Murder Plays House

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Damn right I would. What, do you want me to take the job? Are you trying to weasel out of our partnership?”

  “No! No!” I said.

  “Good. You’re stuck with me, lady.”

  I smiled and merged back into traffic. After Al and I hung up, I called Peter. The first thing he did was fill me in on the state of the neighbor’s construction.

  “Jackhammering. All day. I’m losing my mind.”

  “I’m so sorry, honey. We’ll move. Soon. I promise.”

  “God, I hope so. Anyway, we’re on our way to the Santa Monica pier to ride the carousel.”

  I was free to continue my perambulations around the city. I’d been sure that my husband would not approve of my plan to investigate Alicia’s murder, but to my surprise he was remarkably easy going about my efforts. He merely wished me luck, and reminded me that my first priority was to find us a new house. I don’t think he thought much of my chances of parlaying an investigation into a house purchase. But he hadn’t been out in the real estate trenches like I had. He didn’t know just how little there was out there.

  I took surface streets over to Franklin’s, hoping that I’d find Moira at work. I debated calling the restaurant first, but decided that the benefit of a surprise appearance outweighed any inconvenience of schlepping all the way to Hollywood. I was more likely to catch Alicia’s friend in a gregarious mood if I caught her unawares.

  Franklin’s is one of those dives that for some reason periodically becomes fashionable among Hollywood’s almost-elite. The place certainly has a seedy charm to it, with the cracked vinyl booths and Formica counter. But the food isn’t much to speak of, and the listless snobbery of the wait staff has always made it and other restaurants of its ilk something of a turnoff to me. It’s not that I don’t feel sorry for the Juilliard and Royal Shakespeare Company graduates who are forced to earn their livings pouring ranch dressing onto iceberg lettuce salads and swabbing countertops with foul-smelling rags. I was a waitress myself, back in my pre-lawyer days. I have nothing but sympathy for food servers. It’s just that I’m never really able to understand why their professional despair need express itself in an ill-concealed disdain for my food choices, my clothes, and me as a person.

  Moira was working, if you could call it that, and more than happy to pull herself a cup of coffee from the vast metal urn and sit with me while I ate my BLT.

  “It’s such a nightmare,” she said, dragging the back of her hand roughly across her eyes. It hadn’t taken much to start her tears flowing. The mere mention of Alicia’s name was enough to jumpstart her grief.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said again, patting her arm with one hand while the other balanced my leaking sandwich. I swabbed at the dripping mayonnaise with my tongue and put the sandwich down. “Had you seen Alicia recently?”

  Moira nodded. “I see her all the time. Like every couple of days. She’s my best friend.” Her tears were flowing thick and fast, now. “God, Aziz, that’s the manager, he’s going to kill me. I’ve been crying pretty much constantly since I found out. The customers aren’t real excited about being waited on by some wailing hag.”

  “You’re not a hag,” I said. “But maybe you should take a little time off. It’s got to be really hard trying to work while you’re feeling this way.”

  “Yeah, that might be nice. But if I don’t work, I don’t eat and I don’t pay the rent, so it’s not like I’ve got a choice.”

  I nodded sympathetically. “It’s not an easy life, acting.”

  “You could say that. Although I’m not really sure I can consider myself an actor anymore. I mean, I haven’t gotten a single part in three years. I’m pretty sure that that makes me just a waitress.”

  “That’s kind of what was going on with Alicia, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded and tucked her stringy blond hair behind her ear. I noticed a fine, white scar extending along her crown and scalp. Had her hair been clean, and not dragged back on her skull, it would have been entirely covered. I’d seen scars like that once before—on Stacy’s mother when she was recuperating at Stacy’s house after one of her many facelifts. Mrs. Holland’s had been red and fiery, but they’d faded over time. Like Moira, she now looked a bit pressed and pulled, but not too bad. The only difference was that my friend’s mother was in her sixties, and Moira was surely not much older than I.

  “It’s just really hard for women in Hollywood,” she said, sighing into her cup of coffee. “A guy is considered young and sexy until he’s, like, seventy. But once a girl hits thirty, things start getting really tough. And my God, don’t even talk to me about forty.” She laughed mirthlessly. “I’ll probably just shoot myself before I get there.”

  It didn’t sound like she was kidding, and I patted her on the arm again. There was no comfort I could provide. She smiled wanly. “I’m okay,” she said. “You know the saddest part? Things were starting to turn around for Alicia.”

  I leaned forward in my seat. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she had this new boyfriend, Charlie Hoynes. Have you heard of him?”

  I shook my head.

  “He’s a producer. Film and television. He’s pretty huge. He’s done lots of things, but what he’s most famous for are those vampire movies. The Blood of Desire series? They started on cable?”

  I’m afraid my familiarity with horror movies borders on the encyclopedic, not a surprise given to whom I’m married. “Those adult ones? Basically soft-core porn?”

  “Exactly. He’s done other features, but the vampire movies are his biggest. Now he’s putting together a one-hour adult drama based on those.”

  “Based on the porn movies?”

  “They aren’t really pornography. Just adult entertainment. I mean, there’s a difference, isn’t there?”

  “I guess so.” Horror movies I can catalogue, but pornography is a bit out of my field.

  She looked defensive. “I don’t think Alicia would have done porn. I mean, I know she wouldn’t have. It’s the fastest way to oblivion. Once you shoot a porno, there’s just no way to get back to mainstream film and TV. So the series must be tamer than the original cable movies were.”

  “She was cast in it?”

  Moira nodded. “All but. I mean, she met Charlie at an open call, and she pretty much started dating him right away. I’m sure he was going to give her a part. I mean, he kind of had to, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so,” I said, no more familiar with the ways of the casting couch than I was with contemporary pornographic cinema.

  I wrote down Charlie Hoynes’s name in my little notebook. “Was that the only iron Alicia had in the fire, do you know?”

  Moira nodded. “Well, I mean, except our improv group. Do you know about that?”

  Suddenly, a dark man with a thick bushy mustache and matching eyebrows appeared at our table. “Moira!” he said. “You are only sitting with customer! You are not working, not at all!”

  She glared at him. “Can’t you see I’m on a break? I’m not some Moroccan slave, Aziz. Here in America we have coffee breaks.” She raised her mug at him and shook it slightly. Coffee slopped over the side and onto her hand. “Ow!” she squawked. “Now look what you made me do!”

  “Oh no, so sorry,” the man said, dabbing at her hand with the damp and dirty dishcloth he held.

  She shook him away and he slunk back in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Sorry,” she said to me.

  “No problem. But if you have to get back to work . . .” my voice trailed off.

  “Oh, please. Like I care what Aziz wants me to do.”

  I felt a pang of pity for the poor, beleaguered Aziz. I wanted to follow him into the back and reassure him that all Americans weren’t as spoiled and ill-mannered as his employees, but I had work to do, and alienating Moira surely wasn’t the best way to elicit information from her.

  “You were telling me about your improv group?”

  “Right. You’ve probably heard of us. T
he Left Coast Players, Spike Steven’s comedy troupe?”

  I smiled noncommittally, and she chose to interpret it as a yes.

  “We’ve been in the LCP for years, Alicia and I. It’s pretty much a feeder program for New York Live. Kind of like Second City in Chicago.”

  “Really?” It had been years since I’d watched the midnight comedy show New York Live, but in college I’d been a devoted fan.

  “Yeah, like half the casts of the first ten years or more of NYL were LCP alumnae. There are a couple of folks on the show right now. Jeff Finkelman. And, well, of course, Julia Brennan. No relation.” It was obvious from her tone that the other Ms. Brennan wasn’t one of Moira’s favorite people.

  “Do you know them?”

  “Who? Jeff and Julia? Sure. We’re really good friends. I mean, Julia’s a nightmare, and Alicia and I hate her, but we’ve been friends for years.”

  Ah, Hollywood, the only place on earth where the definition of ‘friend’ includes someone you’ve hated for years.

  “Why do you guys hate her?”

  Moira opened her mouth to speak, and then snapped it shut. “Look, I can’t talk about it.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “Any of it. Julia, the whole thing. Alicia’s dead, and it doesn’t matter any more. NYL has auditions all the time, and the last thing I need is Julia Brennan finding out I’ve been trashing her.”

  “Moira, your best friend is dead. If we want to find out who did this to her, we’re going to have to ask some really hard questions. Like who might have had a grudge against her. I know you want to protect your chances of getting on the show, but what’s more important; that, or finding Alicia’s murderer?”

  Moira stared into her coffee cup, and I had the sinking suspicion that the answer to that question was not as obvious to her as it was to me.

  She sighed. “You know Julia Brennan’s NYL character, Bingie McPurge?”

  “No,” I said, vaguely horrified.

  “Well, she does this whole bit. Bulimia jokes. Anorexia jokes. Anyway, that’s the character that got her the slot on the show. And it’s incredibly funny. There’s only one problem.”

  “What? The tackiness factor?”

  She smiled politely. “Okay, two problems. The big one, though, is that it’s not Julia’s character.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, she didn’t make it up. Alicia did. Bingie McPurge was Alicia’s character. I mean, that’s not what she called her. Alicia just called hers Mia, but she developed her in the improv group. She performed her in our workshops and on our open mike nights. She made it up, she wrote the jokes. Everything.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. Julia stole the character, and made it on to NYL with it. And we just heard she’s got a movie deal with Fox. Alicia’s Mia is going to be huge, and she is never going to get any credit for it at all.”

  “Was Alicia doing anything about it? Was she going to sue Julia?”

  Moira nodded. “She wanted to. But it’s really hard to get a lawyer in Hollywood to take on a major studio like that. Everyone she talked to told her it was too hard a case to win. But Alicia wasn’t going to give up. She’d never give up. That’s just not the kind of person she was.”

  Moira began crying again, and I gave her a minute. Then I asked, “Moira, was Alicia bulimic?”

  “Oh God, no.”

  “Really?”

  “She’d never make herself throw up like that. Too gross. And you have to binge to purge. Alicia would never allow herself to eat that much.”

  “Was she anorexic?”

  Moira considered the question. “I don’t think so.”

  “Could she have been?”

  She shook her head, but not with any sense of certainty. “Maybe when she was a kid, or something. But not now. Not as an adult. I mean, she was really careful about what she ate—she never ate in front of people, because she thought that was just kind of gross, but she didn’t starve herself or anything.”

  I thought of her emaciated corpse. “Are you sure, Moira? Is there any chance that she was anorexic, and just kept it a secret from you?”

  Moira shook her head again, this time firmly. “No. No, I just don’t believe it. I mean, we were best friends. We knew everything about one another.”

  I nodded. Then I said, “Moira, I hate to even ask this question, but you probably understand why I need to. And I’m sure the cops have asked you, or will ask you already.” I paused.

  “Where was I when Alicia was murdered?”

  I nodded.

  “Right here,” Moira said. “Working with Aziz. Where I always am. Where I’m probably going to be for the rest of my life. In this grease pit with a boss who watches me every goddamn minute of every goddamn day.”

  “You work nights?” I asked.

  “I work all the time. Aziz lets me pull double shifts. It’s the only way I can afford to pay for my apartment, my car, and my answering service. Plus the more I work the more he feels like he owes me, so if I ever do get an audition again he won’t have any choice but to give me time off to take it.”

  “The police will probably want a record of it.”

  “I punch a time clock. They can look at that. And they can talk to old Aziz. He’ll tell them I didn’t do more than walk outside once or twice for a cigarette, if that.”

  “Would you mind if I just checked the time clock? I trust you absolutely, but this way I can just cross you off the file, and make it look like I’m doing my job.” I used my best beleaguered-working-girl voice and topped it off with a ‘you know how it is’ shrug.

  She called Aziz over, and the obviously good-natured manager supplied me both with Moira’s time card and his own firm recollection that she’d been working by his side all evening. He even let me use the office copy machine to make photocopy of the time card. I left the restaurant knowing a little more about Alicia Felix, and with at least one potential suspect firmly in the clear.

  Ten

  I was still arguing with Stacy when I walked into my house.

  “Why not? You’re being totally unreasonable,” I said into my cell phone.

  “Why not? Because Charlie Hoynes is a creepy little dope and I’m not going to allow my name to be raised in his presence.”

  “I won’t mention you when I meet him. Just on the phone to get him to take my call!”

  “Not good enough. You just don’t understand how this works, Juliet.” She wasn’t exactly yelling, but I had to hold the phone a few inches away from my ear nonetheless.

  “Sure I do,” I said. “If I use your name to get to Hoynes, then he’s doing you a favor by talking to me, and if he does you a favor, he’ll expect you to do one for him in return.”

  “Precisely. And what he’ll ask for is that one of my clients agree to be in one of his sleaze-fests. And that’s just not going to happen.”

  “So, you just say no! What’s so hard about that?”

  “He’ll call me. And I’ll have to take his calls! That’s what’s so hard. Look, girlfriend. We’re done here. You can’t use my name, and that’s that. End of story.”

  “But I don’t know anyone else who knows Charlie Hoynes,” I said, but she had hung up the phone.

  “I know Charlie Hoynes,” Peter said pleasantly.

  “What?” I snapped my head up. I was still standing in the entryway to our apartment, my cell phone in my hand. Through the arched doorway into the living room I could see Peter and the kids tumbled together on the couch. Isaac was asleep, his head resting on his father’s chest, and a string of drool connecting his pooched-out lower lip to the red plaid of Peter’s flannel shirt.

  “How do you know Charlie Hoynes?” I whispered.

  “You don’t need to whisper, he’s totally out,” Peter said.

  “Yeah, Mama, watch this.” Ruby reached across Peter’s chest and smacked her brother in the head. He didn’t stir.

  “Ruby!” I said.

  She roll
ed her eyes at me and turned her attention back to the TV. They were watching Thumbtanic. Peter and Ruby had rented Thumb Wars (“If there were thumbs in space and they got mad at each other, those would be Thumb Wars”) and watched it pretty much nonstop for two weeks. Now they were on to the all-thumb version of James Cameron’s romantic classic. Nothing cracked my daughter up like an ocean full of drowning thumbs.

  “How do you know Charlie Hoynes?” I repeated.

  “Remember those two producers who pitched me that idea for the abortion movie?”

  I groaned. When Peter and I had first arrived in Hollywood, he had been hungry enough to take meetings with pretty much anyone who would see him, including a producing team that had an idea for a horror movie in which aborted fetuses came to life and attacked a city. It was supposed to be a comedy. Needless to say, Peter didn’t take that job.

  “Please don’t tell me that that’s Charlie Hoynes,” I said.

  “Indeed. Wait a second, it’s the ‘King of the World’ part.” He and Ruby poked each other and snickered.

  “I’m the king of the world!” Peter said.

  “I’m a dentist!” she replied.

  Peter turned his attention back to me. “You want me to call him?”

  “You don’t mind?” I asked.

  “Why should I mind?”

  “Well, he’ll have your number, and you’ll owe him a favor.”

  “Please. Who cares? Go get me the phone.”

  My generous spouse was somewhat less sanguine when Hoynes not only took his call, but insisted that we join him for dinner the following evening at Spago.

  “Ick, Spago,” I said, when Peter hung up the phone.

  “Don’t ick me. This is your fault.”

  I sighed. “I’ll go call a babysitter.”

  “Nobody old!” Ruby shouted. At her piercing howl, Isaac finally woke up, crying, as usual. Neither of my children has ever managed to arise from an afternoon nap without at least twenty minutes of hysterical tears. I used to wonder if the couple of hours of bliss while they slept was worth the drama of their rising, but then Ruby stopped napping and I quickly realized that an entire, uninterrupted thirteen-hour day with a child is significantly longer than your average human adult can tolerate. The break a nap provides is worth any amount of weeping.