Passion, Betrayal And Killer Highlights

“No, everybody loved Bob.”

What drug was she on? Nobody loved Bob, not even her.

“He had lots of friends,” she continued. “The people who worked with him loved him. He was just offered a promotion. It was going to be announced in a few days. His employees couldn’t have been more loyal. Erika thought the sun rose and set around his head. No one wanted to hurt him—to my knowledge. Unless that slut he’s been sleeping with wanted to do him in. That’s always possible.”

I felt like screaming. The woman he had been sleeping with had no motive. Leah did. She had to see that. She had to realize how bad this all looked.

Anatoly cleared his throat. “Last two questions. Did you tell the police about Bob’s affair, or that he told you he was leaving you?”

“No, I…I couldn’t. The only people who know about that are the two of you, Erika and Miranda.”

I could tell by the look on his face that we were thinking the same thing. That was two too many.

“Leah, what’s Bob’s e-mail and password?”

I handed Leah a Post-it and she scribbled down Bob’s private e-mail address and handed it to Anatoly. “The password is June 21.” She hesitated a moment before adding in a much quieter voice, “That’s our anniversary.”

Anatoly waited a few seconds for her to reflect, but I sensed his chivalry was close to used up.

“Any other addresses? His work e-mail, for example?” he asked.

“It’s bmiller@chalet.com. I don’t know what password he used there. I tried accessing his messages when I suspected…” Leah got another faraway look in her eyes.

Anatoly motioned with his hand for her to continue. “I know what you suspected. So what passwords did you try?” he prompted.

“Well, I started with our anniversary, of course. We use that code for all of our accounts, our checking, our various online retailers….”

“What other passwords did you try?”

“My birthday, the date of our engagement, my name, and I tried one other before I gave up…what was it? Oh, of course, the day we first met. None of them worked.”

Anatoly jotted it all down. “Did you try narcissistic?” he whispered under his breath.

I shot him a dirty look, but Leah didn’t appear to have heard him.

“Last thing,” he said. “Are there any questions that the police asked you that I haven’t, or vice versa?”

“No, I’ve answered all these questions before,” Leah said. “I don’t think newly widowed women are supposed to answer all these questions right away. I think they’re supposed to be too distraught to talk. Maybe I’m being callous.”

Maybe she was being crazy.

Anatoly studied her. I got the feeling he was trying to pull information out of her—that she didn’t want to voice. Finally, he shrugged and joined me in the kitchen.

“Come to help me with the tea?”

Anatoly didn’t even bother acknowledging the question. “Meet me at Leah’s at ten-thirty tomorrow morning.”

“Is that a request or an order?”

“Ten-thirty, Sophie. And if you hear anything from the police, call me.” Anatoly left as the kettle began to whistle.

Leah entered the room and crossed to the stove to turn it off. “Skip the tea. Just give me the brandy.”

The next morning I awoke to the sound of grinding coffee beans, which would normally fill me with the kind of inner peace others only experience after visiting the Dalai Lama. However there was an odd pattern to the noise this morning. Normally when you grind coffee you press the top of the coffee grinder for a minute or so until the beans are as fine as grains of black sand. However the person preparing these beans was pressing the grinder for five seconds at a time, and, taking two-minute breaks in between to utter phrases like “Oh, my head!”

I pulled on a robe and went out to the kitchen to see Leah braced against the sink, the grinder currently silent beside her.

Her angry, bloodshot eyes zoomed in on me. “Look at me! Look what you’ve done to me!”

I didn’t immediately answer. I understood that she was hungover but I missed the part that made it my fault.

“Why did you let me drink all that brandy?” She ran her fingers through her hair, inadvertently molding it into a wing formation. “How am I going to reevaluate my life if I feel like my head is going to explode?”

I pulled out a filter and began to prepare the coffeemaker for the beans that I was clearly going to have to grind myself. “Maybe you shouldn’t reevaluate your life just yet.”

“Of course, I have to reevaluate! Weren’t you listening to me last night? I’m not the wife of a comptroller anymore. I’m the widow of a comptroller. That’s an entirely different situation. I have to figure out—OH MY GOD!”

I almost dropped the coffeepot. “What? What is it?”

“This nightgown I’m wearing! You lent me a pink nightgown!”

I blinked. “I thought you liked pink.”

“I’m in mourning! I’m supposed to be wearing black.”

“To the funeral maybe…”

“No, no, no, no.” Leah shook her head hard enough to cause her hair wings to make a flapping motion, then abruptly stopped as she struggled to regain her equilibrium. “There is a period of time in which widows are supposed to wear black, I’m sure of it.”

“Leah, this isn’t Gone with the Wind. No one is going to blackball you for wearing a pink nightgown.”

She started pacing the narrow kitchen. “There’s a way to do this…I know, a book! There’s got to be a book that explains the proper protocol for a newly widowed woman.”

“Like what? Mourning for Idiots? Why don’t you pick up Emily Post’s book on how to be a socially gracious murder suspect while you’re at it, because that seems to be the more pressing problem.”

Leah stopped pacing. “Murder suspect? I didn’t kill Bob.”

“I didn’t say you did, but I’m sure you’ve heard the saying ‘perception is the greater part of reality.’ And I’m pretty sure I know what the police department’s perception is right now.”

Leah looked bewildered, although how this could have been news to her was beyond me.

“But once the police start investigating, they’ll see it wasn’t me. There’s no evidence that could say otherwise because I really am innocent.”

“Wake up, Leah. Innocent people go to jail all the time on bogus charges. It was barely a month ago that Anatoly was charged with assault and murder.”

“But that’s because you set him up, Sophie. You invited him up to your place, kicked a few chairs over or something and then called 911.”

“Okay, forget about that. How many times in the past couple of years have forensic scientists used old DNA evidence to prove that some of the people who have served time for various crimes were actually innocent? While researching Words To Die By, I found out that Ray Krone was in prison for ten years before DNA evidence proved him innocent. What about the cases when DNA evidence isn’t available? Do you think the courts get all those right? You need to look at this realistically and prepare to fight the accusations that are going to come your way.”

In one fluid movement Leah picked up an empty coffee mug and threw it across the room. It exploded against my cabinet door in a burst of ceramic. “I didn’t do it!”

I stood motionless, looking at the remnants of the cup. I had a long history of throwing things, but that’s because I have no self-control. Leah, on the other hand, had always managed to be on the verge of a breakdown without ever actually having one—until now.

Her action must have surprised her, as well, because she had become completely still. Then she slumped against the counter. “I know it looks bad, but I honestly never wished him dead. I wanted the chance to make it work. Why wasn’t I given that, Sophie? Why would anyone do this?” She slid down to the floor, buried her face in her hands and cried.

I reluctantly crept forward and sat down beside her, careful not to get shards of ceramic stuck in my butt. I understood where Leah was coming from. I’m not sure she valued Bob the individual all that much, but she did value their union and the life they had made together. Her choices were not ones that I would ever have made for myself, though they apparently worked for her. But Bob’s extramarital affair had not been one of her choices, nor had his murder. At least I hoped it hadn’t been. Now, after spending years perfecting her role as Mrs. Bob Miller, she was forced to redefine herself, and she had no clue how to do it.

I put my arm around her shoulders. “I’ll ask Mary Ann about the black,” I said, referring to my friend who worked at Neiman Marcus. “She’ll know what you should wear.”

Leah choked back a sob.

“Do you want to cover the mirrors?” I asked.

Leah lifted her tear-stained face. “Cover the mirrors? Bob would have hated that. He wasn’t even Jewish.”

“Look, God’s got Bob covered, so now we’ve got to do what’s necessary to get you through this. The rabbis wrote out some pretty clear instructions on what we Jews are supposed to do when we lose a family member, and you need guidance, soooo…”

Leah nodded and chewed on her lip. “I guess it’s not such a bad idea, but do you think…perhaps just for this morning…?”

“You want to wait until you’ve finished with your makeup and hair.”

“Am I completely shallow and horrible?”

“Maybe, but if so, it’s hereditary, because there’s no way that I’m going to go through the day without my undereye concealer.”

Leah rested her head against my shoulder, which required some contortionist moves on her part, but the gesture was irresistibly sweet. “If you ever try to remind me that I said this I’ll deny it, but honestly—I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“You’re never going to have to find out,” I said, then reached forward and patted her knee. “And you can count on me reminding you.”

If anybody else had lost her husband I would have had the courtesy to let them shower before me. But it was an undisputed fact that Leah’s particular bathing rituals were the primary reason for California’s water shortage, so I made it a point to sneak in first. When I had finished making myself beautiful, I searched the apartment for something appropriate to cover the mirrors with. It took about five minutes for me to figure out that I had nothing. My downstairs neighbor Nancy sewed. She’d probably have some spare fabric. But there were so many things I’d rather do than ask her for a favor—like go snorkeling in a tanker full of plutonium.

I heard Leah turn off the shower. She’d be done in forty-five minutes max. I had promised her I’d cover the mirrors and I didn’t want to renege on that, especially since it was the only thing that seemed to perk her up. I opened one of my dresser drawers for the eighth time and glared at its contents. Of course there was nothing of use in there. Gym clothes, bathing suits and…

My hand reached in and pulled out the first of my many sarongs that I had collected over time to use as bathing suit covers and skirts during the years that it was fashionable. I shook it out and held it up to the full-length mirror fastened to the closet door. It was the right length. I had seven sarongs and five mirrors. Perfect. I hurried around the apartment hanging up my exotic mourning sheaths. By the time Leah was done I was waiting outside the bathroom holding the sarong I intended to hang in there. Leah opened the door and looked at it questioningly.

“Are you going on a cruise?”

“These are for the mirrors. I didn’t have any black cloth.”

“Are you kidding? It’s going to look like we’re holding a luau.”

“A very somber luau.”

Leah shook her head. “Sophie.”

“I put the black one with the purple and turquoise fish in the living room.”

“I gave that to you when you got accepted into USF! I can’t believe you still have it!”

“I take it with me on every beach vacation.”

“Well, I guess it’s okay. After all, you’re putting the red one in the bathroom and the one I gave you is predominantly black….”

“And if you’ll recall, the fish on it are wearing very serious expressions.”

“Bob loved fish.” And that was it—Leah was in tears again.

I hugged her and tried to conjure up some fond memories of Bob ordering halibut. I wanted to feel more sad about this, if for no other reason than to prove to myself that I wasn’t a sociopath, but my main emotion at the moment was relief. If Leah could just have another breakdown over Bob’s eating habits in front of the police, that might sway their opinions in the right direction. Leah wiped her tears and tried to smooth a crease in a skirt that I had lent her. I slipped past her and covered the last mirror. I heard Leah gasp in what I took to be horror as I pushed in the last thumbtack. “Oh, come on, Leah, it’s a mellow red.”

“It’s not the sarong—I just remembered what I forgot.”

“Which is?”

“Mama.”

“Shit!” I locked eyes with Leah. If Mama came for a visit and discovered a tube of Monistat 7 in the bathroom drawer you could count on her demanding to know why the offending offspring hadn’t called her the minute she felt an itch. Forgetting to call to let her know her son-in-law was murdered was not going to go over well. I glanced at my watch. “She must not have watched the morning news or she would have called by now—”

The phone rang. Leah looked like she had just swallowed her tongue and I felt the threat of a migraine.

“It could be a reporter looking for a quote,” I said.

“Do you have caller ID?”

“No, but I’m going to get it any day now.”

“How helpful.”

Leah and I walked over to the phone and stared at it as it rang for the fourth time. I decided to live dangerously and pick it up right before the answering machine did it for me. “Hel—”

“What kind of child doesn’t call her mother when her sister’s schlemiel husband has come to a schwartzen sof?”

The more excited Mama got, the more Yiddish she used. I wasn’t exactly fluent in the language but I knew that to come to a schwartzen sof was to come to a bad end and that schlemiel was a polite way of calling Bob a prick. I cleared my throat.

“Mama, it really wasn’t my place to call you—Leah should have done that.” I winced as soon as I said it. It was an unfortunate force of habit to transfer my mother’s wrath onto my younger sister. I mouthed the word sorry to Leah. She in turn gave me what I had come to know as the “I’m going to get you for that” look.

“So where’s your sister and the lobbus? Are they all right?”

“Leah and Jack are fine. Jack slept over at a friend’s house and Leah’s…” Leah began to shake her head furiously at me. “Leah’s here, but she’s asleep.”

“At ten in the morning she sleeps?”

“Well, she didn’t sleep much last night. As you pointed out, her husband was killed.”

“So who shot him? Was he some kind of criminal? If I find out that he got my Leah mixed up in any kind of monkey business I’ll…I’ll give him the Einhoreh, that’s what I’ll do.”

“What good—or bad—is the evil eye going to do now that he’s already dead?” I heard Leah choke back another sob and I mentally slapped myself.

Mama muttered some more Yiddish before coming back to English. “Enough with the sleeping—put Leah on the phone.”

It was tempting to think that Mama was just being insensitive to my sister’s need for rest, but it was more likely that she knew I was lying, which was impressive because I’m a pretty good liar.

I took a moment to weigh my loyalty to my sister against my desperate desire to get off the phone. Fortunately, I didn’t have to make the choice because Leah, in what I assume was an unexpected attack of altruism, took the phone from me.

“I’m here, Mama. Yes, I’m okay…Jack’s okay…No, I haven’t eaten anything today…”

I left the room to allow Leah some privacy and to avoid being stuck with the phone again.

CHAPTER 3

Alicia let out an exasperated sigh. “Dead people are always so much more likable than the rest of us.”

—Words To Die By

Leah and I were only fifteen minutes late in meeting Anatoly at her house. This was a new record for Leah, but for some reason Anatoly didn’t look like he was in the mood for handing out gold stars.

“Can we go in now?” he asked.

“Hello?” I suggested. “When you greet someone you’re supposed to say hello. Otherwise people accuse you of having Asperger’s.”

Leah looked around the front yard and then stared at the still closed front door. “Where’s the police tape?”

“What’s the point of having police tape if there are no police here to enforce the restriction?” Anatoly asked. “Unless the goal is to entice troublemaking teenagers to mess with the crime scene.”

Leah threw him a confused look. “But in the movies…”

“Hollywood has a very different approach to crime fighting than the police.” Anatoly looked at his watch impatiently. “The police may or may not come back to look for more clues, but they have to accept the fact that by that time things will have been altered.”

“Okay, so let’s go in and alter them.” I looked expectantly at Leah, who was examining the doorknob as if it were attached to the gates of hell.

Anatoly cleared his throat. “Leah, if you want to wait out here I’ll understand. Just give me the keys and I’ll come get you if I have any questions.”

Leah shook her head. “I’ve got to go in eventually.” She pulled out her keys at a speed that underscored the meaning of the word eventually, and after several deep breaths (each one resulting in the further extension of Anatoly’s chin) she opened the door. She stood in the entryway for a full two minutes before Anatoly and I gently pushed past her.

Our first stop was the living room. Things looked eerily normal. If there had been broken picture frames on the floor, they were gone now, with the exception of a few neglected slivers of glass. Anatoly sighed and looked around the room.

“I’m sure they confiscated everything that could possibly qualify as evidence. I doubt we’ll find much.”

“You mean they took my wedding pictures?”

We turned to see Leah standing behind us.

“Can they really do that without asking me?” she asked.

“As long as they have a warrant,” I said. I walked over to the middle of the room and tapped my foot against the bloodstained floor. If I didn’t know better I would have assumed it was spilled burgundy.

Anatoly was now walking slowly around the room, taking it all in. “Show me where the gun was kept.”

Leah led him to the safe, which was tucked into the cabinet below her showcase of Waterford collectibles. It was such a stupid place to put a safe. Like a burglar wasn’t going to search the furniture piece holding thousands of dollars’ worth of crystal. Leah twisted the combination lock a few times until it released. Inside were some insurance papers, a will, a rather extravagant-looking diamond necklace and a few bond certificates that added up to an amount that was considerably less impressive than the value of the necklace. No gun.

Anatoly examined the insurance records. “No life insurance?”

“Bob thought accidental death and disability insurance was enough. After all, both of us were in perfectly good health.”

“So Bob decided to wait until his health failed before approaching the insurance companies for life insurance?” I asked. “Or is it possible he just couldn’t be bothered spending money on a policy that he would never be able to benefit from personally?”

Leah winced and I immediately felt guilty. I was going to have to work on holding back my reflexive insulting observations about her husband now that his previously vacant head contained a bullet.

Anatoly coughed a few times in an obvious attempt to suppress a laugh. “Let’s be grateful he didn’t have an insurance policy—one less reason for the police to suspect you.” He stuffed the papers back in the safe. “Did you have a lot in savings?”

“Just over a hundred thousand,” Leah said softly. “It’s not enough. Our house payments alone are ten thousand dollars a month.”

Anatoly did a quick double take.

“Well, we put down a small down payment!” Leah said defensively. “It’s important to have a nice house to bring business associates to. Besides, Bob was making over four hundred thousand dollars a year and he was getting a promotion, so we knew we’d be fine…or at least we thought we would.” Leah’s eyes misted over. “Oh God, I’m going to have to go back to work, aren’t I.”

“There are worse fates,” I said. “So, other than the savings account, your house and your cars, are there any other assets worth mentioning?”

Leah’s face brightened. “There are the Chalet stocks! Of course, I can’t cash them out yet, since they just went public and the shares are in lockdown….”

“Lockup,” Anatoly corrected. “When a company goes public the employees’ shares go into lockup for the first six months or so.”

Leah dismissed Anatoly’s comment with an impatient wave of her hand. “Lockdown, lockup, who cares what it’s called? The important thing is that Jack and I aren’t going to lose our house and I won’t have to work!”

I creased my forehead. “How much are Bob’s shares worth?”

“I don’t know the exact figure, but it’s well over a million.”

I bit my lip and Anatoly let out a heavy sigh. “So much for eliminating money as a motive.”

Leah took a step back from Anatoly and glared at him. “You aren’t seriously suggesting that I would kill my husband for monetary gain?”

“You wouldn’t be the first woman to do so,” Anatoly said.

“Excuse me, but just because I’m unfamiliar with the terminology of the stock market doesn’t mean I’m completely clueless about money. This is a community property state so if I had wanted to get my hands on Bob’s money, any divorce attorney worth his salt could have done that for me.”

“I know you wouldn’t kill for money or any other reason.” I inched closer to Leah and rested my hand on her shoulder. “But the police might think that you weren’t really up for the whole half-sies thing.”

“This is perfect,” Leah said. “If Bob had been bankrupt, Jack and I would be homeless and hungry, but since he wasn’t, I’m a murder suspect. No matter what the situation is I lose.”

“Just because you’re a suspect doesn’t mean you’re going to be charged with anything,” Anatoly pointed out. “Let’s figure out who else could have done this. Did anyone other than you and Bob know the combination to the safe?”

“No one. Just Bob and I. It was our anniversary.”

“Your anniversary,” Anatoly repeated. “The same combination you used for your personal Internet access, your ATM and your online retail accounts.”

“You can see why neither chose careers that required a lot of creative thinking.” Oh damn it, I’d done it again. I was really going to have to make more of an effort on this delicacy thing.

Anatoly did some more coughing before pulling out the necklace. He held up the pendant so that the light caught the yellow stone and the white diamonds that surrounded it. “Is this one of those yellow diamonds?”

Leah took the necklace from his hands. “Don’t be ridiculous. Colored diamonds are trendy and ugly. Diamonds should be clear like these little ones. The stone in the middle is a yellow sapphire.”

“I see. How much is that yellow sapphire worth?”

“I had the necklace insured for fifty-four thousand dollars.”

“Are you kidding?” I squeaked. “My God, what happened to the days when a man could clear his guilty conscience for under a grand?”

“Clearly Bob had more guilt than the average philandering husband,” Leah said, and shook her head in disgust. “I should have known right away. Bob was never excessively affectionate. We’re both too sophisticated to be taken in by all the hearts and flowers nonsense.”

I sank my teeth into my tongue to refrain from blurting out that she had been renting Sleepless in Seattle on a biweekly basis for the past decade and a half.

“…but it wasn’t until last year that he really became distant. He’d stay out late, make excuses for missing dinner, but he’d always make it up to me by buying me something. As the excuses became more frequent, the gifts became more elaborate.” She held up the necklace to eye level. “I don’t want it. I would never be able to wear it without remembering that he gave it to me just months before declaring that he was planning on trading me in for a younger model. I made such a fuss over his generosity, too. I made him gourmet dinners for a week straight. I’m so incredibly pathetic.”