Murder Plays House

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Why don’t I do it?” I said. “There’s no reason for you to schlep all the way up here, and, anyway, who knows when or if we’ll get paid for this case.” Sandra would bill the government for our time, but if she were to receive reimbursement at all, it wouldn’t be for a good long while.

  “Okay,” Al said. “You’re better at chatting up regular folk, anyway.” That certainly is true. There’s no one like Al for getting the lowlifes to spill their guts, but somehow his skills often fail him when confronted with decent, law-abiding citizens. I think the truth is that after twenty-five years on the force, Al just has a hard time believing that there’s any such thing as an honest person. My years as a public defender certainly infected me with this cynicism, and it has been more than validated by my experiences sticking my nose into private investigations. I’ve seen some pretty straight-seeming people do some pretty awful things. Still, unlike my partner, my belief in the fundamental integrity of at least some members of the human race has not gasped its final breath. Who knows how long that will last?

  Inglewood is one those strange Los Angeles neighborhoods whose benign, even charming, appearance belies its frightening crime statistics. Little cottages flanked by palm trees and jacaranda bushes nestle on small squares of lawn. There are bicycles leaning against porch steps, and kids playing hopscotch and basketball on the sidewalks. It’s only at second glance that you notice the metal bars on the windows and doors, and realize that there are few if any older people sitting out on their porches, even in the warmth of a Los Angeles winter morning. They are bolted and barred in their houses, too afraid of flying bullets and warring children to risk the sun-dappled streets. The young people are out, congregating on the corners, leaning against the broken streetlights and staring at the passing cars with eyes vacant of any expression other than vague menace.

  In my years at the public defender’s office I’d represented many boys like these. And they were boys, still in their teens, although they had lived through enough violence and fear for men twice their ages. It had taken me many hours to get through to these young men, to convince them that I, a white woman from a background so dissimilar to their own that it might have been another country, another era, another world, would represent them not just honestly, but passionately. I’m ashamed to say that many of them never believed me. The ones to whom I got through weren’t necessarily those who ended up being acquitted. Like most public defenders, I had relatively few of those—my clients were pretty much always guilty of the bank robberies and drug deals with which they’d been charged. Every so often, however, I made one of them understand that I cared about him, that I knew that underneath the tough hoodlum he presented to the world was a young boy with the same fears and dreams as any other boy, from any other neighborhood, including my own. Those guys stayed in touch with me, writing me long letters from prison, occasionally bragging of their successes in getting their GEDs, or maintaining contact with their girlfriends and children. Many if not most of them ended up back in prison after their releases, but every once in a while there was one who turned his life around. I wasn’t arrogant enough to believe I was the cause of the transformation, but I knew it didn’t hurt that somewhere in the system he had met someone who took the time to care about him.

  I pulled up in front of a small pink house set back from the street. The owners had given up the fight against crab grass and LA drought, and had ripped up their lawn, laid down cement, and painted the whole thing an almost ironic shade of grass green. They’d done their best with window boxes of nasturtiums and geraniums, and there were a few bright blooms poking out from behind the wrought-iron bars covering the windows. An ancient and impeccably maintained Lincoln Continental hunkered down in the driveway, its fins casting sharp shadows across the flat, emerald pseudo-lawn.

  I pulled into the driveway behind the Lincoln, careful not to get too close to the highly polished rear bumper. I flipped down my mirror, applied some modest, girly pink lipstick, and buttoned my white cardigan up to the neck. Different witnesses respond to different things, and I’m always careful to look the part—whatever that might be. Given the tidy house, window boxes, and thirty year old car, I was betting that the house contained an elderly couple who would be most likely to confide in a nicely but unassumingly turned out matron. And I was right.

  The door was answered by a woman in her late seventies, wearing a flowered dress and a cotton sweater that was the twin of my own. Her sparse white hair was arranged carefully on her head, not quite concealing the mahogany sheen of her scalp, and she had an ironed pink handkerchief tucked into her sleeve. The only affront to the impeccably maintained order of her person was the puffy, veined ankles protruding from a pair of pale blue terrycloth slippers. She had crushed down the backs of the slippers, and her heels hung, cracked and swollen, over the edges. I wriggled my toes as best I could in my too-tight Joan and David navy blue pumps. At this stage of my pregnancy, my feet looked more like those of this old woman than I cared to contemplate.

  “Hello,” I said, extending my hand. “My name is Juliet Applebaum, and I work for your niece, Lara.”

  The woman shook my hand firmly and moved aside to let me in. “Yvette Kennedy. Very pleased to make your acquaintance. My sister told me that someone might be coming to talk about her poor child. You come on in.”

  She led me into the front room, a small neat parlor with carpeting the precise color of the cement lawn. I perched on the edge of a pale pink sofa, marveling at how long it had been since I’d felt the sticky tug of clear vinyl slip-covers beneath my thighs. The only seat in the tidy room not thus protected was a taupe Barcalounger whose cracked pleather seemed not to warrant defense against assault by the human behind. Or, perhaps, it was simply that the recliner had never been empty long enough to allow it to be wrapped in protective sheeting. The old man ensconced in its depths appeared to have been there for the last two or three decades.

  “Mr. Kennedy,” the old woman said, gently, waking the man from his slumber. He startled, and wiped the corner of his mouth with one large hand. His fingers were smooth and bloated, twisted with age and arthritis. Nothing could hide, however, the massive expanse of palm, and it was clear that this had once, a long, long time ago, been a very powerful man. “We have a visitor.”

  He looked at me, and then at his wife. “Mrs. Kennedy?” he asked. His voice was deep and hoarse, but time and sleep had rendered it more of a purr than a growl.

  “It’s about Etta Jean’s girl. You know.”

  He grunted and pushed a bar on the side of his chair. The leg rest swung down, and the back moved upright. He put his hands on his knees and turned his attention to me. He rubbed his gnarled fist across his cinnamon-colored cheek and said, “A gross miscarriage of justice, is what that is.”

  “I agree, sir,” I said.

  “I marched with Dr. King in Selma,” he said, shaking his head. “You’d have told me then that forty years later we’d be looking at this kind of thing, I would have gone on home. Not bothered missing a day’s work.”

  “Now you just stop, Mr. Kennedy,” his wife interrupted. “One has nothing to do with the other.”

  He sighed loudly, and shook his head.

  “Mr. Kennedy. Mrs. Kennedy,” I said. “Your niece Lara claims she was here visiting you in August of this year. Is that true?”

  “It surely is,” the old woman says.

  “Are you positive about the date?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” her husband replied.

  “Really?” I asked. Most people don’t remember dates and times with quite this certitude.

  The woman nodded, her stiff hair bobbing with the vigorous motion of her head. “There’s no mistaking it. Mr. Kennedy is a deacon at our church, First African Methodist, over on Thirty-Seventh Avenue. Lara was with us during the summer baptisms. She came to the Lord, she did. Blessed be his name.”

  “Amen,” her husband said, so loudly it made me jump.

  This was abou
t as good as I could ever have hoped. Better even. Nothing like a baptism for an alibi to turn a case around.

  “Would you like to see the photographs?” Mrs. Kennedy asked.

  I nodded, and to my delight soon found myself leafing through an envelope of pictures clearly stamped with the date and time. There was a series of photos of white-clad young people being dipped backwards into something that looked a lot like the birthing tubs I’d seen advertised for rent in the back of Mothering Magazine. Maybe those tubs doubled as baptismal fonts when they weren’t being used by natural-minded home-birthers.

  “That’s Etta Jean’s girl, right there,” Mrs. Kennedy said, pointing a finger at a rail-thin girl whose robes hung loosely on her gaunt frame.

  My complacent glee at the sureness of an acquittal ebbed. Lara had the telltale, hollow-cheeked, brittle-haired look of a crack addict. Her aunt must have noticed my dismay, because she clicked her tongue.

  “She looks bad in this picture, I know,” she said.

  I didn’t deny it.

  “By the end of her time with us, she was much improved. Much. Isn’t that so, Mr. Kennedy?”

  Her husband nodded vigorously. “Indeed. That is the truth. She got off that plane, I didn’t think she’d be able to walk to the car. Honestly I didn’t. But she got back on it a few months later with a spring in her step. Yes she did.”

  “Was she . . .” I paused, not wanted to insult this sweet older couple. But there was no getting around it, Sandra had hired me to do a job, and do it I must. “Was she using drugs, do you think?”

  “No! Of course not,” Mrs. Kennedy said sharply.

  “Now Mrs. Kennedy, you calm down,” her husband said. “You can see why she would ask. Of course you can.” He turned to me. “It wasn’t the drugs got that girl. She was making her own self sick, no help from any drugs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My sister sent her to us because Lara had been making herself ill,” her aunt interrupted. “She’d put her finger down her throat, to make herself vomit.”

  “She was bulimic?” I asked.

  “Yes, she was,” Mr. Kennedy said. “And that Etta Jean was at the end of her rope. Never could control the girl. You know that’s true,” he admonished his wife, who had opened her mouth to object. “Never could do a thing with her. Well, we took that girl in, brought her to the Lord, and she kept her food down fine. Yes, she did.”

  Mrs. Kennedy smiled. “We fattened her right up. Look here.” She pulled out another photograph. This girl in the picture was by no means fat, but she was a world away from what she’d looked like in the previous photograph. Her skin looked smoother, her hair was neatly ironed and turned under at the ends, and almost glossy. Her smile was broad. She looked happy. I felt a pang at the thought of what befell her once she’d returned home to Dallas. I was willing to bet all the money in my wallet that her bulimia had returned full force once she’d been thrown into jail.

  I spoke to the Kennedys for a while longer, and then told them that I’d send typed witness statements for them to sign and return. I asked them if they’d mind if I took the photographs with me, promising that I’d be sure to have Sandra return them. I left confident that I’d helped Sandra win her case. The word of a deacon and his wife, and the timed, dated photographs, were surely all the alibi Lara would need to provide. Not even a Texas jury could ignore that evidence. There was even a chance that the prosecutor would see his way to dismissing the case before trial. Although, given that this would mean acknowledging what everyone else knew to be true—that his informant was a liar whose interest lay not in convicting actual criminals, but in protecting himself and keeping money flowing into his pockets—perhaps a dismissal was too much to hope for. When I’d worked at the Federal Defender, I’d come across all too many of this particular breed of informant scum. The most galling part of it all is the amount of my tax dollars the government blithely hands over to them as reward for their dishonesty. I’d been involved in cases where the confidential informant had earned millions of dollars setting up drug deals. Now, some of these guys certainly pulled in some actual drug dealers. After all, they were themselves involved in the business, and had been recruited precisely because of whom they knew. A shocking number, however, set up first-time offenders with no history of participation in drug crimes. I’d represented all too many of these folks, people whose sole involvement in the drug trade was at the behest of the informant. They were invariably facing ten-to-twenty-year sentences for their minor roles in drug conspiracies. At first I couldn’t figure out why the informants would prey on this kind of person. Then it finally hit me; why turn state’s evidence against some gangland thug who is bound to have someone track you down and exact retribution, when the DEA will pay you the same amount of money to set up a first-time loser? It’s a simple question of personal safety, and your basic snitch is nothing if not wise in the ways of self-preservation.

  On my way home from the Kennedys, I was overcome by an insurmountable urge. Right here, only ten or fifteen miles out of my way, was Beulah’s Fried Chicken ‘n’ Waffles. It really was too much to expect a pregnant woman to resist. On my way through the overwhelming LA traffic that was quite obviously conspiring with my obstetrician to keep me from my appointment with a platter of wings and thighs, I called Al.

  “Where are you?” I asked him.

  “Shooting range. Just leaving.”

  “Good. You’re not too far. I’ll buy you lunch. Beulah’s.”

  He didn’t even reply. He didn’t need to. My favorite thing about Al is his encyclopedic knowledge of the lunch counters of the Los Angeles basin. We share a devotion to greasy, budget cuisine. It’s what brought us together in the first place. When my first case was assigned to this gruff, sexist gun-toting ex-cop, I never imagined we’d end up friends. In fact, I vowed I’d never work with him again. I’m fairly confident he made the same promise to himself, when he saw me tripping through the office in a black leather miniskirt, acting like god’s gift to criminal defense. A week later, after a day spent interviewing a passel of good-natured Hell’s Angels, Al took me to Felipe’s for a French dip. My first bite of the sandwich served to seal Al in my affections, and I think I earned my place in his when I devoured, in two bites, the purple pickled egg he handed me.

  I was dipping my fried chicken in maple syrup when he walked through the door.

  “Couldn’t even wait?” he grumbled. But he grinned when a platter appeared before him as soon as his butt hit the chair. I’d gotten his order in at exactly the right moment.

  While we gobbled our food, I told him about my success with the Texas case. When I was done recounting the tale, he waved a drumstick at me.

  “Excellent luck. But will we get paid?”

  “Sandra will file a request for investigation fees. We’ll get something, I’m sure.”

  He wiped a stream of grease from his chin. “Well, thank God for that. Because we’ve got nothing on the calendar for the next two weeks.”

  “Nothing? Nothing at all?”

  He shook his head. “Big goose egg. And I’ve got to pay for the rat problem.”

  I made a gagging sound. “I’ll cover half.”

  “Nope,” he sighed. “My house, my problem. Anyway, I hired a kid to help me out. Cheaper than the exterminator. Remember Julio Rodriguez? I’ve got him digging around under my house looking for the dead ones.”

  “He’s out?” I asked. Julio was one of Al’s protégés. He was a young kid with a talent for computers, who had used his skills in slightly less than legitimate ways. Rumor had it that it had taken upwards of a million dollars to close the holes he exposed in the Social Security Administrations computer system, and I’m pretty sure they never caught up to all the immigrants who benefited from Julio’s early-amnesty green card program. The thing about Julio was that he never benefited, financially, from any of it. As far as any of us could tell, he did it all out of a kind of Robin Hood impulse, stealing legitimacy from the g
overnment to provide it to his family, friends, and neighbors. Money never changed hands at all.

  “Yup. Supervised release, as of two months ago. Poor kid, damn probation won’t let him work in the only trade he’s got, so he’s got to hunt rats for me.” In hacker cases like Julio’s, one of the conditions of release is always that there be no further contact with computers. It always seems sort of harsh to me. I mean, how’s a guy supposed to get a job nowadays if he can’t get near a computer? No wonder Julio’s reduced to scraping rat corpses out from under Al’s garage.

  Al patted his lips with a napkin and hunched forward in his chair. “We’re in trouble, Juliet.”

  I nodded. I knew we were. “I’ve got five thousand dollars just sitting around in my separate checking account,” I told him. “That should hold us for a couple more months. We could pay your salary, and the phone bill at least.”

  Al shook his head. “I’m not taking it from you.”

  “That’s ridiculous. We’re partners, Al. You’ve sunk money into this. Now it’s my turn.”

  He dipped a finger into his syrup and swirled it around. “No can do.”

  “Al!” I said sharply. “I’m not willing to give up on us. We’re just in a slump. Things were going great. We got paid a ton of money for the Jupiter Jones case. We had those worker’s comp investigations. Sandra will get us paid. It’s building. Slowly, but it’s building.”