by Susan Isaacs
“From everything I hear.”
“He sounds ...” She hesitated. I nodded, as if I already knew what she would say. Yet my heart speeded up as if to outrace the dread starting to come over me: I was about to get news that Fancy Phil wouldn’t want to hear. I was right. “To put it bluntly,” Andy said definitively, “this Mr. Logan sounds horrid.” Well, I decided, Fancy Phil would have to cope, although I wasn’t looking forward to witnessing his anger-management strategies. Nevertheless, if I had/have any personal philosophical view, any slogan I’d want to put on a T-shirt, it’s this: Never be afraid of the truth. “Perfectly horrid,” she was kind enough to reiterate.
So the prime witness in the case, the Logans’ au pair, Steffi Deissenburger, was saying Greg was horrid? Okay, not a plus. Had Steffi confided Greg’s horridness only to Andy Leeds? Or to Nassau County Homicide as well? That would be a major minus. However, better to know the truth and deal with it. So I pretended to take “horrid” well. I even nodded—How horrid that Greg Logan was horrid!—then sighed with what I hoped sounded like commiseration. I felt Andy Leeds was bothered and on the verge of forgetting that gentlefolk are reticent. My biggest contribution would be keeping my lip zipped.
I received a thank-you-for-understanding sigh. Finally, before I had to come up with a you’re-welcome exhalation, she went on. “What I can’t understand is, how can it be a coincidence that his wife is missing just three or four days and he ... you know, with Steffi?” I swallowed hard. And waited. “I mean, unless he had his eye on the girl all along and was just marking time until his wife quote disappeared unquote. I get ice-cold every time I think of it.”
“It’s amazing Steffi still managed to stay on there,” I murmured. No wonder the cops weren’t looking elsewhere for Courtney’s killer.
“She was so devoted to those children. I suppose she felt a moral obligation.”
“I suppose so,” I said.
“Doesn’t it break your heart when you think of them, their mother just vanishing and then ... ?”
I nodded. It did. “But then Steffi did leave,” I prodded.
“How could she not?” Andy Leeds responded. I sipped the lemonade wishing she’d come up with a cookie to go along with it. “The anonymous phone calls. The police knocking on the door there three, four nights a week to question him.”
“I know,” I said. “And once Steffi admitted to the police that Gregory Logan had been, you know ...”
“Forward,” my hostess politely suggested.
“Forward. Right.” So Steffi had told the cops about Greg. Was he so obtuse or so utterly devoid of ethics that days after his wife was reported missing he decided to make whoopie with the au pair? “After his being forward,” I continued, “it probably seemed suspicious to the authorities that Steffi hadn’t picked up and left immediately.”
“She told you about how he behaved?” Andy asked. I didn’t lie and say yes. On the other hand, I concede that my head might have wobbled in an up-and-down direction. “The ... the awfulness!” I heard a tremor in her voice and she didn’t seem like the tremulous type, but Steffi’s story about Greg clearly had shaken her. I gazed at the lemon circle resting on some ice cubes in the bottom of my empty glass. “Steffi’s a strong girl,” she went on, “but she broke down when she told me. Being in a strange country, going through this lovely woman being missing—and Steffi the last person to see her. And then having a detective try to make her say she had been ... involved with the husband before the wife disappeared. Devotion or no devotion to those children, Steffi had to get out fast—before the police began to wonder what was keeping her there.”
“Before they began suspecting her,” I added.
“Absolutely!” said Andy Leeds.
About three minutes later, as I turned left out of the driveway, I asked myself whether I ought to stake out the intersection of Old Farm Road and West Pequot Drive to await Steffi’s return from Manhattan. That way, I could confront her about what she’d told her new employer and the cops about Greg (lecherous slimeball) versus what she’d told me (quiet, nice, very polite).
A stakeout would definitely make me feel very sleuth-ish. On the other hand, it would probably be boring. And, without the requisite stakeout accoutrements that I’d gleaned from noir movies and novels—powdered doughnuts, cardboard container of coffee, a jar for relieving myself, which, not being a man, would no doubt result in a revolting mess involving me, the driver’s seat, and a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts—I’d probably be longing to get out of there within fifteen minutes. Besides, if Steffi had been duplicitous the first time I’d interviewed her, would she suddenly open up to me if I leaped from my car into the middle of West Pequot and forced her to slam on her brakes?
So I headed home. While waiting to pull out a week’s worth of laundry before it could get scorched by my pyromaniacal dryer, I took a can of Diet Coke onto the patio and reread my notes on all the interviews I’d done. I was mulling over what my next step would be when Nancy called.
“How was Little Liebchen?” Uh-oh. Nancy’s sloooow talk. “Did she fess up about Greg?” Generally, when Nancy drew out her syllables so long it seemed she’d never part with them, it was not Flower of Southern Womanhood Hour. It meant she’d had a vodka or two. Or three.
“Are you coherent?” I asked, nibbling on a no-fat cracker that tasted, predictably, like salted Styrofoam.
“Of course I’m coherent. Would you lay off about my drinking.” The last sentence was more command than request.
“Why not stick a straw into a bottle of Absolut and just glug away?” I advised. “Save all that tedious pouring.”
“Why don’t you put a cork in it?”
With a sigh I hoped was sufficiently passive-aggressive to induce guilt, I went back to the subject at hand. “Steffi wasn’t there. I spoke to the lady of the house, who had green froggies on her skirt. She told me Steffi had broken down and wept while telling her how Greg made a pass at her a few days after Courtney was missing.”
“He must be très stupide. To say nothing of très tacky.”
“I don’t get it. Greg’s not stupid. Not tacky either. And he didn’t strike me as the type who would be swept away.” Then jokingly, I added, “But what do I know about passion?”
“Not much,” Nancy snapped. When she drank she tended to get a bit testy. “To tell you the truth,” she conceded, “I don’t know everything either. Do you want a for-instance?”
“I’m going to get one, so yes, I want a for-instance.”
“For instance, I don’t understand all these women you’re speaking to—Courtney’s friends, the Connecticut froggy woman. What do they do? They’re all thirty-five, forty tops. Whatever happened to jobs? Remember jobs, Judith? Remember all those asshole husbands in 1972, yours and mine included, who said ‘My wife isn’t going to work,’ and how we stood up to them and that idiot mentality. So what are all these women doing home?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “They’re raising their children.”
“I see. And may I inquire precisely why we went through a revolution in women’s rights, why we bothered to have our consciences raised? So our daughters could sit on a bench in a playground and talk about whether Pampers or Huggies hold poopy better. That’s how they talk: Cross my heart, hope to die. Poopy and peepee. Four years of higher education, graduate school—a whole world of possibility open to them—and they elect to sit on a park bench and talk shit.”
“We fought so our daughters could choose—”
“We fought so our daughters would be allowed to do the work for which they were suited. Now what happens? They go to law school, medical school, business school and become lawyers or doctors or number crunchers for how long? Three or four years. But the minute they see they’re just another cruncher or whatever, that they’re not having fun, whatever that means, that they’re flying to Milwaukee with their knees squished and will never get near the corporate jet, what do they do? They up and quit.”
/> “Who’s supposed to raise their children?” I inquired. “An illegal immigrant who doesn’t speak English, who they underpay and overwork? Take a woman like Courtney Logan—”
“Courtney Logan!” Nancy huffed. “Give me a break.”
“She had a business,” I argued.
“She had a business that was going noplace fast,” Nancy replied. “StarBaby was no star and Courtney was no business genius. On her best day she was third rate. I bet you she wasn’t humping anywhere near the top of the totem pole at her old investment bank.”
“Not everyone’s a winner, Nancy. I’m not exactly a tenured professor at Harvard.”
“But you work. Nobody’s begging me to be executive editor of The New York Times either, but BFD, big fucking deal: I work.”
“But I raised my kids, before I even finished my dissertation. And if you can remember that far back, you were freelancing, not working full-time.”
“But we didn’t have a path to follow. They do. Because we cleared it.”
“Maybe they don’t like the path.”
“Maybe in a few years men will be saying: ‘Hey, how come they’re letting all these women like Courtney Logan into law school and medical school and into the hot jobs on Wall Street when all they do is work three years and quit? That’s not fair. Why can’t those places go to men who will stay the course?’ And they’ll be right.”
“Women like Courtney are better, more involved mothers than we are,” I told her.
“Women like Courtney quit good jobs and wind up banging tambourines on their heads in Mommy and Me class and fucking their golf pros and doing anything to avoid real work. Women like Courtney are up a goddamn creek without a paddle. What was she planning on doing when she turned forty-five? Fifty? Better someone shot her and put her out of her misery.”
After delivering herself of that magnanimous insight, Nancy announced she had to wash her hair, although from the clunk of ice cubes against glass, not muffled by any liquid, I surmised she wanted to get downstairs to pour herself another drink. She was less than appreciative when I asked her what was the first letter of the alphabet, then suggested she double it and find the nearest meeting.
After wasting a half hour folding underwear and towels so meticulously they could be displayed at an American Washday exhibit at the Smithsonian, I broke down and called Fancy Phil and gave him the gist of what Steffi had told the cops. I expected a gangster-ish outburst: thunderous Fucks! and fists breaking plaster. But after a long silence, he merely asked what he should do. So I told him.
Around eleven that night my bell chimed. Fancy Phil. Not that he woke me; I’d gotten absorbed finishing an article by a Korean War veteran turned historian on the Second Infantry Division’s role in the fighting at Heartbreak Ridge. (And, big surprise, thinking about Nelson.)
The night was cool, in the low sixties, and Phil was wearing a sweatshirt. Brown University. The “vers” stretched across his gut looked larger than all the other letters. I assumed he’d borrowed it from his son, although the gold Egyptian amulet on a thick herringbone chain was clearly his. “I talked to Gregory,” Fancy Phil announced in a voice loud enough to broadcast that he knew I lived alone. I didn’t want to think about how he knew. I invited him in. “You got time now?” he asked, but by then he was in the living room, on the couch, gazing at a bowl of potpourri on the coffee table, ruefully concluding it wasn’t a snack.
“You asked Greg about Steffi Deissenburger?” I inquired.
“Yeah. You know, you hate like hell to ask your kid the one thing he doesn’t want to talk about. But like I told him, ‘Listen, Gregory, I know you got more’n you can handle. But you gotta stop shittin’ me—pardon me for saying that—because I swear to God I’m keeping out of this. Except my friends—high-class friends—hear things, you know. And what I’m hearing is the cops think something was going on with you and that German girl that was watching the kids. And that’s how come they think you ... you know, did it to Courtney.’”
With sad but hopeful eyes, he glanced away from me and down at the potpourri again, so I excused myself, went into the kitchen, and brought back a plate with a bunch of red grapes and a couple of plums. “What did Greg have to say?” I asked.
“It took a while.” He started on the grapes. “Men don’t like to talk about ... things they don’t want to talk about. Know what I mean?”
“Emotional stuff,” I suggested.
“Right. So I said to him, I said, ‘Gregory, I’m your old man. There’s nothing you ever done that I didn’t do maybe a hundred times.’ So finally he tells me. A few days after Courtney’s missing, he’s sitting with the German girl and she’s showing him a list. So she can go shopping. Probably still buying those pukey-tasting health cereals Courtney made the kids eat. But anyways, all of a sudden, in the middle of reading over the shopping list, Gregory breaks down. Crying. Sobbing his head off because it’s like all of a sudden he’s beginning to get it, that Courtney might never get found. So the German girl pats his hand”—Fancy Phil motioned for my hand and offered a couple of demonstration pats I doubted would leave bruises—“like that. And so Gregory starts to cry even harder.” Fancy Phil shook his head. “Can you picture what it was like for him to have to tell me this, even though I’m his own flesh and blood? I mean, about the crying and stuff. But I told him, ‘Hey, kid, listen, I’ve sobbed my head off, too, and I didn’t have no wife disappear on me.’ I didn’t say ‘unfortunately’ because my first ex is his mother. So anyways, Gregory puts his head on the girl’s shoulder to cry. Like they say, ‘A shoulder to cry on,’ you know?” Fancy Phil leaned back, resting his head atop the couch cushion. He pulled a few grapes off the branchlets with his teeth. “All of a sudden,” he went on, “the girl pulls back! Like Gregory’s grabbed her. Whatever. So Gregory pulls back, too, and they finish the list like nothing happened. And then the girl went shopping.”
“And?” I asked.
“And he swears that was it. Nothing, not one thing else, happened. He didn’t lay a finger on her. It was that he just broke down for a minute and laid his head on her shoulder.”
“Phil.”
“What?”
“Do you believe him?”
“It’s funny.” He spoke more cautiously than usual, but that might have been because he had a mouthful of grapes. “If anybody else told me that story I’d be thinking: Big bull. But I’m his old man. I know my kid. I even know how my kid lies. All kids do. He doesn’t now. But when Gregory was a kid, he’d get three words of a lie out and his ears would turn bright red. I’d give him a smack and say, ‘Don’t lie to me, you little pisspot!’ My ex used to say, ‘Philly, stop with the pisspot, for crissakes!’”
“And you think Greg’s telling the truth now?”
“I think someone should get hold of this German girl—” I shook my head. “I didn’t mean hurt her,” Fancy Phil explained. “I meant to help her try—”
“No,” I said softly.
“You don’t have to whisper with me, you know. I’m not some nut who’s gonna blow your head off that you gotta get to calm down.”
“I wasn’t whispering,” I replied. “I was talking softly. You know Theodore Roosevelt? He said, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.’”
“You trying to teach me history?” Fancy Phil shook his head, the way people do when dealing with a hopeless case.
“It couldn’t hurt.”
“Fine. History.” He put his hands on his knees and, with a weary grunt, pushed himself up from the couch. “It so happens I know history. Theodore Roosevelt was before Franklin Roosevelt.”
“That’s right.”
“So listen, call me right away if you hear something.” I said I would, and yes, of course he could take the rest of the grapes and the plums with him.
It was nearly eleven-thirty. Too late to call anyone and I didn’t have the energy to start the new book I’d taken out of the library. I’d already seen the AMC movie The Sundowners
at least three times, so TV was out. It was hit the Ben & Jerry’s or give myself a pedicure. As I was twirling a tissue to separate my toes, I realized Hey, it’s not even eight-thirty on the West Coast—in Courtney Bryce Logan’s hometown. Not too late.
So I riffled through my clippings, found the one I’d printed out from the Olympian Web site, and within a minute was on the phone with one Lacey Braun, the high-school classmate of Courtney’s who’d been quoted as saying Courtney was “shrewd.” A curious adjective. Okay, maybe not all that curious, but I had no other ideas.
Lacey hemmed and hawed for a minute or two but finally admitted it was because of an incident that had occurred in her senior year of high school, something that had happened between her best friend Ingrid and Courtney. No, she didn’t want to talk about it. Hem, haw again, and then a third time, but at last she gave me a name, Ingrid Farrell, as well as a phone number.
“‘Shrewd,’“ Ingrid repeated. “Well, Lacey’s right. That’s what Courtney was.” I heard two puffs and a slurp. “Ow, hot! Sorry, I just made myself a camomile-clove tea a second before the phone rang.”
“Could I ask you a couple of questions about Courtney, Ingrid?”
“I never saw her again after high school.”
“But you may know something that could be helpful,” I urged.
Ingrid emitted a dubious “uuuuuuuh.” Finally, four actual words emerged: “What is this for?” she finally asked.
“I’ve been hired to check out Courtney’s background. Just to make sure the wrong person isn’t ...” My voice trailed off more because dealing with Lacey and then Ingrid felt like too much expenditure for too little return. “The wrong person could be accused of her murder and ...” I was suddenly too sleepy to offer her an image of an innocent being gassed or fried or whatever they did in the state of Washington.
“You’re not a reporter?”
“No.”
“It’s not nice to say anything bad about the dead,” Ingrid informed me. I thought I heard a regretful note.
“I guess not—except if it can help the living.”
