A Playdate With Death

by Ayelet Waldman

  “And did you speak about it again? Did Bobby?”

  He heaved a sigh and ran his fingers through his hair. “He tried, I think. But you have to understand, once my parents decide to dig their heels in, that’s pretty much it. I know Bobby was hoping to get information about his birth family out of them, but it’s like getting blood from a stone.”

  Poor Bobby. I could imagine him trying to find out about himself, eager for any scrap of information. “Do you know if Bobby ever did learn anything about his birth family?”

  At that moment, David seemed to decide he’d confided enough in a stranger. He just shook his head and got up out of his chair.

  “I should be getting back.” He opened the door to the library and waited for me to follow him.

  Four

  I wanted to make an appearance at Betsy’s gathering. It was the decent thing to do, and it would give me the opportunity to find out more about Bobby’s adoption. Finding out that fact about himself had surely resulted in a considerable amount of personal turmoil. Perhaps it had even been enough to lead him to kill himself.

  I called Peter from the car to let him know I’d be out for longer than I’d expected.

  “There’s someone here who has something to say to you,” he said.

  Then I heard a high-pitched squeak. “Mama?”

  “Hi, Isaac. How are you doing, buddy?”

  “I want to nurse. Come home right now, and bring me my breasts.”

  Peter got back on the line.

  “I suppose you think that’s funny,” I said.

  “He’s been bugging me all day. When are you going to wean this kid?”

  “I’m trying. You know I’m trying.” And I was. I’d been trying to wean Isaac since he was eighteen months old and announced, in a loud voice in the middle of a restaurant, “This side empty. Other side, please.” But the kid clearly had other plans, and they included breast-feeding his way through college. Whenever I tried to hand him a bottle, he would fling it across the room and dive-bomb my shirt front. Nine times out of ten, I would give in, if only to quiet the shrieking. Peter thought I was way too much of a softy, but he’d never experienced the humiliation of sitting on an airplane next to a toddler screaming, “Give me my breast now!” at the top of his lungs.

  While the quality of the food at Betsy’s wasn’t quite up to that of the Drs. Katz, the ebullience of the crowd made up for the hodgepodge of a buffet. The room was packed with people weeping, laughing, and sharing reminiscences of Bobby. I greeted a few of those I’d met at the funeral and made my way over to Betsy, who was sitting on the living room couch, smiling through tears at a story told by a muscular man with a shaved head.

  “And then I was like, ‘I’ll go first,’ and Bobby was like, ‘Okay.’ And then as soon as I start screaming, he decides, no he doesn’t want to get his tongue pierced, he’s never going to get his tongue pierced, and goddamn it if he didn’t check himself into rehab two days later. When I got sober, we started telling people that it was fear of this,” the man stuck out his tongue, revealing a large silver stud, “that got Bobby on the wagon.”

  The small crowd of people huddled around Betsy and the bald man groaned and laughed. I slipped in between them and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Hey,” I said. “How are you holding up?”

  She shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I’m just glad Annie arranged for all this. I couldn’t have dealt with being on my own after that horrible funeral.”

  “I went to the Katzes,” I said. “I found out a few things that I’d like to talk to you about.”

  “What’s going on?”

  I looked around at the crowd of interested faces. “Is there somewhere we could go to talk?”

  Betsy led me down the hall to the bedroom. She flopped on the bed, and I sat on the edge of a sling back chair, doing my best not to fall through the torn seat.

  I told her briefly about my conversation with David. Betsy started to shake her head.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked, her brow wrinkled and her eyebrows raised in shock. “Adopted? Bobby was adopted?”

  “Didn’t he tell you?” That floored me. Bobby hadn’t told his fiancée about what was surely one of the greatest surprises of his life?

  Betsy shook her head. “I can’t believe this. I mean, I’m really surprised. Not that he’s adopted. I’m just surprised he didn’t tell me. I thought we told each other everything.”

  “You’re not surprised that he was adopted?”

  She shook her head. “It makes sense; I mean, how could that woman have given birth to a wonderful, sweet, generous guy like Bobby?” She sniffed.

  “Were you guys doing okay?” I chose my words carefully. “I know you’d had some difficult times lately.”

  “You mean when I got busted, right?”

  I nodded my head.

  “Yeah, well, Bobby really helped me through all that. He stood by me and even went along with the wedding plans, in spite of everything. In spite of his parents trying to convince him to dump me.”

  “And you don’t have any idea why Bobby might have committed suicide?”

  She shook her head. “No. And, honestly, it doesn’t make sense to me. Not a bit. It’s just not something that Bobby would do. He’s not that kind of person. I mean, I was supposed to be the pessimist in our relationship.” She barked a hoarse, sad laugh and then started crying again.

  At that moment, I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to just walk away from Bobby’s death. Call it compassion, call it an inability to leave well enough alone, call it plain old-fashioned nosiness. I couldn’t live with myself without at least trying to find out why Bobby Katz had died and who, if anyone, was responsible.

  I sat down next to Betsy and took her hand. “Would you be willing to let me look into things a bit, maybe do a little investigation? I’ve got some experience with this kind of thing. Maybe I can help figure out what happened to Bobby.”

  She looked at me curiously and said, “I don’t mind. I mean, it’s not like the police are doing anything, as far as I can tell.” Her face brightened momentarily, and it seemed to me that she liked the idea of having an ally, of having at least one other person in her corner, trying to figure out what had happened to the man in her life.

  “Would you mind if I look through some of Bobby’s things? His papers or his computer? It could give me an idea of what was going on with him, maybe lead me in the direction of whatever was bothering him or even whoever might have wanted to hurt him,” I said.

  “I guess that would be okay. The cops took a lot of stuff, but they left his laptop. Do you want to see that?”

  “That could be useful.”

  Bobby had turned their second bedroom into a small home office. He had a computer table set up against one wall and a four-drawer filing cabinet in the corner. I shut the door of the room against the sound of Bobby’s friends, who had begun singing versions of his favorite songs—he must have been a big Billy Joel fan—and started rifling through the filing cabinet. The cops had pretty well cleaned it out. I could see where he had a folder with each of his clients’ names printed across the top, but the contents of the individual files were missing. I found my own and couldn’t resist checking, but it, too, was empty. They’d left the drawers full of articles on weight control and fitness innovations pretty well alone, but I didn’t think those would be particularly useful to me. I was impressed with how carefully Bobby organized his information files, though. He was a man who took his work seriously and clearly tried to keep up in the field.

  I turned my attention to the computer, hoping that the cops hadn’t wiped the hard drive. Luckily, they’d either ignored it or perhaps had made a copy of it for themselves. I felt vaguely guilty searching through Bobby’s files. A person’s computer is as intimate as his underwear drawer, and it reflects his character even more. Bobby’s hard drive was as tidy and orderly as he was. He had carefully organized his files; his folders were all divided in
to subfolders. In a folder named “Work,” I found a client list with phone numbers and addresses that I printed out on the inkjet printer cabled to the laptop. I clicked my way through his various folders, hoping I might find a diary of some kind. No luck. I was about to open a folder temptingly called “Correspondence” when my purse started ringing.

  “Oy, Peter, I totally lost track of time. Is everything okay?”

  “It’s fine,” my husband said, “but the kids are asking for you. I’m about to start dinner, and I need to know if you plan to make it home.”

  “Oh God, is it that late?”

  I promised I’d be home right away and went to find Betsy. Most of her friends had gone home, and she sat in the living room with the last few. When I walked in, she looked up from the photo album she’d been leafing through.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked listlessly.

  “Not really. Not yet. Listen, Betsy, would you have any objection to my borrowing Bobby’s computer? I’d copy the hard drive here, but I’m afraid it would take me hours to get everything.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Go ahead and take it. I don’t care. If his brother comes around, I’ll tell him you have it. Otherwise, he’ll probably think I pawned it or something.”

  Five

  OVER breakfast the next morning, I decided that if I was going to investigate Bobby’s death, I would need some expert advice. I don’t know what I’d do without Al Hockey. Never in my life would I have imagined that I could rely so unreservedly on someone who collected semiautomatic weapons for pleasure. Al and I are about as divergent politically as two people can be, but in some strange way that neither of us understands, we’re friends. Al is an ex-cop who retired from the force after taking a couple of ounces of lead in the belly. He’d been working as a defense investigator at the federal public defender’s office for a few years when I got hired, and we hit it off almost instantly. He’d investigated all my cases for me and had saved me from many an embarrassing mistake. He’s been a terrific source of information, both legal and less-than, ever since.

  “What do you want?” he growled when I called him. “I’m packing.”

  “Packing? What do you mean packing? Are you moving?”

  “No. Quitting. Today’s my last day at the office. You’re lucky you found me here.”

  That came as a shock to me. Al’s retirement from the LAPD had lasted all of six months before he’d taken the public defender job.

  “You’re not retiring?” I asked him.

  “Please. I’m going to go freelance.”

  “Freelance investigation?”

  “Yeah. A couple of weeks ago at the Dodger’s game, I bumped into Vinnie Hernandez, a guy I knew from the LAPD. Turns out he retired two years ago. Now he’s making six figures.”

  “Freelancing?”

  “Exactly.”

  I poured a sippy cup of orange juice and handed it to Isaac, who had his legs and arms wrapped around my leg.

  “Like a private eye?” I asked.

  “Vinnie’s billing out at a hundred bucks an hour, working for private criminal defense attorneys. The guy’s a complete idiot, and in twenty hours a week, he’s making twice what I do in forty.”

  “So you decided to quit.”

  “You bet. I’m no fool. I’m sick of baby-sitting public defenders. I’m going to hang out a shingle, print up some business cards, and start living large.”

  I mopped up the sippy cup’s worth of orange juice that Isaac had just expertly spilled all over the floor and opened a cupboard full of pots and pans.

  “Does that mean that now I have to pay you a hundred bucks to get you to make a call for me?” I said.

  “That depends, Juliet of the black leather miniskirt.” Was he never going to let me live down my youthful indiscretions? Why oh why had I ever thought that skirt was an appropriate thing to show up in on my first day of work?

  Isaac went to work on the pots and pans, drowning out Al’s next question.

  I put a finger to my ear and shouted, “What?”

  “Do you want to go into business with me?” Al replied, also shouting.

  At that moment, Isaac grabbed a wooden spoon and smacked me with it on the shin, as hard as he could. I grabbed his fat little hand and wrenched the wooden spoon out of it. “No!” I yelled.

  “That’s pretty definite,” Al said.

  “What? No. I mean, I don’t know. Wow. What an offer. You’re really asking me to become a PI?”

  I could swear I heard him roll his eyes. “I’m not talking The Rockford Files here. I plan on doing your basic criminal investigation. Skip tracers. Maybe some death penalty work. That kind of thing.”

  “Wow,” I said again, not particularly articulately.

  “Don’t answer me now. We’ll get together sometime soon and talk about it. What did you call me for?”

  I filled him in on Bobby’s death.

  “What is with you, Juliet?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re like some kind of human Ebola virus or something. How many dead people do you trip over in the course of a week?”

  “Funny. Ha ha. So, will you call up your friends at the LAPD and find out what’s going on with the investigation? Mostly, I want to know if they’re considering it a murder or a suicide.”

  “Yeah, I’ll make some calls. Give me a day or two, okay?”

  “Great. Thanks, Al.”

  After I hung up the phone, I scooped Isaac up, disengaged him from the drum kit he’d made out of the set of Magnalite cookware I’d gotten from my mother as a wedding present, and went in search of his older sister. I found her in her bedroom, carefully pasting bits of colored paper, yarn, and other scraps to a large sheet of poster board.

  “Get him out of here!” she shrieked, draping her body over her art.

  “Oh Ruby, don’t be so melodramatic. He’s not going to do anything.”

  The words had barely left my mouth when Isaac grabbed a plastic bottle of Elmer’s glue and squeezed a huge white puddle out on the carpet.

  “Oh my God! No, Isaac! No!” I shouted.

  “You see! You see! He ruins everything!” Ruby echoed my yell. I mopped up the spill, yanked her squirming brother out the door, and shut it firmly behind me.

  “Well, clearly you’re not going to be playing with Ruby this afternoon,” I said. “Look, kid, I need to do some work on the computer. Your daddy’s going to be home from his meeting in about an hour. Can you think of something to do by yourself until he gets home?”

  “TV?” my angelic child suggested with a bat of his eyelashes.

  “Right. Fine. As a special treat.”

  He ran to the couch and scrambled up. I sorted through our bedraggled video collection until I found a copy of Color Me Barbra, a Barbra Streisand TV special from some time in the 1960s. Ruby loved it because she was obsessed with show tunes. Isaac liked it because La Streisand does half the numbers inside of a tiger cage. With real tigers.

  I set Bobby’s laptop up next to my computer and connected it to our home network with an Ethernet cable. Now I could freely copy documents and files from it onto my own hard drive. I went back into his correspondence folder and spent the next half-hour skimming through letters to clients and friends until I found something. I had a feeling about it even before I opened it, because the document wasn’t titled like the other letters in the folder, with the recipient’s name and the date. It was just called “Letter #1.”

  The letter started out somewhat cryptically. Underneath Bobby’s standard letterhead—an old-time circus strongman holding up his address—the salutation read simply, “Hello.”

  I don’t even know how to address this letter. Dear Mom seems wrong; I already have a mom, and you probably wouldn’t want me to call you that. Calling you by your name seems so formal. So, maybe I’ll just leave it blank. I guess you’ve probably figured out who this letter is from. My name is Bobby Katz, and I’m your birth son. I was born on February 15, 1972.
I was placed for adoption on that very day through Jewish Family Services.

  I’ve had a pretty happy life. My adoptive family gave me the best of everything, and any problems I have had were my fault, not theirs. I didn’t even know I was adopted until I had some genetic testing done in preparation for my wedding (I’m getting married in six months to a wonderful girl named Betsy). Once I found out about myself, I registered with the State of California Reunion Registry. I was hoping that you might have done so, too, and was pretty disappointed to find that you hadn’t. I understand, though, that it’s pretty common for birth parents not to be registered—most people don’t even know the registry exists!

  I won’t tell you how I found you—I don’t think it would be fair to the people who helped me. But I did find you. And I’m hoping you’ll be willing to write or E-mail me or maybe even to meet me.

  The letter went on to describe Bobby’s job and interests, and he closed with another plea to his birth mother to write or E-mail him.

  I leaned back in my chair, touched by the hope with which Bobby had sent this letter to someone who, for all he knew, had no interest in establishing any kind of contact with him whatsoever. How must it have felt to find out, as an adult, that you weren’t who you thought you were? Or, at the very least, that some of the basic tenets of your life and sense of self were lies? Had Bobby’s mother refused his attempts at contact? Had he responded to that rejection with despair? Had he even sent the letter? Why wasn’t there an address?

  My reverie was interrupted by my growing consciousness of a suspicious sound: silence. My house was never silent, except when my children were either asleep or engaged in some act of nursery terrorism. I hustled out to the family room, where I found Isaac sitting, slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, staring at Barbra’s flaring nostrils and purple boa. I tiptoed away. I put my ear to Ruby’s door. She was singing softly to herself; the tune seemed to be her own version of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which her father had for some reason considered it not merely appropriate but desirable to teach her.