CHAPTER NINE
I walked toward the Greenspan house, almost but not quite able to ignore the Sunday morning pageant of early spring, the hyacinths tall and dignified, the tulips green nodules not yet in bloom but poised on the brink of glorious color, the forsythia reaching golden-yellow arms into the blue sky. I wanted to enjoy it, to revel in spring poetry.
Spring rides no horses down the hill
But comes on foot, a goose-girl still.
But spring had lost its magic; all I could see was the tiny little life who had been passed from mother to mother—and now was God knew where. One mother was dead; I was on my way to see the other.
If Ellie didn’t shoot me on sight, it would be a miracle.
I hadn’t counted on the press. Stupid of me. I’d somehow assumed I could just walk up to the door of the former stable and ring the bell. Instead I confronted a gauntlet of eager reporters, print and television, trying to get quotes.
“Are you a friend of the Greenspans?” a petite blonde asked, shoving a microphone to within an inch of my mouth. “Have you known them a long time?”
“How is Mrs. Greenspan reacting to the loss of her baby?” an Asian woman asked, photogenic concern etched on her smooth young face.
But the dangerous one was a disheveled print reporter who’d studied in the School of Jimmy Breslin. He sidled up to me while the media types signaled their cameramen and said out of the side of his mouth, “Ms. Jameson, can we talk when you leave here?”
“I don’t think so,” I muttered back.
He raised an eyebrow and regarded me with amusement. “Oh, I do think so, Counselor. Because if you don’t agree to talk to me, I tell these bozos who you are. And then—” He waved an arm at the phalanx of mannequin telejournalists and their camera people. The gesture took in the news vans parked at the entrance to the mews, and even embraced the two cops guarding the cul-de-sac, cigarettes cupped under their hands, as well as the little knot of rubberneckers who stood gossiping and drinking coffee from paper cups.
“I see what you mean,” I replied. Half of being a lawyer is knowing what to concede and when. “Do you know the neighborhood?”
The reporter lifted a shoulder in what might have been an assenting shrug. “Hey, I’m a Brooklyn boy,” he bragged.
“Yeah, by way of Buffalo,” I shot back. Enough people mistaked my Ohio accent for Buffalo that it was worth a try just to wipe the smug smirk off the guy’s face.
“Howdja know?”
My turn to shrug. “We could sit on the Promenade when I get out of here,” I offered. “You buy me a coffee and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
And you’ll tell me a few things in return, I thought but didn’t say aloud. The other half of being a good lawyer is cross-examining people without letting them know you’re doing it.
I rang the bell. I couldn’t believe my own nerve in standing here expecting either Josh or Ellie to give me the time of day, but I had to try convincing them I hadn’t known what Amber was going to do with their baby. And, apropos of surreptitious cross-examinations, I had to find out more about Josh’s Friday night meeting with Amber at the mall.
The door was opened by a woman who looked to be in her mid-seventies. She stooped; she raised her head awkwardly to meet my eyes. “Yes?” she asked in a voice like a raven’s.
“Uh … I’m—That is, Ellie knows me,” I said, trying to find the right words. “I wonder if I might come in, Mrs. Greenspan.” I’d been lucky with the reporter from Buffalo; maybe my guess that this was Josh’s mother would hit the mark as well.
It didn’t. “It’s Miss” she corrected. “I’m Joshua’s aunt. Norma Ruditz,” she continued, holding out a lank hand dotted with liver spots. I took it and shook my way into the foyer.
“Come in and sit,” Miss Ruditz invited. Her voice held the memory of thousands of cigarettes smoked over the years. She walked stiffly toward the palomino couch, her out-thrust head preceding her at an awkward angle. I reminded myself to pick up some calcium tablets at the health food store before heading home.
As the aunt settled herself, I decided on my approach. I hadn’t said I was a friend, but the elderly lady seemed to assume as much. Could I find out a little more about Josh’s movements from her before Ellie showed up and had me thrown out?
“It must be awful for Josh and Ellie,” I began. Short on originality, but perhaps enough to open a floodgate or two.
Norma Ruditz shook her head slowly from side to side. “I warned them,” she said. “I warned them about adopting a baby from some shiksa they never met before.” Her bird-of-prey eyes raked me up and down.
“You’re not Jewish,” she pronounced.
I shook my head.
“Then you should pardon the expression. It’s nothing personal, you understand. Just that people should be with their own, deal with their own, marry their own. Have their own babies and if they can’t, at least adopt from their own.” She spoke with a singsong cadence that wasn’t exactly a Yiddish accent but was instead the natural result of having grown up in a home where Yiddish was the primary language.
If every Jewish birth mother took the same view, she’d refuse to give a baby to a man married to Ellie. It came to me slowly that this was Aunt Norma’s point—that the tragedy began for her the day Josh married out of his faith, and that in her mind the rest followed inevitably.
It was also clear that she had no idea Josh was claiming paternity.
What a comfort she must be to Ellie in her hour of need. Maybe I wouldn’t get thrown out, after all. A fellow shiksa might be a welcome relief to a woman shut up with Norma’s parochial views on mixed marriage.
“I told him to go to the Jewish Family Services. My friend Mitzi’s oldest went there eighteen years ago, they gave her the sweetest little girl. Such a talent, she graduates this June third in her class at—”
“What are you doing here?” a shrill voice interrupted. I turned. Ellie Greenspan stood in the doorway to the bedroom, her hands on her hips, her face a mask of accusation.
“How dare you come here after what you did?” She took a stride forward, bursting into the living room with all the force and fury of a tornado. She strode up to where I sat on the couch and stood over me in an attitude of menace. I wondered for a moment if her slender-fingered hand would reach out and slap me across the face.
For a strange, long moment I waited for it, almost wanted it.
I looked up into Ellie’s sunken eyes, challenging her. “What did I do, Mrs. Greenspan?” I said with deliberate calm.
It was a calculated risk. I figured enough people, from Josh to the media to Marla, were busy commiserating with her, urging her to explore and express her pain, that a dose of cool reason might penetrate her shield of anger.
“You stole my baby and gave him to that woman to sell.” Her voice cracked on the last word. She turned and walked away with a swiftness that startled me.
That was what I’d thought at two o’clock in the morning, but it wasn’t true. I summoned the strength to say so to Ellie’s face.
“No, I didn’t. I presented legal arguments to a judge who made a ruling. Neither I nor Judge Feinberg had reason to believe Amber intended to do anything except give the baby a good home.”
“That’s not what Marla says,” Ellie countered. She sat in the armchair with the turquoise sand-painting print and folded her legs under her like a child.
“Marla,” I echoed. I asked the question I should have put to one of the Greenspans on Wednesday in court. “Did you or Josh authorize Marla to offer three thousand dollars to—”
“We did not,” Ellie cut in, her voice a laser cutting through glass. “That’s exactly what Marla said you’d say. She warned us about you, said you’d try to put everything on her. Well, it was your client who sold my baby, who met Josh at the mall Friday night, who—”
“Did he give her money?” I jumped in with both feet; this was what I’d come for: to hear every horrible detail of h
ow my client spent her last hours on earth.
“We told the police everything,” Ellie replied. Her voice had a dead sound. Indignation was giving way to exhaustion. I suspected she was talking to me only because throwing me out would be too much trouble. And maybe having someone on hand to blame took some of the pain away, if only for a little while.
I pressed my luck. “Then it won’t matter if you tell me, too.”
She sighed. “I suppose not. Yes, Josh went there Friday night. She called him Thursday, the day after we were in court, and said she’d changed her mind again. That we could have Adam back if we paid her ten thousand dollars.”
“And you agreed.”
“We had to,” Ellie replied in her breathy voice. “She said we’d never see him again, that she’d take him across state lines to a—Let me remember her exact words.” Ellie closed her eyes and leaned her head back on the chair. Her hair hadn’t been washed; it hung limp and lank. Her face was without makeup; she looked old and worn. “She said if we didn’t pay, she’d give our son to a family who really cared about him. Cared enough to pay, she meant.”
She sighed, opened her eyes, and sat up again. “Josh met Amber at the mall at eight-thirty. She was with Scott, but she did all the talking, according to Josh. Scott said to meet him at the entrance to Macy’s, so Josh walked all the way through the mall. Then when he got there,” she went on, her tone as bitter as unsweetened chocolate, “there was no Amber and no baby. Scott jumped out and hit him, then demanded the money. But Josh had already paid Amber, so he had no money. Scott hit him some more, then ran away.”
“Scott worked at Macy’s,” I commented. “Maybe he knew some kind of back way through the store.”
“It was near the loading dock,” Ellie confirmed, but her voice had lost interest.
I continued my train of thought. “So the last time Josh saw Amber, she was alive.”
“Josh didn’t kill Amber,” Ellie said. It was a flat statement of fact, not an indignant protest. “If he had,” she began, then stopped herself with a hard clamp of her jaw.
I finished the thought for her. “If he had, he’d have taken the baby with him. He would never have killed her while there was a chance of getting Adam back.”
She flashed me a wintry smile. “I’m glad you understand everything, Ms. Jameson,” she said.
Ellie’s eyes glazed, and she stared at a spot on the wall about ten inches to the left of my face. “After the court ruling,” she began, “I was devastated. I’d lost the baby and found out my husband had an affair with that little slut, all in one day. Even though Marla filed an appeal, things didn’t look promising. I kept trying to tell myself we could start again, find another baby, but it was no good.”
She turned her head and gazed directly into my eyes, pulling me into her pain. “One minute he was there, next to my heart, and the next minute he was gone. Can you understand that? Gone—as if he’d died in my arms. As if he’d fallen into the river and drowned. As if he’d been kidnapped. Gone. I couldn’t think about another baby—all I could do was think about Adam.”
She stared unblinking at my face. “Even now, I keep hoping—Do you know what I hope, more than anything?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t sure I could stand finding out.
“I hope with all my heart that Amber sold my baby. I hope somebody paid good money for him, and took him home, and that he’s warm and dry and fed. Can you believe it?” She shook her head.
“Three days ago I hoped he’d go to college. Now my best hope is that he was bought and paid for and isn’t lying in the swamp waiting for hikers to stumble on.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but what the hell was there to say?
When I left the Greenspan house, the gaggle of reporters crowded the door, pushing microphones into my face and shouting the same stupid questions I’d already refused to answer.
“How is Mrs. Greenspan holding up?”
“Did Ellie know Amber was going to sell the baby?”
“Can you comment on the rumor that Josh Greenspan offered money to the birth mother to—”
My print reporter friend leaned against the brick wall, a wry smile on his young face. He held his head at a cocky angle that demanded a tilted fedora for the full effect. I was willing to bet he’d seen The Paper at least ten times. He lolled by the wall as though nothing on earth could move him from the spot, but as soon as I cleared the gauntlet, he’d find a way to follow me, to make sure I walked along Remsen to the Promenade and didn’t cut along home through the narrow brownstoned streets of the Heights.
I had already decided I could get more from him than he could from me, so I strolled along the tree-lined block past the Brooklyn Bar Association building, past the stately town houses with the seven-foot windows lined with old lace curtains, past huge oak doors with leaded glass and chandeliers winking through the tall windows. I pictured carriages pulling up in front of these grand houses, men in frock coats opening the doors for ladies in long skirts and tiny slippers. I pictured the men scraping mud off their boots on the wrought-iron scrapers that were part of every home’s stoop railing. I pictured a gaslit world of charm and manners, an Edith Wharton world, an age of innocence without baby-sellers or—
Who was I kidding? Babies were born into abject poverty, sold into brothels, farmed out to foster mothers who starved them in that gilded age that knew evil as plainly as we know it today. If the Greenspans had lived then, the same tabloid journalists would have surrounded their house, working for Hearst or Pulitzer.
On that note, I turned around and faced the man whose footsteps had dogged mine for the past half block.
“What’s your name, anyway?”
“Artie Bloom,” he replied, pushing an aggressive hand in the direction of my midriff. I allowed mine to be given a jerky shake as he named as his employer the least obnoxious of New York’s three tabloid papers. We walked in silence toward the river. Already I could see the tip of Manhattan’s skyline from the middle of Remsen Street; it grew larger as we approached the Promenade.
The Promenade—or, more accurately, the Esplanade, a name few know and fewer actually use—that straddles the edge of Brooklyn Heights runs along the top of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. As a result, there’s always a hum of traffic underfoot. But this doesn’t stop the place from being a haven for mothers with strollers, dog walkers, elderly people sunning themselves on benches, young lovers embracing at the railing.
I motioned Artie to a bench near the circle that ended the Promenade. He sat and looked at me expectantly. “Well, did you get anything out of her?”
“Nice subtle approach, Bloom,” I commented.
He shrugged. “You don’t ask, you don’t get.”
I had to laugh. “Yeah, you’re right. And, no, I don’t think I got much out of her. Just what the cops already knew, that her husband went to meet Amber that night to make a deal for the baby.”
Artie Bloom leaned forward eagerly. He had an open face with freckles and sandy-red hair that frizzed like Art Garfunkel’s—an all-American boy, the cereal-commercial kid all grown up.
“Did you know she was going to sell the baby?”
“Bloom, I thought you were smarter than the blow-drys back there or I wouldn’t have agreed to talk to you. Think about it: would I risk my license to do a thing like that? And if I had, would I tell you about it?”
He pulled back a moment and gave me an assessing stare. “No to the second,” he agreed. “I don’t know you well enough to answer the first.”
“I see. And how many other reporters have given that question a little thought?”
“Gotta admit, I’m not big on sharing with my fellow journalists,” the boy reporter replied with a rueful shake of his head. “Never did work and play well with others.”
“But nobody’s printed anything accusing me of assisting Amber in the deals.”
“Hey, nobody wants to get sued,” he shot back. “Every lead has to be confirmed by at lea
st two sources before we can print what we—”
“So all you have so far is Marla Hennessey’s word that I helped Amber set things up.”
Now the look on the young face was one of amused admiration. “Good guess, Counselor.”
“It’s no guess,” I answered. “I’ve known Marla since law school. She doesn’t like losing, and she’s not above hinting that the game was rigged when she does lose.”
“If you didn’t know what your client was going to do, you must feel guilty as hell.”
“You don’t know the half of it, Bloom. But one part of our little deal is that I am not going to tell you how guilty I feel. I am not going to see my name in print any more than it has to be. I’m going to tell you things on deep background. Very deep background. No attribution.”
“Jeez,” he said, letting out his breath in a disgusted whoosh. “Has everybody your age seen All the President’s Men?”
I laughed. “Damn right. Now, what do you know that I don’t?”
He flipped open his steno pad and made a show of consulting his shorthand scribbles. “For one thing, Josh wasn’t the only mark,” he said. “There was a meeting three days earlier with a Staten Island couple who wanted a baby, and she was dealing long-distance with a couple in Kansas City and another in—”
“Amber’s parents live in Kansas City,” I cut in, my voice quickening with excitement. “Maybe she was going to—”
He laughed. It was somewhere between a laugh of derision and a boyish crow of triumph. “Parents! Your client was an orphan, Counselor. A Mount Loretto girl.”
“Mount Loretto,” I echoed. I was stunned but not surprised. It was just one more lie in what was becoming an intricate web of deception. “Isn’t that on Staten Island?”
“Yeah,” the boy reporter replied. “It’s on Prince’s Bay, near Tottenville. A big old Victorian orphanage, straight out of Dickens.”
“So the presents from Kansas City were from other adoptive parents,” I mused aloud. The clashing tastes represented by Amber’s room at the group home began to make sense. The Santa Fe decor came from Ellie Greenspan, the Care Bears from the Midwest.
Fresh Kills Page 11