Obsession, Deceit and Really Dark Chocolate (14 page)

I thought about that for a second. A few years ago I had helped prove that a movie producer who had supposedly committed suicide had actually been murdered. He, too, had left a note, but his note was addressed to his estranged wife. He had written that he couldn’t live without her. Although the police had initially assumed that message supported the theory that the producer’s death had been a suicide, the note had turned out to be nothing more than a plea for reconciliation. But Peter’s note sounded different. From Tiff’s description he hadn’t spouted clichés like “I can’t live without you,” which everybody says and nobody means. He was asking to be remembered in a positive light. I couldn’t imagine anyone writing something like that unless they planned on imminently dying, and since most people don’t have the time to write a farewell note before being pushed out a window, it seemed logical to assume that he really had jumped.

“What was it about him that you and your family might find disturbing?”

“Beats me.” Tiff tweezed a brow growing in a place where brows were never meant to grow.

“I’ll never know why Susie did what she did, but I can’t stop torturing myself about it,” I said. “I keep trying to pinpoint what exactly was so awful about Susie’s life that made her feel like she needed to end it. The only thing I can come up with is her job. She worked for a charity foundation, so you would have thought that her work environment would have been all warm and peaceful, but instead it was absolutely toxic. There was all this backstabbing among the employees, then Susie had to make everything a thousand times worse by sleeping with her married boss. That affair ended a little while back, but there’s part of me that will always wonder if that relationship wasn’t partially responsible for breaking her spirit, you know what I mean?”

“All too well.” Tiff put the tweezers down and rubbed her eyes as if she were tired, but I’m fairly sure that what she was really doing was wiping away a tear.

I had made her cry. Wonderful. I was like an undercover Barbara Walters. I pushed aside my guilty conscience and forged ahead. “Did Peter like his work?”

Tiff hesitated. “Peter actually had two jobs. He worked the ticket counter of American Airlines, which he hated, but it paid okay and it allowed him to travel a lot. His other job was at a political campaign headquarters, which he loved, although I’ll never understand why. He was managing phone campaigns for seven dollars an hour.” Tiff scrunched up her face as a way of expressing exactly how she felt about that. “He was a peon at both places. I know that would have bothered a lot of people, but not Peter. He liked to keep a low profile, and he didn’t deal with stress very well so he learned how to avoid it. I have a real hard time believing that he would have gotten himself involved in an office romance that had the potential of blowing up in his face.” Tiffany held up a hand mirror to my face. “What do you think about your brows?”

“Oh, my God, Tiff! I mean, wow!” I didn’t even know that brows
could
be gorgeous.
This
is why people suffered for beauty, so they could look like a Bond girl, one of the bad Bond girls, too. They were always sexier than their more innocent Bond-girl co-stars.

Tiff looked up at the clock. “I usually work until eight-thirty on Tuesdays, but the client that was coming in after you canceled earlier today, so now I have this hour-long window. I was going to use it to catch up on my reading, but the receptionist told me that you had originally wanted a facial. If you want, I can do it now.”

“Seriously?” So I hadn’t needed to get a waxing after all? I had gone through all that pain for nothing?
Not for nothing,
I reminded myself.
I now look like a badass Bond girl.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel like I had been tricked into allowing myself to be tortured.

I watched as she gathered some products from the wall shelves, apparently taking my
seriously
as a
yes.
“You know, you said Peter didn’t seem to have a lot of direction, but most people who work on political campaigns are pretty passionate about their causes.”

“Peter just became politically active a few years ago,” Tiff noted. She started rubbing my skin with something that looked like crystallized snow and felt like cool grains of sand. “He became fanatical about certain issues, although I can’t say that he was very loyal to either of the two major parties.”

“Really? What was he registered as?”

“I think he registered as an independent. I never once heard him state his position on taxes or anything like that, but he loved animals. I think he was part of some kind of environmental group, like the humane society or something. He was always going to these conventions that he said were for animal lovers. He was also a big advocate for the right to privacy and he abhorred the idea of ‘big government.’”

“That sounds kind of Republican.”

“Not really,” Tiff said as she gently stroked my face with a damp cloth. “I’m not all that political, but it seems to me that when the Republicans say they don’t want big government what they mean is that they don’t want the government interfering with commerce, but they’re totally supportive of laws that require citizens to abide by a certain moral code. Like if the government says that gays can’t marry and women can’t have abortions…well, isn’t that big government? See, that’s the stuff that set Peter off. He thought the government should stay out of people’s personal lives. He was also pretty passionate about curtailing discrimination as much as possible. The candidate he worked for once proposed this ridiculous plan that would make it illegal to discriminate against ugly people. It was so stupid. Who in their right mind would humiliate themselves by filing a complaint claiming that their employer was being mean to them because they had too many blackheads? But Peter thought the whole plan was great. Save the Gays and the Ugly People, that was his motto.”

“You already told me he wasn’t gay, but was he…um…?” How could I phrase this delicately?

“Ugly?” Tiff finished for me. “No, not gorgeous, but not ugly. He had this great smile, kind of crooked and impossibly sweet, and he had the rosiest cheeks you’ve ever seen. People used to ask him if he was wearing blush.” She started to laugh but it morphed into a strangled sob. She turned away from me and faced the wall. “I haven’t talked about this with anyone. My family is far away and my friends…” Her voice trailed off and she shrugged while still facing away from me. “You know how it is. People don’t know what to say to someone who’s lost a loved one to suicide. It’s like they don’t know if they should comfort you or distract you or what. It never occurs to anyone that all you really need is someone to listen.” She turned back around. “I’m sorry, I’m used to playing therapist to my clients, but this is the first time a client has played therapist to me. I think I owe you a big discount.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said softly. “I know what it’s like to lose someone you love. I was a total daddy’s girl, and when my father died my college English professor took me under her wing. She was there for me when no one else really was, so the way I see it this is just my way of taking care of a karmic obligation.”

“What about when you lost Susie?” Tiff asked. “Was anyone there for you then?”

Shit, for a moment there I had totally forgotten about Susie. “Sort of,” I hedged. “It helps to hear you talk about your brother, it makes me feel less alone.” God, I was going to have so much to atone for on Yom Kippur.

Tiff grabbed a Kleenex from a box sitting on the shelf behind her and dabbed at her nose. “Peter and I weren’t even that close, but I miss him. I miss him so much.”

“Family’s like that,” I said. “We never want to deal with them until they’re no longer around to deal with.”

“So true.” Tiff tossed the tissue in the garbage and set back to work on my face. I waited until I thought she was composed before continuing my interrogation.

“So you can’t think of anything that might have pushed Peter over the edge.” I was getting desperate. Pretty soon my appointment would be over and Tiff had given me nothing useful—apart from the killer eyebrows.

“As far as I know Peter was doing fine. In some ways he was the healthiest one in the family. He was the only one of us who was able to conquer his fear of f lying.”

“Yeah? Was Peter afraid of f lying when he got the job at American?”

“Totally. It was initially my mom’s phobia, but with a little effort she was able to instill her fear in her children. As far as I’m concerned, humans are land animals and we need to stay true to our nature.”

I flashed Tiff what I hoped was an understanding smile. In the past year and a half two people had tried to kill me and four people I knew (albeit casually) had been killed. As far as I was concerned, human nature was something that could use improvement. “So as far as you know there was no straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“Not that I’m aware of,” she confirmed. “But you have to remember, I didn’t even know there was a camel…the camel’s supposed to represent his depression, right?”

“Sure, why not.” I suppressed a heavy sigh as Tiff began to spread some thick green gunk all over my face. This interview was going nowhere. If there was a link between Peter’s death and Eugene’s it was likely to remain a mystery forever.

I let the subject of Peter and the fictitious Susie drop. Instead we chatted about other important issues, like if it was really true that French women don’t get fat or if Halle Berry really used the drugstore cosmetics she endorsed. Somewhere along the line Tiff told me that she needed to lose twenty pounds and I resisted the urge to tell her that the bulk of her figure problems could be solved with a straight-cut pant and support bra. But fashion faux pas aside, I found myself really liking Tiff. She was open, unpretentious and just a fun person to hang with. I briefly reversed that opinion when I looked in the mirror after my facial, but Tiff assured me that the splotchy red face she had given me would transform into a perfect complexion by the next morning.

I was about to leave when it occurred to me that there was one more question I should ask. “I probably shouldn’t bring our siblings up again, but Susie was a big traveler, too, and I was just wondering if they went to any of the same places.”

Tiff wrinkled her pert little nose. “What if they did? Why would it matter now?”

“It wouldn’t—it just seems like Susie and Peter had a lot in common, and I just wanted to know if that extended to their preference in vacation destinations.”

By her expression it was clear that Tiff still didn’t understand my reasons for wanting to know this (which is something the two of us had in common), but she took a stab at answering. “Let’s see,” she said. “He’s been to Denver, Orlando, Portland, Des Moines—”

“Des Moines?” I repeated. “He took a vacation to Des Moines, Iowa?”

“I’ve never been,” Tiff admitted, “but he said that there’s some cool stuff there. Like there’s the Iowa Hall of Pride, which he said was kind of neat, and he couldn’t say enough about this shop called Gung Fu Tea. Peter was a big tea drinker.”

“You’re serious? He flew halfway across the country for tea?”

Tiff laughed. “What can I say, he had his eccentricities. Actually, I think there might have been those humane society gatherings in some of those places. His next trip was supposed to be to Eureka.”

“Eureka, huh? That’s um…sounds like it would have been fun.” The only way I would vacation in Eureka was if my only other option was Des Moines. I grabbed my purse off the matte silver hook on the wall. “Thank you so much for everything, Tiff. I’ll definitely make another appointment with you.”

“Great. You know, Sophie, I’m really glad we met. It’s so rare to talk to someone who’s coming from the same place as I am.”

“The hand of fate I guess.” I carefully avoided her eyes.

“Maybe we could go out sometime, for lunch or something. We could just hang out and talk.”

I actually would have loved to add Tiff to my list of friends, but the lies I had told her made that impossible. Ironically that reality necessitated another lie, which I forced myself to say. “Sure, I’ll give you a call and we’ll set it up.”

Tiff beamed, making me feel a thousand times worse. “Great! Maybe we can go to someplace nice. I so rarely get to treat myself to a good meal.”

“Sounds great,” I said with as much mock enthusiasm as I could muster. I went out to the front desk and decided to deal with my guilt in the American way: I left her a huge tip.

9

Intellectuals have an excellent grasp of the abstract and intangible. If I have questions about God and mysticism, I talk to them. But if I want a clear and simple solution to an everyday problem, I seek advice from the uncomplicated folks at the church.

—C’est La Mort

I DON’T KNOW WHAT OTHER PEOPLE LOOK LIKE RIGHT AFTER GETTING A
facial but I looked like the “before” picture on a makeover show. A night on the town was out of the question. There were only two guys I felt comfortable enough to be with when I looked this bad, Mr. Katz and Hitchcock. Mr. Katz was waiting for me at home, but I was going to have to make a detour to get my hands on my buddy Alfred.

I drove over to the Inner Sunset and parked my car a mere block and a half away from Le Video. If there was a cult f lick, documentary or silent movie you wanted to see you could always count on Le Video to have it in stock. I found the Hitchcock shelf among the other dusty displays and ran my fingers lightly over the bindings. Was I in a black-and-white mood or was I craving some color…

“Sophie?”

I turned to see Mary Ann standing behind me. Why is it that when you don’t want to be seen you run into everyone you know? Is that just God’s way of being funny?

Mary Ann f lashed me a stunning smile as a way of greeting. “What are you doing here?”

“Hitchcock,” I said, gesturing to a
Rear Window
VHS. “I’m a little surprised to see you here. You’re usually a Block-buster girl.”

“This is the second time in my life I’ve been here,” Mary Ann admitted, “but I’ve been spending a lot of time with Rick lately and he’s really into old movies. His favorite actor is Errol Flynn, and I wanted to see one of his movies.”