A Playdate With Death Read Online Free PDF

dark-haired woman seated next to Bobby’s mother and to a tall, stooped man with an oversized nose sitting on the couch and leafing through a magazine.
    “Did he just have the one brother?”
    “Yeah, David. Dot com David.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Didn’t you know? David is Cyberjet. The Internet portal? He’s worth like a hundred million dollars, even after the crash.”
    “Wow,” I said, delighted to have found someone at once close to the family and indiscreet.
    “Wasn’t Bobby getting married?” I said. “Where’s his fiancée?”
    Larry snorted. “Betsy? No way Arthur and Leslie would ever let her into the house. She’s a drug fiend. And, anyway,
I’m
betting she had something to do with Bobby’s death.”
    “Really?” I asked. “I thought it was suicide.”
    “Who’s to say she didn’t drive him to it? Anyway, the cops haven’t ruled out murder.”
    That explained their insistence on getting a statement from Betsy. “Do the police consider the fiancée a suspect?”
    “Probably. At the very least, she drove him to it. That’s what Arthur and Leslie think, anyway. Like I said, she’s a drug fiend.”
    “Didn’t Bobby and Betsy meet in recovery?”
    He snorted. “I wouldn’t mention that around here if I were you. We’re not allowed to talk about Bobby’s little problem. The most Arthur and Leslie will admit is that he had a period of ‘youthful indiscretion.’”
    At that moment, Larry’s wife joined us. She, like her mother, was slim and dark-haired. Her mascara was smudged and her nose tinged with red. She looped her arm through her husband’s and smiled at me wanly.
    “I’m Juliet. I was a client of Bobby’s,” I said.
    “Thanks so much for coming. It really means a lot to myparents, to all of us, that so many of Bobby’s colleagues and clients came today,” she said.
    “He was a lovely guy,” I told her, feeling my eyes fill.
    “He was. He really was.” The tears flowed freely down her cheeks. “He’s always had just the biggest heart. He was the kind of kid who brought home stray cats and lost dogs.”
    Larry shook his head. “Gee, your mom must have just loved that.”
    Michelle smiled through her tears. “Oh, she went ballistic. He’d hide them in his room until one of the cleaning ladies would find them and tell my mother. Once he hid a rat in his closet for like a month. And not a white rat, either. A big gray street rat. Then, one day while he was at school and Lisa was home from college, she was digging around his room for something or other, and she opened up this plastic shoe box with holes punched in the top. She started screaming and ended up kicking the box over and the thing got loose. My mother had the exterminators in within an hour, and there was rat poison all over our house for days. They never caught the rat, though. He’s probably still living in the basement.”
    We made small talk for a while longer, during the course of which Michelle told me what Bobby had already told me months before: Their parents were both doctors. Their father was a surgeon and their mother a pathologist on the faculty at UCLA. The girls had followed in their footsteps. Lisa, the older sister, and her husband Mitch had an obstetrical practice in the Valley. Michelle, a research scientist with both an M.D. and a Ph.D., was a statistical geneticist with Biogenet,a biotech company that specialized in creating disease-resistant seed.
    “Wow,” I said. “A doctor, a scientist, and an Internet entrepreneur. It can’t have been easy competing with you guys.”
    “No,” she admitted, “but then Bobby didn’t really try to compete. He wasn’t academically inclined. From the time he was a little kid, he said he was going to be an actor. That’s all he really wanted. He didn’t even go to college.”
    “That must have been something of a disappointment for your parents.”
    “I guess so, but then they never really expected that much from him. I mean, not academically.