Heir Apparent

by James, Terry

  “My name is Eddie King,” I said. “I’m a private detective. I’m seeking some information on an adoption.”

  The warmth of two intense gazes burrowed into the nape of my neck.

  “Are you representing one of the parties involved?” she asked. I would have preferred she got up from her desk and came to the counter, if only for the sake of the expectant couple.

  “Yes,” I said, as quietly as I could. “The mother.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “The mother’s?” I asked.

  “The child.”

  “William Joseph Morris.”

  She typed it on her keyboard and stared at her screen.

  “Date of birth?”

  “March 24th, 1972.”

  She typed that. She then reached for the mouse and went through a series of movements and clicks as she watched her screen. When her hand at last was still, she turned and looked at me.

  “That’s a closed adoption, sir. The mother will have to come down here with the relevant paperwork, and we can look and see if the adoptee has signed the consent form. If he has, we can give that information out to her. If he hasn’t, then you’ll need to get a court order to unseal the records.”

  “Can you just tell me if he signed the consent form?”

  “No, sir, I can’t.”

  I picked up my hat and put it on my head. She was back at her work before I could thank her.

  The couple made a good show of being absorbed in their own affairs as I walked past them on my way out the door.

  It was about 1:30 when I stepped into the office. I hung my hat and coat on the rack and picked up the mail from the floor. The hospital bill had arrived. I didn’t open it.

  I stood for a moment at the side of my desk, staring down at the checks from Fletcher Enterprises. I bowed to fate and grabbed the checks and slid them into the middle drawer of the desk.

  I sat down. It had been a while since I had studied the Silly Putty. I picked it up off the blotter and brought it close to my face and read it again.

  I set it back down and hoisted the phone book onto the desk and turned to the B’s. There were thirteen Brenner’s, nine of them men who may or may not have been married to a woman named Ruth. Of the three women there was a Patricia, a Margaret, and an R. I pulled the telephone over and dialed R.’s number.

  A woman answered. I asked for Ruth. Wrong number. I tried the same tactic going down the list of men’s names. On the sixth call a woman replied:

  “Speaking.”

  “Is this the Ruth Brenner who worked for the agency?” I asked.

  She hesitated, wariness in her breath. She was about to say something, then decided not to. She hung up.

  I took down the address.

  29

  MOST OF THE trees in Cedar Grove were older than the houses. The moment you crossed San Pablo Avenue north of the Aerotek plant it was like entering a primeval forest. Both sides of every street were lined with massive old oaks and cedars and walnuts and elms, their upper branches so thickly interwoven that cats and squirrels could travel from one end of the subdivision to the other without ever setting foot on the ground. Before it was Cedar Grove, it was an old-growth cedar grove. During the post-war aerospace boom the County, lobbying hard for the Aerotek contract, promised a new sector of housing for all the engineers and their families. As a gesture of compromise to the Joyce Kilmer Society, which was adamantly opposed to any development in the old cedar grove, the County promised to preserve as many trees as possible. To their credit, they did manage to retain every tree that happened to be standing within ten feet of the grid lines of the proposed street layout, which accounted for all the trees which seemed to have leapt out into the street. Every few blocks you encountered an enormous old oak or fig right in the middle of an intersection, a yellow band painted around its trunk, a sight that never ceased to amaze me.

  Her address was 1919 Virginia Street. I took Rose off of San Pablo, drove six blocks down to Virginia, and hung a left. The leaves had started to turn. Thin shafts of sunlight angled down through the yellow and orange foliage, paving the street with golden cobbles. I rolled my window down and inhaled a heady draught of tree bark, chlorophyll, and rotting pumpkins. If I could choose anywhere in the city to live it would be in one of the sprawling ranch-style houses of Cedar Grove. Something about all that rectilinearity amidst the wild jumble of branches appealed to me. All those beautiful old LeSabres and DeVilles and Thunderbirds lazing in the driveways, not one of them with more than ten thousand miles on it, probably had something to do with it. Chalet blue. Starlight silver. Beaumont beige. Colors I yearned for as a kid but never came close to possessing.

  It was about a quarter after two, and the only sign of life on the street was an elderly gentleman out for his constitutional in a smart tan blazer and a short-brimmed Panama. I pulled over to the curb in front of 1919 and cut the engine and sat there for a while reveling in the leaf-muffled silence. The house was tan brick with a two-car garage. The curtains in the wide picture window were open, a lamp shade illuminated within. A small patch of dappled sunlight lay like newly minted silver dollars atop the hood of the white ‘64 Impala in the driveway.

  I got out and, buttoning my coat, made my way across the leaf-strewn yard. At the foot of the front door lay a black rubber welcome mat with “BRENNER” stamped in white caps in the middle of it. I rang the doorbell, a fine, leisurely three-tone chime, its final note slow to fade. The peep hole darkened. I held an amiable pose. She eventually got around to opening the door.

  She was in her late sixties or early seventies, well-padded from head to toe. The thick lenses of her large, round bifocals magnified her eyes to nearly twice their natural size, which coupled with her relatively small nose and mouth gave her the look of a spooked barn owl.

  She beheld me with suspicion from the safer side of the glass screen. The call must have put her on her guard.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am,” I said. “My name is Eddie King. I’m a private detective.”

  I held my license up to the glass in front of her face. She tilted her head back and took a long gander at it. The print was obviously too small for her to read, but she made a good show of it.

  “I’ve already told the police everything I know,” she said, her eyes returning to mine.

  “I’m not sure what you’re referring to,” I said.

  “You’re not here about St. Jerome’s?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “What is St. Jerome’s?”

  She gave me a dubious look. “The orphanage.”

  I put my license away.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” I said. “I’m trying to locate a man named William Morris. He was put up for adoption as an infant in 1972. As far as I know there was never any contact between the child and his natural parents.”

  I pulled the Silly Putty from my pocket and held it up to the glass. “I encountered your name among the father’s possessions. It appears to be an impression from a newspaper article. I thought it might be a lead.”

  She squinted at it briefly, then, utterly baffled, returned her attention to me.

  “I can’t read that.”

  “It says you were a vital link between the agency and something else,” I said, lowering the Silly Putty. “It’s not clear what. It says you made a difference in people’s lives.”

  That seemed to soften her.

  “What did you say your name was again?”

  “Eddie King.”

  She studied my face for a while, then she unlocked the screen door and opened it.

  “Why don’t you come in,” she said. “I’ve got something on the stove.”

  I thanked her, removed my hat, and stepped in.

  About three steps beyond the door I was bowled over by a powerful wave of déjà vu. The rust colored sofas, the heavy stone facade around the fireplace, the wood paneling at the back of the room, the blonde walnut shelves and cabinets with bottled ships and other dated bric-
a-brac on them, the brass starburst clock, the vertically striped brown and tan curtains, the Harvest Gold table lamps with shades matching the drapes, the huge television console in a dedicated walnut cabinet, the bottle of Rolaids and the TV Guide on the brass and glass coffee table—everything was exactly as it had been at some other time, in some other life.

  “Have a seat,” she said. “I’ll just be a minute.” Even those words, her casual delivery, her mildly conciliatory tone, reverberated through me. Then, as before, she was walking away from me across the tan shag carpet, her beige polyester pants making the same scratchy sound, her broad, flat behind radiating the same sense of hospitality. Even the smells were uncannily familiar: a buttery aroma which I knew for a fact to be macaroni and cheese, a strange tonsily odor that seemed to be coming off all the brown in the room, the oily, lemony scent of furniture polish, and a certain faint musky fragrance, which I couldn’t place but which was the most arresting of all.

  I walked over to one of the rust colored sofas and took a seat, setting my hat beside me. That other man set his hat beside him too. As I sat listening to a spoon clinking against a pot, the déjà vu gradually faded. Only then did it dawn on me that anyone stepping into this relic of (or, heaven forbid, homage to) the 1970s would have felt like they were experiencing déjà vu.

  She came back in, noticeably more relaxed, and sat down in the brown vinyl armchair facing me on the other side of the coffee table.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want my macaroni to burn.”

  “Smells good.”

  “When I first saw you,” she said, “I thought you were an FBI agent. Or CIA.”

  I smiled. We sat in silence for a moment, then she said:

  “I had so many babies. Two hundred and sixty-three, to be exact. Two or three to a room at any given time for nearly thirty years. They came and they went. Oh, such beautiful little people. Cast off like a change of clothes. You can’t help but get attached to them.”

  I nodded.

  “So you ran a kind of foster home here?”

  “It was more than that. It was a real home for a lot of those kids. Some of those babies were with me for years before anyone claimed them.”

  “Was it here, in this house?”

  “Yes.” She turned her eyes towards the wall to my right and gazed at it for a while. “It seems so empty without them.”

  She looked at me. “Tell me again who you’re trying to find?”

  “His name is William Morris,” I said. “He was born in March of 1972. His birth parents were Walter and Imogen Morris. I don’t know the names of the adoptive parents.”

  “And why are you trying to locate him?” she asked. “Are the birth parents trying to reunite with him?”

  “Actually, the father recently passed away,” I said and proceeded to tell her the same story I had told Kathy Jerrell.

  “What makes you think the baby was with me?” she asked.

  “As I said, your name was mentioned in the article, and I thought it might be a lead.”

  “What article?”

  I pulled the Silly Putty from my pocket again and held it out on my palm. “I’m afraid I don’t know where the impression came from, but it seems to be newsprint.”

  “What is that thing?”

  When I told her, she made a shooing motion with her hand, as if to bat away a pesky fly, and groaned. “I’ve seen enough of that stuff for one lifetime. That’s one thing I won’t miss, trying to get Silly Putty out of the carpet.” She took the wedge and held it close to her face, tilting her head up and down to try to get it into focus.

  “It’s hard to read the backwards print,” I said, sensing her mounting frustration.

  “No wonder!” she exclaimed. “I thought I was really starting to go blind. Okay, now I see it’s backwards.”

  “Shall I read it to you?”

  She handed it back to me, and I read the text, offering my guesses at the broken words.

  “It could be from the article they did on me,” she said.

  “Which article was that?”

  “Oh, jeez, this was probably a good ten years ago. The paper did a piece on independent foster caregivers. They came and interviewed me.”

  “Do you happen to have a copy of it?”

  “I’m sure I do somewhere back in there,” she said. “I wouldn’t have a clue where to look for it. There’s so many old albums. That’s one of my projects, put that room in some kind of order.”

  “Did you keep any records of the babies you took in?” I asked.

  “All that stuff was subpoenaed for the case.”

  “What case?”

  “The St. Jerome’s case,” she said as if it were common knowledge.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that,” I said.

  She grimaced. “Disgusting. What they did to those children. The director was running a child pornography ring out of the orphanage.”

  I crossed my arms and looked at her.

  “I don’t know how long it was going on,” she said. “They were raided about two years ago by the FBI. He got thirty years. Keith Mannix is his name. You must have read about it in the paper. It was front page news.”

  It sounded vaguely familiar. Perhaps at some subconscious level I had already made the connection. It wouldn’t have been the first time my intuition had had to wait for the facts to catch up to it.

  “I’m sure other people were involved,” she said. “All the records, dating back to the founding in 1932, were subpoenaed by the court. They came for mine, too. Who knows if I’ll ever get them back.”

  She looked indignant, as if wanting me to share her personal affront, which I did to the best of my ability.

  “St. Jerome’s wasn’t the only agency that used me,” she said, keen to make it clear that she was in no way involved. “I was with Shepherd’s Flock and Bright Futures, the Langley Agency, others I can’t remember.”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me,” I said. “These albums you mentioned, do they have pictures of the babies you took in?”

  “Yes, a lot of them do.”

  “Do you have dates in them?”

  “No,” she said. “But it’s easy to tell when they’re from.”

  “Would you be able to find one with pictures from the early seventies?”

  “I don’t know as that would be much good to you if you’re looking for an adult,” she said. “Do you have a picture of him?”

  “No. But I’d like to have a look, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Hold on,” she said and got up from the chair and made her way back to the hallway and around the corner. While I was waiting for her, I grabbed the bottle of Rolaids from the coffee table and, for the hell of it, opened the cap and retrieved one of the tablets and popped it into my mouth. I chewed it and listened to her rooting around.

  After a while I stood up and ambled around the room, looking at all the tacky odds and ends. I stopped before the bookshelf and perused the titles: Better Homes and Gardens Fondue and Tabletop Cooking, More Joy: A Lovemaking Companion to the Joy of Sex, Angels: God’s Secret Agents, The Total Woman, to name but a few.

  I was about to turn away when a certain combination of letters and layout snagged in my peripheral vision. Blow me if Guttersnipe wasn’t staring me in the face, right there on the shelf beside Shogun. I pulled it out and opened the cover. An inscription on the title page, in blue ballpoint, read: “To Ruth, a very special lady. Thanks for everything. Baxter Conway.” Something cold and hard and about the size of a clenched fist slid down my esophagus into my stomach. The date beneath the dedication was “Aug, 1998.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I heard her say from wherever she was.

  I stuffed the book into my inside coat pocket. “Did you find something?” I called out, quickly returning to the couch.

  She came back into the living room holding a thick, powder-blue photo album. “I found the article,” she said, taking her seat and opening the al
bum on the coffee table. The clipping was loose, creased over where it had extended beyond the edges of the album. She handed it to me.

  The date was June 8, 1998. The upper left-hand quarter of the page was occupied by an ad for the Chrysler PT Cruiser, a car that I detest for its pretensions of being something classic. The car was parked in some leafy urban utopia, at a three-quarter angle facing the viewer. On the near side a man and a woman were strolling hand in hand, the man’s right shoe, raised in stride, about to make spatial, if not physical, contact with the leading edge of the grille—the vertical bands that I had mistaken for ventilation grating. The man and woman were dressed in the tastefully updated seventies apparel characteristic of late-nineties fashion, he with his bulbous-toed shoes, flared trousers, and broad-collared shirt, she in a silky summer dress patterned in concentric ovals vaguely reminiscent of lava lamp globules. The ad was black-and-white, probably one of the last of its kind before all the dailies, even the cash-strapped Herald, had made the switch to color. The slogan at the bottom of the ad was one word: “Soul.”

  The article running along the right side of it was titled “Unsung Heroines Form Union.” I found the paragraph that Walter had sampled; there wasn’t much that I hadn’t already gleaned from the snippet. I skimmed through the rest of the article, the gist of which concerned a group of local independent foster caregivers who, unhappy with their inability to bargain with either the State or the private adoption agencies, had decided to form their own union. I set the article aside, no more informed as to why Walter had taken an impression of it than before.

  She was looking through the album, smiling sweetly at the memories it conjured. I leaned forward. From my vantage they were all upside down, pictures of babies and couples holding babies and some of toddlers and older children, taken with Polaroids and Instamatics and who knows what other devices, but it was immediately apparent from the colors blaring from the pages that we were in the 1970s. It wasn’t just the clothes and the outlandish home furnishings in the backgrounds of the pictures. Even the photo processing chemicals of that era seemed to produce garish, saturated hues that instantly took me back to my own childhood, or rather to the images immortalized in our own family album: me on my yellow potty, me in the highchair with red goop all over my face, me in my orange and green Aquaman costume. Images etched into my brain with hydrochloric acid.