Murder Plays House

Book 5: A Mommy-Track Mystery

by Ayelet Waldman

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Juliet Applebaum is a public defender turned stay-at-home mom—and a “highly likable sleuth” (Judith Kelman). Now in Murder Plays House, with a new arrival on the way, the Applebaum household is bursting at the seams. And Juliet is balancing clue-chasing and diaper-changing with a new task: house-hunting.
 
Juliet loves her kids. She loves their dirty little faces and skinned knees. She loves the ridiculous and amazing things they say. But when three-and-a-half year old Isaac evicts her husband and her from their own bed one night, love is the last thing on her mind. Juliet now recognizes the need for a few changes…starting with a bigger house. And when the new baby arrives, they’ll welcome the extra space.
 
But if there’s ever a bad time to search for a new house in L.A., it’s now. In a buyer-unfriendly real estate market, one practically has to kill to find an affordable home. No wonder Juliet is prepared to overlook a corpse on the grounds of her would-be dream house. To salve her conscience—and get her foot literally in the front door—she vows to find the killer of the homeowner’s sister. The investigation leads her from the madness of house-hunting into a world of washed-up actors and canceled TV shows, a world more depraved than she could ever have imagined.
 
“Smoothly paced and smartly told.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Think Chinatown, but with strollers and morning sickness.”—Long Island Press

Release date: July 5, 2005

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 320

Sample

“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

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

Table of Contents

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 didn’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.

“What have we got going on today?” I asked Al, when he snarled into the phone. Not a morning person, my partner. That’s one of the few traits he shares with my husband, although Peter would take issue even with that. He hates to think he has anything in common with Al. Peter just doesn’t find the whole libertarian-militia-black-helicopter thing as charming as I do.

“Rats. Rats is what we’ve got going on,” Al said.

“Those rats pay our bills,” I reminded him. Al is a notorious despiser of lawyers, preferring to call my fellow members of the bar either “liars” or “scum,” and referring to every firm we do business with, somewhat tediously, as “Dewey, Cheetum & Howe.”

“Not your kind of rat,” he said. “Real rats. Big, fat tree rats, all over the office. My idiot neighbor took down his palm tree, and they’ve all migrated into my garage.”

I felt my stomach heave. “Al,” I groaned. My rat phobia probably stems back to the time my mother let me take my kindergarten class gerbil family home for Christmas vacation. I woke up on New Year’s Day to find that Penelope, the mother gerbil, had eaten her children. Also the head of Squeakers, her husband. I found her belching over the remains of Squeakers’s body. All these years and two children later—while there are certainly days when I sympathize with Penelope’s impulse—I still cannot abide rodents. Even rabbits are too whiskery and slithery for my taste. And rats are beyond the pale.

“I’m not coming to work today,” I said.

“I figured as much. Anyway, why should you even bother? It’s not like we’ve got any business.”

Al isn’t a guy inclined to self-pity, which made his woeful tone of voice all the more worrying. Our business had been limping along lately. We’d certainly experienced flush moments, but it had been far too long between well-paying gigs. Al’s optimism had been less and less apparent, and now I feared it had seeped entirely away.

“When is the exterminator due?” I asked.

“Today, but who knows if he’ll be able to do anything. They’re everywhere.”

“So what do you want to do today? Come up here and work out of my house?”

“No point. Nothing to do. I’m calling this day a loss and heading on over to the shooting range as soon as the rat guy shows up.”

“Good idea.” Firing a few rounds into a paper mugger was just what Al needed to improve his mood. By tomorrow he’d be chipper again. I hoped.

I decided to take advantage of my newly acquired day off and do some house hunting. I had already gone around with a realtor a few times, in a more or less desultory manner, just to see what was out there, and what our money could buy us. Not as much as I’d hoped, it turned out. Lately, I’d taken to cruising the nicer neighborhoods, more to torture myself with what I couldn’t afford than for any other reason. Although there was always the chance that I’d pass a house at the same time an ambulance pulled away, bearing its owner to his final rest, and setting in motion a probate sale.

I pulled into a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, bought myself a mocha freeze (promising the baby that this would be the last jolt of caffeine I’d expose her to for at least a week), and pulled out my cell phone.

“Kat Lahidji,” my realtor murmured in her slightly breathy voice.

“Hey Kat, it’s Juliet.”

“Hi! Are you on your way to class?” Kat and I had met at a prenatal yoga class on Montana Boulevard. I liked her despite the fact that she, like every other pregnant woman in that part of greater Los Angeles, didn’t even look pregnant when seen from the rear. She was in perfect shape, still doing headstands in the sixth month of pregnancy. She had sapphire blue eyes and nearly black hair that she tamed with a collection of silver and turquoise pins and clips and wore swirled into a knot at the nape of her neck. Only her nose kept her from being exquisitely beautiful. It looked like something imagined by Picasso—a combination of a Persian princess’s delicate nostrils, and the craggy hook of a Levantine carpet merchant. Kat had once told me that her mother-in-law was on a tireless campaign to convince her to explore the wonders of rhinoplasty.

Kat and I had become friendly, meeting weekly for yoga, and even once or twice for lunch, although Kat never did much more than push her food around her plate. Despite the fact that her food phobia made me feel compelled to double my own consumption in order to compensate, we enjoyed each other’s company. We had the same slightly off-beat sense of humor, were plagued by similar insecurities about the state of our careers and the quality of our parenting, and shared a fondness for crappy chick flicks that disgusted our husbands to no end. I had been surprised to find out that Kat was a real estate agent—she seemed entirely too, well, real, for that dubious profession. She did have the car for it, though. She drove a gold Mercedes Benz with the embarrassing vanity plate, “XPTD OFR.” When she had caught me puzzling out the plate’s meaning, she had blushed a kind of burnt auburn under her golden skin, and told me that her husband had bought her the car, plates and all, as a present to celebrate her first year’s employment in his mother’s agency.

“You work for your mother-in-law?” I had asked, shocked.

“Yes,” Kat sighed.

“The nose-job lady?”

“The very same.”

I had wanted to ask my friend if she was out of her mind. But I had also wanted her to show me some houses, so the question didn’t seem particularly appropriate.

Kat responded to my invitation to join me on a morning of house-hunting with her usual professional excitement. “God, do you really want to bother?” she said. “I mean, what’s the point? There’s nothing but dumps out there.”

“There’s got to be something. I finally got the official go-ahead from Peter; I’ve graduated from a looky-loo to a spendy-spend.”

She sighed heavily. “All right. I’ll see what I can scrape up to show you. At least it will get me out of here for a couple of hours.”

Kat was a truly dreadful real estate agent. Perhaps she kept her loathing for her job hidden from clients who didn’t know her personally, but I doubted it. She lacked the fundamental realtor ability to seem upbeat about even the most roach-infested slum. On the contrary. She had a knack for telling you as you pulled up in front of a house exactly what was wrong with it, why you were sure to hate it, and why she wouldn’t let you buy it even were you foolish enough to want it. Her standard comment about every house was, “Who would ever live here?” Sometimes she just shuddered in horror and refused even to step out of her car, forcing me to explore on my own. It made for entertaining, if slightly unproductive, house-hunting.

I actually might have considered the first house Kat showed me that day. It was a crumbling Tudor whose prime was surely in the 1920s or 30s, but the kitchen and bathrooms still had the original art tiles, and the master bedroom had a killer view of the Hollywood Hills. It could have worked for us, except for the fact that in the gaggle of young men hanging out on the corner in front of the house I recognized one of my old clients. He’d weaseled his way out of a crack cocaine conviction by ratting out everyone both above and below him in the organization. Given that in the thirty seconds I was watching him, I saw him do two hand-offs of what looked suspiciously like glassine packets, I figured he had resumed his original profession. Either that or he was still working for the DEA, and was just pretending to deal.

“Nice neighborhood,” I said to Kat.

She laughed. “My mother-in-law calls it ‘transitional.’”

“Transitioning from what to what?”

“Slum to crime scene, apparently,” she said. That kept us giggling through the next couple of inappropriate dives.

“Okay, I’ve got one more house on my list, but there’s probably no point. It’s not even really on the market,” Kat said. We were attempting, with the assistance of another round of frozen coffee drinks, (no reason not to start breaking promises to this baby early—her childhood was most likely destined to be a series of failures on my part, and if Ruby and Isaac were anything to go by, caffeine exposure would surely be the least of her problems) to recover our senses of smell from assault by a 1920s Craftsman bungalow with four bedrooms and forty-two cats.

“I don’t think I can stand it, Kat,” I said.

“I told you they all sucked.” She heaved her feet up on the dashboard and wriggled her toes with their violet nails. “My legs are killing me. Look at these veins.” She traced her fingers along the mottled blue lumps decorating her calves. Kat was only six months pregnant, a month or so behind me, but already she had a brutal case of varicose veins, the only flaw in her otherwise perfect pregnant persona. I had been spared that particular indignity, but had plenty of others to keep me occupied: ankles swollen to the size of Isaac’s Hippity Hop, most notably, and a belly mapped with stretch marks like a page out of the Thomas Guide to the city of Los Angeles. I was desperately hoping the lines would stop at the city limits, and not extend all the way out to the Valley.

“It’s kind of nice how your toenail polish matches the veins,” I said.

“I paid extra for that. Anyway. One more. I’m sure it’s no better than any of the others, but I haven’t seen it yet. My mother-in-law asked me to go check up on it for her. Apparently it belongs to the boyfriend of the son of her cousin. Or something. She wants to make sure they’ve got it in shape to show it. We could just pretend we went, and go catch a movie or something.”

My ears perked up. “Gay owner?”

Kat nodded, stirred her straw in her drink without sipping, and held out her hand for my empty cup. “Yup.”

“That’s terrific!” I said. Gay former owners are the Holy Grail of the West LA real estate market. Who else has the resources, energy, and taste to skillfully and painstakingly decorate every last inch of a house down to the doorknobs and crown moldings? Single women generally lack the first, straight men always suffer from a dire shortage of the third, and straight couples with children definitely have none of the second.

“Movie time?” Kat said, hopefully.

“No. Let’s go see the house.”

“But it’s not even on the market. And it’s bound to be hideous.”

“Come on, Kat! Gay owners! Let’s go!”

I wasn’t disappointed. We pulled up in front of a large, stucco, Spanish-style house with wrought-iron miniature balconies at every front window, tumbling purple bougainvillea, and a small but impeccably maintained front garden. The house was only about ten or so blocks from our apartment in Hancock Park, in an even nicer neighborhood called Larchmont.

Even Kat looked strapped for something negative to say. Finally, she grumbled, “I’m sure it’s out of your price range.”

I jumped out of the car and raced up the short front walk. The house was a little close to the street, but the block seemed quiet, at least in the middle of the day. I was already imagining how the neat square of grass would look with Ruby’s bike overturned in the middle and Isaac’s plastic slide lodged in the flowerbeds.

The front door was of carved oak. In the middle of the broad, time-darkened planks was a knocker in the shape of a gargoyle’s head. I grabbed the lolling tongue and rapped once. Kat came up behind me.

“There’s a lock box,” she said. She reached into her purse, pulled out a keypad, and snapped it onto the box attached to the door handle. Then she punched a few numbers into the keypad, and a little metal door at the bottom of the box slid open. In the box was a security key that looked like it belonged in the ignition of the Space Shuttle rather than in the front door of my dream house. The house I planned to live in until I was an old lady. The house I intended for my children to call ‘home’ for the rest of their lives. My house. Mine.

“Open it, already,”