“Dead!” A loud wail caused him to distance the phone from his ear. “No way!”
“I’m afraid so. She died last night—”
A gasp. “No!”
“Is there any way we could talk about Marissa?”
“Okay, yes, sure, yes,” said Beth Halperin. “I will leave now, I cannot do soufflé like this—Marie-Claire? I am leaving…no, no, I have to…a friend has died…do what youwant,I amgoing.”
Milo said, “Where can we meet?”
“I’m going home.” She rattled off an address on Amigo Avenue.
Milo said, “That’s Reseda?”
“Do a GPS.”
Chapter
5
We left just before two, hit merciful traffic on the 101, and arrived thirty-two minutes later.
Beth Halperin lived in a custard-colored cube with a low-peaked tar roof that evoked a five-year-old’s drawing of a house. Gray pebbles in place of a lawn. No greenery visible beyond the cracked driveway hosting an older black Celica.
More of the same on the rest of the block. Bungalows built for aircraft workers in the fifties.
Milo said, “Amigo Avenue. You spot any signs of friendliness?”
During the drive, I’d found the property listed on a rental agency website. A thousand square feet on a cement lot three times that size. No garage but AC, hardwood floors, a granite kitchen, and cable-readiness.
Three thousand a month, six-month lease, and a month’s worth of deposit required. The cost of being young and barely self-supporting in L.A.
Beth Halperin opened a flat gray door wearing a man’s white shirt over black leggings. Since posing for her California I.D., short blond hair had expanded to long and pearly white.
A tattoo in some sort of foreign script ran along her right forearm.The hand at the end of the arm trembled, as did its mate. She laced her fingers to still them and looked us over with huge, pale-blue eyes that lingered on Milo’s olive-green vinyl attaché case. The irises were rimmed in red, a mascara blot smudged her left cheek, a pimple so rosy it had to be fresh had erupted on her chin like a nasty little volcano.
Despite the symptoms of stress, lovely. Same as the other three.
Maybe that had been part of the appeal. The pretty girls hanging together.
Milo introduced us but Beth Halperin didn’t seem to be listening as she stepped back and let us into a small, low living room set up with a black, faux-leather sectional that screamedby-the-month.Aluminum-and-glass tables looked as if they couldn’t withstand a breeze.
“AC” was an ancient louvered box sitting atilt in a window, “hardwood” was cheap gray laminate that extended into a gray kitchenette. Three framed posters hung on custard-colored walls. The Grand Canyon at sunset, adorable penguins huddled on an ice shelf, glossy towers on a beach. In the beach scene,Tel Avivwas emblazoned atop the skyline in wispy white letters meant to emulate skywriting. Or maybe a plane had actually left the message.
Milo said, “Elisheva. That’s an Israeli name?”
Her frown said,Here we go again.“It’s a Hebrew name. The original where they got Elisabeth. So call me Beth.”
“Got it.” He smiled.
Unimpressed, she sat on the shorter arm of the sectional. “What happened to Marissa?”
Milo said, “Can’t get into details but she may have overdosed.”
“Impossible. Marissa did not take drugs.”
“Never?”
