A Playdate With Death

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Pretty intense,” Peter said.

  “No kidding.”

  “You know, sometimes I wonder. If you have kids, and you adopt another, is it really possible to love the adopted kid as much?”

  “I suppose it must be. For some people. I don’t think the Drs. Katz succeeded very well, though.”

  “It must be hard. I mean, think about how much time we spend talking about how much Ruby looks like you, or about how Isaac has my ability to focus on an issue.”

  “Focus? I think obsess is a better word for it.”

  “Semantics. Anyway, we’re always talking about how much they’re like you, or like me. How many times have you said that Isaac looks like your dad? Isn’t that a big part of why we love them so much?”

  I took a sip of wine and considered that. “I don’t know. I think it might be part of how we love them, but not why. With an adopted child, you just have a different how, if you see what I mean. You don’t love him any less. Just differently, the way we love each of ours differently.”

  Peter shrugged. “Maybe. I guess we’ll probably never know. Anyway, it sounds like you think the adoption might be related to Bobby’s suicide.”

  “If it was a suicide.”

  “Is there still any doubt? What are the cops saying?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think they’re still considering it a suspicious death.” I told Peter about Bobby’s on-line purchases, and he agreed that the behavior didn’t sound like that of a man about to kill himself. “Al made another call to one of his friends. I’m hoping he can prod the cops into looking at Bobby’s case a little more closely.”

  “How is Al? How’s his new business?”

  “Okay, I guess. Oh. Ha. You’ll never believe this. It’s the most ridiculous thing. He wants me to go into business with him.”

  Peter looked at me seriously. “Why is that so ridiculous?”

  “What? Me, go into business as a private eye? Like Hercule Poirot? Or Cordelia Gray? Or Matlock?”

  “I don’t think it’s such a nutty idea for you to team up with Al to do some investigation. It’s clear you have a knack for it, don’t you think? Without you, the cops would never have solved Abigail Hathaway’s murder or the Fraydle Finkelstein thing. Why not turn this skill of yours into a career?”

  “Because I have a career. Or had one. I don’t want another. Anyway, I’m supposed to be home raising the kids, remember?”

  He shrugged. “You decided that you couldn’t be a half-time public defender. Maybe you could be a half-time investigator.”

  “It would never work. What would I do? Sit around Al’s empty garage helping him polish his gun collection? I have better things to do with my time.”

  “Like?”

  “Like car pool! Like playdates!”

  “That reminds me,” he said. “Since I’m getting back to work, you get to take Ruby and Isaac to Ari’s birthday party tomorrow. I’ve got a meeting with the studio executive assigned to my project.” He reached into his pocket and handed me an invitation printed with a pattern of mottled green, brown, and black.

  “Tell me this isn’t camouflage,” I said.

  IS it only in Los Angeles that people would do this? Or is it because Ruby’s classmate Ari’s parents were from Israel, where they take for granted that the army is a part of life? Whatever the reason, the party was like something out of a movie: Rambo or The Guns of Navarone. Isaac had never been so happy in his entire life.

  The playroom of the birthday boy’s house was decorated in brown and green streamers. The party hats perched jauntily on the children’s heads were little green berets. G.I. Joe himself was there, though he was actually more of a G.I. Jacob. Ari’s uncle, who had recently mustered out of the Israeli army and immediately immigrated to Los Angeles to work in his brother’s chain of electronics stores, wore what looked like an Israeli army uniform, complete with sergeant’s stripes and a webbed belt cinched tightly at the waist. He had a black plastic toy Uzi submachine gun hanging on his shoulder (at least I hoped it was a toy), and dark red combat boots. His dark, curly hair peeked out from under a burgundy beret that was close in color to his full, pouty lips. He had longer lashes than I did.

  The kids marched around the living room in formation for a while, then had a water pistol fight in the backyard. I concentrated my attention on the soldier uncle and did my best to keep from licking my lips. What is it about a man in uniform? No matter how much all of the guns and pageantry of it bothers me, I still find something strangely compelling about a set of cute buns swathed in military green.

  At the same time that I was drooling over the soldier, I was feeling pretty damn disgusted about the whole gun thing.

  Thank God Stacy was there. Her son Zach was quite a bit older than the birthday boy, but as he went to school with Ari’s sister, he’d been invited to join in the festivities. We leaned against the kitchen counter talking softly.

  “Can you believe this?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes and flicked back her thick blond hair. Stacy is one of those women who were born to make others feel jealous. She seems beautiful, although she’s the first to point out that it’s more a result of careful preparation and judicious spending than any natural physical perfection. Her hair is always carefully cut in a classic modification of the style of the moment, and I haven’t seen her without makeup since we graduated from college. Her life seems perfect, too. She has a math-whiz son, a handsome husband, and she is one of the rising stars at International Creative Artists, Hollywood’s biggest talent agency. Unfortunately, what with her husband Andy’s infidelities, sustaining that image of impeccable contentment requires as much work and artifice as does keeping up her physical appearance. She and Andy have been in and out of divorce court and couple’s counseling, trying for years to deal with the fact that she earns more money than he does and that, for some reason, that fact instills in him the urge to buy expensive cars and even more expensive women.

  “I just don’t get it, really I don’t. Why are boys so infatuated with guns and soldiers?” I said, keeping my voice low.

  “I don’t know. Probably because their parents are,” Stacy said.

  “Are they? Do you really think these people are gun owners?” I waved at the collection of Hollywood and almost-Hollywood parents. The women all looked like they were trying to be Stacy, and the men had that self-satisfied air they tend to acquire when their incomes keep pace with their toy-buying whims.

  “You’d be surprised,” my friend said.

  “Am I going to have to start asking whether there’s a gun in the house before I send Ruby and Isaac out on playdates?”

  “It’s not a bad idea. But, then, Ruby’s been over to my house thousands of times. It’s never bothered you.”

  My jaw dropped. “You have a gun?”

  She nodded. “Just a little one. I got it last year after Andy moved back home.”

  “Are you kidding me? Why?”

  “Remember last’s year’s bimbo?”

  “Who could possibly keep track?”

  Stacy rolled her eyes. “I know, I know. Anyway, she was the craziest of them all. After he broke up with her, she started calling the house at all hours. We changed our phone number, and then she started calling me at work. I kept imagining that scene from Fatal Attraction, you know, where Glenn Close puts the bunny in the pot? I wanted to be prepared in case she came after Zach’s gerbil.”

  Was I the only person in the city of Los Angeles who wasn’t packing heat?

  The pièce de résistance of the party—I swear I’m not making this up—was a piñata shaped like a two-foot-long pistol. The kids thwacked at it happily, while Ari’s parents beamed and scrupulously videotaped every minute of the festivities. When the piñata finally burst, after a good half hour of feeble strikes by the children and one good whack with his machine gun by G.I. Jake, a rain of tiny plastic soldiers, water pistols, and foil-wrapped chocolates in the shape of rifle cartridges showered down on th
e children’s heads. God knows where they got the candy bullets.

  After cake and ice cream, I gathered my two and put them in the car.

  “That was a gun party,” Isaac announced, beside himself with astonishment and glee.

  “Yes, it was. Did you like it?” I asked them.

  “I didn’t,” Ruby said loyally. “We don’t like guns, do we Mama?”

  “No. No, we don’t.”

  “I do,” Isaac said. “I love guns. I love them. And I loved that party. That’s the kind of party I’m going to have, okay?”

  “Over my dead body,” I said, thinking of Bobby Katz and what a gun had done to him.

  “No!” Isaac wailed.

  “What, honey?” I asked, leaning into the car where I’d just buckled him into his car seat.

  He wrapped his soft, plump arms around me and kissed me on the cheek, hard. “I don’t want you to have a dead body.”

  I kissed him back. “That’s just a saying, honey. My body is fine. It just means I don’t want you to have a gun party.”

  “But why not?” he whined.

  “I’ve told you a million times, baby. Guns are bad; they kill people.”

  “Real guns are bad. They kill people. Play guns are just pretend. They just pretend to kill people.”

  I looked at him, surprised. Did he, at his age, really understand the difference between real and pretend? “Even pretending to kill people is bad, Isaac.”

  His lower lip pooched out a bit and his eyes filled with tears. “Am I a bad boy?” he whispered.

  “No! No, of course not.” I covered him with kisses. “You’re a very good boy. You’re the best boy.”

  “Mama?” Ruby interrupted.

  “What, sweetie?”

  “Well, you always tell Isaac guns are bad. So maybe that’s why Isaac thinks he’s bad. ’Cause he loves something so much, even though it’s so bad.”

  I stared at her. Then I turned to him. “Is that true, Isaac? Do you think you’re a bad boy because you love guns and I tell you guns are bad?”

  He burst into tears and buried his head in my neck.

  Ten

  THAT night I finally got around to reading all the E-mail Bobby had received after his death. There were a couple of messages from clients, obviously written before they knew what happened to him. The rest were from Internet contacts who were not aware that he’d died. There were messages from his on-line adoptee support group. There were piles of spam—junk mail from mortgage brokers and pornography web sites and the like. Mostly, however, there were messages from Candace.

  The first of Candace’s messages began with a plaintive lament about his failure to contact her. Apparently, it had been a long time since she’d received an E-mail from him. She begged him not to cut her out of the “loop of his life.” The rest of the message had to do with the letter Bobby had written his birth mother. Candace urged him to ignore the woman’s failure to respond and to contact her. Candace’s tone was almost nagging. Clearly, she’d been giving him this advice for some time. At one point she even threatened to “drive out there” and talk to the woman herself. I didn’t think she was serious, the words were followed by a keyboard;), but the threat didn’t strike me as entirely idle.

  In her next message, Candace apologized for “haranguing” Bobby and asked him to call her or come by the café. After that came a string of short messages. A couple begged him to call and apologized again and again for “being so bossy.” Finally, she grew angry and called him cruel and selfish for excluding her from “the most important moment of your life—the culmination of your very existence.”

  There followed twenty or so one-line messages along the lines of “Where are you?” and “Why aren’t you answering me?”

  The last message began with the words, “You know I love you.” It went on from there. She told him that long before they’d met in person she’d realized that she wanted to dedicate herself to him. She insisted that their shared tragedy brought them together. She berated him for his unwillingness to consider a relationship with her, his obvious “soul mate.” Finally, she wrote, “I know you say that the reason you don’t want to be with me—in every sense of the word—is because you consider me your ‘soul sister,’ and not your lover. But we both know that’s not true. You’re allowing your guilt about Betsy to keep you from realizing your true destiny. The Lakota don’t believe that you can hide from your destiny. You can’t remain shackled to that stoned and destructive soul, not when mine cries out to you.”

  I leaned back in my chair with a sigh. Poor Candace. Poor Bobby. The truth was, he seemed an unlikely object of such passionate devotion. Bobby had been handsome, sure, but in a kind of bland, blond way. His good looks were strained, blurred, somehow, as a result, I’d always assumed, of his methamphetamine use—speed wreaks havoc on the skin. Bobby was, of course, in good shape. It was his job to be. He wasn’t, however, bulky and overly defined. He had a pleasantly strong and firm body, and his stomach was less of a washboard than a solid countertop. But really what made him seem something less than a Lothario was his easygoing, almost innocuous manner. He was pleasant and cheerful. He was ready with an encouraging word or an inspiring quote from one of his AA manuals. But he wasn’t passionate. He wasn’t ardent or fervent. He was calm and pleasant and decidedly un–soul mate–like. But then, who am I to say? My soul mate spends most of his days playing with vintage action figures and writing about serial murder, cannibalism, and human sacrifice.

  THE next morning, Al called me with the news that he had, basically, no news. His sources at the LAPD weren’t saying much about Bobby’s death.

  “Let me put it this way,” Al said. “It could be suicide. Or maybe not. I get the feeling they’re thinking that if it was a homicide, it was a drug hit—you knew the guy was an addict, right?”

  “Recovered.”

  “Whatever. Once an addict always an addict, that’s what I say.”

  I rolled my eyes at the phone. “How original, Al.”

  “Anyway, the gun wasn’t registered to him or to anyone else, but there’s no evidence it was an illegal weapon. It was most likely purchased through a gun show, in which case there would be no records about who bought it.”

  “Why not? Don’t gun sellers have to do background checks?”

  “Not at gun shows.”

  “Why not?”

  Al didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “Honestly, I’ve never really understood that myself. Anyway, a background check wouldn’t do us much good. Those records are destroyed after the person passes the check.”

  “What?” I was shocked. “Why? Why destroy the record of who bought the gun?”

  “Haven’t you heard of privacy, girlie? You want the United States government keeping track of its private citizens’ every move?”

  “I sure as hell want the government keeping track of the gun buyers!” I said.

  I could feel Al seething on the other end of the line. Finally, he said, “Listen, you tree-hugging feminist, I’m just not going to have this fight with you. And, anyway, maybe you should be thanking me instead of yelling at me.”

  I was suitably rebuked and decidedly chastened. “You’re right. Thank you so much. Really. Don’t be mad, okay?”

  He sighed. “No sweat. It’s not your fault. You’re confused. Anyway, I got the skip trace results back on the two women from the hospital. I’ll fax them over to you.”

  “Thanks. Really. I owe you one.”

  “Don’t owe me. Come work with me.”

  I laughed.

  “I’m not kidding,” he said.

  I’D already figured that the younger woman, Brenda Fessler, was the mom. I knew that Bobby had been adopted through Jewish Family Services, and Fessler sounded like a Jewish name. Moreover, I thought a nineteen-year-old was more likely to put up a child for adoption than a twenty-six-year-old. The skip trace had turned her up in Reno, Nevada. I tried the telephone number but found it disconnected. I tapped my finger
s on the table for a moment, irritated at the dead end. Then, figuring what the heck, I could afford the ninety cents, I called information. There was no Brenda Fessler listed, but there was a Jason Fessler. I decided to give it a whirl. The phone rang once and was picked up by a jaunty voice. I wasn’t really expecting much, but when I asked for Brenda the man yelled out, “Hey, Ma! Now you’re getting phone calls at my house! Here, give me the baby.”

  “Hello?” The voice was as bright and cheerful as the man’s, and I hoped that this might be the woman I was looking for.

  “Hi. I hope you can help me. I’m trying to track down the mother of a baby boy born at Haverford Memorial Hospital on February 15, 1972.”

  “Again?”

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “A nice young man called me about this very thing a month or so ago. He was born on that date and was trying to find his mother. Are you calling about the same baby?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I told him. Much as I wish I could help him, he’s not mine. My Jason was born at Haverford Memorial on February 15, 1972, and he’s right here. You called his house, actually. And I’m holding his son, Jason Jr., who’s six months old. And a doll. Aren’t you? A big precious doll?” I thanked the happy grandmother for her time and hung up.

  It had to be Susan Masters. The skip trace had turned up a woman whose maiden name was Susan Masters but whose married name was Sullivan. The fact that confused me was that the date of her name change was 1968, a full four years before Bobby was born. The birth date and the social security number matched, however. For some reason, Susan Sullivan had used her maiden name when she checked into the hospital. Perhaps because she planned to give her baby up for adoption and hoped for some anonymity.

  The Sullivans still lived in Los Angeles. Their address was in the Pacific Palisades, a beautiful little community north of Santa Monica. I dialed the number, and a woman’s voice answered almost immediately.