Nursery Crimes

by Ayelet Waldman

  “You broke it? Who the hell are you? What’s happening here?”

  “I did not break anything,” I replied indignantly. “I’m just leaving a note for my friend Jeff Goldblatt. I noticed that your mailbox door was open and that . . . that . . . a letter had fallen out of it. I picked it up and put it back for you. I was trying to close the door so that nothing else would fall out when you opened the door on my stomach.” I reached for my belly and gave a little grimace of imaginary pain.

  She wasn’t sure whether to believe me. We looked at each other for a long moment. “You’re a friend of Goldblatt’s?” she finally asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “I was dropping off a check, if you must know.”

  That extra detail seemed to convince her.

  “Well, sorry,” she said, and brushed by me.

  “Apology accepted,” I called to her back and followed her down the path. She stopped at her car, opened the trunk, and took out a shopping bag. I walked quickly back to my car and jumped inside. Breathing heavily and more nervous than I’d ever been in my life, I drove off as fast as I could without speeding. I was home within ten minutes.

  Peter was in the same position he’d been when I left, although he seemed to have finished the pot of coffee.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.”

  “Awake yet?”

  “Getting there.”

  “Ruby still asleep?”

  “Isn’t she with you?” He looked confused.

  “Peter! You put her in bed forty minutes ago.”

  “I did? Oh, right. Yeah. She’s asleep.”

  “Will you wake up, already, for crying out loud?”

  “I got E-mail from your mother last night,” he said, changing the subject.

  “What? Why is she writing to you?”

  “She’s been writing to you, apparently, but you haven’t answered. She asked me if there’s anything wrong.”

  “I haven’t checked my E-mail in ages,” I said. “I’ll go log on right now.”

  It took more than ten minutes for all my E-mail messages to download. I hadn’t checked my E-mail since the day before Abigail Hathaway died, and I had a huge backlog of messages. E-mail is a big part of my social life. I write regularly to friends from college and law school as well as to my old colleagues at the federal defender’s office. I don’t think I’ve spoken to my mother since she got her first laptop with a modem. She spends all her free time surfing the Web, so her phone line is permanently engaged and she communicates exclusively by E-mail.

  After I’d finished answering my mail, I logged on to the Web. I was checking out a few of my favorite sites when an idea suddenly occurred to me. I clicked over to Yahoo, input the name “Nina Tiger,” and requested a search. It was only moments before I got my results. One hit. I clicked on the icon and found myself looking at a review of a children’s book called Nina Tiger and the Mango Tree. Probably not who I was looking for, unless the red-haired woman doubled as an exuberant tiger cub.

  I leaned back in my chair, rubbed my belly, and considered the situation. If this woman had a computer and spent time on line, I should be able to find her. It was worth a try. I’ve never been a big one for newsgroups, those message boards of strangers who share a common interest, although at one point, when I was feeling particularly exasperated with my mother, I posted for a while to a group called alt.reddiaperbaby. While it was entertaining for a while to compare stories about socialist summer camp with twenty or thirty strangers, most of whom were named Ethel or Julius, ultimately I got bored. But I remembered how to use Dejanews, the site that digests all the hundreds of thousands of posts to the thousands of newsgroups on topics ranging from alt.misc.parents to alt.dalmatians to alt.gunlovers. I clicked over to it, typed in the red-haired woman’s name, and ordered a search. Success. I found an E-mail address registered to a Nina Tiger: tigress@earthweb.net. Cute. Crossing my fingers, I asked for tigress’s author profile. If she posted to a newsgroup, I would find out.

  Tigress, it turned out, was a big-time cyber-geek. Dejanews provided me with listings of her participation in a whole variety of newsgroups. I checked out her postings to alt.postmodern—tigress was not a fan of Jeff Koons. She did, however, enjoy Star Trek: The Next Generation and French cooking. I scrolled down past postings to those groups and others, including one dedicated to the Rajneesh and another whose topic I couldn’t figure out—it had something to do with witchcraft, or rugby. One of the two. Then I found something interesting: Tigress spent a lot of time chatting with folks on the topic of alt.polyamory. That sounded like sex to me.

  I clicked on tigress’s most recent posting to the newsgroup. The protocol of newsgroup participation is to include a portion of the person to whom you are responding’s message at the top of your own so that readers will know what the topic of conversation is. Otherwise it would be almost impossible to follow the train of various comments and responses. Tigress had excerpted a prior message from someone named “monkey65” and responded to it.

  <>

  My loss is immeasurable because my love’s loss is immeasurable. I feel his misery in my own soul. His wife’s refusal to embrace our love and make it part of her own doesn’t ease the pain of her being violently thrust from this life into the next passage. I ache with Coyote as I love with Coyote. Our intertwined souls feel this wrenching together as we feel all else together. We will celebrate her voyage into the next life with a tantric love dance.

  tigress

  It was difficult to keep myself from gagging. I wasn’t sure what made me more sick to my stomach: Nina Tiger’s pretentious, New-Age pseudomourning, or the idea of Daniel Mooney—it had to be he—performing a “tantric love dance,” whatever the heck that might be.

  I snipped the message and copied it into a file on my computer. In the interests of security, however paranoid, I labeled the file “Animal Musings.” No way a hacker, police detective, or nosy husband would figure that out.

  I then went back to Dejanews and searched for more information on my pair of tantric murderers. After about an hour I could stand no more. My back ached, my eyes were blurry, and I was thoroughly disgusted. I logged off, put my computer to sleep, and staggered out to the kitchen. I found Peter just where I’d left him. He was still hunched over his empty cup of coffee but seemed to have progressed through all the various sections of the Los Angeles Times. The Trades were spread out in front of him, and he was busily circling items with an angry red marker.

  “Hey. Whatchya doing?” I asked.

  “Figuring out who’s getting paid more than I am.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Pete, tell me you’re not serious.”

  “Totally,” he said, miserably. “The Hollywood Reporter has this long article on some twenty-eight-year-old hack writer who just turned down one point seven million dollars to write the script for Revenge of the Killing Crows. Turned it down. Meaning, it wasn’t enough money. Meaning, he’s planning on making more money doing something else.”

  “You don’t know that. Maybe the guy has some artistic integrity and doesn’t want to write the Killing Crows thing,” I said.

  “Give me a break, Juliet. First of all, this is Hollywood. No one has artistic integrity. And even if they did, they wouldn’t for one point seven million dollars. And second of all, I would kill to write the movie that you seem to think is so artistically bankrupt.” He positively snarled at me. My sweet, unflappable spouse had turned into a character from one of his own scripts.

  “What has gotten into you this morning?” I asked, trying to keep my own temper. For some reason, my moods always seem to adjust to match Peter’s. When he’s depressed, I’m depressed. When he’s angry, I’m angry. Unfortunately, his positive emotions don’t seem
anywhere near as contagious.

  Peter moaned, reached over, and hugged me. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I’m being a bear. I was up until four in the morning trying to finish that scene I’m working on. I am never going to finish this script. Which means I’ll never get another movie.”

  Suddenly he dropped his arms from around my neck and looked at me, horrified. “Oh, my God, do you think I’m the reason we’ve been rejected at all the preschools? They know I’m going nowhere, and they don’t want their precious kids to associate with the spawn of failure.”

  I rolled my eyes. Before I could express a reassuring word, Peter started scrambling around the table.

  “Where’s a pencil? I have to write that down. Spawn of Failure. Great title.”

  Laughing, I kissed the top of his head. “I love you,” I said.

  “Love you, too. What have you been up to all morning? How’s the baby doing?” He scribbled on a corner of the newspaper and then leaned over and gave my belly a kiss.

  “Isaac and I are fine. We were just . . . um . . . driving around.”

  “What?” he asked. “Driving around?”

  “I mean, Ruby and I went to Abigail Hathaway’s house to return the shirt to her daughter, and after I dropped her off at home I . . . I . . . I just drove around.” I paused. “I’m lying,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t want to tell you what I really did, so I lied. But I can’t lie to you. I did go to Ms. Hathaway’s house. But, then, I sort of followed Daniel Mooney.”

  “You what?”

  “I followed him. But listen, here’s why—”

  “I don’t care why!” By now he was yelling. “You took our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter on a car chase?”

  I yelled back, “It wasn’t a car chase! We very slowly and carefully followed Daniel Mooney and his girlfriend to her house, and then I immediately brought her back here before I went back to figure out the girlfriend’s name. Do you honestly think I would ever risk Ruby’s safety?”

  Peter paused. “Girlfriend?”

  “Yes, girlfriend. And you’ll never believe the stuff I found out about the two of them on the Web.”

  Peter was interested despite himself. “Go on.”

  “Turns out this creep is sleeping with this woman, Nina Tiger, or “tigress,” as she likes to call herself. They met about a year ago on a newsgroup for people interested in polyamory.”

  “Poly what?”

  “Love relationships among more than two people.”

  “Ick.”

  “My feelings exactly. Anyway, they met on the Web, and pretty soon were having very public and very raunchy Internet sex. Finally, it wasn’t enough for them. They decided they needed to consummate their cybersex. The whole time, mind you, they kept the entire population of their newsgroup apprised of every single sordid detail of their relationship. They started sleeping together, sneaking around behind Abigail’s back.

  “Within a couple of months, the newsgroup freaks started hounding them. Remember, the whole point of this movement or whatever it is is that they are supposed to by polyamorous, not just adulterous. Tigress and Coyote—yes, that is indeed his nom de guerre—finally succumbed to the pressure and decided to include Abigail in their little love nest or cesspool, whatever you want to call it. And, get this, they decided, with the help of their comrades in arms—and legs, for that matter—that the best way to get Abigail to go along with this multiple-partner thing is to have her walk into her bedroom one fine day and find ol’ tigress and Coyote waiting there, buck naked.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Nope. They planned their moment, and one fine evening there they were, waiting for Abigail when she walked in from work. Surprise, surprise, Abigail was less than thrilled with the little Wild Kingdom tableau awaiting her. In fact, she freaked out—which, by the way, totally confused everyone in the newsgroup, all of whom apparently were under the impression that she would rip off her clothes and jump into the sack with the fabulous twosome.

  “Not one to be trifled with, Abigail threw Coyote out on his butt, and he, bizarrely, to my mind, began this desperate siege to try to get her back. Finally, after about a week or so of flowers, phone calls, etc., she relented, on the condition that he stop seeing tigress and get some marital counseling, which he did. Go to therapy, that is. He did not stop sleeping with the hungry jungle cat. They just went back to doing the nasty in secret. They seem to have been under the impression that Abigail didn’t know about it, or at least that’s what they told the newsgroup.”

  “Holy cow.”

  “Cows say ‘Moo!’” a high-pitched voice squealed.

  Peter and I spun around to find Ruby standing in the doorway. How long she’d been there and how much she’d heard we never did figure out. I didn’t have time to mention to Peter that Nina Tiger had caught me going through her mail.

  Eleven

  SO Daniel Mooney had killed his wife for the second-oldest reason in the book: love. Something still bothered me, however: This was a full thirty years after the “me decade” and the divorce revolution. By conservative estimates, one in every two marriages doesn’t make it. Why didn’t Daniel Mooney just divorce his wife and marry his trophy, like most other philandering husbands? Why did he kill her, exposing himself to the possibility of taking up residence on San Quentin’s death row?

  There were two possible explanations that occurred to me. The first had the benefit of a little drama and just a hint of Jacqueline Susann. Mooney, acting in the heat of his overwhelming passion, overcome with lust and despair, struck out in a blind rage. Since Mooney seemed about as capable of passion as your average android, I could pretty much rule that possibility out. That left me with the single biggest motivator of all, the reason most crimes are committed to begin with. Filthy lucre. Money.

  That night, after I put Ruby to bed and after Peter had gone to work, I went back to my computer. I logged on to a legal search engine that I’d been subscribed to while at the Federal Defender’s office. Surprisingly, my password still worked. Promising myself that I would notify Marla Goldfarb that she should adjust the office’s subscription to exclude me and any other ex-employees just as soon as I was done, I began a search of the real property files.

  Real property means just that—land, houses, apartments, and the like. The search engine listed appraised values and title histories of all pieces of real property in most if not all areas of the country. In the California real estate market, average, and even not so average, wage earners have the vast majority of their assets tied up in their homes. One of the best ways to figure out what someone is worth—one of the only ways, unless you’re the FBI or the IRS and can subpoena bank records—is to figure out what kind of money she has invested in her house.

  It took me no time at all to find Abigail Hathaway’s property interests. In addition to her house in Santa Monica, she owned eight rental units in East Los Angeles and three small apartment buildings in South-Central L.A. and Watts. Lovely, elegant Ms. Hathaway was a slumlord. Slumlady? Anyway, she collected rent on a number of buildings in decidedly dicey parts of Los Angeles. She also owned a commercial building on Wilshire Boulevard and a couple of empty lots downtown. A real estate magnate in preschool teacher’s clothing.

  Scrolling down through the document that my entry of her name had generated, I found another listing—a large holding on the central California coast. A ranch, most likely, since it listed agricultural uses under its property description. Old California families often used to own vast ranches all over the state. William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon is the most famous of these, but families such as the Hewletts, Packards, Browns, and others still keep their “rustic” family retreats. It appeared that the Hathaways were part of that select group.

  Now the question became how Abigail Hathaway had come into these various properties and what kind of stake, if any, Daniel Mooney had in them.

  Before I continued my search I got up and tiptoed into the
hall. I paused outside of Peter’s office and listened to the rapid-fire click-clack of his computer keys. His work was obviously going better. I continued down the hall and stopped outside of Ruby’s door. Opening it a crack, I peered into the semidarkness. She lay on her bed, arms and legs spread wide. That child sure knew how to take up space. Smiling at the sound of her snores, I softly closed the door and headed to the bathroom. The minute dimensions of my pregnant bladder were having a detrimental effect on my stamina.

  Business accomplished, I headed back to my desk. Thankfully, I had not been logged off in my absence. Going back to my search, I began with the Santa Monica house. According to the record, it had been purchased in 1983 by Abigail Hathaway and Philip Esseks. 1983. I did some quick math. (Okay, not so quick, but I’m a product of the new math of the early 1970s, and it is simply not my fault that I need to add and subtract using my fingers and toes. And let’s not even talk about my times tables.) Sixteen years ago. Abigail’s daughter Audrey looked to be about fifteen years old or so. That made it likely that Philip Esseks was Audrey’s dad and one of Abigail’s first few husbands.

  Married couples generally purchase residential property as joint tenants. That means each has a right of survivorship. If one dies, the other owns the whole thing. The house was Abigail’s. Even more interesting, there was no bank lien on the property, meaning that it had either been fully paid for when bought or the mortgage had been paid off.

  Since Abigail owned the house before her marriage to Mooney, the house was hers and hers alone. Under California’s community property laws, each person retains ownership of whatever assets he or she brings into the marriage. It’s only what they earn or acquire during the time they are together that gets split down the middle. The house belonged to Abigail, and unless she had expressly made it part of their community property (something I couldn’t see a woman who’d been through a divorce or two doing), if Mooney divorced her, he wouldn’t get any of it.