Read Online Murder Plays House by Ayelet Waldman - Free Book Online

devoured, in two bites, the purple pickled egg he handed me.
    I was dipping my fried chicken in maple syrup when he walked through the door.
    “Couldn’t even wait?” he grumbled. But he grinned when a platter appeared before him as soon as his butt hit the chair. I’d gotten his order in at exactly the right moment.
    While we gobbled our food, I told him about my success with the Texas case. When I was done recounting the tale, he waved a drumstick at me.
    “Excellent luck. But will we get
paid?
”
    “Sandra will file a request for investigation fees. We’ll get something, I’m sure.”
    He wiped a stream of grease from his chin. “Well, thank God for that. Because we’ve got nothing on the calendar for the next two weeks.”
    “Nothing? Nothing at all?”
    He shook his head. “Big goose egg. And I’ve got to pay for the rat problem.”
    I made a gagging sound. “I’ll cover half.”
    “Nope,” he sighed. “My house, my problem. Anyway, I hired a kid to help me out. Cheaper than the exterminator. Remember Julio Rodriguez? I’ve got him digging around under my house looking for the dead ones.”
    “He’s out?” I asked. Julio was one of Al’s protégés. He was a young kid with a talent for computers, who had used his skills in slightly less than legitimate ways. Rumor had it that it had taken upwards of a million dollars to close the holes he exposed in the Social Security Administrations computer system, and I’m pretty sure they never caught up to all the immigrants who benefited from Julio’s early-amnesty green card program. The thing about Julio was that he never benefited, financially, from any of it. As far as any of us could tell, he did it all out of a kind of Robin Hood impulse, stealing legitimacy from the government to provide it to his family, friends, and neighbors. Money never changed hands at all.
    “Yup. Supervised release, as of two months ago. Poor kid, damn probation won’t let him work in the only trade he’s got, so he’s got to hunt rats for me.” In hacker cases like Julio’s, one of the conditions of release is always that there be no further contact with computers. It always seems sort of harsh to me. I mean, how’s a guy supposed to get a job nowadays if he can’t get near a computer? No wonderJulio’s reduced to scraping rat corpses out from under Al’s garage.
    Al patted his lips with a napkin and hunched forward in his chair. “We’re in trouble, Juliet.”
    I nodded. I knew we were. “I’ve got five thousand dollars just sitting around in my separate checking account,” I told him. “That should hold us for a couple more months. We could pay your salary, and the phone bill at least.”
    Al shook his head. “I’m not taking it from you.”
    “That’s ridiculous. We’re partners, Al. You’ve sunk money into this. Now it’s my turn.”
    He dipped a finger into his syrup and swirled it around. “No can do.”
    “Al!” I said sharply. “I’m not willing to give up on us. We’re just in a slump. Things were going great. We got paid a ton of money for the Jupiter Jones case. We had those worker’s comp investigations. Sandra will get us paid. It’s building. Slowly, but it’s building.”
    He shrugged, and then changed the subject. “You doing okay?”
    “You mean because of the murder?”
    He nodded. Then, in a gruff voice, as if uncomfortable with his own attempt at empathy, he said, “I know it can be hard, first time you see something like that.”
    “Not as hard as being shot,” I said. I spoke from experience. Bullet wounds were one of the few things Al and I had in common.
    “I don’t know. That’s different,” he said. At that moment, Al’s cell phone rang, and he sent an inquiring glance in my direction. I nodded, and he licked the syrup off his fingers and answered the phone. I could tell by his tone that he was talking to one of his talented and beautiful daughters, the younger of whom was an FBI agent in Phoenix. Hewas