Turtle Baby (2 page)

"Sure," Estrella answered. As she reached to take the case file from Madge, Bo noticed a quivering of narrow gold bracelets circling Estrella's wrist. "Uh, excuse me. I'll be right back."

Tossing the manila file folder on her desk, Estrella hurried out, leaving a trail of spicy perfume in the air. In seconds Bo and Madge Aldenhoven heard the click-bang of the loose pneumatic closer on the women's room in the hall.

"Is Estrella sick?" Madge succeeded in making the question sound vaguely ominous.

"Probably gout," Bo answered, jamming her hands into the pockets of long, partridge brown knit culottes that with huarache sandals either created an illusion of slenderness or made her look as if she were standing in a hole. Bo wasn't sure which. "I hear it's going around."

Madge sighed. "I assume that you are taking your medication, Bo, and that this puerile attitude so unbecoming in a woman your age is actually you and not the 'disability' you claim to have."

Bo couldn't decide whether to take offense at the "woman your age" part, or the more serious slur on the concept of brain disorders deserving equal footing with, say, congenital hip displacement. Since coming out as one of the fifteen million Americans treated yearly for severe depression or manic-depressive illness, Bo had noticed a new chill cloaking the already strained relationship she endured with her supervisor.

"The pills are in my purse, bottom drawer on the left," Bo intoned. "Since you're so interested, let me explain that this particular medication, actually an acid, seems to complement the inhibitory qualities of another acid, naturally present in the brain, whose name is gamma-aminobutyric—"

"I haven't got time for this, Bo," Aldenhoven snapped, rising from Bo's chair. "Tell Estrella when she returns that I'll need to give her case to someone else immediately if she's not up to it. I want that petition filed today."

"Why? We've got forty-eight hours to do the initial investigation. The baby's safe. What's the rush?"

But Madge Aldenhoven was gone.

Bo stared at a photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe in profile over her desk until Estrella came back, her normal coloring restored.

"Es, you must have the flu or something. I think you should go home. Madge said..."

"Bo, I have a beet of news," Estrella began, her accent deepening with nervousness. "I ... Henry and I ..." She leaned against the desk and took Bo's hand. "We want you to be a godmother."

"Godmother," Bo repeated blankly. "You go to the bathroom, come back, and tell me you and your husband want me to be a godmother. Rejecting the devil and all his works, that sort of thing?"

"I mean the godmother," Estrella tried again, her free hand unconsciously touching the belt of her poppy red shirtwaist.

The subtle gesture was, Bo realized, absolutely poetic.

"Es," she yelped, leaping up to hug her friend, "a baby! When did you find out? God, that's great. Henry must be thrilled; he's wanted to be a dad all along. No wonder you're barfing, it's morning. They say that goes away after a while, right?"

Estrella attempted a game smile and then burst into tears.

"Oh, Bo, it's awful. I just feel awful. I've been sick for days and then last night we did the pregnancy test thing and it was positive and Henry's so happy, and my whole family's delirious with joy and I should be, too, but I just want to crawl in bed and never get out, and I don't know if I can keep working and I have these weird dreams. It's awful, and there must be something wrong with me because—"

"Ah," Bo interrupted, leading Estrella to her chair and popping open the Sprite. "This has a familiar ring. Hormonal changes with pregnancy and all that."

Estrella took a sip of the Sprite. "Huh?"

Bo grinned conspiratorially at a picture of Edgar Allan Poe on her bulletin board. "It's not the same, but we ..." She gestured at the collage of photos above her desk. "... can relate."

"Bo, I'm not crazy, I'm pregnant," Estrella began and then grimaced at the faux pas. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say 'crazy.' You know what I mean. Those people you're collecting, they were all..."

" 'Crazy,' occasionally," Bo conceded. "Mood-disordered, guests of the best psychiatric hospitals of their times, a few suicides. But my point is, it's a matter of degree. What you're going through is because of a big change in your chemistry. It's affecting your brain, but you'll adjust to it after a month or so. In the meantime, I'm going to help."

Estrella examined a mummified fly in a gauzy web decorating the upper corner of the office window. "There's nothing you can do. I've got myself into this, but ..." She mashed the heels of her hands against her eyes, smearing mascara into the semblance of a narrow mask. "I mean, I thought I wanted this, but now ..."

"You look like the Lone Ranger." Bo grinned. "And of course you want this baby. Just try to ignore any negative thoughts until you have a chance to adjust."

"How do I ignore my own thoughts?"

"That's the hard part," Bo agreed. "Poe drank, O'Keeffe painted, Hemingway blew his head off. For you I suggest a day in bed with a stack of magazines. Meet me back here at three thirty. I'm going to do the preliminary investigation on this case for you."

"Since when do you speak Spanish?" Estrella's look gave new depth to the term "skeptical."

"I don't need to, just to get records from St. Mary's, take the required look at the kid, and glance at the house where these people were keeping him. Besides, I can say, 'Donde esta otra cerveza?' with the best of them. Trust me."

"Where is another beer? Such a useful phrase in child abuse investigations. Bo, it won't work."

Bo grabbed the case file and stuffed it into a briefcase on her desk. "Yes, it will. My cases are caught up, I'll tell Madge I'm going out to check on that new family crisis intervention center that's halfway to Los Angeles, and you'll go home and relax until three thirty when you can draft the petition from my notes, go over to court and file it, and call it a day."

Estrella actually smiled. "I owe you one, Bo."

"How many times have you and Henry helped me over rough times, Es? Ten? Twenty? How about pretty much consistently, all the time, for nearly three years! I know it's not easy being friends with somebody like me. Let me do something for you for once, okay?"

Estrella glanced at the long-dead fly once again. "Just be careful then, Bo. You never know when one of these easy cases is going to get messy. And you don't know anything about dealing with Mexican people. I shouldn't let you do this ..."

Bo raked her silvering auburn hair with both hands and refastened a cherrywood clip that strained to corral too many curling wisps. "That's just your wacked-out chemistry again. Too much estrogen or something. Go home and research diaper services over a tall glass of lemonade. Lie in the sun, if it ever comes out. Take a nap. I'll see you at three thirty."

In the parking lot Bo threw her briefcase onto the passenger's side bucket seat of an almost new Pathfinder with four-wheel drive. She'd bought it with the insurance compensation for her BMW wrecked only a month earlier. Haze-filtered sunlight swam on the pinkish beige surface of the vehicle's hood, a color named "champagne pearl" by the manufacturer. Bo polished a smudge of dust from the left side panel with her thumb. Estrella's case was going to be easy. At least something different. An eight-month-old baby who'd gotten into the laundry detergent or something. Hardly a quagmire of murderous intrigue.

Safely belted in the Pathfinder, Bo drove sedately through the chain-link gates of the CPS parking lot. No sense in irritating Madge with a display of boisterous driving.

From the console between the gray leather seats, not one but two gear levers indicated the vehicle's readiness to take Bo anywhere she wanted to go. Off the roads. Into the desert where an ancient silence that either terrified or bored other people invariably flooded her mercurial brain with peace.

She'd go out to the desert soon, she promised herself. She would have gone already, but she'd been driving a cheap rental car until the current vehicle turned up a week ago at a police auction. Dar Reinert, the child abuse detective who'd worked a recent big case with her, had alerted her to its sale. Probably out of macho-cop-guilt, she thought, because he hadn't really believed she was in any danger. Hah.

"Only a coupla years old," he told her paternally over the phone. "Been used to transport cargo in from a little airstrip the Tobacco and Firearms guys found out in the desert near Borrego. Wheel rims look like pastry crust, but they're chrome steel so I can hammer 'em out for ya. Want it?"

Bo knew the "cargo" had been drugs, fleeing Mexican gang kingpins, and the occasional corpse, and didn't care. A four-wheel drive would be her passport to earthly nirvana, well worth the small sacrifice in symbolic principle. And the lousy gas mileage would do for penance.

"I want it," she told the detective.

And even though the end of June was too late for anything resembling comfort in the arid wilds surrounding San Diego, she was going to get out there at least once. Just once before the hammering heat of July, August, and September that could mummify an already dehydrated human body in one day.

Bo had seen it. One of her first cases involved a runaway fourteen-year-old girl, already an open file with Child Protective Services. The teenager's active CPS status was the result of her frequent calls to the child abuse hotline claiming that her parents were abusing her by not allowing her to date a twenty-year-old reject from the navy with a history of arrests for kiting checks.

The girl, Stacey, had sneaked away with the young felon, Ron, for a romantic motorcycle trip to the desert. Alone at last, they had explored the joy of sex on a greasy tarp and feasted on four six-packs of Corona and a bag of jalapeno barbecue chips. When Ron, as he explained later, declined Stacey's offer to move in with him the next day, she hopped on his Yamaha Virago 535 and sped away into the desert, furious. He didn't worry too much because he passed out.

When she hadn't returned by the time he woke up the following morning, he assumed she'd ditched the bike somewhere and got a ride back to San Diego. Visions of statutory rape charges precluded his phoning her family to see if she'd made it home after he hitchhiked back. By the time Stacey's frantic parents found him to ask, it was hours too late.

Sheriff's deputies located the body that evening, less than a mile from the fallen four-hundred-pound motorcycle, which had simply been too heavy for the hundred-and-five-pound girl to upright. Coyotes had found the body first. What was left, Bo noted when she accompanied Stacey's father to the morgue for the identification, was a mottled husk that looked like a wizened old woman. She hoped he didn't see the barrel cactus spines imbedded in his daughter's hands from what must have been a last, frenzied attempt to find moisture.

To the Pathfinder's rear door the previous owners had welded a wire frame that held a five-gallon can of water. An unsightly addition that, in light of Stacey's demise, Bo welcomed. Five gallons of water could buy at least two extra days in the summer desert, in an emergency. Plenty of time for somebody to find a stranded camper.

Rounding the corner from Linda Vista Road onto Genesee Avenue, Bo slowed to admire a long vacant lot full of thistles. Their blue flowers dried on the gray-green stalks every year, retaining a color that reminded Bo of forest ponds on Cape Cod. That same inscrutable amethyst. An artist away from the job that paid her rent, Bo envisioned a painting in which blue thistles covered an entire canvas. Maybe she'd stop on the way back and pick a bouquet for Estrella, to celebrate the forthcoming blessed event. Except the spiky flowers were probably full of ants, or earwigs, or the larvae of centipedes. Maybe she'd just buy a couple of carnations at the florist near the hospital.

By the time she found a parking space in St. Mary's Hospital for Children's inadequate front lot, Bo was entertaining doubts about the new medication Dr. Broussard had said might work better than the lithium. The side effects did seem less noticeable. That sloppy, awkward slowness that seemed to accompany all the medications was a little less annoying. And there was no hand tremor, or not much, anyway. But the singular thoughts characteristic of manic depression were heartily in evidence despite the scrim provided by the little pills. Objects seemed more than usually anxious to reveal covert aspects of themselves. Bo regarded the parking lot's asphalt pavement, thought of dead dinosaurs melting into the primordial crude oil from which asphalt would be made, and sighed.

"I can only imagine," she told an audience of invisible dinosaurs at her feet, "what a life without these endless scenes from PBS specials might be like."

The baby called Acito was, Bo ascertained at the fourth-floor nurses' station, still classified as "guarded" after presumably ingesting a toxic substance that had caused violent diarrhea and vomiting. "Rule out hemolytic anemia," her copy of the medical chart suggested. What it meant was, "Don't rule out hemolytic anemia; hemolytic anemia is a possibility here." Bo whistled critically at medical jargon that seemed intent on obfuscation.

"What kind of poison causes hemolytic anemia?" she asked the nurse who'd politely duplicated the chart.

"I don't know." The young woman smiled beneath a haircut too short and chic to hold a nurse's cap even if she owned one. Bo tried to remember when nurses stopped wearing those starched white relics, and concluded that the actual date was probably a secret. "But sometimes it's a symptom of malaria."

"Malaria? I thought this baby got into some kind of toxic substance."

"It looks that way," the nurse answered, leaning conversationally on the counter. 'We've got whole blood on standby, just in case he needs a transfusion. He came in pretty sick."

Pretty sick. The usual euphemism for "potentially near death." Bo drew a sharp breath and felt a halo of sudden sweat forming at her hairline. The hall with its bright colors, its stuffed animals and Disney pictures, was a facade, a set. Behind it desperate battles were being fought. Nothing new, but the reality seemed oddly shocking.