Singer 02 - Long Time No See (21 page)

For all I knew, she could be right. But I asked myself out loud: “Who
did
the cops talk to? Neighbors. Greg. Fancy Phil. And who else? Who could cast a shadow over Greg?” Nancy didn’t reply, although she did grunt in triumph when the tip of her middle finger finally made it down her stretched-out leg and touched a toe. “I’ll tell you who. Steffi, the au pair.”

“But you talked to her, too, and said she only had nice things to say—”

“I guess that was only our first talk,” I replied.

I
CAN’T SAY
I raced to Connecticut, because that would imply eighty miles per hour up 1-95 in a Porsche. Forget the Porsche: Besides the forty thousand dollars over the price of my Jeep, my delusion of myself as suburban sex goddess was more easily sustained climbing down from an SUV than heaving myself out of something low-slung, penis-shaped, and racing green. But after my hike on the beach with Nancy, I jumped into the shower, dressed, and was driving past an excessively quaint sign that said
ENTERING WHITSBURY
(in the colonial-style lettering that rendered Whitsbury as Whitfbury), when I realized two things. I hadn’t called Steffi Deissenburger to ask if I could speak with her again and that four-thirty on a Sunday afternoon was not a swell time to pop in anywhere. So I gave myself an assertiveness lecture recycled from one of those Women Who Loathe Themselves/Women Who Love Themselves books I wind up ordering on the Web because I’m embarrassed to ask for it at the Dolphin Bookshop in town.

The next thing I knew, I was telling Steffi’s employer, Andrea Leeds, that my name was Judith Singer—right, just like the sewing machine—and she was telling me that Sunday was Steffi’s day off and that she’d gone (parallel paths of foreboding formed between her brows) to Manhattan.

“I’m sorry to stop by without calling, Ms. Leeds, but I was visiting friends in New Canaan and forgot my little phone book.” Three lies in one sentence. I wasn’t sorry to stop by without calling, I knew absolutely no one in New Canaan, and having spent a wild Saturday night getting the Palm Pilot and the Dell to make peace with each other, I had transmogrified into an e-babe with no little phone book. “I’m on the board of the Shorehaven Library. That’s how I know Steffi. She was always there with the Logan children.”

“Please, come in.” She was dressed in a yellow polo shirt and a short yellow skirt with green frogs all over it, so I assumed she’d just come home from the golf course. Andrea Leeds would probably be called rangy, being a head taller than I. She was definitely angular, almost bony, with knobs for elbows and knees. Though her face was technically an oval, with a broad forehead and Balkan cheekbones, it was more like an oval balanced on its side: Thus, with an impeccable pageboy curving under precisely at her wide jawline, she gave the impression of a woman who displaced far more space than she actually did. “Call me Andy, by the way.” She led me along a hallway, taking such long strides I had to double-time it to keep up. The walls were covered with nursery school scribble drawings, matted and framed. “I’m spending quality time”—she smiled to signal I-know-it’s-a-cliché, so I gave her an I-get-it smile in return—“with my girls.”

She led me into a room I hadn’t seen on my last visit. The library. Perfect. Tall windows and French doors welcomed the late afternoon sun. The light burnished the pale wood paneling so it shone gold. The cordovan leather couch had been so well used it looked as if the Invisible Man were lounging on its tastefully crackled cushions. On the shelves were books—genuine books—with those little bulges mid-spine to indicate they’d been read, or at least opened. With a single sniff you’d know these weren’t the mildewed tomes homeowners buy by the yard to give the illusion of literacy. I had the sense that had Courtney seen the Leedses’ library, she’d have understood in an instant that for all her botanical pictures on ribbons, and doilies in the bottom of wastebaskets, Andy Leeds, with her roomful of books (at a glance, a good but unsurprising white-guys-writing-in-English collection), was the one who’d gotten it right.

“Gwendolyn, Gwyneth, this is Mrs. Singer.”

Together, the identical twins cheeped a happy hello as well as something that sounded as if it could be “Mrs. Singer,” the sort of gracious greeting my children couldn’t manage until they were in their early twenties. Then, side by side in a club chair, the children went back to studying
Horton Hatches the Egg.
Gwen and Gwyn not only had their mother’s wide Slavic features, pale brown hair, and long limbs, they were wearing the same yellow getup avec frogs. Since I doubted that three-year-olds golfed, even in Whitfbury, I decided the mother-daughter froggy business was a fashion statement that, by the grace of God, would not survive a voyage across Long Island Sound to Shorehaven.

After I complimented Andy Leeds on the girls’ deportment—deportment being one of those words I figured would go over big—and she did her “Say thank you to Mrs. Singer, Gwendolyn and Gwyneth” bit, all of which seemed to take a half hour, she offered me a seat at a small table, probably an antique she and Mr. Leeds used whilst they played whist of an evening.

“I’m so relieved Steffi’s found such a fine family to work for,” I told her.

“We think the world of her.” Beneath Andy’s upper-class civility, I sensed authentic civility. However, I also detected an unuttered question mark. Any parent who leaves her children in the hands of a relative stranger, even one with a solid resume and enthusiastic references, looks for additional reassurance, and all the more so when the young woman in question comes from a house in which a murder had been committed. “She seems like a lovely young woman,” was all I would say, since I wasn’t handing out endorsements for anyone connected to Courtney Logan.

“What a dreadful time she went through!” My hostess shuddered. The frogs on her skirt quivered sympathetically.

“To see someone just drive away like that”—I tsked-tsked—“and never ...”

“Would you like some lemonade?” Andy Leeds asked meaningfully, glancing at her daughters. We left behind the gold glow of the library and the twins—who apparently could be trusted not to bean each other with Trollope and Updike novels they’d yanked off the shelves—and repaired to the kitchen.

Another mom, another kitchen. Yet another elaborate stove with six burners and several strange little ovens, as though all these suburban women were vying for three Michelin stars. Andy Leeds took a pitcher out of the refrigerator and poured the lemonade over crystalline ice cubes in a slender glass. “They still suspect the husband?” she inquired.

“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.”