Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

  “Did you notice the license plate?” I ventured. “Was it from New York or some other state?”

  “I don’t think I saw. Travis was crying and I felt, you know, bad about coming home early. Courtney had asked me to please keep them out and if they got to be a problem to go to Baskin-Robbins and buy them ice cream.”

  “That doesn’t sound like her,” I remarked. “Ice cream?”

  “Well, you see, she understood how young children were. She wanted to make it easier for me to handle them. She was very thoughtful in this way.”

  “Right. Now, would you say the woman was younger or older or the same age as Courtney?”

  “I would say a little younger, but not too much. Thirty or thirty-one.”

  “And what did she look like?”

  “Like the woman in the photograph you emailed to me. Very plain. Dark blond or light brown hair. She wore it back, like a chignon, but not so elaborate, if you understand. Not very tall, but she wore shoes with those high but very heavy heels. I don’t know what you call them. And a plain gray business suit with a white blouse under it. Not well cut, the way Courtney’s suits were. Like a little gray mouse the woman looks, was what I was thinking. She—what is the word?—oh, carried. She carried herself as though she did not wish to be seen.”

  “Would you say shy?”

  “Maybe shy, someone who is not easy at being friendly—except with a few who know her well.”

  “Was she easy with Courtney?”

  “I did not see her enough to know.” She paused, and I held myself back from throwing another question at her. “It is like this,” Steffi continued. “I watched her when she was looking at the children and I thought, She is fond of them not because she likes children but because she thinks so well of Courtney and they are Courtney’s. So she has admiration for Courtney. Maybe I was wrong and she is still shy, even with children. But she did not seem to know how it was with them, or even to like them. She kept looking at Travis as though he would see her and understand he had to stop crying.”

  “What was your general feeling about her?”

  “Perhaps lonely,” Steffi said cautiously. “She did not act like a woman with a husband or nice boyfriend. You know? As if there is someone in the world who wants you. Still, I did not see her longer than one minute. I cannot even tell you more than maybe, possibly, this woman was the woman in your email.”

  After speaking with Steffi I found myself at loose ends, only in part because I couldn’t figure out what to do next. Her offhand remark about the confidence of a woman with a husband or boyfriend who knows there is “someone in the world who wants you” kept replaying in my head.

  At ten-twenty (according to the perpetually erroneous clock on the lower right of my computer screen), I was at the height of aggravation at myself. I hadn’t been able to dismiss the why-doesn’t-he-call anxiety about Nelson as well as the so-why-don’t-you-call-him-and-stop-the-playing-hard-to-get-game response (to which I added a schmuckette-that’s-what-you-get-for-sleeping-with-a-married-man kick in the ass). I was starting to get unusually inventive, constructing a scenario in which Nelson drove home from the motel the previous afternoon, slept with his wife out of guilt or desire, had a heart attack, and at that very moment was being laid out with a boutonniere in his lapel in some Methodist funeral home. The phone rang as I was subtracting the carnation and adding an American flag because he’d been in the air force and was a cop.

  It was Nelson. Alive. His greeting was the one he’d always used two decades earlier, saying I love you, to which I responded with my customary “Who is this, please?” He told me he’d like to come over, I said good. Thirty-five minutes later he came through the door. He kissed me thoroughly before saying “I’m here on business.”

  “I could tell,” I answered, trying to ignore the hideous houndstooth jacket he was wearing again. I led him through the living room into the sunporch, a small room common in Tudor-style houses built in the 1920s and ’30s, the old-time equivalent of a den. It was there I watched my old movies, listened to music, stretched out on the couch to read mysteries and the occasional literary novel, biographies, magazines—anything not having to do with being a historian. I gestured to a seat on the couch for Nelson.

  I sat cater-cornered to him in Bob’s old leather recliner, a chair that had begun making embarrassing squealing sounds not long after he died, no matter how much silicone and oil I offered it. In my weirder moods, I thought of the chair as haunted, though not malevolently so.

  Anyway, I told Nelson what Steffi had said about the emailed photo, that she had seen someone resembling Emily saying good-bye to Courtney and driving off. Then I offered him what I’d found out about the Red Oak Bank’s client Richard Grey and about Saf-T-Close’s going public in ’98 and its acquisition by Chapman-Bohrer on October 11,1999.

  “That’s fantastic!” he said. “How did you find that out?”

  “Luck. And the Web.”

  “I’m impressed, Judith.”

  “Wow. Now I am, too,” I told him. “Nelson, can you look to see if Emily or, more likely, Courtney bought any of this stock? If Emily did it, it would be a clear case of insider trading. So she couldn’t do it legally. But if Courtney knew about Saf-T-Close’s being acquired early enough, through Emily, she might have made a killing.”

  “On that twenty-five thousand she pulled out of those joint accounts?” Nelson asked.

  “Well, I don’t know about that. I mean, if the stock went from thirty to fifty, I figured that’s about a sixty-six percent profit. But what I’m thinking is that—assuming there is an Emily-Courtney connection—that Emily gave Courtney her money to invest.”

  “And then?”

  “And then maybe Courtney held on to it. And Emily, who had planned to disappear from the bank, made a side trip to Shorehaven. I don’t know if she got back her money, but maybe she got back at Courtney.” Nelson did not make a big production out of thinking. Still, I knew. “What are you thinking?” I demanded.

  “I’m thinking that if this story you’re telling me turns out to be true, which I’m not saying it will, then it will be a stinkeroo to figure out. These two weren’t teachers, or cops. They were financial sophisticates.”

  “And we’re not.”

  “Unless you sneaked in an MBA along with your Ph.D.”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay now, my turn. I may be onto something also.” Late morning light streamed through the louvered windows and lit up his hair. With his snub nose and large, choir-boy eyes, he looked vaguely angelic. He reached into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and extracted a folded sheet of paper. “Listen to this.”

  “Can I see it so I know what you’re talking about?”

  “No. Listen, Judith ... The last thing I want to do is hurt your feelings, but I’m going to say it straight out. You’re not my partner in this.”

  “So how come you’re here?”

  He flashed one of his annoyed looks. “To talk.”

  “To talk about stuff you really shouldn’t be talking about?”

  “Probably.” He seemed remarkably casual about such a lapse, although I supposed that anyone doing the sort of work he’d done for all the years he’d been doing it could not be easily flustered. “Do you want to listen?”

  “Of course.”

  “This is just between us.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that, Nelson.”

  Instead of countering with anything smug or scathing, as almost anyone else would do, he simply opened the paper and ran his finger down what appeared to be a column. Naturally, such a showing of cool impressed me exponentially. “I was checking out incoming calls to Emily’s house and office. Okay, five of them came from the same number in the 917 area code. You know what that is?”

  “The code for a lot of pagers and cell phones.”

  “Right. It’s used around the tristate area. So, a couple of things. The cell phone was bought on September seventeenth, 1999, a Friday, at an
AT&T place on West Thirty-ninth in Manhattan. That was over a month before Emily Chavarria and Courtney Logan disappeared.”

  I leaned forward. “Was it in either of their names?”

  “No. It was bought and paid for by someone named Vanessa Russell.”

  “Cash or credit card?”

  “A Discover card,” he replied. “First of all, whoever Vanessa is or isn’t, she—or someone who used her cell phone—made those five calls to an 856 area code, which is—”

  “Cherry Hill,” I said. “Home of the lovely Holiday Inn overlooking—Okay, who did Vanessa call in Cherry Hill?”

  “Only Emily Chavarria’s voice mail at the bank. Now let’s see how good at this you are,” Nelson said. “The calls varied in length from a little over a minute to almost four minutes. What does that tell you?”

  I did some hmmming. “Does your watch have a second hand?” I inquired. He nodded. “Okay, time me: ‘Hi, Nelson. This is Judith Singer of Sixty-three Oaktree in Shorehaven. I’m calling you about the whole business with Emily Chavarria and Courtney Logan. I’d appreciate getting whatever information you have. You can call me at 516-537-1409.”’

  “Twenty-one seconds.”

  “Which means either she was leaving a hell of a long message—”

  “You got it. Checking Emily’s messages.”

  “Which would most likely have to be done by Emily, because she’d have to know the password or code or whatever to retrieve them.”

  “Most likely,” he agreed, “but not definitely.”

  “Were any of those calls made after Emily disappeared?”

  “Three of them.”

  “If the phone is in the name of Vanessa Russell ... How did you find it so fast?”

  “Doesn’t take long if your contact from the phone company feels like being a nice guy. Everything’s computerized. Almost all of the other calls to access Emily’s voice mail were made from Emily’s house. One was made from a pay phone at a restaurant in Manhattan. The rest were from that cell phone.”

  “So Emily was around even after she didn’t go to Australia but disappeared.”

  “I’d give it a seventy-five percent shot,” Nelson said.

  “I’d give it a ninety,” I retorted.

  “In a homicide investigation you shouldn’t give anything those odds. If you were a guy, I’d say you haven’t been doing this long enough to know a pile of shit from a hot rock.”

  “But I’m not a guy.”

  “Right. So maybe you’re being a little overoptimistic about your deductive talents. But I still haven’t gotten to the good part.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That someone using Vanessa Russell’s cell phone called Courtney Logan’s house on Sunday, October twenty-fourth, and then again on Thursday, October twenty-eighth, three days before Courtney disappeared.”

  “Oh my God! That definitely ties Emily to Courtney.”

  “No, that ties a user or users of a certain cell phone to both Emily and Courtney. Maybe it was Emily herself calling. Maybe not.”

  I bounded out of the chair, muttered “Excuse me,” and hurried to the kitchen. Returning with a bag of organic celery hearts, I plopped down on the couch beside Nelson and offered him one. Looking at me as if I’d proffered a bag of rocks, he shook his head. I pulled off a stalk and began to munch. “Eating calms my nerves,” I explained.

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “Oh, shut up! Now, Vanessa Russell of cell phone and Discover-card fame: Is there really such a person?”

  “I don’t know yet. There was no answer at the home number that she gave on the application for cell phone service, a 718 Brooklyn number. I called her where she supposedly works, with a 212 area code, but there’s no such number. I’m having someone check out her home address and number and also with Discover to look at her credit history, if any. But I can’t take too much time on this. Courtney is a homicide and Emily is a missing person in New Jersey. Not my jobs.”

  I set down my celery and put my hand into his; I’d always loved the way his hand made mine look dainty. “You wish it were your job, don’t you?” He nodded. “Can you try to make it yours? Like on the theory it involves an organized crime figure you’re already investigating for ... whatever. I mean, Fancy Phil was Courtney’s father-in-law.”

  “I already tried that the day after they fished her out of that pool. The powers that be knew exactly what I wanted to do, which was to horn in on a homicide case. They said leave it alone.”

  “Was it an actual order?”

  “No, it was one of those friendly suggestions that if you don’t take to heart, your ass is grass and you wind up getting an unfriendly suggestion that it’s time to start filling out the pension papers.” He gave a what-the-hell shrug that was utterly unconvincing.

  “So what are you going to do?” I asked.

  “What I’m doing. A little looking here and there. A little listening. Mainly to you. And to a couple of my old friends still in Homicide—though not on this case.”

  “They’re part of the old regime and don’t get the juicy cases? That’s department politics?”

  “Smells like it.”

  “Nelson, do you honestly think Phil Lowenstein had anything to do with Courtney’s murder or Emily’s disappearance?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “You know,” I told him.

  He rose from the couch and I did, too. “Twenty percent chance,” he said.

  “Two percent, and I’m not going to split the difference. Even if he wanted to find out what I was doing ringing Greg’s front doorbell and offering my services—”

  “You did that? Are you nuts, Judith?”

  “Marginally. But if Fancy Phil was interested in hearing what I had to say, he could have done exactly what he did do, hang out in a corner of my garage until I pulled my car in and closed the door. ‘Hi! Wanna see my new pinkie ring?’”

  “He surprised you in your garage?”

  “He’s such a playful fellow. Look, if he’d wanted to get me wiped out, I’d have already been run over by a cement truck. No, he hired me. I’m working on his behalf, even though I refused to take any money from him.”

  I suddenly realized I was following him to the front door, without a detour to the upstairs. He gave me a fast kiss on the forehead. “Gotta go. Can I see you tonight?”

  “I can’t.” He looked on the verge of asking me to change my plans, so I added: “It’s a long-standing date with friends from high school. There’s no way I can weasel out of it.”

  I said nothing about not wanting to weasel out. After he left I went back onto the sunporch and sat where Nelson had been sitting. The cushion was still warm from him. Did I really not want to see him? Of course not. Doing anything with Nelson was better than listening to my friend Marcy’s unfailing lament over what managed care was doing to her practice of medicine and hearing Helena’s ode to the golfing life in Boca Raton. (I suspected my descriptions of St. Elizabeth’s History Department Frolics were equally electrifying for them.) But I was afraid of an overnight with Nelson, not only that all the nights after that would be unbearably lonely, but that somehow I would wind up being the lever to pry him out of his supposedly lousy marriage. If anything was going to happen between me and Nelson, it would have to be on a separate agenda from whatever was going on between Nelson and the guidance counselor.

  Naturally I had an almost irresistible impulse to bring the entire matter before Nancy, except I wanted to avoid her inevitable harangue even more than I wanted to hear her advice. Instead, I made notes on the case for the rest of the day, went into the garden to cut some roses, and left for dinner in Manhattan with my pals. As expected, nothing was new with them, beyond a new grandchild for Marcy and new moisturizing regimen for Helena. I heard about both at great length.

  Driving home from Manhattan, I was so exhausted I blasted a rap station and turned the air conditioner to its iciest to keep from nodding off. I’d never been o
ne of those frisky types about whom it is said: If you want to get a job done, give it to the busiest person. A full day for me was teaching a class, making egg salad, and watching a Bette Davis movie. While I did crave the sense of being alive that I got from murder, all the exhilaration and agitation of the past month had worn me out more than I wanted to admit.

  I was heading down Oaktree Street. Even before I got to the driveway, I saw my way to the garage blocked by a colossus of an automobile. I got alert fast. And turning in, I spotted a heavy, hairy braceleted right arm as the front passenger door of the giant car swung open. Fancy Phil. It was like a massive intravenous shot of caffeine.

  “What’s up, Doc?” He at least had the decency not to guffaw at this allegedly humorous reference.

  Glancing at his Cro-Magnon driver, I turned to Fancy Phil: “How come I have the pleasure of your company at this time of night?”

  “Let’s go inside and we’ll talk.”

  His multichinned face, illuminated by the outdoor lights, was one large, friendly smile. Around his neck he wore a star of David so unavoidably huge on his black knit shirt, so goldly garish that I could only assume it was not only meant to be noticed, but also to reassure: My people = thy people. “Not inside,” I said, smiling back. “It’s such a beautiful night.” I gestured upward to what was either Venus or a satellite and took a deep breath of rambling roses and car exhaust. “Let’s stay out here.” I walked up the path to the three steps that led to the front door, sat, and patted the flagstone beside me.

  Fancy Phil followed me slowly and somewhat stiffly, as if he were Frankenstein walking after just a few moments of life. He did not sit. “What’s the matter? You scared of me again? I thought you got over that.”

  It’s always hard to choose when your gut says one thing and your brain says another. “Phil, do you have your driver’s number?” In case he thought I was referring to the man’s ID from Ossining State Penitentiary, I added: “His phone number.”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Then please tell him to take a ride for a half hour or so. You’ll call when you need him.”