Turtle Baby (12 page)

"What's baker's back?" Rombo's crooked nose, broken by somebody named Billy Beloit on the Midwest boxing circuit in another life, flared in disbelief. He'd been trying to interest Martin in physical fitness for years, but the lanky caterer had, until now, shown total disinterest.

"Occupational hazard of kneading, lifting trays in and out of the ovens. Overworks minor muscle groups while the rest of my classically well-proportioned body atrophies into something approximating string cheese. I'm trying to talk Bo into joining the class. She'd like the music."

Rombo glanced out the window again. "I think that's the truck. Are she and Andy coming for dinner on Sunday? Or did we decide to wait for them to 'define their relationship'?" He shook his head fondly. "With all the encouragement straight people get, you'd think they'd have the drill down by now, wouldn't you?"

"It is the truck." Martin nodded as the hall phone rang. "I'll get that. Go to work."

Rombo opened the top of the Dutch door and caught a dried bougainvillea bract blowing in from the spectacular plant trellised to the Spanish cottage next door. "I'm not leaving until I see it against the wall," he said. "What if the doors won't close over the TV? What if they didn't put the speaker-cord holes where we told them?"

"It's for you," Martin called from the Berber-carpeted hall. "It's the ER."

"What's up?" Rombo said into a replica of a 1920s wall phone friends had provided as a housewarming gift. "Sure. I guess so."

Outside a gleaming van embossed with the name "Pickwick Furniture" in heavily serifed lettering backed into the driveway.

"I don't believe it," Rombo fumed, hopping while tying polished black Italian dress shoes. "The cops have brought over some guy they picked up at the border last night, stopping cars on the U.S. side and warning people about a curse. They kept him in county jail all night, can you believe? Then they bring him over to the hospital, where he should have been from the beginning, at noon, when of course the duty intake worker's gone to lunch. I've got to get over there to do the intake. Guy's name is Dee-wayne something-or-other. Sounds Southern. The desk clerk says he looks like he's been beaten pretty badly, too, but he's in no shape to tell anybody what happened."

"Have I told you lately that you're about the most exceptional guy I've ever met?" Martin asked, opening the lower half of the door for Rombo.

"I hate it when you get emotional." Rombo blushed as he pulled a lightweight gray blazer over his polo shirt and grabbed his keys.

"No you don't, you love it." Martin nodded, hugging the muscular social worker. "Call Bo and check on Sunday, okay?"

From the furniture van two women in tennis shoes deftly maneuvered the first section of a hand-rubbed cypress wall unit onto a rubber-wheeled dolly.

"Don't worry," one beamed at Rombo. "We won't scratch your floor."

"Unquestionably, Chac was poisoned. I knew from the almond smell when I leaned over her," Andrew LaMarche told Bo and Estrella over a plate of broken rice with squid at one of the many Vietnamese restaurants in the neighborhood surrounding CPS headquarters. "But in the excitement I couldn't quite recall what that odor meant, just that it meant poison."

"So you grabbed Chac's glass off our table when you left, and then had the residue tested this morning. Andy, you're a genius! If it weren't for you, nobody would ever have known. I mean, I just assumed it was a drug overdose, and so did the Mexican police."

Estrella was using her chopsticks to push a plateful of barbecued pork fried rice into a landscape of small hills. "I keep seeing that foam bubbling out of her mouth," she whispered. "That's what smelled like almonds, isn't it?"

"Probably," LaMarche answered. "The odor is characteristic of cyanide poisoning. But the foaming would have been caused by a second poison, also found in the shot glass. It's an alcohol called cicutoxin. Comes from a wild herb that, according to the chief toxicologist at the Poison Control Center, doesn't grow naturally in this climate. Some kind of hemlock. Looks like parsley, he said. Grows wild near streams or in wet meadows."

"There isn't a wet meadow within five hundred miles of here," Bo told a serving of ground shrimp on sugarcane she'd ordered to impress Andrew LaMarche with the sophistication of her palate. The dish, while odd, wasn't half bad. From the determination with which he was chewing his squid, Bo feared the same could not be said of Andrew LaMarche's' own attempt at culinary broadmindedness. Estrella appeared to have discovered some troubling message beneath her fried rice, and was frowning at it.

"So there were two poisons in Chac's shot of tequila," Bo went on. "But why two? Wouldn't either one of them have been enough to kill her?"

"It's quite strange," LaMarche continued. "Almost as if her murderer particularly wanted the cyanide to be present, but didn't trust its efficacy." He leaned forward and poked with a chopstick at the red plastic dragon topping their table lamp. "Cyanide's volatile, a gas. Even in a suspension, the molecules won't stay put. And this particular cyanogenic glycoside appears to have been extracted from a fruit. The lab thinks it was probably apple."

Bo registered disbelief. "A cyanide apple? Come on, Andy. The groceries haven't run a special on those in ages."

"Oh, the fleshy part of apples is, obviously, perfectly safe to eat. But the seeds contain cyanide, Bo. A few won't hurt you, but a couple of handfuls would be lethal."

"Kind of ruins the Johnny Appleseed story, doesn't it?" Bo mused, eyeing the rice paper on her plate.

"Bo?" It was Estrella, her face a mask of dismay.

"Are you okay, Es? You haven't eaten much. Want to go walk around outside for a minute?"

"No. It's not that." Estrella's dark eyes were troubled. "Chac's death is my fault, Bo. If it weren't for me, she'd still be alive."

"Oh, Es," Bo said with sympathy. "I felt that way, too. Like we never should have opened this investigation. We should just have left Chac and Acito alone. But—"

Estrella took a deep breath. "The poisons were in her drink, right?" she asked. "Well, she almost knocked her drink over when she was yelling at you. If I hadn't caught the glass, it would have spilled, and she wouldn't have drunk it, and ..."

Bo placed her hand over Estrella's trembling one as LaMarche shook his head. "Estrella," he insisted, "somebody wanted Chac dead. If that drink had spilled, there would have been another one. What it looks like to me," he scowled, "is that both the baby and his mother were targeted for death by someone well versed in natural poisons. It's really quite peculiar."

"Peculiar," Estrella repeated, shuddering.

"It's out of our hands now, Es," Bo said, recognizing the response as rational and sane. "It's a criminal case. I'm sure the police will find Chac's killer. In the meantime, I'm going to request a confidential foster care placement for Acito. What did the police say when you told them about the lab report on Chac's glass, Andy?"

The waiter had brought the check and LaMarche made a production out of figuring the tip, then getting a doggy bag for Estrella's fried rice. Once outside the restaurant he launched into a monologue about the very shopping center in which they now stood. "It's the first in the nation," he expounded, "built in the forties when—"

"Andy!" Bo interrupted. "What did the police say?"

"The San Diego Police said," Estrella answered, climbing into the passenger's side of Bo's vehicle, "that the crime took place in Tijuana and its investigation is therefore the responsibility of the Mexican police."

"So?" Bo asked, looking quizzically at LaMarche, who was elaborately adjusting a windshield wiper on his maroon Jaguar, parked next to Bo's Pathfinder under a coral tree. On the sidewalk beyond the tree an ancient woman in traditional loose black trousers held a flowered umbrella over her head as she carried a baby in a shawl on her back. Bo thought the baby could win a Buddha look-alike contest, if only one of the three Oriental supermarkets in the shopping center would sponsor one.

"Um," Andrew LaMarche said, watching the progress of the baby Buddha. "The San Diego Police have contacted the Mexican authorities, and will send both the glass and the toxicology report to Tijuana by courier this afternoon." His tone attempted businesslike closure on the subject, a ploy Bo hadn't fallen for since the last time her mother tried it when Bo was about five.

"And then what?" she insisted, standing on the Pathfinder's narrow runningboard and tossing her hair.

Andrew LaMarche seemed miserable. "An investigation of some sort, I assume," he said, pulling at a corner of his mustache. "Probably not right away ..."

"What do you mean, 'not right away'? A woman's been murdered! Detective Reinert told me they went to Chris Joe's last night, looking for drugs when they thought Chac died of an overdose. Chris Joe's gone. Won't they search for him, interview us and everybody else they can find who was at the bar last night? What's an investigation of 'some sort'? What are you saying, Andy?"

Estrella sighed and pulled the door on her side of Bo's car closed. "Mexican police procedures are different," she said. "We need to get back to the office, Bo."

Andrew LaMarche nodded at Estrella's words as if they contained profound and immutable wisdom. "Dinner tonight, Bo?" he suggested with abrupt lightheartedness. "I'm cooking."

"Sure, Andy, dinner." Bo scowled from her perch on the runningboard. "We've just witnessed the gruesome murder of an innocent woman. A woman about whom I think you're telling me the police in Mexico don't really give a damn. I think you're telling me they're not even going to try to find her killer. Her orphaned baby, also poisoned, now gives new meaning to the phrase 'stranger in a strange land,' and has the double misfortune to be trapped in the hands of an agency made up of people like Madge Aldenhoven. So of course we have nothing to think about except dinner."

"Chac was not a Mexican citizen," he said, picking invisible lint from the Jaguar's gleaming roof. "And her, uh, occupational history prior to the success of her singing career had brought her to the attention of the Tijuana police. I learned this morning that she'd been arrested for prostitution, Bo, more than once. A dangerous way to make a living. And I'm afraid it's a fact of life that police on either side of the border—"

Bo felt a snap behind her eyes, and a rush of anger that writhed in her shoulders. What good did it do to take your medication and behave at all times with overweening rationality, when the world itself was devoid of reason?

"So it's just okay to murder prostitutes?" she yelled, more at the coral tree than at Andrew LaMarche, who was gesturing helplessly to Estrella. "Chac exchanged sex for money in a world structured entirely around the hormonal habits of men, and because of that she and her baby ceased to be human, right? They became animals. Humans are allowed to kill animals anytime they damn well please. That's it, isn't it?"

A small crowd was gathering, drifting toward Bo from the parking lot and the doorways of several establishments selling jewelry, live eels, and videos whose titles were spelled in Oriental pictograms. Bo hit the top of the Pathfinder with a fist, then climbed inside.

"Okay, okay," she breathed before Estrella could say anything. "But I'm not being crazy, Es. If I hadn't been born in Boston to a fairly wealthy family, if I hadn't been educated, if I hadn't found psychiatrists who could teach me how to keep going with an illness that leaves thousands of women on the streets every year, I could be Chac! I've never even been hungry, Es. But I know perfectly well I'd sell my body if I were starving and there were no other way to get food."

"I know," Estrella sighed. "Every woman knows. We just don't talk about it."

As Bo backed into the parking lot, she and Estrella stared at Andrew LaMarche, still standing beside his car. In some ways the distance between herself and Estrella and this perfectly nice man, Bo thought, surpassed that between earth and the furthest star in the Milky Way. The reality of prostitution was a factor in that distance. "I'm not going to forget about this," she told Estrella. "I'm going to find out who killed Chac."

"Count me in," Es replied, straightening under her seatbelt and patting her stomach. "After all, this baby might be a little girl, my daughter. What would she think if her mom just looked the other way?"

"All right!" Bo yelled, and gunned the Pathfinder into the street.

Bo dropped Estrella at the front of the CPS building, closer by a city block to the cafeteria refrigerator than their office. The carton of fried rice, if preserved, would provide dinner for Henry Benedict. Estrella was committed to that possibility.

"You have several phone calls," Madge said as Bo entered the building through the back parking lot door. "And St. Mary's can release the Indian baby to a foster home just as soon as you make the arrangements. I'd like you to do that right now, Bo. Let's free that hospital bed for the weekend."

What Madge really meant, Bo knew, was "Let's free our budget of two more days' worth of hospital bills." A month of foster care cost less than a day in St. Mary's Hospital.

"There are some problems," Bo said, sitting on a pile of case files stacked on the chair next to the supervisor's desk. "For one, Acito's AIDS test results won't be available until Monday. I won't know until then whether he can go to a regular foster home, or he has to go to a medically fragile placement." She had attended the training for foster parents willing to take in babies with AIDS. Disposable diapers had to be used, and these had to be discarded in special red plastic trash bags provided by the county. The foster parents were supposed to wear rubber gloves for changes. Chicken pox and other childhood skin diseases presented serious obstacles to needed cuddling. The training had been so upsetting that Bo lost an entire night's sleep just thinking about the reality it addressed.

"I'd forgotten about that," Aldenhoven noted sadly. In the moment of silence shared with Bo, the usual antagonism was absent.