near-beauty who rang my doorbell that Friday afternoon was a surprise.

  “Hey,” she greeted me.

  “I appreciate your coming over,” I told her.

  “No prob.” Kellye didn’t seem to notice the missing “lem.” “Nice house. Hey, I’m glad you’re doing something to—what’s that word?—whatever, to honor Court.” Although she did appear to be vocabularily challenged, she was alert and self-confident. I led her through the house, out the back door, and offered her a seat on an old cedar bench. Unobtrusively, she flicked off what might have been an atom or two of pollen before executing that deft bent-knee, ass-to-seat maneuver that indiscernibly transforms the naturally graceful from a standing to a sitting position. “So much publicity. Yuck. It’s nice someone wants to hear nice things about her.”

  “I do want to hear nice things,” I assured her. “But if I’m going to write about it, or turn it into an oral history, it’s my obligation to ask all sorts of questions. My job isn’t to commemorate Courtney Logan, even though I’m sure she deserves it.”

  “Gotcha,” she replied. Kellye Ryan did not look like the average Shorehaven mommy, in a T-shirt and khakis with just enough forgiving Lycra to get her through dinner at Burger King without having to open her zipper. Instead, she wore one of those dresses of palest peach silk and lace that is barely distinguishable from a full-length slip. As she was at least five feet ten, it ended mid-thigh, which in her case was not a problem.

  With the dark hair pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck and her almost black eyes, Kellye looked like a beautiful flamenco dancer. That is, until she smiled. Then she looked like a flamenco dancer from Transylvania. Dracula teeth: Her upper canines were so elongated they appeared to pierce her lower gums. I had to stop myself from lowering my chin to protect my neck.

  “Tell me a little about yourself,” I prompted. “What’s your background?”

  “You know.” Sensing this might not be quite enough, she went on. “College, Bard. After, Bill Blass.”

  “Were you a model?”

  “Uh-uh,” she said, while giving me a modest little shrug to acknowledge the compliment. Then she got busy aligning the two spaghetti straps on her slip-dress.

  “What did you do there?”

  “Marketing.”

  I sensed a little more small talk was needed before I started asking her about her murdered friend. “Did you like working in the fashion industry?”

  “I mean, to work for Bill Blass? Total, total dream job.”

  “Uh-huh,” I found myself saying.

  “The whole line. Quality. Down to the seams. Beautifully finished. You never have to be ashamed to take off your jacket.”

  “Right. And now?”

  “Married, two kids.” Her smile slowly faded and a sorrowful expression elongated her face. “Same as Court.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “Tennis tournament. Rolling Hills.”

  “That’s a country club?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. They paired us. Doubles team. I mean, Mutt and Jeff. Short and tall. But we were great. Together. We started playing singles. A powerhouse, that girl! Fridays. Strategy, strategy. And a killer serve.”

  “And you became close friends?”

  “Right.”

  “What was she like?” I asked.

  As Kellye considered she scraped some invisible lipstick or crumbs from the corners of her mouth with the tips of her pearl-colored pinkie nails. “Court? Smart. Adorable. I used to kid her. Call her Miss Perfect,” she said, smiling sadly. “But she was. Always there for you. Great friend. Totally, totally in love with her kids.”

  “And what about her husband?”

  “In love with him, too,” she said quickly, although I noticed the “totally, totally” was dropped. “She was cute looking, too. But smart enough not to wear ruffles, you know? Princeton, and it’s not easy to shake that boring, Ivy style, so she was a little too safe fashionwise. But who’s going to argue with Armani?”

  “Not me,” I said.

  “And always ... doing. StarBaby. Before that Citizens for a More Beautiful Shorehaven, president one time. Volunteer, Island Hospital. Something else with cancer. Tennis, running, learning golf. And doing for Trav and Morgie? Like the day she ...” Kellye, suddenly breathless, pressed her hand against her chest and paused to compose herself. “The day Court was missing. Got killed probably, but who knew that then? She made a Halloween pumpkin cake. You wouldn’t believe it! Two cakes in bundt pans. Put them together, one on top of the other—you know, bottom to bottom, with frosting for glue. It honestly did look like a pumpkin. Orange frosting, black frosting eyes, and she smushed together green gumdrop thingies for the stem. I said, ‘Court, you don’t have enough to do?’ and she said, ‘Yes, but wait till the kids see this. They’ll be’ ... Some word like ‘so happy.’” Kellye’s eyes grew moist. A tear rolled out onto her black lower lashes. She carefully dabbed it off with the side of her index finger to avoid smudging her mas
cara.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  ‘“Sokay.” Her tears kept flowing. Kellye Ryan might have been deficient in language, but perhaps not in intelligence and definitely not in feeling. I found a tired Kleenex in my back pocket and handed it to her. “When she was missing,” she finally went on, “I couldn’t stop thinking. Sicko people out there, you know? Like the guy who killed Versace. Except not gay. And creepier. So I was petrified. Like what could be happening to her? I didn’t want to think about all the things that could be—oh, Jesus!—done to her. But I couldn’t help it. And then when they found her body ... I just pray whoever shot her in the head just did it, not later after doing like sex things or torture things.” She folded the tissue and inserted it under her lashes, holding it at one eye, then the other until the tears finally stopped. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I replied. Kellye closed her eyes for a moment to regain her composure. Then she nodded—I’m okay now—patted around her nostrils with the tissue, and swallowed hard. She crossed her legs at the ankle, and swung them over to the left, in that uncomfortable posture women’s magazines urge upon you to look ladylike and/or to prevent onlookers from having an I-Thou relationship with your pudendum. “Did Courtney ever talk about her past?” Kellye shook her head. “Old boyfriends?”

  “Uh ... Some guy at Princeton. Chip? Chuck? One of those names.”

  “Any last name?” I asked.

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Did she ever talk about her family?”

  “Uh-huh. Only child. Crazy about gymnastics, but even though she was skinny then ... You know how they say: ‘You can’t be too thin.’”

  “Anything else?”

  “Her mother was born-again for a little while. She talked about Jesus really loud at Taco Bell or one of those places. Courtney said she was so mortified she wanted to die.”