Singer 02 - Long Time No See (37 page)

“From when I was between marriages. And you know, on the job.”

With that cheerful thought, I got busy setting the table. “Do you know what I’m thinking?” I asked.

“You’re going to tell me, aren’t you? Where do you hide your canned tomatoes?”

I pointed to the pantry and said: “About Emily. That Josh Kincaid I told you about, the one who’d worked with Courtney at Patton Giddings, who met Emily at a real estate closing? The way he described her—”

“‘Her’ meaning Emily?”

“Yes. He made her sound so bland and quiet that she must have been close to invisible. I guess she had a good relationship with the bank’s big client, that Saf-T guy. But I don’t know about other relationships. When I spoke to her mother, she didn’t know anything about Emily’s friends. Maybe there weren’t many, or any. By the way, the mother was not from the big conversationalists, to put it mildly. And Emily’s neighbors, that nice young couple you spoke to also—Beth and Roberto—their description was of someone really quiet or extremely shy.”

As Nelson was opening the cans of peeled tomatoes, I got to thinking that this sort of intimacy was probably more threatening to my peace of mind than the sex part of the relationship. Such welcome coziness, and from the very man I’d yearned to be cozy with for much of my adult life. I recalled that in the first years after we parted, I’d often excuse myself when the family was watching TV together in the evening and go upstairs to a bathroom, lock the door, and sob. “So what about her being quiet or shy or unassertive or whatever?” he asked. “How many hundreds of times have you seen neighbors of a guy who’s just gunned down ten people being interviewed? They all say, ‘But he was such a nice, quiet person.’ Quiet people kill. Shy people kill.”

“I know. But it’s so weird to me to have to think of someone that retiring as a criminal mastermind. Look, she accepted the glass ceiling at work. Her whole career she’d been at only one job, and it didn’t sound like a particularly thrilling one.”

“Not everybody is ambitious.”

“I know that. She could have done better, but she stayed and stayed in a boring, safe job. Sure, maybe that was how she was, someone who didn’t like challenges. But that’s what’s so amazing, that she plotted this whole criminal scam, using insider information. She had Courtney, or Courtney and some offshore corporation, buying the stock low and selling it high.”

I had to give him credit; he could listen and chop the onion with the boldness of a television chef at the same time. “First of all, my sweetheart, this is just your theory. It could be that Emily Chavarria and Courtney Logan met each other at that women’s thing in Baltimore and became friendly. The reason Emily called Courtney a few days before Halloween was that she was going to a party and couldn’t decide whether to go as Snow White or the Seventh Dwarf.”

“I know it’s just a theory,” I conceded. “Anyone could have killed Courtney. Greg, the au pair, the high-school classmate who wound up taking the blame for the candy-bar-money theft, Mr. or Mrs. Fancy Phil, the guy who built and serviced the Logans’ pool. Just give me another theory that fits as many facts as mine does. I’ll be glad to consider it.” He turned away to think and chop.

All I wanted to do was stand there and watch him, so I made myself go upstairs to my office. I got on-line and did one of those People Searches. A few Vanessa Russells, though I sensed none of them was Emily since killers probably prefer unlisted numbers. Still, I printed out the page.

I pushed back from the desk to avoid one of my flake-out attacks: I’d begin at a music site ordering a Sinatra CD, wind up reading personal accounts by Japanese-Americans of life in internment sites during World War II, then shut down the computer having no memory of why I’d turned it on in the first place. Focus, I ordered myself: Even a big baby like Josh Kincaid had landed himself a job at Patton Giddings. True, after a year he’d been asked to leave, but if he hadn’t had the family mortgage company to fall back on, he probably could have chosen from a couple of non-dead-end, semi-interesting jobs in finance. I had no idea how much discrimination against women there was in the field, but even assuming a great deal, Emily might have gotten out of the Red Oak Bank and gone elsewhere. Well, I thought, maybe she had a mad crush on an unattainable man there and couldn’t bear to leave. Or maybe, despite having the Mr. Saf-T seal of approval and thus kept on by Red Oak, she was a noticeably dim bulb or a bad egg nobody else would hire.

The aroma of sautéing onions wafted into the room and I felt myself getting teary—not from the onions but from the perfection of having Nelson in my house and the knowledge that sooner or later he’d be leaving for his own. For his wife. From wife, it was just my usual happy hop to contemplating the possibility that she’d decide on a late-in-life baby—Surprise, honey!—thus guaranteeing their marriage for the next twenty or so years.

I pulled my chair back to the computer and typed in “Samantha R. Corby.” Eight S. Corbys, with addresses and phone numbers. I printed out that page, too, then switched to a general search engine and gave “Samantha R. Corby” a shot. Nothing, which didn’t cause me to reel with shock. However, knowing the mindless literalness of computers, I typed in “Samantha Corby.” One item came up.

I double-clicked and there I was, at the Web site of the Wiggins, Idaho,
Star
, a newspaper that made the
Shorehaven Beacon
read like the
Christian Science Monitor
. Right there, in the November 19,1999, issue, in a small box titled “Welcome New Neighbor!” between “Arlene and Arnold Chester” and “Dr. and Mrs. Alwyn Rossi” was “Samantha Corby.” I had no idea of what to do next, but since no mellifluous calls of “Dinner!” were rising up the stairs, I pulled up a map of Idaho and made Wiggins the center of that universe. Just a few millimeters above it, a direction some might call north, past towns called Bellevue, Hailey, and Ketchum was Sun Valley. Resort, I thought. Famous resort. Hadn’t some Olympics been held there?

I got on the phone. The woman at the
Star
, who sounded as if she might be the paper’s entire staff—or the only one there so late in the day—said the names for “Welcome New Neighbor!” came from local real estate brokers. She gave me a few numbers. I kept making calls until Nelson bellowed: “Ready when you are!”

I came down bubbling about my Samantha Corby discovery. “Could be,” Nelson said, actually pulling out a kitchen chair for me.

Whatever parsley he hadn’t used he’d stuck in a glass and set it on the table as the centerpiece. “When Steffi talked about the woman she saw leaving the Logans’, the woman who might be Emily,” I said a few minutes later as I pierced a couple of pieces of fusilli, “she described her as a little gray mouse.” Busy admiring either my shirt or my cleavage, Nelson nodded in a polite, uninterested way that was almost husbandly. I thought I deserved a little more heed, having already lauded his tomato sauce at length, with absolute sincerity. He was a natural cook, at home in any kitchen. He’d even discovered my vegetable patch and picked some lettuce and radishes for the salad. “Nelson.”

“What?”

“I want you to pay a lot of attention to me right now.” He smiled, nodded okay, took a bite of the garlic bread he’d made, then refilled our glasses from the bottle of red wine I always kept on hand for Nancy so she wouldn’t get d.t.’s or bitchy or whatever. “Okay,” I said, “remember ‘little gray mouse,’ but put it on the shelf for a minute.”

“It’s on the shelf. I’m listening, Judith. I’m fascinated by everything you say.”

“Good.” I made a big deal of clearing my throat, probably because I wasn’t completely clear about what I was going to say and I guess I wanted Nelson to approve of every syllable. You think you get to a point in life when other people’s opinions don’t matter. You are who you are; you won’t be destroyed if someone doesn’t like you or mocks your ideas. I knew Nelson liked me—loved me—and he wasn’t going to laugh his head off if he thought I was wrong. He’d say straight out that he disagreed with me. At best he’d be kind. At worst, polite. Sure, if I’d say something blatantly idiotic he’d respond with “Give me a break,” but I knew he was well aware I wasn’t a blatant idiot.

“Come on,” he said encouragingly.

“To me, it seems that when you’re searching for the whodunit in a murder case, you have to have the pertinent facts. But if the facts aren’t enough to help you to solve it, you also have to search out the emotional or psychological truth. I keep thinking about the sort of person Courtney was and I keep coming up with the feeling there was something fundamentally wrong with her.”

“Homicide victims are dead because someone perpetrated a crime against them,” Nelson retorted. “They’re no better or worse than anybody else. Saints get murdered. So do monsters. If you’re right about Courtney, she was involved in a serious mess. She was greedy, arrogant, and a lousy judge of character.”

“Right, but let me go on from this. At first I thought of her as a perfectionist, but I think it’s equally about control. She wanted to be in charge. She was the one who set the rules. No sugar for the kids. Only an hour of TV. The au pair had to wait until after the kids were asleep before she could watch television in her own room. The young woman who did the videography for StarBaby told me that until Courtney lost interest, Courtney practically breathed for her. She didn’t hire an interior decorator the way a lot of women in her economic class do. She did it herself. Perfectionism or control, but nothing was left undone. The chandelier in the front hall: it had teeny lampshades over each bulb, and each shade had a scalloped trim. She lined the bathroom wastebasket with a doily.”

“I can’t believe someone thought she deserved to die for that,” Nelson said.

“No. That’s not why Mack Dooley got a big surprise when he took off the pool cover. But before I get to that, let’s talk about how other people saw Courtney. Greg? He’s not going to say he hated her. There’s no way of knowing what he felt. The same with the au pair. She seems to have genuinely idolized Courtney, but if she had a mad pash for Greg, requited or unrequited, she’s not going to tell me that Courtney was a domineering pain in the ass.”

“Do you have a mad pash for me?” he asked.

“No, I’m just toying with you until I can find something better.”

“That’s what I figured you’d say.”

“Courtney was pretty, or at least cute, kind of a Princeton amalgam of Sandra Dee and June Allyson.” Nelson laughed, but then he’d always reacted that way to my movie analogies, so I flicked my hand to brush him off. “But so many people seemed to think there was something not right about her.

“First and foremost, that woman she went to high school with, Ingrid Farrell. Ingrid took the hit when Courtney stole that candy-bar money. It’s really not a juvenile prank, because everyone believed Ingrid was guilty. Even Ingrid’s parents believed she’d done it, and so they made restitution. The cloud of that incident has been hanging over her ever since. It was a terrible thing for Courtney to do. Okay, next: Jill Badinowski, one of StarBaby’s clients: She described Courtney as being an ice-cold businesswoman, that she could be selling videos of babies or poison gas, it made no difference. Fancy Phil told me that if you looked for personality in Courtney, it wasn’t there. He described her as
lukshen
, Yiddish for noodles.”

“Noodles are a no-no?”

“No, they’re a yes-yes, but plain, without seasoning or sauce, they’re really blah. So Fancy Phil saw Courtney as bland. On the other hand, he recognized how manipulative she was, trying to get him to buy whatever she and her husband couldn’t afford: a Land Rover, a super-duper TV. She even tried getting Fancy to buy her a sable coat.”

“So what are you saying?” Nelson wasn’t challenging me, just trying to find out where I was going.

“I’m not one hundred percent sure yet. What does it sound like to you?”

“I don’t know. So far, what strikes me is that candy-bar thing. I know I kidded you about it, but it’s not cute or pretty. It stinks. The sable coat is pushy, but it’s not the end of the world.”

“One of the women in her group of about seven or eight mothers of little kids didn’t really know Courtney very well. But she was very smart, very insightful, plus she used a movie analogy in describing Courtney.”

“Always a sign of high intelligence,” Nelson observed.

“Of genius. She compared Courtney to a pod person in
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, just a shell of a person, drained of all humanity.” I waited for a laugh or a good-natured shake of his head, but he merely sipped his wine and waited. “Zee Friedman, the videographer, said that when little Travis came into the room while they were talking, Courtney got this blissed-out look on her face, like a Madonna. And when Greg came home from playing golf, Courtney acted as if he were the hottest guy in the world.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I love my kids with all my heart and soul,” I said, “but when they were little and came running into the room and interrupted what I was doing, believe me, it wasn’t Mary and Jesus time. And after you’re married for six or seven years or whatever, and you’re with a business associate, you don’t get all steamed up when your husband comes home. The au pair picked up on it, too; she said when Greg was around, Courtney acted like a bride on her wedding day. And her best friend Kellye Ryan noticed the ‘Ooh, isn’t he hot?’ bit. She didn’t buy it for a minute. In fact, she thought Courtney was having an affair—although she’s a minority of one. Most everyone else didn’t see her as sexual at all.” I rested my head against the back of the chair. “Is she coming through clearly to you yet?”

“No.”

“Cecile Rabiea, who came to Patton Giddings the same time Courtney did, said her work was good, but she wasn’t able to go the full route, to court the client, help the client. It wasn’t that she was lazy, it’s that somehow she couldn’t get the human element right.”

“Fine, but she’s still not clear.”

“Courtney didn’t comprehend other people’s needs, not really. She could have been immature or insensitive. On the other hand, she could have been seriously deficient or defective. And another thing: She wasn’t showing people her true colors. Maybe she didn’t have any colors. Too many people described her in terms of being slightly off. You know, like a pretty good actress playing roles like wife, mother, neighbor, investment banker. When you’re talking about a person’s essence, a pretty good imitation isn’t good enough. That’s why people were struck that there was something off about her.”