All or Nothing by Elizabeth Adler Read Free Book Online Page A

milk, two sugars––which, translated from Starbucks language meant a big strong cup of coffee. A cell phone was clutched between her right ear and shoulder and two fingers of her right hand were actually on the wheel––unless, of course, she took a moment out to adjust her lip gloss in the driver’s mirror.
    She was laughing at her girlfriend’s description of her relationship with Al Giraud as “sex and no shopping.” She liked it that way.
    She hung a left and the big car purred up Al’s street and, as if on automatic pilot, into his tiled courtyard. She said good–bye to her friend, switched off the ignition and was out of the car in a flash, purse tucked under her arm, coffee cup still clutched in her left hand.
    Unlike Al, she had no love affair with her automobile. She had never been a poor kid dreaming in the movies of owning a powerful silver beast that would carry her into a different, better, more glamorous world. Marla had been born right here in Beverly Hills. She didn’t know from more glamorous worlds. Hollywood was the place everyone ran away to––not from.
    Not so with Marla’s parents, though. Max and Irina Cwitowitz had found paradise in Beverly Hills, far from the Balkan war zones that had been the basis of life as they knew it. And far from the ragged remnants of family life with too many people dead in battles, or lost and never found in bombed buildings, or scattered over generations by constant wars. When Russia had taken over the Balkans in the division of countries after World War Two, they had both still been children. Homeless, penniless––and fatherless. Their mothers had become friends, shared a pitiful dwelling together in the basement of a bombed–out church. Both women had, when their children were old enough, urged them to escape to another, better life in a free country.
    Max and Irina were married in a secret wedding ceremony, something that made both mothers happy. Then they had left on their dangerous escape route out of the Iron Curtain, knowing they would never see them again. It had been a long, hard road before America opened its welcoming doors to them and granted them citizenship, and before Max’s entrepreneurial side came to the fore and made him, within ten years, a real estate mogul.
    Max Cwitowitz had sold half of Beverly Hills plus a good portion of Bel Air and Brentwood in the forty years he had been in business, and in the process had made himself a tidy fortune. His hope had been that his only child, Marla, would take over the business from him. “Cwitowitz and Daughter” had a nice ring to it. But right from being a babe in arms, Marla had had a mind of her own. Most parents had to push their kids into law school––Marla had actually demanded to go there.
And
she had graduated magna from UCLA, then with a masters in law. And now, she was studying for her doctorate as well as teaching at Pepperdine.
    And now––she also wanted to be a private eye.
    Marla wanted it so bad, it hurt.
    She opened Al’s front door with her own key, called out, “Hi, honey, I’m home,” giggling as she took a sip of the coffee. Costa Rican did not taste too great cold and, pulling a face, she wandered into the kitchen, left the paper cup on the counter and drifted off in search of her man.
    Al’s home was about as spare and masculine as it got. No cushions on the brown leather nail–head–studded chesterfield; no flowers on the glass–topped iron coffee table; no rugs on the shiny hardwood floor. It was clean, though, she had to concede that to him. Manuel Vargas’s cleaning crew came in weekly and left the house looking as though no one lived there. Not a towel unrolled, not a pillow creased, not a dish in the sink. Windows gleamed, floors shone and the bedspread was unwrinkled.
    Al was not home and Marla flung herself on that unwrinkled gray linen bedspread and stretched out, arms over her head, wondering where he was. She kicked off her shoes then sat up and