by Susan Isaacs
“As though she was going to something important. I would say in Manhattan, but I do not know, of course.”
“A sexy suit?”
“No, no. Business, I think. A beautiful suit. Although she put on makeup and once put her hair up on her head. But she wore a blouse. Not sexy. You could not see her, you know, her breasts.”
“Let’s get back to Greg Logan. He came home around eight during the week?” Steffi nodded. “Every night?”
“Yes. His business was food, take-out food. People bought their dinners in his stores, so he had to be in his office, above the commissary where the food was prepared if something was not correct. And these times she was away so long, she would be gone from after breakfast to seven or once even seven-thirty. If he called, I had her beeper number and was to call her right away. But he had her cell phone number, of course, so I am sure he could always speak to her.”
“But most of the time?”
“She was home. In her office. Courtney spent many, many hours there. She worked so hard.”
“What time did Greg Logan come home the night she disappeared? He wasn’t working, was he? Halloween was a Sunday.”
“He was meeting a Chicago man in the city. I believe for an early dinner. He came home about fifteen minutes past eight o’clock.” Steffi’s voice was flat, as if she’d recited this story so many times that the words were without meaning.
“Did he look the way he always did?”
“His face, yes.” I waited. “He usually wore what is called a sports shirt to his office. But that night he wore a suit and tie.”
“How was he behaving? Same as always?”
“Yes.”
“Not excited or upset? His clothes not messed up?” I was looking to find the truth and, hopefully, clear Greg. But I also wanted to find out what Steffi had told the cops.
“No. He acted”—she clasped her hands in her lap like a schoolgirl—“as always. Appeared as always.”
“Which was ... ?”
“Neat. Very neat. Pleasant. And, you know, a little tired.”
“Was he worried when you told him Courtney had gone out for apples—How long before was it?”
“She left between five-thirty and six o’clock.”
“So was he worried that she’d been gone so long?”
“Not at first. But as it got closer to nine I would say he was maybe concerned. He said she might have met some friends.”
“And then?”
“He went upstairs. The children were asleep. I think he stayed upstairs in his bedroom.”
“His bedroom? Did he share a bedroom with Courtney?”
“Oh yes. I meant their bedroom.”
“Do the windows up there overlook the swimming pool?”
Steffi closed her eyes and put back her head to think. There was a U of beige glossy makeup around the white skin on the underside of her chin. “No. Their bedroom windows are in front and on the side of the house. The pool is in back.”
“Did Greg come downstairs again?”
“Yes. About nine-thirty or nine forty-five. He looked worried. He said he’d called the police, but there were no auto accidents, so I need not worry. She might have gone to a friend’s and forgotten to tell him is what he said.”
“He’d tried her beeper and cell phone?”
“Yes, he said he did that. She did not call back. He left a message on the voice mail of her cell phone, but she did not call.” She lowered her head until she appeared to be gazing at the hands in her lap. “He stayed downstairs after that. Walking from room to room. I did not know what to do. He kept looking at his watch. I thought I should get out of his way. I went upstairs—”
“About what time?” I inquired gently.
“About ten o’clock. From my room I can hear the garage door open, but I heard nothing.”
“Did your windows overlook the pool?”
“No.”
“Okay. Please go on.”
“I came downstairs at about ten-thirty. I asked him if he thought he might call the police to say she was missing. He said no, not yet, that Courtney might be out to dinner or a movie with some friend and be angry if he called the police. He seemed, you know, calm. But then he started going from room to room looking for a note she might have left. More than one time he asked me: ‘Are you sure you didn’t throw away a piece of paper?’ I tell him I am sure, but a few minutes later I go into the kitchen because I thought I hear sound from there and he is going through the garbage pail.”
“Did he call his father?”
“I don’t know. He used the telephone, but I do not know who he was talking with. I just see the telephone line light up again and again. And then I went upstairs because I thought, if Courtney comes in, it is not my place to be there when he greets her. Just before midnight there is a knock on my door. It is Mr. Logan and he tells me, ‘None of Courtney’s friends know where she is. I called the police. They are coming.’”
Chapter Seven
“SOUNDS LIKE A bullshit case to me,” remarked Claymore Katz, criminal lawyer and bon vivant, as he stroked his luxuriant mustache.
Clay resembled Theodore Roosevelt or a walrus, depending on whether or not he was wearing his glasses. He had been Bob’s roommate at Columbia College. As long as Bob lived, they’d had lunch every six months or so to talk business, politics, and relive the 1955 World Series. There had also been an annual dinner in Manhattan with me and the girlfriend or missus of the moment, during which—usually seconds before the entrée was served—Clay would lean over for his sincere moment with me: Tell me, Judith, how are the kids doing?
Clay stirred his martini with his index finger. Two tiny white cocktail onions chased each other madly around an ice cube as if trying to conjoin, breed, and form a string of odoriferous pearls. “Then again,” he was saying. I pulled my eyes away from the glass. “I’ve seen one or two guys like this Greg Logan go up the river on nothing more than dumb-ass circumstantial evidence.” He tore off the end of a sourdough-fennel roll and popped it into his mouth.
“Totally true,” Heather Peters-Katz, the latest wife, said as she reached across the table and solicitously brushed several crumbs off the husbandly mustache. Heather should know. She’d been an assistant United States attorney, a federal prosecutor. Now, evidently, she was Clay’s junior partner, not only in his firm, but also in his life. Giving no sign he’d heard his wife speak, the barrister cleared his throat to go on.
The Katzes of East Sixty-eighth Street and East Hampton had such an active social schedule that I hadn’t anticipated getting an actual dinner with them. I’d called Clay to invite him to lunch and pretty much expected a damn-I’m-all-booked-up-how-about-Wednesday-at-3:07-in-my-office. My guess about his dinner invitation? He felt guilty for having called only a couple of times to find out how I was doing sans Bob in the more than two years since the shiva. Or else he had visions of me sliding my hand over his generous thigh in a midday paroxysm of widowy lust while he was halfway through his broiled-without-butter arctic char. His hearty courtroom voice had boomed over the telephone: Judith, Heather would never forgive me if I kept you all to myself. She’s dying (having let “dying” slip out, Clay was too cosmopolitan to falter, though I did sense a millisecond’s pause) to see you. The restaurant he’d chosen was one of those new chic wonders with a one-word name—Esplanade or Thyme or Gala—with bare ecru walls and so many candles that you feel you’re not getting enough oxygen, the way you do on a long flight.
“The police seem to think the husband did it,” I said in a sprightly voice. I’d brought up the Logan case as if it were a lively bit of suburban lore to amuse these city slickers, not as though it were a crime I was investigating. “Everyone says they’ve stopped looking for the killer and are bent on making a case against this Greg Logan.”
“Another Boulder.” Clay sighed, taking his final forkful of a salad composed largely of beets and kidney beans. Clearly, we were living in what would become known as the Year of M
aroon Food.
“Boulder as in the JonBenet Ramsey case?” I inquired.
“In the sense of the cops not wanting to do the work, going for the obvious solution.” Though to me it seemed likely that Boulder had been an inside job, I kept my own counsel.
“What’s the evidence?” Heather demanded. Clay, his lower lip thrust out in vague annoyance, peered around the restaurant as if someone at another table had been talking too loudly. I began to ache for Heather. Her husband’s generic female companion was thirty-two and bosomy, and Heather looked on the verge of receiving those birthday cards of dubious hilarity, the sort with “Look out! Here comes the big 4-0!” on the front.
“The evidence?” I responded. “Well, Greg took over forty thousand dollars out of their joint account and put it under his own name. His explanation is that Courtney was withdrawing money for her business and he needed to keep a certain amount of cash on hand to keep his bankers happy. Evidently the cops aren’t buying his story. Oh, and her body was found in the family pool.”
“Was he having an affaire de coeur?” Heather inquired.
“Well, there were the usual rumors around town, about his taking up with the au pair either before or after the murder. But I doubt that happened.”
“Why not? It’s been known to happen.” Heather Peters-Katz was one of those people who italicize at least one word per sentence, making everything she said sound sarcastic, which I didn’t sense was her intention. Actually, she was polite enough, if not truly benevolent.
In looks, she was the picture of good-natured simplicity, reminding me of the Strawberry Shortcake doll my daughter Kate used to have, with that toy’s pinchable, fat cheeks and ridiculously red hair. Unlike Ms. Shortcake, however, Ms. Peters-Katz was built like a brick shithouse. She generously exhibited her endowments by means of an out-of-court pea-green silk dress so clingy it gave evidence she had cleavage both front and rear.
Seated beside her, alas, I’d noted that with lackluster eyes and nostrils the diameter of the average garden hose, she wasn’t particularly pretty. Clay, I suspected, like many presbyopic middle-aged men, probably didn’t know precisely what his new wives actually looked like except for the more obvious features: breast projection, ankle thickness, hair color.
“Well, I can only give you my impression of the case,” I replied, throwing in an “uh” and an “um” to show I’d only just begun to think about the Logan murder. “I don’t know what the cops really have on Greg. But the au pair is working up in Connecticut now. People tell me she still speaks of him respectfully, as a former employer—not as a lover or an old lech or anything. I’m sure she told the cops the same thing.” Husband and wife propped their chins on their fists and waited for my next question, which I addressed to a neutral sliver of space halfway between them: “You’re both defense lawyers. If you were representing Gregory Logan, how would you handle the case?”
“I would—” Heather began.
But Clay was already mid-sentence: “I’d make the DA and the cops sweat. Why the hell should it be easy for them? I’d dig into this Courtney’s background.” Instead of looking peeved at being beaten to the punch, Heather’s head bobbed up and down, agreeing with her husband’s every sentence as if to say: That’s precisely what I would have said. It was as though Betty Friedan had never lived. “Any men in her life?” Clay demanded. “Unsavory characters? Criminal associations?” I told him about Fancy Phil. “Ah,” he sighed. With evident fondness, he smoothed his hair with the tips of his fingers. Both his hair and mustache were dark brown, but with that mysterious orange Ronald Reagan tinge that occurs when men hit the dye bottle. “Okay, so he set aside that forty thou. Now how much did she take from their account?”
“Between their money market and brokerage accounts I hear the total she actually wound up with was twenty-five thousand. She told Greg it was for StarBaby, her business, for camera equipment and I guess what you’d call promotion—ads and stuff.”
“Well?” Heather asked, twirling the stem of her wineglass impatiently between her thumb and index finger. “Has anyone seen a twenty-five-thousand-dollar camera or a full-page ad in the Times?”
“Not that I know of,” I responded.
“That’s my point!” Clay trumpeted, banging his empty martini glass on the table for emphasis. “Too many unanswered questions.” You’re telling me, I said to myself. “There’s been a rush to judgment,” he continued. “I’d have private detectives and forensic accountants all over the place looking for stuff on this woman, following the money, finding out who her friends were. Of course, with Logan’s old man, Lowenstein, there could be some organized crime angle and Courtney could be pure as the driven snow. But I’d buy time demanding a lot of forensic tests. And I’d look for anyone who might have a reason to want her dead.” The waiter, probably an actor whose career was already kaput because he looked like Leonardo DiCaprio’s older, less handsome brother, slid our entrées in front of us and faded out.
“Who had reason to want her out of the picture?” Clay demanded. His hands gripped the edge of the table. Leaning forward, he jutted his head toward me as if he were Queen’s Counsel in some British courtroom drama and I an accessory to murder standing in the witness box. “Who?” he repeated.
“As far as I can tell,” I answered, “no one. I mean, who’d want to kill a woman out to buy organic apples for her kids? On the other hand, there is the inescapable fact that she was shot in the head twice.”
“Does the husband at least have a decent alibi?” Heather interjected. Clay had fallen momentarily silent during the Sniff, Swish, Swallow, Cerebrate, and Nod Ceremony over the Burgundy he and the sommelier had earlier conferred about exhaustively. When I took a sip, it tasted like Manischewitz without the blessing of sugar.
“Greg had an early dinner meeting that night,” I told her. “Unfortunately, he was still driving to it around the time Courtney drove to Grand Union—or wherever she went—between five-thirty and six.” I’d heard that from Steffi, who had seemed observant enough. “He got home about eight-fifteen—”
I would have gone on, but all of a sudden a man about my age was standing behind the fourth chair at our table, the empty one. He sighed and shook his head: “Just got in from D.C. All the flights were delayed.”
I waited for Clay to suggest to the man that he was at the wrong table. Instead, he leaped up, vigorously pumped the man’s hand, and announced to me: “This is Dan ...” I didn’t get the last name because Heather was cooing “Dan!” and springing from her seat, leaning forward to offer her cheek to his cheek. They briefly smooched the air then switched cheeks only to peck once more to conclude their Euro-kiss. Immediately after that Clay and Heather began a battle of words: “Judith, this is our dear friend—”
“Dan Steiner,” Clay cut in. “He retired last year from running his own—and may I add—very, very successful hedge fund—” Dan Steiner was approaching six feet, although he hadn’t gotten there. Still, he was inches taller than Clay, who, unsettled being so near a man of greater height and vaster wealth, began to stroke his already smooth tie uneasily.
“But the real point is Dan is going for a Ph.D. in Russian history at Yale—” Heather, I thought, was being excessively delightful. I surmised her sparkle was not evoked by his academic credentials. Dan the Man himself did not appear the sort to inspire such enthusiasm. Although he fairly could be described as slim, or at least trim, he had developed one of those mush faces that are visited upon many in their fifties; it had lost not just color, but definition, so precisely from the point the jaw rose out of the chin he resembled an overkneaded oblong of dough topped with thin gray hair. The chin itself, however, a hard-edged rectangle, protruded out of his face as though it were an appendage donated by another species; it was so long I kept marveling he hadn’t grown a beard to camouflage it, especially now that he was one with Academe.
“He drives up to New Haven every week to take—”
“Dan—I hope Clay told you
—Judith has a Ph.D. in American history and teaches at a very prestigious small Catholic college—”
Since the three of them were standing, I decided it might appear surly to remain seated. But just as I was about to rise, Dan reached across the table and gave my hand the limp shake of a man who’s never gotten over the notion that women are the weaker sex. His eyes looked past me, or nearly so; an observer would have thought he was saying Nice to meet you to my earlobe. Then he took his chair. Now that Heather and Clay had only each other to look at, they, too, quickly sat. Within two seconds Dan was asking about one of Clay’s SEC cases and Clay immediately began simultaneously declaiming and violating the Canon of Ethics: “The guy’s in a sweat. He’s leveraged beyond belief.”
Dan intoned: “You know, when you get that kind of leverage, certain moves in the market are magnified and—”
Not that I cared that they were (a) boring and (b) rude. Okay, I did care. But also, I was so agitated by being half of what I gathered was a blind date that all I could do was stare at my Tender Young Chicken in a Rosemary-Mustard Marinade Grilled over Apple Wood and try to calm down. What was as galling as the presumption of fixing me up without asking me if I’d be interested was the fact that Dan appeared utterly uninterested. He was spouting to Clay about unlearned lessons of the Long-term Capital Management scandal while disregarding me with such intense concentration that I could tell he’d been strong-armed into the dinner and wanted to be either at home with a tome about the terribleness of Ivan IV or on the town with whatever his definition of a hot number was.
Heather leaned so far over to me her left breast brushed across the fruit salsa atop her halibut, leaving a small dark stain and a fleck of what I guessed was peach but could have been some new fruit I’d never heard of. “Judith,” she whispered, unaware of the to-do on her left nipple. “We didn’t tell you about Dan because we didn’t want you to get your hopes up.” As I was literally dumbstruck she filled in the blank: “In case he didn’t show.” Then she sat back, waiting for me to attempt to entice Dan.
