Singer 02 - Long Time No See (19 page)

“And with Courtney?”

“God rest her soul and all, but she was the chirpiest, least sexual human being I’d ever met.”

It wasn’t just muscles that gave Susan Viniar her air of authority. Unlike the pontificators and the boasters who aim to wow you, she spoke with quiet simplicity, as though her words came from both her heart and head, such a decent heart and a good head that they had to be right. Then again, I reflected, she could be one of those people so bedazzled by their own fantasies that they truly believe their fabrications are truer than truth.

“Okay,” I said, “so if we assume no lover, but a husband who adored her, neighbors who thought highly of her, friends who liked her, or at least saw her as a decent person, then it comes down to: What kind of person would want to kill her?”

Susan’s arms crossed even tighter, as if she were beginning a set of isometrics or warding off a chill. “Based on what I saw? What I knew Courtney to be?” I nodded encouragingly. “Absolutely no one,” she declared.

So no one had anything against Courtney Logan. I thought: Then how come she won’t be making a strawberry, blueberry, banana Flag Day cake this year?

That night, the storm finally exhausted itself around ten-thirty, leaving behind it the intoxicating smell of ozone and wet grass. A soft breeze blew through my open bedroom window and touched me gently, as if aware I needed special handling. I pressed the eject button and a tape I’d made years earlier of
Old Acquaintance
slid out of the VCR. I probably sighed, an audible
hommage
to Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, and female friendship, and with another flick of the finger turned off the TV.

It was one of those rare, lovely nights that I wasn’t feeling at least a little depressed-lonely or frightened-lonely. Depressed, that I’d wind up alone in an assisted-living facility rife with denture-clacking, Trotskyite bridge players and Lucky Strike-smoking, anti-Semitic Republicans. Or frightened, that I’d have an anaphylactic reaction to the sting of a bee which had slipped through the quarter-inch rip in my bedroom window screen: I’d be discovered a week later, the phone receiver clutched in one decomposing hand, the other having had only enough life left to dial 9-1 ...

But this night was good. I lay at ease in bed, my pillow perfectly fluffed, my blanket just the right weight, enjoying the sweetness of almost-summer in a dreamy way that carried me back and gently set me down in the backyard of my Brooklyn childhood. As far as I can recall, I wasn’t even thinking about who killed Courtney Logan, though I might have subconsciously weighed Acquaintance Susan Viniar’s No Possible Extramarital Funny Stuff theory against Good Friend Kellye Ryan’s Courtney Was Having a Fling hypothesis. I turned onto my side, flipped over the pillow so it was cool against my cheek and closed my eyes. Ahhh. So naturally when the phone rang, the sound shot through me the way current zaps a convict in the electric chair. My legs kicked and I made one of those Nyah! noises and answered the phone with a croaky “hello.”

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” Even had I been more composed, I don’t think I would have pretended I didn’t know it was Nelson Sharpe.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Not bad.”

“Good. Is it too late?” He wasn’t actually slurring his words, but he was inordinately slow. He’d had a touch too much of something. “Can you talk now?”

“Sure.”

“How’ve you been?”

“All right,” I told him. I pictured him leaning against the dark-paneled wall of a smoky Irish bar, talking into a pay phone. Except he wasn’t Irish. He was a WASP, a Methodist, but I couldn’t conjure up a Methodist bar. Or else he was sitting at his desk in the Special Investigations bureau, his bottom drawer with its half-drunk bottle of whiskey still open. Then I realized I was thinking in black-and-white, which no doubt came from watching more noir movies than were healthy for me. So I opened my eyes to the reality of my dark room and asked: “How have you been, Nelson?”

“Good. Hey, listen. I was out, talking with a couple of guys.”

“Uh-huh,” I said encouragingly.

“Couple of buddies from Homicide. That Courtney, the one who’s Fancy Phil’s daughter-in-law. She had this car, a Land Rover.”

He seemed to be waiting for something from me, so I said: “Right.”

“You didn’t hear this from me, but the mother’s helper who was working for them reported she saw Courtney drive away in it. But then later that night, when the husband called and the precinct cops went over, there it was, in the garage—the garage in their house.”

“Right,” I said again. My heart was beating faster than it should, though it was less the fact of Nelson calling me than that he was calling me about the Logan case. I think. Anyhow, I reached up and switched on the lamp to kill any fanciful thoughts. “So do they have any idea who brought the car back? The murderer with Courtney dead? Courtney alive and the murder was done at the house?”

“The only physical evidence in the car was evidence of Courtney—and the husband and the au pair. Lots of kids’ fingerprints in the back.”

“Husbands drive their wives’ cars,” I told him. “It’s not a felony in New York.”

“Right. Sure. But there wasn’t a sign that any other adult had been in it besides the two of them and the au pair.”

“But anyone else who would have planned for even two seconds to kill her would have worn gloves,” I protested. “And the fact that Greg Logan’s prints were on it might have meant he took her car out to get his lawn mower blade sharpened or something.”

“The guys from Homicide said it was warm that day.” He’d pretty much dropped the
d
sound from “Homicide” and “said,” as though lifting his tongue to the front of his palate was too great an effort. “Warm for Halloween. Anyone wearing gloves would get looked at funny.”

“Maybe it was someone wearing a Halloween costume,” I suggested.

I waited for the Nelson I knew to give me an argument. But all I heard was breathing so slowly I thought he might have fallen asleep. Then he surprised me. “For all I know, you may be right,” he said. “Not about the costume. You probably read all those idiot serial-killer books.”

“I do not.”

“But there is enough talk on TV these days about DNA that, okay, if it wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, even a dope would have taken precautions, like wearing a hat so hair doesn’t get on anything. Maybe gloves, too, and he’d stick his hands in his pockets or something so no one would ask questions.”

“Or her hands.” All I got was silence. I had a sense Nelson was waiting for me to continue, since he was just pie-eyed enough to have forgotten that it was he who’d made the phone call. “So the car was in the garage,” I prompted. I wasn’t about to shout hosannas of gratitude since the detail that the Land Rover was back in the garage was in practically every news account I’d come across. “Anything else?”

“About what?” he demanded, annoyed, as though I was trying to pump him for police secrets. “Oh, she’d had the car serviced on October fourteenth.”

“Right. And she disappeared on the thirty-first.”

“And between those two times, do you know how many miles she put on the car?”

“How many?” I asked, probably too eagerly.

“Seven hundred sixty-two,” he replied coolly.

“Wow. That would be a lot of car pools.”

“Yeah, Judith. A lot of car pools.” And before I could ask him anything else, or even say thank you, he hung up.

And that should have been that. The next morning, a Saturday, I put hot rollers in my hair so I’d look sleek at the New York Historical Society’s exhibit on female allegories of America. With luck, and enough hair spray to increase the hole in the ozone layer, I could get to my daughter’s apartment in an unfrizzled state so that she and her boyfriend could serve me a dinner of shockingly expensive, oddly mated foreign dishes—bouillabaisse, tandoori chicken, and gnocchi the size of softballs had been their last offering—from their local gourmet take-out joint.

Kate’s boyfriend, Adam, was a slender young man who worked in MTV’s legal department. He dressed in slacks so baggy that it looked as though he were carrying a load in his diaper. He wore only black shirts, like Il Duce’s thugs. Never a tie. What kind of thirty-year-old guy (who spoke as if he’d spent his youth in a Watts rap group instead of being what he was, Mr. White Boy at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School) would be that susceptible to fashion that he would actually don a zoot suit? Could someone like him be man enough for my beautiful and brilliant Kate? Every time I visited them (for he and his wardrobe of fascist shirts had moved in with her), I worked myself into a fair case of melancholia, to say nothing of indigestion.

Except at ten o’clock, Kate called and said she had to cancel, that she’d been called into the office to work on a hostile tender offer. I refrained from demanding what I wanted to demand, which was What the hell is so important about a tender offer that it can’t wait till Monday? And I emitted not a single guilt-inducing sigh of resignation: Women without husbands are dependent on the kindness of children. So I told her I was looking forward to seeing her as soon as the pressure let up. Then I trudged into the bathroom, removed the hot rollers, ran my fingers through my hair until, regarding myself in the mirror, I was pleased to discover I didn’t look like Mike Myers playing Linda Richman. Rather, I looked sensuous, albeit slightly world-weary, a combination of Anna Magnani and Simone Signoret—though admittedly I had the advantage of having forgotten to turn on the light.

Then I clomped downstairs, determined not to wimp out of going to the Historical Society simply because it held no prospect of human contact. However, I gave myself permission to take a later train. So when the doorbell rang a little after ten-thirty, I’d had just enough time to get sweaty and crabby from unsuccessfully trying to get my new Palm Pilot to form a relationship with my computer.

Of course as I called out “Who is it?” in nauseatingly mellifluous tones, I was picturing Nelson at the door: Having found my voice on the phone so Siren-like the night before, he’d been compelled to come over. So when I looked through the peephole and saw him, then heard “Nelson Sharpe,” I stood rather stupidly for a moment, astounded that it actually was he. Quickly, I patted my damp forehead with the hem of my skirt, stretched out the neck of my T-shirt to blow two blasts of cool air under my arms, and opened the door.

“I, uh ...” he said. This time there was no hounds-tooth sports jacket to make me think twice. Evidently, this was dress-down Saturday for the Special Investigations unit, and he looked so good in a plaid shirt and jeans I temporarily forgot about the gold ring on his left hand.

“Would you like to come in?”

“I don’t want to disturb anybody.” I knew him well enough to know he was simply double-checking. Nelson was nothing if not thorough. He’d probably already driven past the house a few times, staked it out for a while, then looked in the garage, where he’d seen only one car—mine, the car registered in my name whose license plate the cops in his unit had called in the night of my dinner with Fancy Phil. No doubt he’d concluded Bob was, in all likelihood, in the city, clearing off his desk on a Saturday morning.

Okay, it did surprise me that Nelson hadn’t considered that my husband’s MO might have changed sometime during the last twenty years. On the other hand, had Bob been alive, without a doubt he would have been at his office.

Nelson’s wedding band flashed its cold light at me a minute later, when we were sitting four feet apart on the living-room couch. “Listen,” he said, “last night ...”

“You’re not sure what you said to me. You’re afraid you might have whispered sweet nothings in my ear. Don’t worry. You didn’t embarrass yourself.”

“No, no,” he countered, with an isn’t-that-ridiculous chuckle. Then he applied his detective skills to checking out the weave of the upholstery on the arm of the couch. “I’m concerned I might have repeated some, uh, casual conversation about the Courtney Logan case I heard from a couple of guys.”

“Guys in Homicide.”

“Guys in Homicide,” he repeated quietly.

“Well, you didn’t blab any state secrets— Stop pulling at that thread. You’ll unravel the whole couch.”

“I wasn’t pulling on it.”

“What were you doing? Investigating it?”

He shifted so his body was facing mine. His legs parted and I found myself staring into his eyes to hypnotize myself so I wouldn’t even take a quick peek at the bulge in his jeans. It’s bad enough when you’re simply attracted to a guy; it’s much worse when you already know what the prize inside is. What had I expected, that it would retract when he hit his fifties?

The problem was gazing into his eyes, which were big and a beautiful satiny brown. Soft, like cow eyes, except that implies a bovine quality, and his were, as they had been, intelligent, aware. And sexual. Women know: Some guys have the heat that makes their eyes almost feverish when they’re looking at someone they want. Nelson had probably had those eyes at age ten. He’d definitely had them when he and I had been lovers, in his late thirties. I knew he’d have them for the rest of his life. “Look, Judith, can we have an honest talk?”

I quit looking into his eyes. “No.”

“No?” He acted shocked, as if I’d said something that would scandalize any decent human being.

“Unless you want to have an honest talk about the Courtney Logan case,” I added.

“Listen, don’t you think ... when we happened to run into each other last year, don’t you think that was meant to be?” Nelson’s voice was low enough to be bedroomy.

“‘Meant to be’? What’s happened to you? Are you buying CDs of pounding surf and wind chimes? The answer is no, it was not meant to be. You and I had an accidental meeting because of a shared interest.” His eyes had narrowed, which meant he was probably burning over my associating him and wind chime recordings, so I quickly added: ‘“Shared interest’ being homicide.”

“I’m out of Homicide. I told you that.”

“Why did you leave?” He didn’t answer. “Did you jump, Nelson? Or were you pushed?”

“Pushed,” he said quietly to his knees.

“What happened?”