Singer 02 - Long Time No See (44 page)

But then I had to open it. “Courtney,” I shouted over her caterwauling, “you better hear me. This isn’t a democracy. I rule. Either you come into the kitchen or I’m going to shoot you, and with any luck, I’ll kill you.”

I pulled out a chair into the middle of the kitchen. I must have had a reason for that, though I don’t recall. She sat. After throwing her a dishtowel for her ear, I grabbed the phone. God knows what I shrieked to the 911 operator. Then began the endless wait for the cops to arrive.

The vibrations from my chattering teeth spread downward until I was shivering all over. I have no doubt she saw it, because I wasn’t more than five feet from her. Nevertheless, she did not try to take advantage. Instead, hunched over in the chair, both hands pressing the towel over her ear, she seemed to have withdrawn for a consultation with herself. No more bawling, no more attempts to get back the gun.

When the two cops came, one gingerly took the bloody gun from me. It was evidence and I suppose I wasn’t radiating an Annie Oakley aura of expertise in the firearms department.

With that, Courtney began to weep. Loud sobs, buckets of actual tears. “Thank God you’re here!” she cried to them. “Thank God!”

“Listen,” I warned them, “she’s the one who killed that woman they found in the pool last month!”

“Don’t listen to her,” Courtney exhorted them. “My name is Amy Carpenter and ...” She stopped to weep some more but only for a moment. “She thinks I’m having an affair with her husband and I swear to God I’m not. Look what she did to me! Please, let me get to a doctor. Oh please.” She looked up at them. Her doe eyes, only slightly red, brimming with tears, were so moving they almost tugged on my heartstrings. The two men glanced at each other, then back to Courtney. She showed them her ripped earlobe and then held up her broken, swollen pinkie.

It occurred to me that what I might be seeing in their eyes was sympathy. “She’s not Amy Carpenter,” I told them. “She’s used lots of aliases. She’s Courtney Logan, for God’s sake!” A mistake.

Tall cop spat out: “Courtney Logan is dead.”

“No, no,” I told him. “She’s not! The woman who’s dead is—”

“Oh God! Please don’t make me sit here like this. Please, get me to a doctor,” Courtney wept. “I’m so scared I’ll bleed to death.” Shorter cop, gazing at her, looked as if his pity was turning to love, mixed with a dash of horror that someone would drop dead on his watch and he’d have to fill out the reports. Sensing this, she looked up at him, a lovely crystal tear resting on her lower lashes, on which, somehow, she’d had the luck or foresight to apply waterproof mascara.

Two more cops arrived. Second tall cop was grimacing at the blood-soaked towel and therefore didn’t bond with Courtney. His partner, Female Cop, looked over at the first two and inquired, “Hey, guys. You call an ambulance?” A perfectly reasonable question, I thought.

“This lady,” Tall Cop said, pointing to me, “is saying the other one—” His somewhat icy tone thawed as his finger moved toward Courtney. “She’s saying this one is Courtney Logan. The one that got shot in the head and put in her own swimming pool.”

“If you’ll just listen for a minute,” I began.

“Shut up, lady,” the short cop barked.

“Hey, guys. Yes or no? You call an ambulance?”

“I’m going to throw up,” Courtney announced with a note of genuine nausea in her voice. “Please, could someone get me to the bathroom fast?” All four cops took a step toward her.

“Not before one of you calls Captain Sharpe at headquarters!” I shouted. Four heads turned to me. I saw four faces with foreheads creased, as if they’d only taken one semester of the language I was speaking. As I was repeating myself, Courtney made a run for it.

Cleverly. Instead of standing, turning, and rushing for the kitchen door, like a person escaping, she rose from the chair in a crouched position. It barely seemed as if she had moved. Then she raced toward the door. The cops took a long instant to comprehend she was not making a run for the bathroom. Too long. Courtney was out the door and crossing the patio. “I have to get to a doctor,” she cried. “I have to!” God, she was fast!

She had almost reached the grass when two of them got to her. But instead of kicking or biting, fighting to get free, as I’d expected, Courtney collapsed, falling to the flagstone, arms limp, torn earlobe lying on the stone. Tall and Short knelt beside her and called out “Ma’am?” over and over. After a minute, when she didn’t stir, each took a side and tried to help her up. However, despite her being not much heavier than a paperweight, they could only haul her up so that she was on her knees.

I was calling out to Female Cop, “Could you please call Captain Sharpe and tell him you’re at Judith Singer’s house with Judith and Courtney Logan?” when Courtney made her mistake. Grabbing onto Short as if attempting to draw herself up, she tried to open his holster to take his gun. I had to give him credit. Before I could see it coming, he either swatted or smashed her so she was down on the patio again. Then he flipped her over onto her stomach and handcuffed her.

At that point Female stepped back into the house and said something about calling for an ambulance and backup and what was that captain’s name at headquarters? I can’t recall what else she said, because when I next opened my eyes I was on my living-room couch and the emergency medical technician who was taking my blood pressure was saying, “Everything’s fine, dear.”

“I
HATE TO
say it, but you’re going to have to regrout your tile.” Nancy stared down at the black and white tiles in the passageway. “All that blood.” She glanced over to me. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Just a little shaky.”

“Seriously, how about a double Absolut? It won’t turn you into me.”

“I already had a double Xanax,” I told her.

We strolled back outside and sat on an old beach towel I’d spread on the grass on the side of the house. A cool day for a picnic, but the sky was radiant and the vision of the gun looking down its nose on me seemed fainter in the brightness. Cops were still in the kitchen and out on the patio, although all the crime-scene work seemed over. They chattered the way coworkers do on mornings after the Oscars or a World Series game: Can you
believe
what happened?

“Did Courtney look anything like the shot of her we originally ran?” Nancy asked. “Or did she look like that nauseating, nostrils-on-parade picture that was in the
Beacon
?”

“Neither. She dyed her hair dark brown, got really dark brown contact lenses, and lost weight.” Nancy’s eyebrows lifted. “She didn’t mention which diet. You know those corky clogs that add a couple of inches? She had them on, so I got the impression of someone five-three or five-four.”

“What was she wearing?”

“You always go right to the heart of the matter,” I said. “A pink and orange getup. It could have been Ralph Lauren, but you’ll probably tell me it wasn’t.”

“Describe it.” I did. Wearily, she shook her head. “No, no, no, you poor, benighted fool. It sounds like Escada. By the way, where is your Little Boy Blue? Or Big Boy Blue? Does he know what happened yet?”

“Of course. He was here for a while.”

“Holding your hand, no doubt.”

“No doubt. But he went back to headquarters to have some jurisdictional dispute over the case. He worked on it, he wants it—for its own sake and as a way back into Homicide—but the
schmendrick
from Homicide who screwed up the case wants to keep it. He said he’ll be back.”

Though Nancy didn’t change her expression, I somehow found it necessary to add, “He
will
. And not just for that.” When she did not reply, I changed the subject. “I can’t believe I actually fainted.”

“So Victorian of you.”

“I know. And one of my least favorite eras.”

“You forget Dickens, but you’re in shock. God, you were so incredibly brave. To say nothing of effective. Can you talk about it some more or are you just going to stare up at that tree?”

“The noble oak,” I murmured.

“Noble sycamore, you ass. If you want to sit here in comfortable silence, that’s all right with me, even though I came here so you could ventilate.”

In the capacity of official best friend, Nancy had arrived in time to hear me giving most of my statement to a young, gum-cracking detective. I’d spoken about the Ellen Berman pretense, the gun in Courtney’s hand and all she’d told me, my tearing off the earring, breaking her finger, and then the gun in my hand. For good measure I’d thrown in Courtney’s break for freedom, the scuffle, the handcuffs. “No,” I said. “I’d like to talk about it.”

“Do you think Emily just surprised Courtney by coming over before Halloween and that’s why she got killed?” Nancy asked. “Or was the whole thing planned?”

“Planned is my guess,” I said, “although I’m still not sure how detailed the plan was, especially about Emily. Certainly the killing wasn’t a whim. Listen, whatever Courtney says is suspect. Maybe Emily did surprise her. Maybe she invited Emily over to get a few more fingerprints on things, have a nice drive with more fingerprints, then murder her in the woods. But it seems to me she’d used her charm to get Emily to go blonder and blonder for a reason, to be a better Courtney substitute. So she must have been thinking of the pool, hoping she’d be left there till the cover came off and the body would be in lousy shape. Or maybe she’d planned on burying Emily in Piney Woods Park, but digging a deep enough grave was too much of an effort. She did seem to spend the fall making plans—getting credit cards and fake ID, probably driving back and forth to Cherry Hill and maybe scouting out places to ditch Emily’s car, getting Emily a cell phone in Vanessa Russell’s name. And one of the days she sent the au pair Steffi out of the house with the kids: She told Steffi to take them to Baskin-Robbins if they started to kvetch. That was totally out of character. But she wanted to be sure no one could possibly connect her with Emily.”

“Do you want my two cents?” Nancy asked.

“Sure.”

“I think that the minute she had the opportunity to make some serious bucks with Emily’s on-line skills and the insider trading, Courtney started planning her own takeover—of the money—and Emily’s murder. She strung Emily along, but once she got her mitts on all that money, there was no way she was going to share. Dead Emily was a given the minute Courtney got the money in a nice, warm offshore account.”

“It was only a matter of timing, then?” I asked.

“Timing and opportunity. Courtney probably wanted out for ages.” Delicately, Nancy picked a few blades of grass off her brown-and-white spectator flats. “Anybody else would think she had the perfect life, or at least a decent one.”

“I know. But to her, it was a failure. She hadn’t made a mark in investment banking. She got turned down for a loan for StarBaby. And StarBaby itself: It wasn’t going to tank, but it does sound as though it was going no place fast. Her best friend, Kellye Ryan—”

“Our Lady of Prada?”

“Yes. Kellye and the young woman who was videotaping for her, Zee Friedman, the one I’d love to fix up with Joey: They seemed to think that by the summer Courtney was depressed. And then by the fall, her mind was somewhere else. A new lease on life—that didn’t include StarBaby.”

“Don’t forget the husband,” Nancy interjected. “I bet she didn’t see him as a man who started a new business and was making a go of it.”

“Of course not. She saw him as a loser, a guy who didn’t have the guts to be big.”

“Big was an issue for Courtney,” Nancy observed. A uniformed cop walking by nodded politely. Suddenly, dazed by the power of Nancy’s innate man-attractant, he tried to smile suavely. By that time, of course, Nancy had lost track of his very existence.

“That’s part of why I think Courtney was planning something before StarBaby’s lack of success got her down,” I went on. “Look, she took twenty-five thousand dollars out of their joint bank and brokerage accounts last spring and summer. I’m sure the police will subpoena her bank records, but she didn’t put that money into her StarBaby account.”

“Maybe she spent it on something worthwhile, like clothes,” Nancy suggested. “Or—listen to this—she took the on-line plunge and lost the whole damn bundle trading stocks on the Internet!”

“That was one of my guesses.” The tranquilizers were starting to take effect. I stretched out on the towel and watched leaves swishing in the breeze. “Or she could have used some of it to buy fake ID and open bank accounts. I bet that would be hard to find out, though. She used so damn many different names. Nelson said it looked to him as if Courtney had a great source of phony ID. From that ID, she was able to get credit cards and driver’s licenses in different names. Usually, good ID like that costs a bundle. So either she was willing to spend a healthy amount of money on it or she got some sort of quantity discount.”

“Where would you buy ID like that?” Nancy asked.

“Why? Whom do you want to be?”

“I don’t know. Someone thirty-five. Remember when I was thirty-five? I was thinking, Holy shit, I’m old. Next stop, Death. Now? I would start over somewhere, pass myself off as a thirty-five-year-old—Okay, a thirty-five-year-old who’s lived hard. Not in Snore Valley. I suppose it’s a cliché, but I’d pick Paris. What I can’t comprehend is where did a mommy from Shorehaven come up with first-rate fake ID? She wasn’t a criminal.”

“Of course she was! And smarter than most. As far as the ID, there’s supposed to be some on the Internet,” I reported. “Except Courtney strikes me as being too smart to order something like that, a birth certificate or a driver’s license—and then go present it to get a passport. She’d be risking arrest. She’d be risking a police or FBI sting. And she’d be risking blackmail by the scumbucket who sold it to her.”

“So where else?”

“She probably could finagle a birth certificate with a raised seal from some county in a sparsely populated state ... I don’t know. Like Montana maybe. Some functionary in New York or Florida wouldn’t be able to say ‘Hey, that’s not what a Montana birth certificate looks like.’ Maybe she just made it her business to find someone who sold high-quality stuff. It shouldn’t be different from drugs or any other contraband. Unless you really trust your source, it’s terribly risky.”