Murder Plays House

by Ayelet Waldman

  The headphones were no match, however, for the twins sitting in the seat in front of me. When their frazzled young mother made it onto the plane, seconds before the door closed, dragging two car seats with her, I nearly burst into tears. My babies were in coach! Far away from me. I was liberated from them, free to enjoy an adult-only universe. And here, in first class, was a mother traveling with a set of infant twins. A set of twins who, apparently, had outgrown their naps. They could not have been more than eighteen months old, and neither of them shut up for the entire flight. They screamed, they cried, they wailed, and no matter how loud I turned up the volume on my headset, I heard them. Worst of all, I had to pretend I didn’t care. I had to pretend that, unlike the other sour-faced denizens of first class, I, as a mother, had sympathy for the young woman. I knew her pain. And I did. I really did. Yet I still wanted to throttle her and her wretchedly behaved children.

  By the time the flight attendant dumped my hot fudge sundae in my lap, I had grown somewhat fatalistic about the possibility of enjoying my flight. Her cheerily apologetic “Oopsie!” didn’t even bother me. Neither did the snicker of the fat man with the runny nose. Or the resounding wails of the twins as their mother put them down for a moment to pass me a handful of baby wipes so I could swab ineffectually at the sticky, wet stain on my slacks.

  Peter, on the other hand, reported that the children had been so tired from their two days with my parents that they’d both fallen asleep as soon as the plane took off. He’d spent the flight happily rereading a copy of Dune he’d found in the seatback pocket. Once again I had to restrain myself from beating him about the head and shoulders.

  The studio had arranged for a car to pick Peter up and take him home, and the look on the driver’s face when he realized that three sticky urchins, one of them pregnant, were going to be joining his client in the impeccably maintained Lincoln Continental was a cross between horror and despair. He was even less pleased when it became obvious that our luggage could barely fit on a single cart. The poor man had to lug both booster seats himself. I did dump out the cookie crumbs, sand, and gobs of melted gummy bears before handing him the seats. There was nothing I could do about the crusted-on yogurt, short of throwing the seats away and starting fresh.

  My cell phone rang almost as soon as we got settled in the car. It was Al.

  “Where are you?” he shouted into the phone.

  I held the receiver a few inches from my ear. “On the ten heading for home.

  “So?” Al asked. “What did you find out?”

  “One dead end after another.” I told him about my conversation with Julia. “How did you do on the Board of Realtors list?”

  “Got it,” he said. When I first met Al, he had been something of a Luddite, suspicious of the Internet, certain it was a tool of the government for spying on innocent and unwary citizens. While he’s still convinced that the FBI and NSA are amassing piles of information on individual taxpayers, a suspicion that has lately begun to sound less and less crazy to me, he has grown adept at using the Internet for his own purposes, both professional and otherwise. While once he had to rely on buddies on the force to whisper in his ear, he can now find almost anything out with a few clicks of the mouse. He also uses the Internet to keep in close touch with his militia and anti-tax cronies.

  “Read me the list of names,” I said.

  He did, but unfortunately I didn’t recognize any of them.

  “I’ll email it to you,” he promised.

  One of the joys of flying from east to west is that that time difference allows you much of your day once you’re home. Peter took pity on me after my hellish flight and volunteered to stay home with the kids. I called Kat and browbeat her into arranging a visit with Marilyn Farley, who was still stuck in bed, trying to stave off the delivery of her twins. I told Peter, albeit half-heartedly, that I would take Ruby and Isaac with me, but they were busy getting back in touch with their stuffed animals and action figures and were unwilling to leave the house.

  Kat met me in front of Marilyn’s bungalow in the neighborhood known to real estate agents, and to real estate agents alone, as Beverly Hills Adjacent. The rest of us call it Los Angeles. Kat was leaning against the door of her car, and she looked just terrible.

  “Hey,” I said, walking up to her.

  She smiled wanly.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong.”

  But she was clearly lying. Her face was drawn and thin, and her pregnant belly looked like it was hanging from her shoulder blades like a basketball on a hanger. Her skin was pallid, and almost green.

  I opened the door of her car and got in, motioning for her to do the same. She followed me and leaned her head against the steering wheel.

  “What is it, sweetie?” I said, patting her shoulder. “Is it this investigation? Is Nahid giving you a hard time?”

  She shook her head. “No, no. Nothing like that. I’m just under pressure. You know, with the baby coming. Nothing’s ready. I haven’t moved Ashkon out of the nursery. I haven’t set up his big boy bed. There’s just so much to do.”

  I sighed sympathetically. I hadn’t made any preparations for my baby, either. But by the third, you just sort of assume everything will fall into place.

  “It’ll work out, Kat. It’s just a matter of one intense weekend’s worth of work. If you want, I can give you a hand. We’ll go shopping for all the stuff you need, including Ashkon’s new furniture.”

  She sat up and shook her head. “That’s sweet of you, but it’s not just that.”

  I waited.

  She seemed to muster up her courage. “Sometimes, when I’m feeling stressed out . . . I . . . well . . .”

  “What?” I asked softly.

  She sighed. “God, this is so embarrassing. It’s just that I thought I was over all this. I mean, I was over it all. And then last week I just started doing it again.”

  “Doing what?”

  She rubbed her hand across her mouth, swallowed, and then said, “I used to be bulimic. I mean, I guess I still am.”

  For a moment, I was surprised. And then I wasn’t at all. Kat’s confession made all too much sense. Her thinness always seemed somehow unnatural to her. Here she was, this beautiful, voluptuous, middle-eastern woman, who somehow managed to be rail-thin even while pregnant. While virtually every Persian woman I’ve ever met has been fashionably thin, Kat always looked like someone on a drastic diet. It was as though her flesh seemed empty—missing its accustomed fullness and heft. Her sharp cheekbones cried out for a layer of padding, her neck sank oddly into a bosom too round and soft for her bony chest and torso.

  “You’ve been making yourself throw up?” I asked, doing my best not to sound judgmental.

  She nodded. “I know it’s awful. For the baby, especially.”

  “The baby will probably take the nutrients it needs from your body. I’m more worried about you.”

  “I should go back to my meetings.”

  “Like AA?”

  “Yeah, but for bulimics. I stopped going a few years ago. I didn’t need it. But now I guess I do.”

  “Do you have a therapist?” I asked.

  “I did.”

  “Maybe you should see her again, too.”

  “I don’t have time! I mean, I told you, I’ve got like nine million things to do, and Nahid is running me ragged at work.”

  “And here I am, making things even harder for you. Please, Kat. Make time. Call the therapist. You can’t keep doing this to yourself. You’ll make yourself sick. And at some point the baby will start to suffer, too.”

  She closed her eyes, as if to keep her tears from falling, and then said, “We’d better go in. Marilyn is expecting us.” She opened her door and walked out, leaving me to follow behind.

  This eating disorder thing was so tenacious, so impossibly ubiquitous. Was there a woman in the city of Los Angeles who was not somehow stuck in its claws? What was most remarkable to me was how it could r
ear its ugly head years after Kat had assumed she was cured, after she had moved beyond that kind of mindset and behavior. Just like, for that matter, Alicia Felix.

  MARILYN Farley was lying in bed, on her left side, looking about as bored as any woman has ever looked. We were shown to her room by an older woman who could only have been her mother-in-law, given the combination of politeness and impatience with which Marilyn treated her.

  “It’s great to meet you!” Marilyn said, a bit hysterically. “God, I’m so pathetic. You just can’t have any idea how horrible this is. I’ve been stuck in this bed forever. I’m not even allowed to roll over! I’m just supposed to lie here on my left side and hope I don’t have to pee more than a few times a day. I can’t even read, because the medication they have me on gives me blurry vision. So all I do all day is watch crappy movies on cable. There was the one really horrible one about a cannibal wedding that gave me nightmares for days.”

  I blushed. “Yeah, That’s not the greatest movie. I’m so sorry about the bedrest.” I could never have managed it. Who would drive carpool? Who would go the grocery store? Who would run out to the shoe store to buy the pair of pink ballet slippers without which the recital could not proceed? Then I gave it a moment’s reflection. Would it really be so bad? Trapped in bed watching movies? Even Peter’s movies? With no other responsibilities? I wondered if there was something I could do to induce a little preterm labor of my own.

  Marilyn, despite her understandable embarrassment at having lost her programmer, was willing to try to list for us the individuals who had come to her open house. She confessed to me that she was afraid that her irresponsibility had somehow led to Alicia’s death. I got the feeling that Detective Goodenough had not done a particularly good job of convincing her otherwise. I reassured her that even if her programmer had been used, it had, at worst, made the murderer’s job a little easier.

  “If someone really wants to kill someone else,” I told her, “he’ll find a way. It would have been just as easy to break a window.”

  “But then the alarm would have gone off,” Kat said.

  I shook my head. “The alarm can’t have been on, otherwise it would have gone off when the murderer opened the front door, even if he had used a key.” I jotted down a note to ask Felix if Alicia normally turned the alarm on when she was home alone. If she did, then why had she left it off this time? Was she expecting someone?

  As Marilyn did her best to remember the various realtors who had come to her open house, and whether or not they had brought clients with them, I took careful notes. None of the names sounded familiar, and while Kat knew some of the agents, she couldn’t link them to Alicia in any way. Marilyn told me that there were a few people who had wandered in off the street, and that while she couldn’t, of course, remember their names, she was fairly certain they’d signed in. So those individuals, at least, would be on the list Detective Goodenough had taken from her. That is, if they’d given their real names.

  Once we’d exhausted the conversation about the open house, I spent a frustrating half hour trying delicately to figure out whether Marilyn was hiding anything. None of my gently put questions resulted in any kind of lead. Marilyn seemed genuinely never to have met Alicia Felix, not to know her, not to have had anything to do with the case in any way. Except that it was her programmer than had allowed the murderer access to the house.

  Twenty-six

  AL and I spent the next few days working on other cases, doing routine skip traces. I refused to set foot in the office until Julio was absolutely finished finding rat corpses, and Al had reluctantly admitted that the place was still plagued by the odor of dead vermin.

  “I don’t know where the hell they could be,” he said. “In the walls, maybe? Anyway, Julio’s going to poke some holes in the sheet rock and then repaint the whole damn garage.”

  “Good,” I said. “He needs the work, and your garage could do with a renovation.”

  We were operating out of my kitchen, and his car. We didn’t normally bother with skip traces—while they were once the bread and butter of private investigative services, nowadays most companies are aware of online tracing services and don’t bother paying investigative fees to find the welshers and absconders that plague their businesses. We were doing these as a favor for a friend of Al’s who had set up a semi-shady limited partnership scheme, only to find that the bulk of his investors had disappeared as soon as the economy had turned the least bit ugly. I tried to tell Al that the guy was probably paying us to avoid getting his own legs shot off by the people we were trying to find, but my partner ignored me. At any rate, none of the dozen disbarred lawyers and unlicensed physicians we tracked down seemed particularly dangerous. Just scrambling for cash, and not particularly honest.

  The weekend found me absolutely gleeful at the prospect of time with the children, and out of Al’s Suburban. That is, until Ruby began her by-now tedious refrain.

  “I don’t understand, why do I have to wait until I’m twelve to get my ears pierced?” she said.

  “Because you have to be old enough to take care of the holes yourself. And that will be when you’re twelve.”

  “But I’m old enough now! Both Isabel and Sophie got their ears pierced! All they had to do was clean the holes with special stuff and keep twirling their earrings. I can do that. I’m not a baby.”

  How could I explain to my child that the thought of a needle being jammed through her little white lobes, those pads of sweet flesh as precious to me as every other tiny, innocent part of her adorable little body, just made my heart rush to my mouth? We own our children’s bodies when they’re small. We created those little pearl toes, those dimpled elbows, those rounded cheeks. Our children belong to us as much—no more—than they belong to themselves. I reached around Ruby’s waist and dragged her onto what lap I had left. She wriggled out of my arms, unintentionally jabbing me in the belly.

  “Ouch!” I said.

  “I don’t feel like sitting on your lap.”

  “Okay,” I said, my feelings hurt. Then, I looked at her. She was standing in a way that was unfamiliar to me. Her hip jutted out at an angle, and she had the toe of one sneaker balanced on the other foot. Her arms were crossed in front of her chest and she looked almost comically furious. She wanted to grow up, and I wasn’t letting her. Then I thought of horrible little Madison and the other diet girls, and how scary that had all come to seem to me, in the wake of the tide of anorexia and bulimia that seemed to be washing over everything in my life. I was so afraid for Ruby, and so desperate for her to stay close to me so that I could protect her from all that.

  “You know what, Ruby?” I said. “Let’s go get your ears pierced.”

  Her shrieks of joy were so loud they made her little sister in my belly kick me in the ribs. Hard.

  OUR first stop was the mall. None of the jewelry stores did ear-piercing, but we found a gift shop that advertised the service in the window. We waited at the register while the sales girl talked into her cell phone.

  “He is like such a complete pig, and I like totally told him so. I instant messaged him, and I’m like, if you think I’m gonna just sit here while you boff her—”

  “Excuse me!” I said loudly.

  The salesgirl looked up at me from under her stiff, blond bangs. “What?”

  “We need some help,” I said.

  “Mama?” Ruby said. “What does ‘boff’ mean?”

  The girl laughed and said into her phone, “O’migod, I gotta go. I’ll call you back in like a minute.”

  “Mama!” Ruby insisted.

  “Nothing, honey. It’s teenager talk.” Then I turned to the girl. “We’re interested in having her ears pierced.”

  “Cool!” she said, ducking under the counter and coming out to stand by us. “I just learned how to do that the other day. C’mon.”

  She led us to the front of the store where a little stool was set up in the window. She pointed at a row of stud earrings and told Ruby to pick o
ut a pair.

  “I’ve just got to remember how to do this,” she said, picking up a white piercing gun. “Oops!” she shrieked, howling with laughter as a gold stud flew out of the gun and landed on the floor. “I guess someone loaded it already.”

  Ruby pointed out a pair of blue glass earrings, and the sales girl bit her lipsticked lip, leaving teeth marks in the heavy gloss. “Um, when’s your birthday, because those are for December,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told her.

  “Well, like it totally does. I mean, she can’t have like someone else’s birthstone.”

  Ruby’s lip began to tremble, giving lie to the notion that she was old enough to be doing this in the first place.

  “Just give her the blue ones,” I said.

  “Okay, whatever,” the sales girl said, and then, as if entirely unaware of our presence, reached a talon-nail up to her forehead and picked at a shiny pimple. I watched horrified as the zit popped under her finger. She glanced at the smear of puss on her nail and then wiped it casually on her jeans.

  “You know what?” I said. “I’ve changed my mind. Come on, Ruby.” I grabbed my daughter by the arm and dragged her out of the store. By the time we hit the parking lot, she was hysterical.

  “Stop crying!” I said, opening the car door and lifting her inside. “Stop crying, Ruby. We’ll get your ears pierced. I promise. Just not there. That place was disgusting”

  “Well then, where?” she snuffled.