Singer 02 - Long Time No See (12 page)

“What about her husband?”

“I only met him once—the last time I saw her. He came in after golf. The way she looked at him you’d think he was this combo of—I don’t know—Gary Cooper and Jude Law. You mentioned warmth: She acted pretty warm with him, as if he was really, really hot. To me, he was a majorly boring golf guy with good facial planes.”

“Do you think the hot stuff was an act on her part?”

Zee cocked her head to one side for a moment of introspection. Finally she said: “I never had enough of a sense of the real Courtney to know if there was a false Courtney. For all I could tell, she was deep and unknowable. Or shallow and what you saw was all there was.”

“But with you she was just businesslike?”

“Right, but ... In the last couple of months, she did seem kind of detached. I mean, not upset or sad it wasn’t doing better. Indifferent. Distant. Her mind was someplace else.”

“Where?”

Zee offered an I-don’t-know shrug. “I couldn’t begin to guess. But Courtney went from trying to inhale for me—which was a real pain, I’m very organized—to basically letting me wing it.”

“Could she have been depressed?”

“Well, she always acted so peppy. It was hard to see beyond that. She’d say hi and it would come out ‘Hi-ee!’ with this cute little squeak at the end. I’d say she was pretty low in July, but she was still squeaking. And by September she was squeaking Hi-ee, except her head was someplace else that wasn’t StarBaby country.”

“Did she seem afraid of anything? Nervous in any way?”

“Not that I could see, but then again, how much was she going to let me see?”

“Could she have been in love? Having an affair?” Zee offered me an I-don’t-know shrug. “Did you ever see her emotional about anything?”

Zee shook her head slowly, though I could see she was still mulling over my question. While she mulled, I concluded she wasn’t a homicidal psychopath and would be terrific for Joey. “It was weird,” she said finally. “One time she got a phone call. We were in her office, which was an upstairs bedroom she’d converted. Cool. She used a beaten-up table that
had
to be an antique for her desk. There were tons of real flowers in vases. The room was done to a tee, like everything in the house. Anyhow, she put whoever was calling on hold and then went someplace else. But she must have stayed on the second floor, maybe her bedroom, because I could hear her, although a lot of it was muffled. She seemed pretty upset: ‘Why can’t you ...’ And what else? Oh. ‘You
promised ...’
That was all I heard, but boy, did she sound hassled. Almost desperate. I don’t know, I could be reading too much into it.”

“Could you tell if she was talking to a man or woman?” Zee shook her head. “Do you happen to remember when it was?”

“Late afternoon, when she was making out my check. That’s why I was in her office. It must have been my last check—which would have made it a Sunday. The Sunday before Halloween. The Sunday before she disappeared.”

“Was that before or after you met her husband that afternoon?”

“After. Definitely after.”

From Zee’s I drove from Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge—a structure that does not inspire confidence in the profession of civil engineering—into Brooklyn to keep a lunch date I’d made with Joey two weeks earlier. Ever since Bob died, I had to force myself out of the house to live something that vaguely resembled a life.

Except whenever I was out, all I wanted to do was get home. It wasn’t so bad the days I was teaching at St. Elizabeth’s, because my classes were all in the morning. I could be safely home by twelve-thirty. But for the first few months after his death, when I had days off, and I’d be doing volunteer work or running errands, I found myself scurrying to my car and rushing back to the house at lunchtime. And once I got there, my face damp from the tension, my breathing harsh ... What? What was I expecting? Bob calling really long distance?

So for the last eighteen months or so I’d pushed myself back into the world, making lunch and dinner dates weeks in advance. Some nights I went to meetings, lectures, concerts. I was in an adult-ed class for beginning conversational Spanish. Or I let Nancy drag me into the city, to the galleries or the theater. When I was alone I buried myself in piles of term papers or exams. Or I’d reread a favorite book—nothing new, nothing unexpected for me. I played endless, numbing games of computer solitaire. Or I’d watch my favorite old movies until I’d become so enervated by Rosalind Russell’s pluck that I’d fall asleep.

Maybe Socrates was right and the unexamined life was not worth living, but I was giving it my best shot. Weekends were harder. Everybody else knocked themselves out with leisure. But unless Nancy or one of the kids was free, or I had a date, I’d have no answer for the universal Monday-morning-at-work question: What did you do this weekend? For a while I made elaborate to-do lists in eighteen-point boldface and taped them up on the refrigerator. However, by Sunday night the only crossed-out item would be something like “Find Jane Fonda low-impact video,” which, instead of inserting into the VCR as I’d pledged to myself, I’d inserted into the garbage can. All I seemed able to do was clean house. Along with the cassette I’d toss out stuff I’d previously been unable to part with: a bag of potting soil from around the time of the Reagan-Carter-Anderson race, five thousand pounds of
Gourmet
magazines, Bob’s collar stays.

Anyhow, Joey took me to a new, hot restaurant near his apartment. The waiters, in white, short-sleeved shirts, black slacks, and skinny black ties, looked like funeral directors from Tuscaloosa. The food, however, was not southern but a trendy fusion, Californian and Cuban, which seemed to mean vertical stacks of rare fish, greens, and assorted legumes over
al dente
rice. Joey had not only heard about Crabapple Films but had actually given their latest release, a film set on Staten Island but based on
As You Like It,
four and a half out of his five stars. But he said no, I could not call and ask Zee if she was interested in being fixed up with him. And no, movie critics do not casually saunter into production offices and ask half-Chinese, half-Jewish PA’s for information on their latest projects.

When I got home, I weeded my flower beds and vegetable patch until it was too dark to find weeds. It wasn’t only the loss of Bob, the change of my status from wife to widow, that made weekends so tough. It was the other loss in my life—Nelson Sharpe. For twenty years I’d spent too many Saturdays and Sundays in a reflective fog, summoning up every episode of our relationship—and there were plenty of episodes. Worse, the previous year when I’d accidentally bumped into him for a total of three seconds: I compulsively replayed that scene again and again, choosing it hands down over anything the present had to offer.

Okay, the scene: It had been almost twenty years since Nelson and I had last laid eyes on each other. Suddenly there he was, walking right past me. The truth? He looked semilousy. His salt-and-pepper hair had hardly any pepper left. His face was the chalky, indoor color of a lifelong civil servant, though later I tried to tell myself he’d simply gone pale with shock at seeing me. While I had neither the time nor the presence of mind to give him the once-over, his body still looked fine. His eyes, still beautiful, large, and velvety brown, were wide open—with amazement or horror. For those three seconds they did not leave my face.

It’s amazing how long three seconds can last. Naturally, I immediately thought there was some ghastly flaw he’d spotted, one of those hideous imperfections of middle age I’d missed because my eyesight had gone to hell—a giant hair growing out of my chin, an entire cheek covered by a rampaging liver spot. I held my arms tight to my sides so as not to reach up and feel for what was wrong. But then I reassured myself that for someone who, in her youth, had assumed that by her mid-fifties she’d resemble Albert Einstein, I was still fairly attractive. However, before I could think of something unmortifying to say, or offer him a serene nod, he had passed me by.

When I reported the encounter (in encyclopedic, adolescent detail) to Nancy, she made me swear not to do anything crazy like call him. I swore. Nevertheless, she insinuated I’d try some cute trick to get around my oath—like faxing him Bob’s obituary—so I slammed down the phone.

Actually, it was Nelson who called me the next morning. He explained he hadn’t meant to be rude, but was so shocked to see me he couldn’t think of anything to say. We talked for just a few minutes. He told me there was a new political regime in the department. He was out of Homicide and head of a unit called Special Investigations. He also said he and June had gotten divorced fifteen years before. He’d been married for three years to a woman named Nicole, a high-school guidance counselor. Naturally, being the Compleat Schnook, I asked how old she was. Thirty-nine, which technically made him old enough to be her father and untechnically made me speechless with something pretty close to despair. He filled the silence by asking what I was doing, so I told him I’d gotten my doctorate and was teaching college. I didn’t say a word about Bob. Nelson said, Maybe one of these days we could get together, have a cup of coffee. I said no, I didn’t think that was a good idea.

And that was it. End of conversation. Later I was positive that when he spoke of his new wife his voice hadn’t had a lilt, but Nancy declared I was
non compos mentis
or, alternatively, engaged in the most pathetic sort of wishful thinking. So I demanded, Then how come he wants to have coffee with me? She replied he’s probably an old lech who reflexively whips out his wonker for an airing every time a woman passes by. He’s not
that
old, I chimed in, and he was never a lech. Drop this, Nancy warned. Whatever it was you had together, it never meant to him what it meant to you.

But back to the Courtney Logan case. Since it was Memorial Day, I had the leisure on that Monday morning to attempt to come up with a reasonable suspect for the murder who could take the place of Greg. However, I soon realized I didn’t know anywhere near enough about Courtney’s friends and associates to begin. Since I couldn’t interrogate Greg, I did the next best thing and called my client, Fancy Phil Lowenstein. He said he’d meet me that night in a new restaurant. In Port Washington. La Luna Toscana. Eight o’clock. You get there before me, you tell Antonio, Listen, I’m the doctor of history who’s here for Phil. He’ll take care of you till I get there.

But Fancy Phil had arrived before I did, and was seated at a corner table. He faced the room, his back toward a mural of a moonlit olive grove that for some reason was overrun by a herd of cross-eyed sheep. At first all I could see of Phil’s outfit was a giant red napkin over his chest. Then I saw it was tucked into the neck of a black sports shirt that had a minuscule pattern of what appeared to be chartreuse boomerangs. He wore a gold link bracelet and a gold watch with twelve diamonds instead of numerals. Maybe to go with the watch, he had on his doozy of a diamond pinkie ring.

Before Fancy Phil was so much antipasto that what must have been the large oval platter beneath it all was completely camouflaged. Cheese vied with peppers for air. Artichoke hearts tried their best to squeeze in between the bresaola and pepperoni. His pudgy fingers were busy rolling up slices of prosciutto and provolone into a cigar shape. He stuffed the entire cylinder into his mouth, chewed once, swallowed with a big bounce of his Adam’s apple, and commanded: “Sit down, sweetheart. I ordered some stuff. If you don’t like it, Antonio’ll have the chef make whatever you want. So, you come up with any, uh, theories?”

“I’m working on it,” I answered as he poured me a glass of red wine.

He held my glass up to the light. “Rosso di Montalcino.” His accent would make an Italian shriek with laughter. Not to his face, of course. Someone might have the nerve to laugh with Fancy Phil, but never at him. “It comes from Tuscany. That’s what ‘Toscana’ means. Tuscany. It don’t mean parrot.”

I decided not to inquire why anyone might think such a thing. “I need to speak to more people who knew Courtney,” I told him. “I’ve got feelers out trying to get the names of her close friends, but I could get going quicker if you could help me.”

“No problem.” He picked up a dark olive so huge it looked like a major organ from a small mammal. He popped it into his mouth and it disappeared. He did not seem to know or care if it had a pit.

“When do you think you could come up with some kind of a list?”

“Now,” he said.

“You have it all written down?”

“Not written. I know stuff from Gregory. I spoke to him and then I went there after you called me.”

Iron sconces on the wall held flickering bulbs that were supposed to approximate the gleam of candles, but instead of a soothing glow, the continual sputter of light made you wonder if your retina was detaching. La Luna Toscana. For some reason I never could explain, whenever a new culinary trend got under way in Manhattan, like Tuscan cuisine, it spread to the other four boroughs, then went west, straight out to Kansas City—with a side trip to Emporia—before it could manage to cover the twenty-six miles east to the north shore of Long Island.

“Greg gave you specific names?” I asked, pondering a chunk of white cheese that felt hard enough to break a tooth. I set it on the side of my plate and picked up a bread stick. “For you to give to me?”

Wearily, Fancy Phil shook his head. Naturally, not a single jet black hair changed position. “Nah. I asked him what he told the lawyer. One of the things he told her were the names of Courtney’s friends, her business people. Then when I was upstairs with Morgan playing Candyland, I walked out for a few minutes and went into her office.” He paused. “This is strictly between you and me.”

“Sure.”

“So I’m in her office. I don’t know about computers, but I look at the fat leather book she had, with a calendar and addresses and other crap. A map of the Underground in London.”

“It’s called a Filofax. It’s made in England.”

“Bully for England.”

“So you took notes of what was in her Filofax?”

“No, no, no. I didn’t need to take no notes. I never forget nothing.” He snapped a celery stick in two and shook one of the pieces at me the way a teacher would shake a pointer at a deliberately dense student. “You should remember that, Doc.”