“Not since I am knowing her. She told me she took them in high school and it messed her up. She drank a Sea Breeze, that’s all. Maybe sometimes another cocktail. But only one, she wanted to be in control.”
“Sea Breeze.”
“Vodka and cranberry juice, I think they are disgusting. Mostly she held them to look like she was drinking. She didnotoverdose.”
Milo leaned forward. “Beth, I’m a homicide detective.”
“Yes, I know that, I googled you.”
“The point is she may not have known she overdosed.”
A second of silence, then: “Oh.”
Beth Halperin’s hands separated and relaced around her right knee, bending her forward. She rocked a couple of times, stopped, sat up straight, and looked away from us.
“Stupid, stupid, I got…mevulbal…confused.”
“Understandable, Beth. How’d you and Marissa meet?”
“She knew Yoli—my roommate—from high school.”
“Which high school?”
“Here. Reseda.”
“Did Bethany and Tori also go there?”
“Yes—you talked to them?”
“Not yet. Marissa listed the four of you as her friends.”
“Okay. Yes. They were friends from a long time. I started rooming with Yoli and they didn’t know me. But later they accept me.”
“You earned your stripes.”
Beth Halperin smiled. “Stripes I earned in the army. Three.”
“You made sergeant.”
“It’s not hard. I ran a kitchen near the Lebanon border. That’s where I met Oded. A guy. He was a lieutenant. After the army, we traveled and he came here to go to engineering school.”
Her hands flew apart again and re-formed as white-knuckle fists. “Then he said bye-bye and I’m here, so I look for a place to cook and go to Sweet James in Canoga Park, Yoli is a waitress and her roommate left her with all the rent so I move in with her.”
“We’re talking a while back.”
“Two years. I’m returning to Israel in August.”
“So you met Marissa—”
“After that. Maybe…twenty months.”
“What can you tell us about her?”
“Nice,” she said.
I said, “But you weren’t close.”
Her lips screwed up. “She is dead, I don’t want to…to say.”
