A Playdate With Death (18 page)

I agreed with this assessment. I certainly didn’t know Bobby as well as she did, but in all our time together, he’d never been anything but upbeat. Even when Betsy had gotten into trouble, Bobby had retained his positive outlook. He’d been convinced that it was just a matter of working harder to help her with her recovery.

“Bobby didn’t kill himself,” Betsy said firmly.

“I hate to say this, but maybe it was a drug deal gone bad,” Roy said.

“Roy! Bobby would never have done that!” Betsy sounded outraged.

“You can’t know that, Betsy. Every one of us is just one step away from using. Maybe Bobby took that step. Maybe he arranged to meet some guy out by the beach and got robbed instead.”

The thought had occurred to me right after Bobby’s death, but I had dismissed it. Bobby had been the poster child for the recovery movement. It just didn’t seem possible for him to have fallen off the wagon. Moreover, Bobby was acutely conscious of the health consequences of using. Methamphetamine had become toxic to his body. It didn’t make sense that a man devoted to maximizing his physical performance would risk so much. Perhaps, however, I’d been too hasty in casting this drug-deal scenario aside.

“I know it doesn’t seem possible, but maybe Roy has a point,” I said. “Think back to Bobby’s behavior leading up
to the day he died. Was he acting strangely in any way? Did he disappear for periods of time?”

“Juliet, I think I would know if he were using. I mean, for God’s sake, the warning signs are, like, tattooed on my forehead. He wasn’t.”

“But wasn’t he being unusually secretive? He kept the adoption thing from you. Isn’t it at least possible that he kept his drug use from you as well?”

I knew I was cross-examining her. Peter is forever complaining about this habit of mine. Once you learn courtroom techniques, however, it’s difficult to abandon them for the niceties of acceptable conversation. For one thing, they are remarkably effective. There’s nothing like an insistent barrage of questions for eliciting a response.

Betsy bit her lip. “He did lie to me for months about the adoption. But I would know if he used. Wouldn’t I?” she said, plaintively.

I just shrugged my shoulders.

We sat quietly for a little while, and I debated whether or not I should ask Betsy about Candace. That woman was in love with Bobby. Maybe she’d killed him out of frustrated desire. When I brought up her name to Betsy, she shook her head. “No, he didn’t say anything. I mean, how could he? He never told me he was adopted, so how could he tell me about meeting some woman on an Internet adoption web site?”

I fumbled around for more to ask Betsy but finally gave up. It gave me pause that Betsy had argued against the possibility of Bobby having killed himself. If she had done it,
wouldn’t she be more inclined to support the suicide hypothesis? I hadn’t learned much in my visit, but neither had my concerns been assuaged. For the time being, I wasn’t going to dismiss the possibility that Betsy had had something to do with Bobby’s death.

I
swore under my breath as I stood looking at the smashed window of Peter’s car. Peter’s lovingly tended, vintage 2002. The one I’d insisted on driving. The one I’d parked in front of Betsy’s apartment, in a part of Hollywood that verged on the seedy.

The front passenger window was shattered, bits of glass littering the ground and the bucket seat. I glanced in the window and was relieved to see that the radio was still there. For once I’d actually remembered to take my purse with me, so that was safe as well. The fact that it seemed to be an act of vandalism rather than theft gave me little comfort, and I stomped around the car to the driver’s side. My breath caught in my throat and my stomach lurched when I saw the words scratched into the side of the car. Someone had
written “MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS,” in jagged capital letters.

The words extended along both driver’s-side doors and were carved with such force that the orange paint had peeled up around the scratches. I looked quickly up and down the street. At the end of the block, I saw two boys playing around with a broken scooter. They were trying to get up some speed while balancing on the scooter’s remaining wheel.

“Hey!” I called out to them.

They looked up at me and then continued with their game.

“Hey!” I said again and walked quickly up the block. They appeared to be brothers; one was about seven years old, and the other looked no more than five. They had dark skin and close-shaved heads, and the older boy wore a gold cross dangling from a hoop in one ear.

“Did you see anyone near that orange car back there?” I asked.

The older boy shrugged his shoulders, and the younger boy giggled.

“Did you?” I asked again.

“Maybe,” the older boy said. “How much you pay me to tell you?”

I crouched down next to him and said, in my best mommy voice, “Listen young man, if you don’t tell me who scratched up my car, I’m going to find your mother. I bet she’ll make you talk.”

He clicked his tongue and said, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout your car.”

“Fredo, that rich dude was hangin’ out by the orange car, remember?” the younger brother said.

“You shut up,” the older boy whacked his brother on the top of his head.

“Hey!” I grabbed the older boy’s arm. “No hitting.”

“Yeah, Fredo! No hitting,” the little boy said, his lip trembling.

“Fredo, tell me what happened to my car,” I said.

The boy rolled his eyes. “Fine. Whatever. This phat car pulled up next to yours, and this dude got out. That’s all we know. Honest. I don’t know what he did or nothing. He was just, like, walking around your car.”

“Did you see him break the window?”

The little boys shook their heads.

“Do you know what kind of car he was driving?”

“No. It was phat.”

“Fat?”

The little boys rolled their eyes at my ignorance. “You know, cool. Awesome. Like a racing car,” Fredo said.

“What color was the racing car?”

“Metal,” said the younger boy.

P
ETER
’
S
face turned a mottled red when I told him what had happened. He rushed out to his beloved car and knelt down next to the driver’s-side door. He ran his fingers along the scratches, swearing quietly under his breath.

“I’m so sorry, honey. Really,” I said.

“Who did this?” he asked, rising to his feet.

I told him what the two boys had told me. “I’m figuring that by racing car they meant sports car. That’s what Isaac calls them, doesn’t he?” Among our son’s many obsessions was one with the automobile. While Hondas were his inexplicable favorite—he called them Wandas and lovingly stroked each one we passed (it made for slow going on walks)—he was also enamored of anything he could call a racing car. For some mysterious reason, this included both sports cars and taxicabs.

Peter swore again.

“I’m sorry, Peter. Really I am.”

“It’s not the car that I’m upset about. I mean, yeah, I’m upset about the car. I can’t even imagine what it’s going to cost to fix this. The scratches go all the way through to the metal. But that’s not what I’m worried about.”

“I know,” I said.

We went back in the house. I called the police department, and while I waited on hold to file a report, the two of us ran through the various people involved in the case, trying to come up with a possible suspect. The problem was that the only person whom I could even remotely imagine doing something like that was the only one I could be sure hadn’t been involved. Betsy had been in the room with me the whole time I’d been parked in front of her house. That left the members of Bobby’s birth and adoptive families, none of whom seemed a particularly likely candidate for such a brutally juvenile warning. And then there was Candace.

Finally, after I’d waited close to a quarter of an hour on hold, a police officer picked up the line. I told her what had
happened and where I’d been parked. Then, I said, “I think this might have something to do with the death of a friend of mine.”

The officer, who had seemed up until then utterly bored with the details of yet another act of destruction of property, perked up. “Excuse me?” she asked.

“My friend, Bobby Katz, was found dead in his car a couple of weeks ago. It appeared to be a suicide, and I understand that the Santa Monica Police Department has closed the case. However, I think that someone might have been trying to warn me off any further investigation.”

“Are you a private investigator, ma’am?” The cop’s voice was frosty.

“No. No, I’m not. I’m a friend of the deceased. I was simply trying to help his fiancée determine what happened to him. Perhaps you can refer this to the detectives assigned to the case.”

“Ma’am, there won’t be any detectives assigned to a suicide if the case is closed. However, I’m more than happy to pass this information along to someone in the Santa Monica PD.”

I was getting the brush-off. “Officer, listen. If Bobby was murdered, then it’s very possible that I just got a warning from his killer. I’m concerned. With reason, I think.”

“You said your friend committed suicide.”

“No, I said that the case had been
ruled
a suicide. There’s a difference.” I knew I was coming off high-handed, but I was scared, and she was making me angry.

“As I said, ma’am, I’ll pass this along. This is your police
report number for insurance purposes.” She mumbled a string of numbers and then she hung up the phone.

“Well?” Peter asked. He was sitting at the table, holding Isaac on his lap. Isaac was sucking on a tube of yogurt and had a trail of fluorescent pink down the front of his shirt. I swabbed at the stain with a paper towel.

“Well?” my husband repeated.

“I don’t think they’re going to do anything.”

“Juliet, I’m worried about this.”

“I know. I am, too.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Wait to hear from the police, I guess.”

“I won’t hold my breath.” He kissed the top of Isaac’s head. For a split second, I wished I’d taken Al up on his offer. I imagined confronting this fear with a loaded revolver. I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d feel safer.

“I’m going to call Bobby’s parents,” I said.

“Which ones?”

“The Katzes. Maybe they’ll let me take another look at Bobby’s things. If the cops aren’t going to do anything, I’m going to have to track down whoever is responsible myself.”

Peter compressed his lips in a thin line but didn’t say anything. He picked up Isaac and carried him out to the playroom, where Ruby was busy building a dollhouse out of blocks. I couldn’t tell whether he was angry with me for continuing my investigation or whether he understood that it was my only option. I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t try to find out.

I dug Bobby’s parents’ phone number out of my purse
and picked up the phone. His father answered. Before I could make my request, he said, “Ms. Applebaum, we all appreciate that you are trying to help. However, I must insist that you refrain from continuing in these efforts. It’s a violation of Bobby’s privacy. And of ours.”

I had been expecting something like this. “I understand that you might feel that way, Dr. Katz. But Betsy isn’t convinced that Bobby committed suicide. It’s possible that I’ll be able to uncover enough information to convince the police to reopen the case.”

“Betsy is a deluded and manipulative drug addict, who seems to have sucked you into her fantasy or beguiled you into going along with her plans, whatever those may be. What she thinks about Bobby is utterly irrelevant. The police, the coroner, the medical examiner, all agree that Bobby killed himself. Your pursuit of intimate details of his life is not only unhelpful but destructive.” The doctor’s voice was cold and harsh, but I wasn’t giving up. Someone had struck out at me, had threatened me. It was personal now. I was too angry and too scared to back off.

“I’m terribly sorry to have offended you, Dr. Katz. But I have reason to believe not only that Bobby was murdered, but that the murderer is trying to scare me off the investigation.” I told him about the warning on my car.

He snorted derisively. “I haven’t any idea who did that to your car, Ms. Applebaum. Moreover, it’s ludicrous for you to imagine that it had anything to do with Bobby’s death. You parked in a lousy neighborhood. Be more careful next time.” And with that, he hung up on me.

My tenacity in the face of opposition is either my best or worst quality, depending on whom you ask. When I was a child, it was a source of intense frustration to my poor parents, who took a remarkably long time figuring out that the best way to get me to do something was to tell me not to. Peter has proved to be a better manipulator and generally avoids being on the wrong side of my intransigence. In fact, because he’s not a particularly obstinate person himself, he has always relished having, as he says, a pit bull in his corner. I myself grew somewhat less comfortable with this particular side of my personality when I began seeing it reflected back at me in Ruby’s face. My daughter makes me look positively irresolute; she doesn’t have a pliable bone in her body. She came out of me with her little fists balled and raised and has been bashing her way through the world ever since.