Singer 02 - Long Time No See (2 page)

“What should she do, take the kid along?” Nancy crossed her slender arms over her true size eight chest, clearly miffed I was not anticipating the arrival of The Dress with sufficient enthusiasm.

“Nancy, focus: I’ve read everything about this and seen whatever they have on TV.”

“For me,” she declared, “this case is mildly interesting. For you, it’s unhealthy. I don’t like seeing you—”

“Relax. I’m fine! Listen, this is what seems to have happened: Courtney brings the little girl home. She says to the au pair: ‘I forgot something. I just have to run to Grand Union for a minute.’ Then she
doesn’t come back
.” I chewed my lip for a moment. “Have you heard any gossip or about anything the paper
hasn’t
printed?”

Several years earlier Nancy had given up freelance writing to become first an assistant, then an associate editor of “Viewpoints,”
Newsday’
s op-ed pages. Before she could even tell me she was too overwhelmed with work to listen to reporters’ gossip, a blatant lie, the saleswoman returned. She carried the hanger aloft. The white dress wafted in the breeze she created. Together, she and Nancy fingered the hem reverently, in the manner Catholics might touch the Shroud of Turin. Then off they strode toward the dressing room.

Halfheartedly, I leafed through a rack of gray clothes which appeared designed to fit a Giacometti sculpture and thought about Courtney. According to both
Newsday
and Channel 12, the Long Island all-news cable station, no one had seen her at the supermarket or in its parking lot. That was not in the least remarkable, as the market was about a mile and a half from her house, and her car, a 1998 Land Rover, was later found right where it usually was, in the garage. Not one neighbor had seen or heard anything unusual. That was no big deal either. In that part of town, Shorehaven Farms, the houses stood at least an acre apart.

The following day, an announcement was made in the middle school and high school’s homeroom classes requesting anyone who had been trick or treating in Shorehaven Farms between five and six
P.M
.—the time the au pair believed Courtney left for the supermarket—to please come to the main office ASAP. A few minutes before three, after a proffer of full immunity was broadcast over the PA, six juniors who had spent a productive night toppling mailboxes finally came forward. All swore they had seen nothing of Courtney.

Nancy returned from the dressing room, gray-green eyes shining, cheeks aglow. It was clear the dress had done for her precisely what she’d hoped, an event that has not yet occurred in my life. But then, Nancy is one of those natural ... Well, not quite beauties. One of those women in their fifties who remain natural lovelies, all peaches-and-cream skin and long legs and auburn hair and huge eyes and wasp-waistedness, although the last had been facilitated by Jason J. Mittelman, M.D., F.A.C.S., Long Island’s premier plastic surgeon, and his gluttonous liposuction machine. “The husband,” Nancy postulated.

“Feh.”

“What do you mean, ‘feh’?”

“Too obvious,” I told her.

“You’re clearly not as bright as you think you are. It happens to be a thesis that’s so obvious it’s actually subtle.”

“Wrong,” I informed her. “If there’s a shred of proof they would have arrested him.” Then I mused: “I wonder what they actually have, if anything.”

“Judith, you’re not going to—”

“Please! Of course not. I’m just wondering. It’s a sign of intellectual curiosity, not that you would know. Now what about the husband?”

“Somebody Logan.”

“Greg Logan,” I said encouragingly.

“Well, you asked if I’d heard any gossip,” Nancy went on, tossing her head back so her hair flopped prettily, the southern belle gesture that accompanies any reaction from mildly pissed off to utterly hysterical. “I did hear one thing. He did not come into this world as Gregory Logan. He changed his name from—Are you ready?” I nodded. “Greg
Lowenstein
.” She began to spell it for me.

“Don’t waste your breath,” I interrupted. “So big deal. People anglicize their names. Three generations ago half the Eastern Europeans and a quarter of the Italians who came through Ellis Island—”

“Greg’s father is Fancy Phil Lowenstein. The gangster. The one who wears all that jewelry. He’s the guy who brokered the truce between the Italian mob and Russian Mafia and he’s this close”—she held up her index and middle fingers so they looked glued together—“to the Gambellos.”

I switched from chewing my lip to gnawing my knuckle for a while. “So what are you getting at?” I was finally inquiring just as the saleswoman came into view. A garment bag with Nancy’s KKK robe was hooked over her index finger; her other hand held the sales receipt and charge card. As she seemed to be advancing at the pace of a bride coming down the aisle, I kept going. “Are you saying some two-bit hood with an asinine nickname was dispatched to throttle Courtney Logan, the mother of Fancy Phil Lowenstein’s grandchildren, and dump her body in Long Island Sound?”

“In Fancy Phil’s circle,” she replied, “that’s a quickie divorce.”

What Nancy did not reply, but which I learned when I picked up the papers from the driveway the next morning, was that
Newsday
was going with Greg Logan’s pedigree as their front page, along with a photograph of Greg carrying his small son and holding his daughter’s hand, heading toward a BMW in the driveway. The picture might have been taken with a telephoto lens because Greg did not look intruded upon and outraged. Merely sad. Possibly exhausted. Good-looking, though not conventionally; his face was more valentine-shaped than standard rectilinear Wheaties box. Still, with his high cheekbones and thick, dark, up-slanting eyebrows, he seemed intriguing in a slightly Genghis Khan way, even though the perpetually off newspaper color gave his skin that odd tone which makes people look as if they belong to a race with mauve skin.

Fancy Phil’s picture—a black-and-white mug shot—was inset. He did not look like a Calvin Klein model. The headline made a semiclever reference to “family,” which anyone more worldly than Travis the Toddler would know was intended to mean not only a group of people related by ancestry, marriage, or adoption but also the old
la famiglia
so beloved by Mafia genre movies—dialogue inevitably accompanied by glasses of Chianti held high by men with inordinately hairy arms.

The
New York Times
, naturally buried the story in the depths of the Metro section, allotting it three short, untitillating paragraphs. The
Shorehaven Beacon
, which was tossed onto driveways on its customary Friday, said nothing new about the Lowenstein connection, only that a “spokesperson for the Logan family” asked for the community to pray that Courtney would turn up “‘alive and well.’” What the
Beacon
did print was the photo of Courtney they’d run earlier with their original feature on StarBaby. It was captioned: “
WHERE IS SHE
?”

In the picture, Courtney, wearing slacks and a sweater set and an open, friendly smile, leans against a tree in front of what seemed to be a pretty nifty Georgian-style colonial. It was hard to tell precisely what she looked like because the
Beacon
is printed on such tissuey stock—the sort used for toilet paper in Second World countries—that the ink was always smudgy. Her nose and eyes, scrunched up in the act of smiling, offered too much nostril and too little eye; it was hard to read her expression. But her dimples were so deep that, even under the sad circumstances, I found myself smiling back. Her blond, shoulder-length hair was surprisingly full and wavy, more Grand Ole Opry than Princeton, although perhaps it had just been the humidity.

“Where is she?” took over the town. In the bakery, a neighbor gazed covetously at a cheesecake while proclaiming Courtney the victim of a serial killer. Leaning against the Shorehaven Triplex’s popcorn machine—not cleaned since the Carter Administration—the kid behind the counter held a monster cup of Sprite and opined that Courtney Logan was an FBI agent, undercover to get evidence on the Logan-Lowensteins, and, at that precise moment, was probably being debriefed in Washington. Or maybe dead. In my book group the favorite theory held that Courtney’s body was in the trunk of some hood’s Lincoln Continental, courtesy of Fancy Phil, who wanted his son to marry some other Jewish gangster’s daughter from Scarsdale, thus creating an unstoppable Long Island-Westchester organized crime axis. (This was no more idiotic than their interpretation of
Mrs. Dalloway
.) At work, the perpetually overwrought history department secretary suggested in her usual choked voice that maybe the au pair had buried Courtney alive in a graveyard,
where nobody would think to look for her
.

For the next few weeks, with increasing desperation, I read the papers and listened to the news hoping for a driblet of information about the Courtney Logan case. But Courtney had disappeared from the media as completely as she had from Shorehaven. People who’d only wanted to gossip nonstop about the Logans went back to warring over the “No Right Turn on Red” sign on Main Street and Harborview Road: Neighbors shook fists at neighbors at Town Hall meetings over whether the sign was a prudent traffic control measure or an edict that violated the due process clause of the U.S. constitution. Who else could I carry on with about the mystery? My children were busy being adults. Nancy suddenly had even less free time than usual, having tumbled for her new Jaguar mechanic. My other friends were involved with their own less interesting, less adulterous affairs.

I was so hard up for someone with whom to analyze the Courtney case that I actually wound up trying to discuss it with Smarmy Sam, aka Samuel P. B. Braddock III, the department chair. As always, because he thought of himself as a patrician and me as his inferior, the Smarm had simply pushed open my office door without knocking and stuck in his head. With his limp-lidded eyes and awesome overbite, this was no treat. He looked as if a couple of crocodile genes had glommed onto his double helix. “I’d liiiike an answer,” he was saying. Well, he’d come to my office to again try to persuade me that teaching an additional two classes of America from Reconstruction to the Cold War in the spring was not just good for the commonweal, but for me as well.

“Before we get to that,” I said with unseemly animation, “did you happen to hear that a woman from my town vanished into thin air?” Before Sam could get a word in edgewise, I offered a synopsis of what had been reported.

Sam understood that before he had a chance at my jumping at his offer, he’d have to let me jabber. “Is this Greg Loooogan a suspect?” He spoke more in a honk than a voice, that lockjaw Long Island accent still extant among polo players, random debutantes, and fakers. “By the by, is this Logan related to the Logans of Oyster Bay?” Sam inquired.

“No. He’s related to Fancy Phil Lowenstein, a mob guy. Actually, Fancy Phil’s his father.”

“Oh.” The Smarm, predictably, was doing his best to hide that he was appalled by the likes of me. His best, as usual, was not good enough. He was a man who not only taught American history, but believed he owned it. An ambulatory anachronism in our age of diversity, Sam was an East Coast WASP who not only thought he and his ilk were better than, say, me and my ilk—or anybody’s ilk—but also believed we needed constant reminders of what our place was, for our own good. Was his accent the real thing? Was he genuinely wellborn? None of us had a clue. Well, he did keep his pens in a mug with a St. Paul’s insignia and he managed to work the phrase “preparing at Sint Pol’s” into a sentence at least once a week. Naturally, the entire department was on continuous Sint Pol’s alert, all sworn to report an occurrence the second it passed the two-dimensional lines that were his lips.

“Caaaan we return to the business at hand?” Sam asked. “Your class load, or, if I may be so bold, your lack of it?”

So my need to talk about Courtney and what had happened to her was, yet again, frustrated. After the Smarm left, I told myself it was better he wasn’t interested. Many mysteries in life remain unsolved. No matter how much I yearned, it would not be productive for me to try to insert myself into a situation that was none of my concern, even though every fiber of my being, and I had a fair number of fibers, cried out to do precisely that.

A few words of explanation might be appropriate here. Here they are: I am passionate about whodunits. The fictional kind. Hand me a Robert Parker novel, a John Dickson Carr locked-room mystery, even one I’ve read three times before, and you’ll be giving me the gift of pleasure. But I love real-life whodunits more. About twenty years ago, as I was passing over to the bleak side of thirty-five, at a time when my now-lawyer daughter and film-critic son were little more than tykes, a local periodontist, M. Bruce Fleckstein, was murdered. I recall hearing about it on the radio and thinking: Who could have done such a thing? Before I knew it, I was investigating, and feeling thrillingly alive.

I am not sure why. Maybe it had to do with my sense of fair play—trying to bring the scales of justice back into balance. Murder is an attack on the body politic as well as on a particular body, and perhaps I felt the need to set things aright in my home town. Maybe I liked solving the puzzle, or maybe I was simply drawn to the dark side of the street. Believe it or not, I actually was instrumental in determining just who the killer was. But in the course of my detective work, I came into contact with a real homicide detective, Lieutenant Nelson Sharpe of the Nassau County Police Department.

To make a long story short, I had an affair with him. That was it. Six months of faithlessness in a twenty-eight-year marriage. Even for a historian like me, aware of the persistence of the past, it should have been ancient history—except I fell in love with Nelson. And he with me. For a time we even talked about leaving our spouses, getting married. We simply couldn’t bear being without each other. Not just for the erotic joy, and there was plenty of that, but for the great fun we had together. But even more than my secret belief that a marriage that rises from the ashes of two other marriages is doomed from the start was our mutual, acknowledged awareness of what our leaving would do to our children. At the time Kate was six and Joey four. Nelson had three kids of his own. So he stayed with his wife June and I remained with Bob Singer. Nelson and I never saw or spoke to each other. For almost twenty years.