Fresh Kills

by Carolyn Wheat

  No force on earth except one. The door opened and a big man walked up to the counter. A big man with the face of a basset hound and the disgusted expression of a cop who sees civilians meddling in police business.

  Detective Milt Aronson walked over to the table and said, “What are you two doing here?”

  I hoped to hell Artie wasn’t going to say, “Having pizza.”

  Instead he gazed up at the big detective with the eagerness of a kid greeting a favorite uncle. “Are you going to arrest Mr. Califana?” he asked.

  Jerry jumped up from his chair and looked around wildly for a place to hide.

  “You want a press release, call DCPI,” Aronson retorted, naming by initials the police information office. “Just get the hell out of here.”

  Artie looked at me, as though expecting me to weigh in with a speech about the rights of the press under the First Amendment, but I was happy to accept the reprieve. I took a few bills out of my wallet, threw them on the table, and hustled Artie out the door, glad Aronson wasn’t going to grill us about how we happened to be there.

  On the way to his car, Artie turned and looked back toward ’At’s Amore. “Let’s wait a few minutes,” he said. “See if Aronson takes Califana out in handcuffs.”

  “If he killed Amber, where’s the baby?” I said, heartlessly throwing rain on his parade. “He’s the one person in the country who doesn’t want Adam; if for some reason he decided after all these years to kill Amber on the exact same night she’s selling her new baby, which is a pretty farfetched coincidence, then what did he do with Adam?”

  Artie opened the door to his car and got in, then leaned over to unlock the passenger door for me. I jumped in beside him; within minutes the Artie Bloom Express was on its way back toward the mall.

  “You buy his story?” I asked as we sped along the expressway.

  “Makes a certain amount of sense,” Artie replied. “Amber’s ditching Scott and taking her baby out of state. She decides to get herself a nice going-away present from her ex. So she agrees to meet him at the Native Plant Center, only she never gets there because she’s busy getting killed.”

  “By someone who picks her up at the mall in a silver car very much like the one Jerry happens to own,” I finished, not bothering to hide my sarcasm. “His story won’t last five minutes once Aronson starts questioning him.”

  “I don’t know,” Artie said, shaking his head. “It’s not like I can’t see Jerry killing her, because I can. But would he kill her before he found out what she knew about his kid?”

  “You’re assuming there’s something to find out,” I countered. “What if Amber was just playing on his obsession, lying to him about the baby being alive? If he found out that she was jerking him around, he’d kill her so fast—”

  Artie took his eyes off the road and locked them with mine. “Did he strike you as that good an actor, Counselor?”

  I remembered the look on Jerry’s face as he opened the lockbox that held the sacred talismans of his lost child. No, I decided, Artie was right. Jerry Califana believed with every cell of his being that his Laura was still alive. So if he killed Amber, it wasn’t because he’d come to see that she was lying about his child’s death. And he wouldn’t have killed her if there was the slightest chance she had information that would lead him to Laura.

  “You know, Scott may not be off the hook here,” I mused as we raced along the expressway.

  “How do you figure that?” Artie replied, giving me a sideways glance.

  “He jumps Josh only to find out that Amber already has the money,” I said. “So he runs for his car, hoping to find Amber and the baby waiting for him. Instead, he finds a car that won’t start and no Amber. And, more important, no money.”

  Artie nodded; I pressed my luck. “So he hops on the motorcycle and takes off. He knows Amber double-crossed him. She ditched him at the mall and disabled the car. So he tracks down Amber, kills her, and then races to my house pretending he’s looking for her when he knows damn well she’s already dead because he—”

  “Where’s the baby all this time?” Artie countered. “And what about the silver car? Does Jerry—or whoever Amber’s accomplice is—just stand there and let her get killed? And isn’t coming to your house to establish an alibi pretty sophisticated for a lump like Scott?”

  “Hell, Bloom, we know where the baby is,” I answered, my voice dropping. I didn’t want to say the words—didn’t want to think them—but the reality I’d been pushing away ever since Amber was found had to be faced.

  “In the swamp,” I said, lowering my eyes and trying not to form the picture in my mind’s eye. “Scott killed Amber and the baby, then tried to make it look like Amber successfully ditched him and left the state with Adam.”

  “Why would he destroy an asset worth at least ten thousand dollars?” Artie retorted. It was as cynical a reply as anyone could have made, and it cheered me no end.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “He never should have let her come here,” Mrs. Bonaventura said mournfully. She struck me as a woman who said most things mournfully; the entire world seemed not to live up to her expectations.

  Artie Bloom and I sat on identical chintz-covered chairs, placed with geometric precision across the room from the sofa. The group home seemed smaller and quieter this time; of course Marla wasn’t with me, filling the air with smoke and pacing up and down.

  “Why did he?” I asked. I sipped at my weak iced tea. My hand came away wet after I placed the sweating glass on a straw coaster.

  “I don’t know,” the older woman replied. “It just happened. One day he showed up at the door and she was with him. I wondered because she was older than the other girls, and he treated her different from the beginning.”

  “How do you mean different?” I’d seen it myself; seen the private room, decorated with a lavish hand, seen the private telephone line, seen that Amber was the princess of this little castle. What I didn’t know was why.

  Artie’s steno pad was nowhere in sight. We’d agreed that since I’d met Mrs. Bonaventura, I should conduct the questioning. I had the feeling that if Mrs. B. realized the press was sitting in, we’d be out on our respective ears in short order.

  “That room used to hold three girls,” the housemother confided, “but Doctor made me move them out and put Amber in there alone.” Her voice was laden with grievance. I had a sudden picture of her gleefully ridding the master bedroom of Amber’s furniture and moving three spartan single beds into the space.

  “Then he said she needed a private telephone line.” Again the disapproving tone invited me into a game of Ain’t It Awful. “He said the adoptive parents who wanted her child were paying for it, but I saw the bills. That line was in her name, but he paid for it with his own money.”

  Interesting. Ellie Greenspan had led me to believe that she and Josh financed Amber’s link to the outside world; was Amber collecting expense money from them for extras Doc was already paying for? And what of the Kansas and Maryland couples? I was willing to bet they both kicked in.

  I shook my head and tried for a tsking sound that said I couldn’t agree more. “And look how she paid him back,” I ventured. Hell of a thing to say about my own client—but then look how she’d paid me back.

  I was answered by a malicious gleam in Mrs. Bonaventura’s black eyes. I had a moment’s vision of her wearing a fringed shawl, Tarot cards spread before her, candles flickering behind her head. She was a natural gypsy, and I leaned forward expectantly as she opened her mouth, certain she would tell me she’d seen Amber’s treachery in the stars.

  I wasn’t disappointed. “I told him,” she said with lipsmacking satisfaction. “I warned him not to trust that little snip.”

  I hadn’t heard that word since my Grandma Winchell went to live at the Home. If Amber was only a snip, I wondered what it took to make a bitch in Mrs. B’s lexicon.

  “She was in and out of here whenever she pleased,” the housemother complained. “All the
other girls had rules, curfews. In by ten on weeknights, eleven on weekends. And even during the day, we kept an eye on them. They’d spend all day at the mall eating hamburgers and drinking milkshakes if we let them. Gaining weight, smoking—all the things that would be bad for the babies.”

  “The babies are the most important thing,” I said gravely, unsuccessfully trying to push away Amber’s image of herself as a prize brood cow. I didn’t dare meet Artie’s eyes. Laughter lay just below the surface of my diaphragm, ready to leap into my throat and destroy my rapport with Mrs. B.

  “Of course,” the housemother agreed. Her head bobbed up and down in an awkward nod; the bun wobbled as she moved. “That’s what our adoptive parents pay for, healthy babies. And while there are no guarantees,” she went on, as though instructing a prospective adopter in the vagaries of genetics, “we try our best to give our little mothers healthy food and a quiet lifestyle.”

  “Except for Amber,” I said, gently working the housemother back to my agenda.

  “She went out whenever she felt like it,” Mrs. B. complained. “She’d go to the mall, see the girls she used to work with. I told Doctor he ought to make her stay home,” she confided. She looked directly at me, deliberately excluding Artie from the conversation, as though his masculinity prevented him from understanding.

  “I wasn’t surprised when I found out she slipped out and got married,” she continued. She sat back and clamped her thin lips shut. “It’s just the kind of thing I warned Doctor about.”

  “And what did he say?” I lifted my glass to my lips, hoping to hide the eagerness I felt. We were finally getting to the heart of my interest—Doc Scanlon. I felt sure Mrs. B. would rather cut out her tongue than criticize her boss, but if I could couch my questions in serious Amber-bashing, I had a chance of opening her sealed lips.

  “Oh, he’s like all men,” she responded with a curdled smile. Again I fought down the urge to laugh. How was Artie going to get usable quotes from this interview? “A girl like Amber can twist them around her little finger.”

  “I wonder what else he paid for besides the private line,” I said, infusing my voice with a sisterly bitterness I hoped would match my companion’s mood.

  “It wasn’t just him,” Mrs. B. said defensively. “Those poor people who wanted her baby just couldn’t give her enough. She had her own portable television, a CD player.” She shook her head. “Of course, I didn’t realize there was more than one couple giving her things. I thought the presents from Kansas City were from her own family.”

  This was old news. I needed a lever into something I didn’t know. I gave the matter some thought, but before I could come up with something, the boy reporter jumped into the conversation.

  “I understand there was a burglary at Doc’s office,” he began, his tone conversational. I tried not to look as astonished as I felt; he’d been holding out on me.

  “Not just the office downtown,” Mrs. Bonaventura confirmed, her tone thick with relish, “but right here in this house.”

  “Two burglaries?” Artie exclaimed. “I knew there’d been one at the office on Victory Boulevard,” he went on, “but I didn’t know there was one here, too.”

  “Oh, yes,” the older woman said with a grim nod of her head. In some corner of her mind, she seemed obscurely to blame Amber for this as well—and maybe she wasn’t wrong. If Amber got her special treatment because she had something on Doc Scanlon, she might well have obtained her knowledge through burglary.

  But then there was Jerry Califana—were the records he’d brought out for Artie Bloom’s perusal taken from Doc Scanlon’s office?

  “When did these burglaries happen?” Artie inquired, a look of solicitous interest on his freckled face.

  “Oh, the one here was six months ago,” Mrs. B. replied. “It was cold outside, but no snow. November, perhaps.”

  Six months ago Amber had been four months pregnant. At four months, you could probably commit burglary. Breaking into this house didn’t require the skills of a cat burglar by any means, and Doc’s office was on the first floor.

  “Do you remember what was stolen?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” the housemother said with a shrug of her black-clad shoulder. “That’s why Doctor didn’t bother to report it. He said there was no harm done. But me,” she went on, “I would have called the police anyway. Even if all they did was mess up some old records nobody cared about.”

  “Old records?” I tried to keep my voice innocently curious, but Mrs. B. wasn’t that gullible.

  “Nothing important,” she said with a snap of her jaw. Closing the barn door before any more horses managed to escape.

  “Adoption records?” I persisted, but to no avail. My hostess rose from her chair and made for the door.

  “It was nice of you to come,” she said with wooden politeness. “I must be getting back to work now.”

  Artie rose more slowly; I was afraid he was going to push our luck with a parting question, but he bowed to the inevitable.

  We stepped out into a fine April afternoon. The sun was high in the sky; there were soft green leaves on the trees and dandelions winked at us from the square, mowed lawns.

  “Old adoption records,” I said. “I wonder how old.”

  “And you thought Jerry Califana was just your average paranoid,” Artie teased. “Maybe he’s right—and it looks like he’s got the records to prove it.”

  “Where to now?” I asked as we crossed the street, making for Artie’s antique Chevy.

  “I want to see where Amber lived,” the boy reporter said, “maybe talk to her landlady. And I want to talk to that waitress from Friendly’s. She lives right around here, as I recall.”

  He opened his steno pad and checked the address Herman Tolliver had given him. Then he drove around the block and pulled up in front of a tract house that looked like all the other houses on the street, moss-green and boxy, with spindly white-blossomed trees in the front yard. Three minutes later we were sitting in a living room, courtesy of Sonia Rogoff.

  “It’s kinda like having a baby again,” the waitress said, glancing at the senile mother who sat in an oversized orange chair. “Only she weighs a hundred and twenty pounds and has a mouth on her somethin’ awful,” she added, giving her mother a conspiratorial grin. The old woman smiled and, as if in response to her daughter’s prompt, said, “Fuck you, bitch.”

  Sonia’s grin widened. “See what I mean?” she said, inviting us into the conspiracy. “She always was a pistol, my ma.”

  “Always was a pistol,” the gnomelike creature repeated with a satisfied nod.

  “Yeah, Ma, a real pistol,” the waitress said. She turned her attention to Artie and me, but every so often she let her eyes slide to where the old woman sat in a chair too big for her.

  “See, that’s why I work nights,” Sonia explained. “I gotta stay with her all day, and then when the kids come home, I can go out. Not that I go anywhere except work,” she added. “Four nights a week I’m schleppin’ ice cream, and seven days I’m changin’ diapers and takin’ Ma for walks.”

  I would have asked why. I would have asked how—how can you give her your life? How can you keep on day after day after day? How can you bear to look into the petlike, vacant eyes of a woman who must have been strong and tough and funny once upon a time?

  Who knew malls had saints working the night shift?

  “So you remember the couple with the baby?” Artie asked, not bothering to keep the eagerness out of his voice. With every witness we talked to, he saw his story getting bigger and bigger. If nobody bombed a major capital, he had hopes of the front page.

  “Yeah,” she replied, but a frown crept between her eyebrows. “What TV station did you say you were with? Where’s the cameras?”

  “I’m not a television reporter,” Artie replied, his smile dimming only slightly. “I write for a newspaper.”

  “Oh, a newspaper,” Sonia repeated. “I thought maybe it was A Current Affair. Me and Ma,
we watch that all the time.”

  “All the time,” the old lady agreed, nodding like a car toy.

  “About Amber Lundquist,” Artie prompted. “You saw her the night she—”

  “Not just that night,” Sonia interrupted. She wore a tank top and cutoff jeans; her long, ropy legs ended in worn moccasins. She sat with one leg tucked under her like a teenager, but her pert face was lined with wrinkles brought on by too many days in the sun.

  “You saw her there before?” Artie flipped open his steno pad and sat poised for an answer that would take him to the front page.

  “Lots of times,” Sonia said with a conspiratorial nod. “She used to come in when she was still pregnant. And I seen her with this other couple, too.”

  “What couple? Can you describe them?”

  She lifted her bare shoulders in a shrug. “Dunno. They were pretty ordinary. She might have been Spanish, but he was just a guy. Light brown hair, kind of a thin face.”

  “Kyle and Donna Cheney,” Artie guessed, his eyes lighting up. “She’s Cuban; her name was Donna Pacheco before she married.”

  “They’re the ones who claim they dropped out of the bidding for Adam?” I asked.

  Artie nodded. Sonia glanced from the boy reporter back to me with an avid face, drinking in the scandal that was juicy enough for A Current Affair even if Artie had no cameras with him.

  “How do you remember them so well?” I cut in, suddenly suspicious. This woman served a lot of ice cream to a lot of people; she could hardly have known Amber was going to turn up dead in a swamp. So how come she had total recall of Amber’s visits to Friendly’s?

  Artie didn’t like the question, but Sonia Rogoff didn’t seem to mind. “I don’t know,” she said, “it’s like when I’m at work I’m so happy to be out in the world with regular people, I like to watch them. And watching her was like following a story on television. First she’s pregnant, then she has the baby, she’s with this guy, then with that guy.”

  It made sense. “So this one night,” she continued, taking in both Artie and me with her inviting glance, “she and her husband come in together, only they weren’t exactly together. She and the baby sat in one booth and the husband was alone in the booth behind—at first.”