Dating is Murder (30 page)

“Was it because he wanted to be a partner?”

“Oh, please. Fifty percent of my gross? For what, his people skills? Not in this lifetime. The problem was, he threatened to turn me in. Think about that. I’m arrested, Gene’s arrested. Forget losing the house, the cars, Emma growing up in Palm Springs with Grammy Quinn. Prison would be the least of it, because by then I’d met Yosip and Frito—”

“Frito?”

“Tcheiko’s lieutenants. I could identify them. I know some organizational details the Feds would be interested in. And Tcheiko would lose face among his peers, because of my error in judgment, and he’s very unforgiving about that sort of thing, that was made very clear to me. I don’t think federal custody is really the place for me, do you?”

“Then it was . . . self-defense. Killing Rico.”

She smiled. “I’m not sure a jury would see it that way, since he was naked at the time. In front of the fire. Unarmed, except for prosciutto and olives, and a loaf of sourdough.”

“What’d you kill him with?”

“The Wüstof.”

“Excuse me?”

“Bread knife. Using what’s at hand, that’s a core homemaker philosophy. I went down on him, he fell asleep, I slit his throat. I always have my knives sharpened for the holidays, a little cutlery store in Beverly Hills. Ear to ear is what you always hear, so that’s what I focused on, one good incision. And from there it was just a step at a time. You can do anything in the world if you break it into small, manageable parts. Oh, please.” She was looking at me now, eyes narrowed. “Don’t waste your sympathy on him. Do you know he came over on Saturday to ask if I’d killed Annika? You told him she was looking for a gun, so he thought I’d killed her. Thought he could squeeze me for a bigger percentage. Do you need a Kleenex?”

My nose was running, the way it does when I try not to cry. I thought of Lauren Rodriguez, the look in her eyes that would never go away now. She’d never get over losing her son. I couldn’t stop my nose. I felt as though my face were leaking. “His mom,” I whispered.

Maizie stood. “She shouldn’t have raised such a selfish kid. I’m sorry for her, I truly am, but everyone’s got a mother—you can’t let that stop you. I have a child.” She glanced at her watch. She was like Bing, ready to yell “Cut!” the minute the conversation palled.

“Capricorn,” I said breathlessly. “Emma’s the Capricorn. The logo on your pills.”

Maizie smiled. “Yes. Emma.” There was a counter between us, a white counter, sparkling clean, no trace of the blood that must have spattered here from Rico Rodriguez going through a saw. “Because you know what real euphoria is? An epidural, after fourteen hours of labor. And then the prize. My Emma. Giving birth to my baby was the best day of my life.”

“Maizie,” I said. “She’s so wonderful.”

“Thank you. You’d have been a good mom, too, Wollie. I’m sorry, I had no idea you’d keep at this the way you did. And you figured out a lot. Surprisingly. Not to be offensive, but you just don’t look that smart. I think it’s your hair.”

“I suppose—” I cleared my throat. “If I didn’t want to take this—fen—”

“Fentanyl,” she said, and her hand once more reached into her denim apron pocket. She drew out the gun. It was small. Black. “It’s a twenty-two. It’s all I could find; Gene’s always walking off with the keys to the gun cabinet. It’ll do the job, I just can’t guarantee how fast, and you could be conscious the whole way out. And consider the mess. I don’t have time to clean and even if Lupe were here, I couldn’t ask her, she’s Catholic. And it’s loud. The room’s insulated, assuming the trapdoor worked. It should close automatically—” Maizie walked over to the spiral staircase, heels clicking across the white tile floor. I looked around frantically, but there was no place to run, hide, no door, nothing. A weapon, then, something, anything. I tried a kitchen cabinet. Locked. Each cabinet had little locks.

How had she pulled this off, how could no one know about this, the police, the FBI—

They did know. She hadn’t pulled it off. For the second time in an hour I felt like the stupidest person alive. Simon had tried in every way he could to prevent this. There was no crime going on at
Biological Clock
except bad TV; he’d “recruited” me to distract me. He’d done everything but glue my feet to Santa Monica Boulevard to keep me away from here.

But here I was.

Where was he?

The house must be under surveillance, bugged, the phones tapped—that’s how it worked, right? Agents must be in a van on the street, listening to everything we’d been saying, getting it all on tape, maybe waiting for the right moment to come rushing in—

Now would be a good time!
I wanted to yell.

Maizie climbed back down the spiral staircase with a smile. “Okay, all insulated. Wollie, don’t be difficult. It’s like Emma’s pink medicine. She always thinks it will taste bad, but it doesn’t. This could be so easy.”

Simon wasn’t coming. Not that my opinion of men is low, but in my experience, the cavalry doesn’t show up just because you need them. If Simon was listening, he wouldn’t be listening, he’d be in here already, he’d be in here at the first mention of guns and whatever Maizie kept yapping about in that Tupperware. He wouldn’t use me for bait or for evidence gathering. He wouldn’t use me, period.

Simon!
I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream, period.

He wasn’t here because he wasn’t listening, because this was a soundproof room, with no telephone, and a secret entrance that no one, not even a state-of-the-art good guy knew about. And they didn’t know I was here because my car was parked blocks away and I’d used the back-gate entrance that UPS knew about, but the FBI maybe didn’t, since my hostess had neglected to fax the FBI a map and, most of all, they didn’t know I was here because they all thought I was heading to
Biological Clock.

“Shouldn’t we do this in your car, Maizie? Or mine? If you’re going to use my car to dump my body, wouldn’t it be easier if I’m already in it?”

“No,” she said, growing exasperated, “because then when I dump you, I’d have to drag you in one piece and it would attract attention. We went over that. Also, you’d be easy to ID, they could determine time of death—no. Trust me, it creates more problems than it solves.”

“I see.” I seemed to be both shivering and sweating now, and then I sneezed; it was as though my body were running through its repertoire of involuntary activities, sensing the end. My memory was running through its own repertoire, saying I love you to P.B., Joey, Fredreeq, Uncle Theo. Mom. Simon. Doc.

I loved you too,
Doc said back.
I just loved my kid more.

“One last thing,” I said. “Where’s Annika?”

“Wollie, it’s so ironic. She killed herself. She left me a suicide note the day she left. I just couldn’t show anyone; it was too incriminating.”

That’s not true, I thought, wrapping my arms around myself to fend off hysteria. Annika e-mailed me. Just days ago. I had to believe it came from her, because otherwise, what was all this for? If she’d been dead all along . . .

I held myself tighter and felt something in my jean jacket, in the pocket. Hard.

I slipped my hand in my pocket. Cold. One of the things I’d bought at Williams-Sonoma. The meat mallet. I could feel the tiny string on it, attached to the small rectangular price tag.

Words began to run through my head like voice-mail messages.

Crotch, neck, soft parts of the face.
Seth, from Krav Maga.

I couldn’t do that. I don’t even do sit-ups.

You do what you have to do to stay alive.
Ruta, my childhood babysitter.

Annika would never kill herself. Not over a guy. She was smarter than that.

If you’re not dead, you’re not done.
Seth.

“Can I look at it?” I said, my voice squeaky and high, like little Emma. “The fentanyl?”

Maizie took a seat and pushed the small Tupperware container toward me.

My left hand worked the lid, my right hand staying in my pocket. I couldn’t believe she didn’t notice, but she didn’t. I was shaking so badly that when I pushed the Tupperware back across the counter, it wouldn’t go in a straight path. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t get it open.”

Of course she tried to open it for me. She was a mom. The Tupperware lid was tough, though. She needed both hands to pry it off. She held on to the gun but, still, she used both hands, and so then she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking at the Tupperware.

This was it. Now or never. A last voice played in my head.
A moment. You can’t hesitate or you lose your nerve.
The voice was Maizie’s.

Some force reached into my pocket and pulled out the silver meat mallet with my hand attached to it. I don’t know what you’d call it, some phenomenon of physics or biology stretching across a white Formica counter to bring the full weight of an arm onto someone’s neck, head, shoulder, ear, cheekbone, not once, not even twice, but enough times to make her fall from the stool she sat on, onto the white tile floor. When that happened, I stopped.

The blows stopped, but the cries didn’t, the raw sounds a throat can make, somewhere between a scream and a sob that I finally recognized as coming from my own body, not hers.

40

I
ran up
the spiral staircase. At the top, waiting for me, was the yellow cat, wanting out.

I wanted out too.

There was no handle, though, or door knob, so I pressed and pushed and banged the side of my fist against the trapdoor. It wouldn’t open. There was a keypad but I couldn’t begin to guess a code, so I punched numbers. The cat meowed at me. I thought about panicking and then remembered I had a cell phone. In my pocket. My other pocket.

I got reception. I called Simon. I didn’t think twice. When his voice mail answered, I said, “It’s Wollie, I’m in her house, the studio behind the house, underground, in an underground—and I can’t get out and I’ve maybe—killed her. And she said Annika’s dead but she can’t be dead because she e-mailed me.” My voice cracked and I hung up and clutched the banister of the spiral staircase, where I sat, my body knotted like a pretzel. The cat purred and rubbed itself against my shoulder.

I dialed 911. They asked me questions. I answered them. I hung up.

I sneezed. Then I waited.

Life is short. That’s one of those things that occurs to you when you glimpse death, yours or anybody’s. You think, “I’ll remember this, this will remind me not to waste time,” but you forget. You carry on like you have several hundred years to live and like it matters if some guy now living in Taiwan who once loved you still does, or if you pass a math test or win a reality TV show or finish the frogs or get your car washed before the end of the year.

When all that really matters is that you’re not dead. The rest of it, like what that means in the long run or what I was feeling right at the moment, I couldn’t sort out. I didn’t know if Maizie Quinn was or wasn’t dead, and I knew that this distinction would make a big difference in the lives of many people, me among them, but for the moment I didn’t care. I had her gun on the top step, away from the cat, and I had the meat mallet. There were no sounds below me, the sounds of a human being rallying. If I were a different sort of person, a brave one, for instance, I might have gone down to see if I could do something about her, like revive her or tie her up, but I was the person I was, so I stayed where I was, crouched and tense and concentrating on steady shallow breaths, thinking about being alive. Sneezing.

I don’t know how long it was just the yellow cat and me, but after a time there were voices, so muffled I might have been hallucinating. I screamed and pounded and then the door opened upward and people moved past me down the spiral staircase. Someone—he told me he was FBI, they were all FBI—helped me up, took from me the meat mallet, with blood drying on its silver surface, and, after I directed his attention to it, the gun. He led me to a chair near the fireplace and gestured to a woman, who came and stayed close to me. At some point someone from below called up, “She’s alive,” and for a moment I thought they were talking about me. And then I slid out of the chair onto the floor, I’m not sure why, except that I wanted something more solid underneath me. I stayed there across the room from the reindeer pieces with their primer drying until paramedic types brought Maizie up from below on a stretcher. I didn’t see her face, only her healthy-looking blond hair, matted with the darkness of drying blood. I began to shake all over again. That’s when Simon walked in.

When I saw his face, grim and tense and pale, I had to work not to cry. He scanned the room and saw me.

Came toward me with long strides. Stopped when someone grabbed his arm to whisper something in his ear. Nodded to him, spoke a few words, came over and looked down. Then he knelt on the floor next to me, very close.

“You all right?” he said.

I nodded, not able to speak.

“Hurt?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t move.” He gestured to the woman with me, then stood and walked away.

A minute later another medical type with a first-aid kit came over and checked out my vital signs and asked me some questions. My answers seemed to satisfy him. I started to tell him to check on the cat, but the words came out funny. He covered me with a blanket, let me stay on the floor, walked away to say a few words to Simon, and left.

Simon seemed to be the Bing Wooster of this operation. I wondered why the area wasn’t being roped off as a crime scene, then thought that maybe no one but me knew a crime had been committed here, except the crime of me hitting Maizie with a meat mallet. I turned to the woman at my side. “There’s an earlobe here,” I said.

“A what?”

“An earlobe.” I stood. She touched my arm and started to ask me something, but I wrapped my blanket around myself and walked over to Simon, standing in the kitchen. He must’ve had eyes on the side of his head. He turned immediately.

“Yes? What is it?”

“There’s an earlobe around here somewhere. On the floor.”

“A what?”

“An earlobe. It belonged to Rico Rodriguez. The cat was playing with it. The rest of Rico is in Antelope Valley.”

Simon took a long look at me, then nodded. The news didn’t seem to surprise him, but I figured they train them not to look surprised. He put a hand around my upper arm, gently, but his hand was so big it surrounded my bicep like a bandage. “Wollie,” he said. “You need to—”

“Where’s Annika?”

“Not now.” As if to reinforce this, his cell phone rang. He listened, frowning, then addressed the room at large. “All right, we’ve got company. They’re early. Exiting the 405 at Valley Vista, taking surface streets. Let’s move.” He addressed the woman who’d been hovering and asked where her car was. Base camp, she told him. “Put her in mine,” he said, and fished keys out of his jacket. “Windows up.”

“We’ve got a problem.” It was a new agent, coming in from outside, leaving the door open. He came over to Simon, the urgency in his voice unrestrained. His manner was not deferential. “We picked up Dr. Kildare and Hazel at the Sportsman’s Lodge. He’s falling over himself to cooperate, but all he knows is she’s to stand outside the house, meet them at the gate. Car one is Lenin. He verifies it’s her, drives through, radios car two, that’s Stalin. He comes through, she closes the gate, walks them here to the lab. If she’s not at the gate, the deal’s off. She’s not alone, the deal’s off. Lenin doesn’t ID her, Stalin stays away, we shoot it out with him on the freeway all the way to Tijuana or Death Valley or wherever the hell he parked the getaway jet.”

Simon nodded. “That’s more than one problem. Hazel?”

“Nothing. Knows company’s coming. Betty Crocker’s been cooking all day.”

Simon nodded. “Female agents?”

“Dahl, San Diego, stuck on the 405 and she’s short. We’re working on a wig for Ellis.”

“Won’t make it in time. Passwords?”

“Husband doesn’t know. Surveillance says no, but we’re reviewing transcripts. It’s not something we were listening for. Right now I need you to look at the geography out front. If we can get him onto the block, Potemkin may have a shot from across the street.”

Simon looked toward the door, shaking his head. “Not unless we get them to roll down a window. Even then, it’s going to be a bad night in the neighborhood.”

“I don’t need a wig,” I said.

Both men turned to me. The room went quiet.

“No.” Simon didn’t even think about it.

But the agent with him thought about it. He looked at me with interest, then turned to Simon and said something I didn’t catch.

“I can do this,” I said to them. “I can. I’m like her.”

Simon shook his head. “Not enough. They’ve met her.”

“Tcheiko hasn’t.”

“No.”

“What are you going to do?” I said. “I knocked out Little Fish. There’s nobody else. I can get them to roll down the car window. I can be Betty Crocker for ten goddamn minutes.”

Simon looked at his watch. “You didn’t sign on for this.”

The other agent said, “Actually, she did sign on for this. This is Kermit, right? Use her.”

Simon’s cell phone rang. He spoke into it, held up a finger to us, then walked outside.

The other agent kept looking at me. “Think you can do this?” he said.

I felt the room around me holding its breath. “Yes,” I said.

He nodded. “Let’s go.”

The room came to life. Two women agents led me to a corner, helping me into clothes they must’ve found in the house, jeans that had to be Maizie’s and a white sweater. They talked calmly and encouragingly. Nothing fit exactly right; the jeans were too short, and the sweater sleeves, but it was all close enough. I smelled like her now, subtle and spicy. It was Annika’s scent too, the aromatherapy products. Sassafras oil, maybe.

One of the agents apologized, asked me to hold still, and then I heard scissors and saw my hair fall to the floor. Another put foundation on my face and handed me a lipstick and a mirror. Maizie’s makeup. Maizie’s haircut. On my way outside, I grabbed an apron from a peg.

Agents flanked me and we hurried down the path toward the house, the butter-yellow traditional American with white trim. The porch was lit up with the tiny icicle lights. We passed other people, one wearing a headset, others on cell phones, the agents on either side of me protective, as if I were the most important person in the world, which in their world, at this moment, I was. We walked faster and faster, toward the security gate, and it began to sink in, what I was doing. I pushed the thought aside. A man ahead of us opened the electronic gate.

The film was still shooting on Moon Canyon, a generator powering big lights that illuminated the street. Equipment trucks, trailers, and cars were everywhere, street, pavement, and grass, blocking one another. The crew milled around, a small army of cell phones and headsets. I had an impression of sailors on a ship, battening down hatches in preparation for a storm at sea. “Crossing Valley Vista,” an agent said into a radio. “Kermit in place.”

Simon stood by a tree, near the koi pond. He wore a headset too, head bowed in concentration, listening. He looked up and stared at me, his face hard. As when we’d first met.

“No,” he said to his headset. “If there’s a password and you can’t come up with it, we pull her out.” He signaled to an agent near me. “Kill half the lights.”

I heard glass break. The yard went darker.

Footlights lined the driveway. I glanced at my sneakers, nearly the only things left on me that were mine. Maizie would spot the shoes immediately. Fredreeq too. But slouching in sneakers, I was close to Maizie’s height, a detail more important than fashion consistency.

A black car turned the corner from Moon Rock Road.

I could see it, being near the gate. Across the street, the film crew could see it. Because of the fence around the Quinn property, none of the agents near the house could see it.

“Damn,” I heard Simon’s voice say. “Not enough.”

Activity across the street had quieted but not stopped. A burly guy in a tool belt ambled past the generator, carrying a cable. Another balanced coffee cups in a cardboard take-out tray.

The black car pulled up closer and a window began to descend. The windows on the cars were tinted.

I was alone. The agents seemed to have melted into the darkness around me.

The car came closer. So quiet.

“Wollie, don’t turn around.” A woman was squeezed into a crevice made by the gate joining the fence. Very close to me. “I’m Agent Shepphird. I’ll talk you through this. Approach the car. Say hello and shake hands. Say something friendly; Maizie Quinn’s met this guy. His name is Fritz Benito. Tell him to pull ahead and park anywhere he likes. Then come back.”

I stepped forward. I slouched. The car made the turn into the drive, the driver’s window all the way down. A man in a suit, very dark, round-faced, rough-skinned, looked at me. He didn’t look happy.

I told my face to smile and held out my hand. There was a man in the passenger seat and maybe more in the back. “Hello,” I said. “Pull ahead and park anywhere you like.”

It wasn’t relaxed. I sounded like a computer. The man was staring. I swallowed. “Nice to see you again, Frito.” The minute I said the name, I froze. I’d got it wrong. Bad call.

But he smiled, a brief showing of teeth. The window went up. The car went forward.

I stepped back, into the shadows, breathing hard.

Agent Shepphird’s voice was in my ear. “Wollie. Good job. We’re in. The next one’s our guy. He’s got his first lieutenant with him. Yosip Kasnoff. You’ve met Yosip, but only once. But you’ve talked to Karl Marx—sorry, Tcheiko—three or four times on the phone. He likes you. Hold on, Wollie, I’m getting instructions on my headset. Okay. You’re cooking tonight. They found the transcripts of your last conversation. You promised him fusion cooking: applying California spa techniques to French recipes using African ingredients. And that’s the password. What you’re cooking for him.”

“Okay. What is it?”

There was a pause. Agent Shepphird said, “We don’t know.”

My heart stopped.

“Make up something,” she said. “He’s not going to be eating it.”

“I don’t cook.”

“Hold on. Dinner suggestions, anyone? Kermit doesn’t cook.” She paused, perhaps listening to her headset. “Meanwhile, Wollie, here’s the goal: get Tcheiko inside the compound and out of his car. We have SWAT guys on the roof, MP5s pointing at both front windows in the limo. They just need to see what they’re shooting at. But if it goes wrong, you panic, you see a gun, hear one, hit the ground. Agents will be on top of you like a football. We’ll take care of you. Hit the ground, Kermit—Wollie. You’ll be fine. Here he comes. Wing it.”

Wing it?

My mother has always talked about out-of-body experiences. I’d never known what she meant. What an interesting time to understand something about my mother. Tcheiko’s car pulled up just as the first had done. I stepped out of the shadows and approached. The driver’s window went down, the tinted window, and I was looking into the face of a man, extraordinarily handsome, much more than Simon, more even than Doc, with a black-and-silver beard and a nearly shaved head and salacious brown eyes. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here. I hope you’re hungry.”

He regarded me calmly, not smiling but not with the fierce look of the man in the first car. I thought of the guns aimed at us. In the dark. I could feel the sweat form under my skin. Now what? Whose turn to speak? What were my instructions? Why didn’t he speak?