I sip the coffee, light and sweet.
“I really tried to help Claire. She was lost out here. Her husband was making money and she didn’t know what to do with it. I told her to get a housekeeper and not be so chained to the kids. But the truth is, she was chained to Randall. Totally dependent on him. Nurse and doctor, over and out.”
“Did she follow your advice?”
“Oh, drop dead, I was her best friend, she called me ten times a day! Our housekeepers were friends, our kids played together — but I’m so mad at her now.”
‘Why?”
“She just stopped calling. A cold shot out of the blue, right after Dee-Dee’s fourth birthday. Suddenly she started making up excuses and stood me up four times in a row. Remember in seventh grade when your best friend stopped talking to you for no reason? That’s how it felt, and it hurt.”
“Did you ask what was going on?”
“She said she was busy.” Teddy Feign shakes her head, “I’m busy. I gave up my Saturday to take her shopping. She buys all this great stuff at Neiman’s, takes everything back. Why bother?”
Teddy Feign rests her chin on her hand like a teenager, still stung by the rejection.
“Claire was stuck back in Massachusetts. Randall thrived in California.”
“Why is that?”
“Both his parents are doctors.” She raises her eyebrows. Do I get it? “We’re talking major pressure. Randall comes off low-key, but he is driven. I mean, look: they’ve been out here less than two years and already he’s one of the top orthopods in the city.”
The door swings open. Teddy Feign is so wound up she startles in her own kitchen.
A little girl bursts in.
“This is Diedre. Watch the water, honey.”
Diedre is wearing a pair of overalls and Minnie Mouse boots, and has a sassy chin-length haircut, along with a pint-sized sense of entitlement.
“Pleased to meet you,” she chirps with her chin in the air and I think, When she’s fifteen, Teddy Feign doesn’t have a chance.
Diedre is followed by an older woman.
“Reyna says we can play in the puddles,” the girl announces.
“Hey, that’ll be fun,” cries Teddy Feign, jiggling her daughter into a smile. She introduces me to Reyna, who shakes my hand. Plump, maybe sixty years old, Reyna is clearly a cut above the other housekeepers. She speaks without an accent and wears a tan belted dress with low matching heels, tinted brown hair, and fashionable glasses in gold frames.
“It’s almost stopped raining and Dee-Dee is tired of playing in her room.”
“Good idea.”
I like Reyna’s stately competence. I like the way she strokes Dee-Dee’s hair.
“Take a pair of my boots,” Teddy Feign offers. “Reyna and I have the same size feet!” She says this with a bright grin, as if that miraculous connection bridges all the gaps between them.
Reyna is matter-of-fact. “Thank you. Come on, Dee-Dee, let’s see which pair of Mommy’s boots Reyna can wear.”
She takes the child by the hand and helps her slide off her mother’s lap, leaving us with a polite smile.
I am glad my cousin had a friend like Reyna in America.
The rain has lightened to a fine mist with just enough force to put a slant into it. The air is saturated with humidity and outside the deep green foliage is motionless, drooping straight down with the weight of the water.
The flow down the walls in the closet has abated and the maid in uniform has one more armful of wet dish towels and pot holders to clear away.
“What do you know about Dr. Eberhardt’s relationship with Jayne Mason?”
“It was big news when Jayne became his client. She adored Randall, used him for every little thing. That’s the reason he couldn’t come to Dee-Dee’s party — he had to go out to
“Was Claire jealous?”
“She didn’t know what to make of it. Whenever Jayne called the house she’d freeze. I told her to
The phone rings.
“Hi, doll, I’ll have to call you back,” Teddy Feign sings, full of cockiness, “I’m talking to the FBI.”
With all the solemn authority of the Bureau, I admonish her sternly not to go around blabbing our conversation to the world.
“I’m sorry.” She is immediately abashed, her fragile self-confidence fractured, “I promise I won’t.”
Embarrassed, she opens a drawer and pulls out an accordion-file envelope.
“Now I’ve got to get that electrician back to fix the lights in the closet
“Why do I know that name?”
“Claire gave him to me. They went to high school together back in Boston. He worked with Dirk on the remodel.” Suddenly indignant about the unanswered phone call,
Now I recall Kathy Donovan telling me about Claire’s old boyfriend, how they’d given her his number out in Venice as a joke. So this is the second time Warren Speca’s name has come up in connection to Claire Eberhardt. One of the skills you learn at the academy is how to memorize an address off a card, upside down.
Outside we can see Diedre piling wet sand on the sliding pond of a redwood play structure while Reyna watches from under an umbrella, wearing a pair of knee-high riding boots.
“When I told her to take my boots I didn’t mean my four-hundred-dollar Ralph Laurens, Jesus Christ.” Teddy Feign sighs. Then, despairing of the water damage to her pristine walls and newly sanded floors, “What am I supposed to do?”
“Wait for Dirk.”
• • •
The route back along San Vicente is blocked by fallen trees. An emergency crew is diverting cars along the residential streets. I follow a long line of traffic moving slowly past Poppy’s old house on Twelfth.
The For Sale sign is still out front and the place looks even more shrunken and forlorn in the rain. This time I don’t stop, but a memory comes with me.
I am on my knees on the hardwood floor of the living room. It is a dark Saturday morning and I can see the rain through the lace curtains on the narrow windows on either side of the front door. Yesterday I was five minutes late coming home from school and my grandfather is punishing me by forcing me to kneel in front of the television with the set turned off so I cannot watch my favorite programs. My mother comes and goes past the doorway but says nothing. I stare at the empty green screen. My knees ache. They have been pressing against the hard wood for a long time.
Suddenly I am pulling in to the garage at Bureau headquarters in Westwood. I don’t know how I got there or how, in the dry safety of the car, my cheeks became so wet.
FIFTEEN
IN LOS ANGELES there are seven days out of the year that are so spectacular you feel lucky to be alive … and to own a convertible that is running again.
The days come after a rain or a fierce blow by the Santa Ana winds has blasted all the muck out of the
