Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 112, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 684 & 685, September/October 1998

Con by Margaret Logan

©1998 by Margaret Logan

Can anyone write about the social stratification of Long Island more amusingly than Margaret Logan? A native of Massapequa, Ms. Logan now lives in Southampton, the setting for her first novel (in 1988), the well-reviewed Deathampton Summer. When she isn’t at work on “Local Slant,” the opinion column she writes for Southampton Press, the author continues to produce novels. Her latest: Never Let a Stranger in Your House (St. Martin’s Press).

Born ten months apart, the Lynch sisters, christened Constance and Elaine, looked enough alike to be twins. Con had married at twenty; the following year, Lainey married too. Con had been vastly pregnant at Lainey’s wedding; ten months later, copycat Lainey gave birth too. Both babies were girls.

The Lynches being such a close-knit family, neighbors in Queens who’d watched Con and Lainey growing up had noted these recurrent symmetries without surprise. It seemed natural that the new generation, Con’s Lisa and Lainey’s Stacy, with their wide-set, deeply blue eyes, their pert noses adorably dusted with equal quantities of freckles, their fair curls burnished with reddish lights, could be twins themselves. “It’s nice,” people would say. “Takes the sting out of being an only child.”

Con met such remarks with an unpleasant laugh. She knew the old hypocrites were itching to be told why the sisters’ breeding, slam-bang out of the gate, had come to a screeching halt.

This was, of course, before Con’s husband Kevin dumped her for his bimbo.

Given a sympathetic ear instead of mealy-mouthed hypocrisy, Con would have taken grim pleasure in setting her own record straight. Lisa was an accident, she’d say. The first, last, and only good to come from my rotten marriage.

As for Lainey, who knew? The way Con figured it, Stacy had been as messy as any other baby, and sex, the act, is messy too. A double insult to Lainey’s raging passion for clean. Over the years, Con had seen ample evidence that Lainey was totally off the wall on the subject. Coming home from the supermarket, she’d wash every can, jar, and bottle in hot soapy water before admitting them to her immaculate cupboards. A woman like that was bound to put housework, even terrible jobs like windows, miles ahead of getting down and dirty between the sheets. And, Con would bet serious money, no complaints from Steve, her husband. His raging passion was his work, his great almighty career. Coming home at nine, ten o’clock and leaving at dawn, he hardly ever laid eyes on the one kid he had. No impetus for a second, and scant opportunity to plant it.

Before long, it became obvious that Con and Lainey had married opposite kinds of men. Kevin tended bar at one of those corner places you see all over Queens. He aspired to ownership of a bar just as friendly but out on the Island and much classier. For all Kevin’s good looks and flirtatious charm, you didn’t have to know him long to be dead certain the classy bar would exist only in his dreams. Steve Flynn was a dynamo who, in the family phrase, could sell ice cubes to Eskimos. Starting as a salesman for a small company that made computer peripherals, he’d worked the angles of two mergers and a leveraged buyout to become head of marketing. The Flynns had punctuated each instance of corporate turmoil with the purchase of a larger house. Currently they resided in Massapequa, farther out on the Island than Kevin’s wildest fantasy. Their colonial had four bedrooms and four baths, double Jacuzzi in the master. In the three-car garage were Steve’s new Cherokee, Lainey’s new Lexus, and a space. “That’s for Stacy’s car,” Steve would tell you, “when she graduates B.C.” Parked out back, in the canal that was a brief chug to Great South Bay, was My Way, Steve’s thirty-five-foot Blackfin Combi, bought secondhand but mint.

Con and Lisa, invited to admire these fruits of success, were satirical. “My Way,” Lisa snickered to her mother. “Like, big and loud?” Con was more direct. “I see why you wanted to move, little Sis. I mean, why spend your life cleaning two and a half toilets” — the allotment of the Flynns’ previous house — “when you can spend your life cleaning four?”

Nights in her Flushing one-bedroom, curled up with Buddy, the handsome Doberman that was her sole luxury, Lisa out with that gang of hers, Con might admit to envy. Kevin’s erratic child support had stopped when Lisa turned eighteen. His alimony payments, equally unreliable, had been turned into a joke by inflation. On principle, Con denied him the satisfaction of crying for help, even when Krauss Tool and Die, whose office she’d run for six years, had been snuffed out by the Jap competition.

She’d enjoyed Krauss’s. “The last family-owned T&D in Queens!” old man Krauss would proclaim every morning. “And the best!” Con would yell back. The middle son — married, of course — had fallen for her. After some hot, sweet smooching behind the file cabinets, she’d insisted they stop. She feared old man Krauss’s censure. His hurt feelings. Also, truth to tell, the act wasn’t what it once had been for her. The diseases alone... You had to wonder if the nuns had been right. She hoped to God Lisa was being careful.

Next month, the unemployment checks would stop. She’d be out pounding the pavements alongside Lisa. So, yeah, she envied Lainey’s life of ease. Who wouldn’t? Which wasn’t to say she was blubbing in her beer about it. Con never blubbed, even when her parents, always good for a mooched meal or paying a dental bill, put their Rego Park house on the market and beat it to Florida, zip, just like that. Without a word of warning. Well, there’d been that fracas over Lisa’s habit of crashing whenever the night’s pleasures had ended closer to Rego Park than Flushing. Sailing in, three in the morning! Just like a duchess! Con, of course, had burst out laughing. “Ma!” she’d gasped when she was able. “What do you know about duchesses?”

The Florida condo had one bedroom. “Very small,” Con’s father had kept repeating. Con heard relish and satisfaction, knew the old folks were pulling in the welcome mat. Lainey heard something different. “That’s okay,” she’d reassured. “You’ll get a Hide-A-Bed. They make real nice ones now.” When time passed and it became clear no such purchase was in the offing, Lainey had blubbed her eyes out. “So they don’t want us there,” said Con. “So what? Like you’re some kind of traveler all of a sudden? You who never leave your own yard from one week to the next?”

Soon after this exchange, on a warm evening in early June, Con unfolded her own Hide-A-Bed, the nightly action that turned the cramped living room into her and Buddy’s sleeping quarters. It was Lisa’s karaoke night. Con considered, not for the first time, the merits of a switcheroo. If Lisa had the Hide-A-Bed and she the bedroom, Lisa wouldn’t wake her when she came in.

Like a duchess.

But the joke had drained out of that one. She brushed it away along with the switcheroo. Because face it: All that kept Lisa from bringing a boyfriend home in the middle of the night was having to slither him in and out past her mother’s body, Con a famously light sleeper. Once Con was shut into her own space, behind a closed door, all bets were off.

I’m easy, Con reminded herself, but not that easy. She reached for the remote, found her program.

A rerun, wouldn’t you know. She squashed the mute button as if offering the doctors and nurses an angry challenge — Suck me in again? We’ll see about that! — and let her thoughts run back to Lisa’s sorry work history. Never yet a job worth sticking with. Sales clerk, on your feet all day, plus the heartless public. Waitress, ditto. What sensible person wouldn’t quit? She’d tried nanny, but the kids kept getting colds and whatnot, passing everything right on to her, never mind their whinging and screaming and the parents undercutting any attempt to instill a little discipline.

Lisa was bright, that was the problem. Too spunky and independent for the crummy jobs you get without college. Whereas dumb, wimpy Stacy...

Rolling down this familiar track, she was abruptly derailed by a dazzling truth, brand new. “I hate them,” she announced to the empty room in tones of wonderment. “All three. I hate them worse than Kevin.”

The phone rang. Caught in the vortex of revelation, Con didn’t want to pick up. Lisa might be in some kind of trouble, though, and the answer thing was on the fritz.

“Con? You sound different.”

“You don’t,” she told Lainey.

A little laugh in Massapequa. “Is that good?”

“What’s up, Lainey?”

“I have to ask this favor. Steve just called — he’s stuck in this emergency meeting down at the Raleigh-Durham subsidiary. He was supposed to take Stacy to the airport tomorrow, and now he can’t.”

And of course Lainey couldn’t do it. Too busy cleaning. Six months after Steve bought her the Lexus, the odometer — Con had sneaked a peek — had read 247. “Why the airport?”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Another small laugh, airy with guilt. Information had been kept from Con. On purpose. Crissake, Lainey, when’re you gonna learn to keep it simple? What Conniver doesn’t know won’t hurt her. “Steve gave her this little trip.”

“Did he now.”

“It’s a reward, kind of. She got real good grades this year, at least until the very end. Anyway, could you, Con? I know it’s last minute and all, but—”

It’s not like she’s got anything else to do. “Where’s she going?” Butter wouldn’t melt in Con’s mouth. “Someplace nice, I hope.”

“Paris first. Once she gets the hang of it, she’ll take trips out to the countryside. It’s just for two weeks.”

“Ooh-la-la. All by her lonesome?”

“She had a girlfriend lined up, but it fell through. She was gonna back out herself, but Steve put his foot down. He’s got this fixation about broadening her horizons. Keeps hammering on her it’s normal for college kids to go to Europe on their own.”

“I wouldn’t know,” snubbed Con. “Why don’t you call a limo? Massapequa must be loaded with limos.”

“No limo driver’s going to make sure she gets on the plane, and I’d worry myself sick. Airports attract all kinds. Terrorists, you name it. Just the other day, on the news? Those kidnappers, white-slave traders, they call them, down in Texas or wherever it was?”

Con smelled a rat. Lainey wasn’t leveling about why the kid had to be hand-delivered. Torture her some more? Bring up the distinct possibility of terrorists in Paris?

For the second time that evening, Con was struck by an idea so astonishing she had to catch her breath.

“Con? You there?”

“What time’s the plane?”

“Six-thirty, but she has to be an hour early. So if you could hang around until she’s actually in the air? And then call me? I know it’s a lot to ask, but—”

“Yeah, yeah. That’s rush hour, you know. I’ll pick her up at one, and we’ll hang out here awhile. At least that spares me the worst of the suburban traffic. And listen, I’ll bring her home, too... No, I want to... Because I like hearing stuff straight out of the oven, that’s why. Plus, Steve’s sure to be busy that day... I’m not asking, Lainey. That’s the deal. You’ll get your turn, but I deserve first crack. Fair’s fair.”

When they’d hung up, Con let out a wild whoop. On the muted TV, the doctors and nurses were tearing down their everlasting hall, shouting across their everlasting gurney. Pale thrills next to the tumult inside Con. She didn’t care what time Lisa came in, she’d be wide awake. Full of karaoke, Lisa would absorb the grand idea slowly. But once it sunk in, the look on her face! Con hugged herself. She could hardly wait.

Steering her bucket of bolts onto Wantaugh State, Stacy moping in the passenger seat, Con felt giddy as a girl.

“On our way,” she cried, socking the kid’s arm.

“I guess,” sighed Stacy.

Time to flush the rat, Con decided. “What’s with you, toots? You got a problem with Paris?”

Stacy burst into noisy tears. Skillful Con dug out why long before they reached the expressway.

The friend who’d fallen through on Paris was, unbeknownst to Steve and Lainey, Mark Falco, Stacy’s boyfriend since high school. (If Mark, on scholarship at Boston College, hadn’t paved the way, Stacy reminded her aunt, she’d never have had the nerve to stray so terrifyingly far from her mother’s side.) The trip had been Mark’s idea. He’d scrounge up plane fare somehow, piggyback on Stacy’s parents’ largesse for everything else. Steve, overjoyed by his daughter’s apparent repudiation of Lainey’s countless phobias, had instantly dumped his frequent-flyer miles into a Business upgrade and prepaid the hotel. Too late, Stacy learned the horrible truth: Mark was two-timing her with her best friend. Bursting with righteous fury, she told him Paris was off. Then she tried to tell her father Paris was off.

Mile after mile of complaint on Steve, much interrupted by tears. His heartlessness. His general piggery. His total refusal to see her, Stacy, as a person with her own needs, needs that had absolutely nothing to do with stupid stupid Paris.

Then she was back on Mark, endless if-only and what-if. More tears, then on to Steve again.

The whole petty foolishness had Con so bored out of her skull she almost missed the Clearview turnoff. The only thing that kept her from throttling the silly brat was how beautifully this unexpected turn of events meshed with the grand idea.

Lisa eased open the apartment door. “Okay?” she whispered.

Con grinned, cocked her head toward the bedroom. “I told her to stretch out, I’d wake her in plenty of time. She wanted a Coke. I said no, I bought you this special herb tea, really kills the jet lag. She takes a swallow, wants to spit it out. You drink every drop, I say. You’ll thank me for it in Paris.”

“You’re something else, Ma.”

“The best is that no one in the building saw us. All right, listen up. The cab’s coming in less than an hour, and we’ve got lots to cover. Here’s the passport, there’s her signature—”

“Oh my God. Her hair!”

“I said, none of the busybodies saw us. ’Course, I made her put it in a ponytail in the car. I pretended the AC was broken, and nothing’s hotter than—”

“I’m talking about me, Ma. This.” She raked frantic hands through her close-cropped curls.

“Relax. You cut it after the photo was taken.”

Lisa looked dubious and — Con’s heart stopped — scared. “Come on, girl! Traveling, short hair’s easier to take care of.”

No sooner was Lisa calmed on this than a new problem struck her. “What if I run into one of her college friends?”

“A: It won’t happen, and B: If it does, you’ll handle it.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Would you just think a minute? First place, they’ll be distracted by the haircut. You listen, pick up what you can. But basically you give them this whispery croak. You’ve got laryngitis, the doctor said no talking, and anyway, you have to run, you’re late, you have to catch a train.” She reached out, gave Lisa’s cute round chin a tweak. “What, you think the plane ride’s gonna wipe out all your street smarts? All right then. What you have to handle, you’ll handle. Let’s finish the important stuff. No problem with the signature, thank God.”

“Right.” A complicated scowl from Lisa. Her forging capability was rooted in shame. From the grandeur of Massapequa High, Stacy had lorded it over her older but poorer cousin incessantly, faulting her clothes, her hair, her accent, even her penmanship. “You still write that way?” she’d shrieked incredulously. “Like the nuns?” Mortified, Lisa had stolen some pages of Stacy’s homework and, within weeks, achieved an identical script, rounded and upright — what her long-decamped father would call classy.

“Here’s your ticket. Business Class both ways.”

“God. No wonder she’s such a spoiled brat.”

Con, deadpan: “And five thou in traveler’s checks.”

She waited out Lisa’s explosion of jealous rage before continuing, calm and businesslike. “Three for you, two for me and her.”

Lisa’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How come?”

“Probably me and Buddy will take her on a little trip of our own. Your friends’ll be calling, right? I can stall them for a while, laryngitis, all that, but two whole weeks, they’ll wonder.”

“They gave her five, Ma. They must’ve had their reasons.”

“Like you said, they spoil her rotten. Your hotel’s paid for, so you’ll have over two hundred a day for food and whatever.” Lisa’s face clearing — she’d never been good with numbers — Con pressed on. “Cashing a traveler’s check, you sign here. You have to do it in front of the bank teller. They’ll check the passport, so before you go in the bank, paste on that sulky look of hers. Let’s see it now. Great. That’s her to the life. Now. The passport says to call Uncle Steve and Aunt Lainey in case of accident or emergency. You know what that means.”

A weary sigh. “Yes, Ma.”

“I want to hear it.”

“Stay out of trouble. Don’t worry, okay? I’m not the weak link in this deal. What if she starts screaming and the neighbors hear?”

Con stood. “Buddy,” she said in her special voice.

The Doberman went on alert. Con pointed to the bedroom. “Guard, Buddy.”

The dog was at the door in a single bound. His menacing stance and long, low growl sent Lisa into nervous giggles. “Call him off, Ma,” she begged. “He’s panicking me.”

The buzzer sounded, announcing the cab. Con threw her arms around her daughter. “Oof,” said Lisa, not liking this urgency.

“Don’t forget the postcards. Every other day at least.”

“I know. Give me some credit, Ma.”

Would’ve been nice, Con thought as the door shut behind her daughter, if she’d hugged back a little. And if she’d been more impressed by her, Con’s, cleverness in getting Stacy, Lisa herself, really, out of calling home the minute she arrived or anytime after. “Those foreign phones are the devil to figure,” Con had told Lainey with absolute authority. “And don’t you or Steve be calling her at the hotel, either. You’ll have her back on the next plane, homesick to the soles of her shoes.”

But the thing that really stung? For Lisa, the big excitement was the scam, pulling a fast one on the high-and-mighty Flynns. She’d been stubbornly blind to the fact that Con had whistled up, out of thin air, nothing less than a magic carpet. Two weeks, totally carefree, in Paris! It could be the start of a whole new life! So why, last night, and again today, had she balked at taking this in? Refused to show proper appreciation for the wonder of it?

Con gave herself a shake. Regrets weren’t her style. Lisa had looks, brains, a great body. Her luck would find her, ready or not.

“Okay, Buddy,” she said, picking up her scissors. “Let’s do it.”

The two of them approached Lisa’s bed. Stacy was lying on her back, snoring faintly, arms raised over her head. Like, don’t shoot, I surrender. Con had a little laugh over it before carefully freeing the girl’s thick ponytail.

She winked at Buddy. Two weeks was plenty of time to work Stacy over, make her believe her aunt had acted out of love for her and fear for her safety. “Don’t forget,” she’d say, “you brought this on yourself. You lied about Mark and then you kept lying. If your father knew the whole story, would he have risked it? Would he have sent a girl with a broken heart to a place where they don’t even speak English?”

And if Stacy didn’t buy it, or if the switcheroo came out in the wash some bright day, did Con actually care? The egg would be on Flynn faces, not hers. That degree of humiliation, what choice did they have but to shut up and swallow it?

Sue? For what assets? The bucket of bolts? Buddy, who’d rip their throats open?

Con had chopped off all the hair she could reach. She wasn’t the crying kind, or Stacy’s heightened resemblance to Lisa would’ve put a lump in her throat for sure. Two long weeks. Gonna really miss the kid.

Dazed by the flurry of arrival, foreign babble wherever she turned, Lisa would’ve lost it totally if not for Luc’s firm grip on her upper arm.

It was the first time he’d touched her. Last night, after all that free champagne, she wouldn’t have said no to a cuddle, but he’d been a perfect gentleman.

When he’d told her he was Luc Mercier, she’d thought “Luke,” a name she’d always hated. Once he’d spelled it, though, it sounded totally different. Chic, as he’d say. He wasn’t as tall as she liked, but real good-looking. His dark hair and eyes, he’d said, were from his mother’s side, from the south of France. And his clothes! Navy blazer nipped in at the waist, pleated off-white linen slacks, one of those shirts with a band instead of a collar.

He was an agent. Not a salesman, an agent. For specialty French cooking oils-olive, walnut, lemon, orange, all kinds.

Business Class, she’d expected her seatmate to be some fat old guy like Uncle Steve. When she saw it was Luc, she’d been like, wow, the fun begins. Now, as he released her arm and gave her a little shove toward Passport Control, she knew he was a godsend on top of his sexy glamour. If she had any problem with Stoneface there in the passport booth, Luc would lay some French on him and fix it.

Stoneface glanced at Stacy’s photo and back at Lisa. Lisa kept her sulky look but made scissoring motions around her head. Stoneface flipped a few pages, banged down his stamp, and handed the passport back. “That’s it?” she said. He answered with a wave of dismissal and beckoned to Luc.

Luc had predicted he’d take longer, something about being what he’d called a “frequent flyer over the pond.” Waiting, Lisa had time to wish she’d brushed her teeth, back in the airplane.

Finally his hand was back on her arm, steering her toward luggage pickup, then Customs, then to the street exit. “Jean-Jacques should be waiting with the car,” he said. “Sadly, with our crazy traffic, one never... ah! Here he comes, on the dot.”

Don’t tell me it’s that big-mother Benz, thought Lisa.

It was. While Jean-Jacques put the bags in the trunk, she wriggled around in the buttery leather of the backseat thinking she’d died and gone to heaven. Luc said something in French to Jean-Jacques, who shrugged one meaty shoulder and heaved himself in next to her. Luc got behind the wheel. “I feel like driving,” he told Lisa. “Jean-Jacques will keep you company.”

Lisa was about to invite herself up front, but stopped just in time. For all she knew, this was how they did it in France. Plus, Jean-Jacques was a ringer for the big dumb bozos she’d had to deal with around Queens. The kind that take offense if you look sideways.

Paris, the big green overhead sign said, but they swept past unheeding. “Hey, Luc?” she said. “Wasn’t that our turn?”

“No, cherie, we go this way. It’s much easier.”

Lisa subsided and they began to talk about how they’d spend her first morning in the City of Light, good places to shop and eat lunch and so forth. After quite a while she asked, “Shouldn’t we be, like, getting there? I mean, this isn’t even the suburbs, right? Actually, this looks more like the country than the airport did. In New York—”

The cell phone rang. “Excuse me, cherie,” said Luc.

He spoke briefly and hung up.

“Was that French?” Lisa asked. “Really? It didn’t sound like French. Listen to me, what do I know?”

“Not much.”

The way he said it, she felt slapped. “Huh?”

“You asked what did you know. I said not much. I was speaking Arabic on the phone. I spoke in Arabic to a man in Marseilles, but of course you don’t know Marseilles, either.”

“Why’re you talking to me like that? What’s going on here?”

Luc’s laugh was ugly, his eyes, in the rearview mirror, mean as sin. A huge pit opened before her, sucking her into its hideous depths.

She wrenched herself back from the edge. “Stop the car,” she commanded, giving it all she had. “End of the line for this kid.”

“No stopping on the autoroute.”

Lisa took stock. Why Luc had turned on her was to cry over later. For now he was nothing, unimportant. Unless he wanted to kill himself, he’d stick to his driving. Which left Jean-Jacques.

No point in starting something with him, hoping some passing driver would see her struggles and call the cops. Traffic was heavy enough, but the Benz had tinted glass.

In Queens, handling a backseat bozo, you grabbed ahold of what you could — that handle over the door — and used your other hand to flip the latch. Then you kicked the door open for the whole world to sideswipe and tear off its hinges. Supposedly the bozo would pull over to spare his car and you could run away.

Worth a try, Lisa decided. France was civilized. If they chased her, someone would see and report it, maybe even try to help.

Jean-Jacques was fussing with something in his jacket pocket. Now or never, she decided. She swiveled like a snake, grabbed the handle. Before she reached the latch, though, the man’s powerful arms had circled her, one big fist jammed painfully under her ribs. Rhythmically squeezing, he forced the air out of her lungs until her kicks and punches grew feeble, lazy.

He released her and, quite gently, as if she were a valuable and delicate piece of china, assisted her collapse onto the luxurious leather of the seat.

Lisa’s sole thought was for air, gulp after gulp of precious air. Years afterwards, this passionate greed for air was what she remembered most vividly. Not the wetted, sweet-smelling wad Jean-Jacques pressed against her nose and mouth, not the strangeness of waking at sea, feeling the ship move beneath her, bound for a land where people spoke Arabic and she would live her new life.