Turtle Baby (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Three)

by Abigail Padgett

  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."

  Davy Dooley
looked about forty, with graying dark hair worn in a long braid over the back of a denim shirt. With the exception of the limp, he exuded an outdoorsy athletic vigor Bo associated with forest rangers and tour guides. "On your foster care application you said you were Hispanic?" she mentioned.

  "Yep," he answered. "Born in Mexico City. My dad was an Irish missionary priest." His blue eyes crinkled at the edges with laughter. "Guess Mom was a knockout in those days. Still is, for that matter. The church sent Dad back to Ireland and gave Mom a job cooking at an orphanage. When I was three she married an American architectural restoration specialist she met when he was restoring the cathedral reredos, and moved here. But my real father's family wanted me to keep the name, and that's how the world got Davy Dooley, the Mexican stuntman."

  "Stuntman?" Bo said, recording the information in Acito's case file.

  "Hollywood," Acito's foster father answered, stretching to throw another stick on a small fire in the craftsman bungalow's tiled fireplace. "Indian parts mostly, because I'm dark-skinned. Can't tell you how many horses, cliffs, and waterfalls I've been shot off of. But after I busted my leg up good in the first shoot of the buffalo hunt scene in Dances with Wolves, I knew my stunt days were over. Connie and I have a nice nest egg in some blue-chip investments, but we don't need to touch any of it right now. It's there, though, if we ever get a kid."

  Bo watched fog drifting through an open window from the sea. The little summer fire was pleasant, she thought. Just enough to burn off the damp without appreciably heating the room. "What do you mean, 'get a kid'?" she asked.

  "I had endometrial cancer when I was only twenty-two," Connie Dooley answered, entering with a sleepy Acito and taking a seat in a rocker beside her husband. "Had to have a hysterectomy. We can't have children, and want to adopt, but it's not easy. We're too old, they say."

  "And too unconventional," Davy added. "We don't like nine-to-five jobs, I'm seen as a cripple, and to top it off, Connie's Buddhist."

  Bo glanced at the woman, who looked a great deal like her husband except for brown eyes and two braids instead of one. "Wow," she said.

  Connie grinned mischievously over the Little Turtle's freshly washed and electric hair. "It's okay," she said. "I chose Buddhism over a PR career in Hollywood that involved years of lying to the press about the sexual and substance-abuse hobbies of beautiful people. Got out just before I made so much money I'd have had to become one of them. Kept the Porsche, though. Nobody's perfect."

  Bo laughed, realizing that she liked these people. Backlit by firelight, they looked like an odd version of Rembrandt's The Holy Family.

  "I'll just have a look at the baby's room, and then go," she said, accepting the cooing Turtle from Connie's arms. He looked adorable in new pajamas with snaps at the waist and a conga line of ducks in baseball caps across the chest. Bo buried her face in soft black hair and offered a silent prayer to any deity who might be listening that no deadly virus lurked in his blood.

  "You can just go ahead and put him down," Connie Dooley told Bo as Davy turned on the bright overhead light in the nursery. A crib was made up, soft coverlet waiting. In a corner of the room the edges of a red plastic "contaminated waste" bag were visible under the lid of a diaper pail.

  "We understand about the precautions." Davy nodded somberly. "Until we find out the test results."

  Bo lay Chac's Little Turtle on his back in the crib, and admired his Maya nose and coal-black hair. Except something was wrong with his hair. Standing back, Bo tilted her head from side to side, looking. It wasn't just the light. A tuft of hair above his right eye was lighter than the rest, gray-looking. Leaning to examine the anomaly, she brushed back his thick hair. At the scalp the barely visible new growth was white!

  Bo gasped and felt her eyes widen.

  "What is it?" Connie asked. "Is something wrong?"

  "No," Bo attempted a recovery. "I just remembered I left my iron on at home. Gosh, I'd better run."

  The Dooleys would think she was flaky, Bo thought as she hurried to the car. But the likelihood paled in comparison to what she'd discovered. Nothing less than the identity of Acito's father!

  Chapter Eighteen

  Cutting Ant

  Dewayne Singleton saw the red plastic visitor's tag fall from the black sweater of a nun who'd come to the hospital to teach the evening crafts class. She'd taken the sweater off in the hall by the nurses' station, and in folding it to fit over her arm she'd pulled loose the spring-loaded clip that fastened the tag to the sweater's neck. It fell to the floor beneath the wooden extension that kept patients from reaching objects on the circular work surface inside the open station. The wooden ledge, Dewayne observed, also prevented the staff from seeing the floor beneath it.

  Prison life had taught him to betray no interest in events taking place nearby. To fasten his gaze on an imaginary horizon hanging always twenty feet ahead of him. The pills they'd given him made it easier, although they made the muscles in his legs hurt, too. Looking straight ahead he approached the nurses' station and stepped on the tag. Through the hospital slipper he could feel its metal clip.

  "Muscles in my legs and arms be hurtin'," he told one of the people behind the desk. "That normal?"

  "Haldol does that," a beefy white psych tech in a Pearl Jam T-shirt answered sympathetically. "Doctor's ordered you to start on lithium tomorrow. Soon as it gets up to blood levels, we can take down the Haldol. Meanwhile, you can have a couple Tylenol if you want."

  "Sure," Dewayne said.

  The psych tech asked a nurse to unlock the medication safe, and went to fill a small paper cup with water.

  "Whoa," Dewayne groaned, leaning to rub his ankles. "Sure do hurt down here in my ankle." While bent over, he retrieved the plastic tag from beneath his foot, stood, and jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

  "Here, this should help a little," the psych tech said, handing Dewayne two gelcaps and the cup of water. "You can have some more later if you need it."

  "Thanks, man," Dewayne answered, swallowing the pills.

  He didn't know what he'd do with the red plastic tag, but it might help him get out. The message from Allah about the curse wasn't so clear now. Just a sort of memory, like you'd remember a dream and not be sure whether or not it really happened. But it must have happened or he wouldn't be here. Allah must have sent him to warn the woman, his wife. Get her out of California. Her and this baby she had. They had to go away.

  Dewayne paced beside the dayroom wall, and wondered why the idea sounded so familiar. It had nothing to do with Allah and the Muslim leader at Wade, the Imam who'd showed Dewayne the true way. It was older than that, like from his childhood when Mama would read from the infidels' Bible and tell Dewayne he was a blessing-child sent to warm her heart. The thought of Mama made him cry.

  The duty nurse noticed and wrote in Dewayne's chart, "Patient discussing religion all day, agitated and tearful at 7:30 P.M. Rule out manic-depressive illness."

  Chapter Nineteen

  "A heart sacrifice" —Popol Vuh

  Bo parked the Pathfinder near Andrew LaMarche's Del Mar condo, and sat staring at a Torrey pine bending seaward from a sandy bluff behind the shake-shingled buildings. The ancient trees, she remembered from a seminar on San Diego's native plants, grew nowhere but here and one small island off the coast further north. Slipping an extended version of Pachelbel's Canon into the tape deck, she allowed her head to rest against the seatback and fixed her attention on the tree.

  The Canon had been used for everything from TV commercials to background at a memorial service held by a local animal rights group for dolphins enslaved by a Chicago aquarium, but Bo still loved its simplistic theme. The music, if languorously orchestrated, made her think of the Sidhe, the fairy people. In her mind it was a lullaby for the Little Folk, now asleep unseen in Irish glades where no sound but dripping rain might disturb their vanished story.

  Relaxed, Bo watched as from beneath the horizon the sun sent red-orange fire that bathed the Tor
rey pine briefly, then slid away. "The tree remains, but not the hand that planted it." She repeated one of her grandmother's many and frequently quoted aphorisms. Chac's ghost, she hoped, would rest tonight. Maybe find its way to some mythical realm where fairies slept in ferny shadows, and lie down with them. The Little Turtle was safe.

  But someone else was not. Chac's murderer, who had also tried to kill a handsome baby boy, could not know how dogged one certifiably mad Irishwoman could be. If the police in two countries chose to do nothing, an underpaid DSS investigator could make life miserable for someone who liked to play with poison. Someone either smart or careless enough to muddy jurisdictional legalities by playing criminal in marginal contexts with people about whom the world doesn't care. A drug-abusing Indian prostitute and her ugly little bastard. That's how it was. But not, Bo smiled at the Torrey pine, for long.

  If Andrew LaMarche, surprisingly dressed in an oversized washable silk shirt that made him look more like Lord Byron than an urban pediatrician, was unnerved when Bo arrived at his door with a dog bed and a dog, he quickly recovered. "Ah, hello, Mildred." He smiled, bowing slightly. "How good of you to bring your mistress, on whose clamoring wing rides my faint but willing heart."

  "Willing, huh?" Bo grinned against his freshly shaven cheek in an embrace at once sweet and oddly alarming. A foghorn's vibrato, played by a harpsichord. "You've been reading Romantic poets again, haven't you?" The flippant remark did little to assuage the dizzying minor chord thrumming in her chest. Flippancy wasn't going to work in this context.

  "Shall we put the dowager's pillow near the hearth?" he suggested, pushing a button on a slate-topped coffee table that caused the gas logs in a small fireplace to ignite with a whoosh.