Nursery Crimes (10 page)

“Did anything unusual happen the night Abigail was killed?” I asked, changing the subject. “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”

“The police already asked me that. I told them everything was just the same as always.”

“So it was just your basic Monday night?”

“I guess so.”

“Like every other day of the week?”

“Yeah. Well, no.”

“No?” I asked.

“Fridays are different,” Maggie said. “On Fridays Abigail leaves at a quarter to six because she’s got therapy at six. But on every other day she stays late with me. Just as she did that night.” Maggie started to sniffle.

“She was seeing a psychologist?” I asked. It was hard for me to imagine supremely confident Abigail Hathaway in therapy. I’m not sure why, since it seems like everyone in Hollywood is seeing a shrink, but I wouldn’t have expected Abigail Hathaway, the frost queen, to regularly unburden her soul. It just didn’t seem her style.

“There’s nothing wrong with seeing a therapist,” Maggie said defensively. “Anyway, she’d only been going for a few months. It’s not like she was crazy or anything.”

“Do you know who she was seeing?” I asked, not really imagining that Maggie would, or would say so.

“Well, let me think. A couple of months ago the doctor called and canceled the appointment because she was sick. I took the message because Abigail and Susan were having a f—— discussion. Let me see if I can remember the doctor’s name.”

“Try. Try hard,” I pressed.

“I remember thinking it was Chinese. Tang? Wong? Wang, that’s it, Wang!”

“The doctor’s name was Wang?” I asked. “Was it a woman? Do you remember the first name?” It couldn’t be the same one, could it?

Back when Ruby was first born, and Peter and I were going through our difficult period of adjustment, we had, on the advice of a friend, visited a couples counselor. Peter had had a movie in production just then and he had gotten friendly with the lead actress, Lilly Green, a budding starlet who soon thereafter surprised everyone by winning a supporting-actress Oscar for her first serious film performance. At the time she was shooting Peter’s movie, she had been in the process of dissolving her own rocky marriage and gave Peter the name of her therapist, one Dr. Herma Wang.

We’d made an appointment with Dr. Wang, who turned
out not to be the tiny, slim, Asian woman I had been expecting, but rather a somewhat overweight Jewish matron with a thick Long Island accent, who used her married name.

Peter and I had lasted exactly one session with the good Dr. Wang. In the first three of our fifty minutes she’d managed to drop the names of three or four hundred of her most famous patients. Not their last names, mind you. She’d say things like, “As I said to one of my patients, ‘Warren, every marriage is a partnership,’” or “As I often tell a patient, ‘Julia, you can’t expect him to understand you if you don’t utilize your three-part communications technique.’”

Technically, I suppose, she wasn’t violating anyone’s confidences, but really, how many of us
don’t
know who those folks are? Peter and I decided that whatever problems we had weren’t worth spending a hundred bucks an hour to hear Dr. Wang wax poetic about the trials and tribulations of Mel, Matt, Bruce, and Susan. We never went back.

“Yes, it was a lady doctor, but I don’t really remember her first name,” Maggie said.

“
Could it
have been Herma?” I asked.

“Maybe. I don’t know. Why are you asking me all these questions?”

“Juliet’s just a busybody,” Stacy said, pinching my leg under the table.

Realizing I wasn’t likely to get any more out of Maggie, I stopped the interrogation and kept my mouth shut for the remainder of the lunch. While Stacy and Maggie spent the next half hour or so sharing fond memories of Zachary’s years at Heart’s Song, I sat and pondered what I had discovered. If Abigail Hathaway was really seeing Dr. Wang, marriage counselor to the stars, then she was
most likely going to couples counseling. If she was going to couples counseling, that meant her marriage to Daniel Mooney might be in trouble. And if that were the case, maybe he plowed her into a mailbox! It might be a huge jump from getting a little marital counseling to murder, but as I said before, Daniel Mooney had really rubbed me the wrong way. It wouldn’t make any sense
not
to investigate this lead, even if it was a little far-fetched.

The waitress stopped by to clear our plates, and asked us if we were interested in coffee.

“I’ll have a double, half-caf, nonfat latte,” Stacy ordered.

I thought for a moment. Had I exceeded my caffeine allotment for the day? I decided that I probably had. “I’ll have the same. But not a double. And not nonfat. And decaf,” I said.

The waitress looked at me, confused.

“A single, decaf latte,” I said. “Full-fat.”

“Oh. Okay,” she replied.

“I don’t think I’ll have anything,” Maggie said. “Actually, I think I’d better get going. I should do prep for tomorrow. It’s music day and I want to teach the kids a new song.”

Neither Stacy nor I objected. Maggie gathered herself together, kissed Stacy warmly on the cheek, shook my hand coldly, and left.

I watched her walk out the door and, once she had gone, turned to Stacy.

“So, what’s the deal, Stacy? What’s going on with you and Bruce LeCrone?”

She jerked her head up at me and blanched. “Nothing.”

“Baloney.”

“Seriously, nothing. Ooh, look, our coffee is here.” She
busily engaged herself in pouring copious amounts of artificial sweetener into her tall mug.

“Stacy.”

My friend looked up at me. “How did you know?” She whispered.

“I talked to you on Monday night. I even said something like, ‘Maybe LeCrone killed her,’ and you never mentioned that you saw him that night. You never mentioned the party.”

“Didn’t I?” She looked pale and almost frightened. “Juliet, promise me you won’t say anything. Please. It’s over. I swear it’s over. It was over as soon as you told me about what he did to his wife.”

“What’s over, Stacy?”

“Me and Bruce. It was nothing, really. Just a fling. I mean, for Christ’s sake, I’m entitled. Do you know how many times I’ve had to deal with Andy’s little adventures? It’s about time it was my turn.”

Stacy’s husband, Andy, has always been a notorious womanizer. Stacy knows it. Her friends know it. Everyone knows it. Every couple of years they separate, only to get back together again a few weeks or months later after therapy and lots of promises of eternal fidelity. I’d thought Stacy had reached some kind of peace with it—that she’d gotten used to it in a way. Maybe she had. Maybe betraying him back was her way of dealing with Andy’s treachery.

“How long were you seeing LeCrone?”

Stacy laughed mirthlessly. “I’d hardly call it that. We had sex a few times. The first time was in his bathroom in the middle of a party.”

I grimaced. She looked at me, almost defiantly. “We got carried away.”

“I guess you did,” I said. Then I felt bad about sounding so judgmental. “It sounds pretty exciting.”

“It was. I met him a couple more times. And then, that Monday night we got a room at the Beverly Wilshire. That was the last time.” She was looking straight into her coffee cup, and it took a moment for me to realize that she was crying.

“Oh, Stacy, honey, don’t cry,” I said. “You’re right, you do deserve it. Andy’s been doing this kind of thing to you for years. You are entitled. Really you are.”

“But you wouldn’t have done it,” she said.

That brought me up short. No, I couldn’t imagine cheating on Peter. But then, I couldn’t imagine him cheating on me, either.

“I don’t know, Stacy. I have no idea what I would do under similar circumstances. But that doesn’t matter. All that matters is how you feel.”

“Well, I feel like I’m the one who was hit by a car.”

I reached my hand out across the table, and she took it. We sat there silently for a few more minutes and then paid the bill, gathered our things together, and left. We stood awkwardly in front of my car. I reached out my arms and hugged my friend.

“Call me, okay?” I said when I released her.

“Okay. I love you, Juliet.”

“I love you, too. You’re my best friend. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah. I know. You’re mine, too.”

I waved good-bye, opened my car door, and squeezed myself behind the wheel. I headed for home, thinking about all those terrible marriages around me. LeCrone and his wives. Andy and Stacy. Abigail Hathaway and Daniel Mooney. It often felt like Peter and I were the only
happily married couple we knew. Sometimes that made me feel complacent, better than anyone else. Sometimes it just scared me. Maybe we weren’t any different. Maybe it was just that our misery simply hadn’t started yet.

I
walked in the house and, not hearing Ruby’s voice, peeked my head into Peter’s office. He was lying on his stomach on the floor, surrounded by
Star Wars
action figures, carefully putting the mask on Darth Vader.

“
Luke
, it is your destiny,” I said.

“Hi.” He didn’t look up.

“Where’s Ruby?” I asked.

“Nap.”

“Whatcha doing?”

“Playing.”

“Hmm.”

Peter’s “office” looks like an eight-year-old boy’s clubhouse. The bookshelves are crammed full of action figures. He’s got every comic book hero placed carefully next to the appropriate villains. I’m convinced Peter collects all these toys not, as he insists, because they are valuable (although his collection of vintage ’70s Mego Superheroes was once appraised at $4,750), or even as
inspiration for his writing, but because as a kid he was deprived of them. His mother did her best, but she just barely managed to support her three children after his father walked out on her. Whatever money she had went to cover the basics, such as food and shelter and, of course, television.

Peter spent his childhood craving the toys he saw on TV. He tells one story that always makes me cry, although he tells it as a joke. One year at Christmas he desperately wanted a GI Joe Frogman. His mother couldn’t afford the doll, but she did get him the doll’s diving suit. He used a tiny, plastic GI Joe coat hanger for a head and shoulders, and tugged the empty wet suit around a bucket of water. I like to tease him that his next feature will star the archvillain “Hangerman.” Every time Peter shows up with another two-hundred-dollar Major Matt Mason figurine in the original 1969 packaging and I want to wring his neck, I try to remember that boy with no dolls.

I walked into the room, straddled his prone figure, and lowered myself onto his rear end.

“Ooph.” He grunted. “You weigh a ton, babe. It’s like having Juggernaut sitting on my butt.”

“Gee, thanks. Come to think of it, I do feel sort of like a fat mutant.”

“You’re not fat, you’re pregnant.”

“That’s turning into your mantra.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ll stop saying it as soon as you get over your lunatic obsession with your weight.”

“First of all, I’m
never
going to get over that particular lunatic obsession, and second of all, you’re no stringbean yourself.”

“Oh, yeah?” he said, flipping over under me so that I
was straddling his crotch. He started tickling me in the ribs.

“Stop! Oh, please stop. Please please please.” By then I was laughing so hard I was crying. I rolled off of him and onto my side on the floor, curling up into as small a ball as I could—that is to say, not very small. He kept tickling me.

“Peter! Stop it right now or I’m going to pee in my pants! I’m serious!”

That made him quit. He leaned down and kissed me on the mouth, lingeringly.

I won’t describe what happened next. Suffice it to say we did what most couples do when they find themselves at home on a lazy afternoon with the kid down for her nap and no laundry to be done.

Afterward, as we lay on the floor of his office, tucked together like spoons—well, like a spoon and a ladle—I reached under me and grabbed a little figurine. “Boba Fett is poking a hole in my back,” I said, handing Peter the toy.

Holding the doll puppet-fashion, Peter deepened his voice and said, “May the force be with you!”

“It already was, baby,” I said. “Hey, guess where I went this afternoon?”

“Yoga?”

“Nope. Abigail Hathaway’s memorial service.” I winced, waiting for the bomb to drop. Surprisingly, it didn’t.

“Hmm,” he said.

“That’s it? Hmm? Aren’t you angry? Aren’t you going to tell me to mind my own business?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Well, Juliet, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. For the past year or so you’ve been sort of at loose ends. It’s like you know you should be staying home with Ruby, but something in you doesn’t really like it. You’re used to being useful. You’re used to helping people. And for some reason, being useful to us, helping your family, isn’t as satisfying to you as doing for other people. Ever since you’ve started looking into this Hathaway thing, you’ve been different. It’s like you’ve got your old sense of purpose back.”

“You know, Dorothy noticed that, too,” I said. “I definitely feel like I can contribute something here. But I’m surprised that you’re not worried about me.”

“Well, I’m not,” he replied. “I’m not worried because I know that you know what you’re doing. I wasn’t worried when you were out canvassing witnesses in Crip or Blood territory. Why should I worry now? I assume that you aren’t going to do anything that will put yourself in any danger. I assume that you will nose around and give whatever information you uncover to that detective you spoke to. I assume you’ll be sensible.”

“I will be sensible. I
am
being sensible, really.”

“Good.”

“Do you want to hear what I found out at the service?”

“Sure.”

“First of all, I saw her husband, who is a total creep. He looks like some Yanni-wannabe.”

“Really? That doesn’t seem like the kind of person she would be with.”

“Exactly what I thought. You should have seen this creep. His stepdaughter was sitting there, weeping, and he barely noticed her. It was awful. I felt like scooping the poor thing up and taking her home.”