Felony Fraud and the Ugliest Sable Coat in the History of the World

We all inherit the seed of larceny from my grandmother Buddie a.k.a. Beelzebubbe. There are many, many illegalities over the years: stealing china in Aruba, smuggling pearls from Hong Kong, taking a loaf of bread from Jerry's Deli in Los Angeles on the night my first movie premieres - but the incident involving her sable coat turned her into a career criminal to me.

My grandparents are married for almost sixty years before the death of my grandfather, whom we call Zadie. Talk of divorce first surfaces in about 1934. They hate each other. You know how you sometimes go out with a couple who fights? How you sit embarrassed in a restaurant while they snipe at one another, each turning to you for confirmation of how idiotic, misguided, and just plain wrong the other one is? Now imagine that couple armed with semiautomatic weapons. Buddie and Zadie are at war from the time I meet them.

The sable is a by-product of a particularly nasty separation when she throws him out of the house. "Let him go live with his mistress," she shouts to me over the phone, her baritone going bass. This is where she mentions the bleeding from his penis thing. To me it isn't too much information. I'm fascinated.

She is so angry at his betrayal, his bleeding putz aside, that she goes out and buys a full-length $14,000.00 sable coat. Money is not a normal flashpoint for them, so her act of economic revenge is kind of weird. Every other couple in the world might argue about money, but my grandparents, the most contentious married people in history, are surprisingly fair-minded about it. Both are from very poor families. When they strike it rich they figure they both deserve it.

So Buddie buying the sable coat as an act of retribution is an aberration. She can buy a sable anytime she wants, no questions asked. She starts hating the coat once they reconcile - well, they're living together again anyway, if not truly reconciled. That crappy sable really is phenomenally ugly, and there it is, day after day, hanging in her closet, reminding her of the recent bad blood between them. That just pisses her off.

The sable is fully insured of course, so she takes to wearing it out to dinner and casually leaving it draped over chairs, hoping someone might steal it. No takers, which gets her even more pissed off. Buddie is defiantly adamant about not wanting to keep that coat. "Why should I have to look at it? Tell me! Why?!" Like that explains everything that follows.

My cousin Edy, Buddie's niece, gets a terse phone call in Northridge, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. "There will be a package for you at the Greyhound bus terminal arriving in three days. Don't ask any questions." Then a click. Edy and Buddie are very close, but becoming a criminal accessory has never been part of my cousin's role in the relationship.

Back in San Antonio Buddie calls the police. "I came home, the door was open, the coat was gone." She sticks to that story no matter who asks the questions. "I came home, the door was open, the coat was gone." When the police point out the lack of signs of a forced entry she remains nonplused. "Maybe they stole a key." She has actually planned it all out rather well. Two days previously she takes most of her jewelry to the safe deposit box, using an upcoming trip as an excuse, reasoning that if she is going to say her coat was stolen, the first question will be about whether anything else is missing, and she knows not to push her luck. One of her diamond rings is worth $75,000.00. As tempting as it is, she can't go there. "Thank God my jewelry was in the vault, or they might have gotten that too." Clever girl.

It gets worse. The man who facilitates her insurance policy is married to Edy's brother's ex-wife, a woman who despite not being a blood relative remains loyal to Buddie, serving as chauffeur, gopher, and schlepper for decades, until my grandmother angrily drops her for no good reason a couple of years before she dies, breaking the woman's heart. But Buddie wants to get rid of that damned sable, she wants her money back, and the force of that desire obscures the idea that committing felony insurance fraud might be wrong, or that screwing over people she considers family isn't very nice.

A few days later Edy drives all the way to downtown Los Angeles and picks up her box. In it are the sable coat, two or three old sport coats of Zadie's, and a broken travel alarm clock. "They also took some of my husband's clothes and a few electrical appliances. I came home, the door was open, the coat was gone."

Everyone knows she is lying but it's impossible to prove. These days they could send a pert medical forensics specialist to locate the trail of sable hairs between Buddie's house and the Greyhound bus terminal in downtown San Antonio, linking the crime to my cousin, and tracing it to the thrift store where well over a decade later Edy finally disposes of it.

I have no doubt Buddie imagines she is doing Edy a good turn by sending her the coat. She urges her to sell it and keep the money. But how exactly does she envision Edy fencing a custom-cut, full-length sable coat, with my grandmother's name embroidered in large silk thread along the lining? The coat sits in the closet, making my cousin nervous for fifteen years. Her house is destroyed twice, once by the Northridge quake, and once by a city bus jumping the curb and knocking off three rooms, but that coat survives. Round about the fifteen-year mark Edy calls me. "I finally got rid of it!" she says. We probably haven't spoken of the sable coat for a few years, but I know immediately what she's talking about, and I knew it's a huge relief to have gotten rid of the burden, no matter how many years has passed.

"I came home, the door was open, the coat was gone."