The Big Nap

Praise for the Mommy-Track Mysteries

T
HE
B
IG
N
AP

N
URSERY
C
RIMES

“A humorous tale . . . . Juliet’s voice is strong and appealing, and the Hollywood satire is dead on.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Funny, clever, touching, original, wacky, and wildly successful.”

—Carolyn G. Hart

“A delightful debut filled with quirky, engaging characters, sharp wit, and vivid prose. I predict a successful future for this unique, highly likable sleuth.”

—Judith Kelman, author of
After the Fall

“Told with warmth and wicked humor,
Nursery Crimes
is a rollicking first mystery that will leave you clamoring for more. Ruby’s adorable and Juliet is the sort of outspoken and funny woman we’d all like as a best friend.”

—
Romantic Times

“[Waldman] derives humorous mileage from Juliet’s ‘epicurean’ cravings, wardrobe dilemmas, night-owl husband, and obvious delight in adventure.”

—
Library Journal

“Unique . . . will intrigue anyone who values a good mystery novel.”

—
The Tribune-Review Pittsburgh

“[Waldman is] a welcome voice . . . well-written . . . this charming young family has a real-life feel to it.”

—
Contra Costa Times

For helping me to understand the Hasidic community I thank Karen Zivan, Alex Novack, and the incomparable Esther Strauss. All mistakes are most definitely my own. For medical information I thank Dr. Dean Schillinger. I am eternally grateful to Mary Evans and to my husband, Michael Chabon, without whom nothing is possible.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

I
probably wasn’t the first woman who had ever opened the door to the Fed Ex man wearing nothing from the waist up except for a bra. Odds are I was not even the first to do it in a
nursing
bra. But I’m willing to bet that no woman in a nursing bra had ever before greeted our apple-cheeked Fed Ex man with her flaps unsnapped and gaping wide-open. You could see that in his face.

I thought about being embarrassed, but decided that since I’d been too tired to notice that I wasn’t dressed, I was definitely too tired to care. “You have to air-dry them,” I explained. “Or they can crack.”

“That has to hurt,” he said.

I signed for the package, which turned out to be yet another sterling silver rattle from Tiffany (that made seven), closed the door, and dragged myself up the stairs to the second-floor, duplex apartment where I lived with my husband,
Peter, my three-year-old daughter, Ruby, and the mutant vampire to whom I’d given birth four months before.

“Yes, yes, yes. I know,” I sang in a mock cheerful voice as I scooped my screaming baby out of his bassinet. “Finished your six-minute nap, have you? That’s all the sleep you’ll be needing this week, isn’t it? Hmm?”

Isaac eyed my conveniently exposed nipple and increased the pitch of his wail. I settled my bulk into the aggressively ugly glider rocker that had taken pride of place in our living room and lifted him to my breast. He began suckling as though he’d just gotten home from vacation in Biafra. It had been all of half an hour since he’d eaten. I leaned back in the chair, ran my tongue over my unbrushed teeth, and looked up at the clock on the mantelpiece. Noon. And I’d been awake for eight hours. Actually, it’s hardly fair to say that I woke up at 4:00
A
.
M
. That was just when I’d finally abandoned the pretense that night was a time when we, like the rest of the world, slept. Isaac Applebaum Wyeth never slept. Never. Like really never. It was my firm belief that in the four months since his birth the kid hadn’t closed his eyes for longer than twenty minutes at a stretch. Okay, that’s not fair. There was that one time when he slept for three hours straight. But since I was at the doctor’s office having a wound check (bullet and cesarean, but that’s another story altogether) at the time of this miracle, I had only Isaac’s father’s word that it had actually occurred. And I had my doubts.

Sitting there, nursing Isaac, I entertained myself by imagining what I would be doing if I were still a federal public defender and not a bedraggled stay-at-home mom. First of all, by this hour of the day I’d have already finished three or four bail hearings. I might be on the way to the Metropolitan Detention Center, hoping my smack-addict
clients were straight enough to have a conversation about their plea agreements. Or, I might be in trial, striding around the courtroom, tearing into a quivering FBI agent and exposing his testimony for the web of lies that it was. All right, all right. Maybe not. Maybe I’d be watching my client self-destruct on the stand while he explained that the reason he was covered in red paint and holding the sack of the bank’s money complete with the exploding dye pack was because his friend borrowed his clothes and car and did the robbery and then mysteriously gave him the bag. And no, he doesn’t remember his friend’s name.

But I wasn’t a public defender anymore. I wasn’t even a lawyer. I was just an overtired, underdressed mother. I’d quit the job I’d loved so much when Ruby was a baby. This decision shocked the hell out of everyone who knew me. It certainly hadn’t been part of the plan I’d set out for myself when I walked down the aisle at Harvard Law School with the big diploma emblazoned with the words “Juliet Applebaum,
Juris Doctorat.
” I’d left Cambridge brimming over with ambition and student loans and began my career as a corporate lawyer, a job I hated but with a salary I really needed.

Then, one day, I got into an argument with the clerk in my local video store that changed my life. Never, when I started dating the slightly geeky, gray-eyed slacker who gave me such a hard time when I rented
Pretty Woman
, did I imagine that he’d pay off my student loans with the proceeds of a movie called
Flesh Eaters
and move me out to Los Angeles.

My husband Peter’s success had given me the freedom I needed to have the career I really wanted, as a criminal defense lawyer. Our decision to start a family had derailed me completely. I know lots of women manage to be full-time
mothers and productive members of the work force at the same time, but, much to my surprise, I wasn’t one of them. When I tried to do both I succeeded only in being incompetent at work and short-tempered at home. At some point I realized that it would be better for my daughter to have me around, and if I was bored out of my skull, so be it.

Isaac must have gotten sick of listening to me yawn, because he popped off my breast, let loose a massive belch, and graced me with a huge smile. He was, like his sister before him, bald but for a fringe of hair around the sides of his lumpy skull. He had a little hooked nose and a perennially worried expression that made him look, for all the world, like a beleaguered Jewish accountant and inspired his father to christen him with the nickname Murray Kleinfeld, CPA.

I kissed him a few times under his chins and hoisted myself up out of the chair.

“Ready to face the day?” I wasn’t sure who I was asking—my four-month-old son or myself.

Only a mother of an infant knows that it is in fact possible to take a shower, wash your hair, and shave your legs, all within a single verse of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” The trick is finishing the E-I E-I O’s with your toothbrush in your mouth.

Balancing Isaac on my hip, I gazed at my reflection critically. Washed and artfully ruffled, my cropped red hair looked pretty good, as long as you weren’t looking too intently at the roots. My face had lost some of that pregnancy bloat, although sometimes it did seem as though Isaac and I were competing to see who could accumulate the most chins. My eyes still shone bright green and I decided to do my best to emphasize the only feature not affected by my rather astonishing weight gain. I applied a little mascara.
All in all, if I was careful not to glance below my neck, I wasn’t too hideous.

“Isn’t your mama gorgeous?” I asked the baby. He gave me a Bronx cheer.

I rubbed some lipstick off my teeth.

“Let’s get dressed.”

A mere half-hour later, a record for the newly enlarged Wyeth-Applebaum household, Isaac and I were in the car on our way to pick up Ruby at preschool. He was, as usual, screaming, and I was, as usual, singing hysterically along with the Raffi tape that played on a continuous loop in my Volvo station wagon.

One really has to wonder how children make it to the age of ten without being pitched headfirst out a car window.

O
N
the way home, my children thoughtfully contrived to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel—not an easy task given that I’d been averaging more or less eleven minutes of sleep a night—by regaling me, at top volume with (in one ear) a long, involved story about Sneakers the rat and how he had escaped from his cage, and (in the other) the usual hysterical weeping.

As we pulled into our driveway, Ruby said, “Mama, can we go to the park? Please oh please oh please oh please.”

It was only because I was momentarily distracted by thoughts of the proper diagnosis of sleep-deprivation psychosis that I forgot that I’d been looking forward to turning on
Sesame Street
and enjoying an hour or so of TV-induced stupor (mine rather than theirs).

“Okay, honey,” I said. Oh well, there was always the possibility that Isaac would fall asleep on the way there. I bundled the two of them into their double stroller and set off for a walk to the playground.

Our neighborhood, Hancock Park, is one of the oldest in Los Angeles, dating all the way back to the 1920s. It’s full of big old houses, most of them stuccoed Spanish-style numbers with the occasional elaborate English Tudor thrown in for variety. The broad tree-lined avenues arc in gentle, carefully planned curves. While the addresses might have hinted at a certain long-ago grandeur, the neighborhood’s proximity to downtown L.A. and a number of less savory neighborhoods has, in the last couple of decades, made it a haunt of car thieves and even the odd mugger or two. That’s kept the housing prices lower than in some tonier areas. It’s also kept out the movie-industry riffraff for the most part. We lived in one of the many duplexes sprinkled throughout the neighborhood.