“This whole thing is pretty far out,” I replied. “But the bottom line is, Amber’s dead and the baby’s missing.”
She turned her head away. “Yeah,” she said softly, a touch of regret crossing her face like a cloud streaking across the sun.
“If you remembered Amber from before,” I asked, “why did you let her rent your upstairs apartment?”
“’Cause Doc asked me to,” she said. “God, you don’t know what I do because that man asks me to. Sometimes he stops on his way to his office up on Victory and asks me if he can use my washer and dryer. Which means I do his laundry for him while he sees patients. He stops by and borrows my car whenever he feels like it. Sometimes he doesn’t even ask: every time I try to get the keys back, he forgets them in his other pants.”
She looked down at her cigarette, suddenly aware there was no smoke coming from it. She relit the tip and took a long, deep drag.
“He talked me into taking Amber as a tenant—of course, he didn’t tell me it was her, but I recognized her the minute I saw her. I couldn’t believe he took her as a patient after he was so afraid she’d sue him last time she had a baby.”
“You think she blackmailed him?” I asked bluntly.
She shrugged. “Could be,” she replied. “I wouldn’t put it past her. And he’s not a guy who’d stand up to that. He’s a soft man; he’d give her what she wanted—even if it was something of mine, like the apartment.”
It was getting chilly on the little cement porch; I would have liked an invitation to step inside. But Betsy needed her smoke the way I needed oxygen, so I resigned myself to staying a little longer on the cold hard steps.
“You know when he served me with our divorce papers?” Betsy asked. “I mean, we both wanted the divorce, I knew it was coming, but—but he walked up to me on my birthday and handed me the summons. On my birthday! Can you believe it?”
I shook my head. Boyish Chris Scanlon didn’t seem the type.
“When I burst into tears,” Betsy went on, “he gave me this puzzled look. Like ‘what did I do?’ He could never just say something nasty to my face and be done with it; he had to pretend he was the good guy and just happened to hurt my feelings.”
It was a fascinating sidelight, but it wasn’t getting me anywhere. I turned toward the tall reeds on the other side of Travis Avenue and said, “I didn’t realize you lived so close to the wildlife refuge.”
“Used to be we called it a swamp, couldn’t wait till it was drained and the land put to good use,” Betsy said. “Now the Sierra Club types call it a goddamn wetland and the damned thing never will be drained.” Spending the day with toddlers seemed to engender in Betsy Scanlon a need to smoke and swear, to let her bad-girl adult take over after a day of wiping little noses.
“So you never went over there, never walked around the nature preserve,” I persisted.
“Nature preserve, my butt,” Betsy replied with a snort of derision. “It’s a swamp. What’s to see? Weeds as high as a second-story window, squishy grass under your feet, a few mangy old birds. Hell, no, I never went in there, and neither did anyone else in the neighborhood. Just a bunch of fairies from Manhattan, wearing hiking shorts, that’s the only people ever went in there.”
It took me a moment to dislodge my mind from an image of Tinker Bell wearing L.L. Bean shorts and little tiny hiking boots, but I managed it.
“What about when you were a kid?” I prompted. “A place like that would have been a kid’s paradise where I came from.”
But Betsy, I decided, hadn’t been a kid the same way I had. Her happiest days would have been spent, not exploring the undeveloped land near her house, but playing dress-up or serving tea to her dolls. She had, in short, been a girly kind of girl, and the tall weeds held no fascination for her then or now.
I was halfway to the ferry terminal on the bus before I remembered the most vital piece of information: the color of Betsy Scanlon’s car, the one her ex-husband was given to borrowing. It was silver.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. Amber was killing her golden geese, raking in as much cash as possible before taking off with her baby. She had Jerry meeting her in the parking lot where she’d stashed her getaway car, so why not ask Doc to pick her up at the mall and squeeze a final blackmail payment out of him on the way?
But Doc doesn’t want to pay, doesn’t want Amber holding her information over his head for the rest of her life, so instead of taking her to the Native Plant Center, where she’d stashed her secret car, he keeps going on Travis Avenue and forces her into the swamp. He uses Betsy’s car partly to disguise himself, partly because it’s handy, only a block away from the wildlife refuge.
A soft crime for a soft man. A man who might have faked a baby’s death, not really for money, but to get himself out of a possible malpractice suit for misdiagnosing a nonexistent heart ailment. A man who might have let Amber’s blood pressure climb a little too high during the birth, hoping she’d die of natural causes, but who wouldn’t risk his license to make sure she didn’t come out of the anesthetic. At the time, Amber’s accusation had seemed postnatal paranoia; now it made sense.
The clincher: of all the possible suspects, Doc Scanlon was the only one who could get rid of Baby Adam quickly and quietly. All he had to do was put the kid into the pipeline, take full advantage of his nationwide network of desperate would-be parents, send him out of state for adoption by some couple in Arizona or Oregon.
Did Doc have an alibi for Friday night? How could I find out?
I snapped on my television set the minute I walked into my living room. It was sheer habit; there was nothing I wanted to watch, but I needed to hear a human voice.
I was halfway to the bathroom when the import of the news announcer’s words penetrated my consciousness.
“The body of Scott Wylie, missing since Friday, has been found in an undeveloped area near the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island,” the portentous male voice intoned. “Wylie, aged 24, was wanted for questioning in the drowning death of his wife, Amber, and the disappearance of the child known as Baby Adam.”
It was déjà vu all over again as I watched the cops haul yet another body out of the swamp. The only difference was that I didn’t have soaked feet. The announcer went on. “… exact time of death has not been determined, but Wylie has been in the water for at least two days. Police theorize he was riding his motorcycle along an isolated stretch of Victory Boulevard when he was struck from behind by an unidentified hit-and-run driver. There is as yet no sign of the missing infant.”
There was a picture of Scott, a young, hopeful kid with a solemn look and slicked-down short hair. High school graduation, I assumed. It was a far cry from the earringed punk I’d known.
I sat down hard on the mission rocker.
Scott was dead. And had been for several days.
It was another brick in the case I was building against Doc. I had my eye on Scott for one of the burglaries of Doc’s office, with Jerry penciled in for the other one, which meant that Scott knew Amber was blackmailing the good doctor. So in order to get free, Doc had to kill both Amber and Scott.
“Could I speak to Artie Bloom, please?” I asked, trying to sound like a lawyer instead of an outraged citizen who wanted the boy reporter’s head on a plate.
“Who may I say is—”
“My name is Cassandra Jameson,” I cut in, “and I need to talk to Mr. Bloom about a breaking story.”
She took my number and promised to beep Artie. Less than two minutes later, the phone rang.
“I take it you saw the news last night,” he began. “All the time we were wondering if Scott grabbed the kid and took off, he was decomposing. I hear the body was a real bloated mess, looked like a zeppelin.”
“Charming word picture, Bloom,” I said. “But that’s not why I called.” I explained my theory about Doc, gratified to hear a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. The boy reporter was impre
ssed, no doubt about it.
“Counselor, I can’t run any of this,” he said at last. “My paper isn’t going to let me libel a guy like Doc Scanlon without a hell of a lot more than speculation. And that’s all you’ve got here, spec—”
“What time did Scott die?” I cut in. “What did the cops say about the car that hit him? Did they examine the motorcycle yet? What’s the cause of—”
A long, heartfelt sigh greeted my questions. “Aronson said the cycle was struck from behind by a vehicle with a high bumper, probably a four-wheel drive. One of those yuppie Jeeps.”
I digested this; so much for Betsy’s silver car as the murder weapon.
“Does Doc own a four-wheel?”
Another snort. “A minute ago you had him in the silver car picking up Amber. Now you want him in the four-wheel ramming Scott. You can’t have it both ways.”
“Why not? The cops don’t have an exact time of death for either Amber or Scott. Why couldn’t Doc borrow his ex-wife’s car, pick up Amber, take her to the swamp and kill her, then use his own car to run Scott off the road?”
“Why? Why change cars? And how does he know where to find Scott? What does he do, look in his crystal ball and sees Scott zooming along Victory on his cycle?”
“Maybe Scott went home to look for Amber,” I improvised. “He races around the house, but she’s not there. So he leaves, but by now Doc’s killed Amber. Doc’s in the wildlife refuge parking lot, which fronts Travis Avenue, remember, when he sees the motorcycle racing by; he jumps in his car—”
“Aha,” Artie said, as he gloated. “Which car? The silver one or the four-wheel?”
“Aha yourself,” I shot back, inspiration fueling me, “he’s got both cars there. He brought his own four-wheel to the parking lot, borrowed Betsy’s car in case anyone saw him pick Amber up, and now he jumps into his own car, leaving hers in the lot. After he kills Scott, he comes back, moves his wife’s car back to the street near her house, and drives home in his own four-wheel, which you haven’t admitted he owns yet, but he must or you wouldn’t have let me—”
Artie sighed. “It’s a Trooper,” he admitted. “But why does Amber get into the car with him in the first place?”
“That one’s easy, Bloom. Amber’s cashing in all her chips. She’s ready to ditch Scott and take Baby Adam on the road, but before she goes, she wants every penny she can get. So she sets up a meeting with Jerry to sell him information about his dead kid, and she decides to take one last whack at Doc Scanlon. Only she never makes the meeting with Jerry because Doc’s more desperate than she realizes.”
“The scary thing is this makes sense,” Artie said, his tone glum. “I only wish I could print it.”
He hung up. I stared at the phone for a minute, realizing too late that I hadn’t raked Artie over the coals for the way he’d treated me in print.
The irony of it shot a quick jolt of anger through me. He could hint that I was a baby-seller without a qualm, but he didn’t dare make an allegation like that against Saint Christopher of the Golden Cradle without proof.
It was up to me to supply that proof.
He smiled that disarming smile, the one that would have had me making a quick mirror check of my makeup if I’d met him in a bar. He gave a shrug and made a deprecating movement with his mouth.
“You got me,” he said. His blue eyes twinkled at me from under slightly lowered lids. Bedroom eyes. Eyes that seduced and promised, eyes that wanted my understanding.
Eyes I didn’t trust for a minute.
“You ask me if I deliberately went into Mount Loretto looking for pregnant girls,” he repeated. “You wonder if I asked my patients at Arthur Kill Correctional Facility about pregnant girlfriends. The answer is—absolutely.” He nodded firmly. He opened his mouth to continue, then stopped as if working on the most effective way to phrase his next words.
“I believe in life,” he said simply. “Call me a right-to-lifer, I don’t mind. I have never stopped a woman from getting an abortion if that’s what she wants,” he explained, locking his blue eyes onto my face. “But if I can offer her an alternative, if I can help her find a home for her baby, I will. I plead guilty, Ms. Jameson. I go where the babies are.”
I had come prepared for bluster. I had come expecting to hear a long defense of Doc Scanlon’s pro bono work and a heated denial that he used it to round up pregnant teenagers. Instead, he’d copped a plea right off the bat. It left me with at least thirty questions I didn’t have to ask.
I hastily shuffled through my mental index cards and decided to up the ante. He was a charmer; how would he deal with outright rudeness?
“You go where the white babies are.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never denied my services to any woman on account of race,” he began. “I have programs for—”
“I’m sure you do,” I said, waving away his disclaimer, “but all the girls at the group home were white. Whatever services you give the others, it’s the white babies who get placed in the best homes.”
He sighed and looked over at the wall where his diplomas hung, framed in shiny dark wood. The other three walls were covered with collages of babies and smiling mothers. There was no way to tell whether the mothers holding infants were birth mothers or adoptive parents. Which might have been the point.
“I can’t change the world, Ms. Jameson,” he said at last. “I wish, I truly wish, that every child regardless of race or age or physical condition could find a loving home. But should I deny a couple a child because they prefer to adopt within their own race? Should I refuse to help a birth mother make the most difficult decision of her life because she’s white?”
This was getting me nowhere. I’d come to Doc’s Victory Boulevard office in hopes of confronting him with enough evidence that he’d break down and admit something, anything I could take to the police. So far, the advantage was all on his side; he now knew I was suspicious, but he also knew I didn’t have any concrete proof.
“You told Lisa to lie about the father of her child,” I said. “You helped her bury the real father in a bunch of names so the adoptive parents wouldn’t realize Lisa’s boyfriend was doing time. Do you do that kind of thing often?”
His smile was full of Irish charm and his blue eyes twinkled as he replied, “Counselor, I don’t draft court papers. The lawyers do.”
I gave him a steady look, but a sour taste formed in my mouth as I realized where he was going with this. “Which means that if any of this comes to light, you’ll blame it all on Marla Hennessey,” I translated.
Good cross-examination requires keeping the witness off-balance. “What about Amber’s first child? The one who may or may not have died?”
Doc Scanlon’s jolly Saint Nick face assumed a mask of solemnity. “A tragic loss,” he said. “The child’s father has never accepted his baby’s death. At first, he blamed me, threatened to sue for malpractice.”
“I know,” I said, nodding agreement. “But now he’s convinced the baby never died, that you and Amber put it up for adoption.”
“Bereaved parents can convince themselves of many things,” Doc said. The tiny smile that played around his rosebud mouth, half-hidden by his beard, told me I was getting nowhere fast. He could play this game all afternoon.
“Where were you the night Amber died?”
He opened his mouth to reply, but I cut him off. “And don’t tell me you were home watching television. You were seen at the mall.” I stared straight into the guileless blue eyes, hoping he wouldn’t see the bluff.
“I doubt that, Ms. Jameson,” he replied genially. “Since I wasn’t there. And neither was my Trooper,” he added, his eyes glinting with pleasure at the shock on my face.
“You’ll be interested to know that once I heard how Amber’s husband died, I insisted the police examine my car. They found no trace of damage, no evidence whatsoever that it was involved in an accident. So it couldn’t have been the vehicle that struck the young man’s motorcycle and forced
him off the road.”
Later that night, I wondered if Scott could have gone off the road into the reeds by accident. Sheer coincidence. Nothing whatever to do with the fact that his wife lay underwater not two miles away, in another part of the same wetland preserve. Just another careless motorcyclist riding without a helmet.
“Christ, it was hit-and-run at least, Counselor,” Artie Bloom said in a tone of disgust. I’d reached Artie at his home number; his paper went to bed at eight-thirty, so he’d already filed whatever story he’d written on the case. “Aronson said there was a hell of a dent on the back fender of that cycle. Somebody in a four-wheel or a pickup truck clipped him pretty—”
“Pickup? You didn’t say pickup before,” I said accusingly. “You said four-wheel drive.”
“Something with a high bumper,” Artie clarified. “Could have been a Jeep or a van or a light pickup truck. And, in case you were wondering, Josh Greenspan agreed to let the cops examine his Bronco. No chipped paint, no damage.”
“Does Califana’s pizza parlor deliver?” I mused aloud. “What kind of—”
“Yeah, like he’s gonna deliver pizzas in a big red pickup truck. This is Staten Island, not fucking Texas.”
“Which means?”
“Which means he’s got a bicycle with a thermal pizza box on the handlebars. I can’t see that running Scott Wylie off the ass end of Victory Boulevard, can you?”
I could not. I hung up the phone and looked at the clock. Eleven P.M. Not too late to call an old law school friend, I decided.
I took a leaf from Marla’s book of bluntness and began, “Doc Scanlon says he’s not responsible for what lawyers put in affidavits. Which means if push comes to shove, he’ll roll over on you so fast—”
“I suppose this colorful language is part of being a criminal lawyer?” Marla interrupted, her tone a meld of sweetness and suspicion. “One problem with being a criminal lawyer is that you tend to see crime everywhere. There’s nothing in my affidavits for me to worry about.”
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