The Muffia (17 page)

He nodded again. He seemed to be wrestling with some changed view of me. I thought he even appeared a little hurt.

“I’ll probably get it out again soon,” I said, finishing the thought, “just to try to take my mind off things.”

He scrunched up his face in concentration then dove to the floor for his messenger bag. My last comment hadn’t even registered. Guess I’d been wrong about hurting him.

“OK,” he said, pulling out a yellow legal pad. “Tell me the whole story again from the beginning, with as much detail as you can remember. Just leave out the graphic sex descriptions of you and the other guy, if you don’t mind.”

So I told him everything again, just as he’d requested, from the very beginning, trying not to leave anything out. From reading
Deliciously Disturbed
to Berggren’s dinner party, to what she’d told me about Nissim and Udi meeting in the army, through Nissim and his associates taking Udi’s body away and Jelicka’s subsequent wild speculations—all of it with as much detail as I could recall, though I’d probably left something out. I told him everything except, of course, the intimate sexual details, per his instructions.

And as fast as I could talk, Cullen was taking it all down, every word of it, with great solemnity, legitimizing and elevating what I’d considered Jelicka’s delusional musings into the realm of possibility.

Chapter 25

“Just because Cullen thinks your scenario is plausible doesn’t mean that’s what really happened,” I told Jelicka the following morning. “The fact is, we may never know why Udi died or why Nissim and his thug associates came to take him away.”

I’d agreed to meet her at the Century City Mall before my mediation session for a little shoe shopping at Bloomingdale’s, followed by lunch and non-alcoholic margaritas at
Pink Taco—
a restaurant named after a woman’s labia
.
I was slightly put off about eating there, for obvious reasons, but Jelicka said it was fun, so I agreed— at least they hadn’t called it
Beef Curtain.

“Yay, and say unto him, I speaketh the truth,” said Jelicka, mocking me
and
the Bible as she opened a shoebox, picked up one of the Louboutin metallic flats inside, then dropped it back in dismissively.

“It still could be very
un
true,” I went on, slipping my foot into the fourth pair of boring black work pumps I’d tried on so far—these with a low cut opening that revealed my toe cleavage. “There is no evidence that Udi died of anything other than natural causes.”

I didn’t want to totally twist her knickers because the whole thing with Udi had taken her mind off Roscoe and she was relishing her role as
crime solver extraordinaire
, but I still didn’t think it was good for her continued existence to be entertaining the idea of exposing a murder plot involving the Mossad.

“You’re not thinking, Maddie. It appears nefarious and
it is
. You’re still too upset to fully grasp what I’m saying.” She assessed the shoes. “I like those on you. They make your ankles look sexy.”

“Stop saying I’m too upset to know what I’m talking about. I really liked Udi, but it
wasn’t
love.”

“How do you know it wasn’t love?” Jelicka had an almost ingenuous expression on her face—like she’d lost her definition of love and needed a new one. I could relate. Love had become mysterious and inexplicable.

“It was lust,” I said. “He didn’t live here and he would never move here, so I knew going in that there were limitations. I really couldn’t fall in love with him.”

“Sorry, but that’s bullshit,” Jelicka said with conviction. “You fall in love with who you fall in love with. It doesn’t matter where they live. You can feed yourself any line of crap you want, but falling in love is out of your hands, girl.”

She was right, of course, though we still hadn’t come up with a definition of love we could agree on.

“OK, then, how about this? I was protecting myself from falling in love because Udi was unavailable and younger than I.” I sounded like a shrink. I probably could have used a good shrink.

“That’s still crap,” she said. “But at least it’s honest. Now, when this is all over, I’ll help you find a more appropriate love interest.”

I opened another shoebox—a pair of black pumps exactly like every other pair of black pumps. “I can’t shop for shoes right now. Let’s eat.”

“How’s it going with Roscoe and the divorce?” I asked once we were seated in our booth at Pink Taco. The restaurant was as pink as Babeland had been, which was appropriate, considering its namesake.

“Horrible, but there are no more tears left—I’ve cried enough. It's time to move past all that and own my anger, you know? I hired a shark lawyer a few days ago, so I feel pretty good, actually. Of course, the Xanax isn't hurting.”

“Here’s to moving on,” I said, laughing and lifting my non-alcoholic margarita in toast.

There we were, both of us enduring major upheavals in our lives, toasting ourselves on a weekday afternoon—granted with virgin drinks. Other women might be kicked to the gutter and stay there after getting dumped or having a lover die on top of them, but neither Jelicka nor I would be kept down for long, with or without pharmacological assistance.

Our glasses clinked and Jelicka took her first sip.

“I need the tequila,” she said. “Where’s our waiter?” She stood up and waved at the first cute guy she saw in an apron.

“So what’s the next step?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“With our investigation.”

“We don’t
have
an investi— I don’t know what the next step is,” I said. “I don’t think there should even
be
a next step. It’s too dangerous.”

“Once we get the government involved, you’ll see this isn’t some idle hunch.”

“We are not doing that!” I caught myself behaving in a manner unbecoming a mediator and brought my voice under control. “You mean the U.S. government?”

“Of course. They’ll want to know. We’re doing a service for our country.”

“No,” I said as firmly as I could. “There’s no evidence.”

“OK, then we’ll
get
some evidence. We just need to probe a little further. That’s how we’re going to
find
this evidence you say we need.
Then
we’ll call the government. What did Berggren say?”

“About what?”

“About Udi and his friend and everything? Did she tell you anything juicy?”

“Well, I didn’t want her to suspect I was digging, you know, so I just sort of asked some general questions. But she’s having a dinner party on Saturday night and I’m going. I’m hoping to find out more.” I most definitely was not going to mention the word
assassin
at this point.

She sat back, thinking, her eyes squinting as if she were looking very far away.

“What?” I asked with a certain modicum of dread.

“Did she invite the friend?”

“Nissim? I don’t know. Why?”

“Because if we could find out where he lives and we could get him out of his house and over to, say, Berggren’s house, then we could go through his stuff—see what we find. Get some
evidence
.”

I’d already thought of that, despite my better judgment. In fact, it was my plan to get Nissim’s address just in case the recent events came back to haunt me, but I didn’t see the wisdom in telling Jelicka any of this. “If Nissim is a spy," I said, "don’t you think he’d have his house rigged with all kinds of cameras and things? There could even be an explosive device or something triggered to go off when somebody opens the door.”

“Maybe we’ll wear disguises.”

“A lot of good disguises are going to do if we get blown up. You’re acting like you’re in some movie that we already know ends happily,” I told her. “We don’t have an ending, and if it turns out there really was a crime committed, then you— me or
we
—might end up very dead, just like Udi. And please can we leave the other Muffs out of this?”

“Fine. But you’re really overreacting. All we need is a little proof.”

“Like what, a written confession that Nissim poisoned Udi?”

“I’ll know it when I see it. Remember, I’ve been to Israel and I can read a little Hebrew.”

“That was twenty years ago, not that it’s even relevant. If someone
does
go, it shouldn’t be one of us. Maybe Cullen would do it.”

“Hey, great idea. Ask him. He’s a writer so he’d just make up a good excuse.”

I frowned at her then glanced at my watch and realized I was going to be late. “I have to get to my mediation.”

“Divorce?”

“Neighbor dispute in the Marina.”

“Somebody not pick up his dog’s poo?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Well, good luck, but don’t let it distract you. You have to get Nissim and his fiancée invited to Berggren’s dinner party.”

Something was telling me—other than, of course, Jelicka telling me—that I should trust her instincts. Despite the fact that the Jelicka I knew, wife of Roscoe and member of the Muffia, was the only one I’d ever known, people always have another side.  It could well be that the Jelicka I knew was being subsumed into another Jelicka I hadn’t known existed. Perhaps the one I knew was the cover and the real Jelicka was starting to emerge, wearing more than a new pair of shoes.

Chapter 26

“Hello. Welcome. As you know, mediation is the process of resolving disputes where a third-party neutral assists the parties involved in a dispute to come to a satisfactory resolution. My job is to listen to all of your issues and concerns. But unlike a judge who imposes a decision on you,
I
try
to help you find a solution to your dispute that both of you can live with. I want to commend you both for your willingness to try mediation today, and I want to assure you I will do all I can to remain unbiased and guide you toward a resolution that is win-win.”

I was addressing a very serious looking man and woman sitting on the sofa in front of me in my friend’s underused real estate office in Marina Del Rey, a community comprised of expensive real estate on and off the water north of the airport. Looking down at them from my perch on a wooden chair opposite the sofa wouldn’t be my first choice of an ideal seating arrangement—I prefer everyone to be at a round table so we all at least
seem
on equal footing. But these two people, like some of my friends, seemed almost phobic about driving to the Valley; hence our meeting in this office at the Marina.

“You found me through the Southern California Mediation Association website. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” said the man grimly. “That’s correct.” The woman just looked like she didn’t want to be there.

The man, about fifty, wore glasses and appeared to be roughly halfway through hair transplant surgery. The woman struck me as a cool professional type with a steely determination—for what I couldn’t tell. And as a trained mediator, I could feel the power imbalance between them immediately.

“I want to assure you both that I don’t know nor have I ever heard of either of you prior to receiving your email, and I believe I can be completely unbiased as we go through this process. I’ll be taking notes, but they’re just for me and will remain, like the mediation itself, completely confidential. None of us should talk about what happens in this room outside of this room.”

Both still wore stern expressions but neither offered any reaction to what I’d said so far, so I plowed ahead with my opening statement.

“The way this will work is one of you will talk and then the other will have a chance to respond, adding whatever you think is important. If you forget to say something, don’t worry. You’ll have another chance to talk, and then another, until everyone has said all he or she wants to on any subject he or she thinks is important to the issues we’ll be mediating today.” I paused then added firmly, “One ground rule though, and this is critical: We do
not
interrupt each other.”

There was still no reaction, unless both man and woman, sitting on opposite ends of the floral sofa, looking at their cell phones is a reaction. I gave them my best flight-attendant smile and prepared for take off. “And now, I’d like us to put away all handheld electronic devices.”

Reluctantly, it seemed, they put their phones away, particularly the woman who dashed off one last text message before tossing her Blackberry into the black Longchamps briefcase on the floor in front of her.

I shifted my attention to the man since his body language told me he was the one with the grievance.

“Would you like to start?”

“Well,” he began, shifting his weight on the sofa. “I’m Stan.”

“Hello, Stan.”

“Hello. Susan and I are neighbors. We live in the same condo complex in the Marina.” He still couldn’t or wouldn’t look at her.

“OK.” I had questions, of course, but it was better for now that I sit patiently and listen to what he wanted to tell me instead of asking him what I wanted to know.

“For the last three months, Susan has been making a lot of noise—”

At this Susan rolled her eyes, but Stan didn’t see it.

“Anyway, she’s loud and I find that to be a problem.”

“Have you talked to her about it?” I asked after a pause.

“Well, I’ve told her I have trouble sleeping from time to time.”

“I see. Stan, let me ask you—have you told her that there’s too much noise coming from the apartment?”

“No. I thought by telling her what I told you I told her she would, you know, get it.”

At that point, I smacked right up against one of my own personal biases—that men are lousy communicators—and had to make an effort to hide it. I took a breath and visualized a sweet, non-confrontational woman—the kind I’d never be. “Have you ever spoken to her directly about the noise you’ve been hearing and perhaps holding it down?”

“It’s awkward, you know? The condo development—it’s not the greatest construction, if you know what I mean. But she doesn’t need to be so loud.”

“I see. OK, so, let me see if I can reframe . . .”

Reframing is one of the important tasks of any mediator—by skillfully rephrasing what the parties are saying in slightly different words, they know they’ve been heard and understood. There’s also the hope that one party might come to understand the other party’s point of view and give a little.

“What I hear Stan saying is that he is unable to sleep because of the noise coming from your condo, Susan. He’s hinted that the noise bothers him, but so far he hasn’t really confronted you. Would you say that’s accurate, Stan?”

Susan shrugged while Stan nodded, running his hand over his head and the forty or so visible hair plugs. So far this seemed pretty straightforward—neighbors living in close proximity in apartments and condominiums often had noise issues. All I needed to do was get Susan to agree to quiet down or limit the noise to certain hours and to get Stan to accept that he’s going to hear things he might not want to living in a poorly constructed condo complex.

“All right, Susan, what would you like to say?”

“I don’t think I make a lot of noise,” she said. “No one else complains.”

“You wouldn’t know,” Stan said, flustered. “You are—you are out of touch, with that iPod plugged into your ears all the—”

“Stan, remember the rule. You’ll have another opportunity to talk when Susan is finished.”

“No one else has complained to me, anyway,” she went on. “Besides, I believe people enjoy hearing others having a good time. Stan is making too big a deal of it.”

I took a deep breath, smiled and tried to validate both of them, another function of a skilled mediator. “Susan,” I began, “Stan may be making a big deal about this, but we’re talking about
feelings
here—no one’s right, no one’s wrong. I mean, if you agreed, you wouldn’t need me to find a solution to what amounts to a difference of opinion, right? None of us can judge the worthiness of anyone else’s emotions. What we need to do is find a way
through
the feelings.”

I didn’t know if they were feeling validated but it would have been hard to sound more patronizing.

Smoothing her pencil skirt, Susan crossed her legs. “Of course, Madelyn. I think the whole problem comes down to the fact that I have a boyfriend who makes me scream like a banshee every time we have sex and Stan just can’t deal with it. He’s started doing this ridiculous hair transplant surgery, but it’s all since I broke up with him about six months ago when I started dating Juan Carlos.”

How do I reframe that
? “Stan? Do you have anything you’d like to add?”

Stan shook his head vehemently, chagrined.

“OK. Well. Let me try to reframe what’s been said to this point. Susan doesn’t believe she makes a lot of noise but she believes that even if she were making a
little
noise, it’s the kind of happy noise people like to hear. Then there’s the issue of the poor construction of the condominium complex, which you seem to agree on—and, by the way, I want to commend you both on this point. It’s very good that we have this to agree on. Very good. Consequently, it is indeed possible that sounds might appear louder than they actually are.”

Suddenly, as I sought a way to maintain some professionalism to the proceeding, Stan sprang to life — red faced, hair plugs on end.

“When she comes, or, more accurately, when she
pretends
she’s coming—because it’s all faked—”

“It is
not
faked! I faked it with
you
!”

“She sounds like an orangutan. It is
not
a happy sound. Frankly it’s scary to everybody. Parents don’t want their kids to hear screeching like that, and that’s regardless of the construction. Besides she’s just doing it to get back at me because I wouldn’t pay for her boob job.”

“All right, now. Stan, let me—” I started to say, using my non-threatening voice again to no avail.

“I told him to just move out of the building if it’s so upsetting to him that I have a new boyfriend. I don’t know what else I can do.”

“I’m not going to—” Stan blathered, indignant.

“Would it help, do you think, Stan, if Susan could restrict the hours she has sex with Juan Carlos to the hours that you are not at home?”

“And I’m not loud,” Susan said. “That’s ridiculous. Other people would have complained.”

“They have.”

“Name them.”

“OK,” I said, hoping to diffuse the escalating anger. “Let’s see if we can—”

“Oh, and by the way,” Susan said, cutting me off, “this has nothing to do with my boob job. I paid for that myself.”  She was sitting up taller and thrusting her new voluminous breasts forward for both Stan’s and my benefit. Thirty-six C, I guessed.

“I’m a writer,” exclaimed Stan. “I work at home. And I seriously doubt his name is Juan Carlos. He looks like an Irv or Abner. He probably paid for those big tits.”

Susan was starting to get red in the face. She was so worked up she was having trouble forming words. Before anyone could say anything else, I stood up and raised my hands along with my voice. “OK, let’s see if we can move forward here. If Susan has loud orgasms, and I emphasize the ‘if,’ do you, Stan, feel that your right to complete quiet—given that you both live in a poorly constructed condo complex where many noises travel—is more important than Susan’s right to enjoy sex with her partner in an uninhibited fashion?”

“I think I should be able to have sex whenever I want to,” Susan said, choking out the words.

“Susan, I realize this is difficult, but I asked Stan.”

“You’re a whore,” Stan spat.

“I’m not a whore. You’re a withholding asshole.”

Clearly, I’d lost control of the mediation. “Alright, let’s see if we—”

That’s as far as I got before Susan attacked me. “Stop rephrasing or framing or whatever it is you're doing." Then she went after Stan. "You didn’t give me enough sex, Stan. What am I supposed to do? Masturbate every night?”

“How could I give you enough sex when you got home at eleven o’clock and I go to bed at nine-thirty?” Stan was screaming now, standing tall at his full five feet nine inches.

“Well, who the hell goes to bed so fucking early?” Susan was standing now, too, towering over him in her heels with her fake breasts thrust out. She looked like she could eat him for breakfast. “And if you’re asleep, then tell me how you hear us screwing and making all the noise you say we make. Huh? Huh, little man?”

Sometimes in a mediation I become immobilized—amazed that the parties to a conflict once co-existed in a more peaceable state. I then find myself wondering how they got to such a low point. These two people had supposedly loved each other, and it seemed that much of the current conflict was about old hurts. Perhaps what Stan and Susan needed was a gifted psychologist. Their problems went deeper than I was trained to deal with.

“I went to bed early every night because I was trying to finish writing the book so I’d get an advance to buy you your fucking boob job!” Stan yelled. “It doesn’t mean I couldn’t hear you, you ungrateful baboon.”

“Stan! Susan!” I moved between them, almost yelling, hoping to shock them into silence. It worked. Before they could start yelling again, I picked up my handbag and placed their deposit check on the couch between them.

“Thank you for attempting the process of mediating your dispute. Under the circumstances, I think you’re both very brave. But I can’t help you. I’m afraid I can’t see coming to a resolution of this dispute that you both can live with and frankly, I think the issues presented here today are beyond the scope of mediation. Good luck.”

As I walked out, gesturing to the receptionist that we were finished with the room, I was shocked to discover that, despite the tension that had arisen and the unresolvable nature of the dispute, all the talk about Juan Carlos and Susan’s screaming had made me horny as hell.