by Susan Isaacs
And that was it. End of conversation. Later I was positive that when he spoke of his new wife his voice hadn’t had a lilt, but Nancy declared I was non compos mentis or, alternatively, engaged in the most pathetic sort of wishful thinking. So I demanded, Then how come he wants to have coffee with me? She replied he’s probably an old lech who reflexively whips out his wonker for an airing every time a woman passes by. He’s not that old, I chimed in, and he was never a lech. Drop this, Nancy warned. Whatever it was you had together, it never meant to him what it meant to you.
But back to the Courtney Logan case. Since it was Memorial Day, I had the leisure on that Monday morning to attempt to come up with a reasonable suspect for the murder who could take the place of Greg. However, I soon realized I didn’t know anywhere near enough about Courtney’s friends and associates to begin. Since I couldn’t interrogate Greg, I did the next best thing and called my client, Fancy Phil Lowenstein. He said he’d meet me that night in a new restaurant. In Port Washington. La Luna Toscana. Eight o’clock. You get there before me, you tell Antonio, Listen, I’m the doctor of history who’s here for Phil. He’ll take care of you till I get there.
But Fancy Phil had arrived before I did, and was seated at a corner table. He faced the room, his back toward a mural of a moonlit olive grove that for some reason was overrun by a herd of cross-eyed sheep. At first all I could see of Phil’s outfit was a giant red napkin over his chest. Then I saw it was tucked into the neck of a black sports shirt that had a minuscule pattern of what appeared to be chartreuse boomerangs. He wore a gold link bracelet and a gold watch with twelve diamonds instead of numerals. Maybe to go with the watch, he had on his doozy of a diamond pinkie ring.
Before Fancy Phil was so much antipasto that what must have been the large oval platter beneath it all was completely camouflaged. Cheese vied with peppers for air. Artichoke hearts tried their best to squeeze in between the bresaola and pepperoni. His pudgy fingers were busy rolling up slices of prosciutto and provolone into a cigar shape. He stuffed the entire cylinder into his mouth, chewed once, swallowed with a big bounce of his Adam’s apple, and commanded: “Sit down, sweetheart. I ordered some stuff. If you don’t like it, Antonio’ll have the chef make whatever you want. So, you come up with any, uh, theories?”
“I’m working on it,” I answered as he poured me a glass of red wine.
He held my glass up to the light. “Rosso di Montalcino.” His accent would make an Italian shriek with laughter. Not to his face, of course. Someone might have the nerve to laugh with Fancy Phil, but never at him. “It comes from Tuscany. That’s what ‘Toscana’ means. Tuscany. It don’t mean parrot.”
I decided not to inquire why anyone might think such a thing. “I need to speak to more people who knew Courtney,” I told him. “I’ve got feelers out trying to get the names of her close friends, but I could get going quicker if you could help me.”
“No problem.” He picked up a dark olive so huge it looked like a major organ from a small mammal. He popped it into his mouth and it disappeared. He did not seem to know or care if it had a pit.
“When do you think you could come up with some kind of a list?”
“Now,” he said.
“You have it all written down?”
“Not written. I know stuff from Gregory. I spoke to him and then I went there after you called me.”
Iron sconces on the wall held flickering bulbs that were supposed to approximate the gleam of candles, but instead of a soothing glow, the continual sputter of light made you wonder if your retina was detaching. La Luna Toscana. For some reason I never could explain, whenever a new culinary trend got under way in Manhattan, like Tuscan cuisine, it spread to the other four boroughs, then went west, straight out to Kansas City—with a side trip to Emporia—before it could manage to cover the twenty-six miles east to the north shore of Long Island.
“Greg gave you specific names?” I asked, pondering a chunk of white cheese that felt hard enough to break a tooth. I set it on the side of my plate and picked up a bread stick. “For you to give to me?”
Wearily, Fancy Phil shook his head. Naturally, not a single jet black hair changed position. “Nah. I asked him what he told the lawyer. One of the things he told her were the names of Courtney’s friends, her business people. Then when I was upstairs with Morgan playing Candyland, I walked out for a few minutes and went into her office.” He paused. “This is strictly between you and me.”
“Sure.”
“So I’m in her office. I don’t know about computers, but I look at the fat leather book she had, with a calendar and addresses and other crap. A map of the Underground in London.”
“It’s called a Filofax. It’s made in England.”
“Bully for England.”
“So you took notes of what was in her Filofax?”
“No, no, no. I didn’t need to take no notes. I never forget nothing.” He snapped a celery stick in two and shook one of the pieces at me the way a teacher would shake a pointer at a deliberately dense student. “You should remember that, Doc.”
“Is that a veiled threat that’s supposed to make me feel chilled to the bone?”
Fancy Phil laughed a deep, big-bellied laugh, said “Nah,” and recommended the Tuscan pot roast.
The next morning was one of those exquisite end-of-May days, the air sweet with the fragrance of new-mown grass and so clear that from the highest hill in Shorehaven you could see the Manhattan skyline shining gold in the sunlight. But I was in a carrel at the library. The unending creak of the elevator transporting books was my background music while I studied Fancy Phil’s list of names. Unlike him, I’d had to write things down. I was awed by his ability not only to remember the spelling of each name, but to spew out the phone numbers and addresses that he’d cribbed from Courtney’s Filofax.
I didn’t know where to begin, so before I took on Courtney’s friends, women who might also tie their tampons with ribbons, I flipped a quarter. Heads meant that Steffi Deissenburger, the Logans’ former au pair, was German. Tails she was Austrian. She’d been reported in news accounts as being from both places. Austria won. I got out my cell phone and called the consulate in Manhattan and—Mein Gott!—finally got connected to a man who clearly knew who she was.
Nevertheless, Herr Toasty—which was the best I could make of his name, since his speech was exceedingly clipped—told me, in a huffy manner that all but said Dummkopf, that it was the United States embassy in Vienna that issued visas to Austrian citizens, not the Austrian consulate in New York. So I addressed him, in an even huffier tone: Excuse me, Herr Toasty, but it’s one thing for an Austrian national to be an innocent victim of our overeager media, and it’s quite another (I raised my voice) FOR FOREIGNERS TO USE OUR LIBRARIES AND THEN RUN OFF WITH BOOKS THAT ARE PROPERTY OF A PUBLIC INSTITUTION! After some mutual, guttural harrumphing, Herr Toasty agreed that if he could possibly find someone who might know Fraulein Deissenburger’s whereabouts, which was highly unlikely, he would mention my name, the Shorehaven Public Library, and overdue books in the same sentence.
Naturally, I considered all the reasons why I should not have used the name of the Shorehaven Public Library in vain not before I’d hung up with Herr Toasty, but after. Like if Steffi Deissenburger actually had taken out Madeline and the Bad Hat to read to little Morgan but had borrowed it on Courtney’s card and ergo knew that the library having her name in its records was fishier than last week’s flounder. Like if Steffi (or worse, her lawyer) did call but, instead of calling me at school, decided to call the library and demanded to speak with the head of the library, thereby getting me kicked off the board and well on my way to becoming a town scandal. And then of course there was the little question I’d been avoiding answering: Was I nuts? Nuts to think I could set myself up in the detecting business, nuts to risk chasing down a murderer, and even more nuts to take on a client like Fancy Phil Lowenstein.
For most people, this sort of anxiety leads them to say: I’m so ups
et I can’t eat a thing. Usually for me, it’s: I’m so upset I need a grilled-cheese-and-tomato sandwich and a glass of milk and multiple Fig Newtons. So by the time I went out to dinner with a historian who taught at Queens College, I could only gaze into the brown depths of the Spicy Chicken Soong feeling something between existential nausea and plain pukey. However, that awful feeling evaporated as we wound up comparing and contrasting Watergate and the Whitewater/Lewinsky debacle, alternately howling with laughter and nodding sagely with the usual wild abandon of two historians sharing a half bottle of Chardonnay.
So if I wasn’t singing “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” by the time I got back, I was in a pretty decent mood. No messages at home. I listened expectantly to the one that was on my voice mail at the college, hoping to hear Steffi Deissenburger’s girlish Teutonic tones advising me she had no library books and leaving a phone number, but it was only Commodore Patrick Daley, USN, Ret., one of my oldest students, telling me he had recovered still more memories of Admiral Hyman Rickover and the development of the Nautilus and would I consider writing his memoirs with him?
I was thinking semideep thoughts about how so many older students at St. Elizabeth’s would find excuses to come to my office and then not talk about the course, but their own personal histories. It wasn’t simply because they were lonely. They needed the solace of knowing that their lives had meant something. So when the doorbell rang I didn’t think, Gee, it’s nine forty-five and people don’t just drop in at this hour. I sauntered over to the front door and peered through the peephole I’d had put in after Bob died, along with an alarm system and an overzealous motion detector that warned me of any squirrels humping within a five-mile radius. At first all I saw was an eye squinting back at me. And then I realized it was Nelson Sharpe.
Chapter Six
NELSON SHARPE.
Faced with the precise scenario I’d been dreaming of for twenty years, I was, of course, completely unprepared. My entire body, from my scalp to the soles of my feet, was jolted by an electric Yikes! With each beat, my heart slammed harder until my entire chest filled with what felt like life-threatening hammering. Except it wasn’t my heart, but the geyser of blood erupting in my head that made me sure my imminent death certificate would read “cerebral accident” instead of “myocardial infarction.”
After a couple of seconds, relieved to find myself alive, I managed to put the chain on the door and open it its three inches. Nelson looked significantly better than he had the year before, when I’d bumped into him for that instant. Casual now, his sports jacket (a houndstooth check patterned after a hound who needed orthodontia) was open, displaying an admirable section of broad, white-shirted chest, bisected by a yellow knit tie, and what appeared to be a still-flat belly. His coloring was no longer the civil-service parchment I’d been shocked by a year earlier. Actually it was now a fairly furious red. “Come on, Judith, open the damn door!”
Never a girl who could play hard to get, I eased off the chain, grateful I was still wearing slacks and a silk blouse and hadn’t changed into one of my tantalizing bits of lingerie, like an oversize T-shirt and stringy terrycloth robe, neither of which disguised the fact that my breasts were no longer looking up. Anyhow, the instant the chain came off, Nelson used his suburban variation on the old TV cop routine, though instead of slamming his body against the door, he used a discreet combo of knee and shoulder that pushed the door open far enough that I could not change my mind about letting him inside.
Like I would change my mind. Except his first words in the front hall as he stood beside the umbrella stand were not: “Ah, Judith, eternally my beloved,” but “What the hell were you doing last night?” Well, I thought, at least he wasn’t shouting. In fact, his volume control was turned down suspiciously low.
“What are you talking about?” I whispered back. Not a particularly scintillating response, but I was so flustered being with him, alone in the house, that it was a small miracle that five consecutive words emerged. I couldn’t really listen for his answer, being too busy focusing all my energy on breathing slowly so he wouldn’t think I was panting with desire—or wheezing with the über-hysteria of postmenopausal women in Freud’s lesser case studies. Also, with the exhilaration of Nelson’s presence, I couldn’t think straight enough to recall what I had done the previous evening. Plus, my cognitive processes weren’t helped by his sports jacket. A thought flitted through my head: If you’re dressing to drop by at your former lover’s house, even if you don’t have an iota of feeling left, you spiff up. What could have possessed him to wear a sports jacket that belonged in a smutty vaudeville act?
So for an interminable time that probably lasted four seconds, we stared into each other’s eyes and I think were mutually embarrassed to discover that, despite twenty years’ worth of crow’s-feet and hideous houndstooth, the old flame was still blazing.
I got busy clearing my throat while Nelson recovered from the moment’s awkwardness by acting like a detective, i.e., glancing over at my mail that was strewn over a small, skinny-legged half-an-oval table across from the umbrella stand. Since all that was in sight was a Long Island Power Authority electric bill, a thank-you note from Human Rights Watch for the contribution, the June issue of the Journal of American History, and a Williams-Sonoma catalog, he turned back to me and snapped: “Last night.” His snap, however, was still pretty damn sotto voce. What was with him? In the old days he’d never been a sotto voce kind of guy when in snappish mode. Not that he was a screamer, but boy, could he be loud.
Then it dawned on me that the reason for his self-control was his conviction that I was not alone, that Bob must be upstairs. In our briefest of brief phone conversation the previous year, he’d told me about his new wife. I hadn’t mentioned my late husband. However, since my hands were now on my hips (my acutely pissed-off position) with my unringed ring finger clearly visible, I concluded his deductive skills might have dimmed a tad.
“Okay,” I said, “I give up. What about last night?”
“You were seen in the company of a certain Philip Joseph Lowenstein.”
“A certain Philip Joseph Lowenstein? You mean out of all the Philip Joseph Lowensteins in Nassau County—”
“Fancy Phil Lowenstein, damn it!” He made a fist, but before he could smash it against the wall for emphasis, which, as I recalled, was one of his Top 10 Intimidating Cop Tricks, he thrust his hand into his pocket. “Look,” he said more calmly, “I know what you like to do.” Then quickly, abashed, he added: “Are you involved in looking into his daughter-in-law’s murder? Or are you ... Is Phil Lowenstein some kind of an acquaintance, or a business associate?”
“How about my paramour?”
“Come on, Judith.”
“How come you’re asking me about Courtney’s murder? Didn’t you tell me you weren’t in Homicide anymore?”
“I’m heading up the unit called Special Investigations.”
“Which does what? Investigate with whom your ex, uh, lady friends are dining?”
“It deals with organized crime. And so does Fancy Phil.”
“Let’s see ... What happened?” I asked. “You have a tail on him and ... Give me a minute to think this through. You or someone in your unit saw him coming out of La Luna Toscana with me. Being a gentleman, Fancy Phil walked me to my car—”
Peeved that I wasn’t awestruck by his unit’s investigatory prowess, he cut me off: “Yeah, right. And my guy ran your license plate. And there was your name and address on my desk this morning.” He permitted himself a small smile: “The report had you down as ‘an alleged history professor.’”
“That’s what they say where I teach, too. Listen, do you want to come inside and sit down so you can grill me more comfortably?”
“I don’t want to grill you,” he was saying as he followed me into the kitchen. We sat across from each other at the table, which sounds proper, but being a narrow refectory kind of thing, it brought us close enough together that I could sense the heat
radiating from his knees. Every few seconds his eyes would dart around the room, maybe searching for some familiar landmark still there after twenty years. But the white-flecked beige Formica counters had turned to blue-black granite and the GE refrigerator with the kids’ artwork had been replaced by a Sub Zero the size of a small kitchen. Or maybe he was checking to see if Bob was shuffling about in slippers and robe. I offered, but he declined anything to eat or drink. I flipped open the tab of a can of Dr. Brown’s Diet Cream and took a sip. “Do you know who Phil Lowenstein is?” he continued. “I mean, beyond whatever it is you read in the paper?”
“I have no doubt you’ll fill me in.” The next second I panicked that he’d think what I’d said was a double entendre, so with enormous nonchalance I took another sip of soda, which naturally was too ambitious. I leaped up for a napkin sensing it less than suave to wipe my dripping chin on the shoulder of my turquoise silk blouse.
“He’s got high-level ties to both the Italian Cosa Nostra and the Russian Organizatsiya,” Nelson said as I sat back down. “He’s done everything dirty—dealt in stolen checks, diamonds, stock manipulation, bootleg gasoline, all sorts of stuff. Phil Lowenstein stinks to high heaven.”
“Some might call him the personification of the American entrepreneurial spirit.”
“Don’t blow this off, Judith. Look, he took a vacation for aggravated assault, but we think he’s been behind at least half-a-dozen hits.”
“Are you saying Fancy Phil himself pulled the trigger?”
