Turtle Baby (8 page)

"You must be talking about Estrella's case, the little Maya baby ..." Bo answered, watching Madge push up the sleeves of a gold ramie hip-length sweater that made her look as if she were about to join a bicycle tour in France.

"It's not Estrella's case now," the supervisor insisted, pointedly placing Acito's case file on Bo's desk while placing the file of the crack baby on Estrella's. "I've been trying to tell you ..."

"I'll have to call you back, Dar," Bo said into the phone as Madge crossed her arms over a necklace of carved wooden beads that precisely matched the dead-leaf brown of her cashmere slacks. "In the meantime can you run a check for me on ..." Bo fumbled in Acito's case file for the names she'd heard yesterday. "...Dewayne Singleton from someplace in Louisiana, and a minor called Chris Joe Gavin, Henderson, Kentucky. Thanks, Dar." To Madge she said, "Are you trying to give me a Spanish-speaking case? Where's Estrella?"

"Estrella is sick this morning," Madge emphasized the key word, "and as it turns out the mother speaks English. Estrella did a superb initial investigation yesterday, but I'm afraid this case has just become too demanding for her current, well ... resources."

"Her resources?"

"Any woman who's ever been pregnant could identify Estrella's condition immediately, Bo. It's hardly a secret. And after what happened at the hospital last night, we've decided that it would be more appropriate for you to continue the investigation."

"Because I'm not pregnant?" Bo had to ask. "I'll bet Nick Paratore's not pregnant, either. He's in our unit, too. I just saw him in the cafeteria. He wasn't barfing or anything. Why don't you give the case to him? And what happened at the hospital last night?" She widened green eyes and let them go glassy. "Let me guess. The baby turned out to be a tiny werewolf and ate the entire night staff, right?"

Madge stared at the floor as if it were about to slip away, and clenched her teeth. "The mother showed up at St. Mary's last night, demanding the release of the baby. There was a row when staff explained that he had to remain in the hospital for an HIV test, and then go into foster care pending the outcome of our investigation. The police were called. I think the mother actually assaulted Detective Reinert, but he allowed her to return to Tijuana in spite of that. Doubtless a mistake, not that it matters. We're probably looking at a 'freed for adoption' here unless the father can be located. That's what I want you to do. Either find the father or let's file for termination of parental rights. If the baby's HIV positive, transfer him to medically fragile long-term foster care. If not, transfer him to adoptions, assuming you don't find the father, or he forfeits his right to the child. Meanwhile, Estrella will handle your case from yesterday. Any questions?"

"No," Bo answered. "No questions."

Except why wasn't I invited to your installation as God, Madge? And how inspiring that you haven't let it go to your head.

"Good." Aldenhoven sighed and stalked into the hall.

Bo pushed the heels of her hands against her knees under an African print skirt featuring ragged black suns on rust-colored homespun, and grimaced. The Maya mother and baby, she thought, had wandered too close to a nation made of systems. Bureaucratic systems like the one she worked for, which weren't real, which were nothing but interlocking grids of rules. Which could never, ever hear a mother's song or touch a baby's soft black hair.

"I'm overreacting," she said to a photograph of the poet Anne Sexton on her bulletin board, "as usual. But then, you'd understand, wouldn't you?"

The system was going to take Chac's baby away, unless somebody stopped it.

"CPS, Bo Bradley," Bo snarled into the phone when it rang again. "Oh, hi, Andy ... yes, I heard." The sleeveless black turtleneck she'd chosen to complement the woodblock-printed skirt felt as though it were alive and slowly choking her. "Sure, I can come right over," she agreed, pulling the fabric away from her throat. Proximity to the dry, mechanical heart of injustice, Bo realized, made even her own clothes feel threatening.

"I'm going over to St. Mary's," she yelled at Madge's door, "for a technical explanation of the substance that poisoned Acito."

"That will be good in the court report," the supervisor answered with a disinterested calm typical of strangers at bus stops discussing pleasant weather. A calm that Bo Bradley, carefully medicated and stabilized manic-depressive, would never feel. Or, she admitted, ever want to feel.

Andrew LaMarche was waiting for her in the carpeted lobby of St. Mary's Hospital for Children, holding Acito's medical records and a nosegay of white violets. Beneath his starched lab coat an oxford cloth shirt in eggshell and a surprising silk tie painted in taupe and cream asters made his gray eyes seem almost blue.

"For you," he said, proffering the nosegay. "My lady."

"Oh, God, Andy," Bo replied, pleased but aware that everyone in the lobby might be watching, "thank you. They're lovely, really, but ..."

"It's a summer day," he insisted, ushering her toward the hospital's glass-walled cafeteria. "Flowers before business. I'd like to see you tonight, Bo." Beneath a graying brown mustache his smile was confident, almost impish.

Not for the first time Bo experienced a familiar conceptual lurch at the warmth of that smile. The warmth of the man, who had proven to be a stalwart friend as well as a tantalizing potential lover. Except that he insisted on muddying the situation with archaic references to love and marriage.

"Andy, we just don't have the same agenda," Bo said as he paid for two coffees and accompanied her to a cement table in the cafeteria's outdoor courtyard. "I'm not the marrying kind. My attention span's too short."

"Nonsense," he murmured.

"Andy, that was a joke. Now, tell me about this poison."

He opened the record file and handed Bo duplicates of several pages. "It's a substance called abrin, derived from a tropical plant. It has no known use in any commercially produced product either here or in Mexico, and in fact would be very difficult to acquire. One would almost have to grow, harvest, and store it deliberately. It's quite unusual, Bo. There's simply no way a baby could accidentally ingest it."

Bo ran her right hand through her hair and pursed her lips. An image of jars full of herbs rose in her mind and refused to vanish. Chris Joe Gavin, boy-guitarist, had a thing for dried plants.

"As the mother is a native of Guatemala, it may be possible that she has some knowledge of tropical plants, perhaps even of primitive medicine ..." Andrew LaMarche suggested somberly and then stopped as Bo's green eyes turned pine-dark at his words.

"Why would Chac want to poison Acito?" she demanded. "She adores that baby. She even wrote a song for him. And what, exactly, do you mean by 'primitive'? Surely not the thousand herbal remedies drug companies are scrambling to document and produce synthetically?" Bo rummaged in her purse for a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke in an eloquent column over her right shoulder.

"My sister, Elizabeth, quite smoking a couple of years ago," LaMarche mentioned to a cement bowl of pink lantana on the table. "She said it was like having to learn to talk all over again."

"Please give your sister my regards when you speak to her," Bo muttered, letting the cigarette hang from the corner of her mouth in a manner reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart. A trench coat, she realized, would be a big help.

"Actually, I'll be seeing her on Monday," he said, inspecting immaculate, buffed nails. "I'm flying down to Louisiana to be an expert witness in a New Orleans case. Lafayette's only a short drive from there. I thought you might like to join me."

"I have a job, Andy. That precludes almost all impromptu jet-setting. And why would you want me to go, anyway?"

"To meet my family." His smile was a cross between a sort of mannered lechery and something deeper. "I'd like you to meet my sister and her husband, and their children."

The desire in his eyes created an instant movie in Bo's brain. A balconied New Orleans hotel room with plush furniture, magnolia petals falling slowly through warm, moist air. A single blues sax echoing in narrow streets while on the bed ... She could run by Victoria's Secret over the weekend and pick up something tantalizing yet demure. Something to match the magnolias, whatever in hell color magnolias were.

Bo felt a flush escaping her turtleneck and rising to stain her cheeks, if not her freckles, which would now be splatters of beige putty. Her hand around the now empty coffee cup was trembling.

The hell with demure, Bradley. Demure is not what you have in mind here. By the way, what do you have in mind here?

"Perhaps this is somewhat premature," he offered.

"No," Bo answered thoughtfully. "Not exactly."

Accustomed to occasional manic episodes with their predictable sexual surges, Bo assessed her feeling for Andrew LaMarche and found it to be something slightly different. The usual compelling inclination was there, trailed by a cloud that seemed full of lightning and half-lit corridors. The unknown. But so what? This was just something that happened. A gift from a universe probably created in the same yearning away from aloneness.

"I can't go to visit your family, Andy," Bo began, "and I'm not going to marry you, but I do have an idea."

"Bo, I want to have a life with you, not just—"

"I'm only talking about tonight, Andy. I'm saying yes, let's do something tonight. I'd like to go down to Tijuana to see Chac's show, maybe talk to her about the legal hurdles ahead in getting Acito back. Will you go with me?"

Something in the atmosphere switched gears. In reversing their roles she'd seized the reins of a situation that had gone on for too long. If people wanted to make love, they should just do it and get it over with, Bo reasoned. And wasn't it the prerogative of the woman to set the terms of that experience?

Andrew LaMarche stood and shot his cuffs. "I'll be happy to go, but do you really think it's wise?"

"Absolutely," Bo said, crushing her cigarette in the Styrofoam coffee cup before throwing the whole mess into the trash. "And now I've got work to do. I'll just check in on Acito before going back to the office." She waved the violet nosegay. "See you tonight."

"Oui," Andrew LaMarche said, reverting to the language of his Cajun childhood as he invariably did when under stress.

Bo found Acito untrammeled by IV lines, happily banging on a Fisher-Price drum in the fourth-floor playroom. He shared a playpen with a black baby girl whose exquisitely cornrowed and beaded hair, Bo assessed with admiration, must have taken somebody hours to do. Acito ignored his companion, focusing exclusively on his drum.

"You cad." Bo knelt and smiled through the pen's mesh side. "You're going to tell her nothing matters but your music, right?"

"Dogwuggg," Acito said as Bo stood and gathered him into her arms. "Wugggeee."

"Dogwood is woody." Bo nodded, hugging him.

His companion immediately dropped to her diapered rump and began banging on the drum with both hands. Acito turned in Bo's arms to watch, and a glassine string of saliva fell from a pool at the corner of his mouth.

"Still teething, I see," she said with approval. "You're doing a fine job."

In profile his classic Maya nose seemed more pronounced. Bo imagined him in quetzal feathers and embroidered loincloth, standing atop a limestone pyramid in some jungle as yet unscathed by Spanish invaders. And maybe he'd have that flattened forehead Eva said the ancient Maya created by binding infants' skulls between boards. A desirable deformity that made the child godlike.

Any deformity, Eva said, was considered a blessing by the ancient Maya. A cleft palate or clubfoot, an extra finger or crossed eyes—any departure from the physical norm was evidence of the gods' favor. Bo placed the baby back in the pen, hoping no hidden virus was creating its own deformity within his cells. The HIV test results wouldn't be back until Monday.

Instead of going straight back to the office, Bo turned onto San Diego's central artery, the old Cabrillo Highway, and grinned. Taking charge of the Andrew LaMarche problem entailed certain responsibilities.

In five minutes she was in the artsy, upscale little community called Hillcrest, home to coffeehouses, restaurants, counterculture music emporiums, several specialty bookstores, and a shop catering to the sexually active.

"I'm looking for something conservative," she told the young man behind an impressive display of condoms. "Maybe a pinstripe, or a foulard pattern. Nothing splashy."

"Wow," the boy answered. "I don't know. We've got, you know, your basics. Stars and stripes. Rainbow, of course. A glow-in-the-dark green. And this new one—a Navajo blanket design. That's our best-seller right now. But you know these novelty ones are just for show, don't you? Guys'll wear one of these over the real one. Kind of a layered look."

"I think not," Bo said, trying to imagine Andrew's likely response to a layered look. "Just one will have to do."

"We have a Japanese model that's very popular—incredibly thin and embossed with tiny white roses, but as strong as the heavier ones."

The embossed roses sounded intriguing. Bo was certain she could find something in rose-embroidered silk to match.

"I'll take three," she decided, and tucked the parcel in her purse.

On the way back to the office she found Radio Romantico on the dial, and listened to both "Unchained Melody" and an old Dolly Parton hit redone in Spanish. What this wholesale piracy of dated music might mean, Bo couldn't guess. But it was fun to sing along.

"Es, can you tell me why Mexican studios are recutting every top ten hit from 1955 on in Spanish?" she asked when she returned.

Estrella looked, Bo thought, like death in a biscuit tin. Bo's grandmother had frequently used the phrase to describe pale, gaunt people. It fit Estrella perfectly.

"Who knows?" Estrella answered. Unspoken was the codicil, "... and who cares?"

Bo had not seen Estrella at work before in less than full makeup. She had also never seen Estrella at work in jeans and a faded sweater. Time for a different approach.