Murder Plays House (8 page)

“Now just look at this carpeting,” he said, flinging open the double doors to the dining room. “It’s in perfect condition, but if you don’t like it, you can tear it right up. Who knows what’s underneath. Could be parquet!”

Kat winced, and I nearly laughed. The mauve shag carpeting probably concealed something, but it was more likely to be bare cement than anything else.

The real magic of the house, however, was that it seemed to have been designed by someone with homicidal feelings toward small children. I’d never before been somewhere quite so kid-unfriendly. The circular staircases had no railings and led down to cement floor. I kept Isaac’s hand tightly in mine, because I didn’t trust him to avoid the spiky wrought-iron sconces that were placed just at the level of his eyes.

We drifted aimlessly through one hideous room after another, the children amusing themselves by making faces in the mirrors that lined every wall and some of the ceilings. The master bedroom was nearly the death of Ruby, although it was hardly her fault. How could she have expected that the sliding glass doors would lead to a sheer twenty-foot drop to the asphalt below.

“They must be redoing the balcony!” the agent said, Ruby swinging from his hand. I couldn’t bring myself to thank him for grabbing her collar and saving her life.

Finally, once it had become obvious that unlike the listing agent, we were not the types whose cheerfulness could not be dimmed even by peeling bathroom fixtures and water-stained ceilings, he led us out to the garden.

“It’s perfect for children. Perfect. There’s even room for a play structure!”

I followed his pointed finger with my eyes. “Where?” I asked.

“Right there!”

“In those sticker bushes?”

“It’s a xeriscape—a low-water garden. Very fashionable, and environmentally sensitive.”

I murmured something noncommittal, then found my attention distracted by the shrieks of a child. Little Ashkon had managed to impale himself on the thorns of one of those succulents.

“Oh no!” Kat screamed, tearing through the garden, tripping over the rusted patio furniture.

“Stay right here!” I ordered my children, sitting them down on the back step—the only area not overrun with child-eating thorn bushes. “Do not move!”

I ran over to help Kat. She was trying to yank Ashkon’s arm free of the barbs, but their gyrations served only to entangle him further.

“Wait!” I barked. I waded warily into the garden. Kat held her son still while I carefully disengaged him from his predator, thorn by thorn. Once he was free, Kat lifted him in her arms, and we trudged back to where my kids were sitting, quietly for once.

“Perfect for kids?” Kat snarled at the other agent, who had the grace to blush.

By the time we got back into the car, Ashkon had stopped crying, and had begun showing off his scratches to Isaac, who expressed very satisfactory awe at his friend’s bravery. I took off down the hill, as fast as I could.

“Fine,” Kat said.

“Fine, what?”

“Fine, we’ll get you the Felix house.”

“Really?” I smiled at my friend. “Really?”

She had her arms crossed over her chest, and she looked grim. “I just warn you, it’s not going to be easy. Nahid is planning a full frontal attack for when the boys decide to put the house on the market. She’s lined up a psychic to do this insane ‘ghost-clearing’ ceremony, and she’s already booked a dresser for the open house.”

“A dresser?”

“You know, like a decorator.”

“But the house is beautifully decorated!”

Kat shook her head. “If there isn’t something gilded
in every room, my mother-in-law doesn’t consider it done.”

“Ah. She must
love
your place.”

Kat laughed bitterly. “Not a holiday goes by that she doesn’t try to foist some monstrosity off on me. You would not believe what she gave Reza for his birthday this year.”

“What?”

“I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be. It hangs from the ceiling. It’s covered in gilt sparrows.”

“Ew!!”

“My sentiments exactly. It went right into his study, with every other present she’s ever given us. At this point that room looks like Ali Baba’s cave!”

“So what do we do? How do we get me my house?”

Kat shook her head. “I don’t know. I have to think about it. If we wait until it goes on the market, we’ll be screwed. Knowing my mother-in-law, she’ll jack the price up and get a bidding war going. I wouldn’t be surprised if she manages to convince people that a dead body is good
feng shui.
Our only hope is to get an accepted offer
before
it goes on the market.”

“How do we do that? Isn’t the owner’s boyfriend Nahid’s cousin’s son or something? They’re not going to sell it to us, especially not if they know she can make them more money.”

Kat wrinkled her forehead. “I don’t know. But that’s our only hope.”

We rode in silence for a while. Then I said, “What if I went to talk to Felix? What if I offered to help with the investigation of this sister’s death? You know, in my capacity as an almost-licensed private investigator, and an experienced criminal defense attorney. I could act as his advocate with the police, that kind of thing.”

“You’re saying you want to ingratiate yourself with a
murder victim’s brother, in order to buy his house on the cheap?” Kat said.

I glanced over at her. “Yeah.”

She heaved her feet on the dashboard and tapped her toes. She looked positively disgusted with me. Finally, she said, “That could work.”

W
HEN
we got home I foisted the kids off on their father with instructions to give me an hour’s peace and quiet.

“And you know what would be great?” I said.

“What?” Peter asked, Isaac dangling upside down from his shoulder and Ruby wrapped tightly around his legs.

“An early dinner.”

My husband glanced ostentatiously at his watch. My generally constant level of pregnancy starvation had resulted in our evening meals creeping closer and closer to the daylight hours. I couldn’t help it. I just couldn’t seem to make it past five. I suppose that wouldn’t have been so bad if I weren’t always hungry again by eight. Yes, all right, I’d been eating two full suppers since the first trimester of my pregnancy. Two breakfasts, too. Also two lunches. So sue me.

“How about if we make homemade pizza?” Peter asked.

“Mmm,” I said, wondering how I’d survive until the pies came out of the oven.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll make you an extra one for tonight. And have an apple if you’re hungry now.”

Thank God I’m married to an understanding man. So sympathetic was he, in fact, that he had taken, with each pregnancy, to matching me pound for pound. Alas for him he could not breastfeed the pounds away.

I waddled off to Peter’s office and logged on to his computer. In a short while I had gathered a very detailed picture of Alicia’s brother, Murray Felix. No surprise the man went by his last name only. The name Murray conjured up many things—a
bar mitzvah
boy, a certified public accountant, a podiatrist with bad teeth. But Murray, the fashion designer, on the cutting edge of every trend? I don’t think so. So Felix it was. A name that was also a brand.

Felix had launched his label with a collection of old-school preppy clothes,
a la
Ralph Lauren, but with a twist. The men’s suits were cut a little tight, with bright colored ties that would not have passed muster at the Harvard Club. The women’s gowns looked like fairly conservative classics, but in black and white only, with necks so high and hems so low that they were nearly demure. Except they were each characterized by a plunging back nearly to the buttocks, or a cut-away section that revealed an unexpected peek of the side of a breast. The fashionistas had raved about Felix’s quirky creativity, his lush fabrics, his unexpected vision. And the hordes had responded by buying, and buying big.

Within a few years, however, other quirky, unexpected, lush designers had come on the scene, and Felix’s star had begun to fade. Then, last year, the man had come up with the marketing coup of all time. He hired as a spokesman an eighteen-year-old rapper from Compton named 9 MM and launched the line that made his career. 9 MM had a brother serving a life-sentence for murder, a mother with three crack
cocaine possession convictions on her record, and more street cred than any other gangsta rapper in the business. The clothing line was called Booty Rags and, from the pictures I saw on the Web, seemed to consist primarily of gigantic cargo pants, tight shirts in vaguely Indian patterns, and dresses of torn spandex that revealed significantly more than they covered. Booty Rags were all the rage—everyone from Hollywood starlets, to teenage nymphets, to the well-maintained and impeccably toned matrons of Beverly Hills was prancing through their days draped in the torn and bedraggled finery. For those, like me, whose bodies would not stand up to the rigors of micromini dresses and see-through tank tops, Felix sold T-shirts with ‘Booty Rags’ scrawled in a facsimile of graffiti tagging. No wonder Alicia’s brother was selling his house in Larchmont. He had moved way beyond that pleasant neighborhood, and well into the land of gated estates.

The aroma of baking pizza interrupted my Internet reverie. I followed my nose out to the kitchen and found my husband and son swathed in identical white aprons. Their hair and faces were dusted with flour, and they had rigged up a catapult system out of wooden spoons and elastic bands.

“What’s up, guys?” I asked, from what I thought was the relative safety of the doorway.

“Extra dough,” Peter said. Isaac leaned back and fired off a grayish clump. The T-shirt I was wearing had ridden up over my round belly, revealing a strip of midriff. The dough caught me right there.

“Ick,” I said, peeling off the cold clot. “Gross.”

“Yeah!” Isaac squealed. “Really gross. Like brains!”

I winced. “Ick,” I said again. “Where’s Ruby?”

“She didn’t feel like helping. She’s down on cooking for some reason. She’s in her room, playing computer games.”

I left my men to their battlefield, hoping vainly that one or the other of them would become inspired to clean up. I found Ruby hunched over the iMac she had inherited when her father upgraded his system.

“What’cha doing, kiddo?” I asked, sitting down on her bed and picking a bit of pizza dough off my stomach.

“Barbie dress up.”

Ruby’s favorite computer game was a particularly vacuous one in which she spent her time crafting outfits for Barbie to wear. Her current project looked like a bra and panties in a lime green, with fringes.

“Cool outfit,” I said, wondering if I shouldn’t hire her out to Felix. She seemed to have his style down pat.

She leaned back in her chair and gazed at her handiwork appraisingly. “It’s okay. Mom?”

“What?”

“I need a belly button pierce.”

I lifted my eyes from my stomach and stared at my six-year-old, dumbfounded. “You need
what?
”

“I need a belly button pierce. Like Barbie.” She pointed at her design. It was only then that I noticed that she’d decorated the doll with a thick gold hoop where her belly button would be. The thing is, though, Barbie is not particularly anatomically correct, and Ruby’s ring sat on an empty expanse of virtual belly.

“You don’t need your navel pierced, kid.”

“Yes I do!” she said. “Barbie has one!” She poked the screen with one indignant finger.

“First of all, Barbie isn’t real. She’s a doll. And that’s just a picture of a doll that
you
made. And anyway, if she
were
real, Barbie would be a lot older than you, Ruby.”

“But I’d look really good with a belly button pierce.” She lifted up her shirt and showed off her delicious rounded
stomach. I scooped her up in my arms and kissed her exactly where she’d hoped to impale a bit of metal.

“Mom!” she objected.

“Sweetie, we’re not having this argument. You’re not getting your pupik pierced, and that’s that.”

“Pupik is not an English word, mama.”

“I know sweetie. It’s Yiddish. It’s what your Bubbe and Zayde call a belly button.”

She sat up in my lap and gazed at me, her expression carefully devoid of expression. “Okay, well. How about earrings?”

I stared back at her. Had this all been a ploy to get me to agree to pierce her
ears?
Was my little girl capable of that kind of craftily sophisticated manipulation?

“When you’re twelve, Ruby. You know that.”

She groaned in frustration and heaved herself off my lap. “When I’m
twelve?
I can’t wait that long! I might already be ugly when I’m twelve! I might be . . .” she paused for dramatic effect. “I might
be fat!”
She whispered the word, as though it were too horrible even to say out loud. I could have been imagining it, but I swear she shot a horrified glance at the stomach peeping out from underneath my too-small shirt.

I was saved from launching into a defense of my prenatal weight gain by the chirping of the telephone. Peter had reprogrammed all the ringers on our various phones so they did anything but ring. They beeped, they twittered, they squawked.

I left Ruby to her fashion design and went to answer the phone. Kat didn’t even bother to say hello.

“She says if I even
talk
to them she’ll force me to manage rental units for the next thirty years.”

“What?” I asked, perplexed.

“Nahid. My mother-in-law. My
boss
,” she snarled. “She
caught me going through the computer looking for Felix’s phone number. She freaked. I mean, freaked.”

“Why? What did you tell her?”

“I didn’t tell her anything.” Kat paused. “Okay, I told her that we’d decided to approach Felix to see if he’d be interested in a quiet sale.”

“You what?” I’m ashamed to say I shouted. “Why? Why would you tell her?”

“You don’t understand the woman,” Kat shouted back. “She’s a
djinn!
I couldn’t help it. I had to tell her.”

Now, Peter’s mother and I weren’t friends. I had never managed to muster sufficient interest in her Hummel figurine and Beanie Baby collections even to feign a relationship. Did I think Peter’s mother was crazy? Sure. Did I find her irritating? Definitely. But even I had never thought of the woman who insisted on being called “Mother Wyeth” as being a demon capable of assuming both human and animal form. But then, perhaps I’d change my tune if I had to work for her.