MURDER PLAYS HOUSE
By Ayelet Waldman
Berkley Prime Crime: 312 pp., $23.95
By PAULA L. WOODS, Special to The Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2004
Is it
my imagination, or is there any gathering of three or more
people in Los Angeles where the conversation does not
eventually turn to real estate? The exorbitant prices, the
desperate hunt to make an offer on properties before they
hit the Multiple Listing Service, the negotiation with a
seller whose property has fallen out of escrow, all are
grist for the conversational mill when the demand is as high
and the supply is as low as it is in the Los Angeles area.
But the conversations prompt the question: How far would you
go to snag the house of your dreams?
Juliet
Applebaum, heroine of Ayelet Waldman's sprightly Mommy-Track
mysteries, must answer that question in the series' fifth
entry, "Murder Plays House." A former federal public
defender and partner in a fledgling private investigation
firm, Juliet is pregnant with a surprise third child and
living in a two-bedroom apartment in Larchmont. Her husband,
Peter Wyeth, is trying to work on another screenplay, but
between the children crowding him out of the bed and the
property next door undergoing a major renovation, the man
can get no rest. Exhausted, he tells his wife to find them a
house to buy: "A big house. With lots of beds. At least two
for each of us." Juliet's work situation is no better — rats
have infested the Westminster garage where she and partner
Al Hockey, a former cop, work. Juliet needs a place to hang
her multiple hats — and fast.
In her
search for the perfect home-office property, the ravenous
P.I. employs her pregnant girlfriend Kat, a food-phobe and a
"truly dreadful real estate agent … lacking the fundamental
ability to seem upbeat about even the most roach-infested
slum." Kat shows Juliet properties with killer views of the
Hollywood Hills that, given the look of several of Juliet's
former clients loitering around, are at best transitioning
from "slum to crime scene." Finally, they chance upon her
dream property: a two-story Greene & Greene-style home and
guesthouse in Larchmont. Owned by two gay men (whose
decorating skills make them "the Holy Grail of the West L.A.
real estate market"), the property is not yet officially on
the market.
There's
only one hitch — the dead body in the guesthouse, that of
struggling actress Alicia Felix, who was sister and personal
assistant to one of the home's owners, Felix (a one-name
designer whose line of barely there Booty Rags are all the
rage among the fashionistas). Alicia's brutalized and
emaciated body haunts Juliet but also presents a rare
opportunity: She could offer her services to Felix to solve
his sister's murder, thereby getting not only an inside
track on the sale of the property but also adding a
celebrity name to her and Al's client roster.
Working
around LAPD homicide detectives, Juliet interviews the
people who knew and not exactly loved Alicia: Spike Stevens,
the washed-up director of the Left Coast Players, a comedy
troupe where Alicia got her start; Julia Brennan, a former
member of the ensemble who expropriated Alicia's signature
character, Bingie McPurge, and rode it to stardom; and
Charlie Hoynes, ex-bedmate and producer of a soft-core
vampire series on cable TV. They are the subjects of
Juliet's spot-on analyses, including the gem: "Ah,
Hollywood, the only place on earth where the definition of
'friend' includes someone you've hated for years."
But as
the investigation wears on — and Juliet consumes prodigious
amounts of food — she learns that Alicia's struggles with an
eating disorder are at the opposite end of a spectrum of
self-loathing that includes her own obsession with her
pregnancy weight gain: "They were aerobicized and stepped
and Zone-dieted down to a svelteness that only a town that
idolized the broomstick likes of Calista Flockhart and Lara
Flynn Boyle could have considered normal. Alongside them, I
felt hugely, lumberingly, hideously fat." And when her
6-year-old daughter starts worrying about "carbohydrapes"
and diets, Juliet realizes she has some serious work to do
on the kinds of messages being transmitted in the
Wyeth-Applebaum household.
Amid the
laughs, Waldman makes some serious points about female body
image and women's relationships to food. They make "Murder
Plays House" an engaging read, enough so that you can
overlook Juliet's rampant cynicism about the entertainment
industry that feeds her family and the author's occasional
gaffes about
Los Angeles geography and architectural styles. "Murder Plays House" is
a stellar entry in a series notable for its humor and
intelligence, and it should bring Waldman and her heroine a
broker's caravan of new fans.
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