Turtle Baby (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Three)

by Abigail Padgett

  "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.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Red Road

  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.

  "And I haven't thought through the issue of ethnicity," Bo went on. "He's a Maya Indian, but don't the Indian Child Welfare rules only apply to tribes in the U.S.? And even though his mother lived in Mexico, she wasn't Mexican, she was from Guatemala, and the presumed father is a U.S. citizen. And she was married to him. That would make Acito a citizen on two counts. So what kind of foster home is appropriate?"

  As Bo had expected, Madge grabbed the four-pound Department of Social Services Procedures Manual from its place of prominence on her desk, and knit her brow. "Let me check on this," she said, nodding. "We can probably cover our bases with a Hispanic home, but the Indian thing's touchy. I'll have to check with Legal. Don't do anything yet. And keep trying to find that father."

  In the strategic war that comprised their working relationship, Bo thought as she headed into her own office, Madge Aldenhoven had just lost a skirmish. Not much, but enough to allow Bo to think about the enormity of her responsibility to Acito, whose future now lay in her hands.

  An argument that he was Native American would take him out of San Diego County's supervision, and place him with one of the local tribes. In the event that his father could not be found, Acito would automatically remain in the care of the Indian Child Welfare Council until his eighteenth birthday or until his adoption by an Indian family. But, Bo pondered while rifling through her phone messages, would Chac want

  that for Acito? Had she come all the way from Guatemala and married an American so that her baby would grow up on a reservation?

  You have no idea what Chac would have wanted, Bradley. Just try to keep your dismally elitist opinions out of it. Be objective.

  Finding Acito's father would eliminate the need for any official decisions regarding the baby's future. Bo looked at her "due diligence" documentation, and sighed. Dewayne Singleton, whoever he was, did not appear anxious to be found. An escaped convict with a bizarre criminal record Bo suspected wasn't criminal at all.

  "How many of you picked up on the 'Jean Baptiste' business?" she asked the faces on her bulletin board. "Anybody here ever been tempted to find a cure in the Bible? Maybe tried eating locusts and honey like John the Baptist? Didn't work, did it? But where else could you turn? There was no lithium in your time, no Clozapine, no Prozac, Zoloft, or Paxil. No Thorazine, no Haldol, no Tegretol, or Imipramine, even. Nothing to harness your chemical demons. If you'd tried Bible bugs for medication, it would have made sense. But this guy has better options. Why would he be thinking like that?"

  The face of Virginia Woolf stared out from between Cole Porter and Mark Twain. "We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others," her words from The Moment and Other Essays echoed in Bo's brain.

  "So true," Bo nodded to the writer who had at the end waded into a deep stream, her pockets full of stones. "But I need to know if I'm right. I need to know if Dewayne Singleton's crazy."

  Estrella's entrance caused a draft of air from the hall that rustled the pictures above Bo's desk. Tchaikovsky and Edna St. Vincent Millay appeared to nod vigorously.

  "Stop talking to the dead and start figuring out who killed Chac," Estrella said. "I've been thinking. Chris Joe seems the most likely candidate, but we can't overlook other possibilities. What do we know about her manager, this Munson Terrell? And wasn't there a woman with him? Who's she?"

  "And the bartender," Bo added. "After all, he made the drinks. The woman was probably Terrell's wife or whatever. And the bartender's name is Jorge, I think. When I went there the first time on Wednesday, he seemed nervous. Terrell was asking where Chac was, and Jorge wasn't telling him, but he told me. He seemed afraid of Terrell."

  "It's pronounced 'Hor-hay,' " Estrella grinned. "So how can we talk to this Jorge without Terrell knowing he's a suspect?"

  Bo nudged off her shoes under the desk and searched for a rubber band with which to corral her hair. "He isn't a suspect," she said into a drawer containing pens, pushpins, a stapler, a staple remover, Post-its in five colors, at least eight hundred paper clips, and no rubber bands. "Nobody's a suspect in any real sense, because there's no police investigation. Do you have a rubber band?"

  Estrella tossed one to Bo. "You need a haircut," she noted. "So what do we do?"

  "Jorge doesn't speak much English." Bo smiled pointedly at her friend. "Didn't I hear you say you needed a velvet painting of Elvis when he weighed less than a refrigerator? You could just run down to T.J. ..."

  "I'll do it, Bo, but it's not the Mexican people who buy that junk, you know. They just make it for American tourists who have bad taste. Lots of American tourists with lots of bad taste."

  Bo cringed. "Sorry," she said, snapping the rubber band around a wad of hair at the base of her neck. "Guess I just don't want to deal with much of anything about that border. Es ..." She turned to face a woman whose name had been Sanchez before Henry Benedict joined her life. "What's going to happen down there, with NAFTA and everything? What's going to happen to the Yaqui Indians and all the refugees like Chac, pouring into Mexico from Guatemala and El Salvador and Nicaragua? Are we going to turn Mexico into one huge border town, catering to our sleaziest inclinations?"

  "You think I can answer that because my grandparents were born there and I speak Spanish?" Estrella answered, wide-eyed. "And no matter what happens to people like Chac in the future, it can't be any worse than what's really happened to Chac right now! We can't save Mexico from its future, but we can make sure somebody doesn't get away with murder in Mexico this week. Comprende?"

  "Si." Bo smiled across the little office and a cultural gap Estrella had just bridged with her heartfelt pragmatism. "I just wish
we knew how we were going to do that—"

  The muffled thud of the phone interrupted Bo's train of thought.

  "Child Protective Services, Bo Bradley speaking," she answered.

  "Hey Bo," Rombo Perry's voice greeted her fondly, "I hear Martin's trying to talk you into ballet classes. You can practice pas de deux after dinner on Sunday, if you'd like. How about it? Would you and Andrew like to join us for something high-carb, low-fat at about ..."

  Someone was talking in the background. Bo couldn't quite make out the words, but the soft male voice sounded agitated. Not surprising, given Rombo's place of employment. County Psychiatric was the last safe haven left for thousands whose faulty brain chemistry brought them to the attention of the police. One of these obviously wanted to talk to his social worker.

  "Sure. I'll be with you in just a moment," Rombo said to the man. "At about six, Bo. Martin's experimenting with an orange salsa and—"

  "The Angel Jabril," said the voice in the background. "Y'all don' know, but the curse of Allah ..."

  "I need to talk with a client," Rombo told Bo. "Could you call me back about Sunday?"

  "Wait a minute, Rom," Bo said, clutching the phone and staring into the wild eyes of Victor Hugo glaring down from the bulletin board above. "Who's the guy talking about Allah?"

  "A client, Bo. You know we observe confidentiality, and—"

  "Rom, there was somebody in Tijuana last night, in the hallway of a bar where the mother of my client was murdered. Somebody yelling about Allah and a curse. I can't believe it, but what if this is that guy?"

  From the muffled exchange Bo could hear, it was clear that Rombo Perry had covered the phone with his hand. But even though the conversation was unintelligible, the cadences of speech were distinct. Rombo's Chicago accent with its Midwestern, rapid twang. And the other man, a drawl, broad vowels, blurred consonants. As if the edges of his speech had been worn away, leaving what sounded like a spoken song. Southern. Like the voices Bo had heard in the morning's calls to Louisiana.

  "Rom," she spoke loudly enough to be heard over the ongoing conversation, "is the man you're talking to named Dewayne Singleton? If he is, he's the father of a baby on my caseload. A baby who's orphaned and will be freed for adoption if I can't find the father. Just tell me no if that's not his name, okay? You won't be violating confidentiality that way."

  An intake of breath and then a sigh told Bo everything she needed to know before Rombo Perry answered. "Oh, boy," he breathed. "This is too weird."

  "I'm coming right over there, Rom," Bo told the social worker. "Will they let me in?"

  "Your agency can subpoena our records, Bo, but you can't just barge into a locked facility to interview one of our clients. This man is in no condition to—"

  "Oh come on, Rom, remember whom you're talking to. I've been in psychiatric hospitals." Bo noticed that her hand was shaking as she unconsciously drew a series of barred windows on the margin of her desk calendar. "Nobody's going to be more compassionate, gentle, and nonintrusive. But this is really important, Rom. There's an eight-month-old baby boy with nobody..."

  "Come on over," Rombo Perry acceded. "I'll talk with you about this, but I can't guarantee you access to my client."

  Bo grabbed Acito's case file and her keys, her breath shallow.

  "I'm afraid we've got another suspect," she told Estrella. "Acito's father is in County Psychiatric, yelling about Allah."

  Estrella's mouth formed an O. "Madre de dios," she whispered.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rattling House

  From the front, San Diego County's new psychiatric hospital looked like what it had once been, the corporate headquarters of a grocery chain. Nestled in an old industrial development between two freeways, the sprawling one-story building could have been a Kmart. No resemblance to Bedlam whatsoever.

  "Pretty nice," Bo told the building as she minced her way through the expansive parking lot on pinched feet. The black pumps might be terrific for sitting around in board rooms, she acknowledged, but for treks across large cement parking lots sneakers were without peer.

  "Uh, you're talking to the hospital," a soft male voice mentioned from a sidewalk leading to tinted glass doors. The speaker, whose long gray hair and beard shone in the sunlight, was holding a clipboard.

  "Yeah," Bo admitted, blushing. "It looks so pleasant."

  The eyes gazing from under bushy eyebrows took Bo's measure in one sweeping glance. "It is," the man said, straightening a flowered tie worn over a blue satin bowling shirt. "But as you may know, this is only a short-term facility. Many who need a long-term supportive environment have nowhere to go after they leave here. Are you registered to vote in San Diego County?" The man's eyes, reflecting the blue in his shirt, were sparkling.

  Bo had been waylaid for worse causes by fake ministers at airports in several major cities. "Yes," she said, "but—"

  "Would you sign a petition urging the county council to allocate funds for subacute psychiatric care in—"

  "Hold it!" Bo grinned. "Let me read this thing, and I'll sign it. You're preaching to the choir here. I know all about it."

  "You'll forgive me," he said after Bo's signature was on the petition, "but have you just spent twenty years smoking cigarettes and watching daytime television in a board-and-care where nobody talks to you except when they pass out the pills?"

  "No, I haven't," Bo answered, entertaining the thought that her presence here might just possibly be ill-advised.

  "Then you don't know all about it. I do."

  "But you're not watching TV in a board-and-care now," she pointed out. "What happened?"

  "Technology's finally catching up to schizophrenia," the man beamed. "Cops picked me up talking to the candy machine at the bus station three months ago, brought me here. New medication, new man. I can't hold down a job yet, but I can help the folks who're still lost out there, right?"

  "Absolutely!" Bo grinned, entertaining the thought that she ought to come down here more often. Maybe volunteer or something. Except she'd have to marry Andrew LaMarche and quit her job in order to have the time. Probably not the best idea. "Keep up the good work." She waved and walked under the hospital's freshly painted entrance overhang.

  At the guards' cage Bo showed her CPS badge and was given a red plastic visitor's tag before the locked door was opened to a paved courtyard where Rombo Perry balanced a twirling volleyball on his index finger. The courtyard, she noted with approval, was immaculate and equipped with the same modern cement tables and benches that graced St. Mary's Hospital's outdoor dining area. Rombo seemed, as usual, to just have come from posing for a fitness magazine. The deltoid muscles beneath his polo shirt moved like silk as he tossed the ball in the air and spun for an impressive catch.

  "How do you keep in such good shape?" Bo asked. "I'd kill to have just one award-winning muscle."

  "How about going to Martin's ballet class?" Rombo suggested. "That'd do it."

  "Rom, get real. Can you see me in a tutu?"

  "Martin was worried about that, too. He has his limits, it seems. But the class wears sweats, Bo. Only the more daring have moved up to the dashing tights-and-legwarmers look. And they don't really dance; they just work out at the barre. From Martin's progress, I'd estimate about a year and a half before they attempt the opening steps to 'Itsy-Bitsy Spider.' He's sure you'll love it."

  "I don't have time." Bo sighed. "This job eats my life, and I like to work on my paintings in what's left. So what's going on with Dewayne Singleton? Are you going to let me interview him?"

  "He's in B Unit," Rombo said, nodding toward a glass wall behind which the traditional central nurses' station was topped by an attractive tiered skylight. "You can talk to him, but he's pretty psychotic, Bo. No upsetting topics, okay?"

  Of course not. Just a few questions about poisons and murder. Bradley, this is unconscionable.

  Rombo unlocked the B Unit door and escorted Bo into a carpeted lobby area. "In here," he indicated an airy dayroom
containing upholstered chairs and the ubiquitous TV, which was not on. There was nobody in the dayroom but a wiry black man looking out the far window. Bo noticed without wanting to that all the pictures adorning the walls were fastened in place with screws through the frames, and glazed with sheet plastic in place of glass. But the pictures were nice. Her own hospitalizations, she remembered, had not included pictures.

  "In where?" she asked.

  "Right there. That's Mr. Singleton."

  Bo touched Rombo's arm. "No. It can't be. The baby's father isn't black. I'm sure of it."

  "Well, Mr. Singleton obviously is. If you don't want to talk to him, I'll take him on back to his group."

  "No, I need to interview him."

  Bo took Acito's case file from her briefcase and walked across the pale teal green carpeting with trepidation. This couldn't be the Little Turtle's dad, or could it?

  "Mr. Singleton?" she said, and then reeled with recognition as the man turned swiftly to face her. The look in his eyes was one Bo had seen in mirrors. A fanatic certainty frustrated by the inability of everyone else to comprehend it. "I'm Bo Bradley, an investigator from Child Protective Services. I'd like to talk to you about—"

  "Beau a man's name," Dewayne Singleton interrupted. From his demeanor it was clear that he felt pride in having recognized an obvious attempt at deception. "Why you want to call yourself that?"

  At about five foot seven, he looked taller than that in new Levi's and a plaid shirt with sleeves rolled halfway up his chocolate-colored arms. A healing cut on his forehead was the only flaw on an otherwise attractive, clean-shaven face.

  "In the South it is usually a man's name," she agreed. There was no point in elaborate explanation. "Mr. Singleton, did you marry a woman named Maria Elena Bolon in Mexico?"

  "Yeah, that the ho." He scowled. "Got to warn the woman, that woman my wife. Man's job to shield his woman under a wing, even if she a ho." He nodded his head with conviction.