The Muffia (24 page)

“Odd how?”

“Odd with
you
. Odd that I feel like I’m competing with your mother. Odd that you wouldn’t think to call last night—”

“You aborted the mission!” he protested.

“Odd that you didn’t think I’d be worried about you, even though I aborted the mission, and call. And I don’t feel like it’s my job to tell you that these things might make a girl feel odd. Sorry, but that’s it.”

“It was the phone job, wasn’t it? If I’d known I—”

“It’s not the phone sex. I mean, all right, the phone sex makes me feel a little odd now, but it’s not only the phone sex.”

“What do you mean it’s not only the phone sex?”

He wasn’t a bad person, but it was as if he hadn’t heard me, hadn’t taken in how I felt at all.  “Nothing,” I said, not wanting to prolong the futility. “I’m glad you called to tell me you’re all right.”

“I’ll call you when I get back?”

“Sure,” I said. And even though the subtext was probably lost on him, what I was really saying was,
“Don’t bother
.”

Chapter 33

“Fourteen-fourteen Mockingbird Lane,” Jelicka said with a faux-eerie tone that worked in counterpoint to the sunshine as I negotiated the Prius through the narrow streets of the Hollywood hills. Cars were parked in any available spot with no regard to other vehicles that might need to get by, while fallen plastic bins for garbage, recycling and lawn debris created an obstacle course on this windy day.

I groaned. “You have quality sex for the first time in however many years and you’re making jokes about something inherently
not
funny.”

“I thought it was funny.”

“Besides,” I said, “the
Munster
family lived at thirteen-thirteen.”

“Really? I watched that show like it was homework.”

Jelicka seemed oblivious to the magnitude of what we were planning to do, which was to break into Nissim and ZsaZsi’s house. She’d been dogging me about it ever since the previous aborted attempt during Berggren’s dinner party a few days earlier. This time, I’d reluctantly agreed to join her—more out of worry for her than anything else.

“I don’t feel good about this,” I said.

“What do you mean? Do you think they’re home?”

“No, they don’t work at home. ZsaZsi told me when I met her that she sometimes makes calls before she leaves in the morning, but she’s always out of the house by noon, and it’s—” I looked at my watch. “It’s two.

“So we’re good,” Jelicka said.

“No. We’re not
good
. I need to know you’re going to start being serious.”

“I
am
being serious.”

“You’re not focused.”

“I
am
. Focused just looks different on me.”

I pulled over behind a van to allow a mattress delivery truck to pass and looked at her intently. “What we’re planning on doing here is dangerous—not funny.”

“But it might be
fun
,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

“Not really, no. Exciting and dangerous, possibly. Not fun.”

Pulling the car from behind the van, we continued traveling up and up some more. My little hybrid might be good on gas, but it sure is gutless on steep hills.

“Maybe I just feel good, you know?” she said. “Because of the sex. And the sex
was
good. But that’s not why I’m in a good mood. I’m in a good mood because we are possibly doing the world a service.”

“I’m happy for you, Jel, really. You needed to get laid. Just don’t confuse the post-coital glow with being invincible. Having great sex does not equal the cloak of invisibility—or whatever.” I didn’t want to be a total downer but come
on
—doing the world a service?

“From your tension level, Madelyn, I’d say the good sex you enjoyed not so long ago has worn off and you need another dose yourself.”

“Thanks for pointing that out.”  I
was
wound up, but even if I’d just come from a satisfying romp with a very alive Udi, I’d still be worried about searching the house of an ex-assassin, even one I knew.

“What can I say?” Jelicka said cheerily. “Regardless of whether or not there’s a deadly plot afoot, I will not let it get me down.” Then she started
doo-doo-doo-ing
The Munsters
theme song and I had visions of Herman, Grandpa and Eddie hopping on for the ride, when she stopped mid-
doo
. "Did you know Al Lewis’s cousin was married to my mother-in-law at one time?”

What was she talking about?
Then an
oh-my-God
recollection from years ago reared its ugly head: Hadn’t Jelicka once been diagnosed with a mild bi-polar disorder?
Yes!
She was having a manic episode. This was getting worse by the minute.

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I think we should turn around. This is suicide. You don’t have a child. But if I die, Lila won’t have a mother. Let some person whose job it is figure out if Nissim is plotting something terrible.”

“We could have asked your friend Cullen, the masturbator’s friend, to join us.”

“No, we couldn’t. And please don’t call him the masturbator’s friend. It was just that one time and—”

“That you
know
of.”

“Fine, that I know of.” It didn’t much matter if Cullen was a repeat phone-sex offender.

“If he was good at talking you off he’s done it before.”

“What does that mean? That I’m tough to talk off? Whatever—he’s unavailable. He went to the Middle East with his mother,” I said, trying to put an end to the topic.

“Another guy from the Middle East? What’s with you and the Middle East?”

“Cullen’s not
from
the Middle East. He’s just visiting Egypt and Turkey.”

“Turkey. . . now there's a bizarre place. Remember that book we read? Or
tried
to?”

I’d been the Muff who hosted an evening for a book by Orhan Pamuk that was set in a remote part of Turkey and told the heartbreaking story of young teenage girls being driven to suicide, among other things. I’d loved it but most of the other Cliterati hadn’t read it. After that we decided we should only read books under two hundred and fifty pages.

“It was called
Snow
. But that took place in Kars—way east. Cullen and his mom are going to Istanbul and then up the Turquoise coast to see all the ruins.”

“Who needs him anyway?” she offered. Then something caught her eye and her head did a one-eighty. “That was it—twenty-five sixty-one. Some house.”

The house was cute, in a mixed up kind of way—probably built in the 1970s and “updated,” which in LA often means architectural confusion of some kind. Large anodized pieces of aluminum protruded at “artistic” angles from the roof and the tiny graveled front garden was suggestive of a miniaturized metal Stonehenge. The front walkway was lined with a row of glass cubes sitting atop a lime-green stucco wall, which asymmetrically matched the glass cubes in two of the windows. The house itself had been painted slate grey and might have been mysterious at night. But during the day it just looked drab. The overall affect was less-than-pleasing to the eye.

“Let’s park down the street a little, then we can walk back up to the house undetected.”

She had a point and I had to apply some of my mediation training about peoples’ different communication and reasoning patterns, which I’ve been known to forget when my own emotions get involved. One of the behaviors we’re taught to observe is that when something’s important to a person, he often gets locked into thinking there’s a right and a wrong way to handle it—childrearing, war, home invasion: it becomes a
my way or the highway
kind of thing, even if on a conscious level someone is willing to admit that intelligent minds can differ. We're also trained to look at why people become entrenched in their own belief systems—whether they’ve acquired those systems as a result of their parents, school, life experience, fear (actually I've come to believe that fear drives most human behavior)—so as to acknowledge it and hopefully move beyond it. But when you're in a relationship, the theory can get muddied with the reality and you're just confronted with the vast differences between people. When I’m mediating
other
peoples’ disputes, I can be empathic about each of the parties’ entrenched positions and try to help them move off them, while having no vested interest in the outcome. I am, however, not nearly as successful in applying these theories to myself.

“You probably think I’m having one of my bi-polar episodes, but I want you to know I haven’t had one of those in years. Honest. I’m religious about the meds.”

I stared hard into her eyes. We’d come this far, I thought.
What could it hurt to walk around the house and look in the windows?

Once the Prius was wedged between a Peugeot and a Porsche, we got out and walked back up the hill a few hundred yards. It was another gorgeous southern California day that makes most people feel glad to be alive, but which can also make some residents fear their luck won’t last and that an earthquake is imminent.

When we reached the house, Jelicka motioned me around the side.  “They always put keys under flower pots.”

“Shhhh—” I shhhhed. “Who does?”

“People!”

“Not everybody,” I whispered. “I don’t.”

“I do!” she whispered louder, about to pick up one of several bright green flowerpots that perfectly matched the walls.

“Wait! Gloves.” I pulled two pair of leather gloves from my bag and handed her a pair.

“What about under mats or on ledges?” I asked. “People put keys there, too.”

“On TV maybe,” she said.

“In real life,” I protested in an even louder whisper, though it seemed silly to argue about where to search for the key to a house we shouldn’t have been looking for a key to in the first place.

“So look already,” she said, picking up a pot then placing it down in a different spot.

“Always put stuff back exactly where you found it.” How could she not know this basic rule of snooping?

“I thought I did,” said Jelicka, mystified, as I nudged the pot a few inches further from her.

This was exactly what I was worried about—okay, one of the things.

Feeling above the door, I found nothing except dirt and soot, and there was no mat to even look under.

Meanwhile Jelicka looked under the last of the flowerpots. “No key,” she announced.

“So much for that theory,” I said, moving all the pots back to where they’d come from. “Better we just peek in the windows anyway.”

“Don’t worry. I have this.” She whipped out what looked like a miniature screwdriver set.

Glowering at her, I said, “Please tell me that’s not a lock-pick kit.”

“I could tell you that, but it would be a lie.”

I stopped. There’d been a sound and neither of us had made it. “Shhh,” I warned, touching my ear.

“What is this, charades? We’re trying to get into the house,” Jelicka said, opening her kit.

“Shhh. I heard something.”

Jelicka listened for five seconds before she walked over to the door with me close behind.

“How do you know how to pick a lock?” I asked.

“How hard can it be? I see them use these things on TV everyday.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say.”

“Don’t start with me again. I’m taking this seriously.”

She knelt down and began futzing with the lock, trying various long pieces of metal. The locks looked as old as the house—the original house—not what you’d think a Mossad agent in the twenty-first century would use to keep people out.

“I’d say these locks suggest there’s nothing nefarious going on, Jelicka. Which means it might be a good time to leave.”

“Possibly.”

“Do you come by all this knowledge from writing screenplays or just from watching crime shows?”

“Both. And before that there was
Harriet the Spy
,
Nancy Drew
and the original
Bionic Woman
. I wanted to be a spy but I didn’t like the training, so I kind of trained myself in a way that still permitted me to shop and have weekly manicures. I should have taken lock-picking though. And I could be a better swimmer. I
am
good with a Glock, however.”

“Don’t tell me you brought a gun. We’re already breaking and entering. We don’t need to add armed robbery.”

“You won’t say that if we find something.”

“Where is it?” I asked gravely.

“Purse,” said Jelicka, inserting another long pick into the lock and poking around.

I slowly lifted what looked like a real gun from her Alexander McQueen handbag then carefully placed it back with a shudder.

“This is harder than it...ouch.” Jelicka dropped the pick and gripped her right index finger—the finger
nail
to be specific—which was hanging by an acrylic thread. “Goddamn it, I just had these covers put on.”

“Maybe they’re not designed to stand up to the rigors of lock-picking,” I said.

We’d made no headway in the roughly ten minutes she’d been working on the lock and I was ready to call an end to the escapade when, from behind us, came a voice:

“Hullo, there. Can I help you with somethin’?”

Jelicka dropped her nail tip and we both wheeled around to face a grizzled man who had to be seventy, if a day. He wore tie-dyed pirate pants, a black beater and the expression of someone who enjoyed a daily bong hit.

“Good afternoon,” I said, casually taking off my gloves and extending my hand to shake his. Fortunately, I’d prepared for a nosy neighbor and had my story ready. “Gail Russell, Century Twenty-one. How are you?”

“Ain’t that that big real estate racket? Whatch doin’ back here?”

“We were just trying to determine the best place for the lock box, Mr.—” Jelicka had by this point stood up next to me, smiling broadly. She and I were both dressed in upscale street clothes and, other than the fact our behavior might be perceived as questionable, we seemed like normal women.