by Susan Isaacs
I finished cleaning off the tops of the salt and pepper shakers with my napkin and willed myself not even to glance at the ketchup-encrusted seam between the table’s top and sides. Instead I inquired: “So it was more money—what money could buy—than wheeling and dealing that interested Courtney?”
“Nah, that’s not right either. Because you couldn’t shut her up about business when she started StarBaby. Blab, blab, blab. And when she finally said everything twice, she’d talk about other people’s businesses, too. Like telling you Wall Street Journal stories. Boring corporate crap: ‘Schmuckola, Incorporated’s quarterly profits exceeded all forecasts.’ Like I really give a you-know-what about Schmuckola. But after a while, when StarBaby wasn’t raking it in, she didn’t have nothing to say about anybody’s business. So put it this way: Courtney liked wheeling and dealing only if she was in the plus column.”
“That money she took from her and Greg’s brokerage and bank accounts,” I said. “We’ve gone over how she put some of it back. But in the end, she wound up keeping for herself twenty-five thousand dollars of what used to be joint money.”
“Yeah,” Fancy Phil said. “That’s right. She needed it for StarBaby.”
“Can you remember when all that taking out and putting back on her part happened?”
“Lemme think. Gregory told me about it ... I guess the second week of November, two weeks after she was missing, when the cops began asking him about that forty thou he took out from their joint account and put in his own name.”
“That was the money that was supposed to make his bankers feel comfortable, right?”
“Right. You’re running a legit business, you need an open line of credit, you don’t want no uncomfortable bankers.” He paused, then bunched up his lips and spat out—fortunately not in my direction—as if he’d just tasted something revolting. “Except those dummy putzes, those Homicide cops! They took Gregory’s putting forty thou aside to make Soup Salad Sandwiches secure to mean he was the reason Courtney was missing, if you get me.”
“You mean, the cops’ theory is that Greg wanted to get his hands on the family money, and maybe he and Courtney fought. So he killed her.”
“You ever hear such crap? Anyways, Gregory told me something like he had a talk with Courtney on Mother’s Day, whenever that is.”
“Mid-May.”
“So a talk in mid-May, about her pulling money out of their joint accounts for that stupid StarBaby. Then later they had words again; I guess in the summer. That’s when she dipped in and helped herself the second time. Can you believe such chutzpah? But he told me she calmed down moneywise around the time Morgan started kindergarten. So that’s around Labor Day or a little after. Courtney said she was sorry and Gregory said he was sorry but he had to keep a certain cash balance to make his bankers happy. He told me everything was lovey-dovey after that.”
I took a deep breath and asked: “How sure are you that your son is telling the truth?”
Fancy Phil answered “As sure as I can get” so quickly and so calmly I decided to believe him.
“From what I’ve heard ...” I was interrupted as Monte came from behind the counter with what looked like an entire loaf of bread, toasted, as well as a bowlful of jelly containers and butter pats. When at last he stopped smiling and moved back behind the counter, I continued: “Courtney’s usual pattern seemed to change in September. She lost interest in StarBaby. According to both her best friend and the young woman who worked for her part-time, her mind was elsewhere. It all jibes with what you’re saying.”
“Want a piece?” He held out a triangle of toast.
“No thanks. Listen, Phil, you’re a smart businessman. What does it tell you if someone who is really interested in money and business starts neglecting the very business she’d thought would be the key to her making it big?”
“It could tell me a couple of things,” he said carefully.
“Like?”
“Like with a woman? She could’ve had a boyfriend. But I don’t think so. Not Courtney. She could’ve been, you know, having depression or something—a nervous breakdown. Or maybe she was getting born again, the Jesus stuff they do. But I don’t think that either. If I had to guess, I’d say she found some other business that was more, you know, interesting than the one she had.”
“Could she have gotten involved with something messy? Wound up paying blackmail? Or did she have it in her to possibly be blackmailing someone else?”
Fancy Phil shook his head as if I’d suggested something beyond idiocy. “When someone’s in trouble, there’s like ... an invisible black cloud over them. They can go ha-ha a million times a day, but someone like me—you know, someone who knows what trouble really means—can sniff it out. And Courtney didn’t have no black cloud like she was scared or in a jam or trying to pull a racket that wasn’t going right.”
“What about the opposite? Could she have found some other business interest more lucrative than StarBaby?”
“‘Lucrative.’” He chuckled without any discernible humor. “I know what ‘lucrative’ means.”
“I’m sure you do. That’s why I used it. I don’t talk down to you, Phil. We’re both too smart for that.”
“Yeah, I know, Doctor. Anyhow, if you’re right, and I say if, then yeah, some other lucrative business thing makes more sense to me than a boyfriend or blackmail. But that’s The Big If. You could be going on a wild-goose chase. Mark my words.”
“But there’s a time you’ve got to trust your instincts, isn’t there?”
“There’s a time,” he agreed.
“So regarding the love versus money approach,” I went on. “If I believed it was love that drove her, I’d keep looking in Shorehaven. But as far as money goes, I need to follow Courtney’s finance contacts. So what I’d like you to do is see if you can get something from Greg—”
Fancy Phil was squeezing the contents of a container of strawberry jam onto the corner of his thickly buttered toast. The jam looked like a clot of blood. “Done,” he declared.
“But you don’t know what I want yet. “
“Whatever you want,” he said, carefully seeing that the jelly covered every crevice of his toast, “I can do.”
What I wanted was names of Courtney’s colleagues. True to his word, Fancy Phil delivered, calling me just before noon with a list of names and telephone numbers. My Caller ID indicated he was phoning from a Shorehaven number. I figured it was safe to assume that he’d gone to the Logan house while his son was at work and made himself comfortable—perhaps in Courtney’s home office—by Greg’s invitation. Or more likely not. Fancy Phil probably considered his own need invitation enough.
I almost couldn’t believe it was me acting so fast, but by four that afternoon there I was, marching up a downtown Manhattan street two blocks from Wall even though the blood supply to my little toe was being choked off by a patent-leather shoe. I felt sort of choked off, too. Even though this was the heart of High Finance City, it was a creepy neighborhood. The sidewalk lay in the perpetual dimness of shadows cast by office buildings that seemed to be leaning toward each other, tall, dank, and dreary, on either side of the narrow thoroughfare. Number twenty-two’s gray masonry gave off a moldy odor as if it had been decaying since—I eyed the cornerstone—the second decade of the twentieth century. Once past the almost immovable revolving brass-and-glass door, I found myself confronted by a long-lashed security guard who reminded me of one of the teenage rapists in A Clockwork Orange. He gave me a slit-eyed gaze, even after Cecile Rabiea, vice-president of Patton Giddings, whom he phoned, told him it was fine to send Ms. Singer up to the thirty-fourth floor.
Patton Giddings was one of those institutions venerable enough to gain even more respect from looking seedy. The rug in the reception area was worn down to the mesh in spots, and what was left looked as if it hadn’t been shampooed since FDR beat Hoover in ’32. A secretary came and led me down darkly lighted halls. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect in an investm
ent bank. Certainly there were no shirt-sleeved hysterics screaming “Buy!” or “Sell!” Most doors were closed. The hallway was carpeted and I couldn’t even hear my own footsteps.
Besides my tight shoes, I was wearing my several-years-old almost-Armani black pant suit, an austere, cream-color silk T-shirt, and the gold watch Bob had bought me for my fiftieth. If I wasn’t exactly dressed for success, I felt fairly confident no one in the financial community would break out in scornful laughter upon seeing me. However, when I was ushered into the brave new world of Cecile Rabiea’s ultramodern office, I immediately knew that the shoulder pads of my suit jacket (which could have replaced first and second bases at Shea) were clearly not of the twenty-first century.
Cecile, of course, was. First of all, she was probably six feet. I sensed she’d never been one of those tall and gawky twentieth-century girls who had wished themselves diminutive and adorable. No, as she stood to shake my hand, her bearing asserted: I’m glad I was born to be tall! She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, around Courtney’s age, although she had lineless, pulled-tight-over-her-features skin and a chin-length helmet of dark brown shiny hair that, sooner or later, would have people referring to her as “ageless.” On her right cheek was a mole precisely where a Madame de Pompadour might have pasted on a beauty spot.
“Thanks for seeing me, Ms. Rabiea.”
In charcoal slacks with a matching, high-collared, zippered tunic, she was strictly contemporary. She looked appropriately got up to lead a hostile takeover of Briny Deep Fish Sticks or to captain a NASA voyage to Uranus. The only jewelry she wore was a plain, thin platinum wedding ring so understated that suddenly I had an overwhelming urge to take off my watch.
“Please call me Cecile,” she requested, gesturing for me to take a seat in a chair that resembled a squared-off, leather toilet, although it was probably some incredibly brilliant design by one of those gaunt Milanese designers with black-framed glasses you always see in the Times’s Style section.
“Judith,” I responded. “As I mentioned on the phone, I’m working on behalf of the family. So far, the police haven’t made much progress.”
“Are you a detective?” Cecile asked. Frankly, I could have done without the way her eyebrows started rising, ready to signal disbelief if I said yes.
“No. By training, I’m a historian. What the family wants me to do is a research project.” Her eyebrows looked as if they were about to go up again, so I added: “Historical research often means trying to extract meaning from the past, so in that sense it’s a form of detection.” No gales of derisive laughter, no snort of incredulity, so I kept going. “I want to see if there’s anything in Courtney Bryce Logan’s past that might have played a part in her disappearance and murder.”
Instead of more eyebrow theater, Cecile gave me an encouraging nod. “That makes sense,” she said. “I vaguely remember a saying about ‘Study the past ...’”
‘“Study the past, if you would divine the future,’” I quoted. “Confucius said it.”
“When was Confucius again?”
“Somewhere around the fifth century B.C.”
Either I sounded authoritative or I was right, because whatever the test was, I passed. Cecile asked: “What do you want to know about Courtney?”
“How well did you know her?”
“We weren’t friends, if that’s what you mean,” Cecile said, leaning back in her high-backed starship Enterprise black suede chair. “Look, investment banking can be a cutthroat field. Who’d want to have a close friend who knows your innermost thoughts, your vulnerabilities, when you might get into a competitive situation with her? On the other hand, neither of us felt any hostility toward the other—at least I’m sure I didn’t. We were business-friendly, but not friends.”
“How would you assess her capabilities?” I asked.
“Hard to say,” she said cautiously. “We graduated college and came to Patton around the same time. If you come in without an MBA, the way we did, you’re put in a two-year analyst program. It’s really a kind of boot camp. You spend a hellish amount of time crunching numbers, doing computer models of businesses, and so forth. But you work alone, or with associates and partners, twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, all-nighters—whatever it takes.” Cecile was clearly not the sort who would try to be engaging, yet her manner was so forthright and low-key that the word “agreeable” came to mind and stood alongside “formidable.” “So I never got to know her all that well,” she went on. “I’d have known her even less if she hadn’t been a woman. Thirteen years ago, when we started here at Patton, women were already more than a novelty. But we weren’t an established fact yet. Every once in a while a small group of us would meet for dinner or drinks for mutual morale raising.”
“What was Courtney like?”
“Like all of us. Focused on career. Ambitious. At the beginning, though, we were all pretty useless. I believe Courtney was a psych major and I majored in math, but—I can only speak for myself—I came here knowing next to nothing about investment banking.”
“Did Courtney seem to know more than you did? Less?”
“I have no idea. The game in this business is to act as if you know what’s going on as you try to grab onto the next rung of the ladder. Or at least not to look as panicked as you feel. Naturally, you have to scramble up the ladder pretty fast, or someone will throw it over.”
“If you’d been in different fields, if say, she’d been a lawyer, could you have been close to Courtney Logan?”
Cecile Rabiea had obviously been conceived without nervous mannerisms. She simply sat motionless in her grand suede chair. Finally she said: “I don’t think so. She was a bit too rah-rah for my taste. Happy, happy, Patton, Patton, go team go. I mean, she was perfectly fine. It’s simply a matter of personal style.”
“I understand.” I peered around her spare but expensive office. “You seem to have done pretty well.” She wasn’t a person given to modest shrugs or self-effacing You’ve-got-to-be-kiddings. “Was
Courtney as successful as you before she retired to become a full-time mother?”
“No.” I counted one-banana, two-banana to give her whatever time she wanted. Cecile would say only what she wished to say. I sensed my pressing her or prattling to cover the silence would be counterproductive. Anyhow, by the time I got to the fourth banana, she went on: “The first two years she did as well as I did. Most of the others got a thank-you for having been with us, Godspeed, and have a nice life, but the two of us were asked to stay on. But then ...”
She swiveled back and forth, which I sensed was a prelude to standing and saying Nice meeting you. So I leaned forward and said: “Listen, you have my word that anything you tell me won’t have your name attached. You’re one of five names and I’m only going to report what was said, not who said it.”
When her nod finally came, it said, Okay, I believe you. “What a lot of people don’t understand is that everyone on Wall Street is really smart,” she began. “I didn’t get where I did by having the highest IQ, because I don’t. I’m only as smart as the next guy. You get ahead in this business by being persistent. I think that’s the point Courtney couldn’t comprehend. There’s no magic. You do first-rate work. Courtney did, from what I heard. But after that, you’ve got to be tenacious. When they finally let you get near a client or potential client, you offer him your information and your insights. Then you call to wish him happy birthday. You ask him all about his fly-fishing trip. You help him get more office space. You give him hot news on one of his competitor’s earnings-per-dollar sales. You take him out to dinner with his wife and your husband. Pretty soon, you’re an established fact in his life. When he needs an investment banker, who does he turn to? To you. Except Courtney apparently felt her work alone could speak for itself.”
“Didn’t anyone tell her it wasn’t enough?”
“I’m sure something was said. But if you don’t have a good sense of people, if you can’t read the subtext beneath the
ir words, then you’re not going to get it. And you definitely won’t be able to fulfill a client’s needs, needs maybe even he hasn’t identified yet.”
“So she had something of a tin ear for”—I paused—“the human stuff?”
“I wouldn’t put it that strongly. She just lacked a little something, it always seemed to me. Maybe depth. Maybe sensitivity. Not that she wasn’t nice.”
“But she didn’t have the right stuff?” I asked.
“If you’re a professional cheerleader, or a wife and mother, nice and pretty and bright is more than enough. But not if you’re an investment banker. Clients expect commitment. Solidity. Now subtract from that the fact that once the research and the spreadsheets were done, the reports written and the meetings held, Courtney believed she’d done enough. To win the client. To earn the big money.” Cecile got up from her big chair. I rose from mine. “She never comprehended that at that point her work was only half finished.” She walked me to the door. “Courtney wasn’t capable of going the full mile. She could only make it halfway. I’m sure at some level she understood she didn’t have it. I remember feeling sad for her, but I knew her leaving was inevitable. And sure enough, once she had the baby, she didn’t even try to get back into this world.”
So I checked off the first name on Fancy Phil’s list. Then I spent the next day and the one after that traveling into Manhattan, speaking with Courtney’s former colleagues—an investment banker here, a real-estate mini-mogul there, as well as the chief operating officer of some mammoth conglomerate that apparently couldn’t stop itself from buying anything that had the word “broadband” attached to it. Actually, I was surprised all these hotshots were willing to see me without due diligence, or at least a few probing questions. My guess was they all considered themselves, to one degree or other, traffickers in information—gossip as well as the financial stuff—and they wanted to be inside the Courtney Logan learning curve.
