Fresh Kills (14 page)

It was almost sunset when we found Amber, but the search continued till after dark, in the hope—or fear—that Baby Adam would turn up as well. It continued, but without me. I had seen enough of death for one day.

“These things happen,” Matt Riordan said. I'd fled to the comfort of his co-op apartment on Fifth Avenue after watching the emergency services cops pull Amber's swollen body out of the swamp. I'd stood under a hot shower, washing away the cold and damp and smell of death for a long time. Now I sat wrapped in a royal blue velour man's robe, big white men's socks on my feet, sipping Scotch that should have been in a museum.

My sometime lover lifted a glass of his miracle Scotch to his lips. “If I fell apart every time I lost a client, I'd—”

I held up a warning hand. “Look, the clients you take, you expect them to get fished out of swamps on Staten Island. This was supposed to be a simple adoption, not the Gotti trial.”

His answering smile was composed of equal parts amusement and condescension. “I have been known to represent innocent people,” he said.

“Yeah, right. The last time you represented someone who didn't deserve twenty to life was when you were with the Manhattan D.A.'s office. But the important point here is that this isn't about you and your practice—it's about me.” I took a deep swallow of my own Scotch and let its smoky warmth burn my throat. Thank God for alcohol, I thought. It always comes through.

“First Rojean, now Amber,” I said. There was a ragged edge to my voice I didn't like. So I medicated it with another swallow of single-malt.

“Cass,” Riordan said, an edge of exasperation in his rich, jury-seducing voice, “you can't go through life blaming yourself every time one of your clients dies or screws up.”

“Screws up,” I mimicked. “Yeah, I'd say selling your baby constitutes screwing up, all right. How can you …?”

“How can you?” he countered. He marshaled arguments, fixing me with the same intense stare I'd seen him use on Juror Number Six in his last Godfather trial. “You've been a criminal lawyer for almost twenty years, Cass. You need a thick skin for this kind of practice, and up to now, you've had it. You didn't put those poor kids into the bathtub and you didn't help Amber sell her baby. So why not cut this self-indulgent guilt trip and get down to finding out what happened to Amber?”

“Finding out.” I stared into the amber liquid in my glass. Amber, clear and bright and golden, reflecting sunlight. The amber pendant. Amber's maple-syrup hair. Ellie telling Amber she fit her name because she was bringing light into their lives with her baby. Amber, pulled from the swamp, dripping weeds, her face a puffy blur.

“I identified the body,” I murmured. I picked up the heavy cut glass and drained the rest of the Scotch in a long fiery swallow. Under ordinary circumstances Riordan would have called it a sacrilege to treat his Scotch like fraternity chug booze, but this time he just sat and watched as I worked things out my own way.

“It wasn't the sea,” I went on. “So there wasn't as much damage from fish, and she wasn't in there all that long. But she was puffy and pale and—” I broke off before I got to the part about the foam bubbling out of her nose and mouth. I took another swallow of the burning-sweet liquid.

“She was gruesome,” I said.

I looked up into my companion's deep blue eyes. They held a compassion I seldom saw. “Could I have another drink?”

He poured. I was over my limit and we both knew it, but he didn't say a word, just filled my glass with more of the amber nectar. I took a sip and let the Scotch burn my tongue with its smoky, biting taste.

“After what she did, I'm not sure I care who killed her.” I let that thought lie on the couch between us. “I'm not saying she deserved to die. Exactly. But why should I worry about who killed her? Hell,” I went on, throwing back a shot of booze like a gun moll in a forties movie, “whoever killed Amber was a better human being than she was. It's hard to imagine someone worse than a woman who'd sell her own baby.”

The courtroom voice was soft and seductive as Riordan asked the only question that mattered: “What about the baby?”

“What about the baby?” I let all the frustration I felt fill my voice as I faced the adversary on the other end of the couch. “You think I know where the baby is? You think I helped Amber line up buyers, that I told her to get married so she'd have an airtight legal claim to the baby? You think I—”

“You know I don't think any of that,” Riordan replied, his tone as soothing as the Scotch he poured. “But I do think you could help locate the baby if you asked the right questions.”

“The cops are covering Staten Island like a heavy fog,” I countered. “What can I do that they can't?”

He shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe nothing. But I do know you are going to be impossible to live with—even more impossible than usual, that is—unless you get off your ass and try.”

There was nothing in those words that would have caused a normal person to break down in tears. So why did I lean into Riordan's broad chest and sob like a child, letting him hold me close until the tears dried up?

C
HAPTER
N
INE

I walked toward the Greenspan house, almost but not quite able to ignore the Sunday morning pageant of early spring, the hyacinths tall and dignified, the tulips green nodules not yet in bloom but poised on the brink of glorious color, the forsythia reaching golden-yellow arms into the blue sky. I wanted to enjoy it, to revel in spring poetry.

Spring rides no horses down the hill

But comes on foot, a goose-girl still.

But spring had lost its magic; all I could see was the tiny little life who had been passed from mother to mother—and now was God knew where. One mother was dead; I was on my way to see the other.

If Ellie didn't shoot me on sight, it would be a miracle.

I hadn't counted on the press. Stupid of me. I'd somehow assumed I could just walk up to the door of the former stable and ring the bell. Instead I confronted a gauntlet of eager reporters, print and television, trying to get quotes.

“Are you a friend of the Greenspans?” a petite blonde asked, shoving a microphone to within an inch of my mouth. “Have you known them a long time?”

“How is Mrs. Greenspan reacting to the loss of her baby?” an Asian woman asked, photogenic concern etched on her smooth young face.

But the dangerous one was a disheveled print reporter who'd studied in the School of Jimmy Breslin. He sidled up to me while the media types signaled their cameramen and said out of the side of his mouth, “Ms. Jameson, can we talk when you leave here?”

“I don't think so,” I muttered back.

He raised an eyebrow and regarded me with amusement. “Oh, I do think so, Counselor. Because if you don't agree to talk to me, I tell these bozos who you are. And then—” He waved an arm at the phalanx of mannequin telejournalists and their camera people. The gesture took in the news vans parked at the entrance to the mews, and even embraced the two cops guarding the cul-de-sac, cigarettes cupped under their hands, as well as the little knot of rubberneckers who stood gossiping and drinking coffee from paper cups.

“I see what you mean,” I replied. Half of being a lawyer is knowing what to concede and when. “Do you know the neighborhood?”

The reporter lifted a shoulder in what might have been an assenting shrug. “Hey, I'm a Brooklyn boy,” he bragged.

“Yeah, by way of Buffalo,” I shot back. Enough people mistaked my Ohio accent for Buffalo that it was worth a try just to wipe the smug smirk off the guy's face.

“Howdja know?”

My turn to shrug. “We could sit on the Promenade when I get out of here,” I offered. “You buy me a coffee and I'll tell you whatever you want to know.”

And you'll tell me a few things in return
, I thought but didn't say aloud. The other half of being a good lawyer is cross-examining people without letting them know you're doing it.

I rang the bell. I couldn't believe my own nerve in standing here expecting either Josh or Ellie to give me the time of day, but I had to try convincing them I hadn't known what Amber was going to do with their baby. And, apropos of surreptitious cross-examinations, I had to find out more about Josh's Friday night meeting with Amber at the mall.

The door was opened by a woman who looked to be in her mid-seventies. She stooped; she raised her head awkwardly to meet my eyes. “Yes?” she asked in a voice like a raven's.

“Uh … I'm—That is, Ellie knows me,” I said, trying to find the right words. “I wonder if I might come in, Mrs. Greenspan.” I'd been lucky with the reporter from Buffalo; maybe my guess that this was Josh's mother would hit the mark as well.

It didn't. “It's
Miss
” she corrected. “I'm Joshua's aunt. Norma Ruditz,” she continued, holding out a lank hand dotted with liver spots. I took it and shook my way into the foyer.

“Come in and sit,” Miss Ruditz invited. Her voice held the memory of thousands of cigarettes smoked over the years. She walked stiffly toward the palomino couch, her out-thrust head preceding her at an awkward angle. I reminded myself to pick up some calcium tablets at the health food store before heading home.

As the aunt settled herself, I decided on my approach. I hadn't said I was a friend, but the elderly lady seemed to assume as much. Could I find out a little more about Josh's movements from her before Ellie showed up and had me thrown out?

“It must be awful for Josh and Ellie,” I began. Short on originality, but perhaps enough to open a floodgate or two.

Norma Ruditz shook her head slowly from side to side. “I warned them,” she said. “I warned them about adopting a baby from some shiksa they never met before.” Her bird-of-prey eyes raked me up and down.

“You're not Jewish,” she pronounced.

I shook my head.

“Then you should pardon the expression. It's nothing personal, you understand. Just that people should be with their own, deal with their own, marry their own. Have their own babies and if they can't, at least adopt from their own.” She spoke with a singsong cadence that wasn't exactly a Yiddish accent but was instead the natural result of having grown up in a home where Yiddish was the primary language.

If every Jewish birth mother took the same view, she'd refuse to give a baby to a man married to Ellie. It came to me slowly that this was Aunt Norma's point—that the tragedy began for her the day Josh married out of his faith, and that in her mind the rest followed inevitably.

It was also clear that she had no idea Josh was claiming paternity.

What a comfort she must be to Ellie in her hour of need. Maybe I wouldn't get thrown out, after all. A fellow shiksa might be a welcome relief to a woman shut up with Norma's parochial views on mixed marriage.

“I told him to go to the Jewish Family Services. My friend Mitzi's oldest went there eighteen years ago, they gave her the sweetest little girl. Such a talent, she graduates this June third in her class at—”

“What are you doing here?” a shrill voice interrupted. I turned. Ellie Greenspan stood in the doorway to the bedroom, her hands on her hips, her face a mask of accusation.

“How dare you come here after what you did?” She took a stride forward, bursting into the living room with all the force and fury of a tornado. She strode up to where I sat on the couch and stood over me in an attitude of menace. I wondered for a moment if her slender-fingered hand would reach out and slap me across the face.

For a strange, long moment I waited for it, almost wanted it.

I looked up into Ellie's sunken eyes, challenging her. “What did I do, Mrs. Greenspan?” I said with deliberate calm.

It was a calculated risk. I figured enough people, from Josh to the media to Marla, were busy commiserating with her, urging her to explore and express her pain, that a dose of cool reason might penetrate her shield of anger.

“You stole my baby and gave him to that woman to sell.” Her voice cracked on the last word. She turned and walked away with a swiftness that startled me.

That was what I'd thought at two o'clock in the morning, but it wasn't true. I summoned the strength to say so to Ellie's face.

“No, I didn't. I presented legal arguments to a judge who made a ruling. Neither I nor Judge Feinberg had reason to believe Amber intended to do anything except give the baby a good home.”

“That's not what Marla says,” Ellie countered. She sat in the armchair with the turquoise sand-painting print and folded her legs under her like a child.

“Marla,” I echoed. I asked the question I should have put to one of the Greenspans on Wednesday in court. “Did you or Josh authorize Marla to offer three thousand dollars to—”

“We did not,” Ellie cut in, her voice a laser cutting through glass. “That's exactly what Marla said you'd say. She warned us about you, said you'd try to put everything on her. Well, it was your client who sold my baby, who met Josh at the mall Friday night, who—”

“Did he give her money?” I jumped in with both feet; this was what I'd come for: to hear every horrible detail of how my client spent her last hours on earth.

“We told the police everything,” Ellie replied. Her voice had a dead sound. Indignation was giving way to exhaustion. I suspected she was talking to me only because throwing me out would be too much trouble. And maybe having someone on hand to blame took some of the pain away, if only for a little while.

I pressed my luck. “Then it won't matter if you tell me, too.”

She sighed. “I suppose not. Yes, Josh went there Friday night. She called him Thursday, the day after we were in court, and said she'd changed her mind again. That we could have Adam back if we paid her ten thousand dollars.”