by Susan Isaacs
“See? This is why it’s useless to talk to you.” I tried to swallow so I could speak, but I found myself choking on my own gulp. “It so happens I gave it my all. You and everyone else will never know how hard I tried to be the best mother there is. Maybe I wasn’t the best wife in the world, but I tried there, too. Part of it was I didn’t have the best material to work with.” There was no need to ask Courtney what she meant, because she was on a roll.
“He was the biggest disappointment. Good-looking in that exotic way, very intelligent, a real natural athlete. You look at those blobby parents of his and you wonder how in the world did they produce someone with such amazing hand-eye coordination. And his speed! He’s all the way back and suddenly he’s at the net. And money. He had money and an MBA, which can be an unbeatable combination. Except what did he do about it? Next to nothing. He had no daring. He took a really good idea and worked and slaved and turned it into a mediocre business.” I decided it best not to bring up StarBaby. “And do you know the most pathetic thing about it? Greg was perfectly content to be second rate.” Courtney rubbed her lips together the way you do before you blot lipstick. “He knew damn well he was settling for safety and security over the chance to be a player. And he knew that sooner or later someone was going to come in and copy his formula and make it the next Starbucks. Do you know what he said?”
“What?” Her right arm, the one with the gun, must have been getting weary because she was propping up her forearm with her left hand. All I could think of was what in the world I could do to disarm her. For once, I was overjoyed to be sixteen pounds over the legal limit, except I couldn’t come up with a way to throw my weight around that would result in both my getting the gun and staying alive.
“He said he could live with that. I told him in a kidding-around way that I didn’t know if I could. And he said, ‘Well, Courtney, you’re just going to have to learn to live with it.’ And then his whole fixation on being legitimate. Believe me, when I told him I was proud that he wasn’t interested in the family business or the family values, if you know what I mean, I meant it. But it permeated every aspect of his life. He was panicked about anyone thinking he was coarse. Panicked. Half the time we’d go out with other couples, really terrific, successful couples, and he’d hardly say anything because he was so panicked. Except his excuse was that he was reserved. Reserved? And taxwise there were probably hundreds of deductions he could have made legitimately, but he wouldn’t let the accountant take them. You can be understanding for a while, but for how long? And the really sick thing? He was on the phone with his father at least once a day, even on weekends. Talking about baseball and the market, like his father was a normal person. Greg never heard of the term ‘arm’s length.’”
I was tempted to ask her about her children but was afraid of setting her off. Sooner or later, unless she decided to fire in the meantime, I’d have to do something. But my legs were performing a pathetic shimmy and it was all I could do just to keep standing. The unsettling thing about Courtney, as if I needed more unsettlement, was that for an egocentric crazy sociopath, or whatever the diagnostic term is, she was as intuitive as she was.
Just as I was thinking, Huh? What about your kids?, she said: “As far as the children go, they’re better off without me. I know that may sound like a rationalization, but it’s the truth. They always loved Steffi, our au pair, better than they loved me. I felt badly I couldn’t leave Steffi a letter with some instructions or guidelines, though that was obviously out of the question.”
“What about Emily?” I inquired. Courtney did her lip-rubbing business again, then kept them pressed together, as in “mum’s the word.” “I know you two met at a regional FIFE meeting in Baltimore. But I couldn’t piece together how the relationship developed.”
Her lips parted. “I wouldn’t call it a relationship.” Each time she began talking again I’d get an instantaneous flush of hope, followed by a growing desperation and paralysis. The reverse psychology which had worked earlier, telling her I didn’t think she was smart and that I didn’t want to hear her version of events, might not work again. “There was much too much of a hero-worshiping aspect to it,” she was saying. “I mean, the woman was a tabula rasa looking for someone to write on her. Self-confidence in negative numbers. Which was sad, because she had a mind. But if I hopped on one foot, she’d hop. I bought a Lana Marks bag and guess who else did? One time I told her, ‘Emily, you can wear a really great pants suit and the bank won’t fire you, I guarantee it.’ So of course she had to buy a couple of pants suits, but I got sixty thousand emails asking where she should buy it and what designer and all that.”
“Her name wasn’t on your database,” I said.
She laughed, throwing back her head, although not so far that she still couldn’t keep her eye on me. And the gun didn’t move a millimeter. “That’s because the month before I left I got a new hard drive. My nightmare was that Greg would spare no expense trying to find me and hire one of those computer people who can read stuff you think you erased.” She shook her head in weary recollection. “You wouldn’t believe how long it took to import a lot of that stuff and reenter the rest. Not just database stuff. My other files, too, minus what I didn’t want to show up. Days and days and days I was my own secretary.”
“You weren’t involved with on-line trading?”
“You mean day-trading? No. That’s so dilettantish. For total losers and a couple of geniuses. I admit I’m not that kind of a genius.” For a moment she looked pensive. “Emily traded on-line, but she didn’t sit around all day staring at a computer screen like a day-trader. I wouldn’t call her a genius, but she was terrific at it. She made herself some good money.”
“What was her nest egg? From the first public offering of Saf-T whatever?”
“Very impressive,” Courtney remarked. “How did you track that down?”
“Someone else did.”
“Who? All right, play games. I don’t care. You’ll see where it will get you. Well”—she grinned—“technically you won’t see.” With her first real smile of the morning, I noticed the old Courtney dimples. “What were we talking about? Oh, Emily. Emily got in on the ground floor with the IPO, invested her life savings, thirty-five thousand. She doubled her money the first week. Then she sold all her Saf-T-Close stock and began making serious money. I mean, from something like her initial seventy thousand investment, she ran it up to almost seven hundred thousand in on-line trading by the next summer. She’d get home from the bank and that’s all she’d do, not that she had a lot of other opportunities. Anyhow, every time she made a killing she had to call me up and boast. Well, finally this boring person in New Jersey was worth almost three-quarters of a mil! That’s when I said, ‘Let’s have lunch. We haven’t seen each other in ages.’”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know,” she said irritably. “So we kept having lunch. And then she told me about the Chapman-Bohrer buyout. Anybody would think, Oh, Courtney’s the evil genius behind all this, but Emily was the one who suggested it.”
“Suggested what?”
“You know. That I should buy stock for her in my name and she’d give me fifteen percent of whatever she netted. The naïveté, the gullibility. That she could trust anyone, even me. Then she said if I wanted to buy for myself, whatever money I wanted to put into it—She said, ‘Why don’t you have your parents buy your shares for you? They have another name.’ Like a couple who makes fifty grand or so a year would be buying twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of Saf-T-Close. For someone smart she was not smart.”
“That was the money you took out from your joint accounts?”
“Right again. Very, very good. But buying under another name gave me the idea of the offshore corporation. So I set that up and gave Emily the papers to sign as coprincipal, except three guesses what I did with those papers.”
“Why did you have to kill her?”
“I take full responsibility for that,” Courtney s
aid. “I just didn’t think something through that I should have.”
“What was that?”
“That once she comprehended—and that took forever—that we weren’t best friends and that I hadn’t bought tickets to Australia for us and that there was no chance in hell she was going to get her hands on the money, she wasn’t going to take it lying down. She threatened to blackmail me.”
“How?”
She did not directly answer. “Well, I didn’t want her to go back to her bank and say, ‘I didn’t go to Australia and New Zealand because my friend Courtney fucked me over.’ I wanted her to make a clean break so they’d think she was missing. So I got her a hotel room in the city and told her there was some problem with the offshore corporation because our lawyer had left the island. I said, ‘Just sit tight. We’ll take our vacation as soon as I clear this up. I’m working night and day on it.’ I got her a cell phone so she wouldn’t make calls to my house from the hotel. I said, ‘We can’t afford to have any phone records if the SEC ever decides to take a look.’
“But then she finally figured out something was wrong. And then the blackmail threats began: She was going to tell Greg. Then she’d go to the SEC, which I personally doubt she would have done. But of course that would have totally fucked up my plans about getting away. And then she came out to Shorehaven. Unfortunately, she’d been to the house a few times, so she knew where it was. She could practically get there on automatic pilot.”
“And?”
“And, I said, ‘We can’t stay here, Emmy. You’re making too much noise, carrying on like this. Let’s go for a walk.’ And of course she said okay. She even waited while I ran back upstairs to get out the gun. I told her I had to change my shoes and she believed me. I even got her to drive my car one last time.”
“Where did you shoot her?”
“Where? In the head.” She spoke with exaggerated patience, the way an unkind person might do with someone who is slow.
“I mean, where were you?”
Courtney exhaled, as though exhausted by the memory. “In Piney Woods Park, behind the old Fiske mansion, on one of the trails.”
“You shot her twice.”
“One for good measure. Just to be sure. That’s how I am. This was just a couple of days before Halloween, the day I was planning my escape. But I had to put everything else aside. Anyhow, I shot her and I put a pile of leaves and branches over her and said a little prayer that I wouldn’t screw this up. Then I had to go home, pick up Emily’s car, and drive it to one of those dumpy car cemeteries with all the old wrecks. Isn’t it amazing, how the mind works? I must have passed the place a year or two before, going somewhere. All of a sudden, on my way home from the park right after I’d shot her, it came back to me. Then I had to get rid of the plates. I threw them into a Dumpster at a construction project.”
“And her body?”
“I was so nervous. You should have seen me! But I knew I couldn’t let it stay where it was. But then on Saturday after it got dark, Greg was still at the office and I told Steffi, the au pair, to take the kids to Roosevelt Field and go to F.A.O. Schwarz and the food court for dinner. She was so good about working on weekends if I needed her. So I wrapped her—Emily—in one of those green plastic things you put on the floor when you paint. What do you call it? A drop cloth. I put my watch and rings on her. I got her into clothes similar to what I was planning on wearing on Halloween, wrapped her in the drop cloth, and put her in the back of my car—”
“But her fingerprints were on your car. And in your house. You obviously wiped your prints off in order to make the police think that Emily’s fingerprints were your fingerprints—the same fingerprints that would match the body. She visited you at least a couple of times, right? When you had Steffi take the children away for the day, and again when you went to the dentist.”
She shook her head, smiling at a recollection. “If you’re dying, no pun intended, to know how I did it, I had her drive me to the dentist’s office. I’d made an appointment for her under a made-up name, and when we got there I said, ‘Ooh, your teeth need to be cleaned.’ Cute? She didn’t even know she had an appointment. I just said, ‘Go in, Emmy. They’ll take you. Oh, listen: I made the appointment under another name. I don’t want anyone being able to connect the two of us.’ Steffi was with the children.”
“I guess there were other times she came to your house, too.”
“So?”
“So what I’m thinking is that maybe you planned out this ... Emily’s death a little more than you’re describing.”
“Did you ever hear of ‘FO and D’?” Courtney asked too sweetly. I shook my head. “No? We used to say it in school.” For the first time she looked angry. “Fuck off and die!”
I spoke right away, trying to keep my voice soothing. “Did you ever consider that the pool wasn’t a good place? That they might have found her before she”—I wasn’t able to come up with a euphemism, so I said—“decomposed?”
“Of course I thought about it. But this wasn’t how I’d planned to do it. She came to the house and I had to improvise. All you can do in any situation is your best. I had to shoot her in the goddamn middle of nowhere. What if there’d been a hiker around? Then the next night I had to go back and get her, which was incredibly spooky. I bet you’re dying to know how I got her into the pool.” I nodded. “I drove my car. It’s a Land Rover. Greg said a Range Rover would send the wrong message, which just about sums him up. I drove across my neighbor’s property after dark with the car’s lights off. I got to ten feet away from the pool, then I carried her. In the dark. Talk about deadweight. But she was out of the car, into the drink, pool cover tied back down in five minutes.”
“You weren’t worried that once you were gone the police would look in the pool?”
“Of course. I agonized. But my escape plan was in place. Worse comes to worse, they’d pull back the cover and say, ‘Gee, that’s not Courtney. It’s someone who’s her size and who has blond hair, or almost blond, but—gee, where could Courtney be?’ It was a calculated risk. But I’d be in another city. I’d be in another life! Let them look for Courtney. They wouldn’t find her.”
The blond business. Was Emily simply mimicking the woman she venerated? Or had Courtney talked Emily into going blond? If so, she’d formulated the pool burial not at the spur of the moment, but in early September, when Emily started changing her hair color. “How had you originally planned it, before you had to use the pool option?”
“FO and D.” She was getting bored with me.
“Where did you get the gun?”
“Oh, that was about two, three years ago when we were skiing in Utah.” Her manner turned reflective, as if reminiscing about a pleasant vacation. “I was a nervous wreck, sending it home in my luggage, but it was the only thing I could think to do. Like the airline really noticed. But I just thought that with someone like Phil Lowenstein in the family, we should be armed.”
“Did he or anyone else ever threaten you?”
“No. But why not be protected?”
“Greg didn’t know you had the gun?”
“Of course not. He probably would have thought it was coarse or something. And he was definitely too much of a wuss to have a gun in the house.” She combed her hair off her face with her left hand. “I know you’ve been playing for time, trying to think of some way out. Not that I blame you. You’re smart, but as I said, not as smart as I am. I hate to say it, but—”
With my left arm I slammed her gun hand against the wall. With my right, I jerked her gold hoop earring down. She screamed as it tore through her earlobe—I think as much with horror as with pain—and covered her ear with both hands. Now the gun was pointing toward the ceiling. Blood began oozing out between her fingers and down her neck. Reaction time was a factor, I knew. With mine being sluggish and hers fast, it would only be a second or two until she’d get back enough control to wrest her right hand from her ear, aim, and shoot.
I grabbed for
the gun, but she tightened her grip. I couldn’t get it loose and found myself swaying as she writhed and screamed, “My ear! My ear! You ripped my ear!” With one hand I grabbed onto her wrist and tried to keep the gun pointed up, although her wrist was slick with blood. Then I remembered something I’d heard at a self-defense forum at a Take Back the Night rally on campus: If you’re trying to release someone’s grip, don’t go for his thumb. So I grabbed Courtney’s pinkie and bent it back, and farther back, until her next scream told me I’d broken it.
Although I already knew that because now I had the gun.
Except we were at a standoff. I had the gun, but I needed the phone, which was in the kitchen. Courtney alternated between holding her ear and howling “I’m going to bleed to death!” and “My finger!” and making swipes toward me to try to get the gun back. The shoulder and sleeve of her bright pink sweater were blood-soaked, and for an instant it brought to mind Jacqueline Kennedy’s suit after JFK was shot. My teeth started to chatter and I clamped my jaw shut.
But then I had to open it. “Courtney,” I shouted over her caterwauling, “you better hear me. This isn’t a democracy. I rule. Either you come into the kitchen or I’m going to shoot you, and with any luck, I’ll kill you.”
I pulled out a chair into the middle of the kitchen. I must have had a reason for that, though I don’t recall. She sat. After throwing her a dishtowel for her ear, I grabbed the phone. God knows what I shrieked to the 911 operator. Then began the endless wait for the cops to arrive.
The vibrations from my chattering teeth spread downward until I was shivering all over. I have no doubt she saw it, because I wasn’t more than five feet from her. Nevertheless, she did not try to take advantage. Instead, hunched over in the chair, both hands pressing the towel over her ear, she seemed to have withdrawn for a consultation with herself. No more bawling, no more attempts to get back the gun.