Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

  My next guess was that some third person—a nutcase, an icy, methodical killer—had done them both in. Whoever it was might have been cruel beyond belief—besides being homicidal—because he/she had stashed Courtney in her family’s swimming pool. Or maybe he/she had just been pressed for time: trick or treaters out and about, people inside the Logan house. Or he/she had to get rid of the body fast because he/she needed a day, a week, or, as it turned out, months, to get out of town? But when had he/she done the deed? Steffi and the children had seen Courtney driving away. Was it when she arrived back home with the mysterious missing apples? Could she have been murdered in the Grand Union parking lot and driven home in her own car? If so, how come there were no traces of blood from the head wounds? Or was she kidnapped, held, and killed a day or a week later? After all that time in the pool, how precise could the medical examiner be?

  I turned off the TV, strolled into the kitchen, took out a bag of those pygmy peeled carrots, and started to chew. There was a big difference between the two dead/missing women, if indeed there was a Courtney-Emily link. Courtney’s sapphire earrings that Greg had given her for her thirtieth birthday were where they were always kept, in the safety-deposit box. Other than the twenty-five thousand she’d helped herself to from around Mother’s Day to Labor Day, her money was where it belonged, in joint bank and brokerage accounts and in her StarBaby business account. And possibly most important, there were no signs of planning; Courtney had actually said: “I forgot something. I just have to run to Grand Union for a minute.”

  Emily Chavarria, on the other hand, she of never missing a day’s work, had been discovered missing only after the three weeks’ vacation she was supposedly taking, when she didn’t return to the Red Oak Bank. The New Jersey police had asked her parents about her money—specifically, where was it. How much had it been? Five hundred, five thousand, fifty thousand dollars? Five hundred thousand? Who knew? After all, Emily had been graduated from one of the best business schools in the country. She could have been a canny investor. On the other hand, maybe she’d lost a bundle guessing on the wrong dot-com stock.

  I took another carrot, despite my chronic worry that I’d chew too fast, choke, not be able to do the Heimlich maneuver on myself, and would die not only needlessly but still sixteen pounds above the “large-boned” group on the height/weight tables. Anyhow, the difference between the two women was that there seemed to have been planning behind Emily’s disappearance and, perhaps, murder. If she’d vanished or been killed after her last day of work, no one would look for her for three weeks. She’d left for her trip on a Friday, more than a week before Courtney disappeared. Just like someone with a perfect attendance record to finish up the complete week, I mused. Just like someone that meticulous to have a plan.

  I was telling myself to stop imagining and start digging, that the guilty party, the person with the nefarious plan, had most likely been a third person. Or, I mulled, going back to the Fancy Phil-wild-goose-chase theory, maybe there’d been no plan at all: Emily Chavarria’s disappearance and Courtney Logan’s murder had nothing to do with each other. The phone rang. I risked my life swallowing a not-quite-chewed bite of carrot so instead of saying hello, I coughed.

  “You okay?” Fancy Phil asked.

  I coughed again and said, “Fine.”

  “Gregory thinks she could have gone to some meeting of that FIFE a while ago. Probably before she got pregnant with Morgan. Or maybe when she was pregnant but before she decided to stay home and be a mother. But it could have been some other group. He’s not sure.”

  “Morgan’s five years old, right?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “He thinks she went to Baltimore, but it could have been Washington, D.C. What’s this all about? That girl from New Jersey who’s missing? You really don’t think—”

  “Phil, it could be a wild-goose chase. I don’t know.” It occurred to me I might be sounding crabby, but—I looked at the clock—it was almost eleven and I was too tired to care. “But don’t you want me to check on this Emily Chavarria so I can rule out the possibility?”

  “Do whatever the hell you want,” Fancy Phil answered. A microsecond later he hung up the phone.

  As I was getting into bed, I gave myself a figurative pat on the back: You’ve got guts, I told myself, not being fazed by Fancy Phil’s pique or anger or fury, whatever the slamming down the phone had meant. Naturally, about twenty minutes later, just as I was floating in that brainless state between wakefulness and sleep, I sat up wildly alert, panting with fear. From outside the house, I’d heard the change of hum a car engine makes as it slows down. It was just past the house. Whoever was in the car could have been admiring the contrast between my purple pansies and the violet ones planted around my mailbox. Except it was too dark for that. Or perhaps the driver had merely shifted gears, although not being one of those manual-transmission kind of dames, I couldn’t be sure. On the other hand, I didn’t know Fancy Phil’s precise address, but twenty minutes would be a reasonable estimate as to how long it would take from his town to mine. By the time I got up, locked the bedroom door, then pulled back an edge of curtain to peek out the window, all I could see was a pair of red taillights disintegrating in the blackness of the night.

  Two days later, though, Phil and I were pals again, although not chummy enough that I could expect an honest answer to the question: Did you drive past my house after eleven Thursday night? So I didn’t bother asking it. Instead, I nodded respectfully as he related: “So I told Gregory,” Fancy Phil was explaining, “‘Hey, Gregory, it’d be nice to take Morgan and Travis and that ugly nanny to a matinee of that Sesame Street show.’ You wouldn’t believe what that rat-bastard scalper charged me, but it’s worth it. We won’t get bothered.” A weighty gold link bracelet on his right wrist and what looked like a cabochon emerald set in a braid of gold on his pinkie made no sound against the leather-covered steering wheel, but they sparkled in the sunlight.

  At that moment his yacht of a car pulled into the Logans’ driveway, right up to the front. Fancy Phil opened the old-money-green door with a key, punched four numbers into the alarm pad, and stood back, the compleat gentleman, to let me precede him inside. Well, with a compleat gentleman, one doesn’t fret about being shot in the back or whomped on the head with brass knuckles. On the other hand, he seemed content just to follow me around.

  “Who did the cooking?” I asked as we headed toward the kitchen. “The au pair, or Courtney?”

  “Courtney. I gotta give her credit. She made an excellent meat loaf.” As he tsked for a moment—probably more over loss of meat loaf than loss of daughter-in-law—I glanced around. Expensive. A floor of terra-cotta tiles of a hundred subtly different shades, that virtually announced: Not machine-made! Dark granite counters that gave off a blue sheen. Wood cabinets with glass doors that displayed blue-and-white dishes, some from a set of one of those classic Royal Copenhagen patterns, some that were likely antique pieces. There was every sort of drinking glass, from juice tumblers to brandy snifters. An elaborate stove. A double refrigerator with glass doors to display the Logan mustard collection and the family’s preferences in yogurt. A floor-to-ceiling collection of cookbooks, from Apples, Apples and More Apples! to The Elegant Vegetarian.

  I whipped out a pair of the translucent plastic gloves they sell in boxes (which I used to change the litter box whenever I baby-sat for Kate’s loathsome, allergen-laden Persian cat Flakey). I wasn’t quite sure why I felt compelled to bother with the glove business, but it had a hard-boiled detectiveish quality that appealed to me, and seeing Fancy Phil nodding appreciatively as if he approved of my cunning, I realized at the least it was a good marketing move.

  Drawer by drawer, cabinet by cabinet, appliance by appliance, I went through the kitchen, but all I found was a small mound of black, hardened glop on the bottom of the oven, which I decided was more likely blueberry drippings than a clue, and an impressive accumulation of twist ties for plastic bags kept in its very own plastic bag. F
inally, Fancy Phil and I leafed through every cookbook, then shook each one hard, a task he seemed to enjoy. Nothing fell out: no old grocery store receipts, no premortem shopping lists, no “call so-and-so” notes.

  By that time I was beginning to get that sluggish feeling of overload that comes with seeing an overambitious museum retrospective, so I passed on the rest of the downstairs. With Fancy Phil following me, I went upstairs and into Courtney’s office. Pretty, done up in raspberry and pale green, feminine but not frivolous. Costly, no doubt. The trimming on the valance over the curtains had its own dainty fringe. I turned on her computer, an extravagant-looking IBM with one of those giant, flat monitors I’d never actually seen in person. The Windows clouds looked spectacular. Even better, no password was required. Five seconds later, of course, when I got to her financial program, QuickBooks, there was a blank box. I typed in “Courtney,” “Court,” “Gregory,” “Greg,” “Logan,” “Bryce,” “Lowenstein,” “Olympia,” “Princeton,” and so forth, the way they do in movies, but gave up after her birth date and the kids’ names failed.

  “Was there any pet name Courtney or Greg called each other?” I asked.

  From where he was sitting, on a window seat that overlooked the backyard and pool, Fancy Phil said wearily: “Beats the hell out of me. You done yet?”

  “No. Listen, do you want to go downstairs and read”—from his curdled expression I gathered he did not find this suggestion appealing—“or watch TV?”

  “Nah. I’ll watch you.” Oddly, the remark sounded more flirtatious than threatening, so I ignored it and double-clicked on Courtney’s calendar database. No password! I studied her calendar pages from May through December, past the thirty-first of October when she disappeared. Play dates, Mommy and Me classes, weekly nail and monthly hair appointments, Saturday-night dates with people who had local numbers. Ditto with the dates that said “Filming” and “Meeting #1” and “Meeting #2.” The contacts were all suburbanites with phone numbers from Shorehaven and the surrounding towns of Port Washington, Manhasset, Great Neck, and Roslyn. Zee Friedman’s name was there for the weekends she worked. However, I found no sign of the name of the other assistant, the Wesleyan guy, who supposedly was holding Courtney’s video equipment.

  Steffi Deissenburger had told me that in the weeks before Courtney disappeared, she had gone out, dressed in suit and heels, very pretty, very business looking. She’d stayed away all day, returning shortly before Greg was due home. She’d warned Steffi that if Greg called to tell him she was shopping, an activity which he’d have no trouble in believing his wife capable. Nowhere were there any indications of these appointments, assignations, shopping expeditions, or whatever they were.

  “Done yet?” Fancy Phil inquired, reasonably patient.

  “No,” I said, or possibly grouched. My hands were clammy under the plastic gloves.

  I went back to two years before Morgan was born, when Courtney was still at Patton Giddings. This was easier because there were more blank days; whatever calendar she’d kept for business appointments did not seem to be on this computer. What was there, however, in 1994, on April 8, 9, and 10, the weekend after Easter, was FIFE EAST—BALTIMORE.

  “Hot shit!” Fancy Phil exclaimed. I turned on the printer and copied that month as well as all of 1999, when Courtney disappeared in October, until May 2000, when she was found. “Good work.”

  “Thanks, but it’s not good work until I find out if Emily Chavarria was at that meeting also.”

  “How do you find that out?” he asked.

  “Beats me. I’ll figure something out.”

  “Wanna go out for a drink, Doc?” he asked.

  “No thanks. I want to check out their bedroom. Her chest of drawers or whatever and her closet. You can go down and make yourself a drink. Trust me: I’m not going to heist her panty hose.”

  “Nah. I’ll keep you company,” Fancy Phil said.

  To make an hour-and-a-half-long story short, I went through every drawer built into her walk-in closet, every handbag in the handbag cubbyholes— many Kate Spades and something that had cost a navy-blue alligator its life. I searched every pocket of every garment and I felt inside each size-six shoe on her rows of slanted shoe shelves, five pair of which were Manolo Blahnik, a label whose price I once inquired about upon seeing a pair of brown-and-black spectators with a flawless little bow and was told a dollar amount that actually caused me to gasp.

  Deciding against using Fancy Phil as my stenographer, I wrote down from which article of clothing and which handbag I found the stuff I laughingly decided to call evidence: a fold-up hairbrush, two Clinique lipsticks in Copper Rose, a Clinique compact, a wad of purple bubble gum I assumed was Morgan’s and not Courtney’s wrapped in a sales receipt, a Montblanc pen, and a sales slip from Barneys in Manhasset for an eighty-five-dollar candle and a fourteen-dollar lip balm. There was also a twenty-dollar bill in a pair of gray wool slacks. In other words, unlike the half ton of junk that could be salvaged from my closet and dresser, Courtney Logan had left little behind; she’d been neater and more organized than I, though not quite obsessively orderly.

  “Wanna go for cocktails?” Fancy Phil inquired, pausing an instant before “cocktails” as if seeking a word refined enough for a lady.

  I couldn’t understand his sudden desire for my company, but I figured I ought to do better than my earlier No thanks. “I wish I could, Phil, but I have a date and I have to do all the girl things to get ready.”

  Refinement no longer required, he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Who’s your boyfriend?”

  “An English professor at the college where I teach.”

  “A professor?” he said, obviously controlling an overwhelming urge to shudder at the horror of such a union or perhaps at the notion of a man teaching English. I couldn’t really tell. “You gonna marry him?”

  When, slightly aghast, I said, “God, I hope not,” he gave a genuine if monosyllabic chuckle. Then he said, “You’re a good kid, Doc.”

  Actually, I had no Saturday-night plans. Postmodernist Geoff had found someone else willing to share expenses and was safely in England. With any luck, I was rid of him at least for the summer, if not forever. I’d spotted him during exam week walking across the quad (and brushing arms in significant manner) with Promiscuous Patti of the music department and suspected she might be his companion in the Lake District. Anybody I actually wanted to see was being otherwise amused and I didn’t have the patience to listen to any of my après-Bob single-women acquaintances recounting all-men-are-louses/all-men-are-little-boys/all-men-only-want-one-thing sagas.

  On the other hand, I was too steamed up about Courtney-Emily possibilities to watch a movie or read a mystery. Instead, since Nancy wasn’t around to stop me, I called Nelson Sharpe and spoke to his voice mail. He called back less than a half hour later.

  By seven P.M. we were sitting across from each other at a table out on the gray wood deck of Fisherman’s Folly, breathing in the salt air of Long Island Sound and whiffs of gasoline from the boats at the marina next door. “This isn’t a social meeting,” I said to Nelson after a waiter with a shaved head and a tiny, curly pigtail so unkempt I wouldn’t have been surprised if he oinked set down Nelson’s gin and tonic and my Campari and soda.

  “You said that on the phone,” he snapped. “You don’t have to repeat yourself.” He set his wedge of lime on the side of his cocktail napkin.

  When we’d been lovers, we’d met during the day, when my kids were in school, so I’d only seen him in a jacket and tie or on the way to getting naked. Now, in a red plaid short-sleeved shirt and khaki slacks, he looked as if he’d embarked on an entirely different line of work—construction foreman or phys-ed teacher. His forearms were more thickly muscled than they had been. I tried not to imagine the second wife running her hands over his arms while they made love. I decided not to think that he was pumping iron to impress her, but as his accommodation to some new department fitness regulation. “I app
reciate your seeing me on such short notice,” I said congenially.

  “Cut the crap, Judith.” We smiled at each other and sipped our drinks. I didn’t inquire: What did you say to your wife to get out on a Saturday night? He glanced at my ringless ring finger, then looked into my eyes and asked, “What do you want to know?”

  “Have you heard anything more about the Courtney Logan case? I mean, there hasn’t been anything in the papers or on TV for a while now. Are the Homicide guys just going through the motions because they think it’s the husband?” Before he had a chance to talk, I added: “I’m not asking you to betray your oath or tell me classified police secrets.”

  “You’re really smooth at this,” he remarked.

  “Thank you.”

  His eyes were still on mine. Over the years since we’d parted, I’d recalled so many details about Nelson, but this I’d forgotten, his ability to win any staring contest in the world. Never actually a contest: Nelson didn’t appear to be holding your eyes to confront, the way an animal does to establish dominance. At least it had never seemed that way then. His velvet-brown eyes seemed always gentle and a little sad. I remembered long ago thinking he gazed the way he did because he was searching for something he desperately needed. Sitting there, listening to the soft lap of surf against the wood pilings of the deck, I told myself such romantic notions ought to have been tossed out right after my early adolescence, along with the stuffed animals and the pressed corsages. I pulled my eyes from his and turned my attention to my own lime wedge, squeezing it into the red bubbles of my Campari and soda. Naturally, I’d forgotten what I’d asked him.