Singer 02 - Long Time No See (5 page)

“Well, Mr. Dooley—”

“Call me Mack,” he said cheerfully. For such a short man, he had remarkably long arms. Except for the lack of hair, he resembled those jolly chimpanzees in baseball caps who are perpetually being trotted onto TV by anthropologists to prove that human beings aren’t the only primate with language and tool-making skills.

“As I told you on the phone,” I told him, “I’m only
considering
a pool right now. I’m not ready to commit to—”

“Sure, sure, but with a place like yours—” Mack Dooley glanced back at the house. It’s a Tudor-style of brick and stone with a fine mullioned bay window. It’s not imposing, but solid, the sort of house Henry VII’s favorite furrier might own. “—how could you go with vinyl?” He was not entirely successful in suppressing a shudder at that thought. “Now, you’re probably talking a lap pool, about four feet deep, right?” I nodded. “And fifty feet long, although you could do sixty here easy and in the end you’d say, ‘Mack, thanks for pushing me to sixty.’”

“Maybe you can give me estimates for both,” I suggested. I pulled back my head and eyed him. “Were ... Were you the one I saw on TV?” He nodded modestly, although his light eyes, bright against his tanned-to-leather skin, sparkled at the recognition. “God, it must have been terrible for you, finding her like that.”

“Yeah, well, it was no treat. I mean, every couple of years, you open a pool and there’s somebody’s ex-cat. But trust me, nothing like this.”

“Were you able to see who it was?”

Mack Dooley shook his head. “She was like floating—you okay, hearing this kind of thing?” I nodded encouragingly. “Except what I saw was her back. At first I thought, This is some kind of big animal, a raccoon, or one of those eight-hundred-dollar big dogs—I forget what you call them—that drop dead when they’re seven years old. But then I see, Sweet Jesus, it’s a
person
. I could make out the back of her neck and a little of her ear. So I say to John—” he pointed with his chin at his assistant at the other end of the tape measure. “‘Get out of here.’ Then I threw him my cell phone and I told him, ‘Get 911.’ You don’t want a kid like him having to see something like that.”

“Was the body badly decomposed?”

“What can I tell you? She was facedown. But what I seen of her, you wouldn’t call her composed.” Mack didn’t appear to resent the questions. After three days of interrogation, not just from cops but from reporters and neighbors, he seemed to be resigned to the attention that comes with celebrity.

“Was she clothed?” I asked.

“Yeah, but what she was wearing didn’t look so good either.”

“What was she wearing?”

He looped his thumbs over the waistband of his lightweight gray sweatpants, pursed his lips, and moved them left, right, left as he thought; this was a question no one seemed to have posed. “Looked like some kind of jacket. My best guess? One of those blazers.”

“What color?”

“Hard to say. Probably used to be dark, but it was kind of faded. I guess from the chlorine. All I could see was the shape at first. The back. That’s how come I thought: Raccoon? I didn’t see the rest of her. You know how they say ‘dead man’s float’ when you’re learning to swim?”

“Right.”

“Well, for some reason it wasn’t like that with Mrs. Logan. I couldn’t see her arms and legs. They must have been hanging down in the water, and after—what is it?—all those months, the water isn’t what they call crystal clear. Now don’t think that’s a problem for you, poolwise, Mrs. Singer. All pools get algae and stuff over the winter no matter how much chemicals we dump in the fall. One acid-wash in May—takes hardly no time—and you’ll have perfect water all summer.”

I had to admit, the notion of a pool was sounding not so ridiculous. Laps in the morning before work, laps in the evening. I could have unimaginably firm upper arms and be one of those women who wear sleeveless turtlenecks. I could have friends over for a swim and a barbecue, or drift alone on a float with a plastic cup of Chardonnay and watch the sun set. My head began making up-and-down motions as if I were already saying yes to Mack Dooley. “Did you know her?” I asked quickly, to divert attention from my bobbling head. “Courtney Logan, I mean.”

“Yeah,” he said, “because she was the one I had to deal with, putting in the pool. She signed us up for the maintenance, too.”

“What was she like?” I paused. “I guess you’ve been asked that too many times.”

“I don’t mind,” Mack replied graciously. “She was really nice. But businesslike. Know what I mean? A lady. Hello, how are you, did you have a good weekend—that kind of stuff. Not snotty or snooty or whatever you call it, like some of them—I hope you’ll pardon me, but you’re not one of them ... The younger ones. The yuppie ladies. They leave the business world to raise their kids, but you know what? They still gotta show you what big shots they are. They’re so ... tough. Not Mrs. Logan. She was just nice to deal with.”

“Was she a hard bargainer? Did she accept your first price?” He seemed to hesitate. “Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “If I decide on a pool, you’ll make a profit. I’m not such a good negotiator.” He pressed a button and the tape measure whizzed back into its receptacle. The blond kid moseyed back to the truck.

Mack Dooley smiled again, a pleasant, crooked-toothed smile in an orthodonticized universe. “She had one shrewd business brain, I’ll tell you that. Every time the husband was ready to sign on the dotted line, she’d say to him, ‘Greg, let’s sleep on this.’ But in the nicest way. She handled herself so nice you couldn’t resent her.”

I thought back to the photograph the
Beacon
had published: Courtney
had
looked genuinely nice. “Did the husband seem browbeaten by her?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I kind of assumed he was more the easygoing type.”

“Did the police want to know all about him?”

“Did they ever!”

“Like what?”

“Did he have a temper. Did I ever see them fight. How they got along.”

“How did they get along?”

“As far as I could see, good.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. His beard made a sandpaper sound. “What else? Oh, did I notice anything between him and the foreign girl who watched their kids.” I raised my eyebrows in what I hoped was a subtle query. “I saw her a few times, with the little girl, by the pool. Quiet type. Not what they call a looker. With the hair that kind of separates into strings. Like a mop just before it dries. Except—I don’t know—maybe it’s how girls’ hair is supposed to be these days and it’s really pretty.”

“What did you tell the police when they asked you about this au pair and Greg Logan?”

“The truth. I didn’t see nothing. If I was Logan, I guarantee you, I wouldn’t be tempted with such a nice wife, blond hair, dimples. Except the girl didn’t have a bad shape. And listen, how the heck can you tell what’s doing in some other guy’s heart? Right?”

Right. And three days later on a gloomy Sunday afternoon, with the sky a ceiling of gray steel, I said zero to Nancy about hearts or about Mack Dooley. I didn’t want to listen to another lecture on what she’d decided was my fixation not on solving a puzzle—figuring out whodunit—but on Nelson Sharpe. Instead I politely inquired: “Besides looking at it, does anyone actually
use
a gazebo?” We were making our way through the acre and a half of woods on the side of her house, taking minuscule elflike leaps to avoid the poison ivy and nettles that were already choking to death the spring wild-flowers. “Besides, if it’s stuck all the way out here, you wouldn’t see it from the house.” We turned to look behind us. Only a dark shingled edge of the roof of the Millers’ sprawling Victorian was visible through the newly leafed trees. “I guess you could bring a book out here. But would you want to read on a wooden bench or one of those wrought iron garden chairs that make your ass numb? Plus—” I glanced up at the lofty oaks, maples, and other assorted trees— “in this light, what could you read? The first two lines of an eye chart?”

“I need
someplace
.” Nancy sounded less huffy than desperate. “Larry’s going to trash the house again.” Every five or six years her husband, an architect, would be gripped by a new artistic vision:
This
is what the world should look like. Then the grand old house’s guts would be ripped out and replaced—with all white walls, floors, and furniture. Or with a single, immense terra-cotta-tiled space that was kitchen-dining-room-living-room-den-library. Or with such rococo moldings and fixtures that even the downstairs guest bathroom looked as if a Bourbon king could be in there signing an entente.

“Well,” I said, stopping to admire a miniature forest of knee-high ferns, “better Larry finds a new aesthetic when he gets bored than a new wife.”

Nancy shrugged. “I am no longer certain that is true. What do I need him for?”

“You love him.”

“You are an incorrigible romantic, Judith.” She shook her head, saddened by my foolishness. “Of course, being a romantic is a cinch once you don’t have a husband. Tell me, how can I love someone who wants his creative legacy to be a Gothic media room? Do you know what he confided to me last night,
post
the usual
coitus nauseus
?: ‘Nancy, the Gothic style is the only morally correct form of building.’ Any moment he’ll get a tonsure and a hair shirt.” She shrugged. “The man is fifty-eight years old. This is probably the beginning of dementia. I’ll be changing his diapers soon.”

“Would it blight this day even more if I reminded you that the age difference between you and Larry is three years, not thirty-three? But so what? For a woman in her mid-fifties, you look fabulous. You even look fabulous for a woman in her forties. Why get hung up on age—”

Setting her hands on the slim hips of her tight, low-slung jeans, Nancy snapped, “Hush!”

“You know what my new motto is?” I asked her.

“Regurgitate every syllable of psychobabble I hear on
Oprah?”

“No,” I said. ‘“Never be afraid of the truth.’”

“The truth is, it’s Viagra three nights a week. The only thing
not
limp about Larry is his dick. His very essence is limp. And speaking of limp, it’s high time you reconsidered your adolescent fantasy about that cop. If you don’t think he has to put a splint on it these days you are seriously deluded. You’re deluded anyhow. A few months’ fling twenty years ago and he’s the love of your life?”

I slammed my hands onto my hips. “I did not bring him up.”

“He’s in the air. I can sense his continual presence in your head.”

“You’re way off base,” I lied.

“You wonder why you’re not meeting any decent men—”

“No. I don’t wonder. You do.”

“He’s married, Judith.”

“Not to the same one.”

Nancy stopped short before a copse of bamboo. “No. You’re right. To a new one.”

“It’s not working.”

“How do you know? You ran into him a year ago for a couple of seconds.”

“But then he called,” I protested feebly.

“And you had a four-second conversation.”

“It lasted a few minutes. I could hear it in his voice: He wasn’t happy. Anyhow, he’s not in Homicide anymore. He’s head of some other unit, Special Investigations. Something like that. But if you’re thinking I’m obsessed, it so happens I was the one who said ‘Nice talking to you again’ and got off the phone.”

“Sure. So you could faint.”

“I don’t faint.” I hated fighting with her. It was one thing to be assertive professionally, to tell a history department chair you will not teach four sections of America from Jamestown to Appomattox the following fall, especially if he’s going to stick forty students in each section. It’s another thing to go head-to-head with your dearest friend. But Nancy possessed what I guessed was a journalist’s ability to withstand unpleasantness and keep going. In fact, confrontation seemed to refresh her. So I turned away and got busy studying her house. All that was visible was the roof and what I was pretty sure (but not a hundred percent) was the top of a linden tree. I didn’t really want to ask if it was, because it would clue her in that I wanted desperately to change the subject. Naturally, Nancy would know if it was a linden. It has always been my belief that Protestants, born with innate knowledge of the names of all things botanical, cannot help but think less of you if you have to ask.

“In three-quarters of an hour,” she observed, “I haven’t heard one word about Courtney Logan from you. Why? To prove to me you’re really not interested in a murder, i.e., not interested in
him.”

Precisely. So I snapped, “No. I’ve been listening to you nattering on about gazebos.” I decided not to add: and couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

“I was expecting you to ask me to hit up our reporters for unpublished tidbits about the head wounds.”

“Wounds?”
I demanded. “I heard about
a
bullet.” Nancy made a big show of casualness, taking off her sweater and tying it around her waist. It was a peach-color wisp of a thing, made from some suddenly chic fluff I think was shaved off the gonads of Indonesian goats, the must-have knit now that cashmere had become a bore and pashmina a cliché. “Wounds?” I repeated. “Did I hear a plural?”

“I heard something about there being two bullets in her head. The first shot killed her. The second one was... I don’t know. Maybe insurance.”

“Do they have any idea what the weapon was?” I demanded.

“The medical examiner may. I don’t.”

“Are you sure both shots were from the same gun?”

“No.”

“Can you find out?”

“No, Judith. I don’t do crime. I assign and edit op-ed pieces—other people’s diatribes about health care. Or bilingual education. Friday I cut a thousand-word paean to desalinization to seven hundred.” She shook her head. Her expertly cut auburn hair swung gracefully a quarter inch above her shoulders. “It still sucked the big one.”

“You could ask the reporter who’s covering the Courtney—”

“Listen to me. You know how you think my drinking is bad for me? That’s what I think this detective business is for you. Okay, fine, twenty years ago you had some fun figuring who did it to that dirty dentist. It showed you there was a world that extended beyond your car pool. And you got laid. Maybe even made love to. Fine. I do it all the time.” In Nancy’s mind, Mount Sinai was the place God had given Moses the Nine Commandments. In her thirty-one years of marriage, at least fourscore lovers had come—and gone. “Gives you a glow that beats a paraffin wrap. But you’re not me. You take fucking seriously.” Somewhere in the deepest south there is a finishing school that teaches young ladies a thousand and one wiles—from the moist-lips-slightly-parted-as-if-anticipating-fellatio-while-hanging-on-every-word trick to cunningly contrived cleavage displays. Only when belles have mastered all thousand and one stratagems are they given carte blanche to say anything that comes into their heads, any place, any time, no matter how obscene or shocking, along with a guarantee they will be deemed far more enchanting than conventional eyelash-batting magnolia blossoms who mind their tongues. “There’s nothing
wrong
with taking fucking seriously, even though it’s a tiresome way of looking at the world.”