Murder Plays House (27 page)

“She found her programmer. It was in the glove compartment of her car the whole time. She only thought it was in her purse. She hadn’t driven the car, so she didn’t see it.”

“How did she suddenly find it?”

“She went into labor yesterday, and her husband was on the other side of town at a meeting. Her mother-in-law drove her to the hospital in Marilyn’s car. Marilyn opened the glove compartment to look for some tapes to take into the delivery room with her.”

What did this mean? If Marilyn’s programmer hadn’t been stolen, how had her number been used? Someone must have programmed her number into a different programmer. But who? And why?

“Did she tell all this to the detective?”

“I’m sure,” Kat said. “Her babies are fine, by the way. Still in the NICU, but she says they’ll be out in a few days.”

“That’s wonderful. Um, Kat?”

“Yes?”

“How are you feeling?”

There was silence on the other end of the line. “Okay, I guess.”

That morning, before I’d gone out, I’d done a little Web surfing. I hadn’t been sure whether I was going to talk to Kat about what I’d found out, but now that I had her on the phone, I couldn’t bear not to. “Sweetie,” I said. “I hope you don’t think this is presumptuous of me, but I got a few names for you.”

“Names?” she said warily.

“Of therapists. People who specialize in bulimia among women our age.”

“I had a therapist.”

“Did you like her?”

She didn’t reply.

“Do you want me to give you the names?”

After a few seconds of silence, she said, “Okay.”

“I’ll email them to you.”

“Okay.”

“I hope you don’t think I’m butting in to something that’s none of my business.”

“No. No,” she said listlessly.

“Kat, you know you can call me. Anytime. Day or night. If you feel like doing something, or if you just want to talk.”

“I know.”

“Have you gone back to a meeting?”

“I was thinking about it.”

“Maybe you should go to one. Is there one tonight?”

“There’s one on Saturday, at Cedars.”

“How about you bring Ashkon to my house, he can hang out with Isaac and Ruby, have a sleepover, even. And you can go to the meeting. You won’t even have to tell Reza if you don’t want to.”

I wasn’t sure whether or not she’d accept my offer, and I was tremendously relieved when she did.

I walked into the doctor’s office, mulling over what Kat had told me about Marilyn’s programmer, and nearly fell over with surprise. Peter was sitting, waiting for me, reading a copy of
Baby
magazine.

“Hey!” I said. My eyes nearly filled with tears at the unexpected sight.

“Hey, yourself.”

I sat down next to him and grabbed his hand in my own. I squeezed, tightly. “What are you doing here?”

“Finding out all sorts of interesting things. Did you know that you’re not supposed to be eating tunafish sandwiches while you’re pregnant?”

“Really? Why not?”

“Mercury poisoning. Tuna is full of mercury. Which causes birth defects and learning disabilities.”

When the nurse came to get me, she found Peter on his
knees between my legs, doing his best to administer a Stanford/Binet to my belly button.

Of all the appointments for Peter to join me for, he had to be there when my doctor read me the riot act about my weight.

“Twenty-five to thirty-five pounds,” she said. “That’s what we recommend.”

I smiled a sickly smile.

“Juliet, you’ve already put on close to fifty pounds. And you’re nowhere near done.”

I nodded. “I know. Scary, isn’t it?”

She shook her head. “Your blood sugar is perfect, so that’s a good thing. Are we scheduling a c-section, given that you’ve had two? Recent studies do indicate a heightened risk of uterine rupture in post-caesarian trials of labor, particularly multiple caesarians.”

It took me all of a second to decide. “Yes, let’s schedule it.”

“Good choice. Given that, the size of the baby isn’t as important as if you were planning on a natural birth. But still. You are gaining weight faster than we would like.”

I looked over the doctor’s shoulder in time to catch Peter snickering into his hand. I freed a foot from the stirrup and aimed a kick at his groin. He jumped out of reach.

“I want you to watch what you eat,” the doctor said, helping me sit up.

And watch, I did. I watched the milkshake and the French fries all the way from my plate to my lips. In my defense, I will say that it was Peter’s idea that we go to Swingers for lunch after the appointment. I couldn’t be expected to satisfy myself with some limp salad while he downed a burger, could I?

I had just turned down, with considerable ceremony, a
refill on my milkshake when Peter’s cell phone rang. He answered it and murmured into the receiver for a minute. When he hung up, his face was pale.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he said.

“What?”

“That was Jake.”

“Jake your agent?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Charlie Hoynes’s daughter is dead.”

“His daughter? You mean Halley?”

“Jake was on his way to the funeral, and he remembered that Hoynes and I had just got together. He called to make sure we knew about it.”

I thought of Hoynes’s wife, and her obvious desperation on the day we’d spoken. “Oh, No. That’s awful. Did she die in the hospital? Was it the anorexia?”

Peter nodded. “I guess she starved herself to death.”

The French fries and ice cream roiled in my stomach, and I put a hand over my mouth and ran to the ladies room.

P
ETER
did not want to go to the funeral. He was right; we barely knew Hoynes, had never met his poor daughter, and my motivation for insisting we attend was entirely suspect. Nonetheless, within half an hour we’d gone home, changed our clothes, and were on our way out to the cemetery. I called the kids’ schools from the car and arranged for Ruby and Isaac to stay late in their after-school programs.

The service had already started when we arrived at the chapel on the cemetery grounds, but it had clearly not been going on long. A thin woman with limp brown hair hanging shapelessly over her ears led the assembled congregation in a hymn that I’d never heard before. Something about sheep and water and Isaiah. She wore traditional priestly vestments, but draped with a shawl made out of some kind of African Kinte cloth. I’m not particularly good at distinguishing among the various Christian clergy, but the formality of her robes, combined with the consciously inclusive
nature of her language and clothing, led me to infer that it might be an Episcopal service.

The hymn singing went on long enough for me to peruse the crowd. There was something familiar about it—something that seemed less than funereal, and it took me a while to put my finger on it. Finally, it hit me. But for the somberness of the tone, the room had the feel of a bat mitzvah. People were dressed in regulation black, but that had long since become the color of choice at every life-ceremony, from weddings to brises to bar mitzvahs. There were a few people weeping, most noticeably Charlie Hoynes’s ex-wife. What gave the proceedings their adolescent, nearly celebratory feel, however, were the rows of teenagers, strictly segregated by sex—the boys in bright, barely-worn suits, the girls in dresses either too childlike for their size, or too skimpy and revealing for the event. The children seemed genuinely upset; all of the girls, and even one or two of the boys, were crying. I couldn’t help but notice, however, that most of the children kept one eye on their compatriots to make sure their tears were carefully modulated to that of every other girl, no more nor less dramatic, their grief neither more nor less apparent.

After the service, I made Peter join the procession of cars out to the gravesite. I refrained, however, from forcing him to take one of the white roses handed out by the black-gloved attendants. We stood at the rear of the crowd, while the Episcopal priest murmured a few additional prayers. Halley Hoynes’s mother was seated on a white wooden chair at the edge of the grave, and as the line of people began to pass by her, dropping their rose on top of the polished, golden wooden casket as it was lowered slowly into the black, loamy earth, she began to wail. Her cries were soft
at first, high pitched and impossible to understand. Soon, though, her voice grew louder and clearer. She was keening the words ‘my baby’ over and over again. Hoynes sat a few feet away from her, Dakota at his side. He stared grimly into the rectangular hole, his face flushed, his lips clamped shut. Dakota wore a pair of oversized, black sunglasses and lipstick that shone dark and almost purple against her pallid cheeks. She too stared straight ahead, ignoring the cries that had now grown to shrieks. The procession passed, flower by flower, in front of Halley’s wailing mother.

Finally, just when I felt that I, who knew the poor woman not at all, might be forced to approach her to offer some kind of a comfort, another woman, small, round, dressed in a grey coat, crouched next to the grieving mother and pressed her damp face to her own doughy cheeks. The little woman cried, too, but silently, and something about her noiseless grief seemed to still her friend’s howling. They rocked together at the edge of the grave, until the last flower was tossed on the casket, and the priest had come to offer her arm.

As we made our way back down the narrow paths to our cars, the priest announced that the family would like us to join them at Barbara Hoynes’s home in Brentwood. I pulled out my pad and jotted down the address. Peter glared at me.

“We’re not going,” he said.

“Yeah, we are.”

“Why?”

I pulled open my car door and motioned for him to get in. I didn’t want anyone else to hear this argument. “I don’t know. Because Alicia Felix was murdered just a few weeks ago, and now Halley Hoynes is dead, and I just have a feeling about it all.”

Peter slammed the car into reverse and began to back slowly down the hill. “How can you possibly have a feeling? That’s ridiculous. Shameless. Charlie’s daughter died of anorexia. What could that possibly have to do with Alicia’s murder?”

“Alicia was anorexic, too!”

He shook his head at me. “And so is half of Los Angeles. So what?”

I sighed and, slipping off my shoes, lifted my swollen feet onto the dashboard, making sure to tuck my skirt under me so as not to flash any of the other mourners. “You know what Al always says about coincidences.”

Peter shook his head impatiently. “Juliet, we don’t know the woman. We never met her daughter. How can we just show up at her house? It’s absurd. Anyway, aren’t you afraid she’ll recognize you?”

“There were at least a hundred people at this service. Do you honestly think anyone will notice us there?”

“You’re not exactly small enough to fade into the woodwork, honey. And with my luck, Hoynes will trap me in some corner, and I’ll end up committing to writing his wretched movie, just because I feel sorry for him!”

“Don’t be absurd. His daughter is dead. The last thing Hoynes is going to want to do is talk business.”

But of course that’s exactly what Hoynes did want. As soon as we walked into the living room of the ostentatious plantation-style McMansion off Mulholland Drive, Hoynes grabbed Peter and dragged him off to talk business. Thank God Jake caught sight of the two of them and insinuated himself into their těte-à-těte, otherwise Peter’s career would surely have foundered on the rocky shoals of a vampire abortion comedy.

Once I realized that my husband was safe in the hands of
his agent, I felt free to wander the edges of the crowd, eavesdropping. It was essentially a typical Hollywood scene, although there were more overdeveloped young women in tight funeral wear than I’d seen before at the kind of parties Peter and I attended. I supposed that these were Charlie’s actresses, all there to prove their allegiance and hope it would be remembered when it came time to cast the next television show or movie.

Barbara Hoynes’s friends looked like they had wandered in off the set of an entirely different picture. They were much older, in their late forties or early fifties, as was she. Many of them were typically thin and elegant, but the woman who had comforted her at the graveside was not the only one who looked like a regular person. There were one or two other women who, like Barbara herself, looked their ages. Barbara sat in an armchair in front of the empty fireplace, her face by now more or less composed. It was obvious even sitting down that she was a tall woman, and one who had once been shapely but had now grown more stately and imposing. She had a broad shelf of a bosom and a wide, flat face interlaced with a fine webbing of wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. Unlike her husband’s current girlfriends, she had clearly avoided the plastic surgeon’s knife, although perhaps the size of her breasts indicated a long-ago familiarity with the shape-altering formula so prevalent among the younger women in the room.

I was doing my best not to look like I was staring at Halley’s mother, when I felt a hand on my arm.

“Hi,” Dakota said. She was still wearing her sunglasses.

“Hi.”

“This is a nightmare.”

“It’s very sad.”

Dakota ran a trembling hand through her hair. “I just can’t believe it. That stupid girl.”

I glanced at her, surprised. Most of us try not to express those kinds of sentiments, even if we do feel them.

Dakota took a huge gulp of the drink she held in her hands, grimaced, and sucked in air. “I just can’t believe it,” she said again.

“I’m sure it’s a terrible shock.”

“Halley was just so
stupid.
I mean, to end up killing herself?” She took another swallow, sucking the last bit of alcohol out of the plastic tumbler. She crunched an ice cube between her teeth and then swayed, grabbing my arm with her hand. It was only then that I realized how drunk she was. “If that bitch finds out about the pills, I am going to be so screwed,” she mumbled.

I held my breath, willing her to continue.

“That’s all I need, is for Tracker’s lunatic wife to figure out that I gave that crazy girl some of my pills.” She put a hand over her eyes. “Get me another drink, okay?”