Singer 02 - Long Time No See (8 page)

“How did you hear about StarBaby?”

Jill turned to pour water into a well in the great coffee machine. Even from the back she would have looked like a pudgy cartoon kid except for her varicose veins. “Half a second,” she murmured. She appeared befuddled until she found which button to press to start the thing; it was one of those oversize shiny contraptions with so many valves, buttons, and spouts it looked capable of playing the Italian national anthem. “It’s new,” she explained, although that seemed to be the case of everything but the house itself, and even that was suffused with the smell of freshly hung wallpaper. “Oh, StarBaby, right. I saw the ad for it in one of those giveaway papers. My husband—Pete—and I talked it over. Then I called.”

Unfortunately, the Saga of Jill Badinowski, from Delta Adhesives to her StarBaby connection, was still emerging with unbearable slowness. A yeast dough could rise in the time it took her to move from sentence to sentence. I couldn’t tell if this was just her midwestern style (unlike New York talk, in which natives tend to shove out each phrase in their hysteria to get to the next, even more brilliant one) or if she was so lonely she wanted to keep me around longer. My longing to snap, Spit it out! grew in direct proportion to the length of her narrative.

“She came here the next day. Courtney Logan, I mean,” Jill went on. Then she shuddered, probably recalling the murder, although it might have been the house’s overenthusiastic central air-conditioning, unwarranted on such an exquisite May morning. She was wearing a yellow-and-white striped tank top that matched her shorts and the skin on her rounded upper arms was dotted with pink goose bumps. “Are you writing up something about her for the library?”

“No. I happen to be a historian. I’d like to try some sort of oral history.” She nodded, impressed. “But before I start taking down the history,” I went on, “I just want to get a sense of all different aspects of Courtney’s life. I was looking for someone who had used StarBaby. My neighbor Cheryl mentioned you.”

“Cheryl’s little girl TJ is in my daughter Emily’s class. First grade.” A brief, soft smile made her face glow. Since it would be impossible to achieve that look of tenderness thinking of Chic Cheryl, I read it as the expression of someone who not only liked the idea of having children, but who actually enjoyed their company. Absentmindedly, Jill stroked Luke’s head.

“You have two children?” I asked because I sensed she expected me to.

“No. We also have twin boys, Michael and Matthew. They’re nine. Oh, they’re all in the video! The StarBaby video. Do you want to see it?” She seemed so desperate for me to say yes I found myself nodding with maniacal eagerness, if only to prove to her that we Long Islanders are decent folk.

I sat on a new-smelling brass-studded leather couch in a wood-paneled TV room that had once been a small library. Shelves that had been built for hundreds of volumes were now filled with family photos, athletic trophies, and arrangements of silk flowers; everlasting ivy and wisteria drooped from shelf to shelf, obscuring the spines of the Clancys, Jude Deverauxes, and diet and parenting books that constituted their library. Together, Jill and I watched sixty minutes of Luke and family.

I was a movie buff, not an expert on film. But from what I could see on the TV room’s giant screen, StarBaby’s efforts were the work of a pro, giving genuine value for the year’s worth of videotaping. Of course, whether that one cassette was worth the three thousand dollars Jill told me it had cost was another story. There were slick opening credits: A logo of a five-pointed star rocked cradle-like on a crescent of film. Seconds later the word “StarBaby” in chubby pink-and-blue letters appeared beneath it. Then the star dissolved into a shot of baby Luke Badinowski’s toothless grinning and the video began.

Throughout winter, spring, summer, fall, there were relatively few of the predictable home movie scenes most parents show to tolerant relatives and friends: no baby waving bye-bye, no toddler cautiously touching baby goat at a petting zoo, no tyke gnawing on a new Christmas or Hanukkah toy. Instead, Luke and family walked along the Shorehaven waterfront and checked out the progress of a horseshoe crab, ate swirls of frozen yogurt and watched sailboats from the town dock, visited the pediatrician’s for a checkup, and explored every room of their house. The Badinowskis’ seven moves had paid off, I guessed; Pete’s last promotion must have been a big one, because the furniture, rugs, and window treatments in each of the rooms were not just newly acquired, but expensive.

“Did Courtney do the filming herself?” I asked. For an instant Jill looked startled, as if I started blabbing in a movie theater, unnerving her, taking her out of the mesmerizing story up on the screen. She shook her head no. It was clear she wanted to keep watching the video, and almost as clear that she was hoping an outsider would revel in her family with her. Seven cities, I thought. If you have to say good-bye to friend after friend, there must come a point when you finally cannot allow yourself friendship. I could hardly imagine a life in which I had to ask a stranger to watch my home movies.

So I turned back to view Luke peering up at
Blue’s Clues,
pulling up a carrot from the family vegetable patch, playing a baby version of football with his two brothers, being taught how to climb up a playground slide by his sister. Watching wasn’t that great a sacrifice. The Badinowskis seemed a good-hearted clan, although crew-cut Pete of Delta Adhesives carried himself as if he’d gotten an M-16 up his ass in some marine boot camp.

StarBaby had done not merely a professional job, but an intelligent one. Throughout the video, someone offscreen must have been asking specific questions, because everyone—from the pediatrician to siblings to the mailman to shoulders-back, chin-up Pete—spoke of Luke affectionately and occasionally articulately, with none of the predictable, awkward Hi! It’s me and I just want to say, uh, hello to, uh, the big boy on his birthday.

When it was over, I offered my praise of Luke, who was sitting on the floor taking apart a red-and-yellow plastic truck which I assumed was meant to be taken apart. Then I asked Jill: “Did you spend much time with Courtney?”

“Oh sure,” she replied. With her midwesterner’s passion for Rs, her sarcastic response emerged as Eww shrrrr. “Actually, she came with a sample video and talked to me about what I wanted. She was probably here for less than an hour.”

“What was she like?”

“I can’t honestly say. I guess ... We must be, must have been, around the same age. But I felt like she was a lot older.” Jill pulled at a loose thread on the hem of her shorts, causing a giant pucker. “She was so sophisticated. She wore slacks and a plain white blouse. It had to be silk. And a gold watch but no other jewelry. Except her wedding and engagement rings. She just looked ... perfect. Not like in
Vogue.
But you know that quiet good taste people in the East have? And she was so self-confident I couldn’t imagine
not
signing up for the video.”

“Well, it looked great to me.”

Jill offered me a sunny smile. “To me, too.”

“You called her sophisticated. Is that Indianapolis for cold?”

She flushed and cocked her head to one side to consider my question, and I had enough time to notice that if you played connect the dots with the darker freckles on her left cheek you got a snowman with one arm. “Not cold,” she finally replied. “She was nice. I didn’t feel like she was looking down on me or anything. But then again, she wasn’t judging me as a potential friend. I guess you could call her charming. But it was strictly business charm. I knew not to take it personally. She wouldn’t be interested in me.” She glanced down at Luke. “Well, why should she be? Even though Pete’s chief operating officer of Delta now, my job hasn’t changed.
My
motto isn’t ‘Achieve, achieve, achieve.’ Why should I interest someone like her?” Jill may have been waiting for me to protest, but I took too long. She continued: “Not that I’m finding fault with Courtney. She was a type. And a businesswoman. She didn’t come here to be my friend.”

“But her business was kids,” I suggested. “That’s kind of a warm and friendly way to make a living.”

“Warm and friendly is what sells these days,” Jill snapped, so sharply that I was still sitting frozen on the leather couch recovering from her tone while she was bending over to disengage Luke from the pieces of red-and-yellow truck he’d started to heave at the blank TV screen. “That’s what Courtney Logan was here for. Selling something. Making money on a product. Babies. But her business could have been making cookie cutters.” Then she added in her amiable, middle-America way: “Or poison gas.”

Jill’s poison gas floated over my head all day as I read an article—a revisionist analysis of Harry Hopkins’s administration of the lend-lease program by a Tulane University historian besotted by his own audacity—and planted my lettuce and arugula. It stayed with me, too, as I pushed my cart up and down the supermarket aisles, looking over a recipe for “French cutlets” on the tofu container, knowing in my heart—wishing it could be otherwise—they would not turn out
délicieux.
Everywhere I’d turned in Shorehaven, all I had heard about Courtney was “smart” and “nice.” Very nice. Really, really nice. Genuinely nice. Jill’s was the first not-nice. I didn’t have to open the can of Vanilla Almond tea leaves in my cart to read the animosity behind “poison gas.”

It was nearly seven when I set my bag of groceries in the back of my Jeep. Too much time studying frozen cheesecakes, scrutinizing sponge mops. Living alone, I’d noticed a tendency to check and recheck the unit price on Ultra Charmin and to squeeze far too many nectarines in order to put off going back to an empty house. So, I mused as I drove back up Main Street and down Beacon Road, was Jill simply reacting to a real or imagined condescension to a housewife on Courtney’s part? Or had she, even subliminally, picked up on a ruthlessness that everyone else, gasping or tsk-tsking over Courtney’s murder, had been eager to overlook?

What an evening it was, sugary with the mingled scents of flowering crabapple, dogwood, cherry, and apple trees. Except I kept thinking about poison gas. For me, better than nice. Because, I told myself as I pressed the garage-door opener, nice women do indeed get murdered, but nice cuts way down on motives:

Q: What did Courtney Logan ever do to you?

A: Nothing. She was incredibly nice.

But a cold woman, a ruthless woman, a poison gas woman might give me something to work with.

I drove the car into the garage, got out, and opened the rear gate of the Jeep thinking, Hmm, Boston lettuce with sliced mushrooms and how could I get leads to the investment bankers who’d worked with Courtney, and oh, to her close friends, too, and—

“You Judith?” a rough voice demanded. And, from a cobwebbed and shadowed corner in the back of my garage, out stepped Fancy Phil Lowenstein.

I
N A VOICE
that had the delicacy of sulfuric acid, Fancy Phil Lowenstein demanded, “You Judith Singer?” Simultaneously, he put an arm around my shoulders that weighed enough to compress the disks between each vertebra. I thought of all those movies in which the heroine plunges her hand into her pocketbook and retrieves one of those femme items, like a metal nail file, that can be instantly converted into a weapon. But the notion, Aha! I’ll poke my Jeep key into his eyeball to distract him, did not occur to me. My brain, fear-frozen into suspended animation, did not instruct my hand to unzip my shoulder bag, plunge in, and retrieve my house keys—with the nifty little panic button for the alarm system I kept on my key ring. In fact, all I could think to do was nod, like one of those dopey dolls whose heads bop up and down on a spring: That’s me, uh-huh, yes, right, I’m Judith Singer.

Fancy Phil muttered: “I’m asking ...” His voice trailed off as his eyes peered upward, at the motor of the garage-door opener. Then they scanned the rear wall, at the rake, snow shovel, and mysterious-object-left-by-children-that-might-have-pumped-up-basketballs-or-served-as-hookah-or-bong-or-whatever-they-call-it that dangled from the Peg-Board. Apparently, he suspected my garage was bugged because he murmured: “...because of that research stuff you mentioned to ...” His eyebrows lifted in a gesture I suspected was Felonese for “my son.”

With that, I found myself being transported toward the door that led from the garage into the house. I wasn’t being shoved or dragged so much as simply having my location altered by an elemental force. “You know who I am?” Fancy Phil inquired as his fingers grasped my upper arm. It was like being held by five bionic bratwursts, the smallest of which sported a ring with a diamond the size of one of Jupiter’s lesser moons.

I stood before the entrance to the kitchen, my heart banging against my chest like some desperate creature pounding on a door, begging to be let out. In, actually, was the place I wanted to go. Nevertheless, I knew there was no real sanctuary: Garage, kitchen, this guy could kill me anywhere. I stood paralyzed, my face inches from the door, my handbag gripped under my free arm. My car keys were clenched so tight their metal teeth bit into the flesh of my palm. I didn’t realize I was hugging my grocery bag with such passion until I heard a dull
bloop!
of splitting plastic and immediately inhaled a whiff of vanilla yogurt. Finally some words emerged. “You’re Mr. Lowenstein,” I replied.

“Yeah. Phil Lowenstein. And you know whose father I am.” I nodded. I’m pretty sure I didn’t actually turn to look at him, although I vaguely recall allowing my eyes to drift sideways. Fancy Phil’s head had been plopped midway between his shoulders without benefit of neck, so his second chin rested against the heavy gold neck chain exposed by the open collar of his shirt. He’d put on quite a few pounds since his last mug shot. “Call me Phil.” He released my arm and wiped his forehead. His skin, glazed with perspiration, was flushed an ominous red that, as I watched, was darkening to purple. “Hot in here,” he observed. A flash of gold caught my eye. A snake bracelet entwined around his meaty wrist, the mouth and tail separated by an inch of over-tanned skin and graying arm hair.