Singer 02 - Long Time No See (10 page)

“How come she didn’t go to one of those legitimate bankers for a loan?”

“Trust me, honey, she did. And they said, Hey, not one thin dime more until you start doing serious business.”

“Was StarBaby failing?”

“No. But she wasn’t breaking her back carrying sacks of money to the bank vault either. She was doing so-so.” Speaking about his daughter-in-law, Fancy Phil’s face didn’t harden into anything resembling hatred, but it didn’t get warm and fuzzy either.

“Maybe she would have built the business up in time.”

“Maybe. And in time maybe the bank would have given her a big loan. But meanwhile, she couldn’t believe the real reason the business was slow: because it was a
stupnagel
moneymaking idea. No, Courtney was positive all she needed was capital. Capital, capital. She wouldn’t shut up about having to capitalize.”

“And Greg?”

“Gregory was scared she’d go through everything they had together without telling him. Then the banker would check his net worth figures and say, Hey, Logan, you’re full of it. You don’t got no fifty-five thousand in the money market account and eighty in stocks.”

I must have blinked: a young couple in their thirties with so much. Even though Bob had done well, there were years we had to choose, especially early on, and the choice hadn’t been between a BMW or a Mercedes; it was a new roof or a new septic tank. But the Logans had it all, along with money in the bank. “How much did Greg say Courtney took without telling him?”

“Fifteen from the money market. Twenty total from Smith Barney. So she took thirty-five. But she put back ... I forget. I think ten. So they were down a total of twenty-five big ones for the cameras and for ads.”

“When did this happen?”

“Around this time last year,” Fancy Phil replied.

“Let me be clear about this.” I stood, got my shopping-list pad and pen from near the telephone, and came back to the table to do the arithmetic and make a few notes. “Courtney’s fiddling with their money happened about a year ago. But about two weeks before she disappeared—and was murdered—Greg transferred forty thousand dollars from a jointly held money market account into an account that was in his name only.”

“Yeah. A coincidence. I mean, him moving the money and then Courtney getting killed. He needed another loan from his bank in October.”

“Let’s go over the math. If she’d helped herself to fifteen out of the money market account, that meant originally they had fifty-five thousand.”

“Yeah.”

“And how much was in their Smith Barney brokerage account?”

“Eighty minus twenty. Plus the ten she put back.” He watched patiently until I wrote
70,000, Smith B.
“You don’t got a doctor in arithmetic, do you?”

“No. So tell me, Phil, do you sense Greg was very angry about Courtney’s money manipulations?”

Fancy Phil shook his head vehemently, as if the words “Greg” and “angry” could not occur in the same sentence. “Nah. Upset. Like he knew Courtney was going through a tough time, being home with the kids, trying to get used to going from being on the fast track to being a mother. And a businesswoman, but not in the city. What she couldn’t get through her head was that now Gregory was the breadwinner. He couldn’t let her keep sticking her hand in the till for a business that was—I hate to say it of the dead—stupid. Every young married couple has one of those video cameras. All they
do
is take pictures, like they invented babies and they’ve gotta show the world. Little Buster in the high chair. Little Buster out of the high chair. Little Buster in the grocery store. They take their babies out at night, for God’s sake, to restaurants, so everybody can share their joy. So there’s Little Buster screaming and puking that milky lumpy stuff all over the polenta and making everybody else crazy, and they’re
still
taking pictures. ‘That’s Little Buster
breching
in Mario’s.’”

“But you think Greg and Courtney’s marriage was basically sound? They were just going through a rough time?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure? No serious trouble?” Fancy Phil raised his right hand as if taking an oath. His palm was oily from the popcorn. “What about the au pair?”

“What about her?” he snapped. “A hundred different languages in the world and they pick a girl who speaks German. Teaching the kids:
Auf Wiedersehen, Grossvater.’
And she had a face that could stop a clock and probably did.”

“Maybe. And maybe she had a great figure or a sweet vulnerability that attracted your son. I don’t know. The police and half of Shorehaven obviously believe there was something between her and Greg.”

“Well, there wasn’t. Cross it off your list. Gregory loved Courtney. He didn’t step out.”

Fancy Phil’s nostrils dilated. I sensed this was not a sign of pleasure. So I decided to skip any more questions about the au pair. Still, considering I was alone in a house with a gangster convicted of aggravated assault, I felt remarkably comfortable. There he was, my first client, sitting at the head of my narrow kitchen table. Fancy Phil was clearly a man who expected respect, or at least not condescension, much less a hard time. Still, even if I gave him an argument, I sensed I probably wouldn’t wind up bloated, bobbing in the East River, a New York moment for the folks from Toronto on a Circle Line tour. But I felt I had to say: “Phil, from time to time I may ask you questions you don’t like.”

“That’s okay.”

“Good. I don’t want to have to be concerned you’ll hold a grudge.”

“What are you worrying about?”

“I wouldn’t say worrying. It’s just those two and a half years you spent upstate because of an aggravated assault on a fellow—”

“Chicky Itzkowitz?” He snorted a dismissive laugh. “That’s what I call history. Plus I told you, I retired. A new man. Anyway, with Chicky it was a business matter.”

“Well, you and I are doing business even if I’m not taking money.”

“Hey, Dr. Judith.”

“What?”

“You got nothing to worry about.”

He did look relatively benevolent, a hoodlum Buddha. So I asked: “What did you think of Courtney?”

“Me, personally?” I nodded. He thought for a minute, then shook his head sadly.
“ Lukshen
. You know what that is?”

“Noodles?”

“Yeah, but the thing is,
lukshen
without butter, without salt and pepper ... What’s the word? Blah. A
b
word.”

“Bland?”

“Yeah! Bland.” He put his elbows on the table and rested his chins on the heels of his hands. “You send your kid to an Ivy League college because you want him to be better than you. But he winds up bringing home a bowl of
lukshen
from the West Coast with blond hair and blue eyes who went to another Ivy League college and is an investment banker and plays tennis and is even cute looking if you like cute looking. Looks like a great package. But then you look for a personality and it’s not there.”

“There is a kind of West Coast low-key style.” Well, I wasn’t about to interject that his son wasn’t exactly a live wire either, although in fairness, I had met Greg under strained circumstances during a terrible period in his life.

“Excuse me, Doc,” Fancy Phil said, “but bullshit. Low-key, laid-back, loafers without socks—that’s how they are. But people from the West Coast still have a personality.”

“Was she a good mother to the kids?”

“Yeah. Fine. I mean, she could talk your ear off about Travis’s teething. She was always saying to Morgan, ‘I need a huggy-buggy,’ and Morgan would go running to her.” With his thumb and index finger he massaged the bridge of his nose. An altered nose, the broad-bridged, slightly upturned schnozz many got in the fifties and early sixties, in the era of frantic assimilation, a nose which made thousands of second-and third-generation American Jews look as if they’d descended from Porky Pig. “And she was good to Gregory, too, except for putting her hand in the till. Always calling him ‘sweetie’ or ‘honey’ or ‘Greggy,’ but listen, she was a good wife. You saw their house?”

“It was lovely.”

“She fixed it up herself. No interior decorator or nothing.”

“On the other hand ...” I prompted.

“On the other hand,” Fancy Phil went on, “if she’s quitting her job to stay home with the kids, how come she’s not staying home with the kids? She’s out all the time. Call the house and you got that kraut. ‘Mizzus Logan is at her exercise class,’” he mimicked in what I assumed he believed to be a German accent. “A class? What kind of crap is that? Someone’s gotta teach you to touch your toes? Or she’s at a meeting, or having lunch with her girlfriends, or taking a run, or in her office—”

“Did she have an office outside the house?”

“Nah. She took over a bedroom. Anyway, she’s in her office doing business and cannot be disturbed.”

“Did you meet Courtney’s family?”

“Yeah. They’re what you’d expect.
Lukshen
comes from
lukshen.”

“Where do they come from?”

“Washington. The state. Olympia. It’s somewhere, but I don’t know where.”

“Are both parents alive?”

Fancy Phil gave an exaggerated sigh of boredom. “You want to call that alive, then they’re alive. The old man’s a comptroller of some two-bit lumber company. The old lady designs flowers. Puts them in bowls or something.”

“Did they come east to the funeral?” He nodded. Not one of his fleshy features moved, yet I sensed a change in his expression. “How did they act?” He shrugged. “Phil, I’d like to get a sense of the people Courtney came from. Was the finding of the body a shock to them? Or do you think they had a sense she was dead in the months before, when she was missing?”

“They think it had something to do with me,” Fancy Phil said, his tone so flat it might have been one of those computer-generated voices. “At the funeral. Episcopal. But I go over to the mother and try to hug her.” He lowered his arms so they were rigid against his sides. “She goes like this. It was like hugging a little block of cement. She’s short, like Courtney. And neither of them—her or the husband—would look in my direction. And not one word.”

“What made them think you had something to do with it?”

“Just—you know, what I was supposed to be.”

“You never had any arguments with Courtney? Or with Greg about Courtney?”

“No!”

“Did they think Greg had anything to do with it?”

“I don’t know. At least they talked to him.”

A night breeze blew through the open kitchen door and gave me a chill. One of my neighbors’ dogs began that hysterical staccato bark you hear from nutsy dogs or from dogs with nutsy owners. Fancy Phil glanced at his beer bottle and seemed surprised to find it empty. “Did they put up any kind of a fuss about Greg having custody of the children?”

“What are you talking about?” he asked, annoyed. Then he answered his own question: “You mean, if they thought Gregory did it, they would want to get the kids away from him. No. They didn’t say a peep about custody.”

“Right. Okay, the first few days after Courtney disappeared: Did the cops ask Greg to see if anything of hers was missing?”

“Yeah, and as far as he could tell, nothing was. The only money that was touched was the money Gregory took out of their joint account two weeks before. The sapphire earrings he got her for her thirtieth birthday were where she kept them, in a little safe they have in a closet. Some other jewelry. Her mink was in the closet.”

“Did she have an engagement ring?”

“Yeah, sure. She was wearing it, you know, when they found her. And her Rolex, too.”

“So all that was missing was the twenty-five thousand she’d taken from the money market and stock brokerage accounts months before she disappeared?”

“Right,” he agreed.

“So now what I’ve got to do is find out if she paid out twenty-five thousand dollars for video equipment and advertisements.”

“And if she didn’t?”

“Then I’ll need to figure out what was going on in Courtney’s life right before her death.”

S
TAR
B
ABY’S VIDEOGRAPHER,
Z
EE
Friedman, bent over the railing on the landing outside her fifth-floor walk-up. “Just one more flight!” she called out encouragingly. She lived in a run-down neighborhood just north of the grand, high-ceilinged apartments around Columbia University and south of the renovated brownstones of Harlem’s latest renaissance. The stairwell of her building exuded that Old New York smell which has nothing to do with Henry James and lavender; for nearly a hundred years, the yellow-brown walls had soaked up garlic and onion vapors from the various ethnic groups that had used the place as their first step up from New York’s bleakest tenements. Now optimistic twenty-somethings and disillusioned thirty-somethings paid nearly a thousand bucks a month rent for each room.

Zee graciously ignored the mewling sounds that came from my throat with each breath as I made my way up the fourth flight of ridiculously steep stairs that seemed designed for a longer-legged species than
Homo sapiens
. In her leaning over, cascades of her black hair fell forward, forming a curtain around her face. It wasn’t until I finally clomped up to her landing that I got a good look at her. Zee definitely outclassed her surroundings. She had the pudgy apple cheeks of one of those Victorian bisque dolls, except instead of the expected vacant blues, her eyes were alert, sparkling black. “Hi!” Her handshake was like a stevedore’s, although she wasn’t much more than five feet tall.

“Hi,” I gasped.

“Half Chinese, half Jewish,” she replied to my unasked question as she led me into her studio apartment. I nodded, not yet trusting myself to speak two consecutive words without snorting. “Twenty-four. Years old, I mean. The Zee’s for Zelda. After Zelda Fitzgerald. Why, you may ask, did my parents think it was a good idea to name me after some poor demented woman who burned to death in a mental hospital? The answer is: I don’t know.”

Her not-very-large studio was divided into three areas: a kitchen that was simply some shelves above a sink and a two-burner stove; what I assumed was the bedroom, although it was hidden behind a curtain that looked fashioned from hula skirts; a five-by-five square that was the living room. Zee escorted me in and gestured toward a Baby Bear-size club chair. It was covered in one of those sage green, one-size-fits-all slipcovers that are better in catalogs than in life, although on her chair it had the schleppy charm of a child playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. She sat across from me on a love seat draped with three or four flowered fringed shawls, the ones you see on pianos and fortune-tellers. None of the floral prints matched.