The Cradle Robbers (14 page)

“Maybe a Mercedes,” Nancy said.

“So it was either a Cadillac or a Mercedes?” I said.

“Yeah,” Jase said. “Something like that.”

“But it was definitely black?”

“Or maybe blue. Not white. Definitely not white.”

“Do you remember anything else? The license plate number?”

“No.”

“Anything about the driver? Was he wearing a uniform? Did he have an accent? Was he white, black?”

“He was a white guy,” Jase said.

“No he wasn’t,” Nancy said. “He was Filipino. Or Mexican. I think.”

Oh, the joys of eyewitness identification. I wasn’t going to get anything useful out of these two. The best they could give me was either a blue or black car, and the driver was probably not African American. Although, given the state of their inebriation, he was probably a Maasai tribesman driving a fuchsia Humvee.

I took the wad of cash and handed it to Jase along with one of my business cards. “Call me if you think of anything else,” I said.

Jase licked his thumb and began counting his money. Nancy hung over his shoulder, smiling avariciously at the stack of bills. Neither noticed when Sadie and I walked out of their miserable yard and away from their horrible lives.

Sadie and I met our family back at the hotel. It was the second time Peter and I had had to make up in as many days, and we were both feeling pretty sheepish. My experience with the loathsome McDonnells had made me appreciate him all the more, and I gathered he had come to feel something similar while trapped on a rocky prison island with no cellular service and only our children for company. The nadir of his day had been when Isaac got lost, causing the National Park Service to come to a crashing halt while every ranger and tourist on the island ran up and down the island’s craggy paths and rusted stairwells screaming Isaac’s name. Peter had panicked, convinced Isaac had flung himself into the sea in an attempted reenactment of Clint Eastwood’s daring escape. It turned out that he had merely locked himself into a porta-potty.

Whatever the reason for our rapprochement, Peter and I were very happy to see each other, and had we not been trapped in a single hotel room with
three small children, we might even have been inspired to celebrate the end of our quarrel in a fitting manner. As it was, we were limited to room service and in-room movies.

When the children were finally asleep, I recounted the horror of my day. “Whoever set this up, whoever took Noah, must have had some connection to the foster care system. I’m assuming it was a woman because it was a woman who contacted Sandra and it was a woman who hired Jase and Nancy. She knew that the baby would only be released to a licensed foster care provider, and she had access to information that allowed her to find a couple who still had a license but were sufficiently dishonest and corrupt that they would do whatever she asked.”

“Who could it be?” Peter said. He was leaning up against the headboard of the queen bed we were sharing with Sadie. Ruby and Isaac were curled up together like puppies in the other bed. They got along so well when they were asleep.

“I haven’t the faintest idea. In fact, I’m all out of ideas. This is driving me insane. Now I know for sure that someone stole that baby, but I can’t even begin to figure out who, or why. I can tell you one
thing, though. I just know that Sandra’s murder wasn’t an act of random prison gang violence. It’s connected to this. It has to be.”

“What will you do if you do find the baby?” Peter asked.

I moved Sadie from one breast to the other. “I don’t honestly know. I better start looking for Sandra’s family. I should probably figure out whether they even want the baby before I do anything else. If they don’t, then what? Even if I succeed, I’ll have tracked Noah down only to deliver him right back to the foster care system.”

T
HE
next day, when we returned to Los Angeles, I called Al and found him finally busy on a case referred by Harold Brodsky. Despite the fact that we’d just flown in that morning, I decided to take the kids to school, and now I was driving down the freeway, debating whether to go to the office or “work” from home. I had a mountain of laundry that was calling my name, which would normally be a good reason to head down to Westminster.

“I guess I could try to find Sandra’s aunt and cousins,” I said.

“Already on it,” Al said.

“What do you mean, you’re already on it? You’re
on Brodsky’s case.” Al was supposed to be figuring out how to keep a brawling young actor from being sued by someone who had beat
him
up in a bar fight.

“Not me. Chiki.”

“How is Chiki tracking people if he’s not allowed to work on the computer and not allowed to travel?” I swerved to avoid a large SUV that was drifting perilously close to my lane. The driver was talking on her cell phone and applying lipstick. I’d never try to do
both
at once while driving. One or the other, but not both. “You know what?” I said. “Don’t tell me. I don’t care. Let this be your and Chiki’s problem. I’m going to go talk to some more junkies. I can’t seem to get enough of junkies nowadays. Let me know if some paying work comes in that I should be doing instead.”

Twenty minutes later, as I strapped Sadie’s car seat into its wheels in preparation for our perambulation through Eagle Rock, Sandra’s old neighborhood, I tried to reassure myself that, contrary to popular belief, exposure to microbes is actually good for babies. How, I reasoned, could an immune system develop in a perfectly sterile environment? Moreover, my own mattress was probably far more
bug-ridden than anything we would come across today or anything Sadie had been exposed to at the McDonnells’. I made another mental note to find out where one orders a handmade mattress in an odd size.

Eagle Rock is a small neighborhood nestled between downtown L.A. and Pasadena. Considering that it’s home to Occidental College, it has a surprising number of beat-up houses, more than its share of pit bulls barking behind chain-link fences, and the world’s ugliest and most degenerate shopping mall, Eagle Rock Plaza. However, it also has a bunch of urban-chic coffee shops, a strong sense of community, and “Snapshot Day,” when the neighbors all take pictures of one another for their family albums. It’s one of those neighborhoods that seems to be perennially on the verge of “gentrification,” with all the community outrage that that tends to inspire. It’s named for an actual rock, a huge monster of a thing on the top of which hot springs have supposedly etched an eagle in flight. Personally I think it looks more like Yosemite Sam’s mustache.

I pushed the stroller down Colorado Boulevard, which I figured was grim enough to be a hangout for the kind of person I was hoping to find. I was looking
for a specific type of dealer or user, not one of the young black or brown men the cops like to bust. I was looking for white kids, kids like Nancy and Jase might have been ten years ago. I was looking for white kids with dreadlocks, pierced tongues, elaborate tattoos that implied an adolescence with at least some money to spare for body art.

The first five or six people I spoke to either didn’t know Sandra’s boyfriend or weren’t talking. But then I found two perfect specimens out in front of a bar. They were crouched on the sidewalk, playing with a small white rat, a paper cup of change set before them in case any passersby felt inspired to make a donation.

“Hi,” I said. “Cute rat.” Let me be clear. There is no such thing as a cute rat. All rodents are hideous and vile and were the world to be rid of them in a single fell swoop of extermination, I would be thrilled, the food chain be damned. Still. Interrogation is an art form.

“Isn’t she though?” one of the girls said. “Her name is Squeaky. But not because she’s a rat or anything.” She picked up the rat and kissed it. I struggled not to gag. “We named her after Squeaky Fromm.”

“That’s even better. So, ladies,” I said. I reached into my front pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill. I held it in my hand. “Where’s Tweezer today?”

“Tweezer?” the rat-kisser said.

I sighed, folded up the bill, and made as if to shove it back in my pocket.

“We know him!” the other girl said. “We just haven’t seen him for a couple of weeks.”

“Shut up!” the rat-kisser hissed.

“Why?” the other girl said. “What difference does it make? Anyway, I want a mocha latte and we’ve got, like, no money.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?” I asked.

“I dunno, like a month ago, maybe? A little more. He used to live here, in an apartment up on Casper. But then his old lady got busted and he moved out. He still hung out, though. We’d see him around, doing this and that.”

“But you haven’t seen him in a month?”

She frowned. “Maybe a little more. I don’t know. Hey, can you make that ten bucks instead of five?”

“If you give me the name of someone who might know more than you do.”

The girl with the rat said, “You can try Kate.
She’s a friend of his girlfriend’s. If anyone knows, she will. I want ten dollars, too.”

“Do you know Kate’s last name?”

“Yeah, I do. My sister went to high school with her. It’s Gage.”

“Where can I find this Kate Gage?”

“She works at Swork, that coffee shop down the street. Hey, baby, you wanna see Squeaky?” She held her rodent toward Sadie, who batted her hands at the wriggling monstrosity. I spun the stroller around, whipped a twenty out of my wallet, and handed it to the other girl. “Thanks,” I said, tearing down the block before they could infect my baby with bubonic plague.

Swork was all blond wood, stainless-steel industrial ceilings and tables, and funk. It was packed with the usual L.A. hipster screenwriting wannabes, tap-tapping on their laptops and Web-surfing on the wireless network. Ben Harper was playing on the sound system and the coffee I ordered was called Mellow-D. As I sipped my coffee and nursed Sadie, I thought to myself that this was yet another thing that Ruby would not have been victim to. When breastfeeding my first child, I not only avoided
broccoli, onions, alcohol, secondhand smoke, and rodent-wielding panhandlers, but I even did my best to steer clear of caffeine. Here I was simultaneously lactating and ingesting coffee. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to end up on La Leche League’s Top Ten Most Wanted list.

After Sadie and I had both had our fill, I approached the young woman behind the counter.

“Kate?” I asked.

She pointed across the café to another woman, this one a little older. She was busing tables, wiping them down with a blue cloth. Carrying Sadie over my shoulder, I crossed the room.

“Hi, Kate,” I said. “I knew your friend Sandra. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

She stood up and put a hand out to steady herself. “Do I know you?” she asked. Her dyed black hair accentuated her yellow-tinged skin, and there was something disturbing about the way she looked, with her severely short bangs and the ragged locks hanging around her jaw. The 1940s tight-waisted housedress and thick-soled shoes she wore didn’t do anything to alleviate this impression.

“I knew Sandra,” I repeated. “Do you have a minute? Can we talk?”

She hesitated, and then sat down. She hovered over her chair as though unsure whether she really wanted to be there, as if she might get up and run at any moment. I explained who I was, and how it was that I’d come to know her friend. I told her about my suspicions regarding Sandra’s death. I watched her face lose its wary expression.

“I’m trying to find Tweezer,” I said, finally.

She frowned. “There’s no way he would know anything. Even if Sandra told him something, he’s likely to have forgotten it by now. Without Sandra around, Tweezer’s totally lost. He’s like a little kid.”

I settled Sadie across my lap and rocked her gently. “I honestly don’t know who else to talk to, Kate.”

“But if you really think that Sandra’s murder had something to do with all this, with her baby being taken, then it’s crazy to think Tweezer had anything to do with it. He’d never hurt Sandra, he loved her. She was like his mother. She did everything for him. The whole idea is nuts anyway; the guy can’t arrange a trip to the grocery store, let alone a contract killing.” Putting Sandra’s death into such brutal words clearly caused her pain, and Kate’s mouth trembled. For a moment, she looked like she was going to cry.

“Do you know Tweezer’s real name?”

“Yeah, didn’t Sandra tell you? He’s Gabriel Francisco Arguello.”

I’m sure my jaw dropped. The Arguello family is as close as California gets to landed gentry. They make even the Gettys look like nouveau-riche carpetbaggers. The Arguellos received their land grants from the kings of Spain and, despite a minor reversal of fortune during the Mexican-American War in 1848, they managed to retain a significant portion of their northern California holdings, including a few acres not too far from Coloma. Between the gold they later found on that land and their prime San Francisco real estate, the family had been pretty well set up ever since.

“Are you telling me that Tweezer’s father was Frank Arguello, the mayor of San Francisco?” I said.

“No, that was his grandfather. Tweezer’s dad died when he was just a kid. His mom was in politics, though. I think it’s pretty much the family business. She used to be on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and I think his uncle is the lieutenant governor or something.”

“I know,” I said. “I voted for him.”

“Do you want more coffee?” Kate said suddenly.

I shook my head. She rose unsteadily and poured herself a cup. Then she sat down and took a tentative sip.

“For the longest time my doctor told me I wasn’t supposed to have any coffee, which was fine, because it made me feel really sick. But now he says it might actually be good for my liver. So I’m allowed to have it again.”

My confusion must have been evident.

“I have hepatitis C,” Kate explained. “That’s the bad kind. And I have an exceptional case. People can usually live for decades with this disease, but mine is proceeding really quickly. I’m finally a prodigy at something, and it’s hep C. That’s probably why Sandra never asked me to take Noah for her. I have a hard enough time taking care of myself, let alone a baby. And, well, I guess she wasn’t sure I’d be around for him. I might not be. Not without a liver transplant.”