Death Gets a Time-Out Read online

  Praise for the Mommy-Track Mysteries . . .

  DEATH GETS A TIME-OUT

  “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

  “Waldman skillfully unravels the intertwined relationships . . . to reveal a cunning murder plot . . . 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

  “A perky, enthusiastic, and infectious read.”

  —Library Journal

  A PLAYDATE WITH DEATH

  “Smoothly paced and smartly told.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Sparkling . . . [A] swift and engaging plot . . . 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

  “Juliet is a modern heroine refusing to quit or take another snooze until she feels justice is properly served.”

  —Book Browser

  NURSERY CRIMES

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

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Funny, clever, touching, original, wacky and wildly successful.”

  —Carolyn G. Hart

  “A delightful debut filled with quirky, engaging characters, sharp wit, and vivid prose. I predict a successful future for this unique, highly likable sleuth.”

  —Judith Kelman, author of After the Fall

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

  —Library Journal

  “[Waldman is] a welcome voice . . . well-written . . . this charming young family has a real-life feel to it.”

  —Contra Costa Times

  DEATH GETS

  A TIME-OUT

  Ayelet Waldman

  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.

  DEATH GETS A TIME-OUT

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

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime hardcover edition / July 2003

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / June 2004

  Copyright © 2003 by Ayelet Waldman.

  Illustrations by Lisa Desimini.

  Design by Steven Ferlauto.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  For information: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  Visit our website at www.penguin.com

  ISBN 978-1-101-66459-9

  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.

  Acknowledgments

  My sincerest thanks go to Diane at the breathtakingly beautiful Casa Luna for giving me a place to stay in Mexico; to Karen Gadbois and Susan McKinney for information on San Miguel; to Jean Rosenbluth for details of Los Angeles life and geography; to Clara Hennen for reading and commenting on the book; to Kathleen Caldwell for her unending support; and to Sophie, Zeke, and Ida-Rose for letting me get my work done. Thanks to Minouche Kandel and Dr. Eric Kandel’s work on recovered memory. Any mistakes and misinterpretations I have made are entirely my own.

  I feel special gratitude to Mary Evans and Natalee Rosenstein for shepherding my work so carefully. And, as always, thanks to Michael for making everything possible.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  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

  “DON’T be so rigid, Peter,” I called after my husband as he went to answer the door. “Everybody loves breakfast-for-dinner. Breakfast-for-dinner rocks.” My redheaded five-year-old, Ruby, and her younger brother, Isaac, nodded, slurping up their Cheerios with obvious delight. These were the very same Cheerios that, had it been morning, they would have left disintegrating in a sodden mess at the bottom of their cereal bowls. Kids are such suckers for a change of context. Breakfast-for-dinner. Pajamas to school. Chocolate syrup on their toothbrushes. Okay, maybe that last one would be going too far, but don’t think I hadn’t considered it. Anything to get them to brush.

  “That’s the last time I take you seriously when you offer to cook,” Peter said as he came back into the kitchen. He was following in the wake of my best friend Stacy. Stacy is one of those women who was born to make the rest of us feel like we woke up a few hours late and have been scrambling to catch up ever since. She’s a top talent agent at International Creative Artists. Her kid is a math prodigy and a soccer whiz, and competes all over the state—I’m never sure if it’s the matches or the Math Olympics that keep them traveling. By them I mean Zachary and his nanny. Stacy’s too busy to take a bus to Stockton for the semifinals of either algebra or foul-kicking.

  In addition to everything else, Stacy is just about the most beautiful friend I have. All this gorgeousness isn’t necessarily natural. She’s a wizard at putting together a good-looking package. She has her hair done by a man who flies in from London once every six weeks, and her makeup is hand-churned from the urine of blind Parisian nuns. Or something like that. Anyway, it comes from France, and a tube of
lipstick costs more than a pair of my shoes. And I’m a sucker for expensive shoes. Over the years I’ve gotten used to feeling intimidated in the face of Stacy’s perfection. I’ve even developed the ability to laugh about my lack of self-confidence. I accept the fact that flawlessness is pretty much out of the question for me. Hey, I’m happy if I manage to brush my teeth before noon. Makeup is way beyond me, and the only thing I can remember using a blow-dryer for in recent memory is to dry out a particularly nasty diaper rash. Isaac’s, not my own. I’m ashamed to admit that it probably doesn’t hurt my self-esteem that Stacy’s marriage is, sadly, in a state of semiconstant upheaval; her husband has a weakness for tall, blond twenty-two-year-olds. Women who look just like Stacy did when they met. My marriage, albeit not necessarily the hotbed of romance it once was, is absolutely solid. Peter and I love each other, and have come to accept one another’s flaws and failures. Well, except that whole cooking thing.

  “Hey, are those real diamonds?” I said.

  Stacy rolled her eyes at the question. Of course they were real. Stacy has an agreement with Harry Winston. She makes her movie star clients wear the jewelers’ designs at the Oscars, the Emmys, and every other awards show, and in return they bedeck her in precious stones whenever she demands it. I’ve seen Stacy draped in ropes of rare, black Tahitian pearls worth tens of thousands of dollars. She showed up at a dinner for the president of our university in a choker so thick with rubies that she looked like she’d had her throat cut. She’s even managed to snag a pair of ten-carat diamond earrings to wear to the odd movie premiere. I’d never before seen her looking quite so magnificent, however.

  “Is that a tiara?” I asked. Ruby’s head shot up from her bowl, and she stared at the glittering crown on my old friend’s head. She jumped down from her chair and bolted out of the room. Weird little kid, that one is.

  Stacy stared at me, tapping one pointy-toed, stiletto-heeled shoe. “It’s a hairband,” she said.

  “A diamond hairband?”

  “Yes, a diamond hairband.”

  “Are we wearing those nowadays?”

  “We seem to be wearing pajamas nowadays. Might I ask why?”

  I presented my bowl of instant oatmeal with a flourish. “Breakfast-for-dinner!” I said. Then, eyeing her burnt orange, floor-length, taffeta gown, I hugged my frayed flannel bathrobe around me a little more closely. I cursed myself for not looking harder for the belt for the bathrobe and instead resorting to cinching it with one of Peter’s old ties. “Why are you so dressed up?”

  “Think about it,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “You and Andrew are renewing your vows . . . in Vegas.”

  “No.”

  “Um . . . it’s Oscar night and you’re going to the Vanity Fair party?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a fairy princess!” Isaac piped up.

  Stacy smiled at him, then glared at me. “No.”

  Suddenly, I groaned, overwhelmed with that all-too-familiar feeling of hormonal brain implosion. “You’re going to the Breast Cancer Benefit that you invited me to last month. And that you reminded me about two days ago when we were at yoga.”

  “Bingo,” Stacy said.

  I smiled weakly. “I guess I don’t have to finish my oatmeal.”

  As I tore through my closet trying to find something that even approached evening wear, I cursed my failing memory. “I swear this has nothing to do with you,” I said, poking my head out and smiling weakly at my friend. She stood in the middle of my messy bedroom like Cinderella in the grimy kitchen, after the Fairy Godmother has dressed her, but before she’s gone for her pumpkin ride.

  “I know,” she said.

  “Last week I made it all the way to Ruby’s school before I remembered that I was on my way to drop off the dry cleaning, not pick up carpool. How about this one?” I held up a pale green crepe gown I’d worn to my cousin Marcie’s son’s black tie Bar Mitzvah the year before. Stacy shook her head, and I went back into the bowels of my entirely unsatisfactory closet. It wasn’t that there weren’t enough clothes in there. On the contrary, the shelves and bars were overflowing. The problem was that nothing fit anymore. Two kids and a lifetime of physical sloth had made my once svelte body a thing of the past. The distant past.

  “And yesterday I had to go back to the grocery store three times because I kept forgetting things. This?” I waved a dress at her.

  “It’ll do,” she said.

  “I blame the children,” I said as I crammed myself into a cocktail dress that I’d last worn long before Isaac had made his appearance. If it weren’t for the fact that every woman I knew was suffering from the same ailment, I would have seriously considered having an MRI. What is it about child-bearing that lowers a fog over the brains of normally intelligent women? Here we all are, competent professionals, used to managing companies, handling crises, hiring and firing people, and now we stumble through our days with yesterday’s underwear peeping out the leg of our slacks. Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe all the other moms juggle carpool, lunchboxes, doctors’ appointments, piano lessons, religious school, parent-teacher conferences, karate, diaper changes, soccer, and babysitters with the same aplomb they brought to graduate school and appellate arguments. Maybe I’m the only one with drifts of unwashed laundry taking over the living room and toilet paper stuck to her shoe.

  I pinned a large broach to the bodice of my dress and stuffed my feet into a pair of three-inch black heels with silver buckles that had fit before I’d had two children and grown half a shoe size. They were too fabulous to throw away.

  “Okay?” I said to Stacy, as I executed a limping pirouette.

  “Hair? Makeup?” she barked.

  “Right. Right.” I ran into my bathroom and scrawled a bright red smile on my chapped lips. A little mascara and I was done. My hair, however, was hopeless. I wrapped a towel around my shoulders and dunked my head into the sink. I slicked my wet hair back with most of the contents of a bottle of hair gel and hoped that the cresting wave of eighties nostalgia had reached Joan Jett.

  “Done,” I said, coming out of the bathroom. Just then Ruby walked into my room, her hands behind her back.

  “I found it, Mommy.”

  “What sweetie, what did you find?”

  “My princess crown!” With a flourish she presented me with a silver plastic tiara. Much of the paint had chipped away, and one side had been chewed to a frayed stub.

  “Wow,” I said. “That would definitely complete my outfit.”

  “Now you can have a tiara just like Aunt Stacy’s. Put it on!” my daughter ordered.

  “It is not a tiara,” Stacy said. “It’s a diamond hairband.” She had the grace to blush.

  “Um, honey, I just did my hair. I’ll put it on later, okay?” I said to my daughter. Her eyes began to fill, and her plump lower lip trembled. “Okay, I’m putting it on right now!” I said, and balanced the tiara on my head. “It’s perfect!”

  She smiled and said, “Don’t take it off.”

  “You know why we’re friends?” I asked Stacy as I disentangled the plastic teeth of Ruby’s crown from my hair, and struggled to buckle my seatbelt while Stacy peeled out of my driveway.

  “Because we know each other better than anyone else does, and that includes our husbands,” she said.

  “Nope. Because I make you look so good.”

  She smiled at me and, reaching over, pinched my cheek. “You look beautiful, Jules. Fix your pin so it covers up more of that stain.”

  Two

  WE were just the wrong side of fashionably late to the benefit. The other women at Stacy’s table, all of whom worked with her at International Creative Artists, were already taking delicate quantum-particle bites of their radicchio and fig salads. I noticed that most of them had pushed aside the Gorgonzola cheese. I wondered if it would be acceptable to scrape their plates onto my own.

  Stacy and I made our apologies and sat down. She swept a practiced eye over the crowd. The yearly
All-Girl Gala for the Cure, sponsored by the Breast Cancer Action League, was a chance for the women of Hollywood to do good while strutting their stuff, without having to bother finding a beard in a flashy Armani tux. The gowns were fabulous, and the deal-making was formidable. Hollywood runs on an old boys’ network, and it wasn’t often that the women were given the chance to engage in the same kind of billion-dollar bonding. The Gala was one of the few times in a year where a young female director could catch a studio executive’s eye without being upstaged by that week’s boy wonder, or a woman with some money to spend could find a script worth investing in without having to funnel her cash through a patronizing tough-guy producer. Since I wasn’t part of the Industry other than as the wife of a middling successful screenwriter, I’d never had a reason to go to the Gala. When Stacy invited me to be her date for what she called Babes for Boobs, I jumped at the chance to see the glitterati do what they do best—glitter.

  “Miyake. Armani. Miyake. Valentino. Miyake. God help us—Versace,” Stacy said, pointing a polish-tipped finger at the gowns gliding by our table.

  “And yours?” I asked.

  “Donna Karan.”

  “And mine?”

  “Back of your closet, circa 1993. No, wait—1992.”

  “Man, you’re good,” I said.

  I finished gobbling up my rare grilled ahi with mango cilantro salsa, and made my own perusal of the room. The lights were dim, in honor of the carefully sculpted cheekbones and Botoxed foreheads. Plastic surgery looks best in soft light. The tables were set with mint green china that matched the papered walls and complemented the gilded chairs. A lavish arrangement of white lilies and tuberoses spilled over the center of each table. The hum of conversation was pitched at a higher level than normal—there was no bass drone to disturb the soprano whirr. Noticeably absent was the noise of clicking silverware. I appeared to be the only woman eating anything at all.

  At a table close to the front, I saw my friend Lilly Green. She was leaning forward, her perfect, pointed chin resting on one delicate hand. Her mouth was open in a warm and inviting smile that, if I hadn’t known her so well, I would have assumed was absolutely real, signifying nothing so much as her complete absorption in and delight with her tablemates’ conversation. The truth was most likely that she was bored—she usually was at events like this. Unlike other movie stars, Lilly would much rather have spent an evening playing Scrabble with her kids than reveling in the glitz of Hollywood. But she was also invariably polite, and while not the kind of person either to suffer fools gladly, or engage in phony small talk, she also hated to hurt people’s feelings.