“So why didn’t you like her?”
“Because she tried to psych me out. Right before we went on. Acted friendly to me when the producer was there, all through makeup. But the minute we were alone she sidled in close to me, talking in my ear—almost seductively. Telling me she’d met plenty of actors and every one of them was screwed up psychologically. “Uncomfortable with their identities’ is the way she put it. “Playing roles to feel in control.’ ” He chuckled. “Which is true, but who the hell wants to hear it?”
“Think she was trying to intimidate you?”
“She was definitely trying to intimidate me. And what was the point? It was all phony bullshit. Like TV wrestling. I was the bad guy, she was the good guy. We both knew she’d be tossing my ass on the mat. So why gild the lily?”
Playing roles to feel in control.
Little boxes.
Maybe Hope had seen herself as an actress.
Returning home, I called the producer of the Costa Mesa production. His assistant checked her logs and verified that Karl Neese had, indeed, been onstage the night of the murder.
“Yeah, that was one of our better ones,” she said. “Good ticket sales.”
“Still on?”
“Hardly. Nothing lasts long in California.”
Milo checked in at ten to five. “Any protein in the house?”
“I’m sure I can find something.”
“Start looking. The thrill of the hunt is ripe in my nostrils and I am hungry.”
He sounded exhilarated.
“The visit to the dean was productive?” I said.
“Feed me and I’ll tell you. I’ll be over in half an hour.”
No shortage of protein. Robin and I had just shopped and the new refrigerator was double the capacity of the old one.
I made him a roast beef sandwich. The white kitchen seemed vast. Too big. Too white. I was still getting used to the new house.
The old one had been eighteen hundred square feet of silvered redwood, weathered shingles, tinted glass, and half-mad angles, built from antique materials and recycled wood by a Hungarian artist who’d gone broke in L.A. and returned to Budapest to sell Russian cars.
I’d bought it years ago, seduced by the site: Deep in the foothills north of Beverly Glen and separated from neighbors by a wide patch of thickly wooded, high-table public land, it afforded a privacy that had me encountering more coyotes than people.
The seclusion had proved perfect for the psychopath who burned the house down one dry summer night. Tinder on a foundation, the fire marshal had called it.
Robin and I decided to rebuild. After a couple of false starts with miscreant contractors, she began supervising the construction herself. We ended up with twenty-six hundred square feet of white stucco and gray ceramic roof, whitewashed wood floors and stairs, brass railings, skylights, and as many windows as the energy-conservation regulations would allow. At the rear of the property was the workshop where Robin went happily each morning, accompanied by Spike, our French bulldog. Several old trees had been immolated but we craned in boxed eucalyptus and Canary Island pines and coast redwoods, dug a new Japanese garden and a pond full of young koi.
Robin loved it. The few people we’d had over said it had come out great. Milo’s appraisal was “Tray chick, but I like it anyway.” I nodded and smiled and remembered the slightly moldy smell of old wood in the morning, arthritic casement windows, the creak of foot-polished pine floorboards.
Adding a pickle to Milo’s sandwich, I put the plate back in the giant fridge, brewed some coffee, and reviewed the notes on my most recent custody consultation to Family Court: both parents engineers, two adopted sons, ages three and five. The mother had fled to a dude ranch in Idaho, the father was furious and ill-equipped for child care.
The boys were painfully polite but their drawings said they had a good fix on the situation. The judge who’d referred the case was a capable man but the dolt to whom it had been transferred rarely read reports. Lawyers on both sides were miffed that I didn’t agree with their respective party lines. Lately, Robin and I had started talking about having children of our own.