Fresh Kills

by Carolyn Wheat

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  Fresh Kills

  A Cass Jameson Mystery

  Carolyn Wheat

  For Mom, my first editor

  For Dad, my first opposing counsel

  PROLOGUE

  Little Fresh Kill. The name rolled around in my head as I trudged through the long grass, eyes intent on the boggy, soggy ground underfoot. I thought about what we were looking for and shivered.

  I was part of an army of searchers. Men in red checked hunting jackets, cops in blue windbreakers, teenaged boys in leather jackets. I was one of a few women, plodding behind the men’s longer strides, feeling like a camp follower.

  Staten Island is full of kills, narrow inlets that were once the despair of captains maneuvering wooden ships around the island toward the bustling harbor of Manhattan. The word comes from the Dutch, meaning creek. Nothing sinister. Or so the old Staten Islander who walked next to me said. Now the tall ships were gone, and the swampland we trudged along lay between the Con Edison plant and the sanitation landfill.

  Ecological types have taken to calling places like these “wetlands”—and the name was apt; I was up to my ankles in chilly water hidden beneath tall reeds—but to me it was still a swamp. Full of secrets. Capable of sucking people into the marshy ground, never to be seen again. An obstacle course in brown and gray.

  It was a great place to dump a body.

  It was getting late: dark and cold and raw. The calendar said April; this particular evening would have felt at home in November. My denim jacket, even with a wool sweater underneath, wasn’t warm enough. My feet, in sneakers, had been soaked for hours. But it wasn’t just the cold that froze my heart.

  Every muscle ached as I plodded through the spongy, overgrown swamp, pushing aside brown, feather-topped grass. But I couldn’t stop, couldn’t knock off and call it a night the way some of the other searchers were beginning to do.

  In the distance I heard the frantic barking of police dogs. The cop next to me broke into a run. I stumbled as I tried keeping pace with him, damp cold stabbing my lungs. As I ran on frozen feet toward whatever the dogs had discovered, my shins cried out in pain with each ragged step. Reeds whipped my face; I no longer bothered to push them out of the way before rushing toward the place where the dogs bayed.

  As I tripped over hillocks of sphagnum moss, my sneakers sinking into the boggy ground, I prayed to the God I didn’t believe in that the dogs had found a dead rabbit.

  They hadn’t.

  Little Fresh Kill clung to its dead tenaciously, moss and weeds grasping at the girl’s body as though pulling her into a watery underworld.

  It was my fault. I stood on the bank watching the Emergency Services cops lowering ropes, knowing I should leave and knowing that I couldn’t. That my punishment was to watch my client being pulled from the swamp like a discarded boot.

  She was so small. Not a child, not yet the adult she’d tried to be. Long, blonde hair weed-tangled, face bleached white. A Staten Island Ophelia, with foam coming out of her open mouth. Her hands were clenched; had she grasped in death at the reeds, trying to pull herself out of the watery grave?

  Around me the voices of the civilian volunteers who’d combed the area for the last several hours began to swell with speculation.

  “Poor kid must’ve drowned herself,” a man with a pipe in his mouth said, shaking his head.

  “But what was she doing here?” a heavyset woman in an Army fatigue jacket wanted to know. “I thought she was staying at that place in New Springville.”

  “What place?”

  “Home for unwed mothers. Didn’t you hear the story on the news?” Fatigue Jacket’s eager face proclaimed her ready to provide an update for anyone who’d missed the story.

  “Didn’t know there were any unwed mothers anymore,” the pipe smoker replied, “what with abortion and all.”

  I moved away from the crowd, away from the cops trying in vain to keep the volunteers from turning into ghoulish rubberneckers. Turned toward—what? The stand of misshapen dwarf trees? The willow in the distance, head bowed as if weeping? The acres of swamp turned from wasteland into a wildlife refuge big enough to hide a hundred bodies?

  The sun was setting, blood-red spilling into all the watery lanes of the kills. The sky was streaked with improbable colors, creams and lilacs and pinks as artificial-looking as a paint-by-number landscape. I kept walking, head bent, legs moving like pistons, aching like hell.

  She was dead. Amber was dead.

  I wasn’t feeling too good myself.

  The truth stabbed through me like the ice-cold swamp air: It was my fault. It was all my fault.

  I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Squishing footsteps behind me made me turn, fear jumping into my throat. “What the hell—”

  It was Detective Aronson. The last guy in the world I wanted to see.

  He grabbed my arm. It hurt, but he wasn’t going to know that.

  “Where do you think you’re going, Ms. Jameson?” The voice was as smooth as the hand was rough. Aronson could play good cop/bad cop all by himself.

  “I don’t know. I—” I grabbed a deep breath and looked the detective in the eye. I had to know the worst. “Any sign of the baby?” I asked, my voice a dry croak.

  “You hoping for a perfect score, Counselor? Two for two?”

  “That’s not fair,” I protested. Yet even as I spoke, I felt a perverse comfort in the fact that Aronson knew it was my fault. At least I wasn’t on a self-blame trip for nothing.

  “All I did was represent her in court. I’m not responsible for what she—” My voice broke. I turned away. If I wasn’t responsible, who was?

  Detective Milt Aronson released my arm and sighed. “No sign of the baby. We’re going to keep looking.”

  I nodded. When I was able to speak again, I said, “I’ll go back with the others and help search.”

  The look he gave me was ninety percent contempt and ten percent pity. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”

  He turned on his heel and walked back toward the clumps of searchers.

  I marched like a zombie toward the place where I’d left the car. Once I tripped over a hillock of moss and sank to my knees in cold water. It was hard getting up; I felt as if I deserved to lie in the stinking, freezing muck that had claimed Amber’s life.

  I’d known girls like Amber existed. I’d known there were people in the world who sold babies, others who bought them, and lawyers who did the deals.

  I just hadn’t known I’d be one of them.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was number eighty-four on the calendar, a one-case lawyer with nothing to do but wait. If I’d been in Criminal, I’d have had other courtrooms to cover, clients to greet, calendars to answer. But here on the Civil side, I was a stranger, as out of place as a Wall Street corporado in Brooklyn night court.

  Other lawyers milled around, calling out names, looking for clients or opponents. “Anyone here on Thompson v. Powell?” a stoop-shouldered man with a bald spot asked everyone who came through the door.

  “Who’s here for the Transit Authority?” a woman in a size-four black suit asked in a tiny voice.

  “Who’d admit working for the Transit Authority?” the lawyer sitting next to me said under his breath. He was a young, upwardly mobile type with a Land’s End briefcase and a supercilious smile. Clearly the Brooklyn Supreme Court motion part was a comedown in his professional career.

  It was oddly soothing, the lazily expectant atmosphere of the motion part. There was bustle; there were brisk clerks hauling tons of official paper; there were t
he Service “girls” who answered motions for absent attorneys. There were deals in the hallways, slaps on the back. Typical lawyer stuff. With one difference from my daily fare in criminal court. No one was here because she’d drowned her children in three feet of scalding water.

  “Anyone here a notary?” The voice was unmistakable, though it had been a while since I’d heard it. East Bronx Irish, loud enough to cut through the din of legal chitchat but not so loud as to render the speaker unladylike.

  Marla Hennessey. Sometime friend, sometime rival, sometime bitch. Which of her multiple personalities would be out today?

  Before Marla got her answer, the bailiff called out, “All rise,” and the judge took the bench. Sixty lawyers stood, then flopped back down on the benches. Somehow, during the thirty seconds we were up, Marla substituted herself for the Land’s End briefcase.

  “No, I’m not a notary,” I whispered, as the calendar call began. “How are you? Haven’t seen you in ages,” I went on, doing the Greeting Old Law School Friend number as though there had never been any bad blood between us.

  “Can you come out in the hall for a minute?” Marla’s green eyes had a calculating look I knew all too well.

  “I don’t dare miss the first call,” I whispered back. “I’ll be in this damned courtroom for the rest of my natural life as it is.”

  As the clerk droned out the names on the calendar, lawyers jumped up and said, “Ready For,” “Ready in Op,” or as an occasional variation on a theme, “For the Motion.”

  “Cass, don’t bullshit me.” Marla was one of the few people I knew who could shout in a whisper. “I checked the calendar. You’re number eighty-four. It’ll take two minutes to explain, you say yes or no. The worst thing that happens is you’re second-called.”

  Second call is the civil court equivalent of the Chinese water torture. It meant waiting until at least noon. But such was the force of Marla’s personality—or the depth of my curiosity—that I followed her into the hall.

  Once there, she lit a cigarette and began waving it in her hand, her huge hammered-silver bracelet riding up and down on her wrist.

  She’d put on weight. She’d colored and cut her hair, wearing it in a platinum pageboy that fitted her head like a cap. Her clothes were silver and mauve, flowing garments that gave an illusion of soft femininity. As I listened, I reminded myself that it was only an illusion. Marla was as armored as if her clothes and hair were made of stainless steel.

  I was so busy studying her that it took me a minute to realize she was talking about adoptions. About me handling an adoption, to be exact. I shook my head and started to protest.

  “I don’t know anything about—”

  “Cass, I’m telling you. It’s no big deal.” My neck stiffened. Whatever Marla Hennessey was selling this time, I was determined not to buy. Everything in life that was hard for me—getting through law school, finding and then losing boyfriends, starting my own law practice—came under Marla’s heading of “no big deal.”

  “I’ve never handled an adoption before.” I said it flatly, as though that were the only problem.

  “Adoptions are easy, Cass. A piece of cake.” Life to Marla was just one plate of angel food after another.

  “It’s exactly the same as a closing,” Marla went on, her nicotine voice rasping, “except that instead of a three-bedroom co-op in Park Slope, you’re transferring title to a bouncing baby boy.”

  Why were baby boys always bouncing? And when had Marla learned to reduce human life to “transferring title”?

  “Jesus, Marla, that’s a humane way of putting it.”

  “Well, that’s all adoption is. Legally speaking.”

  Legally speaking. Our first day at NYU Law School came back to me in living color. The Torts professor handed around a yellow legal pad for us to sign in on. By the time it got to me, it contained more three-named individuals than a library of Victorian novels. Good old Sam the hippie had transformed himself into Samuel Lionel Ripnick. Ed Franklin, who still had acne on his chin, blossomed into E. Harrison Franklin III. And Marla listed herself as Marla Hennessey Schomberg, thus raising from the emotional dead her despised ex-husband. Anything for those elegant three names that spelled “Partner” to white-shoe law firms.

  Except me. Cass Jameson, I wrote in bold black strokes, forgoing the middle name I’ve never liked anyway. Integrity above all. I was very young.

  The funny thing was, nearly twenty years later, the three-piece suits with the three-name handles were doing pretty well, while I was always behind in the mortgage payments on my brownstone office-home. I doubted whether repainting the office window to read “Cassandra Louise Jameson” would help, but …

  Could adoptions be all that difficult?

  Could they be harder than standing before a judge and representing a woman who’d listened too long to the devils in her head and plunged two toddlers and an infant into near-boiling water?

  What would it be like to handle a case with a real, live, unhurt baby? A baby with no cigarette burns on its legs, a baby who smiled at a kind world? Rojean Glover’s children had never known a kind world, even before their fatal bath-time.

  “Tell me how easy,” I said with a sigh. Resisting Marla Hennessey in full thrust had never been easy. And part of me, a very strong part, wanted to atone for Rojean.

  How can you represent those people?

  It’s a question I’ve been answering in one form or another for all the years I’ve practiced criminal law. How can you represent a rapist? What if you know for a fact your client is guilty? What if your client told you point-blank she was going to lie on the witness stand?

  The last one is easy; you get off the case. Guilty is one thing, perjury another. Try explaining that fine ethical distinction at a cocktail party.

  If you’re going to practice in the criminal courts, you work out a philosophy that lets you answer the other questions. Answers like: I don’t know he’s guilty; I wasn’t there, was I? Answers like: The Constitution requires a fair trial, with lawyers on both sides doing their best; by defending my client, guilty or not, I maintain the integrity of the criminal justice system.

  Good answers. Most of the time.

  But they didn’t work when it came to Rojean.

  I didn’t know, I told myself.

  How could I know?

  You should have known. The answer pounded at me, woke me up at two A.M. You should have known. Her Family Court history was right there; she’d been charged with abuse four times. Each time, the judge returned the kids after a few months of foster care. And then the cycle of poverty, frustration, and ignorance would start again. Tonetta had a broken arm; she must have fallen out of her high chair. Todd cut his head open when he stumbled against the radiator. Trudine fractured her leg on the monkey bars in the playground. Always an answer, always an excuse.

  I represented Rojean Glover on a charge of endangering the welfare of her children by leaving them alone for two days while she struggled to get back on public assistance so she could feed them. Six-year-old Tonetta, the oldest, was left in charge. When a neighbor called the Bureau of Child Welfare, the children were found hungry, dirty, and scared, and were taken away—“put in protective custody,” in the bureaucratese of BCW. Shoved into foster homes, where at least they had more to eat than one box of Cap’n Crunch cereal with no milk.

  It was a triumph of legal representation. I commissioned my own social work study to compete with the official probation report and convinced the judge that if Rojean went into a special parenting program and saw a counselor once a week, she could learn the parenting skills she’d never gotten from her own junkie mother. Not that Rojean was an addict—she’d seen enough of drugs in her childhood to keep her clean—but she’d never seen a healthy family, so how could she possibly raise one?

  How can you represent those people?

  By understanding them. By seeing them as people, not monsters, no matter what they’ve done. By finding the whole story, th
e one that appears between the lines of the official records. By listening instead of talking.

  So why, two months into her counseling program, did Rojean listen to the voices that told her the kids were possessed by the devil and had to be cleansed in a scalding bath so they could enter the kingdom of heaven?

  And why didn’t I know it was going to happen? Why didn’t I see the schizophrenia as well as the poverty and ignorance? Why didn’t I prevent it?

  The newspapers blamed the judge. A few mentioned my name in the last paragraph of the story. But the truth was that if a less conscientious lawyer had represented Rojean, those kids would be alive. In a foster home, but alive.

  How can you represent those people?

  I didn’t have any more good answers.

  I came back to attention, realizing I’d drifted away while Marla outlined the ridiculous ease with which I could handle an adoption.

  “I’ve got a horny white teenager about to pup. I’ve also got a desperate older couple who’d like to have a kid before they get their first Social Security check. So they’ve decided to bypass the adoption agency crap. They’re paying the girl’s medical expenses and a reasonable legal fee.”

  “Where do I come in?” Marla wasn’t the only lawyer taking a smoke break. The air was blue and thick; I wanted this conversation over.

  “Judge Feinberg—a real pain in the ass—says the girl needs her own lawyer. That it’s a conflict of interest for me to represent both the kid and the parents. As though every lawyer in the city hasn’t done it that way since God was a teenager. So,” she went on, exhaling a stream of smoke that matched her silver silk, “I need someone to meet with the girl, get her consent, and file the papers in court. Easy, no?”

  “Sounds easy enough,” I conceded. I thought back to the one or two things I knew about adoptions. “What if the girl changes her mind? Doesn’t she have—what, thirty days?”

  “God, Cass.” A drag on another cigarette was exhaled in an elaborate sigh. “Talk about looking gift horses in the mouth. The last time we had lunch all you could talk about was that broad who killed her babies, and now you want to open Pandora’s box on this adoption before you even take the case. Trust me, this girl’s not changing her mind.”