Nursery Crimes

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Stacy! If you’d just shut up for a moment, I’ll tell you how I solved this murder!”

  That shut her up. I described the events of the past week or so to Stacy, lingering over details of my derring-do. Once again I kept Julio out of it, as I’d promised Al, but no other element of the story was spared my dramatization. By the end of my tale I’d actually managed to leave Stacy speechless. I think that’s the first time that anyone has ever accomplished that. My story complete, I said good-bye, hung up the phone and looked complacently over at Peter.

  “Uh, Juliet, didn’t Detective Carswell ask you not to reveal any details of the investigation?” he said.

  I blanched. “I totally forgot. Do you think it’s okay? Do you think Stacy will tell anyone?”

  He looked at me.

  I answered my own question. “Of course she will. Oh, no no no no.”

  I immediately dialed her number, but got voice mail. She had already begun to broadcast. I left a frantic message, begging her not to tell a soul. She was definitely going to ignore it, but it was the best I could do. I put my head down on the kitchen counter and moaned. “I had to tell the single biggest gossip in Los Angeles. I hope this doesn’t get back to Carswell.”

  “Don’t worry, sweetie,” Peter said, patting my head. “Stacy and the detective don’t exactly travel in the same circles. It’ll probably be fine.”

  I didn’t make the same mistake again. Both Al and Jerome called me that morning, and I remained discreet, expressing only my happiness that Daniel Mooney had been apprehended and nothing else. I didn’t let my guard down until I heard from Lilly Green.

  Lilly called me from her car phone.

  “Juliet! I just got my nails done and I’m right around the corner from you. Meet me for a cup of coffee at the Living Room and tell me everything about your murder!”

  I threw a baseball cap on over my hair, quickly dragged on a pair of leggings and one of Peter’s flannel shirts, and promising Ruby and Peter that I would not be gone long, rushed out the door. As I was tearing up the block on my way to meet Lilly at the homey little café she favored, it occurred to me to wonder if I would have dropped everything so quickly for a friend who wasn’t a famous, Oscar-winning movie star. Just how starstruck was I? I couldn’t answer the question and decided not to bother trying. I liked Lilly, and if I also liked being seen with her, well, that didn’t make me any worse or any better than the rest of Los Angeles. In L.A., being starstruck is one’s civic duty.

  By the time I got to the café, huffing and puffing and beet-red with the exertion of my block-and-a-half walk, Lilly was already there, lounging on an overstuffed sofa, sipping a latté out of a cup the size of a basketball. She wore a pair of jeans and an old, ratty turtleneck sweater. Her hair was casually wound around her head and held in place with a chopstick. She looked gorgeous. I sighed for a moment, imagining just how beautiful I looked right then, exploding out of Peter’s old shirt, my leggings fraying at the seams with the effort of containing the bulk of my thighs. Silently repeating my mantra “I’m not fat, I’m pregnant,” I gave Lilly a hug and sank down next to her on the couch.

  “Nonfat latte,” I said to the rail-thin young thing who had instantly appeared to take my order. I got service like that only when I was with Lilly. Alone, I’d have been waiting for hours.

  “Decaf?” she asked, except it sounded like “detaf” because she was having difficulty talking through the large silver stud embedded in her tongue.

  “No. Caf-caf,” I said.

  The waitress looked disapprovingly at my belly and turned away.

  “Lilly, can I bum a cigarette? Or a line of cocaine?” I asked, loud enough for the waitress to hear. Her back stiffened and she hustled off. “Why is it everyone thinks they can tell a pregnant woman what to drink, eat, whatever? I mean, for crying out loud, it’s only coffee. Women in France drink coffee and swill red wine the whole time they’re pregnant. No one bugs them.”

  “Yes, but then they give birth to little Frenchmen.”

  “Good point.”

  “So, you were right about Abigail Hathaway’s husband!” Lilly said, getting to the point.

  Once again conveniently forgetting my promise not to discuss the case with anyone, I filled Lilly in on my role in the arrest of Daniel Mooney.

  “Herma Wang should have her license revoked,” Lilly said once I’d finished.

  “Why?”

  “For not figuring out that he was so violent, that’s why. She was perfectly willing to tell me that the family is in crisis and go on and on about all the suppressed rage, but did she put two and two together and realize someone was actually in danger? God forbid.”

  “She told you that? What is she, the Liz Smith of shrinks? Confidentiality be damned—I know a movie star!”

  “I know. Ridiculous, isn’t it? I can only imagine what she’s told people about us.” Lilly grimaced. “I’m doing my best just not to think about it.”

  “She wouldn’t talk about you. She just likes talking to you. She’s telling you stuff so you’ll keep having lunch with her and she can tell people she’s friends with a movie star. It’s hardly unusual. I mean, look at me, running out of my house at a moment’s notice to meet you for coffee.”

  Lilly laughed uncomfortably, not sure if I was kidding.

  At that moment my coffee showed up. I slurped at it loudly, for the pierced waitress’s benefit.

  “Anyway, what else did Wang tell you?” I asked.

  “Oh, not much more than that. The family was having terrible problems. They were considering divorce. The daughter was acting out, having problems in school, hanging with a fast crowd. That kind of thing.”

  “Audrey, she’s the daughter, is kind of a lost soul,” I said. “She has this horrible shaved and dyed hairdo that I’m sure she got just to torture her mother.”

  “They did a lot of torturing of each other, according to Herma,” Lilly said. “Not a very easy relationship. Abigail had high expectations, and Audrey had a hard time fulfilling them, or something like that. Apparently Mooney and the girl didn’t like each other, and that was a source of real tension in the marriage.”

  “High expectations? Sounds like every mother-daughter relationship I’ve ever heard of,” I said.

  “Not mine.” Lilly sounded bitter. “My mother expected me to get pregnant at fifteen and spend my life living in a trailer park with six kids by six different men. She’s sorely disappointed that I’ve exceeded her expectations.”

  “God, are our kids going to be sitting here in thirty years having this discussion about us?” I asked, imagining Ruby and the twins bemoaning our various flaws over latte or proton shakes or whatever they’ll be drinking then.

  “God forbid.” Lilly shuddered. “Why didn’t he just leave her? Why kill her?” she asked.

  “Money. It must have been about money. She owned everything they had as her separate property. It’s likely that he would have had to walk away from the marriage empty-handed.”

  “But I imagine that he must have hated her, too. Don’t you think he would have had to, to murder her?”

  “I wonder.”

  “It’s always someone in the family, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s always a family member who’s the murderer.”

  “Usually. Or, if not family, then certainly someone the victim knew. Stranger-on-stranger crimes are much rarer.”

  “But that’s what we’re all afraid of. Isn’t that ironic? We’re so afraid of being killed by some serial killer but it’s our loved ones we really should be afraid of.”

  I looked at Lilly for a minute, wondering what was inspiring these morbid thoughts. “Lilly, are you trying to tell me something? Have you murdered someone?”

  She laughed. “Actually, you know what? There are only two people I can even imagining killing. Guess who?”

  “Your agent?”

  “No. Although that’s an idea.”

  “
The director of your last picture.”

  “Ouch. That stings.”

  “Sorry. So who?”

  “Well, one is my ex-husband, obviously. The other is my mother.” Lilly laughed grimly. “And instead of killing either of them I bought them each a house.”

  “You bought Archer a house?” I almost shouted.

  “Community property bought Archer a house. And a boat. And two cars. And a share in Planet Hollywood and so on and so on and so on.”

  “Wow. You know what, Lilly? maybe we should get married. I could use some extra cash.”

  “Very funny. Ha, ha, ha.”

  Suddenly I had a thought. “Hey, Lilly, are the twins still in preschool?”

  “Yes. Next year they’ll start kindergarten at Crossroads,” she said proudly.

  It occurred to me that I didn’t even know where Amber and Jade went to school. “Where do they go now?”

  “Temple Beth El,” she said.

  That stopped me in my tracks. Lilly Green, the personification of blond, Aryan womanhood, sent her kids to a Jewish school? She noticed my bemused expression.

  “Archer’s mother is Jewish,” she explained. “And the girls didn’t get in anywhere else. We applied pre-Oscar.”

  “Oh. Do you like it?”

  “I love it. I love that the girls walk around the house singing “Shabet shalom, hey!” she warbled.

  “Sha-bat.”

  “Right, right. Shabat shalom, hey! I have a terrific idea! Why don’t I ask the principal if they still have slots available for next year?”

  “No. No. That’s okay.” It probably sounds crazy, but Peter and I had never discussed the religion thing. We celebrated whatever holiday came around and just sort of assumed that things would work themselves out. I couldn’t see asking him to send Ruby to a Jewish preschool. That would be like taking sides.

  “Really, I don’t mind. I’ll ask her when I pick up the girls tomorrow.”

  “You’d better not. You know, the whole Jewish thing.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. There are plenty of goys like me at the school. I’m going to ask her. It can’t hurt.”

  We talked for a while longer about Daniel Mooney and about whether he’d plead guilty or go to trial. After we’d finished our coffees, Lilly offered me a ride home.

  “No, I think I’ll walk. I need the exercise.”

  It was only after she’d gone that I realized she’d left me with the check. Again.

  Sixteen

  OVER the next few weeks the newspapers were full of the tragedy of Abigail Hathaway and Daniel Mooney. The case was taken away from the Santa Monica D.A. and moved to downtown Los Angeles. Mooney was charged with first-degree murder, which carries the death penalty, and thus no possibility of bail. Audrey called a few more times, but we never got together. She told me that she had decided to finish out the school year before moving to New Jersey and was living in her house with her aunt. She seemed to have gotten over her first blush of giddiness at her stepfather’s arrest, and expressed her eagerness to put the whole ugly business behind her. I agreed that that was probably a good idea, but secretly wondered if she ever would be able to put the loss of her mother behind her. Could anyone?

  My pregnancy proceeded and I closed in on the final month, looking forward with mounting impatience to Isaac’s arrival. I tried to spend as much time as possible with Ruby, preparing her as best I could for the upheaval the new baby would cause in all our lives.

  One night, after putting Ruby to sleep and sending Peter off to work, I lay in bed, trying to fall asleep. I tossed and turned, or rather, I tried to toss but couldn’t quite manage to heft my belly from one side of the bed to another. Finally, frustrated and hungry, I got up and made myself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Recalling Peter’s recent irritation at me for getting crumbs in the bed, I decided to eat in my office, and play on the computer for a while. I logged on, licked my fingers clean, and checked out what was happening on Moms Online. I lurked for a while in a chat room, but couldn’t manage to work up any interest in the sore-nipple discussion.

  I decided to check out how Nina Tiger was dealing with the arrest of her lover. I clicked over to Dejanews and plugged in her name. I soon tired of reading her vitriolic defenses of Mooney’s innocence but, unfortunately, I wasn’t tired enough to go to sleep. Bored, I typed in Daniel Mooney’s screen names. As I had already read in tigress’s correspondence, Coyote was the topic of much conversation among the polyamorous. Nobody had seemed to notice mchoman’s absence from the newsgroup in which Mooney had participated using that alias, but boytoy2000 had been sorely missed by the more raunchy of his cyberpals. Because none of his buddies had linked him to Daniel Mooney, there was much speculation about where boytoy2000 had gone.

  I input the last of Mooney’s aliases, GRrrrL. That’s when I got the shock of my life. GRrrrL, Mooney’s female alter ego, had posted as recently as last night. Shaken, I called out for Peter. He came tearing into my office.

  “Is it happening? Are you in labor?” he asked, almost hysterically.

  “No. Look.” I held a trembling finger out to the screen.

  “Juliet! You have got to stop doing that to me. Look at what?”

  “Dejanews has postings from GRrrrL, Daniel Mooney’s alias, from last night.”

  Peter quickly scrolled down the screen.

  “This is what our tax dollars are going for? Web access in prisons?” he asked, outraged.

  “There is no Web access in the county jail. GRrrrL is posting from outside.”

  “Then there’s got to be a mistake. Mooney’s in jail. Dejanews must be wrong.”

  “They’re not wrong. GRrrrL is posting.”

  Peter and I sat staring at the screen for a moment.

  “I’m going to find GRrrrL,” I said.

  “How?”

  “Watch.”

  I scrolled up and found the address of the newsgroup on which GRrrrL’s most recent post had appeared. I clicked the “new message” box and posted the following message under the subject heading “GRrrrL sought”:

  GRrrrL—I want to talk to you. E-mail me and set up private chat.

  “Why not just E-mail GRrrrL directly?” Peter asked.

  “Because I want whoever’s using the account to know just where I tracked GRrrrL down.”

  “Oh. Now what?” Peter asked.

  “Now we wait,” I said grimly.

  We waited. We waited for two hours and heard nothing. Finally, exhausted and drained, we set the computer to download E-mail every half hour and went to bed. The next morning I leaped out of bed and rushed to the computer. At 6:30 A.M. I had received a message from GRrrrL. Fingers shaking, I opened it.

  Private chat at 4:00 P.M. See you there!

  The rest of the day passed in something of a blur. Ruby, sensing that I was preoccupied and tense, matched me mood for mood. When she wasn’t whining she was throwing a tantrum or stomping around the house in a huff. Peter and I spent the day frantically trying to entertain her, but she had the attention span of a flea. No game was good enough, no toy fun enough. Finally, in desperation, Peter took her to our old standby, the Santa Monica Pier. We figured he’d tire her out on the carousel and rides. While they were gone I mostly paced around the house. Oprah distracted me for a few minutes but not long. Finally, at ten minutes to four, I heard Peter’s car pull in the driveway.

  I rushed to the front door and opened it in time for him to tiptoe in, carrying a sleeping Ruby in his arms. Walking as quietly as possible, he took her into her room, put her in her crib, and closed the door.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  We went into my office, closed the door, logged on, and entered the chat room.

  GRrrrl? Are you here?

  Here I am. I know who you are.

  I looked up at Peter, scared. “How does he know me?”

  “I don’t know. Is your tag line somewhere on your message?”

  “No, just my e-mail address.”


  How do you know who I am? I wrote back.

  Never mind. What do you want?

  I paused for a moment. What did I want? To know who he was, I suppose.

  Who are YOU? I typed.

  GRrrrL.

  No, who are you IRL?

  “IRL?” Peter asked, reading over my shoulder.

  “In real life.”

  Who do you think I am? GRrrrL asked me back.

  This screen name belongs to Daniel Mooney.

  Then I’m Daniel Mooney.

  Daniel Mooney is in the county jail. He can’t log on.

  Poor Daniel. Locked in jail.

  I looked up at Peter again. “What’s going on here?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Juliet, what if GRrrrL placed the ad for the hired killer? What if Daniel Mooney didn’t do it?”

  The thought had crossed my mind at the same time. After all, the only hard evidence against Mooney was the ad. The rest was purely circumstantial. I decided to give it a shot.

  Do you know who killed Abigail? I typed.

  Daniel Mooney killed Abigail.

  Is that true? Do you know that for a fact?

  Do YOU know that for a fact? GRrrrL asked back.

  Now GRrrrL was messing with me.

  “Peter, maybe I should just ask him straight out.”

  “Go for it.” He squeezed my shoulder and kissed my cheek. I took a deep breath and then started typing.

  Did YOU kill Abigail?

  There was a pause. Finally GRrrrL replied,

  Did YOU?

  No, I did not. You didn’t answer my question. DID

  YOU KILL ABIGAIL HATHAWAY?

  Bye-bye, Juliet.

  And GRrrrL was gone. Peter and I sat, staring at the computer screen for a moment. I copied the text of our conversation into a file on my computer and sent it to print. As I clicked the print button, I had an epiphany.

  “I know who that was.”

  “You do?” Peter asked doubtfully.

  “Nina Tiger.”

  “His lover?”

  “It’s got to be her. Think about it. They have the same access provider. All she’d have to do would be to log on as a guest and input the password he uses for that alias. Who else would know his password? It has to be her.”