The Muffia (25 page)

He stared at us with red eyes.  “You can call me Joe. What’n the hell’s a lock box?”

“It’s one of these,” I said pulling the device from my own non-designer handbag. “Surely you’ve seen these, Joe. They allow realtors to enter a home and show it to clients without bothering the seller’s agent or the occupants.”

“Don’t they usually put ‘em on the front doors?” he demanded.

“Not necessarily,” said Jelicka. “That can ruin the curb appeal.”

“Well, all right. But these are nice folks. Nice young couple. Surprised they’re selling. I thought they liked it here.”

“Oh, they do,” I said. “They like it very much. But you know, they’re getting married, planning a family. Living in the hills just isn’t practical.”

He cleared his throat and I thought he might say something else, but that stoner’s glaze came over his face and he walked off as suddenly as he’d appeared.

“We might consider leaving now,” I whispered.

“That would be silly. Especially since . . . We’re in.” Jelicka placed her hand on the knob and beamed when it turned.

She’d done it. The pick that had broken her nail had also tripped the lock. I high-fived her. Despite all my earlier trepidation, I now found myself getting into it. Even if Joe called somebody, we’d be in and out before they could arrive.

Opening the door, we poked our heads in and peered around. We hadn’t seen an alarm panel while walking around the house and no sound was emitted, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t an alarm going off at a local police dispatch. However, if Jelicka was right about Nissim and he
was
Mossad—a one-in-a-hundred-thousand chance, I thought—he might not want an alarm going off that would bring U.S. law enforcement to his lair.

Stepping inside, we closed the door. Still no noise emanated from the interior. The faint whirring of city life somewhere outside, along with the hum of a distant appliance, was all that my ears could detect. We found ourselves in a simply appointed, mid-century styled living room where, at least by appearance, nothing seemed suspicious.

“See that painting?” Jelicka asked in a hushed voice.

I followed her gaze to the dining area and spotted a few paintings hanging on the walls, none of which, I thought, would be considered a desirable acquisition by the board of the Museum of Modern Art. One painting in particular looked as though Jackson Pollock’s progeny might have produced it while suffering from both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. “The abstract?”

“What do you want to bet there’s a safe behind it?”

“Jel, no one does that anymore. That’s cheesy and obvious.”

“What’s past is prologue, right? It’s
such
a dated place to put a safe that it’s the logical place to put one.”

“Whatever.”

I went over to the painting—an acrylic in hues of that same lime-green color as the house's exterior, along with black, grey and the occasional splash of neon blue, hanging without a frame—and lifted it. I expected to find absolutely nothing. Curiously, there was no safe but there was a hole, a six-by-six-inch cave carved out of the wall.

“See.” Jelicka was thrilled. “What did I tell you?” She walked closer to peer inside.

“What I see is a hole in the wall,” I said. “They probably just put the painting here to cover it. Besides, there’s nothing inside.”

“Let’s keep looking.”

I returned the painting to its place and followed her through the dining room to the kitchen. “Are we going to check all the cabinets?” I asked, opening the spice cabinet—empty, except for the spices.

She closed the dishwasher, peered into the microwave—nothing. Then at the same time we saw it . . . the freezer.

“You,” she whispered.

“No, you.”

She didn’t move. “OK, together,” I said.

Together we walked to the freezer—one of those pull-out kind and very large. Each of us took one side of the drawer and looked at each other, silently counting.  “One, two, three . . .
go
!”

We pulled hard and the heavy drawer snapped against its tracks, disturbing the automatic icemaker and causing a loud rattling of ice.

“Shhhshshhh!”

Unsure of what might be in the freezer—food? severed heads?—together we ventured a peek inside. It looked like a normal freezer to me though there were a suspicious number of packages of frozen
edamame
.

Very slowly, Jelicka stuck the hand with the damaged nail into the drawer and started pushing the frozen food around. If there were any body parts, they were cleverly disguised as chicken tenders.

“Let’s check the other rooms,” whispered Jelicka.

We were walking down the hallway, carpeted with sisal, when I heard a door open somewhere.

“Madelyn?” The voice calling my name was familiar but it wasn’t a welcome familiarity.

Jelicka, who was in front of me, whirled around.

“Nissim,” I mouthed silently.

“What’s he doing here?” she whispered frantically, as if she finally realized that what we were doing entailed such risks as the legal owner returning to his home.

I had no idea what he was doing home at two o’clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday, but there was no time to discuss it. I pushed her further down the hallway.

Jelicka began reaching inside her handbag and I snatched it from her.

“No gun,” I said as softly and firmly as I could.

“But—”

“No. No gun!”

Nissim spoke again, this time sort of sing-songy.  “Ma-de-lyn—I think you’re in here. I saw your car outside.”

Why hadn’t we taken Jelicka’s car!

The windows wouldn’t open enough for us to fit through, so true to crime cliché, she and I dived into the closet with me clutching both our handbags, and we held our breaths.

“My neighbor called to tell me there were a couple of women in my back yard and I was just down on Vine having lunch, so I decided to come up and see what was going on.”

“Give me the gun,” Jelicka whispered, grabbing at the handbags, which I tried to keep out of her reach without knocking clothes from hangers or overturning shoes.

“OK, Maddie, you can come out now.” Nissim sounded almost playful. I wouldn’t have felt particularly playful toward an interloper in my house.

“Stop. Jelicka, shhhh!” I said, pushing her hands away.

“I know why you’re here, Madelyn. Berggren told me you were asking questions. And to tell you the truth, if our situations were reversed, I’d be curious, too.”

Why was he saying all this? To soften me up somehow? He didn’t sound upset or even alarmed, but then again, he was a professional, and he was moving steadily toward us. 
I had no game plan. There was nowhere to hide.

“You and your friend were right, by the way. I used to be Mossad.”

Jelicka reached out and clutched my arm. I felt for her other hand just to make sure she hadn’t snagged the gun somehow.  No Mossad agent would take kindly to having a Glock pointed at him.

“But it was a long time ago,” he went on. “I’ve been exclusively into real estate for about six years now. That is the truth.”

His voice was getting louder. Soon he would open the closet door and the jig—as they say— would be up.

“I’m still friends with those guys, though. I worked with them a long time. So sometimes they ask me to help them out. This was one of those times.”

He was very close now. I tried to see Jelicka’s expression in the dark, which was impossible, but from the death grip she had on my arm, I knew she was terrified.

The closet door opened, throwing light onto us and revealing Nissim’s smiling face. “Ladies . . .” He didn’t seem to think we were a threat.

“Nissim—” I said. “Hello.”

“Boker tov,” said Jelicka.

Nissim turned his attention to Jelicka. “Other than the fact it’s the afternoon, good morning to you, too.”

Jelicka’s Hebrew, like most things about her, was inconsistent.

“Let me introduce my friend. Nissim, Jelicka. Jelicka this is Nissim,” I said as cheerfully as if I were at the Southern California Mediation Association annual dinner instead of in a guy’s closet with one too many overcoats.

“Shalom,” said Nissim.

“Shalom,” responded Jelicka.

Nissim was being very gracious and understanding, I thought. Hardly the kind of behavior one would expect from a man finding uninvited persons in his house.

“Please . . .” He gestured for us to step out of the closet.

“Nice to see you again,” I said in my friendliest voice as I followed him out of the room, Jelicka close behind me.

He turned to face us, once he’d reached the dining area. “You broke into my house,” he said.

Clearly he was correct, so there was no point in denying it. Instead, I switched to my empathic mediator voice. “Yes. We did. I’m
so
sorry, Nissim.” I spoke as if I’d only just learned that his father had passed.

“I should call the police.”

“From previous experience I know you don’t like to call the police.”

He smiled, clearly recalling that day at my house when he and his friends came for Udi’s body. “It depends,” he said. “I’ve been known to make exceptions.”

Jelicka had been pretty quiet up to this point, but she was starting to recover her nerve. “We had to get in to find out what really happened. I know a little something about Israel and the Mossad.”

“And this would mean what?” asked Nissim, his body language difficult to read, even for me, an astute reader of body language.

“She’s been to Israel and has friends there,” I said.

“Madelyn told me how you showed up at her house that day but it didn’t sound on the up-and-up. In fact, it stinks like an overflowing Van Nuys garbage can in August.”

Nissim gestured to the dining table and we obediently sat down.

“Look at the situation from our point of view," he said. "An Israeli citizen dies in your country while having sexual intercourse. If he were to go to a U.S. morgue, what would be gained?”

“How about ‘we follow the rules’ is what would be gained?” Jelicka said with a smile.

I gave her a kick under the table to get her to call off the attack-dog antics.

“Perhaps,” Nissim said, “but this Israeli citizen who died is not insured in your country. His last will and testament—in a safe-deposit box in Tel Aviv—says nothing about being buried in the U.S. His family is in Israel. His Israeli employer, the safest airline in the world, can get him home quickly and for free. What would you have done?”

“Well, what was that about implanted chips?” Jelicka asked in her “softer” voice. “That sounded really suspicious to me.”

“As I told Madelyn, El Al implants microchips in all its employees.”

“But why would they do that?”

“Why not? Training people is expensive. They’re protecting their investment.”

Jelicka scowled.

“People do put chips in a lot of things these days,” I said. “Dogs, horses. Why not people?”

“It’s very cost-effective as well,” Nissim went on. “Israel produces most of the microchips for human implantation, so they’re very cheap. People in Israel are putting chips in their children so they won't wander away from the playground.”

If this were true, I could consider putting one in Lila, just in case she forgot her phone.

“When Udi’s movement stopped that day, these friends of mine knew it immediately. They called to ask if I knew what Udi was doing in Agoura Hills and I told them I thought he was having sex with you, or perhaps he was sleeping. Then later they called back and said he was still not moving, so something was wrong and would I come with them. And that’s what we did. The rest you know. That’s it.”

“But those guys with you... especially the one who was built like a Sub-zero,” I protested. "He looked like a hired thug from the WWF."

“You mean like him?” Jelicka asked, pointing behind me.

I turned to see the refrigerator-like man who’d been at my house that day. “Yeah, like him.” Alarm bells went off inside me, but I tried to keep it together. I brought my hand up in a small effort at a wave, like we’d originally met under more auspicious circumstances. He smiled in return.

“Who
is
that big guy?” Jelicka whispered, a little too provocatively.

I shot her a look and said, “Listen, Nissim. I’m sorry we broke in. It wasn’t right. I know I didn’t know Udi very well, but I kind of felt I owed it to him to, you know, turn over all the stones.”

Nissim nodded—a concession—then he said, “He was crazy about you. When they got him back to Israel, the airline did an autopsy and it turned out he had large amounts of a drug in his system that he shouldn’t have been taking.”

I was stunned. “A drug? He didn’t act like he was taking drugs. He barely took a drink.”

“Maybe you just weren’t aware of the symptoms. And anyway, this drug is legal.”

Jelicka gasped.