Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

  “Where is she?” took over the town. In the bakery, a neighbor gazed covetously at a cheesecake while proclaiming Courtney the victim of a serial killer. Leaning against the Shorehaven Triplex’s popcorn machine—not cleaned since the Carter Administration—the kid behind the counter held a monster cup of Sprite and opined that Courtney Logan was an FBI agent, undercover to get evidence on the Logan-Lowensteins, and, at that precise moment, was probably being debriefed in Washington. Or maybe dead. In my book group the favorite theory held that Courtney’s body was in the trunk of some hood’s Lincoln Continental, courtesy of Fancy Phil, who wanted his son to marry some other Jewish gangster’s daughter from Scarsdale, thus creating an unstoppable Long Island-Westchester organized crime axis. (This was no more idiotic than their interpretation of Mrs. Dalloway.) At work, the perpetually overwrought history department secretary suggested in her usual choked voice that maybe the au pair had buried Courtney alive in a graveyard, where nobody would think to look for her.

  For the next few weeks, with increasing desperation, I read the papers and listened to the news hoping for a driblet of information about the Courtney Logan case. But Courtney had disappeared from the media as completely as she had from Shorehaven. People who’d only wanted to gossip nonstop about the Logans went back to warring over the “No Right Turn on Red” sign on Main Street and Harborview Road: Neighbors shook fists at neighbors at Town Hall meetings over whether the sign was a prudent traffic control measure or an edict that violated the due process clause of the U.S. constitution. Who else could I carry on with about the mystery? My children were busy being adults. Nancy suddenly had even less free time than usual, having tumbled for her new Jaguar mechanic. My other friends were involved with their own less interesting, less adulterous affairs.

  I was so hard up for someone with whom to analyze the Courtney case that I actually wound up trying to discuss it with Smarmy Sam, aka Samuel P. B. Braddock III, the department chair. As always, because he thought of himself as a patrician and me as his inferior, the Smarm had simply pushed open my office door without knocking and stuck in his head. With his limp-lidded eyes and awesome overbite, this was no treat. He looked as if a couple of crocodile genes had glommed onto his double helix. “I’d liiiike an answer,” he was saying. Well, he’d come to my office to again try to persuade me that teaching an additional two classes of America from Reconstruction to the Cold War in the spring was not just good for the commonweal, but for me as well.

  “Before we get to that,” I said with unseemly animation, “did you happen to hear that a woman from my town vanished into thin air?” Before Sam could get a word in edgewise, I offered a synopsis of what had been reported.

  Sam understood that before he had a chance at my jumping at his offer, he’d have to let me jabber. “Is this Greg Loooogan a suspect?” He spoke more in a honk than a voice, that lockjaw Long Island accent still extant among polo players, random debutantes, and fakers. “By the by, is this Logan related to the Logans of Oyster Bay?” Sam inquired.

  “No. He’s related to Fancy Phil Lowenstein, a mob guy. Actually, Fancy Phil’s his father.”

  “Oh.” The Smarm, predictably, was doing his best to hide that he was appalled by the likes of me. His best, as usual, was not good enough. He was a man who not only taught American history, but believed he owned it. An ambulatory anachronism in our age of diversity, Sam was an East Coast WASP who not only thought he and his ilk were better than, say, me and my ilk—or anybody’s ilk—but also believed we needed constant reminders of what our place was, for our own good. Was his accent the real thing? Was he genuinely wellborn? None of us had a clue. Well, he did keep his pens in a mug with a St. Paul’s insignia and he managed to work the phrase “preparing at Sint Pol’s” into a sentence at least once a week. Naturally, the entire department was on continuous Sint Pol’s alert, all sworn to report an occurrence the second it passed the two-dimensional lines that were his lips.

  “Caaaan we return to the business at hand?” Sam asked. “Your class load, or, if I may be so bold, your lack of it?”

  So my need to talk about Courtney and what had happened to her was, yet again, frustrated. After the Smarm left, I told myself it was better he wasn’t interested. Many mysteries in life remain unsolved. No matter how much I yearned, it would not be productive for me to try to insert myself into a situation that was none of my concern, even though every fiber of my being, and I had a fair number of fibers, cried out to do precisely that.

  A few words of explanation might be appropriate here. Here they are: I am passionate about whodunits. The fictional kind. Hand me a Robert Parker novel, a John Dickson Carr locked-room mystery, even one I’ve read three times before, and you’ll be giving me the gift of pleasure. But I love real-life whodunits more. About twenty years ago, as I was passing over to the bleak side of thirty-five, at a time when my now-lawyer daughter and film-critic son were little more than tykes, a local periodontist, M. Bruce Fleckstein, was murdered. I recall hearing about it on the radio and thinking: Who could have done such a thing? Before I knew it, I was investigating, and feeling thrillingly alive.

  I am not sure why. Maybe it had to do with my sense of fair play—trying to bring the scales of justice back into balance. Murder is an attack on the body politic as well as on a particular body, and perhaps I felt the need to set things aright in my home town. Maybe I liked solving the puzzle, or maybe I was simply drawn to the dark side of the street. Believe it or not, I actually was instrumental in determining just who the killer was. But in the course of my detective work, I came into contact with a real homicide detective, Lieutenant Nelson Sharpe of the Nassau County Police Department.

  To make a long story short, I had an affair with him. That was it. Six months of faithlessness in a twenty-eight-year marriage. Even for a historian like me, aware of the persistence of the past, it should have been ancient history—except I fell in love with Nelson. And he with me. For a time we even talked about leaving our spouses, getting married. We simply couldn’t bear being without each other. Not just for the erotic joy, and there was plenty of that, but for the great fun we had together. But even more than my secret belief that a marriage that rises from the ashes of two other marriages is doomed from the start was our mutual, acknowledged awareness of what our leaving would do to our children. At the time Kate was six and Joey four. Nelson had three kids of his own. So he stayed with his wife June and I remained with Bob Singer. Nelson and I never saw or spoke to each other. For almost twenty years.

  And then, less than a year before, we’d caught a glimpse of each other. For barely an instant. Unplanned. Nelson looked even more shocked than I felt. All he could manage was a brief nod as he kept walking. The next morning at eight-thirty—the time he used to call me knowing Bob would be on his way to the city—my phone rang.

  However, the three seconds of seeing him and that very short phone conversation proved, for me, three seconds too long and one talk too many. After Bob’s death, I wasn’t exactly going to win any mental health awards. It took me months to get over that fleeting encounter with Nelson. I lifted the phone to call him a couple of thousand times. The only reason I hung up before the connection was actually made was that he was a cop and could no doubt trace any call. Naturally I couldn’t sleep. Some internal motor kept racing. Some inner voice wouldn’t stop screaming Fight or Flight; all that held me back from fighting or fleeing was a cloud of despondency so thick I couldn’t see my way through it. Since I was already the Zoloft Queen, I tried to cure my ills with more therapy. Relaxation cassettes. Self-help books. A yoga video. Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. Finally, what helped was time. So no more detecting for me. I’d vowed as much to Nancy. The previous week, when I discovered my Jeep straying onto Bluebay Lane, the street on which the Logans lived, I made a U-turn and drove straight home.

  With Smarmy Sam gone, I turned back to my computer screen. There were the same three paragraphs of what was supposed to be a seven-hundred-fifty-word rev
iew of a book about the Glass-Steagall Act I’d promised to email two weeks earlier. Yet instead of a fourth paragraph, I typed an outline of what I knew from the papers, radio, and TV:

  GREG ... SHOULD HE BE SUSPECT

  IN COURTNEY DISAPPEARANCE?

  1. Spouse usually 1st suspect.

  2. Greg owns small chain of take-out places called Soup Salad Sandwiches. One in Huntington. Rest on the South Shore.

  A. Smart. Graduated from Brown, MBA from Columbia.

  B. Got into food business when father, Fancy Phil, gave him 2 fast food franchise stores in N.J. called Mr. Yummy’s. Sold them for the $$$ to start own business from scratch.

  3. SSS: Stores sell 3 varieties of soups, salads, and sandwiches daily. Big on quality ingredients. Stores in upper-middle-income towns.

  4. An au pair living with Logans. University student. Depending on which account, from Austria or Germany. She was one Courtney told, “I forgot something. I just have to run to Grand Union for a minute.” Any funny business with au pair and Greg??????

  I also noted all the information I could recall about Courtney and her company, StarBaby. The following morning, on my way to work, I became one of those pitiful sensation sniffers and drove (shamefully slowly) down Bluebay Lane. It was the day before Thanksgiving. I should have spent those extra minutes at home with an orange so I could toss a few dozen strands of zest along with a tablespoon of Grand Marnier into the canned cranberry sauce—an old family recipe. Instead I found myself scrutinizing Greg and Courtney’s red-brick colonial.

  The house was set well back from the street on a velvet carpet of lawn. On each side of the dark green front door, three white columns stood tall and proud. The shutters were painted that same old-money green. Nevertheless, despite its classic Georgian features, the scale of the house was slightly off. It was set back on an acre, and though the builder had wisely not hacked down the property’s impressive old trees, the Logans’ place seemed overly large for a single family. It looked more like the Romance-languages department at a New England college.

  In mysteries, it always annoys me when houses in which strange doings have occurred are described as “strangely still.” What are they supposed to do? Cha-cha? Nevertheless, there was absolutely no sign of life in what the Post, obviously hoping to prevail in some tabloid alliteration competition, was calling the “lush Lowenstein-Logan Long Island estate.” It really was strangely still. No BMW in the driveway today, no tricycle left out overnight. The curtains were drawn. A stubby flagpole over the door, the kind that displays those flags mail-order catalogs have managed to palm off on the public, was not flying the national colors of Pumpkinland or United States of Pilgrim Hats or whatever hideous banner suburbanites run up for Thanksgiving. However, if the Post could be trusted, Greg Logan was still in residence, having been “advised by Nassau County police authorities to remain in the community.” Well, with Courtney having been missing for almost a month now, that advisement was no surprise.

  The only surprise was that I had sunk so low that instead of going straight home after work to prepare what my kids referred to as Mom’s Secret Sweet Potato Recipe (which, even with its optional canned crushed pineapple, was no different from the thirty million casseroles of marshmallow-covered golden glop that grace the tables of American households every fourth Thursday of November), I drove straight to the house of Mary Alice Mahoney Schlesinger Goldfarb. Nancy and I had known Malice since our college days at the University of Wisconsin, so I guess she was something between a longtime, unwelcome acquaintance to Nancy and a semifriend to me.

  Mary Alice talked more than anybody in Greater New York and said the least. Was she annoying? Usually. Vacuous? Indubitably. Stupid? Probably. However, somehow her pea-brain was optimally structured for the absorption and retention of every item of Shorehaven gossip that flitted through the air, no matter how vague.

  “Who’s catering you?” Mary Alice inquired as we stood in her dining room. Her gold-and-white outfit, with its skintight pants and embroidered bolero jacket, would have looked better on a matador. I sensed it was the work of one of those avant-garde designers she had, sadly, grown to favor. Naturally, she was not cooking, but, as her third husband, Lance Goldfarb, urologist to the North Shore’s best and brightest, was suburbane enough to understand, only first wives cooked.

  Mary Alice, however, was preparing for the next day’s feast. She leaned over her table (gleaming black wood with red and yellow glints, made from what was doubtless an endangered species in the Amazon rain forest), her long, thin fingers rearranging squashes, purple grapes that I guess were supposed to look slightly moldy, sprays of bittersweet, and some ruby-petaled flowers that looked like a cross section of female genitalia. The arrangement overflowed a sterling silver tureen the size of a footbath. Mary Alice’s engaged-to-Goldfarb ring, a diamond dazzler, sparkled in the genteel light of a Venetian chandelier.

  “No one’s catering for me,” I responded. “I’m cooking.”

  A saddened “Oh” popped out from between her high-gloss lips, but she quickly put her index finger against them, as if she were a kindergartner who’d just been signaled to shush. For a woman halfway into her fifties, Malice had an astonishing repertoire of little-girl mannerisms. I knew what she was thinking: Bob had left me practically in the poorhouse, i.e., unable to afford a caterer who could bring in baby squabs stuffed with wild mushroom polenta which would be touted, by the caterer’s Manhattan-actor-waiters, as much more authentically Native American than any turkey. However, poverty was not an issue for me. Bob had grown into the sort of man who could never resist a frolicsome lunch with an insurance actuary. He’d planned for everything except his own early death and had left me, though not rich, well fixed enough to spring for a squab or two.

  But I repressed a powerful urge to babble a defensive: I like cooking my own food. Instead I asked: “What’s new?” Then, before she could utter her first word in what would be an exquisitely detailed description of how she was having her chinchilla jacket relined, I immediately tossed in a “Oh, Mary Alice, I keep forgetting to ask ... Has anyone seen Greg Logan around town?”

  “Not that I’ve heard about,” she replied, pulling out one of her Empire dining-room chairs (from Husband Mahoney) and sitting. I did likewise, although the large Napoleonic bee design on the center of the burgundy damask of each seat had always seemed slightly menacing. “But you know who has been seen around town?” She waited, patient. I was, too, so finally she pronounced: “The au pair! In the patisserie. Buying rye bread.” I noticed Mary Alice was still rolling her Rs intermittently, so “rye bread” came out vaguely Gallic; she’d recently returned from a weeklong urethra conference in Lyons with Husband Goldfarb. “She was wearing what everyone was positive was an Hermès scarf.” She gave a humorless, monosyllabic laugh. “You know what that means.” She rested her left arm on the table and, with her right fingertips, caressed the gold threads of what was either a leaf or a duckling embroidered on the jacket’s sleeve.

  “She knows how to accessorize?” I suggested.

  “No. Most people were saying, Well, we know who’s dipping into Courtney Logan’s scarf drawer.”

  She waited for me to respond, so I said “Wow.” Actually, I was impressed with the notion of an entire drawer dedicated to scarves. Mine were kept in two Hefty One-Zips that resided with my nightgowns and a lifetime’s collection of half-slips I couldn’t bring myself to throw out.

  “But then I heard, no, she isn’t stealing. It was one of many, many, many gifts .” To make sure I understood, she added: “From Greg Logan.”

  “So people are saying he’s taken up with the au pair?”

  “Not now. Before .” Malice took a deep breath to compose herself after imparting this electrifying news. As for me, I’d already said Wow, and a gasp would have been extravagant, so I just sat quietly. “Before Courtney disappeared,” Mary Alice explained. “They say what happened is that Courtney came home with their little girl Morgan from trick o
r treating. One guess what she walked in on?”

  “Greg Logan and the au pair?” She gave a knowing nod. I was still trying to get used to the notion that “Morgan” had become more than a financial institution or a surname. It was what former investment bankers named their daughters. Then I asked, “Where was their little boy during this liaison?” Mary Alice shrugged. “And wasn’t Greg at a business dinner in the city that night?” I went on, “That’s what I’ve been reading, that when Courtney didn’t come back, the au pair made no attempt to call him. She just put the kids to bed and waited until he got home. Then she told him she didn’t know where Courtney had gone.”

  “Not according to my sources.”

  “Who are your sources, Mary Alice?”

  “Everybody.” She adjusted one of Husband Schlesinger’s three-carat diamond-stud earrings. “Everybody knows about them, Judith.”

  “Well, let’s say Courtney did walk in on that kind of a thing,” I conceded. “What is she supposed to have done? Or what was done to her?”

  “Ha!”

  “They’re saying Greg and the au pair murdered Courtney?”

  “That’s the number one theory. They did it, maybe to keep her from screaming or something and—”

  “Where did they stash the little girl with a bagful of candy while they were murdering Courtney Logan?”