The Cradle Robbers (2 page)

“This house is going to kill us,” Peter said. “It’s going to crush us and bleed us like a succubus.”

“I love our house.”

“I love it, too, but it’s still going to suck the life out of us.”

“Hey, did I tell you that Isaac wants a King Arthur birthday party?” The second floor of the house had a series of Juliet balconies looking down into the living room. The flagstone floors and balconies made for the perfect setting for enacting the drama of the Knights of the Round Table.

“What a cool idea!” Peter said. “We can rent ponies and have jousting in the ballroom!”

Well, at least I’d succeeded in distracting him. The birthday party was well over a month away, and my husband is something of space cadet, or a Luftmensch, as my grandmother would have said. His brain is in the clouds, his mind distracted by things like his next horror screenplay or his bid on an eBay auction for a Maskatron action figure (with three
masks, a pair of weapon arms, and two flesh-tone thigh pieces). Within a month, neither he nor Isaac would remember this birthday party idea, and I would not have to tell them that if they thought that the cosseted preschoolers in Isaac’s class were going to be allowed to hurl lances at one another, or that I was going to allow ponies in the house, they were out of their minds. Still, I was happy that at least Peter was finally thinking, however briefly, about something other than our sex life. Or lack thereof.

By morning, all three kids had migrated into our bed like refugees from a natural disaster. Except that the calamities they were running from were overpriced furniture, matching linens, and enough toys to populate a series of children’s books. The only rooms in our house that were entirely furnished were the ones belonging to the three children. I’d spent an entertaining and expensive afternoon shopping from the comfort of my hospital bed while recovering from my last caesarean section. On the very day I realized we had actually found a house, I had purchased online everything I was missing for the kids’ rooms, making sure it all
matched. My mother, a woman whose photograph, with her trademark early 80s perm and brightly colored reading glasses, can be found in the
Oxford English Dictionary
under the word “frugal,” never once bought matching bedroom furniture for me when I was a child. In fact, my bedroom “sets” were always inherited from the most recently deceased relative on either side of the family. I slept on Tante Froma’s foam rubber mattress until I was nine, stored my clothes in Uncle Sol and Auntie Gertie’s colonial chest of drawers until high school, and lived surrounded by my great-aunt Nettie’s fascination for all things Danish Modern until I went to college. I swore that when I had children, my daughter would have a little white canopy bed with a matching dresser and desk. So far Ruby appeared not to care in the slightest about her lovely bedroom furniture and seemed only interested in wheedling herself into our bed whenever possible. Isaac could be sleeping in a shoebox for all he noticed his immediate surroundings. I had high hopes for Sadie, however, even though she had yet to spend more than the first two hours of any night in her carefully chosen Victorian-style crib with the pansy-print bumper and sheet set. She was bound to one day appreciate
the fact that the knobs on her dresser matched the cushion on the desk chair, which were the same shade of sunny butter yellow as the linings in the baskets in which she would store her shoes, once she was big enough to wear them. Wasn’t she?

I popped Sadie off the nipple and, holding my breath, shifted her into the bassinet pulled up alongside our bed. She belched softly, and then settled down. I exhaled, relieved at having for once made a successful breast-to-bassinet transfer, and turned to wake up the other two children. Then I heard a low rumbling. I turned back and the cloying sour smell of a breast-fed baby’s dirty diaper accosted me. While I watched, a tangerine stain spread across the front of Sadie’s pale blue onesie.

“I just don’t get why it’s orange,” Ruby whispered. She sat up in bed next to me, staring into the bassinet.

“It’s almost the exact color of your hair.”

Ruby opened her mouth in a simulated retch. “Gross, Mom.”

Sadie pursed her lips and sucked, still deeply asleep. This, I thought, is the biggest difference between a first-time mother and a third. Never,
never,
would I have allowed Ruby to lie festering in her
own filth. Now, I wouldn’t wake Sadie up if the house were burning down around us. I’d just wheel her outside in her bassinet and tell the firefighters to turn off their damn sirens.

“Go get dressed, kid,” I said to Ruby. “If you’re ready in five minutes or less, I’ll make pancakes.”

T
HE
beauty of being a self-employed mother is that you can take your baby to work. That’s also the horror of being a self-employed mother. Although, who am I kidding? I’m so barely employed that it hardly counts, and I certainly have no right to whine. (Not that that has ever stopped me before.)

I used to have a career. I used to be a criminal defense attorney working at the federal public defender’s office in downtown Los Angeles. I represented drug offenders and bank robbers with the odd white-collar boiler room scam artist thrown in just to keep me on my toes. I loved my job. There was nothing I enjoyed more than a morning interviewing
a client in the Metropolitan Detention Center, followed by an afternoon court appearance to argue a motion to reveal the identity of a confidential informant, topped off by an evening spent preparing a witness for cross-examination. It was when those days were complicated by pumping breast milk and racing home to see the baby before she fell asleep that the joys of work began to pale. I left the federal defender’s office when Ruby was fourteen months old, full of plans to go with her to Mommy & Me, to sit with her on my lap at story hour in the library, to take long walks around the reservoir with her in the stroller, to laze away our days at the playground.

And that’s what we did. Our lives were about Mommy & Me and the playground and story hour and crayons and building blocks. We went to the library, to the park, to the zoo, to the art museum. We made necklaces out of Cheerios and ate banana and almond butter sandwiches. Three days of that and I was ready to be institutionalized. In the years since then, I have gone on to prove that it is possible to be both so busy that you realize only at dinner time that you’ve eaten nothing all day but eleven frozen frappucinos and half a rice cake you found under
the baby’s car seat and, at the same time, to be so bored that a radio news segment on blind trout fishermen strikes you as the most provocative thing you’ve heard since college.

When I was pregnant with Isaac I began, accidentally at first, to do some investigation work. My husband says I was drawn to the work because I am nosy; he thinks that I have an unhealthy need to know what is going on in the lives of people around me. I think my natural curiosity is part of my charm. I’m nowhere near as bad as my grandmother, who stole Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s famous line, “If you have nothing nice to say, come sit by me.” I’m at least interested in finding out both the good
and
the bad about people. Is it my fault that the latter seems so much more prevalent and easier to discern?

Not quite two years ago, my old colleague Al Hockey convinced me to go into business with him. Al’s not a lawyer. He’s an ex-cop who retired from the force when the health consequences of the bullet he took made it difficult for him to function in uniform. He wasn’t going to sit behind a desk and push a pen; that’s just not the kind of guy he is. But the department wasn’t about to let him back on the
street with a crumpled colon and a chip on his shoulder. To be fair, the chip’s been there all his life, and they shouldn’t have hired him if they weren’t interested in a cop who was constitutionally incapable of sucking up to the brass. After he quit the force, Al became a defense investigator with the federal defender’s office, and then he went out on his own. Al and I are unlikely friends, but friends we are, and partners, too, although every so often I wonder if my excessive fertility isn’t going to drive him to dissolve the partnership and throw me out on my ass. But I’m done having kids. Even if I wanted more, back then I wasn’t letting Peter close enough to bring another Applebaum-Wyeth into the world.

“Any rats today?” I asked as I walked into Al’s garage.

I’d tried to convince Al to shift our offices to one of the many bedrooms in my new house, but after glaring at the gargoyle chandeliers and homoerotic murals, Al had hopped back into his SUV and rolled on home to Westminster. I don’t mean to imply that my partner is an intolerant man. Sure, he’s a neoconservative nut, but his militia unit is the only racially integrated one in the United States. His wife is African American, and he is a card-carrying
Libertarian and thus adamantly in favor of things like gay marriage. As far as he’s concerned, people can sleep with whomever and whatever they like, so long as the object of their desire is either a consenting adult or an inanimate object. He is, however, an old-school kind of guy, and certain things make him uncomfortable. Like the fact that my husband would be working underneath us in a dungeon with real handcuffs dangling from the walls and his storyboards propped up against an antique vaulting horse that none of us is naïve enough to think was ever really used for gymnastics. So it was the garage for Al and me, rats and all. Al insisted that the vermin infesting our makeshift office were
tree
rats, as if the fact that they normally made their homes in tall and gracious California palms made them any less disgusting.

“They’ve been quiet today,” Julio, our office assistant, said.

“Please tell me you’re not working on the computer.”

“Of course not.” He tapped a few keys and the screen went dark. One of the conditions of Julio Rodriguez’s supervised release from federal prison was that he have absolutely no contact with computers.
That’s what happens when you’ve been convicted of immigration fraud through computer hacking. If being banned from the keyboard effectively means that you’re barred from all employment other than the most menial, well, that’s not the Probation Department’s problem, is it? Al and I had been on a protracted and so far unsuccessful campaign to convince Julio’s probation officer that society as a whole would be better served by harnessing this kid’s significant technological talent than by forcing him to flip burgers or stand on a street corner waiting for day-laborer work. We were hoping that the fact that Julio never personally benefited from his hacking would count for something. The system he had manipulated belonged to the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, and he had been
giving away
Social Security cards, not selling them. But so far our pleas had fallen on deaf ears. The probation officer was of the opinion that whatever his motives, Julio was an incorrigible criminal with an addiction to Internet havoc and, like an alcoholic from booze, he needed to be kept away from the computer at all costs. While I thought the guy was overreacting, and I knew Julio wasn’t about to commit another crime, I had to admit that
there was a certain truth to the fact that our assistant could not, no matter how hard he tried, keep his fingers from dancing on the keyboard. In the couple of months since he’d started working for us, our network had already magically reconfigured itself and was now working at about four times the capacity and twice the speed. My hard drive had been restructured, too. I wasn’t asking, but I knew it wasn’t Al who had renamed and reorganized the database.

“Where’s the boss?” I asked.

“Coffee.”

“Ah.” My partner is not much of a morning person and is as addicted to caffeine as Julio is to digital technology.

I sat down in my chair, pulled a baby blanket over my shoulder, and lifted Sadie out of her car seat. She wasn’t crying yet, but she was making the snuffling noise that was a prelude to the frantic rooting for the breast that heralded the hysterical weeping. If I could cut her off at the pass, I might be able to get her to sleep for another hour. If so, it was possible that I would actually accomplish something this morning. That would be an event so unusual that it might cause my partner to fall to the floor in a dead faint.

“Anything new come in?” I asked.

“No,” Julio said. “But Al is helping me with a personal problem.”

My heart sank. It is so rare for a public defender to see clients turning their lives around. Julio, who had served his time and left prison with the fortitude and confidence to rewrite the story of his life, was the exception, not the rule. I couldn’t bear the idea that his tale was going to be one with an unhappy ending.

“What happened?” I said.

“Don’t sound so tragic,” Al snarled from the doorway. His eyes were puffy from lack of sleep and he held a giant coffee mug in his hand. “It’s not Chiki. It’s his cousin.” Chiki. Right. I reminded myself that Julio had recently, with an uncharacteristic blush and stammer, invited us to call him by his nickname.

“My cousin’s bunkie.”

“What’s a bunkie?”

“That’s what the ladies in prison call their cellmates. My cousin Fidelia is up at Dartmore. She called last night looking for help for her bunkie. The lady just had a baby, and someone stole the kid.”

“Apparently,” Al said, his old desk chair squeaking
under his weight, “the girl signed the baby over to a foster family, thinking it was just supposed to be for a few days or weeks, and she’s now afraid they’ve absconded with the child.”

I shook my head. “Okay, hold on gentlemen. Back up here. Tell me what’s going on slowly enough for my nursing-addled mind to comprehend it. Who are we talking about?”

“Her name is Sandra Lorgeree. She was just a couple months pregnant when she got busted, and she had the baby in prison,” Chiki said. “She’s doing five years.”

“And her baby got put into foster care?”

“Not exactly,” Chiki said. “California Department of Corrections regulations allow moms to spend just twenty-four to forty-eight hours with their newborns in the hospital after they give birth. Then the ladies get sent back to the prison. The babies got to be turned over to the custody of a blood relative. If the lady has no blood relative, then she has to find someone who is a foster parent licensed by the state of California. Otherwise the baby goes to the Department of Social Services and
they
put the baby in foster care.”