Free The Big Nap by Ayelet Waldman

lovely woman?
    “Indeed, I do. In
couture.
”
    “Ah,
couture
,” I said. That explained the price tag.
    “Would you like to try it? If you decide you like it, we can shorten the slacks for you while you shop.”
    I paused for a moment. I had never in my life spent that much money on a single outfit, not even my wedding dress. I’d bought that at a sample sale for ninety-seven dollars. Ninety-seven dollars and the black eye I’d gotten when Iyanked it out from under the sweaty fingers of another bargain-hunting bride.
    “It
is
expensive,” she said, reading my mind. “But it’s beautifully made. It’s a fabulous outfit.”
    She said the magic word. I was under strict orders to find fabulousness at all costs. “Okay, I’ll try it.”
    Ninety minutes later, Isaac and I were on our way home, our trunk loaded down with the satin pants, gray shirt, and the astronomically expensive black sandals with silver buckles that I simply had to have to go with the outfit.
    “I
am
fabulous, aren’t I?” I asked my baby as we zipped through the streets of Los Angeles on our way to pick Ruby up at preschool.
    That afternoon, I popped an Elmo video into the VCR for Ruby, mentally apologizing to the American Academy of Pediatrics, who had just informed me, via NPR, that I was doing incalculable damage to my child by allowing her to watch TV. I strapped Isaac into his Baby Bjorn and began to pace back and forth. As long as I was moving, the baby was quiet. I’d spent the day worrying more about my appearance than about Fraydle and I was feeling guilty. I was also certain that Fraydle’s father was never going to find her, no matter how hard he was looking for her. I debated calling the police, but realized that without the Finkelsteins’ cooperation, I wouldn’t get very far. Chances were that she had just taken off, probably to avoid a marriage to someone she didn’t love.
    I needed to find her myself.
    Even at the time, I knew my involvement with Fraydle was a little crazy; certainly it was out of proportion to how well I’d known the girl. But for some mysterious reason I felt a sense of responsibility toward her. Maybe she remindedme of myself at her age. Maybe her plight activated the do-gooder complex that had lain dormant since I’d left the federal public defender’s office. Maybe I just needed to concentrate on something other than how utterly and completely exhausted I was.
    I hadn’t expected Yossi to call, and he hadn’t surprised me. His evasiveness was certainly suspicious, but short of calling the cops and telling them that first of all I had a missing person to report and second of all I felt a little uncomfortable about the veracity of an Israeli friend of the disappeared, I wasn’t sure what I could do.
    I needed some advice and I knew just who would give it to me. I picked up the phone and, continuing to bounce Isaac up and down on my chest, called the federal public defender’s office, my old stomping ground. The secretary to the investigators’ unit put me on hold and I waited for Al Hockey to get off his butt and answer the phone. Al had been working as an investigator for the federal public defender ever since he’d retired after taking a bullet to the gut in his twenty-fifth year at the L.A. police department. Retirement hadn’t agreed with him, and he always said that getting people out of jail wasn’t all that different from putting them away, just a little bit harder. During my time as an attorney in that office, we’d been an unstoppable team. I owed every one of my “Not Guilty” verdicts to his tireless footwork. Al possessed the miraculous ability to pluck an alibi witness out of thin air.
    “If it isn’t my favorite private eye! Juliet Applebaum, how are your bullet holes?”
    “Fine, Al. And yours?”
    “Just fine. What borderline illegal activities do you have in store for me today?”
    “Illegal? I’m outraged. Truly outraged. When have I ever asked you to do anything