Murder Plays House Read Free Page B

about even the most roach-infested slum. On the contrary. She had a knack for telling you as you pulled up in front of a house exactly what was wrong with it, why you were sure to hate it, and why she wouldn’t let you buy it even were you foolish enough to want it. Her standard comment about every house was, “Who would ever live
here?
” Sometimes she just shuddered in horror and refused even to step out of her car, forcing meto explore on my own. It made for entertaining, if slightly unproductive, house-hunting.
    I actually might have considered the first house Kat showed me that day. It was a crumbling Tudor whose prime was surely in the 1920s or 30s, but the kitchen and bathrooms still had the original art tiles, and the master bedroom had a killer view of the Hollywood Hills. It could have worked for us, except for the fact that in the gaggle of young men hanging out on the corner in front of the house I recognized one of my old clients. He’d weaseled his way out of a crack cocaine conviction by ratting out everyone both above and below him in the organization. Given that in the thirty seconds I was watching him, I saw him do two hand-offs of what looked suspiciously like glassine packets, I figured he had resumed his original profession. Either that or he was still working for the DEA, and was just pretending to deal.
    “Nice neighborhood,” I said to Kat.
    She laughed. “My mother-in-law calls it ‘transitional.’”
    “Transitioning from what to what?”
    “Slum to crime scene, apparently,” she said. That kept us giggling through the next couple of inappropriate dives.
    “Okay, I’ve got one more house on my list, but there’s probably no point. It’s not even really on the market,” Kat said. We were attempting, with the assistance of another round of frozen coffee drinks, (no reason not to start breaking promises to this baby early—her childhood was most likely destined to be a series of failures on my part, and if Ruby and Isaac were anything to go by, caffeine exposure would surely be the least of her problems) to recover our senses of smell from assault by a 1920s Craftsman bungalow with four bedrooms and forty-two cats.
    “I don’t think I can stand it, Kat,” I said.
    “I
told
you they all sucked.” She heaved her feet up on the dashboard and wriggled her toes with their violet nails. “My legs are killing me. Look at these veins.” She traced her fingers along the mottled blue lumps decorating her calves. Kat was only six months pregnant, a month or so behind me, but already she had a brutal case of varicose veins, the only flaw in her otherwise perfect pregnant persona. I had been spared that particular indignity, but had plenty of others to keep me occupied: ankles swollen to the size of Isaac’s Hippity Hop, most notably, and a belly mapped with stretch marks like a page out of the Thomas Guide to the city of Los Angeles. I was desperately hoping the lines would stop at the city limits, and not extend all the way out to the Valley.
    “It’s kind of nice how your toenail polish matches the veins,” I said.
    “I paid extra for that. Anyway. One more. I’m sure it’s no better than any of the others, but I haven’t seen it yet. My mother-in-law asked me to go check up on it for her. Apparently it belongs to the boyfriend of the son of her cousin. Or something. She wants to make sure they’ve got it in shape to show it. We could just pretend we went, and go catch a movie or something.”
    My ears perked up. “Gay owner?”
    Kat nodded, stirred her straw in her drink without sipping, and held out her hand for my empty cup. “Yup.”
    “That’s terrific!” I said. Gay former owners are the Holy Grail of the West LA real estate market. Who else has the resources, energy, and taste to skillfully and painstakingly decorate every last inch of a house down to the doorknobs and crown moldings? Single women generally lack the first, straight men always suffer from a dire