Then something chewed at the back of my mind. Nora had said that Roy liked to watch videos of himself. Liked to watch them in bed with Tasha. But maybe all the tapes he screened weren’t network quality. I thought of Deanna, who paraded out this morning looking like a porn queen. Is that how Roy Evans chose his women? Could it be that he made his own hardcore videos? And what if one of his home movies costarred Roy Evans with Tasha Barlow?
I considered lugging the tapes back home so I could watch, but there was no way — not right now, with my promise to Dan. And not with the kids around. Roy’s secret — if he had one — would have to stay in this cubicle for now, protected by a flimsy key that I dropped in my Fendi wallet and by a Korean who couldn’t care less.
Chapter Eight
When I got home, all I wanted was a hot bath. I felt chilled to the bone. The sleek brass Brookstone barometer-thermometerhygrometer by the front door reported that the temperature was sixty-two degrees — nippy for L.A., but probably not an explanation for why I was trembling like a six-year-old in a spelling bee.
Grant clambered down the stairs to the front hall when he heard me come in, then paused a few steps from the bottom.
“You okay, Mom?” he asked, looking at me, concerned.
I tried to stand up straight and not sway like a flag in Dodger Stadium — even though my eyes were red, my face was white, and my mood was blue. All I managed was a little nod.
“You sure?” he asked. He’d started to hold out a paper to me, then pulled it back, probably figuring I didn’t have the strength to take it.
“I’m fine,” I said firmly. If I didn’t have kids, I’d probably have collapsed into a mewling heap about now, but in front of my son, I couldn’t/shouldn’t/wouldn’t fall apart. No way I’d make Grant face a weeping woman when he needed a mature mom.
I gestured toward the paper. “What have you got there?”
Grant took a moment, seemed to decide I must be fine, then jumped down to the landing with a thud. “I found the guy you wanted,” he said.
I hadn’t put down my keys yet, but I took the picture he held out for me and looked at it. Nothing too striking — just the blurry image of a man walking out of a courthouse, holding a sweater at an odd angle in front of him. Then I realized it was draped over his wrists, probably to hide handcuffs.
“Johnny DeVito?” I asked.
“Johnny DeVito,” Grant confirmed.
I looked again. So there he was — the ex-con lover boy. The man Nora claimed had loved Tasha — and who had definitely bought her some darn nice bedroom furniture. He had his head cocked down, but I could see the outline of his face, which seemed puffy and slightly distorted. Not ugly, the way Nora had said, but not quite right, either.
“Found it online, and I blew it up so you could see him better,” Grant said. “It was a really distant shot. Sorry about the bad quality.”
The picture was fuzzy, the features slightly blurred. Grant’s sophisticated laser printer could definitely spit out a better image than that — I knew because I’d paid for a lot of pixels — so the problem had to lie with the original source. Probably a newspaper, which meant that at some point, Johnny DeVito had made news.
I held the picture up to the light. “I wish I could make out more,” I admitted. “Looks like someone whitewashed his face.”
Grant shrugged. “I know, kind of strange, isn’t it. But it was the only picture I could find of him anywhere. And I spent a long time looking.”
“I didn’t mean for you to do that,” I said, suddenly back in suburban mother mode. “You have so much else to do that’s important. Your SATs. Your math test…” I let my voice trail off because I couldn’t get up my usual anxiety about Grant’s calculus grades.
“I’d be glad to flunk math if it would get Dad cleared,” Grant said, with more emotion in his voice than usual.
“An F won’t help anything,” I said, but then I let it drop. School might have been important on a planet long ago and far away, but since the murder investigation, we’d all been transported to another galaxy, where the old rules didn’t apply.
Grant shoved his hands into the pockets of his cargo pants. “So can you find out more about this guy?” he asked. “Prove he did it?”
“I wish,” I said with a sigh that came out louder than I’d intended. “I have some pretty good information, but Daddy’s mad that I’m playing detective and he wants me to stop. I think he’s wrong, but you know Daddy. He can be pretty stubborn.”
Grant looked down and shuffled his feet, and I realized I shouldn’t have said that. The family needed a united front. Dissing his dad wasn’t part of the game.
“Does Dad know this DeVito guy?” Grant asked.
“I doubt it,” I said, but then I paused and added, “You should ask Daddy.” But we both knew he wouldn’t.
Towering above me, Grant leaned over my shoulder to study the picture again. “You’ve gotten taller again,” I said, turning around to eye him. “Did you shoot up another inch in your sleep last night?” I smiled and Grant just shrugged, briefly embarrassed. How disorienting to be a teenage boy, your life changing so fast you couldn’t keep up with yourself. I could relate.
“I’m tall enough to beat up your Johnny if I find him,” Grant said, flexing his arm, lean and muscular under his Fila tennis shirt. Facing DeVito across a net, Grant definitely had an edge. But all bets were off if the weapons were more powerful than Prince rackets.
“So tell me about the stuff you’ve gotten,” Grant said, taking a step back and folding his arms. “The evidence that will help Dad.”
Was there ever stuff I could tell. And wouldn’t that be nice. I could reel off all the bizarre details of my detecting escapades, starting with Roy’s dog collar, and get my intelligent son’s perspective. With his scientific mind — he did get a 98 in physics, after all — he could analyze all the details and maybe come up with theory and proof. But for once, I stopped myself. Grant was already more tangled in this mess than he should be.
“The evidence is clear that Daddy’s innocent,” I said, going for the bottom line.
Grant sighed and rolled his eyes. “Lame, Mom.”
Yup. Lame mother-talk. “But we’re on the verge of a breakthrough,” I said, trying to stay optimistic. “I have a good feeling.”
“Last time you had a good feeling, I got hypothermia,” Grant grumbled. “Remember that day at Bear Mountain? You told me I could leave my Polartec in the car and ski in a T-shirt. Only it snowed.”
“This is different,” I assured him. “Clear skies coming up.”
Grant looked at me dubiously and I didn’t blame him.
“By the way, a guy from FedEx delivered a couple of boxes for Dad. They’re in the garage. I told him to put them there in case they were bombs or something and shouldn’t be in the house.”
He glared at me, daring me to challenge him, but I didn’t. Given the way things had been going lately, who was to say they weren’t bombs? Couldn’t blame Grant for trying to keep one more thing from exploding in our faces.
Grant’s friend Jake pulled into the driveway in his new blue Subaru Outback — finally, an L.A. kid with an appropriate car — and when the two of them left, I wandered out to the garage. Three cardboard boxes were piled in a corner, with a return address from Dan’s office. I peeled the packing tape away from one of them and peeked inside. Dusty manila covers and stacks of scrawled papers gave them away as old patient files. Grant had clearly been watching too many late-night movies. Nothing here that was going to detonate.
I went back inside and escaped to the bathroom, finally able to wash away my morning with Roy Evans. I filled the deep Jacuzzi tub and poured in a few drops of Jo Malone French lime blossom bath oil, then lit the Fresh Yuzu candles I had around the ledge, fragrant with Japanese grapefruit and Sicilian lemons. It was like taking a bath at the United Nations.
By the time I got out, I smelled like a fruit salad and had managed to forget that my situation stank
. Maybe that bath oil really was worth a hundred bucks. At six o’clock, I decided to give a family dinner a try. I’d always been convinced we could save civilization if every family sat together once a day, eating a meal and talking. That I didn’t feel like eating and definitely wouldn’t be talking wasn’t going to stop me. Not up for cooking, I called Pacific Hunan and ordered a dozen dishes of Pan-Chinese food. When the delivery came, I dragged the bags to the family room and plopped the food into cheerful Fiestaware red bowls, which I arranged on the palazzo-stone table (expensive but indestructible, as I always explained to clients). I set out big linen napkins and brightly colored twisted-glass chopsticks at each place, then checked the logs in the fireplace and flipped the switch so the gas ignited and the fire came to life. Not bad. I dragged three oversized kilim pillows out of the closet, arranging them in front of the fireplace, then stepped back and took in the scene. Low-key and cozy. Very Elle Decor.
I called everyone in for dinner, and the stage set seemed to work. “Looks nice, Mom,” Ashley said, her first pleasant comment in weeks. Grant turned on the sound track from High Fidelity — one CD all of us could bear. The mood was right, and in between the spring rolls and the kung pao chicken, Ashley and Grant started singing along to the Kinks’“Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy.” If only. Jimmy got into the spirit by showing that he could eat lo mein one strand at a time with his fingers. And I didn’t even look at Dan when John Wesley Harding sang “I’m Wrong About Everything.”
I brought out dessert and Jimmy grabbed a tangerine and energetically dug into it, sending the peels flying all over. Dan went for a fortune cookie and snapped it open, putting the little paper aside as he bit into the hard dough.
“Anybody want to hear my fortune?” Dan asked with a smile. “My good fortune.”
Well, that got our attention.
Ashley put down her chopsticks and paused in midchew.
Jimmy, sensing an important moment, squeezed tangerine juice all over his bare foot.
“My future is looking very bright,” Dan said, playing with the slip from the fortune cookie. “That’s what it says. Or what it should say.”
Ashley gave a little gasp — a quick intake of breath — and the expectation etched on her face was easy to read: It’s over. Daddy’s going to tell us this horror is finally over.
On the CD, Bob Dylan was crooning about his head being on straight and being strong enough not to hate.
I tried to swallow, but could hardly breathe, waiting for Dan’s next words. One sentence and our lives would return to normal. Someone else had been arrested. The police had issued an apology. Tasha Barlow wasn’t even dead.
“Tell us,” I said, my voice shaking and small. “Tell us.”
“Good news is good news,” Dan said.
We waited.
Dan looked around at us proudly, enjoying his moment. Then he spoke. “Some important people saw my article on facial reconstruction and want me to write a textbook. It’ll be the definitive one in the field. For Harvard University Press, no less.”
Ashley uttered a loud wheeze of disappointment, and I felt like the air had been sucked out of the room. Bob Dylan was pretty pissed off himself.
I don’t cheat on myself, I don’t run and hide,
Hide from the feelings that are buried inside
he wailed from the CD in protest.
Ashley stood up abruptly, kicking the kilim pillow so hard that it flew into a half-eaten bowl of prawns foo yung. The shellfish slammed onto the stone table and the thick sauce oozed onto the carpet, dripping down like blood.
“We don’t care about your stupid book!” Ashley yelled, her bitterness bursting back. “Who do you think will read it when you’re on death row?”
She stormed out of the room, and the chain reaction that followed went pretty much as would have been expected. Jimmy burst into heaving sobs, Grant muttered an apology and excused himself, and Dan said nothing but set his lips into a firm line and started to clean up the prawns. I stood open-mouthed, unable to move. As usual, the whole disaster had been my fault. I never should have served fortune cookies.
I called Nora first thing Sunday morning.
“You talked to Roy,” I said, trying not to sound accusing. “I thought you weren’t planning to see him.”
“Yeah, well, he called. He wanted his stuff back, but I’d already given it to you. And he told me you’re not his girlfriend.” She said it triumphantly, as if we’d been fighting for him, and she’d won. She could have him.
“Have you heard from Johnny DeVito?” I asked.
“No.” She sniffled. “But I really need to talk to him. I left him a couple of messages, but now he changed his phone number. I found a card he sent Tasha. It probably was a long time ago because I found it with some dried flowers. I remember he’d sent her roses for her birthday. Anyway, it had a return address and I was thinking of checking it out. Seeing if I could find him. But my car’s in the shop.”
“Want me to drive?” I asked. Whoa. Where had that offer come from? But it was too late for me to take it back, because without hesitating, Nora said, “Sure.”
An hour later, I pulled up and waved to Nora, who was waiting outside, sprawled across the top step of the apartment building. She got up slowly and ambled over to the car, wearing pale blue nylon sweatpants that stuck to her thighs and a matching jacket that hung down loosely and still managed to reveal a roll of fat at her waist. Grief hadn’t made her lose her appetite.
We exchanged brief hellos, and she pulled the door closed on the Lexus, then reached for the seat belt.
“So where are we going?” I asked, ready to take off. I put the car into DRIVE and checked the rearview mirror. Nobody had followed me here. Though, come to think of it, who would?
Nora held out a slip of greasy paper and read me the address, mentioning a town I’d never heard of before.
“Is it near here?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Dunno.”
I didn’t ask how she’d planned to get there. Instead, I typed the address into the Direction Finder GPS on the dashboard and waited for a map to appear. I studied it for a minute. The town was in a valley on the other side of the hills and in territory I didn’t know. “It’ll be a long drive,” I said, but neither of us was changing her mind, so I took off.
We didn’t say anything as we drove, just listened for the synthetic voice on the GPS to call out directions every couple of minutes. We followed it onto a freeway. During a weekday rush hour, the eight lanes would have been packed, but this Sunday morning the road could pass for the track at Le Mans — a smattering of cars, all of them roaring at eighty-five miles per hour. I stayed in the right lane and didn’t go much above sixty — okay, sixty-five — but Nora clutched the edge of her seat and looked like she might start screaming any minute.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I hate freeways,” she said. “We don’t have these at home.”
“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” I said, veering around a Honda that thought the speed limit sign meant something.
“I’m not from Kansas, I’m from Idaho,” she said. Either she didn’t like my joke, or she hailed from the one town in the world where The Wizard of Oz hadn’t opened yet.
We exited the freeway, following the electronic voice into a nouveau riche suburb of oversized McMansions crammed onto tiny lots. They looked cheaply built, but screamed with flamboyant flourishes like Corinthian columns, Doric arches, bulging balustrades, and Victorian finishes. Often all on one house.
“Ooohhh,” said Nora, nose pressed against the window like she was on the Swingin’ Safari Ride at Disneyland, “look at these. Aren’t they fancy?”
More folly than fancy, but why argue? Bad taste could be purchased at any price. We turned another corner onto Hillman Drive, and I slowed down in front of number 17, the numerals visible on a small mailbox in front. The house itself sat far back on the lot, high up a steeply pitched incline. I might have loosely labeled it Americ
an Colonial (crossed with English Tudor) if not for the terraces with swirled white railings. A nice touch — if the house were perched on the edge of the Meditteranean.
“Have you ever seen anything more fabulous?” asked Nora, her hot breath making little circles of condensation on the window.
“Never seen anything like it at all,” I said truthfully, pulling up next to the curb and turning off the car. Decorative brass fencing circumnavigated the house, but the driveway and the main walk-way remained open. Still, no way would I try to navigate my Lexus up the steep driveway.
“Can’t you get closer?” Nora asked.
“We can walk from here,” I said, getting out.
She glared at me — maybe they didn’t walk in Twin Falls, either — but then marched ahead. I hung back slightly as she trudged up a steep staircase, panting and puffing. Finally, on the front porch, Nora rang the bell. After a long wait while nobody answered, she rang again. And again.
“You coming up?” she asked, looking down the staircase at me. Her face was red from the exertion.
“I’ll wait here. It doesn’t seem like anyone’s home.”
Looks to Die For Page 16
