Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

  When the two cops came, one gingerly took the bloody gun from me. It was evidence and I suppose I wasn’t radiating an Annie Oakley aura of expertise in the firearms department.

  With that, Courtney began to weep. Loud sobs, buckets of actual tears. “Thank God you’re here!” she cried to them. “Thank God!”

  “Listen,” I warned them, “she’s the one who killed that woman they found in the pool last month!”

  “Don’t listen to her,” Courtney exhorted them. “My name is Amy Carpenter and ...” She stopped to weep some more but only for a moment. “She thinks I’m having an affair with her husband and I swear to God I’m not. Look what she did to me! Please, let me get to a doctor. Oh please.” She looked up at them. Her doe eyes, only slightly red, brimming with tears, were so moving they almost tugged on my heartstrings. The two men glanced at each other, then back to Courtney. She showed them her ripped earlobe and then held up her broken, swollen pinkie.

  It occurred to me that what I might be seeing in their eyes was sympathy. “She’s not Amy Carpenter,” I told them. “She’s used lots of aliases. She’s Courtney Logan, for God’s sake!” A mistake.

  Tall cop spat out: “Courtney Logan is dead.”

  “No, no,” I told him. “She’s not! The woman who’s dead is—”

  “Oh God! Please don’t make me sit here like this. Please, get me to a doctor,” Courtney wept. “I’m so scared I’ll bleed to death.” Shorter cop, gazing at her, looked as if his pity was turning to love, mixed with a dash of horror that someone would drop dead on his watch and he’d have to fill out the reports. Sensing this, she looked up at him, a lovely crystal tear resting on her lower lashes, on which, somehow, she’d had the luck or foresight to apply waterproof mascara.

  Two more cops arrived. Second tall cop was grimacing at the blood-soaked towel and therefore didn’t bond with Courtney. His partner, Female Cop, looked over at the first two and inquired, “Hey, guys. You call an ambulance?” A perfectly reasonable question, I thought.

  “This lady,” Tall Cop said, pointing to me, “is saying the other one—” His somewhat icy tone thawed as his finger moved toward Courtney. “She’s saying this one is Courtney Logan. The one that got shot in the head and put in her own swimming pool.”

  “If you’ll just listen for a minute,” I began.

  “Shut up, lady,” the short cop barked.

  “Hey, guys. Yes or no? You call an ambulance?”

  “I’m going to throw up,” Courtney announced with a note of genuine nausea in her voice. “Please, could someone get me to the bathroom fast?” All four cops took a step toward her.

  “Not before one of you calls Captain Sharpe at headquarters!” I shouted. Four heads turned to me. I saw four faces with foreheads creased, as if they’d only taken one semester of the language I was speaking. As I was repeating myself, Courtney made a run for it.

  Cleverly. Instead of standing, turning, and rushing for the kitchen door, like a person escaping, she rose from the chair in a crouched position. It barely seemed as if she had moved. Then she raced toward the door. The cops took a long instant to comprehend she was not making a run for the bathroom. Too long. Courtney was out the door and crossing the patio. “I have to get to a doctor,” she cried. “I have to!” God, she was fast!

  She had almost reached the grass when two of them got to her. But instead of kicking or biting, fighting to get free, as I’d expected, Courtney collapsed, falling to the flagstone, arms limp, torn earlobe lying on the stone. Tall and Short knelt beside her and called out “Ma’am?” over and over. After a minute, when she didn’t stir, each took a side and tried to help her up. However, despite her being not much heavier than a paperweight, they could only haul her up so that she was on her knees.

  I was calling out to Female Cop, “Could you please call Captain Sharpe and tell him you’re at Judith Singer’s house with Judith and Courtney Logan?” when Courtney made her mistake. Grabbing onto Short as if attempting to draw herself up, she tried to open his holster to take his gun. I had to give him credit. Before I could see it coming, he either swatted or smashed her so she was down on the patio again. Then he flipped her over onto her stomach and handcuffed her.

  At that point Female stepped back into the house and said something about calling for an ambulance and backup and what was that captain’s name at headquarters? I can’t recall what else she said, because when I next opened my eyes I was on my living-room couch and the emergency medical technician who was taking my blood pressure was saying, “Everything’s fine, dear.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “I HATE TO say it, but you’re going to have to regrout your tile.” Nancy stared down at the black and white tiles in the passageway. “All that blood.” She glanced over to me. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Just a little shaky.”

  “Seriously, how about a double Absolut? It won’t turn you into me.”

  “I already had a double Xanax,” I told her.

  We strolled back outside and sat on an old beach towel I’d spread on the grass on the side of the house. A cool day for a picnic, but the sky was radiant and the vision of the gun looking down its nose on me seemed fainter in the brightness. Cops were still in the kitchen and out on the patio, although all the crime-scene work seemed over. They chattered the way coworkers do on mornings after the Oscars or a World Series game: Can you believe what happened?

  “Did Courtney look anything like the shot of her we originally ran?” Nancy asked. “Or did she look like that nauseating, nostrils-on-parade picture that was in the Beacon?”

  “Neither. She dyed her hair dark brown, got really dark brown contact lenses, and lost weight.” Nancy’s eyebrows lifted. “She didn’t mention which diet. You know those corky clogs that add a couple of inches? She had them on, so I got the impression of someone five-three or five-four.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “You always go right to the heart of the matter,” I said. “A pink and orange getup. It could have been Ralph Lauren, but you’ll probably tell me it wasn’t.”

  “Describe it.” I did. Wearily, she shook her head. “No, no, no, you poor, benighted fool. It sounds like Escada. By the way, where is your Little Boy Blue? Or Big Boy Blue? Does he know what happened yet?”

  “Of course. He was here for a while.”

  “Holding your hand, no doubt.”

  “No doubt. But he went back to headquarters to have some jurisdictional dispute over the case. He worked on it, he wants it—for its own sake and as a way back into Homicide—but the schmendrick from Homicide who screwed up the case wants to keep it. He said he’ll be back.”

  Though Nancy didn’t change her expression, I somehow found it necessary to add, “He will. And not just for that.” When she did not reply, I changed the subject. “I can’t believe I actually fainted.”

  “So Victorian of you.”

  “I know. And one of my least favorite eras.”

  “You forget Dickens, but you’re in shock. God, you were so incredibly brave. To say nothing of effective. Can you talk about it some more or are you just going to stare up at that tree?”

  “The noble oak,” I murmured.

  “Noble sycamore, you ass. If you want to sit here in comfortable silence, that’s all right with me, even though I came here so you could ventilate.”

  In the capacity of official best friend, Nancy had arrived in time to hear me giving most of my statement to a young, gum-cracking detective. I’d spoken about the Ellen Berman pretense, the gun in Courtney’s hand and all she’d told me, my tearing off the earring, breaking her finger, and then the gun in my hand. For good measure I’d thrown in Courtney’s break for freedom, the scuffle, the handcuffs. “No,” I said. “I’d like to talk about it.”

  “Do you think Emily just surprised Courtney by coming over before Halloween and that’s why she got killed?” Nancy asked. “Or was the whole thing planned?”

  “Planned is my guess,�
�� I said, “although I’m still not sure how detailed the plan was, especially about Emily. Certainly the killing wasn’t a whim. Listen, whatever Courtney says is suspect. Maybe Emily did surprise her. Maybe she invited Emily over to get a few more fingerprints on things, have a nice drive with more fingerprints, then murder her in the woods. But it seems to me she’d used her charm to get Emily to go blonder and blonder for a reason, to be a better Courtney substitute. So she must have been thinking of the pool, hoping she’d be left there till the cover came off and the body would be in lousy shape. Or maybe she’d planned on burying Emily in Piney Woods Park, but digging a deep enough grave was too much of an effort. She did seem to spend the fall making plans—getting credit cards and fake ID, probably driving back and forth to Cherry Hill and maybe scouting out places to ditch Emily’s car, getting Emily a cell phone in Vanessa Russell’s name. And one of the days she sent the au pair Steffi out of the house with the kids: She told Steffi to take them to Baskin-Robbins if they started to kvetch. That was totally out of character. But she wanted to be sure no one could possibly connect her with Emily.”

  “Do you want my two cents?” Nancy asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I think that the minute she had the opportunity to make some serious bucks with Emily’s on-line skills and the insider trading, Courtney started planning her own takeover—of the money—and Emily’s murder. She strung Emily along, but once she got her mitts on all that money, there was no way she was going to share. Dead Emily was a given the minute Courtney got the money in a nice, warm offshore account.”

  “It was only a matter of timing, then?” I asked.

  “Timing and opportunity. Courtney probably wanted out for ages.” Delicately, Nancy picked a few blades of grass off her brown-and-white spectator flats. “Anybody else would think she had the perfect life, or at least a decent one.”

  “I know. But to her, it was a failure. She hadn’t made a mark in investment banking. She got turned down for a loan for StarBaby. And StarBaby itself: It wasn’t going to tank, but it does sound as though it was going no place fast. Her best friend, Kellye Ryan—”

  “Our Lady of Prada?”

  “Yes. Kellye and the young woman who was videotaping for her, Zee Friedman, the one I’d love to fix up with Joey: They seemed to think that by the summer Courtney was depressed. And then by the fall, her mind was somewhere else. A new lease on life—that didn’t include StarBaby.”

  “Don’t forget the husband,” Nancy interjected. “I bet she didn’t see him as a man who started a new business and was making a go of it.”

  “Of course not. She saw him as a loser, a guy who didn’t have the guts to be big.”

  “Big was an issue for Courtney,” Nancy observed. A uniformed cop walking by nodded politely. Suddenly, dazed by the power of Nancy’s innate man-attractant, he tried to smile suavely. By that time, of course, Nancy had lost track of his very existence.

  “That’s part of why I think Courtney was planning something before StarBaby’s lack of success got her down,” I went on. “Look, she took twenty-five thousand dollars out of their joint bank and brokerage accounts last spring and summer. I’m sure the police will subpoena her bank records, but she didn’t put that money into her StarBaby account.”

  “Maybe she spent it on something worthwhile, like clothes,” Nancy suggested. “Or—listen to this—she took the on-line plunge and lost the whole damn bundle trading stocks on the Internet!”

  “That was one of my guesses.” The tranquilizers were starting to take effect. I stretched out on the towel and watched leaves swishing in the breeze. “Or she could have used some of it to buy fake ID and open bank accounts. I bet that would be hard to find out, though. She used so damn many different names. Nelson said it looked to him as if Courtney had a great source of phony ID. From that ID, she was able to get credit cards and driver’s licenses in different names. Usually, good ID like that costs a bundle. So either she was willing to spend a healthy amount of money on it or she got some sort of quantity discount.”

  “Where would you buy ID like that?” Nancy asked.

  “Why? Whom do you want to be?”

  “I don’t know. Someone thirty-five. Remember when I was thirty-five? I was thinking, Holy shit, I’m old. Next stop, Death. Now? I would start over somewhere, pass myself off as a thirty-five-year-old—Okay, a thirty-five-year-old who’s lived hard. Not in Snore Valley. I suppose it’s a cliché, but I’d pick Paris. What I can’t comprehend is where did a mommy from Shorehaven come up with first-rate fake ID? She wasn’t a criminal.”

  “Of course she was! And smarter than most. As far as the ID, there’s supposed to be some on the Internet,” I reported. “Except Courtney strikes me as being too smart to order something like that, a birth certificate or a driver’s license—and then go present it to get a passport. She’d be risking arrest. She’d be risking a police or FBI sting. And she’d be risking blackmail by the scumbucket who sold it to her.”

  “So where else?”

  “She probably could finagle a birth certificate with a raised seal from some county in a sparsely populated state ... I don’t know. Like Montana maybe. Some functionary in New York or Florida wouldn’t be able to say ‘Hey, that’s not what a Montana birth certificate looks like.’ Maybe she just made it her business to find someone who sold high-quality stuff. It shouldn’t be different from drugs or any other contraband. Unless you really trust your source, it’s terribly risky.”

  “So the source could have been some sewer sludge guy—or Courtney herself getting a phony birth certificate?” Nancy asked.

  “Right. If it was Courtney, she’d need mail drops. I’m not sure if municipalities would mail a birth certificate to a box number. For all I know, it’s the same with end-of-the-month statements from on-line brokers. But considering what else she was willing to do, I suppose a mail drop would be easy enough.”

  “She certainly had a sense of entitlement,” Nancy observed. “Princeton.”

  “Please, you don’t need three credits in sociopathy to graduate from Princeton. She was—she is—a bad person.”

  “Can you imagine, stealing from your joint account with your husband while you’re still sleeping in the same room? Tacky. What’s fascinating to me is that when her best wasn’t good enough, what did she do? Turned around and became another person.”

  “Unmitigated chutzpah,” I murmured.

  Nancy twisted her hair into a topknot, then let it fall back onto her shoulders. “Too bad she became disagreeable.”

  “The murder business, you mean.”

  “Yes, that poor mouse woman. And you, almost!”

  “But Courtney was always willing to do whatever it took for her own ends. Remember how she took the Crunch-Munch money and put the blame on Ingrid Farrell?”

  “You’ve got to wonder,” Nancy reflected, “what kind of a guy Greg Logan is. Not only putting up with her sticking her hand in the till. She must have shown her true colors at some point. Couldn’t he know or intuit she was a bad seed?”

  “Some people thought she was fine. Kellye Ryan seems to have been genuinely devoted to her.”

  “Possibly Kellye is not the person for whom the phrase ‘Still waters run deep’ was coined.”

  “That’s true,” I agreed. “Courtney’s pool man thought well of her.”

  “Always the authoritative judge of virtue.”

  “So did her au pair. And Emily, of course. Although the pool guy didn’t know her very well. And Emily, may she rest in peace, is dead. And the au pair is so good-hearted she’d probably think ...”

  “What?” Nancy asked. “You were going to say something about her thinking Hitler was a nice guy, but then you remembered she was Austrian. Am I right?”

  “You’re in the right neighborhood,” I muttered. “Okay, yes. But getting back to how people viewed Courtney. A lot of them thought there was something not quite right, not the real McCoy about her. But it’s still possible Greg was
conned the way Emily was. Listen, it’s significant she betrayed the two people who were emotionally dependent on her. One she killed, one she left with a shattered life. Not just that, even though she claimed she was being kind by giving him an alibi, she made him top suspect by putting the body in the pool. And I’m not even mentioning her two kids.”

  “Was it the emotional dependency itself that drove her bonkers?” Nancy inquired.

  “Could be. She is really, really sick. Nelson said he’s met more than his share of those. Psychos or sociopaths or whatever. Most people think of them as madmen like Charles Manson, or obsessed losers like Timothy McVeigh. But he says a fair number of them are smart, attractive, charming. Like con men, who don’t just need the money; they need to pull the scam, to destroy lives. And I think with Courtney, her craziness—”

  “Or overwhelming greed.”

  “Or need. Whatever it was, it gave her the power, the energy to be convincing.” I got up from the towel and straightened out my shirt. “Guess what?” I said.

  “You’re going for a nap.”

  “How did you know? Seriously?”

  “Give me a break. And after the nap? Him?”

  “No. My client, Fancy Phil Lowenstein. And Gregory Logan.”

  It took me nearly two hours to tell Greg and Fancy Phil all that had happened from the beginning of the case. We sat in the Logan living room the way I had the last time. Not a speck of dust, the nap of the rug vacuumed to attention, but it didn’t look as though it had been used since my last visit. The room was still a shrine to Courtney’s grimly impeccable sense of design. But as I wound down my story, I noticed the tortoiseshell-framed photograph of husband and wife, Courtney and Greg aglow and agleam in their tennis whites, was no longer on the table beside the antique leather-bound books and the fat-bottomed onyx vase.