The Baby Squad

by Andrew Neiderman

  From the expressions on the faces of the personnel, it was as though they had all been greeted that morning by a marquee that announced Preston’s promotion to partner or even as though they had advance notice before he himself had been told. His secretary, Rose Walters, stepped forward and presented him with the first gold-bordered business card that read “Cauthers, Myerson, Boswell, and Ross.”

  “Congratulations, Mr. Ross,” she said, her eyes beaming like candlelit crystals, “from all of us.”

  He gazed at the card and smiled at Rose, who at fifty-four was often like a mother to him. His own parents had died four years ago in a tragic train wreck, one of the nation’s worst in twenty years since the advent of the bullet train. They were on their way back from their Florida residence when the laser guidance system went down. His mother had always been terrified of air travel, no matter what the safety records. How ironic, he often thought. Maybe it was true that when the clock ran out, it didn’t matter where you were or what you did about it.

  “Thank you, Rose. Thank you, everyone.”

  They surged forward to shake his hand, embrace him, and pat him on the back.

  He felt as if he had just won the New York City Marathon. It took him nearly ten full minutes to get to his office. For a while, he just sat there staring out at the view of the expanding community. Northwest of the city was the new airport with the most modern controller equipment and four landing strips capable of handling international flights, the state-of-the-art heliport, and the terminal that took passengers on the bullet train into Manhattan. Around the airport, business had bloomed, including restaurants, hotels, and one of the three licensed Las Vegas–style casinos. Even in bright daylight, its never-ending neon stream of enticements could be seen.

  The whole picture reminded him of a documentary he had seen about the inside of a beehive with its queen being serviced by lines and lines of drones. Everything that had been constructed around that airport depended on it for its life.

  Off to the right were the fifteen thousand acres of the hydroponic farm, producing enough vegetables for the entire Hudson Valley, as well as exporting to the north and west of the state, New York City, and Long Island. The community was a bed of activity, with its environmentally acceptable automobiles moving in a constant metallic stream over the new double-level highways and wide state roads.

  I’m a partner, he told himself. I’m a full partner.

  He felt gigantic, growing, exploding with new power and promise. This was the most prestigious and influential law firm in the tricounty area. They had taken over the entire thirty-eighth floor, and Bertram was negotiating to seize space on the thirty-seventh as well. To be part of all that expansion and development, to be a major player in it, was quite an accomplishment in so short a time. He was truly the wunderkind of the local legal community.

  There was a knock on his door, and a moment later, Ross entered carrying a basket of fruits, nuts, and candies the secretarial staff had bought him.

  “Everyone is just so proud of you, Mr. Ross,” Rose said when he displayed his surprise. “If I heard it once, I heard it twenty times. They all feel like they’re moving up the ladder with you.”

  “Thank everyone for me, Rose. Really. This is very nice. But,” he said, turning to his desk, “I’d better get my nose in my work before I let my head get too big.”

  She nodded. “Mr. Cauthers sent over the files for the parentals and asked you to give it priority.”

  “Oh?”

  She nodded at the table at his left. He hadn’t even noticed the pile of folders when he entered. His mind was still in the clouds.

  Parentals were submitted by couples to apply for children. Cauthers, Myerson, Boswell, and now Ross was a firm that specialized in representing such applicants before the review boards. They had become so well known and trusted that once they accepted a case, it was almost sure to be approved. He had assisted in at least forty by now and knew the drill. What it amounted to was sticking your nose into the most private aspects of a married couple’s lives and going over every detail of their existence with a fine-tooth comb so there would be no surprises at the hearing. By the time he or one of his partners went before the review board, they could practically recite their clients’ DNA.

  There were a number of instances where a red flag would raise a concern and result in them rejecting the case. The couple either had to try another firm, which didn’t hold much hope, reapply when the problem was fixed, or give up. That often led to a divorce, and then the family relations division of Cauthers, Myerson, Boswell, and now Ross would be involved on a different level.

  He knew of at least two instances of this that had resulted in violence, one spouse murdering another because of a rejection. Juries were reluctant to sentence the perpetrator to death and even balked at life without parole, especially female jurors if the defendant was a woman. It was almost an unwritten justification for homicide or, at least, quite understandable. In the eyes of many, when a married adult was unfit for one substantial reason or another to be a parent, he or she was unfit to live. Once again, Cauthers, Myerson, Boswell, and now Ross were involved in their criminal division. They had never lost a client to either the death penalty or life without parole. A number were already out of prison and remarried, some even reapplying for children.

  Preston moved the pile to his desk after clearing it off and opened the first case. Someone else who was just promoted to a partnership would revel in it all day, go to lunch early, drink and celebrate and get less than zilch done, but not him, not the wunderkind. He’d work harder today than he had worked yesterday, and tomorrow he would work harder yet.

  He was well into his third hour when he heard a soft knock and looked up to see Bertram Cauthers entering his office.

  “How are you doing, Preston?”

  “Good. I think I have four positives already,” he said, patting the pile. Positives resulted in a larger fee for the firm.

  “Fine. I’m afraid I have some terrible news. It’s going to bring a great deal of scandalous attention to your little community, Preston.”

  “What?” He sat back in anticipation.

  “That girl, Lois Marlowe, the one with the prenatal vitamins…”

  “Yes?”

  “Dead.”

  “What?”

  “It looks like a homicide. McCalester called me ten minutes ago. A detective from the state CID is coming down.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Looks bad. There’ll be a great deal of attention on Sandburg with everyone conjecturing that there is an Abnormal who might just have done the dark deed. Hattie Scranton is calling her squad together. Everything is going to be accelerated. The general consensus is it’s some aberration or clandestine Abnormal. More motive to cover up disclosure, perhaps.”

  Preston shook his head. “I can’t imagine who,” he said.

  “Maybe you should talk to Natalie about some of your friends to see if she has any suspicions. I wouldn’t want either of you associating with such a person. All we need is to have something like that picked up. Imagine what it would do to our credibility as the premier legal analyzers of parentals.”

  “Yes, I understand,” Preston said, shaking his head. “McCalester had no leads?”

  “He’s not equipped to run a murder investigation, but with the state boys swooping in, I don’t expect it will be long. Anyway, I’m sure it will pass in time. It’s just a bad black mark on your town. I know how fond Natalie is of your home, but I wouldn’t look down on a move. In due time, of course. You don’t want to do anything to draw any more attention to the situation.”

  “Absolutely,” Preston said.

  Bertram smiled. “Damn sorry to have something unpleasant occur on your special day, Preston. Why couldn’t the murderer have waited one more day, huh? Don’t let it put a damper on your celebrations. Take your wife out, enjoy, and celebrate.”

  He nodded at Preston’s files.

  “Sorry to interrupt. Ta
lk to you at lunch,” he added, and left the office.

  Preston turned the next page of the file he was reading, but his eyes slid off the page, and he stared for a moment at the closed door. Then he called Natalie on the video phone. It rang and rang, and then the machine voice answered and gave directions to forward the call to a cellular. He pushed the numbers and listened as the cellular answering machine came on.

  “Where are you? Why aren’t you working on your new novel this morning?” he asked first, unable to hide his annoyance. He was always annoyed when he couldn’t reach her with all these methods of communication tying people together. “There’s been a terrible incident in town. If you haven’t heard yet, call me.”

  He thought about the Normans and remembered they were scheduled to go to dinner to celebrate with them. Bertram Cauthers had made him paranoid, however, and suspicious of everyone. Judy and Bob Norman were into their parental years. They, too, hadn’t yet applied.

  Why not?

  What if it were Judy?

  Natalie’s best friend.

  “Damn it, Natalie,” he muttered after the phone clicked off. “Where the hell are you?”

  Natalie had permitted Judy Norman to pull her away from her Wordsmith and her new novel for an early lunch at the Cliff House in Spring Glen. The cozy little restaurant had a patio under glass that was built on a promontory overlooking the Sandburg Creek. Today it would be absolutely breathtaking, Judy had said.

  “Besides, who wants to celebrate with our husbands only? Let’s have our own celebration, just the two of us. They’ll just get into talking politics and bore the panties off us.”

  Natalie couldn’t help but smile. Judy made her feel good. She was always so bubbly and up, eschewing depression, ducking and bobbing around and under people who were “containers of negative energy.” She assured Natalie that these people only brought you down, ruined your own karma.

  Her husband, Bob, wasn’t as outgoing, but he was generally a very calm, centered man who rarely complained. What she liked about the Normans was that they never argued in public, never brought their personal problems to a dinner date or any other event, and were always very considerate of each other and the people they were with. Contentiousness, dark moods, little annoyances didn’t dominate. They had a sweet, youthful aura about them.

  Bob Norman was a good-looking six-foot-one-inch man with a trim build and a graceful manner. He had inherited his father’s very successful furniture business, but he had brought his own creativity and energy to it and expanded it threefold. They had one of the nicest homes in the community, built on a knoll with a lake on the property.

  Judy was thinner and smaller than Natalie. At times she looked almost childlike, but she had beautiful almond eyes, rich dark brown hair that she kept trimmed at her collarbone, and a smile that simply made everyone feel better about themselves. It flashed on and off like a digital camera light. Before she and Bob married, she had worked for an accounting firm and was getting her own CPA license, but after they courted and married, she went to work at Norman’s Elegant Furnishings and ran the accounting department there instead. Natalie always felt they resembled a team more than she and Preston did.

  On at least two different occasions over the past month or so, Natalie was on the verge of revealing her condition to Judy. She was, after all, her best friend and probably, next to Preston, the only other living soul she trusted in this community.

  Judy never seemed as fanatical as most of her other female acquaintances when it came to Abnormals and natural birth. The worst she had ever said about it was she couldn’t imagine herself carrying a nine-pound infant in her small frame.

  “I’d be bent over like an old lady,” she claimed, and laughed.

  They had other topics that interested them, anyway. Judy was a good reader, and Natalie used her as a proofreader, looking for her reaction first when she had completed one of her novels.

  “Sometimes, often,” she said, her eyes twinkling like Christmas lights and that little dimple flashing in her left cheek, “I wish I lived back in the 1950s. You make it sound so wonderful in your stories, Natalie. It’s like that old movie we rented, A Summer Place, remember? There’s a palpable sense of the passion we don’t get in our films today. Everything’s so…perfect. Understand?”

  “Exactly,” Natalie had said, happy someone else could feel what she often felt about romance and love and marriage. Maybe that was why she had come so close to revealing her condition to Judy. Today, she thought, she would.

  “You look so thoughtful,” Judy said, reading her instantly when they had sat at the table in the Cliff House. “Almost as if you’re worried sick about something, Natalie. Why would anyone whose husband just got the promotion yours got be worried about anything?”

  The waiter interrupted them with a rendition of the specials. As soon as he left, Natalie turned back to Judy.

  “I’m not worried about Preston’s promotion as such,” she began. “You’re right. It’s wonderful, everything he’s ever wanted.”

  “You both wanted,” Judy corrected.

  “Yes, that’s true. Both of us.”

  “You once told me, Natalie, and you wrote it in Heart Strings, that for a marriage to work, the husband cannot be happy unless his wife is happy, and vice versa, right?”

  “You’re right. Of course, yes. I really believe that,” Natalie said. Why shouldn’t she? In general, wasn’t her marriage really predicated on that premise?

  She had met Preston in what she considered an old-fashioned, romantic way. Having a dull time at a mixer that involved her school, NYU, and Preston’s school, Columbia Law. She had been bored from the get-go and detoured herself onto a patio. She had a great view of the New York City skyline with airplane lights blinking against the stars and a magnificent full moon.

  Most of the young women her age had opted for the Matchmaker, a computer system that analyzed thousands and thousands of people and spit out the perfect match-ups. Whether it was just good public relations or what, the statistical results supported a nearly 98 percent success ratio and, more important perhaps, bragged about a 100 percent success record when it came to the couples applying for parental licenses and children.

  Once, many, many years ago, parents actually matched up their children and arranged marriages. Supposedly, that had a significant success ratio, too, but nothing like The Cupid computer. Slipping through the rather large cracks was anything that even remotely suggested what she would characterize as romance. If you were told the person who had been scheduled to meet you was your best chance for a perfect and successful relationship, why worry about candlelight and music? It was a fait accompli almost before the first words had even been spoken.

  This had always bothered her more than it did her girlfriends. Divorce had become such a fear because it had dramatic ramifications on chances to have a second marriage and children. Wasn’t it better to have the best possible setup? Love was really a fantasy, anyway, right?

  Wrong, Natalie thought with every part of her being. She actually was sickened by all the devices used soon after the beginning of the twenty-first century to bring young people together: dating games, television shows, restaurants that had special singles evenings putting eligibles at the same tables, Internet companies that promised compatibility—all of it contrived, plotted, moving people about as if they were all…predictable.

  That was it, she thought. That was what made romance possible—spontaneity, unpredictability, surprise. She had always been an excellent English student, a good writer, and a rabid reader, especially of old books now treated as curiosities, as if America were practically primitive only twenty-five years ago.

  “They say that when the moon is full, people are more passionate,” she had heard a man say from behind her. She turned and looked into Preston’s face for the first time, the glow of moonlight electrifying his eyes. “Think that’s so?” he asked with that wry smile of his that teased and taunted. He was truly a flirt from
the start, and she loved every minute of it.

  “So do I,” Natalie heard Judy say. It interrupted her musing.

  “What?”

  “I believe what you wrote about marriage, what makes it successful.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “You’re in such deep thought, Natalie. I just know…oh, isn’t that Carol Saxon?”

  Natalie turned as a dark brunette entered the restaurant accompanied by a rather officious-looking bald man in a blue suit. The waiter led them to the table next to theirs, which deflated Natalie instantly. Carol Saxon was one of Hattie Scranton’s baby squad members, a busybody who enjoyed invading other people’s privacy. She had the facial features to fit such a personality: a long, pointed nose; two large, protruding eyes; and a harsh, sharp chin that looked like something she could use to open gift boxes. Like some of the other women in the squad, she had a manly demeanor about her, too, Natalie thought. She walked with her shoulders back, strutting, glaring, always looking angry.

  “Hi, Carol,” Judy said as they drew closer. Judy could be friends with a cockroach, Natalie thought, or at least be pleasant to one.

  Carol nodded. The bald gentleman pulled out her chair for her and then sat.

  Judy turned and twitched her nose as if to ask, What’s that terrible stink? Natalie stifled a laugh.

  “This is Martin Borrick,” they heard Carol announce, and both turned back surprised. “Mr. Borrick is a deputy reviewer on the county’s baby acquisition board and a state investigator for subsidy assignments.”