Turtle Baby (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Three)

by Abigail Padgett

  Down the hall, past the glaring statue, outside. The car started immediately and drove itself away from Munson Terrell's dead body. Several blocks away Bo saw a brightly lit convenience store, and seized control of the vehicle.

  "I have to call the police," she told it. "That's what one does in these circumstances."

  The hand that dialed 911 from a pay phone next to an ice machine was shaking, but Bo managed to convey the gist of the situation to an operator trained to remain calm. A dead man. The address. Bo's name. Her address. Her phone number.

  "You may phone me at my work number tomorrow," she agreed politely in a voice that sounded like Julia Child's. "No, I will not wait at the address of the deceased for the arrival of the paramedics. Yes, I'm sure Mr. Terrell is dead."

  One more call, this time to Eva Broussard, gave Bo sufficient stability to get home.

  "I will meet you at your apartment in an hour," the unruffled voice told Bo as if they were talking about dinner before the symphony. "I will give you a mild sedative, phone Estrella and Andrew, and spend the night. We will not discuss this until tomorrow, if then. Agreed?"

  "Agreed," Bo replied gratefully.

  She hoped the paramedics got there before Kee Terrell got home at 9:30. She hoped Kee wouldn't have to smell the almonds.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Laughing Falcon

  Bo awoke at an uncharacteristically early hour and found Eva Broussard already drinking coffee on the deck. The marine layer, still dense, sent dimensionless fog-shapes from the sea. Bo watched something that looked like a thin frying pan float diagonally through Eva before dissipating near the deck doors.

  "Chickens can swim in Louisiana," she told her psychiatrist, whose bare, tanned feet were propped on the deck rail. "Fly, too. So I guess an Australian murderer might take himself out, leaving what must be the worst suicide note ever written."

  She held her left forearm across Eva's field of vision.

  "Did you read this? It's awful. Not what you'd expect from a sophisticated international type."

  Eva stood and stretched, the sleeves of her oversize black sweater sliding down to reveal muscular arms adorned with narrow woven leather bracelets. With a bronze finger she drew an Iroquois mask in the film of dew on the deck rail. The elongated face lacked a mouth. Eva's black eyes beneath cropped silver hair regarded Bo fondly.

  "This is the mask of confusion," she said. "It also teaches the way to defeat confusion. Would you like some coffee?"

  Bo smiled at the drawing. "You mean I should stop talking, achieve inner tranquility, that sort of thing? Sounds like fun. But I'm afraid the best I can do is find tranquil surroundings, Eva. My mind never shuts up. And right now it's going over and over what I saw last night. I should probably have closed his eyes, but they were ... they were dry ..."

  Eva sighed and wrapped an arm over Bo's shoulders, steering her inside.

  "Coins," Bo went on as Eva poured coffee. "My grandmother always talked about putting coins on the eyes of the dead, although my whole family's dead and I didn't see coins on any of their eyes—"

  "Yes," Eva interrupted. "Your parents and sister are dead and you've stumbled on to the dead body of a man you suspect was responsible for another grisly death you witnessed less than a week ago as well as the attempted murder of a baby, followed by the slaughter by police of a man who suffered the same disorder with which you must live. One might safely say that for a mind prone to emotional and symbolic excess, your situation is less than optimal. How are you going to deal with it?"

  Bo eyed the empty Golden Grahams box on her kitchen counter narrowly.

  "Go out to breakfast?" she suggested.

  "Excellent," her psychiatrist agreed. "And Bo? Wear a long-sleeved blouse. I don't want to read suicide notes over my omelette."

  Bo couldn't remember having eaten breakfast at six o'clock in the morning, ever. But the little Mexican restaurant on Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach was already populated with early risers when she and Eva jogged in, ruddy from the three-block sprint through patchy fog. Bo ordered huevos revueltos and grimaced at a fading wall mural from which a toreador glared proudly at a gaunt spider plant in an orange macrame sling. The restaurant smelled of cooking grease and old wood.

  “Huevos revueltos looks like it should translate as 'revolting eggs,' " Bo said, scowling at the toreador. "You know, Eva, Terrell's suicide pretty much closes this case. Ties it up in a clean little package. Yuppie idealist dies of self-loathing. Except I don't buy it. That suicide note's just too smarmy, and—"

  "Revueltos means 'scrambled,' and suicide notes aren't usually drafted for publication. What are you saying, Bo? That you don't think Terrell's death was a suicide?"

  Bo inhaled steam from her coffee cup. "I don't know him," she admitted. "But the picture Martin painted of Terrell during their workshop in the desert was scarcely that of a depressed man contemplating suicide. And I have trouble connecting this ..." She tapped her left arm under the sleeve of her navy sweatshirt. "... to a border-hopping Australian entrepreneur with a museum-quality home, a svelte, adoring wife, and an adoptive child on the way. It's possible that Terrell took himself out, Eva, but I find it hard to believe he wrote what I saw on the computer screen."

  "Let me see your arm again," Eva sighed as Bo obligingly pushed up her sleeve.

  "I agree that the choice of words is juvenile and affect-laden," she nodded after pondering Bo's outstretched arm. "But I never met the man and my sensitivity to English nuance is permanently compromised by the fact that I've spoken Canadian French since I was five years old. That's fifty-five years. Who do you think wrote the note?"

  "I don't know. Kee might have. She has an odd, childlike quality. Except that would implicate her in her husband's death, and Chac's, and the attempt on Acito. And that's the hitch. Kee would not have harmed a baby, especially an Indian baby. It's not possible. That rules her out, even if her apparent devotion to Terrell doesn't."

  "And ...?"

  "And so that leaves Chris Joe Gavin."

  Bo spooned a prodigious mound of fresh salsa atop the scrambled eggs placed before her by a waitress in gleaming orthodontic braces and a parochial school uniform.

  "Do you think the boy is responsible for Terrell's death, and the others?" Eva asked, attacking her chorizo sausage omelette.

  "I don't know what I think," Bo sighed. "And there's no way to prove anything. Chris Joe looks like the obvious culprit. An out-of-control adolescent male, jealous, resentful, bitter. But Chac's song, the folk tale in the last verse ... it seems to point to Terrell, so he probably did commit suicide. Bottom line, we're probably never going to know what really happened."

  "Can you live with that?" Eva asked.

  Bo grinned at a sprig of parsley adorning the refried beans on her plate. "I doubt it," she answered.

  Two hours later she arrived at work on time, wearing a pale yellow cotton-blend shirtwaist bought three years ago for the interview that landed her this job. The social worker costume. Wash-and-wear niceness. The dress did little to buffer Madge Aldenhoven's voice, now shrill with bureaucratic outrage.

  "The one case I could have transferred out today has just blown up!" she informed Bo, pacing in the tiny office as Estrella pretended to read a three-page, single-spaced directive from County Administration regarding reimbursement vouchers for repairs on county-owned office equipment. A copy of the directive had been in the mailbox of every county employee that morning. A small forest, Bo thought, had gone into yet another ton of paper that nobody would read. Madge seemed ready to perform acts of violence, a fact that only reinforced Bo's satisfaction in her choice of the idiot dress. No

  one would assault a kindly social worker in a buttercup yellow shirtwaist.

  "We should have sent this damned Indian baby over to Indian Child Welfare in the beginning," Madge went on. "Now we're going to be stuck with this case for months."

  More like years, Bo thought to herself, but merely said, "I thought you'd set Acito
up for a pre-adopt foster home. What happened?" In the foggy morning sunlight pouring weakly through their office window Madge looked like a puppet being walked up and down on invisible strings. The shadow twitching behind her seemed gnomelike and out-of-sorts.

  "The parents of that dead lunatic who was legally the baby's father phoned the hotline this morning from someplace in Louisiana. They left a message saying they can't take the baby right now, but they will under no circumstances release him for adoption. We're stuck."

  Bo wished the faces on her bulletin board, every one of them undoubtedly labeled "lunatic" by earlier versions of Madge Aldenhoven, could come to life if only for a moment. She particularly wished Walt Whitman would step down onto her desk and bellow the endless entirety of Song of Myself at Madge until she either got the message or locked herself permanently in her office.

  "And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to her own funeral ..." Bo recited, examining her nails and altering the gender of the possessive pronoun to fit the situation, "... drest in her shroud." The shroud part was particularly apt, she thought. Madge was wearing a blousy, belted shift of tan kettlecloth. Easily mistaken for a shroud in the wrong light.

  "I'm not in the mood for whatever it is that you're doing, Bo," the supervisor snapped. "And what happened to your arm?"

  At Eva's suggestion Bo had stuck a large butterfly Band-Aid over Munson Terrell's suicide note, which had proven resistant to removal. Outback Odyssey's promotional pens had apparently been filled with indelible ink.

  "Blood work," Bo sighed dramatically. "Isn't it amazing what modern medicine ..."

  "They don't draw blood from the front of your arm." Madge frowned.

  "Psychiatric blood tests are different," Bo lied, smiling at Charlie Parker and his saxophone above her desk. "You know, lunatic blood?"

  Estrella appeared to choke on a sip of coffee.

  Madge stopped pacing. "I'm sick of your nonsense, Bo. You'll get a new case within the hour, and I expect you to complete the investigation today. In the meantime I want a case plan for the Indian baby. Foster care says there aren't any long-term homes available right now. They're going to do a recruitment program sometime this year, but right now there's nothing. Try Indian Child Welfare. It may not be too late to let them take him."

  Bo spun her desk chair so the full impact of her social worker costume would not be lost on Madge. "What a mess," she said sympathetically as Estrella bit a half-moon out of her Styrofoam coffee cup. "Those grandparents sure botched things up. Too bad the placement he's in now is only certified for short-term. They seem to enjoy fostering, and might agree to keep him ..."

  "I'll have foster care reclassify them as long-term," Madge said. "What was their name?"

  "Uh, it begins with a D," Bo answered, pulling Acito's case file from the collection on her desk and feigning no memory of the distraught Dooleys. "Here it is—Dooley. David and Constanzia Dooley."

  Madge was at the door. "Can you convince them to keep the child until this legal difficulty with the grandparents is straightened out?"

  "I'll give it a try," Bo said brightly. "We need to get this case out of the way."

  When Madge had closed the door behind her Bo and Estrella mimed high-fives across the space where their supervisor had paced. The legal problem with the grandparents, with knowledgeable handling, could drag on for years. The State of Louisiana would accept jurisdiction over Acito, based on the Singletons' residence there. Then it would grant the State of California, County of San Diego, "courtesy supervision" of its ward, there being no money to transport him to Louisiana and no desire on the part of that state to assume the financial burden of his care. After a few years the courts would insist that permanent arrangements be made for the child, at which time the Dooleys' case for adoption would be insurmountable, particularly if the grandparents made it known that they wished the child to remain with the Dooleys.

  An archaic law designed to prevent "bastardy" had given Acito an appropriate home. A woman's legal husband, the law insisted, was legally the father of her children even if that were a physical impossibility. The law said that Dewayne Singleton, imprisoned in Louisiana, had nonetheless managed to father a child in Mexico. When the mother, and then Dewayne, died, Dewayne's parents became Acito's next-of-kin. They could, as had Chris Joe Gavin's mother, prevent Acito from being placed by San Diego County's Child Protective Services under the direction of San Diego County's Juvenile Court, for adoption.

  Bo sighed, and then phoned the Dooleys.

  "It isn't foolproof," she warned. "But it's the best I can do. Good luck."

  The Dooley's understood, they said, and then whooped with joy.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Ancient Word

  The new case Madge brought in fifteen minutes later was merely the last entry in a case file already thicker than the San Diego phone book. "Opiela," it said simply on the orange band where the names of children were usually written. The single word was enough.

  "Oh, no!" Bo winced. "Not again!"

  "Afraid so," Madge nodded, eyeing the case file with a disdain equal to Bo's. "This time a neighbor found one of them, the ten-year-old girl, sleeping in a ramada in his orange grove. The neighbor phoned police when the girl refused to go home, claiming her mother's boyfriend hangs around the house all day in his underwear, drunk."

  "Is she afraid he'll hurt her?"

  "No." Madge shook her head. "The girl says she's afraid she'll hurt him. Says it's all she can do to keep from pouring hot coffee into his shorts. Hearing this, the police, of course, took her into custody. I'm afraid the protective issue this time may center on the boyfriend, not the child."

  "I'll go talk to Marjorie," Bo told her supervisor. "Get her to throw the drunk out. It doesn't sound petitionable."

  Marjorie Opiela and her eight children had been on the receiving end of Child Protective Services for a decade, to no avail. Robustly unconcerned with twentieth-century standards for diet, cleanliness, and school attendance, the Opielas continued to thrive a hair's-breadth short of the cloudy line beyond which the term "child abuse" might legally be employed.

  One or another of the children was referred to CPS with astonishing regularity by doctors, teachers, truant officers, neighbors, and police for problems ranging from head lice to petty theft. Nearly every worker in the system had at some point tried to convince Marjorie Opiela to clean her crumbling barn of a house occasionally, and to force her children to wear shoes. The worker who'd decorously left a packet of birth control information on Marjorie’s kitchen table had been run off with a broken canoe paddle. Bo regarded the case as an opportunity to ponder Munson Terrell's death, since there was documentably no point in devoting thought to the colorful, recalcitrant Opielas.

  "Interview the girl at the receiving home and then go on up to Leucadia and talk to the mother," Madge said. "If there's no grounds for a petition, we'll close it and you'll have another one this afternoon."

  "Great," Bo replied without enthusiasm. At least the trip to the northern coastal community of Leucadia would be pleasant. It would take her along the beaches, past Torrey Pines State Reserve, near Andrew's condo. She wondered what she was going to do about Andrew, and decided to table the conflict until later. The decision was rendered moot when the phone's muted bell thumped seconds later.

  "Bo," the familiar voice began carefully, "I was pleased when Eva called last night to tell me what had happened. I mean I was pleased that she was with you. It must have been upsetting, finding Terrell's body. But I'm sure you're relieved that the mystery is resolved. I thought you might like to meet me for lunch to celebrate. I mean to celebrate the resolution of the case, not Terrell's death. Ah, mon dieu. I'm not doing well, am I?"

  Bo smiled and drew a series of collar pins on the margin of her desk calendar. "We do need to talk, Andy, but I've got to run up to Leucadia on a new case. I can't meet you for lunch. How about dinner? You know, I'm not really convinced about Terrell's death. I want you to
take a look at the suicide note. I've got it on my arm—"

  "You've got it on your arm?" Andrew LaMarche's voice attempted to suggest that suicide-note-laden arms were only marginally out of the ordinary.

  "I copied the note on my arm; there wasn't any paper. But I don't think Terrell wrote it. Why don't you meet me for dinner at—"

  "I've got a better idea. I made some peanut soup last night, and an oyster rarebit, as well as a pan of coffee fudge. The soup and rarebit are in the freezer, but you could stop by on your way back from Leucadia and ..."

  Bo recognized the throbbing of her Achilles' heel, and gave in to it with abandon. "Coffee fudge! I'll be there. But you must have been up half the night cooking. How come?"

  "I was, um, concerned that you, ah, well, I was worried about you, Bo."

  "We'll need a salad," Bo replied. "And a long talk about how I hate it when people worry about me. Nothing, however, could keep me from trying coffee fudge."

  "There's a spare key inside the doormat. Just pull up the C in 'WELCOME.' It's fastened with Velcro. The key's right there, and you can leave the soup and rarebit on the counter to thaw."

  "Okay, but wouldn't it be quicker just to microwave it?"

  "A microwave thaw overcooks everything except the center." A hint of self-congratulation surfaced in his voice. "I rather hoped you'd see the effort I expended in sublimating my need to race to your side and hover last night. Cooking, I think, will do nicely until the harpsichord kit arrives. I do love you, Bo."

  "Cooking is brilliant," she agreed. "And tonight we'll talk about the lengths to which I'll go in a lifelong struggle for autonomy. In the meantime Estrella's going to be in the office all day in case Chris Joe Gavin calls."

  "What?"

  "Tell you about it later. Gotta run."

  As Bo placed the receiver in its cradle the Alfred Stieglitz photo of Georgia O'Keeffe pinned to her bulletin board seemed to smile knowingly. Enduring relationships with men tended to be an uphill climb for independent women, the smile suggested, especially independent women riding mood swings that demanded frequent solitude. But it was always fun to try.