Murder Plays House

by Ayelet Waldman

  A bulletin board hung crookedly on the wall, and I winced at the hole I was sure the nail had made in the thick, creamy plaster. The board was full of what appeared to be fan mail, much of it in the ornate curliques of young girls’ handwriting. I stood up on my tiptoes to read one of the letters, but Kat stopped me.

  “Come on,” she said. “Don’t be so nosy.”

  I flushed. That’s certainly one of my worst qualities. Or best, if you consider my job.

  “She must be an actress,” I said.

  “Probably.”

  “With a knack for self-promotion. And a really good website.”

  Kat shrugged, not particularly interested, and led the way down the small hallway next to the kitchen. We walked into a surprisingly large bedroom, with French doors opening to the garden. Dappled light shining through the windows illuminated the piles of clothes and gave the veneer of dust on every surface a golden luminescence.

  “Pig,” Kat said.

  “Yeah, but it’s a gorgeous room anyway, don’t you think?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Is that the shower running?” I asked, but Kat had already pulled open the door to the bathroom and begun to scream.

  Two

  ALICIA Felix’s was not the first dead body I’d ever seen, but I think it would take years of experience in crime-scene investigation before one became inured to the sight of a naked woman slumped against the wall of her bathtub, her chest and belly defaced with a scrawl of stab wounds. I reached the bathroom door in time to catch Kat as she tottered backwards. I held my friend up with one arm as I stared at the grim scene in the small, white-tiled room. Kat sagged against me, her face buried in her hands, her chest heaving. I looked at the dead woman for only a moment, but what I saw seared itself into my memory. This was a hideously violent murder. The poor woman’s torso had been hacked and torn, nearly shredded. Her wide-open eyes had a milky quality, as though a haze had lowered over them as life seeped away. Her body looked rigid, almost like a grotesque statue, particularly around the neck and jaw. Her skin was mottled; above the flesh was white and waxy, but what I could see of the bottom was purple, the color of a deep bruise. Postmortem lividity, the pooling and settling of the blood in response to gravity. The shower was still running, washing her body with a constant stream, and thus there was very little blood spilled anywhere at all. I could see only the smallest smudge just underneath the woman’s shoulders and neck, which were bent to one side by the protruding taps of the shower.

  What made the starkest impression on me, however, was not so much what had been done to her, although that was certainly awful, it was rather the shape of the woman’s body. She was, in a word, emaciated. Her legs were long and horribly thin, withered as if by a wasting disease. Her knees bulged larger than her thighs, contrasting starkly with her skin-draped femur and tibia bones. Her ribs and the gullies between them were clearly visible even despite the stab wounds. Her clavicles stood out from her neck, nearly framing her bony jaw. The only hint of fleshiness about her body was the one breast, the right, that had not been horrifically mutilated. It sat, perfectly round, obviously fake, in the brutalized expanse of her chest.

  I slowly backed out of the doorway, pushing Kat behind me. I settled her on the edge of the bed, but then remembered that the room was a crime scene. The whole house was one, and Kat and I had wandered through it freely, stomping across the floors and carpets, handling everything, probably obliterating all signs of the murderer. I grasped Kat more firmly around the shoulders, heaved her off the bed, and together we stumbled out to the courtyard. I sat her down in one of the wrought-iron lounge chairs in the garden. She leaned her head back on the white muslin cushion, her eyes still closed. I don’t think she had opened them since she’d first seen the body. I reached into my purse, pulled out my cell phone, and dialed 911. Then I called Al. He asked no questions, just took down the address and hung up the phone.

  Kat and I sat in silence while we waited for the police to arrive. A gnarled and lush jasmine vine grew up a trellis nailed to the side of the guesthouse, and the air was redolent with the blossoms’ heady fragrance. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, relishing the smell, the steady beat of my heart, and the sun warming my flushed cheeks. It felt, for a moment, as if Kat and I were ensconced on a tiny island of sweet-smelling tranquility, the twittering of birds and the steady hum of our breath the only sound that disturbed the silence.

  In a few minutes, however, I heard the faint shriek of police sirens, and got up to open the front door to the four uniformed officers that were the first of the hordes that soon invaded; their loud voices, heavy footsteps, and barking radios banishing every trace of that odd moment of serenity.

  THE supervising detective seemed a bit taken aback at the sight of two heavily pregnant women rolling around in the middle of his crime scene. In addition to asking us the same long series of questions about who we were, what we were doing there, and what we had seen, that we had already answered for the uniformed officers who arrived first on the scene, and again for the detectives who had shown up fifteen minutes later, he grilled us about how we knew each other, even going so far as to request a description of the prenatal yoga class in which we’d met. I watched him carefully jot down the name and address of the yoga studio, and did my best not to express frustration at the thoroughness of his inquisition. This was, after all, his job. He had no way of knowing at this stage of the investigation what clues, what individuals, would come to be important. Kat and I, as the discoverers of the body, were, of course, his first and so far only possible suspects.

  I was in the middle of recounting, for the third time, what we had been doing in the house, when Al arrived.

  My partner walked into the yard, flanked by police officers. One of them, a grizzled man who seemed too old to be a cop at all, let alone a uniformed officer, called out to the detective, “Hey, this is Al Hockey. He used to be on the job. He knows the redhead.”

  I gave Al a relieved smile, and he winked at me. He extended his hand to the detective, whose brusque manner had already begun to dissipate.

  “My partner giving you some trouble?” Al asked.

  “Your partner?” the detective said.

  “I’ve been doing some private security work since I retired. Juliet works with me.”

  “Al left kicking and screaming,” the older officer said. “Bullet took him out, but he’d still be here if it weren’t for that.”

  The detective nodded. “I’m about done with my questions,” he began. Just then, we were interrupted by a piercing shriek.

  “What’s going on here? What are you all doing here?” A small woman with pitted olive skin meticulously covered by a smooth sheen of expensive make-up, was standing in the French doors, hands on her hips, her face twisted into an anxious scowl. “What happened?” she yelled.

  The detective heaved himself laboriously to his feet and walked over to the woman. At the sound of her voice, Kat had finally roused herself from her stupor. She had not been able to answer the police officers’ questions with much more than whispered monosyllables, and I was worried that she was in some kind of shock. Now, she glanced over at the woman and groaned, “Oh, God.”

  “What? Who is that?”

  “My mother-in-law.”

  Nahid Lahidji’s eyes were hidden behind a vast pair of Jackie O sunglasses, but she certainly didn’t seem old enough to be Kat’s husband’s mother. She had the clothes for it, though. She looked exactly like what she was, a fabulously successful Beverly Hills real estate agent. Her trim body was encased in a chartreuse Chanel suit with large gold buttons and matching stiletto pumps. Her black hair was sprayed into a bobbed helmet, and her diamond earrings flashed in the sun. Her thin wrists were heavy with bracelets and bangles, and her lipstick was fire-engine red.

  Mrs. Lahidji blew by the detective as if she hadn’t even noticed his presence. “Katayoun! What’s happened here? Why are the police here? What have you done?”

 
“What?” I asked, dumbfounded at the absurd accusation. I turned back to Kat, expecting her to blow up at this tiny, designer-clad, green goblin, only to see her close her eyes once again.

  “Katayoun! I’m talking to you!” the woman said sharply.

  By now the detective had caught up with her. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said, “I’m going to have to ask you a few questions.”

  She spun on one elegantly appointed heel. “One minute. I’m talking to my daughter-in-law!”

  “Mrs. Lahidji,” I interrupted. “I’m Juliet Applebaum, and Kat was showing me the house. I’m afraid we found a body in the guesthouse.”

  “A body!” she shrieked. “The house isn’t even on the market yet!”

  I was not quite sure what to make of that comment. Was it standard procedure to dump a body only after the house had an official MLS listing?

  The detective finally managed to refocus Kat’s mother-in-law’s attention on him.

  “Ma’am?” he said. “I’ll need to know your name.”

  “My name?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Nahid Lahidji. And who might you be?”

  The cop identified himself and asked her whether she knew the name of the deceased.

  She replied, “A woman? Blond? Fake boobs?”

  “Well, I, uh, I couldn’t make a definitive call about the breast implants,” he said, looking a little embarrassed. “But yes, a blond woman.”

  “In the guesthouse?” Nahid barked.

  He nodded.

  “Then it must be the owner’s sister. God knows there wouldn’t be any reason for another woman to be on the property.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “Of course I do. This is my listing!”

  “Nahidjoon, please.” Kat whispered. Nahid paid not the slightest attention to her.

  “Ma’am?” the detective asked softly, almost tentatively. Why, I wondered, did the man seem so utterly cowed by this miniature tyrant?

  “Felix, like her brother. Her first name is Alicia. She’s an actress.”

  Three

  I felt terrible leaving Kat in the clutches of her terrifying mother-in-law, but by the time the detectives released us I was desperate to get home. I’d called Peter and asked him to pick Ruby up from school, and had found out that Isaac’s stomach flu had returned with a vengeance. I hated the idea of Peter taking him out, even just to do a carpool run, but not even Al could convince the detective that I was needed at home. In fact, he didn’t intimidate the supervising detective anywhere near as much as the diminutive Nahid Lahidji did. It was Kat’s mother-in-law who got us sprung. After she had engaged in a conversation with the detective in which she’d asked as many questions as she’d answered, she turned to me.

  “Business card,” she snapped.

  “Excuse me?” I said. By then I’d become as silent as Kat.

  “Give me your business card. And your driver’s license, too.”

  I proffered the requested documents wordlessly.

  “Katayoun!” she said. Kat roused herself, reached into her purse, and handed Nahid her wallet. The older woman rummaged through it, tsking at the jumble of cards and bills until she found Kat’s driver’s license. She then reached into her trim gold purse and pulled out a sparking card case. She snapped it open, removed a thick business card printed on creamy ochre paper, tapped all the cards into a neat pile, and handed them to the detective.

  “Check the names against the licenses,” she said. “And then we’re leaving. My daughter-in-law and her friend need to get home. As you can see, they are both in a delicate physical condition.”

  The detective leafed through the small stack of documents and then handed our driver’s licenses back to us. “We’ll be needing to talk to you again,” he said.

  “Of course,” I replied.

  “We’ll see,” Nahid said. She poked Kat and said, “Katayoun. Up. We’re going home.”

  Kat struggled to her feet, and I reached out a hand to help her. She shook her head at me, rubbed her eyes once, and then stood up. “I’m okay. Nahidjoon, I’m fine.”

  Nahid clucked her tongue. Then she turned back to the detective. “I assume when you’re done here you’ll clean up after yourself. I’m planning an open house for next week, and I can’t have you making a disgusting mess here.”

  His jaw dropped, but by then the woman had spun on her heels and was halfway across the yard to the outside gate, dragging my friend along behind her.

  I turned to Al, expecting him to escort me out, but he shook his head slightly. “I’m going to hang out here for a while,” he whispered to me. “See if I can’t get in to see the body. You go on.”

  Kat and her mother-in-law had already driven away by the time I got out to the front of the house, and it was a moment before I remembered that I’d left my car in the parking lot at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Nahid had hustled Kat into her own car, and Kat’s Mercedes was still on the street in front of the house. I debated waiting for Al to drive me, but, it wasn’t more than a fifteen or twenty minute walk home. In the middle of the trek, I realized that while I’d routinely walked dozens of blocks when I lived in New York City, since Peter and I had transplanted ourselves to the City of Angels—and of SUVs—my walking had been pretty much limited to trips to and from various parking lots, and the odd, desperate perambulation with a stroller, trying to convince a crying baby to nod off. I’d certainly never attempted a mile or so in this late stage of pregnancy. But the walk, or should I say waddle, was good for me. By the time I got home, I had managed to calm myself down sufficiently to fool the kids, if not my husband. We spent what remained of the afternoon playing Chutes and Ladders. Peter seemed to understand that I wasn’t in any shape to be alone, so he hung out with me and the kids. He hadn’t cleaned up the bathroom after Isaac’s latest adventure in emesis, but only because we have always had an unofficial division of labor that makes disposing of the children’s various effluvia my purview. There are other household unpleasantnesses my husband assumes responsibility for, including dealing with the cars, plumbing problems, and his mother. Trust me, it’s an even trade.

  It was only after we got the kids to bed that I could collapse on the couch and recount to my husband the horror that I’d witnessed.

  “So the shower didn’t have any effect on the progress of the rigor?” Peter said, when I was done describing the state of the actress’s body.

  “Peter!” I said.

  “What? It might come in handy some day.”

  I shook my head. You’d think after eight years of marriage I’d be used to my husband’s voracious appetite for the disgusting detail.

  He suddenly seemed to remember that we were talking about a real person, and not one of his celluloid corpses. He reached an arm around me and snuggled me closer to him.

  “It was pretty awful,” I said, leaning my head against his chest. “Mrs. Lahidji said the woman was an actress. Alicia Felix. I’ve never heard of her, have you?”

  He shook his head. Then he reached under the couch and pulled out the laptop he’d stashed there when I’d walked in the door. I had pretended not to notice that he had been sitting on the couch playing on his computer while the kids wrestled on the carpet, and I didn’t comment now. He tapped on the computer for a while. Peter had set us up with an Airport, so we could get a wireless connection to the Internet from anywhere in the house.

  “Here she is,” he said. “I found her on TV-Phile.”

  I lifted my head and looked at the screen.

  The headshot that decorated Alicia Felix’s page on TV-Phile.com, a website devoted to the minutiae of canceled television shows and former personalities, was the same one I had seen in her apartment. It showed a gamine-faced blond woman with a thick head of tousled hair and a pout that somehow managed to look both sexy and innocent at the same time.

  Alicia had an impressive list of television credits. She had appeared in guest roles on almost every major sitcom and dram
a in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She had even had a recurring role in a short-lived drama that I remembered watching when I was in law school. It had featured a cast of stunningly attractive prosecuting attorneys, and a few of us had gathered weekly to watch the show in the student lounge. We weren’t fans; rather our purpose was to jeer with our newfound expertise at the glaring errors and misrepresentations in the cases on the television lawyers’ make-believe dockets. I couldn’t honestly remember this Alicia; there had been too many young blond females in the cast.

  Beyond the early 1990s, there were fewer and fewer entries for Alicia. The last listing was in 1997: she had had nothing since.

  “What happened after 1997?” I asked Peter.

  “Maybe she moved into film.” He clicked over to the part of the site devoted to filmographies. Inputing Alicia Felix’s name resulted in no hits.

  “Does that mean she didn’t do any movies? Do they have every single actor listed online? Or could she have had some small roles that don’t show up?” I asked.

  Peter wrinkled his forehead. “I think the site is pretty thorough. I mean, I know that the casting agents on our movies use it to dredge up information even on the most unknown person who auditions for us. I think this has got to mean she never made a movie.”

  “Huh.” I leaned back on the couch and heaved my legs into his lap, pushing aside the computer. “Will you rub my feet, sweetie? Is helps me think.”

  Peter lifted my left foot. “It’s like a little, tiny sausage bursting out of its casing,” he said, poking the swollen skin. His finger left an indentation on my ankle.