Murder Plays House Read online

  “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 . . . Murder Plays House is a well-thought-out mystery.”

  —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

  PRAISE FOR

  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

  “[Juliet is] a lot like Elizabeth Peters’ 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 from Juliet’s ‘epicurean’ cravings, wardrobe dilemmas, night-owl husband and obvious delight in adventure.”

  —Library Journal

  MURDER

  PLAYS HOUSE

  Ayelet Waldman

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr. Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  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.

  MURDER PLAYS HOUSE

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

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime hardcover edition / July 2004

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / July 2005

  Copyright © 2004 by Ayelet Waldman.

  Cover design by Steven Ferlauto.

  Cover art by Lisa Desimini.

  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: 978-1-101-66460-5

  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.

  Acknowledgments

  MY thanks to Sylvia Brownrigg, Peggy Orenstein, Micheline Marcom, and Susanne Pari, brilliant writers and fine editors all; to Natalee Rosenstein, Esther Strauss, and Rebecca Crowley for taking such good care of me; to Lisa Desimini for such delightful and original covers; to Jan Fogner for details of the real estate business (all errors are my own, of course); to Kathleen Caldwell for her unending support; to Mary Evans, not just a remarkable agent, but a good and loyal friend.

  Sophie, Zeke, Ida-Rose and Abraham give me something to write about, and their father makes everything possible.

  Berkley Prime Crime Books by Ayelet Waldman

  NURSERY CRIMES

  THE BIG NAP

  DEATH GETS A TIME-OUT

  A PLAYDATE WITH DEATH

  MURDER PLAYS HOUSE

  THE CRADLE ROBBERS

  To my girls,

  Sophie and Ida-Rose

  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

  One

  AS I huddled in the six inches of bed that my three-and-a-half-year-old son allowed me, I comforted myself with the knowledge that at least I was marginally more comfortable than my husband, who had been reduced to camping out on the floor. We di
dn’t normally permit Isaac to evict us from our bed, but since he’d made his toddler bed uninhabitable with a particularly noxious attack of stomach flu, we’d been forced to let down the drawbridge and allow the barbarian through the gate.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to sleep on the couch?” I whispered to Peter.

  He grunted.

  “Honey? Do you want to try the couch?”

  “Yeah, right,” he muttered.

  “It’s not that wet,” I said defensively.

  He groaned and rolled over.

  It wasn’t my fault that the dryer broke down two loads into laundry day. Perhaps it was shortsighted of me to use the couch as an impromptu drying rack, but how could I have anticipated a night of vomiting and musical beds?

  I jumped as Isaac jammed his foot into my stomach, and reached a protective hand around my bulging belly. I patted at the tiny elbow I felt poking up just north of my belly button and murmured to the little girl swimming in the warm dark inside of me. This was likely just the first of many beatings she would suffer at the hands of her older brother.

  “Juliet?” Peter said softly.

  “Mm?”

  “Is he asleep?”

  “Like the dead.” I heaved myself over so I could see Peter’s shadowed form on the floor.

  “You win,” he said.

  “Good,” I replied. Then, “I win what?”

  “You win. We buy a house. A big house. With lots of beds. At least two for each of us.”

  I sat up in bed. “Really? Really? Oh sweetie, that is so great. You will not be sorry, I promise. I’ll start looking tomorrow. I’ll find something with enough room for all of us, and even a special place for your collection.”

  The truth was, I’d started looking for a house months before, and Peter probably knew it. I had paid little or no attention to his insistence that our entire family could continue to fit comfortably into a two-bedroom apartment, even with the pending arrival of our surprise third child. Peter was just nervous about spending the money on a house. He preferred the flexibility of a month-to-month lease, comforting himself with the notion that if his screenplays ever stopped selling, we could just pack up our children and his twenty cubic feet of vintage action figures still in the original blister packs and move into the trailer next to his mother’s. Yeah. Like that would ever happen. While it’s possible that there has been born a man both cruel and strong enough to force this particular Jewish American Princess into a double-wide in Cincinnati, Ohio, it is certainly not the sweet, sensitive, grey-eyed guy I married.

  Anyway, I knew the moment I saw the double pink line of the pregnancy test that we were going to buy a house, and since then all of Peter’s protestations and carefully constructed arguments about mobility and low overhead had had about as much effect on me as flies buzzing around the ears of a hippopotamus. Sure, they were irritating, but did they prevent me from wallowing in the mud of the Los Angeles real estate market? As my six-year-old daughter would say, “I don’t think so.”

  I drifted off to a sleep enchanted by dreams of second bathrooms and front-loading washers. Alas, it seemed as if I had only just managed to close my eyes when I was awakened by an insistent whine in my ear.

  “Come on, Mama. It’s seven fourteen! We’re going to be late for school.” As I had every morning since Ruby’s sixth birthday, I cursed my mother for buying my overly conscientious daughter that Little Mermaid alarm clock.

  I hauled myself out of bed, scooping Isaac up with me, and prodded Peter with one toe. “Bed’s all yours, sweetie,” I said.

  Peter leapt up off the floor and burrowed into the newly vacant bed. I sighed jealously and herded the children back to their room. My husband works at night; he finds the midnight hours most conducive to constructing the tales of mayhem and violence that characterize the particular style of horror movie for which he has become marginally well known. That leaves the morning shift to me, a system that works well, by and large, although on the mornings following nights punctuated by the cries of sleepless children, I sometimes wonder if I’m getting the short end of the stick. Before allowing myself to become awash in a sea of self-pity, I reminded myself that since I barely earn enough with my fledgling investigative practice even to pay a babysitter, it is in my interest to make it possible for my husband to get his work done.

  I left Isaac wrapped in a blanket in front of the television set, a sippy cup of cool, sweet tea propped next to him, and a plate of dry toast balanced in his lap. He had strict instructions to wake his dad if he felt sick again. He had already started to nod off when his older sister and I walked out the door.

  “Mama, what’s in my lunch?” Ruby said as we drove down the block to her school.

  “Peanut butter on whole wheat, pretzels, half an apple, and a juice box, of course.” I always packed Ruby the identical lunch. She is a picky child, and I’m a lazy mother, and once we figure out something that suits both of us, we stick with it.

  She sighed dramatically.

  “What?” I said.

  “Well, it’s just that that’s an awful lot of carbs.”

  I nearly slammed into the car in front of me. “What did you say?”

  “You know, carblehydrapes. Like bread and stuff. They make you fat.”

  “First of all, it’s carbohydrates. Second of all, they do not make you fat. And third of all, you don’t need to worry about that, for heaven’s sake. You’re only six years old!”

  I could feel my daughter’s scowl burning into the back of my neck.

  “Honey, really. You don’t need to worry about your weight. You’re a perfect little girl.”

  “Miss Lopez says I’m fat.”

  Now I really did leap on the brakes. “Your teacher called you fat?” I was very nearly shouting.

  “Not just me. All of us. She says there’s a eminemic of fatness.”

  “An epidemic.”

  “Right. Epinemic. We’re all fat. The whole first grade.”

  I pulled into the drop-off area of her school and turned to look at my child. Her red curls were tamed into two pigtails on either side of her narrow face. She was wearing a thick sweater and jeans, so it was impossible to see the shape of her body, but I knew it better than I knew my own. I knew those knobby knees, the narrow shoulders, the tiny rounded belly. I’d memorized that body the moment it came out of me, and had been watching it ever since. She wasn’t fat. On the contrary. She was lengthening out into a skinny grade-schooler who looked less and less like my baby every day.

  “Sweetheart, there might be an epidemic of obesity—that means fatness—in the whole country. But not you, or your friends. You guys are all perfectly shaped. You don’t need to worry about your weight. All you need to worry about is being healthy, okay?”

  Ruby shook her head, sending her pigtails bobbing. “You worry. You worry all the time about being fat.”

  “No I don’t,” I lied, feeling a vicious stab of guilt. I had obviously done exactly what I swore never to do. I had infected my lovely little girl with my own self-loathing. Despite all my promises to myself, I had handed down to her my sickening inability to see in the mirror anything other than my flaws. Was it too late? Was Ruby already doomed to a life of vertical stripes and fat-free chocolate chip cookies?

  She unclipped her seatbelt and bounded out the door, dragging her Hello Kitty backpack behind her.

  I rolled down my window and shouted, “Don’t forget to eat your lunch!”

  She didn’t bother to reply.

  AS I waited in traffic to get on the freeway, I called my partner, Al Hockey. Al and I had worked together at the Federal Public Defender’s office, in the days when I imagined that I’d spend the rest of my life representing drug dealers and bank robbers, cruising the streets of Los Angeles looking for witnesses who might have seen my clients anywhere but where the FBI claimed they had been. Back then, I’d been a fan of the leather miniskirt, and thought of child-bearing as little more than an excuse to buy cute maternity
suits and garner a little extra sympathy from the female members of my juries. It had never occurred to me that once I had my kids I’d end up shoving all my suits into the back of my closet and spending my days in overalls and leggings, ferrying squealing bundles from Mommy and Me to the park, and back again.

  Al had once told me that lawyers like me, the ones who seem to get off on squiring the lowlifes through the system and giving the prosecutors a run for their money, invariably end up growing old on the job. I remember that I felt a flush of pride at his words, but replied that I wasn’t getting off on it—rather, I loved being a public defender because I did justice. Al had looked up from the evidence we were sifting through and held up a photograph of our client pointing a gun at a terrified bank teller. I’d muttered something about the Constitution protecting the guilty as well as the innocent, and had gone back to preparing my cross-examination.

  I had surprised both Al and myself by deciding not only not to spend my life as a public defender, but also to quit work altogether to stay home with my kids. On my last day at the office, I swore to Al that I’d be back someday, but neither of us had imagined that the work I’d return to would be as his partner in a private investigation service run out of his garage in Westminster. Al and I specialize in criminal defense investigations, helping defense attorneys prepare their cases. We interview witnesses, track down alibis, take photos and video of the crime scenes, and do everything we can to help earn our clients the acquittals they may or may not be entitled to. As partnerships go, we have a good one. His years as a detective with the LAPD taught him top-notch investigative skills, as well as the delicate art of witness intimidation, and my criminal defense experience makes it easy for me to anticipate what an attorney will need when trial rolls around. Given the spotty quality of the private defense bar, sometimes I end up crafting the defense from start to finish, even going so far as to give the lawyer an outline for a closing argument.

  We work well together, Al and I, even if ours is an unlikely match. I’m a diehard liberal, and Al’s, well, Al’s something else altogether. I pay my dues to the ACLU, and he pays his to his militia unit. He belongs to a unique band of gun-toting centralized-government-loathers. Although some of their rhetoric is a bit too close to that of the white supremacists seeking to overthrow the U.S. government, Al and his colleagues are an equal-opportunity bunch. They’d have to be. Traditional groups would have tossed Al out as a race-mixer, and despised his children as mongrels. Al’s wife, Jeanelle, is African-American. Al’s positions are purely political and entirely unracist. He feels that all of us, white, black, brown, and green, are being screwed over by a government concerned with maximizing the wealth of the very few. The difference between Al and normal people who might at least sympathize with that opinion, especially come April 15, is that Al expresses his belief by amassing guns and marching around in the woods with a cabal of similarly committed loonies.