The Muffia (11 page)

“So you like the
Weekend at Bernie’s
idea after all.”

“It’s brilliant," I said.
Weekend at Bernie's
was a late-80s comedy featuring dead Uncle Bernie propped up and acting his part for the whole movie. "You’re a genius for thinking of it. Now go answer the door.”

“What if it’s the cops?”

“Why would it be the cops?”

“Maybe someone heard you screaming but didn’t hear the ecstasy in your delivery.”

“Go!”

Quinn dashed away toward the front door and I tried to sit Udi up with great difficulty. He was far heavier than what I would have expected, given the agile way he moved around the bedroom, and he didn’t want to bend.
Wasn’t it too soon for rigor mortis?
Maybe I was just tired and sore from the work out I’d had getting out from under him.

I settled on a position for him that looked more like lounging than actual sitting. At least he wasn’t lying flat. I put his sunglasses on him and even though he was dead, I kissed him once more, then covered him with the chenille throw. The overall impression was of peace and contentment.

As an afterthought, I tried to open his mouth with my fingers, the idea being it might make him look like one of those guys whose mouth fell open while sleeping. But there was no budging it. His jaw was locked. Rigor mortis there, too. I wondered what rigor—discipline and work—had to do with mortis, which derived from the Latin word for death. Well, in
this
case, death was proving to be hard work—at least for me.

Chapter 16

“Madelyn? Madelyn, could you come out here, please.”

It didn’t sound like the girl scouts had arrived selling their cookies. Quinn’s tone of voice was one I’d heard her use on the phone while reprimanding her errant movie stars, and she was using my
whole
name. This had to be serious.

Glancing back at Udi who looked so peaceful, if in need of rolfing, I got a waft of sadness once again. I finally meet a guy I like
and
like having sex with and then he dies. Does anyone need this kind of luck?

Heading into the front hallway I saw Quinn smiling a little too brightly, her eyes pressed open as wide as they would go, standing next to three guys dressed in black, who, taken together, gave me the impression of the kind of sound system you see on stage for giant reunion concert tours for bands like
Kiss
or
Deep Purple
, with an enormous center unit flanked by two smaller, but still substantial boxes of indeterminate purpose.

The center guy had a
ginormous
bald head with a few indentations here and there—a refrigerator-with-a-head kind of guy, but with even less animation. One of the side guys with red hair on his head and chin had a bit more of an expression. At least he was chewing gum, even if his eyes were fixed in a stare. The guy on the other side, who had dark hair, a sparkle in his eyes and a very Eurotrash-y, navy blue pin-stripe suit, seemed remarkably familiar. He looked a little like Nissim, the man who’d brought Udi to Berggren’s dinner party that fateful night. What was odd was that as I got closer I realized it
was
Nissim from Berggren’s dinner party.

“Hello, Madelyn,” he said in a voice evocative of Udi’s but not nearly as sexy.

“Hello,” I ventured. “Nissim? What are you doing here?”

“Is Udi here?”

“Udi? You mean the guy I met at Berggren’s?”

He smiled. “Yes. Udi. Udi Hamoudi.”

The refrigerator grunted then crossed his arms in front of his expansive chest.

“What makes you ask?” I said.

Quinn excused herself to “use the restroom” and headed back toward the solarium where I hoped she’d improve upon my attempt to turn Udi, or whoever he was, into Bernie.

“I know he was planning on coming to LA to see you. That’s why he told me he couldn’t see me. He must have got on the flight last minute because he only called me before the plane left Tel Aviv.”

“Ah,” I nodded my understanding then nodded again while I continued to search for a better response. “Ah,” I said again.

“He’s here, yes?”

The red-headed guy with a little too much facial hair said something to Nissim in Hebrew and he said something in return. The refrigerator grunted again and uncrossed his arms. Then all three of them looked at me. And I wished Quinn would come back.

“Yes,” I said tentatively. “Is that a problem?”

“Can you get him to come out here, please? I need to speak with him.”

“Well, actually—the thing is—Quinn? Could you come out here?”
Couldn’t Nissim have just called if he needed to talk to Udi? Had Udi given them my address?

“What is it, Madelyn? Is there some reason to be concerned?”

“No. No concern. It’s just Udi’s not feeling well,” I began. “I mean, you know what that flight is like and being a sky marshal and all, he doesn’t get to sleep. He’s got to stay vigilant, you know, for the possibility of in-flight altercations.”

“Yes,” said Nissim, sounding unconvinced.

Quinn reappeared and was able to see and hear the red-haired man say something to big fridge, then the two of them laughed. Nissim said something else to them in Hebrew and they stopped. Then Nissim leveled his gaze at me. “We really need to see him. It’s very important.”

Quinn threw me a look that I couldn’t read, but it gave me courage. I realized it was my house we were all standing in and these guys, even if Nissim was a U.S. citizen, had no business making me feel vulnerable.

“You know, I think you should come back,” I said confidently. “I don’t want to wake him, but if you tell me what you want him to know, I’ll let him know what you said. Or leave a message on his cell phone if you want.”

“Say, why were you guys laughing just now?” Quinn asked.

The three of them exchanged looks that I couldn’t read, then Nissim said, “Actually, Madelyn, these guys are with El Al and we really must see him.”

“Why? He’s so tired, Nissim. He needs to rest.”

“Yeah,” said Quinn. “He’s passed out. You couldn’t revive him if you tried.”

I glared at her.

“If your friend has seen him, perhaps you will permit us to do the same.”

“Listen,” said Quinn. “I just came to get my makeup, which I’d left here and, well, you know how a girl needs her make up.”

Nissim scrunched up his face. Clearly they didn’t believe her. I felt like the tension in the entryway was audible, bouncing off the plastered walls so loud it hurt my ears.

“Let me speak to you for a moment, Madelyn,” Nissim said.

“Why don’t you go into the solarium,” Quinn suggested. “He’s sleeping peacefully. See for yourself.”

I looked at her.

“Go on, Madelyn.”

Something about her calling me by my proper name told me she felt confident that we could go back into the solarium and Nissim wouldn’t suspect anything.

“Do you need something else?” I asked Quinn, trying to convey my concern.

“Nope. I’ll wait out here with these guys while you two have a private chat.”

“All right,” I said. “We don’t want to wake him up, though.”

“Understood,” said Nissim.

“You see,” I said, gesturing toward the daybed. “There he is, sleeping like a, well sleeping quieter than a baby. That saying is simply untrue.”

“Yes. Babies are louder than that saying would suggest.” Nissim was staring at Udi while he said this, I suppose looking for signs of life. “Udi?”

Nissim took a step closer to the couch and I remember hoping that Quinn had propped Udi securely enough so that he wouldn’t keel over if someone pushed him.

“You said you wouldn’t wake him,” I said stepping between the dead and the living. “So I’ll just get him to call you when he wakes up.”

“I didn’t say that.” Nissim walked over and took Udi’s wrist, pressing his finger to the vein. The jig was up. What did it matter? I knew I hadn’t killed him. That would be evident from any autopsy, I told myself.

“As I thought,” Nissim said, taking Udi’s sunglasses off and opening his lids. He let them snap shut and my mind flashed on the other book I’d considered for tomorrow’s book club,
The Opposite of Dead.
Oh, how I wished Udi had been the opposite of dead at that moment. However, it was Nissim’s coldness, rather than Udi’s, that chilled the room. “You should have said something.”

“But . . . but . . .” There are times you just can’t think what to say.

“I will need to take him with me.”

“You can’t just take him. Where are you going to take him? And what do you mean, ‘as you thought?’”

“We’ve been monitoring him. There’s been no movement for over two hours.”

“You’ve what?”

“We’ve been monitoring him. He has a chip in his shoulder.”

“A chip? Like a bone chip?”

“A silicon chip. A tracking device.”

“You mean like those things people put in their pets in case they’re stolen?”

“You are an intelligent woman, Madelyn. I’m sure you have seen these Hollywood spy movies. Chips are implanted in people, too.”

I cringed at the word implant. It reminded me of my own ruptured prosthetic breasts which I’d finally pulled out during a particularly difficult chapter in my marriage and which might have contributed to Lila’s father’s affair with a woman whose boobs didn’t present such challenges.

“But he’s a sky marshal,” I said.

Nissim pushed his chintzy jacket aside and rested his hands on his hips, facing me.  “Yes, he was. We put chips in them.”

What? Was he a cookie?

“Really. You put chips in your sky marshals. Does Virgin?” I loved saying the name of this suggestively named airline. It made me believe that the tedium of modern commercial jet travel could still offer promises of the new and exciting.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I just want to understand. You’re saying El Al makes its sky marshals get little global positioning chips installed in them.”

“Not just the sky marshals, all the employees. Udi has a chip, I have a chip, so do my friends.”

“And this is normal?”

“Yes, this is normal. We live in the Middle East. You never know.”

“You never know what?”

“You just never know. That’s all.”

By this point I was thinking that none of this was normal. Three guys showing up at my house, the burly associates that looked like appliances. Something wasn’t right, but I kept coming back to the fact that Udi and Nissim were friends and one of
my
closest friends thought Nissim was a good guy.

“No, I guess you’re right. You never know what’s going to happen. One thing I do know,” I went on, “is that the older I get, the less I know about anything.”

Nissim wasn't listening. He was sniffing the air. Then a wistful look came over his face.

“We were, you know . . .
at it,
when he just sort of moaned and then collapsed,” I offered.

“I suspected this could happen.”

“You did? How?”
How could Nissim have suspected this could happen?

He turned away. “I’m sorry. I know he liked you a lot.”

“Well . . .” I didn’t want to begin this line of discussion. I’d likely end up crying again. “What do you think killed him?”

“I don’t know, perhaps some sort of heart defect. Usually the testing catches these kinds of things during the hiring process, but we will do an autopsy.”

“An autopsy?”

“We will need to take him with us, Madelyn,” he said.

“No—” I stood protectively next to my dead lover who only a few hours ago had been the polar opposite of a corpse. Something about Nissim taking Udi seemed all wrong.  “This should be reported,” I protested. It had become clear that I would have to risk losing the international mediation job.

“I’m going to call the police.” I moved toward the phone again. Now I really wished I’d called earlier, before I let Quinn stop me.

“Please do not call the police, Madelyn. Udi was an Israeli citizen and this is an internal matter—internal to the state of Israel and El Al Airlines. There is no need for your government to be involved.”

“What if this whole thing comes back to haunt me in some way? I mean his fingerprints are here and he’s dead.”

“This won’t happen. Trust me.”

“How can I trust you? I don’t know you.”

“You know I was Udi’s friend. And I’m a friend of Berggren’s.”

“Well, yeah, I guess I know that. But I didn’t know Udi very well either. And I just found out his name wasn’t really Udi.”

Nissim gave me a chilly look. Then he called out to the appliances, “Neve, Josi.” He said something in Hebrew that I, of course, couldn’t understand, but I knew they’d be rolling in imminently. “Everyone called him Udi,” he said to me.

“OK, well, since when do airlines go to such lengths to ensure proper after-death care of their employees? If I’d known they were so generous, I might have considered the industry as a career myself, probably on Virgin.”

“El Al cares. I cannot speak for Virgin or any other carrier.”

Seconds later Neve and Josi appeared, tailed by Quinn, who only shrugged and mouthed something in my general direction that was completely obscured by her hand flitting in front of her mouth.

As soon as they spotted Udi, they began speaking quickly in Hebrew. Udi had only taught me the words for kiss and hug so, since there wasn’t much of either going on, I recognized nothing of what they were saying. But it seemed like they repeated a couple of words more than twice. One sounded like
katoon
or
kitten
and another,
hassle
or
les
hassles
, which was French for lots of hassles, I think, which is what the whole unfortunate event with Udi was turning into.

The guy with the excessive red facial hair, whom I believe was Josi, left the room, almost tripping over the beanbag chair and getting caught up in the chenille throw before narrowly avoiding a collision with Quinn.

“Maddie, what’s happening?” Quinn asked, dodging Josi.

“They want to take Udi.”

“You’re a lawyer. They can’t do that . . . can they?”

“Maybe…I don’t know Israeli law. And I don’t know what the law is on possession or removal of dead Israelis within the contiguous United States.” This issue clearly demonstrated how legal specialization limits one’s knowledge of areas outside the specialization.