Bye-Bye, Black Sheep Read online

  “A master of smart, snappy repartee.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Praise for

  THE CRADLE ROBBERS

  “Customary humor . . . dependably tart mommy-track wisecracks.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Witty . . . smart sleuthing.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Human and credible characters—in particular, a smart, sensitive sleuth . . . should delight committed fans and attract new ones.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Fabulous.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Waldman always provides full-bodied characters, humor, and a socially conscious plot that entertains as it enlightens.”

  —Booklist

  MURDER PLAYS HOUSE

  “Well-plotted . . . Juliet is a wonderful invention, warm, loving, and sympathetic to those in need, but unintimidated by the L.A. entertainment industry she must enter to search for clues . . . What a motive, what a resolution, and how clever of Juliet to figure it out.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The Mommy-Track Mysteries get progressively feistier and wittier.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “As always, Waldman uses humor to portray the Los Angeles scene while making some serious points about what is really important in life. This thoroughly modern cozy will be popular.”

  —Booklist

  “Witty Waldman is so endearingly pro-kid that you may run right out and get pregnant, and so unsparing about Hollywood sylphs and pro-anorexia websites that you may never diet again.”

  Kirkus Reviews

  DEATH GETS A TIME-OUT

  “Juliet and her patient husband make an appealing couple—funny, clever, and loving (but never mawkish). Waldman has an excellent ear for the snappy comeback, especially when delivered by a five-year-old.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Waldman is at her witty best when dealing with children, carpooling, and first-trimester woes, but is no slouch at explaining the pitfalls of False Memory Syndrome either.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Think Chinatown, but with strollers and morning sickness. Arguably the best of Waldman’s mysteries.”

  —Long Island Press

  A PLAYDATE WITH DEATH

  “Smoothly paced and smartly told.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Sparkling . . . Witty and well-constructed . . . Those with a taste for lighter mystery fare are sure to relish the adventures of this contemporary, married, mother-of-two Nancy Drew.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] deft portrayal of Los Angeles’s upper crust and of the dilemma facing women who want it all.”

  —Booklist

  THE BIG NAP

  “Waldman treats the Los Angeles scene with humor, offers a revealing glimpse of Hasidic life, and provides a surprise ending . . . An entertaining mystery with a satirical tone.”

  —Booklist

  “Juliet Applebaum is smart, fearless, and completely candid about life as a full-time mom with a penchant for part-time detective work. Kinsey Millhone would approve.”

  —Sue Grafton

  NURSERY CRIMES

  “[Juiet is] a lot like Elizabeth Peters’s warm and humorous Amelia Peabody—a brassy, funny, quick-witted protagonist.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “A delightful debut filled with quirky, engaging characters, sharp wit, and vivid prose.”

  —Judith Kelman, author of After the Fall

  “[Waldman] derives humorous mileage fom Juliet’s ‘epicurean’ cravings, wardrobe dilemmas, night-owl husband, and obvious delight in adventure.”

  —Library Journal

  Berkley Prime Crime books by Ayelet Waldman

  NURSERY CRIMES

  THE BIG NAP

  A PLAYDATE WITH DEATH

  DEATH GETS A TIME-OUT

  MURDER PLAYS HOUSE

  THE CRADLE ROBBERS

  BYE-BYE, BLACK SHEEP

  BYE-BYE,

  BLACK

  SHEEP

  Ayelet Waldman

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  BYE-BYE, BLACK SHEEP

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley hardcover edition / August 2006

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / July 2007

  Copyright © 2006 by Ayelet Waldman.

  Cover art by Lisa Desimini.

  Cover design by Steven Ferlauto.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-66462-9

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  To Mary Evans

  Acknowledgments

  This novel was written at Hedgebrook, a retreat for women writers. I am eternally grateful to that marvelous place and its incomparable staff for the gift of time, solitude, peace, and space.

  Thanks to Tsan Abrahamson, Kristina Larsen, and Devin McIntyre.

  And to the wonderful people at Berkley: Leslie Gelbman, Abigail Thompson, Susan Allison, Donita Dooley, Sharon Gamboa, Don Rieck, Michelle Vega, and Trish Weyenberg. And especially Natalee Rosenstein.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen
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  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  One

  I fingerprinted my seven-year-old daughter because they made me. I didn’t want to do it. It made me uncomfortable to dot her plump thumbs on the little pad of ink and roll them on the stiff white card. Her left thumb was soggy and creased from its night’s sleep tucked firmly against the roof of her mouth, so the print it left was smeared and almost unreadable.

  “Okay, all done. Go wash your hands,” I said, as I tucked the card back into its plastic jacket.

  “My turn,” my son, Isaac, said.

  I shook my head. “We don’t need to do one for you.”

  “But I want to do it, too.”

  “Sorry, honey.”

  Ruby turned from the kitchen sink where she was lathering up her hands with an excess of dishwashing liquid. “It’s only for big kids,” she said.

  “Why?” he said.

  She gave a disdainful shake of her carrot-colored curls. “Because.”

  “Why does she get to do it?” he demanded. “She’s not so big.”

  I said, “Because her teacher said we had to.”

  “It’s for my own protection,” Ruby said, parroting the words of the kindly Los Angeles Police Department officer who had come to her school and distributed the cards. “It’s so that if I get stolen Mama and Daddy can get me back.”

  Isaac’s lower lip began to tremble and glycerin tears gathered on his eyelashes. “But I want to come back, too. It’s not fair.”

  This was precisely why I hadn’t wanted to do this in the first place. This was why I object on principle to the whole notion of educating small children about abduction and kidnapping. The fear that our children will be stolen from us has become a national obsession. We watch the stories of Polly and Amber’s abductions on television, and torture ourselves by imagining the last hours of their lives. We instruct our children to avoid contact with those they don’t know, never to speak to strangers, never to get into the car with a stranger, even if he asks them to help him with his sick puppy, or if he tells them that Mommy sent him to pick them up because something terrible has happened. We teach them about “bad touches” and “good touches.” And now it seems we fingerprint them and file the cards away, not, as Ruby says, so we can find them if they are snatched, because if they are found we would know them. I fear that these cards have one use only. They are used to identify the bodies.

  All this fear, all this anxiety and, when population is factored into the analysis, the rates of stranger-abduction have remained constant over the years. It is no more likely that our children will be stolen and murdered than it was when I was small, in the late 1970s. No more likely, despite the fact that back then we all had the run of our neighborhoods, riding our bikes through the streets, playing kick the can and hide-and-seek until dark.

  The cost of this parental apprehension is high. I see it now in Isaac’s face as he struggles to understand from whom his sister is being protected and why he is not lucky enough to dabble in black ink to earn the same defense. I see it in Ruby’s understanding of a world that, infected by the unease of the adults around her, now includes hordes of malicious strangers intent on doing her harm.

  “I want to do my fingerprints,” Isaac wailed.

  Sadie, who at eight months old is always ready to lend her voice to any catastrophe, looked up from her pile of Cheerios and let loose with a full-throated cry.

  It’s important for a parent to stand firm, to be consistent in her rules. Once a mother makes a decision, she must stick to it, whatever the cost. Otherwise the child learns only that a tantrum is the best method to get his way.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll get another card from Ruby’s teacher and we’ll do your fingerprints tonight. Stop screaming, or you’ll wake up Daddy.”

  Another stellar moment in the annals of Juliet Applebaum, bad mother.

  But I really didn’t want the kids to wake Peter up. My husband is a screenwriter, responsible for such classics of American cinema as The Cannibal’s Vacation and Flesh-eaters I, II, and III. With an animated version of his cannibal series in production, he had earned himself a little room to experiment with something new. The cartoon cannibals would pay the mortgage on our rundown 1926 Hollywood Hills pile of a house for a little while, at least until the series was canceled, so Peter didn’t have to churn out another horror movie right away. I still wasn’t earning very much as a private investigator, although the month before had been unusually lucrative for me and my partner. In that one month I’d brought home almost as much working part-time as I had when I was working ten hours a day or more as a federal public defender. That was a significant improvement over the months when the business had cost me money.

  Peter was making the most of the opportunity his series had bought him, and had been up until close to four A.M. hashing out the structural problems of Act II of a screenplay entirely unlike anything he’d ever done before.

  He was writing a kung fu movie.

  Some people think my husband is a strange guy, although I take issue with that. I think most men of his generation harbor a perhaps unhealthy obsession with comic books, action figures, and other detritus of their childhoods. Peter’s passion for vintage Mego action figures and DC 100-Page Super Spectaculars stems from a slightly different place from most of the guys he hangs out with at Hi De Ho Comics. He has the complete run of twelve-inch G.I. Joes, from 1964 to 1976, with a particular interest in Kung Fu Grip and Life-Like Hair, not because those are the toys he played with when he was a little boy, but because those are the toys he desired but did not own. It’s nostalgia, but nostalgia for unfulfilled passions. Peter grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, a city quite a bit closer to Appalachia than most people realize. It’s as far as his parents got when they climbed up out of the holler and down off the mountain. They made it to the city, but the city didn’t make much of them, and there was never enough money to go around, certainly not enough for toys. Peter never had a G.I. Joe. He had a couple of G.I. Joe outfits, and a knock-off military doll from a discount store that was called something like Army Jack, but he never had the real thing. He’s making up for lost time, now. I think his collection is up to around thirty, and those are just the G.I. Joes. I couldn’t even begin to count the other vintage superhero dolls. And then there are the Star Wars action figures.

  He’s good at sharing, though. There are definitely figures he insists on keeping in their original blister packs, but there are plenty of others he lets the kids play with. Peter’s office is an authentic dungeon in the basement of our house, complete with handcuffs bolted to the wall and an antique vaulting horse that still bears the marks of leather straps and cords (either the movie star who built our house, Ramon Navarro, had something of a predilection for the sadomasochistic or he’d been taken for a ride by an insane interior decorator). It is a paradise of toys and dolls.

  Another of Peter’s loves is Hong Kong martial arts movies. His favorite director is Yuen Woo-ping, the Master. Peter says his name with an awed reverence, the kind you might reserve for the Pope if you were a devout Catholic, or for Leonard Nimoy if you spent your weekends at Star Trek conventions, in uniform, wearing a pair of fake pointed ears. Peter’s goal with this current project was to write a script worthy of the Master, or of Tsui Hark or King Hu or one of the other Hong Kong auteurs whose light touch and balletic grace with a sword and nunchaku he so admires.

  That morning, I had to keep the kids quiet so Peter could get a decent morning’s sleep after
a hard night’s work. Then I had to get the kids out the door for school, and get myself and Sadie down to Westminster, to my partner Al Hockey’s garage, from which we ran our suddenly not-entirely-unprofitable business. Al and I met when he was an investigator for the federal public defender and I was a newbie lawyer. He’d helped me get through my first investigations, and I’d earned his respect, despite my manifold screwups. He liked me, he said, because I was “game.” When I left the office to stay home with my kids, Al warned me that I wasn’t going to make it as a stay-at-home mom. “You’ll be bored in about three weeks,” he said. He was wrong. Very wrong.

  It took three days. Three days of Gymboree and Mommy & Me and story time at the library. Three days of walking the neighborhood pushing my stroller and desperately trying to meet other moms with kids more or less the same age. Three days of driving from one playground to the other, making a thorough and scientific comparison of the various swings and teeter-totters. After three days I was pulling my hair out. I just wasn’t suited to that kind of life. I wasn’t one of those moms who could be happy spending soporific hours in the park discussing theories of child development and swapping potty-training tips. I love my kids, but spending eighteen hours a day alone with them was turning me into a psychotic bitch with a vocabulary more constricted than the average toddler. I stuck it out, though, for years, doing my best to drown my sorrows in whipped mochas and crumb cake.

  I had finally decided that neither my ass nor my ambitions could hack it anymore, when Al showed up with the idea of starting an investigative agency. He said I could work a few hours a day, just to occupy my mind with something other than which breast pump was the most effective and whether or not exposure to television would cause my children to develop attention deficit disorder. (The answer to that last question, by the way, is yes. Yes, of course, but so what? It’s worth it. Nothing buys a mother a more peaceful eighty-four minutes than the DVD of The Lion King.)

  Two

  WHEN I got to the garage I found Al and our assistant, Chiki Rodriguez, dancing anxious attendance on a very unusual guest. The first thing I noticed was that she was tall; even sitting down she seemed to tower over Chiki. She stared down at the top of his head as he refilled her coffee cup. The second thing I noticed was the size of her feet. She had one leg crossed over the other, and a boat of a parrot green pump dangled from her long toes. The shoes, with their chrome spike heels glinting in the harsh light of the fluorescent bulbs, were easily a size thirteen.