A Playdate With Death (16 page)

I willed myself to avoid the plate of doughnuts and home-made cookies sitting invitingly next to the coffee machine
and finally compromised by taking just half of a honey-glazed. I was licking my fingers after finishing the second half (it seemed rude to leave a half-eaten doughnut just sitting there on the plate) and leafing through a brochure urging me to practice my shotgun skills with some AA Flyer Clay Targets when Al finally showed up.

“Why are we meeting here?” I asked.

He dumped the black nylon duffel bag he was carrying over his shoulder onto one of the vinyl chairs.

“I needed to get some target practice in. What do you have for me?”

I spent about fifteen minutes describing the various facts about a murderer’s history that the California courts consider relevant in determining whether he should be executed for his crimes. I’d printed out a good law review article on the subject. Al was grateful both for the article and for the information.

“You see,” he said, “this is why you should go into business with me. You figure out the legal stuff, and I do the legwork. We’d be a good team.”

“
You
do the legwork? Please. When I was at the federal defender’s office, I didn’t just sit behind a desk. You and I went out in the field together. Or have you gotten too senile to remember our days interviewing methamphetamine addicts and robbery witnesses?”

“Prove it,” he said with a smile.

“Prove what?”

“Prove that you’re capable of doing something other than prancing around a courtroom. Come shoot with me.”

I gave a disgusted snort. “How would that prove
anything
? I don’t have to shoot a gun to show that I can investigate a crime. I didn’t carry a gun when I tracked down my baby-sitter after she’d disappeared. I didn’t carry a gun when I confronted Abigail Hathaway’s murderer.”

“Yeah, well, maybe if you had been the one carrying a weapon, you wouldn’t have been the one bleeding on the floor.”

I was about to launch into a speech about how people who own guns are more likely to be shot with their own weapons than they are to shoot anyone else but bit back the words. Al and I had had this fight too many times before.

“Speaking of investigations, have you found out anything new about your trainer?” Al asked. Clearly he also wanted to preempt our all-too-familiar debate.

I gave him a quick synopsis of the confusing search for Bobby’s birth parents.

“I’m beginning to wonder if any of this is even related to his death,” I said.

Al shrugged his shoulders and said, “My operating assumption has always been that there are no coincidences. Here this guy shoots himself—”

“Or someone shoots him,” I interrupted. “Don’t forget the Palm Pilot.”

“You’re really stuck on that, aren’t you?”

“I just don’t think someone would order a Palm Pilot on-line and then kill himself before it even has a chance to arrive. And, anyway, Bobby just wasn’t a depressed kind of guy.”

“Okay, either he shoots himself, or someone shoots him, and he just so happens to have recently found out that he’s adopted and is looking for his biological parents. It’s got to be linked.”

“Because there are no such things as coincidences.”

“Exactly.”

“It’s a good theory. It’s certainly the one I’ve been operating on. There’s just one problem with it.”

“What?”

“There
are
such things as coincidences. They happen all the time.”

He shrugged again.

“Hey, you wouldn’t consider doing me the usual favor and calling one of your LAPD buddies to check on the status of the case, would you?” I asked.

“Sure, if you do one other thing for me.”

“Anything!”

“Come shoot with me.”

I rolled my eyes. “No.”

“Listen to me for a minute. I know you’re opposed to the idea of people carrying guns, but don’t you think your arguments might carry a little more weight if you actually knew what you were talking about? Try it. Take a couple of practice shots. You might find out that you like it.”

“I won’t like it.”

“How do you know, until you try?”

So I did.

And I did. Like it, that is.

D
ESPITE
the bright yellow sign informing us that the range was equipped to handle semiautomatic pistols, rifles, and even fully automatic machine guns, and that they would happily rent those weapons out to us if we didn’t bring our own, Al gave me a small handgun to shoot with. It was black, and heavy, and the handle warmed up quickly in my sweating palm.

He stood behind me in the little booth and watched as I held out the gun with a shaking arm, took aim at a pink silhouette on a sliding metal rack, and jerked the trigger back. Nothing happened.

“Safety’s on,” Al said.

“What?” I asked, lifting up my ear guards.

“Safety.” He took the gun from me and disengaged the
safety with a practiced thumb. “Squeeze the trigger. Don’t jerk.”

“What?” I had the ear guards back in place.

“Squeeze. Gently,” he said once I’d freed up an ear.

“Oh. Okay. Like a camera. Squeeze.” I aimed as best I could and squeezed. The gun went off with a muffled bang, and my arm jerked. I squinted at the target. To my utter astonishment, there was a mark on the lower left-hand side of the target. I’d hit it.

“Wow!” I said. “I must be a natural. Check that out.”

“Not bad. Try again.”

The next time, however, I was anticipating the recoil. I couldn’t help but flinch as I pulled the trigger. I looked up at the target. It had suffered no further damage.

I raised my eyebrows at Al and said, “Gee, you’re right. It is too bad I didn’t have a gun when I was investigating the Hathaway murder. I could have fired at her killer and missed. That would have been both smart and effective, don’t you think?”

My sarcasm was lost on Al. He motioned at me, and I lifted up the ear guards. “Why don’t you try keeping your eyes open,” he said.

That’s when I started having fun. The next time, I opened my eyes, lined up the target in my sights, and squeezed the trigger, reminding myself not to flinch in anticipation of the recoil. I blasted a hole at the bottom of the target, just where a man might find it most painful.

After that, I couldn’t be stopped. I fired single rounds, taking careful aim. That soon got boring, and I experimented
with emptying my gun into the target as quickly as I could. I turned down Al’s offer of his shotgun and instead tried out his M-9 semiautomatic pistol. The thing weighed at least two pounds, and it took me a while to figure out how to keep the nose up and my arm steady. Once I had that down, however, it was a little distressing how much fun I had firing off the fifteen rounds.

After a couple of hours, Al and I repaired to an early lunch of doughnuts and coffee.

“I told you I’d make a convert out of you,” he said.

I snorted the coffee out of my nose. Wiping at the brown stain on my white T-shirt, I shook my head. “Al, you really don’t get it, do you?”

“What?”

“I’m not surprised that I had fun. I mean, there’s a reason millions of adolescent boys spend all their free time and money in arcades playing Cop-killer or whatever those games are called. Target shooting is
fun.
I don’t have a problem with target shooting. If guns were only available at shooting ranges, I’d be perfectly happy. It’s the fact that any certified lunatic can buy an assault rifle and mow down a preschool class that bugs me. Or the fact that every single one of my gang-banger clients has an arsenal the size of a National Guard unit. By the way, their guns are legally purchased as often as not. It’s the
availability
of a deadly toy that I find so problematic, not that people have fun playing with them.”

He opened his mouth, but I didn’t give him time to interrupt. “And don’t you dare offer to give me one for my own protection. I have two kids, one of whom is a gun nut.
I’m not bringing a gun into my house,” I said.

I recognized the look that crossed over his face. His eyes held a very definite “Now’s the time to teach them gun safety” kind of gleam. But, to my relief, he snapped his mouth shut in a thin line and even, after a moment or two, managed a smile.

“Well, intelligent minds can disagree, I suppose,” he said.

“Yup.” I nodded.

T
RUE
to his word, Al used his cell phone to call a couple of his buddies at the LAPD. His old partner was at his desk and put him on hold while he made a call to the Santa Monica Police Department, where Bobby’s case was lodged. He was back within minutes. Al nodded and thanked the guy.

“Well?” I said.

“Closed. Cause of death deemed suicide.”

“Are they absolutely sure?”

Al shrugged. “Who knows. But they closed the case.”

I stared at him for a moment. “Yeah, well, I haven’t closed mine,” I said.

I
N
order to get out to meet Al unencumbered by children, I had dropped Ruby off at a friend’s for an all-day playdate and left Isaac sitting in our bed watching a
Zaboomafoo
marathon on PBS, a sports bottle of chocolate milk in one hand and a defrosted bagel in the other. Peter hadn’t even woken up when I’d rolled him over to make room for his son, and I’d given Isaac strict instructions that if he needed anything, he should kick his father until he gained consciousness. Despite the fact that I’d left the house almost three hours before, neither of the men in my life had budged.

Isaac’s eyes were glazed over from watching three hours of the Kratt brothers engaging in their particular brand of frenzied animal-watching—sort of like Mutual of Omaha’s
Wild Kingdom
but on speed and with better jokes.

“Hi Mama. I’m a lemur,” my son told me when I walked
in the room. He’d eaten his bagel and used his chocolate milk to paint his face with a couple of lemurish black stripes.

“So you are. Is Daddy still asleep?”

“Yeah.”

“Did he wake up at all?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t want to watch TV, so he put the pillow over his head.”

It was nice to know I wasn’t the only neglectful parent in the house. I scooped Isaac out of bed, set him gently on the floor, and whipped the covers off my insentient husband with a shriek that wouldn’t have embarrassed a banshee. He leapt about sixteen feet in the air.

“Good morning, darling,” I purred.

He growled at me and stomped off to the shower. I followed him into the bathroom and leaned against the cold tile wall.

“I’m going to need you to spend some more of that fabulous quality time with Isaac today,” I shouted over the sound of the water.

He grunted.

I
didn’t call Susan before driving over to her house. I figured there was a good chance I’d catch her at home on a Sunday afternoon, and I didn’t want to give her the chance to avoid me. The sense of righteous indignation that I’d felt after talking to Reuben Nadelman had abated somewhat, but I was still eager to confront her with what I knew. If I caught her unawares, she was less likely to be able to come up with
another in the series of half-truths and outright lies with which she had already tried to confuse me.

I pulled up the long driveway, wondering how once again mine were the only tire tracks in the combed gravel. Did the Sullivan family drive hovercraft? Salud obviously had Sundays off, because a handsome older man with pale, blondish gray hair and a weather-beaten face answered the door. He looked like a man who spent a lot of time outside, even if just on the golf course. He was wiry and thin, but his height gave him the impression of bulk.

“Yes? Can I help you?” he asked.

“Hello, I’m Juliet Applebaum. I’m a . . . a friend of Susan’s. Is she in?”

He sized me up for a minute, not having missed the stumble my voice made over the word
friend.
I got the feeling that very little got by this man.

“Please come in.” He led me through the now-familiar entranceway and back into a large, sunny kitchen. Half of the room was a fairly unremarkable kitchen with the usual cabinetry and appliances. The other half was graced with an impressive oversized stone fireplace, in front of which stood a large, round oak table. The table was set with pretty blue and white dishes and contained the remains of what had obviously been an elaborate brunch. There was a half-eaten platter of berries carefully arranged by color, and a wicker basket with a bright blue gingham ribbon and a few crumbly muffins and croissants nestled in a matching napkin. Susan sat flanked by two handsome, blond men in their mid-to late twenties. I recognized one as the young man who had
pushed Isaac on the swing. The other was clearly his older brother. The two looked remarkably alike, and they both resembled Bobby to an uncanny degree. He, too, had possessed those same handsome, innocuous features and surfer-boy, blond hair.