A Playdate With Death (17 page)

A pregnant woman in a pale pink sweater that precisely matched her lipstick, her dark hair held back by a thick velvet band, also sat at the table. Near the fireplace, in a low armchair, sat an elderly woman dressed in a severe navy suit tied at the neck with a floppy white bow. Her long, wrinkled earlobes were weighed down by huge, yellowish diamonds that looked like they could use a cleaning, and she was speaking as I came into the room.

“I wish you’d joined Patrick and me at Mass this morning, Susan. Father Fitzgerald gave a lovely sermon. Truly inspiring. It’s been so long since you’ve heard him speak. When was the last time you went to church, dear?”

Everyone looked up as I walked into the room. When Susan saw me, her face froze, and red splotches began to appear under the freckles on her cheeks and neck. Both young men glanced at her. They wore identical looks of concern.

“Hello, Susan. I was just passing by and hoped we might have a word,” I said, the bright tone of my voice ringing falsely in my ears and, I’m sure, in theirs.

“Yes. Yes of course,” she said, rising suddenly. “Let’s talk in the garden.”

“Susan,” the older woman said. “Hadn’t you best introduce your friend to us? Or am I the only person who hasn’t had the pleasure?”

“Oh, of course. Of course,” Susan mumbled awkwardly. “Juliet, this is my mother-in-law, Mary-Margaret Sullivan. Marmie, my . . . friend Juliet.” Her voice tripped over the word, as mine had earlier. “Juliet, these are my sons P. J.,” she pointed to the older young man who was a bit stockier than his brother. “And you met Matthew the other day. P. J.’s wife Charlotte. And of course my husband Patrick.”

I smiled politely and shook hands all around. The boys’ handshakes were firm, like their father’s, but Susan’s mother-in-law’s palm lay like a bundle of dry sticks in my own.

“We’ll be outside,” Susan said, motioning me to a set of French doors behind the table.

“Are you all right, Mom?” Matthew asked, his brow wrinkled with concern.

“Your mother’s fine,” his father said, and the young man blushed and stared down at his plate of half-eaten, congealing quiche.

“It’s nothing, honey,” Susan said soothingly. “Juliet and I are just trying to work out some problems with the library benefit. Lots of last-minute crises, as usual.” The woman sure was a fluid liar. But, then, she’d had a lot of practice. She put a hand on my arm and pushed me out through the door. Her nails dug through my shirtsleeve, and I had to work hard to keep from wincing.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, once the door had closed behind us. “I’ve told you all about Bobby. Why can’t you just leave me alone?” She sat down heavily in one of the Adirondack chairs, and I made myself comfortable in the other.

“Have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Have you told me all about Bobby?”

“What do you mean? I’ve told you everything I know.”

“I went to visit Reuben Nadelman yesterday.”

She looked at me sharply, and I could see that she was desperate to know more. She didn’t speak for a moment and then, in a small voice, said, “How is he? Is he married? Does he have other children?”

“He’s married. And he has one son. At least, he has a son whom he considers his. The boy is not his biological child, however.”

“What do you mean?” Susan began twisting the ring around her finger.

“Reuben is infertile. His son was conceived through artificial insemination of donor sperm.”

She shook her head. “That’s just not possible. If he’s infertile now, he wasn’t twenty-eight years ago. He was certainly fertile enough to get me pregnant.”

“Susan, Reuben Nadelman is not a Tay-Sachs carrier. If he is Bobby’s father, then Bobby would have had to inherit the gene from you.”

“But, I’m
not
a Tay-Sachs carrier. I told you. I’m not Jewish, and anyway, I took that test, and it came out negative.”

I leaned forward in my chair, giving Susan a look that I hoped was piercing. “Well, then you know what this means,” I said.

“What? What does it mean?”

“If Bobby didn’t inherit the gene from you, then he must
have inherited it from his father. And if you don’t have it, and neither does Reuben Nadelman, then Reuben can’t be Bobby’s father. So who is, Susan? Who is Bobby Katz’s father?”

Something flickered across her face, but I couldn’t tell what. “There is some mistake. Either Bobby’s test was wrong, or Reuben’s test was wrong. I know that Reuben got me pregnant.”

“Couldn’t it have been someone else?” I asked.

“No!” her voice was sharp and angry. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” she said. “I’m finished talking about this. I have nothing more to say about Bobby or anything else. I want you to leave. You can walk around the house to the front. You know the way.” And with that, she rose to her feet and walked unsteadily into the house, closing the French doors firmly behind her.

A
S
I drove down Sunset Boulevard, I puzzled over what Susan had told me. None of this made any sense. Who was Bobby Katz’s real father? Had Susan had another lover, a lover of whom she was so ashamed that she refused to talk about him?

It didn’t seem possible that there was someone worse in Susan’s mind than Reuben Nadelman. She’d been so worried about not foisting a Jewish child off on an unsuspecting Catholic family that she’d gone to great pains to make sure she gave him to a Jewish family. Yet she’d admitted to me that she’d had an affair with Reuben. What could be that much worse than a Jewish lover in her eyes?
Who
could be worse? I tried to imagine what person would be so unacceptable that Susan Sullivan would pretend to have had a child by a Jew rather than admit to an affair with him. A
convicted felon? A relative? Her father? Her father-in-law?

That thought made me slam on the brakes. A silver sports car swerved quickly around me. I inhaled sharply as it bulleted in front of me. Thank God for the other driver’s reflexes. I was going to have to figure out a way to cut down on the emotive driving if I wanted to see out my fourth decade. I thought again about the Faye Dunaway-in-
Chinatown
scenario I had shocked myself by imagining. It just didn’t make sense, however. Neither Susan’s father nor her father-in-law were likely to be Bobby’s father. Unless Susan was lying about her genetic test, the man who had contributed his little bundle of chromosomes to Bobby’s creation had been a Tay-Sachs carrier. While it was theoretically possible that one of those men carried the gene, it was a ridiculously long shot. And if there’s one thing I learned in all my years of investigating and trying cases, it was the logical principle of Occam’s razor. The simplest and most obvious explanation is most often the true one.

None of this got me any closer to discovering what had happened to Bobby. Had he or had he not committed suicide? If he had, was his despondency related to his adoption and what he’d found out about his birth parents, or was there some other motivation for it altogether? I couldn’t seem to accept the suicide theory; it didn’t make sense, given everything I knew about Bobby. However, if it wasn’t suicide, then it was murder. The fact that Bobby had been found with the weapon ruled out a random killing, to my mind. None of the many drive-by shooters and carjackers I’d come across in my public defender days left their weapons behind.
Professional criminals, and by that I mean those who engage in illegal behavior for profit, value their weapons. They’re attached to them. More importantly, the guns cost money. The last thing these guys want to do is throw money away. If Bobby’s death were the result of a random act of violence, the killer wouldn’t have left the gun behind.

No, if Bobby was murdered, he was murdered by someone he knew, and that person had done his or her best to make the crime look like suicide. As Al has told me time and time again, look to the family. More often than not, the only people who hate us enough to kill us are those who are supposed to love us the most. The question was, which of Bobby’s families? He had so many.

My cell phone rang. The caller ID screen was flashing “Home.”

“Hi, Peter,” I said. “How are you guys doing?”

“We’re good. We just built a model Native American village out of Lego blocks.”

“What a good dad you are. And so PC.”

“Yeah, whatever. Listen, I’ll make you a deal.”

“What?”

“I’ll give you the whole rest of the afternoon on your own if you do kid duty tonight so I can catch a movie with a couple of the guys.”

A few more hours of freedom! “Sure, no problem,” I said, doing my best to convey the false impression that I was doing him a favor. “I’ll be home before dinner.”

“Take your time.”

In the background I heard banging and shrieking. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Isaac’s bringing in the cavalry to attack the village. I’d better go help Ruby rescue the women and children.”

I hit the End button and tapped the steering wheel.
Look to the family,
I thought to myself. Bobbie and Betsy weren’t married, but they were about to be. Maybe I needed to look a little more closely at the person on whose behalf I was supposedly investigating this case. I made a quick right onto Melrose Avenue and headed over to Hollywood.

I
found Betsy still sober, to my great relief, and looking much better than when I’d seen her last. She’d finally gotten up the energy to wear something other than sweats. She had on a pair of black flared jeans with neon green roses embroidered down one leg, and a green Lycra top that clung tightly to her body, outlining her breasts and leaving bare the little roll at her midriff. She had a small gold hoop in her bellybutton. Her hair was freshly cut, and she’d put on lipstick. In fact, she looked a heck of a lot better than I did.

“Roy, this is Juliet Applebaum, the client of Bobby’s who’s been trying to track down what was going on with him before he died. Juliet, this is my friend Roy West.”

I shook the hand of the small man who had been sitting with Betsy. He looked about forty, with graying hair cropped close to his head and gold grommets punched into both earlobes. A third bit of gold poked through one of his eyebrows. He looked too old for his metal decorations, and he smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. He took a great swig from the oversized plastic L.A. Dodgers cup he held in his
hand and belched softly. There was a bottle of Diet Coke on the coffee table. I was willing to bet the farm that Roy was a friend from AA. The smoking and copious caffeine consumption gave him away.

Betsy hadn’t shown much ability to keep on the wagon in the absence of Bobby’s positive influence. I was glad to see that she had fallen back in with the AA circle. Hopefully, their support would give her the strength she needed to stay straight.

I told Betsy that I hadn’t found out much more about Bobby’s birth family, and in fact was even more confused than ever before. I paused, waiting for her response. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for or what I hoped she would tell me. Mostly, I just wanted to get a better sense of her. Could she have had something to do with her fiancé’s death?

“Are you sure Bobby’s Tay-Sachs test was accurate?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I guess so. I mean, we had it done at UCLA. I can’t imagine they would screw it up.”

I couldn’t either. “Do you think I could take another look through Bobby’s things?”

“What are you looking for?”

“I don’t really know.” I shrugged. “I guess I’m just on a fishing expedition.”

“Well, you’ll have to fish somewhere else,” Roy interrupted.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“The Katzes came over here and cleaned Betsy out. They
took all of Bobby’s files, his office furniture, even his books. It was all we could do to keep their hands off the living room furniture.”

“Roy said it was mine, and he knew, because he helped me move it in from my old apartment.” She smiled at him.

He preened. “I was happy to do it. Lying to those creeps is a good deed.”

I looked from one of them to the other. It dawned on me that they might be either sleeping together or inching toward it. A new boyfriend would explain Betsy’s transformation from depressed widow to Lycra-clad babe. Or was he new? Was it possible that she’d been seeing him even before Bobby died?

I made small talk for a little while, watching them closely. There definitely seemed to be some kind of chemistry between the two. Betsy brushed against Roy’s arm as she picked up his cup to refill it. He put an arm around her shoulder when she mentioned Bobby. It was a comforting gesture, but it seemed more intimate than simply supportive.

“Are you going to keep investigating?” Betsy asked me.

“I don’t know what more I can do,” I said. “I might ask Bobby’s parents if they’ll let me see his papers. Maybe they’ll let me look through his hard drive again. I can’t imagine that I’ll find anything, though. It’s really a puzzle.”

Betsy nodded. “I’ve been running through this over and over in my mind, and I just can’t think of any reason for Bobby to have killed himself. I know I was kind of wrapped up in my own problems, but I still think I would have
noticed if Bobby had been depressed. He just wasn’t like that. He didn’t get blue. If he was bumming, he’d just go work out.”