Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

  When we got outside it was not only hotter, but more humid. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t want to stand there and feel my hair growing into a deranged frizz. At that instant he touched my arm and said: “I’ll drive.”

  The words “I think I’d better be getting home” seemed to be on their way from brain to mouth. Nevertheless, I found myself opening my handbag and dropping in my car keys. I don’t remember much about the short ride except staring at the blank screen of one of those global positioning systems and thinking, What if he can’t? What if I don’t? What if it’s awful? What if the motel room or wherever he was taking me smells of insecticide? What if one of us (no doubt him) really doesn’t want to see the other again afterward? Would there have to be one more tryst for courtesy’s sake? What if he’d been imagining me as I was twenty years ago? What’s going to happen when we leave and I have to go home alone and he goes back to the guidance counselor? In matters of the heart, I’ve always had a tendency to look on the bright side.

  He pulled into a Holiday Inn. Since in our earlier days we’d met in one of his friends’ apartments, I immediately started agonizing over motel protocol. Check in together? I linger while he goes to the front desk? He pays? Dual, egalitarian credit cards? Untraceable cash? “I have the key,” Nelson remarked as we pulled into a parking space.

  “I guess that makes you an optimist.”

  “About you, yes.” As we walked through the halls and took the elevator upstairs, he held my hand. His skin felt so hot I knew, besides his excitement, that my fingers were freezing. “Judith,” he said as he slipped the magnetic key card into the slot, “this isn’t going to be painful. You’re not going to need anesthesia. Relax.”

  I stood beside the low, king-size bed that overwhelmed the small room. A sliver of sunlight slipped inside where the curtains didn’t quite meet and made a diagonal across the bedspread. I was saying, “God, don’t you wish we could get past the next couple of minutes and—” when he kissed me, a gentle, leisurely kiss to show me No, I don’t want to get past anything.

  Amazing, I suddenly realized, how completely I remembered his lips, the prickles of his beard, the same aftershave that smelled like lemons and witch hazel. He was only a couple of inches taller, so it was the easiest thing in the world to kiss him. I thought, I want to do this for hours, but I found myself pulling off his jacket, his tie, unbuttoning his shirt. After he eased off my cotton sweater, I was the one who threw back the spread, hauled off his undershirt, drew him onto the bed before I’d even bothered to slip off my shoes. “Please,” I whispered.

  “Listen,” Nelson told me, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t have to be anyplace until tomorrow.” He slid his hand behind my back and, in a move I hadn’t forgotten, unhooked my bra and tossed it aside in a single fluid motion.

  All through the afternoon we kept murmuring the helpful hints lovers offer each other: “Easy,” “Slower,” “Faster,” “Harder,” “More.”

  At the end of the day, he said, “You know how women are always needing reassurance and how men aren’t supposed to be good at giving it?”

  “I’ve heard words to that effect.”

  He propped himself up on his elbow. “So, here goes. I loved you way back when. I love you now. And I loved you all those years in between.”

  “Same here, big boy,” I told him.

  “No. You have to actually say it.” So I did.

  I left him an hour later. I can’t say the possibility of intimacy hadn’t occurred to me, because even before having dinner with Nelson the previous evening, I’d shaved my legs so closely I’d taken off the first two layers of the epidermis. However, I didn’t want to stay the night with him. Toothbrushes, deodorant, and makeup were all buyable in New Jersey, but I didn’t want to have to bear the chilly loneliness of daybreak after a night of his warmth. He drove me back to the parking lot of Carlo’s Big Cheese and we parted with soft-spoken I-love-yous.

  I got back to Shorehaven with time to spare until sunset and drove over to Nancy’s without even calling first. Maybe subconsciously I wanted her to wag her finger at me and howl “Adulteress!” but instead, after agreeing to stay for Larry’s barbecued swordfish kabobs, an admittedly high price to pay, I dragged her upstairs to her computer and asked her to access a couple of Newsday’s databases, like Lexis and Nexis.

  “Have you taken leave of your senses? No, don’t even bother answering. Do you have any idea how much the charges are? How can I justify—”

  “You don’t have to justify anything. Just say you used it for some personal research and pay them back.”

  “Why can’t you go to the library?”

  “Because it’s seven-fifteen on a Sunday night, that’s why.”

  “Wait till tomorrow.”

  “Now.”

  “Oh Lord! I can’t—”

  “Nancy, I don’t have time for your Butterfly McQueen act. You know how a person should be willing to lay her life on the line for her best friend? Just access Nexis and we’ll call it even.”

  Muttering “shit-ass-rat-fuck,” she got on-line and typed in all the permutations of Gray or Grey and Richard or Richards, the Pharmaceutical Container Man. It took only seconds and some scrolling backward to discover that in April 1998, Richard Grey and his sister Marlena Grey Eugenides offered shares of their family’s company, Saf-T-Close, in a public offering.

  “Let me think,” I said. “That’s one of those IPOs. Initial public—”

  “I know what it means, turkey. But what does it mean?” Nancy asked.

  “I think ... I’m not one hundred percent positive, or even seventy-five percent positive, but I think it means that Emily Chavarria knew that the bank’s big client, Saf-T-Close, was going to sell stock to the public. Maybe she got in on the ground floor and made a bundle.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  The truth was, I had no idea. “Keep looking,” I ordered her, a little imperiously, but I was standing beside her aching to get on-line and she refused to relinquish control of either her chair or the mouse. “Boring, boring, boring,” I muttered as she clicked on various thrilling items, such as Saf-T-Close hiring Charles W. Swarski Jr. as its new director of marketing and its earnings per share increased by eight percent in the quarter ended December 31,1998. Then I said, “Look!” On October 11, 1999, Chapman-Bohrer, a major drug manufacturer, announced its acquisition of Saf-T-Close at fifty dollars per share. “‘At close of business the previous Friday,’” I read off the screen, “‘Saf-T-Close’s final price on the NASDAQ was thirty dollars per share.’”

  “All right!” Nancy cheered. Almost immediately, she deflated. “What does this have to do with Courtney Logan?”

  “Insider trading!”

  “What about insider trading?” she persisted.

  When I tried to explain and the words didn’t come, we agreed to reconnoiter and meet again in five minutes. Nancy made a beeline to her bedroom phone to call her broker at home and I stayed by the computer and called Kate on another line. Fortunately she answered, making it unnecessary to expend enormous stores of energy being civil to Adam.

  It used to be, Kate explained, that insider trading applied to sales or purchases of stock by a company’s employees, people who have confidential information about the company’s plans. These days, she said, it also applied to people who are tipped off by an insider even if they don’t work for the company or owe it any legal duty. A banker like Emily could be one of these people. If Richard Grey tipped her off about the sale, she couldn’t buy Saf-T-Close at a lower price and then flip it the next day or week and nearly double her money.

  I said good-bye to my daughter and sat down at the computer and went back to the April 1998 announcement. The price of the IPO was eleven dollars per share. If Emily had a piece of the IPO, which was probably legal, she could have made a nice profit on Saf-T-Close. But what if she wanted more? What if, besides her profit on the IPO, she wanted to put even more money on a sure thing, the
acquisition? How would she work it?

  Nancy returned and took off her imaginary hat to me. “The broker says the deal with insider trading is that you get someone else to buy the stock and not set off the SEC’s computer alarm or whatever.”

  “So Emily could have gotten Courtney to buy the stock,” I mused. “But how much good would that do? Courtney only had twenty-five thousand.”

  “For someone smart you’re so fucking muddle-headed,” she said with her usual delicacy.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying, peabrain, that if indeed any of this is true and not a figment of your overheated imagination, then Emily might have given Courtney some bucks, big bucks, with which to buy said shares of Saf-T-Close and maybe agreed to give her a nice percent of the profit for her trouble. And maybe, you nit, Courtney wanted to keep the money all for herself. I mean, what less can one expect from a person who has the panache to embezzle from a Crunch-Munch sale? And maybe Emily got pissed, made some careful plans”—she took a deep breath and kept going—“came to Shorehaven for a tête-à-tête with Courtney, and two shots later—”

  “Courtney is dead and Emily is free to start a new life where there aren’t any glass ceilings!”

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE WOMAN FROM FIFE sounded unduly nasal, as if she were holding her nose in a juvenile attempt to disguise her voice. “You’re the second call about this today,” she said. For a second I was flummoxed, not a reassuring state of mind on a Monday morning. Who? What? Why? Who else could possibly ... ?

  “Oh,” I replied, “you mean Captain Sharpe of the Nassau County Police Department.” I did my best imitation of a warm chuckle. “I guess he’s one step ahead of me this morning.”

  “I’m sure if he wants to share the details, you can get them from him,” Ms. Lovely said, clearly not finding my warm chuckle either credible or endearing.

  “Probably not. It would take me a week to convince him to give me the correct spelling of Emily Chavarria’s name.” The day before, Nelson had been willing to share information with me (to say nothing about what else he’d shared). But not only didn’t I want to rely on his generosity again, I didn’t like the idea of being a damsel in distress who needs saving by a hero. “Look,” I went on, “I’m doing this on behalf of the family. Obviously they’re frantic. All I need to know is if Ms. Chavarria and Ms. Logan were at the same meeting at any time, if they could have met. Please. For the family.”

  “All right, all right. I told the captain ... They were at the same meeting in ’94, in Baltimore. It was in April. FIFE East. But as I explained to the captain, there were over forty delegates. I, personally, have no way of knowing if they ever said two words to each other. I wasn’t even here in 1994.” Both times she said “the captain,” she got a little breathy. I figured Nelson had been troweling on the gruff charm.

  “Is Ms. Chavarria still active in the organization?”

  “The captain asked that, too.”

  “I suppose there’s a certain investigatory mindset.” I figured “mind-set” was one of those corporate words coined to evade the need for actual thinking and would warm the cockles of Ms. Lovely’s heart. “Was she still active?”

  “Yes, in the South Jersey chapter and in FIFE East. Not in National.”

  “And what about Courtney Logan?”

  A hurricane of a sigh came over the phone. “Paid her dues. Was she active in the Wall Street chapter? I’m afraid you’d have to call them.”

  “Okay, whom should I call?”

  “I can’t give out such information.”

  In movies, private investigators are always slipping people twenties to get information. I couldn’t imagine saying, Hey, Ms. Lovely, if you cooperate, I’ll stick a couple of sawbucks in the next mail. So I merely said: “Look, I know you must be horrendously busy—”

  “I am and I really have to—”

  “—and I wouldn’t be bothering you if not for the family. If you could tell me the name of the head of the Wall Street chapter—” Before she could slip a word in edgewise I added: “And also, if you could email or fax me the list of people who were at the Baltimore meeting, I know they’d be grateful.” With another whooshed exhalation, she gave me the name and agreed to fax the list. I was on the verge of asking what, if any, other questions Captain Sharpe had asked. But at that moment she got another call and got rid of me fast.

  The president of FIFE Wall Street was a hotshot at Merrill Lynch, so I wasn’t expecting anything. But she took my call and told me no, Courtney Logan hadn’t been to any meetings or events that she could remember. She herself had of course heard the name and about the murder, though couldn’t recall ever meeting her. However, she really should write a note of condolence to the husband, poor guy. I was nearly in shock over her acute niceness, but nevertheless was able to give her Greg Logan’s name and address.

  Shortly after that, a faxed list of the Baltimore attendees arrived. Now that I had it, I didn’t know what to do with it short of entering every name on a search engine and seeing if any articles on serial killers or missing women came up. But I decided I had other fish to fry first, so I shoved it into the desk drawer I used for papers and clippings I really wanted nothing to do with yet couldn’t bear to throw out.

  Then I paced around the room for the seven whole seconds such a circumnavigation took. When I’d returned to graduate school after Bob and I decided not to have another baby, I’d taken over the fourth bedroom as an office. It was so small that whenever I felt guilty about only having two kids, about not adding another Jew to the world to help replace the lost ones, I’d think that the third child would have untold resentments at having gotten stuck with what, essentially, was a cell with sheer white curtains.

  I sat back down and returned to the Courier-Post Web site, where I downloaded the piece about Emily’s mysterious disappearance. Then I spent a half hour muttering “Shit!” until I finally figured how to extract the photograph from the body of the article. Ten minutes later, after reaching Steffi Deissenburger, I emailed the photo to her. I thought it was a pretty nifty idea until the increasingly familiar dread returned—that I actually was on Fancy Phil’s wild-goose chase, and in the end, Emily would have been a side trip to nowhere. The killer would turn out to be Steffi, or Steffi + Greg. Having thus screwed up, I would incur Fancy Phil’s fury and Nelson Sharpe’s contempt. Or vice versa.

  On that happy note, the phone rang. “This is Steffi Deissenburger.” I probably thanked her twice. “It is not a bother,” she said. “I cannot tell one hundred percent if this woman was a visitor. But”—I held my breath—“I think she could be, or might be, someone who was visiting Courtney. I did not see her for long. Only for a minute.”

  A tingle of excitement, followed by the warm flush of hope that feels too good to be a hot flash. My heart began to pound. But wanting to sound composed, I said, with over-the-top sincerity, à la Judd Hirsch as the shrink in Ordinary People: “Tell me about it.”

  “Sometimes when Courtney had a friend visit,” Steffi said, “she would ask me to take the children from the house. So she and the friend could enjoy a quiet conversation. Did I tell you that already? This is what I did on that day. I took Morgan and Travis to the library, then to lunch, then I think to the big playground in Christopher Morley Park.”

  “When was this?”

  “I believe it was in ... I cannot say exactly. It could have been the end of summer.”

  “Please,” I urged her, “go ahead.”

  “I brought the children back earlier than Courtney had asked. Travis was—he was crying. From being cranky, you see. He had not had a nap and he was a child who needed one. Sometimes he even took a nap in the morning.”

  “What time was it when you got back to the Logans’?”

  “Before four. Courtney asked me to keep the children out until four o’clock so she and her friend—”

  “Did she mention the friend’s name?”

  “I don’t thin
k so. Or I don’t remember. I am not sure.”

  “Sorry to have interrupted you. Please go on.”

  “I drove home, and as I am parking the car, a woman comes out from the front door. Courtney is there and they kiss good-bye.”

  “A hugging kiss?” I asked.

  “No. A fast kiss like Americans do who do not know each other so well.” Steffi made the staccato smack of a social kiss. “The woman sees the children, so Courtney waves to me to come over. She says, ‘This is Morgan and this is Travis.’“

  “She doesn’t introduce you?”

  “No. I believe she is a little angry that I came home before four o’clock, although she may just be tired. And the woman says something like ‘They’re so cute,’ even though Travis is crying. He was very, very cranky and it was a long day for him. Then the woman gets in her car and drives away.”

  “Did Courtney say anything to you about your coming back early?”

  “No. I started to apologize, but she said to forget about it, that it was all right and she had a nice visit with her friend.” I got a clear mental picture of Steffi at that instant: her contrite expression, her heavily made-up face, her placid posture, her nervous hands.

  “Courtney didn’t call the woman Jane or Mary or anything? Just ‘my friend’?”

  “I think just that. I don’t remember.”

  “Okay, you said the woman got into a car. Do you remember what kind it was, or the color?”

  “No. I don’t think it was a German or a Swedish car. I have been to both countries and their cars are familiar to me. And the color ... ? I don’t remember. It may have been dark.”