Fresh Kills

by Carolyn Wheat

“We had it all set up. The meeting, the payoff, then we split. I had the car all ready.”

  Meeting, payoff—what was going on here? But in some corner of my mind I suspected I knew. I was afraid I knew. A cold draft wound around my ankles like a cat; my knees weakened and I leaned against the doorjamb to keep them from buckling.

  The baby. Where was the baby?

  “I had that fucking car checked over by a top mechanic,” Scott continued. Spittle formed at the corners of his wide mouth as he talked; it seemed vital that he convince me how well he maintained his car. “So why wouldn’t it start when I went to the parking lot to get it, huh?”

  “Parking lot?” I jumped on the one thing that might pin down some information. “What parking lot, where?”

  He snorted. “Like you don’t know, Ms. Smart-ass Lawyer Bitch. At the mall, where else? At the mall where you met Amber while I was at the fucking gas station trying to get some meatball to come look at my engine. The only question here is, where did you take her from there? She’s not here, I can see that, but where—”

  “The mall. The Staten Island Mall? That’s where Amber is?” Relief surged up through my legs and settled in my upper thighs; I tottered to a chair before I slid down the wall onto the floor.

  Amber was safe. The baby was safe. They were at the mall, waiting for this blockhead to pick them up in a car that had—

  Scott followed me to the chair in a single bound, snaked his arm around my neck, and held me in a choke grip that had me gasping for breath.

  “You made a side deal with her, didn’t you?” When I didn’t answer, he screamed, “Didn’t you?” in a banshee screech that should have brought six black-and-whites to the front door.

  My response was to gag and claw at his arm with fingers that had all the tensile strength of overcooked spaghetti. He looked at me with speculation in his gray eyes, then let up ever so slightly on the choke hold. Blessed air surged through my lungs, and my body sagged with a relief my mind knew was all too premature.

  “Okay, don’t tell me where she is,” he continued in a deceptively reasonable tone. “Just give me your share of the money and I’m out of here.”

  Money. Whatever lingering wisps of hope I’d had that Amber and the baby were waiting forlornly at the mall to be picked up like any normal mother and child evaporated. Money. What money?

  Money for selling the baby. Apparently Amber and Scott were more than willing to listen to the Greenspans’ desperate offer—so long as the amount was readjusted upward.

  “You were the one who told us Greenspan would pay,” Scott went on. “Only Amber was smart enough to know he’d pay more than three thousand. And then you two went behind my back—”

  I wore a shroud of cold sweat. “No, I didn’t, Scott,” I said in a very tired voice. But how to convince him?

  It came to me suddenly that he wasn’t as tough as he pretended to be, that he was playing a role. Sean Penn in any number of cheap street-boy movies. So I delved into my own bag of cinema clichés and said, “In my right pocket. Just pull it out and you’ll see where I was all evening.”

  The quick puzzled frown between his eyebrows was followed by a nod of understanding. He knew where I was going with this; we’d seen the same movies. Communication by cinema. Welcome to the Global Village.

  His bony hand plunged into the right pocket of my silk baseball jacket and pulled out a rectangle of cardboard.

  “Read it,” I ordered. Playing Kathleen Turner in the ill-fated movie about V.I. Warshawski.

  “Angelika Film Center,” he read, sounding out each syllable. “So what? Anybody could say they were at a—”

  “It’s a computer receipt, Scott. Read the date and time.”

  “April 20,” he said obediently, “Friday. Seven-o-five P.M. showing of …”

  “It’s a Chinese movie,” I explained. “I was in the movie until almost nine, then took the train back to Brooklyn. Unless you think Amber’s developed a sudden taste for post-Communist Chinese cinema, you can be sure I haven’t seen her tonight.”

  A long sigh accompanied Scott’s release of his arm around my neck. “Ah, fuck,” he said. He struck his own thigh with an outstretched palm, like an old codger slapping his knee, but there was no humor in the gesture.

  “She’s gone,” he whispered. “She and the baby and the money.”

  “Gone where, Scott?” I pressed. “If you tell me everything you know about tonight, maybe we can—”

  “Maybe you can put me in jail?” The challenge came out halfhearted; Scott had lost a lot of his edge since realizing at last that I knew considerably less than he did about Amber’s activities.

  “That’s not important now,” I countered. “What is important is that we find the baby.”

  “It may not be important to you,” he objected. “But it’s number one on my hit parade.” A nice Sean Penn line. I tried to come up with something Kathleen Turner would have been proud to say. But before the words formed themselves in my mind, Scott was on his way to the door.

  “Scott! Get back here!” The irony wasn’t lost on me; for the past five minutes I’d Loped against hope that Scott would walk out and leave me alone, and now it seemed like the worst thing that could happen. I needed him to lead me to Amber, to the baby, before it was too late.

  The outer door slammed. I jumped from the chair and ran after him, flinging the door open to the cool April night. Scott ran with awkward haste down Court Street, then jumped onto a big shiny motorcycle I hadn’t known he possessed and took off with a roar.

  I made a fist and hit the doorjamb so hard the pain reverberated to my elbow.

  My fingers still tingled as I picked up the phone to call the police. Detective Button at the 84, I decided. He’d know which precinct to notify on Staten Island.

  I had a moment’s pause: should I call? Was it ethical for me to turn in my own client? My mind reviewed hastily the obligations of a lawyer regarding future crimes. Then I stopped myself. This was no time for an ethics opinion. There was a baby’s life at stake. Just dial the phone and worry about ethics later.

  As I punched the numbers into the phone with shaking hands, it was not Amber’s pink-white baby whose image haunted me. Instead, it was Rojean’s children: Tonetta, hiding behind her mommy’s skirt, fingers in her mouth, looking at me with huge puppy eyes; Todd, white baby shoes scuffed and worn, oversized shorts falling around his skinned brown knees; baby Trudine, with her two-tooth grin and full head of fine black hair.

  I won my case, and the Glover children died. It made me a kind of accessory before the fact.

  I’d won Amber’s case, and she and her baby were missing. I wasn’t going to be an accessory a second time.

  The man whose heavy bulk filled my doorway could only have been a cop. He had thinning black hair, a basset hound face, and an air of perpetual disappointment.

  “Ms. Jameson,” he said rather than inquired, “I’m Detective Aronson, Staten Island Detective Unit. May I come in?”

  Staten Island? I’d called Brooklyn—why was I getting Staten Island? And why so quickly—he couldn’t possibly have crossed the Verrazano Bridge in the three minutes since I’d put down the phone.

  “Of course,” I said, opening the door and admitting Aronson. He stepped in and surveyed my client waiting room as if taking inventory. Then he walked uninvited into my office and sat, not on one of my red leather client chairs, but in the larger chair behind the desk. The seat of authority. My chair.

  I declined the gambit, remaining standing behind one of the client chairs instead of sitting down. “Do you want me to tell you what happened, or—”

  “You represent a woman named Amber Lundquist,” he began, in a weary, heavy voice, “also know as Amber Wylie.”

  “That’s her married name,” I replied tartly. “It’s not an alias.”

  “I didn’t say it was,” he said without inflection. “Ms. Jameson, where were you between eight and ten this evening?”

  “What does that
have to do with Scott coming here and threatening me?” I countered, astonished that a person who called the cops to make a complaint was being asked to provide an alibi.

  “Just answer the question, ma’am.”

  “Am I being charged with something?” My voice rose in disbelief. As a defense attorney, I was not always a fan of New York’s Finest, but this was—

  “No, ma’am,” the detective said, but the lines around his mouth tightened, as if he hated to admit that he didn’t have grounds for an arrest.

  “Then what is this about?” I said. I stepped away from the chair and paced the floor. Adrenaline surged through me; first Scott invaded my life, and now the cops were acting as if I’d committed the crime of the century.

  “Where were you, Ms. Jameson?” Aronson persisted, his voice hard. “Were you at the Staten Island Mall, by any chance?”

  “Staten Island—” I broke off, astonished. How could he know about the mall? I hadn’t had a chance to tell him what Scott had said about meetings, about deals.

  “No, I—” I stopped in mid-sentence and walked to the waiting room, where my jacket hung on the rack. I went to the pocket and pulled out my Angelika ticket, with its computerized statement: date, time, movie. What a night—providing the same alibi twice.

  I handed it to him. He took it and stared for a moment, then turned it over in his big hand, as if hoping for a message in code.

  “Just because you have a receipt doesn’t mean you saw the movie,” he intoned. “You could have paid for this and then headed straight for the mall, trying to give yourself an alibi.”

  “I was with a friend,” I said. Anger warred with fear as I realized this man was serious; I was a suspect in something, but I didn’t know what.

  Or did I? Somehow the detective knew about the mall; did he know about Scott and Amber’s attempts to sell their baby? And did he think that I, as Amber’s lawyer, was part of the plan? I gave him my friend’s phone number without protest, hoping he’d call right away and let me off the hook.

  He didn’t. He pocketed the piece of paper I’d written Sandy’s name on and leaned back in my chair. “Tell me about this Amber,” he invited.

  “She’s my client,” I said, disbelief edging my voice. Surely he knew about lawyer-client privilege.

  “Look,” I went on, “I called you. I called because Scott Wylie came into my house and—”

  “What do you mean, you called us?” Aronson shot back. He sat up in the chair, leaned forward in an attitude of intimidation. “Lady, I’m here because Joshua Greenspan was assaulted in the Staten Island Mall.”

  “Assaulted?” I grabbed the back of the client chair and gave serious thought to sitting down in it before my knees gave way.

  “By Scott,” I murmured.

  “Now, how would you know that, Ms. Jameson?”

  “Because he was here. Which is what I’ve been trying to tell you since you walked in that door. Scott came here looking for Amber. He was convinced I—”

  I broke off, unable to say the words. He thought I’d helped Amber sell her kid and then split the money with her.

  It was time to sit down. I slid onto the red leather chair, no longer caring who sat in the seat of power and who didn’t.

  “Look, we know she had an accomplice,” Aronson said. “She was seen leaving the mall and getting into a car. Someone drove her away from there, with the baby.”

  “What kind of car was it?” I asked. “Did you get a description of the driver? Which direction did it—”

  “I’m here to ask the questions, not answer them, Counselor.”

  Typical cop. So I sat as quietly as I could with adrenaline surging through my veins like cheap booze and answered all his questions.

  When we came to the events outside the courtroom Wednesday, my voice faltered and I found myself looking at the floor.

  “… three thousand dollars,” I mumbled.

  “You say Ms. Hennessey approached you?” Aronson repeated, not bothering to hide his skepticism. “But you didn’t report it to the judge or the District Attorney or—”

  “No,” I admitted. “Things happened so fast, and then—I didn’t want to add to Ellie’s troubles.”

  “You’d better think up a more plausible excuse, Counselor,” Detective Aronson advised, “since Mr. And Mrs. Greenspan say that you approached their lawyer with an offer of money in return for relinquishing rights to the child.”

  I sat in numb silence after that, refusing to answer any more questions on the grounds that the answers might tend to incriminate me. As a defense attorney, I’d always been a fan of the Fifth Amendment, but I’d never actually used it before.

  Until now.

  I fell into bed around three A.M., but sleep was fitful and unsatisfying. The next day was Saturday, which meant the good citizens of Staten Island were off work and ready to search the swamp for the missing baby they’d heard about on the morning news. I put on my old clothes, borrowed Mickey’s car, and drove across the Verrazano Bridge to join the search party.

  It was almost sunset when we found Amber, but the search continued till after dark, in the hope—or fear—that Baby Adam would turn up as well. It continued, but without me. I had seen enough of death for one day.

  “These things happen,” Matt Riordan said. I’d fled to the comfort of his co-op apartment on Fifth Avenue after watching the emergency services cops pull Amber’s swollen body out of the swamp. I’d stood under a hot shower, washing away the cold and damp and smell of death for a long time. Now I sat wrapped in a royal blue velour man’s robe, big white men’s socks on my feet, sipping Scotch that should have been in a museum.

  My sometime lover lifted a glass of his miracle Scotch to his lips. “If I fell apart every time I lost a client, I’d—”

  I held up a warning hand. “Look, the clients you take, you expect them to get fished out of swamps on Staten Island. This was supposed to be a simple adoption, not the Gotti trial.”

  His answering smile was composed of equal parts amusement and condescension. “I have been known to represent innocent people,” he said.

  “Yeah, right. The last time you represented someone who didn’t deserve twenty to life was when you were with the Manhattan D.A.’s office. But the important point here is that this isn’t about you and your practice—it’s about me.” I took a deep swallow of my own Scotch and let its smoky warmth burn my throat. Thank God for alcohol, I thought. It always comes through.

  “First Rojean, now Amber,” I said. There was a ragged edge to my voice I didn’t like. So I medicated it with another swallow of single-malt.

  “Cass,” Riordan said, an edge of exasperation in his rich, jury-seducing voice, “you can’t go through life blaming yourself every time one of your clients dies or screws up.”

  “Screws up,” I mimicked. “Yeah, I’d say selling your baby constitutes screwing up, all right. How can you …?”

  “How can you?” he countered. He marshaled arguments, fixing me with the same intense stare I’d seen him use on Juror Number Six in his last Godfather trial. “You’ve been a criminal lawyer for almost twenty years, Cass. You need a thick skin for this kind of practice, and up to now, you’ve had it. You didn’t put those poor kids into the bathtub and you didn’t help Amber sell her baby. So why not cut this self-indulgent guilt trip and get down to finding out what happened to Amber?”

  “Finding out.” I stared into the amber liquid in my glass. Amber, clear and bright and golden, reflecting sunlight. The amber pendant. Amber’s maple-syrup hair. Ellie telling Amber she fit her name because she was bringing light into their lives with her baby. Amber, pulled from the swamp, dripping weeds, her face a puffy blur.

  “I identified the body,” I murmured. I picked up the heavy cut glass and drained the rest of the Scotch in a long fiery swallow. Under ordinary circumstances Riordan would have called it a sacrilege to treat his Scotch like fraternity chug booze, but this time he just sat and watched as I worked things out my ow
n way.

  “It wasn’t the sea,” I went on. “So there wasn’t as much damage from fish, and she wasn’t in there all that long. But she was puffy and pale and—” I broke off before I got to the part about the foam bubbling out of her nose and mouth. I took another swallow of the burning-sweet liquid.

  “She was gruesome,” I said.

  I looked up into my companion’s deep blue eyes. They held a compassion I seldom saw. “Could I have another drink?”

  He poured. I was over my limit and we both knew it, but he didn’t say a word, just filled my glass with more of the amber nectar. I took a sip and let the Scotch burn my tongue with its smoky, biting taste.

  “After what she did, I’m not sure I care who killed her.” I let that thought lie on the couch between us. “I’m not saying she deserved to die. Exactly. But why should I worry about who killed her? Hell,” I went on, throwing back a shot of booze like a gun moll in a forties movie, “whoever killed Amber was a better human being than she was. It’s hard to imagine someone worse than a woman who’d sell her own baby.”

  The courtroom voice was soft and seductive as Riordan asked the only question that mattered: “What about the baby?”

  “What about the baby?” I let all the frustration I felt fill my voice as I faced the adversary on the other end of the couch. “You think I know where the baby is? You think I helped Amber line up buyers, that I told her to get married so she’d have an airtight legal claim to the baby? You think I—”

  “You know I don’t think any of that,” Riordan replied, his tone as soothing as the Scotch he poured. “But I do think you could help locate the baby if you asked the right questions.”

  “The cops are covering Staten Island like a heavy fog,” I countered. “What can I do that they can’t?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But I do know you are going to be impossible to live with—even more impossible than usual, that is—unless you get off your ass and try.”

  There was nothing in those words that would have caused a normal person to break down in tears. So why did I lean into Riordan’s broad chest and sob like a child, letting him hold me close until the tears dried up?