Singer 02 - Long Time No See (27 page)

“Did they check to see if she had embezzled any—”

“Of course,” he said, managing not to snicker at my too obvious question, although barely. “She didn’t. So what else can I tell you? This Emily was zero-point-zero-zero percent like Courtney. I think whoever called to tell me about her said she was single and ultraserious and from what I can remember not good-looking and didn’t have a personality because I
can’t
remember. You know what I mean? Like a total blank. Not
totally
total. I get”—he closed his eyes and swayed his head like a fortune-teller—“an aura of dorkiness. If I’m thinking of the right person. Actually, no. Not dorky. A loser.”

“Could her path have crossed Courtney’s?”

“Anything’s possible,” Josh replied, pulling an Oreo apart and scraping off the filling with his top front teeth. “Is it likely? Statistically, I’d say like two shots out of a hundred. Red Oak is way down in South Jersey, and whoever was telling me about her disappearing mentioned—I think, but I wouldn’t swear on a stack of Bibles—that she also lived somewhere around Cherry Hill. And Courtney had been out of it for years, for however old her oldest kid is. Also, I doubt if a diddly little bank like Red Oak had much business with Patton Giddings, although anything’s possible, and, like Patton Giddings told me, basically, I don’t know shit about investment banking. So for all I know maybe Emily and Courtney were best friends.”

“Did they ever find any trace of her? Or her body?”I asked.

“I’m hardly on the A-list of calls to make when the cops or whoever trip over Emily something’s body,” Josh replied. “But I never heard anything else.”

It was only when the train from Manhattan came up out of the tunnel that I allowed myself to tingle with anticipation. How many young women in New York and New Jersey who are somehow involved in finance could vanish into thin air or, in Courtney’s case, into the family swimming pool? Sure, it was possible that the answer was forty-seven. But I had a gut feeling that somehow there was a connection between Courtney Logan and—I went straight from the Shorehaven station to my computer—Emily Chavarria.

Bingo? Maybe. According to the
Courier-Post,
Emily Chavarria, age thirty-one, a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, an assistant branch manager at an office of the Red Oak National Bank in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, left for a three-week trip to New Zealand and Australia on Friday, October 22. A week and two days before Courtney’s disappearance. She was never seen again. On Monday, November 15, the president of the bank, concerned that Emily had not only missed the eleven 3
A.M
. trust department meeting but hadn’t called in—two occurrences utterly at odds with her perfect-attendance, perfect-person record—had his secretary drive the fifteen minutes to Emily’s place not far from Cherry Hill. When there was no answer at the door, the secretary called the police and, getting a key from the apartment complex’s property manager, she and two cops entered the premises. No sign of disturbance. No sign of luggage. No sign of Emily Chavarria. Not then. Not since.

B
LESS THE
W
ORLD
Wide Web. The articles from the local New Jersey newspapers I came up with mentioned Emily Chavarria belonging to two groups: an organization of New Jersey bankers and the South Jersey chapter of a national group called FIFE—Females in Financial Enterprises—which I guessed was preferable to WIFE.

I called Fancy Phil and gave him the assignment of finding out if Courtney had been a member of FIFE. Again he muttered about a wild-goose chase, I muttered back that if it was a wild-goose chase, I was doing it on my dime, not his. He grumbled, I’ll get back to you. I was relieved it did sound as though he meant I’ll get back
to
you rather than
at
you, a concern I would likely not have had if my first client had been a podiatrist. Anyhow, I went back to the articles. Emily came from a small town, Leesford, Oklahoma. I checked out Leesford on the Yahoo white pages: Only one Chavarria was listed. I called Chavarria, Pete, and got his wife on the phone. “Mzzz. Chavarria,” I began, to avoid the Ms./Mrs. quandary which, for all I knew, might not have been completely resolved in Oklahoma, “my name is Judith Singer. I’m an investigator on Long Island. I’ve been looking into a case that has some similarities to your daughter’s disappearance.”

“Uh-huh,” she replied.

“I hate to bother you during what must be an upsetting time for you—”

“We don’t ... know where ... she is,” she cut in, pausing between every two words. She didn’t sound obviously broken up, but more like someone not inclined toward conversation, though whether that was out of taciturnity or grief I couldn’t tell.

“I understand that. I’d just like to ask you a few questions, maybe come up with some parallels between the woman who is missing on Long Island and Emily.” She didn’t say anything, so I went on: “I know she was scheduled to make a trip to Australia and New Zealand. Did you hear from her, or get any postcards or anything?”

“No.”

“I see.”

“The police in New Jersey. They said ... it didn’t look like Emily went.”

I decided not to ask how they knew, because her answer might exhaust her willingness to talk. So I made a guess that the Jersey cops had found she didn’t board her plane—or something like that—and instead asked: “Does Emily have any close friends on the East Coast?”

“I guess. I wouldn’t know their names.” Ms. or Mrs. Chavarria had what I guessed was an Oklahoma twang, the sort of accent that makes most people sound open and uncomplicated. Not her. Yet even though I assumed she must be going through hell, there was something about her—or maybe about me—that did not automatically evoke sympathy, which made me feel both guilty and wary. I sensed my reaction might mean something, because even though Greg Logan had been a cold fish the night I’d gone to speak to him, I still had felt terrible about his loss. “I
told
the police that,” she added.

“Right. Do you know if Emily had a boyfriend?”

“I don’t know. She came home for Christmas, but she only stayed two days.”

“So maybe she didn’t get a chance to keep you up to date.”

“Maybe,” Ms. or Mrs. Chavarria replied.

“Was she going someplace else?”

“No. Christmas and New Year’s is busy at the bank.”

“Do you know if Emily ever went up to New York City, or to Long Island?”

“No.”

“Did she ever mention a friend named Courtney? Courtney Logan.”

“No.”

“Her maiden name”—I almost slipped and said “was,” but caught myself in time to keep it in the present tense—“is Courtney Bryce.”

“No.”

“Can I ask: When was the last time you heard from Emily?”

“A couple of days before she went on her trip. Except the police say she didn’t go. She called to say good-bye.” There was no break in her voice at the word “good-bye.” Not a flicker of emotion.

“Did she sound as if she were upset about anything?”

“No.”

“Was she excited about her trip?”

“I guess.”

“Did she say she was looking forward to it?”

“No.”

Finding myself winding the telephone cord around my finger, I made myself stop when I noticed the upper joint turning cerise from strangulation. “Did the police from New Jersey ask you anything I haven’t?” I finally asked.

It took a very, very long minute, but finally Ms. or Mrs. Chavarria answered: “They wanted to know where she kept her money.”

“And did you know?”

“No.”

“Did they say why they were asking?”

“Because she took her money out of the bank.”

“All her money?”

“That’s what they said. And out of her stocks and bonds.”

After I gave her my number and asked her to call collect if anything else occurred to her, I hung up and stared at the phone as if I could see through the wires and circuitry. If only I could call Nelson was my first thought and Stop it! was my second. And my third was that years earlier he’d told me how most investigative work was supposed to be boring, following A to B to C and so on, in mind-numbing, skip-nothing sequence. However, he’d found the thoroughness of it comforting. Even if you were ninety-nine percent sure of knowing what G was, you still had to go through D, E, and F. For some mysterious reason, that time-consuming process sometimes led to bright, new ideas and almost always made for a stronger case.

Easy to be meticulous, I thought, if you’re a cop and you have access to A, B, C, D, and so on. Go through missing people’s houses, get to their bank or brokerage accounts, flash a badge, and ask your questions. I had no subpoena, no license, not even a business card.

However, I did have Fancy Phil, and he was turning out to be a not-bad gumshoe. Courtney had been a member of the Wall Street chapter of FIFE, he reported back, though in the past few years, what with living on Long Island, having two young children, and running StarBaby, Greg doubted she’d gotten to any meetings. I closed my eyes, trying to envision a joint tea/meeting/cocktail hour between the downtown Manhattan FIFEers and the South New Jerseyites, but I couldn’t get a picture. I probably exhaled a careworn sigh, because Fancy Phil demanded: Whatsa matter? Nothing, I replied. But do you think you can go back and ask Greg if Courtney was ever active in the association, or if she’d gone to any event where she might have met members from other chapters? There’s a FIFE member from New Jersey who’s been missing since November. What would stop me from asking him? he asked, sounding cranky. Well, I replied, for starters he might think it curious, your asking such a specific type of question. Curious? Fancy Phil declared. I’m his old man. If Gregory can’t trust me, he can’t trust no one. If you think he don’t know that then you’re not thinking.

I decided I needed to stop worrying the Courtney-Emily connection to death. Unfortunately, I couldn’t call Nancy, who would instruct me not to be an utter ass. She and her husband had gone to a dinner party at some
Newsday
executive’s house where she was convinced Larry would jabber on about Gothic architecture, mock her political observations, spill red wine, laugh his raucous donkey laugh, and cost her her job. So I meandered into the sunroom, channel surfed, and came across
Stagecoach
with John Wayne and Claire Trevor as the whore with the heart of gold—one of my favorite westerns. I settled in for a night on the couch, a squishy throw pillow perfectly supporting the back of my neck and my head. Except I couldn’t concentrate because I couldn’t stop brooding over what connection there could be between Courtney and Emily.

My first reaction was to consider more carefully Fancy Phil’s suggestion that I was on a wild-goose chase. The two women had been in separate chapters of FIFE, which was probably a good-sized organization. What were the odds against them knowing each other? As I’d always been queen of the SAT verbals and among the deeply pathetic in math, I couldn’t begin to calculate what the chances were against two highly intelligent, reasonably successful and responsible women around the same age winding up murdered or missing. Thus, unencumbered by fact, I kissed off the wild-goose-chase hypothesis.

My next guess was that some third person—a nutcase, an icy, methodical killer—had done them both in. Whoever it was might have been cruel beyond belief—besides being homicidal—because he/she had stashed Courtney in her family’s swimming pool. Or maybe he/she had just been pressed for time: trick or treaters out and about, people inside the Logan house. Or he/she had to get rid of the body fast because he/she needed a day, a week, or, as it turned out, months, to get out of town? But when had he/she done the deed? Steffi and the children had seen Courtney driving away. Was it when she arrived back home with the mysterious missing apples? Could she have been murdered in the Grand Union parking lot and driven home in her own car? If so, how come there were no traces of blood from the head wounds? Or was she kidnapped, held, and killed a day or a week later? After all that time in the pool, how precise could the medical examiner be?

I turned off the TV, strolled into the kitchen, took out a bag of those pygmy peeled carrots, and started to chew. There was a big difference between the two dead/missing women, if indeed there was a Courtney-Emily link. Courtney’s sapphire earrings that Greg had given her for her thirtieth birthday were where they were always kept, in the safety-deposit box. Other than the twenty-five thousand she’d helped herself to from around Mother’s Day to Labor Day, her money was where it belonged, in joint bank and brokerage accounts and in her StarBaby business account. And possibly most important, there were no signs of planning; Courtney had actually said: “I forgot something. I just have to run to Grand Union for a minute.”

Emily Chavarria, on the other hand, she of never missing a day’s work, had been discovered missing only after the three weeks’ vacation she was supposedly taking, when she didn’t return to the Red Oak Bank. The New Jersey police had asked her parents about her money—specifically, where was it. How much had it been? Five hundred, five thousand, fifty thousand dollars? Five hundred thousand? Who knew? After all, Emily had been graduated from one of the best business schools in the country. She could have been a canny investor. On the other hand, maybe she’d lost a bundle guessing on the wrong dot-com stock.

I took another carrot, despite my chronic worry that I’d chew too fast, choke, not be able to do the Heimlich maneuver on myself, and would die not only needlessly but still sixteen pounds above the “large-boned” group on the height/weight tables. Anyhow, the difference between the two women was that there seemed to have been planning behind Emily’s disappearance and, perhaps, murder. If she’d vanished or been killed after her last day of work, no one would look for her for three weeks. She’d left for her trip on a Friday, more than a week before Courtney disappeared. Just like someone with a perfect attendance record to finish up the complete week, I mused. Just like someone that meticulous to have a plan.

I was telling myself to stop imagining and start digging, that the guilty party, the person with the nefarious plan, had most likely been a third person. Or, I mulled, going back to the Fancy Phil-wild-goose-chase theory, maybe there’d been no plan at all: Emily Chavarria’s disappearance and Courtney Logan’s murder had nothing to do with each other. The phone rang. I risked my life swallowing a not-quite-chewed bite of carrot so instead of saying hello, I coughed.