The Cradle Robbers

by Ayelet Waldman

  Peter collapsed into his kitchen chair. “This is insane. It’s is going to go away, right? Please tell me this is going to go away.”

  “It’s going to go away. It’s going to cost the studio some money to litigate, and I hope to God they don’t decide to settle, but yes, it’s going to go away.”

  “Settle? Settle? But it’s all a lie! How could they settle?”

  “In order to avoid spending a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees. But let’s not go there, okay? I mean, your studio is famous for not settling, otherwise it would end up a constant target for these kinds of extortionists, and it’s a patently false claim. Don’t worry, honey. The lawyers are going to take care of it. It’s going to be all right.”

  Peter groaned.

  “Sweetie,” I said. “Chiki and I have to get going or I’m going to miss my flight. Are you going to be okay here?”

  He groaned again.

  “Peter,” I said. “Let’s focus now, okay? Sadie? Ruby? Isaac?” I kept the words very simple. “Can you handle this? Do you want me to stay?” I made my unwillingness to do that so clear by the sound of my voice that the hopeful expression on his face immediately faded.

  “No, I’ll be fine,” he said.

  “Call Lilly if you’re in trouble,” I said. “She’s in town this week, and I’m sure she’ll let you come over this afternoon and hang out by the pool.” Our friend Lilly Green is a movie star with a full staff of nannies. When left on his own, Peter often resorts to Lilly’s beneficent companionship. But then, so do I. It’s a lot easier to kill a day with three children at her house than at ours. Especially since at her house you get to lie on a chaise longue drinking iced tea while a nanny takes care of your children.

  “You are going to help me with this lawsuit, aren’t you, Juliet?” Peter said.

  “Of course I am. And there’s not going to be anything to do. Tomorrow I’ll call the studio’s legal department, but I’m sure they’re already dealing with it. They’ll make it go away. I promise.”

  He stood up and gave me a hug. I kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Honey, Chiki and I really have to go. See you tonight.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  Seven

  THE visiting room of Dartmore Prison made an attempt at cheer that somehow served only to highlight how grim the place really was. The long tables had been pushed back from the walls in one corner to allow some floor space to be transformed into a play corner where a few children played listlessly with broken plastic toys. The Duplo buckets contained too few building blocks to make a satisfying castle, and the ride-on fire engine was missing a wheel, so the toddler using it had to cling to the seat at a perilous angle, pushing with his chubby sneakered feet and squeaking along half-heartedly across the dingy tiled floor.

  The attorney visiting rooms were located along one wall of the main room. They were even more bleak than the main visiting room—claustrophobically small, with glass doors so that the guards could be sure that no untoward activity was taking place inside.

  I called down both Fidelia and Sandra, and while I waited for the guards to find them, frisk them, and bring them in, I thumbed through a Vogue magazine I had bought in the airport. Every prisoner was subject to a thorough body cavity search both before and after a visit, and depending on where she worked in the prison, and how long it took to locate her, it could take as much as an hour for a visit to begin. I had time to read all about how it took Kate Hudson weeks to get back into her size 28 jeans after having her baby, and how she still needed to lose twenty more pounds. Since I couldn’t fit one of my breasts into a pair of size 28 jeans, let alone my behind, I wasn’t feeling all that sorry for Ms. Kate. Still, her fat little naked baby caused me to get one of those dangerous nursing mother reactions, and I had a terrible feeling I was going to have to run outside and use the breast pump I had left in the rental car in the parking lot. I’d pumped once in the bathroom on the airplane, a decidedly unpleasant experience (what is that smell in airplane bathrooms?), and once in the parking lot before I’d come in the prison. That had been fairly comfortable, the cigarette-lighter adapter easy to use, and I would have been fine if a small boy hadn’t popped his head in the passenger-side window I had rolled down for air, causing me to shriek and spill breast milk all over my pants. He had been nearly as frightened as I, and his grandmother even more horrified. The stain on my slacks made me look like I’d wet myself, and I had a feeling that if the air-conditioning in the visiting room didn’t start working soon I was going to begin to smell pretty funky. Just the way to inspire confidence in a client. Well, I reminded myself, it wasn’t like I was being paid for my work on this case. They’d have to take me as I was. Stinky, the eighth dwarf. Although if it took them much longer to get down here I was going to have to be rechristened Leaky.

  Fidelia was the first to arrive. She was a tiny woman, even shorter than I am, with rabbity features and a broken front tooth. She passed her tongue over that tooth over and over again as she talked, as if irresistibly drawn to the sharp edges of the angled crack.

  “Chiki, he tell you what I’m in for?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Fidelia was happy to talk about it. She had been a senior in high school, two months past her eighteenth birthday, when a boy, someone with whom she’d “hooked up” on a fairly regular basis, decided that he didn’t like the fact that she was hooking up with other guys. Or maybe he just didn’t like her smile that day. Whatever it was, he came after Fidelia with his fists, broke her nose, and gave her two black eyes. Fidelia showed the purple of her bruises to her brother, and her brother showed the silver of his automatic pistol to the boy. Fidelia’s brother got twenty-five to life for murder. Her sentence was lighter; she could get out in as little as fifteen years.

  “Fifteen years,” I said. “That’s a long time.”

  “Yeah. But I got my friends. Sandra, she’s a good woman. She’s smart, too. She helps all of us with our cases. She’s better than a lawyer, you know? There’s another lady inside who’s a real lawyer, like went to law school and everything, and Sandra does a better job on our appeals than Clarisse does. And Sandra don’t charge nothing. Clarisse, you got to pay her, or get someone on the outside to pay her. Sandra, she don’t even ask the girls for cigarettes or shampoo or nothing.”

  “Have you two been roommates for a long time?”

  “Since before Noah was born. That’s her baby. Noah Anthony. We from the same neighborhood in L.A., Eagle Rock, but of course we never knew each other on the outside. Sandra, she had a white bunkie before me, but that lady she got all hooked up with the Aryan Women, and Sandra, she hates them. She fought that girl until they put her in the SHU and then they sent her over to me. That was messed up; Sandra, she could have been killed. The Aryan Women, they’re part of the Aryan Brotherhood, and those guys run the prison, you know? But Sandra, she didn’t care. She said they could kill her, but she wasn’t going to spend the next five years living with no Nazi lady.”

  When I was done talking to Fidelia, and had sent her back up, they let me see Sandra. In normal company, she would not have seemed so gargantuan, but in the land of the Lilliputians, compared to Fidelia and me, she loomed like a basketball center. Despite the pits of acne scars on her cheeks, Sandra was beautiful, blonde, and regal, with a long nose and aquamarine eyes, like some kind of Nordic princess. She held her feet splayed, her back straight, and her small bosom thrust out, in that stately posture of a woman whose childhood included years of ballet lessons. She was carrying the usual pile of legal papers and envelopes.

  After we introduced ourselves, I asked her about what Fidelia had said.

  “I never said anything about not wanting to be bunkies with that woman.”

  “You did want to spend five years living with a Nazi?” I said.

  “Of course not. I just didn’t take any such stand. I was nowhere near that brave. I simply asked to be transferred, repeating my request until the warden got so irritat
ed with me that she had me put in the SHU for two weeks. By the time I was released, my former roommate was in segregation, having stabbed someone in the throat with a knife made out of toilet paper.” Sandra sat down.

  “Toilet paper?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve heard of making knives out of toothbrushes, hard candies, spoons. Never toilet paper.”

  “It’s like papier-mâché,” Sandra said. “Ms. Applebaum, I understand from Fidelia that you have agreed to investigate the disappearance of my baby. I am very grateful to you. You cannot imagine how horrible it is to be stuck in here with no way to find him, no way even to know if he is safe.”

  “Chiki told me about how it happened that Noah was . . . was taken. But could you tell me yourself? Just so I’m sure I have the full story?”

  She folded her hands on the table in her front of her. She had a stillness about her that was remarkable, especially considering the fact that I could tell she had been a junkie, and a hardcore one at that. I did not know if she was currently using, but I could see that Sandra had used for long enough to blow out the veins on the inside of her elbows and even those on her wrists. There were marks on her forearms, on the side of her neck, in the well of her throat. Her pale skin was a roadmap of heroin ruin.

  “In the months before Noah was born I tried to find someone to take him. My parents both passed away—my mother when I was young, in grade school, my father almost five years ago now. My father has no family, but I have an aunt and two cousins on my mother’s side. I haven’t seen them since I was a teenager, but I know if I had some time, I could find them.”

  “What’s your aunt’s name?” I asked.

  “Bettina Trudeau. And my cousins are Jonathan and Mary. I don’t know if Mary got married and changed her name.

  “It’s an unusual enough name, Bettina Trudeau. I should be able to find it with a simple skip trace.”

  Sandra smiled sadly. “I hope you’ll need to.” Then she continued with her story. “I heard about the Lambs of the Lord from the social worker here at the prison. Some of the other pregnant women in the unit were using them, and it seemed like the perfect solution for me. The Lambs could keep the baby for as long as it took for me to find my aunt or my cousins. They sent me a packet and I signed a foster care agreement with them.”

  I frowned. “Did the social worker arrange for them to send you materials?”

  Sandra nodded. “A week or so after she told me about the Lambs of the Lord, I got their stuff.”

  “So you didn’t contact them? The social worker set it up for you?”

  “Yes.”

  That, it seemed to me, was going to be important in any lawsuit against the organization and against that social worker. If she was actively soliciting on behalf of the Lambs of the Lord, and going so far as to set up contracts with women who had not actually contacted the Lambs of the Lord themselves, that would directly implicate her in the baby-stealing conspiracy. If one existed.

  “What’s the social worker’s name?”

  “Brock. Taylor Brock.”

  I jotted that down.

  “Does she work here full-time, do you know?”

  “Mornings, I think, most days.”

  “Did you bring the paperwork you got from them?”

  Sandra took an elegant brochure printed on thick, creamy paper from one of her creased envelopes. She had brought dozens of these envelopes down with her. Prisoners aren’t allowed to have file folders, so they keep all their papers in the envelopes in which they receive them. I’ve known prisoners to carefully nurture a single manila envelope for a dozen years. For that reason, I always make sure to send each page of correspondence in its own large envelope. Just in case they need an extra one.

  Sandra had a contract on matching paper, replete with fine print. There was also a form entitled “Instructions for Transfer of Custody.” I glanced over the documents, noticing the engraved letterhead and the organization’s address.

  “Did you ever meet with anyone from the Lambs of the Lord?”

  “Just the foster family. When I got to the hospital I called the number on the instruction sheet. The foster parents got there right away, but the midwife wouldn’t let them take my baby. She said I had a right to at least a few hours with Noah.”

  “A social worker wasn’t there to facilitate the transfer?”

  “No, just the couple.”

  I shook my head and motioned for her to continue.

  “It was a long labor, and I was so tired. I tried not to, but I fell asleep holding Noah in my arms. I wasted hours of his time with me, sleeping. But I remember it. I have reconstructed every single moment of those hours in my mind. Those are the only minutes in the first years of my son’s childhood that I will be with him outside of a prison and I want to remember them exactly as they happened.”

  I swallowed, willing myself not to cry, and swearing that I would linger with gratitude and joy over my baby as soon as I once again held her in my arms.

  “After about six hours the couple came in,” Sandra said.

  “What were they like?”

  “Young. Nervous. I don’t know. It was hard to pay attention. Everything happened so fast. I was staring at Noah, trying to hold him in my eyes for as long as possible. They sort of whisked him out and away. I didn’t even talk to them, really.”

  “And what’s happened since?”

  “I’ve written to the address they gave me, but my letters have come back ‘addressee unknown.’ The Lambs of the Lord won’t accept collect calls, but I’ve written to them, too. They wrote me this letter.”

  She opened an envelope that had softened and crumpled a bit over time, but was scrupulously clean and unmarked. She pulled out a single sheet of paper. The letter, on plain white paper with what looked like a totally different letterhead, laser-printed rather than engraved as it had been on the formal contract and the solicitation, informed Sandra that the Lambs of the Lord had no record of her case, that the child “Noah Anthony Lodge” was not under the care of the agency, and that all further correspondence from her would be returned unopened.

  “I wrote back to tell them they had the name wrong, that it’s Lorgeree, not Lodge. I’ve asked friends on the outside to call the telephone number the foster family gave me, but nobody has gotten through. The same with the number for the Lambs of the Lord. Noah has just vanished. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve gone crazy, if this was all some horrible psychotic episode. If it wasn’t for the fact that I can’t fit into my clothes, it’s almost like I never gave birth to him at all.”

  There was no response I could give that would possibly make her feel better. I felt my heart reach out to this young mother, whose circumstances were so dramatically different from my own, but whose love for her baby was precisely the same. I was suddenly so deeply ashamed of my previous thoughts that her child would be better off in other arms. Who was I to say such a thing?

  After a few moments Sandra said, “I should probably tell you what I’m in for.”

  “Only if you want to.”

  It was a heroin deal. Sandra had introduced a new friend of hers to her dealer, and the two men had cooked up a scheme to take advantage of the L.A.–Kabul heroin distribution network that had gotten so vigorous since the U.S. invasion. Sandra’s new friend, however, turned out to be a confidential informant, working for the cops. For some reason the prosecutors decided to take pity on her and prosecute her in state court rather than federal. Or maybe the feds just wanted to throw the county D.A. a bone. Sandra pled guilty and was sentenced to five years, and was lucky to get it. If she’d been prosecuted in federal court she would have gone to jail for two or three times as long.

  One of the things you learn as a public defender is that the line between those who end up in jail and those of us whose lives are untouched by this kind of trouble can be very thin. Sometimes it’s a matter of evildoers getting caught, but more often than not it’s a question of the fortunes of people’s lives
, the accidents of fate and birth. Had my parents both died when I was young, as Sandra’s had, might I have ended up a heroin addict, caught up in a drug deal, in jail on conspiracy charges? Anything is possible. I was so lucky in my life, and she was so unlucky. My babies were home safe in my beautiful, ramshackle house. Sandra had no idea where hers was. I decided at that moment that I was going to help this young woman, not because of Chiki and his cousin, not because Al and I had little else to do right then, but because I owed it to whatever it was in the world that had allowed me such good fortune and cursed her with such unhappiness.

  Right before I left, Sandra said, “If the Lambs of the Lord try to have my parental rights terminated, do you think I could have Noah’s birth father come forward and demand custody?”

  I had been waiting for Sandra to mention the father and was relieved that I didn’t need to bring it up myself. I flipped my notebook to an empty page. “I’m not a family law attorney, but I am absolutely certain that the baby’s father is entitled to custody of the child. Unless, of course, there’s a reason that he would be denied custody on his own.”

  “Tweezer’s a junkie.”

  “Is he still using?”

  She shrugged. “Probably. I mean, when I’m with him he can stay clean, more or less. But not on his own.”

  “I’m not sure, then, that it would help your case to have him come forward.” She frowned. “Do you want me to get in touch with him?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Not yet. I hear from him sometimes. Or people tell me where he is. We lost our apartment in Eagle Rock after I got arrested, so he’s been staying with friends. If I need to find him I’ll be able to.” Sandra pushed her chair back across the tiles with a decisive squeak and opened the door to the interview room. “I am grateful for your help, Juliet. I wish I could pay you in something more than gratitude, but that’s all I have left to offer.”