Murder Plays House (10 page)

The door to my dream house was answered by a small man with a thick shock of black hair and the largest brown eyes I’d ever seen in my life. His sooty lashes were so long they looked tangled, and his lips were full and red. He was beautiful, although certainly not traditionally handsome. He was far too petite for that. He looked like a miniature movie star, a fashion model writ two sizes smaller than normal.

“Hallo,” he said, in a vaguely European accent.

“I’m Juliet Applebaum,” I said, extending my hand.

“Farzad Bahari,” he said, taking it in his own. His grip was surprisingly firm, for such a delicate man.

He led me through the vaulted entry way and into the long living room. A cheery fire was burning in the green-tiled fireplace, and the many sconces were lit, despite the bright midmorning light shining through the leaded glass windows. I surreptitiously buried a covetous toe in the thick Chinese carpet, and determined to convince Felix and his pretty boyfriend not only to sell me their house, but also to toss in the rug.

“One moment. I’ll let Felix know you’re here. He’s in his room. Resting.”

“Of course,” I said. “This must be very difficult for him. Losing his sister.”

Farzad pursed his voluptuous lips for a moment, and then nodded, almost grudgingly. He left me alone in the room and ran quickly up the stairs. I took advantage of his absence to look once again around the room. When Kat and I had been through the house I’d been far too interested in the tiles, wood floors, moldings, and fixtures to look at the pictures on the walls. Now I could examine the black and white photos at my leisure. There was a long row of them, matted and framed behind museum glass. There were one or two that looked decidedly like Robert Mapplethorpes—few other photographers capture the male body with quite that erotic artistry. The others were dramatic, stylized fashion photographs, including two large prints of ethereal models wearing clothing that bore the unmistakable mark of Booty Rag ghetto-chic.

“Those are Avedons,” a voice said. I leapt back—I’d had my nose pressed altogether too close to the glass.

“Wow!” I said. “The real deal?” I turned to look at Alicia’s brother. He was a tall, thin man with fair hair cropped close to his scalp. His narrow face was dominated by a sharp beak of a nose, made all the more prominent by the diamond stud nestled in the crease above his nostril. He was wearing a black T-shirt in a soft clingy fabric that looked like silk. His narrow hips were having a hard time holding up his voluminous cargo pants, and a pair of black silk underwear peeped above the drooping waist.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.

He nodded, and collapsed into an oversized wing chair, leaning his head back into the nubbly leather. “So you’re a friend of Stacy Holland’s,” he said.

At that moment Farzad came into the room carrying a tray with three small cups and a matching coffeepot. He put the tray down on a side table. Without asking me how I took mine, he spooned generous portions of sugar into each cup and handed them to his boyfriend and me. I took a tentative sip, and then smiled. The coffee was rich and sweet, but plain and strong, too. Much better than the milkshake-like concoctions I’d been drinking lately.

“Mm,” I said.

“Farzad makes a fabulous cup of coffee,” Felix said, smiling at the smaller man. Farzad sat down on the couch and tucked his legs up under him. He nodded graciously at the comment, clearly understanding that it was no more than his due.

I took another sip, and then warmed my hands around the small cup. “I’ve known Stacy forever,” I said. “Since college.”

“Oh?” Felix said, in a voice entirely devoid of interest.

“Did she explain to you why I wanted to meet you?” I asked.

“Sort of. But I’m not sure I really understand. She told me that you were the one who . . . who found Alicia.”

“Yes,” I said softly. I told him how Kat and I had come to be in the house that morning.

“I told Nahid that lock box was a dreadful idea!” Farzad interrupted. I looked over at him. His face was flushed and he looked angry. “She wouldn’t listen. She is just like my mother. Does what she wants.”

“You hadn’t asked her to put the box on?” I asked.

“Of course not!” he said. “It’s a ridiculous idea. Putting your key on the door so anyone can walk in! What’s the point of having a five thousand dollar alarm system if you leave the key for anyone to find?”

“Why did she want the lock box, do you know?”

Felix reached across to the couch and laid a calming hand on his boyfriend’s arm. “We were just about to put the house on the market,” he said to me. “Nahid wanted to be able to get in when she needed to, and to send other agents by to look at the place while we were out of town. She had one of her handymen come and install the box.”

“You were out of town?”

He nodded. “At our place in Palm Springs. We’d been there for a couple of months. That’s why we wanted to sell the house. To move down there, permanently.”

“You’d planned to leave LA?”

He nodded. “Farzad’s been dying to get out of the city. And we’ve fallen in love with Palm Springs. The desert has wonderful energy. So creatively inspiring. We were there working on the preliminary sketches for my autumn collection when we found out about Alicia. So much for the collection,” he said, waving his hand as if to bid it goodbye. “I’m not likely to get any of it done now.”

“Of course you will. You’ll be ready to go back to work in a week or two. It will be a good distraction for you,” Farzad said, managing to sound both tender and bossy.

Felix shook his head. “I don’t know. I doubt it. Maybe you’ll have to do it for me, sweetie.” He laughed humorlessly. “It’s not like anyone would know the difference.”

I gently brought them back to what we’d been talking about before. “So you were out of town when Alicia was killed?”

“Yes,” Felix said. He suddenly narrowed his eyes and looked at me. “I’m not sure I understand, Ms. Applebaum. Exactly why did you ask Stacy if you could meet me?”

I explained to Felix that I was an investigator, and that I was eager to help in any way that I could. “I guess you could
say that finding her body makes me feel like I have a kind of personal stake in finding out who murdered your poor sister,” I finished, lamely.

Felix nodded, not looking entirely convinced. He said, “How can you help? The police are investigating her murder.”

“Well, in addition to being an investigator, I was a criminal defense attorney. I can act as your advocate with the police, help you navigate their questions, follow leads they might not be interested in pursuing. I’d be on your side, acting in your interests. You can’t necessarily rely on the police for that.” I thought of Harvey Brodsky and had a sudden inspiration. “My partner and I provide these kinds of services for people in situations like yours. High-profile individuals for whom relying on the good will of the police is simply not an option, but for whom engaging a criminal defense lawyer might not project the right image.”

Farzad nodded, although Felix still looked perplexed, and perhaps a little suspicious.

“Why would I need an advocate with the police?” Felix said.

“Because the police are bound to think you killed Alicia!” Farzad said. “They always blame the family.” He turned to me. “Don’t they? Don’t they always blame the family?”

“Well, statistically, murders are most often committed by someone the victim knows. So yes, they do look to the family.”

“But we were in Palm Springs!” Felix said.

I nodded. “And I’m sure the police will rule you out once they verify that.”

“No they won’t,” Farzad said. “They’ll just say we paid someone to kill her.”

I was surprised by his vehemence. Why was he so sure that he and his partner would become suspects in this grisly murder?

Felix once again patted his boyfriend’s arm. Then he smiled at me, uncomfortably. “Farzad was born in Iran. He doesn’t have exactly warm feelings toward the police.”

I nodded sympathetically. “Of course not.”

“He’s basically pathologically suspicious of authority,” Felix said.

“Have you done this kind of work before?” Farzad asked.

“Yes, I have. Of course my work is confidential, so I can’t give you references, but rest assured my partner and I are experienced in this area.” Lilly’s case qualified as experience, didn’t it? “This isn’t a service for everyone,” I said, hoping my voice wasn’t slipping into too oily a register. “Only individuals with a certain public profile can afford this level of protection, or even need it. Most people simply muddle through. Ours is a service appropriate only for the select few.” I was definitely going to need a shower when I was done with this interview.

I wasn’t wrong in my assessment of Felix’s vanity. I’ve found, in fact, that it’s very difficult to overestimate the narcissism of the average wealthy Los Angelino.

“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to have someone on our side,” Felix said. “I do have a public profile I need to protect.” Then he narrowed his eyes. “But what do you get out of this?”

I was not willing to confess my hope to buy his house on the cheap, and I was getting more and more uncomfortable with my own ulterior motives.

“We pay her,” Farzad said. “That’s what she gets out of it.”

I nodded. “That, and the knowledge that I’ve done what I can to help find whoever did that to your sister. Finding
her is not something I’m ever going to be able to forget.” I wasn’t lying. The image of Alicia’s violated body was there, in my memory, forever.

“How much, exactly, do we pay you?” Farzad asked.

I outlined Al’s and my rates. They were reasonable, considering how much money Felix obviously had.

After a moment, Felix nodded. “Okay. We can give it a try. See if it works out.”

I hoped my huge sigh of relief was not audible. I leaned forward. “You won’t be sorry,” I said. “Can I ask you a few questions about your sister? To give me some context for my investigation?”

Felix told me that he and Alicia had grown up in Miami. “My dad owns a Chevrolet dealership. The first thing I did when I got out of there was buy a European car.”

After a brief stint at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Felix had followed his sister out to Los Angeles. She’d gone to UCLA and majored in acting. By the time her brother joined her in Hollywood, it was clear to them both that her star was rising.

“She had auditions almost every day, and seemed to get a lot of the parts she tried out for. It was mostly commercials and little one-time roles on TV shows, but she was doing really well. And she was leading this total Hollywood lifestyle. She and her friends would spend every night at parties, or at clubs. She was dating guys you’d recognize from TV, even if you didn’t know their names. To a kid like me, it seemed like the coolest scene ever.” He shook his head ruefully. “Alicia was terrific. She put me up for almost a year—I slept on this stinky little pull-out futon in her living room. She introduced me to people, even set me up with guys she knew.”

“Hey!” Farzad said.

“That was all before you, baby.”

“Did the rest of your family know you were gay?” I asked. “Or just Alicia?”

Felix snapped his fingers in the air. “Oh honey, I’ve been out of the closet my whole life. My mother caught me with our Cuban gardener when I was about fourteen years old.”

“Wow!”

He smiled, ruefully. “Let’s just say she was
not
surprised. I’d been cutting up her dresses and restyling them for her since I was nine years old. Not many hetero boys can manage a straight seam in velvet.”

I thought of my husband and his wardrobe of jeans, khakis, and T-shirts.

“That’s certainly true,” I said.

“Anyway, I was lucky. My parents were fine with it. They just told me to keep my hands off the help.”

Farzad snorted into his coffee cup.

“So Alicia was getting a lot of parts,” I said.

“For a while,” Felix said. He then told me what I already knew about the downturn in her fortunes.

“That must have been difficult, coinciding as it did with your success.”

He shook his head. “It was awful. I mean, not that Alicia was necessarily jealous. She was glad for me.”

“She certainly liked having someone to borrow money from,” Farzad interjected.

“Farzad! You know full well how much I owe Alicia,” Felix said, raising his voice.

The younger man shrugged and made a zipping motion across his lips.

I paused for a minute, and then said, “Alicia borrowed money from you?”

Felix glared at his boyfriend. “Not exactly. I mean, I never expected her to pay me back.”

“And you gave her a place to live?”

He nodded. “She worked for that, though. She was our personal assistant.” He shot a warning glance at his boyfriend, and I wondered exactly what he was worried the indiscreet young man would tell me.

“What did she do for you?”

“She took care of the house while we were gone, for one. And she did errands and things.”

“What kind of errands?”

“You know. Picking up the dry cleaning. Doing the grocery shopping. Making dinner reservations, booking travel. That kind of stuff.”

I nodded, imagining what it would feel like to be one’s younger brother’s maid and errand girl. I don’t think I could have tolerated it for a minute, and I felt terribly sorry for Alicia. While my career might not be going anywhere fast, it certainly wasn’t sinking into the kind of oblivion that had forced her into this awkward and surely unpleasant situation with her brother.

“What was Alicia planning on doing once you moved to Palm Springs? Was she going to come with you?”

Felix shook his head. “No. She couldn’t have. Not if she wanted to keep auditioning and appearing with her comedy troupe. She’d have found some other work, I guess.”

“Was she upset at the prospect of your move?”

“She wasn’t thrilled. I mean, it meant a lot of changes for her. But Alicia was a flexible person. She would have been fine.” He heaved a huge sigh. “I don’t know what’s going to come of all that now.”

“All what?” I asked.

“Palm Springs. The move. Everything.”