Singer 02 - Long Time No See (42 page)

I sat up and quickly told her, “Oh please. There’s no reason to worry about getting involved.”

“Well, this may be a big nothing. I hate to waste your time. But I was talking to my friend about some of the conversations I had with Courtney and a couple of bells rang. Maybe I could meet you for a cup of coffee sometime?”

“Sure. How about later today?”

“Today? Well, I’ll actually be near Shorehaven. I have to go to that big picture-framing place. Just tell me where to meet you.”

“Would you like to come over here?” I asked. “I can guarantee you a semi-decent cup of coffee.”

“Are you sure it wouldn’t be—”

“No trouble at all!” I gave her directions to my house from Main Street.

“Around eleven or so? Is that okay?” Ellen asked. “God, I hope I’m not wasting your time and your coffee. But there are a couple of things about Courtney”—she hesitated for a minute—“that somebody ought to know.”

E
LLEN
B
ERMAN RANG
my doorbell at ten-thirty, a half hour early. Since I would have wasted the next thirty minutes alternately fantasizing she’d give me a major lead like, Oh, Courtney’s dream was to live at 43 degrees latitude and 98.6 degrees longitude, or dreading she’d have an insipid tale like, Courtney shoplifted a teaspoon in her Old Master pattern, I was glad to see her.

“Am I too early?” She was pretty, a little like Audrey Hepburn in
War and Peace
—the thick browed Audrey. She had those great, dark doe eyes.

“No, this is fine,” I assured her, opening the door wide. “Glad you’re here. I didn’t put on any eyeliner, but if you can survive that horror, I’ll put up a fresh pot of coffee.”

“Thanks!” No sweet tremulousness like Hepburn: Ellen had the easy manner of the naturally outgoing. Her clothes were outgoing, too, in that astutely mismatched designer way. Cropped orange pants, a shocking-pink cotton sweater, snazzy cork-bottomed clogs in pink, red, and orange. Her jewelry was a simple gold watch and thin hoop earrings. Instead of heading for the living room and into the sunroom, I led her toward the just-straightened-up kitchen. Just then she asked: “Would it be okay to use your bathroom?”

“Sure. It’s straight through—” When I turned back to point her in the right direction, I saw she had another accessory. A gun.

No matter how many scenes you’ve seen in movies where the camera looks straight into the barrel of the gun, it doesn’t prepare you for the ugliness of looking into that long metal nose with its single nostril. It’s a creature out of Hell. My body told my mind that I didn’t have long to live; whatever force holds cells together began to weaken. I’d heard that people lose control of their bladders or defecate in this kind of horrific moment. Others simply black out. My body considered all three options, but instead crashed against the wall right where we were, just outside the kitchen. Even though the answer was obvious, I asked with disbelief: “Courtney?”

No answer. Her eyes darted back and forth over that five-foot-long passageway between center hall and kitchen. I glanced around and saw what she was looking for. Yes, this was the perfect spot. No windows, not even a small, ornamental pane of leaded glass. No windows, no witnesses.

“Is that—” I began.

“No questions,” she snapped, though still in that chipper, extrovert voice. No more peppy little blonde: She had the deep gold tan of a wealthy brunette. She’d lost weight, too, and now was model-thin if not model-tall.

“Is that the gun you used on the ... other person?”

“Of course not,” she said dismissively.

Her thumb moved, or maybe it was only my head shaking in denial of what was happening. But though I had no knowledge of guns beyond seeing Nelson’s in its holster and watching
Shane
, I had the sense she was flicking the gizmo that would take off the safety lock. “Not the other person. Emily!” My words exploded, and the force made her head jerk back. “Is that the gun you used on Emily?” No answer. In that second of silence that followed, I thought how terribly sad it was that I would never know how it would have turned out with Nelson. But since that was a future I wouldn’t have, and I had almost no more present, I sent up a silent blessing for Kate and Joey. Then I got out the first four words of the
Shema
, the prayer Jews are supposed to say twice a day and right before their deaths. But I stopped myself because I was still alive, and where there is life I was obliged to fight for it. Thinking “I’m dead” would doom me.

“What do you know about Emily?” she inquired, as if asking about a mutual acquaintance.

Slowly, not so much because I did not want to startle her but because I didn’t have much strength, I pushed myself from the wall into an upright position, regretting the year I’d picked Learn to Crochet over Tae Kwon Do. “Do you mean the Emily Chavarria who was found on May fifteenth in your family’s swimming pool?” I asked her. Just then, a thought flashed into my head: How the hell did she find me? I didn’t go around thumbtacking index cards on bulletin boards or sending out “Wanted” posters with
RSVP JUDITH SINGER
in the lower left corner. “Oh,” I said. “Did you find out about me from that man in Wiggins I gave my name to? Your neighbor Victor?”

“You got it!” she replied brightly. I was still having trouble thinking of her as Courtney Logan. I didn’t dare look directly at her any more than I’d make eye contact with a slobbering Doberman. But after a couple of glances, I saw her hair had been dyed, very skillfully, the darkest brown, with a touch of auburn. My color. Her eyes, too, were like mine, somewhere between dark brown and black. Of course, I looked like one of those late-nineteenth-century photographs you see at Ellis Island, Pensive Semite in Babushka, and she like Audrey Hepburn. What I couldn’t figure out was what kind of loyalty a man like Victor would feel toward Samantha/Courtney. “When I moved in,” she explained, as if she’d heard me ask, “I told a couple of my neighbors I was on the run, that my husband had been abusive.” Maybe she wanted me to tell her how clever a strategy that was. I didn’t, so she explained: “I said he was very rich. He’d been stalking me. He’d hired detectives. I told them about beatings. I told them he’d threatened to kill me. I begged them to let me know if anyone came looking for me.”

“How were they able to reach you? You moved, didn’t you?”

“Question time is over.” The horror of her was her niceness. She had a gun and was about to kill me. Her Audrey Hepburn eyes were still shining. Her voice was cheery: Life is really neat! What made me even more terrified was my knowing the buoyant gunslinger standing less than two feet away had once earned an NRA Distinguished Marksman qualification.

But the next second brought a respite: Though question time was over, answer time was still going on. “I gave them a number in St. Louis where they could call me or leave a message,” Courtney was saying. “Of course, I’m not in St. Louis. But I call that number twice a day, religiously.” Well, I had called her thorough. “And I’m going to keep on doing it until the second anniversary of my escape, just to be extra sure.”

“Escape out of where?”

“Out of
here
! Trust me, the only thing that could drag me back to Shorehaven was to deal with you.”

Because my credo is that it’s always better to know the truth, I decided to give Courtney a dose of it—not for her own good, but for mine. “Your problem is bigger than me, Courtney. Your father-in-law knows all about you. The Nassau County cops just got onto you.
Newsday
could break the story any minute.”

She gave a heh-heh chuckle I supposed qualified as the “mirthless laugh” villains are forever emitting in noir mysteries set in Los Angeles. “You’re trying to buy time,” she observed. “Sorry, I’m not selling any.”

I lost my fight to keep my eyes away from the gun. She could see my fear was exhausting me. It was hard to get enough air to push out my words. “They know about how you switched dental X rays at Dr. Gaines’s office, how you—”

“Listen to me,” Courtney commanded. “Don’t even attempt to match wits with me. I know all about you, how you got involved in that dentist case here in town, whenever, a hundred years ago. Well good for you. You get an A for this one, too—for all you found out all by yourself.” I wish I could say that in looking at her I could see the wickedness or the madness. Truth was, she looked pretty and well put together, though more
Elle
than Long Island. Only her eyes looked somewhat lifeless despite their luster, a hint that something about her was not a hundred percent. However, I guessed it was less an emanation of evil or sign of pathology than the brown contact lenses.

I prayed Fancy Phil was right in his where-to-hide-money theory and that she hadn’t gone to the Caribbean to scuba dive. “How would I be able to find out about the offshore corporation in Nevis? The federal authorities traced that.” I can’t say Courtney looked scared, but for the first time she looked disquieted. With the index finger of her free hand, she stretched out the collar of her pink sweater—even though it was loose fitting enough that it couldn’t be annoying her. “And what about your dental X rays? The Nassau County cops are checking the ones from Emily and the ones supposedly yours from Dr. Gaines against yours from Olympia, Washington.”

“What else do they know?” I couldn’t believe she still had that read-any-good-books-lately? breeziness.

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because I have a gun,” Courtney said reasonably. She did one of those perky, apologetic shrugs—Sorry. Her gold hoops sparkled in the light from an overhead fixture in the passageway. “And you don’t.” Just as I had begun to feel safer, seeing an extra minute or two of life, she suddenly seemed to be growing taller in her cork-bottomed clogs, more resolute. “What else do the cops know?”

“Listen, Courtney, New York’s got the death penalty again. Do you want to add another murder so if you’re caught it’s guaranteed?”

“Stop it,” she said with an indulgent smile. “I’ll live a long and happy life. Unfortunately—”

“I don’t want to hear about your life!” I told her. “I don’t want to hear any big bullshit about how clever you were, because you weren’t.”

“Listen to me!” she ordered. “I—”

“No. You listen to me, Courtney. I don’t want to hear what a brilliant plan you conceived. And I don’t want to hear that the whole thing really wasn’t your fault. I’ve seen too many movies where the killer explains why it’s never his fault. Her fault. It
was
your fault. But unfortunately this is life, not a movie. You have the gun. I don’t have the agility to knee you in the balls even if you had balls. I don’t have the strength to twist your arm so you wind up killing yourself. But know this: You’re not that smart. You’re a screwup, plain and simple. If you weren’t, we wouldn’t have found out about it. Meanwhile your husband has been living under a cloud—”

“It so happens,” she hissed at me, “that even before the whole thing with Emily, I was planning on leaving after I took Morgan trick or treating. I didn’t want to disappoint her by not going. And I also did it on the thirty-first because I knew, I
knew
Greg would be at a dinner meeting in the city with Jim Cooley from Upper Crust. I
wanted
him to have an alibi.”

Maybe she was waiting for me to tell her how thoughtful she was, but I decided to disappoint her. My only chance at getting out was to be able to make some clever move, although with her standing a couple of feet away and the gun pointing somewhere in the general direction of my heart and lungs, clever wasn’t coming. The only way I could buy time was to keep her talking, since I doubted she’d be the type to appreciate the Bergmanesque qualities of a meaningful silence. “Not that I’m being critical,” I went on, “but didn’t it occur to you that the trick-or-treat experience for Morgan might be tainted by the trauma of having a mother disappear and never return?”

“See? This is why it’s useless to talk to you.” I tried to swallow so I could speak, but I found myself choking on my own gulp. “It so happens I gave it my all. You and everyone else will never know how hard I tried to be the best mother there is. Maybe I wasn’t the best wife in the world, but I tried there, too. Part of it was I didn’t have the best material to work with.” There was no need to ask Courtney what she meant, because she was on a roll.

“He was the biggest disappointment. Good-looking in that exotic way, very intelligent, a real natural athlete. You look at those blobby parents of his and you wonder how in the world did they produce someone with such amazing hand-eye coordination. And his speed! He’s all the way back and suddenly he’s at the net. And money. He had money and an MBA, which can be an unbeatable combination. Except what did he do about it? Next to nothing. He had no daring. He took a really good idea and worked and slaved and turned it into a mediocre business.” I decided it best not to bring up StarBaby. “And do you know the most pathetic thing about it? Greg was perfectly content to be second rate.” Courtney rubbed her lips together the way you do before you blot lipstick. “He knew damn well he was settling for safety and security over the chance to be a player. And he knew that sooner or later someone was going to come in and copy his formula and make it the next Starbucks. Do you know what he said?”

“What?” Her right arm, the one with the gun, must have been getting weary because she was propping up her forearm with her left hand. All I could think of was what in the world I could do to disarm her. For once, I was overjoyed to be sixteen pounds over the legal limit, except I couldn’t come up with a way to throw my weight around that would result in both my getting the gun and staying alive.

“He said he could live with that. I told him in a kidding-around way that I didn’t know if I could. And he said, ‘Well, Courtney, you’re just going to have to
learn
to live with it.’ And then his whole fixation on being legitimate. Believe me, when I told him I was proud that he wasn’t interested in the family business or the family values, if you know what I mean, I meant it. But it permeated every aspect of his life. He was panicked about anyone thinking he was coarse. Panicked. Half the time we’d go out with other couples, really terrific, successful couples, and he’d hardly say anything because he was so panicked. Except his excuse was that he was reserved. Reserved? And taxwise there were probably hundreds of deductions he could have made legitimately, but he wouldn’t let the accountant take them. You can be understanding for a while, but for how long? And the really sick thing? He was on the phone with his father at least once a day, even on weekends. Talking about baseball and the market, like his father was a normal person. Greg never heard of the term ‘arm’s length.’”