Singer 02 - Long Time No See (7 page)

“I’m sorry,” he snapped. At last he had an expression. Disdainful. His nostrils flared in impatience, as if I had come to his door peddling a frivolous product. “I don’t have time for this.” With each word of the sentence, his voice grew louder and more contemptuous. His fingers curved until his hands turned into fists.

“Don’t you see?” I pleaded. “The police have only been focusing on you. And while they are, they’re not looking for the person who
did
commit the crime. Also—please hear me out—I’m a first-rate researcher. If you’d like I can look into it, see if I can find anything that might lead to someone else.”

Now he was shaking his head. No. A definitive no. Worse, he was standing. “My lawyer has hired a private investigator.” I could hear the contempt behind his words.

“Please, give me one more minute,” I pleaded, looking up at him. “When I say look into it, I’m not talking about canvassing the neighborhood and asking who saw what on Halloween. Or what, if anything, your neighbors told the police. That’s a legitimate job for your private detective. What I can do is go deeper, follow a paper trail, search into people’s pasts. Also, I have some small experience investigating homicide and—”

It’s so mortifying, to watch someone who’s been trying to dope you out finally conclude
Shit! A wacko!
So I stood as well. I was on the verge of grabbing him by his golf shirt, shaking him and shouting, Please believe me.
I am not a wacko!
Which probably would have been as convincing as Nixon announcing he was not a crook.

We were saved from whatever—maybe only another agonizing silence—by the
clomp-squeak, clomp-squeak
of heavy rubber soles, through the dining room, across the center hall,
clomp-squeak, clomp-squeak
until their noise was hushed by the lush wool of the Persian rug. For an instant he and I glanced at each other, embarrassed, as if we’d been caught doing something illicit.

A tall, rawboned woman crossed the living room and stood before Greg. She looked like Janet Reno in a henna-rinsed pixie cut. Her tan shoes, laced up, had inch-thick, orange rubber crepe soles. Her slacks and matching T-shirt were the hue of canned salmon. The phrase “older woman” sprang to mind, along with the word “polyester,” until I realized she was not that much older than I, albeit dressed in some unnatural fabric that did not reflect kindly on her.

“Mr. Logan, sir?” A bizarre speech impediment? A heavy Scottish burr?

“Yes, Miss MacGowan?” Burr. He made no attempt to introduce us.

“The little ones are asleep.” She offered a professional nanny’s benevolent smile, which didn’t last long. So, I mused, the au pair did not seem to be part of the Logan household anymore. What had made her leave? Had she been fired? Could the au pair and Greg actually have been lovers and were now playing it cool? Or had her departure been due to something else—like fear of Greg Logan? Was I nuts to keep dismissing my own fear of him? I’d watched enough TV news to know: The most dangerous people weren’t maniacs with eyes that swirled like pinwheels. They were the guys who looked virtuous enough that you would invite them over for dinner. “I thought I might drive to Dairy Barn,” the nanny was saying, “and buy those berry pops Morgan’s been asking for.”

“Great!” Greg declared. His eyes were no longer dead; they were sparkling at her. His manner was vigorous. It was as if Greg Logan had vanished and instantly been replaced by an extroverted identical twin. “Excellent! Thank you very much.” Miss MacGowan pursed her lips, a gesture that might have been Scottish for “you’re welcome.” Then, with barely a glance at me, she hurried off. The only sound was the
clomp-squeak
of her shoes.

In those few seconds of silence, my eye drifted to the table beside the chair in which Greg had been sitting. On it was an artful juxtaposition of a pile of antique leather-bound books beside a bottom-heavy onyx vase. Their dark browns and greens glowed in the gold light spilling from a lamp fashioned from a porcelain urn festooned with dragons. On the other side of the lamp, in an old tortoiseshell picture frame (the shell probably yanked off the back of some luckless Edwardian-era tortoise) was a photo of Greg and Courtney Logan. They wore tennis whites. Their arms were around each other, pulling each other close so there was no space between. Her blond head, bound in a terrycloth headband, rested against the chest of his cable-knit sweater. His darkness was a pleasing contrast to her pastel prettiness. They weren’t merely smiling for the camera, they were laughing: two people made for each other, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that formed a picture of marital happiness. God, what a sickening loss he’d sustained.

Suddenly Greg switched off the lamp and said, “I have a great deal to do, Ms.—”

“I wish you’d call me Judith,” I urged. But Greg Logan didn’t say anything. The light from the front hallway was more than enough for me to see that he was shaking his head. No.

And good-bye.

I passed that night squirming in my dark bedroom, feeling my face flame again and again as I cringed over my visit to Greg’s. Over and over I asked myself What in hell possessed you to try such an idiot move? Forget humiliating yourself. He’s Fancy Phil’s boy. Daddy could arrange to have someone dispatched to take care of Singer, J., 63 Oaktree Street. Your address right there for all to see in the
Shorehaven Nynex Community Directory.
And even if he were to turn out to be a sweetie, the world’s most benevolent man, he obviously thinks you’re a major creep, to say nothing of a loser. You’ve blown the whole damn investigation.

I tried not to tune into house sounds: the clunk as the refrigerator switched off downstairs, the creak of absolutely nothing on a floorboard. I hated being alone at night. In bed. In life, come to think of it. I didn’t feel so bad when I was working, or out with my kids or a friend. But dating, at least with the major and minor drips I’d met, only made my loneliness feel not just painful, but pathetic. Postmodernist Geoff wasn’t even a nice guy; he was merely the least dreadful. He had asked me to go to the English Lake District with him in June (“Naturally we’ll share expenses,” had been his second sentence). But I’d said no. Having made out with him on Long Island, I knew there was no point in taking the show—this time with three complete acts—on the road to Windermere.

The truth was, yes, sure, I was a person in my own right. Historian. Mother. Friend. Reader. C-SPAN junkie. Movie lover. Library board member. Nassau County Coalition Against Domestic Violence volunteer. But what I yearned to be was a wife again, to hear Bob’s sleepy voice murmuring “G’night” as he turned over, to sense the warmth of a man’s body across a few inches of bed, to inhale the homey bouquet of the fabric softener on his pajamas, to know we’d have boring sex every other week. Of course, if I’d left Bob and married Nelson, I thought, he and I would still be in a state of postcoital ecstasy, sitting up in bed discussing the Courtney Logan case and—Stop!

Over the years I’d become my own tough cop, policing myself from crossing the line from the occasional loving or lustful memory of Nelson to hurtful fantasy: What is he doing this minute? Is he happy? Would it be
so
terrible to call him and offhandedly say, You just popped into my head the other day and I was wondering how you ... Stop! An hour later I finally managed to lull myself to sleep by thinking about who could have killed Courtney Logan.

The next morning, I had some business to attend to: detective business. I hunkered down at the end of my driveway pretending to be preoccupied by the fate of a dwarf juniper or malnourished baby yew to which I actually had very little emotional attachment. Look, I was desperate for some kind of lead and knew this was the time for Chic Cheryl, my next-door neighbor, to come careening home after driving Spike (husband) to the 8:11. Sure enough, her Mercedes wagon, capacious enough to transport a
Schutzstaffel
battalion, was roaring down the street. Chic Cheryl had to race home in order to have quality time with TJ and Skip (children) and Danny, Colleen, and Bridget (Irish water spaniels) before she had to floor it to get to her nine
A.M
. golf lesson on time.

Her brakes didn’t squeal as much as give a squawk of panic as she slammed them on when she was a foot away from me. “Ju!” she blared. Then, modulating her usual roar, she shouted at me: “How
are
you?”

“Fine,” I told her. She nodded sadly, secure in the fact I was no such thing. I couldn’t say exactly why Chic Cheryl always condescended to me. It may have been that I was a woman without a man, although more likely it was that I drove an American sports utility vehicle. I knew better than to ask her about the Logans, since she’d conveyed the only unique piece of information she had months before (while simultaneously pointing out to me the features of the soles of her new Nike Streak Vengeances), which was the riveting news that she’d heard Courtney Logan had cooked on a La Cornue range with a built-in simmer plate. “Cheryl,” I said, “do you happen to know anyone who used StarBaby, Courtney Logan’s—”

“Not me!” she thundered, shaking her head so vigorously that the morning sunbeams caught each of the Merlot highlights she went to Manhattan for every six weeks; Cheryl had patiently explained, without my ever asking, that truly first-rate highlighting was unobtainable anywhere east of Madison Avenue until France. “I mean, don’t you think it looks”—Her voice grew even louder—“T-A-C-K-Y to show a video of your kids that looks
professional
?” I was never sure about Chic Cheryl, if she talked so loudly to me because she thought hearty voices were the cat’s meow or if for some reason she’d decided that, at fifty-four, I was so old I ought to be deaf. “Can you imagine? ‘A StarBaby Production’
right up there
? I mean, God, does that spell Long Island
or what
?”

“Right. Did you know anybody who ever used ... ?”

And so the next day I paid a visit on Jill Badinowski.

Chez Badinowski was what those shelter magazines—the ones that feature homes of couples so rich you know they don’t sleep together—would call “a small jewel.” It had been the gatehouse on some late-nineteenth-century robber baron’s estate, but now the mansion (Greenbough) and the baron (Jeremiah Eccles Stumpf) were history, and the Badinowskis’ mini Norman villa stood in the shadow of eighteenth-century trees a respectable fifty yards inside the border that separated patrician (i.e., cost more than anyplace else) Shorehaven Estates from the rest of our town.

I’d prepared an explanation about why I was interested in StarBaby and Courtney Logan that would have satisfied anyone not prone to analytical thought, but the minute Jill Badinowski saw me on her doorstep and heard “Shorehaven Public Library Board,” I was welcomed inside without having to say another word.

Jill was in her early thirties, although her prominent freckles, wide-spaced eyes, and fair number of extra pounds gave her the sweet, goofy look of those excessively adorable cartoon kids on greeting cards. By the time I got finished telling her I was trying to get some information on StarBaby and Courtney, I was seated at a big, round, rough, made-to-look-worn wood farm table in her granite-countered, oak-floored dream of a kitchen watching her grind beans for a fresh pot of coffee. This last was no mean feat, as a chunky toddler who was either a short-haired girl or a long-haired boy clung to her leg and shrieked “Chips! Chips!” no matter how many times Jill gently responded with “No more chips!” (I, of course, would have given in and handed over a king-size bag of whatever high sodium, additive-suffused carbohydrate would stop that nerve-grinding duet of gasping sobs and hiccups. Jill, however, was obviously one of those mothers so placid they can remain sympathetic but unmoved by screaming, breath holding, and even turning blue.)

“Were you friendly with Courtney?” I called out over the din. “Was that how come you had the video made?”

Jill’s response was a loud single-syllable laugh of the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding variety. “No,” she boomed back. “I mean, could you see someone like Courtney Logan and someone like me being friends? Not that she wasn’t nice.”

The toddler’s screeching subsided, so I was able to ask: “Why wouldn’t the two of you be friendly?”

“Let me tell you,” Jill said slowly. “In every town there are two kinds of women home with their kids. Typical women like me who can’t imagine
not
being home. Then, you know, the high-powered ones. The ones who were executives or journalists or high-finance types like Courtney.” Cautiously, as if concerned the machine might spit back the coffee, she sifted in the ground beans. “Their motto is”—she made the sort of half-amused, half-sneery sound that, charitably, might be called a chuckle—“‘achieve, achieve, achieve.’ Which, if their husbands are raking it in, becomes buy, buy, buy’ once they’re full-time moms. Not that they do much mothering. Maids. Sitters. Nannies. Au pairs. Believe me, with these two types, never the twain shall meet, if
they
have anything to say about it.”

“But aren’t all of you mothers now?”

“Yes,” she said, slowing down even more. Maybe this was her pensive mode. You could practically take a nap between each word. “But giving birth and staying home doesn’t ... you know, kill the ‘achieve, achieve, achieve’ bug, does it?”

I gave what I hoped was a knowing laugh and quickly changed the subject. “How long have you lived on Long Island?”

“We’re pretty new.” Jill seemed to think she still owed me something more, so while she straightened the curled-up elastic waistband of her bright yellow shorts, she added kindly: “We really like it here.”

“Where are you from?”

“You mean a thousand years ago? From Indianapolis. But Pete—my husband—is with Delta.” Then she added: “The adhesives—not the airline, not the faucet. We’ve moved seven different times.” She tossed off the Delta business in the overly affable manner of someone who had grown weary of explaining a thousand explanations ago. “We started in Houston, then Pittsburgh, Chicago ...” One of the subsequent cities was either so abominable or so dull all that came out was a sigh. “That’s why I needed StarBaby, because Luke—this little guy here”—the kid’s shrieks for chips had modulated to whimpers and now became mere whines—“was five months old and we couldn’t even find our videocam. It’s probably in one of the cartons we never got around to unpacking in Denver. That’s where we were before Long Island.”