A Playdate With Death (19 page)

I was debating the merits of driving out to Thousand Oaks and blustering into the Katzes’ home when the phone rang. It took me a moment to figure out that the whispering voice on the other end of the line belonged to Bobby’s sister, Michelle.

“I’m so sorry about my dad, Juliet. I just want you to know that not all of us think that way.”

“What way?” I asked.

“Not all of us think that Bobby killed himself. I mean, I don’t. He couldn’t have. And I really appreciate what you’ve been doing. It’s
my
fault my dad is all up in arms about this.”

“Your fault?”

“Yes,” she said apologetically. “I didn’t mean to get them upset or to get you in trouble.” That was a funny phrase for a grown woman to use. “But when my mother and David told us about your investigation, I tried to convince my parents to let you go forward. I’m convinced that there is more to this than the police think.”

“Michelle, why are we whispering?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I could almost hear her blushing. “I’m at my parents’ house, and I’m on my cell phone. In the bathroom. I didn’t want my dad to know that I was calling you.”

The Drs. Katz were so formidable that they reduced their grown-up daughter, a woman of significant accomplishment in her own right, to a teenager sneaking a telephone call while pretending to use the toilet.

“There are a few things that I’d really like to talk about, and I can’t imagine you’ll be able to stay in the bathroom for long. Can you meet me?” I said.

“What? Now?”

“Yes. I mean, it doesn’t have to be right now, but it might as well be. Did your father tell you that someone threatened me?” I told Michelle about Peter’s car.

“Oh no! That’s awful. You must be terrified.” That was too strong a word. Nervous? Yes. Scared, even. But the feeling of foreboding inspired by the vandalism of the BMW certainly didn’t rise to the level of terror. Or so I tried to convince myself.

“I guess I could meet you,” Michelle continued. “I could pretend that I have to go into the office.”

It took me a while to convince Peter that I wasn’t taking any unnecessary risks by talking to Michelle. He finally agreed that I should go but insisted that he come along, too. And, since we were both going, Ruby and Isaac were necessarily invited along for the ride.

“We’ll have dinner at the mall,” I said, brightly, as if the prospect of limp egg rolls and gyro platters was an enticement. Actually, for them it probably was.

By the time we arrived, Michelle was already waiting for me at an orange plastic table in the food court.

I sat down opposite her and waved Peter in the direction of the California Pizza Kitchen. “I’ll find you guys in about half an hour,” I told him. I was about to ask him to get me a couple of slices of pizza but changed my mind. Michelle was one of those tiny little women who can’t find enough size twos to flesh out a decent wardrobe. I amended that to a Caesar salad. With the dressing on the side.

Michelle and I watched Peter and the kids wander off. Ruby was skipping ahead, and Isaac was sitting on his father’s shoulders.

“You have a lovely family,” she said.

“Thanks. Do you have kids?”

She shook her head. “No, not yet. We’re thinking about it, but my hours are really crazy. Larry didn’t even bat an eyelash when I told him and my parents that I had to go to work tonight. I probably spend more Sunday nights at work than at home.”

“That’s hard,” I said. I certainly wasn’t about to feed her
the line about how it was perfectly reasonable to expect to have a demanding career and be an active and involved parent. I’d discovered the folly of that the hard way. But Michelle was at least thirty-five years old, if not older. She didn’t have a lot of time to debate the pros and cons of reproduction. No way I was going to tell her that, either.

“Anyway, like I said on the phone, I really do appreciate your trying to help us figure out what happened to Bobby,” she said.

If there was anyone who could help me rule out the possibility that Bobby had killed himself, maybe it was this woman, who loved him so much and knew him so well. “I’m sure you’ve gone over this a thousand times in your mind,” I said, “but thinking about everything that happened to Bobby right before his death—Betsy’s arrest, his discovery that he was adopted—does it seem possible that he could have been depressed enough to commit suicide?”

She shook her head. Tears welled up in her eyes and threatened to spill over. “I just don’t believe Bobby could have done that. He wasn’t like that. I mean, he definitely had a self-destructive side. I guess you know about his methamphetamine problem.”

I nodded.

“But he kicked that. Completely. He’d put all that behind him.”

“You don’t think that what happened with Betsy might have pushed him over the edge?”

“Of course Betsy’s relapse made him
sad,
that’s only natural. But you should have heard him defend her to my parents.
He told them that addiction is a physical and mental disease and lectured them on tolerance and understanding. He was amazing. He stood by her the whole time, and honestly, I don’t think he would have abandoned her now, when she’s back in treatment and doing so well.”

I cringed a bit, remembering Betsy’s jag. “What about finding out about the adoption? Could that have depressed him sufficiently?”

Michelle shook her head. “Bobby wasn’t depressed or sad about that. I mean, he was furious with our parents for not telling him. But he wasn’t upset about being adopted. On the contrary. He seemed really excited about finding his birth mother. You see, our mother is a wonderful woman. She’s smart and strong and a real . . . a real . . .” I was tempted to fill her pause with the word
bitch,
but restrained myself. “She’s wonderful,” Michelle repeated lamely. “But, she’s very demanding. And she’s not a real affectionate person. Neither is my dad. I think Bobby needed that more than the rest of us did. It’s like Lisa, David, and I were kind of hardwired for my parents—we weren’t particularly needy children. But Bobby was wired for something else. He always wanted more of a certain kind of attention than my parents could give. And the attention they did give, the way they got involved in our schoolwork, in our grades, well, that didn’t usually work out so well for Bobby. He never excelled academically, so the fact that that was the way they showed their interest in him ended up causing him anxiety and stress instead of anything positive.”

“It sounds like he didn’t really fit your parents’ ideal of what a child should be like.”

She shook her head. “No, he certainly didn’t. After a while, they stopped demanding so much of him; after all, they had the three of us to satisfy them. Don’t get me wrong,” she said urgently. “They loved Bobby. Really they did. It was just a difficult relationship.”

“Why did they adopt him in the first place? I mean, they already had three children. Why did they want another?” I wanted to see if Michelle’s answer matched that of her mother’s.

“They always planned to have four children—two boys and two girls. They’d even timed everything perfectly so that their residencies wouldn’t be disrupted. But then my mom had to have C-sections with all of us. My birth was particularly hard on her, and the doctors were afraid that if she got pregnant again, she might have a uterine rupture. At first I think my parents accepted that. After all, they did wait eight years before they adopted Bobby. But, finally, I guess they decided that they really had to have their picture-perfect family complete with two of each kind of kid. So they adopted a little baby boy.”

“Do you think that Bobby was eager to find his birth parents because he imagined that they might give him the kind of acceptance that your parents never could?”

Michelle looked thoughtful. “I suppose that’s possible. I only ever really talked about the adoption with him twice. The first time was right after he found out. David told him, and then the next weekend, he asked Lisa and me to meet him at Mom and Dad’s. He told us that he had something important to talk about with the whole family. It was pretty
intense. He sat us all down in the kitchen and told us that he knew about the adoption. At first my father tried to pretend that he didn’t know what Bobby was talking about. I mean, he’d been pretending for so long.

“But Bobby didn’t let my dad get away with it. First, he tried to get Lisa and me to admit it, but I guess we were just too freaked out to say anything. I remember Lisa was leafing through a medical journal of Mom’s, and she just sat there, pretending to read. I don’t even know what I was doing. Probably trying to look invisible.”

“What made your father finally admit the truth?”

“Bobby was getting angrier and angrier. I think initially he was trying to protect David so that my parents wouldn’t know that he was the one who told, but when they kept insisting that it wasn’t true, he told them that David had told him everything. It was horrible. He just looked at Dad and said, “Stop lying. For once just stop lying.”

“Your father told him the truth?”

Michelle shook her head. “No, my mother did. She said that it was true, but that it didn’t mean anything. That it didn’t mean they didn’t love him. She even hugged him, which if you knew my mother, you’d know is a huge deal. She’s not a hugger.”

“How did Bobby respond?”

“He ended up bursting into tears. I did, too, and I swear I even saw a tear in Mom’s eye. Bobby told us that he loved us, and that he wasn’t upset about being adopted. He asked my parents what they knew about his birth mother, but we all could see right away that the question really upset them.
From the very beginning, they were absolutely opposed to his finding out anything about her. I think they finally told him that Jewish Family Services would never tell them anything beyond his birth date and the fact that his mother was healthy. I don’t know if they know any specific facts, but I’m pretty confident that even if they do, they wouldn’t have told Bobby anything else. Mom especially didn’t think anything good could come out of looking for his birth mother. She told Bobby that it was obvious that the woman hadn’t wanted him, so he should just concentrate on the people who did. Namely, her and Dad. And us, of course.”

“How did it all end?”

“I guess we all just told Bobby how much we loved him again, and he told us that he loved us, too. And then we never really talked about it much as a family again.”

“But you talked about it with Bobby?”

“Yeah, one other time. He had given me a free training session for my birthday, so I came down to his gym in Hollywood. He told me that he was looking for his birth mother, and we started imagining what she was like. We figured that she was Jewish, since the adoption had come through Jewish Family Services. Bobby was sure she had been really young, probably a teenager, and that she’d given him up because she wasn’t able to care for him. He was confident that she’d be interested in meeting him, particularly since so much time had passed, and he obviously wasn’t after anything from her. He said that it was even possible that she was looking for him, too.”

“Did he ever tell you that he found her?”

“No, but he did, didn’t he?”

I wondered for a moment whether I should tell Michelle what I knew. I decided to; she was Bobby’s sister. She loved him. She had a right to know. “Yes, he did,” I said.

“And was she a teenager? I mean, when she gave him up?”

“No, she was young, in her midtwenties, but she was married. Her husband was off fighting in Vietnam, and she had an affair.”

Michelle nodded. “That makes sense, I guess. Was she Jewish?”

“No, Catholic.”

“Then why did she go through a Jewish adoption agency? And how did Bobby get Tay-Sachs? Was the father Jewish?”

“He must have been. It’s a little confusing.” I told her about Reuben Nadelman.

“But if he isn’t a Tay-Sachs carrier, and neither is she, then there’s something wrong. He can’t be the father.”

“Right.”

“So who is?”

“That’s one of the things I’ve been trying to figure out.”

“Did she have an affair with anyone else?”

“Not that she’s told me about. But I suppose she must have.”

“That person would have to be the Tay-Sachs carrier, then. You know, his father doesn’t
have
to be Jewish. The disease is not limited to Jews, it’s just more prevalent in the Ashkenazic Jewish population.”

“I know. It also appears in French Canadians and Cajuns.”

“And in the general population, too,” she said, “it’s just very, very rare.”

We sat quietly for a moment. Then Michelle said, “Was Bobby’s birth mother glad when he found her? Was she happy to see him?”

I shook my head. “No. She wasn’t. She’s still married to the same man and has two kids. I think she was terrified her family would find out about Bobby.”

Michelle buried her face in her hands. “Oh, God. Poor Bobby. How awful. How awful to find your mother and have her reject you.”

I put my hand on hers to soften what I was about to say. “Is it possible that being rejected by his birth mother, especially given the difficult relationship he had with your parents, might have made him so depressed he would consider taking his own life?”

Her shoulders shook with sobs. “I don’t know. Maybe. Oh, poor Bobby. Poor, poor Bobby.”

“Michelle,” I said, “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Bobby? Someone who might have a grudge against him?”

She shook her head. “Absolutely not. You know Bobby. He was the most easygoing guy in the world. He would never hurt anybody, and nobody would want to hurt him.”

“What about when he was using drugs? Did he make any enemies that you know of?” It’s hard to get through life as a drug addict without pissing off a few people.

“No. Honestly. The only person he hurt was himself.”

“Was he ever in any trouble with dealers? Was there ever a time when he couldn’t pay for his drugs? When he owed money to people?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t really know anything about his life back then. He did a good job of hiding all that from us. Even when he was at his worst, he tried to protect us from knowing the truth. None of us even realized that there was anything wrong until he checked himself into rehab.”