Pain Killers (26 page)

She was right, of course. I turned back to Dinah, whose blue lips matched the walls and bedspread. Why shouldn’t death be color-coordinated?

I knew it was pointless, but I could not stop wondering what would have happened if I’d taken her up on the sheet-hole offer. The whole notion was a myth—like Jews burying their dead standing up or drinking the Christian baby blood. (Well, maybe on Passover…) But for Dinah, a.k.a. Mrs. Zell, the facts didn’t matter anymore. Tina watched me watching and stepped away.

“You knew her, didn’t you.” She didn’t even say it as a question.

“Yes. No. I just met her,” I said, surprised by the choke in my voice, “on the plane from San Francisco.”

“Well what the hell did you say to her?”

“What do you mean?”

“She swallowed a pharmacy.” Tina snatched me by the wrist and led me along the perimeter of the sea room to the open door of the bathroom. The toilet seat and the floor around it were splotched with vomit, whole pills still visible in the chunk and bile. Even the pills were blue. Those Valiums. The same prescription bottles I’d scoped in her purse flying down were dumped in a small trash can inlaid with some kind of ancient gold coins. From where I was squinting, the profile on them might have been Zell’s. But I had to close my eyes to remember the pharmaceutical highlights in her purse. I recited them like a conductor announcing stops. “Depakote…lithium…Lexapro…Boniva…Valium.” I was jokey because the tears in my eyes freaked me out.

Seeing them, understandably, made Tina even more suspicious. “How close were you?” Her left eye closed to a slit the way it did when she was mad, as if she were aiming down the sight of an invisible gun. “Manny, tell me now. Are they going to find your DNA in her throat?”

“That’s not even funny.”

“No, what’s funny is you dressed like Joey the Dreidel Boy. What’s funny”—her voice edged toward the border between edgy and hysteria—“is you knowing what pharmaceuticals a dead woman, who happened to be living with Harry Zell, stuffed in her purse before she killed herself.”

“I wanted a disguise.” I touched my tender scalp and stole another eyeful of the victim. “Does that look like suicide to you?”

“She could have convulsed. I’ve seen people break their own backs.” I knew how my cunning and beautiful ex-wife skewed the universe. She was unwilling to lavish any sympathy on the departed now that the dead woman had been identified as competition. Tina rattled the empty prescription bottles in the clamshell trash can to make a point. “The lady of the house wasn’t trying to get rid of a headache. She wanted out. Which maybe makes sense, if you’re married to Harry Zell.”

“I keep going back and forth on Zell,” I said.

“It’s black and white,” said Tina. “Whatever his ends, if his means involve working with Mengele, he’s the enemy. I’m guessing Dinah knew. She was probably pulling a Clara Haber.”

“Clara who?”

“Clara Haber. She was married to Fritz Haber. He invented Zyklon B.”

“Death camp gas. I hope she was proud.”

“Not exactly. Fritz was Jewish. And his wife was so mortified at what her husband did she took his service revolver and shot herself in their front garden. After that Fritz renounced his Hebraic roots and tried to join the Nazis. They wouldn’t have him. He lived long enough to see his relatives die from the chemical he invented, then suffered a massive heart attack fleeing the country.”

“Jesus. That’s kind of the gold standard for self-hating Jew. How do you even know that?”

“I told you, I was a morbid child. I wanted to be Jewish.”

“So you read this when you were a kid?”

“Okay, I lied. Sort of. I was fascinated with that stuff growing up. But after you mentioned Mengele, I went on the Web. It’s like, there are the horror stories you expect—the big stuff, like the camps, like genocide—and then there are all the twisted sideshows. Like Fritz fucking Haber. When I saw Mrs. Zell, I flashed on Clara Haber. What woman wants to be married to a collaborator—even fifty years after the war?”

“You think Dinah knew?”

“She could have.”

As we talked, Tina handed me two plastic bags and pointed to my shoes. “It’s too late,” I said. “I’ve already walked around.”

“Just put these on. It’ll hide your prints. Give the forensics team one more thing to think about.
‘How did the guy disappear from the middle of the room?’
”

“You really think that’ll work?” I held on to Tina’s shoulder and still nearly lost my balance putting the bags on.

“It’s science,” she said, handing me two pink rubber bands to keep the baggies from falling off.

“Oh well, never mind,” I said, sealing my pants around the ankles. “But I don’t buy the convulsion theory. Unless she strangled herself, it doesn’t hold up.”

“So maybe somebody interrupted her suicide and killed her. Like in
Magnolia,
when the guy jumps out a window and gets shot on the way down. Which still doesn’t explain how you know what’s in her purse, sweetheart.”

“For Christ’s sake, I told you. We met on the plane. She was some kind of Chasid groupie.”

“Hole-in-the-sheet, right?”

“Is that something women fantasize about?”

“There’s nothing somebody doesn’t fantasize about.” Suddenly her face lit up. “Wait, it’s perfect!”

I knew that look, and I wasn’t thrilled about it. “
What’s
perfect?” I asked.

By way of reply, she hooked one baggied toe on a corner of the blanket and tugged, dragging the baby-blue bedding onto the baby-blue floor. Then she worked her foot into the sheet and pulled it back onto the bed and over the body. Sure enough, a tennis-ball-sized circle of skin was visible over Mrs. Zell’s wrong-way ribs.

“You know,” I said, trying to ignore the body beneath and focus on that perfectly scissored hole, “this isn’t actually the way the Orthodox do it.”

“Her bed,” said Tina, “her fantasy.”

“It’s really Mrs. Zell?”

“Third of three. You should have checked her driver’s license when you were scoping her drugs. Her pictures are all over Zell’s study.”

“So you really think she killed herself?”

“Well, you do have an effect on women.”

A thought elbowed its way into my brain: Tina somehow gets wind of me and Dinah on the plane. Tina gets wrong idea. Tina heads over and kills Mrs. Zell in horrible fashion and, now that I’m here, has the chance to take it a step further—to either frame me for Mrs. Z’s homicide or go “full Marvin,” i.e., murder me the way she’d murdered her first husband, the ill-fated Marvin.

“Baby,” I said, “you didn’t…you know?”

What’s the sensitive way of asking your ex-wife if she savagely mutilated and killed a dead woman you’re both staring at?

“Do this? No.” Tina pointed to my feet. “Honey, your baggie’s slipping.”

Her tone was matter-of-fact. I might have asked if she ate the last slice of pie.

I felt a strange kind of admiration as I watched Tina pluck a few Kleenex out of a box by the bed and start to wipe things down: the nightstand, the headboard, the light switch. Then the bathroom, where she attacked the sink and toilet.

“Under the seat,” she said, lifting and lowering, “the one place bad guys always forget. I saw it on
CSI.
”

“How would people fight crime without prime-time television?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but one wrong move and I’m going to be on Court TV explaining why I’m in Harry Zell’s house. With you as my character witness.”

“Is my character that bad?”

“I think it’s sterling. But on paper you’re a little sketchy.”

“Forget I asked. What are you really doing here?”

“I told you, I
really
wanted to find out about the man who hired us—make sure he pays.”

“No, I mean now. What are you doing? Why are you fucking around with the body?”

“Why are you asking me so many questions?”

“You don’t think it’s questionable?” Whatever calm I had was beginning to curl at the edges. “And speaking of questionable, I still don’t know what happened to you in the minivan.”

“What happened to
me
? You’re the one who disappeared.”

“I disappeared? Is that what you call getting hit on the head, dragged out of the Christian ho van and locked to my trailer toilet?”

Dinah’s still-open eyes held me fast. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of being judged by a corpse. I stepped over to close her eyes, but the lids wouldn’t stay down. They kept flying back open like tenement blinds. Finally I closed them again and pressed down on her lids, but not too hard. It felt a little like pressing on a chocolate-covered cherry. I imagined the lifetime of horror in store if I accidentally caused postmortem eyeball burst. But I couldn’t take her unblinking stare. I eased my fingers off the lids and they stayed shut for a few seconds. Then the left one opened up halfway and stayed there, so it looked, despite her fatal mutilation, like she was only pretending to be dead and was trying to keep an eye on things.

I heard myself gulp and tore my gaze away from the peeking dead woman, back to Tina. “This is the wrong place for a fight,” I said. “We need to think.”

Tina stopped what she was doing and nodded. “I agree.”

“Okay, good. So what do we have? Basically, the guy has a dead wife with a kosher sex fetish.”

“That’s not all we have.”

Tina opened her purse and pulled out a framed photo. Twin brothers. Pimply thirteen-year-olds. Teenagers. One buff, one slender, in matching talliths and yarmulkes. They flanked their father and his new bride, the late Mrs. Zell, in an elaborate powder-blue dress. The buff brother held a Torah in his arms, resting the scrolls against his shoulder like he was burping a baby.

“Look familiar?”

I squinted. “I’m not sure. I think that’s Temple Beth El. The one where you have to know Barbra Streisand to get seats for the High Holidays. I’ve seen it in the paper.”

“I’m not talking about the temple, you idiot. I mean the boys. Remind you of anyone? Check the one on the left.”

“Bernstein! Jesus Christ…I’m surprised you recognized him with his clothes on.”

“Manny, let it go,” she said. “It was part of the job. Anyway, that’s not what makes him hard to recognize. He’s got hair. And no glasses.”

“Not to mention no neck ink.”

“I think they save the neck ink till after the Bar Mitzvah. Or maybe Reform’s different. It
is
his Bar Mitzvah, right?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s their dad’s wedding.” I searched the photo for clues. The rabbi wore a
shmidok
just like mine, a fellow tribesman. “That’s a pretty fancy dress. Maybe it was a Bar Mitzvah/wedding combo. ‘Today I am a man—and my father just married a sheet-hole-crazy shiksa.’”

“Imagine what that must do to a boy.”

“Well, in Bernstein’s case, it set him on the happy road to San Quentin and the ALS. But the other one.” I tapped my finger on the second brother’s face. Something about the tilt of the head, the cast of the eyes, how he peered up at his brother…the perpetually unheralded second son.

Then it clicked.

“Wait!”
I took the photo and studied it closer, angling it to catch the light. “That’s Davey! He’s in my class—or what’s left of him. He tried to blow himself away but only got the bottom of his face. He’s a medical miracle. Mengele operated on him.”

“Mengele does surgery in prison?”

Tina had just finished wiping the place down. I observed her, fighting powder-blue seasickness. “We really should leave,” I said.

Tina took a last swipe at the bathroom doorknob. “We are leaving. Answer the question. Do they let that genocidal freak do surgery?”

“Yeah, I think he gets to operate. There’s a whole other world in there.”

I grabbed a Kleenex from the “designer” box by the bed. It showed a Currier and Ives–inspired winter scene: a covered bridge in New England, a wagon with Mom, Dad and two towheaded children on the way to Grandmother’s house. NO JEWS HERE might as well have been inscribed under the sheet count.

“Did you say something?”

“Mumbling.” I covered the sliding lock on the garden door with a designer Kleenex and unlocked it. Then I remembered. “He’s also doing RDP.”

“Rapid detox? He’s curing junkies up there?”

“He got one of them off junk. I don’t know if that’s the same as curing. Nobody I know ever stayed clean without kicking. Anyway, we need to leave. Someone’s bound to wander back here.”

“Who? The maid’s high as a Ping-Pong ball, and the boys are in San Quentin.”

“What about Zell?”

“He’s up there, too,” she said. “I saw a receipt for a plane ticket.”

“Man, how much more of that place is there to film?”

“Maybe he’s not shooting prisoners.”

“Then what is he doing?”

“Mengele,” we both said at once.

Tina eagle-eyed a piece of white lint on the carpet—anything not powder blue stood out boldly—and crouched to pick it up.

“You’re really wearing the full Jew, aren’t you? I’d kind of like to fuck you in it. This is the closest you’ve ever looked to innocent.”

I stared over Tina’s head back at Dinah—still sprawled on her blue bed, body down and face up. I was conflicted, to say the least. Then the phone rang. Tina pulled away. I shook my head “
No!”

Tina ignored me and answered.

“Zell residence,” she said, sounding Russian. She put a finger to her lips. “Mmm-hmm. Mmmm-hmm. All right, I tell him.”

She hung up and shrugged. “Somebody named Mendel. Zell’s yarmulke is ready.”

“Nice accent. You’re so good at this.”

“First thing they tell you in acting class. Pretend the situation is real.”

“What’s that like?” I said, cracking the garden door a little wider. A stone path led through the beits and alephs and zaftig topiary ladies. I wondered what the gardeners thought.

“Anybody home?”

I recognized the halting Russian accent of my driver, Jack. Tina grabbed the clamshell trash can over her head and rushed behind the bedroom door. He walked in and she slammed the can down on his skull. Jack blinked at me, perplexed. As he crumbled, Tina pushed him. He landed on the bed, on top of the late Mrs. Zell’s middle.