Turtle Baby (15 page)

"Who knows? But these men's things are in right now. My brother-in-law went to one sponsored by his church. Male bonding for Christ or something. From the tape I think the Terrells' workshops have an Australian flavor. Lot of stuff about Aboriginal dreamtime and lost fathers."

Bo remembered Munson Terrell with his ponytail, cradling the head of a dead singer on a flimsy stage in blue light. What had that relationship been?

"He must be upset about Chac's death," she mused. "How can he run off to the desert to do boomerang workshops before she's even buried? And who will bury her?"

"I asked Jorge that." Estrella sighed. "The club's soliciting contributions to cover expenses. She'll be buried in Tijuana. Jorge said they all wanted a nice grave in consecrated ground for Acito to visit, not just a pauper's grave."

Bo paused to consider the cultural differences that had promoted this particular concern, and gave up. She would never have thought of it. But it was nice. "So everybody who worked with her at the club knew about Acito?" she asked.

"Yeah. She used to bring him with her for rehearsals. Why?"

"I wonder why she boarded him across the border in San Ysidro. Why did she start doing that three months ago instead of keeping him with her?"

"Maybe the boyfriend didn't want a baby around?"

"You mean Chris Joe?" Bo frowned. "I don't think he was exactly a boyfriend. And he cared about Acito, even made fresh apple juice for him ..."

Bo trailed off as the implications of what she'd just said filled the little office.

"Apples," Estrella said, nodding. "Cyanide in the seeds."

"Did we get the lab report back on the baby bottle I picked up in San Ysidro?" Bo gnawed her lip, thinking.

"Yeah. It was just apple juice. But Bo ..." Estrella's voice slid higher. "Didn't Andy say cyanide molecules evaporate or something? That they don't stay put?"

"It wasn't cyanide that poisoned Acito," Bo thought aloud. "But then why did Chris Joe run when Chac died?"

Late afternoon sun streaked the walls with blurred bars of light as Estrella glanced at her watch. "Three o'clock," she noted. "I've got to pick up a psychological evaluation for court on Monday. I won't be back in the office today. Is there anything we should do over the weekend?"

Bo clicked a pen against her front teeth. "There's nothing I can think of, unless ... Es, what's Henry doing tomorrow?"

"Henry? He's on duty at the base. Why?"

"Damn," Bo said, dropping the pen. "We need a man."

Estrella's grin was rueful as she patted her stomach. "A girl can get into trouble that way," she warned.

"I mean to infiltrate Terrell's masculinity workshop tomorrow, Es. They're bound to talk about women. If we had a spy there, we might find out something about Terrell's relationship with Chac. Surely he'll talk about her death as he's bonding with the other guys and playing didgeridoos in the desert."

"What about Andy?"

"Oh, right. Andrew LaMarche beating drums beneath the moon in a poignant search for the meaning of manhood? Not in this life."

"Well, call me if you need me," Estrella called over her shoulder as she left. "And seduce that doctor!"

"I will." Bo nodded, scrolling mentally through a list of male acquaintances who might be willing to go undercover to a masculinity workshop. An image of Dar Reinert rose in her mind and then crumbled. The chunky detective, she realized, chuckling, would regard the whole endeavor as an unwholesome joke. Like men dressing up in tights to catch women leaping across stages in toe shoes. Dar wouldn't do. But then who?

It had to be somebody younger than Andrew and less hidebound than Dar Reinert. Somebody trendy and upscale enough to fit in with men in ponytails and exquisite jewelry. Somebody likable, open to the impulsive confidences that might emerge in such a context. Bo hummed the opening bars of the minuet from Swan Lake, and conducted an imaginary orchestra with her pen until a broad smile lit her face.

Bingo! You're a genius, Bradley. This will work!

Punching numbers on the phone with her pen, Bo beamed and waited for an answer. "Martin!" she gushed, "you know those ballet classes you've been wanting me to take with you? Well, I'm willing to try it, but there's something I want you to do for me, okay?"

The sales job would take a while, but it was going to work.

Madge Aldenhoven was talking on the phone and slamming her Procedures Manual repeatedly against the desk when Bo returned.

"There's a new worker in foster care," she said over her shoulder as Bo stood in the doorway. The words were weighted with a significance that seemed just out of reach. Into the phone she said, "Ms. Bradley will have to do a visit immediately, thanks to your incompetence. And this will be written up as a performance review. Your supervisor will have a copy by Monday morning."

The reference was to one of the infamous "purple poison" DSS review forms, so named for the lavender paper on which they were printed. A bad performance review could guarantee a worker an assignment to an undesirable job forever. Apparently the new worker in foster care was going to get one from Madge Aldenhoven. Bo waited to hear why her name had been brought into it.

"The Indian baby," Madge explained after banging the phone into its cradle, "has been removed from St. Mary's and placed in foster care. The hospital social worker phoned our foster care unit to confirm the need for AIDS precautions at least until the test results come back. The new worker, apparently unaware of standard procedures, went ahead and made arrangements for a couple named Dooley to pick up the baby. Here's their address in La Jolla."

"Dooley?" Bo shook her head, taking the slip of paper from Madge. "That's not an Indian name, or a Mexican name. It's Irish. What about the ethnicity business? Why do we have seven thousand pages of rules about who can care for black, white, red, brown, and plaid kids if nobody's going to follow them? And what are these people doing in La Jolla? Most of our foster parents couldn't afford to rent a garage out there, much less a house."

The news was only one more straw on the back of an arthritic camel. Exhausted from the emotional drain of visiting County Psychiatric, Bo decided to give the current administrative crisis minimal attention. Acito would be safe in the licensed foster home, regardless of the ethnic heritage possessed by the foster parents, or the fact that they were obviously wealthy enough to live in one of San Diego's oldest and priciest communities.

"They're supposed to be Hispanic," Madge sighed. "They said they were Hispanic when licensing did the original interviews and home evaluation."

Bo tried to imagine somebody named Juan Dooley, and succeeded only in mentally resurrecting a song, the lyrics to which would now be "Hang down your head, Juan Dooley ..." Accompanied by penny whistle and flamenco guitar.

You're tired, Bradley. Go home and eat fudge. This can all wait until tomorrow, when you'll be less likely to break into song.

"I'll do the visit tonight or tomorrow." Bo nodded. "You'll have to okay the overtime."

"You use too much overtime," Madge said. "If you'd budget your time more efficiently—"

"If I'd budgeted my life more efficiently, I'd be painting in New Mexico right now. Yes or no on the overtime?"

Madge found a blank phone memo on her desk and tore it carefully into strips. "Yes," she answered.

On the drive home Bo located Radio Romantico on her FM dial. Beneath the seatbelt she swayed to a sultry tango whose words, if they meant anything close to her translation, told the tale of a small wig and a dog named Cho who had not paid his taxes. San Diego County would pay the community college tuition of any CPS worker wishing to study Spanish. Bo thought it might be time to take advantage of that perk. Too late to help with this case, but she might at least learn what corazon meant. The word seemed central to every song. Including Chac's song.

As someone who sounded remarkably like Elvis Presley sang "Heartbreak Hotel" in Spanish, Bo reached into the dash compartment for the tape she'd bought in Tijuana. Its cover showed Chac in a strapless black gown at a table adorned with a blazing candelabra.

"I'll bet she was pregnant with Acito when this picture was taken," Bo mused aloud. "That's why they had to pose her seated behind a table." The eyes looking out from the cassette case were a lifetime older than the young face. A skillfully draped length of sparkling chiffon covered Chac's inner arms at the joints, where purple needle tracks would have ruined the image. With one hand Bo took the cassette from its case and put it in the deck. Fast-forwarding the tape to the end, she listened to Acito's song until I-8 reached its terminus at Ocean Beach and the final miles before North America dropped into saltwater.

After parking near her apartment on Narragansett, Bo walked back to Ocean Beach's shopping district on Newport. The used bookstore had exactly what she wanted. A paperback English/Spanish dictionary. Before leaving the store she opened it to the Cs. "Corazon," it turned out, meant "heart."

"I should have known that," she told the store's owner, who had been a shrimper until the fleet folded, and merely nodded while staring out to sea.

At home Bo gathered Mildred from the elderly neighbor with whom the elderly dog watched soap operas all day, and gratefully unlocked her own door. Crisp business suits, she acknowledged, removing the failed glen plaid, were clearly meant only for crisp businesses. A category from which child abuse investigating could be excluded handily.

Wandering to the deck doors in bra and half slip, Bo opened the apartment to a salty breeze and let it blow through her hair. It was time to plan the evening. Scrupulously.

In the bathroom she ran a warm bath and threw in a cheesecloth bag of dried citrus peel and cloves. In the pharmacopoeia of the venerable Bridget Mairead O'Reilly, the combined scents were an unbeatable aphrodisiac. Bo sank into the water, grinning at the possibility of Andrew LaMarche breathing the flavor of her skin and wondering why she smelled like a pomander ball. How to tell a Cajun doctor there are things known only to Irish grandmothers, who are never wrong. Allowing her head to submerge, Bo tried to recite her grandmother's favorite, Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," in its entirety underwater. Hopeless. By the cricket singing in the sixth line she was gasping for air. Time to cut back on the cigarettes, probably. Or else develop an obsessive interest in Martin's ballet class. Maybe both.

But the familiar poem had called up another. One of Yeats's bleak ones recited by Grandma Bridget on dark days.

"I dreamed that one had died in a strange place," Bo whispered, lathering her tangle of curls with an imported shampoo guaranteed to make auburn hair flash like aged claret in candlelight. "Near no accustomed hand ..." The poem was called "A Dream of Death," and might have, Bo thought, been written about Chac. The singer had died far from her home in Guatemala. And there had been no familiar hand to close her eyes. That tender task was performed by Andrew LaMarche. Bo felt a wave of deep affection for him that made her hands shake as she rinsed her hair under the tub's chrome faucet.

But his life wasn't over. Chac's was. Bo sighed as she realized that her planned dalliance among the living would be haunted by the young mother's ghost if she didn't check on the Little Turtle's well-being.

"Ye were born in the night," her grandmother had insisted, causing Bo's mother to clench her teeth and call Bo's father to intervene, "so ye'll have the power to see ghosts, ye will."

Bo's understanding of ghosts lay more in the realm of psychiatry than folklore, but why take chances?

"We're going to visit a baby before we go to Andy's," she told Mildred. The dog was busy dragging underwear from the bathroom floor into the living room, and showed no interest in the information.

Bo dried her hair with a round brush that encouraged graceful waves over the ever-threatening Orphan Annie curls. From her closet she pulled a series of blouses that wouldn't do, and finally settled on an off-white scoop-necked cotton sweater with dramatic sleeves she'd bought months ago on a shopping trip to Laguna Beach with Estrella, and forgotten about. With a gold torque and sand-colored knit slacks, the look would either be casually elegant or understatedly boring. Bo held one ornate earring to her ear and then hung it back on its wooden rack on the bathroom counter. Under harsh scrutiny, she realized, the earrings looked like chandeliers for a dollhouse. Better to stick with simple gold hoops. No perfume. A class act.

On the way out Bo packed clean unmentionables and a plastic Baggie of Science Diet Senior dry dog food in her briefcase, and loaded Mildred's sheepskin-lined bed in the car before returning to phone the Dooleys. They would be happy to see her, Mr. Dooley said. They were just bathing the baby for bed, but would keep him up for his social worker's visit.

Checking her purse for the purchases made yesterday in anticipation of an erotic interlude made impossible by Chac's death, Bo tucked one small foil package in the pocket of her slacks. The remaining two fit inconspicuously in a small outer compartment of her leather bag. Within easy reach. The Boy Scouts, Bo smiled, would be in awe of her devotion to preparation.

The Dooleys, Davy and Constanzia, who preferred to be called Connie, were Hispanic after all. Bo had found their house with some difficulty, nestled in a grove of eucalyptus beside a seacliff mansion whose every room had at one time or another been featured in the local newspaper's Sunday supplement. Its guest bathroom, Bo recalled, had actually won an award in a juried art competition. The room's floor, walls, and ceiling were covered in a mosaic of exotic glass and stone chips designed to re-create a nocturnal desert landscape. The Dooleys lived in the property's coach house.

"We're the caretakers," Davy Dooley told Bo jovially, limping as he crossed the room to offer her a selection of homemade cookies from a painted tray. "I make a little money as a paid bass in two church choirs, and Connie does the billing for several charter fishing outfits and a couple of restaurants from her computer here at home, but keeping this place up is our main job for the moment. Would you like to see the baby's room? Connie's changing the little guy so he'll be socially acceptable."