Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

He glanced down and saw my house keys in my hand. If he was even half as brainy as I believed he was, he’d realize the electronic gizmo on my key chain was a panic button for the house’s alarm system. He flashed me a look that said, Hey, if you want to be ungracious, fine by me. Then he wiggled his index finger and his driver/goon opened the window. “About half an hour,” Fancy Phil said. “I’ll call you.” Quietly and elegantly, the great, dark car backed out and drove off. Fancy Phil turned back to me. “So, you gonna invite me in now?”

  “I’d rather take the night air.” For some reason, I was not afraid. Uneasy, sure. Maybe even apprehensive. But no chill of fear, no shiver of panic.

  “What kinda crap is this, Doc? If I was up to something, I wouldn’t be hanging out in my car in your driveway, so all your neighbors could memorize the license plate. You think you can’t trust me?”

  “I think you’ve got something on your mind and I’d prefer to hear it under the stars.”

  The residue of his smile vanished, but he lowered himself down and, with a barely perceptible grunt, sat beside me on the step. His white linen slacks were stretched so tight around his thighs they looked about to explode from fabric fatigue. “So?” he inquired.

  “So what do you want?” I asked.

  “I want to know everything you got.”

  “I’m not planning on keeping it a secret, Phil. I’ll tell you as soon as I feel I can present a coherent narrative.” I saw the look he flashed me, but I also realized he understood exactly what I’d meant.

  “Listen, Doc. I like you a lot.”

  “Good. I like you, too.”

  “If I didn’t have a wife and, you know, a good friend already, I’d actually ask you out on a date. So liking you so much, admiring your smartness, I don’t want to make you upset. Or angry with me. Or even, God forbid, afraid of me.”

  “Where do you come from, Phil?”

  “What? Way back? Brooklyn.”

  “Me, too. And we had an old saying there: You’re pickin’ on the wrong chicken.”

  “I never heard that.”

  “But you understand what it means,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “For several reasons, none of which I want to elaborate on, it would be best for you if we could resume our old, friendly relationship and cut the business of ‘God forbid, afraid of me,’ which translates into ‘You should be scared shitless.’ Now, do you want a report on what I’ve been doing?”

  “Yeah.” He pretended to scan the sky for glorious celestial objects. “Can I come inside now? I swear I’m not gonna hurt you or make a pass. I’m just upset, is all.”

  It is rarely wise to ignore your head and your gut and proceed on faith, but I sensed this was one of those times. “Let’s go.” I took him into the living room, turned on all the lamps, and left the curtains open. The place smelled of the roses I’d cut before I left for the city, and any trepidation I may have had disappeared when I saw him gazing from vase to vase to vase, from red to apricot to yellow. “Beauty-ful,” he commented.

  “Thanks.”

  Fancy Phil lowered himself onto a club chair and pointed to a hassock. “Can I put my feet up there if I take off my shoes?”

  “Sure, even if you don’t take them off.” I was about to sit a few feet away in a matching chair, but I asked, “Do you want something to eat? Drink?”

  “No.” He patted his belly, not without fondness. “I gotta take off a few. You got any sour balls or anything?” I peered into the depths of my handbag and picked out the two mints wrapped in cellophane I’d taken from the restaurant where I’d just had dinner as well as an almost full pack of sugarless gum. “Thanks, Doc.” When he finished ripping the cellophane with his teeth and gulping the mints whole instead of chewing them, he said: “Look, I didn’t want to scare you. I just wanted to catch you when you got home. It’s that the clock is ticking. They called Gregory and wanted him to go back to their headquarters and go over his information.”

  “Again?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The cops from Homicide?”

  “Yeah. His lawyer told them, you should pardon me, to go take a flying fuck. But you know and I know, they don’t got anyone else waiting in line to take the hit for this thing. Their not making any arrest is an embarrassment for them. I’m ... I’m scared any minute they’ll trump up some phony crap just to make the public think they solved the case. What Morgan and Travis have already gone through ... How could they take their father getting dragged off?”

  “It would be a nightmare,” I agreed. I didn’t want to think about Greg behind bars for Courtney’s murder, his children seeing him in an orange jumpsuit on their increasingly rare visits.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ve got to give them something that will divert their attention from Greg. So let me give you a rough sketch of what I’ve found out.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE MOON WAS almost full. Outside the window, across the street, the mist over my neighbor’s front lawn glowed in the light; it looked as if a Spanish colonial had risen from a swamp on some extraterrestrial landscape. “I don’t see the end to this yet,” I told Fancy Phil.

  He slipped off his white suede loafers and put his bare feet up on the hassock. “See?” he said, wriggling his toes for emphasis. “Feet don’t come cleaner than this.”

  My duties as hostess apparently included smiling my approval of his personal hygiene, so I did. Then I went on: “It’s not only details of what happened with Courtney that we’re missing. It’s the big picture, too. There are so many blanks to fill in. I want to be able to give you a chronology or some kind of logical progression.”

  An enormous pink jewel set in a ropy gold ring on Fancy Phil’s right hand gleamed in a cone of light cast by the lamp. “Do I look like a guy who’s gotta have a progression?” he inquired.

  “Maybe not, but that’s the way I work.”

  He placed his right arm in front of his sizable waist and, with surprising grace, considering he was sitting, offered me a magnanimous bow. “You’re the doctor, Doc. Go ahead.”

  “Okay. Let’s start with the assumption that Courtney had an aspect of her life she didn’t want Greg to know about. That’s not to say there was some deep, dark secret, like an affair or a complicated financial deception. It could have been that she was going to a friend’s house and smoking marijuana and watching dirty movies. Or going to Bloomingdale’s and trying on clothes all day.”

  “I got news for you, cookie,” Phil said, twisting around his ring to better admire it. “Nobody’s got a life that’s an open book.” He saw me eyeing his ring and held up his meaty hand for me, fingers splayed, so it could catch every photon of light and better show off the gem. “Is this a ring or what?” he demanded.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Quinzite opal,” he declared. His nails looked far better manicured than mine, topped with a clear polish with a hint of pink to echo the color of the opal. “Those stories about opals being bad luck? Craziness. But I guess it keeps down the price. Not that I care. I pay top dollar for quality.”

  I gave him a look I hoped would say: Sadly, we must leave the subject of your jewelry. “About Courtney’s life,” I said. “She told Steffi, the au pair, that if Greg ever called and she wasn’t around, to tell him she was out shopping. No big deal. Not the kind of lie that if Greg found out would shake the marriage to its foundation. Still, something was going on. In the week or two before Halloween, Courtney was away three or four times for a whole day, from after breakfast until seven or seven-thirty at night.”

  “That don’t sound like marijuana,” Fancy Phil reflected. “And not Bloomingdale’s either. Because you know what happens, you try on clothes for ten hours? Seriously, you could end up in traction.” He unwrapped a few pieces of the gum I’d given him earlier and popped them into his mouth.

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “Anyhow, according to Steffi, on those days, Courtney dressed up, nicely, elegantly
. Not in anything sexy, not the kind of thing she might wear if she were having a sizzling affair.” (Twenty years earlier I’d worn jeans or corduroys to mine, though I concede I did go flambé in the underwear department.) “It sounds as though she was dressed for business.”

  “Maybe she had some guy who wanted class, not tits and ass.” Delighted by his rhyme, Fancy Phil smiled, albeit a reserved gangster smile that displayed only the hint of teeth.

  “Do you really think so?” I inquired politely. He shook his head hard: no way. “Then I’ll go on. According to one of StarBaby’s clients, when Courtney came to talk about the company, she wore a simple pair of slacks and a silk blouse. Not a suit with a skirt and high-heeled shoes, not with her hair up. The au pair confirmed that.”

  Fancy Phil smoothed down the chest hair in the V made by his open-neck shirt. His gold chain and star clanked. “Courtney was platinum card all the way. I told you, Doc, for someone who liked simple, that girl spent a fortune—like on clothes. Gregory and me was talking about it last weekend. He came over for supper with Morgan and Travis. My wife made her own pizza. Can you believe that? Plain for Morgan, with all kinds of fancy mushrooms for us. Not canned mushrooms. Fresh. Macaroni for Travis. Anyway, Gregory was never cheap, like about Courtney’s clothes. A guy wants his wife to look like a million bucks.”

  “But not necessarily cost it.”

  “You got it, sweetheart. Listen, if you’re in the money, sure, why not? Buy your wife a fur down to the floor, a diamond bracelet that says ‘diamond bracelet’ loud and clear—not one of those crappy tennis things. But Gregory don’t have those kind of bucks yet. Maybe he won’t ever, what with everything having to be legit. Not bucks for the big-time stuff Courtney was dying for. Not to rent a house in Italy for a month with not just a maid, but a cook. A cook? Tell me, what does it take to make spaghetti? And the money Miss Simple pissed away—she should rest in peace. Eight hundred dollars for a pair of pants. That’s what Gregory told me, and that was just for starters.”

  “She’d been an investment banker,” I remarked. “I’d have thought she would have a more realistic understanding of what their finances were.”

  Fancy Phil shook his head sadly. “It was like this. It wasn’t about Gregory. Courtney was positive I had all the money in the world. So whenever she had to have something, she’d hint in front of me. And to tell you the truth, sometimes Poppy Phil would reach into his pocket. Like one time she hinted about a new car to drive the kids around with, with more safety things. Could I say no? Of course not. I got her that Rover. And okay, the TV screen that comes out of the ceiling and gets projected on. For that dumb StarBaby. When she saw I wasn’t going to go for it, she said she really meant it for the kids to watch Sesame Street on. Okay—so call me a schnook—I got it for her. But if she wants a sable? She has a mink already. But she was hinting big time: One of her girlfriends’ husbands bought her”—his voice rose to a falsetto squeal—“‘the most beautiful sable coat for her thirty-fifth.’ That was how Courtney hinted. Never said I want. I’m thinking to myself, a squirt like her puts on sable, she’ll look like a sable holding a pocketbook. And I’m also thinking: No way. Not a sable, not a fox, not even—pardon me—a fucking bunny rabbit. I don’t wanna cut off my son’s balls and buy my daughter-in-law a fur. Also I got a wife. Third wife, and she’s the kind of girl who thinks number three means she gets to have three furs.” Having gotten that off his chest, Fancy Phil said: “What am I talking? Go ahead. Any more on Courtney’s secret life?”

  “On October fourteenth, she had her Land Rover serviced. The thirty-first was the last day she could have possibly driven it, right?”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “Between those two dates, she put seven hundred sixty-two miles on her car.”

  After two seconds of calculation, Fancy Phil asked: “Where the hell did she go?”

  “Remember when I was talking to some of Courtney’s former colleagues in the financial community, how one of them happened to mention what he called a weird coincidence: that a banker in New Jersey, someone he dealt with once, had also been reported missing. Emily Chavarria.”

  “Yeah. The one you asked me to ask Gregory about. He never heard of her.”

  “Right. Thirty-one years old, had gone to a good school. She was supposed to be smart, though not extroverted like Courtney. Quiet. Or maybe just shy. From what the guy who’d worked with Courtney at Patton Giddings told me, Emily must have been more than competent because she was hand-holding one of the bank’s biggest clients. Yet she seems to have hit a glass ceiling that was set pretty low.” Fancy Phil’s head cocked to the side with an unspoken “Wha’?” So I explained: “A glass ceiling is about discrimination. It’s an obstacle nobody inside a corporation will admit to that keeps women and minorities from rising to positions of power. But even though she was young, Emily didn’t find another job and take a hike. So maybe she was resentful. Maybe she felt entitled to more than she was getting or going to get from the bank.”

  Fancy Phil put his feet down in the space between hassock and chair and leaned forward. “You’re just guessing at that.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Keep going. I’ll stop you when you start sounding stupid.”

  “So far so good?” I asked.

  “So far.”

  “From Shorehaven, it’s about a two-hundred-twenty-five mile round-trip to where Emily lives and works. Or worked. Now, one of her bank’s biggest clients was a man who’d inherited the majority interest in a family company. And there came a time when he took his company public, sold shares—”

  “You don’t gotta explain the market to me, Doc. The SEC once tried to get me for stock manipulation, those dumb-fucks.”

  “Anyway, later on, the company was acquired by a large corporation. Of course, if you’re a banker for a company and you know this sort of thing is going to happen—”

  “Insider trading,” Fancy Phil cut in. “Yeah, yeah. The goddamn SEC makes such a big stink about it.”

  “I think they call it a felony,” I replied.

  “They’re so stupid. Anyhow, what’s the name of the guy’s company?” he asked.

  “I’m not prepared to tell it to you right now, Phil.”

  “C’mon.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Why not, goddamn it?” he suddenly bellowed. No suburban niceties for Fancy Phil; no “Quiet so the neighbors won’t hear.”

  I never had anyone angry at me who had a criminal record, one element of which was smashing somebody in the face with a brick. At the sight of the fire in Fancy Phil’s beady eyes, my guts began to turn liquid. His face was a dangerous red, getting redder. I had to steel myself not to turn away from his glare. “Why won’t I tell you?” I demanded, surprised at finding my own voice rising. “An insurance policy.”

  “Cut it out!”

  “No, Phil. Not after I get home late from the city and Surprise! There’s Phil Lowenstein and some muscle-bound moron waiting for me.”

  “He’s not that dumb.”

  “Look, it would make me incredibly happy to help Greg, so you and I can be friendly after all this is over.”

  “I’m friendly now!” he bellowed. Placing his left hand over the star of David, he raised his right high: I swear to God! “Hey, aren’t I sitting here with you? Listening polite.”

  “You’re very polite. And very intelligent. Greg’s lucky to have you in his corner. And I like you, Phil. I don’t want to get you angry or hurt your feelings. But when I saw your car and got a look at your driver ... So this is just a way to make myself feel more comfortable.”

  “I’m not gonna argue with you, even though you’re wrong.” He sniffled once, noisily, to show the hurt I’d inflicted. “Keep talking.”

  “It looks like this Emily had a tie to Courtney, besides that FIFE meeting—that’s the organization they both belonged to. After Emily disappeared, someone called her voice mail at work from a cell phone a few times. Now unless she�
��d given her password to somebody else, she was alive and curious enough to check her messages.”

  “Whose name was the cell phone in?”

  “A name that appears to be a phony, although it’s being checked.”

  “I hate it when the flavor of gum goes south so goddamn fast,” Fancy Phil muttered as he added another piece to the wad already in his mouth. “Who’s checking the name of whoever bought the cell phone?”

  “Someone with easier access to that sort of information than I have.”

  “Which means that’s another thing you’re not telling me.” No rage this time. He merely grumbled.

  “Right. But listen. Here’s the Courtney-Emily link. Whoever had that cell phone also called your son’s house two times, and the last time was a few days before Courtney disappeared.”

  “No shit!” he exhaled.

  “No shit. Maybe they were just trading rice pudding recipes. But it’s my gut feeling that there was some business deal between Emily and Courtney. There’s the matter of the company being acquired by a larger one, and also the matter of Courtney making twenty-five thousand dollars disappear. Who knows what else? If I had to guess, it’s that Courtney fronted for Emily in buying that stock of the company before it was acquired. They knew, because of insider information, that the price would go way up. I’m not saying that’s exactly what happened. For all I know it could be some other shady or unshady deal. The question is, how do I find out? Could there possibly have been a brokerage account Courtney had that Greg hasn’t mentioned to you?”

  Fancy Phil gave me a who-knows shrug, but was silent. I waited while he buffed the stone of his ring on his white slacks. Then he said: “If those two girls was in cahoots and this Emily was smart enough to buy a cell phone in some alias—”

  “The credit card she used is probably a phony.”

  “Sure,” he said offhandedly, as if such methods were kindergarten tactics to him. “So if she’s got the brains to buy a cell phone in a phony name, she and Courtney sure in hell aren’t going to trade in their own names.”