Turtle Baby (6 page)

"Taxi!" she yelled at a rusty 1973 Plymouth cruising Revolución, and handed the red napkin to the driver.

"Si," he nodded as Bo crawled into the back seat, after which he gunned the car left on Avenida Benito Juarez and headed toward the Ensenada toll road. Bo watched pavement slide by through a hole in the floorboards. Perhaps this had been unwise. Perhaps the address was in Ensenada, some seventy-five miles down the Baja Peninsula. Perhaps it was south of Ensenada, where she couldn't go anyway, without papers. Where legendary bandidos were still known to prey on unsuspecting gringos.

Stupid gringos who, had they any sense, would be at the outlet mall in San Ysidro right now, looking for bargains. The driver swerved left again over a rocky parkway, and headed south, up into the hills of Tijuana. The road visible through the hole was now dirt. Bo looked out the window and wondered whether to blame this ill-advised adventure on manic impulsivity or a perverse pride that insisted on beating back fear. Either way, it had landed her on what looked like a set for The Grapes of Wrath.

"Thanks," she said when the cab stopped, paying the driver and skating through a collection of thin chickens circling her feet. The driver had pointed toward an alleyway between two crumbling walled courtyards. Inside one Bo could see a large, immaculately clean Duroc sow fastened with a long rope to a Model T that seemed to have sunk into the ground. Red geraniums grew in the wheelwells. The alleyway was dim, covered in places by strips of corrugated plastic or boards. The feeling was oddly medieval.

"I'm looking for a woman named Chac," Bo told an old man sitting in a large basket beside a curtained door. He seemed not to hear her, but a middle-aged woman in flip-flops came out and pointed up the alleyway, then showed four fingers. Four doors up that way. Bo headed to the designated door, and stopped. How did you knock on a curtain?

"Is there someone named Chac here?" she yelled into the flowered fabric.

"Who wants to know?" came the answer in a voice that was male, adolescent, and English-speaking. Bo was sure she heard fear in that voice. Why was everybody connected to this case so afraid?

"My name is Bo Bradley," Bo told the shirtless blond boy who now stood in the doorway. "I work for Child Protective Services in San Diego, and I have no official capacity here at all, but I need to see Chac about her baby, Acito. Is she here?"

Bo had given the last three words a deep-voiced emphasis she hoped sounded threatening. Beside the slender boy the curtain moved and a young woman stepped into the alley. A slender young woman with rosy-brown skin, braided hair so black it reflected light in tones of blue, and a classic nose Bo recognized immediately.

"I am Chac," the young woman said. "What did you say about my baby, Acito?"

"This could be a trick," the boy muttered.

"You're Maya," Bo noted with enthusiasm. "The baby's nose ... I don't know why I didn't think—"

"What about my baby!" Chac's black eyes were filling with tears as she wadded handfuls of the baggy white T-shirt she was wearing into the waistband of tight black jeans.

"He's in the hospital, but he's doing fine," Bo explained. "St. Mary's Hospital for Children in San Diego. He's been poisoned. They haven't figured out the substance yet. Babies get into things sometimes. But he's getting the best care. He's going to be just fine."

"Acito is poisoned?" Chac gasped and grabbed the door frame. "Poisoned by what? I was with him in San Ysidro this morning. He was not poisoned then. I do not believe you."

The singer's English sounded formal. Old-fashioned.

"Your English is beautiful," Bo said, puzzled. "Where did you learn it?"

"I learned in Antigua, at a convent school called Instituto Indigena Nuestra Señora del Socorro," Chac replied as if the school's name were an impressive calling card. "I was trained as a teacher there and I have U.S. residency papers." Her voice was fierce. "My son is a U.S. citizen. You have no right to take away my son! I will go to the U.S. consulate—"

"Wait a minute," Bo interjected. This changed everything, if it were true. And a call from the U.S. consul's office in Tijuana to Madge Aldenhoven might just lose Bo and Estrella both their jobs. "Natalio and Ynez Cruz brought Acito all the way into San Diego, to St. Mary's, because he was very sick. Since then they've vanished, but the baby's okay. The hospital placed a hold on him and notified my agency because there was no way to reach a parent, but if your child really is a U.S. citizen ..."

"Come in," Chac sighed. "I will show you."

The blond boy scowled and hitched faded Levi's an inch higher over his gaunt hips. He must still be growing, Bo thought. He had that awkward late-adolescent gangliness that would one day fill out in the body of a tall, attractive man. Holding aside the curtain, he glowered at Bo and then tossed his long hair in a gesture meant to demonstrate aloof contempt. It succeeded only in demonstrating that he was several years short of voting age.

"Thank you," Bo said, stepping into a large room created by fastening sheets of plywood to a stucccoed rear wall. The roof was a canvas tarp. The floor, dirt.

"How'd you get this address?" he asked in a slightly nasal tenor. "Get" was pronounced "git." An American. And a country boy.

"From the bartender at the place on Revolución where Chac sings," Bo answered. "He seemed afraid ..."

Chac had been searching through a brightly woven backpack pulled from beneath a cot. "Here," she said, tossing the backpack on the bed and handing Bo an envelope. "This is my marriage certificate. My husband is an American, which makes my baby one, too. You must return our baby."

Our baby? "Are you Acito's father?" Bo asked the blond boy, who had picked up a guitar and was tuning it with elaborate care. At the question he turned a key too far, bringing a rising whine from the instrument.

"No, no, Chris Joe is just a friend," Chac answered, pacing. "Read the marriage papers."

Chris Joe's pale cheeks flushed crimson as he began to play "Midnight in Moscow" at a furious tempo never intended, Bo was certain, by its Russian composer. His guitar strings, she noticed, were of silk-wrapped steel. Chac's words had hurt him. Bo was beginning to get the picture. The boy was in love with the woman, hiding his feelings in a tremulous display of musical virtuosity. It was transparently clear to Bo that Chris Joe wished he were the father. Chac seemed not to notice.

Bo unfolded the document in her hands slowly, taking time to memorize the room, the people. A sense of urgency pervaded both. An uneasiness Bo associated with the night before leaving on a long journey. Chac's bag, thrown carelessly on the cot, had spilled makeup, a hairbrush, a plastic coin purse, and a rectangular box onto the blanket. Bo's glance doubled back to the box. Clairol aerosol hair coloring. Black. Why would a healthy young woman whose hair was naturally black need dye?

"Um, yes, I see." Bo nodded at the marriage certificate. It said that someone named Maria Elena Bolon, a citizen of Guatemala, had married someone named Dewayne L. Singleton, a citizen of the State of Louisiana, United States of America, in a Mexican civil ceremony two and a half years ago. Bo copied the information on a deposit slip torn from her wallet. "And are you Maria Elena Bolon?" she asked.

"Si," Chac answered, leaning to pull something else from the bag. "Here are my papers."

Beneath the acorn-colored skin of the woman's inner arm Bo saw fading purplish scars that could only mean one thing. Maybe the reason for the hair dye. Bo had seen heroin addicts whose hair turned prematurely gray, and heroin was the most likely explanation for those collapsed veins. Tracks. The reason most addicts wore long sleeves, even in summer.

On the deposit slip she noted, "Mo IV drug user; check baby for HIV." AIDS. If Chac had shared needles with other drug users before or during her pregnancy, she could have contracted the virus, which could have infected her baby before his birth. The tracks were old, healed. But Chac might have contracted the virus years in the past. Bo thought of the dark-eyed baby in his hospital crib, and sighed. Life was always, she mused, a complete crap shoot.

The identification papers of Maria Elena Bolon were in order, and included a photograph of the woman now calling herself Chac.

"Why did you change your name?" Bo asked, noticing a shelf of labeled jars over a battered table holding a hotplate and Chris Joe's guitar case. The labels named various herbs. And scratched white stenciled lettering on the guitar case spelled "C.J. Gavin, Henderson, KY, GHOST PONY RULES!"

Chris Joe rolled his eyes at the ceiling tarp, and switched from the Russian song to a plaintive melody that sounded folkloric. He was, Bo realized, creating a musical background for Chac.

"I'm a singer," the young woman said, nodding to the music. "Singers use special names. Mine is a Maya god. What else do you wish to know?"

Bo could think of several hundred questions, but settled on the obvious. "Where's Acito's father, this Dewayne Singleton?"

"I don't know. He left me before Acito was born."

"Do you have any idea where he might be? We need to contact him. Notification of both parents is standard procedure when a child is in custody."

"No," Chac answered flatly.

Chris Joe had placed the guitar in its case and picked up a sort of wooden flute. As he played a haunting refrain that Bo found vaguely familiar, Chac began to sing softly in Spanish. Or at least it was partly Spanish. And the voice filling the dingy room, Bo realized, might be that of an angel. A trained voice, molding invisible fire out of vibrating air. At the song's end Bo heard the phrase "Mi Acito."

"It is the song of my love for my son," Chac whispered. "He is my heart. Do you understand? I cannot lose him!"

Bo felt tears swimming in her eyes. The song was the one she'd heard on the radio. Live, it was mesmerizing. And so was this team of musicians who had her crying in a Mexican hovel in broad daylight. She felt dizzy, as though she were slipping in and out of differing points of view.

Get out of here, Bradley. This is too weird!

"Acito isn't really my case," she stammered, backing toward the door. "You need to contact my co-worker, Estrella Benedict. She'll tell you what to do. Here's the number."

Handing her own CPS business card to Chac, Bo pushed aside the doorway curtain and bolted into the alleyway. The old man in the basket was gone, and so was the Duroc sow. In the mile hike to the nearest paved street where she could catch a bus, Bo saw only a succession of crumbling walls that seemed to hide peculiar and incomprehensible dangers. She hoped if she looked straight ahead, whatever lay behind those baked adobe walls would ignore her as well.

Madge Aldenhoven was characteristically sullen when Bo returned to the CPS offices at 3:00.

"Your new case is on your desk, and where's Estrella?" she called from her office without looking up as Bo passed the door. Amid stacks of manila case files piled on the desk, three chairs, and the floor, the supervisor seemed dwarfed by paper. Bo couldn't help thinking of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado." Of Madge Aldenhoven sealed forever in her office behind thick walls of case files, eventually becoming a cobwebby skeleton with three Bic pens stuck in its spun-sugar hair. The skeleton, Bo fantasized, would be found centuries in the future by archaeologists excavating San Diego after an earthquake separated the city from the continental U.S. The archaeologists would think Madge had been the priestess of a cult that worshipped paper.

"I don't know, but I'm sure she'll be back soon." Bo smiled at Madge's door frame. "Why?"

"Dr. LaMarche called an hour ago," Madge said into a box of tissues on her desk. "The Mexican baby poisoning was not accidental. Estrella needs to pick up those lab reports before filing the case."

"I'll call St. Mary's and have them faxed over." Bo stated the obvious, turning the corner into her own office. Once inside, she pressed her head against the wall for a moment, picturing the little Indian baby in her mind. He was so strong and eloquent in his preverbal way. How could anyone deliberately hurt him?

The news was sickening, but then so was most of the news useful to San Diego County's Child Protective Services. People sometimes murdered children, who could be an intolerable nuisance, or burden. But why Acito? And who? One of the paid caretakers in the little San Ysidro apartment? Bo thought it unlikely. Acito had been a source of desperately needed income to them, and besides, why would they then have taken him to a hospital?

Chac said she'd visited Acito only this morning. Had Chris Joe accompanied her? Could the mother or the strange expatriate hillbilly have wanted a burdensome baby out of the way? Bo didn't like the picture framing itself in her mind. The picture San Diego's police would be sure to see as well. A struggling singer with a history of drug abuse, clawing her way to stardom in the Tijuana music scene. A talented young accompanist, angry at the world and devoted to Chac in a way that could easily become distorted. The police would assume that either one of them could have done it, Bo admitted. The thought made her teeth taste like varnish.

Pulling a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, she began stacking them individually in a crisscross pattern bordering her desk blotter. From the bulletin board above, fifteen faces looked down in sympathy. William Faulkner frowned. Ernest Hemingway scowled. "Monstrous," Mary Shelley mused into the air over Bo's head.

"You're all crazy," Bo told the photographs as Estrella opened the door with a swoosh.

"Oh, great. You're building cigarette fences and talking to those damn pictures again. Did you find out anything about this Indian baby, or have you been sitting here all day conversing with dead people?"

Estrella's mood, Bo noted, had not measurably improved.

"He's a Maya baby," Bo answered, "and I've got vast documentation for you, including a baby bottle and Mom's Tijuana address, but none of it points to infanticide, which is what the lab reports are indicating."

The word hung in the little room, an anachronism.