Nursery Crimes (20 page)

“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.

O
VER
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”:

“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.

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.

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.”

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

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

“In real life.”

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.

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.

There was a pause. Finally GRrrrL replied,

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.”

“You don’t know my password. Why would she know his?” Peter said.

“Gee, I don’t know. Could it be, perhaps, Cthulhu?”

“Hey!” he shouted. “How did you know that?”

“Oh, please, Mr. Owns a First Edition of Every Book H. P. Lovecraft Ever Wrote.”

“I can’t believe you.”

“Could we get back to the issue at hand?”

“I can’t
believe
you.”

“Peter!”

“Okay, okay. How would Nina Tiger have known who you are?”

“She must have compared notes with Mooney. I introduced myself to him, and he probably told her about me. How many pregnant women with red hair could have been following them around? She put two and two together and came up with me.”

“Juliet?”

“What?”

“What are you talking about?”

Then I remembered that I hadn’t mentioned my run-in with tigress. With a huge amount of trepidation, I told him about it. To Peter’s credit, he managed to suppress whatever anger I knew he must have felt. He looked at me horrified and then seemed to make a decision not to discuss it.

“Okay, so it’s Nina Tiger. So what?” he said.

I thought. True, so what? So what if she was logging on as her imprisoned lover? It was weird, but it didn’t mean anything. Then I realized something.

“She never answered my question.”

“What?”

“She never said she didn’t kill Abigail.”

I
called Detective Carswell and left another of my famous messages for him. This time I asked for and received his fax number and faxed over a copy of my chat with GRrrrL. That would make him call back.

“Peter?” I said.

“What?”

“If tigress killed Abigail, that means that Daniel Mooney didn’t.”

“Unless they were in it together.”

“Either way, the murderer is still out there, and so is Audrey.” I began to pace nervously. “I wish that detective would call me back.”

“Juliet, there’s no reason to think that Audrey is in any danger. Tigress hasn’t done anything to her yet. Why would she start now?”

“I suppose. God, I wish Carswell would call me.”

I called the station house again, telling the woman who took my call that it was an emergency. Something about
the tone of my voice must have convinced her how serious I was. She put me on hold. Within a couple of minutes I was talking to Detective Carswell.

I apprised the detective of my online conversation with GRrrrL and explained why I thought that Nina Tiger was the only person who could have had access to Daniel Mooney’s alias and password. Sounding somewhat dubious, he asked to explain how I’d tracked GRrrrL down. After a couple of frustrating minutes trying to explain Dejanews to a man who just barely understood the concept of E-mail, I asked him to please come over so I could show him what I was talking about. He agreed. He and his young sidekick showed up at our door half an hour later.