Singer 02 - Long Time No See (22 page)

“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.”

“I mean, it was a high-school thing.”

“What was?”

“See, Courtney Bryce was always doing stuff. You know?” She took a long, noisy sip of tea. “President of every club. Helping out teachers. Courtney Bryce was the smartest, best, nicest girl in the whole school.”

“Right.” I stifled a yawn.

“Everyone always said, ‘Oh, Courtney, she’s wonderful.’” I waited. “Well, it’s like this: She was running the Crunch-Munch sale. Fund-raising. Candy bars. It was chocolate then. I think now it’s energy bars made from rainforest nuts and stuff. That’s what seniors do every year to raise money for a sit-down dinner on Prom Night.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. My back and shoulders began to ache for bed. I massaged the back of my neck.

“Courtney stole eight hundred dollars in cash from the Crunch-Munch sale. And got away with it.”

“What?”

“We had all this cash. I was treasurer. So I had to put it in a sealed envelope and give it to Mr. Cooper, the principal. And I did. Courtney was with me when we went to Mr. C’s office. And he opened the safe. It was late Thursday afternoon, like almost four o’clock, so he said he’d deposit it first thing Friday.”

“A wall safe?”

“No. This big heavy thing on the floor. And so his phone rang and he picked it up and Courtney and me were just standing there and I went to check out pictures of old graduating classes to see if I could find my dad. Courtney was looking at all of Mr. Cooper’s books. My back was turned to her. So was his. Anyhow, then he got off the phone and shut the safe. The next morning it wasn’t there. The cash.”

“Is it possible the principal took it?”

“Of course not! I mean, he did this every year, holding the money for the seniors because a lot of kids get it in late. He called Courtney and me down separately. Guess who got blamed?”

“That’s an awful story!” I said.

For a long moment, Ingrid was silent. Then she said: “Do you know what the worst of it was? He called Courtney down first. By the time I got there, he was totally, totally convinced she never would have done it. That I did it. No, the worst of it was, ninety-nine percent of the kids thought it was me, too, except Lacey and one other girl. Everyone else believed Courtney. The school made my parents pay it back and even my parents ... Water under the bridge, right? But my name was totally mud. And that kind of thing stays with you forever. I mean, I’ve never been invited to one class reunion. And I was volunteering at the county animal shelter. Well, one day I walked in—this was two or three years ago—and nobody said a word, but I knew somehow someone had heard the story. And then told it to everybody, and everybody
believed
it, people who’d always thought I was a good person. A story, a lie, from way back in high school!”

“Did Courtney avoid you the rest of your senior year?” I asked.

“Well, we never hung out. But whenever there were other kids around, she went out of her way to be sweet to me, like she was full of pity for my being such a bad person. Everyone thought, wasn’t it great of Courtney to be so fantastically nice to Ingrid after the terrible thing Ingrid tried to do—and almost got away with.”

A
GIANT BROWN
eye stared back at me from a magnifying mirror as I plucked my eyebrow. Cautiously. A few months after Bob died, I’d decided it was time to start looking like a human being again. I dug out my old tweezer. Alas. When I finished, one brow was so much higher than the other that for several weeks I looked inappropriately ironic. Soon after, I’d bought the mirror.

So there I was, bright-eyed at six
A.M
., hell-bent on an hour’s worth of self-improvement. What had wakened me? Rambunctious bird business outside my window, or maybe Courtney Loganangst. In any case, I showered and exfoliated enough to go down a dress size. Then, so intently was I concentrating on my eyebrow’s image in the magnifying glass, that when I lifted the portable phone from the edge of the sink, I didn’t catch the opening words of Steffi Deissenburger’s early morning conniption fit. However, it wasn’t necessary. Each time I tried to butt in she squawked: “How,
how,
how could you visit the Leedses’ house on my day off?
How?”
again and again, turning up the volume with every “how.”