We were in Peet’s Coffee on Sunset Boulevard, across from Book Soup. I’d nixed meeting him at the Andalucia out of fear we might end up in the same booth, necking and groping each other as we had that day after Babeland—not that I wouldn’t have considered that under different circumstances. I just didn’t want Cullen thinking we’d pick right up where we left off.
Luckily, I had the excuse that I needed to go to Book Soup to get the book for the next Muff gathering at Paige’s— We Need To Talk About Kevin, a depressing-sounding novel told from the perspective of the mother of a bad seed who grows up to be one of those school shooters like Dylan Kleibold and his gun-crazy friend who shot up Columbine High School and forever tainted the flower the school was named after. I was also sort of hoping Book Soup Steve might make an appearance.
“How’s your mom?” I asked, stirring the whipped cream into my mocha.
“Well, other than having cancer, she’s fine. She’s still very much my mom, you know? That hasn’t changed.”
“But she’s hanging in there?”
“Oh, yeah. Plays with the vibrator, eats a lot, listens in on my phone calls, tells me what to do—you know, same old Mom.” He smiled. “She’s not that bad, really.”
“How did you end up taking care of her?”
Cullen put down his cup. “She showed up one day and hasn’t left. Now she says she’s going to die soon so there’s no point in spending the money on air fare to get anywhere and she might as well die here.”
I wondered if Cullen’s mom’s surprise arrival in Los Angeles had anything to do with his girlfriend leaving. I didn’t ask, but I couldn’t imagine it was much fun sharing a duplex in West Hollywood with the mother of your grown boyfriend. I’d also gotten a glimpse of her character that day in the cancer ward—a hundred miles of rough terrain.
“I’m not sure what I should say.”
He shrugged. “Nothing to say. She’s my mother and there’s really no one else to take care of her.”
“Well, it’s great of you to do it. Not everyone would.”
“Onto more interesting things. How did it go with your Babeland purchases?”
I felt my cheeks flush. I could actually feel the color—more accurately blood— rush to my face. “Good. How about yours?”
“Fine. One night Mom fell asleep on the couch watching Terms of Endearment. I got the thing out . . . both things I guess, and gave ’em a try. The Fleshlight was—well, you know, it feels all right, but it’s still just a metal-encased collection of silicone and I was aware of that the entire time. Difficult to clean if you want to know the truth.”
“I would think.”
What had been easy before now felt awkward. I still found him attractive, but the magic had morphed and we were now decidedly mortal beings—no longer each others’ temporary sexual fantasy. We also sort of knew too much about each other——TMI, as they say. At any rate, I knew a lot about him and his mother. But a lot of what I knew wasn’t sexy, and I had the melancholic thought that the magic between us had gone.
“What are you working on now? How’s the new book coming?” I asked, taking another consoling sip of cafe mocha.
He gave me his lovely smile again. “Quite well, I think. Thanks for asking.”
“So it’s going to work—this new erotic detective genre you wanted to invent?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea. There’s nothing like it on the shelves, but that could be because people have tried it and tanked.”
I put my coffee down. “I read in the New York Times Book Review that erotica of all kinds is supposed to be very big right now. My book club loved the one we read.”
“Well, that’s positive.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin and with it his mood seemed to go a few shades darker. “If I can’t make it work, I’ll probably pack Mom up and go back to Portland.”
“Why would you give up so easily? It takes some people years to write their first novel.” I sensed my opportunity had arrived to segue into my most pressing question. “You know,” I said, letting it hang there a second, “it’s actually your new erotic detective genre that I wanted to talk to you about.”
“And I thought you called because you wanted me.”
He was giving me that suggestive expression again and I felt myself make an effort to get turned on. But I couldn’t have sex with Cullen so soon after Udi had expired in flagrante. Could I?
Gathering myself, I stared into my mocha, though I doubt he was fooled. Luckily I’m told I’m quite skilled at hiding my emotions when I mediate.
“You’ve done research, right?” I asked, once I’d recovered my cool. “Criminal databases, FBI protocols, security checks, global positioning systems?”
“Yes. Hours’ worth, days’ worth—possibly months’ worth. Why?”
His mind was now off Mom, and he was genuinely intrigued with where I might be going with this.
“So, I have this story and I’d like to pitch it to you. You know—see if you think it’s plausible.”
“Do you want me to sign a release, just in case it’s a great idea and I end up writing a bestseller?”
“I’m a lawyer, remember? Forget the fact that ideas aren’t protectable.”
“That’s sexy,” he said, mocking me. He was returning to the playful guy I’d met at the Java Joint. “Ok, I’ll shut up. Go.”
“It starts with a woman who’s reading a very sexy book . . .”
I told him the whole thing, using this other “woman” as the central character. I told him about her reading a book that got her libido going, meeting the guy at a party, the great sex they had, the guy’s potential Mossad connections, the untimely death—and the possibility that the death was not from natural causes. I told him about the woman's “friend” and a group of thugs who, though they said they were from an airline, had really been sent to get the body, and how the woman had become suspicious and now had to find out the truth because the cover-up could involve a threat to national security. Through the entire story he nodded and cocked his head with interest.
“What do you think?” I asked when I’d concluded.
He tapped his tapered fingers on the table.
“I like it,” he said after a few seconds. “I could buy all that happening. And it’s fun and silly—like Sex and The City meets The Women’s Murder Club.”
“I hope I told it well,” I went on. “It just sort of came to me, you know? Maybe it was the sexy book we read and then, of course, I met you and the idea of detective fiction was running around my brain. I couldn’t actually write it. But you know, you could.” The sun was streaming in through Peet’s windows, but it wasn’t the sun, so much as the telling of the story, that was making me perspire. I blotted my brow as demurely as I could with a napkin.
His eyes narrowed and he studied me. It was the first time I felt that the sexual element of our interaction was not a factor. He was weighing what I’d said along with how I’d said it. Though I sort of missed the sexual undercurrent, it was nice that he was taking me seriously.
“I could . . . ,” he mused, still assessing me, which made me want to fidget. “Why’d you pitch me that story if you weren’t going to write or produce it yourself? This is Hollywood.”
I shrugged. “And that means . . . what?”
“It means you don’t just give a good story away. Didn’t you tell me you have a friend who’s a talent agent? Yes, you did tell me that. She was supposed to meet you at Babeland to help you shop for a vibrator.”
“Shhhh. Not so loud.”
“Sorry.”
I really like it when a guy can apologize and make me believe him. “Accepted. Anyway, ideas are a dime a thousand. It’s all about the execution.”
“Of course . . . but I still feel like you’re leaving something out.” He sat back scrutinizing me.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re leaving something out.”
“I’m not. It’s just a story that sort of landed on my
lap. I thought you might need one. New writer, new genre and all.”
“Very generous.” He wasn’t buying it. “You called me and drove in from—where was it? Agoura? To meet up and tell me this story?”
“Not just that. It’s . . .”
It wasn’t just that, of course. I liked Cullen and he was an attractive guy. But the main reason I was meeting with him was I wanted to run Jelicka’s idea by him. He was objective, or someone whom I thought was objective. And I needed an unbiased, undramatic opinion to help me decide what to do. After all, it might be dangerous.
“I’d consider writing it, but there’s just one thing—” He stopped and took my hand. “This woman in the story—she’s you, right? I mean, you’re the one who read the sexy book. In fact, I think you told me about it.”
I didn’t want to look at him. He’d seen right through me. I had to treat him like a party in a mediation. “I did read a sexy book. That’s true.”
“Your hands are shaking.”
I looked down and noticed my hands were shaking. I clasped them together on the table in front of me to steady them. Then he put his own hands on top of mine. They provided cool comfort and strength.
“For all I know,” he went on almost wistfully, “when I met you, you were already reading that racy book. If that friend’s philandering husband hadn’t come into the wine bar, you and I might have gotten together, but instead—and I’m not saying anything about what happened was wrong—but instead, you went to this other friend’s dinner party and met a sexy Israeli spy and the rest, including the spy, is history.”
Cullen was no pile o’rocks. That’s why I’d liked him in the first place. And he was funny. But it was clear I wasn’t going to get anything past him.
“You’re right,” I said, staring into his welcoming eyes. “I’m the woman. But timing’s everything, right? I don’t know why Nate walked in that evening, but he did.”
Cullen sat back, pensive, taking his hands from mine.
“What was his name? This Mossad guy?”
“Udi.”
Cullen nodded.
“He had another name, but we’re not sure what it was.”
He looked up at me as if considering his options. “So as things turned out, you didn’t need to get that Rabbit after all.”
“Well, I didn’t need it. I mean, when I met Udi . . .” How to get out of this? I took a breath to regroup. “It's a nice thing to have.”
He nodded again. He seemed to be wrestling with some changed view of me. I thought he even appeared a little hurt.
“I’ll probably get it out again soon,” I said, finishing the thought, “just to try to take my mind off things.”
He scrunched up his face in concentration then dove to the floor for his messenger bag. My last comment hadn’t even registered. Guess I’d been wrong about hurting him.
“OK,” he said, pulling out a yellow legal pad. “Tell me the whole story again from the beginning, with as much detail as you can remember. Just leave out the graphic sex descriptions of you and the other guy, if you don’t mind.”
So I told him everything again, just as he’d requested, from the very beginning, trying not to leave anything out. From reading Deliciously Disturbed to Berggren’s dinner party, to what she’d told me about Nissim and Udi meeting in the army, through Nissim and his associates taking Udi’s body away and Jelicka’s subsequent wild speculations—all of it with as much detail as I could recall, though I’d probably left something out. I told him everything except, of course, the intimate sexual details, per his instructions.
And as fast as I could talk, Cullen was taking it all down, every word of it, with great solemnity, legitimizing and elevating what I’d considered Jelicka’s delusional musings into the realm of possibility.
Chapter 25
“Just because Cullen thinks your scenario is plausible doesn’t mean that’s what really happened,” I told Jelicka the following morning. “The fact is, we may never know why Udi died or why Nissim and his thug associates came to take him away.”
I’d agreed to meet her at the Century City Mall before my mediation session for a little shoe shopping at Bloomingdale’s, followed by lunch and non-alcoholic margaritas at Pink Taco—a restaurant named after a woman’s labia. I was slightly put off about eating there, for obvious reasons, but Jelicka said it was fun, so I agreed— at least they hadn’t called it Beef Curtain.
“Yay, and say unto him, I speaketh the truth,” said Jelicka, mocking me and the Bible as she opened a shoebox, picked up one of the Louboutin metallic flats inside, then dropped it back in dismissively.
“It still could be very untrue,” I went on, slipping my foot into the fourth pair of boring black work pumps I’d tried on so far—these with a low cut opening that revealed my toe cleavage. “There is no evidence that Udi died of anything other than natural causes.”
I didn’t want to totally twist her knickers because the whole thing with Udi had taken her mind off Roscoe and she was relishing her role as crime solver extraordinaire, but I still didn’t think it was good for her continued existence to be entertaining the idea of exposing a murder plot involving the Mossad.
“You’re not thinking, Maddie. It appears nefarious and it is. You’re still too upset to fully grasp what I’m saying.” She assessed the shoes. “I like those on you. They make your ankles look sexy.”
“Stop saying I’m too upset to know what I’m talking about. I really liked Udi, but it wasn’t love.”
“How do you know it wasn’t love?” Jelicka had an almost ingenuous expression on her face—like she’d lost her definition of love and needed a new one. I could relate. Love had become mysterious and inexplicable.
“It was lust,” I said. “He didn’t live here and he would never move here, so I knew going in that there were limitations. I really couldn’t fall in love with him.”
“Sorry, but that’s bullshit,” Jelicka said with conviction. “You fall in love with who you fall in love with. It doesn’t matter where they live. You can feed yourself any line of crap you want, but falling in love is out of your hands, girl.”
She was right, of course, though we still hadn’t come up with a definition of love we could agree on.
“OK, then, how about this? I was protecting myself from falling in love because Udi was unavailable and younger than I.” I sounded like a shrink. I probably could have used a good shrink.
“That’s still crap,” she said. “But at least it’s honest. Now, when this is all over, I’ll help you find a more appropriate love interest.”
I opened another shoebox—a pair of black pumps exactly like every other pair of black pumps. “I can’t shop for shoes right now. Let’s eat.”
“How’s it going with Roscoe and the divorce?” I asked once we were seated in our booth at Pink Taco. The restaurant was as pink as Babeland had been, which was appropriate, considering its namesake.
“Horrible, but there are no more tears left—I’ve cried enough. It's time to move past all that and own my anger, you know? I hired a shark lawyer a few days ago, so I feel pretty good, actually. Of course, the Xanax isn't hurting.”
“Here’s to moving on,” I said, laughing and lifting my non-alcoholic margarita in toast.
There we were, both of us enduring major upheavals in our lives, toasting ourselves on a weekday afternoon—granted with virgin drinks. Other women might be kicked to the gutter and stay there after getting dumped or having a lover die on top of them, but neither Jelicka nor I would be kept down for long, with or without pharmacological assistance.
Our glasses clinked and Jelicka took her first sip.
“I need the tequila,” she said. “Where’s our waiter?” She stood up and waved at the first cute guy she saw in an apron.
“So what’s the next step?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“With our investigation.”
“We don’t have an investi— I don’t know what the next step i
s,” I said. “I don’t think there should even be a next step. It’s too dangerous.”
“Once we get the government involved, you’ll see this isn’t some idle hunch.”
“We are not doing that!” I caught myself behaving in a manner unbecoming a mediator and brought my voice under control. “You mean the U.S. government?”
“Of course. They’ll want to know. We’re doing a service for our country.”
“No,” I said as firmly as I could. “There’s no evidence.”
“OK, then we’ll get some evidence. We just need to probe a little further. That’s how we’re going to find this evidence you say we need. Then we’ll call the government. What did Berggren say?”
“About what?”
“About Udi and his friend and everything? Did she tell you anything juicy?”
“Well, I didn’t want her to suspect I was digging, you know, so I just sort of asked some general questions. But she’s having a dinner party on Saturday night and I’m going. I’m hoping to find out more.” I most definitely was not going to mention the word assassin at this point.
She sat back, thinking, her eyes squinting as if she were looking very far away.
“What?” I asked with a certain modicum of dread.
“Did she invite the friend?”
“Nissim? I don’t know. Why?”
“Because if we could find out where he lives and we could get him out of his house and over to, say, Berggren’s house, then we could go through his stuff—see what we find. Get some evidence.”
I’d already thought of that, despite my better judgment. In fact, it was my plan to get Nissim’s address just in case the recent events came back to haunt me, but I didn’t see the wisdom in telling Jelicka any of this. “If Nissim is a spy," I said, "don’t you think he’d have his house rigged with all kinds of cameras and things? There could even be an explosive device or something triggered to go off when somebody opens the door.”
“Maybe we’ll wear disguises.”
“A lot of good disguises are going to do if we get blown up. You’re acting like you’re in some movie that we already know ends happily,” I told her. “We don’t have an ending, and if it turns out there really was a crime committed, then you— me or we—might end up very dead, just like Udi. And please can we leave the other Muffs out of this?”
The Muffia Page 17