A Playdate With Death (7 page)

Isaac and I stocked up on navy blue shirts, royal blue pants, and indigo sweatshirts from the sale racks in the various baby stores. I hung my purchases over the handle of his
stroller, and we rolled out of the mall onto Pico Boulevard at the corner of Westwood Boulevard. There, directly across Pico from us, was a Starbucks. Across Westwood, and at the other end of the block, was another Starbucks. Now, granted, Westwood is a busy street, and they were at either end of a fairly long block, but still—was there really enough latte business for two identical coffeehouses?

“Shall we flip a coin, buddy?” I asked Isaac.

He looked up at me quizzically. “Okay,” he said.

“Heads we go to the one down the block, tails we go to the one on the other side of the street.”

It came up tails. Isaac was fascinated. “Do it again,” he said.

“Okay.” It came up heads.

“Third one breaks the tie, buddy.” Tails.

I waited for a pause in the traffic and then, shopping bags flapping in our wake, jaywalked as fast as I could across the street. Isaac shrieked delightedly at both the speed of our run and the fact that we were very clearly breaking the “cross at the corner” rule I’d so carefully drilled into his head.

I walked up to the counter and ordered a tall, fat, skinny, wide something or other and asked the pierced young thing behind the bar if Louise worked at the store. A dark-haired woman with bad skin, who was studying the foaming action she was getting from her steam-valve machine, lifted her head at the sound of my voice. I smiled at her, sure that I’d found my Louise.

The boy with the studded eyebrow to whom I’d asked my question said, “No, I don’t know any Louise.”

“Are you sure? I know there’s a Louise working either here or at the Starbucks down the block. Is your manager around? Maybe I could ask him or her?”

The boy shrugged his shoulders and jerked his head toward the woman. The thick ring in his nose jiggled with the action, and he reached up a hand to steady it. God help me if my children decide to have themselves pierced. Peter swears that the fad will be over by the time Ruby is a teenager, but I am convinced that will only be because they will have come up with something worse, like voluntary amputation, or recreational trepanning.

The dark-haired woman came over to me, her face blank. Her cheeks were pitted and scarred, and a few angry pimples covered her chin and nestled in the corners of her mouth. “I’m the supervisor. Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for someone named Louise. Does she work here?”

“We don’t have anybody by that name,” she said.

“Oh. Well, maybe it’s the Starbucks at the end of the block. I’ll try there.”

“Don’t forget your latte,” the pierced boy called. I went back for the cup and balanced it on the handle of the stroller as I tried to open the door. I couldn’t manage to hold the coffee, open the door, and push the stroller through at the same time, and neither employee seemed particularly interested in helping me. Finally, I tossed the latte in the trash and, holding the door open with one hand, pushed Isaac and his stroller out with the other. I’d get a coffee at the next Starbucks.

Isaac and I reenacted our dangerous and illegal asphalt traverse and headed to café number two. The next Starbucks was a slightly larger version of the first, with a few extra tasteful banquettes and little round tables. This time, the person with the nose ring who took my order was female. She shook her head immediately at my question about Louise and handed me my extra-foamy mocha with a smile that seemed much too sweet for her severe haircut and jewelry. I pulled Isaac out of his stroller, handed him a madeleine, and fed him the foam from my coffee.

I turned to ask the coffee girl if she was sure that there was no Louise when Isaac’s bellow of rage made me spin around in my chair.

“What happened?” I asked, checking him over for broken bones.

“My cookie!” he wailed.

“What about your cookie?”

“It got in your coffee!”

“How did it get in my coffee?”

“I tried to scoop the foam, but it melted my cookie!”

I tried to comfort him, but finally just got him another cookie. His face broke into a grin to rival that of the Cheshire Cat. It had been an elaborate ploy to weasel another madeleine out of me.

“Okay, cookie boy, let’s go.”

We wandered back down the street toward the mall and our car. As we got closer to the other Starbucks, I kept thinking of the supervisor with the bad skin. I was sure that when I’d first said the name Louise, she’d raised her head in
recognition. I mentally kicked myself in the pants for being so dense. A pseudonym. It was entirely possible that the name Louise was merely an alias. Given the fact that some of the “suggestions” on the web site seemed a bit on the gray side of legality, it was reasonable that “Louise” might not want to be directly associated with it. She would want to avoid liability, not to mention the wrath of parents whose identities she’d given away over their objections.

Once more I hauled Isaac back across the street. I walked into the store and up to the front of the counter, without waiting in line.

“Hey! There’s a line here, you know,” a voice snarled at me. I ignored the muscle-bound man in the shiny suit who’d yelled at me and caught the dark-haired woman’s eye.

“Hi,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you.”

She flushed and shook her head. “Sorry, we’re busy.”

“I’ll wait,” I said and leaned against the counter. Isaac started kicking the glass pastry case. Helpful child.

She glared at me and then, finally, shrugged her shoulders and motioned for another young employee to step into her spot at the register. She ducked out from behind the counter and led me to a table in the far corner of the café.

I pulled a few board books out of the basket of the stroller and settled Isaac on a bench not too far from where the woman had sat down. Between the books and the sugar packets on the table, he was set for a few minutes at least.

“Hi, Candace,” I said, reading the name tag pinned to her chest.

She didn’t answer.

“I think we have a friend in common.”

“Yeah? Who?” She sounded like she didn’t think it was very likely.

“Bobby Katz.”

Her face flushed again, and she looked down at her fingernails. They were bitten red and raw.

“You know Bobby?” she murmured, the harshness gone from her voice.

I realized at that moment that she hadn’t heard. I dreaded being the one to tell her. I reached out my hand and grasped hers.

“I’m so sorry to have to tell you this,” I began.

She jerked her hand out of mine. “What?” Her voice was a hollow croak.

“Bobby died ten days ago. I’m so sorry.”

Her skin seemed to gray before my eyes. The acne and scars stood out crimson against the ashen pallor. “What? How?”

I took a breath before launching into the ugly details. I also lowered my voice so that Isaac wouldn’t hear. “It’s not real clear. What we know for now is that he was found dead in his car along the PCH, just south of Santa Monica Canyon. He was holding a gun, and it looks like it was probably a suicide.”

“No!” The people standing in line for coffee looked our way at the explosive sound of her voice.

Isaac whined softly, “Mama?”

“It’s okay, honey,” I said. I walked over and gave him a hug. He was making neat stacks of sugar, Equal and Sweet’N
Low, alternating the white, blue, and pink packets. “You keep playing, okay?”

He nodded, and I went back to Candace. Her face was buried in her hands, and she was worrying the pimples on her forehead with her fingers.

“I couldn’t figure out why he hasn’t been answering my E-mail. I’ve been writing like ten times a day for over a week,” she said.

I realized then that I’d been so busy reviewing his archives that I hadn’t thought of checking Bobby’s E-mail account for
new
messages that had come in since his death. I made a mental note to log on from his laptop once I got home and download all his pending messages.

“Candace, I’m hoping you can give me some information.”

She looked at me suspiciously.

“I’m doing a little checking around for Betsy, Bobby’s fiancée. We’re trying to figure out what was going on with Bobby in the last couple of months of his life.”

At the sound of Betsy’s name, Candace’s jaw tightened.

“I can’t help you.”

“I think you can. I know Bobby found you through Right to Know’s web site. I know you were helping Bobby find his birth parents. Can you tell me a little more about your organization?”

She leveled a suspicious gaze in my direction. “Like what?”

“Well, for example, you’re an organization for adoptees looking for their birth parents, right?”

“Not only. We have some birth parents, too. Anybody
who’s looking for information. But, yeah, it’s mostly lost children.”

The term surprised me.

“What kind of information do you provide?”

“RTK is really a clearinghouse, more than anything else. We pool information, get ideas on where and how to look. That kind of thing.”

“And you started it?”

“I got the idea after I spent two years tracking down my birth mother. I ended up finding my family through the Lost Bird Society. They help lost and stolen Indian children find their way home. I’m Lakota. Part. My birth mother is half-Indian. Her mom lived on the rez her whole life.”

Now that I looked closely, I thought I could see a trace of American Indian; maybe it was just the dark hair, or the not-quite-prominent cheekbones.

“Did you find your birth mother?”

Candace shrugged her shoulders. “Yeah, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with me. She’d really been coopted by the dominant culture, you know? But my grandmother, her mother, she was great. I got to know her pretty well before she died. Meeting her was like coming home. If I hadn’t been stolen from my people, I might have grown up on the reservation, instead of in Newport Beach.”

I resisted the urge to point out that to many people, it might be preferable to grow up in an exclusive beach community rather than a pre-casino-era Indian reservation rife with unemployment and substandard schools and health care. But, then, what did I know about the spiritual vacuum
experienced by American Indian children growing up away from their tribes?

“You founded Right to Know to help others in your situation?” I asked.

“Yeah. The thing is, nobody really cares about the kid in all this. Everybody is so worried about the rights of the birth mother and about the adoptive family. But nobody considers that the kid has a right to know who she is, even if her birth mother is trying to hide from her.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why does a child have a right to know? If the birth mother gave her up and doesn’t want to be contacted, why should the child be told who the mother is?”

Candace glared at me, furious that I’d questioned her orthodoxy.

“Well, the most obvious reason is medical. I mean, look at Bobby. If he hadn’t gotten tested, he might have ended up having a baby with that horrible genetic disease, what’s it called?”

“Tay-Sachs.”

“Yeah, Tay-Sachs. He’s lucky; he got tested. But what if he hadn’t?”

“Well, his fiancée would have had to have been a carrier, too. But I understand what you’re saying. There are lots of genetic diseases that people should have information about.”

“You can’t imagine what it’s like to go get a physical. The doctor starts asking you for all this information about family history, like cancer or diabetes. And you have nothing
to say except ‘I don’t know.’ It’s terrible,” Candace said, banging on the table to punctuate her words. “Why should adopted kids be deprived of medical history information that could save their lives?”

The intensity of her emotions surprised me, and I inadvertently drew back from her. She noticed my reaction and blushed.

I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, so I said in my most reassuring voice, “That’s a good point. I’ve never really thought of that. But couldn’t we solve that problem by requiring birth parents to provide medical histories when they relinquish their babies?”

She pushed herself back in her chair and shook her head vigorously. “You don’t get it. It’s not just the medical stuff. It’s about your identity. I’m an Indian. You know what that means? That’s the reason I never felt at home in the white man’s world.” She waved angrily around her at the benches, the carefully selected prints and posters, the little wooden tables, the white coffee drinkers. “My whole life I felt like I didn’t belong. And if my birth mother had had her way, I’d have never known why. Well, now I know. I’m a Lakota woman. And nobody can keep that from me. Not even my mother.”

She banged her fist on the table, again, hard. Isaac looked up, frightened, and I motioned him over with my hand. He ran up to me and I scooped him into my lap.

“Thank you so much, Candace,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of these issues before, and I appreciate your taking the time to educate me.” We both knew I was buttering her up, but
I smiled my sweetest smile anyway. “Betsy, Bobby’s fiancée, is desperate to figure out what was happening with him. I understand that you found out something important for Bobby, and that he met you here at the store. I need you to tell me what it was that you told him.”

“Why should I tell you? I don’t know you. I don’t even know Betsy.” The name sounded like curdled milk on her tongue.

“Please, Candace. I’m not trying to get you in any trouble. I’m just trying to track Bobby’s actions for the period before his death. We need to find out why he killed himself.
If
he killed himself.”

She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Do you think someone murdered him?”

Did I? That seemed even less likely than that the cheerful, optimistic man had committed suicide. “I don’t know. That’s one of the things I’m trying to find out.”

“What are you, some kind of a detective?”

I paused at that. How much easier it would have been to say, “Yes, right. A detective.” Instead, I shook my head. “I’m just a friend. Candace, please. What did you find out?”