Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

  “And the worst of it is, I think she feels the same way but—”

  “I don’t want to hear about your marriage—either one of them.”

  “Judith, trust me. You’re not cool enough for the I-don’t-want-to get-involved stuff.”

  “As I’m sure you know, I was involved with you. Maybe I still am, or could be. And if that’s the case, most likely it’ll always be that way. When we agreed never to see each other again, it wasn’t because we’d gotten bored or had grown to detest each other. We were still in love. So even though there’s been a hell of a lot of water under both our bridges, it’s tempting to think we can start up where we left off, or at least begin something new. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this. Maybe all you’re looking for is a friendly pat on the head and my thinking you want something more is hideously uncomfortable for you because your tastes now run to nubile nineteen-year-olds.”

  “Cut the crap.”

  “So let me explain why this isn’t going to happen.”

  He gave a sigh of boredom, as if he already knew what I was going to say. “You found you really love Bob and even though there’s still whatever, a mental and physical attraction, it doesn’t justify blah, blah, blah.”

  “The blah, blah, blah is that Bob died two years ago, suddenly.” For an instant incomprehension turned his intelligent face slack and stupid. Then he lowered his head. I couldn’t see his expression, but the flush on his cheek was spreading to his ear, so I knew he was embarrassed about the blah, blah, blah business. “I’m less of a mess than I was,” I went on, “but I can’t afford to get involved with a married man who has a sad story.” I expected him to give me the sad story of his marriage anyway—since a fair number of men believe that women cannot fight their natures, which is to nurture everything from baby goldfish to depressed, middle-aged cops.

  Instead he said, “I’m sorry for your loss. Really sorry.” He stood and so did I.

  “Thank you.”

  “I won’t bother you again.”

  This last bit of business nearly had its intended effect: having me sniffle, then sob, then rush into his arms for comfort. But I couldn’t let myself. Since junior high, I’d always been one of those girls/women who would lose all reason in the face of love. I’d allow a guy to so inhabit my head that every act, from dicing celery to offering the defense of my doctoral dissertation, could not be executed without three-quarters of my brain occupied by thoughts of him. This was one time I wasn’t going to let that happen. “I appreciate that, Nelson.”

  Wearily, like two explorers retreating after having failed to reach the Pole, we trudged back to the front door. “Oh,” he said. “I forgot to tell you what I came over to tell you.” I gave him a go-ahead nod. “It’s not much. I should be keeping my mouth shut, but it’s not so terrible if I don’t. It’s this: The guys have pretty much given up looking for the gun that killed Courtney.”

  “What kind of gun was it?”

  “Probably a Walther PPK/S. Do you know what that is?”

  “I can look it up. Why have they given up? Where have they looked for it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess in and all around her house and grounds, the parking lot at the grocery store where she was supposed to have gone.”

  “Were there any groceries in her car?”

  “Not that I heard of.”

  Which I sensed was a no. “I get the feeling,” I told him, “that either you’re obsessed with the goings-on in Homicide or you know more about this case than the head of the organized crime unit normally would.”

  “Well, you’re involved in it. And with Greg Logan’s father being Fancy Phil Lowenstein, I have a reason to be interested.” The cuffs of his plaid shirt had been rolled up, and now he began smoothing them out and rolling them up again.

  “Do you think they should still be looking for the murder weapon?”

  “I can’t comment.”

  “Nelson, I’m not a reporter shoving a microphone in your face. I’m—” He shook his head: No comment. “Well, let me talk, then. It seems to me that whoever is running this investigation, Lieutenant Somebody, I have the name inside, is not very thorough. Maybe he should look a little harder.”

  “Why do you say that?” he asked, finally satisfied with his cuffs.

  “If you were handling the case, wouldn’t it have occurred to you that if some pillar of the community, a wife and mother, is suddenly missing and you can’t find her, you might consider taking a peep under the cover of the pool in her backyard, even if it looks tied down tight. Or am I misguided?” No answer, though his nostrils flared in a manner that I knew something was bothering him. “If you’d been in charge, wouldn’t you have thought, What the hell, I’ll just take a quick look to see if maybe there’s a body? Or a weapon?”

  “It’s been a sloppy investigation,” Nelson said, so softly I could barely hear him.

  “Did they ask the neighbors if they saw anyone suspicious in the neighborhood that evening?”

  “You don’t ask it like that. Very often, the perpetrator belongs in the neighborhood. You ask: What did you see?” And before I could ask anything more, he turned the knob, stepped out into the sunny day, and closed the front door quietly behind him.

  The next day, Sunday, was less boring than usual since Nancy’s husband Larry was out of town. His newest client, a dot-com near billionaire who had probably played too many games of Dungeons and Dragons in his youth, was consulting with Larry on the design of a forty-thousand-square-foot-Gothic castle in Virginia hunt country. After I rejected tennis and Nancy vetoed my sport, porch-sitting, we wound up walking along the beach of Shorehaven Bay, an inlet of Long Island Sound that, at low tide, offered a flat path of wet, compacted sand, glossy seaweed, and paving of the blue-black shells of the mussels that had been lunch for the gulls.

  “It doesn’t matter that the cops are sloppy,” Nancy was saying. “What bothers me is that you’re avoiding the truth like it was some mangy old coon dog with hydrophobia.”

  “Shush! You sound like Strom Thurmond.”

  “You’re missing my point.”

  “Which is?” I asked.

  “That even if Homicide is as lame as Lieutenant Cutie Pie says they are—”

  “He’s a captain now.”

  “Even if Captain Cutie Pie is right about their sloppy methods, the Homicide guys are probably also right about Greg Logan killing Courtney. Why do they have to take off pool covers and ask a bunch of vexatious questions to half of Shorehaven? They knew damn well who done it.” For a few seconds I enjoyed silence as we cautiously clambered over some boulders slick with seaweed. The afternoon June sun had turned from warm yellow to white-hot and beat down on us with the savagery of an August dog day. It evaporated the tiny pools of water in the empty mussel shells, perfuming the beach with the heady scent of dead fish. I turned away from the lethargic waves lapping against the shore to look up to a house of cantilevered white rectangles perched on a bluff above the beach. “Stop checking out real estate and avoiding what you have to do,” Nancy commanded.

  “Which is?”

  “Call Fancy Phil and tell him straight out: ‘Honey, looks to me like it’s sonny boy that done the deed.’”

  “You know,” I told her, “even if you’re wrong, you’re right. Because except for Greg, I’ve probably spoken to most of the same people the cops spoke to. And so far I haven’t been able to figure out why they’re so in love with the idea of Greg having done it that they haven’t looked elsewhere. They may be sloppy, Nancy, but they’re not stupid.”

  “You say that with the confidence of someone not intimately acquainted with Nassau County’s criminal justice system. Or at least, not intimately connected anymore.”

  “I can pretty well guess why they’re onto Greg, besides his being the husband of the victim. Someone told the cops something they didn’t tell me, something that made Homicide think, Hey, it’s definitely gotta be the husband.”

  Nancy exhaled impatiently. “Th
ey’re cops, for crissake! Genuine authority figures. Nothing personal, toots, but why would you expect people to be as open with some history lady as with the Nassau County police?”

  “First of all, I’m not just some history lady. I’m a good interviewer, an empathetic human being. Why would any of them lie to me?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a sin of commission. Maybe it was a sin of omission.”

  “Nancy, it was hold-nothing-back time. Well, at least they all talked to me. And do you know what I learned Courtney was like? Nice, perky. And cold, emotionally deficient. The sensual woman, the compleat asexual. Madly in love with her husband or maybe having an affair.”

  “You can do both, easy,” Nancy assured me cheerfully.

  “Now listen, after all those interviews—including a couple of people the cops never got to, like her best friend—and all that snooping, what I can’t get is who Courtney Bryce Logan really was. But even so, whether she was a cipher, an angel, or a bitch on wheels, who could possibly have gained with her death? No one.”

  “Except if Greg had a reason to want her dead. He did take the ‘theirs’ money and made it ‘his.’”

  “But that was in response to her sneaking money out of their accounts. And it was forty thousand dollars he took. Major bucks to some people, but not to him.” Nancy was eyeing the ruins of an old seawall in the distance and looked as though she might consider climbing it, with me. So I sat on the sand and kept talking. “Unless, you’re going to say, the murder wasn’t about money. Maybe he was having an affair and wanted his freedom. But then you could say, if that were the case, he’d get a good divorce lawyer. Unless ... well, it might be better to have her dead than squealing Fancy Phil’s secrets, things she overheard in the house.”

  “As long as you’re having this scintillating dialogue with me without my participation,” Nancy remarked, “I’m going over and check out that old wall.”

  I shook my head and patted the beach beside me. Reluctantly, correctly thinking it one of my ploys to avoid walking the extra mile, she sat beside me, took out the tortoiseshell banana clip that held up her hair, and rearranged it into a distant relative of a French twist. “I don’t think Courtney Logan from Olympia, Washington, knew gangster secrets. Listen, Nancy, Fancy Phil’s main thrust, you should pardon the expression, was to keep his son out of the world of mafiosi and Russian hoods and all the other scum. He’s proud Greg went to Brown. He’s proud that Greg was borrowing for his business from a legitimate bank. He’s proud of his grandchildren.”

  “Maybe Fancy Phil was having a thing with Courtney and whispered secrets in her shell-pink ear,” Nancy suggested. “So she had to die.”

  “No. He would never betray his son.”

  “Why not? It was in that movie we saw. The father-in-law and the daughter-in-law. With Jeremy Irons and a one-word title. And the actress with the lips.” Nancy, who could never sit completely still, began to stretch her fingertips down toward her toes. “Well, maybe Courtney was putting too much pressure on Greg. Get rich, buy me a pied-à-terre in the city or a Louis Quinze desk.”

  I recalled what Kellye Ryan had said about Courtney wanting Greg to open some Soup Salad Sandwiches stores on the West Coast, but that hardly sounded like enough pressure to drive a man to murder his wife. “You know, the cops didn’t even talk to all of Courtney’s friends. They felt—they feel they have the killer and the motive.”

  “Face it. Greg is the killer,” Nancy said. “Although with that result, it’s not likely Fancy Phil will write you a letter of recommendation.”

  For all I knew, she could be right. But I asked myself out loud: “Who did the cops talk to? Neighbors. Greg. Fancy Phil. And who else? Who could cast a shadow over Greg?” Nancy didn’t reply, although she did grunt in triumph when the tip of her middle finger finally made it down her stretched-out leg and touched a toe. “I’ll tell you who. Steffi, the au pair.”

  “But you talked to her, too, and said she only had nice things to say—”

  “I guess that was only our first talk,” I replied.

  Chapter Nine

  I CAN’T SAY I raced to Connecticut, because that would imply eighty miles per hour up 1-95 in a Porsche. Forget the Porsche: Besides the forty thousand dollars over the price of my Jeep, my delusion of myself as suburban sex goddess was more easily sustained climbing down from an SUV than heaving myself out of something low-slung, penis-shaped, and racing green. But after my hike on the beach with Nancy, I jumped into the shower, dressed, and was driving past an excessively quaint sign that said ENTERING WHITSBURY (in the colonial-style lettering that rendered Whitsbury as Whitfbury), when I realized two things. I hadn’t called Steffi Deissenburger to ask if I could speak with her again and that four-thirty on a Sunday afternoon was not a swell time to pop in anywhere. So I gave myself an assertiveness lecture recycled from one of those Women Who Loathe Themselves/Women Who Love Themselves books I wind up ordering on the Web because I’m embarrassed to ask for it at the Dolphin Bookshop in town.

  The next thing I knew, I was telling Steffi’s employer, Andrea Leeds, that my name was Judith Singer—right, just like the sewing machine—and she was telling me that Sunday was Steffi’s day off and that she’d gone (parallel paths of foreboding formed between her brows) to Manhattan.

  “I’m sorry to stop by without calling, Ms. Leeds, but I was visiting friends in New Canaan and forgot my little phone book.” Three lies in one sentence. I wasn’t sorry to stop by without calling, I knew absolutely no one in New Canaan, and having spent a wild Saturday night getting the Palm Pilot and the Dell to make peace with each other, I had transmogrified into an e-babe with no little phone book. “I’m on the board of the Shorehaven Library. That’s how I know Steffi. She was always there with the Logan children.”

  “Please, come in.” She was dressed in a yellow polo shirt and a short yellow skirt with green frogs all over it, so I assumed she’d just come home from the golf course. Andrea Leeds would probably be called rangy, being a head taller than I. She was definitely angular, almost bony, with knobs for elbows and knees. Though her face was technically an oval, with a broad forehead and Balkan cheekbones, it was more like an oval balanced on its side: Thus, with an impeccable pageboy curving under precisely at her wide jawline, she gave the impression of a woman who displaced far more space than she actually did. “Call me Andy, by the way.” She led me along a hallway, taking such long strides I had to double-time it to keep up. The walls were covered with nursery school scribble drawings, matted and framed. “I’m spending quality time”—she smiled to signal I-know-it’s-a-cliché, so I gave her an I-get-it smile in return—“with my girls.”

  She led me into a room I hadn’t seen on my last visit. The library. Perfect. Tall windows and French doors welcomed the late afternoon sun. The light burnished the pale wood paneling so it shone gold. The cordovan leather couch had been so well used it looked as if the Invisible Man were lounging on its tastefully crackled cushions. On the shelves were books—genuine books—with those little bulges mid-spine to indicate they’d been read, or at least opened. With a single sniff you’d know these weren’t the mildewed tomes homeowners buy by the yard to give the illusion of literacy. I had the sense that had Courtney seen the Leedses’ library, she’d have understood in an instant that for all her botanical pictures on ribbons, and doilies in the bottom of wastebaskets, Andy Leeds, with her roomful of books (at a glance, a good but unsurprising white-guys-writing-in-English collection), was the one who’d gotten it right.

  “Gwendolyn, Gwyneth, this is Mrs. Singer.”

  Together, the identical twins cheeped a happy hello as well as something that sounded as if it could be “Mrs. Singer,” the sort of gracious greeting my children couldn’t manage until they were in their early twenties. Then, side by side in a club chair, the children went back to studying Horton Hatches the Egg. Gwen and Gwyn not only had their mother’s wide Slavic features, pale brown hair, and long limbs, they were wearing the same yellow get
up avec frogs. Since I doubted that three-year-olds golfed, even in Whitfbury, I decided the mother-daughter froggy business was a fashion statement that, by the grace of God, would not survive a voyage across Long Island Sound to Shorehaven.

  After I complimented Andy Leeds on the girls’ deportment—deportment being one of those words I figured would go over big—and she did her “Say thank you to Mrs. Singer, Gwendolyn and Gwyneth” bit, all of which seemed to take a half hour, she offered me a seat at a small table, probably an antique she and Mr. Leeds used whilst they played whist of an evening.

  “I’m so relieved Steffi’s found such a fine family to work for,” I told her.

  “We think the world of her.” Beneath Andy’s upper-class civility, I sensed authentic civility. However, I also detected an unuttered question mark. Any parent who leaves her children in the hands of a relative stranger, even one with a solid resume and enthusiastic references, looks for additional reassurance, and all the more so when the young woman in question comes from a house in which a murder had been committed. “She seems like a lovely young woman,” was all I would say, since I wasn’t handing out endorsements for anyone connected to Courtney Logan.

  “What a dreadful time she went through!” My hostess shuddered. The frogs on her skirt quivered sympathetically.

  “To see someone just drive away like that”—I tsked-tsked—“and never ...”

  “Would you like some lemonade?” Andy Leeds asked meaningfully, glancing at her daughters. We left behind the gold glow of the library and the twins—who apparently could be trusted not to bean each other with Trollope and Updike novels they’d yanked off the shelves—and repaired to the kitchen.

  Another mom, another kitchen. Yet another elaborate stove with six burners and several strange little ovens, as though all these suburban women were vying for three Michelin stars. Andy Leeds took a pitcher out of the refrigerator and poured the lemonade over crystalline ice cubes in a slender glass. “They still suspect the husband?” she inquired.