The Cradle Robbers

by Ayelet Waldman

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Yeah, it sucks. The crazy thing is, I was always real careful, you know? I didn’t want to get AIDS, so I snorted my heroin. That way I never had to share needles. I didn’t know you could pass hep C through the straws. It just never occurred to me.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I repeated. It seemed like the only thing to say.

  “I felt bad for Sandra. Here she was having this baby, and her best friend was too sick to take him, and the baby’s father was too strung out to do anything. She had nowhere to turn.”

  “What about Gabriel’s parents? Why didn’t she go to them?”

  Kate immediately shook her head. “She would never. Never. Gabriel’s mom is a complete witch. She destroyed his life. Why do you think the poor kid turned out the way he did? And Gabriel’s stepfather, well, Sandra had issues with him. She would never have considered giving Noah to them. They would be her last choice. The very last place she’d turn.”

  Kate did not know where Tweezer was; she hadn’t seen him in nearly a month, since long before Sandra was killed. She had little information for me at all, in fact. She missed her friend, she was ill, and she was barely holding it together. Finally, when I realized that our conversation was going nowhere, I took a business card out of the pack I kept in Sadie’s diaper bag.

  “Please call me if you hear from him,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said, shrugging. “But I won’t. Tweezer and I weren’t close or anything. Sandra was my friend. And without her, there really isn’t any reason for Tweezer and me to see each other, you know?”

  Seventeen

  I was getting heartily sick of commuter air travel. I couldn’t believe there were people who actually did this on a daily basis. Sadie, for her part, was getting to be a perfect little flyer, not even uttering a peep when we took off and landed, nursing right through the change in cabin pressure.

  I timed my arrival at the palatial Arguello family home in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco for 9:30 in the morning, early enough to catch them at home on a Saturday, I hoped, but not so early as to be rude. The graceful Renaissance Revival house was perched on the top of a hill overlooking the bay, and the long loggias along two sides of the house made good use of the view. The house was pale gold brick, not a common building material in a city of earthquakes, with marble arches around the doors and windows.

  Determined not to be any more overburdened in this interview than was absolutely necessary, and not eager to schlep more than I had to up the imposing front steps, I left my car seat and wheels on the sidewalk.

  With Sadie buckled into her Baby Bjorn and staring around her with wide, unblinking eyes, and an extra diaper and the packet of wipes tucked into my purse, I made my way up the steps and rang the bell. After a few minutes, an ancient crone heaved open the door. She wore a stiff black uniform complete with a white ruffled headpiece, just like something out of a British costume drama. The massive oak door was clearly much too heavy for her, but when I moved forward to help she nearly bit my head off.

  “I’ve got it!”

  I halted with my hand halfway extended, feeling like a reprimanded schoolgirl. When the door was completely open, the elderly housemaid said, “Did you see the sign?” My eyes followed her gnarled, pointed finger. The discreet, brass-framed sign read, in impeccable calligraphy on the finest of cardstock, NO SOLICITING.

  “I’m not soliciting,” I said. “I’m here to see Mrs. Arguello.”

  The old woman sniffed doubtfully. “Is she expecting you?”

  “No, but she’ll want to see me. It’s about her grandson.”

  She gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. “Is that . . .” she pointed at Sadie. “Is that . . .”

  “No, no. This is my baby. My daughter.”

  She sagged against the door, relieved. I was beginning to worry that my visit was going to give the poor woman a heart attack. She looked at least eighty years old, and I couldn’t believe they still forced her to work. You’d think they would have pensioned her off long ago.

  “Please wait in the foyer,” she said.

  I cooled my heels on black marble. I’ll say this about detective work, it has the unusual effect of bringing a person into contact with both the very downtrodden and the very rich. In my experience, those firmly placed in the middle class were rarely my clients or the objects of my investigations. This was not the first fabulous house I’d been in since taking up investigation for a living, although it might well have been the nicest. I wracked my brain, but I could not remember ever before waiting in an entryway with what looked suspiciously like an original Turner watercolor hanging where a regular person might put a rack for car keys.

  I was peering at the painting, trying to remember from my long-ago Introduction to Art History days what, exactly, a gouache was, when I heard a frightening rumble coming from the direction of my normally quiet child. I looked down and saw Sadie’s face screwed into a beet-red fist.

  “Oh no. Not here. Please Sadie. Not here.”

  But of course, with the perfect timing peculiar to all the Applebaum-Wyeth children, and probably having noticed that I left the diaper bag with its changing pad and extra outfit stuffed in the basket of the stroller parked at the bottom of the steps, Sadie had chosen that moment to befoul her diaper. I sniffed, hoping that, sound effects notwithstanding, what was going on in the Baby Bjorn could wait half an hour or so before being attended to. No such luck. Moreover, if I didn’t get to it soon, there was no guarantee that we both weren’t going to need a change of clothes. I glanced quickly around and then unbuckled Sadie and, right there on the marble floor, using every single one of the wipes I had on me, I changed one of the most disgusting diapers ever created by a human child. By the time the little old maid made her shuffling way back to the foyer, we were all ship-shape and reassembled, and I was holding in my outstretched hand something that should probably have been handed over to a toxic waste disposal service.

  “Is there somewhere I can throw this away?” I asked.

  “That?” she asked, horrified.

  “Yes. Do you have a garbage can? And perhaps a plastic bag?”

  She shuddered and wobbled away, returning a few minutes later wearing pink rubber gloves and carrying two Ziploc bags and a white kitchen trash bin liner. She held open one Ziploc bag with trembling, gloved hands. I dropped the foul-smelling diaper inside and took the bag from her and closed it. In silence we continued our elaborate disposal ritual, with her holding out each successive bag and me dropping in the terrifying and noxious item. When the last bag was finally sealed, I rolled the whole mess into a neat bundle.

  She held out her gloved hands.

  “That’s okay,” I said, shoving the bundle into my capacious handbag. “I’m a good camper.”

  “Excuse me, madame?”

  “Carry in, carry out.”

  “Excuse me, madame?”

  “It’s fine. I’m all set.”

  “One moment please.” She walked creakily out of the room. After a few moments she was back, ungloved. “Right this way,” she said.

  I followed her through the foyer, down a corridor, and into what seemed to be a music room. There was not one but two grand pianos, one at either end of the long room. In the middle of the room, a pink striped silk sofa and a few chairs clustered around a marble fireplace. A black-haired man with a silver goatee sat in one of the armchairs, his feet up on an ottoman, reading the Wall Street Journal. There was something old-fashioned about the way he looked; his figure matched the Victorian lines and furnishings of the room. His clothes were not at all outlandish or old-fashioned—simple black trousers and a fawn-colored cashmere sweater, its sleeves pushed casually up his forearms. It was something about his face, his beard perhaps, that made him seem vaguely out of his time.

  The woman perched on the striped sofa was more or less the same age as the man, somewhere between fifty and sixty, impeccably dressed and made up
even early on a Saturday morning. Her silvery-blonde hair was coiffed in that chin-length bob that is the default hairdo for women of a certain age and class. I was distracted by it for a moment, wondering if she and her social cohorts got up every morning and teased their hair into submission, or if it was just sprayed so thoroughly that it stayed that way despite a night’s sleep. Normally, at 9:30 on a Saturday morning I walk around the house looking like I’m wearing a fright wig. My only comfort is that Ruby and Peter invariably look worse.

  The woman stared at me, and for a moment I could not figure out the reason for her shock. Then I realized that Sadie was the source of all the consternation. They really did not like babies in this house. Hadn’t her maid warned her?

  “My name is Juliet Applebaum,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. I apologize for the intrusion, and I’m sorry about this.” I motioned in Sadie’s general direction. “I’m afraid that nowadays for me every day is Take Your Daughter to Work Day.” I was not surprised that they did not join in my forced laugh.

  “Ernestine says you claim to have some information about my grandson,” the woman said. “I would have refused to see you, because you see, I have no grandchildren.”

  She would have refused to see me?

  “But I wonder,” she said. “Have you some information about my son?”

  “May I?” I hovered tentatively over a chair.

  She seemed momentarily nonplussed at her own failure to offer me a seat. “Yes, yes of course, do sit down. Do you have some kind of identification?”

  I pulled out my wallet and showed her my bright and shiny new private investigator’s license. It’s amazing how long it takes to clock enough hours to earn one of those when you’re only working part-time.

  “Mrs. Arguello, Mr. Arguello,” I began.

  “Loft.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My husband’s name is Spencer Loft.”

  “Of course. I’m so sorry. Mr. Loft. Mrs. Loft,”

  “Arguello.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I go by Arguello.”

  “Right, Ms. Arguello.”

  “Mrs.”

  “Mrs. Yes, well, ma’am, I was retained by Sandra Lorgeree. She was your son Gabriel’s girlfriend.”

  She held up a well-manicured hand. “I wish to hear nothing about this girlfriend of Gabriel’s. As I told my son when he called after she was arrested, I will not condone criminal conduct, nor will I condone drug use. He is not welcome in my home unless he can document his sobriety. And I will not tolerate any continued contact with that woman, even through the mail.”

  Sadie whimpered—the appropriate reaction, I thought—to both the tone and harshness of Gabriel’s mother’s words. Still, Sadie’s was not a reaction necessarily useful to an interrogation. I bounced gently in my seat, hoping to shush her.

  I said, “Sandra is dead, Mrs. Arguello. She was murdered in prison.”

  I watched her reaction very closely. It is, of course, possible to feign surprise. Actors do it all the time. For those of us who are not gifted with theatrical talent, however, shock is a difficult emotion to falsify. Suzette Arguello’s jaw worked spasmodically and she leaned slightly back into the seat cushion, her hand fluttering up to her throat. Her surprise looked real.

  “Murdered?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  I turned my attention to her husband. He was sitting very still, his newspaper raised, but one corner bent. He peered over it, his brows knotted with dismay. “Good lord,” he said. “How? By whom?”

  “I understand that the crime is still under investigation. She was a prisoner at CCI Dartmore and was killed by another inmate.”

  “How tragic,” Gabriel’s mother murmured.

  “Before Sandra was killed, she gave birth to a son, your grandson. This child was taken from her through an elaborate ruse involving the bribing of foster parents.”

  Again I watched her reaction. This time, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I detected a glimmer of something dishonest in her moue of surprise, a falseness in her exclamation of “How shocking!”

  “Do you know anything about your grandson’s whereabouts?” I asked.

  “What a ridiculous question!” Spencer Loft said. He folded his newspaper with a snap.

  Mrs. Arguello stood up. “I don’t see any need for this conversation to continue, Mrs. Appleman.”

  “Applebaum.”

  “Mrs. Applebaum. My husband and I have given you quite enough of our time.”

  “Do you have a current address for your son?” It was a long shot, but I didn’t have anything to lose.

  “As I said before, we have not spoken to my son, not since he called asking for money for that girl’s defense. I told him then that we would not be part of this kind of thing, and I’m even more certain of that now. Good day, Mrs. Applebaum. Ernestine will see you out.”

  She glared at me until I rose and turned to the door, where the elderly maid awaited my departure. Ernestine saw me down the hall and wordlessly hauled open the massive front door.

  At the bottom of the front steps, I settled Sadie into her car seat on wheels. Then I took the diaper out of my purse and looked around for a garbage pail. Halfway up the block I saw three large plastic bins on wheels—a blue, a black, and a green. I made my way up the steep hill. The bins were labeled for different kinds of waste. I usually leave the Dumpster-diving part of our job to Al, who doesn’t really mind it. He was a cop; he’s used to scraping the bottom of disgusting barrels. Despite my familiarity with what comes out of either end of a baby, I’m not particularly eager to rifle through people’s trash. But my partner was four hundred miles away, and there was something in the black bin that caught my eye. In a knotted white plastic garbage bag, I was sure I saw the telltale pale blue caterpillar lumps of a string of Diaper Genie refuse. There was no way around it. I was going to have to check. I reached into the garbage bin and tore open the bag. I was right. In the bag was the long string of plastic-wrapped diapers collected by a Diaper Genie.

  I checked to see if the bins were marked to indicate what address they belonged to. Alas, they were not. More frustratingly, they were situated more or less equally between the Arguello family mansion and their neighbor’s somewhat less ostentatious abode. Either the bins belonged to their neighbors, or there was a baby in the Arguello house.

  Sadie began her pre-wailing murmuring and I dropped the lid of the bin. The next half hour was spent in a progressively more frantic search for a café in which to wash my hands and nurse the baby. By the time we had accomplished that and I had hauled Sadie back up the unbelievably steep hill to the Arguello house, it was clear to me that the family was gone. Heavy curtains had been drawn across the loggias, giving the house a shuttered and shut-down look.

  I wandered around the periphery of the mansion for a few minutes, hoping to catch a glimpse of something—a mobile hanging in a window, a stroller handle peeping from the garage—but no such luck. Finally, I called a cab and took myself and Sadie back to the airport, somewhat the wiser for my excursion, but no less confused.

  Eighteen

  WHEN the cab finally pulled into our narrow winding street in the Hollywood Hills, after being stuck in a mysterious Saturday afternoon traffic jam on the 101, we found ourselves trapped behind a truck that had worked itself halfway into a ditch. Despite the fact that the truck was clearly jammed tight and going nowhere, its driver had decided to unload from the trailer the largest mattress I had ever seen in my life. It took four men to lift the thing, one of them my elated husband. He had managed to work his way under the mattress, deciding for some reason that he could best assist the movers by balancing the thing on his back. He was calling useless directions at the three laborers, all of whom were assiduously ignoring him.

  “And, heave it to the right!” Peter shouted. “Up and over.”

  “Honey?” I said, bending down so that I could see him.

  “Surprise!” he said.

&
nbsp; “No kidding.”

  “I ordered a mattress for our bed.”

  “I see. When?”

  “Six weeks ago. Aren’t you surprised?”

  “Totally.”

  “Aren’t you happy?”

  “You bet. How are you guys going to get it up the stairs?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  When I greeted the movers in my semi-fluent Spanish, the foreman asked me, very politely, if I would consider asking my well-intentioned husband to allow them to do their job unassisted. I assured them that as soon as they hauled the mattress off of him, I would pin him to the ground and prevent him from aiding them any further, and that is more or less what I did. The three men managed, I have no idea how, to wrestle the monstrosity up the stairs and remove its bug- and mold-filled predecessor. By the time I had made the bed with the extra long flat sheets (fitted sheets were a pipe dream, I’m afraid) and piles of pillows and comforters from our old bed, Peter had put the baby down for a nap and settled Ruby and Isaac in front of The Lion King 11⁄2.

  “We have eighty-eight minutes,” he said as he bounced into the bedroom. “Come here, wife.”

  I love him. I really do. I wish I had been in the mood. But I wasn’t. “Peter, I just got off a plane. I woke up at the crack of dawn, and I’ve been sifting through garbage cans all day. I’m exhausted and I want to take a shower.” I felt awful the moment I said it, even before I saw his face collapse and his mood turn from delighted expectation to crushed disappointment and then anger.

  “Wait,” I said, but he was already out the door. “Peter, wait. I’m sorry.” I ran after him. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I stood in the hall trying to drag him back into the bedroom. “Let’s break in the new bed. Come on!”

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a prima donna!” I said. “I said I’m sorry.”

  “I’m a prima donna? I am?” He jerked his arm out of my hands and stomped away down the hall. I stood there, listening to his footsteps as he walked down the stairs to the first floor, and then all the way to his office in the dungeon.