A Playdate With Death (10 page)

The regret in her voice was unmistakable.

I didn’t know how to respond to this, and she seemed immediately to regret having so clearly indicated how she felt about being forced to adopt when she would rather have given birth to her own baby. We sat silently for a moment.
I fidgeted a bit with my feet, crossing and uncrossing my ankles. She sat perfectly still, the only visible motion in her body the slight flare of her nostrils as she inhaled.

Finally, she said, “If there’s nothing else I can do for you . . .” Her voice trailed off.

I rose quickly to my feet. “Would you like me to keep you apprised of what I discover?” I asked.

“So you intend to continue to . . . to investigate?” She sounded as though the very word made her skin crawl.

I nodded. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head slightly and then, rising to her feet, led me to the front door.

T
HAT
evening, Peter announced that he wanted to have a celebratory dinner but refused to tell me what we were celebrating. The four of us went to Giovanni’s, an Italian restaurant located in a strip mall not too far from our house. Giovanni’s is our favorite restaurant, and we’ve been regulars for years. Despite the unprepossessing surroundings, the food is fabulous—simple and delicious.

The kids went straight back to the kitchen, where they knew the chef and his mother were sure to slip them some before-dinner
panna cotta
or almond nougat. Peter and I took our usual table and ordered our usual bottle of Chianti.

“What are we celebrating?” I asked, raising my glass.

“Two things. First of all, Parnassus agreed to Tyler’s counteroffer. I’m going to do
The Impaler.
And they’re already talking about a twenty- or thirty-million-dollar budget.”

“Wow! That’s fabulous. And they caved on your quote?” Hollywood screenwriters spend their lives trying to raise their “quotes,” the amount they are paid per picture.

“Not by as much as Tyler asked, but by enough. Definitely enough. We’re a little closer to buying that house.”

“Peter! I’m so proud of you.” I was dying to get our family out of the duplex apartment where Peter and I had been living since we moved to L.A. Every time we put aside enough money for the down payment on a house, however, real estate prices shot a little higher. By now they were stratospheric, and I was beginning to lose hope. This was very good news.

“Yup, I’ll be bringing home some bacon now,” my husband said.

“You’re amazing. Really.” I kissed him on the cheek. “Without you, we’d be in the gutter.” Without him, I would probably have stayed at my fancy law firm and be raking in the high six figures by now. But I wouldn’t have been happy. Not for a minute.

“So what’s going on with this thing with your trainer?”

I brought Peter up to date on what I’d found out. I described the complicated situation with Bobby’s adoption and how I had narrowed down the list of possible birth mothers to two. I also told him about Candace and her crusade.

“Pretty intense,” Peter said.

“No kidding.”

“You know, sometimes I wonder. If you have kids, and you adopt another, is it really possible to love the adopted kid as much?”

“I suppose it must be. For some people. I don’t think the Drs. Katz succeeded very well, though.”

“It must be hard. I mean, think about how much time we spend talking about how much Ruby looks like you, or about how Isaac has my ability to focus on an issue.”

“Focus? I think
obsess
is a better word for it.”

“Semantics. Anyway, we’re always talking about how much they’re like you, or like me. How many times have you said that Isaac looks like your dad? Isn’t that a big part of why we love them so much?”

I took a sip of wine and considered that. “I don’t know. I think it might be part of
how
we love them, but not
why.
With an adopted child, you just have a different
how,
if you see what I mean. You don’t love him any less. Just differently, the way we love each of ours differently.”

Peter shrugged. “Maybe. I guess we’ll probably never know. Anyway, it sounds like you think the adoption might be related to Bobby’s suicide.”

“If it was a suicide.”

“Is there still any doubt? What are the cops saying?”

“I’m not sure, but I think they’re still considering it a suspicious death.” I told Peter about Bobby’s on-line purchases, and he agreed that the behavior didn’t sound like that of a man about to kill himself. “Al made another call to one of his friends. I’m hoping he can prod the cops into looking at Bobby’s case a little more closely.”

“How is Al? How’s his new business?”

“Okay, I guess. Oh. Ha. You’ll never believe this. It’s the most ridiculous thing. He wants me to go into business with him.”

Peter looked at me seriously. “Why is that so ridiculous?”

“What? Me, go into business as a private eye? Like Hercule Poirot? Or Cordelia Gray? Or Matlock?”

“I don’t think it’s such a nutty idea for you to team up with Al to do some investigation. It’s clear you have a knack for it, don’t you think? Without you, the cops would never have solved Abigail Hathaway’s murder or the Fraydle Finkelstein thing. Why
not
turn this skill of yours into a career?”

“Because I
have
a career. Or had one. I don’t want another. Anyway, I’m supposed to be home raising the kids, remember?”

He shrugged. “You decided that you couldn’t be a half-time public defender. Maybe you could be a half-time investigator.”

“It would never work. What would I do? Sit around Al’s empty garage helping him polish his gun collection? I have better things to do with my time.”

“Like?”

“Like car pool! Like playdates!”

“That reminds me,” he said. “Since I’m getting back to work, you get to take Ruby and Isaac to Ari’s birthday party tomorrow. I’ve got a meeting with the studio executive assigned to my project.” He reached into his pocket and handed me an invitation printed with a pattern of mottled green, brown, and black.

“Tell me this isn’t
camouflage,
” I said.

I
S
it only in Los Angeles that people would do this? Or is it because Ruby’s classmate Ari’s parents were from Israel, where they take for granted that the army is a part of life? Whatever the reason, the party was like something out of a movie:
Rambo
or
The Guns of Navarone.
Isaac had never been so happy in his entire life.

The playroom of the birthday boy’s house was decorated in brown and green streamers. The party hats perched jauntily on the children’s heads were little green berets. G.I. Joe himself was there, though he was actually more of a G.I. Jacob. Ari’s uncle, who had recently mustered out of the Israeli army and immediately immigrated to Los Angeles to work in his brother’s chain of electronics stores, wore what looked like an Israeli army uniform, complete with sergeant’s stripes and a webbed belt cinched tightly at the waist. He had a black plastic toy Uzi submachine gun hanging on his shoulder (at least I hoped it was a toy), and dark red combat boots. His dark, curly hair peeked out from under a burgundy beret that was close in color to his full, pouty lips. He had longer lashes than I did.

The kids marched around the living room in formation for a while, then had a water pistol fight in the backyard. I concentrated my attention on the soldier uncle and did my best to keep from licking my lips. What is it about a man in uniform? No matter how much all of the guns and pageantry of it bothers me, I still find something strangely compelling about a set of cute buns swathed in military green.

At the same time that I was drooling over the soldier, I was feeling pretty damn disgusted about the whole gun thing.

Thank God Stacy was there. Her son Zach was quite a bit older than the birthday boy, but as he went to school with Ari’s sister, he’d been invited to join in the festivities. We leaned against the kitchen counter talking softly.

“Can you believe this?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes and flicked back her thick blond hair. Stacy is one of those women who were born to make others feel jealous. She seems beautiful, although she’s the first to point out that it’s more a result of careful preparation and judicious spending than any natural physical perfection. Her hair is always carefully cut in a classic modification of the style of the moment, and I haven’t seen her without makeup since we graduated from college. Her life seems perfect, too. She has a math-whiz son, a handsome husband, and she is one of the rising stars at International Creative Artists, Hollywood’s biggest talent agency. Unfortunately, what with her husband Andy’s infidelities, sustaining that image of impeccable contentment requires as much work and artifice as does keeping up her physical appearance. She and Andy have been in and out of divorce court and couple’s counseling, trying for years to deal with the fact that she earns more money than he does and that, for some reason, that fact instills in him the urge to buy expensive cars and even more expensive women.

“I just don’t get it, really I don’t. Why are boys so infatuated with guns and soldiers?” I said, keeping my voice low.

“I don’t know. Probably because their parents are,” Stacy said.

“Are they? Do you really think these people are gun owners?” I waved at the collection of Hollywood and almost-Hollywood parents. The women all looked like they were trying to be Stacy, and the men had that self-satisfied air they tend to acquire when their incomes keep pace with their toy-buying whims.

“You’d be surprised,” my friend said.

“Am I going to have to start asking whether there’s a gun in the house before I send Ruby and Isaac out on playdates?”

“It’s not a bad idea. But, then, Ruby’s been over to my house thousands of times. It’s never bothered you.”

My jaw dropped. “You have a gun?”

She nodded. “Just a little one. I got it last year after Andy moved back home.”

“Are you kidding me? Why?”

“Remember last’s year’s bimbo?”

“Who could possibly keep track?”

Stacy rolled her eyes. “I know, I know. Anyway, she was the craziest of them all. After he broke up with her, she started calling the house at all hours. We changed our phone number, and then she started calling me at work. I kept imagining that scene from
Fatal Attraction,
you know, where Glenn Close puts the bunny in the pot? I wanted to be prepared in case she came after Zach’s gerbil.”

Was I the only person in the city of Los Angeles who wasn’t packing heat?

The pièce de résistance of the party—I swear I’m not making this up—was a piñata shaped like a two-foot-long pistol. The kids thwacked at it happily, while Ari’s parents
beamed and scrupulously videotaped every minute of the festivities. When the piñata finally burst, after a good half hour of feeble strikes by the children and one good whack with his machine gun by G.I. Jake, a rain of tiny plastic soldiers, water pistols, and foil-wrapped chocolates in the shape of rifle cartridges showered down on the children’s heads. God knows where they got the candy bullets.

After cake and ice cream, I gathered my two and put them in the car.

“That was a
gun
party,” Isaac announced, beside himself with astonishment and glee.

“Yes, it was. Did you like it?” I asked them.

“I didn’t,” Ruby said loyally. “We don’t like guns, do we Mama?”

“No. No, we don’t.”

“I do,” Isaac said. “I love guns. I
love
them. And I loved that party. That’s the kind of party I’m going to have, okay?”

“Over my dead body,” I said, thinking of Bobby Katz and what a gun had done to him.

“No!” Isaac wailed.

“What, honey?” I asked, leaning into the car where I’d just buckled him into his car seat.

He wrapped his soft, plump arms around me and kissed me on the cheek, hard. “I don’t want you to have a dead body.”

I kissed him back. “That’s just a saying, honey. My body is fine. It just means I don’t want you to have a gun party.”

“But why not?” he whined.

“I’ve told you a million times, baby. Guns are bad; they kill people.”

“Real guns are bad.
They
kill people. Play guns are just pretend. They just pretend to kill people.”

I looked at him, surprised. Did he, at his age, really understand the difference between real and pretend? “Even pretending to kill people is bad, Isaac.”

His lower lip pooched out a bit and his eyes filled with tears. “Am I a bad boy?” he whispered.

“No! No, of course not.” I covered him with kisses. “You’re a very good boy. You’re the best boy.”

“Mama?” Ruby interrupted.

“What, sweetie?”

“Well, you always tell Isaac guns are bad. So maybe that’s why Isaac thinks
he’s
bad. ’Cause he loves something so much, even though it’s so bad.”

I stared at her. Then I turned to him. “Is that true, Isaac? Do you think you’re a bad boy because you love guns and I tell you guns are bad?”

He burst into tears and buried his head in my neck.

T
HAT
night I finally got around to reading all the E-mail Bobby had received after his death. There were a couple of messages from clients, obviously written before they knew what happened to him. The rest were from Internet contacts who were not aware that he’d died. There were messages from his on-line adoptee support group. There were piles of spam—junk mail from mortgage brokers and pornography web sites and the like. Mostly, however, there were messages from Candace.