Singer 02 - Long Time No See (3 page)

And then, less than a year before, we’d caught a glimpse of each other. For barely an instant. Unplanned. Nelson looked even more shocked than I felt. All he could manage was a brief nod as he kept walking. The next morning at eight-thirty—the time he used to call me knowing Bob would be on his way to the city—my phone rang.

However, the three seconds of seeing him and that very short phone conversation proved, for me, three seconds too long and one talk too many. After Bob’s death, I wasn’t exactly going to win any mental health awards. It took me months to get over that fleeting encounter with Nelson. I lifted the phone to call him a couple of thousand times. The only reason I hung up before the connection was actually made was that he was a cop and could no doubt trace any call. Naturally I couldn’t sleep. Some internal motor kept racing. Some inner voice wouldn’t stop screaming Fight or Flight; all that held me back from fighting or fleeing was a cloud of despondency so thick I couldn’t see my way through it. Since I was already the Zoloft Queen, I tried to cure my ills with more therapy. Relaxation cassettes. Self-help books. A yoga video. Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. Finally, what helped was time. So no more detecting for me. I’d vowed as much to Nancy. The previous week, when I discovered my Jeep straying onto Bluebay Lane, the street on which the Logans lived, I made a U-turn and drove straight home.

With Smarmy Sam gone, I turned back to my computer screen. There were the same three paragraphs of what was supposed to be a seven-hundred-fifty-word review of a book about the Glass-Steagall Act I’d promised to email two weeks earlier. Yet instead of a fourth paragraph, I typed an outline of what I knew from the papers, radio, and TV:

GREG ... SHOULD HE BE SUSPECT

IN COURTNEY DISAPPEARANCE?

1.     Spouse usually 1st suspect.

2.     Greg owns small chain of take-out places called Soup Salad Sandwiches. One in Huntington. Rest on the South Shore.

A.  Smart. Graduated from Brown, MBA from Columbia.

B.  Got into food business when father, Fancy Phil, gave him 2 fast food franchise stores in N.J. called Mr. Yummy’s. Sold them for the $$$ to start own business from scratch.

3.     SSS: Stores sell 3 varieties of soups, salads, and sandwiches daily. Big on quality ingredients. Stores in upper-middle-income towns.

4.     An au pair living with Logans. University student. Depending on which account, from Austria or Germany. She was one Courtney told, “I forgot something. I just have to run to Grand Union for a minute.” Any funny business with au pair and Greg??????

I also noted all the information I could recall about Courtney and her company, StarBaby. The following morning, on my way to work, I became one of those pitiful sensation sniffers and drove (shamefully slowly) down Bluebay Lane. It was the day before Thanksgiving. I should have spent those extra minutes at home with an orange so I could toss a few dozen strands of zest along with a tablespoon of Grand Marnier into the canned cranberry sauce—an old family recipe. Instead I found myself scrutinizing Greg and Courtney’s red-brick colonial.

The house was set well back from the street on a velvet carpet of lawn. On each side of the dark green front door, three white columns stood tall and proud. The shutters were painted that same old-money green. Nevertheless, despite its classic Georgian features, the scale of the house was slightly off. It was set back on an acre, and though the builder had wisely not hacked down the property’s impressive old trees, the Logans’ place seemed overly large for a single family. It looked more like the Romance-languages department at a New England college.

In mysteries, it always annoys me when houses in which strange doings have occurred are described as “strangely still.” What are they supposed to do? Cha-cha? Nevertheless, there was absolutely no sign of life in what the
Post
, obviously hoping to prevail in some tabloid alliteration competition, was calling the “lush Lowenstein-Logan Long Island estate.” It really was strangely still. No BMW in the driveway today, no tricycle left out overnight. The curtains were drawn. A stubby flagpole over the door, the kind that displays those flags mail-order catalogs have managed to palm off on the public, was not flying the national colors of Pumpkinland or United States of Pilgrim Hats or whatever hideous banner suburbanites run up for Thanksgiving. However, if the
Post
could be trusted, Greg Logan was still in residence, having been “advised by Nassau County police authorities to remain in the community.” Well, with Courtney having been missing for almost a month now, that advisement was no surprise.

The only surprise was that I had sunk so low that instead of going straight home after work to prepare what my kids referred to as Mom’s Secret Sweet Potato Recipe (which, even with its optional canned crushed pineapple, was no different from the thirty million casseroles of marshmallow-covered golden glop that grace the tables of American households every fourth Thursday of November), I drove straight to the house of Mary Alice Mahoney Schlesinger Goldfarb. Nancy and I had known Malice since our college days at the University of Wisconsin, so I guess she was something between a longtime, unwelcome acquaintance to Nancy and a semifriend to me.

Mary Alice talked more than anybody in Greater New York and said the least. Was she annoying? Usually. Vacuous? Indubitably. Stupid? Probably. However, somehow her pea-brain was optimally structured for the absorption and retention of every item of Shorehaven gossip that flitted through the air, no matter how vague.

“Who’s catering you?” Mary Alice inquired as we stood in her dining room. Her gold-and-white outfit, with its skintight pants and embroidered bolero jacket, would have looked better on a matador. I sensed it was the work of one of those avant-garde designers she had, sadly, grown to favor. Naturally, she was not cooking, but, as her third husband, Lance Goldfarb, urologist to the North Shore’s best and brightest, was suburbane enough to understand, only first wives cooked.

Mary Alice, however, was preparing for the next day’s feast. She leaned over her table (gleaming black wood with red and yellow glints, made from what was doubtless an endangered species in the Amazon rain forest), her long, thin fingers rearranging squashes, purple grapes that I guess were supposed to look slightly moldy, sprays of bittersweet, and some ruby-petaled flowers that looked like a cross section of female genitalia. The arrangement overflowed a sterling silver tureen the size of a footbath. Mary Alice’s engaged-to-Goldfarb ring, a diamond dazzler, sparkled in the genteel light of a Venetian chandelier.

“No one’s catering for me,” I responded. “I’m cooking.”

A saddened “Oh” popped out from between her high-gloss lips, but she quickly put her index finger against them, as if she were a kindergartner who’d just been signaled to shush. For a woman halfway into her fifties, Malice had an astonishing repertoire of little-girl mannerisms. I knew what she was thinking: Bob had left me practically in the poorhouse, i.e., unable to afford a caterer who could bring in baby squabs stuffed with wild mushroom polenta which would be touted, by the caterer’s Manhattan-actor-waiters, as much more authentically Native American than any turkey. However, poverty was not an issue for me. Bob had grown into the sort of man who could never resist a frolicsome lunch with an insurance actuary. He’d planned for everything except his own early death and had left me, though not rich, well fixed enough to spring for a squab or two.

But I repressed a powerful urge to babble a defensive: I
like
cooking my own food. Instead I asked: “What’s new?” Then, before she could utter her first word in what would be an exquisitely detailed description of how she was having her chinchilla jacket relined, I immediately tossed in a “Oh, Mary Alice, I keep forgetting to ask ... Has anyone seen Greg Logan around town?”

“Not that I’ve heard about,” she replied, pulling out one of her Empire dining-room chairs (from Husband Mahoney) and sitting. I did likewise, although the large Napoleonic bee design on the center of the burgundy damask of each seat had always seemed slightly menacing. “But you know who
has
been seen around town?” She waited, patient. I was, too, so finally she pronounced: “The au pair! In the patisserie. Buying rye bread.” I noticed Mary Alice was still rolling her
Rs
intermittently, so “rye bread” came out vaguely Gallic; she’d recently returned from a weeklong urethra conference in Lyons with Husband Goldfarb. “She was wearing what everyone was positive was an Hermès scarf.” She gave a humorless, monosyllabic laugh. “You know what
that
means.” She rested her left arm on the table and, with her right fingertips, caressed the gold threads of what was either a leaf or a duckling embroidered on the jacket’s sleeve.

“She knows how to accessorize?” I suggested.

“No. Most people were saying, Well,
we
know who’s dipping into Courtney Logan’s scarf drawer.”

She waited for me to respond, so I said “Wow.” Actually, I was impressed with the notion of an entire drawer dedicated to scarves. Mine were kept in two Hefty One-Zips that resided with my nightgowns and a lifetime’s collection of half-slips I couldn’t bring myself to throw out.

“But then I heard, no, she isn’t stealing. It was one of many, many, many
gifts
.” To make sure I understood, she added: “From Greg Logan.”

“So people are saying he’s taken up with the au pair?”

“Not now.
Before
.” Malice took a deep breath to compose herself after imparting this electrifying news. As for me, I’d already said Wow, and a gasp would have been extravagant, so I just sat quietly. “Before Courtney disappeared,” Mary Alice explained. “They say what happened is that Courtney came home with their little girl Morgan from trick or treating. One guess what she walked in on?”

“Greg Logan and the au pair?” She gave a knowing nod. I was still trying to get used to the notion that “Morgan” had become more than a financial institution or a surname. It was what former investment bankers named their daughters. Then I asked, “Where was their little boy during this liaison?” Mary Alice shrugged. “And wasn’t Greg at a business dinner in the city that night?” I went on, “That’s what I’ve been reading, that when Courtney didn’t come back, the au pair made no attempt to call him. She just put the kids to bed and waited until he got home. Then she told him she didn’t know where Courtney had gone.”

“Not according to my sources.”

“Who are your sources, Mary Alice?”

“Everybody.” She adjusted one of Husband Schlesinger’s three-carat diamond-stud earrings. “Everybody knows about them, Judith.”

“Well, let’s say Courtney did walk in on that kind of a thing,” I conceded. “What is she supposed to have done? Or what was done to her?”

“Ha!”

“They’re saying Greg and the au pair murdered Courtney?”

“That’s the number one theory. They did it, maybe to keep her from screaming or something and—”

“Where did they stash the little girl with a bagful of candy while they were murdering Courtney Logan?”

“I don’t know.” Trying to appear blasé, she pretended to be absorbed in a cuticle, although knowing Malice, she could have been genuinely engrossed.

“And then?” I demanded.

“Well, it could be they buried the body someplace. Everyone said the police had a dog and they looked in the wooded area in back between the Logans’ and—I think it’s the Lanes’ house, Judy and Ed. He’s the ear, nose, and—”

“But they didn’t find anything.”

“The other theory,” she said, recovering quickly, “is that Greg’s father, Mr. Big, did something with the body. I mean, that’s his meat and potatoes.” Mary Alice had the gift of unfortunate metaphor. “Or ... But not too many people believe this one.”

“What?”

“It’s a psychoanalytic theory. You’ll probably laugh.”

“Tell me, Mary Alice.”

“That Courtney was, you know, traumatized. She just ran off when she saw them together. And it was so traumatic she got amnesia. She could be anyplace, not knowing who she is. You’ve got to admit, that’s better than being beaten to death or knifed or strangled or something by your own husband and a foreign au pair, for God’s sakes, who then gets free range to your scarf drawer. And everything else, if you get what I mean.”

“How about this: Maybe Courtney went outside and met up with someone weird. Halloween’s the one night of the year you have lots of people—a lot of them in masks—roaming around, even in the quietest neighborhoods.”

“But
everyone
says in this kind of thing, it’s usually the husband. Isn’t it?” Mary Alice reached over to her Thanksgiving centerpiece and tapped a sprig of bittersweet forward an eighth of an inch.
“Isn’t it?”

Isn’t it? Sleeping with a homicide cop for six months does not qualify one as an expert on criminal detection. Neither does reading Maj Sjöwall/Per Wahlöö and Ed McBain police procedurals. Not even once having helped solve a murder. Still, if I hadn’t distracted the ever-distractable Mary Alice Mahoney Schlesinger Goldfarb by inquiring what, as Thanksgiving hostess, she was going to wear (and then listening to her pleat by pleat description of an Issey Miyake skirt), I would have had to say yes, absolutely, it usually is the husband they suspect when the wife suddenly and inexplicably disappears.

Throughout that winter, I heard whispers and mutterings that Greg Logan’s arrest was imminent. None of the rumors panned out. It wasn’t that I forgot about Courtney. One bitter night, when the snow on the spruce outside my bedroom window grew so heavy that my light sleep was broken with the ominous crack of a limb about to crash, I lay in bed knowing in my heart that she hadn’t been grabbed by some monstrous Halloween deviate and was being held against her will, but that she was lying in some shallow, icy, suburban grave. I’d think about her children: One day they’d had a mother who adored them. The next day she was no more. Were these poor kids told Mommy will be back, or Gosh, honey, we don’t know where Mommy is but we hope she’ll call? Were they told anything?