Fresh Kills (19 page)

“Oh, he's like all men,” she responded with a curdled smile. Again I fought down the urge to laugh. How was Artie going to get usable quotes from this interview? “A girl like Amber can twist them around her little finger.”

“I wonder what else he paid for besides the private line,” I said, infusing my voice with a sisterly bitterness I hoped would match my companion's mood.

“It wasn't just him,” Mrs. B. said defensively. “Those poor people who wanted her baby just couldn't give her enough. She had her own portable television, a CD player.” She shook her head. “Of course, I didn't realize there was more than one couple giving her things. I thought the presents from Kansas City were from her own family.”

This was old news. I needed a lever into something I didn't know. I gave the matter some thought, but before I could come up with something, the boy reporter jumped into the conversation.

“I understand there was a burglary at Doc's office,” he began, his tone conversational. I tried not to look as astonished as I felt; he'd been holding out on me.

“Not just the office downtown,” Mrs. Bonaventura confirmed, her tone thick with relish, “but right here in this house.”

“Two burglaries?” Artie exclaimed. “I knew there'd been one at the office on Victory Boulevard,” he went on, “but I didn't know there was one here, too.”

“Oh, yes,” the older woman said with a grim nod of her head. In some corner of her mind, she seemed obscurely to blame Amber for this as well—and maybe she wasn't wrong. If Amber got her special treatment because she had something on Doc Scanlon, she might well have obtained her knowledge through burglary.

But then there was Jerry Califana—were the records he'd brought out for Artie Bloom's perusal taken from Doc Scanlon's office?

“When did these burglaries happen?” Artie inquired, a look of solicitous interest on his freckled face.

“Oh, the one here was six months ago,” Mrs. B. replied. “It was cold outside, but no snow. November, perhaps.”

Six months ago Amber had been four months pregnant. At four months, you could probably commit burglary. Breaking into this house didn't require the skills of a cat burglar by any means, and Doc's office was on the first floor.

“Do you remember what was stolen?” I asked.

“Nothing,” the housemother said with a shrug of her black-clad shoulder. “That's why Doctor didn't bother to report it. He said there was no harm done. But me,” she went on, “I would have called the police anyway. Even if all they did was mess up some old records nobody cared about.”

“Old records?” I tried to keep my voice innocently curious, but Mrs. B. wasn't that gullible.

“Nothing important,” she said with a snap of her jaw. Closing the barn door before any more horses managed to escape.

“Adoption records?” I persisted, but to no avail. My hostess rose from her chair and made for the door.

“It was nice of you to come,” she said with wooden politeness. “I must be getting back to work now.”

Artie rose more slowly; I was afraid he was going to push our luck with a parting question, but he bowed to the inevitable.

We stepped out into a fine April afternoon. The sun was high in the sky; there were soft green leaves on the trees and dandelions winked at us from the square, mowed lawns.

“Old adoption records,” I said. “I wonder how old.”

“And you thought Jerry Califana was just your average paranoid,” Artie teased. “Maybe he's right—and it looks like he's got the records to prove it.”

“Where to now?” I asked as we crossed the street, making for Artie's antique Chevy.

“I want to see where Amber lived,” the boy reporter said, “maybe talk to her landlady. And I want to talk to that waitress from Friendly's. She lives right around here, as I recall.”

He opened his steno pad and checked the address Herman Tolliver had given him. Then he drove around the block and pulled up in front of a tract house that looked like all the other houses on the street, moss-green and boxy, with spindly white-blossomed trees in the front yard. Three minutes later we were sitting in a living room, courtesy of Sonia Rogoff.

“It's kinda like having a baby again,” the waitress said, glancing at the senile mother who sat in an oversized orange chair. “Only she weighs a hundred and twenty pounds and has a mouth on her somethin' awful,” she added, giving her mother a conspiratorial grin. The old woman smiled and, as if in response to her daughter's prompt, said, “Fuck you, bitch.”

Sonia's grin widened. “See what I mean?” she said, inviting us into the conspiracy. “She always was a pistol, my ma.”

“Always was a pistol,” the gnomelike creature repeated with a satisfied nod.

“Yeah, Ma, a real pistol,” the waitress said. She turned her attention to Artie and me, but every so often she let her eyes slide to where the old woman sat in a chair too big for her.

“See, that's why I work nights,” Sonia explained. “I gotta stay with her all day, and then when the kids come home, I can go out. Not that I go anywhere except work,” she added. “Four nights a week I'm schleppin' ice cream, and seven days I'm changin' diapers and takin' Ma for walks.”

I would have asked why. I would have asked how—how can you give her your life? How can you keep on day after day after day? How can you bear to look into the petlike, vacant eyes of a woman who must have been strong and tough and funny once upon a time?

Who knew malls had saints working the night shift?

“So you remember the couple with the baby?” Artie asked, not bothering to keep the eagerness out of his voice. With every witness we talked to, he saw his story getting bigger and bigger. If nobody bombed a major capital, he had hopes of the front page.

“Yeah,” she replied, but a frown crept between her eyebrows. “What TV station did you say you were with? Where's the cameras?”

“I'm not a television reporter,” Artie replied, his smile dimming only slightly. “I write for a newspaper.”

“Oh, a newspaper,” Sonia repeated. “I thought maybe it was
A Current Affair
. Me and Ma, we watch that all the time.”

“All the time,” the old lady agreed, nodding like a car toy.

“About Amber Lundquist,” Artie prompted. “You saw her the night she—”

“Not just that night,” Sonia interrupted. She wore a tank top and cutoff jeans; her long, ropy legs ended in worn moccasins. She sat with one leg tucked under her like a teenager, but her pert face was lined with wrinkles brought on by too many days in the sun.

“You saw her there before?” Artie flipped open his steno pad and sat poised for an answer that would take him to the front page.

“Lots of times,” Sonia said with a conspiratorial nod. “She used to come in when she was still pregnant. And I seen her with this other couple, too.”

“What couple? Can you describe them?”

She lifted her bare shoulders in a shrug. “Dunno. They were pretty ordinary. She might have been Spanish, but he was just a guy. Light brown hair, kind of a thin face.”

“Kyle and Donna Cheney,” Artie guessed, his eyes lighting up. “She's Cuban; her name was Donna Pacheco before she married.”

“They're the ones who claim they dropped out of the bidding for Adam?” I asked.

Artie nodded. Sonia glanced from the boy reporter back to me with an avid face, drinking in the scandal that was juicy enough for
A Current Affair
even if Artie had no cameras with him.

“How do you remember them so well?” I cut in, suddenly suspicious. This woman served a lot of ice cream to a lot of people; she could hardly have known Amber was going to turn up dead in a swamp. So how come she had total recall of Amber's visits to Friendly's?

Artie didn't like the question, but Sonia Rogoff didn't seem to mind. “I don't know,” she said, “it's like when I'm at work I'm so happy to be out in the world with regular people, I like to watch them. And watching her was like following a story on television. First she's pregnant, then she has the baby, she's with this guy, then with that guy.”

It made sense. “So this one night,” she continued, taking in both Artie and me with her inviting glance, “she and her husband come in together, only they weren't exactly together. She and the baby sat in one booth and the husband was alone in the booth behind—at first.”

I broke in for clarification. “By the husband, you mean Scott? A blond guy?”

She nodded. “We got a policy of three or more in a big booth, and I hadda tell both of them they couldn't sit there if they was alone. So she says she's waitin' for someone, so I let her stay, but I hadda make him move up to the front where the smaller booths are.”

“Did he give you a hard time?” I asked.

“At first, he started to, but then she give him a look could freeze a pancake on a griddle, and he gets up and moves. I remember thinkin' if they was together, why not sit in the same booth, y'know?”

She shifted her gum from one side of her mouth to the other, revealing the chipped tooth that gave her a rakish, motorcycle mama look. “But he went quiet, I'll say that for him,” she went on. “Then this other couple come in and sat with her. They didn't wanna order nothin' at first, but I told them they couldn't stay without they bought something.”

“When was this?” Artie asked.

“Two, three nights before she was killed,” Sonia said. “Let me think. I worked Monday, but not—No, it was Wednesday, Wednesday about seven-thirty.”

Amber died on Friday night. That Wednesday she was in Surrogate's Court indignantly rejecting the notion that she wanted money in return for her baby. Yet that night she'd sat in a booth at Friendly's discussing an offer from yet another set of would-be parents.

“Did they seem—” I began, then broke off as I searched for words. Did they seem what? Like a couple desperate enough for a baby to buy it in the mall?

She shrugged. “I didn't notice much,” she said apologetically. “It was a busy night and I had a boothful of teenagers hasslin' me for more water, more napkins. Makin' assholes outa themselves, y'know.”

“Assholes,” Ma repeated with her vacant grin.

“You're a pistol, Ma,” Sonia said without turning her head. Then she frowned in thought and added, “When I brought their sundaes, the girl pointed at the guy in the booth and said something about him being the father. Which made me even more curious, y'know, like why he wasn't sitting with her if he was the father of her baby. But then I started thinkin' maybe he was the father but he wouldn't admit it, wouldn't pay support or nothin'. I know a little something about that,” she went on, “since the father of my twins done the same thing sixteen years ago.”

“Asshole,” Ma pronounced.

“You got that right, Ma,” Sonia agreed without turning her head. “Course I don't say that to the twins,” she said in a lowered voice. “Don't wanna make them feel bad about their dad, even if he is what Ma says he is.”

“Did the guy in the booth ever talk to the couple?” I asked. “Did he come back to where they were sitting?”

She shook her head. “Not then,” she said. “After the couple left, the guy gets up and goes back to where she's sitting and slides into that booth.”

“Back to the last time you saw Amber,” Artie prompted. “Did the same thing happen, with the two different booths?”

“No,” the waitress replied. “The woman come in with her husband and the baby and they all sat together. Then a middle-aged guy comes in and sits with them.”

“Josh Greenspan,” I said, thinking aloud.

Sonia nodded. “Yeah,” she agreed. “I seen him on channel five news. Course,” she went on, leaning toward us as though to shield her mother from the sordid side of life, “if I'd a known what that little bitch was up to with that baby, I'd a taken and shoved an ice cream scoop up her you-know-what.”

I wasn't at all sure what good that would have done, but I applauded the sentiment with an empathetic nod. “He was real intense, the guy,” she explained. “He didn't want to order nothin' either, but I knew Tolliver would give me a hard time if I let people sit in the booth without payin'. He was different from the other couple, though—he couldn't take his eyes off that baby. I started thinkin' maybe he was the grandpa, y'know, like maybe he was the girl's father and he was there to make the guy pay support.”

Sonia shook her head; her hair, which had been badly streaked, was growing out dark roots. She turned to Artie and asked, her tone plaintive, “You sure you don't know nobody at
A Current Affair
?”

“
A Current Affair,
” Ma Rogoff repeated with a sage nod.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

We walked back to the Chevy in silence; before Artie turned the key in the ignition, he pulled out his pocket phone and talked to someone at the paper. Then he turned to me.

“Kyle and Donna Cheney live in Prohibition Park,” Artie said, putting the car into gear.

“Where?” I had a Staten Island map open on my lap, but that name appeared nowhere.

“It's called Westerleigh now,” my companion explained with a smug little smile. “But when it was built in the twenties, the streets were named after dry states and anti-booze politicians. Hence Prohibition Park.”

“You are just a fund of Staten Island trivia.”

“Hey, when my editor assigned me to this beat, she told me to learn everything I could about this borough, and by God—”

He broke off as we reached the corner of an unmarked street. “Where the hell are we?”

I consulted the map. “Take a right, then a left,” I ordered, a smug smile of my own playing around my lips.

Kyle and Donna Cheney lived on a wide street with large, lush yards, attached garages, and houses that looked lived in. As we drove toward the split-level stone-and-white house, Artie said, “This one's mine, Counselor. I doubt these people would be thrilled to spill their guts to a lawyer.”