The Cradle Robbers (17 page)

At that point Chiki told her that yes, he guessed he was aware of that now.

Allison told him she’d tell Jonathan that Chiki had called, and Bettina, too, when she next woke up from her daytime television–induced stupor to have another cigarette.

“Well, that’s that,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Now
I’m
depressed.”

Chiki pressed his cheek against the top of Sadie’s head and squeezed her gently. “There’s also Jonathan’s sister. Mary,” he said. “I’ve got a telephone number for her. At least I think it’s her. I forgot to verify with the daughter-in-law, and I couldn’t bring myself to call back. The Mary Trudeau I found is a student at the New York University School of Medicine.”

“Really? That seems so unlikely, given the rest of the family. Are you sure it’s the right Mary Trudeau?”

“All the biographical data matches.” He rocked gently back and forth and Sadie cooed. “You want Sadie back?” he said, clearly not wanting to let go of her soft warmth.

“No, not if you want to keep her.”

“She’s making me feel better. You know. After talking to Sandra’s cousin’s wife.”

“Good. Sadie’s good for that.”

“She’s a good baby.”

I smiled. “She is. Give me Mary’s number. I’ll call her.”

I woke Mary Trudeau up, which is a terrible thing to do to a medical student, but it’s probably the only reason I found her at home. Chiki had
tracked down the correct young woman; she was Sandra’s cousin, Jonathan’s sister. She even remembered Sandra.

“She was just a couple of years older than me,” Mary said, her voice rough from sleep. “Before my aunt died they used to spend two weeks with us every summer, and Sandra and I would end up playing together, riding our bikes around the lake and stuff. Jonathan’s so much older, he was never around. It was just us two. They came up for Christmas every year, until my aunt died. I don’t know what happened after that; We lost touch.”

Mary grew very quiet on the other end of the line when I told her about Sandra’s murder, and about Noah.

“You’re not married, are you Mary?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“What year in school are you in?”

“My second.”

I held the telephone receiver in my hand and looked at it for a moment. This young girl was managing to put herself through medical school on her own—she wasn’t getting help from the bankrupt mother smoking Luckies through her trach tube, that’s for sure. She was studying twenty hours a day
and looking at another two years of the same. After that there would be a residency with more round-the-clock workdays. Mary Trudeau was carving out a life for herself. Who did I think I was, calling her out of the blue and seeking to foist upon her the baby of a cousin she hadn’t thought about in years?

I said, “This isn’t your problem, Mary. I’m so sorry to have called you. I had no right.”

“What’s going to happen to Sandra’s baby?”

I closed my eyes, wishing so hard she had allowed herself to forgo that question. But I guess that’s not the kind of person she was. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I don’t know where he is, or if I’ll ever find him. If I do, I suppose he’ll go into foster care. He’s young, only a couple of months old. He’ll probably be adopted.”

“And if he isn’t?”

Oh, Mary, you know the answer as well as I do, don’t you? “He’ll stay in foster care.”

She didn’t speak for a few moments. Then she said. “Can you let me know? Can you let me know if you find him, and if he finds a family? Because if he doesn’t . . . I guess . . . I mean . . . I don’t . . .”

“I’ll let you know. Don’t worry, Mary. I’ll let you know.”

I rested the telephone receiver back in its cradle and put my head in my hands.

“Here,” Chiki said. He held Sadie out to me. “I think you need her more than I do.”

A
N
hour or so later, Al showed up, positively glowing with success. He had made Brodsky’s client a very happy man. Al had turned up something decidedly incriminating about the man who was suing the actor. He had a wife who spent much of her time looking like she’d been hit by a bus. A few words from Al, accompanied by a well-lit photograph or two, and the actor was in the clear.

Al put in a call to a friend in the domestic violence unit, who promised to send a social worker around to check up on the woman and present her
with some alternatives to staying with the brute who appeared to count litigiousness as a comparatively minor fault among many.

All in all, a good couple of days’ work.

Al was only too happy to make the call to the San Francisco Police Department for me. Whenever a private investigator engages in any kind of surveillance, he or she is required to notify the local police, or the county sheriff if the stakeout is outside of a major city. The cops aren’t entitled to know who we’re looking for or why we’re after them: We don’t even have to give a specific address, but we do have to give a street name. They like to know the make and license number of the cars involved in the surveillance, and what time we plan to show up. Sometimes they even ask for a description of the surveillance team. The idea is they want to know that we’re there, so if they get any reports about suspicious prowlers, they’ll know it’s an investigator on a stakeout. Also, I suppose, if some dramatic foul-up occurs, they’ll know who’s been there and whose fault it is.

Al had a hard time convincing the San Francisco desk sergeant that the surveillance team consisted of a thirty-six-year-old, five-foot-tall, redheaded woman . . . and a four-month-old baby.

“Very funny,” Al said. “No, the infant will
not
be driving the second vehicle. There is no second vehicle.”

Al and I usually do stakeouts with two cars. We park kitty-corner to the house, one car facing the house, one car pulled forward and using the rearview mirror. That’s why we like doing city surveillances. No one notices two cars in the city. In a rural area, you stick out like a pair of Birkenstocks at a Junior League luncheon, but on a city street you can fade into the mass of parked cars. We choose our cars for their “fade-ability factor,” as Al calls it. As soon as Sadie was born, I bought a Honda Odyssey minivan, like every other suburban mother of a certain demographic with more than two children. (Those with two or fewer drive a Volvo station wagon.) Al drives a Suburban. When Chiki started working for us, Al picked up an old Chevy van at a sheriff’s auction for him to use, claiming that it would make a good overnight surveillance vehicle. I liked to drive Al crazy by referring to the Chevy as his “love van.”

This stakeout, however, I was going to be on my own, with only Sadie for company.

“He’s a real wiseacre, that one,” Al said when he
got off the phone. “One joke after another. Anyway, he wants you to call in with the plate number of the rental car when you get it.”

“Yeah, that’ll happen,” I said.

“You want me to go with you?” Chiki asked.

“You can’t travel,” I reminded him. “You can’t travel, and you can’t use the computer, and one of these days some fat slob with a hairpiece and a badge is going come busting in here and arrest you for violating the terms of your supervised release.”

“My probation officer is a woman,” he said.

“There’s a female probation officer out of Santa Ana who wears a rug,” Al said.

“I’m serious,” I said. “I’ve had to represent people in probation revocation hearings for less serious infractions than these. Chiki, get away from the computer,
now
. Go Swiffer something.”

The next morning I begged my kids’ teachers to let them stay in their respective after-school programs. I got off fairly lightly; in return for the pleasure of unloading Isaac for the afternoon—at a cost of ten bucks an hour, I might add—I merely had to agree to be responsible for six Thursdays’ worth of
classroom snacks. Organic fruit and vegetables only, no peanuts, no partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, and at least two different sources of protein. The mind reels.

Ruby’s teacher decided that what I owed her was classroom laundry service. I was going to be fluffing and folding painting smocks and dress-up clothes for a month in return for an extra two hours parked outside the Arguello family manse.

The afternoon before, I’d called in an order of flowers to be delivered to Gabriel’s mother, with specific instructions that the florist not leave them with the maid, but rather make sure that the mistress of the house herself received the bouquet. I wasn’t bribing Mrs. Arguello; I hadn’t in fact even included a card, and I’d sent a dozen Gerbera daisies, about as cheap an arrangement as you can get delivered to Pacific Heights. All I was doing was making sure that I’d find Suzette Arguello at home, and short of hiring another private investigator to do a stakeout before I went up to do
my
stakeout, sending a personal delivery was the best way to do that.

In retrospect, perhaps I was overly optimistic in
imagining that it would be easy to do a stakeout with a four-month-old. I figured she’d nurse, sleep, maybe poop a little. It never occurred to me that she’d choose that moment to cut her first tooth. Because I was a third-time mother, and had thus adopted the Boy Scout motto as my own, I had a Raffi tape, a rattle, one of those soft books and, miraculously, a bottle of baby Tylenol in my diaper bag. Still, Sadie would neither sit quietly in her car seat nor nurse. She fussed, she cried, she whined, she insisted on being bounced in my lap. It was challenging, to say the least, to keep one eye on the rearview mirror and the other on the drooling baby while at the same time trying to be unobtrusive. I failed.

“Excuse me.” The woman who tapped on my window with her ivory-handled cane was very tall and very old. She was also about the width of a pencil.

“Excuse me, miss,” she said again, this time walloping the glass.

I rolled the window down quickly. I’d declined the insurance on the rental car and I wasn’t eager to pay out-of-pocket if the old woman shattered the
glass. Neither was I especially thrilled at the prospect of picking shards out of Sadie’s hair.

“Good morning,” I said.

“May I be of some assistance, miss?”

“No, I’m fine.”

She harrumphed for a moment and whacked her cane against the ground a few times. She was dressed for a morning’s constitutional walk, in a gray tracksuit and bright white sneakers. “You’ve been sitting here for quite some time,” she said finally.

“Yes,” I said.

“One hour and seventeen minutes.”

“Has it been that long?”

“It most certainly has. What, may I ask, are you doing here?”

I sighed. It happens not infrequently that a nosy neighbor inquires about our business when we’re doing a surveillance. Al is particularly good at scaring them off. He generally barks something about an investigation and they hightail it, afraid of getting caught in the crossfire. I doubted anyone would mistake me for a cop with Sadie in the car, and, moreover, this woman did not look like someone
who would be frightened away, even if she thought I was with the police. On the contrary, she was more likely to call the mayor and instruct him to have me move my investigation to a neighborhood with lower property values.

“I’m waiting for a friend,” I said.

“In your car?” She sniffed and peered through the window, looking suspiciously around the interior. “This
is
your car, isn’t it?”

Just then Sadie sneezed, giving me an idea. “Excuse me,” I said, “Have you been vaccinated for the Rombolola virus?”

“What?”

“It’s just that the baby got her Rombolola vaccination yesterday, and I’m supposed to keep her away from anyone with a compromised immune system. Anyone with an immune-deficiency syndrome, or anyone who hasn’t had a Rombolola vaccination. Especially anyone over the age of . . . er . . . seventy or so. She’s just shedding virus like crazy. And what with the chance of paralysis and rashy pustules, you can’t be too careful.”

Sadie sneezed again, and my nosy interloper leapt about three feet away from the car, trailing her
cane behind her. She was nimble on her feet for her age, that’s for sure.

“You can’t loiter on this street!” she called to me as she backed quickly away from the car.

I held Sadie’s hand up in a little wave and watched the woman sprint up the block, using her cane as a pivot to hurl herself around the corner. Then I glanced back in my rearview mirror, just in time to see the garage door of Gabriel’s mother’s house glide open. Instead of a large European car slipping out, however, the vehicle that made its exit was a bright red Bugaboo stroller. And who should be pushing this most stylish of infant perambulators? None other than Suzette Arguello herself. Accompanying her was a young blonde woman carrying a lime-green, Chinese silk diaper bag. They paused for a moment and appeared to struggle with the stroller’s harness. It was their incompetence that allowed me to catch them, as it took me a moment or two to wrestle Sadie out of the car and into the Baby Bjorn, grab my purse and my own diaper bag, and race down the block.

I reached them just as they were about to disappear around the corner. I was in time to hear Suzette
say, “I’m going to keep Noah with me this morning, Moira. I won’t need you until lunch.”

The newly liberated Moira handed Suzette the diaper bag and went off down the hill.

I said, “Hello, Suzette. I see you’ve found your grandson after all.”

S
UZETTE
Arguello and I ended up in a tea shop on Union Street, sipping green tea while the babies snoozed quietly in our laps. After her face had resumed something of its normal color, and I had reassured myself that the woman wasn’t about to drop dead of a heart attack over the handlebars of her $750 stroller, Suzette had agreed to accompany me for a reviving beverage. At that point, I think, she realized there was no way to keep her secret any longer, and the only thing left to do was effect some kind of damage control.

I let her take a few trembling sips before I began. My first question was very simple. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you steal your grandchild? Why didn’t you just ask Sandra to let you keep him while she was in prison?”