THE 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.
Lola got very quiet.
“I wonder if he’s like that. Like what the article said.” I pressed.
She said nothing.
I pushed harder. “Do you think he might be like that?”
“He don’ hit that baby, I know that. I would never let him hit that girl,” Lola blurted out. She was clearly hiding something but just as clearly worried about how much she had already said.
“I gotta go. It late now,” she said, gathering her bag.
“Wait!” I said. I hadn’t gotten nearly enough information from her. I decided to bargain that Lola’s antipathy toward her employers would keep her from giving me away. Reaching into Ruby’s diaper bag, I rustled around until I found an old business card. Crossing out the federal public defender’s phone number, I scrawled in my home number. “Please give me a call if anything happens, or if you want to talk, or anything,” I said, pressing my card into her hand.
Lola nodded quickly, crammed my card into her pocket, jumped up, and rushed off to the slide, where Morgan had once again begun her slow, deliberate assent. She scooped the little girl off the ladder and, despite Morgan’s howls of protest, hustled her off the playground.
“See you again!” I called after her retreating back.
“Okay. Bye,” Lola said, without stopping or even turning back to look at me.
I’d obviously touched a raw nerve. I believed the nanny when she said that LeCrone didn’t hurt Morgan. Not because I didn’t think him capable of beating his child, but rather because I didn’t think Lola would stand for it. That little Filipina grandmother seemed perfectly capable of protecting her charge. Her reaction, however, made me think that LeCrone’s capacity for violence was not unfamiliar to the members of his household. It seemed pretty likely that he was beating up on someone, and I was willing to bet that it was his wife.
While all this was certainly disturbing, it didn’t get me any closer to proving that the man had killed Abigail Hathaway. All I’d succeeded in doing was ruling out one possible alibi.
I decided to put the LeCrones out of my mind for the time being and went over to Ruby, who was wistfully watching the children on the swings.
“Hey, big girl! You want me to push you?”
“Yes! As high as the sky, Mama! As high as the sun, moon, and stars!”
“Hey, what a coincidence! That’s how much I love my girl! As much as the sun, moon, and stars,” I said, kissing the top of her head. I picked her up and deposited her on the swing.
“I got a coincident, too, Mama. Mines is that I love you as much as there are elephants in the zoo!” Ruby squealed, her legs kicking in the air as the swing rose higher and higher.
“That’s a lot of elephants, Sweetpea.” I pushed her again. For one of the few times in my life I was distracted completely from everything except my daughter, rushing toward the glare of the sunless sky, her copper curls shining and her mouth open in a yowl of glee. My breath caught as I tried to freeze that moment in my memory. I wanted to be sure I never forgot her that way, full of joy and absolutely certain that the world is a wonderful place, a place where Mama is always there to push, it’s possible to reach the moon on a swing, and the zoos are bursting with elephants.