Christietown

by Susan Kandel

  Which one was the bride?

  Trick question.

  The bride would be the one with the hope shining in her eyes.

  Agatha hurried on. It was getting late. One last stop and she’d be finished. The bell on the door tinkled as she entered the small, perfumed space. The saleswoman ushered her into a private room.

  An hour later Agatha emerged with the precious package. At last she’d found it: a smart, two-piece outfit with a wide collar and a striped cloche hat to match. She’d wear it with her fur-trimmed coat, a double strand of pearls around her neck, black gloves, champagne-colored stockings, and sleek black shoes.

  She’d look lovely in person, and even better in the photographs.

  CHAPTER 43

  mnesia saved Agatha Christie’s life. Only by forgetting who she was—and what she’d done—could she face herself in the mirror.

  How well I understood.

  I came home, turned on the lights, and took a seat on the living room sofa.

  I was waiting for Gambino.

  Maybe we could go out for dinner and a movie. It was Saturday night, after all. Romance was in the air. Except that I knew Gambino wasn’t coming home. There’d be a message about a late meeting, a department emergency, a new witness who needed to be interviewed.

  I rubbed my hands together. They were as dry as bones.

  One way or another, I was going to be alone.

  I went into my bedroom and took off my borrowed dress. It had to go back to Bridget’s first thing Monday morning. I shook it out, hung it up, and wrapped it in plastic. Then I pulled on some jeans, washed my face, and went out to the office.

  The Secret Adversary.

  I pulled a paperback off my shelf and sat down at the desk.

  The Secret Adversary was Agatha’s second book, written in 1922, just four years before her disappearance.

  The Secret Adversary is about amnesia.

  Of course, all mysteries are about forgetting. Clues, suspects, motives, opportunities: the author lays them out before you, then tricks you into forgetting what you know. By the end of the book, with the revelation of the guilty party, your memories suddenly come flooding back. How could I have missed that? How did I not notice her? The answer is simple: you knew there’d be no pleasure in remembering too soon.

  The Secret Adversary was the first of the Tommy and Tuppence mysteries.

  Thomas (Tommy) Beresford and Prudence (Tuppence) Cowley are two young adventurers for hire. Willing to do anything, go anywhere. Pay must be good. No unreasonable offer refused. Tommy has a shock of slicked-back red hair and a pleasantly ugly face. Tuppence, a black bob and uncommonly dainty ankles. Agatha always complained of people assuming they were idealized versions of herself and Archie.

  But art doesn’t always imitate life.

  It’s often the other way around.

  Tommy and Tuppence’s first case was to find the mysterious Jane Finn.

  Poor Jane Finn. She had survived the torpedoing and sinking of the Lusitania only to be given the unwelcome task of guarding an oilskin packet containing top-secret papers crucial to the Allied cause. When the bad guys eventually caught up with her (as bad guys inevitably do), they discovered she had substituted blank pages for the vital documents. Fearful of being tortured until she revealed their true whereabouts, Jane

  Finn came upon the idea of losing her memory.

  Jane Finn faked a case of amnesia.

  If she didn’t know who she was, she didn’t have anything to tell.

  If she didn’t know who she was, nothing and no one could hurt her.

  “I think I almost hypnotized myself,” she said, explaining her ruse to Tommy and Tuppence. “After a while, I almost forgot that I was really Jane Finn.”

  Jane Finn feigned amnesia to protect herself from harm.

  Agatha Christie feigned amnesia to protect herself from the knowledge of what she’d done.

  But wasn’t it Archie who had done something to her? Wasn’t he the one who had betrayed her?

  No.

  That wasn’t the way Agatha saw it.

  She was a woman of her time, a woman for whom love was paramount, a woman who—despite all her accomplishments—had no greater aspiration than that of being some good man’s good wife.

  She and Archie divorced. Agatha married again. She and Max Mallowan had a happy life together. They traveled the world, they wrote books—Agatha, mysteries, Max, archaeological treatises. But Archie was always the one.

  After her death, her writing case was opened and inside was the wedding ring Archie had given her.

  If only she’d been cleverer, she wrote in her autobiography, “if I had known more about my husband, had troubled to know more about him, instead of being content to idealize him and consider him more or less perfect, then perhaps I might have avoided all this. I must in some way have been inadequate to fill Archie’s life.”

  Agatha saw the failure of the marriage as her own. She was furious with herself. She needed to punish herself, mostly for the intensity of her rage. She couldn’t live with her anger, couldn’t bear her dashed hopes.

  Amnesia was the perfect vehicle.

  She hadn’t so much faked it as willed it into being.

  There were so many things she needed to forget:

  That she’d run away to hurt him.

  That she’d appropriated his lover’s name to spite him.

  That she’d carried poison to threaten him.

  And that she’d schemed to look beautiful so that when he finally found her, he’d understand what he was giving up. And maybe—if the stars were on her side—he’d change his mind.

  Oh, my god.

  Liz.

  I was coming to the end of the story, when the guilty party is revealed.

  And right on cue, my memories were starting to flood back.

  CHAPTER 44

  unday morning, the sky was dark and angry. Rain had fallen all night and from the looks of it was going to keep falling all day.

  As predicted, I woke up alone.

  Gambino had called around midnight, saying he had something to take care of out in Orange and an early meeting downtown in the morning. It made sense for him to stay over at Tico’s.

  I held the phone to my chest for a minute, listening to the rain hammering on the roof, the blood roaring in my ears.

  Then I got back on the line.

  I told him I understood.

  We agreed to meet at Wren’s preliminary hearing at five thirty. Gambino knew the judge. She was a decent person, he said. She’d treat Wren fairly. Still, I had my work cut out for me.

  I braced myself, then opened my closet door. Half a dozen winter hats, a pair of suede mukluks with rabbit-fur pompoms, and a cheongsam fell at my feet.

  A closet like mine is not for the faint of heart.

  One good thing: I’d found my eighties fuchsia spike-heeled ankle boots with the barely noticeable scratches.

  Also my high-collared Victorian lace blouse, which was back in style, worn with jeans to counteract the Little Bo Peep effect.

  Oh, dear, I thought, spying my ice blue satin blazer and matching velvet skirt crumpled in a heap. Would Kim Novak have done that to the suit she was planning to wear at cocktail hour? I think not.

  I picked up the woebegone goods and searched in vain for an empty hanger. Hangers were the whole problem. No, the whole problem was the unfortunate confluence between my primitive need to hoard and the puny space I had to work with. I threw the lot on the bed. Focus. My goal here was to remember what I’d been wearing last week when I’d gone over to Lou’s to pay a condolence call.

  It was a Sunday. Most people dress down on Sundays. Not me. I remember wondering if I should wear black, and then deciding to go the opposite route. A cherry-red tiered dress with a plum cropped wool jacket and matching plum lace-up boots. Edwardian hippie. Bright and cheerful. The life-affirming qualities of fruit. All of which meant—yes!—that I’d carried my black suede handbag with the p
urple and brown polka dots. And there it was. I grabbed it from the pile and sat down on my bed to go through its contents.

  My wallet, keys, sunglasses, and Advil travel day to day from purse to purse, but the miscellaneous stuff tends to accumulate at the bottom of each one until panic overwhelms me and I dump the collective effluvia onto the floor. Most of it winds up in the trash. But sometimes I find good stuff, like forgotten twenty-dollar bills. Well, once I did.

  I sifted through the garbage in the polka-dotted purse— pennies, cash-register receipts, eyedrops, cough drops, crumpled tissues, stray magazine subscription cards.

  Then I found it.

  I brandished the piece of paper like it was a winning lottery ticket.

  Liz Berman’s to-do list.

  Lou had discovered it in the glove compartment of Liz’s car. He couldn’t bear to look at it, so he’d shoved it at me and I’d stuffed it in my purse.

  Many moons ago, I was one of those people who make to-do lists. But I was always so depressed at the end of the day when confronted with how little I’d actually accomplished that I’d started cheating. I’d erase items I’d never gotten to. Or add items expressly for the purpose of ex-ing them out: take shower, feed dog, check messages. It was self-defeating, yes.

  Liz used a blue ballpoint pen. Her handwriting slanted to the left, which is the sign of a detail-oriented individual.

  The first item on her to-do list read “mani/pedi.” Even Bridget had noticed Liz’s ratty fingernails when Liz stopped by the shop to try on Miss Marple outfits. But I remembered the blood-red talons from that last day at Christietown. Liz had definitely gotten to item number one.

  Item number two was “call Wren.” About what? There were all those little jobs Wren had complained about. Or was it something to do with the affair? Liz had slapped Wren; Silvana had seen it. Liz knew what was going on. Was she calling to tell Wren to back off ? Or to apologize?

  The third item said “Lola’s.” Maybe Liz had a friend named Lola. Someone she might have visited that last week? Someone she might have confided in? Of course, I had no way of knowing when exactly she’d written this list. Lou had given me the impression that it was recent, but there was no certainty of that. I gave him a quick call, but he was out.

  Item number four: “R. Ackroyd.” Roger Ackroyd. The one with the trick ending. Lou said Liz had gone through everything Agatha Christie had ever written. Certainly she would have read Christie’s most famous book. There were two deaths in this book, which is about the average: a widow dead from an overdose of veronal, and Roger Ackroyd, who’d hoped to marry her, dead the following night, a knife in his back. Nothing in the story, however, is precisely the way it seems: suicides that are not suicides, lovers who are not lovers. Maybe Liz wanted to reread it. Maybe she saw it as some kind of commentary on her own mixed-up life.

  Then something occurred to me.

  Maybe Lola wasn’t a friend.

  Maybe Lola’s was a place.

  There were a million people named Lola in Los Angeles.

  But there couldn’t be that many places with that name.

  I pulled out the stack of phone books. I swear that one got dumped at my door every day, each more useless than the next. The one on the top was a White Pages serving “Hollywood, West Hollywood, Los Feliz, and Los Angeles (portions of ),” which could mean just about anywhere. I went straight for the Ls.

  There was a Layla’s Bead Shop on Third Street. A Lolita’s on Yucca. A Lulu’s Alibi on Sawtelle.

  No Lola’s.

  I went through three more White Pages to no avail, each covering various overlapping subsets of greater Los Angeles. But I wasn’t ready to give up.

  There was still the mighty Yellow Pages to conquer.

  Half an hour and three Yellow Pages later, I’d come up with the following:

  Lola’s the restaurant.

  Lola’s the pet groomer’s.

  Lola’s the stationery store.

  Lola’s the wig shop.

  This time, I knew exactly where I was going.

  CHAPTER 45

  he thing about Los Angeles is, nobody knows how to

  drive in the rain.

  Grown men swerve to avoid puddles, soccer moms inch along like turtles, old ladies gun across three-way intersections, distracted by their windshield-wiper settings. It’s enough to make you nostalgic for Jersey.

  Sundays are good because nobody’s on the road. Even in the pouring rain, it took me less than five minutes to get to the strip mall on La Cienega and San Vicente, kitty-corner from the hulking Beverly Center.

  I parked the car underground, then walked up the ramp past the Thai restaurant, the acupuncture studio, and the Payless shoe store until I was standing directly in front of Lola’s Wigs.

  The rain-spattered window reminded me of Forest Lawn Cemetery, with its Gothic black lettering and dusty garlands of plastic flowers. This was the place old hairdos went to die: Veronica Lake’s peekaboo waves; Joey Heatherton’s feathery bob; Angie Dickinson’s cotton-candy page boy. Inside, you could barely see through the clouds of hairspray. My contacts immediately started to sting.

  “May I help you.” It was less a question than a statement. A beautifully dressed Asian woman stood behind the counter. An Asian man—dapper, with a thin mustache—nodded his head.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Maybe in a minute.” I went over to the corner, and fished around in my purse for some eye-drops. After making a mess of my makeup, I slipped on my sunglasses.

  “Take your time, miss,” said the man. “Lots of styles, colors. My wife and I can help you find the one that’s right for you. Please put your umbrella over here.” He indicated a Hello Kitty receptacle that had two Burberry plaid umbrellas in it already.

  I deposited my cheapie collapsible and had a look around. There were many disembodied heads, all staring at me, their wide-open eyes fringed with dark lashes, their lips glossy and beckoning. Join us, they murmured. Liberate yourself from the tyranny of your blow-dryer. A shiny, bouncy life can be yours for a mere $89.99.

  I have to admit it was tempting. Platinum corkscrews? An orange-and-yellow-striped bob? Prom queen? Punk rocker? Also short and curly don’t-notice-me wigs in various shades of mousy brown. At the back were the men’s styles: Elvis, Fabio, Charlton Heston as Ben-Hur.

  “We’re having a special on falls,” the man said. “The Look of Love Pony Express line is twenty-five percent off. You’d look good in a bologne curl.”

  I had no idea what a bologne curl was, but I was fairly certain I didn’t want to look or smell like luncheon meat.

  “Great idea,” I said. “Can I try one on?”

  “Two dollars,” said his wife. “We deduct it from the cost of the fall if you buy. Watch out for the bucket over there. Can’t get a roofer now, big pity.”

  I went to sit at a gold-trimmed vanity with hundred-watt bulbs circling the mirror, undoubtedly a fire hazard. Next to me was a heavyset man fiddling with a jet-black toupee. We acknowledged each other, then he swirled spray around his head. I decided to breathe through my mouth.

  The wife came over, and gathered my voluminous locks into her hands. “Big hair,” she said admiringly. “But more is always better.”

  The husband said, “Please remove the sunglasses.” Then he sprayed something pine scented on my head, which had the miraculous effect of tamping down my hair by at least two inches. Far more effective than the pomade I’d used the other day.

  Then the wife handed her husband something that looked like roadkill, which he promptly banana-clipped to the back of my head. He then stuffed my new flat hair into a pocket hanging off the banana clip and stepped back to admire his handiwork.

  “Nice,” said the wife.

  “Very nice,” said her husband.

  The man with the toupee kissed his fingers to his lips.

  I studied myself in the mirror. I looked bald. Bald in the front, with a dead animal in the back.

  “I don’t think the bolog
ne curl works on me,” I said.

  Then I saw it.

  “That’s the one,” I blurted out, pointing to a frizzy red-haired number next to a Dolly Parton.

  “How come that one is so popular all of a sudden?” said the husband, tut-tutting. “We just sold a nice lady the very same one.”

  I knew it.

  “That was my sister,” I said. “It looks so great on her, I want the exact same one.”

  “Then you can do a sister act,” said the wife. “Everybody in

  L.A. wants to be in show business, right?”

  The husband painstakingly de-bologne-curled me while the wife fluffed up the red wig. Then, working in tandem, they stuffed my hair into what looked like a chopped-off pair of control-top panty hose, careful to tuck in the stray pieces. Finally, they put the wig on my head and tugged it into place.

  I looked at myself in the mirror.

  Wren Abbott looked back at me.

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  As I was paying, I asked the wife, “Are you Lola?”

  “Junie,” she replied, handing me my receipt. “There is no

  Lola.”

  The sky was still blackish and forbidding, but the rain had died down. From Lola’s, I took La Cienega up to Beverly, then turned right. At Fairfax, I swung a left and parked on the street in front of a ramshackle orange hut with a sign that had read OKI DOG until the K fell off, long before my time.

  An Oki Dog is two hot dogs in a burrito filled with chili and pastrami. The pastrami is what puts it over the top. Only for teenagers and Tums abusers.

  I crossed against the light and entered Xotx-Tropico.

  Number five on Liz’s to-do list.

  Xotix-Tropico was a small nursery with foliage crawling up the fence and plants and flowers of every imaginable kind crammed and shoved and balanced on corners and shelves and tables along various skinny, dirt-strewn trails. I could hear the traffic on Fairfax, the honking horns and the screeching brakes, but inside, I felt far away from the city.

  The middle aisle led to the greenhouse in the back. It was kind of like taking an around-the-world cruise. Here’s the English countryside, with snapdragons and roses in shades of pink, yellow, white, even lavender. Now the jungle, dripping with palm fronds and Mexican weeping bamboo. Finally the desert, with its spiky succulents. One long table was covered with tiny plastic pots containing miniature cacti. Several looked like organs—livers or kidneys. Others looked like pebbles. You could pick up a pretty moon cactus for about the price of an Oki Dog.