Fresh Kills (22 page)

I could not imagine making love to a man in such a room.

Did Marla?

I wasn't going to make the mistake of asking that question. But there were others I was determined to get answers to, others I could no longer afford to refrain from putting to my old friend.

“Why did you really want me in this case?” I perched on the edge of the sofa and reached for the Scotch-rocks Marla handed me in a heavy, hand-blown glass.

“I didn't,” Marla said. I knew her well enough to give a tiny nod of approval for the overly blunt answer. It was supposed to shock and wound me, to knock me off-balance so I'd be less able to follow up.

“So who did?” Before Marla could open her mouth, I added, “And don't tell me it was Feinberg. That horse expired some time back.”

“Amber,” she said. Her gray eyes bored into mine. “The little bitch started hassling me about having her own lawyer. She wouldn't tell me why, just made it clear that it was a deal-breaker. And Josh was so hot for this baby and no other—I swear, Cass, I had no idea why at the time.”

The gray eyes took on a guileless note of sheer, misunderstood innocence that took me aback. It was so unlike Marla, who must have forsworn feminine wiles at the age of six.

“I should have suspected,” she went on, her mouth twisting as though the lemon peel in her martini had soured her mouth. “I should have realized only a man who thought his magic sperm had done the deed would be that crazy. Hell,” she went on, picking up the cigarette in a ceramic ashtray and taking a long drag, “I knew the whole story about how he fought adoption, insisted that Ellie go through every quack procedure in the book. I should have known the conversion was too quick, too complete, to be for real.”

I sat back on the sofa and regarded my old friend. She was wearing Indian silk pajamas; Persian slippers with upturned toes adorned her wide, small feet. Sitting on the overstuffed ottoman, smoking, she resembled the caterpillar in
Alice in Wonderland
.

“Protesting too much?” I lifted the glass to my lips and let the Scotch hit my tongue. Cutty Sark, good but not great. But then, Marla was a gin woman and couldn't be expected to understand the mysteries of Scotch.

Marla's lipsticked mouth widened into a smile. She gave a small congratulatory nod and said, “Josh told me from the beginning. Swore me to secrecy, said Ellie must never know.” She shook her head. “Pure soap opera. I told him it was a dangerous situation, that all the cards were in Amber's hands. But he had such a thing about the baby being his.”

She took in a deep drag and let the smoke out in a long, gray stream, then twisted the butt into the ashtray. “God, men,” she said.

“What about Doc Scanlon?” I said, trying to sound casual as I moved the conversation to the topic I really came to discuss. “How many times have you worked with him?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. Quite a few, I guess. He has that group home, he meets a lot of girls through his work at Mount Loretto and—”

“Mount Loretto?” I cut in. “Did you know Amber was a Mount Loretto girl?”

She grimaced and reached for another cigarette from the inlaid wooden box on the coffee table. “I do now,” she said grimly. “She not only lied, she produced a fake birth certificate. She was some piece of work, your client.”

“She was my client thanks to you,” I shot back, then waved away the indignant reply that seemed to be on the way.

“You heard about this Jerry Califana?” I asked. “Amber's ex-husband?”

“The guy who says Amber sold his baby? God, what a pathetic delusion.”

“Is it a delusion? If Amber faked her birth certificate, maybe she and Doc Scanlon faked her baby's death certificate five years ago. Why couldn't—”

Marla rose from the ottoman; cigarette in hand, she began to pace. The Persian slippers made little scuffing sounds on the parquet floor.

“He wouldn't,” she said flatly. “Doc wouldn't do a thing like that.”

“Why not?” I shot back. “Because he's a saint, or because there wouldn't be enough money in it for him?”

Another thought struck me. “Were you working with him back then? Could you have done the adoption for whoever ended up with Amber's baby?”

“Nobody ended up with Amber's baby,” she retorted. “The poor kid's dead and buried.”

She took in another long drag and looked toward the window. Little buds were starting on the tree in back; baby leaves poked out from near-bare branches. In the yard next over, a weeping cherry tree drooped pink-dotted branches like a woman sobbing.

“I shouldn't tell you this,” Marla mumbled. “Attorney-client privilege. But I'll say this much: Doc came to me when Amber's baby died. He was afraid she and that husband were going to sue for malpractice. Now does that sound like a man who faked a death?”

I shook my head. “What about the Mount Loretto connection?” I persisted. “Did Doc meet Amber there before her marriage?”

“What if he did?”

“I'll take that as a yes,” I said. I finished the last of the Scotch, letting it burn my tongue and then swirling an ice cube in my mouth to cool myself.

“How many other prospective birth mothers did Doc find at the orphanage?”

“What do you mean by—”

“I talked to Lisa,” I cut in. “You remember Lisa, from the group home. She says Doc trolls for babies at Mount Loretto, at Arthur Kill, at—”

Marla gave a contemptuous shrug. “What if he does? The girls are old enough to sign a consent form.”

Something in the belligerent stance told me Marla was hiding something.

“Are they?” I persisted. “Are all of them old enough, or are some of your little brood cows still in foster care? Don't you need Family Court approval before a foster child can give her baby up for adoption?”

“Don't try teaching me the law, Cassie,” Marla countered. “I've been doing this work for fifteen years now, and I—”

“Why?” I cut in, suddenly realizing that was the question I wanted answered above all others. “Why did you specialize in adoption law?”

She stiffened. She stood there in her sky-blue-trimmed-with-silver pajamas, her absurd slippers on her feet, and gazed at me with the look of a deer about to be struck by a moving van. Her gray eyes went blank; her face sagged.

She lowered herself onto the ottoman and faced me. Her voice went from strident to husky-soft as she said, “I was adopted.”

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

It fell into place. I'd met her parents at our law school graduation; they seemed tiny, birdlike people next to her broad-shouldered bulk, but I put that down to the vagaries of genetics. This revelation explained her deep commitment to the adoption process, her choice of adoption as a specialty.

“My parents were good to me,” she said fiercely, as though I'd accused them. “They never made me feel different or unloved. I liked being adopted, I liked being chosen instead of coming into a family by accident.”

“I could see that,” I said. I was trying to tread cautiously, aware I was about to hear more than I'd bargained for.

“It started when I was eight,” she went on. Perched on the ottoman, one leg underneath her and the other swinging at her side, she now looked like a little girl dressed up for Halloween.

“At first, it was just this woman who'd sit in her car and watch me at the playground. I asked my parents about her, and they told me to report to the teacher if I saw her again. The next time, she came out of her car, walked up to me—I was sitting on a swing—and told me she was my real mother and she'd come to take me home.”

“Jesus,” was all I could say.

“I screamed and cried and said I already had a real mother and a real home. But she didn't care; she said I'd learn to love her because we had the same blood in our veins.” Her last words reeked of sarcasm.

“She got my name and address from one of the social workers,” Marla went on, her tone deliberately flat. “She wasn't supposed to know where I was, things were very secret in those days, but the social worker was new and she believed in things being more open, so she gave in and told my birth mother where to find me.”

“That must have been a horrible experience,” I said.

“It was only the beginning,” Marla replied. She reached for a cigarette; her hand shook as she struck the match to light it. “My parents went to court, got a restraining order against her, but she still didn't stop. She stalked me at school, followed me to church, brought a petition for return of custody—she made my life hell. At one point, a Family Court judge actually made me visit with her even though I cried in court and said I didn't want to. I visited every other Sunday for a year before the judge finally realized she was crazy as a bedbug; she'd been telling me over and over again how if she couldn't take me home, I'd be better off dead.”

“My God. No wonder—” I cut that thought off in a hurry; I'd been about to say,
No wonder your bedroom is a little girl's safe haven
. No wonder you wear armor clothes and keep people at arm's length. No wonder you hate Amber with such a passion.

“Yeah,” she echoed, her voice street-tough. “No wonder I'm a bitch on wheels. No wonder I'll do anything to make sure my adoptions stick. I don't want any other child going through what I went through. Children deserve stable homes with parents who want them; they don't deserve to be little prizes for people who couldn't get their lives together when it counted.”

“Marla, I—” I began, then stopped as I realized I didn't really have the words.

She shot me a glance that was pure Marla—aggressive, cynical, taking no prisoners. “If you're about to tell me you feel my pain, you can—”

I laughed. “Hell, no,” I replied, knowing now that sympathy was the last thing she wanted. “What I feel is pissed off. How could you think I'd sell a baby, for God's sake? In the first place, I knew absolutely nothing about adoptions until you got me into this.”

“When people see the kind of money they can make by selling babies, they tend to learn fast,” she replied. Her direct gaze held no apology. “Then when I learned about the marriage to Scott, I figured I knew why she wanted her own lawyer.”

“Thanks to Artie Bloom,” I said, “everyone in the five boroughs thinks the same thing.”

I looked down at my empty glass and considered asking for another Scotch. The first one had been pure heaven; the second would slide down my throat so easily, and then—

And then I'd be too drunk to care who killed Amber or what was happening to my reputation as a lawyer. Not good.

“What about the others?” I said, only half-interested. “Lisa said you told her to name a bunch of guys who could have fathered her child, so the adoptive parents wouldn't know the kid's father was doing time. How often do you—”

“Out,” Marla said. She rose from her ottoman like a queen stepping off her throne. She pointed to the door.

“Time to go, Cass,” she said, her voice unyielding. “No more questions, no more accusations. Just get out of here.”

I went. I walked out the door and down the curved staircase to the bottom of the Village brownstone building I'd occupied in my student days. It was like leaving a piece of my past. A piece that would never be the same; I could never again look at Marla Hennessey without seeing that little Halloween girl and her pure white bedroom.

Where to now? I wanted more on Doc Scanlon. The man Amber called Saint Christopher of the Golden Cradle.

What I hadn't realized at the time was that “Golden Cradle” was the nickname adoption people gave to the high-cost agencies that guaranteed perfect white babies for exorbitant fees. Was Doc Scanlon a one-man Golden Cradle? And were his fees more than the law allowed?

I had an idea the former Mrs. Scanlon might have the answers, so I walked to the subway and headed for South Ferry. The boat ride was bracing; the view of the Manhattan skyline spectacular. When I hit the Staten Island side of the bay, I realized I hadn't a clue how to get to Betsy Scanlon's house, but I did know it was near the mall. That meant bus number 44 according to the signs posted over the long corridors leading to the bus terminals.

It was a long, meandering ride that gave me plenty of time to think. Too much time; the entire enterprise seemed crazy now that I was wending my way along totally foreign streets. I asked the driver to let me know when we came to Travis Avenue; he did and I dismounted just short of the mall and the landfill.

I walked along Travis, looking for the side street where Amber and Scott had lived. On one side were neat rows of mustard-colored tract houses; on the other, undeveloped swampland. I passed a small driveway with a chain suspended between two poles. A sign with a Parks Department maple leaf proclaimed the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge.

Amber's last refuge. The place where her body had been found. And it was mere steps away from the cross street where she'd lived. Why hadn't I realized before how close the refuge parking area was to Betsy Scanlon's house?

Because I'd been in a car before. Because I didn't know the area. Because when I'd come to Betsy's the first time to see Amber, I had no idea she'd be pulled dripping wet from the swamp.

I turned my gaze away from the refuge and walked toward the house occupied by Aunt Betsy's Playroom. Which house was it? They all looked alike; was there anything distinguishing—

The letter
C
. The screen door had a
C
on it. Which was odd, now that I knew the house was owned by Betsy Scanlon. Or was it? Was she renting, the
C
referring to her landlord? Or had she bought the house from people named
C
, and kept the screen door?

Who cared? The important thing was that once I recalled the
C
, I found the house. There was, thank God, a light in the window. She was home; I hadn't made this ridiculous trek for nothing.