Singer 02 - Long Time No See (31 page)

Except there he was. No casual short-sleeved, extensor-muscle-baring shirt like the night before. Gray suit, white shirt, blue tie. While it didn’t shout “Cop,” it said something loud enough for Carlo, or whoever the guy in the tinted glasses behind the counter was, to have seated him at a discreet corner table.

“Sit down, Judith.”

Although it occurred to me to inquire “Is that a command or an invitation?” I merely sat. What I finally did say was: “You didn’t mention last night that you were going to Cherry Hill.” When that did not produce a response, I got up, left my purse on the chair, and went to the ladies’ room. When my return received no reaction, I stood beside my chair and said: “Listen, I’ve lived through a not-great marriage and both my children’s adolescences. So if you’re planning on continuing the silent treatment, know that I’ll find it incredibly boring and I’ll be forced to lunch elsewhere.”

“I wasn’t giving you the silent treatment,” he finally replied.

I sat down. “What was it, then?”

“I was at a loss for words.” I wasn’t ready to smile yet, which was fortunate, because he was in ice-cold mode. “I was amazed at how stupid you were,” he continued, “going to the guard and saying you’re from the police lab.”

“It got me in,” I retorted.

“It got you in, but if you’re going to pull that kind of crap, you shouldn’t leave your real name.”

“Next time I’ll have an alias ready.” Nelson stood. I thought he was walking out, but he only strode across the restaurant and said something to the man behind the counter. When he came back I said, “Can I assume you didn’t tell him to call the Cherry Hill cops and have them come and arrest me for false something?”

“I told him a plain pizza.” I nodded. “Are you still drinking Diet Coke?”

“Still. So, did you just hear about me from the security guard or did you get a chance to meet Beth and Roberto?”

“I met them.”

“Good. Nice couple. So you know that Emily left with a suitcase.”

“I know,” he said, hooking his finger over his tie, loosening the knot, then opening the top button of his shirt. “Now tell me what you make of all this.”

“Then will you tell me?”

“Come on, Judith. I gave up a day off to look into this business. I don’t have time to fool around.” God knows what kind of a smirk crossed my face, because he added: “Cut it out.”

“Fine.”

“Talk.”

“I wish I had a lot to tell you,” I began, “but all I’ve done so far is speak to the neighbors. So you probably heard what I heard: Emily was acting as if things were looking up. I don’t know what was going on with her at the Red Oak Bank. Come to think of it, I don’t know what was going on with her
not
at the Red Oak Bank. But at the very least it seems to me when a woman changes her appearance for the better, she has a different sense of herself, or some new expectations. Maybe she’d gone for therapy and had new feelings of self-worth, which for her meant lightening her hair and contouring her cheekbones.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Some makeup thing. Or it could be she found a man.”

The pizza guy came from behind the counter, set a Diet Coke before me and a beer in front of Nelson, both in giant red, green, and white paper cups with the slogan
EATA PIZZA
spiraling from bottom to top. “Did you happen to find out if there was a man?” Nelson asked.

“No. Does that make us even or are you ahead of me?”

“Even.”

“Let’s talk about Emily’s travel plans,” I proposed.

“Go ahead,” Nelson said.

“Well, I was sort of hoping that after last night when we’d discussed how Emily seemed to have made plans and how Courtney seemed to have made none—beyond buying apples for her kids—you might have come up with some information on where Emily did go. From credit cards or something.”

“You’re really an ace at this detective stuff, Judith.” For the first time since I’d walked in, he smiled, openly, generously, as if he’d forgotten he was angry. “‘... credit cards or
something’?”

“Go
ahead,” I said. “Talk about whatever you want to talk about.”

For a little longer than was comfortable, he looked into the foam on his beer. “You know, I have a problem about talking to you.” I started to be amused, but then he added: “I’m serious.”

He was. “What’s the problem?”

“I have to think about anything I say to you, Judith. I could be more, whatever, open with you. Except there’s a direct line between you and your friend Phil Lowenstein.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have been stung by this remark, or stunned either, but I was. “Do you think I would betray you, Nelson?”

“No; no, I don’t. But like I tried and tried to tell you, Phil isn’t a nice man. He’s a dangerous and sometimes violent man. Look, under normal circumstances, even though all these years have gone by with us not seeing each other, I know ...” For a second he put his hand over his heart. “I know you would never do anything to hurt me. Even under abnormal circumstances. But what if this guy put a gun to your head? It wouldn’t be out of character, you know. What if you reported certain information to him and he wanted to know where it came from? So you’d say, ‘Sorry, Phil, it’s a privileged communication.’ Do you think Phil is just going to say, ‘Okay, I respect your right to protect your sources’? Or do you think he’ll grab you by the throat and start squeezing until you manage to cough up my name?” He took a paper napkin from the napkin holder and folded it in half, then in half again. “Listen, my job is on the line. Other than my kids, it’s pretty much my life. If it somehow got out that information I gave you found its way to Fancy Phil Lowenstein, I lose my living, my reputation. Forget being shamed. I’d be risking jail.”

“I want to live to see grandchildren,” I said quietly. “So if there were a gun to my head, well, I don’t know what I would do. So I guess it’s best if you don’t tell me anything.”

We sat in the sort of silence that is only possible between two old friends or two lovers so assured of the other’s admiration that there is no need to charm or even to speak. I don’t know how long we didn’t talk, but finally the guy in the tinted glasses appeared beside our table and set down the pizza. I was getting busy fighting the mozzarella when Nelson said: “Just on the basis of a preliminary check, Emily didn’t use the Amex or Visa that were in her name after Thursday, October twenty-first, the day before her final day of work at the bank.”

“You don’t have to tell me this.”

“And forget her not getting on a plane. There’s no record of her even buying a ticket to Australia or anyplace else since before Christmas 1998, when she went from Philadelphia to Oklahoma City to visit her family. So if things were looking up for Emily, or she had big expectations, I’d like to know what they were.”

We sat in Carlo’s until the leftover slices of pizza congealed. We left the Courtney Logan case and chatted about safer subjects. The public’s Gore-Bush blahs versus the electricity we’d known as kids watching JFK run against Nixon. Police-department politics compared to the politics of academia. Who was worse, Kate’s boyfriend or his son’s fiancée (whom Nelson referred to as the Syosset Slut), who wore microscopic leather miniskirts and too-tight tube tops. Neither of us got near the topic of Nelson’s having a wife.

When we got outside it was not only hotter, but more humid. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t want to stand there and feel my hair growing into a deranged frizz. At that instant he touched my arm and said: “I’ll drive.”

The words “I think I’d better be getting home” seemed to be on their way from brain to mouth. Nevertheless, I found myself opening my handbag and dropping in my car keys. I don’t remember much about the short ride except staring at the blank screen of one of those global positioning systems and thinking, What if he can’t? What if I don’t? What if it’s awful? What if the motel room or wherever he was taking me smells of insecticide? What if one of us (no doubt him) really doesn’t want to see the other again afterward? Would there have to be one more tryst for courtesy’s sake? What if he’d been imagining me as I was twenty years ago? What’s going to happen when we leave and I have to go home alone and he goes back to the guidance counselor? In matters of the heart, I’ve always had a tendency to look on the bright side.

He pulled into a Holiday Inn. Since in our earlier days we’d met in one of his friends’ apartments, I immediately started agonizing over motel protocol. Check in together? I linger while he goes to the front desk? He pays? Dual, egalitarian credit cards? Untraceable cash? “I have the key,” Nelson remarked as we pulled into a parking space.

“I guess that makes you an optimist.”

“About you, yes.” As we walked through the halls and took the elevator upstairs, he held my hand. His skin felt so hot I knew, besides his excitement, that my fingers were freezing. “Judith,” he said as he slipped the magnetic key card into the slot, “this isn’t going to be painful. You’re not going to need anesthesia. Relax.”

I stood beside the low, king-size bed that overwhelmed the small room. A sliver of sunlight slipped inside where the curtains didn’t quite meet and made a diagonal across the bedspread. I was saying, “God, don’t you wish we could get past the next couple of minutes and—” when he kissed me, a gentle, leisurely kiss to show me No, I don’t want to get past anything.

Amazing, I suddenly realized, how completely I remembered his lips, the prickles of his beard, the same aftershave that smelled like lemons and witch hazel. He was only a couple of inches taller, so it was the easiest thing in the world to kiss him. I thought, I want to do this for hours, but I found myself pulling off his jacket, his tie, unbuttoning his shirt. After he eased off my cotton sweater, I was the one who threw back the spread, hauled off his undershirt, drew him onto the bed before I’d even bothered to slip off my shoes. “Please,” I whispered.

“Listen,” Nelson told me, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t have to be anyplace until tomorrow.” He slid his hand behind my back and, in a move I hadn’t forgotten, unhooked my bra and tossed it aside in a single fluid motion.

All through the afternoon we kept murmuring the helpful hints lovers offer each other: “Easy,” “Slower,” “Faster,” “Harder,” “More.”

At the end of the day, he said, “You know how women are always needing reassurance and how men aren’t supposed to be good at giving it?”

“I’ve heard words to that effect.”

He propped himself up on his elbow. “So, here goes. I loved you way back when. I love you now. And I loved you all those years in between.”

“Same here, big boy,” I told him.

“No. You have to actually say it.” So I did.

I left him an hour later. I can’t say the possibility of intimacy hadn’t occurred to me, because even before having dinner with Nelson the previous evening, I’d shaved my legs so closely I’d taken off the first two layers of the epidermis. However, I didn’t want to stay the night with him. Toothbrushes, deodorant, and makeup were all buyable in New Jersey, but I didn’t want to have to bear the chilly loneliness of daybreak after a night of his warmth. He drove me back to the parking lot of Carlo’s Big Cheese and we parted with soft-spoken I-love-yous.

I got back to Shorehaven with time to spare until sunset and drove over to Nancy’s without even calling first. Maybe subconsciously I wanted her to wag her finger at me and howl “Adulteress!” but instead, after agreeing to stay for Larry’s barbecued swordfish kabobs, an admittedly high price to pay, I dragged her upstairs to her computer and asked her to access a couple of
Newsday’s
databases, like Lexis and Nexis.

“Have you taken leave of your senses? No, don’t even bother answering. Do you have any idea how much the charges are? How can I justify—”

“You don’t have to justify anything. Just say you used it for some personal research and pay them back.”

“Why can’t you go to the library?”

“Because it’s seven-fifteen on a Sunday night, that’s why.”

“Wait till tomorrow.”

“Now.”

“Oh Lord! I can’t—”

“Nancy, I don’t have time for your Butterfly McQueen act. You know how a person should be willing to lay her life on the line for her best friend? Just access Nexis and we’ll call it even.”

Muttering “shit-ass-rat-fuck,” she got on-line and typed in all the permutations of Gray or Grey and Richard or Richards, the Pharmaceutical Container Man. It took only seconds and some scrolling backward to discover that in April 1998, Richard Grey and his sister Marlena Grey Eugenides offered shares of their family’s company, Saf-T-Close, in a public offering.

“Let me think,” I said. “That’s one of those IPOs. Initial public—”

“I know what it means, turkey. But what does it mean?” Nancy asked.

“I think ... I’m not one hundred percent positive, or even seventy-five percent positive, but I think it means that Emily Chavarria knew that the bank’s big client, Saf-T-Close, was going to sell stock to the public. Maybe she got in on the ground floor and made a bundle.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

The truth was, I had no idea. “Keep looking,” I ordered her, a little imperiously, but I was standing beside her aching to get on-line and she refused to relinquish control of either her chair or the mouse. “Boring, boring, boring,” I muttered as she clicked on various thrilling items, such as Saf-T-Close hiring Charles W. Swarski Jr. as its new director of marketing and its earnings per share increased by eight percent in the quarter ended December 31,1998. Then I said, “Look!” On October 11, 1999, Chapman-Bohrer, a major drug manufacturer, announced its acquisition of Saf-T-Close at fifty dollars per share. “‘At close of business the previous Friday,’” I read off the screen, “‘Saf-T-Close’s final price on the NASDAQ was thirty dollars per share.’”

“All right!” Nancy cheered. Almost immediately, she deflated. “What does this have to do with Courtney Logan?”

“Insider trading!”

“What about insider trading?” she persisted.

When I tried to explain and the words didn’t come, we agreed to reconnoiter and meet again in five minutes. Nancy made a beeline to her bedroom phone to call her broker at home and I stayed by the computer and called Kate on another line. Fortunately she answered, making it unnecessary to expend enormous stores of energy being civil to Adam.