Follow the Dotted Line (28 page)

Andy had chosen the shortest route to her bedroom and was not deviating. “Mazel tov,” she shouted back. “I’ll bring the lox and bagels.” And she slammed the door behind her.

Saying too much can be a lot like drinking too much; the next morning you wake up with a throbbing cortex, a lingering knot in your gut, and a trail of damage to repair—most of it emotional. Harley was waiting for her when she stumbled down the stairs to graze for breakfast. Andy assumed he’d still be tucked up in his bed, since it was 6:00 a.m. and only people with hideous jobs and jet lag were up at this time of day. It had been her intention to empty her suitcase before she made any amends. But he was sitting on the patio in his yarmulke and prayer shawl, no doubt muttering that ancient Hebrew standard, ‘Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe, who has not created me a woman.’ Now she was going to have to apologize to the patriarchy before she’d had anything to eat.

She was just opening the fridge when she heard the ominous slide of the screen door.

“Good morning,” Harley said, in a voice that was unsettlingly serious.

“Hey, Harley,” Andy shot back enthusiastically, flinching from her affectation of pleasantness. “How’ve you been?”

“Fine. Thank you.”

She pulled out a carton of eggs and turned to look at him, thinking eye contact was the best way to disarm the situation. “You’re looking very . . .” She ceased the compliment when she got a full view of his evolving physical persona. “Severe,” she finished. Every hair follicle on Harley’s body was now in full bloom, fuming and unfettered. And, like the rabbi, he wore an ensemble of black on black. “I, ah, wanted to express my regret about what I said last night. I was really tired . . .”

“Please, don’t,” he admonished her. “The rabbi and I are accustomed to ridicule. It is our burden to bear.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay. If you say so.”

“I just came in to tell you that Lorna called yesterday wanting to know when you’d be back.”

“Really? Good. Great.”

“She wants us to have lunch as soon as possible.”

“Us?” Andy asked, skeptically, drawing the ‘s’ out as sweetly as possible.

“You and me,” he said, as his voice dipped into a bass register she’d never heard before. “At Canter’s. I committed us to tomorrow. Is that too soon?”

She scrambled to adjust to the tone of authority in his voice. “No. No, I don’t think so. Tomorrow’s fine.”

“Well, be sure to get some rest. We don’t want you falling asleep mid-meeting.”

And with that, he stepped back out onto the patio and resumed reciting his morning blessings.

Andy made herself a plate of French toast and decided that if Harley didn’t make it as a Jew, he might have a future as a capo in the Mafia.

They met, as Harley had ordained, at the deli on Fairfax Avenue. It was one of those stunning Los Angeles late summer middays, when the heat radiates off the pavement and sunglasses are necessary for safe navigation. The temperature was nearing 90, and the dearth of smog was a remarkable testament to California’s left-wing air quality standards. In the space previously occupied by carbon emissions, the smell of borscht and pumpernickel permeated the air along the sidewalk.

Inside, the accountant, the fedora-wearing teenager, and the washed-out screenwriter took a booth near the window. Lorna seemed surprisingly agitated for a woman of inscrutable emotion, so Andy took on the job of introducing the boy from Omaha to the mysteries of blintzes, potato knish, and chopped liver. Harley examined the entire menu, soberly nodding his approval of both his People’s cuisine and their ancient dietary laws. By the time he was finally ready to place his order, Lorna had ordered both Andy and herself a Bloody Mary.

“Okay, do you mind of I get this off my chest right away?” the CPA asked, as the waitress exited with orders for the usual Rueben sandwich for the ladies and sweet and sour stuffed beef cabbage for the boychik. “I want to tell you what I know before we’re faced with the Russian dressing.”

“First things first,” said Andy, ignoring her friend’s atypical anxiety. With that, she reached into her purse, pulled out a universally coveted bottle of single highland malt scotch whiskey and placed it on the table. “Am I going to get my money’s worth?” she asked.

Lorna nodded.

It was, Andy decided, a forebodingly humorless nod. She abandoned the banter and asked, “What do you know about Gus Andropoulos?”

Lorna trilled her incomparably enameled nails across the tabletop, searching for an appropriate approach. She turned to Andy with a look of unsparing wariness.

“Yikes, Lorna,” said Andy. “You’re scaring me.”

“I’m preparing you.”

“For what?”

“For what I discovered.”

“It’s that disturbing?”

“It’s that weird.”

“What’s weird?”

“And to be fair, ingenious.”

“What’s ingenious?” asked Andy, in a voice that illustrated just how contagious anxiety can be.

“The M.O.”

Until now, the Hasidic newbie had been making a valiant attempt to remain above the female fray, clearly treating it as idle chatter. But Lorna’s ominous demeanor was so unsettling that the future rabbi could ignore the conversation no longer.

“What does M.O. mean?” he suddenly asked.

“Tilda’s method of operation,” Andy explained.

Lorna tried lamely to lighten her gloomy mood and her delivery. “You have to hand it to the woman—” she began.

But Andy was having none of it. “No, I don’t!” she spat. “Now, what the hell are you talking about?”

Lorna exhaled and tried again. “Well, I can say unequivocally that Gus is dead.”

“O-kay,” Andy pronounced very slowly, with a withering cock of her head. “We kind of knew that, didn’t we? So get on with it. Did you find out how he died?”

“I did. But that’s not the important part.”

“The important part?”

Unconsciously, Lorna started drumming her nails again. “The ingenious part.”

“Enough with the nails, Lorna! What’s the ingenious part?”

Lorna clasped her skittish hands. “Where he died,” she answered.

Andy sat up in surprise, launching the celery stalk she’d been twirling in her fingers out of the booth and onto the floor.

Harley beat his aunt to the salient interrogatory. “Why is that more important than how he died?” he asked.

“Because it explains almost everything.”

The possibility that ‘almost everything’ could be explained was so intriguing that Andy forgave herself on the spot for not having any idea exactly how. Lorna knew, and that’s all that counted. “So give it to us step by step,” she said, reverentially. “Beginning with where he died.”

And with that, the waitress returned and unloaded their lunch platters onto the table. Harley reached for his fork.

“Don’t touch anything,” Andy ordered. “This needs our full attention. Now tell us, Lorna. Where did Gus die?”

“Fiji,” was the answer.

“Oh, my god. How on earth do you know that?”

The restless nails now hurried to the leather satchel on the booth bench beside Lorna and extracted a single sheet of paper. “Because his death certificate tells us so,” she explained, handing Andy a copy of a registered Certificate of Death from the Fiji High Commission. “We were right. Tilda had joint title to the house Gus owned in Texas, and in order to get full title, she needed to file a death certificate. And she did. The certificate was issued in Suva, the capital of Fiji. He died at an upscale resort just outside the city.”

“How?” asked Harley, equally awed by Lorna’s performance.

“He drowned,” she said.

“You got all this from the death certificate?” Andy wondered.

“Mostly. And I got a copy of something called a Medical Certificate for Cause of Death, as well.”

“Was there an autopsy?”

“No. The cause of death was certified by the doctor on the scene as accidental drowning, and according to the records, Gus was cremated right there in Fiji.”

For a moment Andy and Harley sat processing the implications of Lorna’s findings. Then the trio began spontaneously ping-ponging the advantages of Tilda’s modus operandi across the table at one another.

“So if you die in a foreign country, there is no state or county record of your death in the U.S.,” Andy served.

“And if you’re on vacation and it looks like an accident,” Lorna volleyed, “there are few questions and no autopsy.”

“And who wants to ship a body home?” Harley returned. “You cremate the body and eliminate any future possibility of questions.”

It didn’t take much to keep this little ball of impeccable logic in the air.

Andy took another aggressive swing at it. “Drowning an old man can’t be that difficult. I have no doubt she could do it. Maybe with the help of a little booze.”

Lorna was ready and waiting. “And if you succeed one time, why not try another?”

“And another,” Harley lobbed back.

“And another,” said Andy, slamming home the point and scoring the first truly plausible explanation of what had happened to Tilda’s previous husbands—and what had happened to Mark. “And that’s how Fiji explains everything, right?”

“Right,” Lorna confirmed. “Because it explains how she could have killed all four men and no one has been able to assemble the assorted crimes and put them together.”

“But if she killed them all in Fiji—”

“No, no,” countered the CPA with uncharacteristic certainty. “I’m sure each man got his own international vacation. Anyone as clever as Tilda would never use the same country twice.”

Andy was trying to imagine the kind of uninhibited creativity it would take to dream up a plan like this and the sociopathic compulsion to execute it. “I don’t understand this woman,” she whispered with respectful revulsion. “I really don’t.”

“Why should you? Why should any of us?” Lorna pronounced with indignation. “The woman’s a serial killer.”

This simple and rather obvious observation came as a jaundiced jolt to the writer of so much mediocre fiction. For someone who had put up her share of murder and mayhem on a television screen, she had never really contemplated the seemingly innocuous nature of ending the lives of actual human beings. Nor had she realized how easy it was to habitually kill people and go completely undetected.

Harley was beginning to nervously pinch the hair at the base of his chin and wipe moisture from the rim of his felt hat. “Why don’t we just go to the police?” he demanded.

Alarmingly, Lorna turned her eyes on the boy with a fierceness no one was expecting. “I did,” she said. “Those jackasses. I did!”

The Warm Waters of Denial

Andy issued a rare dispensation and told Harley to eat his cabbage before it got cold. She and Lorna didn’t have the stomach for their sandwich yet.

“What do you mean you talked to the police?” Andy wanted to know.

“I’ve been on the Community Policing Advisory Board in the Valley for years,” Lorna reminded Andy. “All those meetings and fund-raisers. Fat lot of good it did me.”

“Who’d you talk to?”

“Bill Lornier and Collin Cinco. I took them to lunch.”

“Really?”

“I paid to have them make me feel like a fool.”

It was difficult to tell whether Lorna was more upset by what she had learned about Tilda or what she had learned about the police. Whichever it was, Andy was certain she had never seen her friend so agitated.

“What, exactly, did they say?”

“That at this point, there was nothing they could do.”

“For god’s sake,” Andy snapped. “What point does this have to get to?”

It’s not that the two LAPD sergeants had been rude or even dismissive, Lorna explained. It was their painstakingly polite condescension that was so aggravating.

“The way it generally works,” Lornier had told her, “is that the Department begins with a crime and then sets out to find a criminal. What you’ve got is someone you believe may be a criminal, and you want us to help you work backward and find a crime.”

“But I think I’ve finally found one,” Lorna had explained.

“No, you’ve found a possible method for committing a crime,” the policemen had countered, alternating sentences between them. “But there is no evidence at all that any crime occurred. This guy, Gus, might have really drowned. And even if he was murdered, Fiji is a little out of our jurisdiction.”

Both men had tried to camouflage a smile with simultaneous sips of coffee, but the accountant had seen their smirks.

“In fact, all of this—even the cabin in Big Bear—is out of our jurisdiction,” Lornier had added.

“Did you ask them about contacting the FBI?” Andy interrupted.

“Oh, yes.”

“And?”

“And Collin Cinco got the punch line on that one,” Lorna sighed, ruefully. “He said, and I quote, ‘The feds pretty much like to start with a crime, too, and then work their way back to the criminal.’ This time they just chuckled out loud.”

The personal deflation she had suffered while lunching with the men in blue visibly reoccurred, as Lorna slumped forward, elbows on the table, head in hands.

Andy shoved the corned beef on rye in front of her friend. “Eat. We need to think this through,” she instructed.

They ate in silence, except for one unnecessary and obviously misdirected burst of anger in which Andy barked at Harley to wipe a dollop of Russian dressing from his beard.

“It’s not even your dressing,” she told him.

“I just wanted to try it,” he said, in a half apology.

“Humph,” was the best she could do.

Dessert was a shared plate of cream cheese blintzes with strawberry jam. When it had been wiped clean, Andy once more ventured the question every American female has been programmed to ask her closest friend in moments of crisis.

“Tell me,” she began. “Just tell me again, Lorna. Am I crazy?”

“No. This woman is definitely killing people. I would swear to it.”

“Then we really need to do something. I mean, something more.”

“Let’s order coffee,” Lorna suggested. “Because I’ve thought a lot about that.”

“You’ve got a plan?”

“More of a strategy.”

The strategy made the only logical sense one could make out of an increasingly idiotic situation. Lorna laid it out over two cups of decaf and Harley’s first egg cream.