by Susan Isaacs
Another thought. Another mug of coffee. One percent milk. Half an Equal. I sat back down at the kitchen table. Had Courtney’s body been put in the pool in order to implicate Greg in the killing? If so, why had the killer refastened the cover so tightly? I recalled when I’d first heard Mack Dooley, the Logans’ pool man, on the radio in May. He’d said something about the cover looking fine: “tied down real tight” the way he’d left it in the middle of September when he closed it up.
Did the killer want people to believe Courtney was simply missing? If that was the case, why risk putting her body in the pool? No murderer would rely on incompetence from the Nassau County PD’s Homicide unit—that they would not look under the pool cover. Because the department had a good reputation. Obviously there might be the predictable politically connected losers or lazy guys, like the guy in charge of the Logan case. Still, most of the detectives were thought of as well qualified. Or terrific, the way Nelson had been.
I put on a pair of gray slacks (which delighted me by buttoning without my having to inhale) and a white shirt, then tied a yellow cashmere cardigan around my shoulders in that trendy, capelike style that made adult females look as if they were playing some communal game of Wonder Woman. Slipping into a pair of Gucci loafers I’d bought in Rome in 1985, I was so comme il faut I looked like a chic distant relative of myself. So I dropped by both Susan Viniar and Kellye Ryan’s houses. And all just after nine o’clock.
Susan’s housekeeper led me upstairs into a home gym with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. I found her straddling a menacing-looking machine, pulling down a bar that resembled a deformed wishbone; the bar was attached by pulleys to—I squinted. Yikes!—ninety pounds of iron plates. The weight did not seem to faze her in the least.
At Kellye’s, after I rang the bell and called out my name, she herself reluctantly opened her own door. No live-in housekeeper. Not quite in supermodel gear yet: Her black hair was wrapped around giant foam cylinders. Strips of parchment-like paper were glued to her nose, forehead, and chin—a beauty treatment, not rampant weirdness. Whatever she was doing to the rest of her was doubtless even less inviting, because she kept gripping the neck of an ankle-length cotton robe to make sure not an inch of skin was showing. “A North Shore Child and Family Guidance luncheon,” she explained. “I’d love to invite you in for a cup of coffee, but like, you know ...” We chatted at the door for about ten minutes.
Afterward, I drove to Starbucks and sat in the parking lot with a container of iced decaf. Okay, what had I just learned? Not much. Neither woman had altered her view: Susan was still convinced Courtney was sexless; best friend Kellye sensed Courtney was preoccupied, the way a woman with a lover might be—and, Kellye added, clutching the sky-blue robe even tighter to make sure whatever glop she had on her neck was invisible, Courtney had “that glow, if you know what I mean.”
Well, at least between the two of them I came up with a list of ten other women who might know Courtney well. So I spent most of the day and early evening visiting and phoning upwardly mobile thirty-somethings.
After dinner, around seven-thirty, I phoned my daughter the lawyer. What could Courtney have been doing? Was it possible she’d made a mint doing on-line trading—hundreds of thousands? millions?—and someone learned of it and wanted to get their hands on the money?
Like Dreadful Dan Steiner, Kate thought it was unlikely although conceivable. “Mom, even in a bull market, I don’t think it’s easy to be a genius for more than a month or two. I don’t know. Maybe she had a special knack for it and picked the right Internet stocks. I mean, you hear amazing stories about fortunes being made, but my guess is most of them are probably myths.”
My response, I regret to say, was one of those vocal maternal sighs designed to make offspring feel they owe you something. Anyway, Kate offered me another minute despite the predictable lunacy (senior partners pounding on conference tables, clients screeching) of whatever merger or acquisition that she was working on. “Listen, Mom, if this Courtney was on-line for hours on end, she could have been reading tech reports on particular securities or on certain industries. Or watching a tape of stock prices. Maybe she wasn’t investing. Just interested or trying to learn. Or she could have been investing small time. From what I hear, even that can get addictive. Or maybe it was something having zero to do with trading. Like hanging out in chat rooms, talking to friends she’d made. Or looking at porn sites, having cybersex, or bidding on baseball cards. There are a million things she could have been doing.” Kate paused for a breath. “Hey, how about trading on insider information from one of her old colleagues?”
How about it? One thing I knew: That whole day, no one said anything to make me leap up and shout Aha! On the other hand, though I was wide awake, my mind was tired. Like soap bubbles, shimmery ideas of who-done-it or how-done-it rose and gleamed for an instant, then popped into thin air. So around eight-thirty, just as the sun was setting, I tooled over to Nancy’s. For a while we just sat silently in her office gazing out at the pink-and-orange June sky—luscious pastels, what you’d see at an Estée Lauder counter.
“Pretty,” she observed. The colors of the sky glowed on her cheeks and forehead, giving her the complexion of a flamingo.
For someone who found looking in mirrors a pleasant experience, who paid a fortune for clothes, who planned what earrings she’d wear a week in advance, Nancy’s office was remarkably unpretty. In fact, it was a mess of a space, with an old rocking chair with a splintery rush seat, a sagging daybed, piles of books serving as endtables, and two dusty afghans left over from the few months in the early seventies when Nancy had gone through an Earth Mother phase and bought a used loom. Nevertheless, the office was the only room in the house that had survived her husband Larry’s latest renovation. No pointed arches, not one gargoyle.
Nancy’s only decoration was on one wall, where she’d taped up some of her early freelance writing efforts: “Bubble, Bubble, Soil and Trouble: What You Need to Know About Phosphate Detergents” and “One Hundred Ways to Say ‘No’ to a Man” (a notion, alas, that had never occurred to Nancy). Now the articles were yellowed and dry, held up by Scotch tape so old it had turned bronze. Flakes of desiccated paper crumbled from the curling edges of the pages and adhered to the baseboard and rug.
“So?” she inquired, sipping a little water or a lot of vodka.
“I spent the day talking to young mothers,” I reported.
“Did you get anything? Besides bored?”
“Were you boring when you stayed home with your kids? Was I?”
“I wasn’t. You were.”
“Shush. I want to talk about Courtney.”
She nodded. In an instant her expression transmuted from snide to solemn. In the grand tradition of best friends, Nancy resembled one of those exquisitely calibrated instruments that sense the first rumbling of a quake a thousand miles away. Unlike a mere good friend or a pal or a chum who might proclaim, Hey, let me know if you need anything/I’m always here for you/If you feel like company just call, Nancy, in a split second, would sense the slightest shift in my seismic activity and respond accordingly. “I’m all ears,” she said.
“A couple of the people I interviewed thought there’d been a change in Courtney this fall. She seemed kind of depressed over the summer, maybe about the business, maybe about something else.”
“Something male?” Nancy inquired.
“Possibly. In any case, she was still working to make a go of StarBaby. But come September, she acted detached from it. The last couple of weeks before Halloween, there were a few times she got all dolled up and was away for the entire day. Her husband doesn’t get home till around eight. And she told the au pair to tell him she’d gone shopping. Most of the time, though, she stayed in the office for hours on end, maybe on-line, maybe talking. Zee, her videographer, says she was just going through the motions, businesswise, with StarBaby. Her best friend sensed something else was occupying her—a guy. Courtney supposedly had ‘that glow.’ On th
e other hand, a woman in her group who really wasn’t close to Courtney told me she thought Courtney was utterly asexual.”
“How did she have her children? By budding?”
“Now, the best friend is superfashionable. Very attractive, too, except for inordinately long canine teeth.” I did my Bela Lugosi imitation for a few seconds, until Nancy closed her eyes. “She seems to have a good heart. But I think the other woman in the group is infinitely brighter. She picked up on something about Courtney that I’d picked up on after talking to a whole bunch of people: She was ... incomplete. The woman, Susan, told me Courtney reminded her of the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
“Excellent,” Nancy said. “Another evening of high culture. I can always count on you to elevate any discussion.”
“I really understand what she meant by pod people. Courtney had all the qualities of a winner—fine education, good job after college, decent-to-terrific husband, money, lovely children.”
“Except she wasn’t a winner? Something was wrong with her?”
“Not wrong. It was that something wasn’t quite right. Listen, some people liked her or thought she was a decent sort. The au pair looked up to her. But except for the best friend, no one had a single tear for her. No one seemed to have the wind knocked out of them by the awfulness of murder.”
“Well, it’s been a while since they found the body.”
“It’s three weeks today,” I told her.
“But she’s been gone since October thirty-first. After a few days, people must have assumed some kind of foul play. So finding her body wasn’t a shock.”
“Listen, imagine if the same thing happened to someone we were peripherally friendly with, say Mary Alice. She certainly is a peripheral friend. But wouldn’t you still be stunned?”
“No. I’d be dancing in the streets,” Nancy said.
“You would not.”
“Doing the tango up Northern Boulevard.”
“No. You’d be stunned.”
“Fine. Whatever you say.”
We were quiet for a minute, Nancy studying the quotes on a paperback she’d bought, me combing the fringe of a brown-and-gold afghan. “I keep thinking about something you said,” I told her. She set aside the book. “About Courtney being third-rate and StarBaby not being a star. Was that something you heard at Newsday?”
She flung back her head in a southern-belle-taking-umbrage gesture and muttered a weary “Mah Gawd!” When my only response was to keep combing afghan fringe, she added: “No, you turkey. It’s something I heard my inner voice say. Courtney Logan quits her job when she has her first kid. Have you heard one tiny little word about her having been dying to get back to Wall Street or wherever she’d been? Or missing it?”
“No.”
“She was running one of those cute home-office businesses that seemed to be going noplace fast.” Before I could challenge her, she added: “I swear I’m not being snotty. If the company had potential, she wasn’t the one who could take it there. Ambition’s fine, but you also need what we used to call in Georgia stick-to-it-iveness.”
“Because no one down there ever heard the word ‘tenacity.’”
“Do you want my opinion or not?” she demanded.
“Go ahead.”
“Courtney strikes me as one of those people ... They have all the right credentials but they end up going through life appalled that instead of being, say, CEO of J. Walter Thompson, they’re running the second biggest ad agency in Florence, Alabama. I mean, look at her. Cute as a button. Must have won a Little Miss Dimples contest back home. Smart. Princeton, magna cum laude. With an Ivy League, MBA husband. Worked at that big investment banking firm.”
“Patton Giddings,” I said quietly. “Listen, Nance, I think it’s time for me to go farther.”
“Which means what?” she inquired, somewhere between huffy and belligerent. “Seeing your cop?”
“No! Literally going farther. If there was a guy in Courtney’s life, the way her best friend says, no one in town has a clue as to who he is. Or at least no one I’ve come up with. If there was some big fight or a business deal here in Shorehaven that blew up and made someone want to kill her, I haven’t heard a peep about anything that could lead to me finding out about it. And I haven’t sensed anyone trying to hide anything either. Frankly, for someone so active locally, she doesn’t seem to have made more than a superficial impression on people.”
“Thus your pod-person thesis.”
“Listen, Nancy, she just could have been a plain old nebbish. Or maybe she was hiding something dark and dirty. But I think sooner or later I have to go into the city because I’m coming close to the end of my rope here.”
“What’s at the end of your rope?” Nancy asked.
“Don’t ask.”
“I’m asking.”
“Fancy Phil.”
Chapter Eleven
“WHAT’S WRONG?” Fancy Phil Lowenstein peered across the yellowed laminate of our table in a booth in Coffee Heaven. A half step up from greasy spoon, the place stood in grubby contrast to the recently renovated, excessively quaint white clapboard railroad station across the street, about eight miles up the track from the Shorehaven stop.
A few leisurely commuters, dressed down in chinos or suited up in seersucker, atilt from attaché cases and tote bags, let their eyes drift in our direction to check if ... Yes! The Long Island Bad Guy himself was at his usual table. Uh-huh, today he was wearing—Je-sus—a giant sun medallion on a rope of gold and a belly-hugging sports shirt, gray, with wide, horizontal bands of red. The shirt was so tight it broadcast the news nobody really had to know, that his navel was an outie. Before he could catch them ogling, they turned to check the day’s special: OJ 2 POCHED EGGS ON TOAST COFFEE $2.20.
Still, these suburbanites, basking in the shine of Fancy Phil’s celebrity, suddenly seemed to be living more fully. Like drooping plants brought into the sun, they were revitalized by his light. Shoulders rose from their slumps. Eyes sparkled. “Two eggs over easy, very crisp bacon!” was ordered in a cocksure manner, as if being a mere few feet from the source of power had transformed men and women alike into wise guys. Mornings couldn’t get much better than this unless a genuinely more transcendent celebrity, a Dick Cavett, say, or a Madeleine Albright, would pop into Coffee Heaven for a bagel and cream cheese.
“You don’t like your breakfast, Doc?” my client inquired. My half-eaten egg white omelette lay on the plate like an exhausted invertebrate.
I myself was feeling fairly jaunty. “No, the omelette was fine,” I replied.
“Because if you want, I can get Monte to make you a waffle. Or a real omelette, with the yellow in it.” Phil himself had finished off a breakfast of scrambled eggs and all the accoutrements. Not a shred of hash-brown potatoes was left, nor a crust from the tower of toast he’d been served. Miniature foil containers of grape jelly and strawberry preserves, now empty, as well as a minor mess of small paper rectangles Phil had ripped off pats of butter, were strewn across the table. “Maybe some pancakes?” He grabbed a few napkins from the dispenser and dabbed the already clean corners of his mouth. “They got hot oatmeal. The kind that still’s got a little crunch in it, not the mushy kind.”
“No thanks, Phil. Look, I want to talk about money.” His poker face was impressive, though the almost imperceptible slosh of black coffee in his cup showed me something had registered. “No, no,” I came back quickly. “Not money for me. I’m in this as a volunteer, just as I said I’d be. I mean Courtney’s money. I need to ask you some questions about her, and please understand I don’t mean to be disrespectful—”
“What are you talking? Respect? You think I’m some godfather where you gotta kiss my ring?”
“No, because I have no intentions of kissing anything of yours. So, let’s move along. If your daughter-in-law had a strong guiding force in her life, what would you say it was? Love—including sex—or money?”
Fancy Phil didn’t even bother
with a token “Hmm.” “Money.”
“How come you’re so sure?”
He gave himself time to mull this over by calling out to the man behind the counter. “Hey, Monte, what’s a guy gotta do around here to get more toast?” Monte smiled, undoubtedly knowing his role in this game, and gave a snappy, yes-sir! salute. Fancy Phil, knowing his role also, graciously inclined his head. Then he turned back to me. “It’s like this.” He massaged the first of his chins. “Picture a business thing, okay? You meet some guy. He looks right, says all the right words. Except you pick up little things. Let’s say you’re talking about a deal. But all of a sudden a girl walks by and he’s checking her out. Then he turns back to you; he says, ‘What were you just saying?’ Now, the guy only lost his concentration for maybe half a second, but you know, hey, he don’t have the ... the focus for you to want to do a deal with him. A girl’s a girl, but a deal’s a deal. Like with Courtney. Focus. You talk about business stuff, and even though she was a good wife and mother, always googly-eyeing Gregory and calling the kids ‘Sweetie,’ in my heart of hearts—” Fancy Phil whacked the northwest corner of his paunch to show me where his heart was—“she’d drop the sugarplum shit—pardon me—if somebody three blocks away whispered ‘spreadsheet.’”
“What did she like more about business?” I pumped him. “The wheeling and dealing? Or the money?”
“Well, she knew how to spend all right. Clothes. That house, the cars, the vacations. Bali the last time. Making Gregory go halfway around the world to go to the beach? Antiques, too. Let me tell you, for two kids playing it straight—”
“By straight you mean legal?” I cut in.
“Yeah. Legal. Legit. For two kids keeping their nose clean, Courtney and Gregory were doing nice. Living nice. Too nice, because Courtney was always spending. Getting plans drawn up for a greenhouse one time. Pressuring him to buy the house next door when it went up for sale. So’s they could knock it down and have more land. Land. They already got two acres. Who the hell was she, Miss Scarlett O’Hara?”
