The Cradle Robbers (19 page)

I padded down the gloomy stone steps to Peter’s dungeon. He had laid carpets down on the floors, including a moth-eaten bear rug he’d found in the attic of the house, so my feet weren’t freezing on the stones, but it was hardly a pleasant working environment. Still, he loved it. He had turned the sawhorse into an impromptu storyboard and had cards pinned all over it. His toys were displayed on shelves running the length of one long wall—he collected superhero dolls from the 1970s and 1980s. His comic books were in specially designed cases arrayed against the opposite wall, and his original comic book art hung alongside his small but growing black light poster collection.

“What’s that sound?” I said.

He looked up from the long trestle table he used as a desk. “The dehumidifiers. They run nonstop. It’s a basement. I wouldn’t want to have any dampness issues.”

“The contractor said the basement’s zinc-lined or something.”

“You can’t be too safe.”

I suppose that’s true when it comes to a T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents issue #1.

“Anyway,” I said. “I think your case is going to go away.”

“What?” he pushed his keyboard aside. “What did you find?”

“Well, Macramé Man’s whole theory is that you stole his idea for a cannibal animated series, right?”

“Right.”

“Which he theoretically pitched to the studio in November of 1993, the year before your first cannibal script made the rounds in Hollywood.”

“Right.”

“The guy they pitched to, that studio exec, does he have notes of the meeting?”

“No, but he vaguely remembers meeting with Macramé Man. Unfortunately. He just doesn’t remember exactly when.”

“Interesting. Well, in Macramé Man’s notes of the meeting he has the exec’s name, plus the dates he met with him.”

“Right.”

“He falsified his notes of the meeting to push it back in time, before you sold your script.”

“How do you know?” he said.

“Like I said, the notes are dated 1993. Apparently that exec told him his series was particularly exciting because it has the sensibility of Wes Craven’s
Scream.”

“Right.”

“
Scream
came out in 1996. It wasn’t even on the radar screen in 1993. He falsified his notes of the meeting to push it back before 1996, because your script was making the rounds in 1994.”

Peter pounded his fist on the table. “God
damn
it,” he shouted.

“I know, despicable.”

“I am so pissed off!”

“I know.”

“I
cannot
believe I didn’t remember the release date of that movie.”

I stared at him. My horror-movie-nerd husband was angrier with himself for forgetting the date of what he viewed as a seminal film of the genre than he was with the cretin who falsified documents in a blatant, perjurous attempt to extort money from him and the studio.

“Make sure you tell all this to your lawyers in
private,” I reminded him. “They might want to save it to impeach the plaintiff during a deposition. Don’t just blurt it out in front of anyone.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Okay, now let me use your computer so I can do a quick Google search on Sandra’s boyfriend, Tweezer.” I could get used to this working together thing. I pushed Peter over so I could squeeze in next to him on the chair.

“Tweezer?”

“Gabriel Francisco Arguello. Let’s see if we can find where he went to college. I’ve got to try to track him down, and I was hoping I might find him with a college roommate.”

Peter eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. “Arguello, as in the San Francisco Arguellos?”

“None other.”

“Jesus.”

I Googled Gabriel’s name into the search engine.

“He’s some kind of party boy.”

Peter leaned over my shoulder. There were dozens of hits from the gossip pages of magazines starting almost ten years prior, when Gabriel was no more than sixteen or so, detailing his presence at
various events and fetes and describing the lovelies with whom he was seen. As his exploits grew more ribald, however, he appeared less frequently, and finally, about five years ago, he stopped being mentioned. I guess once he became completely strung out he dropped off most invitation lists. Doing some heroin is no big deal, but having a serious junk problem gets you scratched off the A-list.

“Try putting in ‘alumni association,’ in quotes,” Peter said.

Gabriel never made it to college, it seemed. He was, however, an alumnus of the Town School in San Francisco, an elite and very expensive school for boys. Back when it was founded in 1939, it would probably not have granted admission to his grandfather, who would one day become the first mayor of San Francisco with a Spanish last name.

Within ten minutes I not only had a list of the boys with whom Gabriel graduated high school, but I had addresses for all six who now lived in Los Angeles. It is simply incredible what the Internet can accomplish. I alternate between celebrating its genius and cowering in fear that our clients will one day figure out that a few clicks of the mouse can get them the vast majority of what they hire us for.
Everyone can be tracked down on the Internet. Give me a name and a few hints of biographical data, and even without a Social Security number I can have a current address and a phone number, listed or not, in less time than it takes to give a baby a bath or pack a lunch box. And if I’ve got a Social Security number, I can do it in about as long as it takes to change a diaper.

None of us is safe. Is it any wonder that private investigators are some of the most paranoid people around? I used to think Al was a nutcase for owning a paper shredder and never throwing away a piece of junk mail that wasn’t first reduced to microscopic bits. About a year after we started working together, I bought a machine that made his look like a toaster oven; I could shred my whole house if I had to. As Al always says, you never know who’s watching, and you can never be too careful.

A
FTER
I left Peter to his work, I found myself unable to sleep, despite my exhaustion. Part of the problem was that it was only a matter of a couple of hours before Sadie awoke for her middle-of-the-night feeding. Since I knew I would soon be jolted awake, it was hard to relax enough to drift off. I lay in bed for a while, and then I pulled out the Updike book my book club had done such a dreadful job of discussing.

Rabbit Angstrom is a miserable son of a bitch, but a compelling character nonetheless. Still, it was hard for me to see what his daughter-in-law saw in him and why she would even consider having an affair
with him. By the time I finished the novel, at close to two in the morning, I was feeling pretty disgusted with the whole damn vaguely incestuous family. I put the book down and stared at the baby, who slumbered on, oblivious to the fact that I was ready for her to wake up and nurse so that I could finally get to sleep myself.

Five hours later, I woke up, the bedside lamp still on, my pillows angled for reading, my neck aching from having slept propped up all night long. Sadie had just begun to cry.

“Oh, my God,” I whispered. “Did you sleep through the night?”

I picked her up and winced as she latched on. In place of my breasts were two bowling balls, rock-hard and as painful as a couple of abcessed teeth. Sadie batted at the nipple of the breast she wasn’t latched on to with her balled-up fist and I nearly hit the mirrored ceiling of my bedroom. “Let’s not kill Mama, okay?” I said, grabbing her hand. The other breast sprayed milk while she nursed, and by the time she was done, the two of us looked like we’d taken some kind of sticky shower.

“Where’s Daddy?” Ruby said. She was standing
in the doorway wearing an outfit that seemed to consist of every single piece of purple clothing she owned. She had on four shirts, two pairs of pants, a smock, and a dress.

“I have no idea. In the dungeon, I suppose. Guess what? Sadie slept through the night, and so did Isaac and you!”

She looked decidedly unimpressed.

“I’m going to find Daddy,” she said.

I laid Sadie down on her play mat and pulled out my breast pump. Within ten minutes of hypnotic pumping, I had two full bottles of breast milk, and had almost fallen asleep again. It says a lot about my sleep deficit, I think, that I was nearly able to lose consciousness while strapped into a machine with sufficient suction force to power a small Third World country. When Ruby was a baby, Peter once described a breast pump to his mother, over the telephone, as “really quite painless.” I offered to hook it up to a certain particularly sensitive part of his body to test out his theory. He declined the invitation.

“He’s asleep at his desk, and he told me to leave him alone. He’s not being nice.” Ruby said.

I was rinsing out the flanges of the breast pump.
“Don’t worry about it, honey. Just get yourself some breakfast. Pour some cereal and I’ll cut up fruit for you.”

“I don’t want fruit.”

“You have to have fruit.”

“Okay. One grape.”

“Twenty.”

“Seven.”

“Fifteen.”

“Ten.”

“Done.”

While Ruby carefully counted out her ten grapes and ate her Cheerios, I roused her brother. Then I took my usual breakneck shower while Sadie lay on the bath mat, sucking her toes. Astonishingly, she was sound asleep again within moments of getting into the car for school drop-off.

“This is going to be an excellent day,” I announced as I let Ruby off in front of her school.

“Do you think so?” she said in a condescending tone, skipping out of the car. Not even the realization, which I’d had three thousand times before, that I was really in for it once this kid hit puberty, could quell the energy inspired by a napping child who had slept through the night. Granted, if I had
gone to bed at anything resembling a decent hour, I would have been much happier, but it was enough to know that Sadie had accomplished the unimaginable.

The first two Town School alumni I called were out—not surprising at that hour. I left messages. At the home of the third, a man answered and informed me that the person I sought, a young man named Hilton Sprague, was at work.

“Are you his roommate?” I asked.

“No, just a friend. Can I take a message, or do you want his cell number?

Sometimes, you get lucky. “Gabriel?” I said.

The voice on the other end was silent.

“Gabriel,” I repeated. “Sandra hired me to find your baby. I was working for her before she was killed.”

No response, and now I was worried that he’d hang up on me. “I know where Noah is,” I said.

Twenty minutes later, I was sitting next to the swimming pool behind a lovely little two-bedroom, two-million-dollar house in the Santa Monica Canyon belonging to Gabriel’s best friend from high school, a man, it seemed, who liked
company. Or someone who traveled a lot. Someone who didn’t mind his friend Gabriel camping out at his house. Gabriel was wearing an open cashmere bathrobe embroidered with the words
L’Hôtel St. Jacques.
The pocket was unraveling and there was a large coffee stain marring the fine wool. Underneath the bathrobe his T-shirt was grimy and his plaid pajama bottoms were rumpled and torn on one knee. He was bedraggled and malodorous and did not look like the scion of one of California’s finest families. I could not imagine how his friend Hilton, who clearly had money and whose house might have been a stage set for a Williams Sonoma catalogue, could stand to have him around.

“I’m so sorry about Sandra,” I said. “I didn’t know her well, but she seemed like a pretty special person.”

Gabriel nodded and snuffled thick, wet mucus into his nose and throat so loudly it startled even him. “’Scuse me,” he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve. He sniffed again.

“You must miss her terribly.”

He shrugged and whispered, “Yeah.”

He had an ulcerated sore on his chin and he picked at it nervously until it began to bleed. He looked down at his finger as if surprised by dot of red he found there. He pressed the cuff of his robe against the wound.

“Here,” I said, pulling a tissue out of my purse. “Use this.”

“Thanks.”

“And put some of this on it once it stops bleeding.” I handed him the antibiotic ointment I kept in Sadie’s diaper bag. After a few minutes of pressing the tissue against the cut he dabbed the ointment on it.

“Thanks,” he said, handing me back the ointment.

“You keep it.” I gave him a Band-Aid. “Put this on your chin. And stop touching it, okay? I know it’s hard, but if you keep picking you’re just going to make it worse.”

“Okay,” he whispered.

I peered at him, trying to figure out what Sandra saw in this wreck of a boy. Underneath the scabs and filth, I could tell that he was handsome, with dark wavy hair, thickly fringed eyelashes, and one of those pouting little-boy mouths that seem to demand to be kissed, at least when they aren’t tainted
by oozing lesions. But there was little left of the sexy little rich boy; now he looked like just so much debris left behind after a hurricane. Perhaps what I was seeing was the devastation wrought by Sandra’s death. Still, even she had not saved him from his drug of choice. On the contrary, for a long time the three of them had been a team—Sandra, Gabriel, and the heroin.

“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked.

“I guess about two months before the baby was born,” he said.

“Tell me what happened then.”

He patted at the Band-Aid. I raised my eyebrows warningly and he put his hands down.

“Tell me what happened,” I repeated.

“She was getting really freaked out. You know, where was the baby going to go, who was going to take him. At the very beginning she thought maybe I could do it.” He laughed, bitterly. “That was before she knew what happened.”

“What do you mean?” We were sitting at an outdoor dining table, underneath an umbrella, and the sun was just beginning to shake free of the morning fog. Gabriel squinted against the light.

“Before she knew I started using again.”

“You weren’t using when she was arrested?”

“We’d been in rehab for a while before it all went down. Sandra had been clean for, like, eighteen months, almost. I was going on a year. We went inpatient together, but I had a relapse. Only one, though. She didn’t let me have any more after that one time. So when she got pregnant, it was okay. I mean, at first she freaked out and everything. Like
really
freaked out. She kept saying she had to have an abortion. That she couldn’t have the baby. She said we could never afford to have a baby. I tried to tell her that my mom would come around, that now that we were sober she’d definitely let me have money. I mean, it’s not like the old lady would let her grandkid starve, you know? But Sandra was so freaked out. She was totally out of her mind. But then one day she suddenly decided it was all copacetic, that we’d be all right.”