Murder Plays House

by Ayelet Waldman

  “That’s nice, honey.” I jerked my foot away. “Way to make me feel good.”

  “Oh stop it.” He took my foot back in his warm palms and began rubbing. “You know I think you’re fat little feet are adorable.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  He tickled my toes and I giggled. “I do,” he said. “You’re the cutest pregnant woman around.”

  I sighed. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew Kat. She’s gorgeous. She looks like a supermodel who happens to have swallowed a basketball. A very neat, petite little basketball.”

  Peter reached his arms around my waist and heaved me on to his lap, grunting loudly. “I prefer women who look like basketballs, not women who look like they swallow them.”

  I leaned against his chest, first checking to make sure that I wasn’t crushing the life out of him. Why am I one of those pregnant women who blows up to cosmic proportions? Why can’t I be like Kat, or like the other Santa Monica matrons at my yoga studio?

  “How about a root beer float?” Peter asked.

  Aha. The answer to my question. “Sure,” I said, rolling off his lap.

  I followed my husband out to the kitchen, and while he scooped vanilla ice cream into the soda fountain glasses he’d bought me for our anniversary the year before, I mused aloud about Alicia Felix’s career.

  “Maybe she stopped getting parts because she got too thin,” I said. “It was disgusting. She looked like an Auschwitz survivor.”

  Peter popped the top off four different bottles of root beer. He was involved in a systematic and painstaking analysis of all commercial root beer brands, including ones available only over the Internet at shocking prices. There were literally two hundred single bottles and cans of root beer taking over our pantry. Every night we had to taste-test at least a few. And I wondered why I was so fat. He carefully poured root beer into the ice cream–filled glasses, careful not to the let any liquid foam over the top.

  “I doubt that’s why she stopped getting cast,” he said. “There’s no such thing as too thin in Hollywood. You would not believe what some of those starlets look like in their bikinis.”

  Peter’s most recent film, The Cannibal’s Vacation, was shot on an island in Indonesia. He was currently pretending to be hard at work on the prequel, Beach Blanket Bloodfest.

  “Oh really? And just how careful an analysis did you make of these gorgeous women in their bathing suits?”

  Actually, I was only pretending to be jealous. My husband is adorable, in that kind of thick glasses, mussy hair, skinny, and pale-skin way that seemed lately to have become so fashionable. He pretty much epitomizes nerd-chic. I’m okay-looking, for an average woman. Pretty even, when I’m not bloated with pregnancy. However, in Hollywood, pretty in a normal way just doesn’t cut it. Everyone here is beautiful, and if they aren’t naturally so, they pay top dollar to get that way. It’s enough to make anyone insecure.

  “Oh, you know me,” Peter said. “Ogling all day and all night. Actually, if you want to know the truth, I did spend a lot of time looking at them. But it was more scientific curiosity. There’s something almost extraterrestrial about those skinny girls with the big boobs. They don’t look human.”

  I leaned over and kissed my husband on the lips. “Thanks, honey. You’re so loyal.”

  He buried his head in my chest. “At least I know these are real.” He sat up and handed me a root beer float. “Taste this one.”

  I slurped.

  “This one any better?” He handed me the other glass.

  “I guess so. But honestly, honey, they all taste more or less the same to me.”

  He shook his head and sighed. “You have such a primitive palate.”

  I took another long sip, and said, “Delicious. So, if the concentration camp look isn’t a deterrent, then why hasn’t Alicia Felix been able to get any work for the past five years?”

  Peter lifted his head and got his own drink. “How old was she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He went to the living room and retrieved his computer. He clicked back to the TV-Phile site.

  “Says here that she was born in 1973.”

  I wrinkled my brow. “So she’s thirty?”

  “Maybe, but I doubt it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her first credit is as ‘Bereaved Young Mother’ on St. Elsewhere in 1983. Something tells me that by ‘young’ they didn’t mean ten years old. She’s got to have been at least twenty then. Or been able to play twenty. That makes her birthdate no later than 1963. Or 1964, if she could play old.”

  I leaned forward and stared at the screen. “No way. She took ten years off her age?”

  “It’s pretty common,” Peter said. “You wouldn’t believe who shows up when we put out a casting call for a high school student. Women your age walk in and try to fake seventeen!”

  “That old and decrepit, huh?” I said.

  “You know what I mean. You’re young and gorgeous, but, baby, I hate to break it to you, you ain’t seen twenty in a long, long time.”

  “Fifteen years,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, for an actress like Alicia Felix, thirty-five is old, and forty is the kiss of death. If she was that old, that explains why her career dried up.”

  I sighed, slurping up the rest of my drink. “That just sucks,” I said.

  Peter nodded.

  “Why is it okay for some of these ancient actors to play virile young men well into their sixties and seventies, but a forty-year-old woman can’t get work?”

  Peter opened his mouth, but I didn’t allow him to get a word in edgewise. I was on a roll. “I mean, do they really expect us to believe that some gorgeous thirty-year-old would ever be married to Sean Connery, or Michael Douglas? Those guys are like sixty years old!”

  “Um, babe?”

  “What?”

  “Catherine Zeta-Jones. Married to Michael Douglas.”

  “Oh. Right. Still . . .”

  “It’s unfair,” Peter said. “But that’s Hollywood. Just be grateful you’re not in the business.”

  “Poor Alicia. It doesn’t look like she was in the business anymore, either.”

  Four

  “I want a hard-boiled egg. And a Tab,” Ruby said.

  “And what?” I was pouring breakfast cereal into bowls, tying Isaac’s shoes, and carefully padding Ruby’s class project, a diorama of her grandfather on skis (long story), with wadded paper towels so that it wouldn’t get crushed in transit to school. All at the same time.

  “A Tab.”

  “A tab of what?” I asked, wondering if it was really possible that LSD had made it to the first grade set.

  “A Tab of soda.”

  “Ruby!” I said, more sharply than I should have. “Speak English.”

  “I am!” she yowled in righteous indignation. “I do not want cereal! Cereal is yucky! I want a Tab soda and a hard-boiled egg!”

  I dropped Isaac’s foot, carefully set the shoebox diorama down on the counter, and turned to my daughter, doing my best not to yell. “A diet soda?” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Yes. Milk is sugary. And sugar makes you fat. And cereal is just stretch, and stretch makes you fat, too. I want an egg, and Tab.”

  “First of all, it’s starch, not stretch, and second of all, how do you even know what Tab is?”

  “It’s the best diet soda. Better than Diet Coke. Madison says so. Madison’s mommy lets her have it. She buys it at a special store. A store for skinny women.” She paused and looked at me critically. “I don’t think you’ve ever been there.”

  I counted silently to ten, poured milk into the two cereal bowls, and set them in front of my children. Isaac picked up his spoon and began eating. Ruby scowled down at the little yellow balls bobbing in the milk.

  “Eat,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes at me.

  “Now.”

  “Whatever,” she said, and lifted her spoon to her lips.

  I sat down at
the table next to her. “Honey, what’s going on with you? Why are you thinking so much about diet stuff? Is it because of Madison? Did she say something to you?”

  Ruby didn’t answer.

  “Honey?”

  She picked up her bowl, drank her milk and cereal down in a few huge swallows, and clambered down out of her chair. As she walked to the sink to deposit her bowl and spoon, I looked at her sturdy legs, her bubble butt (something she inherited from her mother), and her waist, still untapered.

  “Rubes, come here,” I said.

  She came over to me, leaned against my legs, and put her head on my belly. “Hi, baby,” she said, sounding a little glum.

  “Tell me what’s going on, Ruby?”

  She sighed and, without lifting her head of my stomach, said, “Madison, Chinasa, and Hannah are on diets. And I want to be on a diet, too.”

  “Why, sweetie? Why would you want to go on a diet? You’re gorgeous. Your body is perfect! You’re strong and powerful. You’re not fat at all!”

  “I know,” she said.

  I lifted her face in my palms and forced her to look at me. “Well if you know that, why do you want to be on a diet?”

  “Because everybody is on a diet. All the girls in first grade. Everybody wants to be like Madison’s mom. She’s really skinny. She can wear Madison’s pants!”

  “No way!”

  “Yeah, she can!”

  It’s a measure of how sick I am that for a brief moment I felt admiration for a thirty-something-year-old woman who could fit into her six-year-old’s clothes. Then I came to my senses. “I don’t believe that. And if it’s true, then it’s just sick. Honey, normal women can’t wear their little girl’s clothes. Normal women just aren’t that small.”

  “Madison’s mom isn’t normal,” Ruby said, with disgust at the very idea. “Madison’s mom is a model!”

  “Well, that explains it. Models are insane. All of them. They have a grave mental illness. And I don’t want you listening to Madison anymore. Tab! Please. You’re a beautiful girl with a beautiful body. And that’s the end of it. Okay?”

  Ruby shook herself free of my hands. “Okay,” she said, and wafted morosely out of the kitchen.

  At that moment, as if to punctuate her exit, there was the sound of a huge crash, immediately followed by jackhammering. Our neighbors were beginning the demolition of their house. We’d received notification a few months before that the young couple who had bought the duplex from the elderly brother and sister who had lived there for the previous sixty years planned to raze the place and build a McMansion on virtually the entire lot. We hadn’t paid much attention—after all, we were renters, and had little interest in the effects of the neighbors’ activities on property values. For some reason the sheer volume of the construction project had not occurred to me. I wrapped my bathrobe around my waist and ran down the steps to our front door, hoping to catch the workers before they woke my husband.

  “Excuse me!” I shouted at the hard-hat-clad young man wielding the jackhammer.

  No reply.

  “Excuse me!” I shouted, again.

  This time he raised his eyes, but pointed at his ears and shook his head. That’s when I noticed that he was wearing heavy plastic earphones. Lucky him. I waved my hands in the air, and he finally switched off the machine and took off his earphones.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Can you guys wait to do that? My husband works at night, and he sleeps in the morning. You’re going to wake him up.”

  “Huh?” he said.

  “My husband isn’t going to be able to sleep if you guys keep jackhammering!” I said.

  “Lady, we’re working here.”

  “I know that!” I said, exasperated. “But isn’t there some more quiet thing you could be doing? Couldn’t you leave the jackhammering until after lunch?”

  He shook his head. “Lady, city ordinances allow us to begin construction at 8 AM.”

  “I’m not asking you to stop. I’m just asking if there isn’t something more quiet you could do in the mornings.”

  He shook his head, put his earphones back on his head, and revved up his machine again.

  Defeated, I walked back up the stairs to our apartment. I found Peter huddled at the kitchen table, his head in his hands.

  “I went to bed at four,” he said.

  “I know, honey. I’m really sorry. There’s nothing I can do. The city lets them start at eight.”

  “How long is this going to go on?”

  “I don’t know. Months, I imagine. Maybe even longer. I mean, they’re taking the thing down to the ground and rebuilding from scratch.”

  “Juliet,” my exhausted husband whispered. “Please go find us a house. Any house. As long as it’s quiet.”

  I thought of the bucolic garden in which Kat and I had waited for the police. The jasmine plants. The twittering birds. And the house! The giant tub. The Sub-Zero. The mangled corpse. I pushed that last image firmly from my mind and picked up the telephone.

  “You don’t want that house!” Kat said, dumbfounded.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “But someone was killed there! We found her body!”

  “I know.”

  “How could you live there after that?”

  I looked over at my husband, drooping in misery over a cup of steaming coffee.

  “Easily.”

  She let out an exasperated groan. “Anyway, you can’t afford it.”

  “I couldn’t afford it two days ago, but I’m betting there’s some wiggle room in the price now, don’t you think?”

  “That’s sick!”

  “Kat, just do me a favor. Find out what the asking price is. And help me make an offer. I want that house.”

  “Oh, all right. But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “You are a sick person. Really.”

  I laughed. “I’m not sick. I’m just cheap.”

  Five

  WITH Peter awake and able, more or less, to help me get the kids into gear, we were dressed and ready for school almost on time. Before I had kids I never had the problems with tardiness with which I’ve been plagued ever since. I used to blithely juggle court dates, visits to prisons, interviews of witnesses, and appearances before the appellate court with an aplomb that I thought came naturally to me. My first inkling that parenthood was going to have a drastic effect on my competence was the first time I showed up late for jury selection. I had actually made it to the courthouse in plenty of time. It was the twenty minutes I spent crouched in the ladies room, trying to haul my maternity pantyhose back up over my bloated thighs and mountainous belly, that made me late. My favorite moment wasn’t waddling into court, sweat streaming from my forehead, the crotch of my stockings hovering at about knee level. It wasn’t even reassuring my client that all was well while I tried surreptitiously to make sure my skirt wasn’t tucked up into the waistband of my underwear. No, the crowning moment of my career was when the judge called me up to the sidebar and made me explain my tardiness. And forgot to cover the microphone with her hand.

  My attempts to balance work and home kind of went downhill from there. Thus I found myself, six years later, working only a few hours a week, and paying more in late fines to my son’s preschool than the monthly tuition—they billed me ten bucks for every ten minutes I was late to pick the little guy up. Extortion, if you ask me.

  Peter succumbed to the children’s entreaties and agreed to drive them to school. Actually, I think what got him out of the house wasn’t really a burst of paternal devotion, but rather the realization that it was Wednesday, and if he ran the morning carpool he could make it to Golden Apple as soon as it opened and be the first uber-geek in line to buy the brand new Promethea and Top Ten.

  I took a more languid shower than usual—three minutes rather than thirty seconds—and called Al while I was getting dressed.

  “So?” I said my voice slightly muffled by the oversized T-shirt I was pulling over my h
ead.

  “So what?” he answered.

  “So did you see the body?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “Typical sex crime. At least that’s what it looks like now.”

  I shivered. “And what’s going on with the rats?”

  He sighed.

  “Are they still there?”

  “Yup.”

  “And?”

  “And now it seems some of them are dead. At least it smells that way. We don’t know where they are, though. Maybe under the floor, or in the walls.”

  I gagged, which made putting on lipstick something of a challenge. “No way I’m showing up, Al.”

  “So what else is new?”

  I felt a flash of defensive indignation, but the truth was, he was right. The days I actually made it in to work were dramatically outnumbered by the days I didn’t. Still, it wasn’t like I took any money out of his pocket. I billed the clients for the hours I worked. The very few hours I worked.

  “Anyway, what have we got on today?”

  Al sighed. “Barely more than nothing. Just that witness investigation out of Texas. The referral from that friend of yours from law school. I tracked down the address of the witness. He’s up by you. In Inglewood.”

  One of my best friends from law school, Sandra Babcock, had become the terror of the Texas bar. She was an aggressive and talented defense lawyer, operating out of Houston. That made her something of an anomaly in a state where it often seems like most indigent defendants are represented by attorneys whose sole qualification for a career in criminal defense is their ability to catch a nap at counsel table. The appellate court for the Fifth District, perhaps because it understood that it would otherwise force two thirds of local counsel out of business, actually ruled that sleeping through trial does not qualify as ineffective assistance of counsel, a decision which has been a real boon for the hung over and narcoleptic members of the Texas bar, and something of an aggravation for Sandra, whose pro bono clients outnumber her paying ones three or four to one.

  She had called a week before, asking for help on a case. One of her clients, a young woman, had been fingered by a DEA informant who claimed to have passed her three kilos of cocaine for processing into crack. The defendant, a twenty-one-year-old college student, had insisted that she was in Los Angeles visiting family at the time the deal was supposed to have gone down. Sandra had called and asked us to track down the family members with whom she was staying and get witness statements from them. She was hoping that the statements would help in her motion to dismiss the charges. Meanwhile, because it was Texas, the poor kid was rotting in jail, bail not being something the judge felt obligated to provide to an African-American in a drug case, no matter how patently false the charges.