Nursery Crimes (6 page)

I
was still puzzling out my next step an hour later, when Ruby danced over to the VCR and pressed the rewind button.

“Wanna play trains, Mama?” she asked.

I sighed, already bored at the prospect of toddler games. I looked at my watch. I had a whole hour to kill before I could expect to see Peter walk through the door and relieve me of my Romper Room duties.

“Why don’t you play by yourself, Ruby.”

I looked up in time to see a fat tear rolling down my baby’s face.

“You never wanna play with me,” she whispered.

“Sure I do. I play with you all the time. Don’t I?”

“No.”

I thought for a moment. She was right.

“Okay, honey, let’s play trains,” I said, pushing thoughts of Bruce LeCrone and untimely deaths out of my mind and lowering my substantial bulk onto the floor.

Ruby hauled out her plastic bin full of Brio trains and tracks. Peter had brought the little magnetic train set home with great fanfare as part of our campaign to ply Ruby with gender-neutral and boy’s toys. She loved it from the moment she set eyes on it. Much to Peter’s horror, however, she was not at all interested in setting up the tracks and making the little train run around them. Instead, she liked to play “train family.” Lately, the train babies all had bad colds and were in bed, being cared for by the train mommies. The engine, in its role as train doctor, gave them frequent shots and pills. These games drove her normally patient father to distraction, and I’d once heard Peter wail, “Can’t they just pull
a heavy load
?”

Balancing a little caboose on my round belly I said, “Hey look, Rubes, the train baby is stuck on top of a mountain! Can the train mama rescue her?”

By the time Peter got home we’d been playing for close to an hour and my eyes had long since glazed over.
What was it about me that made it so hard for me to enjoy these games? Peter loved playing with Ruby. I often saw other mothers playing with their kids. Was I the only one who found it cataclysmically boring?

At the sound of the garage door opening, Ruby and I rushed to the front door like a couple of golden retrievers who’d been left alone all day. Peter walked in wearing his gym clothes and carrying a brown paper bag that gave off the most tantalizing aroma.

“Guess what?” he said.

“What?” Ruby shouted.

“I went to the gym and guess what?”

“What?” she shrieked again.

“What’s next door to the gym?” He matched her yell.

“What?” This time I thought the windows would shatter.

He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “Barbecue!”

Peter and I had celebrated the pink line in the pregnancy test by ordering a pizza—stuffed, no less—and had been going strong ever since. While he didn’t quite match me inch for inch, Peter’s belly was slowly creeping outward. I found this to be a considerable comfort. The last thing a rotund, pregnant woman needs is a guy with a washboard stomach lying next to her in bed.

We feasted on our ribs, dipping the pieces of spongy white bread that Ruby liked to call “cottony bread” into the barbecue sauce. Finally, chins and fingers sticky and stomachs content, Peter hustled Ruby off to her bath and bed. I picked up the receiver. Stacy was where I knew she’d be at seven-thirty at night. At work.

“Hey.”

“Hey to you, too. Did Bruce LeCrone confess yet?” she asked.

“Ha, ha, ha. You’ll all be sorry you gave me such a
rough time when the guy’s trying to run the studio from San Quentin.”

“Oh, please, Juliet. You are really being ridiculous. Seriously, have you found out anything new?”

I brought her up to date on my phone conversation with the police detective and what I had found out about LeCrone. When I told her about the domestic violence charge she gasped.

“Oh, for crying out loud, Juliet, you are so full of it,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” Sometimes Stacy really made me angry. “I am not full of it. I put his name through the computer. The guy was convicted of beating up his wife.”

Stacy was silent.

“Stacy? Are you still there?”

No reply.

“Stacy, come on. Would I lie to you?”

She sighed. “No, I suppose not.”

“Look, I need some information from you,” I continued.

“What?” She sounded suspicious.

“Nothing too big. I just need to know LeCrone’s address.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Juliet. I’m not going to give you his address.”

“Why not?”

“Because he used to be a colleague. He worked here before he left to run Parnassus. I can’t just give you a colleague’s address.”

“Well, can you tell me approximately where he lives?”

“No!”

“Just look it up on your database. Don’t give me the address, just the neighborhood. C’mon, I’d do it for you,” I wheedled.

She fell silent for a moment and then said, “Are you sure about this domestic violence thing?”

“Absolutely. I couldn’t be more sure. I saw the printout of his record myself.”

“All right. Give me a second, I’ll check in the computer.” She sounded grim. I heard her tapping a few keys.

“He lives in Beverly Hills a little east of the Century City Mall.”

“Near Roxbury Park?”

“I think so,” Stacy said.

“That’s a nice park,” I said. “Ruby would like it. Maybe we’d better go check it out.”

“I’m not even going to bother telling you to be careful, Juliet. It doesn’t do any good.”

“I’m careful. I’m just taking my daughter to the park. What could possibly be wrong with that?”

T
HE
next morning dawned warm and beautiful. It was one of those days that remind you that Los Angeles is just a desert covered in freeways and parking lots. The light was so bright it hurt my eyes, but it seemed as likely to be emanating from the white lines in the road as from the sky above. I usually greeted this kind of day with a scowl and a muttered, “Great, another beautiful day. Who needs it?”

Not so today. Today we had plans. Ruby and I donned matching purple sunglasses and, careful not to wake Peter, gathered up her pails and shovels and headed out to Roxbury Park, a lovely expanse of green grass, play structures, and
bocci
and basketball courts on the southern end of Beverly Hills. The children playing there generally reflected the demographics of the neighborhood, primarily wealthy white kids with a smattering of Iranians and Israelis who’d made good in the jewelry, film, or air-conditioning business.

When Ruby and I arrived we found the play area packed with toddlers. I dumped Ruby’s sand toys out in the pit and set her up next to a dark-haired little boy with a bulldozer, and a little girl with blond pigtails who was making sand pies. Ruby and the tiny chef immediately struck up a conversation and I headed out to the benches, satisfied that she was busy for a while at least.

As in all Los Angeles area parks (and maybe those in all affluent cities), the benches were strictly segregated. About half were populated by a rainbow coalition of women—Asians, Latinas, black women with lilting Caribbean accents. Those women chatted animatedly, sharing bags of chips and exotic-looking treats, stopping only to scoop up fallen children or take turns pushing swings. The children they watched over were, without exception, white.

The tenants of the other benches were the Los Angeles equivalent of the suburban matron, of whom there are two distinct types. One group, with impeccably manicured nails and carefully blow-dried hair, called out warnings to their little Jordans, Madisons, and Alexandras. The other group, the ones I liked to think of as “grunge mamas,” were just as carefully turned out, in contrived rags artfully torn at knee and elbow. They wore Doc Martens and flannel shirts, and their shouts of “Watch out for the swing!” were directed at little boys named Dallas and Skye and little girls named Arabella Moon. I belonged somewhere between the two. My overalls disqualified me from membership in the Junior League, but, since I’m a lawyer and not a performance artist or jewelry designer I wasn’t quite cool enough for the alternative music set.

It took me only a moment to spot Morgan LeCrone.
She sat on the top of a high slide, looking imperiously down at the children playing below her. Behind her, a towheaded boy whined for his turn down the slide. At the bottom, a middle-aged Asian woman waved both hands wildly, beseeching the child to go.

“Morgan, time come down. Come down, Morgan. Other children want play, too.”

Morgan ignored the woman.

I walked over and stood next to the Asian woman, who obviously had the unpleasant job of nanny to the LeCrones’ spoiled princess.

“Mine does that. Drives me nuts,” I said, smiling.

“She never come down. She go up and sit. I always gotta go up and get her.”

“Maybe if you just leave her she’ll have no choice but to slide down on her own,” I suggested.

“You think that okay?” the woman asked.

“Sure. I think that would be fine. Let’s just walk over to that bench and have a seat. She’ll come down.”

I led the woman over to a nearby bench under a shady tree and she sat down, clearly happy to get out of the glaring sun.

“My name is Juliet,” I said, holding out my hand.

She took it. “I’m Miriam, but everyone call me Lola.”

“That means grandmother,” I said.

“You know Tagalog?” she said, surprised.

“Not really. My daughter, Ruby, has a friend who’s Filipina, and she calls her grandmother Lola.”

“Yeah. Lola mean grandmother. All my kids calls me Lola.”

“Do you baby-sit for other kids or just Morgan?”

“She my only one now but she number thirteen for me. I got six of my own, too.” Lola looked proud.

Reminded of her charge, we both looked up in time to see Morgan fly down the slide, hair blowing out behind her, a huge smile on her face.

“Hmph. That something I don’t see alla’ time,” Lola said. “She don’t like to smile.”

“No?” I asked. “That must be pretty hard to deal with.”

“I tell you something: I take care lotta kids in my life. I got six my own kids, I been nanny plenty times. But this kid the hardest. I call her Amazona, she always hittin’ and beatin’ other kids. She even hit me!” Lola shook her head, obviously scandalized at Morgan’s misbehavior.

I murmured sympathetically, shaking my head.

“It’s okay. I love her anyway. I love alla’ my kids.” Lola leaned back against the bench. “Which one yours?”

I pointed to Ruby, who was still busy in the sand pit.

“Nice red hair. She get it from you,” Lola said.

I smiled. “I hope not! I get it from a bottle.”

“You lucky! Everybody think yours real because of her.”

I pulled a pack of gum out of my pocket and handed her a piece. We sat, companionably chewing, for a moment.

“So, do you like being a nanny?” I asked.

“I love my kids,” Lola repeated.

“And the job?”

“That depend. Some jobs I like more than others.”

“I guess it must depend on the family.”

“Yeah, mostly it the family. If the kids happy. If the mom and dad happy. One time I work for couple in the middle of divorce. That was terrible. Poor kids.”

“Are Morgan’s parents good to work for?” I asked nonchalantly.

Lola paused. “They okay. Not so bad. They not there so much, so it’s okay.

“Her parents both work?” I asked.

“He workin’ alla’ time. She, I dunno, maybe she shop-pin’ alla’ time.”

“They don’t spend much time with Morgan?”

“No. The father sometimes go work inna morning before she awake, come back after she asleep. Don’ see her all week. They go out every night. Never even eat dinner with that kid!”

“That’s terrible! You wonder why some people have children. What’s the point if they’re not going to spend any time with them?”

Lola and I nodded, agreeing with each other. I glanced over at Ruby, who had come upon Morgan playing on the slide.

“I know you!” I heard my daughter shout. “Mommy! I remember her!”

Hurriedly, I tried to distract Lola. The last thing I wanted was for her to discover that I had ever seen Morgan before. “So, do you live in?” I asked.

“Yeah. First Monday to Friday, but now they pay me extra and I stay all weekend, too.”

“You work seven days a week?”

“Sure. They pay me fourteen dollars a hour. My daughter in medical school in Manila. It’s very expensive.”

“I’ll bet. When’s the last time you had a day off?”

“Not so long ago. Monday night she tell me go home. She gonna stay in.”

My ears pricked up. This was just the information I was looking for!

“Wow. They both actually stayed home with their daughter for once,” I said, with just the slightest hint of a query in my tone.

“Her, but not him. I put Morgan to bed, I clean up, I go to my sister’s house. I left maybe eight-thirty. He not home yet.”

Pay dirt. Abigail Hathaway was run down on Monday at about nine in the evening. Bruce LeCrone may have had another alibi, but he wasn’t home immediately before the murder.

I decided to try to find out if LeCrone’s violent tendencies had reared their ugly head.

“You know, Lola, I just read this article that said that men who work all the time are more likely to be violent. You know, like hit their wives or their kids.” Embarrassingly unsubtle, but what the heck.