Murder Plays House Read Free

our clients the acquittals they may or may not be entitled to. As partnerships go, we have a good one. His years as a detective with the LAPD taught him top-notch investigative skills, as well as the delicate art of witness intimidation, and my criminal defense experience makes it easy for me to anticipate what an attorney will need when trial rolls around. Given the spotty quality of the private defense bar, sometimes I end up crafting the defense from start to finish, even going so far as to give the lawyer an outline for a closing argument.
    We work well together, Al and I, even if ours is an unlikely match. I’m a diehard liberal, and Al’s, well, Al’s something else altogether. I pay my dues to the ACLU, and he pays his to his militia unit. He belongs to a unique band of gun-toting centralized-government-loathers. Although some of their rhetoric is a bit too close to that of the white supremacists seeking to overthrow the U.S. government, Al and his colleagues are an equal-opportunity bunch. They’d have to be. Traditional groups would have tossed Al out as a race-mixer, and despised his children as mongrels. Al’s wife, Jeanelle, is African-American. Al’s positions are purely political and entirely unracist. He feels that all of us, white, black, brown, and green, are being screwed over by a governmentconcerned with maximizing the wealth of the very few. The difference between Al and normal people who might at least sympathize with that opinion, especially come April 15, is that Al expresses his belief by amassing guns and marching around in the woods with a cabal of similarly committed loonies.
    “What have we got going on today?” I asked Al, when he snarled into the phone. Not a morning person, my partner. That’s one of the few traits he shares with my husband, although Peter would take issue even with that. He hates to think he has anything in common with Al. Peter just doesn’t find the whole libertarian-militia-black-helicopter thing as charming as I do.
    “Rats. Rats is what we’ve got going on,” Al said.
    “Those rats pay our bills,” I reminded him. Al is a notorious despiser of lawyers, preferring to call my fellow members of the bar either “liars” or “scum,” and referring to every firm we do business with, somewhat tediously, as “Dewey, Cheetum & Howe.”
    “Not your kind of rat,” he said. “Real rats. Big, fat tree rats, all over the office. My idiot neighbor took down his palm tree, and they’ve all migrated into my garage.”
    I felt my stomach heave. “Al,” I groaned. My rat phobia probably stems back to the time my mother let me take my kindergarten class gerbil family home for Christmas vacation. I woke up on New Year’s Day to find that Penelope, the mother gerbil, had eaten her children. Also the head of Squeakers, her husband. I found her belching over the remains of Squeakers’s body. All these years and two children later—while there are certainly days when I sympathize with Penelope’s impulse—I still cannot abide rodents. Even rabbits are too whiskery and slithery for my taste. And rats are beyond the pale.
    “I’m not coming to work today,” I said.
    “I figured as much. Anyway, why should you even bother? It’s not like we’ve got any business.”
    Al isn’t a guy inclined to self-pity, which made his woeful tone of voice all the more worrying. Our business
had
been limping along lately. We’d certainly experienced flush moments, but it had been far too long between well-paying gigs. Al’s optimism had been less and less apparent, and now I feared it had seeped entirely away.
    “When is the exterminator due?” I asked.
    “Today, but who knows if he’ll be able to do anything. They’re everywhere.”
    “So what do you want to do today? Come up here and work out of my house?”
    “No point. Nothing to do. I’m calling this day a loss and heading on over to the shooting range as soon as the rat guy shows up.”
    “Good idea.” Firing a