by Susan Isaacs
I waited. Kellye got busy twirling a silvery bangle around her wrist. I said: “I’d like to ask you a painfully direct question.”
“Okay.”
“You’re describing a terrific person. So who in the world would want to hurt Courtney, or get her out of the way? I’m trying to get a handle on her for this history and I can’t seem to get past that question.”
“I can’t either. I guess ... maybe ... one of those serial killers.”
“Is that what you told the police when they questioned you?”
Kellye shook her head and her white-gold or platinum earrings made a tiny tinkling sound. “They didn’t question me.”
“Did they call you or—?”
“No. Nothing. I was surprised. Best friends. They called a couple of the others. But not me. I asked Denny, my husband, should I call them? I was at Court’s the day she was missing. Or killed. But early, when she put the cake together. My Dexter is seven and her Morgan is five, so ... What you’d expect. Boy, girl, age difference. Would they trick-or-treat together? Of course not. So Denny, my husband, said: ‘Do you have something to tell the cops? Something that would help them?’ So I said: ‘No.’ So he said: ‘Then don’t get involved, babe.’ Denny’s a lawyer. Tax, but ... hey, they know. Right?”
“Right. Did Courtney herself seem to change in any way over those last few months, before she disappeared?”
Kellye bit her lip while she thought, a youthful gesture that might have been endearing except for her fangs: “Yes and no,” she finally responded. I waited. “Like I said about her being perfect.” Kellye bit again. “But you know when a friend is just going through the motions. Court was doing that for weeks. Toward the end. Maybe months. At tennis she’d call out ‘Good shot,’ but I could tell. She wasn’t in it. And she kept canceling. Her mind was someplace else. And Halloween, with the cake. She couldn’t not bake—I mean, Veterans Day cake, Chinese New Year cupcakes, and like, is she Chinese? Every holiday. But she was, you know, at least fifty percent flaked. For like a month, maybe two or three, before.”
“Did you ask her if anything was wrong?”
“Sure.”
“And what did she say?”
“That she was—what do you call it?—preoccupied with StarBaby. But it was starting to take off. Everything was fine.”
“The marriage?”
Kellye shrugged her exquisitely tanned shoulders. “She said it was. I mean, she would have liked it if Greg had, whatever. Bigger ideas. She wanted him to open up on the West Coast. New York was okay, but it’s, like, ethnic and they want dinner to be a dinner. Not soup, salad, or a sandwich. Even and a sandwich. But California is spelled L-I-T-E. Except Greg said no.”
“Why?”
“Capital.”
“Is that what Courtney told you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But other than that?”
“They were fine.” She nodded, satisfied with her account. But a second later she was shaking her head.
“What made you think it wasn’t fine?” I asked.
“ESP.” I offered what I hoped was a nod more encouraging than her own had been. “And ask yourself: Why do people get flaked?”
“Did you think she was frightened?” I asked. “Or under pressure of some sort?”
“Not that kind of flaked.”
“You mean Courtney might have been interested in someone else?”
“I hate to say this, but I did kind of think: Some guy? I mean, what could make Court go, like, through the motions. Not have her heart in her pumpkin cake. And she bought Morgan’s costume. Queen Amidala.” I was trying to think of a way to ask Kellye who that might be when she added: “If you said to me, Hey, here’s a billion dollars. Who could Court possibly get hot for, even though she was always hinting Greg was the hottest guy ever.” At this thought, Kellye covered the front of her neck with both hands, then stuck out her tongue as if she were choking. Then, in case I didn’t get it, she added: “Gag, double-gag.”
“What’s wrong with Greg?”
“Q-U-I-E-T.”
“What?”
“He’s too quiet. It’s creepy. Denny, my husband, says it’s because his father is a Jewish Mafia guy. Greg’s father. Not Denny’s. Denny’s father has an air-conditioning company in Glen Cove. And not Jewish. Half Irish, half Polish, or something else foreign. I think. Whatever. But Greg wants everyone to think he’s got class, not that he’s like a gangster. That means low-key. So when he’s with you he acts so low-key it’s like he’s not there. So you won’t think he’s—what’s that word? For always pushing people around and stuff?”
“Pushy? Aggressive?”
Kellye gave me a grateful Bride of Dracula smile. “Right! But maybe Courtney didn’t know better.”
“About?”
“About what was hot. But maybe he really was. Is. Do I know? Except I don’t think so, and I swear to God, I have radar. All my friends say so. They say, Kellye, is so-and-so hot, and I say—”
“So if your theory’s right and Courtney was involved with someone else—”
“But who? Except even for a billion,” Kellye said, shaking her head sadly, “I couldn’t tell you who it could be.”
Chapter Eight
HERE I WAS again, shuffling down the road that I was less and less sure would lead me to the killer. Everyone around Courtney was so pleasantly nonhomicidal. Who in God’s name could murder a woman who cut bunny stencils for Year of the Rabbit cupcakes? Even the Lowenstein-Logan boys, my top two candidates (if Fancy Phil hadn’t been my client) seemed incapable of such an atrocity.
Yet two bullets in the head didn’t appear on any list of Common Household Accidents. Someone had pulled the trigger—twice—and I had to find out who. So here I was, sitting in another kitchen with yet another of what the politicians and media now, universally and nauseatingly, call a “mom.” At some point, I suppose, it was decided “mother” sounded too old-fashioned. Or too prim. Or maybe in the minds of the boomers it was forever linguistically tainted by its linkage to “fucker.”
Anyhow, the mom in question, Susan Viniar, sat at the head of her table. I, by default the guest of honor, sat at her right hand. My own hands were nearly frozen onto an iced beer stein into which she’d poured the thick, freezing drink she’d blended for me.
“It’s a Lime Refresher,” she explained, her firm chin high with self-assurance.
I had to give her credit. I, for one, wouldn’t have been that confident. The bright green stuff in the mug, with flecks of frost dispersed throughout, looked like mad-scientist poison in 1950s horror movies. Still, feeling I was getting noplace fast on the Courtney front, I couldn’t be too fussy. So I waited till Susan sipped, then I did, too. It tasted like a blend of green Chuckles, Gatorade, and crushed ice. That sounds fairly revolting, except to my relief, not only didn’t I die, I found the Refresher, well, refreshing.
“How close were you and Courtney?” I asked.
Unlike Kellye Ryan, Susan had no tears for her friend. Then again, she explained, she and Courtney hadn’t actually been friends. “My son Justin and Travis Logan are in the same play group.” She shrugged, apologetic she couldn’t be of more help. As she did, the deltoids under the straps of her chartreuse-piped-with-apple-green tank top gleamed darkly. I decided I wouldn’t want to be on the opposite side of a school bond fight with this dame. Her muscular, unspeakably firm upper arms were bisected by the sleeves of a coordinating apple-green sweater with chartreuse trim that was fashionably tied around her shoulders. Though slender, Susan Viniar looked weight-trained beyond buff: She could probably bench-press Fancy Phil.
Outside her kitchen window, a bolt of lightning ignited the low-hanging sky. Instead of startling at the flash, as I did, my hostess seemed to be silently counting the seconds until the rumble of thunder began. Then her head bobbed a single bounce, as if to let God know she was satisfied with His performance.
The Viniars’ pine kitchen table was tucked into an alcove
with a bay window and framed by the pale and dark leaves of hanging plants. Outside, beyond a brick patio, we could see the drenched velvet carpet of backyard lawn going on forever. Its perfection was interrupted only by a picket-fenced lap pool and a dark green swing set elaborate enough for Justin to train for the 2016 Olympics. Gorgeous greenness. Even the thick gray storm clouds at second glance seemed to have taken on an olive-drab tinge. In my red pinstripe shirt, I felt like an interloper in Emerald City.
“One time we did have a conversation about signing the boys up for Pre-Swimbees,” Susan was saying, obviously believing she owed me another sentence or two. “But it was part of a larger conversation with a bunch of mothers of one-and two-year-olds.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling I’d taken her Lime Refresher under false pretenses. “Someone told me you were a good friend of hers.”
Susan shrugged again, her deltoids rising, to say nothing of her triceps and biceps brachii. She was such a perfect specimen that, except for the covering of her dark brown skin, she might be the model for one of those charts of striated muscle the teacher pulls down in high-school biology. “I guess it’s understandable, someone thinking we were friends. I mean, we run with the same crowd.”
“What crowd is that?”
With her thumb, she wiped a spatter of Lime Refresher off the rim of her stein. “Maybe ‘crowd’ isn’t the right word. That makes it sound as if we’re the fast country-club set in a John O’Hara novel. What I’m talking about is seven or eight women. We’re mostly in our thirties, with preschoolers Travis and Justin’s age.”
“Better a crowd than going through it alone,” I remarked.
“I guess so. A United We Stand, Divided We Fall mentality.” For about two seconds the teacher in me overcame the detective; I gave her a Very good! smile of commendation for her historical reference. Except the last thing I wanted was for Susan Viniar to decide she’d invited a grinning madwoman into her house, the way Greg Logan had. So I tried converting my smile into a genial I’m-all-ears expression.
“But you’re not really close with these women?”
“In the group? I have one good friend. But it’s like this.” She spoke to the sky as it darkened even more. “If you go the mommy route”—her eyes came back to me—“even if you love your kids more than anything, there’s still only so much gratification you can get from hearing them saying ‘coo-kie.’” Not only did I recall that time, I found myself nodding so empathetically I nearly lost an earring. Susan didn’t need more incentive to go on. Clearly she’d been thinking about this for a long time. She gestured to the panorama beyond the glass, to the acre of lawn, its color deepened to June lushness from the ethereal green of spring, although that more intense hue might just have been shadows of storm clouds. “Living here, you feel so disconnected. You keep asking yourself: Where’s all the suburban kaffeeklatsch stuff, the sisterhood that’s supposed to be coming my way?”
I swallowed my mouthful of Lime Refresher. “I remember. Until I met the woman who’s still my dearest friend, I was so damn .... I guess the word is isolated. No. Lonely.”
“I think a lot of us are,” Susan agreed. “Especially if you worked in a big office the way I did. You go from all that collegiality to pureeing peas in a food mill by yourself. And there’s no one except your husband to discuss all the other things you care about besides children. He becomes your only connection to the world beyond Pampers.” I was about to ask her: What did you used to be? But then I worried that Susan would conclude the question assumed her present identity was less than satisfactory. Meantime she was saying: “You start to ask yourself: Oh my God, what have I done to myself, quitting work, sentencing myself to life in the suburbs? So we travel in packs, taking the kids to all their activities.”
“And Courtney Logan was part of your pack?” Susan nodded and her ponytail bounced. She had the silky black hair of African-American women with six-figure incomes. “But she wasn’t a friend?”
“No.”
“As far as you know, did the police question any members of your circle about Courtney’s habits, connections?”
“They spoke to a couple of the women.”
“And?”
“And what could anyone say? That Courtney loved her family. That she was smart. That StarBaby was not just a great idea, but that she actually brought it to fruition, so maybe she was more focused than the rest of us. And she was a nice person.”
“So how come you and Courtney weren’t really friends?”
“No particular reason.” I waited. “We weren’t on the same wavelength.”
“What was her wavelength?”
“This is some project for the library? You mentioned you were on the board.” Susan posed the question with the cool of someone who already knew the answer, so I didn’t play it cute.
“No, more for me. I can’t seem to get a handle on Courtney Logan. I suppose I shouldn’t be ...”
Susan Viniar didn’t immediately leap up to proclaim, No problem, your asking me questions about personal matters that are none of your business. For a moment that felt uncomfortably long to me but obviously not to her, she gazed at the vapor from the air-conditioning register as it misted up the bay window and considered what I’d asked. “Moms,” like Susan and her crowd, I decided, had remained out in the world a lot longer than we mothers had. They’d worked longer, married later, had children later. They seemed cooler cookies than my contemporaries. These younger women mulled, they pondered, they deliberated. They seemed less desperate, or at least slower, to please.
Finally, as my Lime Refresher began to separate into its somewhat grotesque-looking components, Susan seemed to conclude that: a) I could be trusted, b) it couldn’t hurt for her to be accommodating and for me to owe her a favor; and c) it might be pleasantly kaffeeklatsch-like to talk about Courtney. I sensed she had the self-possession of a diplomat. Not a Talleyrand. Her flawlessly plucked arched eyebrows and bittersweet-chocolate-brown eyes were far too expressive for her to hammer out a strategic-arms-limitation treaty with, say, the foreign minister of Ukraine. However, I sensed that for someone like Susan, negotiating a trade agreement with a petulant neutral power would be a snap.
“There was nothing wrong with Courtney,” she began diplomatically. “In fact, who could be righter? Good school, glamorous Wall Street job. Then came the nice husband, two adorable children, mommyhood. What else? Her house—Lord, when we went there for play group! It was so complete, so decorated, but in that undecorated old-money way. It looked as though there’d been Logans in it for centuries. And I guess you know that with all her volunteer work, she was highly thought of in the community. Plus she had a new business that could go through the roof. She was a decent athlete, too, and pretty—if your idea of pretty is the blond rah-rah type. As far as I could see, the only fly in her ointment was the father-in-law.”
“In what way? Did he interfere in their lives?”
“No. Not that I know of. I’m talking about the simple fact of him. He’s a ... whatever, a gangster. That’s not a social asset in most circles. But I liked the way Courtney dealt with it. Directly. She actually referred to him as Fancy Phil Lowenstein and—I’ll bet not in front of Greg—mimicked him.” Susan cleared her throat, then pitched her voice to a low bad-guy growl: “‘Hey, sweetheart, how’re t’ings?’”
“She sounds like fun,” I remarked.
Susan tilted her head to one side to consider. “Actually, no. I mean, you never had to hold your sides to keep them from splitting. But Courtney was definitely an upbeat person.”
“So if there was nothing wrong with her, what wasn’t right?”
She turned from me and looked outside, and for a moment seemed lost contemplating the masses of green curled around the grape arbor that formed the portal to her backyard. For all I knew, it might actually have been a genuine grapevine. Finally she turned back. “Did you ever see the movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” she asked sheepishly.
“Sure!�
�� I decided that since she seemed convinced of my sanity I’d better not mention that I’d seen all three versions, the Donald Sutherland one twice. “So what are you saying? That there was a pod person inside Courtney?”
Susan’s index finger slowly traced the whorls of a knothole in her pine table. “I guess what I’m saying is that the Courtney I came into contact with didn’t feel totally real.” She shook her head, dissatisfied with her answer. “It wasn’t that she was phony. But there was something ... unusual about her. I sensed she had some other, inner life that the pod person was running—a pod person who had researched the culture of the north shore of Long Island but who’d only gotten an A-minus on the term paper. Almost perfect, but not quite. Or if there wasn’t a pod person, maybe part of Courtney Logan was missing and that’s why she didn’t feel real.”
“Like what?” I inquired.
“The part that makes us not unique, but like everybody else.” Another brutal slash of lightning. The lights flickered, then stayed on, although across the kitchen the digital clocks on the wall oven and microwave began flashing in a crazed bid for attention. Susan didn’t notice. “That part that gives us the sense that a stranger is okay, that he or she shares our humanity and isn’t off in some way, or empty inside, or a threat.” She set her glass down on her napkin, then crossed her powerful arms and turned so she was facing me directly. “Saying this straight out, it sounds asinine.”
“No, it doesn’t sound asinine.” It was easy to sound reassuring because, aside from her evident devotion to her own musculature, so much about Susan—her impressions of suburban motherhood, her historical and movie allusions, her recognition of her own isolation, her introspection—reminded me of me at her age. “It sounds as if there’s good communication between your intellect and your gut. You know, the longer I’m around, the more I believe that if your gut says something’s going on here, something usually is.” Then I added: “Just one question. Couldn’t it be a less cosmic explanation? Like Courtney’s mind might have been someplace else? Business reverses? Maybe she was having a fling?”
