Murder Plays House (3 page)

“Nice neighborhood,” I said to Kat.

She laughed. “My mother-in-law calls it ‘transitional.’”

“Transitioning from what to what?”

“Slum to crime scene, apparently,” she said. That kept us giggling through the next couple of inappropriate dives.

“Okay, I’ve got one more house on my list, but there’s probably no point. It’s not even really on the market,” Kat said. We were attempting, with the assistance of another round of frozen coffee drinks, (no reason not to start breaking promises to this baby early—her childhood was most likely destined to be a series of failures on my part, and if Ruby and Isaac were anything to go by, caffeine exposure would surely be the least of her problems) to recover our senses of smell from assault by a 1920s Craftsman bungalow with four bedrooms and forty-two cats.

“I don’t think I can stand it, Kat,” I said.

“I
told
you they all sucked.” She heaved her feet up on the dashboard and wriggled her toes with their violet nails. “My legs are killing me. Look at these veins.” She traced her fingers along the mottled blue lumps decorating her calves. Kat was only six months pregnant, a month or so behind me, but already she had a brutal case of varicose veins, the only flaw in her otherwise perfect pregnant persona. I had been spared that particular indignity, but had plenty of others to keep me occupied: ankles swollen to the size of Isaac’s Hippity Hop, most notably, and a belly mapped with stretch marks like a page out of the Thomas Guide to the city of Los Angeles. I was desperately hoping the lines would stop at the city limits, and not extend all the way out to the Valley.

“It’s kind of nice how your toenail polish matches the veins,” I said.

“I paid extra for that. Anyway. One more. I’m sure it’s no better than any of the others, but I haven’t seen it yet. My mother-in-law asked me to go check up on it for her. Apparently it belongs to the boyfriend of the son of her cousin. Or something. She wants to make sure they’ve got it in shape to show it. We could just pretend we went, and go catch a movie or something.”

My ears perked up. “Gay owner?”

Kat nodded, stirred her straw in her drink without sipping, and held out her hand for my empty cup. “Yup.”

“That’s terrific!” I said. Gay former owners are the Holy Grail of the West LA real estate market. Who else has the resources, energy, and taste to skillfully and painstakingly decorate every last inch of a house down to the doorknobs and crown moldings? Single women generally lack the first, straight men always suffer from a dire shortage of the third, and straight couples with children definitely have none of the second.

“Movie time?” Kat said, hopefully.

“No. Let’s go see the house.”

“But it’s not even on the market. And it’s bound to be hideous.”

“Come
on
, Kat! Gay owners! Let’s go!”

I wasn’t disappointed. We pulled up in front of a large, stucco, Spanish-style house with wrought-iron miniature balconies at every front window, tumbling purple bougainvillea, and a small but impeccably maintained front garden. The house was only about ten or so blocks from our apartment in Hancock Park, in an even nicer neighborhood called Larchmont.

Even Kat looked strapped for something negative to say. Finally, she grumbled, “I’m sure it’s out of your price range.”

I jumped out of the car and raced up the short front walk. The house was a little close to the street, but the block seemed quiet, at least in the middle of the day. I was already imagining how the neat square of grass would look with Ruby’s bike overturned in the middle and Isaac’s plastic slide lodged in the flowerbeds.

The front door was of carved oak. In the middle of the broad, time-darkened planks was a knocker in the shape of a gargoyle’s head. I grabbed the lolling tongue and rapped once. Kat came up behind me.

“There’s a lock box,” she said. She reached into her purse, pulled out a keypad, and snapped it onto the box attached to the door handle. Then she punched a few numbers into the keypad, and a little metal door at the bottom of the box slid open. In the box was a security key that looked like it belonged in the ignition of the Space Shuttle rather than in the front door of my dream house. The house I planned to live in until I was an old lady. The house I intended for my
children to call ‘home’ for the rest of their lives. My house. Mine.

“Open it, already,” I said.

Kat rolled her eyes at me. “Playing hard to get, are we?”

It was real estate love at first sight. The front door opened into a vaulted entryway with broad circular stairs leading up to the second floor. A heavy Arts and Crafts style chandelier hung from a long chain. It looked like the pictures of the Green & Green mansions I’d seen in books about early Los Angeles architecture.

The living room took up the entire right side of the house. At its center was an enormous fireplace tiled in pale green with a relief of William Morris roses. The walls were painted a honey yellow and glowed from the lights of the ornate wall sconces with hand-blown glass shades that were set at regular intervals around the room. There was a long, rectangular Chinese carpet in rich reds and golds.

“I wonder if they’ll leave me the carpet?” I said.

Kat shook her head. “Don’t get so excited.”

“What?” I said. “This is my house. It’s perfect. I’m buying it.”

“I’m sure there’s, like, a twenty-thousand-dollar pest report. And a brick foundation. Plus, Larchmont is known for car theft because it’s so close to Beverly Boulevard. It’s a car jacker’s fantasy—the lights are all perfectly linked. Anyway, you can’t afford it. Let’s go get some lunch.”

“You’re really good at this, you know?”

She just followed me across the hall to the dining room. There was another fireplace in this room, smaller but just as beautiful as the one in the living room. The walls were papered in what had to be vintage floral wallpaper, tangled ivy, and vines dotted with muted roses. I immediately began fantasizing about all the dinner parties we’d give in this
room. The fact that we’d never actually given a dinner party, and that my culinary skills are limited to pouring skim milk over cold cereal, interfered not at all with this flight of the imagination.

“Oh my God,” Kat said, from behind the swinging doors she’d passed through. I followed her into the most beautiful kitchen I’d ever seen. The centerpiece was a restaurant stove as big as my station wagon. Across from the stove was a gargantuan, stainless steel Sub-Zero. The appliances were professionally sleek, the counters zinc, and there were more cabinets and drawers than in a Williams-Sonoma outlet. One half of the huge space was set up as a sitting room, with a deep, upholstered couch, and a wall unit that I just knew hid a television and stereo system.

I sighed, and turned to Kat. “There’s no way I can afford this place.”

She rifled through some papers. “There isn’t even an asking price yet.”

“It’s definitely going to be more than I can afford.”

“I told you. Should we even bother going upstairs?”

“Why not? I’m already depressed. A little more won’t kill me.”

There were three small but adorable bedrooms on the second floor, with a shared bath, and a master bedroom that nearly made me start to weep with longing. It was so large that the owner’s massive four-poster bed fit into one small corner. There was an entire wall of built-in bookcases, a fireplace, and not one, but two upholstered window seats. But it was the master bathroom that really got to me. It was Zelda Fitzgerald’s bathroom. Two oversized pedestal sinks, a built-in Art Deco vanity with dozens of tiny drawers and a three-panel mirror, black and white tiled floor and walls, and the largest claw-foot tub in the known universe. It was
so big it could easily fit a family of five. Or a single pregnant woman.

“I hate you,” I said to Kat. “Why would you show me this house? I can’t afford it, and nothing else will ever seem good enough after this.”

She sighed. “I know. It’s totally hopeless. Let’s go see the guesthouse.”

“The guesthouse?”

She began reading from the printout in her hand. “Two room guesthouse with full kitchen and bath, located in garden.”

“Guest house like office for Peter, and even office for Al and me so we can escape the rats in Westminster?”

But she was already headed down the stairs.

The guesthouse was as beautifully restored and decorated as the main house. We opened the door into a pretty living room with wainscoted walls and leaded glass windows. However, unlike the main house, which was immaculate to the point of looking almost uninhabited, the guesthouse was clearly lived in. There was a jumble of shoes next to the door—Jimmy Choo slingbacks, Ryka running shoes, and a pair of black clogs with worn soles. The tiny galley kitchen with miniature versions of the main house’s lavish appliances was filthy—there were dishes on nearly every surface, and a month’s worth of crumbs on the counters.

“Ick,” I said.

“Some people,” Kat said. “It would have killed the tenant to clean up? The place is probably infested with mice. Or rats. Definitely cockroaches.”

One corner of the living room was set up with a long wooden table scarred with rings from glasses and what looked to be cigarette burns. On the table was a brand new Mac with a screen larger than any I’d ever seen. There was
also a huge, professional-quality scanner, a color laser printer, a printer designed specifically for digital photographs, and a thick stack of manuals and reference books. I lifted one up—“The Mac Genius’s Guide to Web Design.”

“Check this out,” I called. “I bet there’s like twenty thousand dollars worth of computer equipment here!”

“Hmm?” Kat said.

There were two large stacks of eight-by-ten photographs on the table. One showed a generic-looking blond woman, her hair teased into a halo around her head, and her lips shiny and bright with gloss. An illegible signature was scrawled across the bottom with black marker. The other stack was of a more peculiar photograph. It was clearly of the same woman, but showed her from the back, with her face turned away from the camera. Her arms were wrapped around her body, her fingers gripping either shoulder. The bones of her spine stuck out like a string of large, irregularly shaped beads along the center of her back. These photographs were also signed with the same indecipherable scribble.

A bulletin board hung crookedly on the wall, and I winced at the hole I was sure the nail had made in the thick, creamy plaster. The board was full of what appeared to be fan mail, much of it in the ornate curliques of young girls’ handwriting. I stood up on my tiptoes to read one of the letters, but Kat stopped me.

“Come on,” she said. “Don’t be so nosy.”

I flushed. That’s certainly one of my worst qualities. Or best, if you consider my job.

“She must be an actress,” I said.

“Probably.”

“With a knack for self-promotion. And a really good website.”

Kat shrugged, not particularly interested, and led the way
down the small hallway next to the kitchen. We walked into a surprisingly large bedroom, with French doors opening to the garden. Dappled light shining through the windows illuminated the piles of clothes and gave the veneer of dust on every surface a golden luminescence.

“Pig,” Kat said.

“Yeah, but it’s a gorgeous room anyway, don’t you think?”

“Hmm.”

“Is that the shower running?” I asked, but Kat had already pulled open the door to the bathroom and begun to scream.

A
LICIA
Felix’s was not the first dead body I’d ever seen, but I think it would take years of experience in crime-scene investigation before one became inured to the sight of a naked woman slumped against the wall of her bathtub, her chest and belly defaced with a scrawl of stab wounds. I reached the bathroom door in time to catch Kat as she tottered backwards. I held my friend up with one arm as I stared at the grim scene in the small, white-tiled room. Kat sagged against me, her face buried in her hands, her chest heaving. I looked at the dead woman for only a moment, but what I saw seared itself into my memory. This was a hideously violent murder. The poor woman’s torso had been hacked and torn, nearly shredded. Her wide-open eyes had a milky quality, as though a haze had lowered over them as life seeped away. Her body looked rigid, almost like a grotesque statue, particularly around the neck and jaw. Her skin was mottled; above the flesh was white and waxy, but what I
could see of the bottom was purple, the color of a deep bruise. Postmortem lividity, the pooling and settling of the blood in response to gravity. The shower was still running, washing her body with a constant stream, and thus there was very little blood spilled anywhere at all. I could see only the smallest smudge just underneath the woman’s shoulders and neck, which were bent to one side by the protruding taps of the shower.

What made the starkest impression on me, however, was not so much what had been done to her, although that was certainly awful, it was rather the
shape
of the woman’s body. She was, in a word, emaciated. Her legs were long and horribly thin, withered as if by a wasting disease. Her knees bulged larger than her thighs, contrasting starkly with her skin-draped femur and tibia bones. Her ribs and the gullies between them were clearly visible even despite the stab wounds. Her clavicles stood out from her neck, nearly framing her bony jaw. The only hint of fleshiness about her body was the one breast, the right, that had not been horrifically mutilated. It sat, perfectly round, obviously fake, in the brutalized expanse of her chest.

I slowly backed out of the doorway, pushing Kat behind me. I settled her on the edge of the bed, but then remembered that the room was a crime scene. The whole house was one, and Kat and I had wandered through it freely, stomping across the floors and carpets, handling everything, probably obliterating all signs of the murderer. I grasped Kat more firmly around the shoulders, heaved her off the bed, and together we stumbled out to the courtyard. I sat her down in one of the wrought-iron lounge chairs in the garden. She leaned her head back on the white muslin cushion, her eyes still closed. I don’t think she had opened them since she’d first seen the body. I reached into my purse, pulled out
my cell phone, and dialed 911. Then I called Al. He asked no questions, just took down the address and hung up the phone.