Murder Plays House (22 page)

“What’s going on, sweetie?” I said, softly, reaching out and patting her hand, well above her still-drying nails.

“Nothing. Nothing. It’s just, you know. It’s just so much easier for men. Andy’s still so young. I mean, we’re the same age, but for him that’s young. Thirty-five for a man is nothing. But for us . . .”

“For us, what?”

She looked down at her hands, shaking her bright blond hair down over her cheek. “It’s older. A thirty-five-year-old woman is just older than a man of the same age. If he wanted to, Andy could be dating women ten, even fifteen years younger than he is. How many twenty-year-old guys would be interested in me?”

I leaned back in my chair. “First of all, hundreds. Thousands even. You’re gorgeous. You’re successful. You’re rich. If you weren’t married you’d be beating them away with a stick. But second of all, why would you ever
want
to go out with a twenty-year-old? Remember what the guys at college were like?” I shivered. “Is that really what you want? Some self-obsessed, overgrown child with no staying power?”

She laughed bitterly. “Isn’t that exactly what I’ve got?”

“Oh honey.” I tried to lean over the table to give her a hug, but my belly got in the way. At that moment the waitress arrived with our salads, and we disentangled ourselves and dug in.

“Well?” Stacy said, taking a delicate sip of her iced tea.
“What gives? Why the urgent lunch? How can I help you seal the deal with Harvey Brodsky?”

“Julia Brennan.”

“The comedienne? What about her?”

“Can I?” I reached a fork toward Stacy’s plate.

She pushed it toward me, wordlessly, and I scooped up some of her cheese. With a glance over my shoulder to make sure the waitress wasn’t watching, I sprinkled a bit over my salad. Stacy laughed.

“What?”

“You know what I love about you?”

“What?”

“You’re perfectly willing to stare down a murderer with a loaded gun, but you’re afraid of some self-righteous dingbat of a waitress.”

I sighed. “You should see me with my hairdresser.”

She laughed again.

“Anyway, Julia Brennan,” I said. “Is she a client of ICA?”

“She is.”

“Would you be willing to get me an introduction?”

Stacy lifted a heavily laden lettuce leaf to her lips and chewed contemplatively. “Why?”

Briefly, I told her about the Alicia Felix connection.

Stacy stabbed her lettuce leaves angrily and took a huge mouthful of food. “I can’t believe you,” she muttered.

“What?”

“Juliet, you really expect me to introduce you to one of my agency’s clients so you can accuse her of stealing her character from someone? You take the cake. You really do.”

Of course she was right. Had I really asked my friend to go out on that kind of limb? “I promise I’ll be delicate.”

She set her fork down, clattering it in her plate.

I said, “I just want to talk to her a little about the conflict she had with Alicia. I want to make sure Alicia really had dropped her claim against Julia, like the director of Left Coast said she had.”

“Are you planning on accusing Julia of murder?”

“No!” I did my best to manufacture a tone of outrage, but that was, of course, exactly what I was doing. Not necessarily accusing the woman, but investigating her. I wanted to find out exactly what was going on between those two women. What was the extent of the conflict? How far had it gone? Had Spike really succeeded in getting Alicia to drop her plans for a lawsuit?

Stacy was glaring at me, balefully, and I finally said, “You’re right. Of course you’re right. You can’t introduce me to her. I’ll figure out something else.”

Stacy looked thoughtful. “Did she really steal that character?”

“Absolutely. I mean, I have a videotape of Alicia doing it on some incredibly lame public access TV show out of the Valley years ago.”

“Maybe she stole it from Julia!”

“That’s not what the director of Left Coast says.”

“Left Coast?”

“Left Coast Players. The comedy troupe.”

“I think I’ve heard of it. Hmm.”

“Hmm, what?”

“Just, hmm. Do you mind if I tell this to my partners?”

Oy. Of course I should have anticipated this. The last thing I wanted was to precipitate the ruin of someone’s career. Particularly not someone who I was hoping would talk to me. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Let me figure out what’s going on, first. Okay? Give me some time to get a handle on what happened to Alicia. When I do, then we’ll talk about it again.”

“
When
you do?”

“
If
I do.”

Stacy smiled. “I was just teasing. I’m sure you’ll figure out what happened to her. You always do. You can do anything you set your mind to.”

I shook my head. “I wish that were true.”

“It is,” Stacy said firmly. And that, in a nutshell, is why our friendship has survived so many years, and our two such divergent lives. Stacy and I, for all the entirely different things we value, are each absolutely convinced that the other is not only the smartest woman out there, but is capable of absolutely anything. We’re one another’s greatest fans. Everyone needs a friend like that.

I
left the restaurant with plenty of time to pick Ruby up at school. I’d arranged for Isaac to go to a friend’s house for a playdate, but I hadn’t been able to unload Ruby on anyone—perhaps due to her recently acquired habit of gagging and holding her nose whenever offered a snack that didn’t fit precisely into her guidelines of acceptable foodstuffs—so I was going to have to take her with me. Hers was not an entirely inconvenient presence, however. I was fixating too much on Alicia and her various body-image problems and career anxieties. I wasn’t blind to the possibility that my concentration on those issues was more a reflection of my own neuroses than a realistic assessment of what might have caused Alicia’s murder. I had to explore other avenues, and the one I decided to devote the afternoon to was Kat’s mother-in-law, the formidable Nahid Lahidji. I was betting that Nahid would be less likely to rip my head off if I showed up at her office with a delightfully cute child in tow.

Ruby greeted me with a hug and her usual prattle about the day’s events. Her brother invariably answers the question, “How was school?” with a scowl, and the comment “a
little
good.” Ruby, on the other hand, always has a long list of items that require discussion. Our trip in the direction of the Lahidji real estate office was taken up with a monologue on her new social studies unit, the American Indian tribes of Southern California. Ruby’s teacher, a young woman fresh out of the education program at Harvard, was a devoted and energetic soul, but if she had a failing it was her desperation to single-handedly right the wrongs of centuries of American racism and xenophobia. The six-year-olds studied slavery, the trail of tears, the Japanese internment in World War II, the expulsion of the Mormons, current English-only initiatives, and the problems faced by illegal immigrants. Whatever one thought the general depressing nature of the material, Ruby was reading well, could add a mean column of numbers, and was more adept at navigating a computer than I. So who was I to complain?

“You guys still talking about that epidemic of obesity?” I asked.

Ruby shook her head and in a voice dripping with disgust said, “We’re on another
unit
, Mama. That was the
last
unit.”

“Oh. Okay. And what about Madison? Is she still on a diet?”

No response from the back seat.

“Rubes? What’s going on with Madison and the other girls? Are they still on diets?”

“Madison doesn’t play with me anymore.”

I looked in the rearview mirror. Ruby had her knee propped up under her chin. She was dabbing her tongue on the fabric of her jeans, making a large, round wet spot. “Why not, sweetie?”

She shrugged.

“Ruby? Honey? What happened?”

Her eyes were dry, but her lip trembled. “I said I wasn’t going to be a diet girl anymore. And Madison said only diet girls can play with her.”

I felt a sinking in my chest, and an overwhelming urge to tear off Madison’s perfect little head. “She’s a stinky girl, Ruby. She really is.”

“I know.”

“Are the other girls still diet girls?”

“Some of them.”

“Well, don’t play with them. Play with the ones who aren’t. Those are the smarter girls.”

“I know.”

“I’ll tell you what, honey. I’ll call Madison’s mom. And your teacher. I’ll tell them—” Ruby’s wails interrupted me. “What? What, honey?”

“Don’t call! Don’t call! They’ll call me a tattletale. Pinky swear you won’t call!”

“Okay, okay, honey. I won’t. I won’t call.” I pulled over into a strip mall. “Want some ice cream?” I said.

“Okay. And can we go to the library, afterwards?”

“Sure! What a great idea!” I’m ashamed to say that I pretended to my daughter that my sole reason for agreeing to the library stop was for her edification and pleasure. She was fooled, but only as long as it took for me to settle down in front of one of the computer terminals. Then she scowled at me and stomped off in the direction of the children’s department, warning me over her shoulder that she intended to read “lots of
inappropriate
books!”

I put Nahid’s name into Google and got over five hundred hits. Most looked to be property listings, but there were a number of write-ups in local real estate magazines,
and even the real estate section of the
Los Angeles Times.
The reporter for the
Times
had clearly found Nahid to be a more interesting subject than the run-of-the-mill realtor profiled by his section. Nahid was the daughter of an Iranian general and close confederate of the Shah’s who had been executed during the Iranian revolution. Her husband, a military man who served under her father, had also been killed. She had escaped to the United States with her mother and son, and had, with only the portion of the family fortune that had been invested abroad and was thus safe from the greedy fingers of the new regime, begun a lucrative real estate business. She received her real estate license in 1983, a mere two years after arriving in the United States. Nahid’s hardness, her aggressiveness, suddenly made sense to me. Here was a woman who had been torn from her luxurious lifestyle, seen her father and husband murdered, and who had single-handedly supported her mother and son and, I would bet, countless cousins and friends, ensuring that their transition to life in America would be easier than her own. Reading about Nahid didn’t make me like her any more, but now I admired and respected her.

Over the course of the past twenty-five years, Nahid had become one of the wealthiest and most powerful realtors in Los Angeles. She still sold primarily residential properties ranging from Brentwood mansions to smaller homes in better neighborhoods, but she also owned both commercial buildings and residential multi-unit dwellings all over the city. Nahid Lahidji was a very wealthy woman. I shifted over to the LexisNexis real property listing and looked up her various holdings. While most of them were mortgaged, there were no liens, second mortgages, or tax violations on any of them. Her finances seemed entirely secure. So much for my notion that Alicia’s objections to
the sale of her brother’s house would cause Nahid some kind of financial hardship. On the contrary. The house in Larchmont was a bargain by Nahid’s standards, and the commission on it was small change to her. So why was she bothering at all? Probably as a favor to Farzad and his mother. As for why she had gotten so angry with me for my interference, I imagined that Nahid was simply a woman who did not like her plans to be disrupted in any way.

I jotted down a few URLs for the more helpful sites and then went to find Ruby. She had, in fact, found herself something entirely inappropriate to read. I discovered her stretched out on a bench in the children’s section, chewing on the sleeve of her shirt, and reading
Seventeen
magazine.

“Hey!” I said. “You are way too young to be reading that junk.”

She continued leafing through the pages, teeth busily gnawing holes in the sequined turtleneck she’d made me order off a website called “Gurlsdreemz” after swearing to me that she couldn’t live without it.

“Ruby! Stop chewing on your clothes. You’re ruining that shirt.”

She spat the fabric out and rolled over on her back. “Can I have a prescription to this magazine for my birthday?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Really?” she asked, obviously shocked.

“Your seventeenth birthday.”

“Mom,” she said.

“C’mon kiddo. We need to get going.”

“Wait a sec. I want to show you something.” She paged through the magazine until she came to a photograph of a skinny model wearing a pair of jeans that hung on her narrow hip-bones like clothes on a hook. She wore no shirt, and had her arms wrapped around her virtually nonexistent breasts.

“See?” Ruby said.

“See what?”

“See her belly-button ring? Isn’t it pretty?”

I grabbed my daughter around her waist and hoisted her to her feet, groaning at her unaccustomed weight. It had been a while since I’d tried to pick this big girl up. “You’re not getting your pupik pierced, my love. Let’s go.”

“No.”

“Come on, honey. We have to pick Isaac up in an hour, and I have something I need to do before then.”

I wish I could say I sounded as patient the fifth and sixth times I told Ruby we had to leave. It would be truly wonderful if I could report that we walked out of the library hand-in-hand, an accommodating child and a devoted parent. Alas, it’s more likely that we resembled a screaming banshee and the banshee’s ill-tempered herder. Thankfully, Ruby’s sobs had abated by the time we reached Nahid’s office.

The boss herself wasn’t there, but Kat was. I was shown back to her tiny office by a lovely young receptionist with dark, waist-length hair, and gold fingernails with tiny jewels imbedded in the polish. I found my friend hunched over her computer, a stricken look on her face.

“Hey, Kat,” I said. “What’s up? What are you doing?”