The Big Nap (8 page)

I was silent for a moment. Nettie obviously believed what she was saying. And maybe she was right. Maybe Rabbi Finkelstein was doing everything he could to get his daughter back. And maybe he wasn’t.

“I have to go,” I said finally. “You’ll call me if you hear anything?”

“Yes. I’ll call you,” Nettie said. She leaned into the car and gave Isaac a wet kiss on the cheek. He grabbed her wig and tugged it askew.

“
Motek
,” she said, and patted it straight again. “A lovely boy you have, Mrs. Applebaum. Take care of him.”

“I will,” I said softly. I reached out and hugged the sweet older woman. She held me close for a moment and then, sniffing back tears, walked back into her store. I watched her go and then walked around to the driver’s side of the car, got in, and started the engine.

“Okay, buddy, let’s go to the mall,” I said to Isaac as I pulled onto Beverly Boulevard. “I hear Macy’s has opened up a Rotund Petites department. I’m sure it’s just chock full of fabulousness.”

O
UR
shopping trip was the exercise in humiliation I had come to expect from department stores. While my body had expanded well beyond a size ten, my eyes seemed to have gotten stuck at about a six. I took dress after dress off the rack and into the dressing room, only to find that they would fit provided I had time for a spot of liposuction. I seriously considered the plastic surgery before dumping my reject pile on a salesgirl who had been condescendingly watching my pathetic attempts.

“Ma’am, why don’t you check out our large size collection? It’s on the third floor, next to housewares.”

I glared at her and stomped away. My dramatic exit was somewhat hampered by the fact that I got Isaac’s stroller stuck on the corner of a display table. As I jerked it loose, I sent a pile of miniscule cashmere sweater sets flying.

“Sorry,” I muttered to the salesgirl and hustled off across the store.

I was morosely making my way toward the escalator when my eye was caught by a mannequin wearing a pair of heavy satin pants in midnight black and an almost architectural shirt made of some kind of shiny gray fabric.

“Now, that’s gorgeous,” I said to Isaac. I wheeled him over to the mannequin and lifted up the price tag on the shirt. “Whew!” I gasped. The tag read $450. My first car cost less than that. The pants were a bargain at a mere $250.

“It’s so hard to find something that fits when you’re nursing, isn’t it?”

I spun around to the source of the comment. An older woman in a beautifully tailored suit smiled at me.

“Impossible,” I agreed. “Absolutely impossible.”

“What’s terrific about these pants is that they have an elastic waist. Very forgiving. The cut is slimming, too.” She lifted up the shirt to show me the waistband of the slacks. “And the top is cut very full across the chest. Would you like to try it on?”

“You work here?” How could the same store that employed the snotty little twig who’d “helped” me earlier also have hired this lovely woman?

“Indeed, I do. In
couture.
”

“Ah,
couture
,” I said. That explained the price tag.

“Would you like to try it? If you decide you like it, we can shorten the slacks for you while you shop.”

I paused for a moment. I had never in my life spent that much money on a single outfit, not even my wedding dress. I’d bought that at a sample sale for ninety-seven dollars. Ninety-seven dollars and the black eye I’d gotten when I
yanked it out from under the sweaty fingers of another bargain-hunting bride.

“It
is
expensive,” she said, reading my mind. “But it’s beautifully made. It’s a fabulous outfit.”

She said the magic word. I was under strict orders to find fabulousness at all costs. “Okay, I’ll try it.”

Ninety minutes later, Isaac and I were on our way home, our trunk loaded down with the satin pants, gray shirt, and the astronomically expensive black sandals with silver buckles that I simply had to have to go with the outfit.

“I
am
fabulous, aren’t I?” I asked my baby as we zipped through the streets of Los Angeles on our way to pick Ruby up at preschool.

That afternoon, I popped an Elmo video into the VCR for Ruby, mentally apologizing to the American Academy of Pediatrics, who had just informed me, via NPR, that I was doing incalculable damage to my child by allowing her to watch TV. I strapped Isaac into his Baby Bjorn and began to pace back and forth. As long as I was moving, the baby was quiet. I’d spent the day worrying more about my appearance than about Fraydle and I was feeling guilty. I was also certain that Fraydle’s father was never going to find her, no matter how hard he was looking for her. I debated calling the police, but realized that without the Finkelsteins’ cooperation, I wouldn’t get very far. Chances were that she had just taken off, probably to avoid a marriage to someone she didn’t love.

I needed to find her myself.

Even at the time, I knew my involvement with Fraydle was a little crazy; certainly it was out of proportion to how well I’d known the girl. But for some mysterious reason I felt a sense of responsibility toward her. Maybe she reminded
me of myself at her age. Maybe her plight activated the do-gooder complex that had lain dormant since I’d left the federal public defender’s office. Maybe I just needed to concentrate on something other than how utterly and completely exhausted I was.

I hadn’t expected Yossi to call, and he hadn’t surprised me. His evasiveness was certainly suspicious, but short of calling the cops and telling them that first of all I had a missing person to report and second of all I felt a little uncomfortable about the veracity of an Israeli friend of the disappeared, I wasn’t sure what I could do.

I needed some advice and I knew just who would give it to me. I picked up the phone and, continuing to bounce Isaac up and down on my chest, called the federal public defender’s office, my old stomping ground. The secretary to the investigators’ unit put me on hold and I waited for Al Hockey to get off his butt and answer the phone. Al had been working as an investigator for the federal public defender ever since he’d retired after taking a bullet to the gut in his twenty-fifth year at the L.A. police department. Retirement hadn’t agreed with him, and he always said that getting people out of jail wasn’t all that different from putting them away, just a little bit harder. During my time as an attorney in that office, we’d been an unstoppable team. I owed every one of my “Not Guilty” verdicts to his tireless footwork. Al possessed the miraculous ability to pluck an alibi witness out of thin air.

“If it isn’t my favorite private eye! Juliet Applebaum, how are your bullet holes?”

“Fine, Al. And yours?”

“Just fine. What borderline illegal activities do you have in store for me today?”

“Illegal? I’m outraged. Truly outraged. When have I ever asked you to do anything illegal? Unethical, maybe. Illegal, never.”

“A rather fine distinction. What do you want now?” he asked.

“Missing person’s case,” I replied. I told him the story about Fraydle’s disappearance.

“Sounds to me like she pulled a runner, Juliet.”

“Yeah, that’s what I think, too, but there’s always the chance, however slight, that it may be more serious, and it makes me nervous that the cops don’t know about it.”

“You could always call them.”

“I suppose so, but I’m worried about alienating the parents. I’m just wondering if there’s a way I can unofficially find out if any girls have turned up.”

“Turned up where, the morgue?”

That stopped me in my tracks. I suppose that’s what I meant, but I hadn’t put it so bluntly even to myself.

“Well, yeah. The morgue or a hospital or something. I suppose I could call every hospital in the city, and every morgue for that matter, but I figured you might know an easier way to do this.”

He thought for a moment. “I could ask one of my buddies from the LAPD to check on any Jane Does.”

“That would be wonderful. What do you need to know?”

“A general physical description, age, the neighborhood she lives in, that kind of thing.”

I gave Al the information and made him promise to call me by the next day with whatever he’d found out. I’d done what I could that day. And anyway, Elmo was almost over.

I
was definitely not ready to go out when Peter came home. In fact, Ruby and I were both covered in flour and Isaac was in his bouncy seat, looking like a little Abominable Snowman. We’d decided to bake cookies, but had never got past the dough stage. My mother had called in the middle of our project and I’d had to spend fifteen minutes explaining to her why it was that Peter and I couldn’t put his project on hold, load up the kids, and hightail it out to Jersey for a week. Or two. Or six.

“Hey, family,” Peter said when he walked in the kitchen.

“Hey, Daddy,” Ruby and I answered, in unison.

“Is this fabulous enough for you?” I asked, pointing at my dirty sweatshirt.

He smiled. “No, but this is.” He jumped across the room and wrestled me to the floor, pulling the sweatshirt off.
Ruby, not one to be excluded from a wrestling match, leapt on top of us.

We rolled around the floor for a minute or two, laughing and shouting. Suddenly I noticed that Isaac was squalling.

“Party pooper,” I said, as I got to my feet and picked him up. “We were just having fun, little guy.”

“Hey, give him here,” Peter said, getting up off the floor and brushing flour off his pants. “Come here, buddy. Say hi to Daddy.”

Ruby began working herself into an apoplectic fit when she realized that her beloved father was actually paying attention to the usurper.

“Everybody, quiet!” I shouted. “Okay, you”—I pointed to Peter—“clean up the kitchen. You”— I looked at Ruby—“come help Mama get dressed for a party.”

“I don’t want to help you, I want to be with Daddy,” she howled.

“Fine, whatever, Baby Electra. Help Daddy clean up. I’m going to take a nice hot bath.”

A
FTER
my bath I slipped my new outfit out of the garment bags Macy’s had so thoughtfully provided. No tacky paper shopping bags when you shop
couture.
The pants felt cool and slippery against my skin. The shirt looked, if anything, better than it had in the dressing room. I felt downright attractive for the first time in months. I carefully applied some makeup and put on my most expensive earrings, a pair of diamond studs Peter had given me when Ruby was born. I was admiring myself in the mirror when Peter and the kids walked into the bedroom.

“Wow,” Peter said.

“You asked for fabulous.”

“And that’s what I got. You look great.”

“Thanks, honey.” I kissed him on the cheek and took the baby from him. He stripped off his shirt and put on a clean one. He brushed off his khakis and yanked a jacket out of his closet. I sighed. It’s so much easier to be a man.

Angelika, the baby-sitter, showed up at the house with a bag full of colored paper, kid’s scissors, glue, markers, and glitter. “I thought we could make our own greeting cards,” she said. Ruby looked like she’d died and gone to heaven.

Peter and I left them engrossed in their project, with Isaac happily bouncing in his Johnny-Jump-Up.

“So what kind of party is this?” I asked as we drove down Beverly Boulevard toward Mysterious Mindy’s Benedict Canyon house.

“What do you mean what kind of party?” Peter asked.

“You know, is this a normal people’s party with, like, sour-cream-and-onion dip and a bunch of friends, or is this a Hollywood, catered kind of party with valet parking?”

“I dunno. It’s dinner. It’s a dinner party.”

“Okay, well is it a ‘come on over and I’ll hand you a big bowl of chili and my grandmother’s cornbread’ kind of dinner party or is it a ‘Suzette is serving our first course, Maryland crab cakes in a delicate saffron remoulade roux’ kind of dinner party?”

“Look, Juliet.” Peter turned to me. “Mindy is a friend of mine. And a colleague. My relationship with her means a lot to me. I’d really appreciate it if you’d lose the attitude.”

“Professional or personal?”

“What?”

“Which means a lot to you, your professional relationship or your personal relationship?”

He looked at me for a minute and then back at the road. Neither of us said anything for a little while. Then I spoke. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m sorry, too.” But it didn’t really seem to be okay, and I didn’t believe that he actually knew what he was apologizing for. Nor did I, in all honesty.

We pulled into the driveway of a 1940s bungalow that had obviously had a major face-lift sometime in the past few years. A line of young women in black vests emblazoned with the logo “Valet Girls” stood ready at the doorway. Peter handed the car keys to one and she leaped into the driver’s seat and zipped off. So, it was that kind of a party.

The house was larger than it looked from the outside and decorated within an inch of its life. The style was a sort of eclectic Arts & Crafts with a few gorgeous old pieces that probably had the name Gustav Stickley carefully stamped under a drawer or behind a back panel. Each brightly colored kilim pillow and artful knickknack was in just the right spot. On the walls were a number of large black-and-white photographs in beautiful wooden frames. One, a photo of a pair of lovely young girls bathing in the ocean, looked to my untrained eye like a Sally Mann.

“This place is amazing!” I whispered to Peter.

“I know,” he whispered back. “You should see the kitchen. It’s gorgeous.”

What the heck? How did he know what the kitchen looked like? I was getting ready to ask him, or punch him in the stomach, when the impeccably decorated owner of the impeccably decorated house glided up.

Magical Mindy was wearing a sleek black pantsuit and a white blouse with French cuffs that protruded from her coat sleeves and dangled over her fingers. She had on black stiletto heels that, in case we missed it, had the name Prada
embroidered on the side. Her toenails were painted electric blue and her carefully tousled and highlighted hair fell in luxurious curls down her back. I hated her.