A Playdate With Death (6 page)

The words had barely left my mouth when Isaac grabbed a plastic bottle of Elmer’s glue and squeezed a huge white puddle out on the carpet.

“Oh my God! No, Isaac! No!” I shouted.

“You see! You see! He ruins everything!” Ruby echoed my yell. I mopped up the spill, yanked her squirming brother out the door, and shut it firmly behind me.

“Well, clearly you’re not going to be playing with Ruby this afternoon,” I said. “Look, kid, I need to do some work
on the computer. Your daddy’s going to be home from his meeting in about an hour. Can you think of something to do by yourself until he gets home?”

“TV?” my angelic child suggested with a bat of his eyelashes.

“Right. Fine. As a special treat.”

He ran to the couch and scrambled up. I sorted through our bedraggled video collection until I found a copy of
Color Me Barbra,
a Barbra Streisand TV special from some time in the 1960s. Ruby loved it because she was obsessed with show tunes. Isaac liked it because La Streisand does half the numbers inside of a tiger cage. With real tigers.

I set Bobby’s laptop up next to my computer and connected it to our home network with an Ethernet cable. Now I could freely copy documents and files from it onto my own hard drive. I went back into his correspondence folder and spent the next half-hour skimming through letters to clients and friends until I found something. I had a feeling about it even before I opened it, because the document wasn’t titled like the other letters in the folder, with the recipient’s name and the date. It was just called “Letter #1.”

The letter started out somewhat cryptically. Underneath Bobby’s standard letterhead—an old-time circus strongman holding up his address—the salutation read simply, “Hello.”

The letter went on to describe Bobby’s job and interests, and he closed with another plea to his birth mother to write or E-mail him.

I leaned back in my chair, touched by the hope with which Bobby had sent this letter to someone who, for all he knew, had no interest in establishing any kind of contact with him whatsoever. How must it have felt to find out, as an adult, that you weren’t who you thought you were? Or, at the very least, that some of the basic tenets of your life
and sense of self were lies? Had Bobby’s mother refused his attempts at contact? Had he responded to that rejection with despair? Had he even
sent
the letter? Why wasn’t there an address?

My reverie was interrupted by my growing consciousness of a suspicious sound: silence. My house was never silent, except when my children were either asleep or engaged in some act of nursery terrorism. I hustled out to the family room, where I found Isaac sitting, slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, staring at Barbra’s flaring nostrils and purple boa. I tiptoed away. I put my ear to Ruby’s door. She was singing softly to herself; the tune seemed to be her own version of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which her father had for some reason considered it not merely appropriate but desirable to teach her.

It was a miracle. My children were actually giving me a period of uninterrupted peace.

I went back to my desk and sat for a minute, tapping my finger against the keys. The police had confiscated the contents of Bobby’s filing cabinet, so there was no way for me to see if he’d ever gotten a reply from his birth mother. However, I could check to see if he’d gotten an E-mail. I’d already noticed that Bobby kept careful track of his paper files and the documents on his computer. It stood to reason that he would do the same with his E-mail records.

He didn’t disappoint me. His E-mail program had a carefully organized archiving system. Unfortunately, because I didn’t know his mother’s name or E-mail address, it was going to be a challenge sifting through the hundreds of messages
in the “Personal Correspondence” archive to find which one might have come from her. Using the program’s Find command, I started searching by E-mail subject heading. “Birth Mother” came up with nothing, as did “Mother.” “Mom,” however, led me to a series of E-mails from Bobby’s sister, Michelle, complaining about how their mother had criticized Michelle’s new living room furniture. Apparently, Michelle had bought it at IKEA, and Dr. Katz felt constrained to point out that in Sweden, where the chain had begun, and which the good doctor had recently visited to deliver a paper on “Fluorescent In Situ Hybridization,” IKEA was considered about as classy as Wal-Mart. Michelle had written to Bobby seeking reassurance 1. That IKEA was a reasonable place to buy a couch, and 2. That their mother was a bitch. I searched through Bobby’s “Sent Mail” file and found that he had responded to both in the affirmative.

Subject headings “Adoption,” “Adopt,” and “Adopted” led nowhere. Finally, I decided I had to find a more efficient way to search. I launched Bobby’s Internet browser and looked up his favorite sites. The California Reunion Registry was listed, but I already knew that Bobby hadn’t found his mother through that site. Nothing else in the favorite sites list looked promising, so I clicked down the Go button, hoping he had given his browser a large cache. He had. The browser allowed me to track the last two hundred web sites he’d visited immediately before he died.

Bobby had searched a medical site for a cure for athlete’s foot (I made a mental note not to shower at the gym) and bought a Palm Pilot on-line. He’d posted a review of the
new John Grisham on Amazon.com (he liked it okay but wasn’t thrilled) and bid on a set of golf clubs on eBay. None of these activities, I thought, was that of a man about to kill himself. As of a day or two before his death, Bobby had planned to be around long enough to monitor a five-day on-line auction and receive a package that would take three to seven days to arrive. If he
had
committed suicide, it had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. I wondered if the police had come across this information.

Bobby had also, I noticed, checked his I-Groups home page over and over again. I-Groups is one of the many sites on the web that allows people with similar interests to join up in E-mail circles. The site has hundreds of different groups, some open to the public, some open only to those approved by the members of the group. Being part of an Email circle through a service like I-Groups lets members send messages to the group as a whole, instead of having to cc each individual member. I was part of a couple of these circles myself. Friends from college and I had been E-mailing for quite some time. When I was pregnant with Ruby, I’d joined a list for mothers due in the same month and spent a very self-indulgent and satisfying nine months comparing stretch marks and hemorrhoids. For a while, I’d participated in an I-Group for “recovering attorneys” but found the “support” I got a bit over the top. I mean, it wasn’t like I’d weaned myself off heroin; all I’d done was quit my job.

I held my breath as I selected the I-Groups link in Bobby’s Go menu. If he hadn’t saved his password as a cookie to be entered automatically when the page came up, there
would be no way for me to check his I-Groups home page and access the archives of posted messages.

I was lucky. Like me, Bobby was not particularly security conscious. His home page showed just one I-Group. It was called [email protected]. I clicked over to the archive and began sifting through the messages. Bobby had joined the group almost three months before. His initial message informed the other members that he was an adoptee looking for his birth parents, who were not registered with the California Reunion Registry. He asked for advice about alternative ways to find them. And boy did he get it.

As I scrolled down through the many replies to Bobby’s initial posting, I was interrupted by the scourge of the work-at-home parent: her children. Ruby and Isaac wandered into the room. Isaac was naked from the waist down.

“Isaac! Where are your pants?” We’d only recently convinced Isaac to lose his diapers. It had taken about forty pounds of M&M’s doled out one by one as a reward for each successful bathroom excursion.

“They’re in the toilet,” Ruby said as if I were an idiot for even asking.

“Oh, no. Did you go to the bathroom, Isaac?” He nodded happily, sucking on the two middle fingers of his left hand. I stifled my gag reflex and hustled him back to the bathroom. I fished his pants out of the toilet and briefly considered throwing them directly in the trash. They were from Baby Gap, however, and not even a toilet full of poop justified tossing out a thirty-dollar pair of toddler jeans. Instead, I dumped them into the washing machine. As I scrubbed
my disgusting yet adorable boy from tush to fingertips, I wondered, not for the first time, if I’d still be wiping the kid’s behind when he was in graduate school. Probably not. Probably by the time he had his bar mitzvah, he’d be able to handle his own potty needs.

I’d clearly ignored the kids for long enough. I gazed longingly at the TV, but guilt won out over my desire to keep reading Bobby’s E-mail. Instead, I spilled a load of blocks and miniature cars on the carpet. I groaned softly as I sat down. I know there are some mothers who love nothing more than spending hours finger painting and making Play-Doh castles. I’m not one of them. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my kids. I love them with a combination of ferocity and obsession that can be overwhelming both to them and to me. But playing with them can be skull-crushingly tedious.

Ruby and I played with the blocks while Isaac zoomed his Hot Wheels around us. I did my best to convince her not to bellow in protest when he dared approach our construction site. I was less successful at getting him to stop talking about how his cars were going to shoot and kill each other. We compromised by agreeing that the red Formula One could beat up the other cars, as long as he gave their booboos kisses afterward.

After half an hour or so, my garage built out of blocks was teetering dangerously, and I wasn’t sure if I had the energy to rebuild. Luckily, Peter showed up just as I was beginning to lose focus. As soon as he’d gotten down on his hands and knees and begun renovating my structurally unsound
building, I slipped back to my computer.

Within an hour, I’d made a long list of potential means of finding a birth parent who didn’t want to be found. Bobby’s E-mail pals had provided him with names and numbers of private investigators, on-line search services, and a few organizations dedicated to furthering an individual’s access to his or her biological and familial history. According to his E-mails to the group, Bobby had contacted the organizations first, so that’s what I did. I checked out their web sites. By and large, they seemed fairly innocuous, mostly providing the same kind of support that Bobby had gotten from his I-Group.

One was a little more intense. This site, called www.righttoknow.net, was dedicated to assisting people whose birth parents were not just unknown but were actively keeping their identities secret. The site offered more arcane investigative services, including instructions on performing skip traces and credit card searches. It offered the names of investigators who specialized in “fugitive parents.” At the bottom of the home page was an E-mail address. I copied it and then clicked over to Bobby’s E-mail program. I searched his archives for any message from that address. Pay dirt.

Over the past couple of months, Bobby had been E-mailing with someone named Louise, the founder of Right to Know. From her E-mails, I pieced together that Bobby had contacted her through the web site and asked for help with finding his birth mother. Early on in their correspondence, she told him that she, too, lived in Los Angeles, and that she had sources for finding parents in the area. Louise
sent Bobby E-mails almost daily. I read through a pile of them before I found one that sounded promising. In it, Louise told Bobby that she had “good news” and “information.” She asked him to meet her where she worked, at the Starbucks across the street from the Westside Pavilion, a mall in West L.A.

I copied all the important information onto my computer. It had taken me all of an afternoon to get within one step of Bobby’s birth parents. The Internet seems to have been designed to allow people to spy on one another. It certainly has made the private detective’s job significantly easier. I found this somewhat troubling, although I was less concerned with the death of privacy than with the possibility that Al would find a significant portion of his new business usurped by a web site’s offering to find anything about anybody at bargain basement rates.

T
HE
next morning, after I’d dropped Ruby off at preschool, Isaac and I headed out to the Westside Pavilion. I guess it probably says something about my approach to detective work that before I went to question Louise, I did a little shopping. I had never actually bought new clothes for Isaac. He’d spent the first two and a half years of his life wearing Ruby’s hand-me-downs. Suddenly, however, as if in concert with his burgeoning interest in firearms, he’d begun to refuse to allow me to dress him in her old pink overalls, flowered T-shirts, and pastel leggings, although for some reason he was still perfectly happy to sleep in her Little Mermaid nightgown.