Nursery Crimes

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Thanks, sweetie.” I finally found a pair of leggings with relatively intact seams, threw one of Peter’s freshly laundered dress shirts over it, and accented the ensemble with a jauntily tied scarf. I looked at myself critically in the full-length mirror. At least my hair looked good. I’d dyed it to match Ruby’s red curls. I’d even kept dyeing it while pregnant, figuring that the damage to the baby from an ugly and depressed mother would be worse than whatever the hair dye might do to him.

  “Not bad for a fat girl,” I said.

  “You are NOT fat. You’re pregnant. You look great.” Peter walked over to me and slid his arms around my waist, his hands gently cupping my protruding belly. I leaned back against his chest and smiled. My husband always knows how to make me feel sexy. The night before I gave birth to Ruby, he gave me a black, lace maternity negligee and told me that nothing turned him on like the sight of my huge, pregnant body. What a guy. I have no idea if he was telling the truth, but I decided to believe him. We’re both convinced that the subsequent events were what put me into labor. Who needs labor-inducing medication when you’ve got a willing and able man around?

  Three

  THE office of the Federal Public Defender is in downtown L.A., in the U.S. Courthouse. I had always loved appearing in those courtrooms; the large, wood-paneled rooms have a solemn ambience that well matches the seriousness of the proceedings that take place there. The defender offices are, on the contrary, fairly typical, hideous, government offices with dingy carpeting and glaring, fluorescent lights. The low-rent atmosphere never helped convince my clients that their lawyer was competent and capable. Criminal defendants, like the rest of the world, tend to believe the old adage “You get what you pay for.” Since the indigent don’t have to pay their appointed counsel, they usually feel like they are getting their money’s worth. The constant battle to convince drug dealers and bank robbers that I was good enough for them had contributed to the malaise that eventually precipitated my departure from the office.

  Walking into the office that day, I felt an almost overwhelming pang of nostalgia and longing. I missed the place. I missed going to court. I missed my clients. I even missed the lunatics I used to work with. Criminal defense lawyers are a strange lot, arrogant and usually somewhat nuts, but genuinely and fiercely committed both to their clients and their ideals. You need a special personality to take on the forces of the government day after day, particularly when most people despise what you do and generally feel quite comfortable telling you that. I can’t count how many times people have asked me, usually in tones bordering on disgust, what I would have done if I ever found out that a client of mine was guilty. I always reply that the real question is what I would have done if I had ever found out that a client of mine was innocent. The truth is that I probably would have collapsed with horror. If you do your best, lose, and a guilty person goes to jail, at least you can sleep at night knowing you’ve done your job. If you do your best, lose, and an innocent person goes to jail, that could pretty much ruin your life. Since, no matter how good a lawyer she is, most of a public defender’s clients end up in jail, defending a truly innocent person would be a nightmare.

  I tamped down my emotions enough to have a nice lunch with Marla. I even managed to limit my discussion of Abigail Hathaway’s death to my feelings of shock and my ambivalence over whether to tell Ruby. I refrained from accusing prominent local businessmen of murder. When we got back from our Chinese chicken salads, I said good-bye and went out to the elevator bank, punched the down button, and tried to resist the little voice in my head. If the elevator that showed up hadn’t been bulging with blue-suited prosecutors, I might have gone home that day, and avoided all the stress and fear of the next few weeks. But, as luck would have it, there was no room for a pregnant woman and no suit feeling chivalrous enough to give me his spot. The door closed and instead of hitting the down button again, I walked back into the federal defender’s office and headed to the lair of the investigators. I’ve never been very good either at resisting temptation or minding my own business. That’s what made me such a good lawyer.

  No criminal defense lawyer could function without the assistance of an able investigator. These are often retired cops who see nothing strange in their decision to spend their golden years keeping people out of prison after having spent their youth putting people in. My favorite investigator was a man named Al Hockey, an ex-LAPD detective who took a bullet to the gut in his twenty-fifth year on the force. Al had tried to play golf for a year or so after leaving his job, but at a mere fifty was too young to spend his days chasing a little white ball around a green lawn. He’d been with the federal defender’s office going on ten years, and during my time as an attorney there we were a terrific team. The first time we’d worked together, he’d managed to drum up fifteen bikers, each of whom claimed to have slept in my client’s camper and most of whom surprised the heck out of the prosecutor, judge, and jury by acknowledging more than a passing acquaintance with methamphetamine. It didn’t take the jury long to decide that any one of them could have left the packet of crank in my client’s glove compartment. That was my first not-guilty verdict.

  I walked into Al’s office, plopped myself into a beat-up vinyl armchair, and put my feet up on the desk.

  “Hey, old man. Miss me?”

  Al knocked my feet to the floor and flashed me a huge grin.

  “I was wondering if you were going to grace me with your presence. I heard you were around today.”

  “Wow, you must be using your keen detective skills again, Al.”

  “You know it, fat girl.”

  “I am not fat,” I sputtered. “I’m pregnant.”

  “Whatever. All I know is that it’s been a mighty long time since I’ve seen you in your leathers.”

  I’d earned the eternal devotion of the sexists in the investigator’s office by showing up on my third day of work in a black leather miniskirt coupled with a conservative black blazer. I liked to pretend that I was making a statement, but the truth was I had spilled coffee that morning on the skirt that matched the blazer and, since I had eaten French fries and pie at every truck stop between New York and California, my mother’s old leather mini (circa 1960) was the only thing in my closet that fit. I’ve never regretted my fashion faux pas. It can be next to impossible for an aggressive woman to earn the respect and cooperation of her colleagues, particularly if those colleagues are a bunch of beer-bellied, bellicose ex-cops. For some reason, my willingness to seem decidedly female, even sexy, made the guys feel better about accepting me as an equal. I wasn’t someone they had to watch themselves around for fear of being reported for sexual harassment. Perversely, wearing a leather miniskirt made me one of the guys.

  “Peter’s keeping you barefoot and pregnant, Juliet.” Al laughed.

  I lifted a sneaker-shod foot. “Well, pregnant anyway,” I said.

  “What exactly is it that you do all day?”

  “Oh, you know, bake cookies. Drive car pool. Run the PTA.”

  He looked at me seriously. “And that’s enough for you?”

  I had no ready answer. No, it wasn’t enough.

  “It’s enough for now.” I said and then changed the subject. “So Al, I have a favor to ask.”

  “A favor?” Al asked, his eyebrows raised.

  “Yeah. Nothing big. Well, not too big. Well, maybe kind of big. Will you run someone through NCIC for me?”

  NCIC stands for National Crime Information Center. It’s the computer system listing everyone with a criminal record in the United States. The investigators have access to it so they can get the skinny on the informants, witnesses, and other nefarious characters the defender’s office deals with. They are specifically not allowed to use it to, for example, check if someone’s daughter’s fiancé has a record. Al’s daughter was, by the way, still single despite a couple of offers.

  Al got up, poked his head out of his office door, looked up and down the hall, and sat back in his chair.

>   “Got a name and Social for me?”

  “No Social Security number, but I do have the name. Bruce LeCrone.”

  “Capital ‘C’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about a birth date?”

  “No, but he’s probably about forty-five or fifty years old.”

  “Okay, give me a minute.” Al scribbled the name on a Post-it and headed off down the hall to the computer terminal with the NCIC link. While he was gone I nosed around the files on his desk. Nothing seemed very interesting, just the usual bank robberies, mortgage frauds, and drug deals. Ten minutes passed before Al came back.

  “Well, your boyfriend’s got a record.”

  “No kidding! Great. Fabulous. He’s not my boyfriend. Gimme that.” I grabbed the printout.

  In 1994 Bruce LeCrone had pled guilty to chapter 9, section 273.5.

  “Do you know what section 273.5 is?” I asked Al.

  He looked over my shoulder. “No idea. Here, look it up.” He handed me the blue, paperback California Penal Code.

  I leafed through the book, found the appropriate section, and read aloud, “Willful infliction of corporal injury. Any person who willfully inflicts upon his or her spouse—”

  “Domestic violence,” Al interrupted.

  “A batterer.” I said.

  I was flabbergasted. I knew how prevalent domestic violence is, even in educated, wealthy families. Nonetheless, it still shocked me to hear that someone in my world was a wife-beater. Recent events notwithstanding, most of us probably still believe that that kind of thing happens only in trailer parks, not in Brentwood.

  “Any jail sentence?” Al asked.

  I looked back at the printout. “Nope. Probation.”

  Al leaned back in his chair and looked at me speculatively. “Juliet, what gives? What are you up to?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, disingenuously.

  “You know what I mean. Are you working on something?”

  I considered whether to take him into my confidence. I trusted Al, I always had.

  “I’m checking into the background of a man I think might be responsible for a murder. Have you been paying attention to the case of the nursery school director who was hit by a car?”

  “I think I saw something about it on the local news. What’s your connection to the case?”

  “I knew the woman.”

  “So you’re playing detective?”

  “I’m just looking into a few things.”

  “That sounds like so much nonsense to me.”

  “What?” I was genuinely shocked.

  “Look, Juliet, the cops can do their job. They don’t need you investigating this murder, if that’s even what it is. They’ll figure out who done it without any help from you.”

  I sputtered.

  “This is about you,” he continued. “You are doing this for yourself.”

  I shrugged, angry at him but knowing, deep down, that he was right.

  “You’ve always been a ball of fire, Juliet. It was obvious from that first day I saw you come in here looking like Tina Turner. You just like mixing it up.”

  “That’s probably true,” I admitted.

  “Not much opportunity for that, driving around in that big blue Volvo of yours, is there?”

  “Nope. There isn’t. What do you want me to say, Al? That I’m playing private eye because I’m bored with the daily grind of motherhood?”

  “Well, are you?” He asked.

  I considered for a minute. “Probably. Is there anything wrong with that?”

  Al looked at me and shrugged. “How should I know? Who do I look like, Dr. Laura?”

  I had to spend a few minutes promising Al that I wasn’t involved in anything dangerous before I could gather my things and leave.

  I drove home, strangely excited and energized by my discovery. I walked in the door to find Ruby and Peter immersed in an art project that involved sprinkling purple glitter all over the kitchen floor. I was about to berate the two of them for their sloppiness when Ruby held up a piece of paper covered in glitter and crayon.

  “Look, Mama. This says ‘I love you, Mama, because you are so beautiful.’” My eyes filled with tears as Peter and I smiled hugely at each other over Ruby’s head. Sometimes it just takes you by surprise. Who was this fabulous little person careening around our house, and exactly what had we done to deserve her? How could I possibly consider leaving this delightful creature and going back to work?

  Four

  THAT evening Peter, Ruby, and I went to dinner at one of our regular restaurants, Giovanni’s Trattoria. Giovanni himself greeted us, as usual, and scooped Ruby up in his arms, taking her back to the kitchen to be petted and spoiled by his brother, the chef, and his mother, a sweet old woman in a long, black dress whose sole job seemed to be criticizing her sons and feeding bits of cannoli to my daughter. Peter and I sat down at our usual table in the corner near the kitchen, and ordered a bottle of mineral water. Giovanni had known I was pregnant before my own mother did. He figured it out the night we declined our usual bottle of pinot noir and asked for one of fancy, Italian sparkling water instead.

  “I’m getting the pasta with clam sauce,” Peter said.

  “That’s what I want. Get something else.”

  “You know, Juliet, we can both order the same thing. It won’t kill us.”

  “God forbid. That’s the difference between you WASPs and the rest of us. Two people dining together cannot order the same thing. What’s the point of sharing if we both order the same thing?”

  “What if I don’t want to share?”

  “Then you should have married Muffy Fitzpatrick from the tennis club instead of Juliet Applebaum from the delicatessen.” I smiled sweetly at my husband and reached out to take the piece of bread he had put on his plate, just to illustrate my point. “You get the clams. I’ll get the Arabbiata. And we share.”

  Peter smiled and grabbed his bread back.

  “So, Juliet, what are we going to do about preschool?”

  In my investigative zeal I had completely forgotten about what had involved me with the whole Hathaway affair to begin with.

  “Oh, God. I don’t know. We didn’t even get an interview at Circle of Children or First Presbyterian. Maybe we could just forget about it. Do kids have to go to preschool? Wait, I have a terrific idea! We’ll home-school her!”

  “Right. I can definitely see you doing that. I can see you preparing elaborate lesson plans with multicolored charts and stickers while you’re cooking up a batch of homemade papier-mâché and creating dioramas of early Colonial life. And all this with a baby attached to your breast. That is just so you, Juliet.”

  I shot my husband a glare. “Okay, maybe I’m not the most patient parent in the world, and maybe I’ve never done finger painting or played with Play-Doh or made a model of the Eiffel Tower out of Popsicle sticks, but don’t you think I could handle it for a year?”

  He looked at me balefully.

  “How was your lunch with Marla?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “It was fine. The office is hiring again.”

  Peter raised his eyebrows.

  “No, no. I’m not thinking of going back. I’m seven months pregnant. How could I go back?”

  “But you want to.” Peter was trying to look as if he didn’t care whether I went to work or not. Yet I knew how much he liked having me home. It wasn’t a sexist impulse, but rather a selfish one. He liked the companionship. He liked the idea of being able to rush off spontaneously to Paris or Hawaii or Uttar Pradesh even though, in reality, we never rushed off anywhere more exciting than Home Depot.

  “No,” I answered quickly. “Not really. I mean, I wouldn’t mind having something to do for a few hours a week, but I’m definitely not interested in full-time work!”

  “Oh, good. I was afraid you were getting bored.”

  “Just because I’m bored sometimes and just because I’m not some kind of arts and crafts supermom does
n’t mean I want to leave you guys. I love staying home. Really. I love it.” Maybe I could convince myself if I said it often enough.

  Peter looked relieved. I decided to take advantage of the goodwill I had engendered.

  “I found out something interesting about our friend Bruce LeCrone.”

  “Juliet.” His mood was not as receptive as I had thought. “I thought we decided you were going to give that a rest.”

  “We didn’t decide anything. You did. And, anyway, I’m not doing anything. I just checked to see if he has a record.”

  “That seems like doing something to me.” Peter looked irritated.

  I said nothing. I could see his curiosity slowly getting the better of him.

  “Does he?”

  “Excuse me?” I asked mock-innocently.

  “LeCrone. Does he have a record?”

  “Oh, so you are interested.”

  “Fine, don’t tell me.” He frowned and began earnestly studying the menu.

  “He was convicted of domestic battery.”

  “Domestic battery?”

  “You know, wife-beating.”

  “Holy cow!” Peter exclaimed.

  “Exactly what I said. I was on the right track after all.”

  Peter looked doubtful. “Just because he beats his wife doesn’t mean he killed Abigail Hathaway.”

  “Maybe not, but it sure does mean he’s capable of violence. Anyway, I think it must have been his ex-wife. The charge is seven years old, and unless he married the present Mrs. LeCrone when she was in junior high, I don’t think she’s the one he beat up. Although, I suppose he could be beating her, too. Did you notice any bruises on her?”

  “Don’t get carried away, Juliet. Granted, this doesn’t make him look good, but it’s hardly evidence of murder.” Peter poured some olive oil onto his bread plate, dipped his bread, and took a bite. “Still, I guess we should tell the police about his fight with Hathaway.”

  “You read my mind, my love.” I reached out with my napkin and wiped away the trail of oil dripping down his chin.

  At that moment Ruby came running out of the kitchen, chocolate smeared all over her chin.