Singer 02 - Long Time No See (32 page)

It used to be, Kate explained, that insider trading applied to sales or purchases of stock by a company’s employees, people who have confidential information about the company’s plans. These days, she said, it also applied to people who are tipped off by an insider even if they don’t work for the company or owe it any legal duty. A banker like Emily could be one of these people. If Richard Grey tipped her off about the sale, she couldn’t buy Saf-T-Close at a lower price and then flip it the next day or week and nearly double her money.

I said good-bye to my daughter and sat down at the computer and went back to the April 1998 announcement. The price of the IPO was eleven dollars per share. If Emily had a piece of the IPO, which was probably legal, she could have made a nice profit on Saf-T-Close. But what if she wanted more? What if, besides her profit on the IPO, she wanted to put even more money on a sure thing, the acquisition? How would she work it?

Nancy returned and took off her imaginary hat to me. “The broker says the deal with insider trading is that you get someone else to buy the stock and not set off the SEC’s computer alarm or whatever.”

“So Emily could have gotten Courtney to buy the stock,” I mused. “But how much good would that do? Courtney only had twenty-five thousand.”

“For someone smart you’re so fucking muddle-headed,” she said with her usual delicacy.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, peabrain, that if indeed any of this is true and not a figment of your overheated imagination, then Emily might have given Courtney some bucks, big bucks, with which to buy said shares of Saf-T-Close and maybe agreed to give her a nice percent of the profit for her trouble. And maybe, you nit, Courtney wanted to keep the money all for herself. I mean, what less can one expect from a person who has the panache to embezzle from a Crunch-Munch sale? And maybe Emily got pissed, made some careful plans”—she took a deep breath and kept going—“came to Shorehaven for a tête-à-tête with Courtney, and two shots later—”

“Courtney is dead and Emily is free to start a new life where there aren’t any glass ceilings!”

T
HE WOMAN FROM
FIFE sounded unduly nasal, as if she were holding her nose in a juvenile attempt to disguise her voice. “You’re the second call about this today,” she said. For a second I was flummoxed, not a reassuring state of mind on a Monday morning. Who? What? Why? Who else could possibly ... ?

“Oh,” I replied, “you mean Captain Sharpe of the Nassau County Police Department.” I did my best imitation of a warm chuckle. “I guess he’s one step ahead of me this morning.”

“I’m sure if he wants to share the details, you can get them from him,” Ms. Lovely said, clearly not finding my warm chuckle either credible or endearing.

“Probably not. It would take me a week to convince him to give me the correct spelling of Emily Chavarria’s name.” The day before, Nelson had been willing to share information with me (to say nothing about what else he’d shared). But not only didn’t I want to rely on his generosity again, I didn’t like the idea of being a damsel in distress who needs saving by a hero. “Look,” I went on, “I’m doing this on behalf of the family. Obviously they’re frantic. All I need to know is if Ms. Chavarria and Ms. Logan were at the same meeting at any time, if they could have met. Please. For the family.”

“All right, all right. I told the captain ... They were at the same meeting in ’94, in Baltimore. It was in April. FIFE East. But as I explained to the captain, there were over forty delegates. I, personally, have no way of knowing if they ever said two words to each other. I wasn’t even here in 1994.” Both times she said “the captain,” she got a little breathy. I figured Nelson had been troweling on the gruff charm.

“Is Ms. Chavarria still active in the organization?”

“The captain asked that, too.”

“I suppose there’s a certain investigatory mindset.” I figured “mind-set” was one of those corporate words coined to evade the need for actual thinking and would warm the cockles of Ms. Lovely’s heart. “Was she still active?”

“Yes, in the South Jersey chapter and in FIFE East. Not in National.”

“And what about Courtney Logan?”

A hurricane of a sigh came over the phone. “Paid her dues. Was she active in the Wall Street chapter? I’m afraid you’d have to call them.”

“Okay, whom should I call?”

“I can’t give out such information.”

In movies, private investigators are always slipping people twenties to get information. I couldn’t imagine saying, Hey, Ms. Lovely, if you cooperate, I’ll stick a couple of sawbucks in the next mail. So I merely said: “Look, I know you must be horrendously busy—”

“I am and I really have to—”

“—and I wouldn’t be bothering you if not for the family. If you could tell me the name of the head of the Wall Street chapter—” Before she could slip a word in edgewise I added: “And also, if you could email or fax me the list of people who were at the Baltimore meeting, I know they’d be grateful.” With another whooshed exhalation, she gave me the name and agreed to fax the list. I was on the verge of asking what, if any, other questions Captain Sharpe had asked. But at that moment she got another call and got rid of me fast.

The president of FIFE Wall Street was a hotshot at Merrill Lynch, so I wasn’t expecting anything. But she took my call and told me no, Courtney Logan hadn’t been to any meetings or events that she could remember. She herself had of course heard the name and about the murder, though couldn’t recall ever meeting her. However, she really should write a note of condolence to the husband, poor guy. I was nearly in shock over her acute niceness, but nevertheless was able to give her Greg Logan’s name and address.

Shortly after that, a faxed list of the Baltimore attendees arrived. Now that I had it, I didn’t know what to do with it short of entering every name on a search engine and seeing if any articles on serial killers or missing women came up. But I decided I had other fish to fry first, so I shoved it into the desk drawer I used for papers and clippings I really wanted nothing to do with yet couldn’t bear to throw out.

Then I paced around the room for the seven whole seconds such a circumnavigation took. When I’d returned to graduate school after Bob and I decided not to have another baby, I’d taken over the fourth bedroom as an office. It was so small that whenever I felt guilty about only having two kids, about not adding another Jew to the world to help replace the lost ones, I’d think that the third child would have untold resentments at having gotten stuck with what, essentially, was a cell with sheer white curtains.

I sat back down and returned to the
Courier-Post
Web site, where I downloaded the piece about Emily’s mysterious disappearance. Then I spent a half hour muttering “Shit!” until I finally figured how to extract the photograph from the body of the article. Ten minutes later, after reaching Steffi Deissenburger, I emailed the photo to her. I thought it was a pretty nifty idea until the increasingly familiar dread returned—that I actually was on Fancy Phil’s wild-goose chase, and in the end, Emily would have been a side trip to nowhere. The killer would turn out to be Steffi, or Steffi + Greg. Having thus screwed up, I would incur Fancy Phil’s fury and Nelson Sharpe’s contempt. Or vice versa.

On that happy note, the phone rang. “This is Steffi Deissenburger.” I probably thanked her twice. “It is not a bother,” she said. “I cannot tell one hundred percent if this woman was a visitor. But”—I held my breath—“I think she could be, or might be, someone who was visiting Courtney. I did not see her for long. Only for a minute.”

A tingle of excitement, followed by the warm flush of hope that feels too good to be a hot flash. My heart began to pound. But wanting to sound composed, I said, with over-the-top sincerity, à la Judd Hirsch as the shrink in
Ordinary People:
“Tell me about it.”

“Sometimes when Courtney had a friend visit,” Steffi said, “she would ask me to take the children from the house. So she and the friend could enjoy a quiet conversation. Did I tell you that already? This is what I did on that day. I took Morgan and Travis to the library, then to lunch, then I think to the big playground in Christopher Morley Park.”

“When was this?”

“I believe it was in ... I cannot say exactly. It could have been the end of summer.”

“Please,” I urged her, “go ahead.”

“I brought the children back earlier than Courtney had asked. Travis was—he was crying. From being cranky, you see. He had not had a nap and he was a child who needed one. Sometimes he even took a nap in the morning.”

“What time was it when you got back to the Logans’?”

“Before four. Courtney asked me to keep the children out until four o’clock so she and her friend—”

“Did she mention the friend’s name?”

“I don’t think so. Or I don’t remember. I am not sure.”

“Sorry to have interrupted you. Please go on.”

“I drove home, and as I am parking the car, a woman comes out from the front door. Courtney is there and they kiss good-bye.”

“A hugging kiss?” I asked.

“No. A fast kiss like Americans do who do not know each other so well.” Steffi made the staccato smack of a social kiss. “The woman sees the children, so Courtney waves to me to come over. She says, ‘This is Morgan and this is Travis.’“

“She doesn’t introduce you?”

“No. I believe she is a little angry that I came home before four o’clock, although she may just be tired. And the woman says something like ‘They’re so cute,’ even though Travis is crying. He was very, very cranky and it was a long day for him. Then the woman gets in her car and drives away.”

“Did Courtney say anything to you about your coming back early?”

“No. I started to apologize, but she said to forget about it, that it was all right and she had a nice visit with her friend.” I got a clear mental picture of Steffi at that instant: her contrite expression, her heavily made-up face, her placid posture, her nervous hands.

“Courtney didn’t call the woman Jane or Mary or anything? Just ‘my friend’?”

“I think just that. I don’t remember.”

“Okay, you said the woman got into a car. Do you remember what kind it was, or the color?”

“No. I don’t think it was a German or a Swedish car. I have been to both countries and their cars are familiar to me. And the color ... ? I don’t remember. It may have been dark.”

“Did you notice the license plate?” I ventured. “Was it from New York or some other state?”

“I don’t think I saw. Travis was crying and I felt, you know, bad about coming home early. Courtney had asked me to please keep them out and if they got to be a problem to go to Baskin-Robbins and buy them ice cream.”

“That doesn’t sound like her,” I remarked. “Ice cream?”

“Well, you see, she understood how young children were. She wanted to make it easier for me to handle them. She was very thoughtful in this way.”

“Right. Now, would you say the woman was younger or older or the same age as Courtney?”

“I would say a little younger, but not too much. Thirty or thirty-one.”

“And what did she look like?”

“Like the woman in the photograph you emailed to me. Very plain. Dark blond or light brown hair. She wore it back, like a chignon, but not so elaborate, if you understand. Not very tall, but she wore shoes with those high but very heavy heels. I don’t know what you call them. And a plain gray business suit with a white blouse under it. Not well cut, the way Courtney’s suits were. Like a little gray mouse the woman looks, was what I was thinking. She—what is the word?—oh, carried. She carried herself as though she did not wish to be seen.”

“Would you say shy?”

“Maybe shy, someone who is not easy at being friendly—except with a few who know her well.”

“Was she easy with Courtney?”

“I did not see her enough to know.” She paused, and I held myself back from throwing another question at her. “It is like this,” Steffi continued. “I watched her when she was looking at the children and I thought, She is fond of them not because she likes children but because she thinks so well of Courtney and they are Courtney’s. So she has admiration for Courtney. Maybe I was wrong and she is still shy, even with children. But she did not seem to know how it was with them, or even to like them. She kept looking at Travis as though he would see her and understand he had to stop crying.”

“What was your general feeling about her?”

“Perhaps lonely,” Steffi said cautiously. “She did not act like a woman with a husband or nice boyfriend. You know? As if there is someone in the world who wants you. Still, I did not see her longer than one minute. I cannot even tell you more than maybe,
possibly,
this woman was the woman in your email.”

After speaking with Steffi I found myself at loose ends, only in part because I couldn’t figure out what to do next. Her offhand remark about the confidence of a woman with a husband or boyfriend who knows there is “someone in the world who wants you” kept replaying in my head.

At ten-twenty (according to the perpetually erroneous clock on the lower right of my computer screen), I was at the height of aggravation at myself. I hadn’t been able to dismiss the why-doesn’t-he-call anxiety about Nelson as well as the so-why-don’t-you-call-him-and-stop-the-playing-hard-to-get-game response (to which I added a schmuckette-that’s-what-you-get-for-sleeping-with-a-married-man kick in the ass). I was starting to get unusually inventive, constructing a scenario in which Nelson drove home from the motel the previous afternoon, slept with his wife out of guilt or desire, had a heart attack, and at that very moment was being laid out with a boutonniere in his lapel in some Methodist funeral home. The phone rang as I was subtracting the carnation and adding an American flag because he’d been in the air force and was a cop.

It was Nelson. Alive. His greeting was the one he’d always used two decades earlier, saying I love you, to which I responded with my customary “Who is this, please?” He told me he’d like to come over, I said good. Thirty-five minutes later he came through the door. He kissed me thoroughly before saying “I’m here on business.”