The Cradle Robbers

by Ayelet Waldman

  Al smacked his lips and licked the last bit of mustard from his fingers. “I’m still hungry. Maybe I should get some fries.”

  “God no,” I said. “This place has the worst fries in the city. Come back to my house, I’ll feed you something.”

  Al and I were at Pink’s because I didn’t want to head all the way down to Westminster, a good thirty miles south of the city, if all I was going to do was spend my day making phone calls. I had tried to lure him north with more reasonable breakfast foods, but it had taken a chili dog to get him out of his house.

  Although I’m not a cook—Peter is responsible for that in our family—I keep my cupboards stocked for Al’s infrequent visits, and soon enough we were set up on either end of my long dining room table, between us an array of carbohydrate- and salt-laden snack foods. We were each busy on the phone, trying to convince someone in a position of authority to pay the slightest bit of attention to the fact that there was something strange going on with the Lambs of the Lord foster care agency and the women prisoners of Dartmore Prison.

  My attempts to rouse the interest of someone in the United States Attorney’s office in Los Angeles met with exactly no success. That shouldn’t have been a surprise to me. I did not have many friends in that office. Lots of people I knew from Harvard Law School went on to become Assistant United States Attorneys, far more than joined the public defender’s office, but once we found ourselves on opposite sides of the courtroom, our friendships cooled. There is, in federal court especially, a certain cordiality, a civility that is expected between defense attorneys and prosecutors, but anything more than that is difficult to maintain. First of all, clients never like it when their public defenders are too chummy with the government. They have a hard enough time believing that a lawyer they don’t pay is going to do a decent job for them. If I had a nickel for every time I was told that the next time around my client was going to get a “real” lawyer, I could probably buy myself a car. A small one. Maybe a Hyundai. But a car, nonetheless. Secondly, after enough cases where the system seems stacked against your client, and the U.S. Attorney seems not only to relish the inequality, but to take advantage of it, it’s hard not to develop some animosity of your own, especially in drug cases. There was an assistant U.S. Attorney with whom I’d gone to college who seemed unperturbed by the irony of aggressively prosecuting drug offenders whose conduct was not much different from things she did herself when we were both undergraduates. It didn’t even seem to bother her that I had been a witness to her debauched youth, but as I’d made my disgust at her hypocrisy abundantly clear, and had even, in a fit of anger over a particularly bitter plea negotiation, threatened to report her to the bar association for, and I quote, “Being a drugged-out, lying bitch, with a coke habit to rival the Columbian cartel’s,” she wasn’t inclined to take my calls.

  “I have burned too many bridges,” I said to Al, as I hung up the phone for the fifth or sixth time.

  “That’s not true,” he said. “It’s only the shysters who hate you. The U.S. Marshals think you’re cute. And even the FBI agents like you.”

  “Not the ones I’ve cross-examined.”

  “That’s true. The one’s you’ve had on the stand call you a ball-breaker.”

  “They do not!”

  “This is news to you, girlie?”

  I shrugged. “No.”

  It wasn’t, really. I could hardly pretend to be ignorant of my own aggressive courtroom style, although I had always tried to cloak it in a veneer of sweetness. I’m small; barely five feet tall, and I found out early on that if I came on too strong it came off strangely, like I was some kind of angry leprechaun. I always dressed the part the jury expected me of me—simple suits, Peter Pan collars, velvet headbands. I smiled at them, recruited Peter to sit proudly in the first row behind the bar. I patted my clients’ hands, smoothed their shirts, even hugged them, hoping that the members of the jury would say to themselves, “If that sweet little lawyer likes the six-foot-four-inch biker with the skull and crossbones tattooed on his bald head so much, how bad can he possibly be?” It was a surprisingly effective strategy. I got mean only on cross, and then I really did go in for the kill, tangling the witnesses up in their own lies. That was easiest to do with the confidential informants, liars one and all, but it was shocking how often the law enforcement officers felt comfortable twisting and stretching the truth. They hated when I tripped them up; it made them look bad, it made the judge angry, and often it cost them their convictions. And agents, be they FBI, DEA, ATF, or any others, live and die by their arrest and conviction records.

  “You get anywhere with the CDC?” I asked. State prisons are all managed by the California Department of Corrections, an all-powerful organization that determines everything from how a prisoner’s time will be calculated to where she will serve her sentence.

  Al shrugged. “I got shuffled around. Office of Health Services. Different management sections. The chaplains’ service, for goddamn’s sake. Nobody’s interested. I even asked if I could file a request for a formal investigation. They have no such procedure.”

  I called the Lambs of the Lord number again. I knew it was a futile effort, but I left another voicemail message. Then I looked down along the table to where Al sat drumming his fingers on the scarred wooden surface. “I’ve got to go up there, don’t I?” I said.

  “Yup.”

  “This is going to cost us.”

  “Yup.”

  “Why are we doing this?”

  Al shrugged.

  “Where’s the money going to come from?”

  Al sighed. “We’ll pull it out of expenses. It’s important to Chiki.”

  “Why is it so important to Chiki?”

  “Because it’s important to Fidelia, and she’s family.”

  I think this is why, of all the clients we represented at the federal defender’s office, Al chose Julio Rodriguez—Chiki—to take under his wing. They share this deep and abiding certainty that a man does whatever he has to, at whatever cost, for his family. It wasn’t just the Robin Hood–like nature of Chiki’s crime that Al so admired. It was the parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles who showed up to every single court appearance, filling the courtroom, silently lending their strength to the young man who stood quaking in an orange jumpsuit and shackles. Al, whose own parents and sisters had never spoken to him after he married an African American woman, whose daughters did not know their cousins, was overwhelmed by this large, loving, and multi-hued Mexican American family.

  “You coming up to Dartmore with me?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “Someone’s got to be here in case we get some actual paying work.”

  I sighed.

  He dug in his jacket pocket and pulled out a pack of orange Stim-U-Dents. He stuck one in his teeth and smiled.

  “Going up where?” Peter stood in the arched doorway leading down to his dungeon, blinking his eyes like a mole feeling sunlight on his face for the first time.

  Just then, Sadie, who had been sleeping since we got home from Pink’s, began screaming. I’d left her in her car seat in the front hall and I ran to get her, relieved at having a moment longer to figure out how to explain to my husband that he was going to have to juggle all three kids on his own while I set off on a wild goose chase, on a case where there wasn’t even going to be a paycheck for Al and me.

  When Sadie and I returned to the dining room, we found Al packing up his bag. My husband and my partner tend to have that effect on each other. They drive one another out of rooms. It’s not dislike, exactly; it’s more like they have absolutely nothing in common and neither can really figure out what I see in the other guy.

  “Al, do me a favor,” I said. “Call Chiki from the car and tell him to buy me a ticket for the early shuttle. If I can catch the nine A.M., I can be up and back in a single day.”

  After Al left, I found Peter standing in front of the refrigerator, sizing up its
contents with his mouth twisted into a comical frown.

  “What do you want for dinner? Pickles or soy sauce?”

  “I forgot to go grocery shopping,” I said. “Let’s just order pizza. Can you watch the kids tomorrow? For the day?”

  Peter shrugged, closing the refrigerator door. “That’s pretty much a rhetorical question, isn’t it?”

  I sighed and shifted the baby in my arms. “I’m sorry honey. I know I shouldn’t have just sprung this on you, but it looks like something pretty awful may be going on up at Dartmore, and I need to go up there and get some more information.”

  He poured himself a glass of water from the sink. “Al told me about Chiki’s cousin’s friend and the baby. It sounds awful, but why didn’t you tell me about it, Juliet? I mean, you’ve been working on this thing for days, and this is the first I’ve heard about it.”

  Was this true? Had I really not told Peter about the case? We hadn’t talked about much of note in the past couple of months; our conversations were limited to who was taking what shift with the children.

  Peter took a long drink and then put his glass down. With his eyes on the glass, rather than on me, he said, “It’s just, you know, I’m really lonely, Juliet. I can’t remember the last time we made love.”

  Of course, how silly of me. Here I was, worrying about how little we’d been communicating, when this was the real problem. What was really bothering my husband wasn’t that he didn’t know about my caseload. What was bothering him was what was bothering all the husbands. If only he were getting it regularly, he’d be contently whistling his way through life, satisfied with himself and with his marriage. He was lonely not because we were drifting away from one another, talking less, acting as foremen responsible for swing shifts in a baby factory. No, that didn’t bother him at all. What bothered him was that he wasn’t getting any action.

  “If I’m going to be gone tomorrow, I’d better pump some more milk,” I said, handing him the baby. “I’m not sure I have enough in the freezer for a whole day away.”

  Six

  AT seven the next morning, I was pouring coffee down Peter’s throat, trying to jolt him into consciousness so that I could walk out the door with Chiki, who had not only bought my ticket but shown up to drive me to airport. He was sitting awkwardly at my kitchen table, trying to keep from staring at the gargoyle wall sconces that were hung at odd intervals along the wall over the dark cabinets. We couldn’t find the right size light bulbs, and had just stuffed normal bulbs into the mouths of gargoyles, so they all looking like they were choking on large, round, glowing objects.

  “One more cup, honey,” I said, pressing a mug into my husband’s hand and scratching his scalp. His eyes drifted closed and I pinched him. He jerked awake. Peter works at night, writing down in his dungeon until two in the morning, sometimes even later if he’s on a deadline. He never gets up before ten, and would much prefer not even to see the sun before it begins its afternoon descent in the sky. Sometimes I wonder if he writes horror movies because he himself is a creature of the night, most comfortable in the dark. Ever since he’d started working in a dungeon, I’d been a little worried that he was going to turn into an actual vampire.

  “I’m going to die,” he muttered.

  “You are not. Okay, listen. There are two bottles of fresh breast milk in the fridge, and one on the counter. The bottle of milk on the counter is from this morning. I just pumped it, so it can stay out for a few hours. Like, six to eight even. But you’ll end up using it before then. After it’s done, use the bottles in the fridge. Once you’ve given her a bottle, you should put it back in the fridge. Don’t leave it out, because bacteria from her mouth can grow in the milk. But don’t throw it away. I don’t care what the books say. I’m not throwing out a whole bottle of breast milk just because she took two sips. Change the nipple before you give it to her again. That’s good enough. After you’re done with the bottles in the fridge, move on to the bottles in the freezer, but only take those out one at a time, because they spoil faster and I don’t want to defrost them unless absolutely necessary. You got all that?”

  “Which milk do I use first?”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Peter! Listen,” I recited the instructions again, and watched the haze of confusion descend more firmly on his face. I sighed. “How about if I write it all down. How about that?”

  “Good idea,” he said, slurping his coffee.

  While I was digging around in the kitchen drawer for a pen that had not had been chewed past the point of utility, the doorbell rang.

  “Who could that be at seven in the morning?” I said, going to the front door.

  I pulled open the massive oak door with the bronze knob the size of one of my children’s heads. The man standing on my front steps towered over me. He was close to two feet taller than I am, and three times as broad. My kids could have used his large white sneakers for kayaks and his belly jutted so far out in front of him that he had to extend his ham hock of an arm way out past it to reach the gong that served us as a doorbell.

  “Stanley?” I said. “Stanley, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Morning, Juliet.”

  “Stanley, please tell me this is a social call. Please tell me that you’re dropping by to thank me for the Dodgers tickets Al gave you last season. Please do not tell me you are standing on my front steps because you are about to serve me with a subpoena.”

  “No, Juliet. I’m not serving you.”

  “Thank God. Because that is all I need.”

  “I’m serving your husband. Is Peter home?”

  I glared at him. Then I called over my shoulder, “Hey, Peter, remember I told you about that process server Al and I refer business to sometimes? That old friend of Al’s from when he was on the force?”

  Peter grumbled something unintelligible.

  “Well, you’d better come out here because he’s got a little present for you.”

  “What?” Peter came flying through the front hall, his ratty old fleece bathrobe flying out behind him like a Batman cape. He grabbed the papers from Stanley.

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t come in, Juliet,” Stanley said. “I’d prefer if my first visit to your home were under different circumstances.”

  “I am so not asking you in, Stanley.”

  “I didn’t remember until I saw you standing there that your husband’s name was Peter Wyeth. Otherwise I would have called. I sure would have. You know I would have.”

  I sighed. “You want a cup of coffee?”

  “No, thank you. Excuse me, Mr. Peter Wyeth?”

  “What? What?” Peter said.

  “You’ve been served, sir.”

  “He knows he’s been served, Stanley.”

  “I am aware that he knows that, Juliet. But you know I’ve got to verify service for the record.”

  I shook my head. “You’re going to be picking up the lunch tab next time, Stanley.”

  “I am certainly aware of that, yes I am.”

  “See you later, Stanley.”

  “Good-bye now. Have a good day, Mr. Wyeth.”

  I watched Stanley heave his massive body down the path to the canary-yellow Cadillac DeVille he has been driving for as long as Al has known him, and probably for a lot longer than that. When I turned back to my husband he was holding the wad of stapled documents out to me with a trembling hand.

  “I’m being sued!”

  “I know.”

  “What do you mean you know? How did you know?”

  “Calm down, honey. It’s not like Stanley works for Federal Express. He’s a process server. Ergo, you’re being sued. Who’s suing you?”

  “A maniac! A maniac I’ve never met. I can’t make heads or tails of this. Read it. Read it right now and tell me what the hell is going on.”

  Having a criminal defense lawyer for a spouse gives a person the opportunity to see the justice system in all its baroque and bureaucratic glory. Before he met me, Peter did not understand how
long a case can drag out, how much is involved in a trial, how much can be at stake. Civil litigation is hardly the same as criminal: still, watching me prepare obscurely worded motions dealing with barely comprehensible concepts like habeas corpus, forfeiture, motions for preliminary injunction, and the like, convinced Peter that the American legal system is far more like the absurdly haphazard Court of Chancery of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House than it is like the home of reason and logic that we all learned about in grade school.

  I took the complaint out of his hands and scanned it quickly. “Okay, first of all, it’s not just you who’s being sued. It’s you and your production company and the studio. So that’s nice. You’ve got some company. Not to mention indemnification.”

  “But what is this crackpot claiming?”

  I flipped the pages, walking back to the kitchen with Peter trailing behind me. “Hmm.”

  “‘Hmm’?” he shouted.

  “You’re going to wake the baby.” After nursing pretty much nonstop from five to six in the morning, Sadie was asleep, not that I cared. I was leaving. If Peter woke her, it was his own problem. “The crux of the claim seems to be that he pitched an idea for an animated cannibal TV series to the studio about ten years ago, and he says you ripped off his pitch.”

  “But my animated series is based on my movies!” Peter’s series of cannibal horror movies have been pretty successful, as far as B horror movies go; they have a devoted cult following. A live-action TV series once made it all the way to a pilot, but it was never picked up. Now there was an animated version in the works, and for the past few months Peter had been consumed with critical decisions like whether to go with CGI or traditional animation.

  “Yes, well, he seems to be saying that you stole your movies from his pitch to the studio.”

  “But that’s insane. My first movie came out years ago. And it was a script that I shopped around all over town. And it wasn’t even made by this studio. They just bought the distribution rights!”

  “The plaintiff claims that all that was an elaborate ruse. He claims that the studio got so excited by his pitch that it secretly contracted with you to write a screenplay, which you then pretended to make with a small independent production company but really made with the studio’s money just so that you could make the sequels large enough so that you could go forward with the animated TV series. Which was the plaintiff’s idea. Which you stole.”