26.
Although not much of a reader as a child, Mira Jenkins had never forgotten a children’s book in which a girl was given an unexpected gift of a dime. Or was it a quarter? An impossibly small sum of money, at any rate, worthless by today’s standards, but capable of purchasing a wealth of things at the dawn of the twentieth century. The girl in the book, dutiful and dull, considered various treats that she could share with her siblings—licorice whips, cookies, penny candy. Instead, she succumbed to temptation and purchased a strawberry ice cream cone, something that could never be shared among four children. The cone—surprise, surprise—proved unsatisfying, and the girl gave it away to another child. There was some moment of redemption, something to do with a kitten, and the girl vowed never again to forget the importance of sharing.
What a sap, Mira had thought at the time. The girl had earned the money. Her siblings didn’t have to know she had been given a quarter, much less that she bought ice cream. Hoarding was not wrong, as long as one was discreet. The cruel thing was to enjoy something in front of others, and Mira would never do that.
So she felt no qualms about keeping to herself the maybe-tip from the anonymous caller. If she did the work and it turned into something, she would have earned it. If it proved to be bogus, a dead end, then no one need know she had been duped by a crank caller. The one thing Mira could not afford was being seen as gullible.
Or so she told herself late Sunday afternoon when she decided to drive to Maveen Little’s house, having calculated that the reporters who had interviewed her during the day would have finally decamped. A search was on, she knew from WBAL radio. That was today’s story. The mother was secondary.
Maveen Little lived in a West Side neighborhood known as Walbrook Junction, in a complex of low-rises built about a decade before Mira Jenkins was born. It was well kept, by the neighborhood’s standards, with no broken-down cars or garbage on the grounds. Yet it was its middle-class aspirations that unnerved Mira. Every detail—the abandoned Big Wheel on a patch of dirt in the yard that was neither tended nor completely unkempt, the smell of spices and perspiration in the hall, the bedraggled decorations affixed to the hollow doors—only served to emphasize that the people who lived here wanted something more, and probably weren’t going to get it.
“I’m looking for Maveen Little,” she told the sullen man who answered the door, the boyfriend. She recognized him from television.
“She busy,” he said. The dropped verb seemed to signify his contempt for her.
“I’m from the Beacon-Light—”
“Look, she’s talked out. She got nothing more to say to the news.”
Mira could hear low voices in the apartment, women’s voices. One sounded broken and scratchy. The other was pitched lower, her words indistinct, but they sounded like words of comfort. So Maveen was talking, but she was talking to someone else. Another reporter? A cop? Mira conjured up an image of Nostrildamus, nodding and smiling at her, perhaps even handing her one of the fifty-dollar gift certificates that reporters got for going the “extra mile.”
“It won’t take long,” she said. “One quick question—”
“Not today,” he said, and closed the door in her face. In that bewildered split second, Mira actually considered sticking her foot between the door and its frame. But she was wearing new light-colored sandals that would show scuff marks. Besides, this guy would probably enjoy crushing someone’s toes.
She went outside and sat in her car, the key turned in the ignition so the radio played and the air-conditioning blew. She felt humiliated, despite the fact that no one had witnessed her rebuke. Failure is not an option, failure is not an option, she tried to chant to herself, but who was she trying to kid? Failure was always an option. She was beginning to fear it was her only option.
What if she proved to be a failure after all? At this assignment, at this job, at this career—what would it mean to be a failure? For the first time, she dared to wonder if people she considered successful might be failures in disguise. Her father was a stockbroker, the old-fashioned kind who wasn’t given to daring speculation or sexy deals, but he had provided his family with a comfortable lifestyle. Was that what he had set out to be? She had never thought about this before. Her father was a stockbroker because his father was a stockbroker.
The motto said: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But did that mean trying something new, or doing the same thing until you got it right? Did Nostrildamus want to be where he was, or had he coveted a different career path, perhaps at one of the big national newspapers? The world of medium-sized newspapers was not much different from those little Eastern European countries that had appeared after the Cold War ended. No one knew exactly where they were or why they mattered.
Tears pricked the corners of her eyes and she winked them away violently, even though no one was watching. She was trapped. She couldn’t leave the Beacon-Light until she was perceived as a success, but she was afraid for the first time that she might not be. She had told herself there was nothing she couldn’t do if she tried, but the lie was becoming impossible to maintain. There was so much she couldn’t do, from physics to the simple act of rolling her tongue in that funny hot-dog-bun shape. She couldn’t snap her fingers or whistle. She had been a semitalented dancer as a child, only to hit the wall of physical limitations in her early teens. She simply didn’t have the extension she needed, or the right arch. There was no shortage of things that Mira could not do. Why should this job be any different?
She was so distracted by her own thoughts that she almost didn’t notice the woman emerging from the vestibule of Maveen Little’s apartment, a tall, regal-looking black woman in a killer dress, the casual kind that couldn’t be touched for less than four hundred dollars, and that price didn’t include the just-right handbag and the matching coral-colored slides. The woman climbed into an SUV, a BMW that looked much too nice for the surroundings, but Mira hadn’t zeroed in on it before.
Eyes still moist, Mira reached for her pad and wrote down the license plate. She would ask someone low-level in the library to run it tomorrow, claiming it was connected to a neighborhood story on parking problems, and for all she knew it wasn’t much more than that. But she had a feeling it was a lead, and a good one.
27.
Sharon Kerpelman was forever apologizing for her condo, which was difficult to find and not much easier to enter, with codes at the parking gate and the lobby. She also made excuses for its location, deep within the suburbs, and its willful sterility. She apologized because she expected people to expect her to be ashamed of a place that was clean, well kept, and bursting with amenities. She never bothered to explain that she had fled the city because she had suddenly realized she had endured enough charm to last her a lifetime.
That epiphany came while she was looking for an apartment in the Mount Vernon section, just north of downtown. The city had finally begun to develop some high-end rentals, but they were clustered to the east, near the water, or around the hospital complex on the western edge. Neither location appealed to Sharon, who thought her life might make more sense if she could walk to work, given that she never had time to exercise. An agent listened carefully to her wants and proceeded to take her to a series of ever shabbier places that didn’t begin to meet her criteria. When she entered the apartment with the bedroom accessible only through the kitchen, Sharon muttered to herself: “Enough.” Within a week, using only the classified section of the Beacon-Light, she had found her current place, in the Cedars of Owings Mills. Her mother was thrilled, but Sharon liked it anyway, because it was so obviously not what people expected of her.
She had always enjoyed confounding others’ expectations. Even when she lived in renovated mill cottages and tacky rowhouses, she had surprised visitors with her taste in furniture, which ran to postmodern collectibles or good imitations. Messy at work, she was neat at home, obsessively so, with no patience for clutter. She loved people’s puzzled glances when they came t
hrough the door, their attempt to reconcile public Sharon with private Sharon.
So on Sunday evening, as she waited for her visitors, she couldn’t help wondering if they would notice how beautiful her apartment was. She sat in a Stickley chair, feet tucked beneath her, staring out the plate-glass doors that led to a tiny patio. The sun had just set, so she could make out her own ghostly image in the window. She liked what she saw, although she knew being a not-beautiful woman was supposed to be a tragedy. Not-beautiful was Sharon’s coinage, and it was more or less accurate. Her features were even enough, her hair smooth, her figure pretty good. The only visible defect was the patterned birthmark on her cheek, and it was much less objectionable, in her opinion, than acne-ravaged skin. Plain might be the most accurate term, but it sounded a bit self-pitying, and not ugly sounded anything but. So—not-beautiful. She was not beautiful, not pretty, not cute. But she got by. In fact, Daniel Kutchner had called yesterday, but she was too busy to see him. Or going to be.
The doorbell rang. She had given both sets of expected visitors the two sets of codes, so she didn’t have to buzz them in. She had also given her guests two different arrival times, so she knew who was on the other side of her door. Still, she checked the fisheye, just to be sure.
“Sharon, sweetie,” Rosario said, kissing the air and getting a few strands of Sharon’s hair caught in her mouth. Something alcoholic was on her breath, which Sharon expected, but still found shocking. Drinking was so goyish. Catholic, she amended, for Rosario practiced that form of semialcoholism based on wine and watered-down whiskey.
Even when viewed without a distorting lens, Rosario Bustamante was an odd-looking woman. Short and chunky, with skinny legs and virtually no neck, she was probably in her mid-fifties. No one knew for sure, as Rosario was famously secretive about her age. She was dressed tonight as she dressed on workdays, in a short-skirted suit that suggested she considered herself a knockout, albeit one who had lost interest about halfway through the process of dressing herself. Her blouse had a small rip at the neckline and, Sharon couldn’t help noticing when Rosario reached for her, shadowy stains along the armpits.
“Did you have trouble finding the place?” Sharon asked, wondering if etiquette required her to offer Rosario a drink, when common sense dictated that the woman was probably bumping up against the legal limit already. “I know it’s a hike from your place in Bolton Hill.”
“Well, you tantalized the old cat, didn’t you? I am most intrigued. Most intrigued. Are they—?” She stopped with uncharacteristic delicacy.
“I told Alice and her mother to come later, about eight-thirty. I thought we should speak privately first.”
Rosario settled on the bright crimson sofa, a vintage piece of which Sharon was particularly proud. Yet Rosario seemed oblivious to her surroundings. Sharon wished she had offered her a drink, just to show off her Russell Wright barware.
“So, do you think the police are going to charge your—what should I call her? Your former client, I guess.” The directness was typical of Rosario. For all she drank, she was never unfocused. And she seldom spoke of anything except law and politics, and the gossip that connected the two worlds.
“Alice,” Sharon said. “Her name is Alice.”
Before the juvenile judge, she had always been careful to use the girl’s name, to make sure that no one lost sight of the little being at the center of all this. Sharon had figured out quite early that the anonymity designed to protect Alice was a double-edged sword. A specific person, a girl with a face and a name and two yellow pigtails, would have been so much less horrifying than the phantom pair of eleven-year-old girls who flitted across the news pages and danced on the tongues of shocked-looking anchorwomen.
“Alice,” Rosario Bustamante repeated, nodding as if she approved of the name and it was key to her decision. “So are they going to charge her? Do they have a case?”
“I’ll answer the second question first—no. They have nothing to connect her to this except her own well-intentioned efforts to help them. It’s outrageous the way they’ve jacked her up just because a child has gone missing and the child happens to bear a resemblance to Cynthia Barnes’s new daughter. Or so Cynthia Barnes told the cops. She’s not beyond making this all up, you know. She’s quite vengeful.”
Rosario’s eyebrows shot up. Her brows had been overplucked into sideways parentheses. Clearly, she could not have sculpted such symmetrical shapes with her own stubby hands, but it was hard to imagine a woman paying someone to achieve such an odd effect. Rosario’s appearance became more and more disturbing the longer one looked at her. There was a slight seediness to her—the odd brows, the misapplied lipstick, and, Sharon couldn’t help noticing, the toes peeking out of her sandals. The blood-red paint had been sloppily applied, missing a few nails altogether.
“I don’t want to take on Judge Poole’s family, even indirectly,” Rosario said. “That’s a lose-lose for me.”
“Agreed. I would never go at them. But I’m not going to sit by and see them try to destroy Alice twice over. They’re not the victims here. Besides, we kowtowed a bit too much to the family’s feelings the first time around.”
“How so?”
“We—the other lawyer and I—agreed to a compromise so the girls could get seven years, keeping them inside until they were eighteen. We broke it into three charges—manslaughter, kidnapping, and larceny—and gave them three, three, and one.”
“Larceny?”
“Would you believe the Barneses’ baby carriage cost seven hundred and fifty dollars? Carriages are like cell phones, I guess. The light ones cost the most.”
Rosario’s very gaze was a judgment, an assertion that she would never make such a bum deal for a client.
“You have to understand the context.” Sharon worked hard to keep her voice slow and measured, anxious not to sound defensive. “Cynthia Barnes was going to make a big stink. She was going to marshal all her father’s cronies and lobby the General Assembly to drop the age of juvenile eligibility. She wanted to make it legal for ten-year-olds to be tried as adults, depending on the felonies committed. Ten! If she couldn’t put Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller away for life, then she’d make sure the next child who screwed up did serious time. It was a disaster waiting to happen. And the kids who bore the brunt of it would have been poor black kids in Baltimore.”
“But your responsibility was to your client,” Rosario said. “Not to your future clients.”
Sharon had been sitting on the edge of the Stickley, bare feet tucked beneath her. Rosario’s rebuke was not new to her—she’d had plenty of time to second-guess herself over the years. Hearing the words said out loud made her yearn to fling herself out of the chair and pace in frustration. But her feet were filled with pins and needles, so she stayed where she was.
“Why do you think,” she said softly, “that I’ve asked you here? Why do you think I still care? I know better than anyone what I did. They had the girls’ statements, in which each implicated the other, but the physical evidence was ambiguous.”
“Ambiguous?”
“Based on the autopsy, Olivia Barnes’s death could have been SIDS. Or brought on by shaken baby syndrome.”
Rosario smiled. “Sharon, don’t shit a shitter. As I recall, there was never any doubt that the girls did the deed. The main question was which one actually picked up the pillow and smothered the child, and whether it was an act of aggression or dumb panic.”
Sharon valued Rosario’s candor, for she knew how it felt to be misunderstood for speaking one’s mind, for not wasting time with artificial niceties and oh-so-careful words.
“Alice was an accessory to one crime, the kidnapping. But whatever happened, the fact remains that she did her time—more time than some grown-ups do for manslaughter. She paid society back, okay, and now society is harassing her, trying to make her a scapegoat because of some freak resemblance and a coincidence of geography.”
“Sharon—” Rosario’s voice was as calmin
g as a hand on one’s sleeve. “Sharon, I would really like a drink.”
It was impossible to deny such a straightforward request without asking Rosario straight-out if she was loaded. “Sure,” she said, stamping her feet before she stood, to get the feeling back in them. “I have vodka and scotch.”
“Scotch with a scooch of ice.” Rosario laughed at her own word-play. She had a gravelly, masculine laugh. Gossip, hardened into legend, maintained she was the illegitimate daughter of one of the city’s most beloved mayors, and anyone who had seen his portrait in City Hall had to believe it was true. Daniel Florio in drag would have been a dead ringer for Rosario Bustamante. But Rosario didn’t encourage the speculation, because her accomplishments would appear less impressive if there was a powerful patron in the wings, manipulating her rise. Rosario Bustamante’s official biography was a Horatio Alger tale of a girl transcending her roots as the daughter of a Mexican cleaning woman to become the city’s best criminal defense attorney. But there were tiny hints of connectedness imbedded in her résumé. St. Timothy’s for high school, then Vassar and Yale Law. Sure, she could have done it all on scholarship. But how would a cleaning woman have known to aim her clever teenage daughter at the city’s private school system? Someone had been whispering in Rosario Bustamante’s ear since she was very young.
Sharon brought Rosario her drink, no longer caring if her barware earned her the woman’s admiration.
“Rosario—I can’t do this without you.”
“I’m not sure you can do it with me. Pro bono holds less attraction for me as I near retirement age.” She bared her teeth in a self-mocking grin. Everyone in the courthouse knew it would be decades before Rosario Bustamante died, probably at her desk, or in a summation. But she wouldn’t shuffle off this mortal coil before she sent a few more judges and prosecutors to the edge of apoplexy.
Every Secret Thing Page 24