Fresh Kills (15 page)

“And you agreed.”

“We had to,” Ellie replied in her breathy voice. “She said we'd never see him again, that she'd take him across state lines to a—Let me remember her exact words.” Ellie closed her eyes and leaned her head back on the chair. Her hair hadn't been washed; it hung limp and lank. Her face was without makeup; she looked old and worn. “She said if we didn't pay, she'd give our son to a family who really cared about him. Cared enough to pay, she meant.”

She sighed, opened her eyes, and sat up again. “Josh met Amber at the mall at eight-thirty. She was with Scott, but she did all the talking, according to Josh. Scott said to meet him at the entrance to Macy's, so Josh walked all the way through the mall. Then when he got there,” she went on, her tone as bitter as unsweetened chocolate, “there was no Amber and no baby. Scott jumped out and hit him, then demanded the money. But Josh had already paid Amber, so he had no money. Scott hit him some more, then ran away.”

“Scott worked at Macy's,” I commented. “Maybe he knew some kind of back way through the store.”

“It was near the loading dock,” Ellie confirmed, but her voice had lost interest.

I continued my train of thought. “So the last time Josh saw Amber, she was alive.”

“Josh didn't kill Amber,” Ellie said. It was a flat statement of fact, not an indignant protest. “If he had,” she began, then stopped herself with a hard clamp of her jaw.

I finished the thought for her. “If he had, he'd have taken the baby with him. He would never have killed her while there was a chance of getting Adam back.”

She flashed me a wintry smile. “I'm glad you understand everything, Ms. Jameson,” she said.

Ellie's eyes glazed, and she stared at a spot on the wall about ten inches to the left of my face. “After the court ruling,” she began, “I was devastated. I'd lost the baby and found out my husband had an affair with that little slut, all in one day. Even though Marla filed an appeal, things didn't look promising. I kept trying to tell myself we could start again, find another baby, but it was no good.”

She turned her head and gazed directly into my eyes, pulling me into her pain. “One minute he was there, next to my heart, and the next minute he was gone. Can you understand that? Gone—as if he'd died in my arms. As if he'd fallen into the river and drowned. As if he'd been kidnapped. Gone. I couldn't think about another baby—all I could do was think about Adam.”

She stared unblinking at my face. “Even now, I keep hoping—Do you know what I hope, more than anything?”

I shook my head. I wasn't sure I could stand finding out.

“I hope with all my heart that Amber sold my baby. I hope somebody paid good money for him, and took him home, and that he's warm and dry and fed. Can you believe it?” She shook her head.

“Three days ago I hoped he'd go to college. Now my best hope is that he was bought and paid for and isn't lying in the swamp waiting for hikers to stumble on.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but what the hell was there to say?

When I left the Greenspan house, the gaggle of reporters crowded the door, pushing microphones into my face and shouting the same stupid questions I'd already refused to answer.

“How is Mrs. Greenspan holding up?”

“Did Ellie know Amber was going to sell the baby?”

“Can you comment on the rumor that Josh Greenspan offered money to the birth mother to—”

My print reporter friend leaned against the brick wall, a wry smile on his young face. He held his head at a cocky angle that demanded a tilted fedora for the full effect. I was willing to bet he'd seen
The Paper
at least ten times. He lolled by the wall as though nothing on earth could move him from the spot, but as soon as I cleared the gauntlet, he'd find a way to follow me, to make sure I walked along Remsen to the Promenade and didn't cut along home through the narrow brownstoned streets of the Heights.

I had already decided I could get more from him than he could from me, so I strolled along the tree-lined block past the Brooklyn Bar Association building, past the stately town houses with the seven-foot windows lined with old lace curtains, past huge oak doors with leaded glass and chandeliers winking through the tall windows. I pictured carriages pulling up in front of these grand houses, men in frock coats opening the doors for ladies in long skirts and tiny slippers. I pictured the men scraping mud off their boots on the wrought-iron scrapers that were part of every home's stoop railing. I pictured a gaslit world of charm and manners, an Edith Wharton world, an age of innocence without baby-sellers or—

Who was I kidding? Babies were born into abject poverty, sold into brothels, farmed out to foster mothers who starved them in that gilded age that knew evil as plainly as we know it today. If the Greenspans had lived then, the same tabloid journalists would have surrounded their house, working for Hearst or Pulitzer.

On that note, I turned around and faced the man whose footsteps had dogged mine for the past half block.

“What's your name, anyway?”

“Artie Bloom,” he replied, pushing an aggressive hand in the direction of my midriff. I allowed mine to be given a jerky shake as he named as his employer the least obnoxious of New York's three tabloid papers. We walked in silence toward the river. Already I could see the tip of Manhattan's skyline from the middle of Remsen Street; it grew larger as we approached the Promenade.

The Promenade—or, more accurately, the Esplanade, a name few know and fewer actually use—that straddles the edge of Brooklyn Heights runs along the top of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. As a result, there's always a hum of traffic underfoot. But this doesn't stop the place from being a haven for mothers with strollers, dog walkers, elderly people sunning themselves on benches, young lovers embracing at the railing.

I motioned Artie to a bench near the circle that ended the Promenade. He sat and looked at me expectantly. “Well, did you get anything out of her?”

“Nice subtle approach, Bloom,” I commented.

He shrugged. “You don't ask, you don't get.”

I had to laugh. “Yeah, you're right. And, no, I don't think I got much out of her. Just what the cops already knew, that her husband went to meet Amber that night to make a deal for the baby.”

Artie Bloom leaned forward eagerly. He had an open face with freckles and sandy-red hair that frizzed like Art Garfunkel's—an all-American boy, the cereal-commercial kid all grown up.

“Did you know she was going to sell the baby?”

“Bloom, I thought you were smarter than the blow-drys back there or I wouldn't have agreed to talk to you. Think about it: would I risk my license to do a thing like that? And if I had, would I tell you about it?”

He pulled back a moment and gave me an assessing stare. “No to the second,” he agreed. “I don't know you well enough to answer the first.”

“I see. And how many other reporters have given that question a little thought?”

“Gotta admit, I'm not big on sharing with my fellow journalists,” the boy reporter replied with a rueful shake of his head. “Never did work and play well with others.”

“But nobody's printed anything accusing me of assisting Amber in the deals.”

“Hey, nobody wants to get sued,” he shot back. “Every lead has to be confirmed by at least two sources before we can print what we—”

“So all you have so far is Marla Hennessey's word that I helped Amber set things up.”

Now the look on the young face was one of amused admiration. “Good guess, Counselor.”

“It's no guess,” I answered. “I've known Marla since law school. She doesn't like losing, and she's not above hinting that the game was rigged when she does lose.”

“If you didn't know what your client was going to do, you must feel guilty as hell.”

“You don't know the half of it, Bloom. But one part of our little deal is that I am not going to tell you how guilty I feel. I am not going to see my name in print any more than it has to be. I'm going to tell you things on deep background. Very deep background. No attribution.”

“Jeez,” he said, letting out his breath in a disgusted whoosh. “Has everybody your age seen
All the President's Men
?”

I laughed. “Damn right. Now, what do you know that I don't?”

He flipped open his steno pad and made a show of consulting his shorthand scribbles. “For one thing, Josh wasn't the only mark,” he said. “There was a meeting three days earlier with a Staten Island couple who wanted a baby, and she was dealing long-distance with a couple in Kansas City and another in—”

“Amber's parents live in Kansas City,” I cut in, my voice quickening with excitement. “Maybe she was going to—”

He laughed. It was somewhere between a laugh of derision and a boyish crow of triumph. “Parents! Your client was an orphan, Counselor. A Mount Loretto girl.”

“Mount Loretto,” I echoed. I was stunned but not surprised. It was just one more lie in what was becoming an intricate web of deception. “Isn't that on Staten Island?”

“Yeah,” the boy reporter replied. “It's on Prince's Bay, near Tottenville. A big old Victorian orphanage, straight out of Dickens.”

“So the presents from Kansas City were from other adoptive parents,” I mused aloud. The clashing tastes represented by Amber's room at the group home began to make sense. The Santa Fe decor came from Ellie Greenspan, the Care Bears from the Midwest.

“They told the cops they expected Amber to deliver the baby to them this weekend,” Artie said. “They sent her money for the trip. But then so did another couple in Baltimore.”

Baltimore. Where Amber's mythical married sister lived.

“So she was going to rip off Josh and then take the baby to one of them,” I speculated.

“Maybe,” Artie replied. “There was also this local couple.” He consulted his steno pad. “Kyle and Donna Cheney. They have one adopted kid and wanted another. They live in Westerleigh, which is about two miles north of the Davis Wildlife Refuge.”

“What difference does that—” I began, then broke off. “Oh. That's where Amber's body was found.”

My companion nodded. “They claim they dropped out of the bidding, but who knows?”

“This makes me sick,” I muttered. I turned away from the panorama of skyline and silver water, looking back at the stately brownstones that lined the Promenade. The trees were beginning to bud; pink and white blossoms festooned the branches like tissue paper decorations. It was a gorgeous day, the kind you want to bottle for use on a bleak winter morning, and here I was talking about a baby on sale at the mall.

“Yeah, me, too,” Artie said. He stood up from the bench.

“You owe me a cup of coffee,” I called.

He stopped and looked around, as if hoping to find a coffee shop in between the benches. “Okay,” he said grudgingly. “But I gotta make it quick. Where do you want to go?”

“How about the Staten Island Mall?”

C
HAPTER
T
EN

“What are all those birds doing over—” I began, breaking off as the import of Artie's smirk hit me. Clouds of gulls swirled around a large, flat mound of earth, treeless and vast, sitting on the opposite side of Richmond Road from the mall.

“That's the landfill,” I guessed aloud. The appearance of a squat brick building with New York City Department of Sanitation on it in silver block letters confirmed my brilliant deduction.

“The biggest sanitary landfill in the whole entire universe,” Artie cheerfully volunteered. “One of the perks of being the Staten Island reporter for my paper is that I got a full guided tour. It measures—”

“Do I look like I care, Bloom?” I shot back. We had just passed the turnoff to the marsh where Amber's body had been pulled from its watery grave; I was in no mood for a sightseeing trip through garbage.

Across the road—a six-lane highway, to be exact—stretched a huge parking lot surrounding the giant mall anchored by three major department stores.

It was a perfect metaphor for late-twentieth-century urban life: a highway to nowhere with a mountain of garbage on one side and a shopping mall on the other. We pulled into the parking lot and found a space near the main entrance. As I closed the door on the passenger side of the car, I looked back across the road at the cloud of gulls hovering over the landfill. A few strays had made it to this side of the road; carrion birds circled Macy's, their harsh cries ringing in my ears as we stepped into the Emerald City of shopping: the Staten Island Mall.

“Where are we going?” I asked Artie. He was moving at a rate of speed that had me hustling to keep up.

“Having some ice cream,” he tossed back over his shoulder.

I was about to remark that I hadn't really accompanied him to the mall for food, when I remembered that Amber had met Josh Greenspan at Friendly's.

We stepped out of Macy's into the mall proper, a cavernous space broken up by fountains and escalators and cute little carts with cute little
tchatchkes
sold by cute little women with perky smiles.

There was an information desk; I picked up a folding map of the mall printed in three colors and raced after Artie, who was moving at a speed hard to keep up with even for a hardened New York pedestrian.

We walked the length of the lower level, passing athletic shoe stores, clothing stores for teenagers, The Body Shop, Victoria's Secret—

“That's where Amber worked,” I said abruptly. I had a sudden vision of her and Scott in my office the day she told me she wanted her baby back. I'd thought that was the worst news I could hear regarding this adoption. Now I looked back upon that moment with fond nostalgia.

Artie stopped, causing a woman walking behind him to swerve her stroller and hit the wall. She glared at him and kept moving.