Singer 02 - Long Time No See by Susan Isaacs Read Free Book Online Page A

it was a linden. It has always been my belief that Protestants, born with innate knowledge of the names of all things botanical, cannot help but think less of you if you have to ask.
    “In three-quarters of an hour,” she observed, “I haven’t heard one word about Courtney Logan from you. Why? To prove to me you’re really not interested in a murder, i.e., not interested in him.”
    Precisely. So I snapped, “No. I’ve been listening to you nattering on about gazebos.” I decided not to add: and couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
    “I was expecting you to ask me to hit up our reporters for unpublished tidbits about the head wounds.”
    “Wounds?” I demanded. “I heard about a bullet.” Nancy made a big show of casualness, taking off her sweater and tying it around her waist. It was a peach-color wisp of a thing, made from some suddenly chic fluff I think was shaved off the gonads of Indonesian goats, the must-have knit now that cashmere had become a bore and pashmina a cliché. “Wounds?” I repeated. “Did I hear a plural?”
    “I heard something about there being two bullets in her head. The first shot killed her. The second one was... I don’t know. Maybe insurance.”
    “Do they have any idea what the weapon was?” I demanded.
    “The medical examiner may. I don’t.”
    “Are you sure both shots were from the same gun?”
    “No.”
    “Can you find out?”
    “No, Judith. I don’t do crime. I assign and edit op-ed pieces—other people’s diatribes about health care. Or bilingual education. Friday I cut a thousand-word paean to desalinization to seven hundred.” She shook her head. Her expertly cut auburn hair swung gracefully a quarter inch above her shoulders. “It still sucked the big one.”
    “You could ask the reporter who’s covering the Courtney—”
    “Listen to me. You know how you think my drinking is bad for me? That’s what I think this detective business is for you. Okay, fine, twenty years ago you had some fun figuring who did it to that dirty dentist. It showed you there was a world that extended beyond your car pool. And you got laid. Maybe even made love to. Fine. I do it all the time.” In Nancy’s mind, Mount Sinai was the place God had given Moses the Nine Commandments. In her thirty-one years of marriage, at least fourscore lovers had come—and gone. “Gives you a glow that beats a paraffin wrap. But you’re not me. You take fucking seriously.” Somewhere in the deepest south there is a finishing school that teaches young ladies a thousand and one wiles—from the moist-lips-slightly-parted-as-if-anticipating-fellatio-while-hanging-on-every-word trick to cunningly contrived cleavage displays. Only when belles have mastered all thousand and one stratagems are they given carte blanche to say anything that comes into their heads, any place, any time, no matter how obscene or shocking, along with a guarantee they will be deemed far more enchanting than conventional eyelash-batting magnolia blossoms who mind their tongues. “There’s nothing wrong with taking fucking seriously, even though it’s a tiresome way of looking at the world.”
    “It’s not,” I told her, although I was just keeping up my end of the argument. For all I knew, Nancy was right, and I’d pissed away my juicy decades. Now all I could ever hope to attract was someone like postmodernist Geoff with his ear hair. “But if you think there’s no advantage to doing it because it would be tedious or because Nelson would need a derrick to get it up, then what would be so terrible if he and I were to get together—which I swear I’m not planning.”
    “Because you’re emotionally vulnerable now.”
    “I’m much better.”
    “Do I have to hum ‘The Merry Widow Waltz’ to remind you?” She picked up a dead branch and, with a final glance toward her house, staked it in the dirt: Ground Zero for her gazebo. “You lost a husband. You lost him to death, not to a twenty-something with perky