Open Season (Alex Delaware #40)

Chapter 5

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 screamed by-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 Aviv was 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?”

“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 did not overdose.”

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.”

Milo said, “It could help us find out what happened to her?”

“I don’t see—okay, nothing drama but she got more into…being an actress than being a friend. She did it in high school and thought she could do it for a job.”

“Ah,” said Milo. “And that made her…”

“Not here. For all of us.”

“Busy.”

“Yes,” said Beth Halperin. “But more than that. Busy here. ” She tapped her head.

I said, “Distracted.”

She was digesting that when the door opened and a beautiful olive-skinned, red-haired woman in a black cowl-necked sweater, black tights, and black flats stepped in and froze.

“Beth? What’s going on?”

“Marissa is dead!”

“What!”

“Dead! They are police!”

Yolanda Echeverria’s black eyes rounded. She dropped her purse to the floor and teetered.

We got up ready to catch her but she remained on her feet. I retrieved the purse and set it down on an iffy table.

“I…don’t understand.”

Milo said, “Why don’t you get off your feet.”

He guided her to the sectional, waited until she’d settled next to Beth Halperin. Then he explained.

She said, “O.D.? She never took anything.”

Beth said, “That’s what I tell him.”

Milo opened his case and produced Joe Beef’s photo. “This is the last person she was photographed with. Do you know him?”

The women looked at each other.

Beth Halperin said, “Maybe the producer?”

Yoli Echeverria said, “That’s what I was thinking.”

Milo said, “Marissa told you she’d met a producer.”

Twin nods.

Yoli Echeverria said, “We told her be careful.”

Beth Halperin said, “I think to myself it is stupid.”

I said, “Stupid how?”

“What?” she said. “All the time she gets nothing except a few extras—”

“Non-union stuff,” said Yoli. “Like no real money.”

Beth said, “Exactly. Then she meets a producer and he’s going to give her an actress job?”

“She was so so happy,” said Yoli. “I didn’t want to burst her bubble.”

“I told her,” said Beth. “She yelled at me. That’s the last time we spoke.”

“Oh,” said Yoli. “Sorry.”

They looked at each other again.

Tears flowed. Lots of them.

—

We spent a few more minutes, Milo asking the right questions, repeating some of them. Learning only that mention of “the producer” had come up a week before Marissa’s death.

“First time we heard from her in like a week, two, I dunno,” said Yoli.

Beth said, “She is telling us she is right and we are wrong.”

I said, “When’s the last time you saw her?”

Another ocular consultation.

Yoli said, “Two and a half weeks ago?”

Beth said, “About. Before she told us about him. It was an opening.”

“Of?”

“A clothes place,” said Yoli. “Mama Baba on Melrose. She said they needed girls for pictures but when we showed up, they took like one picture.”

“Of her,” said Beth. “Show them.”

Yoli retrieved her purse and scrolled her phone.

One of the images we’d already seen. Marissa at the center, Yoli to the left.

Beth said, “We left fast.”

“Crazy,” said Yoli.

“Stupid,” said Beth. Sharpness in her voice. She realized it and slapped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry. Not her fault. It’s wanting something too much. But you don’t do that.”

I said, “Go to openings?”

“No, I mean him.” Forming air quotes. “He say he’s a producer so you just go? He killed her?”

Milo said, “We really don’t know much yet. Anyone else you can think of who might want to take advantage of her?”

“Probably a lot of guys,” said Yoli. “It’s that way anytime you go out.”

“Did Marissa complain about anyone?”

“Uh-uh.” She looked at Beth.

Beth said, “Not to me.”

Yoli said, “We always thought she was fearless.”

“Okay, thanks—do you think Tori and Bethany would have anything to add?”

“Probably not,” said Yoli. “We’ll ask them. If they have something, they’ll call you, what’s your number?”

Milo handed out two cards.

Yoli said, “Homicide. Ecchh.”

Milo said, “How can we reach Marissa’s family?”

“There isn’t one, not really. She never knew her dad and her mom died like…three years ago. Some sort of neurological thing, she didn’t want to talk about it. There’s an aunt, she mentioned an aunt. I’ll see if Tori and Bethany know about her.”

“I’d really appreciate that, Yoli. Thanks for your time.”

We stood.

Beth Halperin said, “At the border I used to hear rockets explode. This is worse.”

—

Out in the car, Milo said, “Fake movie producer, makes sense, everything’s falling into place. When we get back I find out who her phone carrier is, put in the affidavit for the subpoena, see who she talked to before she died, and hopefully come up with a name. Once I get a name, I go back to the databases and if they don’t tell me anything, I recheck with Leary because sleazy is sleazy, you never know, maybe the bastard got busted for something but didn’t get charged.”

Long oration.

He turned to me. “That’s the plan. Comments?”

I was forming the word “None” when his phone rang.

The screen said Petra.

He switched to speaker. “What’s up, kid?”

She explained.

“The plan” was now a thing of the past.