The Cradle Robbers

by Ayelet Waldman

Peter wriggled his toes, stretched, and said, “That sounds like a terrible situation. Are you sure you want to be involved?”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “Why not? Why don’t you have a choice? It’s not like she’s really a client.”

  “She is so a client. Just because she can’t pay me doesn’t mean I don’t owe her an ethical obligation. And I don’t have a choice, because she doesn’t have anyone else. I’m all she’s got. I have to help her.”

  Peter opened his mouth, as if to object, but then closed it again. He sighed and said, “I’d better go down to my office and get something done tonight. The last thing I want to do is let Macramé Man distract me from my work.”

  I took the copy of my book club book to bed with me, but I just couldn’t motivate myself to read. It was hard to keep turning the pages when I knew the fate that John Updike had in store for the main character. Finally, I gave in to my baser impulses and pulled my laptop out from under the bed, where I kept it for just such nocturnal emergencies. Peter hadn’t managed to fix the leaking faucets or get our bedroom door to close properly, but he had installed a wireless connection throughout the house. With Sadie snoring softly in bed next to me, I Googled Taylor Brock, grateful that her name was unusual enough to have generated only four hundred or so hits. It took me just a few minutes to figure out why Miss Brock seemed so sanguine, so assured of her impunity. Among the various records of her employment, her graduation with a master’s degree in social work from Cal State Hayward, and her church-affiliated activities, I found a newspaper profile that included a reference to Miss Brock. The subject of the profile was her brother, Franklin Brock, the executive vice president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. Miss Brock wasn’t afraid for her job, despite her unethical and perhaps even illegal activities, because she knew that the very force that controlled the California prisons, if not the whole state, protected her. Her brother was one of the men in charge of the prison guards’ union. For years the union has dominated Sacramento, using their financial clout to elect and destroy politicians according to their own narrow agenda. It’s the guards, not the administrators, who run the prisons nowadays. Squirrelly legislators with their eyes on their pocketbooks have ensured that. Goon squads that take down any elected official standing in their way guarantee it. No wonder Taylor Brock’s only response to our confrontation was to quote scripture and walk away.

  It was a long, sleepless night for me. I was awake when Sadie woke for her midnight feed, and I was awake when Peter came to bed at three. I was beside myself with exhaustion by morning, and in no mood for Isaac’s complicated frame of mind.

  “Where’s your lunch box?” I asked him. I was holding his hastily assembled lunch, or what passed for lunch given that I hadn’t gone grocery shopping in a week and that his preschool had officially banned anything with peanuts in it. I’m not a cruel person; I understand and sympathize with the tribulations of children with food allergies. But I cannot believe that school officials appreciate the true ramifications of the peanut butter ban. What are those of us with less than Martha Stewart–like homemaking skills supposed to slap between two pieces of bread when we forget to go to the grocery store? Peanut butter I could buy at Costco in ten-gallon drums. Try that with turkey breast.

  “It’s in my backpack.”

  “Well, go get it.”

  Isaac dumped the backpack on the floor next to me. I gritted my teeth. Would it have killed him to place it in my outstretched hand? In the backpack I found his lunch box and a juice box, opened, its contents spilled all over the rest of the backpack’s contents.

  “Isaac! You put an open juice box into your backpack!”

  He blinked at me, slack-jawed.

  “Isaac!”

  “What?”

  “You can’t put an open juice box into your backpack! Look, you got your backpack all wet, and you ruined all your papers.” I shook out the soaked drawings, most of which looked like Isaac had stumbled across them holding a marker in his outstretched hand. At least I could not be blamed for shoving these in the trash. Or so I thought.

  “You’re throwing away my pictures!”

  “They’re wet.”

  His lower lip pushed out and his eyes filled with tears. “My pictures,” he murmured, as though he’d worked for all four years of his life on these crumpled artistic efforts.

  “Make me new ones today, okay?”

  He lifted his narrow shoulders helplessly, as if even contemplating that was too much for him.

  “What’s this?” I said, holding up a sheet of paper. I scanned it quickly. “It’s a note about the Parent Appreciation Breakfast.”

  “You shouldn’t come, because the scones are all boogery, remember? And the coffee will be from Peet’s. You hate Peet’s coffee, you say it’s too strong.”

  “Daddy loves Peet’s coffee. And I’ll have tea. We’ll be there, don’t worry.”

  “You don’t have to come.”

  “Of course we’ll come. Don’t worry, Isaac.”

  He sighed dramatically and took a small, sad bite of toast.

  I picked Sadie up from her bouncy seat and put her on the breast to top her off before we set out on our car pool rounds. Even on good days, when I’ve had more than a couple of hours’ sleep, I hate to stop in the middle of car pool to nurse the baby. Today, when I was so tired, having to pull over for a mid-flight refueling would be a disaster. Nursing always makes me sleepy, and I’d probably end up napping on the side of Beverly Boulevard. Not a good way to start the day.

  The telephone rang while I was struggling to get Sadie to latch on and I almost let the machine pick it up. I might have, but Ruby got there before me.

  “Wyeth-Applebaum residence, this is Ruby speaking.” She frowned. “Mama, someone wants to know if we accept collect calls from Dartmore Prison.”

  “Yes!” I said. “Always, Ruby. We always accept collect calls from prisons.”

  “Yes,” she said into the phone. “We like getting collect calls from prisons.”

  I held out my hand. “Give me the phone.”

  “This is Ruby, can I help you?”

  “Give me the phone, Ruby.”

  “She’s right here, but she’s nursing Sadie.”

  “Ruby! Give me the phone this instant!”

  “Can she call you back?”

  “Ruby, if you don’t hand me that phone I’m going to give you a spanking!”

  She rolled her eyes and handed over the receiver. My daughter, alas, knows just how realistic my threats of corporal punishment are.

  “Hello, this is Juliet,” I said.

  “This is Fidelia, Chiki’s cousin.”

  I could tell right away that something was terribly wrong. Fidelia sounded crushed, her voice tiny and lifeless.

  “What happened?”

  “Sandra’s dead. She was killed last night.”

  This was not the first time I’d gotten news like this over the telephone, nor even the first time I’d gotten news like this from a prisoner. Each time I had been nothing short of devastated, wrenched by the reminder of the terrible danger of prison, of the lawlessness and violence governing the lives of people inside. This time, however, seemed somehow worse than the others. Perhaps because Sandra was a woman, perhaps because she was a new mother, perhaps because I’d seen her so recently. This time the tragic waste struck me with a terrible force, and it took some moments for me to catch my breath.

  “I’m so sorry, Fidelia,” I said, my voice cracking.

  Fidelia sobbed suddenly, as if my sympathy had triggered a breakdown in her control. If we had been sitting close together I would have put my arm around her, held her hand, offered some physical comfort. The murmurs I could give over the telephone wire were entirely insufficient.

  “What happened?” I asked when her cries had ebbed.

  “A shiv, out on the yard,” she said. “I didn’t see it but they’re saying . . .” she paused. “I don’t believe wha
t they’re saying. Even when she wanted to change bunkies, she was careful about how she did it. And since then she’s been real good to everyone, helping them with their legal cases and all. I don’t believe it’s true, what they’re saying.”

  I knew that that was as much as Fidelia could tell me. Even if there were no prisoners standing nearby who could hear her, all telephone conversations going in and out of the prison were recorded, and Fidelia was savvy enough to watch her words, especially since the sister of one of the leaders of the guards’ union was no friend of Sandra’s.

  “Find her baby, Juliet. Please find Noah. Maybe you think now it doesn’t matter, because she’s dead, but it does. It does matter, more than ever. I’ve got to make sure you find him, for Sandra’s sake.”

  “I will, Fidelia. I promise.”

  Eleven

  WHEN Al wrapped himself in his Los Angeles cop persona, I could almost see his uniform, hovering like a dark blue ghost around his seated figure. He had someone from the warden’s office at Dartmore on speakerphone, and after introducing himself as “Detective Al Hockey, from down in L.A.,” Al spent some time replying to the man’s questions about precincts, with references to the ones he worked in more than ten years ago. Needless to say, he did not mention the time lag. Within a few minutes he had moved beyond the LAPD and was playing U.S. Army geography with the man on the other end of the line. (“I can always tell when I’m talking to a military man.”) They both, it turned out, were with the 101st Airborne at more or less the same time and couldn’t quite believe they hadn’t met up in Cam Ranh Bay or the Song Con Valley.

  Fifteen minutes later we had our information. Sandra Lorgeree was killed, said the deputy warden, in a hit ordered by the Aryan Brotherhood.

  “The gang’s women’s auxiliary, you could say,” the deputy said. “We don’t know who did the hit. The witnesses were only willing to say that the killer had the tattoo—a little picture of a girl in combat boots with a baseball bat. They all have it, all the Aryan Women.”

  I wrote the word “hit” followed by a doubtful question mark.

  “What makes you think it was a hit?” Al said.

  “All the markings. Yard stabbing. No witnesses. Right through the thorax, so the killer knew what she was doing. We don’t get that a lot around here, not like in the men’s facilities. Fights, sure, even stabbings, but not a clean hit like this. Not someone dead in the yard and no one willing to say much. It’s got to be the Brotherhood. No other explanation.”

  “Any idea why?” Al said. “The victim was a white girl, wasn’t she?”

  “She had some problems with the Aryan Women when she first got here. Ended up in the SHU over it. I’m guessing it took a while for the order to come down from the men’s prison. They don’t do much without being told, the Aryan Women. What we’re figuring is that they sent their complaint on up to the men, and then they got authorization for the hit.”

  Al thanked his source and hung up the phone. He looked at me over the top of his reading glasses. “You buy it?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Why would they need authorization to kill someone?”

  Al shook his head. “I’m guessing if they wanted her dead, it would have happened months ago.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Not that I would put it past the those fascists to order a hit. And if they did, there’s no way the women would talk. No one would snitch on the Aryan Brotherhood. But there’s just not a good enough reason for them to order a hit.”

  Al took off his glasses and chewed thoughtfully on the end. “Unless . . .” he began.

  “Unless they were paid. They work for hire, the Brand does. Not just for ideology.”

  “Bingo.”

  The Aryan Brotherhood, or the Brand, as it is commonly known, is a white-supremacist gang that has effectively taken over many prisons, especially the maximum-security facilities. They engage in drug trafficking, prostitution, and extortion, all within the prison walls. They also murder, often seemingly with impunity. After all, when someone is serving two life terms on twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown in a Supermax, what can he possibly have to lose? Members of the Brand kill all kinds of people: some just because they don’t like them—they hate African Americans, homosexuals, child molesters, informants, prison guards, and Jews—and some because they’ve been paid to do so. Murder for hire is a lucrative business in the prison system. Sometimes a prisoner will commit murder in return for a few thousand dollars delivered to a wife or girlfriend on the outside, sometimes for a few grams of heroin delivered to a cell. Sometimes for the services of a particularly attractive or youthful companion.

  “I hate those scumbags,” Al said. He slowly drew his hands into fists, cracking the knuckles, as if imagining what he would do to the men who would consider his contented marriage an obscenity and his beautiful daughters mongrels.

  “You and me both,” I said. “But you know, Al, nowadays, these guys aren’t even about ideology. There are guys inside with the shamrock tattoo who couldn’t care less about killing Jews or blacks. It’s a gang—it’s about crime and power.”

  “I still hate them.”

  “Yeah, so do I,” I said.

  “And a woman. They got a woman to stab her.”

  I knew what he meant. It never fails to surprise me when we come across women who are as cruel, as violent, as their male counterparts. By and large, women’s prisons are less horrific places than men’s, exploitation movies like Slammer Girls and Caged Heat notwithstanding. There is violence, sure, even sexual violence, but most often it comes at the hands of the guards. The misery of incarceration for women is not usually about fear of their fellow prisoners. The misery comes from terrible living conditions, separation from children and family, woefully inadequate medical care, and mistreatment by those in power.

  Our clients at the federal defender’s office were overwhelmingly male. When, every once in a while, I represented a woman, it was most often someone who had been lured into the criminal enterprise through a boyfriend or husband. The worst crime committed by most of the women I represented was having bad taste in men. There were, of course, violent women, although generally I didn’t see them in my practice. As a federal public defender, my caseload consisted of drug cases, bank robberies, the odd white-collar crime. I did not, by and large, defend individuals accused of crimes like assault or murder, except in the context of a drug transaction, or if the crime occurred on federal property. Still, even in state court, women who stood accused of violent crime most often had as their victims abusive husbands or lovers.

  The woman who killed Sandra Lorgeree, whether she’d committed the murder out of racist rage, personal animosity, or for financial gain, was either an unusual and frightening creature or so under the thumb of the men of the Brand that they’d turned her into one.

  It helped that Al and I were not busy with other work, but I think that even if our office had been groaning under the weight of cases, we both would still have devoted our time to Sandra and her baby. Neither of us could stomach the idea of stopping, of giving up. It would have meant giving in to what had befallen Sandra, and we were both too stubborn to do that. We don’t have very much in common, my partner and I, but one thing we share is a mule-headed stubbornness. This quality is one that we admire tremendously in each other. We’re lucky in this, because everyone else in our lives finds it excessively irritating.

  “I’ll go to Pleasanton with you,” Al said.

  “Just give me a couple of days to stockpile enough breast-milk to see Sadie through another day without me.”

  Poor Sadie. There is a photo album chronicling every month of Ruby’s first year. Even Isaac had managed to fill three albums by his first birthday, and at least half a dozen of the pictures in there were of him alone, without his sister. Other than the official hospital photograph marking Sadie’s birth, and a few shots of her older siblings holding her in their laps, Sadie’s first months had gone by en
tirely unremarked upon—at least on photo stock. I had made her no baby book, and had I managed to motivate myself to do so, instead of the requisite notations of the first smile, first tooth, and lock of hair from the first trim, it would have been far more honest to make an inventory of the indignities she suffered that her siblings never had. Being separated from her mother at the age of four months, from dawn until dusk twice in a single week, probably wouldn’t have ended up high on the list.

  Twelve

  AL and I did not premeditate our masquerade. Our intention when we left John Wayne Airport in Orange County (the only airport Al consents to fly out of—he says because it’s smaller and better managed; I think it’s because he fancies himself a lot like the Duke) was to do a simple interview. Our plans remained the same when we landed in Oakland, when we squeezed ourselves into the miniature doors of the Monopoly playing piece the rental car agency insisted on referring to as a “car,” and all the way along the freeway winding through the gray-green hills to Pleasanton. It was only when we entered the offices of the Lambs of the Lord that our mendacious plan began to hatch. Its birth occurred simultaneously in both our minds.

  I took one look at the artfully framed portrait of the young blond couple, their cheeks painted in rosy tones, their eyes the blue of the sapphire seas, and I knew what we needed to do. I nodded toward the painting with just the barest motion of my head, and Al took in with a glance the dark-haired baby the couple held, its skin dusky gold, its eyes a muddy color somewhere between brown and black. Over the trio hovered an angel with palms outstretched in benediction. Al aimed a nearly invisible wink back at me.

  “Welcome to the Lambs of the Lord,” a smiling older woman said. She sat behind a reception desk that was new but made to look antique, with elaborate scrollwork and spindle legs. The sleek, black, multi-line telephone looked incongruous in the middle of the polished cherry expanse. The lines all blinked, but the receptionist ignored them. “Can I help you?”

  “We don’t have an appointment, I’m afraid. But we’re interested in applying to be foster parents.” I could not believe I had allowed that faux-Southern twang to creep into my voice. Now I was going to have to keep it up for the entire visit, otherwise the Lambs would think I was insane. Yet another reason why one-time high school thespians should avoid undercover work.