Singer 02 - Long Time No See (45 page)

“So the source could have been some sewer sludge guy—or Courtney herself getting a phony birth certificate?” Nancy asked.

“Right. If it was Courtney, she’d need mail drops. I’m not sure if municipalities would mail a birth certificate to a box number. For all I know, it’s the same with end-of-the-month statements from on-line brokers. But considering what else she was willing to do, I suppose a mail drop would be easy enough.”

“She certainly had a sense of entitlement,” Nancy observed. “Princeton.”

“Please, you don’t need three credits in sociopathy to graduate from Princeton. She was—she is—a bad person.”

“Can you imagine, stealing from your joint account with your husband while you’re still sleeping in the same room? Tacky. What’s fascinating to me is that when her best wasn’t good enough, what did she do? Turned around and became another person.”

“Unmitigated chutzpah,” I murmured.

Nancy twisted her hair into a topknot, then let it fall back onto her shoulders. “Too bad she became disagreeable.”

“The murder business, you mean.”

“Yes, that poor mouse woman. And you, almost!”

“But Courtney was always willing to do whatever it took for her own ends. Remember how she took the Crunch-Munch money and put the blame on Ingrid Farrell?”

“You’ve got to wonder,” Nancy reflected, “what kind of a guy Greg Logan is. Not only putting up with her sticking her hand in the till. She must have shown her true colors at some point. Couldn’t he know or intuit she was a bad seed?”

“Some people thought she was fine. Kellye Ryan seems to have been genuinely devoted to her.”

“Possibly Kellye is not the person for whom the phrase ‘Still waters run deep’ was coined.”

“That’s true,” I agreed. “Courtney’s pool man thought well of her.”

“Always the authoritative judge of virtue.”

“So did her au pair. And Emily, of course. Although the pool guy didn’t know her very well. And Emily, may she rest in peace, is dead. And the au pair is so good-hearted she’d probably think ...”

“What?” Nancy asked. “You were going to say something about her thinking Hitler was a nice guy, but then you remembered she was Austrian. Am I right?”

“You’re in the right neighborhood,” I muttered. “Okay, yes. But getting back to how people viewed Courtney. A lot of them thought there was something not quite right, not the real McCoy about her. But it’s still possible Greg was conned the way Emily was. Listen, it’s significant she betrayed the two people who were emotionally dependent on her. One she killed, one she left with a shattered life. Not just that, even though she claimed she was being kind by giving him an alibi, she made him top suspect by putting the body in the pool. And I’m not even mentioning her two kids.”

“Was it the emotional dependency itself that drove her bonkers?” Nancy inquired.

“Could be. She is really, really sick. Nelson said he’s met more than his share of those. Psychos or sociopaths or whatever. Most people think of them as madmen like Charles Manson, or obsessed losers like Timothy McVeigh. But he says a fair number of them are smart, attractive, charming. Like con men, who don’t just need the money; they need to pull the scam, to destroy lives. And I think with Courtney, her craziness—”

“Or overwhelming greed.”

“Or need. Whatever it was, it gave her the power, the energy to be convincing.” I got up from the towel and straightened out my shirt. “Guess what?” I said.

“You’re going for a nap.”

“How did you know? Seriously?”

“Give me a break. And after the nap? Him?”

“No. My client, Fancy Phil Lowenstein. And Gregory Logan.”

It took me nearly two hours to tell Greg and Fancy Phil all that had happened from the beginning of the case. We sat in the Logan living room the way I had the last time. Not a speck of dust, the nap of the rug vacuumed to attention, but it didn’t look as though it had been used since my last visit. The room was still a shrine to Courtney’s grimly impeccable sense of design. But as I wound down my story, I noticed the tortoiseshell-framed photograph of husband and wife, Courtney and Greg aglow and agleam in their tennis whites, was no longer on the table beside the antique leather-bound books and the fat-bottomed onyx vase.

“I don’t know what to say,” Greg told me at last.

“Say you’re sorry,” Fancy Phil boomed from his side of the striped couch.

“Dad, you and I made a deal.”

“So don’t say you’re sorry.” Fancy Phil was dressed conservatively: only a flat, half-inch-wide gold chain and its matching bracelet. His shirt was Hawaiian style with a repeating pattern of Gauguin’s
Tahitian Women on the Beach
.

Greg, in khaki slacks, white cotton cable-knit sweater, and sailing moccasins, sat in the wing chair where he’d been the last time I was there. He looked even more worn than the month before. His tan had faded to parchment, perhaps because he could no longer find golf partners, perhaps because he was now spending all his free time with his children. “I am sorry about how I treated you,” he said.

“Listen, I was out of order, coming here the way I did,” I told him. “It was just that I felt I had a chance of finding out at least something in this case. It didn’t dawn on me that I’d be viewed as another in a long series of nuts intruding on your privacy. I should have been more sensitive.”

“I’m not only sorry, I’m grateful. I owe ... well, if not my life, then everything else to you.”

“I’m the one who went over to her house and talked her into doing it,” Fancy Phil announced.

“I’m glad you did, Phil,” I told him. “You’re a great father.”

Greg nodded his agreement. “How do you think she was able to get away Halloween night?” he asked. “That’s what I still can’t understand. The car was in the garage.”

“My guess?” I said. “She probably left the garage door open, backed out, and waved good-bye. She came back a little while later without her headlights on. It was dark by then. Sunset was before five that day.”

“So what the hell did she do? Walk to Sun Valley?” Fancy Phil demanded.

“No,” I said. “She’d rented a car in Manhattan a week or two before. On the Samantha R. Corby credit card. Maybe she had that car parked close by. A couple of blocks’ stroll and she was off. Not to Sun Valley right away. She spent some time in Miami—”

“Bitch!” Fancy Phil said. Before his son could say a word, he said: “Sorry, Gregory. I’ll leave it alone.” He turned to me. “Before you got here we was talking. About a lot of things. About what he should say to the kids now.” Then to Greg he said: “Whatever you tell them, kid, it’ll be as good as anybody can say it.”

“I’d have to check with Steffi Deissenburger,” I went on. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if the bye-bye Mommy game started in September.”

“Why?” Greg asked.

“So she could have an adult witness to her driving off. Then she went to Florida. My guess is she already had at least a bank account set up there and some kind of address or mail drop. She might have even made a trip down there earlier, setting up whatever needed setting up. We know she charged tickets to Miami. She could do that in one day, fly there and back, and be home by seven-thirty.”

“Do you think she had someone there?” Greg asked quietly. “A man?”

“I have no idea. I assume she went down there just to rest and establish a tan. Her story was she lived on Key Biscayne.”

“What about ... with Emily Chavarria? I mean, their relationship.”

“Most likely a case of hero worship by a lonely young woman that Courtney exploited. But instead of being a good role model, she turned out to be a Svengali.”

Greg nodded. Fancy Phil said: “A
what ?”

“How long do you think ... How long a sentence will she get?” Greg asked.

“I haven’t a clue,” I told him. “Unfortunately, she can probably afford a good lawyer. Let’s hope she can’t charm a jury.”

“Do you think there’s a chance she could get off?” Greg went from looking pallid to looking ill.

“Gregory.” Fancy Phil leaned forward toward his son. “Don’t worry about a jury. Guilty, not guilty, she’s never gonna get off.”

On Long Island, roses are at their sumptuous best in the middle of June. At the end of the day I was out by the bushes clipping away when Nelson came by. I showed him a pale pink one with silvery outer petals. “I never remember the names of them,” I said, “but this is an antique rose—brought over from France in the early nineteenth century. You know, around the time the pirate Jean Lafitte stopped plundering ships. He took time off to fight for the United States. He helped defend New Orleans during the War of 1812.”

“Is that a history lesson or are you asking me to see the good side of Fancy Phil?”

“Both, I guess.”

“If it’s any comfort to you,” Nelson said, “that week when we were tailing him ... That particular time, we were actually after the guy he was supposed to meet.”

“But Fancy never met him, did he?” I tried not to sound overly triumphant.

“I don’t know. He was able to shake the tail. He’s made tail-shaking into an art form.”

I clipped another rose. Nelson took it from my hand and put it into the bucket of water with the others. “Are you ready to talk about us?”

“Today was a little on the stressful side, what with having to rip someone’s flesh and grab a bloody gun and then a finger.”

“I want to unstress you. Let’s go sit down and talk.”

I glanced toward the patio. “I want to stay outside, but I’m not in the mood for looking at Courtney Logan’s blood droplets.”

“Here’s okay, then,” Nelson said. “Look, I know you had more than your share today. I’ll make it quick. I’m going to get a divorce.”

“Listen, before you—”

“With you or without you, Judith, it was going to happen. It’s not only that we’re not happy. We’re not—how the hell can I put it? We’re not even good companions to each other. I married her because she was a decent person and pretty and I couldn’t take dating anymore. At the time I thought that was love.” He glanced away, then looked back. “I was kind of screwed up for a while.”

“So was I. Probably from the day we said good-bye.”

“Me, too,” he said quietly.

“Maybe even before.”

“Maybe me, too.”

“But listen, Nelson. We’ve only known each other in one way.”

“Which is ... ?”

“As adulterers.”

“God almighty! Do you think I’m a compulsive ... fucker-arounder?”

“Not at all. Do you think I am?”

“No,” he said. “Of course not.”

“All that I’m saying is, if at some point you do get free—”

“It’s a done deal.”

“—and that’s entirely between you and your wife, then you and I can see what it’s like truly being together. Leading real lives together. Legit.”

“Living together?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Is that what you want?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s probably what I want. Or to be more truthful, I love you more than you’ll ever know. I want you body and soul. But let’s see how it works in the real world. I may hate your taste in music. You might hate my friends or your friends might hate me. We might love or detest each other’s children.”

“So we’ll start out how?” He slipped his hands into his pockets, a casual pose, a way of looking cool at the start of a negotiation.

“We’ll go on a date. We’ll spend a weekend together. We’ll be single. Free. Legit. We’ll each go to work, we’ll call each other. If I remember correctly, we’ll talk more about the Mets than about politics because political discussions weren’t our finest hour as a couple. What I’m saying is, we’ll be—”

“Natural?”

“That’s good. Natural.”

“Judith, I want to marry you.”

“I want to marry you, too. But before we buy the rings and send out the invitations, we should go for a walk, go to the movies.”

“And then more,” he said softly.

“Maybe.”

Susan Isaacs (b. 1943) is an award-winning author of mystery and literary fiction who holds the rare distinction of having had every one of her novels appear on the
New York Times
bestseller list.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, she attended Queens College, and upon graduation took an aptitude test for a position as a computer programmer. She failed the test, but when the interviewer saw that she had written for her college newspaper, she offered her a job at
Seventeen
magazine.

After several years writing advice columns, then political speeches, Isaacs tried her hand at a mystery novel, and
Compromising Positions
was published in 1978. The story of housewife-turned-detective was a runaway success. It has been translated into thirty languages and adapted into a film starring Susan Sarandon and Raul Julia, and Isaacs wrote the screenplay herself.

Isaacs’s experience in city politics informed her second novel,
Close Relations
. Like
Compromising Positions
, it became a critical and commercial success, and established her as an author of literary fiction. Her fourth book, the World War II drama
Shining Through
, was later made into a film starring Michael Douglas, Melanie Griffith, and Liam Neeson. Isaacs also found success as a screenwriter, penning 1987’s
Hello Again
, a comedy starring Shelley Long and Gabriel Byrne.

A former president of the Mystery Writers of America, she is a winner of the John Steinbeck Award, the Marymount Manhattan Writing Center Award, and the Writers for Writers Award. Isaacs is currently chairman of the board of the literary organization Poets & Writers. She has continued her involvement with politics, covering the 2000 election for the Long Island daily newspaper
Newsday
, an experience she has called “one of the greatest thrills of my life.”

Since 1968 she has been married to Elkan Abramowitz, a criminal defense lawyer with whom she has two children. Now a grandmother, she lives on Long Island.