A Playdate With Death (15 page)

As I drove through the stone gateway that marked the beginning of the tony Los Angeles neighborhood made infamous by O. J. Simpson’s murderous and ultimately unpunished rage, I mused on the coincidence of Bobby being born to one doctor and then adopted by another. Sometimes it seemed like every Jewish mother but my own had gotten her wish.

I wound my way through tree-lined streets past faux French, faux Spanish, and faux English Tudor palaces. Dr. Nadelman lived in a Cape Cod that looked like it had been swallowing the steroid prescription of an East German swimmer. Bobby had been blessed with a seemingly endless supply of wealthy parents.

I was hoping that on a Saturday morning, at 10:30, the doctors would still be home. They didn’t disappoint me.

Bobby’s birth stepmother (is there such a term?) led me through the house to a large kitchen papered in yellow roses. Bobby’s father was seated at one end of a long Country-French table reading the paper.

“Reuben, this is a friend of Bobby Katz’s,” Larissa Greenbaum-Nadelman said, steering me toward a chair and putting a cup of unasked-for coffee in front of me. She pushed a sugar bowl and a coffee creamer in the shape of a cow with an open mouth across the table to me and sat down next to her husband.

Dr. Nadelman nodded his head, folded up his newspaper, and extended his hand. “I wondered if someone would come by. I read about Bobby’s death in the
Times.
I was so very sorry to hear about it. He seemed like a nice man.”

“He was,” I said. “I take it that Bobby came to see you.”

“No, but he wrote to me, and we spoke on the telephone.” Dr. Nadelman took a sip of his coffee. He was a small man with nothing of Bobby’s carefully tended musculature. His dark hair was salted white above the ears. It crossed my mind that he looked Jewish, with his dark eyes and heavy eyebrows, but he could as easily have been Italian or Greek.
Then I realized that that kind of thinking was just what I’d found so repellent in Bobby’s birth mother.

“Bobby contacted me not long ago. He’d received my name from his birth mother, a woman I knew for a short while many years ago. Both Bobby and his mother were under the impression that I was his genetic father.”

“Aren’t you?” I asked.

“No, I’m not. When Bobby first wrote to me, I thought that it was possible that I was. After all, I had had a sexual relationship with his birth mother, and we had experienced a failure of birth control. Even then, though, it seemed very unlikely that he was my son.”

“Why?” I asked. I was absolutely flummoxed by this turn of events. I had been certain, as Bobby most likely had been, that Reuben Nadelman was his biological father.

His wife interrupted. “You see, Ms. Applebaum, Reuben and I tried for many years to have children. While I had a child from a previous marriage, we never conceived one of our own. Reuben’s sperm count was just too low.”

Dr. Nadelman nodded. “We finally had our son Nate through artificial insemination of donor sperm,” he said. “Now, while it’s certainly possible for me to have impregnated Susan—after all, all it takes is one sperm—as I said, it’s not particularly likely. I told this to Bobby when he called me. I told him about my infertility, and that it was unlikely, though not impossible, that I was his father.”

“Do you mind telling me how he reacted?”

Dr. Nadelman shrugged his shoulders. “He was disappointed, I think. Not because he so desperately wanted to
be my son, in particular, but because I think he had been so sure he’d found his father.”

“Disappointed enough to kill himself?” I asked.

Again the doctor shrugged. “I’m sorry, I really don’t know the answer to that. I didn’t know him. Certainly not well enough to make a judgment. But he wasn’t distraught when we spoke. In fact, he still seemed to hold out a hope that he was my son, despite what I told him about my fertility issues.”

“And you don’t know for certain that he wasn’t your son. As you said, all it takes is one sperm.”

“I didn’t know for certain, then. I do know now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bobby told me the story of how he came to find out he was adopted in the first place. His diagnosis as a Tay-Sachs carrier led to his determination that he was the biological son of neither of the people whom he had always known to be his parents.”

I nodded. I knew that much.

“For that same reason, I could not possibly be his father.”

“Excuse me?”

“Tay-Sachs is an inherited condition. It’s autosomal recessive. That means that only if both of a child’s parents pass on the affected gene will that child have the fatal disease.”

I nodded. I knew all this.

“Tay-Sachs
carriers,
on the other hand, receive an affected gene from only one of their parents. That means that either Bobby’s birth mother or father was a carrier and passed that gene on to him. Now, as I’m sure you know, Tay-Sachs is a
disease found almost exclusively in Jews of Ashkenazic descent. Thus, the gene must have come from his father, because Bobby’s birth mother is about as Jewish as the Pope.”

I smiled. The doctor had a sense of humor. Not necessarily a good one, but a sense of humor nonetheless.

“Despite the fact that I am Jewish, I am not a carrier of the Tay-Sachs gene,” he said. “As you may or may not be aware, Tay-Sachs testing is not a chromosome analysis like, for example, the kind of testing done for Down’s syndrome. The Tay-Sachs test involves the detection of an enzyme. Carriers have about half as much of this enzyme called Hex A in their blood as noncarriers. When Bobby told me about his Tay-Sachs, I went and had a blood test to determine my status. It was negative. I’m not a Tay-Sachs carrier and, thus, cannot be Bobby’s father.”

I felt completely deflated—just as Bobby would have felt.

“Did you tell Bobby that you weren’t his father?”

The doctor shook his head. “I would have called him right away, but I didn’t have the opportunity. I read about Bobby’s death in the papers the same day I received my test results.”

I heaved a sigh. “I guess I’m back to the drawing board. I need to find another Jewish man with whom Susan Sullivan had sex at the same time as she had her affair with you.”

“Not necessarily,” Larissa said.

“What?” the doctor and I spoke in unison.

“French Canadians and certain Louisiana Cajuns also carry the Tay-Sachs gene.”

“Really?” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Neither did I,” said her husband. “How did you find this out?”

She patted his hand. “After the boy called, I did a little research. I looked at one or two articles on Tay-Sachs.”

“Why?” he asked, his brow wrinkled with concern.

She reached up a hand and touched his cheek. “This was before you got the test results back—before we knew you weren’t a carrier. I wondered if the Tay-Sachs might have been the cause of your infertility.”

“Why didn’t you tell me what you’d discovered?”

She smiled gently. “I was afraid it would hurt you. I didn’t want you to think that I was still searching for answers. I didn’t want you to think I was still tied up in all those horrible knots, that I was still consumed with our fertility issues the way we both were back then, back before Nate was born.”

Reuben hugged his wife to him for a moment. In that flash of intimacy, I felt like I could see the relationship these two people shared: the warmth, the love, the respect and caring. I wished so much that Bobby had found out that he was this gentle man’s son. The home made by this father would have been the haven the Katzes could never have provided and that Susan Sullivan would not.

“Bobby’s father could be either an Ashkenazic Jew or of French-Canadian or Cajun descent,” I said, almost to myself.

I sat for a moment, thinking of Susan and her vehemence. And her anti-Semitism. Suddenly, another thought occurred to me. Perhaps Susan Sullivan had protested too much. She had admitted to me that she’d lied to her husband about her
education. Maybe she’d lied about much more. Perhaps she’d lied about the results of her genetic testing.

“Is it possible that you
are
Bobby’s father, but that his
mother
passed on the Tay-Sachs gene to him? Maybe
she
has Jewish or French-Canadian ancestry.”

He looked at me for a moment, surprise in his eyes. “I suppose it’s
possible,
” he said softly.

“W
AIT
,
you’re
asking
me
for help?” I was astonished. I’d spent so much time, over the past couple of years, begging Al for information and assistance. He’d never once asked me for anything in return, other than to lend a sympathetic ear to his Baroque conspiracy theories.

“Don’t make so much of it,” he growled on the other end of the phone. “I need a little lesson is all. On mitigation and the death penalty.”

I’d unwillingly come straight home from my visit to Dr. Nadelman. What I’d really wanted to do was whip over to the Palisades and shake Susan Sullivan until she told me exactly who Bobby’s father was and what was going on. Instead, I’d been treated to a hysterical phone call from my husband. It seemed life on the planet could not continue without a certain lavender tutu that had disappeared off the
face of the earth. I described various possible tutu hiding places over the phone, to no avail. Finally, and not a little frustrated, I agreed to come home and search for the offending bit of gauze myself. It took me about three minutes to locate it crumpled in a corner of Ruby’s dollhouse, where it had been doing service as the carpet in the master bedroom. I was getting ready to throttle both Peter and Ruby when the phone rang.

“And why do you need my help?” I asked Al.

“Because I took a case, and I want to make sure I’m up on exactly what the hell I should be doing here.”

“Details?” I leaned back in the kitchen chair, wrapped the phone cord around my finger, and put my feet up on the table. The kids were in Ruby’s room playing Barbie. Peter had retired to his office in a huff and was most likely rearranging his first-series Mego
Star Trek
action figures (still in the original packaging). I could be confident of a few moments of tranquillity.

“It’s a death penalty case, and the attorney hired me to replace the mitigation investigator, who went out on maternity leave. Might I say, at this point, that you ladies are never going to get anywhere in your careers if you keep dropping the ball to drop a baby?”

“No, you might not. Okay. So you were hired to help the defense attorney flush out information that will convince the jury to give the guy life without parole and not a lethal injection.”

“Exactly. Only I’ve never done a mitigation case before. The lawyer seems like a decent enough guy, for a lawyer,
but he dumped the file in my lap without a heck of a lot of explanation or direction. I want to make sure that I’m investigating the right things. You know, finding things that will actually be useful. No point in coming up with a file full of crap.”

“True enough. Okay, here’s what I’ll do. I’m no expert on the death penalty myself. I’ll do a little research, find a couple of articles that describe what specific kinds of things can be used in mitigation of a death sentence, and put it all together for you. When do you need this by?”

“Whenever. Yesterday.”

“Seriously.”

“Well, you got any time today?”

I cocked an ear to the kids. They’d probably let me do a little legal research. I could always toss them in front of the television if I needed to. With Peter working on a mood, I wasn’t going to be able to get away to confront Bobby’s birth mother anytime soon, at least not without the kids. And I wasn’t about to bring them along to what might end up being a confrontation verging on the ugly.

“Sure, I could put in a couple of hours right now,” I told Al.

“Let’s do this. Do what you can today, and then meet me tomorrow. There’s something I want to show you, anyway.” He gave me an address in downtown L.A.

“Where am I meeting you?” I asked him.

“It’s a surprise.”

T
HE
true surprise was how
nice
all the folks were at the indoor firing range. When I’d pulled up in front of the long, low building painted a pale blue, with an oversized mural of cartoon figures pointing weapons, and saw where it was Al had directed me, I’d had to cool off for a few minutes before going inside. Al knew how I felt about guns. I’d always been a proponent of gun control, but getting shot while eight-and-a-half-months pregnant had pretty well sealed my disgust for side arms and their devotees. In the wake of that nightmare, Al had showed up at the hospital with a bouquet of carnations and a little pearl-handled pistol, complete with its own Roma leather lady’s gun purse. I’d sent him and his armory packing. Now, here he was, trying once again to convert me into a gun-toting member of the NRA.

It was, however, hard to stay angry when everyone was so superfriendly. I walked into the building under the banner proudly proclaiming it to be the city’s largest indoor firearm range and was greeted by a smiling young man in an Oxford-cloth button-down shirt. He complimented me on my Dodgers cap and invited me to wait for Al in the lounge, a friendly little room with a bank of vinyl chairs and a gurgling coffeemaker. A pleasant, middle-aged woman with gray blue hair molded into perfect curls pressed a flyer about “Ladies’ Night” at the range into my hands and complimented me on my new red jeans. Everyone there seemed to like how I dressed.