The Cradle Robbers (13 page)

“Ruby,” I said, the threat in my low voice so frightening that a dozen juvenile princes and princesses in our immediate vicinity clung in abject terror to their mothers. “If you licked that lollipop before you put it on Isaac’s head you are going to be in the worst trouble of your life.”

A buzz cut, it turns out, is an oddly easy thing to track down on a Friday afternoon in downtown San Francisco. By the time we were due to meet Peter back at the hotel, Isaac’s long, floppy hair had been shorn to regulation military length by a friendly Filipino barber. Isaac was the proud owner of a new San Francisco Giants baseball cap, which I hoped would help warm his newly denuded scalp.

The next morning we set out for the cable car, me carrying Sadie strapped to my front in the Baby Bjorn, newly bald Isaac wearing yet another new
hat, this time a San Francisco Giants ski cap, and Ruby skipping along by my side. Peter was talking on his cell phone, as he’d been doing all morning. His “litigation team” had set up yet another conference call and Peter was hard at work in his designated role, cursing Macramé Man and bemoaning the frivolity of the lawsuit. He kept it up on the line to the cable car and all the way up Powell Street to Ghirardelli Square. He’s a good father, though, so despite being involved in his telephone call, he managed to catch Isaac when the kid swung from the bar of the cable car into oncoming traffic.

I think Ruby and Isaac enjoyed themselves. I hope someone did, because I sure as hell didn’t. It’s hard to have fun when you’re in an ice cream parlor, breastfeeding a baby, wrangling two rambunctious small children up to their ears in hot fudge and whipped cream, while dodging the dirty looks of the people at the next table who don’t appreciate your husband’s loud cell phone conversation, his profanity, or the dollops of chocolate chip mint that keep landing on the backs of their necks.

Is it any wonder that Peter and I ended up having a fight on the pier? Thank heavens the kids were distracted by the barking sea lions, otherwise they
would have been terrified. It always amazes me how a married couple can carry on a screaming fight in whispers. The volume may be low, but the facial expressions make up for it. Peter would have said this one started when I tore the ear bud out of his ear and flung it in San Fransisco Bay. I beg to differ. In my opinion it began when his cell phone rang that morning.

We both agree on how it ended, or at least how hostilities ceased for the time being. I stormed off with Sadie and hopped in a cab, leaving Peter by himself to manage his conference call and the family outing to Alcatraz.

Forty-five minutes later, I was in Oakland in front of what my skip trace had come up with as the address for Nancy and Jason McDonnell, shaking my head in surprise at the state of the building. Most foster families aren’t wealthy or even upper middle class. Those of us who are comfortably off don’t usually open up our homes to the less privileged. I’ve always been amazed that it is quite often the very people who have the least who are the most generous. Still, this level of decrepitude seemed too much.

The building was a ramshackle three-family
house covered in peeling siding. The front porch hung crazily from one railing, the other side collapsed into a pile of splintered boards. Half the windows were broken, some taped up with duct tape, others covered in cardboard, and others simply left with jagged cracks. Still, the house was in better shape than the one next door, which had gone up in flames at some point and now squatted, a hulking, charred reminder of how little anyone cared about this part of Oakland.

I sniffed the air, wondering if my infant’s lungs were being filled with bits of ashen asbestos and if I should turn and make a run for it. But I had come all this way, and had had a horrible fight with Peter. I couldn’t bear to go home empty-handed.

I circled the house, hoping to find a back or side entrance as the front was obviously too treacherous to attempt even without a baby strapped to my chest. Instead, what I stumbled across was a young couple, huddled on the back steps, sharing a joint.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hey,” the man replied with barely a glance in my direction. His whole body was curved around the joint like a question mark. Everything about him was long and thin, as if he were a fractal-person,
composed of long, thin fingers on long, thin hands, dangling at the ends of long, thin arms under a long, thin face with long, lank hair, all atop a long, thin body. I couldn’t see them, but I was sure his feet and toes were long and thin, too. He was also dirty. Not filthy, but just a little bit greasy.

His friend was his twin, although they looked nothing alike. She was dark and small. But she had no more flesh covering her bones than he did, and she gave the same impression of being covered with a thin layer of grime. She had a down jacket draped over her shoulders, under which she wore only a dirty white tank top. Her arms were dappled with track marks, both fresh ones and others that had long since healed over. This case was causing me to spend an awful lot of time with junk addicts.

“I’m looking for Nancy and Jason McDonnell,” I said. “Do you know how I can get to their apartment?”

The man took a long drag off his joint and looked up at me, as if he was finally really registering my presence in the yard. His gaze lingered on Sadie for a moment. Then, as if dismissing any possible threat we could pose, he shrugged. “That’s us.”

“You’re Jason McDonnell?”

If he noticed the horror in my voice at the thought that these two bedraggled, hollow-eyed junkies were the people I was looking for, he did not show it. “Jase. Nobody calls me Jason. Now you know who I am, why don’t you tell me who you are?”

“Mind if I pull up a seat? My neck is killing me from dragging this baby around.” Sadie was getting too big and fat for the Baby Bjorn, but I hadn’t wanted to pull her stroller onto the cable car. Another reason to be angry at Peter. If we hadn’t had a fight I wouldn’t have stormed off to Oakland without the stroller.

The woman pointed to a rusted metal garden chair across the packed-dirt yard. I pulled it over and sat down. Sadie had fallen asleep, and I hoped that the sudden lack of motion wouldn’t wake her up. I rocked back and forth a bit to simulate walking. Not that that would fool her for an instant.

“I’m Juliet Applebaum,” I said. “I’m here about your foster son.”

“Which one?” Jase said.

“You have more than one?”

“We don’t have any right now, because we’re, like, on temporary hold pending investigation, but
we’ve had a bunch. I don’t know how many. Nancy, what is it? Six? Seven?”

“Seven,” she said.

“I’m talking about Noah Lorgeree.”

The woman drew back from me, and Jase’s face shut down. His fingers twitched spasmodically. He took a long pull on the joint and passed it to Nancy. “We don’t know nothing about that one.”

I was about to start wheedling, smiling, doing a song and dance to get the information, but I suddenly realized that was going to get me exactly nowhere with these two.

“You know what?” I said, leaning forward, the cold metal of the chair pressing against the backs of my legs. “Let’s not even start this, okay? You don’t care, I don’t have the energy for it, and my daughter’s going to wake up hungry in about ten minutes.”

I reached into my purse and pulled out my wallet. I quickly counted the cash. Thank God I’d gone to the ATM in preparation for this trip. “There’s five hundred dollars for you right now if you tell me what happened to the baby. I don’t know what you two are using besides that joint, but I’m pretty sure it’s heroin. What’s the street value nowadays? One
hundred, one hundred fifty a gram? So even if you want to buy a handful of roofies to max out your high, you’ll still get a good three or four grams with what I’m giving you. That’s a nice little chunk, isn’t it? More than you’ve got stashed in your apartment, I’ll bet.”

They stared at me, open-mouthed. That’s usually the response I get when I exhibit a familiarity with a culture more dangerous than the soccer-mom milieu that people often assume I belong to. It’s not that I look particularly straight, although I’m not tattooed and have no piercings other than those that were considered de rigueur among Jewish American Princesses growing up in New Jersey in the 1980s—earlobes, two in each because I had a wild side. But I get my hair cut at an über-funky L.A. salon because that’s where Stacey insists I go, and my clothes, while certainly designed to camouflage my corpulent behind and upper arms, possess a certain ragged, urban chic. I really don’t think I look like a complete suburban mom. But it doesn’t really matter; strap on a Baby Bjorn or saddle up a baby stroller, and to the rest of the world—the non-mommy world—you fall into that amorphous, asexual, a-cool category. Other mothers make
the distinctions—we know the subtle difference between the sling-wearing, attachment-parenting, co-sleeping moms; the top-tier-nursery-school, Bugaboo-stroller-pushing, Pilates-reformer-straddling moms; the barbed-wire-tattooed, Zutano-baby-clothes-buying, never-listens-to-Raffi, funky-hip moms; the soccer-chai-with-drink-cup, nursery-school committee, carpool-queen moms.
We
know how to distinguish one from the other, but to the rest of the world we’re all just moms. And moms are certainly not supposed to know that Rohypnol enhances a heroin high.

“Five hundred?” the woman said. She looked about thirty years old. Actually, she looked about a hundred and thirty, but I could tell she was more or less thirty years old. A little younger than me.

“If you tell me where the baby is.”

“And if we don’t know?”

“You tell me what you do know and I’ll give you three hundred. That’s still three grams or so.”

“Two grams. I won’t use chiva, and china white’s one fifty a gram.”

I waited. Jase ground out the joint on the edge of the top stair and then slipped the roach into the pocket of his filthy jeans.

“Three hundred?” he said.

“Start at the beginning. How did you get involved? Who contacted you about Sandra Lorgeree’s baby?” Sadie began to stir and I got to my feet. While I waited for one of them to answer, I began rocking back and forth, hoping to lull her into a few more minutes of sleep.

“We got a call,” Nancy said. “Some lady called us and asked us if we wanted to earn twenty-five hundred bucks.”

“That’s not what happened,” Jase said. “First she asked us if we were the Jason and Nancy McDonnell who were licensed foster care parents in Alameda County. And if we’d been foster parents to”—he frowned—“damn, what was that kid’s name? The one who got us into all the trouble?”

“Roshaun.”

“Right, Roshaun. She asked us if we’d been Roshaun’s foster parents. The little brat got busted stealing DVDs from Blockbuster. She asked us if we had been his foster parents, and I was like, ‘Yeah, so what? You can’t pin that on us, man. We’re being investigated because of that little sucker, but it’s not our fault. That kid was messed up before he got here.’ But she said she didn’t care
about Roshaun. She just wanted to make sure we still had our licenses. That they hadn’t been taken away yet. I said no, they haven’t taken our licenses, but social services is still investigating that Roshaun case, and they said they aren’t going to place any kids here until they’re done.
Then
she asked us if we wanted to earn twenty-five hundred bucks.”

I continued rocking back and forth and Sadie settled back down. The McDonnells seemed to find my motion soothing, too. It was either the rocking or the thought of the two grams of heroin they were going to be shooting into their veins over the next day or so. The looked almost hypnotized. “Who was she? Did you find out her name?” I said.

“No,” Nancy said. “We never even saw her. She told us we’d get a packet in the mail with the forms to fill out, and that we’d get a call on the day the baby was born. She even sent a cell phone for us to keep with us. Can you believe that?”

Jase laughed. “It was like, perfect timing, too, because Nancy’s cell phone service was cut off a few months before.”

Nancy said, “The driver took the phone back, though, when he took the baby.”

My heart sank. “The driver? What driver?”

She shivered and pulled her down coat more tightly around her shoulders. It wasn’t particularly cold, but she had so little flesh insulating her bones. “A driver came to pick us up when the prisoner . . . what was her name?”

“Sandra Lorgeree.”

“Right, Sandra. When Sandra went into labor, the woman called us just like she said she would. She sent a car and driver to take us up to the hospital by Dartmore. The driver had everything in the car. Everything the baby would need. You know, a car seat and diapers. Formula and bottles. Even a little outfit. The driver waited in the car in the parking lot the whole time we were inside. Then, when they released the baby to us, he drove us down here and dropped us off.”

“And the baby?”

Nancy shrugged.

“You just left the baby in the car?”

“Look,” Jase said. “That was the agreement. We were just supposed to pick the baby up, not keep him. Anyway, we don’t do newborns.”

Even in their addled state they must have sensed something in my expression, some surprise, some
disgust. How could a system, even one as underfunded and overwhelmed as the foster care system, entrust two such obvious miscreants with the lives of children?

“We’ve been fostering kids a long time,” Nancy said defensively.

“Yeah,” Jase said. “We can clean up pretty good when we need to.”

“How did you start, if you don’t mind my asking?” Not that I cared if they minded.

Jase leaned back on the step. “My parents did it. They always had a couple of foster kids running around the house. It’s not bad money, you know? Especially if you take a special-needs kid. That’s what we usually do, right Nancy? You get a bonus for the special-needs kids.”

I looked at Nancy, who had begun dotting her finger along one of the healing track marks on her arm, as if in preparation for spending my money. She didn’t reply to his question.

“Can you remember what kind of car took you to the prison?” I asked.

“I dunno,” Jase said. “Fancy. Black. Right, Nancy? Like a Cadillac or something.”