Murder Plays House

by Ayelet Waldman

  “I know.”

  “Are the other girls still diet girls?”

  “Some of them.”

  “Well, don’t play with them. Play with the ones who aren’t. Those are the smarter girls.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll tell you what, honey. I’ll call Madison’s mom. And your teacher. I’ll tell them—” Ruby’s wails interrupted me. “What? What, honey?”

  “Don’t call! Don’t call! They’ll call me a tattletale. Pinky swear you won’t call!”

  “Okay, okay, honey. I won’t. I won’t call.” I pulled over into a strip mall. “Want some ice cream?” I said.

  “Okay. And can we go to the library, afterwards?”

  “Sure! What a great idea!” I’m ashamed to say that I pretended to my daughter that my sole reason for agreeing to the library stop was for her edification and pleasure. She was fooled, but only as long as it took for me to settle down in front of one of the computer terminals. Then she scowled at me and stomped off in the direction of the children’s department, warning me over her shoulder that she intended to read “lots of inappropriate books!”

  I put Nahid’s name into Google and got over five hundred hits. Most looked to be property listings, but there were a number of write-ups in local real estate magazines, and even the real estate section of the Los Angeles Times. The reporter for the Times had clearly found Nahid to be a more interesting subject than the run-of-the-mill realtor profiled by his section. Nahid was the daughter of an Iranian general and close confederate of the Shah’s who had been executed during the Iranian revolution. Her husband, a military man who served under her father, had also been killed. She had escaped to the United States with her mother and son, and had, with only the portion of the family fortune that had been invested abroad and was thus safe from the greedy fingers of the new regime, begun a lucrative real estate business. She received her real estate license in 1983, a mere two years after arriving in the United States. Nahid’s hardness, her aggressiveness, suddenly made sense to me. Here was a woman who had been torn from her luxurious lifestyle, seen her father and husband murdered, and who had single-handedly supported her mother and son and, I would bet, countless cousins and friends, ensuring that their transition to life in America would be easier than her own. Reading about Nahid didn’t make me like her any more, but now I admired and respected her.

  Over the course of the past twenty-five years, Nahid had become one of the wealthiest and most powerful realtors in Los Angeles. She still sold primarily residential properties ranging from Brentwood mansions to smaller homes in better neighborhoods, but she also owned both commercial buildings and residential multi-unit dwellings all over the city. Nahid Lahidji was a very wealthy woman. I shifted over to the LexisNexis real property listing and looked up her various holdings. While most of them were mortgaged, there were no liens, second mortgages, or tax violations on any of them. Her finances seemed entirely secure. So much for my notion that Alicia’s objections to the sale of her brother’s house would cause Nahid some kind of financial hardship. On the contrary. The house in Larchmont was a bargain by Nahid’s standards, and the commission on it was small change to her. So why was she bothering at all? Probably as a favor to Farzad and his mother. As for why she had gotten so angry with me for my interference, I imagined that Nahid was simply a woman who did not like her plans to be disrupted in any way.

  I jotted down a few URLs for the more helpful sites and then went to find Ruby. She had, in fact, found herself something entirely inappropriate to read. I discovered her stretched out on a bench in the children’s section, chewing on the sleeve of her shirt, and reading Seventeen magazine.

  “Hey!” I said. “You are way too young to be reading that junk.”

  She continued leafing through the pages, teeth busily gnawing holes in the sequined turtleneck she’d made me order off a website called “Gurlsdreemz” after swearing to me that she couldn’t live without it.

  “Ruby! Stop chewing on your clothes. You’re ruining that shirt.”

  She spat the fabric out and rolled over on her back. “Can I have a prescription to this magazine for my birthday?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Really?” she asked, obviously shocked.

  “Your seventeenth birthday.”

  “Mom,” she said.

  “C’mon kiddo. We need to get going.”

  “Wait a sec. I want to show you something.” She paged through the magazine until she came to a photograph of a skinny model wearing a pair of jeans that hung on her narrow hip-bones like clothes on a hook. She wore no shirt, and had her arms wrapped around her virtually nonexistent breasts.

  “See?” Ruby said.

  “See what?”

  “See her belly-button ring? Isn’t it pretty?”

  I grabbed my daughter around her waist and hoisted her to her feet, groaning at her unaccustomed weight. It had been a while since I’d tried to pick this big girl up. “You’re not getting your pupik pierced, my love. Let’s go.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, honey. We have to pick Isaac up in an hour, and I have something I need to do before then.”

  I wish I could say I sounded as patient the fifth and sixth times I told Ruby we had to leave. It would be truly wonderful if I could report that we walked out of the library hand-in-hand, an accommodating child and a devoted parent. Alas, it’s more likely that we resembled a screaming banshee and the banshee’s ill-tempered herder. Thankfully, Ruby’s sobs had abated by the time we reached Nahid’s office.

  The boss herself wasn’t there, but Kat was. I was shown back to her tiny office by a lovely young receptionist with dark, waist-length hair, and gold fingernails with tiny jewels imbedded in the polish. I found my friend hunched over her computer, a stricken look on her face.

  “Hey, Kat,” I said. “What’s up? What are you doing?”

  “Evicting someone,” she replied morosely. She tugged out the pencil that had been holding her hair up on the top of her head and combed it through the locks that tumbled down over her shoulder. “What’s going on? Has something happened with Farzad and Felix?”

  I shook my head. “Not that I know of. I was hoping to have a little chat with your mother-in-law. You know, just background stuff.”

  “She’s not going to talk to you. I mean, she might talk at you, but she’s not going to let you interview her.” Suddenly Kat seemed to notice Ruby’s presence. “Hi honey,” she said. “How are you? How’s school?”

  Ruby plopped herself down in the corner of the office where Kat had a small pile of toys. Ruby picked up a toy by the edge, her face wrinkled in a pout of utter disgust, as though she were handling a dead rodent, rather than a Matchbox car.

  “These are boys’ toys,” she said.

  “That’s because they belong to Ashkon,” I told her.

  She sighed heavily and began to drive the car over the carpet with an ostentatious listlessness. No matter how hard I try, no matter how many gender-neutral toys I buy, my children still persist in acting out the roles assigned to them by contemporary culture. Why is it that that continues to surprise me?

  I turned back to Kat. “Have you heard anything new?”

  She glanced down at Ruby and then at her open office door. I pushed the door closed with my toe.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I was going to call you today. You know the lock box?” she said.

  “On the door of the house? What about it?”

  “Well, the boxes have a little chip inside them.”

  “A memory chip?”

  “Exactly. And someone was messing with the lock box on Felix’s house.”

  I leaned forward excitedly. “What do you mean?”

  Kat reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a lock box. It was grey, with a black hasp that fit through the door handle, and a little metal trap door in the bottom. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a little keypad.

  “This looks j
ust like the one on Felix’s door. You see this keypad?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s called a programmer. Every agent has his or her own programmer, with a four-digit code. You snap your programmer into the box, input your code, and the box opens and you pull out the key.” She punched in four numbers, and the metal trapdoor opened. She yanked out a little drawer. I nodded again; I knew all this. I’d seen her use the lock box on Felix’s door.

  “The chip in the lock box remembers the previous ten numbers.”

  “It does!”

  “Yeah. You know that detective on the case? The really nice-looking black guy with the weird name?”

  “Detective Goodenough?”

  She nodded. “He came by and asked Nahid to show him how the box worked. She accessed the codes for him. I know all this because she called me into her office to make sure that the most recent number on Felix’s lock box was mine; which it was, of course. There shouldn’t have been anybody else’s number in there, except maybe Nahid’s or her assistant’s, if one of them had tried the lock box after it was put on. Because, remember, the house wasn’t really on the market.”

  “But there were more numbers in the box’s memory?”

  “In a way. There was mine, like I said, and before that someone had input the same number nine times.”

  “What was the code? Do you know who it belonged to?” I asked, holding my breath.

  She nodded. “Detective Goodenough traced the number. He called to ask Nahid if the woman worked with us or if she had another reason to have gone to the house.”

  “And?”

  “The code belonged to an agent at Crowden Century 21, in Bel Air, named Marilyn Farley. Nahid asked me if I knew her, or had told her about the house, but I hadn’t. Anyway, it couldn’t have been her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Marilyn’s on bed rest—she’s pregnant with twins. She hasn’t been allowed up except to pee for nearly two weeks. Nahid had me call her. The detective had already been to see her, but she was so desperate for distraction that she talked to me for almost an hour.”

  “Has she been home on her own, or is there anybody who can testify that she’s really been home like she’s supposed to be?”

  Kat smiled. “I asked her that. She said her husband is afraid to leave her alone, so whenever he’s not with her, he has his mother or her mother stay there.”

  I nodded. “Good job,” I said. “Tell me if you get sick of this real estate business. You might have a future as an investigator.”

  “I wish,” she said wistfully. “Wouldn’t that be cool? But Nahid would never let me go. She likes having me right here, where she can watch me.”

  “Did you ask Marilyn if she has ever lent anyone her number, or if anyone else knew it?’ Could someone have taken it and used it?”

  “You can’t just lend the number. You have to have the programmer.”

  “Could someone have reprogrammed their programmer with her code number?”

  Kat shook her head. “No. Only the Board of Realtors can change the code on a programmer.”

  “So whoever it was has to have used her programmer, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “Or had some access to the Board of Realtors.”

  “Right.”

  “Where’s her programmer now?”

  “Here’s the really interesting part,” Kat said. “It’s lost.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She told me that the detective asked to see her programmer, and she went to give it to him. Except it wasn’t in her purse. The day she went on bed rest, she did an open house. She told me that she knows she had her programmer that morning, because she used it at the house, but she hasn’t seen it since. She didn’t notice it was gone, because she hasn’t had to use it since she’s been in bed.”

  “So maybe someone at the open house got hold of her programmer.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “Does she know who was there?”

  “She said it was a zoo. I mean, you know what the market’s like. If it’s a halfway decent house you can get a couple of hundred people at an open house.”

  “What about the sign-in sheet? Isn’t there always a signin sheet?”

  Kat nodded. “Marilyn told me that Detective Goodenough got the sheet from her office. But sometimes people don’t bother signing in.”

  Then I thought of something. “But even if someone stole the programmer, he still couldn’t use it, right? Unless he knew her code number.”

  Kat winced. “Marilyn swore me to secrecy.”

  “Kat!”

  “You promise you won’t tell? She’ll definitely get fired if you tell.”

  “Of course I promise. I mean, I won’t tell unless I absolutely have to.”

  She sighed and leaned closer to me. “She said she’d been having a horrible time remembering anything since she got pregnant. She kept forgetting her code number, and even had to go back to the Board once to have them input a new number.”

  “Please don’t tell me she wrote the number on her programmer.”

  Kat nodded. “On a sticker.”

  “So whoever it was who took her programmer also got the code number.”

  “Right.”

  “Does Detective Goodenough know that?”

  “I don’t know. She must have told him, don’t you think? I mean, it’s a murder investigation.”

  For far too many people, self-interest trumps civic responsibility. “When was that open house?”

  “Right before she went on bed rest. Just about two weeks ago.”

  “Before Alicia was killed.”

  Kat nodded.

  I wrinkled my brow. “So someone went to the open house, stole the programmer, and then used it to break into the house and kill Alicia.”

  “Yup,” Kat said.

  “But Alicia was in the guest house. Would they really have needed the programmer to get in there?”

  “The courtyard is entirely fenced in. There’s no access either to the garage or to the side yard from the guesthouse. The only way out is through the main house.”

  “Still, it seems like pretty convoluted coincidence, don’t you think? You just happen to find the programmer, it just happens to have the code written on it, and there just happens to be a lock box on the door of the person you want to kill.”

  “Maybe the person stole the programmer first, and that’s what gave him the idea of using it to get into the house and kill her.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he went to an open house hoping to steal a programmer, and just lucked into the number. However it happened, why did he bother inputting the number so many times? Why didn’t he just use the stolen programmer once, to get in?”

  Kat paused, thinking.

  “What do you get out of inputting the number?” I murmured more to myself than her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What happens when you input the number again and again? You erase the previously recorded code numbers, right?”

  Kat nodded. “Right!”

  I leaned back in my chair and winced. My sciatica was killing me. “Someone was trying to hide the codes that had been previously used. They were making sure no one would know who had been there before them.”

  At that moment, Ruby jumped to her feet. “Mama!”

  I looked over at her.

  “Mama! It’s almost five o’clock!”

  I looked up at the clock hanging on Kat’s wall. “That’s right honey. Good job reading the time.”

  She scowled at me. “Mama! We’re late picking Isaac up from his playdate!”

  We most certainly were.

  Twenty-three

  WHEN we arrived back home, I dumped the children with their father and called Detective Goodenough. Unlike every other cop I’d ever tried to reach on the telephone, he actually answered his own extension. His voice was deep and resonant, and he projected a stern authority, even over the fiber-optic lines.


  The detective reassured me that he was following up on the open house attendees, and greeted my tentative request for a copy of the open house register with a bark of laughter. He was steps ahead of me on the Board of Realtors, as well, and was already in possession of the names and addresses of everyone on the Board, as well as of the various employees. It wasn’t surprising that he refused to share that information, either, but that at least I could acquire for myself quite easily over the Internet.

  Goodenough was polite, but he neither needed nor wanted my input on his investigation. And who could blame him, really? As far as he was concerned, I was at best an overly aggressive defense attorney, and at worst a busybody pregnant lady.

  I hung up the phone feeling frustrated, and called Al, who volunteered to find out who was on the Board of Realtors. We’d sit down together and figure out if any of the members had a connection to Alicia. I took on the rather hopeless task of tracking down the list of people who had attended the open house. I knew Goodenough wouldn’t share the sign-up sheet with us, and I doubted that Kat’s friend, the pregnant, bedridden real estate agent with the bad memory, would be able to recreate it for me.

  Feeling a bit better about my lack of progress, I wandered into Peter’s office where the rest of my family was crouched on the floor, building the Bottle City of Kandor out of Legos.

  “So, I’ve got some bad news,” Peter said.

  I groaned. “What?”

  “I’ve got to fly to New York for a meeting.”

  I lowered myself to the carpet and leaned against him. I nestled my head against the smooth warmth of his ancient flannel shirt and felt the soft give of the layer of flesh that had lately overtaken his once-thin chest and belly. I toyed with the broken button on his shirt cuff. “Bummer,” I said. “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  I groaned again, and Peter kissed the top of my head.

  Ruby, always on the lookout for any physical contact between her parents that didn’t specifically include her, picked her head up from the pile of bricks she was snapping into the shape of Krypto the Superdog. “We should go with you, Daddy.”

  He ruffled her curls with his hand. “I wish you could, sweetie pie.”