Singer 02 - Long Time No See (35 page)

“No, Phil. Not after I get home late from the city and Surprise! There’s Phil Lowenstein and some muscle-bound moron waiting for me.”

“He’s not that dumb.”

“Look, it would make me incredibly happy to help Greg, so you and I can be friendly after all this is over.”

“I’m friendly now!” he bellowed. Placing his left hand over the star of David, he raised his right high: I swear to God! “Hey, aren’t I sitting here with you? Listening polite.”

“You’re very polite. And very intelligent. Greg’s lucky to have you in his corner. And I like you, Phil. I don’t want to get you angry or hurt your feelings. But when I saw your car and got a look at your driver ... So this is just a way to make myself feel more comfortable.”

“I’m not gonna argue with you, even though you’re wrong.” He sniffled once, noisily, to show the hurt I’d inflicted. “Keep talking.”

“It looks like this Emily had a tie to Courtney, besides that FIFE meeting—that’s the organization they both belonged to. After Emily disappeared, someone called her voice mail at work from a cell phone a few times. Now unless she’d given her password to somebody else, she was alive and curious enough to check her messages.”

“Whose name was the cell phone in?”

“A name that appears to be a phony, although it’s being checked.”

“I hate it when the flavor of gum goes south so goddamn fast,” Fancy Phil muttered as he added another piece to the wad already in his mouth. “Who’s checking the name of whoever bought the cell phone?”

“Someone with easier access to that sort of information than I have.”

“Which means that’s another thing you’re not telling me.” No rage this time. He merely grumbled.

“Right. But listen. Here’s the Courtney-Emily link. Whoever had that cell phone also called your son’s house two times, and the last time was a few days before Courtney disappeared.”

“No shit!” he exhaled.

“No shit. Maybe they were just trading rice pudding recipes. But it’s my gut feeling that there was some business deal between Emily and Courtney. There’s the matter of the company being acquired by a larger one, and also the matter of Courtney making twenty-five thousand dollars disappear. Who knows what else? If I had to guess, it’s that Courtney fronted for Emily in buying that stock of the company before it was acquired. They knew, because of insider information, that the price would go way up. I’m not saying that’s exactly what happened. For all I know it could be some other shady or unshady deal. The question is, how do I find out? Could there possibly have been a brokerage account Courtney had that Greg hasn’t mentioned to you?”

Fancy Phil gave me a who-knows shrug, but was silent. I waited while he buffed the stone of his ring on his white slacks. Then he said: “If those two girls was in cahoots and this Emily was smart enough to buy a cell phone in some alias—”

“The credit card she used is probably a phony.”

“Sure,” he said offhandedly, as if such methods were kindergarten tactics to him. “So if she’s got the brains to buy a cell phone in a phony name, she and Courtney sure in hell aren’t going to trade in their own names.”

“Right. Do you have any idea how they might have done it? Trading the stocks?” I figured Fancy Phil wouldn’t get insulted if I assumed he had knowledge of the illegal.

He didn’t. “Maybe do that Internet trading, someplace where they don’t ask too many questions. Except that’s usually Amateur Hour.”

“Not with these two,” I suggested.

“Yeah, you could be right. If it was me? Offshore corporation.”

“I’ve read about it, but I don’t think I really understand.”

“You could trade in your name: Dr. Judith Singer. But if you do that, what’s the point? The point is hiding yourself. The way I
heard
it’s done”—I couldn’t swear, but I think he winked—“is that you set up a corporation in the Bahamas or Cayman Islands or British Virgins. Okay? You with me? Their laws basically say they can’t give out the name of the person or the people behind the corporation. Trust me, it’s done all the time. That way, it means the pig people at the IRS can’t trace you and those bastards at the SEC can’t go for your throat. See, it’s the corporation that buys and sells stocks or whatever. No names.”

“But Courtney was murdered. Wouldn’t the police or FBI be able to get those islands’ governments to give up information on who’s behind the corporation?”

“Do I look like a lawyer, sweetheart? But the answer is, even if they get the name or names, what good is it gonna do them if this Emily was smart enough to start the corporation in an alias?”

“Don’t you need to show ID to start up a corporation?”

“Yeah, you do. But, Doc, if a lady banker from a good school has got the smarts to figure out how to get a fake credit card, and then has the balls to use it, don’t you think she’s already got a phony ID? You come up with a halfway decent-looking birth certificate, you got your new identity, and a passport is a piece of cake. It costs, sure, but it can be done.”

“So if we don’t know the alias Emily chose to set up the corporation, we’d have a hard time tracing her.”

Fancy Phil’s mouth turned down at the edges. He looked as glum as I felt. “Hard time? Impossible time.”

“You mean even the bank or lawyer or wherever she has the phony corporation won’t know who she truly is?” I asked. “There really would be no way of tracking her down then.”

“Right,” he conceded.

“If Emily set up this corporation to buy the stock, and if she gave Courtney the money to do it for her—beyond whatever money of her own Courtney may also have invested—would both of them have had access to that corporation?”

“Could be,” Fancy Phil said.

“Why wouldn’t Emily just use the corporation and bypass Courtney entirely?” I asked. “I mean, if she created a corporation using a false name and fake ID.”

“Maybe she wasn’t convinced that she couldn’t be traced. If she was a shy girl, maybe she was scared to go someplace like the Caymans, deal with a local lawyer. Maybe Courtney had more brains about this stuff than this Emily: She’d been at a big place that did international deals. The other girl was stuck in some dipshit town in New Jersey. Or maybe Emily talked over her plan with Courtney and then Courtney put on pressure not to be left out of the deal.”

“Blackmail-type pressure?”

“Could be. She wouldn’t have had to say it out loud. No ‘Include me out and I’ll rat to the feds.’ This Emily would be smart enough to understand without words. Know what I mean? Or maybe they were happy partners in this thing, but each of them set up their own corporation.”

“Why?”

“Because after this deal, Emily planned to disappear. Why else all that business with Australia? Or because even happy partners can learn to hate each other. Or because this Emily was smart enough not to trust Courtney.”

“But then why would she kill Courtney?”

“Because Courtney
knew
.”

“Knew what?”

Fancy Phil took a gum wrapper from his pocket and spit out the wad of gum. “Courtney knew the money from insider trading existed, right? Courtney knew Emily existed. And Courtney might not have been satisfied with what she got. You told me she lost her interest in that dumb StarBaby after the summer, that she seemed to have her mind on something else. She could have tried to get the hook into Emily for more: ‘Fork it all over or else.’” He wrapped the gum carefully and stuck it in his pants pocket. “Of course, that’s if your story’s right: ‘Once upon a time there was a bad girl named Emily who led a good girl named Courtney down the garden path.’ You make it sound real possible, even though it’s hopeless to find this bitch.”

“Maybe hopeless is too strong a word,” I suggested.

“I said ‘hopeless’ and I mean ‘hopeless,’” Fancy Phil retorted. “Shit, I can’t believe that little blond pipsqueak Courtney could get messed up with something like this.”

“At least we have a link between these two women, Phil. You can have Greg’s lawyer bring it to the cops. For my part, I’m still going to try to dig up more.”

“How?”

“Should I tell you I have secret methods? Or should I tell you I have no idea, but maybe I’ll think of something?”

Putting his hands above his knees, Fancy Phil managed to launch himself out of the chair. “I hope you can think of something. Because remember that wild-goose chase I was worrying about? For my Gregory’s sake, let’s pray you don’t got us both on it.”

After he left, I walked around in a haze, fluffing up the cushions on the club chairs, rearranging perfectly satisfactory arrangements of roses, turning off lamps. Hopeless, he’d said. I couldn’t believe this was the end of the line. I trudged into the kitchen to set up the coffee machine so all that would be required of me in the morning would be the push of a button.

When a few lucid thoughts returned, they were random ones: Regret that I’d chosen to investigate murder rather than teach a quickie summer course on the social and intellectual history of the United States, a subject I was completely unqualified to teach (not that that would deter Smarmy Sam). Fear that Nelson would not be proud I’d gotten as far as I had, but rather, disappointed that I’d turned out to be irrevocably second rate at the one thing at which I had hoped to excel.

Then I made myself sick over how awful it was that Emily Chavarria had not only outfoxed me, but the police as well. Greg Logan could still wind up paying for her crime with the rest of his life. When I went to bed (as always on my half, as if lying on Bob’s side would be an act of flagrant discourtesy), I fell almost immediately into the deepest sleep.

Arising with the sun, I had an intuitive awareness that something lousy could be happening in my life, much like the way I’d woken up mornings as a teenager when my period was overdue. I could almost hear Fancy Phil’s “hopeless” echoing through the house. I dragged myself into the bathroom, and sparing myself a confrontation with my own image, I turned my back toward the mirror as I brushed my teeth. Who knows what happened next? Maybe the whirr of the electric toothbrush diddled a nerve fiber on some brain cell, or maybe I was just thinking “teeth.” But teeth led to chew, and chew led to gum, and suddenly my mind’s eye was watching Fancy as he spit the gum he’d chewed into a wrapper and then managed to poke it down into the pocket of his too-snug slacks.

Used gum led me to more used gum. I recalled the night I’d called on Greg Logan and how, in taking out my curriculum vitae from my handbag to show him, I’d also pulled out an ancient wad of Trident wrapped in a random piece of paper. The one minuscule globule of moisture left in the gum had glommed on to my CV and I’d almost handed it over to Greg.

What was it about gum? By this time the toothbrush had nearly abraded the enamel of a molar, so I turned off the brush and rinsed my mouth. Gum? I turned on the shower, waited till it went from ice-cold to scalding to its usual lukewarm, and stepped in. Oddly, the thick fog of my melancholy began to lift. No mopey standing under the water hoping to be washed clean of whatever was plaguing me, no sniffling “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” as I soaped up.

It wasn’t until I was drying off my nether reaches that I stood up straight and said, “Oh my God!” Dropping my towel, I pulled my ratty bathrobe off the hook and raced downstairs and into the sunroom. There, in one of those idiotically oversized wicker baskets that look so deceptively felicitous in decorating magazines, was my “Check it out!” book bag from the library. I’d stored the evidence from Courtney’s closet in it, the stuff I seized the day Fancy Phil took me to the Logans’.

There it was: grape bubble gum. A child-sized piece, not a great wad like Fancy Phil had been chomping on. Still, from what I knew of Courtney, this was not a treat she would allow her daughter. In fact, had she picked up Morgan at her Nuclear Physics Readiness Playgroup and espied her chewing something purple and sweet smelling, she would have said: Spit it out.

Since at that hour the sunroom was not living up to its name, I hurried into the kitchen and examined my find under the brightest light. My memory hadn’t failed. The gum was wrapped in the customer’s copy of a charge receipt. American Express. Whatever had been bought cost $3,078.62. However, the nature of the purchase and the name of the buyer was stuck to the gum and therefore unreadable. No reason to give up, I thought. The gum could have been so dried out after months in Courtney’s cordovan shoulder bag that it would no longer have a gummy nature. I tugged gently on the paper. Nothing.

After turning on the coffee machine, I walked across the room and studied an article I’d clipped years earlier, one of Nancy’s first freelance efforts. I’d taped it onto the inside of the door of the broom closet. “Go, Go Goo,” it was called, with advice for removing common stains, candle wax, and, yes, gum. Naturally, from Kate and Joey, I remembered the ice-cube-on-hair trick, but she’d also recommended putting a gum-ridden object in a plastic bag in the freezer, then chipping the gum away. Or dry-cleaning it. Or using peanut butter as a solvent.

But should I, could I have a go at the evidence? I went to call my lawyer. Kate answered first, then an instant later Adam picked up an extension. From the woolly sound of their voices, I realized they were only moments into the getting-up process. I posed my question anyway. First they both made a huge to-do that
they had nothing at all to do with criminal law
and
I should not rely on them for a legal opinion.
Then their best guess—
and it was only a guess
—was that as long as I was brought into the Logan house by a member of the family who possessed keys and the alarm code, and since I had not done this snooping on behalf of the authorities, it was okay to have the receipt in my possession. I saw no point in mentioning the grape gum. When Adam hung up to get ready for work, Kate said: “Mom.” Her voice was gentle, maternal.

“What?”

“Consider not doing it.”

“Doing what?”

“Let’s put it this way,” she remarked. “When I was in high school or college, say I called you about having something like this receipt in my possession. If I’d asked vague questions about its legality, and you knew that receipt was either remotely or closely connected with a murder investigation, what would you have said?”