Singer 02 - Long Time No See (25 page)

I myself was feeling fairly jaunty. “No, the omelette was fine,” I replied.

“Because if you want, I can get Monte to make you a waffle. Or a real omelette, with the yellow in it.” Phil himself had finished off a breakfast of scrambled eggs and all the accoutrements. Not a shred of hash-brown potatoes was left, nor a crust from the tower of toast he’d been served. Miniature foil containers of grape jelly and strawberry preserves, now empty, as well as a minor mess of small paper rectangles Phil had ripped off pats of butter, were strewn across the table. “Maybe some pancakes?” He grabbed a few napkins from the dispenser and dabbed the already clean corners of his mouth. “They got hot oatmeal. The kind that still’s got a little crunch in it, not the mushy kind.”

“No thanks, Phil. Look, I want to talk about money.” His poker face was impressive, though the almost imperceptible slosh of black coffee in his cup showed me something had registered. “No, no,” I came back quickly. “Not money for me. I’m in this as a volunteer, just as I said I’d be. I mean Courtney’s money. I need to ask you some questions about her, and please understand I don’t mean to be disrespectful—”

“What are you talking? Respect? You think I’m some godfather where you gotta kiss my ring?”

“No, because I have no intentions of kissing anything of yours. So, let’s move along. If your daughter-in-law had a strong guiding force in her life, what would you say it was? Love—including sex—or money?”

Fancy Phil didn’t even bother with a token “Hmm.” “Money.”

“How come you’re so sure?”

He gave himself time to mull this over by calling out to the man behind the counter. “Hey, Monte, what’s a guy gotta do around here to get more toast?” Monte smiled, undoubtedly knowing his role in this game, and gave a snappy, yes-sir! salute. Fancy Phil, knowing his role also, graciously inclined his head. Then he turned back to me. “It’s like this.” He massaged the first of his chins. “Picture a business thing, okay? You meet some guy. He looks right, says all the right words. Except you pick up little things. Let’s say you’re talking about a deal. But all of a sudden a girl walks by and he’s checking her out. Then he turns back to you; he says, ‘What were you just saying?’ Now, the guy only lost his concentration for maybe half a second, but you know, hey, he don’t have the ... the focus for you to want to do a deal with him. A girl’s a girl, but a deal’s a deal. Like with Courtney. Focus. You talk about business stuff, and even though she was a good wife and mother, always googly-eyeing Gregory and calling the kids ‘Sweetie,’ in my heart of hearts—” Fancy Phil whacked the northwest corner of his paunch to show me where his heart was—“she’d drop the sugarplum shit—pardon me—if somebody three blocks away whispered ‘spreadsheet.’”

“What did she like more about business?” I pumped him. “The wheeling and dealing? Or the money?”

“Well, she knew how to spend all right. Clothes. That house, the cars, the vacations. Bali the last time. Making Gregory go halfway around the world to go to the beach? Antiques, too. Let me tell you, for two kids playing it straight—”

“By straight you mean legal?” I cut in.

“Yeah. Legal. Legit. For two kids keeping their nose clean, Courtney and Gregory were doing nice. Living nice. Too nice, because Courtney was always spending. Getting plans drawn up for a greenhouse one time. Pressuring him to buy the house next door when it went up for sale. So’s they could knock it down and have more land. Land. They already got two acres. Who the hell was she, Miss Scarlett O’Hara?”

I finished cleaning off the tops of the salt and pepper shakers with my napkin and willed myself not even to glance at the ketchup-encrusted seam between the table’s top and sides. Instead I inquired: “So it was more money—what money could buy—than wheeling and dealing that interested Courtney?”

“Nah, that’s not right either. Because you couldn’t shut her up about business when she started StarBaby. Blab, blab, blab. And when she finally said everything twice, she’d talk about other people’s businesses, too. Like telling you
Wall Street Journal
stories. Boring corporate crap: ‘Schmuckola, Incorporated’s quarterly profits exceeded all forecasts.’ Like I really give a you-know-what about Schmuckola. But after a while, when StarBaby wasn’t raking it in, she didn’t have nothing to say about anybody’s business. So put it this way: Courtney liked wheeling and dealing only if she was in the plus column.”

“That money she took from her and Greg’s brokerage and bank accounts,” I said. “We’ve gone over how she put some of it back. But in the end, she wound up keeping for herself twenty-five thousand dollars of what used to be joint money.”

“Yeah,” Fancy Phil said. “That’s right. She needed it for StarBaby.”

“Can you remember when all that taking out and putting back on her part happened?”

“Lemme think. Gregory told me about it ... I guess the second week of November, two weeks after she was missing, when the cops began asking him about that forty thou he took out from their joint account and put in his own name.”

“That was the money that was supposed to make his bankers feel comfortable, right?”

“Right. You’re running a legit business, you need an open line of credit, you don’t want no uncomfortable bankers.” He paused, then bunched up his lips and spat out—fortunately not in my direction—as if he’d just tasted something revolting. “Except those dummy putzes, those Homicide cops! They took Gregory’s putting forty thou aside to make Soup Salad Sandwiches secure to mean
he
was the reason Courtney was missing, if you get me.”

“You mean, the cops’ theory is that Greg wanted to get his hands on the family money, and maybe he and Courtney fought. So he killed her.”

“You ever hear such crap? Anyways, Gregory told me something like he had a talk with Courtney on Mother’s Day, whenever that is.”

“Mid-May.”

“So a talk in mid-May, about her pulling money out of their joint accounts for that stupid StarBaby. Then later they had words again; I guess in the summer. That’s when she dipped in and helped herself the second time. Can you believe such chutzpah? But he told me she calmed down moneywise around the time Morgan started kindergarten. So that’s around Labor Day or a little after. Courtney said she was sorry and Gregory said
he
was sorry but he had to keep a certain cash balance to make his bankers happy. He told me everything was lovey-dovey after that.”

I took a deep breath and asked: “How sure are you that your son is telling the truth?”

Fancy Phil answered “As sure as I can get” so quickly and so calmly I decided to believe him.

“From what I’ve heard ...” I was interrupted as Monte came from behind the counter with what looked like an entire loaf of bread, toasted, as well as a bowlful of jelly containers and butter pats. When at last he stopped smiling and moved back behind the counter, I continued: “Courtney’s usual pattern seemed to change in September. She lost interest in StarBaby. According to both her best friend and the young woman who worked for her part-time, her mind was elsewhere. It all jibes with what you’re saying.”

“Want a piece?” He held out a triangle of toast.

“No thanks. Listen, Phil, you’re a smart businessman. What does it tell you if someone who is really interested in money and business starts neglecting the very business she’d thought would be the key to her making it big?”

“It could tell me a couple of things,” he said carefully.

“Like?”

“Like with a woman? She could’ve had a boyfriend. But I don’t think so. Not Courtney. She could’ve been, you know, having depression or something—a nervous breakdown. Or maybe she was getting born again, the Jesus stuff they do. But I don’t think that either. If I had to guess, I’d say she found some other business that was more, you know, interesting than the one she had.”

“Could she have gotten involved with something messy? Wound up paying blackmail? Or did she have it in her to possibly be blackmailing someone else?”

Fancy Phil shook his head as if I’d suggested something beyond idiocy. “When someone’s in trouble, there’s like ... an invisible black cloud over them. They can go ha-ha a million times a day, but someone like me—you know, someone who knows what trouble really means—can sniff it out. And Courtney didn’t have no black cloud like she was scared or in a jam or trying to pull a racket that wasn’t going right.”

“What about the opposite? Could she have found some other business interest more lucrative than StarBaby?”

“‘Lucrative.’” He chuckled without any discernible humor. “I know what ‘lucrative’ means.”

“I’m sure you do. That’s why I used it. I don’t talk down to you, Phil. We’re both too smart for that.”

“Yeah, I know, Doctor. Anyhow, if you’re right, and I say
if
, then yeah, some other lucrative business thing makes more sense to me than a boyfriend or blackmail. But that’s The Big If. You could be going on a wild-goose chase. Mark my words.”

“But there’s a time you’ve got to trust your instincts, isn’t there?”

“There’s a time,” he agreed.

“So regarding the love versus money approach,” I went on. “If I believed it was love that drove her, I’d keep looking in Shorehaven. But as far as money goes, I need to follow Courtney’s finance contacts. So what I’d like you to do is see if you can get something from Greg—”

Fancy Phil was squeezing the contents of a container of strawberry jam onto the corner of his thickly buttered toast. The jam looked like a clot of blood. “Done,” he declared.

“But you don’t know what I want yet. “

“Whatever you want,” he said, carefully seeing that the jelly covered every crevice of his toast, “I can do.”

What I wanted was names of Courtney’s colleagues. True to his word, Fancy Phil delivered, calling me just before noon with a list of names and telephone numbers. My Caller ID indicated he was phoning from a Shorehaven number. I figured it was safe to assume that he’d gone to the Logan house while his son was at work and made himself comfortable—perhaps in Courtney’s home office—by Greg’s invitation. Or more likely not. Fancy Phil probably considered his own need invitation enough.

I almost couldn’t believe it was me acting so fast, but by four that afternoon there I was, marching up a downtown Manhattan street two blocks from Wall even though the blood supply to my little toe was being choked off by a patent-leather shoe. I felt sort of choked off, too. Even though this was the heart of High Finance City, it was a creepy neighborhood. The sidewalk lay in the perpetual dimness of shadows cast by office buildings that seemed to be leaning toward each other, tall, dank, and dreary, on either side of the narrow thoroughfare. Number twenty-two’s gray masonry gave off a moldy odor as if it had been decaying since—I eyed the cornerstone—the second decade of the twentieth century. Once past the almost immovable revolving brass-and-glass door, I found myself confronted by a long-lashed security guard who reminded me of one of the teenage rapists in
A Clockwork Orange
. He gave me a slit-eyed gaze, even after Cecile Rabiea, vice-president of Patton Giddings, whom he phoned, told him it was fine to send Ms. Singer up to the thirty-fourth floor.

Patton Giddings was one of those institutions venerable enough to gain even more respect from looking seedy. The rug in the reception area was worn down to the mesh in spots, and what was left looked as if it hadn’t been shampooed since FDR beat Hoover in ’32. A secretary came and led me down darkly lighted halls. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect in an investment bank. Certainly there were no shirt-sleeved hysterics screaming “Buy!” or “Sell!” Most doors were closed. The hallway was carpeted and I couldn’t even hear my own footsteps.

Besides my tight shoes, I was wearing my several-years-old almost-Armani black pant suit, an austere, cream-color silk T-shirt, and the gold watch Bob had bought me for my fiftieth. If I wasn’t exactly dressed for success, I felt fairly confident no one in the financial community would break out in scornful laughter upon seeing me. However, when I was ushered into the brave new world of Cecile Rabiea’s ultramodern office, I immediately knew that the shoulder pads of my suit jacket (which could have replaced first and second bases at Shea) were clearly not of the twenty-first century.

Cecile, of course, was. First of all, she was probably six feet. I sensed she’d never been one of those tall and gawky twentieth-century girls who had wished themselves diminutive and adorable. No, as she stood to shake my hand, her bearing asserted: I’m glad I was born to be tall! She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, around Courtney’s age, although she had lineless, pulled-tight-over-her-features skin and a chin-length helmet of dark brown shiny hair that, sooner or later, would have people referring to her as “ageless.” On her right cheek was a mole precisely where a Madame de Pompadour might have pasted on a beauty spot.

“Thanks for seeing me, Ms. Rabiea.”

In charcoal slacks with a matching, high-collared, zippered tunic, she was strictly contemporary. She looked appropriately got up to lead a hostile takeover of Briny Deep Fish Sticks or to captain a NASA voyage to Uranus. The only jewelry she wore was a plain, thin platinum wedding ring so understated that suddenly I had an overwhelming urge to take off my watch.

“Please call me Cecile,” she requested, gesturing for me to take a seat in a chair that resembled a squared-off, leather toilet, although it was probably some incredibly brilliant design by one of those gaunt Milanese designers with black-framed glasses you always see in the
Times
’s Style section.

“Judith,” I responded. “As I mentioned on the phone, I’m working on behalf of the family. So far, the police haven’t made much progress.”

“Are you a detective?” Cecile asked. Frankly, I could have done without the way her eyebrows started rising, ready to signal disbelief if I said yes.

“No. By training, I’m a historian. What the family wants me to do is a research project.” Her eyebrows looked as if they were about to go up again, so I added: “Historical research often means trying to extract meaning from the past, so in that sense it’s a form of detection.” No gales of derisive laughter, no snort of incredulity, so I kept going. “I want to see if there’s anything in Courtney Bryce Logan’s past that might have played a part in her disappearance and murder.”