The Cradle Robbers (3 page)

“What’s the difference who puts the baby in foster care?”

“This whole licensed foster parent thing has made things really complicated. It used to be that when a prisoner who had no blood relatives would have a baby, she could ask a friend to come up and get the baby and bring it back home. But now, the Department of Corrections won’t release the babies to anyone who isn’t a licensed foster care provider, even if that person is who the mom wants her baby to be with.”

“But I still don’t understand why this is ‘baby stealing.’ I mean, yes, it’s awful and all that, but when the woman gets out she can just go get her kid, right?”

Chiki clucked his tongue in frustration. “It’s real bad when DSS takes a baby, because as soon as they do, the clock starts ticking for termination of parental rights.”

“What do you mean, ‘termination’? Just because the woman’s in prison? What if she’s only serving like a year or something?”

Chiki gave me a look like I was the most ignorant person he’d ever seen. “If DSS get their hands on a baby, they only give the mom six months.
That’s all. I know one lady, she got a three-month extension, but that’s it. After that, the baby is gone.”

I’m ashamed to say I didn’t believe Chiki. I made a few murmurs of doubt, settled a sleeping Sadie in her car seat, and turned to my computer. With a few clicks of the mouse, I was reading a state statute that confirmed what Chiki had said. When a child up to age three is taken by the state, for whatever reason, the mother has, indeed, only six months to get it back. If she can’t take the child back, she loses parental rights altogether. The idea behind this is a good one—infants should not languish in foster care, but instead should be adopted. But for women who are in prison, this requirement has devastating consequences. Once the children of a woman who is serving a sentence longer than six months enter the foster care system, she loses them forever, even if her sentence is only a year.

“This is awful,” I said.

“No kidding,” Al said.

“
You’re
opposed to this?” I was surprised. Al was usually in favor of people sleeping in the beds they’d made, no matter how full of nails.

“You’re damn right I am. The government has no right to take someone’s child!”

“So what happened to Sandra?” I said.

Chiki said, “She didn’t have no relative to take her baby, and no friend who was licensed.”

Sandra had been at her wit’s end, like many other women whose families lived too far away to make the trip to Dartmore prison, about sixty miles southeast of San Jose. All pregnant women in the state of California are automatically transferred to this isolated facility, as it’s close to a maternity hospital. The fact that it’s a maximum-security prison seems not to bother the California Department of Corrections overmuch. The social worker at Dartmore presented Sandra and other pregnant prisoners with what appeared to be their salvation. The Lambs of the Lord, a church-based foster care agency located in Pleasanton, a small city not too far from San Francisco, would send a family to take custody of their babies for as long as it took for the women to arrange alternative care. As soon as the prisoner’s family or friends were available to pick up the baby, the agency would arrange transfer of custody. In the meantime, the baby would be safe, well cared for, and most importantly, out of the dangerous hands of the State.

Women immediately began signing on the dotted
line. At any given moment, somewhere between one and two hundred prisoners in California are in the advanced stages of pregnancy, and they’re all shipping to Dartmore as they approach their due dates. Within weeks, the Lambs had dozens of grateful recruits, including Sandra Lorgeree. She turned her baby boy over to a sweet-faced young couple from the Lambs of the Lord a mere eight hours after he was born, and no one had seen the baby since.

“What does that mean, ‘no one has seen him’?” I said. “Of course she hasn’t seen him. She’s in jail. Has someone else gone looking for him?”

“She’s had people on the outside try calling the telephone number the foster parents gave her. They call at all different times of day and night, but no one ever picks up the phone.”

“And that’s why she thinks her baby’s been stolen? Because the foster parents don’t have an answering machine?”

Al said, “Jesus, Juliet.” He heaved his feet onto his desk. “Since when do you have so much faith in the system? Usually you’re the first person willing to believe that a prisoner is being victimized by the State.”

I shook my head. “I just have a hard time believing that there is some elaborate baby-stealing conspiracy going on. I think it’s much more likely that the foster family is a little overwhelmed with a brand-new baby and isn’t answering their telephone. It doesn’t seem that suspicious to me. How long has it been since Sandra had her baby?”

“Three weeks.”

“Has she been in touch with the foster care agency? With the Lambs of the Lord people?”

“No, they don’t accept collect calls. She’s had friends call them from the outside, but they won’t give any information out to anyone but the mother.”

“How did she get in touch with them in the first place, if they won’t accept collect calls from prison?” Prisoners can only call collect; they aren’t allowed to use calling cards, and they have no access to cash. Frustratingly, the telephone companies that have the prison contracts charge a huge markup for those collect calls. Having an incarcerated individual call you can cost a small fortune. Still, most of the criminal defense attorneys I know begin their voicemail greetings with a message to the operator, informing her that “this machine accepts collect calls from prisoners.” After I left the federal defender’s
office and my home number was the only one my old clients could use to reach me, our friends, family members, and Peter’s business associates were greeted with the same salutation. It wasn’t long before Peter got his own line.

Chiki, who had begun folding invoices into careful thirds and sliding them into pre-addressed envelopes, said, “She reached the Lambs of the Lord through the social worker at the prison.”

“And has she talked to the social worker?”

“The social worker told her to stop making trouble or she’d end up in the SHU.”

Nice. Threatening a grieving mother with the segregated housing unit. In which year of the master’s program in therapy did they teach that?

Chiki gathered the envelopes together and put them in the out basket. Bright red, clearly marked in and out baskets were one of our organized assistant’s many office innovations, and when Al wasn’t filling them with the crumpled, greasy wrappings of In-N-Out burgers, they worked great to simplify the chaos in the garage.

Chiki said, “I told Fidelia you’d make a few calls, try to find out what happened to the baby.”

“Oh Chiki, why did you tell her that?” I said.

Al said, “You got something else to do?”

“Man, you’re grumpy today,” I said as I glanced at my empty in basket. Our business was due to take a turn for the better any day, since we’d come under contract with Harvey Brodsky, flash lawyer to the stars. For a while Brodsky had circled around like a great white, sizing us up with a cold eye, stirring up the water with his churning tail, but not committing to the meal until he was absolutely sure we’d be a tasty enough morsel. Once we’d solved a high-profile murder and proved ourselves qualified to help get his clients out of trouble, he’d taken us on. So far all we’d done was a few routine checks on personal assistants and household staff, and one time Al had convinced his friends in the County Sheriff’s Department not to charge a young client of Brodsky’s for naked skateboarding at Papa Jack’s skateboard park in Malibu. As Al had pointed out to the buddy of his who was on duty, the scrapes on the girl’s behind were sufficient punishment on their own, and she
had
been conscientious enough to wear a helmet. Brodsky had been happy with that save. A front-page spread on the arrest would have ruined the young ingénue’s credibility as this year’s darling of the Christian rock circuit. The retainer
money was coming in from Brodsky on the first of every month, but there was not, at this very moment, much of anything for me to do.

I pointed to Sadie. “I’ve got plenty to keep me busy.”

“What’s your problem, Juliet?” Al grumbled. “Poor woman’s looking for her baby, and you won’t help? This isn’t the bleeding heart I know and love.”

With Chiki around it was hard for me to admit to Al what was wrong. The truth was, I couldn’t help but wonder if the baby wasn’t better off, wherever he was. Don’t get me wrong, I hate the idea of the state taking babies away from prisoners. It’s terribly unjust, and the idea of a woman who is sentenced to a year in prison losing her baby because she can’t reclaim it within this arbitrary six-month window is horrifying to me. But this friend of Chiki’s cousin was going to be in jail for the next five years, and from what he was saying, she didn’t have any real plans for who should take her kid. I didn’t for one minute buy this paranoid baby-stealing fantasy of hers, but let’s say, for a moment, that it was true. Let’s say some childless couple fell in love with her baby and ran off with him. Sure, that’s terrible, but some part of me that I was almost
ashamed of couldn’t help but wonder if the child wasn’t better off, if he wouldn’t be happier growing up in a family, ignorant of his birth mother serving out his early years in prison. The first five years of a child’s life are important years, maybe even the most important. He needed a mother in his life, and he needed the security of knowing that that mother wasn’t going to be taken away from him when his “real” mother was finally released from jail.

I was about to open my mouth when I looked at Chiki standing in the doorway, the Swiffer in his hands. Like most ex-prisoners, he liked to keep his surroundings not just neat and tidy, but almost compulsively clean. Perhaps he was like this before his experiences in prison, I don’t know. It was an uphill battle in this garage, what with the rats and all, but the first thing Chiki did when he started to work for us was transform a storage unit in a corner of the garage into a utility closet, complete with spray bottles of every form of cleaner available at the market. He was partial to aromatherapy. His favorite implement was definitely the Swiffer, and he swished that thing around three or four times a day, catching up every bit of dust before it had a chance to settle on the floor. Chiki was a very young man when he
went to prison, just out of his teens, slightly built and delicate. I never asked him what happened to him on the inside. I did not need to.

Now, as I watched him indulge his grim OCD, I thought of the young mother in prison, and the promise Chiki had made to his cousin and to her. I looked down at my own baby, safe in her nest of blankets in the car seat, her lips pursed in her sleep.

“I’ll make some calls,” I said.

“Thank you, Juliet. Fidelia will really appreciate it, and so will Sandra. I really appreciate it. You know, it’s so hard for those ladies inside.”

“Yeah, I know, Chiki. It’s hard.”

T
HAT
night was book club, and even though I was nowhere near done with the book, I decided to go. I was feeling guilty about not having managed to reach anyone at the Lambs of the Lord, despite leaving a dozen progressively more irritated voicemail messages. I needed the company of some girlfriends, and if previous experience was anything to go by, I wasn’t going to be the only book club member derelict in my belletristic duties. In fact, there were a few who had never once, in the six months we’d been meeting, managed to get through a novel, even when we’d chosen
The Da Vinci Code
expressly to guarantee them a simplified and propulsive
literary experience. This month’s novel was
Rabbit at Rest,
by John Updike, selected by the wife of a client of my best friend Stacey, solely for the purposes, I’m convinced, of announcing to the group that her husband’s screen adaptation had just been greenlit. Which she had done eight times so far, by my count. And we hadn’t yet met to discuss the book.

Stacey and I were at Greenblatt’s, a delicatessen on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, not too far from my house. In addition to decent pastrami, Greenblatt’s has what Stacey insists is the best selection of fine wine in the city. If I were on my own I would have stopped at the Safeway and picked up something in “red” or “white,” but my oldest friend has a far more epicurean palate. Stacey has always been a classier girl than I; even at college she had already developed a style that, together with her shimmering good looks, intimidated every single person on campus, male or female. We became friends despite the fact that Stacey had riding boots especially constructed for her feet and I was a Jersey girl who thought the sale rack at Abraham & Strauss was the height of luxury. It helped back then to cement our friendship that I was as smart as she
was. We competed on an even keel for a while, until I dropped onto the mommy track and she stayed on the bullet train to superstardom, becoming one of the most successful agents at International Creative Artists. What keeps Stacey and me together is loyalty and love. For all our differences, I know I can trust her with anything, even the grimmest and most repulsive secret of my life. She would stand by me through it all. And I feel the same way about her. Still, I can’t help but be jealous of the fact that we seem to be on opposite trajectories. Like a normal person, I get fatter and more wrinkled as we creep inexorably up the ladder of our thirties. Stacey gets thinner and ever more dewy and luminous. Pretty soon people are going to start thinking I’m her mother. And then, inevitably, her grandmother.

“This is what I’m bringing,” she said, holding up a bottle of Château Guiraud Sauternes 1990.

“Oh come on, Stacey. That’s a fifty-dollar bottle of wine.”

“No, it’s a seventy-dollar bottle of wine that I’m getting for fifty bucks. If you tell the ladies that it was on sale, I’ll kill you.”

Catering our book club has become something of a competitive sport. I lay the blame squarely on
Stacey. The first night she was hosting, she had to work late to close a deal, and instead of whipping up a pot of pasta or picking up some cheese and crackers at the supermarket, she instructed her assistant to arrange dinner for twelve. It was the young woman’s first and last week on the job, and I can still taste the poached lobster in ginger sauce. And that was just the first course. Since then, each hosting member has felt the need to ratchet up the level of hysteria, and the books we read are fast becoming beside the point. Pretty soon we’ll be dipping truffle fingers into foie gras. We’ve already done the blinis and caviar.