Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

  So I wound up sitting in some nifty leather chairs and drinking Diet Cokes in crystal tumblers proffered by private secretaries, all of whom had soothing mommy voices. But in the end all these custom-tailored VIPs could offer were similar recollections, that Courtney had been bright, ambitious, and friendly, although not quite top drawer professionally. That is, until I visited Joshua Kincaid.

  “Hey, call me Josh!” he’d insisted before I could get to the second syllable of “mister.” A smiley man, he wore a dark blue loose-weave shirt that looked like a screen door at dusk, tucked into black silk slacks. He was the least investment bankerish of the people on Fancy Phil’s list. No wonder: He’d gotten an invitation to go elsewhere after one year at Patton Giddings and had wound up in his family’s business. Now he was president of Kincaid, Kincaid & Kincaid, Mortgages.

  We sat on a couch in his midtown office and worked on a plate of zucchini and celery sticks his secretary brought in. “Keeps my mouth busy when you’re talking,” he explained, “otherwise I’d never shut up. Bad habit, talking. This works, except by late afternoon ... Do I have to tell you?” Apparently he thought he did. “Gas. Detroit could use me as an alternative energy source.”

  “Right,” I managed to get in.

  “That’s why I walk home every night.” Josh was sandy-haired and fair, with pipe-cleaner arms and legs that looked even longer and thinner because he was so lanky. The more he chattered the more it seemed as if he’d had a successful personality transplant from some short, Falstaffian donor. “So—let me think a second—I guess the last time I heard from Courtney was like about a year ago. May, June, I forget.”

  “What did she—”

  “She wanted financing. For her company. Whatever it was called.” I didn’t even try to slide the word “StarBaby” in edgewise. “So I said to her, ‘Courtney, if you want a jumbo mortgage, I’m the man. But we’re not in the banking business.’ Naturally, that took around fifteen, twenty minutes for all the back-and-forth I-think-the-world-of-you-but-I’m-giving-you-the-bottom-line. To tell the truth, if the baby-video thingie had sounded good, I might have put some of my own dinero into it, but it sounded like she was no way near getting it off the ground, much less fly, much less stay up. Because we aren’t talking seed money. Uh-uh. Courtney wanted heavy bucks and she was nowhere near ready for such a big step and anyone with an IQ higher than cheesecake would have known it. You know what was really pathetic?”

  “Wh—” I think I managed to say.

  “That the Courtney I knew at Patton Giddings would have turned her own proposition down in two seconds flat. Maybe one. And I think she knew that. It’s soooo weird. Everyone always said what a bubbly personality she had, and she did. But this time when we talked, her bubbles had bubbles. She went so over-the-top on the baby idea that I knew at some level—Christ, I hate myself when I say ‘at some level’—Courtney had to know she wasn’t going to make it. But she was desperately trying anyhow, and I give her credit for that. Except she really wasn’t all that skillful at hiding her desperation, and someone who’s really good, someone I’d want to back, would be. Good at hiding desperation, I mean. And you know what’s even weirder?”

  “What?” I asked, realizing that by the time his next sentence was finished I would have missed my chance of catching the 4:43 to Shorehaven.

  “Right after Courtney was missing, guess what? Another woman—a banker in New Jersey. She disappeared without a trace, too!”

  Talk about weird: my reaction. Not one shiver of Dear God! passed through me. Not one gasp. I can only guess it was because I have neither the temperament nor the cheekbones for high drama. I was tempted to say, Yeah, Josh, right, weird. Or maybe I was suppressing my excitement because I didn’t want false hopes. In any case, if the notion of some connection did zip through either my conscious or subconscious mind, even for a second, I didn’t seriously consider the possibility of danger. Like, Egad, a serial killer targeting smart women in greater New York. Or, some heinous plot by evil masterminds is afoot that I must steer clear of. If I had been the least bit fearful, unlike all those plucky protagonists in movies, I would have walked away from the Courtney Logan case, hopped the 5:03 back to Long Island, and taken guitar lessons. Or Chinese cooking lessons. Or had a face-lift and spent the rest of my years looking like Cindy Crawford’s Semitic aunt.

  But at that moment all I was aware of was that I’d spent two days of interviewing people in custom-made haberdashery and all I’d gotten was that Courtney was cheerful, smart, but not quite top-drawer professionally. Thus, when Josh’s secretary followed up the zucchini and celery sticks with iced tea with an actual sprig of mint along with a plate of Oreos, I decided this might be a lead worth pursuing.

  “Wow,” was how I responded.“Another missing woman. Did you know her?”

  “I met her once. We did the home mortgage for some major client of Red Oak—the Red Oak National Bank, little dippy three-branch operation—and Emily was there for Red Oak to make sure his feathers didn’t get ruffled, not that we were out to do that.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Emily something. Hispanic. Or Latino. I’m not sure: Is there a difference? I’m always afraid I’ll use the wrong one and insult them. Or it could have been Italian. Anyhow, she was okay. Not a major deal at the bank, I don’t think. But she seemed to have done a lot of work for this client and he seemed very comfortable with her.”

  “Do you remember who the client was?”

  “A guy with English teeth. You know, two hundred teeth in one small mouth, like they have. Except he wasn’t English. Probably New England. Or super preppy. I remember he kept saying ‘cahn’t’ instead of ‘can’t.’ Except they never say ‘cahn’ for ‘can,’ do they? So you know they’re full of it.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  Josh sucked on an ice cube while he ruminated. Then he crunched it and offered: “Richard Gray? Gray Richards? He inherited like fifty-one percent of the shares of a company that manufactures containers for the pharmaceutical industry. His sister has the other forty-nine. Heavy, heavy money. Dumb, dumb guy.”

  “And this Emily was his personal banker, his contact at this Red Oak place?” Josh nodded, but before he could start talking again I asked: “Why didn’t the bank give him his mortgage if he was such an important client?”

  “The government won’t let you lend more than fifteen percent of capital to any one borrowing entity, so with a small operation like Red Oak ... probably has two hundred million in assets, well”—he chuckled—“you can do the math.” If I had a day and a half and a calculator.

  “Tell me what happened with her disappearance,” I went on.

  “I don’t know. Like one day she was there and she went on vacation and she never came back and no one knew where she was.”

  “How old a woman was she?”

  “Early thirties. At least that’s the impression I got. I could be wrong, ha-ha. Come to think of it, I vaguely remember her introducing herself as an assistant branch manager and she was hand-holding an important client like Pharmaceutical Container Man and I thought, like, ‘Assistant branch manager?’ and guess what I thought next? ‘Glass ceiling.’ Just so you know I’m a sensitive guy.”

  “Did they check to see if she had embezzled any—”

  “Of course,” he said, managing not to snicker at my too obvious question, although barely. “She didn’t. So what else can I tell you? This Emily was zero-point-zero-zero percent like Courtney. I think whoever called to tell me about her said she was single and ultraserious and from what I can remember not good-looking and didn’t have a personality because I can’t remember. You know what I mean? Like a total blank. Not totally total. I get”—he closed his eyes and swayed his head like a fortune-teller—“an aura of dorkiness. If I’m thinking of the right person. Actually, no. Not dorky. A loser.”

  “Could her path have crossed Courtney’s?”

  “Anything’s possible,” Josh replied, pulling a
n Oreo apart and scraping off the filling with his top front teeth. “Is it likely? Statistically, I’d say like two shots out of a hundred. Red Oak is way down in South Jersey, and whoever was telling me about her disappearing mentioned—I think, but I wouldn’t swear on a stack of Bibles—that she also lived somewhere around Cherry Hill. And Courtney had been out of it for years, for however old her oldest kid is. Also, I doubt if a diddly little bank like Red Oak had much business with Patton Giddings, although anything’s possible, and, like Patton Giddings told me, basically, I don’t know shit about investment banking. So for all I know maybe Emily and Courtney were best friends.”

  “Did they ever find any trace of her? Or her body?”I asked.

  “I’m hardly on the A-list of calls to make when the cops or whoever trip over Emily something’s body,” Josh replied. “But I never heard anything else.”

  It was only when the train from Manhattan came up out of the tunnel that I allowed myself to tingle with anticipation. How many young women in New York and New Jersey who are somehow involved in finance could vanish into thin air or, in Courtney’s case, into the family swimming pool? Sure, it was possible that the answer was forty-seven. But I had a gut feeling that somehow there was a connection between Courtney Logan and—I went straight from the Shorehaven station to my computer—Emily Chavarria.

  Bingo? Maybe. According to the Courier-Post, Emily Chavarria, age thirty-one, a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, an assistant branch manager at an office of the Red Oak National Bank in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, left for a three-week trip to New Zealand and Australia on Friday, October 22. A week and two days before Courtney’s disappearance. She was never seen again. On Monday, November 15, the president of the bank, concerned that Emily had not only missed the eleven 3 A.M. trust department meeting but hadn’t called in—two occurrences utterly at odds with her perfect-attendance, perfect-person record—had his secretary drive the fifteen minutes to Emily’s place not far from Cherry Hill. When there was no answer at the door, the secretary called the police and, getting a key from the apartment complex’s property manager, she and two cops entered the premises. No sign of disturbance. No sign of luggage. No sign of Emily Chavarria. Not then. Not since.

  Chapter Twelve

  BLESS THE WORLD Wide Web. The articles from the local New Jersey newspapers I came up with mentioned Emily Chavarria belonging to two groups: an organization of New Jersey bankers and the South Jersey chapter of a national group called FIFE—Females in Financial Enterprises—which I guessed was preferable to WIFE.

  I called Fancy Phil and gave him the assignment of finding out if Courtney had been a member of FIFE. Again he muttered about a wild-goose chase, I muttered back that if it was a wild-goose chase, I was doing it on my dime, not his. He grumbled, I’ll get back to you. I was relieved it did sound as though he meant I’ll get back to you rather than at you, a concern I would likely not have had if my first client had been a podiatrist. Anyhow, I went back to the articles. Emily came from a small town, Leesford, Oklahoma. I checked out Leesford on the Yahoo white pages: Only one Chavarria was listed. I called Chavarria, Pete, and got his wife on the phone. “Mzzz. Chavarria,” I began, to avoid the Ms./Mrs. quandary which, for all I knew, might not have been completely resolved in Oklahoma, “my name is Judith Singer. I’m an investigator on Long Island. I’ve been looking into a case that has some similarities to your daughter’s disappearance.”

  “Uh-huh,” she replied.

  “I hate to bother you during what must be an upsetting time for you—”

  “We don’t ... know where ... she is,” she cut in, pausing between every two words. She didn’t sound obviously broken up, but more like someone not inclined toward conversation, though whether that was out of taciturnity or grief I couldn’t tell.

  “I understand that. I’d just like to ask you a few questions, maybe come up with some parallels between the woman who is missing on Long Island and Emily.” She didn’t say anything, so I went on: “I know she was scheduled to make a trip to Australia and New Zealand. Did you hear from her, or get any postcards or anything?”

  “No.”

  “I see.”

  “The police in New Jersey. They said ... it didn’t look like Emily went.”

  I decided not to ask how they knew, because her answer might exhaust her willingness to talk. So I made a guess that the Jersey cops had found she didn’t board her plane—or something like that—and instead asked: “Does Emily have any close friends on the East Coast?”

  “I guess. I wouldn’t know their names.” Ms. or Mrs. Chavarria had what I guessed was an Oklahoma twang, the sort of accent that makes most people sound open and uncomplicated. Not her. Yet even though I assumed she must be going through hell, there was something about her—or maybe about me—that did not automatically evoke sympathy, which made me feel both guilty and wary. I sensed my reaction might mean something, because even though Greg Logan had been a cold fish the night I’d gone to speak to him, I still had felt terrible about his loss. “I told the police that,” she added.

  “Right. Do you know if Emily had a boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know. She came home for Christmas, but she only stayed two days.”

  “So maybe she didn’t get a chance to keep you up to date.”

  “Maybe,” Ms. or Mrs. Chavarria replied.

  “Was she going someplace else?”

  “No. Christmas and New Year’s is busy at the bank.”

  “Do you know if Emily ever went up to New York City, or to Long Island?”

  “No.”

  “Did she ever mention a friend named Courtney? Courtney Logan.”

  “No.”

  “Her maiden name”—I almost slipped and said “was,” but caught myself in time to keep it in the present tense—“is Courtney Bryce.”

  “No.”

  “Can I ask: When was the last time you heard from Emily?”

  “A couple of days before she went on her trip. Except the police say she didn’t go. She called to say good-bye.” There was no break in her voice at the word “good-bye.” Not a flicker of emotion.

  “Did she sound as if she were upset about anything?”

  “No.”

  “Was she excited about her trip?”

  “I guess.”

  “Did she say she was looking forward to it?”

  “No.”

  Finding myself winding the telephone cord around my finger, I made myself stop when I noticed the upper joint turning cerise from strangulation. “Did the police from New Jersey ask you anything I haven’t?” I finally asked.

  It took a very, very long minute, but finally Ms. or Mrs. Chavarria answered: “They wanted to know where she kept her money.”

  “And did you know?”

  “No.”

  “Did they say why they were asking?”

  “Because she took her money out of the bank.”

  “All her money?”

  “That’s what they said. And out of her stocks and bonds.”

  After I gave her my number and asked her to call collect if anything else occurred to her, I hung up and stared at the phone as if I could see through the wires and circuitry. If only I could call Nelson was my first thought and Stop it! was my second. And my third was that years earlier he’d told me how most investigative work was supposed to be boring, following A to B to C and so on, in mind-numbing, skip-nothing sequence. However, he’d found the thoroughness of it comforting. Even if you were ninety-nine percent sure of knowing what G was, you still had to go through D, E, and F. For some mysterious reason, that time-consuming process sometimes led to bright, new ideas and almost always made for a stronger case.

  Easy to be meticulous, I thought, if you’re a cop and you have access to A, B, C, D, and so on. Go through missing people’s houses, get to their bank or brokerage accounts, flash a badge, and ask your questions. I had no subpoena, no license, not even a business card.

  Howeve
r, I did have Fancy Phil, and he was turning out to be a not-bad gumshoe. Courtney had been a member of the Wall Street chapter of FIFE, he reported back, though in the past few years, what with living on Long Island, having two young children, and running StarBaby, Greg doubted she’d gotten to any meetings. I closed my eyes, trying to envision a joint tea/meeting/cocktail hour between the downtown Manhattan FIFEers and the South New Jerseyites, but I couldn’t get a picture. I probably exhaled a careworn sigh, because Fancy Phil demanded: Whatsa matter? Nothing, I replied. But do you think you can go back and ask Greg if Courtney was ever active in the association, or if she’d gone to any event where she might have met members from other chapters? There’s a FIFE member from New Jersey who’s been missing since November. What would stop me from asking him? he asked, sounding cranky. Well, I replied, for starters he might think it curious, your asking such a specific type of question. Curious? Fancy Phil declared. I’m his old man. If Gregory can’t trust me, he can’t trust no one. If you think he don’t know that then you’re not thinking.

  I decided I needed to stop worrying the Courtney-Emily connection to death. Unfortunately, I couldn’t call Nancy, who would instruct me not to be an utter ass. She and her husband had gone to a dinner party at some Newsday executive’s house where she was convinced Larry would jabber on about Gothic architecture, mock her political observations, spill red wine, laugh his raucous donkey laugh, and cost her her job. So I meandered into the sunroom, channel surfed, and came across Stagecoach with John Wayne and Claire Trevor as the whore with the heart of gold—one of my favorite westerns. I settled in for a night on the couch, a squishy throw pillow perfectly supporting the back of my neck and my head. Except I couldn’t concentrate because I couldn’t stop brooding over what connection there could be between Courtney and Emily.

  My first reaction was to consider more carefully Fancy Phil’s suggestion that I was on a wild-goose chase. The two women had been in separate chapters of FIFE, which was probably a good-sized organization. What were the odds against them knowing each other? As I’d always been queen of the SAT verbals and among the deeply pathetic in math, I couldn’t begin to calculate what the chances were against two highly intelligent, reasonably successful and responsible women around the same age winding up murdered or missing. Thus, unencumbered by fact, I kissed off the wild-goose-chase hypothesis.