Death Gets a Time-Out

Book 4: A Mommy-Track Mystery

by Ayelet Waldman

Genres: Small Town & Rural; Cozy Mystery; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Between juggling lunchboxes, piano lessons, and baby-sitters, public defender turned stay-at-home mom Juliet Applebaum promises to help her famous friend clear her brother's name of murder. But what will she do when she begins to suspect her friend may not be as innocent as she seems?

Release date: June 1, 2004

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 320

Sample

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

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

“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.

Lilly caught my eye, and waved. I waved back. Stacy looked over at me. “Are you ever going to introduce me to her?” she asked.

“To whom? Lilly?” I pretended innocence but I knew exactly what Stacy was after—a client. I had gotten to know Lilly Green when she made her acting debut in one of Peter’s slasher movies. My husband made his living writing screenplays that appealed to teenage boys and pretty much no one else. They starred cannibals and mummies, supernatural serial killers and bloodthirsty ghouls. Lilly had played a lovely young victim who turned into a homicidal walking corpse. Despite the part my husband had written for her, we became friends. She’d won an Oscar for her next film, and gone from B-movie starlet to full-fledged star. We’d remained close, but I have to admit that I’d grown a little uncomfortable around her. She tended to be surrounded by a retinue of managers, publicists, and assistants, and even though she was still the same, unpretentious woman who picked up Ruby every Wednesday and took her along to riding lessons with her own girls, because Ruby had once mentioned that she liked horses, it was hard for me to figure out how to interact with her. Maybe it all came down to my uncomfortable suspicion of my own motivations. Was I Lilly’s friend because I liked her and had things in common with her, or was I her friend because I liked being friends with a movie star? I didn’t really know the answer to that question.

“Introduce me,” Stacy said, already halfway out of her chair.

“Okay,” I said. “But you have to promise me you aren’t going to try to poach her from her agent.”

Stacy looked shocked, wounded, but I knew better.

Lilly had shaved her head for her most recent role, the Oscar-friendly tale of a mentally retarded woman with breast cancer, and the hair had just begun to grow back. If anything, her shorn skull highlighted her almost luminous beauty. Next to her, Stacy, who always looked so impeccable, so perfectly put together, seemed a pale contrivance. After Lilly and I rubbed cheeks in an approximation of a kiss, I stroked the top of her head. “You have a mohair head,” I said, and she laughed, although it seemed to me that it wasn’t quite the belly laugh I was used to getting out of her. One of my favorite things about Lilly was how she invariably cracked up at my jokes. Peter says I’ll like anyone who thinks I’m funny, and it’s probably true. Although he’s wrong that that’s the only reason I married him; it was just as important that he makes me laugh.

I introduced Stacy, and Lilly politely shook her hand.

“So, what are you doing here?” I asked. “You hate parties.”

She shrugged.

“Lilly’s being honored tonight,” Stacy said. “Didn’t you look at the program?”

“Honored?” I asked.

“For dying of breast cancer on screen,” Lilly said. “I guess they couldn’t find a woman what was really sick to drag up onto the stage.”

“You’ve performed a profound service,” Stacy said. “Raising people’s consciousness, increasing awareness. You certainly deserve the award.”

“Maybe,” Lilly said, although it didn’t sound like she really believed it. I had to agree with her. Looking around the room, I wondered how many of the women were struggling in anonymity with the horrible disease from which Lilly had only pretended to suffer. Didn’t they deserve acknowledgment more than she did? After all, when the cameras stopped rolling, she went home. The black cloud never disappeared from their skies.

“So, what are you up to, Juliet?” Lilly asked. “Still solving murders?”

I smiled uncomfortably. “Not murders.” I shifted my weight. My feet had begun to ache in their too-tight shoes.

She cocked an eyebrow at me quizzically.

“Go ahead, tell her,” Stacy said, prodding me in the side with her elbow. “Juliet’s become a private eye!”

I blushed. I was still a little embarrassed about my new career. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it—on the contrary, I was absolutely in love with the job. I’d finally succumbed to the entreaties of my good friend Al Hockey, whom I had met when I was a federal public defender and he was an investigator in the same office. We’d worked on a lot of cases together, and we stayed friends even after I quit to stay home with my kids. When Al hung out a shingle as a private investigator, he asked me to join up with him. As happy as I was with my new identity as sort-of-working-mother, I had the nagging sensation that there was something almost ridiculous about turning my fundamental nature as a nosy snoop into a career.

“Really? A detective?” Lilly asked.

“Well, an investigator. I don’t have my license yet. And it’s only part-time,” I said. At the time Al had made his offer, I’d been slowly going crazy. I know there are women who skillfully and happily manage the transition from full-time, productive member of the work force to stay-at-home mother. I’ve met them in the park. Those are the women who swap homemade Play-Doh recipes and puree their own babyfood from organic produce they grow in their backyards. I’d rather be forced to eat the Play-Doh than make it. And I honestly can’t remember the last time I served a vegetable that didn’t come out of my freezer, unless pickles count. Don’t get me wrong. I love my kids with a ferocity that sometimes scares me. I love their dirty little faces and stubby toes. I love the absurdly funny and piercingly insightful things they say, and the way they tangle their fingers in my hair when I lie down with them to take a nap. But the prospect of spending an entire day alone with them fills me with dread. Keeping two people with a collective attention span of three minutes entertained for an entire fourteen-hour day is a task that makes Sisyphus’s look like playing marbles. Half the time I feel like hiring a nanny and getting my bored, frustrated, rapidly expanding butt back to work as a lawyer. I spend the other half convinced that there’s a point to being there day after day, hour after hour, driving from playdates to piano lessons, doing endless loads of very small laundry, and clinging to sanity with one exhausted fingernail. Al’s offer seemed like a way to do both—be with my kids, and do some work that didn’t involve very short people and a very dirty house.

I had initially suffered from the delusion that it would be a breeze to work part-time while the kids were in school. However, I hadn’t yet ever managed more than a forty-five-minute workday. By the time I dropped Ruby and Isaac off at their two different schools, and ran whatever errands were absolutely critical to the continuation of our existence as a family, I had exactly enough time to make two phone calls or write half a letter before I had to race off to pick them up again. So far Al had been remarkably patient with my glaring absence from our joint venture, although he had taken to calling me his invisible partner.

Lilly narrowed her eyes and leaned forward. “What kind of work are you doing?”

“Criminal defense work, primarily,” I said. “Lawyers hire us to investigate their cases. You know, take pictures of the crime scene, track down witnesses, that kind of thing. And we’ve done some death penalty mitigation work, too.”

“What’s that?” Stacy interrupted. “How do you mitigate the gas chamber?’

“We dig up what we can on a defendant’s background to help the lawyer convince the jury that executing him wouldn’t be fair. You know, like if he was an abused child, or was really nice to his grandmother. That kind of thing.”

Lilly stood up and grabbed my arm. Her face was flushed and beads of sweat stood out on her upper lip. “I need to talk to you,” she said in a low voice.

“Um, okay,” I said, taken aback by her vehemence.

Lilly glanced quickly around and met Stacy’s eye. She bit her lip. “In private,” she muttered.

Stacy raised her eyebrow and smiled stiffly. “I’ll see you back at our table, Juliet,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Green.” But Lilly had already started to hustle me across the ballroom floor. I stumbled along, doing my best to keep from looking as though I was being dragged against my will.

“Hey Lilly, ease up,” I said. “I can barely walk in these shoes.”

She dropped my arm. “Sorry,” she said. We’d come out into the hallway outside the ballroom. We were on the second floor of the hotel on a kind of mezzanine, looking out over the opulent lobby. The hall was empty except for a short line of women standing outside the ladies’ room. A dumpy woman in a viciously patterned, skin-tight gown looked over at us. Her eyes widened and she jabbed an elbow into the side of the woman standing next to her. A ripple ran through the line, and within seconds everyone was either staring at Lilly, or very obviously and carefully not staring at her. I had a sudden insight into what Lilly’s life must be like. These women were all in the movie business, and even they were incapable of treating her normally. How much worse must it be out on the street?

“Let’s go in here,” Lilly said, opening a door into an empty room and pushing me through. It was another ballroom, although a much smaller one. She pulled two chairs off a stack against the wall and motioned me to sit down.

I perched on the crushed velvet seat and poked at the matching curtain draped along the wall. “I haven’t seen this much mauve since my cousin Dara’s bat mitzvah reception at Leonard’s of Great Neck.”

“What?”

“Never mind. What’s going on, Lilly? Is everything okay? Are you okay?”

“I have to talk to you about something,” she said, worrying the silk of her skirt with agitated fingers. I cringed, sure she was going to tear through the gossamer fabric. The dress probably cost more than my monthly rent. This kind of anxiousness just wasn’t like Lilly. She was not a nervous person—she had always exuded the kind of serene confidence specific to very beautiful, very successful women, even when it had looked like her career might begin and end with movies in which her heaving breasts were mauled by flesh-eaters.

“Sure, fine, but don’t tear your beautiful dress, okay?”

She let go of her skirt and clasped her hands, as if that were the only way she could keep them under her control. “I want to hire you,” she said.

I blinked in surprise. “For what? We don’t have any experience doing domestic cases. Not that we couldn’t do one, it’s just that we haven’t really done that kind of work. Yet.” Lilly’s ex-husband, Archer, had taken her for a rather remarkable amount of money when they’d divorced, and I figured she was trying to get some of it back.

Lilly ran a hand over her shorn head and looked around the empty room, as if searching for concealed paparrazi and gossip columnists. “It’s not a domestic case. It’s a criminal case.”

I leaned back in my chair and looked at her. She had knotted her hands together so tightly that her knuckles were white.

“No one can know about this, Juliet.”

“I’m still a lawyer, Lilly. Everything you say to me is in confidence.” I waited.<