Singer 02 - Long Time No See (6 page)

“It’s not,” I told her, although I was just keeping up my end of the argument. For all I knew, Nancy was right, and I’d pissed away my juicy decades. Now all I could ever hope to attract was someone like postmodernist Geoff with his ear hair. “But if you think there’s no advantage to doing it because it would be tedious or because Nelson would need a derrick to get it up, then what would be so terrible if he and I were to get together—which I swear I’m not planning.”

“Because you’re emotionally vulnerable now.”

“I’m much better.”

“Do I have to hum ‘The Merry Widow Waltz’ to remind you?” She picked up a dead branch and, with a final glance toward her house, staked it in the dirt: Ground Zero for her gazebo. “You lost a husband. You lost him to death, not to a twenty-something with perky tits and a law degree from Harvard. So you can’t hate him for leaving without feeling guilty, which being Jewish you have a genius for anyway. And you lost him—” She snapped her fingers—“like that. Whatever you felt for him, you’re still getting over the loss. It would be one thing if you took up with a cute guy with a wad in his jeans to offer you a little temporary comfort. But not this cop. All he can offer you is
Sturm und Drang
and
maybe
middle-aged fucking and champagne for one on New Year’s Eve—none of which you need.” She pulled the branch out of the ground and started walking again. “So no cop.”

“No cop,” I said quietly.

“And no murder.”

“Fine.” Thirty hours later I knocked on Greg Logan’s front door.

“I’
M
J
UDITH
S
INGER
.” I’d rehearsed what I would say to Greg as I was putting on eyeliner. Not bad, I thought: both the makeup and the introduction. As far as the makeup went, for once both eyes came out as if they belonged to the same person. As for the second, I thought the simple intro sounded pleasant, self-assured. Not pert. Pert was the last thing a guy needed one week after his late wife was found in his backyard pool.

Except as I introduced myself, I went hoarse either from nerves or the cheapo estrogen my HMO was foisting on me. My “Judith Singer” sounded like Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone—not a plus at the front door of the Son of Fancy Phil. I cleared my throat and offered Greg Logan a small, sad smile. He stood in the doorway, gazing at something beyond me, so I glanced back.

Nothing. Although technically night, after eight, a band of sky just above the horizon was still pearly with light from the just-set sun. In the deep twilight, the front walk, a path of blue-black stones, appeared to be pools of water. No floodlights were on, but probably none were needed. People weren’t dropping by this house. It was only me and Greg.

I waited for him to ask What can I do for you? or return my mini-smile. But he said nothing. His face was blank. So I said hello. It was so quiet I could hear the jets of a distant plane heading for La Guardia, then the
pop!
of an automatic sprinkler head emerging from the grass. After that, silence again. Not a bird, not a car, not a rustle of a leaf: silence so intense it felt as if life had stopped. My gut started poking me in the ribs: Get going! My mind was soothing: Relax. What’s he going to do? Put a gun to your head?

The widower Greg, in olive shirt with a crossed golf club insignia over his heart stood before me in khaki slacks and bare feet. He was centered in the green door frame against a background of the celadon-on-celadon wallpaper in his front hall. I’d been wanting him to look at me? Oh God, now he was staring into my eyes. Unblinking, unless he and I were having simultaneous blinkage again and again and again.

Trying to find the humanity behind those eyes, I looked deeper. All I saw was more nothing. No intelligence, no dullness, no compassion, no belligerence, no bereavement. Merely two eyes of that ho-hum hue between blue and gray. True, they were those thick-lashed, perpetually moist eyes that, with some men, evoke bedroom thoughts. Except any intimation that Greg was hot stuff in the whoop-de-doo department would have been instantly nullified not just by his silence but—I cleared my throat—by his hair. Potentially, it was gorgeous hair, the blackest brown, that lustrous, heavy hair a gigolo would wear long and gelled back. Greg Logan, however, wore it clipped so close on the sides and in the back he looked less like a lover boy and more like the congressman from Raleigh-Durham on his way to a prayer breakfast. Few sights are less erotic than pallid scalp with brown birthmark viewed through sheared sideburn.

Besides, Greg was too intriguing looking to be conventionally handsome. His eyes and cheekbones slanted upward, and his nose had a slight northerly tilt that gave him the delicate quality I’d spotted on the front page of
Newsday
. In the illumination of a brass chandelier, all that kept his heart-shaped face from being downright girly was his end-of-day stubble and his eyebrows—the crazed, curly kind that look like a pair of invertebrates creeping across a forehead.

I tried to look at him without appearing to stare. Despite Greg Logan’s valentine of a face, the word “effeminate” did not come to mind: The delicacy of his features was more than countered by a tough-guy physique. He had a thug’s thick neck, barrel chest, legs like two giant sequoias. He looked like a man who had to work out double-time to transform the family flab to muscle, and who only seemed to be managing time-and-a-half. His heft made him a presence you had to look up to. Not that I actually had to look up all that far; he wasn’t more than five-nine or -ten.

The encounter was moving from uncomfortable to disturbing. I swallowed hard. Whatever gland pumps adrenaline was working overtime; a wave of nausea was accompanied by tingling skin and a spike of heat that sent perspiration washing down my cleavage.

The silence was broken at last by the deafening tinging of a wind chime. Immediately after, I heard Greg Logan’s breathing, noisy, rapid. I vaguely remember praying, Oh please let this be his adenoids and not some prelude to frenzy, a mere awkward silence with both of us mute from the paralyzing dread that we’ll start blithering at the same instant. But his nonresponse was lasting too long. If I hadn’t been frozen by his stare I would have squeaked Whoops, wrong house and made a break for my Jeep. How the hell could I not have rehearsed anything beyond “I’m Judith Singer”?

At last, thankfully, Greg took a deeper, quieter breath. A flicker of hope: Maybe the deadness in his face was because he was so taken aback by having a visitor that he was in shock. Social shock. He was, after all, the prime suspect. After Courtney’s disappearance on Halloween, through winter and early spring until this very instant in the month of May, I doubted that few, if any, Shorehavenites had stood on his doorstep offering kind words or homemade gingersnaps. Those who had rung his chimes most likely had been more bad news—cops, journalists, crackpots.

But that instant, Greg Logan showed me that no matter if he was murderer or victim, he was still clearheaded enough to recall the suburban motto: Congeniality now, congeniality forever. Even at this moment, just one week after the discovery of his wife’s body, he was able to flash me a mechanical and inordinately white smile. Once more, time could march on.

Exhaling so loudly with relief I almost whinnied, I decided this was not the moment to get distracted figuring out whether Greg’s teeth were capped or bleached. I forced up the corners of my mouth and declared brightly: “I’m on the board of the Shorehaven Public Library.” This was true.

“Oh,” he replied. He opened the door wider and stepped back into the house, letting me come in.

The house smelled of macaroni and cheese which someone had sought to mask with room spray—not the sort that spritzes fake strawberries but the expensive kind that has the scent of genuine apricots. Greg Logan and I stood two squares apart on the dark-green-and-white marble checkerboard floor of the entrance hall beneath the chandelier. I glanced up, beyond his face. Each flame-shaped bulb at the ends of the chandelier’s brass arms had its own miniature celadon lampshade, which in turn was edged with a deeper green trim—sort of like rickrack, except instead of zigzags it was scalloped, so it seemed an unending chain of teeny-weeny smiles.

“Is there anything I can help you with?” Greg inquired, too politely. He was plainly expecting me to ask for a donation. Or to make some grotesque pronouncement: Your wife borrowed
The Lively Art of Pumpkin Carving
in October and it’s seven months overdue.

“I’m sorry to be dropping in like this, Mr. Logan. I know you’ve had a family tragedy—and still must be going through a terrible time.” I waited for him to say Thank you for your concern, or something. But all I got from him was a bigger dose of nothing. I managed to say: “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes.”

I stared boldly at him once more. This didn’t seem to bother him, but once again, the lifelessness in those eyes unnerved me. I averted my glance and peered down, until I got nervous he would think I was staring either at his personals (which I wasn’t, not that you could see anything with those baggy khakis) or at the swirls of hair on top of his feet that looked unnaturally plopped down, like two tiny toupees. Then, ever hopeful, I looked up again. I shouldn’t have. His stare was still as dead as Courtney.

I quickly glanced over at four gilt-framed botanical prints hanging from satin ribbons just to have something other than eyes and foot hair to concentrate on. Was Greg thinking I was some kind of nut? That silent voice inside me started screeching again: Get out, you jerk!
He’s
the nut! A smiley, Ivy League psycho whose dead eyes are going to be sparkling with merriment as he squishes your hacked-up body parts into his compost bin. At which point my intellect’s sweet voice of reason inquired: Judith, is there any need to make yourself crazier than you already are?

Greg gave me a quick once-over. I’d gotten dressed to look more stereotypical library board member than casual neighbor: a navy skirt, a powder blue cotton sweater, a complementary blue silk scarf with butterflies, and only enough makeup so as not to look gruesome. My blue trustworthy look was evidently working because at last Greg said, “Please come inside.”

He led me down the long center hall into a living room so expansive it had four seating areas, like the lobby of a Ritz-Carlton. The house, with its grand rooms and soaring ceilings, seemed precisely the sort of place that would be built by the upwardly mobile too young to remember the 1973 Arab oil embargo. He switched on a lamp or two and offered me a seat on a long, fat-armed couch covered in green, cream, and yellow striped silk—that heavy, nubby stuff. Unfortunately, the couch was heaped with so many throw pillows that despite its vast length, there was only room for a couple of anorexics to sit. I wound up with a giant, overstuffed yellow square on my lap. Each of its four corners had a big tassel, the kind strippers twirl from their nipples (a talent, like playing the xylophone, I’ve always vaguely wished I possessed). Another pillow, a thickly fringed rectangle with a petit-pointed yellow dog, competed for space with my right hip.

“Professionally, I teach history at St. Elizabeth’s College. I was thinking that an oral history from you—” In that instant, Greg Logan froze, his backside inches from the dark green wing chair cater-cornered to the couch. “I understand my being here may seem an intrusion, but I was hoping you might have something important to tell the community about how the criminal justice system operates—or fails to operate.”

He did sit, but his bushy, dark eyebrows were now raised so skeptically high they came close to being curly bangs. “I don’t understand,” he replied, still courteous. Or at least not discourteous.

From the depths of my shoulder bag I pulled out a copy of my curriculum vitae in a clear plastic sleeve—along with a bonus, a petrified wad of Trident wrapped in an ancient shopping list. As I slipped the gum gob back into my bag and handed over my CV, I answered his unasked question. “It seems to me you’ve been the victim of leaks to the press, of knee-jerk assumptions that have more to do with prejudice than reality.”

Greg’s eyes didn’t mist in gratitude, as I suppose—subconsciously, arrogantly—I’d hoped they would. Instead, he responded to my proposal pretty much as he’d been responding from the instant he opened the door. You could say it was the way you’d expect a guy with an MBA to respond—with polite neutrality that really was no response at all. Or else you could say it was the behavior of a well-mannered psychopath. He glanced down at the CV. He was less tentative now, more the businessman. His eyes darted back and forth at an astounding rate. I hoped he wasn’t one of those entrepreneurs who take up speed-reading because they have time for nothing. Obviously he was: In seven seconds he knew what I had to offer and didn’t want it. “This is all very nice, Ms., Dr. Singer.”

“I don’t use the ‘Doctor,’” I told him. “And please, call me Judith.”

He didn’t call me either: “A Ph.D. in history from NYU. I’m sincerely impressed.” He was neither sincere nor impressed. I felt so letdown. He was talking like a well-programmed android: “And I appreciate your sympathy. Although I don’t really understand what an oral history would do.” He gave what was supposedly an apologetic shrug, which was nothing more than a brief, robotic shoulder lift.

“It might elicit some understanding of what you’re going through. Maybe even some empathy that could translate into community support.” I kept waiting for him to start nodding in comprehension. But he sat unmoving, neck frozen, arms bonded to the arms of the wing chair, so I went on. “It seems to me you’ve gotten a raw deal. You’ve been convicted without even being tried.” He did nod then, but barely, merely to indicate he was listening as he tried to figure out the real reason why I was there, and who’d sent me. “I’m also here because I don’t believe you had anything to do with your wife’s murder.” As I said the word “murder,” his right hand slid across his lap to his left and he began to twist his wedding band around slowly. My mouth went dry. My tongue stuck to my palate, which made my next words sound gluey. I managed to say: “You’re too smart to have done it so stupidly.”