Murder Plays House

by Ayelet Waldman

  I smiled. “I know the feeling.”

  “Now, hon, what did you say that poor girl’s name was?”

  “The murder victim? Alicia Felix.”

  She nodded. “Wait right here. I’ll be right back.”

  I dressed quickly and sat down on the doctor’s stool to wait for her. I wasn’t about to risk the exam chair again.

  Within a couple of minutes she returned with two of the large photo albums that I’d looked through out in the waiting room.

  “There’s no harm in showing you these,” the nurse said. “After all, Alicia posed for the photographs.” She began turning pages until she found what she was looking for. “Here’s your friend.”

  The page she handed me was one that I recognized from my earlier perusal. It showed two photographs of a woman’s torso. Her face was turned away from the camera, leaving visible only a sheaf of long, blond hair. In the first photograph, her breasts looked almost prepubescent; they were nothing more than small, flat discs on which perched pale nipples. Her ribs stuck out farther than they did. The bones of her clavicle were sharp, and the hollow of her sternum looked deep enough to sink a finger in up to the second knuckle. The “after” picture could not have looked more different. Alicia had been as uninterested in the concept of less-is-more as the rest of Dr. Calma’s patients. Or perhaps it was the doctor himself who preferred melons to oranges. Alicia’s new boobs were certainly lovely. They were round, and gravity defying, with nearly invisible scars. However, they looked somewhat bizarre, I thought, set on top of that bony torso.

  “Pretty, aren’t they?” the nurse asked.

  “Oh yeah,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Really nice ones.”

  “Now, she had a double procedure. Lots of girls do. You’d probably want to consider the same thing. Here, let me show you.” She picked up the other album and flipped through it until she found the page she was looking for. I hadn’t spent enough time with the face book while waiting for my appointment—I’d been too eager to move on to boobs and hips. Alicia’s photographs were toward the back.

  I took the book from the nurse and stared intently at the pictures. Alicia had had her face pulled and tugged to remove all wrinkles. She’d also had her nose narrowed slightly, and, if I wasn’t mistaken, she’d had some kind of implant put into her chin.

  “Isn’t she lovely?” the nurse breathed.

  “Oh yes,” I said. And she was, in a kind of ethereal, hollow-cheeked way.

  “Dr. Calma works wonders. He really does. You should make another appointment. He could turn you into a princess!”

  “I’m sure he could.”

  Here again was more evidence of Alicia’s desperate attempts to make herself ever more beautiful, ever young. There was something so achingly sad about the lengths she went to in what was doomed, finally, to be a failed endeavor. Alicia, and all the women in that waiting room, were engaged in a hopeless battle against an enemy that there is, ultimately, no way to fight. We all grow old, no matter how much we carve away at our bodies, no matter how much silicone and botox we inject. We can suck out the extra pounds middle age deposits on our hips, but the years will pass with an inexorable certainty. I glanced at myself in the full-length mirror on the wall of the exam room. There was no getting around it; everything the doctor said about my body was probably true. I was only in my mid-thirties, but I was heavy, and getting older every day. But was the answer really to hack and chop and diet and starve? Or was there some other approach to this inevitable collapse?

  Twenty-one

  “HAVE you lost your mind?”

  I sighed deeply into the cell phone. “Probably, yes.”

  “Exactly how are we going to bill the client for that? I’m pretty sure our automatic billing program has no entry for ‘plastic surgery consult,’” Al said.

  “Very funny.”

  By the time Stacy blew into the restaurant with her hands extended before her like a blind woman, I’d had to endure a good ten minutes of that kind of abuse.

  “Read me the specials,” she said as she sat down.

  “Why? What’s wrong with your eyes?”

  “What are you talking about? Nothing’s wrong with my eyes. I just had my nails done, and I don’t want to touch the menu.”

  I looked at her gleaming burgundy fingernails. “And you give me grief about my work ethic? Getting your nails done before lunch!”

  She tossed her hair over her shoulder. “My girl comes to the office. I did an entire morning’s worth of telephone calls while she was doing my hands and feet.”

  I leaned back in my chair and gaped at her. “You have manicures and pedicures in the office?”

  “Of course. Like I’ve got time to go to a salon every week? I don’t think so.”

  What would I do without Stacy and her excesses to remind me what’s wrong with Hollywood?

  “What’s next? Getting a bikini wax at your desk?”

  She laughed. “Could you imagine? Crouching naked on my hands and knees on top of my credenza?”

  “On your hands and knees?”

  “You know. For when they do the—”

  “Too much information, Stace!”

  “Oh, please. Don’t tell me you’ve suddenly become a prude. Like you’ve never had a Brazilian bikini wax.”

  “Uh, no.” I couldn’t even remember the last time I got near a bathing suit, let alone required the services of a sadist armed with pink wax and a bunch of cloth strips.

  “Well, that’s just disgusting,” she said. “What’s the salad of the day?”

  I looked down at my menu. “No-carb Cobb.”

  “Perfect.” When the waitress came, however, it was clear that the choice was far from perfect. By the time Stacy had finished substituting goat cheese for the blue, sliced turkey for the bacon, and adding two extra hard-boiled eggs, she’d made it into something different all together. But that’s my friend in a nutshell. She’s a woman who knows what she wants. Exactly, precisely, completely what she wants.

  “I’ll just have the regular Cobb salad,” I said to the waitress, smiling to let her know that I knew just what a relief it was to have a pleasant, easy-going person like myself to wait on.

  The girl shook her head. “That blue isn’t pasteurized.”

  I wrinkled my brow. “Excuse me?”

  “Blue cheese? Listeria?”

  I sighed. The pregnancy police were everywhere. “Okay, I’ll have the goat cheese, instead.”

  “Ma’am!” she said, outraged. “That’s even worse! How about some Kraft slices?”

  I closed my menu and stretched my irritated frown into a smile. “Why don’t you just hold the cheese altogether.”

  “Of course. And I’ll give you a plain vinaigrette.” She raised her eyes from her pad and appraised me critically. “Unless you’d like the nonfat?”

  “Vinaigrette is fine,” I said sharply.

  She turned away, looking miffed.

  Stacy spread her hands on the table and blew on them. “Harvey Brodsky called me this morning.”

  I winced. “I’m such an ingrate. I haven’t even thanked you yet for that referral.” I’d gotten a message to Lilly that Brodsky might be calling her, but I’d never called Stacy to express my gratitude, and I felt bad. It should have been the first thing I’d done.

  “You haven’t gotten the job yet,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She waggled her fingers in the air. “He seems pretty excited about this murder you’re investigating. My sense was that if this came out well, he’d be interested in putting you and your crazy partner on contract.”

  “That’s basically what he said. And that’s why I called and asked you to lunch.”

  Stacy interrupted me, suddenly calling out to the waitress. “We’ll need two black napkins here!” She turned to me. “I don’t want white fluff all over my suit. And that black top of yours doesn’t need any more lint than it already has.”

  I glanced down at my mat
ernity smock and sighed. It wasn’t particularly linty, but there was a swath of pale green toothpaste where Isaac had wiped his mouth across my belly. When the waitress returned, I dipped a corner of my newly acquired black napkin in my water glass and dabbed at the stain. Something about the general sloppiness of my appearance reminded me of my adventures in personal improvement. “I went to see a plastic surgeon yesterday,” I said, and recounted the horror of my visit. “Can you believe he actually wanted to do all that stuff to me?”

  “Ridiculous.” Then she paused. “What did he want to do to your face?”

  I tugged back on the skin at my jaw.

  “Hmm,” she said.

  “Hmm what?”

  “Nothing. I mean, it’s absurd, of course. Only . . .” her voice trailed off.

  “Only what?” I scowled at her.

  “No, no. I don’t mean for you. I’m just thinking about myself. I mean, about my own jaw line.” She patted at her jaw with the pads of her impeccably painted fingers. “Don’t you think I’d look better like this?” She pulled the skin back toward her ears.

  “No,” I said, without looking.

  “No, really. I mean, lately it’s just getting kind of, I don’t know, heavy. Droopy.”

  “Stacy, what’s up with you?”

  She dropped her hands to the table. “Nothing. You know. Just the usual. Andy.”

  “Oh no, not again!” I said. Stacy’s husband has a notoriously roving eye. The two of them have been separated and reconciled more times than I can count.

  “No, no. He’s not seeing anyone. I mean, I don’t think he is.” Stacy shook her head. I looked closely at her. Was that the glint of a tear in her eye?

  “What’s going on, sweetie?” I said, softly, reaching out and patting her hand, well above her still-drying nails.

  “Nothing. Nothing. It’s just, you know. It’s just so much easier for men. Andy’s still so young. I mean, we’re the same age, but for him that’s young. Thirty-five for a man is nothing. But for us . . .”

  “For us, what?”

  She looked down at her hands, shaking her bright blond hair down over her cheek. “It’s older. A thirty-five-year-old woman is just older than a man of the same age. If he wanted to, Andy could be dating women ten, even fifteen years younger than he is. How many twenty-year-old guys would be interested in me?”

  I leaned back in my chair. “First of all, hundreds. Thousands even. You’re gorgeous. You’re successful. You’re rich. If you weren’t married you’d be beating them away with a stick. But second of all, why would you ever want to go out with a twenty-year-old? Remember what the guys at college were like?” I shivered. “Is that really what you want? Some self-obsessed, overgrown child with no staying power?”

  She laughed bitterly. “Isn’t that exactly what I’ve got?”

  “Oh honey.” I tried to lean over the table to give her a hug, but my belly got in the way. At that moment the waitress arrived with our salads, and we disentangled ourselves and dug in.

  “Well?” Stacy said, taking a delicate sip of her iced tea. “What gives? Why the urgent lunch? How can I help you seal the deal with Harvey Brodsky?”

  “Julia Brennan.”

  “The comedienne? What about her?”

  “Can I?” I reached a fork toward Stacy’s plate.

  She pushed it toward me, wordlessly, and I scooped up some of her cheese. With a glance over my shoulder to make sure the waitress wasn’t watching, I sprinkled a bit over my salad. Stacy laughed.

  “What?”

  “You know what I love about you?”

  “What?”

  “You’re perfectly willing to stare down a murderer with a loaded gun, but you’re afraid of some self-righteous dingbat of a waitress.”

  I sighed. “You should see me with my hairdresser.”

  She laughed again.

  “Anyway, Julia Brennan,” I said. “Is she a client of ICA?”

  “She is.”

  “Would you be willing to get me an introduction?”

  Stacy lifted a heavily laden lettuce leaf to her lips and chewed contemplatively. “Why?”

  Briefly, I told her about the Alicia Felix connection.

  Stacy stabbed her lettuce leaves angrily and took a huge mouthful of food. “I can’t believe you,” she muttered.

  “What?”

  “Juliet, you really expect me to introduce you to one of my agency’s clients so you can accuse her of stealing her character from someone? You take the cake. You really do.”

  Of course she was right. Had I really asked my friend to go out on that kind of limb? “I promise I’ll be delicate.”

  She set her fork down, clattering it in her plate.

  I said, “I just want to talk to her a little about the conflict she had with Alicia. I want to make sure Alicia really had dropped her claim against Julia, like the director of Left Coast said she had.”

  “Are you planning on accusing Julia of murder?”

  “No!” I did my best to manufacture a tone of outrage, but that was, of course, exactly what I was doing. Not necessarily accusing the woman, but investigating her. I wanted to find out exactly what was going on between those two women. What was the extent of the conflict? How far had it gone? Had Spike really succeeded in getting Alicia to drop her plans for a lawsuit?

  Stacy was glaring at me, balefully, and I finally said, “You’re right. Of course you’re right. You can’t introduce me to her. I’ll figure out something else.”

  Stacy looked thoughtful. “Did she really steal that character?”

  “Absolutely. I mean, I have a videotape of Alicia doing it on some incredibly lame public access TV show out of the Valley years ago.”

  “Maybe she stole it from Julia!”

  “That’s not what the director of Left Coast says.”

  “Left Coast?”

  “Left Coast Players. The comedy troupe.”

  “I think I’ve heard of it. Hmm.”

  “Hmm, what?”

  “Just, hmm. Do you mind if I tell this to my partners?”

  Oy. Of course I should have anticipated this. The last thing I wanted was to precipitate the ruin of someone’s career. Particularly not someone who I was hoping would talk to me. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Let me figure out what’s going on, first. Okay? Give me some time to get a handle on what happened to Alicia. When I do, then we’ll talk about it again.”

  “When you do?”

  “If I do.”

  Stacy smiled. “I was just teasing. I’m sure you’ll figure out what happened to her. You always do. You can do anything you set your mind to.”

  I shook my head. “I wish that were true.”

  “It is,” Stacy said firmly. And that, in a nutshell, is why our friendship has survived so many years, and our two such divergent lives. Stacy and I, for all the entirely different things we value, are each absolutely convinced that the other is not only the smartest woman out there, but is capable of absolutely anything. We’re one another’s greatest fans. Everyone needs a friend like that.

  Twenty-two

  I left the restaurant with plenty of time to pick Ruby up at school. I’d arranged for Isaac to go to a friend’s house for a playdate, but I hadn’t been able to unload Ruby on anyone—perhaps due to her recently acquired habit of gagging and holding her nose whenever offered a snack that didn’t fit precisely into her guidelines of acceptable foodstuffs—so I was going to have to take her with me. Hers was not an entirely inconvenient presence, however. I was fixating too much on Alicia and her various body-image problems and career anxieties. I wasn’t blind to the possibility that my concentration on those issues was more a reflection of my own neuroses than a realistic assessment of what might have caused Alicia’s murder. I had to explore other avenues, and the one I decided to devote the afternoon to was Kat’s mother-in-law, the formidable Nahid Lahidji. I was betting that Nahid would be less likely
to rip my head off if I showed up at her office with a delightfully cute child in tow.

  Ruby greeted me with a hug and her usual prattle about the day’s events. Her brother invariably answers the question, “How was school?” with a scowl, and the comment “a little good.” Ruby, on the other hand, always has a long list of items that require discussion. Our trip in the direction of the Lahidji real estate office was taken up with a monologue on her new social studies unit, the American Indian tribes of Southern California. Ruby’s teacher, a young woman fresh out of the education program at Harvard, was a devoted and energetic soul, but if she had a failing it was her desperation to single-handedly right the wrongs of centuries of American racism and xenophobia. The six-year-olds studied slavery, the trail of tears, the Japanese internment in World War II, the expulsion of the Mormons, current English-only initiatives, and the problems faced by illegal immigrants. Whatever one thought the general depressing nature of the material, Ruby was reading well, could add a mean column of numbers, and was more adept at navigating a computer than I. So who was I to complain?

  “You guys still talking about that epidemic of obesity?” I asked.

  Ruby shook her head and in a voice dripping with disgust said, “We’re on another unit, Mama. That was the last unit.”

  “Oh. Okay. And what about Madison? Is she still on a diet?”

  No response from the back seat.

  “Rubes? What’s going on with Madison and the other girls? Are they still on diets?”

  “Madison doesn’t play with me anymore.”

  I looked in the rearview mirror. Ruby had her knee propped up under her chin. She was dabbing her tongue on the fabric of her jeans, making a large, round wet spot. “Why not, sweetie?”

  She shrugged.

  “Ruby? Honey? What happened?”

  Her eyes were dry, but her lip trembled. “I said I wasn’t going to be a diet girl anymore. And Madison said only diet girls can play with her.”

  I felt a sinking in my chest, and an overwhelming urge to tear off Madison’s perfect little head. “She’s a stinky girl, Ruby. She really is.”