Singer 02 - Long Time No See (29 page)

Fortunately, he remembered. “I hear about the case every now and then.”

“Have you heard anything about a missing woman in the south part of New Jersey in relation to it?”

Nelson shook his head. “Who is she?”

“She’s a banker. She was scheduled to go on a three-week vacation to Australia and New Zealand. She left a little over a week before Halloween, when Courtney Logan went off to buy apples and never came back.”

“It might mean nothing.”

“I know. But it might mean something.”

He took out a business card from his ID case and said: “What’s her name?”

A little too late it dawned on me that if I gave Emily’s name, the Nassau County cops would either be on the Turnpike in two seconds flat to interview Emily’s neighbors and colleagues or request the Jersey cops to do it. I’d never get a shot. So I looked Nelson right in the eyes and lied: “I don’t know.”

“You’re lying.”

“That’s not very nice.” Possibly I dilated my nostrils to illustrate how offensive his accusation was.

“You’re a lousy liar, Judith.”

“I am not. You just know me too well.” We finished our drinks and ordered dinner while I filled him in on what I’d learned about FIFE and Emily, without giving her name. However, I did offer up the name of the Red Oak Bank in the spirit of fellowship.

If I wasn’t ebullient, sitting out on that deck in the pink-and-blue light of an early evening in June, at least I was as happy as I’d been in years. I didn’t want to count how many years. Looking at the menu, I told myself it was because I was actually getting a chance to talk about what truly enthralled me, and with a pro, no less. But by the time I decided on a small Caesar salad, without anchovies, and grilled halibut, I realized that most of my pleasure was being with Nelson. I still loved looking at him, hearing his voice again, being in his company. My sex drive, which I long assumed I’d misplaced somewhere in my late forties, was definitely in working order.

“How did you find out about this woman’s existence?” Nelson asked.

“I was speaking with a former colleague of Courtney’s who’d stayed vaguely in touch with her. He didn’t strike me as a genius. He’d gone from investment banking to joining his family’s company, giving mortgages or something. Anyhow, he’d met this New Jersey woman once doing some mortgage deal. Later someone told him about her disappearance. All he was saying was something like ‘Weird, two women just vanishing like that.’”

“What was his name?”

“What do I get in return?” I asked.

“My regards. Tell me his name.”

“What do you think, this guy killed both of them?” Nelson said nothing. “Trust me, he’s not a murderer. A little blabby for my taste. Immature.”

“Thank you for the psychological profile,” he remarked.

“For the record, even though Courtney had been in finance and this woman was, too, he wasn’t able to come up with any connection between them.” Still, I gave him Joshua Kincaid’s name because I couldn’t come up with any reason not to. I felt pretty confident that since Nelson wasn’t in Homicide any longer, the name wouldn’t get to them at least until Monday morning. Which gave me Sunday. “What does it mean, when someone vanishes into thin air? Do you assume they’ve been murdered and go looking for a killer?”

“If they’re like your two women, leading a seemingly normal life? Even if it’s not some psycho raping and killing, it’s still pretty often homicide. Most of the time the perpetrator turns out to be the boyfriend or husband. If this Courtney or the other one was leading a wild life, with a mountain of debt or some clear sign of irresponsibility, then we’d think in terms of them skipping and trying a new life under a new identity. Those types usually screw up just because they are so careless. It’s not easy to disappear.” Nelson fell silent for a moment. Too many intelligent men make a big deal about thinking. They purse their mouths, close their eyes, and say hmmmm, or they massage chins, or rotate their pens between their fingers—while you breathlessly await the jewels of cerebration that will fall from their lips. He, on the other hand, had a natural fluency of thought to speech. When he needed to stop and think, he merely stopped. No big deal, no hmmmms. “Even all those rich guys,” he continued, “the master-criminals-egomaniacs who steal millions: Whenever they move on, they usually leave a lot of pissed-off people behind. Ultimately, those people talk and the guys get caught.”

“So you’re thinking the other woman is dead, too?”

“Just sitting here like this, talking? Yes. But if I was a Jersey cop without too big a caseload, I’d keep looking.”

“For a Courtney connection?”

“Sure. But mostly I’d want to look at her whole life.”

“So you don’t think it’s a wild-goose chase?”

“I’d say it’s something we should look into.”

“‘We’meaning ...”

“Not you and me, Judith.”

My salad and his clam chowder arrived, which was fortunate because I couldn’t think of a withering rejoinder. I speared a small leaf of romaine and suggested that in all the information he’d heard about the Courtney Logan investigation, there might be a byte or two he could pass along that wasn’t Eyes Only or whatever big cop secrets are called. “Like your Homicide guys are apparently all excited because Greg Logan withdrew forty thousand dollars from their joint account and put it in his own name. That was only in response to Courtney having taken twenty-five thousand out of their joint accounts to throw away on StarBaby or cashmere bathrobes or whatever.”

“Don’t you think his lawyer mentioned that?” Nelson asked.

“So?”

“So, maybe someone did follow up.” Except for an occasional flare of temper, he’d always been a low-key, don’t-show-your-cards kind of guy. To another person, the “someone” following up would be interpreted as a reference to a detective in the Homicide unit of the Nassau County Police Department. But despite his low key, I knew the way Nelson played the game enough to realize he was the “someone” he was referring to.

“What did you find out?”

He gave me a small smile of acknowledgment and said: “The twenty-five thou she took: A buddy of mine in Homicide looked into it. There was no trace of it in any business or personal account. They couldn’t find any photography equipment that would come to anything near that. Twenty-five thousand bucks just disappeared.”

I left my fork in the salad, put my arms on the table, and leaned toward him. “Nelson, doesn’t that tell you something?”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“Listen—” I think he was on the verge of calling me “my sweetheart,” which he’d often called me during our affair. But instead he said, “Judith, sometimes what looks like a clue is just a plain, old fact.” I was about to argue that twenty-five thousand bucks would be a big, fat fact, but he held up his hand. “And sometimes cases don’t get solved. Sometimes killers go free.”

“I know, but I don’t think Greg—”

“Why not?”

“He’s too smart to have done it so stupidly.”

“Let me tell you something.” He clunked down his spoon alongside his soup bowl. “A lot of killers are stupid. Those cases almost always get solved in less than seventy-two hours. And sometimes a pretty smart person kills and thinks he’s covered it up in a genius way, like the bad guy in Sherlock Holmes—”

“Professor Moriarty.”

“—except they get arrested within seventy-two hours, too. Now take your friend Greg Logan.”

“I’m not even going to bother saying he’s not my friend.”

“Good. He seems to have gotten everything he might have wanted: No wife, no nagging. Control over all his property, custody of his kids, bank and stock brokerage accounts. Okay, that’s minus twenty-five thou, but either it’s his cost of doing business or he found it and stashed it someplace. In any case, we would have solved this case in seventy-two hours, too, if the idiot who was in charge had done his job.”

“Looked in the pool, you mean?”

“That? Sure. You know what almost seven months in a three-quarters-filled swimming pool does to a body?”

I pushed my salad plate away and asked: “Are you going to give me a graphic description that will make me realize this sort of thing is too ugly for me and I should stick to history?”

“I’m going to try.”

“Don’t they put chlorine in the water?”

“Fifteen gallons of liquid chlorine and algacide.”

“You read the reports!”

“Reports, autopsy findings, a fast look at the video and crime-scene pictures. I did it for you, my sweetheart.” He said it in a mocking way, but couldn’t carry it off. Two red stripes of embarrassment appeared on the tops of his cheeks. “So, do you know what all that time does to a body, even with the chemicals?” he challenged. “See, it decomposes from inside out, so the gases made it float to the top. It’s
really
disgusting after months in cold water. What’s left of the outside of the body gets a waxy look. You wouldn’t have wanted to see Courtney Logan after they pulled her out.” He paused, waiting for me to tell him to stop. When I didn’t, he took a couple of ostentatious spoonfuls of clam chowder. “Of course her face wasn’t identifiable, and part of her head had been blown away by the two bullets. But we had her dental records. Hey, do you know how the skin on your hands and feet get when you’re in the water a long time?” I nodded. “Well, imagine how it would look after seven months.”

I pulled back my salad plate, stabbed a crouton, and ate it. Nelson looked annoyed that I didn’t seem at least mildly nauseated. “How can you tell whether a homicide victim has been murdered someplace else and then moved if it’s been in water for months? I mean, if she were shot right by the pool, would it be different than if she were shot someplace else and brought back?”

“There could be trace evidence at the scene. You know, signs the body had been dragged from a short distance. Or an out-of-place bit of material that indicates some distant location. Like a really unusual soil sample that could tell us she wasn’t killed on Long Island. But after seven months, it’s unlikely, and in Courtney’s case, it didn’t happen.”

“Was there enough left of her to take fingerprints?” I asked.

“They got two or three, I think. Matched prints on her stuff in the house.”

I picked up a bread stick. “You read everything?”

“I read a lot of it,” he answered cautiously.

“Did anything in all the evidence you read about strike you as odd, or worth exploring further?” Slowly, he rocked his head from side to side: maybe yes, maybe no. “What?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

“But you’re good at this and the guy in charge of the case isn’t!” He shrugged. “Wouldn’t you want to see it solved? An innocent man may be—”

“I knew you would say that,” he remarked.

“So what’s your response?”

“If I see anything that can point to someone as the killer or exonerate your boyfriend’s son, I’ll be sure to mention it to one of the nonassholes on the case. Okay?”

“Nelson.”

“What?”

“Are you ticked off with yourself for calling me your sweetheart or with me for staying on the case even though you warned me off?”

“You know what women always say?” he finally said.

I smiled. “What do we always say?”

“I feel like I’m being used.”

“That? You know I’m not using you.”

“Yes you are.”

“Nelson, I’m talking to you as a ... coworker.”

“No. You’re jerking me around to get information you shouldn’t have.”

The pigtailed waiter approached, tray in hand, and eyed us in the way a disapproving parent might look at children who didn’t clean their plates. “Do you want me to hold your entrées?” he inquired, so overly polite as to be rude. Nelson was still giving me the evil eye, so I indicated to the waiter that he could take my plate. While he was at it, he grabbed Nelson’s bowl, then promptly replaced it with his dinner, fried scallops and french fries. Finally, huffing as if he were used to serving a more sophisticated clientele, the waiter set down my fish and left us to our own devices.

“How about this?” I said. “I’ll tell you some of my thoughts and you do with them what you want.”

“Like ... ?”

“Like first seeing if the New Jersey woman and Courtney had any connection. Didn’t you say in the week or so before Halloween, Courtney put seven hundred plus miles on her car? She could have gone to Cherry Hill and back a few times.”

“Maybe she drove to Colonial Williamsburg.”

“Maybe Miss New Jersey had financial dealings with Courtney. All her money had been cleaned out of the bank. And Courtney was down twenty-five thousand.”

“Even if they had some dealings, then we’d likely be looking for a third person.”

“But the woman might have killed Courtney,” I objected.

“Or Greg Logan could have done the job on both of them, stashed the bucks someplace, and is biding his time.”

“If Phil Lowenstein had even an inkling his son might have killed Courtney, do you think he would want me looking into this?”

“Aren’t you hungry?” Nelson inquired.

“I love lukewarm fish. Listen to me. Courtney Logan embezzled from her high-school candy-bar sales.”

He started to laugh. “That’s fifteen to life.”

“Shush. Something was wrong with her. She told the young woman who did the videotaping for her that she had another person working for her. But there’s absolutely no evidence of him. Courtney was lying.”

“Maybe she was trying to puff herself up.”

“And when she went out and the au pair didn’t know where, she was supposed to tell Greg that Courtney was out shopping.”

“What did you tell your husband three afternoons a week when we—”

“Not shopping, but how tactful of you to ask.” When he didn’t apologize I said: “Courtney told the au pair that Greg had too much on his plate. Except no one else, including the au pair, ever saw him as pressured or stressed. And as far as an affair goes, only one person thinks she could have been having one: her best friend.”

“Well,” Nelson said, “you’re the historian. How often in the history of the world does a woman
not
tell her best friend?”

“That’s my point. Courtney didn’t. The best friend is very pretty and sweet but probably not the sharpest knife in the drawer. She said Courtney never told her anything about a guy. She just suspected it because Courtney seemed so distracted. Except I don’t see them as best friends. Like everything Courtney did, there was this quality of superficiality to it.