Nursery Crimes (14 page)

Peter settled Ruby down for her nap and came back to his coffee.

“Listen,” I said, “do you mind if I run out? I’ll be back in about an hour.” I waited for him to ask me where I was going.

“Yeah, fine, whatever,” he mumbled. A morning person my husband is not.

I paused at the front door, giving him another moment to ask where I was off to. Nothing. I jumped back into my car and sped down the freeway in the direction of Venice.

The parking gods were not on my side. I circled the block twice before I finally gave up and parked in the tow-away zone directly in front of the apartment building. I flicked on my hazard lights, jumped out of the car, and walked quickly to the front door.

There were four buzzers next to the door behind which Mooney and his redhead had disappeared. Below each one was a narrow mailbox. One mailbox had no name tag, one read “Jefferson Goldblatt,” and one was marked “Best & Co.” Taped above the fourth bell was a small slip of cardstock elaborately decorated with scrolls and flowers in an Art Deco design. The name “N. Tiger” was hand-calligraphed in a luscious purple ink. The red-haired woman had to be N. Naomi. Nancy. Nanette. Nicole. Noreen. Nesbit. Nefertiti. Noodleroni.

I casually looked around to make sure I wasn’t being watched. Satisfied that there was no one in sight, I pulled on the little metal door to N. Tiger’s mailbox. It was locked. Thinking it hopeless, but somehow not able to help myself, I yanked a little harder. With a tiny shriek of metal the door popped open, only slightly bent. I gulped but, the damage having been done, looked inside the narrow box. At first sight it appeared to be empty, but then I saw a piece of crumpled white paper flattened against the back of the box. I slid my hand inside, and with the tips of my fingers I could just reach the paper. I grabbed it between my index and middle fingers and eased it out. It was a piece of junk mail, one of those cards with the picture of a missing child on the front and an ad on the back. This one was for a dry cleaner. The card was addressed to “Miss Nina Tiger or Current Resident.” I had her.

I shoved the card back into the mailbox and closed the little door as best I could. I had bent the latch just enough to make it impossible to shut. I tried jamming the door shut, and when that wouldn’t work I opened it up again and did my best to bend the latch in the other direction. I was engaged in this futile and highly illegal activity when the door to the building opened. I jumped, in part because
I was startled and in part because the door smacked me on the hip.

“Sorry,” I heard a woman’s voice say.

Cringing, I looked up into the face of Nina Tiger. She had brown eyes and a splash of freckles. She glanced at me and started to look away when she noticed what I was doing.

“That’s my mailbox. What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Um. Um. Nothing.” Quick with the retort as ever.

“Are you going through my mail?” She pushed me aside and reached into her mailbox. She grabbed the door and noticed the latch.

“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: [email protected]. 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.

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.”