Nursery Crimes (15 page)

“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.

S
O
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.

I then checked the house’s appraised value. Scrolling down, I let out a long, low whistle. Wow. Here was the reason Peter and I would never be able to buy a house in a place like Santa Monica. Abigail’s admittedly lovely but certainly not palatial home was appraised at 2.1 million dollars. Yes, you read that right: 2.1 million. And that was only the appraised value. Who knows what she could have sold it for on the open market?

So much for the house. I clicked over to the central coast property. The line of title on that was even simpler. The property had been purchased in 1914 by Alexander Hall Hathaway. It was now owned by the Hall Hathaway Family Trust, with Abigail Hathaway listed as trustee. The ranch’s appraised value was a cool twenty-six million dollars. Good news for Abigail, but meaningless to Mooney. Inherited property is not subject to the community property laws. He would have gotten none of it had they divorced. Presumably, however, he wouldn’t get any
part of it at her death, either. I was pretty confident that the ranch would go to the Hathaway heir—Audrey.

The only thing left to figure out was the ownership status of the commercial holdings—the various apartment buildings and lots sprinkled throughout town. It took me a while, but I finally managed to figure out who owned what. It appeared, curiously, that Abigail was the sole owner of each of the rental units and of the vacant lots. The commercial building on Wilshire Boulevard was owned by an entity called “Abigail Hathaway Ltd.,” a limited partnership. Clicking over to the business listings, I entered the name “Abigail Hathaway Ltd.” and, after a short wait, came up with a description of the partnership. Its sole member was Abigail Hathaway herself.

I returned to the property screens and spent some time trying to figure out the chain of title of the various buildings. They were all sold to Abigail Hathaway between 1989 and 1995. Interestingly, all the properties except the Wilshire office building and one of the empty lots had been sold to Abigail by the same entity, Moonraker, Inc. Moonraker—it had to be Daniel Mooney.

I tried to figure out who, exactly, constituted Moonraker, Inc., but found myself lost in a tangled web of owners, partners, lienholders, and the like. Finally I gave up. I needed someone with real experience in the field to help make sense of what I’d found. I carefully downloaded all the relevant documents and put them into my Animal Musings file.

It was only once I’d logged off, and put my computer to sleep, that I realized how sore my neck was and how my back ached. I stretched my head from side to side and cracked my neck. Detective work was exhausting. And it made me hungry. I waddled to the kitchen and made myself a bowl of ice cream. I added a dollop of butterscotch
sauce and a squirt of whipped cream. I was about to return the whipped cream canister to the fridge when I had a sudden, irresistible urge: I leaned my head back, opened my mouth, and sprayed it full of whipped cream. Coughing and swallowing, I took my light snack to bed.

T
HE
next morning, after I’d fed Ruby and settled her in front of
Sesame Street
, I sat at the kitchen table and tried to think of someone who could help me figure out the meaning of what I’d discovered the night before. I needed a real estate lawyer. Fortunately, one of the benefits of going to Harvard Law School is that my old friends and classmates are successfully employed all over the country in good law firms, and, generally, when I need some legal advice, it’s easy to find. Unfortunately, in this particular instance, I could come up with only one name: Jerome Coley. Jerome had come to Harvard Law School via the governor’s office in Sacramento, where he’d been one of the youngest press secretaries ever to hold the position. Before that he’d been a linebacker for Stanford’s football team and had been named All-American two years in a row. He was a complete hotshot. After graduation, Jerome had taken a job in Los Angeles at a
prominent local firm and, as I recalled, specialized in real estate law.

There was, however, a slight complication: Jerome had been my boyfriend throughout my second and third years of law school, although our relationship never got as serious as it might have. We just weren’t meant to be. He was one of those guys whose ambition is palpable. He knew exactly what he was going to do with his life. He told most people that his goal was to be a senator from the state of California. He confided in me his real dream: to be president. I didn’t have much doubt that he’d succeed.

Jerome had his whole life planned out. After establishing himself in the legal community, he intended to run for Congress, serve a few terms, and then make a play for the Senate seat. A white wife didn’t figure into his plans. Jerome believed that Californians would have a hard enough time electing a 6-foot-6, 280-pound black man to office without the added benefit of a 5-foot-tall Jewish wife standing proudly at his side. He was probably right.

Anyway, after we’d broken up he’d met and married a sweet young woman of the correct race, the daughter of friends of his parents. We hadn’t spoken since our final blowout in the middle of commencement ceremonies (I’d accused him of being a calculating son of a bitch, and he’d responded by accusing me of using our relationship as a sop to my white, liberal guilt), and I wasn’t sure how he’d react to a phone call from me. But no matter how hard I racked my brain, I could not come up with a single other real estate lawyer. I had no choice but to give Jerome a call.

I telephoned information, got the name of his firm, and dialed the number before I had time to change my mind. The receptionist put me through to him.

“Jerome Coley.” He answered his own phone.

“Hi, Jerry. You’ll never guess who this is.”

“Juliet Applebaum.” There wasn’t even a pause!

“Wow. You recognized my voice after all this time!”

“I’d never forget your voice. How you doing, baby?” Baby?

“Um, okay, pregnant. Again.”

“Really? I’d heard you had a kid. Girl, right?”

“Right. Her name is Ruby. This one’s a boy.”

“Ruby. Pretty name. Is she as beautiful as her mama?”

“Well, since her mama weighs about three hundred pounds right now and has ankles the size of soccer balls, I’d say she’s definitely more beautiful.”

“I can’t believe that. You always look good. Even fat, you’d look good.”

This conversation was unbelievable. With a little shiver I remembered how Jerome had always made me feel. Kind of like a melted ice-cream cone. Pulling myself together, I quickly redirected the conversation.

“So you’re not mad at me anymore?” I asked.

“Of course not. Are you still mad at me?”

“Of course not. Bygones and all that.”

“Right. So you calling to ask forgiveness, or is there some ulterior motive up your adorable little sleeve?”

I laughed. “You still know me a little, don’tcha, Jer.”

“Yes, I surely do.”

“Well, I do have an ulterior motive, but first tell me how you’re doing. How’s Jeanette? Do you guys have any kids yet?”

“She’s fine. She’s been home for the past year and a half with our twin boys, Jerome, Jr., and Jackson.”

“Twins? Wow! You must be exhausted!”

He laughed the deep, rolling chuckle that I remembered so well.

“Indeed. Indeed we are.”

“And your job, Jer? How’s that going?”

“Just fine. I made partner last year.”

“I’m not surprised.” I wasn’t. He was a smart guy, and more importantly, he had always been a team player.

“Congratulations. That’s terrific.”