Dial H for Hitchcock (2 page)

I
t was three in the morning when I caught him staring at me with those narrow, flinty eyes.

Suppressing the urge to scream, I grabbed for the phone on my nightstand and dialed 911.

When the operator finally came on and asked if it was an emergency, I hemmed and hawed for a minute. “Suppose not,” I finally admitted, flopping back down onto the bed. “But I would like to get my hands on a dart gun and a net.”

She sighed, and asked if I was from around here. Like I was supposed to know that the steroidal rat on the fence outside my window was an opossum.

As it turns out, the opossum is nature’s own Dustbuster, ridding the world of rotten fruit, slugs, and cockroaches. Poor things are virtually helpless. They can’t run fast or bite hard. The only thing they can do when threatened is play dead by entering a temporary near-coma. They sometimes do this
when they are scavenging roadkill only to become roadkill themselves. The operator suggested I shoo him away with a broom.

After hanging up, I tiptoed back to the window and peered out at him.

He didn’t really look like the result of nuclear fallout.

He had nice pink paws.

He was cousins with the kangaroo.

And I had no idea where the broom was.

I shut the curtains and went back to sleep. I dreamed I was a stewardess on Quantas, serving shrimp on the barbie to the helpless passengers.

The cell phone woke me up at eleven.

I bolted upright.

My first call since the ill-fated un-honeymoon.

Buster, my teacup poodle, sensing something important was happening, was jumping up and down by my Lucite purse, which was sitting on the living room couch where I’d left it the night before. I dove for the purse, knocked it over, grabbed the ringing phone.

“Hello?” Calm, cool, and collected, that was me.

“Hi—just wanted to confirm our hike.”

What hike? I had no idea to whom I was speaking. Plus I’d thrown away the baggy gray sweatpants. I suppose I could wear shorts. But then I’d have to shave my legs.

“Beachwood Canyon,” he went on without taking a breath, “By the stables, around five.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t think you—”

“See you then. Bye.”

I studied the phone for a minute, then reached back into
my purse and pulled out another phone that looked exactly like the first one.

I rubbed my eyes and frowned.

The hot pink cell phone in my left hand belonged to me. I recognized the scratches.

The other one was brand-new. It must’ve made its way into my purse last night.

Strange.

Well, the theater had been packed. I’d bumped into dozens of people. My purse had a broken handle and pretty much hung open. The phone could’ve fallen in at any time. Could’ve belonged to anybody. But my money was on somebody from the third row up from the back.

The neurologist or her beige cardigan girlfriend?

The blonde in the robin’s-egg blue dress?

The bald boyfriend?

Bachelor Number One? He didn’t look like the hot pink cell phone type, but you never knew.

One way to find out.

Received calls.

My son-in-law, Vincent, had given me a lesson on received calls the day I’d bought the phone. The other lesson had been on the phonebook, but by that point my eyes had glazed over, the unfortunate result being I couldn’t program somebody’s phone number if my life depended on it. I stuck with received calls. My philosophy was if I didn’t know your number by heart, or you hadn’t been one of my previous ten callers, I probably didn’t need to talk to you. During the tutorial, Vincent had also shown me how to work the camera. We took pictures of my daughter Annie making vegan avocado
ice cream (no animal products included!). Then, sadly, we had to eat it.

Anyway, I’d simply check the list here, return the call, find out whose phone this was, and give the thing back. It would be my good deed for the day.

Unfortunately, the number was private.

I tossed a pillow against the arm of the couch, lay down, and scrolled down the rest of the list. Private, private, private—all of them were private. Too bad.

Dialed calls was my next option. Dialed calls I’d figured out all by myself. These were all to the same number. Ten calls in a row. That seemed a bit obsessive. But at least the number wasn’t private. I got the machine of somebody named Anita. I went to high school with an Anita. She had a tremendous overbite. I left a convoluted message.

Last chance. 411. Calling information was a rip-off at $1.49 plus airtime, but it was cheaper than the cost of a new phone.

Unfortunately, I had no luck at the Orpheum, either. Nobody had reported a missing phone.

Oh, well. I’d given it my best shot.

Mimi the cat jumped into my lap and started purring. She didn’t want to cuddle. She wanted brunch. She and Buster had spent all of last week with my septuagenarian neighbors, Lois and Marlene, who’d spoiled them with one-pound bricks of cheddar cheese and nightly performances from their late, unlamented burlesque act. The pets weren’t going to be happy to return to their special senior diet. And I’d used up the last of it before leaving on my trip.

I scratched Mimi’s tummy. “Okay, I can take a hint.” When
did I start talking to animals? It was a bad sign. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

I swiped a washcloth across my face, shoved my hair into a bandana, pulled on jeans, grabbed my keys, and headed out the door.

Unfortunately, there was a car blocking my driveway.

A Porsche 911 Turbo with a license plate reading
BYEBYE
.

Well, I supposed I’d put it off long enough.

Time to meet the new neighbor.

T
he new neighbor’s house was hidden behind a tightly clipped eight-foot hedge. Maybe it was the New Jersey in me, but I liked a well-tended front lawn passersby could see. Not that I did much mowing myself. Everybody in L.A. has a gardener. Mine is named Javier. Javier is an excellent source of information. Last week he told me that the trick to coiling a hose is to first spin it like a jump rope to work out the curls. Also, that the world’s largest tree is a ficus in India, which covers five hundred and fifty acres.

There was a yellowed touch pad bolted to one of the concrete pillars on either side of the new neighbor’s weathered wooden gate. I pushed the button, smoothed down my hair, and waited. When nobody answered, I pushed it one more time, then peered through the two-inch gap between pillar and gate.

The front and back doors were lined up on the same axis and both made of glass. I could see straight through to the backyard,
which was quite glamorous, with lacy wisteria and lush bougainvillea. Also, I could hear a fountain. And somebody hammering. While he was at it, he should probably fix that gap. An intruder could easily slip a hand in there and unlock the gate. Well, if he were of delicate proportions. Or a she.

I locked eyes with a sunburned woman standing in the doorway.

“Hello?” She took off her glasses. “Can I help you? Please don’t be selling something. If you are, I don’t want it.”

“I’m not selling anything,” I said.

“Fine. Hold on.”

I stepped back as she approached, her heels crunching on the gravel.

The gate swung open at about forty miles per hour and whacked her on the shoulder.

“Ouch!” she cried, dropping her clipboard. I bent down to get it at the same time she did, and we bumped heads. She scrutinized me, like she was a facialist and I was a client with big pores. It was unnerving.

“Hi. I’m Cece, your neighbor. Right next door?”

“Stupid hinge is loose again. Jilly Rosendahl.” She was in her thirties, short, blond, overweight, aggrieved. She smelled like she’d been eating corn chips. “Do you have a problem with stray cats in your backyard?”

“No,” I replied. “I have an opossum.”

She made a face. “These two mangy cats have been hanging out on my superexpensive pool furniture and shedding all over it. I
hate
cats. I’m not feeding them, but they seem to think they live here.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Unless you’re allergic.”

She thought about that for a minute. “I am. Deathly allergic.”

Just then a young man covered in tattoos appeared at her side. He shoved a piece of paper under her nose. “Sign, and then I can fax it over.”

“My nephew,” she explained, taking the pen out of his hand. “Note for the teacher. He’s always in trouble. Anyway, what can I do for you, Cece?”

“First, I wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood—”

“Yeah, and?” she interrupted.

Nice. “And to see if you could move your car.” I pointed to my driveway. “I need to get to the store.”

“Let me see if it’s convenient. I think my guys are in the middle of something….” Her voice trailed off as she walked toward the foyer, a flick of her wrist indicating that I was to follow. Why she needed her guys to move her car for her was not explained, nor was who her guys were, nor why exactly she had guys. Good thing I’m not the curious type.

The foyer was dominated by a gargantuan oak table that looked like it should have knights gathered around it, feasting on platters of roasted animal parts and tankards of ale.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Jilly asked. “It used to belong to Cher.”

She could barely squeeze around it. She had to get up on tiptoes. As she passed, she stuck her nose into a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses arranged in a crystal vase and inhaled. Then she disappeared down the hall.

Pretty flowers.

Oh, look.

There was a note clipped to one of those little plastic pitchforks.

I will not read the note,
I told myself.
I will not read the note.

I was about to read the note when the hammering started again, putting me back on the path of righteousness. It was followed by a sudden burst of laughter, then somebody cranking up the music. Hip-hop.

Jilly materialized with a muscular guy who looked straight out of central casting. He was blond and wearing a tool belt. “Take ’em, Connor,” she said, tossing him a set of keys. To me, she explained, “Connor’s moving his truck and Decker’s van around the corner, then he’s going to pull my car in. The Porsche, I mean. That one’s mine.”

“
BYEBYE
,” I said. “Right?”

She studied my pores again.

I fidgeted.

“I saw you looking,” she smirked. “It’s okay.”

“What’s okay?”

“They’re yours.”

“What’s mine?”

She looked over at the flowers. “They got delivered here yesterday by accident. You should take them with you when you go, hint, hint.” She drummed her long nails on her clipboard. “Sorry if that sounds rude, but we’re working here. Paying the rent, you know what I’m saying?”

I was about to reach for the flowers when Jilly shoved the clipboard under her arm, scooted the vase over, grabbed a pile of water-stained letters wedged underneath, and handed them to me.

“I’m talking about the letters,
of course.
A person can’t trust the post office.” She shook her head. “I tell that to my guys at least once a day. FedEx is the only way to go. What the—? Is this
chewing gum?
You gotta be kidding me!”

Like a woman possessed, Jilly went after a grayish lump on Cher’s former oak table. “You know the way out, right, Cece? Decker, Ellroy, get in here
now!”

I took my letters—a bill from the gas company and assorted junk—and got out while the getting was good.

Connor, sitting pretty in Decker’s van, gave me a wave as I headed up to Santa Monica Boulevard. New friends always raised a person’s spirits.

So did Petco, which was decorated for the season with a grim reaper-themed birdbath at the entrance filled with complimentary goblin-shaped pet treats, and orange-and-black streamers hanging from the ceiling. I browsed through the costumes, wondering if Buster would consent to dressing up as Minnie Mouse. They were all out of Mickey.

Within minutes, my cart was overflowing with things I didn’t need. That happened to me a lot. Once, I’d made it as far as the checkout counter with a $249 cooled and heated pet bed to keep my dog active and healthy in all seasons. Since I’d last visited, Petco had added to their inventory. There was now an athletic gear section with doggie jogging shorts, doggie hoodies, and tiny doggie water bottles. The food section had expanded, too. My eye went straight to a pile of plastic-wrapped sausages, the stuff of Buster’s dreams.

“Just slice and serve,” said the clerk. “They’re made by Dick Van Patten. One-hundred-percent holistic. He makes them for tigers, cheetahs, and polar bears, too.” I tossed a couple in my cart, mostly because I used to have a crush on Willie Aames, who played Dick Van Patten’s middle son, Tommy Bradford, on
Eight Is Enough.

I shuddered as I passed the parakeet cage. It happens to
people who’ve seen
The Birds
too many times. Poor Tippi Hedren. Legend has it she’d rejected Hitch’s advances and he’d punished her by having real birds attack her instead of mechanical ones. The hairdresser smeared her with anchovies and ground meat to attract them, and at one point the birds were even tied to her clothes with long nylon threads, the better to get them biting and flapping in her face. These parakeets looked pretty harmless, though, with their bright blue and green feathers. A little boy tapped on the cage, trying to get them to pay attention, but they were too busy nibbling on each other’s beaks.

“Are they kissing?” he asked the clerk, who was walking by with an armful of chew toys.

“Passing seeds,” the clerk replied, “which is the ornithological way of showing love. Birds are monogamous. Until death us do part, and all that cool stuff? They’re also extremely altruistic. It goes against Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but science can’t explain everything.”

“What goes around comes around,” the boy said.

The clerk nodded sagely. “You can’t hide from karma. It’ll get you in the end.” He dumped the toys into a cardboard box, took my cart, and wheeled it over to an empty register. “I’ll open up and take you over here, hon.”

After I got home, I fed the pets, then checked my home phone and the matching pink cell phones.

No messages for anybody.

I wasn’t expecting to hear from Bridget, my second best friend. Her vintage clothing store was going through an IRS audit. She was probably busy staying out of the big house.

But I was surprised not to have heard from my best friend,
Lael. A master baker, she’d been designing a Taj Mahal—themed wedding cake when I’d left. I was dying to know how the sugar-paste elephants had come out.

And what were my daughter and son-in-law up to? Probably playing with little Alexander and baby Radha. Having fun. Bonding. Eating barley and seitan casseroles.

They were disappointed in me, all of them. They didn’t understand how I could hurt Gambino. That was my ex-fiancé’s last name. His first name was Peter, but I called him Gambino. They said that was the whole problem.

That I was afraid of intimacy.

That I’d broken his heart.

I said I wanted to save him from more of the same.

They said that wasn’t my call to make.

Was karma going to get me in the end?

Maybe I could still turn it around.

“Buster!” I called out, dumping an entire Dick Van Patten sausage into his already empty bowl. “Dessert!”

He was going to need the energy. After his nap, we were going for a hike.