The Big Nap

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Maybe,” she said, in a conspiratorial whisper. “You want to get a cup of coffee? We can talk.”

  I hadn’t actually managed to have more than a sip of the mud Yossi had prepared for me, and I needed a shot of caffeine.

  “Is there somewhere we can go?”

  “For coffee? On Melrose?” she asked, incredulous. We walked out of the courtyard. It took us a minute or two to choose which of the seven coffee shops on the block we would find the most comfortable.

  We settled for a Starbucks on the opposite side of the street. “It’ll be more private,” Anat said. “None of the people on the courtyard buy coffee there.”

  We walked into the café and up to the counter. I ordered a mochaccino, which I once heard has the calories of a milk shake. I dumped in a rather ludicrous packet of Equal and shook an inch-thick layer of chocolate flakes onto the top of the foam. Anat got a triple espresso. No wonder she looked so thin. And wired.

  We made our way over to a couple of comfortable armchairs and sat down. Say what you will about the Starbucks-ing of America, the stores sure are cozy. And, I’ve always liked the somewhat watery brew. I like a cup of coffee I can sip, not chew. Except for the chocolate flakes.

  “I’ve been thinking about the last time I saw Yossi’s girlfriend,” Anat said to me. She was obviously relishing the prospect of gossiping about her ex. “Maybe two weeks ago, maybe a little less, I saw her here one day after the next. Both times she was upset.”

  “Upset?”

  “The first time, she looked furious. I noticed her because she slammed his door so hard that I came out of my apartment. She was pale, like a sheet. But you know, she still looked beautiful. Like a movie star. Those big eyes.”

  “And then you saw her again?”

  Anat sipped daintily at her espresso. I gulped my frothy, fat-filled festival of chocolate. “Yes,” she said. “She came back the next morning. I was sitting out on the balcony and I saw her run into the courtyard. Something was wrong. She looked terrible. She knocked on his door and when he answered it she pushed into the apartment. It was like he didn’t want to let her in, but she pushed by him. I waited on the balcony, watching, and then maybe ten minutes later, she flew out. This time she was crying hysterically. She ran out of the courtyard. And that was the last time I saw her.”

  “Could she have come back when you weren’t around?”

  “It’s possible, but I asked the others and nobody saw her there, either. A lot of us noticed her when she made those two dramatic exits, but nobody I talked to saw her come back ever again. If she did, it was when none of us were home.”

  I leaned back in my chair. Yossi had told me that they’d argued, but he certainly hadn’t told me that she’d left him once in a rage and once weeping. This seemed like information critical to Fraydle’s disappearance. I realized that Anat wasn’t the most reputable of witnesses. She herself had a motive to do away with Fraydle. She was obviously still in love with Yossi. Nobody is that interested in an old boyfriend unless she still cares.

  By now I was convinced that something very bad had happened to Fraydle. It was time to tell Fraydle’s parents about this. And it was time to call the police.

  Twenty-two

  “I told you, Juliet, if they hear nothing by Shabbos, Sima will insist they go to the police. Before that, I can do nothing.”

  I leaned on the counter at the front of Nettie’s market, where I had rushed immediately after leaving Starbucks.

  “Listen, Nettie, I don’t think Fraydle ran away. I think that something has happened to her. Friday is too long to wait. By then, it might be too late.”

  Nettie drew back, anxiously knotting a cloth in her hands. She shook her head. “I can do nothing. Nothing.”

  “Nettie, Fraydle had a boyfriend. An Israeli boyfriend. Not religious. I’m afraid he might have hurt her because she was getting married.”

  Nettie shook her head furiously. “What are you talking? A boyfriend. That’s ridiculous.”

  “She went to his apartment. I talked to him, I talked to his neighbors.”

  Nettie gasped, “Mein Gott.”

  “It’s time to go to the police.”

  She nodded. “You go talk to Sima.” She glanced around the store as if looking for something. “Listen, this is what you’ll do. I’ll call her and tell her I’m sending you to get something from the garage. And then when you go get the box, you’ll talk to her.”

  “What?” I asked, confused.

  “I use her garage for storage. My storage area is so small and they have lots of room. It’s their Pesach kitchen, their kosher-for-Passover kitchen, and during the rest of the year they don’t use it. So I put my things there. I’ll tell her I need a box from the garage, and while you’re there, you’ll talk to her.”

  “Nettie, I’ll just go over to talk to her. I don’t need an excuse.”

  Nettie shook her head. “She’s not going to talk to you. She won’t even let you in the house. Baruch told her not to talk to you anymore.”

  “What? Why?”

  Nettie shrugged her shoulders. She picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Listen, Sima, I’m sending someone over to pick up a case of”—her eyes scanned the empty shelves—“a case of tuna fish. I’m out. I can’t come myself because the store is full of customers. They won’t leave me alone today.” She gestured wildly around the empty shop and hung up the phone.

  I rolled my eyes at this unnecessary subterfuge. Nettie obviously didn’t want to be there while I coerced Sima into going to the police. I walked quickly out the back door, down the alley, and to the Finkelstein house. Fraydle’s younger brothers were once again playing on the porch. I climbed the steps, smiled reassuringly at them, and knocked on the door.

  Fraydle’s mother came to the door. When she saw me, she began to shake her head.

  “Please,” I said. “I just need to get a case of tuna for Nettie.”

  Sima looked at me for a minute, and then shrugged her shoulders. “Come,” she said, leading me into the house and to the kitchen. The little boys trailed after us. I stood awkwardly for a moment and watched as one of the youngsters crawled onto a kitchen chair. He reached out for the sugar bowl sitting in the middle of the table and sent it flying to the ground, shattering in an explosion of sugar and porcelain. Remembering Sarah and the broken saucer, I flinched. Sima, however, didn’t react the way I’d expected her to. She merely kissed the top of the boy’s head, and reached for a broom and a dustpan to sweep up the fragments and spilled crystals.

  “The garage is down those stairs.” She pointed toward a door in the wall next to the stove. I opened the door and walked down the steep wooden stairs into the gloom of the garage. There was a rickety banister that I didn’t dare touch for fear it wouldn’t support even the weight of my hand. The garage was entirely taken up by boxes piled against walls and by a complete kitchen set up in one corner. There was a small stove, an old refrigerator, a metal sink, and an ancient chest freezer.

  I walked toward the piled-up boxes and began searching for a case of tuna. A low hum filled the garage. I lifted my head and looked around. The hum seemed to be coming from the freezer. I walked over and put my hand on the top. It was cold. This was, Nettie had said, the Passover kitchen. The holiday wasn’t for months. I heard my grandmother’s voice in my mind, “Aroysgevorfen electricity!” A waste of electricity. My mouth grew dry. I grasped the handles of the freezer and gave a tug. With a hiss, the top lifted up, and I screamed.

  Fraydle looked as though she were asleep, except she was very white. She was curled up in the freezer, with her legs up against her chest. Her eyes were open just a crack, enough to see that they had rolled back in her head. Frost crystals had formed over her eyes and mouth. Her head rested in a pool of something frozen and black. Blood.

  Suddenly I became aware of the thumping noise of footsteps coming down the stairs. I dropped the lid of the freezer and backed away from it.

  Sima rushed down
the stairs, the little boys close behind her. When she saw me she stopped dead in her tracks. “What? What?” she asked, her face pale. Her hands reached out and grabbed the boys by their collars, not allowing them to cross the floor toward me. Sima stood motionless, her white knuckles gripping the backs of her sons’ shirts as they wriggled, trying to escape her grasp. She looked into my face.

  “Fraydle?” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  I looked at the freezer and she moaned. She knelt down and scooped the little boys into her arms, burying her face in their necks. Great, rasping sobs shook her body, and the boys grew silent and pale at the sight of their mother’s tears. I stood there with the wailing woman and her children for what felt like hours, but was surely not more than a moment or two. Then I led them up the stairs to the kitchen and shut the door at the top of the stairs behind me. I sat them at the table, lifted the phone, and, finally, many days after I should have, dialed 911.

  Twenty-three

  BY the time they let me go home, I had leaked though my breast pads and soaked my shirt. It was only the sight of me dripping all over myself that convinced the police officers to allow me to leave. Before I made my escape, a detective interviewed me in the little room where I’d nursed Isaac the first time I was at Fraydle’s house. I told the investigating officer, a woman of about my age with close-cropped brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses, everything I knew, including Yossi’s name and address. I even disclosed Ari’s sexual orientation. At this point I knew I could hold nothing back. The police needed to know everything so that they could find out who had done this horrible thing.

  I walked the few blocks from the Finkelsteins’ house to my own quickly, desperate to see my husband and kids. My eyes were dry, which surprised me, as I’m a woman who can be reduced to tears by a television commercial. I hadn’t cried once since we’d discovered Fraydle’s body. It was as if I couldn’t lay claim to tears in the presence of Sima and the rabbi, who had walked into the horror on the heels of the police. Their mourning was so complete and total that my tears would have been a pale and inappropriate shadow.

  The scene I left behind me in Sima’s kitchen was quiet and miserable. Fraydle’s father leaned against the counter, his body folded and almost shrunken in despair. Nettie, whom I’d called after I’d spoken to the police, and Sima sat at the kitchen table, each kneading a dishtowel and, periodically, using it to wipe their streaming eyes or noses. Fraydle’s littlest brothers were huddled in a corner of the kitchen. Sarah sat in a chair next to her mother, shaking and weeping, gripping Sima’s hand in her own. The older boys stood around the edges of the room, eyes wet with tears and faces pale.

  When I reached my house, I unlocked the door and ran up the stairs into my apartment. I found Peter in the rocking chair, feeding Isaac a bottle. Ruby was watching television.

  “Juliet! Where have you been? It’s been almost four hours! I was completely freaking out!” Peter shouted.

  I ran across the room and, kneeling beside his chair, put my head in his lap next to Isaac’s warm body. The baby spat out the bottle nipple, grasped a piece of my hair in his little fist and shoved it into his mouth. Only then did I start to cry.

  Peter stroked my hair with his hand. “What happened, honey? What happened? Are you okay?”

  I hiccupped and sat up. I looked over at Ruby, who was so enraptured by the dancing purple dinosaur on TV that she had not even noticed my tears.

  “Fraydle’s dead,” I whispered.

  Peter didn’t look surprised. “I was afraid of that,” he murmured. “How?”

  “I don’t know. Peter, I found her body.” I was still whispering.

  He looked at me, his mouth open and his eyes wide.

  I told him about how I had found poor Fraydle shoved into the freezer.

  “What’s a Passover kitchen?” he interrupted at that point in my story.

  “At Passover you can’t eat any bread, only matzo. Really strict Orthodox won’t even cook in the same kitchen that bread was ever prepared in. So they keep an entirely separate kitchen to do their Passover cooking. They never let anything that’s not kosher for Passover into that kitchen so that it will never be spoiled.”

  “Oh,” he said. The two of us were silent for a moment, thinking about the horrible despoiling of the Finkelsteins’ kosher kitchen.

  I continued: “When I was in the garage, I heard the freezer humming. It didn’t make sense that there would be something in the freezer, because Passover is still months away. I just walked over and opened it.” My eyes filled with tears again.

  “Hey! Why are you crying?” Ruby shouted. She had momentarily looked up from Barney.

  I quickly wiped my eyes. “It’s nothing, honey. I’m just tired.” I turned to Peter. “What’s the baby drinking?” I asked.

  “Formula.”

  “What?”

  “Juliet, you weren’t here and he was going nuts. There wasn’t any breast milk in the freezer. I found that sample can of formula that they gave us at the hospital. He seems to like it fine.”

  I shrugged my shoulders, too exhausted by the events of the afternoon to argue. Also, I realized that I couldn’t expect Peter to share my obsession with keeping my nursing infant pure of the contamination of baby formula. I wasn’t really sure, myself, why I felt so strongly about it. I took the baby from Peter’s arms and nestled him in my lap on the couch. He rooted madly as I freed a breast for him. He gave a contented sigh as he latched on.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Peter said. “You got a message from Barbara Rosen.”

  “Who?” I asked. “I don’t know anyone named Barbara Rosen.”

  “She said she’s Jake’s mother.”

  “Jake who?” I asked.

  “Jake Rosen, I assume.”

  “I don’t know any Jake or Barbara Rosen.”

  “Mama!” Ruby shouted. “Jake in my class!”

  “Oh, right. Jake’s mommy. What did she want?”

  “She said she just called to remind you that The Boys From Syracuse is tomorrow afternoon.”

  I’d forgotten all about our plan. “Oh, right. Her older son’s play. She thought it would be fun if we took the kids to see it.”

  “I wanna go, Mama!” Ruby said.

  “Okay, honey,” I said, thinking that sitting through a children’s production of a Rodgers and Hart musical was a little more than I could handle right at that moment.

  “I wrote down all the details,” Peter said. “She’ll save seats for you and Ruby.”

  “Do you want to go instead?” I asked hopefully.

  “Do you need me to go?” Peter asked.

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Good, because I’d rather have root canal. But have fun.”

  THE police came by again later that day. The female detective who’d spoken to me at Fraydle’s house was accompanied by an older man in an ill-fitting navy suit with the unmistakable sheen of polyester. She introduced her partner, Carl Hopkins, and herself, Susan Black.

  Peter took the kids out to play in the yard and I sat at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around a steaming cup of chamomile tea and, once again, and in more detail, told the officers everything I knew about Fraydle’s death.

  “How well did you know the victim?” asked Detective Black.

  “Not well at all. She baby-sat for me once, and then didn’t show up the next day. When I went looking for her, that’s when I found out that she was gone.”

  “And when was that?”

  “A little over a week ago.”

  “And why didn’t you call the police then?” Detective Hopkins interrupted.

  I turned to him. “It wasn’t my place to. I couldn’t report her as a missing person. Only her parents could have done that.”

  “That’s not exactly true, ma’am,” Detective Black said. “You couldn’t have filed a report, because we would need a member of the family to verify that the girl was actually missing, but you certa
inly could have alerted us to her absence.”

  I nodded my head and softly said, “I could have, and in retrospect I should have.”

  Once we’d gone over the details of my search for Fraydle, Detective Black gave me her card and asked me to call her if I heard anything new. Then she leaned back in her chair, looked at me intently for a moment, and said, “Ms. Applebaum, I used to work with Detective Mitch Carswell of the Santa Monica Police Department.”

  I swallowed, not a little nervously.

  “I understand that you were helpful to him in solving the Hathaway murder.”

  Helpful? If single-handedly finding out who killed Abigail Hathaway, the headmistress of Los Angeles’s most selective nursery school, qualifies as helpful, then I suppose I was.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I understand that you were shot by Ms. Hathaway’s killer.”

  I looked into Detective Black’s face. Her expression was absolutely impassive.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Ms. Applebaum, we at the Los Angeles Police Department take our work very seriously.” She paused, as if waiting for me to say something. I didn’t. I just looked at her. Detective Hopkins stared at me balefully.

  Finally, Detective Black continued. “This is my homicide investigation, Ms. Applebaum. I am the primary detective on the case. I expect you to provide me with any and all information you possess.”

  “As I have,” I said.

  She held up her hand as if to still my voice. “And I expect that you will do nothing else. No more trips to New York. No more interviews with witnesses. Nothing. Do you understand?”

  I considered defending myself and explaining to her exactly why I’d investigated Fraydle’s disappearance, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. I wasn’t going to convince the two detectives that they needed the services of a crime-solving soccer-mom-in-training to track down Fraydle’s killer. All the same, I felt a niggling sense of irritation. Why couldn’t the woman just say thank you and assure me that she would competently carry out the investigation? Why did she feel the need to warn me off, as if I were some recalcitrant adolescent mucking up her turf?