Free Murder Plays House by Ayelet Waldman Page A

thing.”
    “You’re saying you want to ingratiate yourself with amurder 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.”

Seven
    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 crackcocaine 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