Fresh Kills (23 page)

I rang the bell and waited. The door was opened just a crack by a chunky woman with short blond curls and a face that had once been cute but now showed lines around the mouth and puffs under the eyes. I could picture Betsy Scanlon as a cheerleader, the kind of girl who in my day would have worn pink angora sweaters and put little bows in her teased hair.

“Mrs. Scanlon?” I said, making it a question for purposes of courtesy. I reminded her who I was.

“Oh, yeah, Amber's lawyer,” she said without enthusiasm. She opened the door and, instead of inviting me inside, stepped out onto the concrete porch. She closed the door behind her and lowered herself onto the top step. She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her pants pocket and offered me one.

“I don't smoke in the house,” she said, lighting up and enveloping both of us in a cloud of menthol, “on account of I've got kids in there all day.”

I nodded. I'd had the entire bus ride to come up with an opening question, and I still didn't have one. “It was terrible about Amber,” I began.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Were you home that night? Did you see her go out?”

Betsy shook her head and expelled smoke. “No, I was at my brother's, baby-sitting my niece. When I got home, everything was quiet, but then the cops came and started asking questions.”

This was getting me nowhere; it was time to throw out a fast one and see what came over the plate. “You and Doc never had children?”

Her blue eyes widened. The lines around her eyes disappeared, but only for a moment. Then she squinted, adding ten years to her face. “No,” she said. She turned her face away, looking toward the other houses on the street.

Did I dare ask why? I was pondering how far to push her when she said, “He couldn't. And before you ask, I would have adopted but he wouldn't hear of it.”

“Interesting,” I said, trying for a noncommittal tone and failing. “He may be the best-known pro-adoption doctor in New York City, and he wouldn't adopt a kid himself.”

I looked straight into Betsy's sky-blue eyes, eyes that couldn't possibly be as innocent as they looked, and said, “I wonder if it was because he knew too much. That he couldn't play the denial games other adoptive parents get into.”

Her wry answering smile contradicted her baby-doll eyes. “Yeah, I know what you mean. They all want to think their baby's a genius, when the truth is most birth parents are losers who didn't know how to work a condom.”

She drew in a long breath and let it out in a heavy sigh. “But I don't think that was it, not really,” she said at last.

The baby blues locked onto mine and she said, slowly and deliberately, “He didn't want a child because he wanted to be the child in our marriage. He didn't want my energy, my time, my love given to anyone but him. He's easily the most selfish man I've ever known.”

I sat in stunned silence, amazed that she would say these things to a stranger. Or perhaps it was because I was a stranger, and we were sitting in the dark, that the words flowed so freely.

“He seems so charming,” I said at last. “Almost boyish.”

“The trouble with boyish charm,” Betsy replied, her words floating on a stream of menthol, “is that it usually comes attached to a boy.

“Hell,” she went on, dropping the cigarette onto the walk and stepping on it with a sneakered foot. “It took me seven years to figure out that just because he made me feel special it didn't mean he thought I really was special. He makes everyone feel that way. His nurse thinks he walks on water, and as for that Mrs. B.—anyone with half an eye can see she'd cut off her right tit if he asked her to.”

That was an image I wanted out of my mind at the earliest opportunity. “Would she lie for him?” I asked.

“Like a rug,” Betsy said. “Not that I know what she'd have to lie about,” she added. “As far as I know, Chris's business is on the up and up.”

“There's a guy out in Tottenville who thinks your husband stole his baby,” I said, matching her tough-girl tone. “He says Doc faked the baby's death, then put it up for adoption, with the cooperation of the man's wife.”

“That's bullshit,” Betsy shot back. “Hell, there are enough girls who want to give up their babies. He doesn't have to take one away from someone who wants to keep it.”

“Would it make a difference if the wife was Amber?”

“You mean—wait a minute, you mean this baby you think Doc stole was hers?”

I nodded; the blue eyes narrowed. “That changes everything,” she said in a low voice.

“You think he might have done it for Amber?” I didn't want my eagerness to scare her off, but I couldn't suppress it entirely.

“She was a real bitch,” Betsy said, as though that said it all. And it did, but not in a way that would be admissible in a court of law. She reached into her pocket for another cigarette, cupped her hand around it to shield it from the spring breeze, and lit it. We sat in silence; I waited for her to stand up, go into the house, and shut the door in my face.

“He was scared,” she said at last. Her cigarette had gone out, but her lips still caressed its tubular bulk. “He made a mistake about the diagnosis. He kept talking about how Amber and her husband could sue and wipe him out.”

She opened her eyes with a suddenness that resembled a doll being raised from its sleep mode to wakefulness. “In the old days, you had a baby that wasn't quite right, you went to church and lit a candle. Today, you sue the doctor, even if it wasn't his fault. It's like everybody thinks they're entitled to a perfect baby.”

“Amber's baby wasn't perfect?”

“I don't know exactly,” she said. She turned the full force of her blue eyes on my face, willing me to understand. “Once he said it would be better if the baby died; that the real money came when a child would be disabled for life. I'm not sure what he meant, but—”

“I am,” I said grimly. “He was right. A wrongful death action for a baby doesn't bring much in the way of damages, because the court looks at how much the child might have contributed to its parents' support in the future, but a suit for damages when a baby needs lifetime care could run into the millions.”

“And the next thing I know, he tells me the baby's dead,” Betsy said. “He tried not to sound too relieved, but I could tell it was a big weight off his mind.”

“Had Amber talked about suing him?” I asked. “From what I knew about her, if she thought a living baby would bring more money through a lawsuit, she wouldn't have agreed to the phony death scam.”

She screwed up her face in thought; the wrinkles around her mouth and eyes deepened. “I don't know all the facts,” she said at last. “In fact, I don't know any of them. I just know he worried a lot less after Amber's baby died. And he was placing a lot of babies for adoption at the same time, so I suppose he could have given Amber's baby to one of those couples. But it sounds pretty far out,” she continued, shaking her head.

“This whole thing is pretty far out,” I replied. “But the bottom line is, Amber's dead and the baby's missing.”

She turned her head away. “Yeah,” she said softly, a touch of regret crossing her face like a cloud streaking across the sun.

“If you remembered Amber from before,” I asked, “why did you let her rent your upstairs apartment?”

“'Cause Doc asked me to,” she said. “God, you don't know what I do because that man asks me to. Sometimes he stops on his way to his office up on Victory and asks me if he can use my washer and dryer. Which means I do his laundry for him while he sees patients. He stops by and borrows my car whenever he feels like it. Sometimes he doesn't even ask: every time I try to get the keys back, he forgets them in his other pants.”

She looked down at her cigarette, suddenly aware there was no smoke coming from it. She relit the tip and took a long, deep drag.

“He talked me into taking Amber as a tenant—of course, he didn't tell me it was her, but I recognized her the minute I saw her. I couldn't believe he took her as a patient after he was so afraid she'd sue him last time she had a baby.”

“You think she blackmailed him?” I asked bluntly.

She shrugged. “Could be,” she replied. “I wouldn't put it past her. And he's not a guy who'd stand up to that. He's a soft man; he'd give her what she wanted—even if it was something of mine, like the apartment.”

It was getting chilly on the little cement porch; I would have liked an invitation to step inside. But Betsy needed her smoke the way I needed oxygen, so I resigned myself to staying a little longer on the cold hard steps.

“You know when he served me with our divorce papers?” Betsy asked. “I mean, we both wanted the divorce, I knew it was coming, but—but he walked up to me on my birthday and handed me the summons. On my birthday! Can you believe it?”

I shook my head. Boyish Chris Scanlon didn't seem the type.

“When I burst into tears,” Betsy went on, “he gave me this puzzled look. Like ‘what did I do?' He could never just say something nasty to my face and be done with it; he had to pretend he was the good guy and just happened to hurt my feelings.”

It was a fascinating sidelight, but it wasn't getting me anywhere. I turned toward the tall reeds on the other side of Travis Avenue and said, “I didn't realize you lived so close to the wildlife refuge.”

“Used to be we called it a swamp, couldn't wait till it was drained and the land put to good use,” Betsy said. “Now the Sierra Club types call it a goddamn wetland and the damned thing never will be drained.” Spending the day with toddlers seemed to engender in Betsy Scanlon a need to smoke and swear, to let her bad-girl adult take over after a day of wiping little noses.

“So you never went over there, never walked around the nature preserve,” I persisted.

“Nature preserve, my butt,” Betsy replied with a snort of derision. “It's a swamp. What's to see? Weeds as high as a second-story window, squishy grass under your feet, a few mangy old birds. Hell, no, I never went in there, and neither did anyone else in the neighborhood. Just a bunch of fairies from Manhattan, wearing hiking shorts, that's the only people ever went in there.”

It took me a moment to dislodge my mind from an image of Tinker Bell wearing L.L. Bean shorts and little tiny hiking boots, but I managed it.

“What about when you were a kid?” I prompted. “A place like that would have been a kid's paradise where I came from.”

But Betsy, I decided, hadn't been a kid the same way I had. Her happiest days would have been spent, not exploring the undeveloped land near her house, but playing dress-up or serving tea to her dolls. She had, in short, been a girly kind of girl, and the tall weeds held no fascination for her then or now.

I was halfway to the ferry terminal on the bus before I remembered the most vital piece of information: the color of Betsy Scanlon's car, the one her ex-husband was given to borrowing. It was silver.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. Amber was killing her golden geese, raking in as much cash as possible before taking off with her baby. She had Jerry meeting her in the parking lot where she'd stashed her getaway car, so why not ask Doc to pick her up at the mall and squeeze a final blackmail payment out of him on the way?

But Doc doesn't want to pay, doesn't want Amber holding her information over his head for the rest of her life, so instead of taking her to the Native Plant Center, where she'd stashed her secret car, he keeps going on Travis Avenue and forces her into the swamp. He uses Betsy's car partly to disguise himself, partly because it's handy, only a block away from the wildlife refuge.

A soft crime for a soft man. A man who might have faked a baby's death, not really for money, but to get himself out of a possible malpractice suit for misdiagnosing a nonexistent heart ailment. A man who might have let Amber's blood pressure climb a little too high during the birth, hoping she'd die of natural causes, but who wouldn't risk his license to make sure she didn't come out of the anesthetic. At the time, Amber's accusation had seemed postnatal paranoia; now it made sense.

The clincher: of all the possible suspects, Doc Scanlon was the only one who could get rid of Baby Adam quickly and quietly. All he had to do was put the kid into the pipeline, take full advantage of his nationwide network of desperate would-be parents, send him out of state for adoption by some couple in Arizona or Oregon.

Did Doc have an alibi for Friday night? How could I find out?

I snapped on my television set the minute I walked into my living room. It was sheer habit; there was nothing I wanted to watch, but I needed to hear a human voice.

I was halfway to the bathroom when the import of the news announcer's words penetrated my consciousness.

“The body of Scott Wylie, missing since Friday, has been found in an undeveloped area near the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island,” the portentous male voice intoned. “Wylie, aged 24, was wanted for questioning in the drowning death of his wife, Amber, and the disappearance of the child known as Baby Adam.”

It was déjà vu all over again as I watched the cops haul yet another body out of the swamp. The only difference was that I didn't have soaked feet. The announcer went on. “… exact time of death has not been determined, but Wylie has been in the water for at least two days. Police theorize he was riding his motorcycle along an isolated stretch of Victory Boulevard when he was struck from behind by an unidentified hit-and-run driver. There is as yet no sign of the missing infant.”

There was a picture of Scott, a young, hopeful kid with a solemn look and slicked-down short hair. High school graduation, I assumed. It was a far cry from the earringed punk I'd known.