Murder Plays House

by Ayelet Waldman

  “I don’t know.”

  She looked as if she was about to being sobbing again.

  “Ruby!” I warned. “Enough.”

  She sniffed dramatically, and we pulled out of the parking lot. We drove down Beverly Boulevard in silence, and then suddenly Ruby said, “How about there?”

  She was pointing at a storefront brightly painted with geometric designs that looked vaguely tribal. A huge, green neon signed flashed the words “Body Piercing.” Two young men were leaning up against the wall of the building, their skateboards tipped up against their legs, their dreadlocks blowing in the gentle breeze.

  I was about to say no, when a thought occurred to me. Who better to entrust with my baby’s precious lobes than someone whose business encompassed body parts far more sensitive and susceptible to infection?

  I was probably not the first mother of two to hop out of her Volvo station wagon and into the waiting area of Tribal Memory Tat and Hole Works, but I doubt that they’d seen much of my kind of woman. The gaping mouths on the long line of bepierced and betatted young people waiting patiently on the paint-spattered vinyl couch and stools made that abundantly clear. Ruby and I crossed the cement floor with trepidation, both because we were nervous, and because the floor was decorated with a painting of the huge portrait of a Maori warrior in full face-paint, and it felt kind of weird to be stomping across his protruding tongue.

  “Can I help you?” the young man behind the counter asked politely. He was young and part Asian, with long black hair caught up in a bun on top of his head. His ears were pierced with large, round, steel plugs that measured at least one inch in diameter, causing his lobes to hang low and distended against his cheeks. Each of his eyebrows sported a dozen rings of various sizes. I couldn’t see under his clothes, but I was willing to bet that getting through a metal detector would have involved some nearly pornographic maneuvering.

  “Exactly how sanitary are your facilities?” I said, ignoring the fact that I sounded like my Bubbe, who used to travel everywhere with a purse-sized bottle of Formula 409 with which she freely sprayed down park benches, bus seats, and even the chairs in restaurants.

  “Good question,” he said, and then he proceeded to outline for me the various cleansing tools he used. He showed me the prepackaged needles, each individually wrapped and sealed. He described the technique he used to sterilize the earrings, and then promised that he wore gloves throughout the procedure.

  His professional thoroughness won my heart. Ruby’s belonged to him the moment he showed her the gold hoops with the little mother-of-pearl beads he planned to use in her ears.

  “Doesn’t she have to have studs at first?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said. “We find these work much better.”

  The procedure wasn’t painless, but Squeak (that was what he told Ruby to call him) was true to his word. He washed his hands thoroughly, he changed gloves every time he touched something that hadn’t been sterilized, and he took a good five minutes meticulously evening out the dots he drew on Ruby’s ears. He assured me that if she ever wanted any more piercings in her ears, or if she ever planned on getting plugs like his own, there would be plenty of room in her lobes. I somehow managed to refrain from shouting, “Over my dead body!” The actual piercing was done with a long, black needle, and Ruby managed it with nary a tear, although her arms, wrapped tightly around my neck, seemed to be shaking. It’s possible, though, that the trembling was my own.

  The line of young men and women we had jumped (Squeak had asked them if they minded, and they had all assured us that they didn’t) burst into applause when we walked out of the curtained piercing room. Ruby blushed and showed off her little hoops.

  “Ooh!” a tall, blond girl of about eighteen exclaimed. “Mother-of-pearl! That’s just what I want in my nipple!”

  Twenty-seven

  THAT Monday I took the list of Board of Realtor members, as well as the names Marilyn had remembered, over to Felix’s house. Detective Goodenough arrived moments after I did.

  “Ms. Applebaum,” he said, not sounding at all surprised to see me. I was waiting in the living room for Farzad to get Felix, and the maid had let the detective in.

  “How is the investigation proceeding?” I asked him. “Finding out about the tampering with the programmer will certainly help, I imagine.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me, and then nodded. “You’re friends with the younger Mrs. Lahidji.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  We waited in silence until Felix and Farzad walked into the room. The men were obviously surprised to see the detective. They had been expecting only me. Goodenough pulled a long list of names out of his briefcase. In addition to the names of the members of the Board of Realtors that I had also brought, he had others that must have been from the sign-up sheet. After a quick glance at me, to which I replied with a nod, Felix and Farzad agreed to look over the names. The four of us passed over them, one at time, using Felix’s Palm Pilot to see if anything hit. Nothing did. And neither did any of the names strike either man as familiar. I wasn’t surprised. After we were done, the detective piled his papers together and slipped them back into his case.

  “Do you think I could get a copy of the list?” I asked.

  He smiled thinly and shook his head. “How’s that certification coming, Ms. Applebaum?” he asked, instead of replying to my request.

  I opened my mouth but could think of no searing reply.

  He stood up. “I’ll see myself out. If you think of anything new, you’ll call me,” he stated, rather than asked.

  After he’d gone, Felix excused himself.

  “I’ve got a lunch meeting at Barney’s. I haven’t met with the buyers there in ages, and I want to give them a sneak peek at the new line.”

  “So you’re working again?”

  He passed his hand over the stubble on his head. “I guess so. I mean, I have to get back sometime, don’t I? Too many people depend on me.” He didn’t look at Farzad, but I did. The younger man had his lips pursed in a tiny frown.

  After he left the room, I turned to Farzad. “It’s good he’s working, don’t you think?”

  “It’s about time,” the slight man said, kicking off his slippers and tucking his feet up under him. “So, you haven’t found out anything, have you?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid.”

  “So much for your house.”

  I winced and examined his face, hoping to see reflected there at least some humor. He still wore his almost petulant moue. I felt a sinking in my stomach. There was just no way he would allow me to buy Felix’s house unless this case came to some kind of satisfactory conclusion.

  “You’re still billing us, too, aren’t you?” Farzad said.

  “If you aren’t satisfied, or if you think the bill is too high, you won’t have to pay it.” Now, that wasn’t generally Al’s and my policy, but neither did we usually force our services on people whose homes we hoped to buy.

  Farzad acknowledged my statement as if it were no more than his due.

  “So, who do you think killed Alicia?” I asked him.

  “That detective thinks it was just a random sex-crime,” he said.

  “Did he tell you that?”

  The little man shook his head. “No, but that’s what he thinks. I’m sure of it.”

  “And what do you think?” I asked again.

  He leaned his chin in his hands and cocked his head coquettishly “What does it matter what I think? Aren’t you the private eye? Maybe you think I did it?”

  “Did you?” I asked in a pleasant tone of voice.

  He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. Then he said, “No, no of course not. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I felt like killing the woman. I mean, not really. But you know how it is. She was exasperating. She wasn’t an easy person to share Felix with.”

  “Was that what it felt like? Sharing your boyfriend?”

  “She lived with us, didn’t she? And she worked for Felix. Alicia
was always around, and she was a presence, if you know what I mean. She wasn’t someone you could ignore.”

  I nodded. “That must have made moving to Palm Springs pretty attractive.”

  He smiled. “Absolutely. Of course that wasn’t the only reason, and we still want to go. But getting away from her was definitely part of it. For me, at least.”

  I shifted tacks. “Farzad, why wasn’t the alarm on the night Alicia was killed?”

  He wrinkled his brow. “Well, it wouldn’t have been, would it? We never used it when we were home, only when we went out. And even then Alicia was pretty bad about turning it on. Anyway, if there’s nothing else . . .” He rose to his feet both suddenly and languidly, like a cat. “Let me see you out.”

  I was about to object, but there really wasn’t anything more I could ask Farzad. Perhaps he had killed her. He certainly had motive. But he, like Felix, had been in Palm Springs. They would have to have conspired to kill her together, and to provide one another with an alibi, and that just didn’t make any sense.

  As I drove cross-town to my prenatal appointment, I ran through the list of suspects in my mind. There was Charlie Hoynes, and Dakota. And his ex-wife. There was Felix and Farzad. Nahid Lahidji, Julia Brennan. None of them seemed any more or less likely than the others. So who had killed Alicia, and why? Was it just some crazed psychopath, after all?

  Just then, my cell phone rang. It was Kat. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Marilyn found her programmer.”

  “She what?”

  “She found her programmer. It was in the glove compartment of her car the whole time. She only thought it was in her purse. She hadn’t driven the car, so she didn’t see it.”

  “How did she suddenly find it?”

  “She went into labor yesterday, and her husband was on the other side of town at a meeting. Her mother-in-law drove her to the hospital in Marilyn’s car. Marilyn opened the glove compartment to look for some tapes to take into the delivery room with her.”

  What did this mean? If Marilyn’s programmer hadn’t been stolen, how had her number been used? Someone must have programmed her number into a different programmer. But who? And why?

  “Did she tell all this to the detective?”

  “I’m sure,” Kat said. “Her babies are fine, by the way. Still in the NICU, but she says they’ll be out in a few days.”

  “That’s wonderful. Um, Kat?”

  “Yes?”

  “How are you feeling?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. “Okay, I guess.”

  That morning, before I’d gone out, I’d done a little Web surfing. I hadn’t been sure whether I was going to talk to Kat about what I’d found out, but now that I had her on the phone, I couldn’t bear not to. “Sweetie,” I said. “I hope you don’t think this is presumptuous of me, but I got a few names for you.”

  “Names?” she said warily.

  “Of therapists. People who specialize in bulimia among women our age.”

  “I had a therapist.”

  “Did you like her?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Do you want me to give you the names?”

  After a few seconds of silence, she said, “Okay.”

  “I’ll email them to you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I hope you don’t think I’m butting in to something that’s none of my business.”

  “No. No,” she said listlessly.

  “Kat, you know you can call me. Anytime. Day or night. If you feel like doing something, or if you just want to talk.”

  “I know.”

  “Have you gone back to a meeting?”

  “I was thinking about it.”

  “Maybe you should go to one. Is there one tonight?”

  “There’s one on Saturday, at Cedars.”

  “How about you bring Ashkon to my house, he can hang out with Isaac and Ruby, have a sleepover, even. And you can go to the meeting. You won’t even have to tell Reza if you don’t want to.”

  I wasn’t sure whether or not she’d accept my offer, and I was tremendously relieved when she did.

  I walked into the doctor’s office, mulling over what Kat had told me about Marilyn’s programmer, and nearly fell over with surprise. Peter was sitting, waiting for me, reading a copy of Baby magazine.

  “Hey!” I said. My eyes nearly filled with tears at the unexpected sight.

  “Hey, yourself.”

  I sat down next to him and grabbed his hand in my own. I squeezed, tightly. “What are you doing here?”

  “Finding out all sorts of interesting things. Did you know that you’re not supposed to be eating tunafish sandwiches while you’re pregnant?”

  “Really? Why not?”

  “Mercury poisoning. Tuna is full of mercury. Which causes birth defects and learning disabilities.”

  When the nurse came to get me, she found Peter on his knees between my legs, doing his best to administer a Stanford/Binet to my belly button.

  Of all the appointments for Peter to join me for, he had to be there when my doctor read me the riot act about my weight.

  “Twenty-five to thirty-five pounds,” she said. “That’s what we recommend.”

  I smiled a sickly smile.

  “Juliet, you’ve already put on close to fifty pounds. And you’re nowhere near done.”

  I nodded. “I know. Scary, isn’t it?”

  She shook her head. “Your blood sugar is perfect, so that’s a good thing. Are we scheduling a c-section, given that you’ve had two? Recent studies do indicate a heightened risk of uterine rupture in post-caesarian trials of labor, particularly multiple caesarians.”

  It took me all of a second to decide. “Yes, let’s schedule it.”

  “Good choice. Given that, the size of the baby isn’t as important as if you were planning on a natural birth. But still. You are gaining weight faster than we would like.”

  I looked over the doctor’s shoulder in time to catch Peter snickering into his hand. I freed a foot from the stirrup and aimed a kick at his groin. He jumped out of reach.

  “I want you to watch what you eat,” the doctor said, helping me sit up.

  And watch, I did. I watched the milkshake and the French fries all the way from my plate to my lips. In my defense, I will say that it was Peter’s idea that we go to Swingers for lunch after the appointment. I couldn’t be expected to satisfy myself with some limp salad while he downed a burger, could I?

  I had just turned down, with considerable ceremony, a refill on my milkshake when Peter’s cell phone rang. He answered it and murmured into the receiver for a minute. When he hung up, his face was pale.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That was Jake.”

  “Jake your agent?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “Charlie Hoynes’s daughter is dead.”

  “His daughter? You mean Halley?”

  “Jake was on his way to the funeral, and he remembered that Hoynes and I had just got together. He called to make sure we knew about it.”

  I thought of Hoynes’s wife, and her obvious desperation on the day we’d spoken. “Oh, No. That’s awful. Did she die in the hospital? Was it the anorexia?”

  Peter nodded. “I guess she starved herself to death.”

  The French fries and ice cream roiled in my stomach, and I put a hand over my mouth and ran to the ladies room.

  Twenty-eight

  PETER did not want to go to the funeral. He was right; we barely knew Hoynes, had never met his poor daughter, and my motivation for insisting we attend was entirely suspect. Nonetheless, within half an hour we’d gone home, changed our clothes, and were on our way out to the cemetery. I called the kids’ schools from the car and arranged for Ruby and Isaac to stay late in their after-school programs.

  The service had already started when we ar
rived at the chapel on the cemetery grounds, but it had clearly not been going on long. A thin woman with limp brown hair hanging shapelessly over her ears led the assembled congregation in a hymn that I’d never heard before. Something about sheep and water and Isaiah. She wore traditional priestly vestments, but draped with a shawl made out of some kind of African Kinte cloth. I’m not particularly good at distinguishing among the various Christian clergy, but the formality of her robes, combined with the consciously inclusive nature of her language and clothing, led me to infer that it might be an Episcopal service.

  The hymn singing went on long enough for me to peruse the crowd. There was something familiar about it—something that seemed less than funereal, and it took me a while to put my finger on it. Finally, it hit me. But for the somberness of the tone, the room had the feel of a bat mitzvah. People were dressed in regulation black, but that had long since become the color of choice at every life-ceremony, from weddings to brises to bar mitzvahs. There were a few people weeping, most noticeably Charlie Hoynes’s ex-wife. What gave the proceedings their adolescent, nearly celebratory feel, however, were the rows of teenagers, strictly segregated by sex—the boys in bright, barely-worn suits, the girls in dresses either too childlike for their size, or too skimpy and revealing for the event. The children seemed genuinely upset; all of the girls, and even one or two of the boys, were crying. I couldn’t help but notice, however, that most of the children kept one eye on their compatriots to make sure their tears were carefully modulated to that of every other girl, no more nor less dramatic, their grief neither more nor less apparent.

  After the service, I made Peter join the procession of cars out to the gravesite. I refrained, however, from forcing him to take one of the white roses handed out by the black-gloved attendants. We stood at the rear of the crowd, while the Episcopal priest murmured a few additional prayers. Halley Hoynes’s mother was seated on a white wooden chair at the edge of the grave, and as the line of people began to pass by her, dropping their rose on top of the polished, golden wooden casket as it was lowered slowly into the black, loamy earth, she began to wail. Her cries were soft at first, high pitched and impossible to understand. Soon, though, her voice grew louder and clearer. She was keening the words ‘my baby’ over and over again. Hoynes sat a few feet away from her, Dakota at his side. He stared grimly into the rectangular hole, his face flushed, his lips clamped shut. Dakota wore a pair of oversized, black sunglasses and lipstick that shone dark and almost purple against her pallid cheeks. She too stared straight ahead, ignoring the cries that had now grown to shrieks. The procession passed, flower by flower, in front of Halley’s wailing mother.