Fresh Kills (18 page)

There followed a birth certificate, a death certificate, and several postnatal medical records from Our Lady of Pity Hospital.

“See, here's where the doc checks ‘none' under ‘heart defects,'” Jerry explained. “Then the very next day, there's a note about decreased vascular activity.”

“So where were you Friday night?” Artie asked, his tone innocently conversational.

The pizzamaker's jaw dropped. He gave Artie the kind of look he'd have given a giant cockroach and replied, “What's that got to do with my Laura?”

“Nothing,” Artie responded breezily. “Nothing at all. That's the night your ex-wife bought the farm, that's all. Or should I say the swamp.”

The boy reporter had a sound grasp of cross-examination. I looked at him with new respect.

“I don't have to tell you anything,” Jerry said, the sullen tone of his voice reverting him to the teenager he'd been when he met and married Amber.

“No, you don't,” Artie agreed. “And I don't have to print anything about how Amber sold your baby.”

“You mean you won't write anything about Doc unless I tell you where I was on Friday night?”

“That's right,” Artie confirmed. “See, my interest in all this is Amber. That's what my editor sent me to Staten Island for. Now, don't get me wrong,” he added, spreading his pudgy, freckled hands in a placating gesture, “I'd like nothing more than to break a big story about Doc Scanlon selling your baby, but first I've got to come up with something on Amber's murder. So, what's it going to be, Jerry? You going to answer my question, or am I going to walk out of here and forget all about your baby?”

Jerry gave it serious thought. He looked at the documents spread out on the pizza table like cards in a poker game, then up at Artie's face, which gave him no quarter. Then he muttered, “She asked me to meet her.”

I couldn't believe it. Aronson was going to kill me. Artie and I had managed to locate the man in the silver car, the man who'd picked Amber up at the mall and driven her to her death. And here he was, sitting at a table in his own restaurant, admitting everything to a reporter and a lawyer.

“At the mall?” Artie prompted.

“Hell, no,” Jerry replied, shaking his head. “At this place called the Native Plant Center.”

“The what?” I asked.

“It's part of the Greenbelt,” Artie said absently, as if that was supposed to tell me something. “It belongs to the New York City Park system,” he added.

“Where is it?”

“Across from the mall,” Jerry explained, his voice dropping as he realized the full implications of what he was saying. “Right next to the Davis Wildlife Refuge.”

“Let me get this straight,” I began. “You—”

“Why not let him start at the beginning,” Artie said.

I clamped my mouth shut and waited for Jerry to collect his thoughts.

“She promised to give me all the documents,” Jerry said at last. “She practically admitted Laura was still alive and that she knew who adopted her. She promised to give me everything, including the name of the couple who had Laura.”

“In return for what?” asked Artie.

“Twenty thousand dollars,” Jerry answered. He wiped a big hand across his face and went on. “She told me to be at the Native Plant Center parking lot at nine o'clock, to wait for her to come. So I did. I got there at eight-thirty and sat in my car until nearly ten. I had the money; I took a second mortgage on this place, but she never showed.”

I looked over at Artie. Was he buying this? Here was a man with every reason to kill Amber, a man whose car fit the description of the one she'd been seen getting into at the mall, and we were supposed to believe he was sitting idly in a parking lot doing nothing while his ex-wife drowned less than a mile away?

One thing was certain: no force on earth was going to move Arthur H. Bloom from that wire-backed chair until he had his story.

No force on earth except one. The door opened and a big man walked up to the counter. A big man with the face of a basset hound and the disgusted expression of a cop who sees civilians meddling in police business.

Detective Milt Aronson walked over to the table and said, “What are you two doing here?”

I hoped to hell Artie wasn't going to say, “Having pizza.”

Instead he gazed up at the big detective with the eagerness of a kid greeting a favorite uncle. “Are you going to arrest Mr. Califana?” he asked.

Jerry jumped up from his chair and looked around wildly for a place to hide.

“You want a press release, call DCPI,” Aronson retorted, naming by initials the police information office. “Just get the hell out of here.”

Artie looked at me, as though expecting me to weigh in with a speech about the rights of the press under the First Amendment, but I was happy to accept the reprieve. I took a few bills out of my wallet, threw them on the table, and hustled Artie out the door, glad Aronson wasn't going to grill us about how we happened to be there.

On the way to his car, Artie turned and looked back toward 'At's Amore. “Let's wait a few minutes,” he said. “See if Aronson takes Califana out in handcuffs.”

“If he killed Amber, where's the baby?” I said, heartlessly throwing rain on his parade. “He's the one person in the country who doesn't want Adam; if for some reason he decided after all these years to kill Amber on the exact same night she's selling her new baby, which is a pretty farfetched coincidence, then what did he do with Adam?”

Artie opened the door to his car and got in, then leaned over to unlock the passenger door for me. I jumped in beside him; within minutes the Artie Bloom Express was on its way back toward the mall.

“You buy his story?” I asked as we sped along the expressway.

“Makes a certain amount of sense,” Artie replied. “Amber's ditching Scott and taking her baby out of state. She decides to get herself a nice going-away present from her ex. So she agrees to meet him at the Native Plant Center, only she never gets there because she's busy getting killed.”

“By someone who picks her up at the mall in a silver car very much like the one Jerry happens to own,” I finished, not bothering to hide my sarcasm. “His story won't last five minutes once Aronson starts questioning him.”

“I don't know,” Artie said, shaking his head. “It's not like I can't see Jerry killing her, because I can. But would he kill her before he found out what she knew about his kid?”

“You're assuming there's something to find out,” I countered. “What if Amber was just playing on his obsession, lying to him about the baby being alive? If he found out that she was jerking him around, he'd kill her so fast—”

Artie took his eyes off the road and locked them with mine. “Did he strike you as that good an actor, Counselor?”

I remembered the look on Jerry's face as he opened the lockbox that held the sacred talismans of his lost child. No, I decided, Artie was right. Jerry Califana believed with every cell of his being that his Laura was still alive. So if he killed Amber, it wasn't because he'd come to see that she was lying about his child's death. And he wouldn't have killed her if there was the slightest chance she had information that would lead him to Laura.

“You know, Scott may not be off the hook here,” I mused as we raced along the expressway.

“How do you figure that?” Artie replied, giving me a sideways glance.

“He jumps Josh only to find out that Amber already has the money,” I said. “So he runs for his car, hoping to find Amber and the baby waiting for him. Instead, he finds a car that won't start and no Amber. And, more important, no money.”

Artie nodded; I pressed my luck. “So he hops on the motorcycle and takes off. He knows Amber double-crossed him. She ditched him at the mall and disabled the car. So he tracks down Amber, kills her, and then races to my house pretending he's looking for her when he knows damn well she's already dead because he—”

“Where's the baby all this time?” Artie countered. “And what about the silver car? Does Jerry—or whoever Amber's accomplice is—just stand there and let her get killed? And isn't coming to your house to establish an alibi pretty sophisticated for a lump like Scott?”

“Hell, Bloom, we know where the baby is,” I answered, my voice dropping. I didn't want to say the words—didn't want to think them—but the reality I'd been pushing away ever since Amber was found had to be faced.

“In the swamp,” I said, lowering my eyes and trying not to form the picture in my mind's eye. “Scott killed Amber and the baby, then tried to make it look like Amber successfully ditched him and left the state with Adam.”

“Why would he destroy an asset worth at least ten thousand dollars?” Artie retorted. It was as cynical a reply as anyone could have made, and it cheered me no end.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

“He never should have let her come here,” Mrs. Bonaventura said mournfully. She struck me as a woman who said most things mournfully; the entire world seemed not to live up to her expectations.

Artie Bloom and I sat on identical chintz-covered chairs, placed with geometric precision across the room from the sofa. The group home seemed smaller and quieter this time; of course Marla wasn't with me, filling the air with smoke and pacing up and down.

“Why did he?” I asked. I sipped at my weak iced tea. My hand came away wet after I placed the sweating glass on a straw coaster.

“I don't know,” the older woman replied. “It just happened. One day he showed up at the door and she was with him. I wondered because she was older than the other girls, and he treated her different from the beginning.”

“How do you mean different?” I'd seen it myself; seen the private room, decorated with a lavish hand, seen the private telephone line, seen that Amber was the princess of this little castle. What I didn't know was why.

Artie's steno pad was nowhere in sight. We'd agreed that since I'd met Mrs. Bonaventura, I should conduct the questioning. I had the feeling that if Mrs. B. realized the press was sitting in, we'd be out on our respective ears in short order.

“That room used to hold three girls,” the housemother confided, “but Doctor made me move them out and put Amber in there alone.” Her voice was laden with grievance. I had a sudden picture of her gleefully ridding the master bedroom of Amber's furniture and moving three spartan single beds into the space.

“Then he said she needed a private telephone line.” Again the disapproving tone invited me into a game of Ain't It Awful. “He said the adoptive parents who wanted her child were paying for it, but I saw the bills. That line was in her name, but he paid for it with his own money.”

Interesting. Ellie Greenspan had led me to believe that she and Josh financed Amber's link to the outside world; was Amber collecting expense money from them for extras Doc was already paying for? And what of the Kansas and Maryland couples? I was willing to bet they both kicked in.

I shook my head and tried for a tsking sound that said I couldn't agree more. “And look how she paid him back,” I ventured. Hell of a thing to say about my own client—but then look how she'd paid me back.

I was answered by a malicious gleam in Mrs. Bonaventura's black eyes. I had a moment's vision of her wearing a fringed shawl, Tarot cards spread before her, candles flickering behind her head. She was a natural gypsy, and I leaned forward expectantly as she opened her mouth, certain she would tell me she'd seen Amber's treachery in the stars.

I wasn't disappointed. “I told him,” she said with lipsmacking satisfaction. “I warned him not to trust that little snip.”

I hadn't heard that word since my Grandma Winchell went to live at the Home. If Amber was only a snip, I wondered what it took to make a bitch in Mrs. B's lexicon.

“She was in and out of here whenever she pleased,” the housemother complained. “All the other girls had rules, curfews. In by ten on weeknights, eleven on weekends. And even during the day, we kept an eye on them. They'd spend all day at the mall eating hamburgers and drinking milkshakes if we let them. Gaining weight, smoking—all the things that would be bad for the babies.”

“The babies are the most important thing,” I said gravely, unsuccessfully trying to push away Amber's image of herself as a prize brood cow. I didn't dare meet Artie's eyes. Laughter lay just below the surface of my diaphragm, ready to leap into my throat and destroy my rapport with Mrs. B.

“Of course,” the housemother agreed. Her head bobbed up and down in an awkward nod; the bun wobbled as she moved. “That's what our adoptive parents pay for, healthy babies. And while there are no guarantees,” she went on, as though instructing a prospective adopter in the vagaries of genetics, “we try our best to give our little mothers healthy food and a quiet lifestyle.”

“Except for Amber,” I said, gently working the housemother back to my agenda.

“She went out whenever she felt like it,” Mrs. B. complained. “She'd go to the mall, see the girls she used to work with. I told Doctor he ought to make her stay home,” she confided. She looked directly at me, deliberately excluding Artie from the conversation, as though his masculinity prevented him from understanding.

“I wasn't surprised when I found out she slipped out and got married,” she continued. She sat back and clamped her thin lips shut. “It's just the kind of thing I warned Doctor about.”

“And what did he say?” I lifted my glass to my lips, hoping to hide the eagerness I felt. We were finally getting to the heart of my interest—Doc Scanlon. I felt sure Mrs. B. would rather cut out her tongue than criticize her boss, but if I could couch my questions in serious Amber-bashing, I had a chance of opening her sealed lips.