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

tits and a law degree from Harvard. So you can’t hate him for leaving without feeling guilty, which being Jewish you have a genius for anyway. And you lost him—” She snapped her fingers—“like that. Whatever you felt for him, you’re still getting over the loss. It would be one thing if you took up with a cute guy with a wad in his jeans to offer you a little temporary comfort. But not this cop. All he can offer you is Sturm und Drang and maybe middle-aged fucking and champagne for one on New Year’s Eve—none of which you need.” She pulled the branch out of the ground and started walking again. “So no cop.”
    “No cop,” I said quietly.
    “And no murder.”
    “Fine.” Thirty hours later I knocked on Greg Logan’s front door.

Chapter Three
    “I’ M J UDITH S INGER .” I’d rehearsed what I would say to Greg as I was putting on eyeliner. Not bad, I thought: both the makeup and the introduction. As far as the makeup went, for once both eyes came out as if they belonged to the same person. As for the second, I thought the simple intro sounded pleasant, self-assured. Not pert. Pert was the last thing a guy needed one week after his late wife was found in his backyard pool.
    Except as I introduced myself, I went hoarse either from nerves or the cheapo estrogen my HMO was foisting on me. My “Judith Singer” sounded like Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone—not a plus at the front door of the Son of Fancy Phil. I cleared my throat and offered Greg Logan a small, sad smile. He stood in the doorway, gazing at something beyond me, so I glanced back.
    Nothing. Although technically night, after eight, a band of sky just above the horizon was still pearly with light from the just-set sun. In the deep twilight, the front walk, a path of blue-black stones, appeared to be pools of water. No floodlights were on, but probably none were needed. People weren’t dropping by this house. It was only me and Greg.
    I waited for him to ask What can I do for you? or return my mini-smile. But he said nothing. His face was blank. So I said hello. It was so quiet I could hear the jets of a distant plane heading for La Guardia, then the pop! of an automatic sprinkler head emerging from the grass. After that, silence again. Not a bird, not a car, not a rustle of a leaf: silence so intense it felt as if life had stopped. My gut started poking me in the ribs: Get going! My mind was soothing: Relax. What’s he going to do? Put a gun to your head?
    The widower Greg, in olive shirt with a crossed golf club insignia over his heart stood before me in khaki slacks and bare feet. He was centered in the green door frame against a background of the celadon-on-celadon wallpaper in his front hall. I’d been wanting him to look at me? Oh God, now he was staring into my eyes. Unblinking, unless he and I were having simultaneous blinkage again and again and again.
    Trying to find the humanity behind those eyes, I looked deeper. All I saw was more nothing. No intelligence, no dullness, no compassion, no belligerence, no bereavement. Merely two eyes of that ho-hum hue between blue and gray. True, they were those thick-lashed, perpetually moist eyes that, with some men, evoke bedroom thoughts. Except any intimation that Greg was hot stuff in the whoop-de-doo department would have been instantly nullified not just by his silence but—I cleared my throat—by his hair. Potentially, it was gorgeous hair, the blackest brown, that lustrous, heavy hair a gigolo would wear long and gelled back. Greg Logan, however, wore it clipped so close on the sides and in the back he looked less like a lover boy and more like the congressman from Raleigh-Durham on his way to a prayer breakfast. Few sights are less erotic than pallid scalp with brown birthmark viewed through sheared sideburn.
    Besides, Greg was too intriguing looking to be conventionally handsome. His eyes and cheekbones slanted upward, and his nose had a slight northerly tilt that gave him the