The Big Nap (22 page)

I got up and gave Al a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for the information, Al. I really appreciate it.”

He blushed. “No problem, girlie. I’ll talk to you.” He hoisted himself out of the couch and left.

T
RUE
to her promise, Barbara Rosen had saved us seats at the performance of
The Boys From Syracuse.
Ruby and Jake sat next to each other, holding hands and giggling. I settled Isaac in my lap and tried to nurse him to sleep, much to Barbara’s horror. Apparently, baring the breast, even under cover of a shirt and a draped baby blanket, is just not done at the better Los Angeles private schools. What could I do? It was either get the kid to sleep, or listen to him cry through the entire performance.

While the baby nursed, and Barbara tried very hard to look as if she was not utterly humiliated to be seen with us, I checked out the mobbed auditorium. The attendees were mostly mommies, although there were a number of daddies who’d managed to escape from the office. Virtually all the daddies were watching the play through the eyepiece of
their video cameras. Every second person was holding a bouquet of flowers, as if this were opening night at the opera rather than a junior high school production. The smell of roses was thick and heady.

The lights dimmed and the orchestra struck up an almost recognizable version of the play’s overture. I looked down at Isaac, who had thankfully dropped off to sleep, and settled back in my chair, determined to try to enjoy the show.

It actually wasn’t awful. The sets and costumes were almost professional, and there were some hysterical moments when the young boy playing the duke took off his hat with a flourish, inadvertently releasing into the air huge clouds of the baby powder that had been used to whiten his hair. I even found myself humming along to the songs. It was in Act I, as I was tapping my feet to “This Can’t Be Love,” that I began to get the beginnings of an idea. As I watched the preadolescent Dromios get hit over the head and an Adriana in braces drag home the wrong Antipholus, it became clearer in my mind. By the time Dromios shrieked, with a rather endearing lisp, “Shakespeare!” I knew who had murdered Fraydle.

I sat through a full twenty minutes of standing ovations before I could finally bear it no longer. I whispered a hurried goodbye to Barbara and Jake and, carrying Isaac and dragging an unwilling Ruby, ran out to the car.

“But I don’t want to leave!” Ruby wailed, as I buckled her into her car seat.

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “But the play is over and Mama has an errand to run.”

I drove much too quickly down Santa Monica Boulevard, dialing Peter’s cell phone as I whipped through yellow lights. I reached his voice mail. Cursing, I tried his assistant. Voice mail again. I wasn’t going to be able to unload
Ruby and Isaac. I turned onto Melrose Avenue and drove to Nomi’s restaurant. I parked in the last spot in the lot, yanked the kids out of the car, and hustled them into the almost-empty restaurant. Anat sat at a table, reading a Hebrew newspaper.

“Hi! What’s going on?” she asked.

“Anat, I have a question for you. You told me that the last time you saw Fraydle she looked weird. What did you mean by that?”

She shrugged and wrinkled her brow. “I can’t explain it. She just looked different.”

I leaned forward and looked at her intently. “Could you have seen someone else, someone who looked like Fraydle, but wasn’t Fraydle?”

Anat looked at me, puzzled. “I don’t think so. It was her. Same hair, same clothes. She just looked—I dunno, different.”

“Like less pretty?”

“Exactly!”

“Could it have been someone who looked like Fraydle, but wasn’t as pretty?”

Anat looked skeptical. “I guess so,” she said, not sounding particularly confident.

I thanked her, gathered up the kids and ran out the door of the restaurant to the car. I buckled them into their car seats for the millionth time that day, and headed back up Santa Monica Boulevard. As I drove, I thought once more about Anat. The fact that Fraydle’s body had been found in her own parents’ home seemed to rule Anat out as a suspect. I couldn’t imagine the Hasidic girl inviting Anat into her house. And besides, I knew who killed Fraydle. I just needed someone to tell me why.

I pulled into the Gap parking lot and jumped out of the
car. I stuck Isaac in his stroller and convinced Ruby to postpone her tantrum with the promise of an ice cream reward. I didn’t even bother to pretend to be visiting the store, but just walked right up the block into the courtyard of Yossi’s apartment building and knocked on the door. After a few moments it opened a crack. Yossi grimaced when he saw me and tried to close the door in my face.

“Yossi!” I said. “You have to talk to me. Please. I know what happened with Fraydle.”

Now, I didn’t
know
anything. I merely suspected. However, I was sure that the only way to get Yossi to tell me the truth was to pretend that I already knew it.

He opened the door slowly. His face was unshaven and he looked pale and ill. I pointed to Isaac, who was sitting in his stroller chewing on his fist, and to Ruby, who was throwing sticks and pebbles into the fountain.

“I have my children with me,” I said. “Let’s sit out here so I can watch them.”

He looked at me for a moment, and then walked out of his apartment and sank into one of the two lawn chairs in front of his door. I perched on the other one and made sure that Ruby was far enough away that she couldn’t hear our conversation.

I sat silently for a minute, and then I said softly, “You were sleeping with Fraydle’s sister, Sarah.”

He didn’t deny it. He didn’t even look surprised. He simply said, in a hoarse whisper, “Has she told the police?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

He looked up at me. “I didn’t kill Fraydle. I loved her. I still love her.”

I nodded. “Tell me what happened, Yossi.”

“It was after Fraydle told me about Ari Hirsch. She came one day and we were together, like always. Then, afterwards,
she kissed me and said goodbye. She said she had to marry Ari, that her father insisted and that it was important to the whole family. She said her father needed the alliance with the Hirsch family. She told me she loved me but that she had to take care of her family.”

His eyes filled with tears.

“Go on,” I murmured.

“I begged her not to leave me. I promised her that I would take care of her family. I even promised to
chozer b’tshuvah
, to become Hasidic. She wouldn’t listen. She just said that it had already been decided. She had accepted him. And then she left. She just got up and left.

“For days I tried to talk to her. I looked for her at the store. I walked up and down the streets looking for her. I couldn’t find her anywhere. It was like she had disappeared. Finally, one day, I saw her sister, Sarah, walking home from school. I stopped her and begged her to take a message to Fraydle. She said she knew all about Fraydle and me. She said she knew we’d been together, that she’d followed Fraydle to my house. She promised to help me, to talk to Fraydle for me. She told me to wait at my house and that she would come to me after she’d talked to Fraydle.

“Sarah came that evening, right before dark. She sat down on my couch and told me that Fraydle didn’t love me. She said that Fraydle wanted to move to New York, that she wanted to be with Ari Hirsch. Sarah said that Fraydle told her she was tired of me and was glad of the excuse not to be with me anymore.

“I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there, in shock. And then Sarah came over to me, and kissed me. She kissed me, and she took off her clothes and . . . and . . .”

“And you slept with her,” I said.

He nodded. “She looks so much like Fraydle,” he whispered.
“I closed my eyes and it was like being with Fraydle.” He paused. “Look, I know it was terrible. I know it was unforgivable, but you have to understand, Fraydle had left me and I needed her so much.”

I couldn’t give him the absolution he craved. “Did you see Sarah again?”

“No, I mean, I saw her but we didn’t—we weren’t together again.”

“What happened?”

“After she left, I just went to sleep. I woke up the next day to someone banging on my door. It was Fraydle. She came into the room and she was smiling. She looked so happy! But then she saw Sarah’s sweater. Sarah had left her sweater on the chair. Fraydle stopped talking and picked up the sweater. She looked confused and asked me what it was doing there. I lied to her. I told her that it was hers, that she’d left it there, but she shook her head. And then she looked at the bed.”

“The bed?” I asked.

“I woke up to answer the door. The bed wasn’t made. She saw . . . the blood.”

“Sarah was a virgin.”

He nodded.

“What did Fraydle do?”

“She picked up the sweater and she walked out the door. She slammed it so hard, plaster fell from the ceiling.”

“Did you follow her?” I asked.

“No.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know what to say to her. I was so ashamed.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing for a while. I just sat there. Then, I went to the travel agent and I bought the plane tickets. I wanted to prove to Fraydle that I loved only her and wanted only her.
I was sure I could convince her that I’d only been with her sister because I missed
her
, because I wanted to be with
her.
I was sure if I bought the tickets, she would understand how much I loved her and she would come with me. Come to Israel and marry me.”

“Did you see Sarah again?”

“She came the next day. I went to find Fraydle in the morning. That was when you saw me outside your house. Fraydle was angry, furious at me. She said she wouldn’t go with me and to leave her alone. I came back here. I just lay on the bed, trying to figure out what to do. And then Sarah showed up. She knocked on the door, and I told her to go away. She pushed her way inside. She came up to me and tried to kiss me, but I pushed her away. I just snapped. All the pressure building inside me just exploded.” He looked ashamed. “I said terrible things. I told her to go away, that she disgusted me. I told her that she was a whore.”

“What did she do? What did she say?”

“Nothing. She just started to cry, and ran away. That’s the last time I saw her.”

“Did you ever see Fraydle again?”

“No. But I think she must have wanted to come with me. I think she was going to come, and that’s why she was killed.” His voice rose sharply. Ruby turned around at the sound.

“It’s okay, honey,” I reassured her. “Mommy is just having a talk. Everything is fine.”

She turned back to her game and I looked at Yossi. “Yossi, what do you think happened to Fraydle? Who do you think killed her?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he just buried his head in his hands.

“I want you to come with me to Fraydle’s house,” I said.

He shook his head, not bothering to lift it up.

“I want you to come with me to confront Sarah and her family. I know that your relationship with Sarah is why Fraydle died.”

Yossi raised his head and then, to my surprise, agreed to come with me. I didn’t trust him enough to put him in my car and, besides, I really didn’t want my kids along for this ride anymore. Dragging them on an investigation was one thing. Putting them in danger was something else entirely. I told Yossi that I’d meet him at the Finkelsteins’ home in an hour and bundled the kids back down the block and into the car, which, thankfully, had not yet been towed. I drove as fast as I could down Melrose Avenue, dialing Peter’s number. Of course he wasn’t answering. His assistant, however, picked up her phone. She told me that Peter was on his way back to the set from a meeting off the lot. When I informed her that it was an emergency, she promised to tell him that I was coming and to call the security booth so that they would let me in.

The kids and I tore through the studio lot in the direction of Sound Stage #6 where they were shooting the interiors of Peter’s show. I parked in a spot clearly marked No Parking and once again unloaded my children. We walked brazenly through the Authorized Entry Only door and onto the cavernous sound stage. On the far end was a perfect replica of a 1970s-style kitchen. Ruby looked over at the stage and then let loose with a piercing shriek that brought the bustling crowd to a standstill. A remarkably lifelike corpse lay in a pool of blood on the baby-blue, vinyl-tiled floor, a hatchet lodged comfortably in its forehead.

I clamped my hand over her eyes and crushed her face to my stomach. “It’s just fake, Ruby. Pretend. It’s just a picture.”
I tried to sound jovial and reassuring, but that was made a bit difficult by the fact that fifty or sixty people had stopped dead in their tracks and were staring at me as I stood there holding a screaming toddler and pushing a stroller containing a now-wailing infant.

“Um, excuse me,” I said to the room at large. “I’m looking for Peter Wyeth.”

“Juliet! How wonderful to see you.” I turned in the direction of the voice and found myself staring into the perfectly made-up face of the ever-lovely Marvelous Mindy Maxx.

“Peter’s not here, Juliet,” she said. “He’s on his way back from a meeting with the special effects guys in Burbank. He’s on the road, but he should be here any minute. Can I help you with something?”

I was ambivalent for a moment, but a glance at my watch decided me. “Listen, Mindy, sorry to do this. Sorry, everybody,” I called out. I turned back to my husband’s producing partner. “I really need to be somewhere. It’s an emergency. Is Angelika around? Can I leave the kids with her?”

Mindy paused for a second, obviously mulling over my request. The various sound, film, and props folks whom I’d disturbed turned back to their work.

“Why don’t you leave the kids with me? I can watch them until Peter gets here,” she said.

“No, that’s okay. I’ll wait.” I looked around for an out-of-the-way place to deposit the children and myself.

“Really, Juliet. I don’t mind.”

“Really, Mindy. It’s fine. I’ll wait.” I knew I sounded hostile, but I was too distracted by what I had to do to cover up my feelings. The truth was, I
felt
hostile toward this impeccably dressed woman who was spending way more time with my husband than I was.