Murder Plays House

by Ayelet Waldman

  “How often did you see each other?”

  “Two, maybe three times a week. She was a good kid. She helped me out with my daughter. Dakota’s not a big one for kids, are you babe?”

  Dakota curled her lip and shook her head.

  “Alicia always stayed over on Halley’s night with me. I’ve got the kid every, what is it. . .?” He looked at his girlfriend.

  “Tuesday,” she murmured.

  “Right. Halley’s at my house on Tuesdays. So Alicia always came over that night. I’ll tell you, I miss her one hell of a lot.” He paused, wiping carefully at his dry eyes with his napkin. “Especially on Tuesdays.” He sighed at the wearying thought of Tuesdays. “Halley loved Alicia. She really did. And that girl doesn’t take to just anyone. For instance,” he dropped his napkin and chuckled. “She sure as hell can’t stand Dakota, can she?”

  “The feeling’s mutual,” Dakota said, taking a gulp of wine.

  Two waiters arrived at our table and lay our laden plates down with a flourish. I was momentarily distracted by the pile of fluffy mashed potatoes sitting next to my lamb chop. I always order according to the side dish. Steak, stew, fish, I like them all. But what really catches my attention is a nice butter-laden gratin, or a mound of pureed squash. I gobbled up a few bites, blissing out at the creamy texture, the buttery flavor. Food always tastes so good to me when I’m pregnant. I looked up just in time to catch Dakota’s disgusted expression. I imagined that to a woman who took finicky eating to such an extreme that it nearly qualified as performance art, Hoynes and I were one and the same—overweight, greasy-cheeked gluttons. I felt a spark of sympathy for Tracker. Sure, he’d made his own bed, but how could he stand to share it with such a judgmental twig?

  I swallowed the fond in my mouth and continued with my questioning.

  “Had you cast Alicia in your vampire series?”

  He spread his hands wide. “Hey, nothing’s final until the show’s on the air, you know? Sure, I was considering using her. I probably would have, you know? But I hadn’t made any final decision. I still haven’t.”

  Dakota’s head snapped upward. She’d been staring at her plate, busily performing an autopsy on her halibut fillet. “What the hell does that mean, Charlie?” She seemed suddenly to have forgotten his new name.

  He patted her hand and chuckled. “It means what it always means. Nothing’s final until it’s in the can.” He turned back to me. “I got lots of parts for girls in this series. We’ll suck ’em dry every week, if you get my meaning.” He bellowed with laughter, making the diners at the neighboring table jump in their seats. “Alicia wanted the part of Empress of the Night. Just like Dakota does.”

  “Did Alicia think she would get that part?”

  “She might have. But she knew it was still up in the air. That’s just how I work, isn’t it Dakota?”

  “Tracker, you promised me that role. Months ago.” Dakota’s face was pale, and the hand she had wrapped around her wine glass was trembling, making the liquid slosh in the glass. “You did!”

  He sighed and looked at me. “A producer’s life—it ain’t easy, let me tell you.”

  “Goddamn you, Charlie Hoynes. Goddamn you!” Dakota shouted. She leapt to her feet and rushed out of the restaurant. Peter and I stared after her. I turned back to Hoynes. It took me a moment to realize that he was not in the least upset. His shoulders were shaking only because he was laughing.

  “That is one feisty girl, let me tell you. She’ll make a damn fine Empress.”

  “Don’t you want to go after her?” I asked.

  He shook his head and placed a huge bite of steak in his mouth. Then, with his mouth still full of food, he said, “She’ll find her way back to my house. Or not. Don’t worry about it. Dakota’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.”

  I didn’t want to spend another minute at the table with that vulgar, greasy-mouthed pig. But I had no choice. Whatever she had meant to him, Alicia had considered Charlie Hoynes her boyfriend, and as depressing and sad as that was, I needed information from him. I also wondered just how much a role in a soft-core porn TV series meant to Dakota Swain. Enough to run out of Spago and make her own way home, sure. But how about enough to commit murder?

  “I take it Dakota and Alicia didn’t get along,” I said.

  He laughed, and I could see a clot of pink meat on his tongue. “I’m honest with my girls. It’s all out in the open with me.”

  “Did they spend much time together?”

  “I doubt it. They didn’t have much in common, those two. Oil and water.”

  That certainly rang false. They seemed to have absolutely everything in common, except an affection for Hoynes’s daughter.

  “Your daughter, Halley, how old is she?”

  He took a large swallow of wine and wrinkled his brow. “Let’s see . . . sixteen? No, wait a minute. She was born in 1986. That’ll make her seventeen. Or was it ’87? No, ’86, I’m sure of it.”

  By now my husband had pinched me under the table so many times that I was sure I had a bruise the size of a grapefruit on my thigh.

  “And she and Alicia were friends?”

  Hoynes nodded, his mouth once again full of food. “Alicia helped her out. Halley’s a little bit anorexic. Won’t eat. It’s just a teenage phase, but Alicia’d been through that when she was a kid, so she knew what was going on with Halley. She got where the kid was coming from, which is more than I can say for Halley’s hag of a mother.”

  Could that really be true? Had Alicia confided in Hoynes that she had been anorexic, when she hadn’t even admitted it to her best friend, Moira?

  “She told you she used to have anorexia?”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t tell me anything. She told Halley. And Halley told her mother. And her goddamn mother called up my lawyer screaming her head off, lunatic that she is.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would that upset your wife?” I said.

  “Hell if I know. My lawyer is always getting hysterical phone calls from my ex. Seems the kid went home and told her mother that she hated her—and who can blame her?—and that she wanted to move in with me and Alicia.” He laughed, genuinely tickled by the idea. “Like that would have happened. Anyway, Halley said only Alicia understood her, because she knew firsthand what it was like to have this crazy anorexia thing. Barbara freaked out—so what else is new. And when Ms. Barbara Hoynes freaks, she calls her lawyers.”

  Hoynes scraped his fork against his empty plate, gathering up the last of the juices. “You’d think she would have been glad Halley had found someone to talk to about her problem, wouldn’t you? I mean, the goddamn girl didn’t talk to anybody, not even the shrinks they’ve got me paying through the nose for. But Barbara’s a jealous woman. She just couldn’t stand to see Halley close to anyone but her. And especially not one of my girls.”

  I could sort of understand that. But one might imagine that Halley’s well-being would override her mother’s vindictiveness or sense of competition. For that matter, one might have imagined that the ex–Mrs. Hoynes would consider herself well rid of her vile ex-husband.

  “Did Alicia keep seeing Halley after that?”

  “Sure she did. You think I’m going to let Barbara say who I can and can’t have in my house? She threatened to take me back to court, but I’d like to have seen her try. Lunatic.”

  “What would her grounds have been to take you to court?”

  “Grounds? You think that woman needs grounds? Who knows. She wanted Alicia away from the kid. She thought she was a bad influence, and she told me she’d go to court to keep her out of Halley’s life.” He belched softly, covering his mouth with a curled fist. “She didn’t need to in the end, though, did she?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, someone took care of that for her, didn’t they?”

  “Do you think your ex-wife could have had something to do with the murder?”

  “Nah, I mean, she’s a nut-case, but not a murdere
r. Anyway, she’s got all she can handle with Halley. Girl’s back in the hospital.”

  “She’s in the hospital?”

  Hoynes sat back, letting out a sigh of contentment and patting himself on the stomach. “Halley’s in and out every few months. Whenever her weight drops below eighty pounds, her mother checks her back in. Thank God I’ve got health insurance through the Guild, that’s all I can say. Hey, you know what I just thought of? I should sell my own damn story. Beloved girlfriend brutally murdered. Killers at large. Disease-of-the-week daughter. Make a great TV movie, don’t you think?”

  I blinked.

  Hoynes laughed and said, “Hell, maybe I should option it myself! How about that? Give myself a hundred grand for the rights.”

  Fourteen

  “YOU owe me big time,” Peter said. We were lying in bed, doing our best to recover from our evening with the charming Tracker Hoynes. The man had actually imagined that we’d go out “clubbing” with him after dinner. Was he out of his mind? Had he not noticed that I was the size and shape of a dirigible? Even if I hadn’t been pregnant, I would never have gone out dancing with him. First of all, I hadn’t been out to a bar since I met Peter and was finally relieved of the obligation to spend my weekends searching for a man. More importantly, however, I knew that if I spent another minute in Hoynes’s presence I would end up grabbing a chair and whacking him over the head with it.

  “How should I pay you back for tonight?” I asked.

  “Find us somewhere to live.”

  I groaned. “Anything I can do in the interim?” Despite the advanced stage of my pregnancy, I did the best I could to compensate my husband both for our terrible evening and for my lack of real estate progress. Afterward, I put the videotape of Alicia’s appearance on Talking Pictures on the VCR in our bedroom. The production values were every bit as dreadful as I had expected, given the company with whom the show shared studio space. The tinny music started up, and the camera swooped in on Candy’s face. She was harshly lit, the glare coming from above her head and casting the lower half of her face in shadow. She presented a decidedly cadaverous appearance to the camera.

  “Hallo, I’m Candy Gerard. Welcome to Talking Pictures,” she said, staring steamily into the camera. I’m sure it was my imagination, but I could swear she was doing a Marlene Dietrich imitation.

  Peter turned to me. “Talking Pictures?” he said.

  I smiled wanly.

  “This is the show I’m booked on?”

  “Um. Yeah.”

  “Who booked me on it?”

  “Um, I did.”

  “You do realize you’ll have to pay me back for that, too.”

  “Tonight?”

  “No. I’ll take a rain check.”

  “Sure, honey. Now be quiet, here’s Alicia.”

  The Left Coast Players troupe consisted of two men dressed as high school nerds and Alicia wearing a miniskirt, a tube-top, and a ponytail high on her head. One of the men went off screen and returned dressed as a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts, complete with huge, pink cardboard box and sprinkles. Alicia and the donuts engaged in a dance that looked more like simulated sex than Balanchine, and then she started miming eating the donuts. Once she’d faked consuming what appeared to be at least a dozen, she began to stick her fingers down her throat. At that moment, she tripped over the dancing donuts and got her hands stuck in the box. The shtick proceeded for another few minutes, with Alicia trying to get her fingers down her throat to make herself throw up, and something interfering at the last second. The bulimic who couldn’t purge. Ha ha ha. Ho ho ho.

  “Is it me, or is this really not funny?” I said.

  “It’s not you.”

  Finally, the sketch was over, and Candy interviewed the players. Alicia didn’t say much, other than to drop the name and contact number of her agent. The discussion was dominated by the donut box, who spoke at great length about the historical and cultural antecedents of urban comedy. Peter was nearly asleep when the half hour was up.

  “I can’t wait to be on that show,” he said when I poked him awake. “Really.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be.” He leaned over and kissed me on the lips. “You’re lucky you’re so damn cute, otherwise I’d be really upset. And honey?”

  “Yes?”

  “The San Diego Comic Con is next weekend. And I am so going.”

  “Okay.”

  “Juliet?”

  “Yeah, sweetie?”

  “Does Felix know you’re only representing him to get a hold of his house?”

  I sat up. “That’s not the only reason I’m investigating this case!”

  “But it’s the main reason. Don’t get me wrong. I want to move as badly as you do. I haven’t gotten a minute’s work done since that damn construction project started. But it just seems . . . I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “Unethical.”

  “It isn’t. Really. Farzad and I even talked about how much I want the house.” I felt a little knot in my stomach. What had been unethical was implying to Harvey Brodsky that Felix was my client even before he’d hired me. But all that was okay now. I’d been hired. And I’d find the killer. And Brodsky would hire us, and Al and I wouldn’t have to shut down the agency. I hoped.

  I snuggled closer to Peter. “I wish I could see Julia Brennan’s Bingie McPurge. I wonder if she’s any funnier than Alicia was.”

  “Wait a sec,” Peter said, and took the remote out of my hand. He clicked over to his new toy, TiVo. Within minutes he had an episode of New York Live playing on the television set.

  “You recorded this?” I said.

  He shook his head. “No, but the software thinks I like it, so it keeps recording it for me, I think because I have it catching Monty Python. I haven’t bothered to correct it yet, so you’re in luck.”

  Julia Brennan didn’t dance with a box of donuts, and New York Live had a slicker set and better costumes to lend that much-needed air of verisimilitude. Bingie McPurge’s attempts at emesis were thwarted by elaborate casts on her arms, by catching her thumbs in a pair of mouse-traps, by a toilet seat that was stuck shut, by a pair of Chinese finger cuffs. But it was the same gimmick exactly. The bulimic binges, and then cannot purge. And it was just as humorless in its more professional incarnation.

  “Well, that’s pretty clear,” Peter said when the skit was over and Julia had gagged her way off screen.

  “She stole the character from Alicia.”

  He nodded. “Definitely. Although it does raise one really important question.”

  “What’s that?”

  He pounded on his pillow with his fist and lay back down in the bed, drawing the down comforter up to his chin. “Why in God’s name did she bother?”

  I laughed. “It’s just unbelievably awful, isn’t it?”

  “Yup.”

  “Wanna hear something really horrible?” I turned off the light and curled up around him.

  “What?” he murmured, already half asleep.

  “They’re making it into a movie.”

  “What?” He sat bolt upright.

  “You heard me.”

  “Oh my God!” He collapsed back onto the pillow. “Sometimes I really hate this business.”

  Fifteen

  THE next morning, right as I was walking out the door to drive the kids to school, my phone rang. It was Farzad.

  “There is a detective from the LA police department here. He wants to talk to Felix.”

  “Damn,” I muttered, looking at my watch. Peter was sound asleep, and the kids needed to be at school in ten minutes. “Where is he?”

  “Waiting in the living room.”

  “And where’s Felix?”

  “In the shower.”

  “Okay, here’s what I want you to do. Give the detective a cup of coffee, and tell Felix to take his time getting dressed. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “Oh, and Farzad?”


  “Yes?”

  “Don’t say anything to the cop, okay?”

  He grimaced. “What do you take me for, Juliet? I’m not some stupid American who confesses everything to the secret police.”

  “Good,” I said, and hung up the phone, wondering if I should have pointed out to him that while the LAPD was far from perfect, their powers did not yet include hauling people from their homes in the middle of the night and making them disappear. At least, I didn’t think they did. I called Al and told him to meet me there, luckily catching him on his cell phone in the Ikea parking lot. He was only too happy to leave Jeanelle to shop on her own. It wasn’t until I was speeding down Beverly Boulevard to dump the kids and get to Felix’s house that it occurred to me to wonder what exactly it was that Farzad wasn’t dumb enough to confess to the police.

  I managed to dump each of my children off in front of their respective schools. I gave Ruby to a mother with whom I’d once shared field trip carpool duties, and Isaac to the nanny of his best friend. I crossed my fingers that both women would sign the kids in correctly and make sure their lunches made it into their cubbies, and tore over to Felix’s house. For once, I actually made it in significantly less time than I’d promised.

  Farzad answered the door and nodded his head in the direction of the living room.

  “Where’s Felix?” I asked in a low voice.

  He pointed up the stairs.

  “Come with me,” I said.

  We found Felix in his bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, his forearms resting on his knees, and his head bent low.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He raised his head at the sound of my voice, and I could see the tracks of tears down his cheeks.

  “Thanks for coming over,” he said.

  “Hey, that’s what you pay me for,” I replied. “Felix, do you have an attorney?”

  He nodded. “Of course. I mean, the business does.”

  A corporate lawyer adept at contract negotiations and employee disputes was not going to do Felix much good under these particular circumstances.