Murder Plays House by Ayelet Waldman Read Free Book Online Page A

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 tomake 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 head.
    “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