Fresh Kills (25 page)

“Spare me,” I said, raising greasy fingers to the sky. “I'm not a fan of political correctness at the best of times, and when it comes to food—”

She'd plaited her hair into a complicated knot of braids the color of new rope; the sun poured in through the window and bathed her in a golden halo. Dorinda, goddess of health, turned and poured an iced orange zinger for a weedy-looking man with a toothbrush mustache at the other end of the counter.

She was, of course, right. The spareribs, which had tasted like a little bit of Chinese heaven when I lifted the first one to my lips, were congealing into an inedible mess at the bottom of the aluminum tray. The ones I'd already eaten lay like concrete in my belly. I pushed the dish away and resolved to put more distance between me and the Good Taste Chinese Takeout on Court Street.

“If Doc Scanlon didn't send Adam out of state,” I mused aloud, “then where is he?”

I resolutely pushed aside the thought that he was in the swamp. Artie Bloom's confident assertion that Baby Adam was worth too much on the open market to be killed echoed in my head. Whoever murdered Amber and then Scott knew the full retail price of a white baby.

Dorinda cruised past, a pitcher of water in her hand, refilling glasses. “Where would you hide a baby?” I asked.

“Where would you hide a needle?” she countered, her blue eyes widening as she contemplated the question.

“In a haystack?” My voice rose in disbelief. “You're not taking this seriously. I'm trying to—”

“No, not a haystack,” my old friend said, “a sewing basket.”

“Dorinda, it's 1994. Who the hell has a sewing basket, for God's—”

“I do.”

Of course she did. How else would she get appliqués on her vintage aprons; how else would she put oversized decorative buttons on men's tuxedo shirts; how else would she mend the antique blouses she picked up for a song? And where else would she hide a needle?

It was like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. You hide a needle in a sewing basket, among other needles that look just like it. You hide a letter on top of a desk filled with other letters. You hide a baby—

I had it!

I set the iced coffee glass down with a bang and tossed a couple of bills on the counter to cover it, then called out a quick thank-you to a puzzled-looking but pleased Dorinda, and took the steps up to the office two at a time.

I was hoping to catch Mickey and borrow the keys to her car before she took off for the afternoon. She'd been working half days for the past three months; we hadn't seen much of each other since our last conversation about adoption and motherhood.

Marvella Jackman raised an inquisitive eyebrow as I came through the door. It was after two
P.M.;
I should have been in Part 25 on a drug case.

“Glad you're here, Ms. Jameson,” my secretary sang out. There was an odd look of anticipation on her face. “Ms. Dechter call about an hour ago; she's on her way to the hospital. Pains coming three minutes apart now, so—”

“Oh, my God. Mickey's having the baby!”

So obsessed had I become with the missing Adam that my first thought was
She's probably using her car
.

Which left Marvella's. It took a hefty bribe to get her to part with the keys to her ten-year-old Lincoln Town Car, which she polished religiously every weekend right after church, but she finally handed me the bunch.

“I'll be careful,” I promised.

“You'd better be, Ms. Jameson,” she warned. “Anything happens to that car, I can't be responsible for what my Covington will do.” Covington Jackman, a carpenter by trade, had muscles Arnold Schwarzenegger would have envied. I doubted he'd actually harm me physically, but I pocketed the keys with some trepidation.

“Call Judge McGarvey and adjourn my two o'clock,” I called as I ran out the door. “Tell him I've got food poisoning.”

Which, judging by the way the spareribs were acting in my stomach, wasn't going to be a complete lie.

I drove Marvella's car along Victory Boulevard, passing Doc Scanlon's office and giving an involuntary backward glance. As if the doctor would somehow sense I was driving past, on my way to discovering where he'd hidden Baby Adam until it was safe to place him with a new adoptive family.

Unless Marla had lied to me about Doc's not placing a child since Amber's death. But after what she'd revealed about herself, I doubted she'd cover for Doc if he'd ripped Baby Adam out of Ellie Greenspan's arms for profit.

Of course he could have shipped the baby out of state last night, or used another lawyer besides Marla to handle the adoption. If he'd done either of those things, I could be on a fool's errand, which was why I hadn't called Detective Aronson before setting out from Brooklyn. I had to have more than a brilliant insight brought on by Dorinda's sewing basket and Edgar Allan Poe. I couldn't see Detective Aronson accepting my purloined baby theory without a struggle.

I eased the huge car into the right lane, turned onto Richmond Avenue, and cut another right just across from Willowbrook Park, heading into the development known as New Springville.

I started the great parking space hunt, not as tricky a proposition on Staten Island as on Manhattan, but still something that took a sharp eye and quick reflexes. I slipped in behind a station wagon and killed the engine, then sat a moment and considered my strategy.

It was at this point that I realized I didn't have a strategy. I had a bedrock-solid belief, a conviction that rang as true as Edgar Allan Poe's bells. And I had the advantage of surprise. Betsy Scanlon was not expecting me to walk up to her door and ask if Baby Adam lay in one of the Sears cribs in the sun room.

That was how you hide a baby: put it in with other babies, in a place where people see children come and go, where one more infant can pass unnoticed. Aunt Betsy's Playroom was the perfect hiding place for Adam Greenspan—and I was all but certain he was taking his afternoon nap with the other little boarders.

My theory was that Betsy was just a caretaker, without a stake in the baby-selling scam. She was hiding Adam for Doc, one more little favor for her ex-husband, like doing his laundry or letting him drive her car to the mall. I doubted she was making a profit.

Why did I believe Betsy wasn't working the scam along with her ex-husband? I didn't know; I just felt somehow that she wasn't a woman who could be a party to selling a baby.

But how to reconcile that with the obvious fact that if she had custody of Amber's baby, she was an accessory to Doc's crime?

The completely half-baked nature of this venture slowly came home to me as I sat in the car, slumped behind the steering wheel, thinking about how to accuse a woman I hardly knew of keeping a child from the parents who loved him. For whatever reason, she'd chosen to abet her former husband instead of telling the police she had the baby. She'd chosen to let Ellie and Josh Greenspan live in terror instead of letting them know their baby was alive. She was not likely to invite me into her house and confess that Baby Adam was the third kid from the left in the crib room.

I mentally drafted an affidavit in support of a search warrant; if Detective Aronson had my suspicions, he'd have to get a warrant to search the premises. Did he have enough evidence to get one?

No. That was the problem. Everything I had was built on a hunch supported by a feeling, not something a judge would consider reliable evidence to justify violating Betsy Scanlon's Fourth Amendment rights.

Of course, if I told the cops what I suspected, they could work toward getting the kind of evidence that would stand up in court. But how much time would that take? And how long did Doc intend to leave the baby at Betsy's? For all I knew, he had a couple flying in from Atlanta, ready to exchange unmarked bills for a bundle of joy formerly named Adam. Any interest on the part of the police could lead to Adam's being hustled out of the jurisdiction before they could get a warrant.

No, surprise was not just my best advantage, it was my only hope. And it would be lost if the police began nosing around; Betsy would tell Doc, and the baby would quietly disappear into the gray-market pipeline.

I couldn't leave Staten Island without testing my hunch. But how to get inside Aunt Betsy's Playroom without letting the former Mrs. Scanlon know what was on my mind? And how would I know Baby Adam when I saw him? The truth was, all babies looked pretty much alike to me. Baby Adam would be younger than most infants farmed out to day care, but did I really know a seven-week-old from a four-month-old? Would I even know a boy from a girl if he wasn't swaddled in baby blue instead of pink?

And suppose I managed to identify him; how was I going to get him out of the house? Even if I was right and Betsy was a reluctant accomplice rather than an active conspirator, she really wasn't going to hand me a baby and wish me luck. She'd kept Adam a secret for several long, horrible days—why would she surrender him now?

All this wasn't helping. If I kept on sitting here and ruminating about my choices, or lack thereof, I'd accomplish nothing. At the least, I had to go to Betsy's and get her to invite me into the house—something she'd pointedly not done the last time I visited. We'd sat outside in the cold, ostensibly so she could smoke, but the truth was, she didn't dare ask me into her living room, in case Adam began to cry and I began to wonder what a baby was doing in day care after dark.

I hefted myself out of the creamy leather bucket seat and opened the door. I had to do something before I talked myself out of doing anything. I closed and locked the door to Marvella's car and walked quickly along Travis Avenue. On one side of the road lay the orderly development, houses arranged in neat rows like grade-school children out for a walk. On the other side of the road lay the swamp, where Amber and Scott had met their deaths.

I turned a corner and reached the street where Betsy lived, the street where I'd gone to confront Amber about the paternity of her child, back when I really thought she and Scott intended to make a home for their baby.

I stood for a moment and looked at the house. From the outside there was no way to tell that nearly twenty children played and slept and cried and laughed inside. But some neighbors must have seen the children come and go, and one more baby could easily have come and stayed without causing the kind of comment that would be expected if a newborn suddenly popped up in someone else's life. Even those neighbors who had slogged through the swamp with me in search of Amber and Adam, who devoured the news reports and were on the lookout for Baby Adam, could be forgiven for not thinking the baby might be with Betsy.

I started up the walk, trembling slightly as I considered how close I might be to finding the baby whose unfocused blue eyes had begun to haunt me. The baby I was accused of selling.

That thought allowed me to push the bell. I stood waiting, still without a clue as to what I was going to say when Betsy came to the door. I quickly ran through a mental file of possible reasons for my presence on her concrete steps: a question about Doc's office burglaries; another clue regarding Amber's first baby; a fictitious witness who saw Scott at Betsy's house after the mall incident. But before I could formulate a plan, I noticed a small red-haired girl playing in the yard at the side of the house. She was on the grass next to a driveway made of cement squares someone had painted in red, white, and green blocks.

I decided to strike up a conversation with her; if Betsy came out while I was talking to the kid, she wouldn't suspect that I was there to collect Adam Greenspan. I hoped.

I walked over to the child. “Hi,” I said. My tone was a little too bright, the voice of a person who talked to children the way she talked to small dogs who nipped at ankles.

She looked up at me with wide blue eyes. She held one of those wooden paddles with a ball hung on a rubber band; she bounced the ball idly, without rhyme or rhythm, as she talked.

“When you were a little girl, did you bite your nails?” she asked. She didn't look at me, but her tone implied that this question was to be taken seriously. She wanted solid information.

“Didn't everybody?” I replied.

“Melissa doesn't,” the kid announced. “And Fern doesn't and Randi doesn't. But I do and so does Tasha and Brian and—”

I had the feeling this could go on. I held out my self-manicured hand and said, “Well, I stopped, and look how long my nails are now.”

“I'll stop when I'm six,” the child said firmly. She nodded to show her determination, then hopped away, skipping along the painted squares of the driveway, hopscotching her way to the scraggly lawn. She turned and hopped back, carefully stepping on the green squares and avoiding the red.

“How old are you?” I asked; it was the kind of question a non-child person asked.

“Four years and eight months,” she said, tossing off the answer without looking up.

“That's a good age,” I remarked.

“No, it's not,” retorted the kid. “I'd rather be sixteen. That's my favorite age.”

“Because you could drive a car?” I ventured.

She nodded. “And because I'd be big like my cousin.”

The child stopped suddenly and measured me with her eyes. “How tall are you?” she asked.

“Five feet five inches,” I answered.

She considered my answer, then rejected it. “You're three greens and a half,” she countered. Then she demanded, “Tell me how tall I am.”

I gave the matter some thought. “I'd say you were about three feet.”

“No,” she replied with a decisive shake of her head. “I'm two red ones.”

Red ones?

It took a minute. Then I glanced down at the painted squares of concrete and realized she was using them as her unit of measurement. And she was right; if you laid her little body down on two of the red squares, her head would be at one end and her sneakered feet at the other. As for me, I was about three and a half green squares, which were twice as large as the red.