Dead Ex, page 24
I stalled as long as I reasonably could, but I had no inspired thoughts on what to do, so finally I turned to him, evening bag in hand. Which was when I saw movement twenty feet ahead of the Integra, streaking toward the exit ramp.
It was Joey, sprinting into the night.
F o r t y
T he thing about Joey is, she’s a runner. She’s got small breasts and long legs and no body fat, and to her, jogging is a good time. She’s one of those people out doing it at midnight or in the midst of a rain-storm, making you wonder if she’s got an Olympic event coming up. So it didn’t surprise me that she’d try to outrun a cop.
Why she chose to was another story, but she must’ve considered it to be in my best interest, because she’d never just ditch me.
I saw her a full six seconds before he did, and by the time it occurred to me to stop gawking, it was too late. He spotted her. She was now a flash in the distance, at a full-out sprint, disappearing down the exit ramp.
“Stop! Halt!” he yelled.
Run, Joey, run! I screamed, but had the good sense to keep it in my head.
She was on the shoulder, thank God. The cars must’ve appreciated that, as no one wanted to end the year by mowing down an overdressed jogger.
I had to give the cop credit—he started after her. But after a dozen or so yards he slowed, then stopped. He was a little on the chubby side, and fully clothed, in heavy shoes, holding a big flashlight, while Joey had
D E A D E X 2 1 9
a good head start, a runner’s body, and carried nothing but a gun in her lingerie.
The cop headed back to me, talking into his radio. He was not happy.
His gait was heavy and aggressive now, and his words came in angry sound bites: “long red hair” and “mid to late twenties.” It was nice of him to underestimate her age by ten years, but the fact was, police everywhere were going to be looking for her now.
“Up against the car,” he yelled at me.
I complied.
He didn’t frisk me. He did something truly unnecessary. He hand-
cuffed me.
I don’t suppose anyone really likes to be handcuffed—unless her taste runs to bondage, which mine doesn’t, although I try to be open-minded—
but my problem was not with being restrained. It was that I’m well endowed. With no arms, I felt exposed, like two breasts with a head attached.
Like I was practicing for my Playboy centerfold shoot. Not that this cop had any prurient interest in me, but there was a lot of traffic on the 405, and I could only hope that I wasn’t distracting. I sure as heck was cold.
I didn’t bring up these concerns, because the guy was hopping mad.
He made me perch on the guardrail rather than have me sit in my car, which I found mean-spirited. When another California Highway Patrol car parked behind us on the shoulder of the freeway, he pushed me into the passenger seat of his own car and buckled me up, still handcuffed, which meant I was effectively straitjacketed. He walked back to his colleagues, and after a time I heard his voice raised in indignation. Maybe losing a suspect—what we were suspected of I didn’t know—wasn’t going over well with the other cops. Especially a suspect on foot, in a cocktail dress and patent leather shoes.
And how would I protect her? If fleeing the scene of a routine traffic stop was against the law, then Joey would see in the new year from jail.
If they found her. So it was imperative they didn’t find her. L.A. county jail is a place people talk about the way they used to speak of that prison where they kept the Count of Monte Cristo. Not that jail’s ever a good time. Mug shots. Strip searches. Hanging with a bad crowd.
The three officers approached me. One was a woman, and it was she who helped me out of the car, patted me down, uncuffed me, gave me a
2 2 0 H A R L E Y J A N E K O Z A K
Breathalyzer test, and held up a finger, instructing me to follow it with my eyes. Then I was rehandcuffed, put into the backseat of the squad car, and shoulder-harnessed, which was as comfortable as lounging in a rock quarry.
“Okay, who’s your friend?” The original cop, whose name tag said kranslauer, got in the driver’s seat, poised to write down my full testi-mony on a small notepad. He’d been nice enough on first meeting me, but that was then, and this was now. Maybe his belligerence was for the benefit of the woman officer, who sat in the front passenger seat.
I took a deep breath. “Officer Kranslauer—am I pronouncing that
correctly?—I’m often the designated driver at times like these, because, as we’ve legally established, I’m not much of a drinker. That being the case—”
“What’s her name?”
Evade, evade, evade. Obfuscate. Conceal. Becloud. Perplex. There was that voice again, and whoever he was, he had access to a thesaurus.
“You see,” I said, “we met tonight in a parking lot in front of Vons, in Studio City. I had no plans for New Year’s Eve, and she had a party to go to, and I didn’t intend to drink, and she did, and what with the price of gas, carpooling always seems to be—”
“You don’t know her name?”
“Not absolutely.” This was true. Until Joey’s marital status was sorted out, was she or wasn’t she Mrs. Horowitz? “Well, her first name is Mary.
What struck me about that is, my mother named me after Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and so it was something we had in common.”
Blood was rushing to Kranslauer’s face. “Are you telling me you have no idea who she is?”
“I’m bad at names. Isn’t everyone? The trick is, you’re supposed to repeat someone’s name immediately after they—”
“Whose party were you going to?” This came from the woman of-
ficer.
“A little French restaurant on Little Santa Monica was what she
said.” I was discovering something extraordinary: if I stuck to the truth—
not the whole truth, of course—I could do this. It was pouring out of me, in fact. I wasn’t even breaking a sweat.
“Who’s giving the party?” Kranslauer barked.
D E A D E X 2 2 1
“Hold on. Let me just adjust my handcuffs—there. The party? Hosted by—not sure. A law firm, maybe. As I said, she was the invitee.”
“Let me get this straight,” Kranslauer said. “You were going to a party you weren’t invited to, where you wouldn’t know anybody, giving a ride to a total stranger.” He leaned over the front seat to get in my face. “Are you a lesbian?”
“No. Well, not to my knowledge. I mean, I’m currently in a hetero-sexual relationship, and I’m pretty happy.”
“Where’s he tonight?” the female cop asked.
“Working. He’s in—textiles.” Okay, not so good. Must stick to truth.
“Where’s this woman live?” Kranslauer asked.
“Her? Not sure.” This was also true, in the sense that Joey might not be the actual owner of Solomonhaus. Hadn’t the locks been changed repeatedly? “I’d probably have just dropped her back at Vons, where she left her car.”
“I thought you said she’d been drinking, that you were the designated driver.”
“Yes, true. I mean, assuming she was sober. Naturally.”
Kranslauer glared at me, but I was able to look him in the eye. I kept my expression limpid. One thing I had going for me was orange hair, which, even more than blondness, had to lower people’s expectation of my intelligence. And judgment.
Kranslauer checked his clipboard. “This your current address, on your license?”
“No, I’ve had a few since then.”
“Where do you live now?”
“Pasadena.”
“With your boyfriend?”
“No. Uh . . . no.”
“You don’t live with your boyfriend?” the female cop asked. This was making me nervous.
“No. Although I’ve spent a lot of time there lately. Wilshire, in Westwood.”
“What’s his name?” she asked.
“Whose?”
“Your boyfriend.”
2 2 2 H A R L E Y J A N E K O Z A K
“Why do you need to know his name?” I was suddenly panicked.
What could they possibly want with Simon?
“Does he know you’re driving a car registered to your old lover?”
Kranslauer’s tone was rude now. Anger’s one thing, but is rudeness ever necessary?
“Yes, he knows,” I said. “It’s not a problem.”
“Well? What’s his name?” The woman cop wouldn’t give up. She ob-
viously had boyfriend issues. Happily, her cell phone rang, and she stepped out of the car to answer it.
“Well?” Kranslauer asked. “What’s his name?”
“S-simon.”
“What? Suss-simon?” Kranslauer asked. “What kind of name is that?”
“Hebrew, I think.”
“Suss-simon what?”
I coughed and mumbled, “Alexander,” which came out, approximately,
“Bubgeezer.” Kranslauer didn’t even take a crack at that.
“Back to this situation. What was going on with you two when I pulled you over?”
“What do you mean?”
“With you driving erratically and her waving her arms.”
“Have you ever heard of car dancing?”
“No.”
“When you hear a song that just makes you want to dance, but you’re in a car, so you have to pour all your moves into your upper body? You’ve never heard of that?”
He stared at me. “Lady, I saw a car swerving like a potential accident hazard, and a woman carrying on like I don’t know what. Maybe she was being held against her will.”
“Against her will?” I said, mildly shocked. “Wouldn’t she have asked you to rescue her, if that were the case?”
He had no answer to that. “Did I see a bungee cord in your trunk?”
he asked suddenly.
“You saw my bungee cord? That’s great news. I thought I’d lost it.”
He glanced at the woman cop, still on the phone, then back to me.
“All right, what do you think made her run off like that?”
“Officer, the world is so filled with disturbed people following strange
D E A D E X 2 2 3
impulses, it amazes me that most of us still manage to get out of bed and make it to work. Maybe she hears voices. I know I do.”
That did it. Kranslauer clearly did not hear voices, and he didn’t want me hearing them either. He leaned back, away from me. “What kind of voices you hear?”
“At first I thought it was Agamemnon. Lately I’ve been thinking
Zeus.”
At that point, the woman opened the car door and told him that she and her partner were taking off to check out a possible 23-152 northbound on the 405. Her manner made me think she was higher up in the food chain than Kranslauer. He told her he might book me on a 207. She stared at him, then asked him to step out of the car.
I couldn’t hear it all, because of the freeway traffic, but the woman said the watch commander would not go for a 207 based on a bungee cord. A radio squawked. A minute later Kranslauer came back, undid my cuffs, and told me it was my lucky day.
“If I wasn’t just called in on an eleven seventy-nine, you’d be on your way to getting booked for kidnapping and maybe even car dancing. Get out of here.”
“Thank you, I—”
“Don’t thank me, that really pisses me off. Go. Just go. Because can I tell you something? I don’t like you. And I really don’t like your hair.”
F o r t y - o n e
I got off at the next exit and took surface streets back to Sunset, looking for Joey. It would be an exercise in futility if Joey didn’t want to be found, but what if she did? I would, if I were out there in a little black cocktail dress, without even a sweater. At least she was in flats. Thank God for Chloe and the lawyer who didn’t like tall women.
I turned on my phone and found hers in her Fendi clutch under the seat and kept them close, in case Joey found a way to call. Unless she thought I was still under the watchful eyes of Kranslauer, in which case she’d call someone else. I dialed Fredreeq.
“Heard from Joey?” I said.
“No. What’s up?”
I told her. Everything. The traffic cop, the gun, the search warrant, Joey’s wild idea of confronting the killer, the cryptic call from Charles Zetrakis, the toxicology report on Elliot. It took a while, as I had to pause for Fredreeq’s periodic screams. But by the time I told her about the party we were supposed to go to and the lawyer who was going to get Joey back all the money she’d handed over to Elliot, Fredreeq had had enough.
“Where is this party?”
“La Baguette,” I said. “Little Santa Monica, near Century City—”
D E A D E X 2 2 5
“I’ll find it. Meet you there in twenty minutes.”
“But—”
“Joey will show. She dressed for it, she needs a lawyer, she’ll hitchhike if she has to. So we’ll show too. If she thinks we’ll let her waltz on up to some gun-happy killer—”
“I’ve had this conversation with her, Fredreeq—”
“Over my dead body,” Fredreeq said. “You hear what I’m saying? Over my dead body. I expect full backup from you. If we have to organize an intervention, we will.”
I agreed, hung up, and headed to La Baguette, listening to voice-mail messages on the way. Two were from Simon, a restrained sort of “Happy New Year” that suggested he didn’t care to be overheard sounding amorous.
The third was from P.B. “I just want to know if you got me the Planetary where they fight for the future of Man in the Spawning Caves of the Neo-Arachnid Variants bred by the Murder Colonels,” he said. “But I guess it can wait till I see you tomorrow.”
I wasn’t going to see my brother tomorrow, and I didn’t know the answer to his question, but whatever it was he spoke about sounded so much more relaxing than the night ahead. I don’t love parties. But Joey was on foot, with no money, credit card, house key, or phone, and if helping her out meant partying, then party I would.
• • •
La Baguette was small, and everything in it had an undersized element, from the chairs to the serving sizes. “Very French,” Fredreeq said. “They’re a petite people.”
But it was also meticulous in its attention to detail, and the candlelit beauty was reflected on the faces that filled the rooms. I imagined this restaurant and all its guests in Europe, where things were soft and a little worn and comfortingly old. Much more appealing than the steel hardness of Solomonhaus or the matte, neutral tones of Simon’s penthouse. It struck me that Simon’s condo didn’t really suit him, any more than Joey and Solomonhaus were a match. Only Fredreeq, in Mar Vista, seemed at home in her own home, with its yellow kitchen and literal picket fence. Where would I feel at home?
2 2 6 H A R L E Y J A N E K O Z A K
Joey’s lawyer, Rick Slepicka, was fashionably thin, wearing a thin tie, holding a thin champagne flute, and sporting a thinning head of hair.
The hostess of La Baguette pointed him out to Fredreeq and me. Joey had not yet shown up.
“Let me take a stab at him,” Fredreeq said. “Since he doesn’t like tall women. I never heard of that, by the way. Must be some wacko lawyer thing.”
I let Fredreeq collar Slepicka while I moved to a buffet table to befriend his date, Daphne. She was a young and pretty thing—and short—
who said she was a first-year associate at Sawyer, Slepicka & Sloane, Rick’s law firm.
“What kind of law do you do?” I said.
“Torts.”
I had a greeting card image take shape, of lawyers working alongside chefs, doing torts and tortes. And tarts. This got me to wondering about the difference between tortes and tarts, which then got me to wondering if I knew what a tort was. I didn’t.
“What is a tort?” I asked.
Daphne wrinkled her nose. “Geeky sounding, isn’t it? I wasn’t looking forward to the class, in law school. But a tort’s just a wrongful act, an injury other than by breach of contract, for which you can seek legal re-dress. So it’s pretty interesting.”
“That is pretty interesting,” I said. “So, if you give a bunch of money to someone and you think you’re in business together fifty-fifty and they do too, but then they die and it turns out you were mistaken, would that be a tort?”
“Depends. If contracts are involved, no.” Daphne poured champagne into my glass. “And since one party is dead, it might get into estate law.
Wills and probates.”
“The reason I ask is, my best friend has a situation—”
“Joey Rafferty?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, you’re Wollie, ” Daphne said. “Joey was talking about you. You’re going to be on SoapDirt. Anyhow, Rick had me looking into Joey’s problem. Interesting case.”
“Daphne, could you tell me what you found out—I mean, unless it’s privileged? Because Joey may not make it here tonight, and—”
D E A D E X 2 2 7
“No problem,” Daphne said, nibbling a bread stick, “since we’re not taking the case. Tell Joey that Elliot, her putative husband—he’s got this sister—”
“Camille Horowitz,” I said. “I know her.”
“Camille. Right. She’s going to post a bond to try to get herself appointed administrator, first thing Monday. Joey needs to show up at the courthouse and try to block that. She may not succeed, but Camille’s doing an end run around her by not telling her. That’s not cool.”
“But it’s legal?” I asked.
“Technically.”
“But couldn’t Joey and Elliot be considered common-law husband
and wife?”
“Nope. Not applicable. Trust me—our firm’s estate guy says this
has the makings of a long story. Like the siege of Troy. Endless billable hours.”
The Trojan reference gave me pause. And who would pay for all those billable hours? I asked Daphne about that.
“Well, that’s the problem. Rick doesn’t do contingency cases. None of the partners do. Or even pro bono, unless there’s some major PR
