Murder Plays House Read Free Page A

few rounds into a paper mugger was just what Al needed to improve his mood. By tomorrow he’d be chipper again. I hoped.
    I decided to take advantage of my newly acquired day off and do some house hunting. I had already gone around with a realtor a few times, in a more or less desultory manner, just to see what was out there, and what our money could buy us. Not as much as I’d hoped, it turned out. Lately, I’d taken to cruising the nicer neighborhoods, more to torture myself with what I couldn’t afford than for any other reason. Although there was always the chance that I’d pass a house at the same time an ambulance pulled away, bearing its owner to his final rest, and setting in motion a probate sale.
    I pulled into a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, bought myself a mocha freeze (promising the baby that this would be thelast jolt of caffeine I’d expose her to for at least a week), and pulled out my cell phone.
    “Kat Lahidji,” my realtor murmured in her slightly breathy voice.
    “Hey Kat, it’s Juliet.”
    “Hi! Are you on your way to class?” Kat and I had met at a prenatal yoga class on Montana Boulevard. I liked her despite the fact that she, like every other pregnant woman in that part of greater Los Angeles, didn’t even
look
pregnant when seen from the rear. She was in perfect shape, still doing headstands in the sixth month of pregnancy. She had sapphire blue eyes and nearly black hair that she tamed with a collection of silver and turquoise pins and clips and wore swirled into a knot at the nape of her neck. Only her nose kept her from being exquisitely beautiful. It looked like something imagined by Picasso—a combination of a Persian princess’s delicate nostrils, and the craggy hook of a Levantine carpet merchant. Kat had once told me that her mother-in-law was on a tireless campaign to convince her to explore the wonders of rhinoplasty.
    Kat and I had become friendly, meeting weekly for yoga, and even once or twice for lunch, although Kat never did much more than push her food around her plate. Despite the fact that her food phobia made me feel compelled to double my own consumption in order to compensate, we enjoyed each other’s company. We had the same slightly off-beat sense of humor, were plagued by similar insecurities about the state of our careers and the quality of our parenting, and shared a fondness for crappy chick flicks that disgusted our husbands to no end. I had been surprised to find out that Kat was a real estate agent—she seemed entirely too, well,
real
, for that dubious profession. She did have the car for it, though. She drove a gold Mercedes Benz with the embarrassing vanityplate, “XPTD OFR.” When she had caught me puzzling out the plate’s meaning, she had blushed a kind of burnt auburn under her golden skin, and told me that her husband had bought her the car, plates and all, as a present to celebrate her first year’s employment in his mother’s agency.
    “You work for your mother-in-law?” I had asked, shocked.
    “Yes,” Kat sighed.
    “The nose-job lady?”
    “The very same.”
    I had wanted to ask my friend if she was out of her mind. But I had also wanted her to show me some houses, so the question didn’t seem particularly appropriate.
    Kat responded to my invitation to join me on a morning of house-hunting with her usual professional excitement. “God, do you really want to bother?” she said. “I mean, what’s the point? There’s nothing but dumps out there.”
    “There’s got to be
something.
I finally got the official go-ahead from Peter; I’ve graduated from a looky-loo to a spendy-spend.”
    She sighed heavily. “All right. I’ll see what I can scrape up to show you. At least it will get me out of here for a couple of hours.”
    Kat was a truly dreadful real estate agent. Perhaps she kept her loathing for her job hidden from clients who didn’t know her personally, but I doubted it. She lacked the fundamental realtor ability to seem upbeat