“Ellen, this is Diana. I know you’re tied up, but I have a client in a really big hurry to get something up before next week. I had a nice Richard Serra lined up, but the wife says it doesn’t have enough color. They want a horizontal, for over the couch. Do you think you could help? I know it isn’t much notice, but…”
“Hi, this is Fernando. I’m set for installing the painting on Wednesday. Hey, I was wondering, do you think they would mind if I changed the frame? I wouldn’t ask, but I have this really great idea for…”
“Hi, Mom, it’s me. Don’t wait up for me. I’m going out tonight. I borrowed your yellow silk blouse. Hope you don’t mind, but you weren’t here to ask. Oh, and your gold hoop earrings, too. Thanks. Bye…”
“Mrs. Laws, I represent Greenhaven Acres cemetery. We offer a full line of funeral services and interment plots, and we believe it is never too early…”
The doorbell rang. I hit the “stop” button gratefully.
My next-door neighbor, Mark Richardson, waved a pitcher invitingly over my threshold. “I made margaritas,” he said by way of explanation. “Can I come in?”
I opened the door wider. “Sure. I’m—”
“Celebrating the end of the trial. I know. It got a thirty-second blip on the news.”
Catching up would have to wait. I got down the gourd-shaped margarita glasses, cut open a lime, and rolled the edges in kosher salt. I eyed the greenish liquid while he poured. “Aren’t those supposed to be fattening?” I asked him.
He paused. I was baiting him, and he snapped it up. “I made them with Equal instead of sugar,” he said. “And I used fresh lime juice. Besides, it’s a special occasion.”
Mark was obsessed with fat—other people’s, not his own; he didn’t have any. He ate sparingly, and what he did ingest he ran off in nightly marathons along the water. I’d known other people afflicted with this preoccupation, particularly at the beach, but Mark carried it to extremes.
Every trip outside his front door afforded him fresh opportunities for sizing up the heft-impaired. I had seen him eyeing grocery carts in the checkout lines at the market, correlating the contents with the buyer’s corporeal abundance. An overweight woman in shorts could send him into a tailspin. Although Southern California probably hosted a smaller percentage of the Relaxed Fit crowd than average, there was population enough to keep him in a state of perpetual outrage and despair.
Mark was also good-looking, aggressively heterosexual, forty, and a cardiologist, so of course he was spoiled rotten, for reasons probably not in that order. Women—a large number of whom seemed to sport little pink sweat-bands, long legs, and miniscule waists—were always knocking on his door. He didn’t have a special girlfriend because, as he confessed one night in the community hot tub, when you saw someone steadily you spent all your time having sex, and there was no chance to do any reading or get your shirts done. He needed space, he said, and some free moments.
I had no desire to expose for his scrutiny the sponginess of my thighs or the entropy that was patently at work on my body in general, so for the most part we got along fine. Occasionally he couldn’t help himself and told me something I was wearing made me look matronly. I usually told him I didn’t care. Then I’d go take it off. We had an easy relationship, made possible by proximity and the certainty on both sides that it would never turn into anything else.
We had a business relationship, too. Fortunately for me, he had a very limited view of what constituted “art.” His enthusiasm for a work was in direct proportion to the degree of undress of its female subject matter. His apartment was filled with nudes in every medium, from lithographs to statues to mock frescoes. Not challenging or beautiful works, either—the nipples were too prominent, and the bodies were bent back suggestively. His bedroom looked as if he’d hired a junior high school boy as an interior decorator.
They were lithe, though. He told me, probably to enjoy the shriek of horror it elicited, that he couldn’t abide Gauguin. The colors were pretty, he said, but the models were so fat.
Mark was savvy enough to know that what might be titillating to, say, your average liberated beach bunny, would not go over so well with overweight sixty-year-olds contemplating their first bypass surgery. He hired me to find him some “pleasant” art for his office, envisioning, I imagine, the pseudo-Impressionist village scenes particularly popular in surfside galleries. Instead, I bought him some first-rate Japanese landscapes that managed to be simple, arresting, and serene. His patients liked them, and I got more than a few referrals.
“So you nailed the kid,” Mark said, handing me the drink. “Do you have any carrot sticks?”
“Look in the refrigerator,” I said, though he was already bending over the vegetable bin. He eyed a somewhat geriatric cucumber with enthusiasm. He glanced at me.
“Don’t say anything,” I warned him.
He shrugged and put it back in the bin. Sometimes he seemed a lot younger than my daughter. Maybe it was all those years he’d spent in the lab, when other people were moving beyond water balloon fights and scatological humor.
“No luck,” he said, emerging from the interior of the refrigerator. “So how do you feel?”
“Really tired. And glad it’s over,” I confessed.
“No second thoughts? Not a twinge of guilt?”
I looked at him in surprise. “Do you think I should?”
He shrugged. “The kid was only seventeen when he did it, wasn’t he? That’s a little young to be tried as an adult.”
“Not these days. Our hands were tied.” The laws regarding juvenile criminals had become a lot stiffer in California. “I really think he did it, Mark,” I told him. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have voted to convict.”
“Hey, relax. It’s fine by me. Personally, I’m a Get Tough on Crime type myself. Although from what I hear, he might have done a lot of people a favor by knocking off La Ivanova.”
I set the margarita glass down so hard, the drink sloshed onto the countertop. “What?”
“Let’s just say it was no secret that she gave you-know-who a run for her money in the Queen of Mean department. And from what I hear, her clients weren’t all such happy campers, either.”
“Well, it was apparently a secret to me,” I told him. “And I don’t recall hearing anyone else mention it in all the time I spent on this trial. Everything I heard suggested just the reverse. For all I knew, she was a cross between Dolly Levi and Mother Teresa. How is it you know so much more about this than I do?”
He grinned. “You’re such a straight arrow, I bet you didn’t read any newspaper articles about the case or talk it over with anybody, did you? I mean, you wouldn’t even talk to me.”
“Don’t make it sound like Temperance or Eternal Chastity. You weren’t supposed to, so I didn’t.”
“I rest my case. Anyway, I saved you a couple of the newspaper articles, if you’re interested. There wasn’t all that much about it.”
“Of course I’m interested. How come the jury is the last to know everything? It makes me uncomfortable.”
“Well, don’t be. I’m probably exaggerating. Anyway, I doubt it makes any difference whether she was Catherine the Great or Ivan-a the Terrible. The burglar killed her, and he was just after her money.”
“Bad analogy,” I told him. “They were both monsters.”
“Stop showing off, just because you majored in the humanities.” He made it sound like a skin disease.
“Okay, but what if a lot of other people did dislike her, or were unhappy, as you say? Maybe other people had a motive to kill her, too. I think that should have come out, don’t you? It might have made a difference.”
He shook his head. “If it didn’t, you can bet there were good legal reasons for not admitting it as evidence. Besides, I can’t see getting upset enough to kill the matchmaker just because your ‘perfect mate’ turns out to be some bottom-drawer Juliet with bright orange hair and thick ankles. Although,” he said, pouring himself the remaining con
tents of the pitcher, “I could certainly see asking for your money back. Particularly at the prices she charged.”
I looked at him suspiciously. “Come on, Mark, you do know something, don’t you? Stop pretending you read that kind of thing in the L.A. Times.” The matchmaking service had been very exclusive, and well-to-do, privacy-obsessed clients didn’t tell dating horror stories to reporters.
He looked down his nose at me, but the effect was spoiled by the kosher salt on the tip. “Haven’t you ever heard of doctor-patient confidentiality?”
“Your patients have used her matchmaking service?”
“I didn’t say that,” he said virtuously. “But why would that surprise you?”
“It doesn’t seem strange to you?”
“Why should it? People with a lot of money and high-profile jobs don’t have a lot of time to spend looking for mates. And they certainly aren’t going to hang out in bars. Having someone pre-screen a few suitable candidates for you would be incredibly more efficient and a lot less trouble than finding the person yourself.”
“You make it sound like Harvard Business School or some very tony Executive Search. Don’t tell me you’d ever do something like that!”
He shrugged.
“Mark!”
“It’s been suggested,” he said coolly.
“Oh.”
“Don’t sound like that, Ellen,” he said, smirking. “I don’t want to get married; I want to date. It may be immodest to say so, but I haven’t had any problem finding women to go out with.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
“But—and this is the critical point—I wouldn’t want to marry most of the people I date.”
“That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard you say all night,” I told him.
“Cute. What I’m trying to say is that if I ever did decide to get married, maybe I’d have trouble meeting the right kind of girl. How could I be sure she wasn’t interested in me because my first name is ‘Doctor’? I mean, how could I tell if she wanted me or my money?”
“For one thing, you could try picking a woman with a serious career and a life of her own,” I said. “Besides, you don’t have any money. You’re always losing it.” He was, too. He kept investing in dubious get-richer-quick schemes that didn’t pan out, or—worse—limited partnerships that deliberately lost money to avoid paying taxes. He was so busy avoiding taxes he didn’t notice he wasn’t making any gains, either.
“Yes, but that’s only temporary,” he said grandly. “And anyway, I won’t want my wife to work, so why should I want to marry someone who’s already wedded to her career? One of us is enough.”
“You’re not living in this century, Mark.”
He smiled. “Think I’ll have any trouble finding someone who’ll let me support her?”
“I hope so, but probably not.”
“That’s what I love about you, Ellen. You’re so honest. The point I was trying to make is that if I ever do decide to settle down, I might not know the right person already. I’m not going to want to spend all the time and energy required to romance women I’m not going to be interested in in the long run. My free time is too precious to me. What would be wrong with getting a little assistance?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it. It just doesn’t sound like much fun. No, it’s worse. It’s pessimistic. Falling in love is a leap of faith.”
“Who said anything about falling in love?”
“Don’t you want that?” I asked him.
“I’ve had it. Lots of times. I’m not sure it has much to do with happiness in marriage.”
“Maybe not,” I said, “but it sure helps you get over the rough spots. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
“Okay, I know you had a great marriage, with love and all that, but you were young, Ellen. You didn’t have baggage. I have requirements.”
“You mean ‘demands.’”
He smiled. “If you like. But listen, I know you, too. If you ever considered getting married again, you’d be choosy. I can tell.”
“I’m not in the market,” I said firmly.
“Not even if someone presented you with five stunningly eligible matrimonial choices?”
“Especially not then.”
He cleared his throat. “I should be going.”
I handed him the rinsed-out pitcher. “Not before you tell me everything you heard about Natasha Ivanova.”
“Not everything, okay? It wouldn’t be fair. But here’s the gist of it. I heard that some of the service’s clients paid wildly inflated prices for nightmarish nights on the town with people who were completely unsuitable.”
“Unsuitable how?”
“Oh, you know. Overaged or underemployed.” He shuddered. “Some of them were even…overweight.”
“Horrors.”
“Exactly.”
The phone rang as he was exiting. I debated picking it up—I wasn’t in the mood for real estate cold calls or a great deal on “home exteriors”—but when you’re a mother, even of a college freshman, it’s second nature to answer, just in case.
It was not a name I recognized, so I asked him to repeat it.
“Greg Ramirez, from The Daily Zephyr.” The Zephyr was the South Bay’s local newspaper. “We’re doing a story on the trial. We were wondering if you’d like to give us some background on how you reached the guilty verdict.”
No, I wouldn’t. “How did you get this number?” I asked him.
“The trial’s over. The jury list is public knowledge since this afternoon.”
“Great,” I said wearily.
“I know you’re probably tired right about now, but if there is anything interesting you could tell me—some colorful details like did the jury get along, were there any hold-outs, that sort of thing…”
“There was nothing like that. Look, I—”
“And the verdict?”
“If you want to understand the verdict, look at the evidence,” I snapped.
“Can I quote you on that?” He sounded very young, probably some journalism intern learning the ropes.
“No,” I told him. “Look, I’m sorry I sound irritated, but I really don’t want my name in the newspaper. And I am very tired, so—”
“I understand,” he said, more kindly than I probably deserved. “I’ll call someone else. Oh, and Mrs. Laws…”
“Yes?”
“If you really don’t want to be disturbed, you might want to take your phone off the hook.”
“Thanks. I’ll think about it.”
I thought he was being naive about how many of his competitors would be panting to get my story, but the minute I set down the receiver, the phone rang again.
“Yes?” I inquired, in what I hoped was a discouraging tone.
There was a moment of silence, then a couple of heavy breaths.
“Hello?” I said. “Hello?”
“Die, you racist bitch,” the voice on the other end said at last. “We know who you are…”
3
“It’s probably nothing to worry about,” said the sergeant.
That’s easy for you to say, I thought. But I didn’t say it. If I smarted off to the police, who would come to save me when Ramon’s avenger came after me with the weapon du jour?
“You’re probably thinking that’s easy for me to say,” said the sergeant, with a little laugh. “But honestly, it’s not all that uncommon when a gang member gets convicted of a crime. It’s probably just some wannabe showing off to get noticed. Just some kid, maybe no more than twelve, thirteen years old.”
Was that supposed to make me feel better? “Well, ahem,” I told her, “what I’m wondering is, even if that’s true, how far is he going to go to get ‘noticed’?”
“Usually it stops at the phone call,” she said reassuringly.
“Usually?”
“Well,” she admitted, “there have been cases when it went farther than that, but that’s usually when a witness from the neighborhood testifies ag
ainst a ‘homey.’ I don’t know of any cases in this part of the county where anyone’s gone after the jury after a verdict. In South Central, who knows?”
My mouth felt extremely dry, as if I’d packed it with cotton.
The sergeant was on my wavelength. “Look, Mrs. Laws…”
“Ellen,” I corrected her. I wanted to be her best pal. I wanted all the police to feel extremely friendly toward me. If I could have arranged it, I would have made them all chocolate cheesecake brownies, one of my most irresistible recipes.
“Ellen,” she agreed. “I know this must make you very nervous, but—”
“That’s putting it mildly. No one told me I’d need protection if I served on this jury.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” she said soothingly, in a voice that had obviously calmed the hysterical public before. “If a real threat had been intended, someone would have contacted you while you were still on the jury. You know: put pressure on you to vote ‘not guilty.’ Think about it.”
“The thing is”—I could hear the hoarseness in my voice—“the thing is, I have a daughter.”
“I see,” she said seriously. “How old is the little girl?”
She didn’t see; how could she? “She’s not—that is…” How could I explain how fiercely I wanted to protect her, after the one great injury that had already been done her, the big hole that had already opened up in her life? I didn’t want her to have to be afraid, too, now that she was gaining confidence again after her father’s death and moving toward independence.
There weren’t words to say it. “She’s not a child,” I admitted. “She’s a community college student.”
She was very kind. “As I said, Mrs. Laws—Ellen—I really don’t think there is anything to worry about. But just in case, why don’t we have a patrol car swing by your”—there was a pause while she consulted her information—“townhouse for the next few days? A high-profile police presence would certainly discourage anyone who had thoughts of harassing you or your family. In a few days, the anger will have died down. It always seems to work that way.”
Staying Cool Page 3