Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

  “You from the lab?”

  “Yes.”

  I was already looking ahead. The complex was a series of wood and fieldstone structures that looked more than substantial enough for an upwardly mobile assistant bank manager. He wrote down my name, directed “First left, first right,” raised the barrier, and even managed a one-finger salute.

  Emily herself, or the new owner of 807 Squirrel Court, had set a huge stone squirrel beside the front door of the town-house to greet visitors. Despite its toothy smile, I moved on and rang the bell of the attached house next door. A woman about thirty, with purplish-red hair—the result of that rinse that makes everyone who uses it look as if their ancestors hailed from a part of the British Isles with extremely peculiar climatic conditions—answered the door.

  “Good morning!” I said, in a jaunty, dropping-in-at-nine-thirty-on-a-Sunday voice. The woman tightened the belt on her pink, waffle-weave bathrobe. “I’m Judith Singer. I’ve been hired by the family to look into Emily Chavarria’s disappearance.” I didn’t say whose family, a sign of my growing skill at subterfuge. I suppose it was to my credit that I felt a pang or two of guilt.

  Maybe the woman picked up my discomfort because she opened her door wide and stepped back so I could come in. “Hey,” she greeted me. “Beth Cope.” A man about the same age strolled into the hall. “Judith Singer,” she introduced us, “my husband, Roberto Anello. Hon, Judith is a detective. She’s looking into Emily’s disappearance.”

  Roberto, in a corresponding bathrobe in blue, flared his nostrils, but he was only suppressing a yawn. Lacking the hair for a purplish-red rinse (or for anything else for that matter), he scratched his scalp. Then, having come to some sort of decision, he asked with considerable courtesy: “Do you have any ID?”

  Oy, I thought. “Sure,” I said. I opened the latch on my handbag, took out my car keys, cell phone, and Palm Pilot and poked around in the utterly ID-free abyss.

  I was saved by Beth’s “Hey, no problem” and Roberto’s silently seconding the motion, because, within seconds, I was in their kitchen. I sat across from them at a table between a red leatherette booth, the sort found in diners. As the walls were festooned with an Eskimo Pie clock and archaic signs like PEPSI COLA’S THE DRINK FOR YOU! and OBERMAIER’S YUMMY PIES, I concluded they were 1950s aficionados. Ergo, I fit right in.

  “You were living here last October, when Emily supposedly left for her trip?” They nodded simultaneously. “Did she talk to you about it at all?”

  “Not much,” Roberto said. “It’s like we—Beth and I—met that night after work like we always do and went grocery shopping. Friday shopping.” Beth beamed as her husband spoke. “We came in around sevenish.” She nodded vigorously in agreement. They seemed such a pleasant couple, and obviously pleasant to each other. I found myself wishing that Kate would have a relationship like that instead of with MTV Adam and his zoot suits.

  “I guess we remember because we told the police all about this sometime in ... I guess back in November,” Beth added. “It was incredibly spooky. I mean, Cherry Hill is not the kind of place people vanish from.”

  “So Emily’s putting a suitcase into the trunk of her car—” Roberto went on.

  “Which was ... ?” I asked.

  “A Toyota something,” he replied. “I think an Avalon.” I noticed, he wasn’t actually bald. A layer of pale fluff covered his scalp, the sort of near hair you often see on a newborn. “And I said, ‘Hey, Emily, need any help?’ because the suitcase was half the size of her and she looked like she was struggling. She said no thanks. Then we asked her where she was going. She said Australia and New Zealand. For three weeks. I thought, Hey, what a great trip!”

  “And you know what I thought?” Beth chimed in. “Three weeks on one suitcase? She’s a better woman than I am. She only had that one suitcase in the trunk and then she closed it.”

  “She was driving herself to the airport?”

  “I guess,” Roberto said. “Personally, I’m not a great believer in long-term parking.”

  “Did she seem excited about the trip?” I asked.

  “Not that I could see,” he responded. “She had a flattish personality. Besides being quiet. I mean, she wasn’t quiet and weird or quiet and nervous. Just ... quiet. She wasn’t, what do you call it? A big talker.”

  “It’s like this,” Beth added. “We were just ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ neighbors.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Even if she didn’t say anything, do you have any sense how it did seem to be going for her around the time she left and didn’t come back?”

  “I couldn’t tell,” Roberto answered, “but Beth has a theory.”

  I looked to her. “Well,” she exhaled meaningfully. “I feel bad saying this but she was as close to being totally dull as a person can get.” I nodded. “And she looked dull. No makeup except this kind of awful frosted coral lipstick that must have been a freebie, one of those cosmetic company mistakes that become gift-with-purchase. You know what I mean. Anyway, Emily wasn’t homely or anything, but she didn’t have lots to work with. Small eyes. Hair about here”—she indicated the middle of her neck—“which is neither here nor there. Except in the last couple of months she started to look better. Much better. Not noticeable makeup, but whatever it was worked because she suddenly looked like she had some life in her face. And she let her hair grow and it was definitely, definitely highlighted. I mean, September, October, and it kept getting blonder and blonder instead of darker.”

  “She still wasn’t what anyone would call a babe,” Roberto interjected.

  “But I told Roberto: ‘I bet she’s someone’s babe!’”

  Beth and Roberto turned out to be the best The Meadows had to offer. One woman screeched from behind her closed door: “What? What? Who? What?” I shrieked “Emily Chavarria” until my throat hurt and I began to worry that someone six town houses away would call the cops. Across Squirrel Court, another couple knew her, but not as a neighbor—only as a photo in a newspaper captioned MISSING. Everyone else was out praying or golfing.

  Unable to figure out what to do next, I longed for guidance, Detection for Dummies. I drove around Cherry Hill aimlessly. Eventually, I wound up in the parking lot of a giant mall, the kind of place that has too many stores selling the sort of candles whose scent is so belligerent no packaging can contain it. I opened the car window, turned off the engine, leaned back in the seat, and closing my eyes, thought about what it takes to go to Australia besides a fondness for marsupials.

  Arrangements. Had Emily bought a ticket and then simply not shown up? Were Australia and New Zealand a cover for other plans, like establishing a new identity in some far-off place? Maybe she’d bought a ticket to Lima, Peru, or Lima, Ohio, and was, at this very minute, snickering over her rebanada or Froot Loops as she contemplated her successful murder of Courtney Logan. Or was I being too hasty? Was Emily also a victim? Was there some evil genius preying on FIFE members or on smart women or some other category I couldn’t figure out? Were any other members of FIFE mysteriously missing or murdered? Was some rogue FIFEer running amok? Was there some connection between Greg Logan and Emily Chavarria I’d missed?

  Before I finished each question, another would pop up. I opened my eyes for an instant just to make sure there were no Hannibal Lecters sauteing fava beans outside the open window of my Jeep. Safe. I tried to imagine Emily’s life. Coming to an Ivy League school from a small town in Oklahoma. Whether shy or nerdy, quiet. Living a quiet life, seemingly brightened only by coral lipstick.

  Yet according to Beth and Roberto, she’d begun coming out of her shell. As the days grew shorter, her hair grew blonder. Her face brightened. To me, this Emily didn’t sound like someone singing the blues. In fact, Beth had suggested the possibility of a man. I could relate. Was it a coincidence that with the mere notion of Nelson back in the general vicinity of my life, I’d gone to the hairdresser the previous week to become a bit more intensely brunette? If I’d had blond tendencies, t
he way Emily apparently did, no doubt I, too, would have spent fall getting sun-streaked.

  So who was the new guy? Definitely no one I could come up with on a late Sunday morning. In fact, the only man I could think of mentioned in connection with Emily was the bank client Joshua Kincaid had called Pharmaceutical Container Man. What the hell was his name? In noir whodunits, the detective calls his secretary and says, “Listen, dollface, what was so-and-so’s name?” And with two cat-claw nails, doll-face takes the chewing gum out of her mouth and says ...

  Right! Richard Gray or Gray Richards. And he owned fifty-one percent of his family’s company. Could Emily have been yearning for one of those plain-girl-takes-off-her-glasses-and-rich-guy-who’d-overlooked-her-goes-hubba-hubba moments? She sounded too serious a careerist to mix business and romance, but Josh Kincaid had mentioned something about her hitting the glass ceiling, so I wasn’t going to rule it out—especially since I had nothing else.

  I checked my voice mail. Four messages! To many, no big deal. To me, a wildly eventful morning: Fancy Phil reported that Greg had never heard of anyone named Emily Chavarria. My son Joey announced he’d been hired by the New York Times’s Arts and Leisure section to do an article on the Coen brothers. Nancy, her Georgia tones sugary as pecan pie, demanded, “Where the fuck are you?” And then Nelson, in his bland cop voice: “I’ll see you at noon today, Sunday—” I glanced at my watch. Nearly eleven. Even flying, there was no way I could make it back to Long Island. “—at Carlo’s Big Cheese Pizza, Forty-seven Donovan Street, Cherry Hill.” Cherry Hill?

  If stomachs can have seizures, mine did, contracting over and over before finally solidifying into a pain-producing object north of my navel. How the hell had he known? I tried some relaxation breathing I recalled from a yoga video I’d watched two or three times: in through the nose, hold, hold, hold, out slowly through pursed lips. All right, he’d called at ten forty-two, so clearly he was in or near Cherry Hill. Either there had been a magic moment when he’d spotted me tooling around in a red Jeep with New York plates and a St. Elizabeth’s College faculty parking sticker or he, too, had gone to check out Emily’s house and discovered from Everalert or Beth and Roberto that a lady from the lab/investigator for the family had left just a short time before. From the tone of his voice, it didn’t sound as if he were planning on a fun lunch.

  Being one of those drivers who needs very specific directions—“Immediately after an off-white stucco house with a cutesy mailbox decorated with little girls holding a daisy chain, bear right onto North Peanut Street ...”—I spent a good part of the next hour locating Carlo’s Big Cheese, then trying to outwit a traffic circle in order to reach it. So when I walked into the place in a state well beyond frazzled, I felt grateful that Nelson had always been one of those people for whom noon meant precisely that. I’d have time to select a table not in direct sunlight, check to see if the ladies’ room was go-able in, and lighter of bladder and spirit, sit down and breathe some more.

  Except there he was. No casual short-sleeved, extensor-muscle-baring shirt like the night before. Gray suit, white shirt, blue tie. While it didn’t shout “Cop,” it said something loud enough for Carlo, or whoever the guy in the tinted glasses behind the counter was, to have seated him at a discreet corner table.

  “Sit down, Judith.”

  Although it occurred to me to inquire “Is that a command or an invitation?” I merely sat. What I finally did say was: “You didn’t mention last night that you were going to Cherry Hill.” When that did not produce a response, I got up, left my purse on the chair, and went to the ladies’ room. When my return received no reaction, I stood beside my chair and said: “Listen, I’ve lived through a not-great marriage and both my children’s adolescences. So if you’re planning on continuing the silent treatment, know that I’ll find it incredibly boring and I’ll be forced to lunch elsewhere.”

  “I wasn’t giving you the silent treatment,” he finally replied.

  I sat down. “What was it, then?”

  “I was at a loss for words.” I wasn’t ready to smile yet, which was fortunate, because he was in ice-cold mode. “I was amazed at how stupid you were,” he continued, “going to the guard and saying you’re from the police lab.”

  “It got me in,” I retorted.

  “It got you in, but if you’re going to pull that kind of crap, you shouldn’t leave your real name.”

  “Next time I’ll have an alias ready.” Nelson stood. I thought he was walking out, but he only strode across the restaurant and said something to the man behind the counter. When he came back I said, “Can I assume you didn’t tell him to call the Cherry Hill cops and have them come and arrest me for false something?”

  “I told him a plain pizza.” I nodded. “Are you still drinking Diet Coke?”

  “Still. So, did you just hear about me from the security guard or did you get a chance to meet Beth and Roberto?”

  “I met them.”

  “Good. Nice couple. So you know that Emily left with a suitcase.”

  “I know,” he said, hooking his finger over his tie, loosening the knot, then opening the top button of his shirt. “Now tell me what you make of all this.”

  “Then will you tell me?”

  “Come on, Judith. I gave up a day off to look into this business. I don’t have time to fool around.” God knows what kind of a smirk crossed my face, because he added: “Cut it out.”

  “Fine.”

  “Talk.”

  “I wish I had a lot to tell you,” I began, “but all I’ve done so far is speak to the neighbors. So you probably heard what I heard: Emily was acting as if things were looking up. I don’t know what was going on with her at the Red Oak Bank. Come to think of it, I don’t know what was going on with her not at the Red Oak Bank. But at the very least it seems to me when a woman changes her appearance for the better, she has a different sense of herself, or some new expectations. Maybe she’d gone for therapy and had new feelings of self-worth, which for her meant lightening her hair and contouring her cheekbones.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Some makeup thing. Or it could be she found a man.”

  The pizza guy came from behind the counter, set a Diet Coke before me and a beer in front of Nelson, both in giant red, green, and white paper cups with the slogan EATA PIZZA spiraling from bottom to top. “Did you happen to find out if there was a man?” Nelson asked.

  “No. Does that make us even or are you ahead of me?”

  “Even.”

  “Let’s talk about Emily’s travel plans,” I proposed.

  “Go ahead,” Nelson said.

  “Well, I was sort of hoping that after last night when we’d discussed how Emily seemed to have made plans and how Courtney seemed to have made none—beyond buying apples for her kids—you might have come up with some information on where Emily did go. From credit cards or something.”

  “You’re really an ace at this detective stuff, Judith.” For the first time since I’d walked in, he smiled, openly, generously, as if he’d forgotten he was angry. “‘... credit cards or something’?”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Talk about whatever you want to talk about.”

  For a little longer than was comfortable, he looked into the foam on his beer. “You know, I have a problem about talking to you.” I started to be amused, but then he added: “I’m serious.”

  He was. “What’s the problem?”

  “I have to think about anything I say to you, Judith. I could be more, whatever, open with you. Except there’s a direct line between you and your friend Phil Lowenstein.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have been stung by this remark, or stunned either, but I was. “Do you think I would betray you, Nelson?”

  “No; no, I don’t. But like I tried and tried to tell you, Phil isn’t a nice man. He’s a dangerous and sometimes violent man. Look, under normal circumstances, even though all these years have gone by with us not seeing each other, I know ...” For a second
he put his hand over his heart. “I know you would never do anything to hurt me. Even under abnormal circumstances. But what if this guy put a gun to your head? It wouldn’t be out of character, you know. What if you reported certain information to him and he wanted to know where it came from? So you’d say, ‘Sorry, Phil, it’s a privileged communication.’ Do you think Phil is just going to say, ‘Okay, I respect your right to protect your sources’? Or do you think he’ll grab you by the throat and start squeezing until you manage to cough up my name?” He took a paper napkin from the napkin holder and folded it in half, then in half again. “Listen, my job is on the line. Other than my kids, it’s pretty much my life. If it somehow got out that information I gave you found its way to Fancy Phil Lowenstein, I lose my living, my reputation. Forget being shamed. I’d be risking jail.”

  “I want to live to see grandchildren,” I said quietly. “So if there were a gun to my head, well, I don’t know what I would do. So I guess it’s best if you don’t tell me anything.”

  We sat in the sort of silence that is only possible between two old friends or two lovers so assured of the other’s admiration that there is no need to charm or even to speak. I don’t know how long we didn’t talk, but finally the guy in the tinted glasses appeared beside our table and set down the pizza. I was getting busy fighting the mozzarella when Nelson said: “Just on the basis of a preliminary check, Emily didn’t use the Amex or Visa that were in her name after Thursday, October twenty-first, the day before her final day of work at the bank.”

  “You don’t have to tell me this.”

  “And forget her not getting on a plane. There’s no record of her even buying a ticket to Australia or anyplace else since before Christmas 1998, when she went from Philadelphia to Oklahoma City to visit her family. So if things were looking up for Emily, or she had big expectations, I’d like to know what they were.”

  We sat in Carlo’s until the leftover slices of pizza congealed. We left the Courtney Logan case and chatted about safer subjects. The public’s Gore-Bush blahs versus the electricity we’d known as kids watching JFK run against Nixon. Police-department politics compared to the politics of academia. Who was worse, Kate’s boyfriend or his son’s fiancée (whom Nelson referred to as the Syosset Slut), who wore microscopic leather miniskirts and too-tight tube tops. Neither of us got near the topic of Nelson’s having a wife.