I broke in for clarification. “By the husband, you mean Scott? A blond guy?”
She nodded. “We got a policy of three or more in a big booth, and I hadda tell both of them they couldn’t sit there if they was alone. So she says she’s waitin’ for someone, so I let her stay, but I hadda make him move up to the front where the smaller booths are.”
“Did he give you a hard time?” I asked.
“At first, he started to, but then she give him a look could freeze a pancake on a griddle, and he gets up and moves. I remember thinkin’ if they was together, why not sit in the same booth, y’know?”
She shifted her gum from one side of her mouth to the other, revealing the chipped tooth that gave her a rakish, motorcycle mama look. “But he went quiet, I’ll say that for him,” she went on. “Then this other couple come in and sat with her. They didn’t wanna order nothin’ at first, but I told them they couldn’t stay without they bought something.”
“When was this?” Artie asked.
“Two, three nights before she was killed,” Sonia said. “Let me think. I worked Monday, but not—No, it was Wednesday, Wednesday about seven-thirty.”
Amber died on Friday night. That Wednesday she was in Surrogate’s Court indignantly rejecting the notion that she wanted money in return for her baby. Yet that night she’d sat in a booth at Friendly’s discussing an offer from yet another set of would-be parents.
“Did they seem—” I began, then broke off as I searched for words. Did they seem what? Like a couple desperate enough for a baby to buy it in the mall?
She shrugged. “I didn’t notice much,” she said apologetically. “It was a busy night and I had a boothful of teenagers hasslin’ me for more water, more napkins. Makin’ assholes outa themselves, y’know.”
“Assholes,” Ma repeated with her vacant grin.
“You’re a pistol, Ma,” Sonia said without turning her head. Then she frowned in thought and added, “When I brought their sundaes, the girl pointed at the guy in the booth and said something about him being the father. Which made me even more curious, y’know, like why he wasn’t sitting with her if he was the father of her baby. But then I started thinkin’ maybe he was the father but he wouldn’t admit it, wouldn’t pay support or nothin’. I know a little something about that,” she went on, “since the father of my twins done the same thing sixteen years ago.”
“Asshole,” Ma pronounced.
“You got that right, Ma,” Sonia agreed without turning her head. “Course I don’t say that to the twins,” she said in a lowered voice. “Don’t wanna make them feel bad about their dad, even if he is what Ma says he is.”
“Did the guy in the booth ever talk to the couple?” I asked. “Did he come back to where they were sitting?”
She shook her head. “Not then,” she said. “After the couple left, the guy gets up and goes back to where she’s sitting and slides into that booth.”
“Back to the last time you saw Amber,” Artie prompted. “Did the same thing happen, with the two different booths?”
“No,” the waitress replied. “The woman come in with her husband and the baby and they all sat together. Then a middle-aged guy comes in and sits with them.”
“Josh Greenspan,” I said, thinking aloud.
Sonia nodded. “Yeah,” she agreed. “I seen him on channel five news. Course,” she went on, leaning toward us as though to shield her mother from the sordid side of life, “if I’d a known what that little bitch was up to with that baby, I’d a taken and shoved an ice cream scoop up her you-know-what.”
I wasn’t at all sure what good that would have done, but I applauded the sentiment with an empathetic nod. “He was real intense, the guy,” she explained. “He didn’t want to order nothin’ either, but I knew Tolliver would give me a hard time if I let people sit in the booth without payin’. He was different from the other couple, though—he couldn’t take his eyes off that baby. I started thinkin’ maybe he was the grandpa, y’know, like maybe he was the girl’s father and he was there to make the guy pay support.”
Sonia shook her head; her hair, which had been badly streaked, was growing out dark roots. She turned to Artie and asked, her tone plaintive, “You sure you don’t know nobody at A Current Affair?”
“A Current Affair,” Ma Rogoff repeated with a sage nod.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
We walked back to the Chevy in silence; before Artie turned the key in the ignition, he pulled out his pocket phone and talked to someone at the paper. Then he turned to me.
“Kyle and Donna Cheney live in Prohibition Park,” Artie said, putting the car into gear.
“Where?” I had a Staten Island map open on my lap, but that name appeared nowhere.
“It’s called Westerleigh now,” my companion explained with a smug little smile. “But when it was built in the twenties, the streets were named after dry states and anti-booze politicians. Hence Prohibition Park.”
“You are just a fund of Staten Island trivia.”
“Hey, when my editor assigned me to this beat, she told me to learn everything I could about this borough, and by God—”
He broke off as we reached the corner of an unmarked street. “Where the hell are we?”
I consulted the map. “Take a right, then a left,” I ordered, a smug smile of my own playing around my lips.
Kyle and Donna Cheney lived on a wide street with large, lush yards, attached garages, and houses that looked lived in. As we drove toward the split-level stone-and-white house, Artie said, “This one’s mine, Counselor. I doubt these people would be thrilled to spill their guts to a lawyer.”
“Whereas they’ll be happy to see themselves quoted in your paper as would-be baby-buyers,” I countered. But as we walked toward the house, I stayed back, letting Artie make the moves. He walked toward the door and rang the bell.
The door was answered by a short woman with dark hair and a pale face. She gave Artie a wary once-over and asked in a gruff tone what he wanted.
“Mrs. Cheney?” he began. “I’m sorry to disturb you like this. I’m a reporter for the—”
“Go away. I don’t want to talk to you people.” Her voice rose.
I stepped forward and spoke into the screen door. “I’m not with the press,” I called, holding up a conciliatory hand.
“I don’t care who you are or what you want,” she shot back. “I don’t want to talk to anyone about what happened to that girl. It’s nothing to do with me or my family, and I don’t want anyone coming around here and bothering us.”
“Mrs. Cheney, all I want is to—” I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted, but it seemed important to find out what she had to say about my client. And maybe she and her husband hadn’t decided against dealing with Amber; maybe they’d been at the mall the night she was killed.
“I don’t care what you want,” she shouted, her voice rising into a screech. A man next door called through his screened window, “You need some help there, Donna? Want I should call the cops?”
She shook her head. “Thanks, Bernie,” she called back, “but they were just leaving.” She said the words with a pointed little smile of triumph, knowing we had no choice but to obey.
A white van with a rosebush painted on the side pulled into the driveway; the motto on the side was “Cheney Nursery and Landscaping. Our Business Is Growing.”
A tall, thin man with sandy hair and a nervous face stepped out of the van and strode toward Artie and me.
“What’s going on here?” he demanded.
“Are you Kyle Cheney?” I said before Artie could speak.
He nodded. His wife called out, “They’re from the newspapers. Don’t talk to them.”
“I’m not a reporter,” I clarified. “I’m a lawyer. I represented Amber Lundquist.”
“Oh, my God,” Kyle said. “We didn’t—That is, I—” He clamped his thin lips and started again.
“My wife and I have nothing to say. We never paid Amber any money, and the last
time we saw her was Wednesday night. So please leave us alone.”
I turned toward Artie’s car, but the boy reporter was made of sterner stuff. “You already have one adopted child, named Aaron, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but plowed ahead. “And you wanted another one, so you met Amber at the—”
Kyle Cheney’s face, which was ruddy and marked with severe acne scars, paled. He took a step forward, clenched his sinewy hands into fists, and said, “Get the hell away from me and my family.”
Artie took one last shot. “If you won’t talk to me,” he said, “I’ll have to get my facts from other people. Don’t you want the chance to tell your side of the story?”
“No,” Kyle said. He turned and strode toward his house, where his wife waited inside, barricaded behind a screen door.
Artie shrugged, then opened his car door and motioned for me to get in beside him.
“Looks like not everybody wants to get on A Current Affair,” I remarked, recalling Sonia Rogoff’s wistful ambition.
“Can’t win ’em all,” Artie replied in a cheerful tone. “Besides, I can always say they refused to talk to me, make that sound like they must have something to hide.”
I opened my mouth to protest that this was a pretty low trick, then recalled that I’d done the same to people taking the witness stand at a trial. When it came to treating people decently, there wasn’t much to choose between Artie’s job and mine.
We drove toward Richmond Road. There were blue-and-white police cars on the side of the road where Travis Avenue began. It was the turnoff that led to the Davis Wildlife Refuge, where Amber’s body had been recovered. I studied the cars while Artie negotiated the intersection. No ambulance, no morgue wagon, no Crime Scene Unit.
No body. No baby. Thank God.
Artie took a right off Richmond Road and pulled into the undeveloped parking area. Aronson stood in a little knot of men and women. Something was up—but what?
“Find something, Detective?” Artie shouted. He was only halfway out of the car, but the questions poured from his mouth. He slammed the door behind him and raced toward the blue-and-white cars parked in the mud-rutted lot.
“What is this place?” I asked no one in particular. It wasn’t the Davis Wildlife Refuge. It was too close to the main road for that, and it had no official Parks Department insignia.
A green-uniformed Parkie replied, “It’s the Staten Island Native Plant Center. Part of the Greenbelt.”
The place Jerry Califana claimed Amber had told him to wait for her.
I walked across the muddy ruts, which were not as dry as they looked at first glance, trying not to think about the effect on my shoes.
Aronson came straight to the point. “You knew she had a car?”
“A car?” I echoed.
“Yeah, a car. Did you know she had one?”
“You mean Scott’s car?”
“No, I mean a car in her own name,” the detective replied, holding onto his patience with visible difficulty. “Did she ever come to see you in a car, or give any other evidence of car ownership?”
“No,” I said, beginning to see where this line of questioning could be leading. “You mean you found her car? The one she was planning to take off in?”
“What do you know about that?” Aronson’s thick eyebrows knotted, and he glared at me, suspicion in every line of his face.
I glanced at the other cops with Aronson, as if hoping to enlist their support. “Detective, she wasn’t going to walk to Kansas City or Baltimore. If she ditched Scott on purpose, which it looks like she did, then she either went with an accomplice or she had her own car ready somewhere. It stands to reason.”
Aronson stood back and pointed to a white hatchback flecked with mud. “Can you identify this vehicle?”
I stifled a smile at his police-report style. “No,” I said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
He shook his head back and forth. He drew in a breath and expelled it through pursed lips, a silent whistle. He looked at me as though trying to decide whether to let me in on a secret. Then he said, “I’m going to inventory this car, Counselor. I want you to stand by in case you can identify whatever we find inside.”
The words hung in the air; I wondered what he expected me to say. Did he think I’d make Constitutional objections to his search? If Amber had been alive, I’d have raised holy hell and he knew it, but dead clients have little interest in the Fourth Amendment. And with a missing baby, any objections I might have made to the search would be quickly overruled in the name of what the courts call exigent circumstances.
Besides, he didn’t want to know what was in that car any more urgently than I did.
The trunk held nothing I couldn’t have predicted: Baby stuff and more baby stuff: a diaper bag, a duffel with little cotton outfits and what looked like dozens of doll-sized white socks, a giant box of Pampers, one Sportsac tote with clothes Amber herself might have worn, an extra pair of sneakers—
Sneakers. Amber’s feet had been bare; a sandal had been found nearby. Surely if she’d expected to go hiking into the swamp, she’d have changed her shoes. Which didn’t mean much; obviously she hadn’t walked voluntarily to her death.
There was nothing visible to the naked eye in the front or backseats—typical of a New York car, even on Staten Island. You didn’t leave even a faded T-shirt on the floor in case a thief decided it might cover something of value and break your car window. Even if nothing was stolen, the cost of window replacement was high enough to cause New Yorkers to put “No Radio” signs in their windows. Urban legend had it that one pissed-off burglar broke the window anyway and left his own sign reading “Then get one, sucker.”
Aronson stood back while another cop pried open the glove compartment. Wearing surgical gloves to protect whatever prints could be found, he pulled out a sheaf of documents.
The top one was a death certificate for Laura Marie Califana.
Artie’s story in Monday’s paper was entitled “Heartbreak Kid.” It wasn’t on the front page, but it was the first thing that hit your eye on page three, with a big picture of the cops dragging the body out of the swamp.
Dorinda gave me a quizzical look as she brought over my French cruller; the only time I read newspapers is when one of my clients makes the headlines. Which, fortunately, doesn’t happen often.
I read the first paragraph, holding the paper closer to my face than I liked to admit I needed to.
“She even sent me an early Mother’s Day card,” mourned Carla Stebbins, would-be adoptive mother of the unborn child carried by Amber Lundquist, 25, whose drowned body was found in a Staten Island swamp Tuesday night. Stebbins and her husband Timothy live in the Mission Hills district of Kansas City; they say they paid Amber over $5,000 in the expectation that she would choose them as the adoptive parents of her baby.
Little did they know that Amber made the same promise to Josh and Ellie Greenspan of Brooklyn Heights and to Rita and Mark Tripp of Baltimore.
“I always hated Mother’s Day before,” Carla said, wiping a tear from her eye. “It was a day I’d spend in a deep depression, thinking about the baby I couldn’t have. Until this year, until Amber called our 800 number and told us about her baby.”
800 number? Call 1-800-INFANTS. Had there been an 800 number in the Greenspans’ ad in the Dreamchild newsletter?—Or had Josh decided to skip it since he knew the only birth mother he wanted was the one carrying his child?
Artie didn’t say. I read through more heartbreak, with quotes from the Baltimore couple, echoing the sense of loss and betrayal. I was beginning to feel annoyed; where was the hard news? Where was something I didn’t know?
Then I came to the last paragraphs:
… legal fees, and other expenses related to interstate adoptions. “My lawyer can help us,” Amber is quoted as telling the Stebbins family, “but she doesn’t come cheap.”
Ms. Lundquist was represented by Cassandra Jameson, of Brooklyn. Ms. Jameson denies that she
had knowledge of her client’s activities.
I was shaking when I lowered the paper into my lap.
Damn Artie Bloom! I’d spent the day tromping around Staten Island with him, playing Lois Lane to his Clark Kent, only to have him screw me in print.
I could sue his ass off. I would sue his ass off. I’d drag him into court so fast his head would—
And what would that get me? More publicity, more exposure. More people thinking that where the smoke got this thick, there had to be fire.
The words were true; I was Amber’s lawyer. But putting that fact directly after Amber’s alleged boast that her lawyer—conveniently identified as female—didn’t come cheap was tantamount to accusing me of brokering babies.
But was it libelous? Even though the last time I’d heard the word libel was in my first-year Torts class, I knew that what Artie had done was perfectly within his paper’s legal rights.
Still, I ate the cruller in three huge bites, washed it down with the last of my iced coffee, and raced upstairs to get a second legal opinion. Fool for a client, and all that.
Matt Riordan answered on the second ring. He was on his way to federal court to handle one of his more notorious clients—I could have read all about it on page five of Artie’s paper—but he confirmed my suspicion that bringing suit would be the worst option I could exercise.
“But the article does raise an interesting point,” he went on, in his mellow courtroom voice. “Could this expensive lawyer be your friend Marla?”
That thought would have crossed my mind eventually, I told myself.
“But then why would she bring me in as Amber’s lawyer?”
“Why did she say she brought you in?”
“Nice cross-examination technique,” I said approvingly. “She said it was because the judge insisted that Amber have her own lawyer.”
“Assuming that’s true,” Riordan said, “it might mean the judge had reason to suspect Marla was doing something that wasn’t kosher.”
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