Fresh Kills

by Carolyn Wheat

  “What about Doc Scanlon?” I said, trying to sound casual as I moved the conversation to the topic I really came to discuss. “How many times have you worked with him?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Quite a few, I guess. He has that group home, he meets a lot of girls through his work at Mount Loretto and—”

  “Mount Loretto?” I cut in. “Did you know Amber was a Mount Loretto girl?”

  She grimaced and reached for another cigarette from the inlaid wooden box on the coffee table. “I do now,” she said grimly. “She not only lied, she produced a fake birth certificate. She was some piece of work, your client.”

  “She was my client thanks to you,” I shot back, then waved away the indignant reply that seemed to be on the way.

  “You heard about this Jerry Califana?” I asked. “Amber’s ex-husband?”

  “The guy who says Amber sold his baby? God, what a pathetic delusion.”

  “Is it a delusion? If Amber faked her birth certificate, maybe she and Doc Scanlon faked her baby’s death certificate five years ago. Why couldn’t—”

  Marla rose from the ottoman; cigarette in hand, she began to pace. The Persian slippers made little scuffing sounds on the parquet floor.

  “He wouldn’t,” she said flatly. “Doc wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

  “Why not?” I shot back. “Because he’s a saint, or because there wouldn’t be enough money in it for him?”

  Another thought struck me. “Were you working with him back then? Could you have done the adoption for whoever ended up with Amber’s baby?”

  “Nobody ended up with Amber’s baby,” she retorted. “The poor kid’s dead and buried.”

  She took in another long drag and looked toward the window. Little buds were starting on the tree in back; baby leaves poked out from near-bare branches. In the yard next over, a weeping cherry tree drooped pink-dotted branches like a woman sobbing.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this,” Marla mumbled. “Attorney-client privilege. But I’ll say this much: Doc came to me when Amber’s baby died. He was afraid she and that husband were going to sue for malpractice. Now does that sound like a man who faked a death?”

  I shook my head. “What about the Mount Loretto connection?” I persisted. “Did Doc meet Amber there before her marriage?”

  “What if he did?”

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” I said. I finished the last of the Scotch, letting it burn my tongue and then swirling an ice cube in my mouth to cool myself.

  “How many other prospective birth mothers did Doc find at the orphanage?”

  “What do you mean by—”

  “I talked to Lisa,” I cut in. “You remember Lisa, from the group home. She says Doc trolls for babies at Mount Loretto, at Arthur Kill, at—”

  Marla gave a contemptuous shrug. “What if he does? The girls are old enough to sign a consent form.”

  Something in the belligerent stance told me Marla was hiding something.

  “Are they?” I persisted. “Are all of them old enough, or are some of your little brood cows still in foster care? Don’t you need Family Court approval before a foster child can give her baby up for adoption?”

  “Don’t try teaching me the law, Cassie,” Marla countered. “I’ve been doing this work for fifteen years now, and I—”

  “Why?” I cut in, suddenly realizing that was the question I wanted answered above all others. “Why did you specialize in adoption law?”

  She stiffened. She stood there in her sky-blue-trimmed-with-silver pajamas, her absurd slippers on her feet, and gazed at me with the look of a deer about to be struck by a moving van. Her gray eyes went blank; her face sagged.

  She lowered herself onto the ottoman and faced me. Her voice went from strident to husky-soft as she said, “I was adopted.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It fell into place. I’d met her parents at our law school graduation; they seemed tiny, birdlike people next to her broad-shouldered bulk, but I put that down to the vagaries of genetics. This revelation explained her deep commitment to the adoption process, her choice of adoption as a specialty.

  “My parents were good to me,” she said fiercely, as though I’d accused them. “They never made me feel different or unloved. I liked being adopted, I liked being chosen instead of coming into a family by accident.”

  “I could see that,” I said. I was trying to tread cautiously, aware I was about to hear more than I’d bargained for.

  “It started when I was eight,” she went on. Perched on the ottoman, one leg underneath her and the other swinging at her side, she now looked like a little girl dressed up for Halloween.

  “At first, it was just this woman who’d sit in her car and watch me at the playground. I asked my parents about her, and they told me to report to the teacher if I saw her again. The next time, she came out of her car, walked up to me—I was sitting on a swing—and told me she was my real mother and she’d come to take me home.”

  “Jesus,” was all I could say.

  “I screamed and cried and said I already had a real mother and a real home. But she didn’t care; she said I’d learn to love her because we had the same blood in our veins.” Her last words reeked of sarcasm.

  “She got my name and address from one of the social workers,” Marla went on, her tone deliberately flat. “She wasn’t supposed to know where I was, things were very secret in those days, but the social worker was new and she believed in things being more open, so she gave in and told my birth mother where to find me.”

  “That must have been a horrible experience,” I said.

  “It was only the beginning,” Marla replied. She reached for a cigarette; her hand shook as she struck the match to light it. “My parents went to court, got a restraining order against her, but she still didn’t stop. She stalked me at school, followed me to church, brought a petition for return of custody—she made my life hell. At one point, a Family Court judge actually made me visit with her even though I cried in court and said I didn’t want to. I visited every other Sunday for a year before the judge finally realized she was crazy as a bedbug; she’d been telling me over and over again how if she couldn’t take me home, I’d be better off dead.”

  “My God. No wonder—” I cut that thought off in a hurry; I’d been about to say, No wonder your bedroom is a little girl’s safe haven. No wonder you wear armor clothes and keep people at arm’s length. No wonder you hate Amber with such a passion.

  “Yeah,” she echoed, her voice street-tough. “No wonder I’m a bitch on wheels. No wonder I’ll do anything to make sure my adoptions stick. I don’t want any other child going through what I went through. Children deserve stable homes with parents who want them; they don’t deserve to be little prizes for people who couldn’t get their lives together when it counted.”

  “Marla, I—” I began, then stopped as I realized I didn’t really have the words.

  She shot me a glance that was pure Marla—aggressive, cynical, taking no prisoners. “If you’re about to tell me you feel my pain, you can—”

  I laughed. “Hell, no,” I replied, knowing now that sympathy was the last thing she wanted. “What I feel is pissed off. How could you think I’d sell a baby, for God’s sake? In the first place, I knew absolutely nothing about adoptions until you got me into this.”

  “When people see the kind of money they can make by selling babies, they tend to learn fast,” she replied. Her direct gaze held no apology. “Then when I learned about the marriage to Scott, I figured I knew why she wanted her own lawyer.”

  “Thanks to Artie Bloom,” I said, “everyone in the five boroughs thinks the same thing.”

  I looked down at my empty glass and considered asking for another Scotch. The first one had been pure heaven; the second would slide down my throat so easily, and then—

  And then I’d be too drunk to care who killed Amber or what was happening to my reputation as a lawyer. Not good.

  “What about the oth
ers?” I said, only half-interested. “Lisa said you told her to name a bunch of guys who could have fathered her child, so the adoptive parents wouldn’t know the kid’s father was doing time. How often do you—”

  “Out,” Marla said. She rose from her ottoman like a queen stepping off her throne. She pointed to the door.

  “Time to go, Cass,” she said, her voice unyielding. “No more questions, no more accusations. Just get out of here.”

  I went. I walked out the door and down the curved staircase to the bottom of the Village brownstone building I’d occupied in my student days. It was like leaving a piece of my past. A piece that would never be the same; I could never again look at Marla Hennessey without seeing that little Halloween girl and her pure white bedroom.

  Where to now? I wanted more on Doc Scanlon. The man Amber called Saint Christopher of the Golden Cradle.

  What I hadn’t realized at the time was that “Golden Cradle” was the nickname adoption people gave to the high-cost agencies that guaranteed perfect white babies for exorbitant fees. Was Doc Scanlon a one-man Golden Cradle? And were his fees more than the law allowed?

  I had an idea the former Mrs. Scanlon might have the answers, so I walked to the subway and headed for South Ferry. The boat ride was bracing; the view of the Manhattan skyline spectacular. When I hit the Staten Island side of the bay, I realized I hadn’t a clue how to get to Betsy Scanlon’s house, but I did know it was near the mall. That meant bus number 44 according to the signs posted over the long corridors leading to the bus terminals.

  It was a long, meandering ride that gave me plenty of time to think. Too much time; the entire enterprise seemed crazy now that I was wending my way along totally foreign streets. I asked the driver to let me know when we came to Travis Avenue; he did and I dismounted just short of the mall and the landfill.

  I walked along Travis, looking for the side street where Amber and Scott had lived. On one side were neat rows of mustard-colored tract houses; on the other, undeveloped swampland. I passed a small driveway with a chain suspended between two poles. A sign with a Parks Department maple leaf proclaimed the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge.

  Amber’s last refuge. The place where her body had been found. And it was mere steps away from the cross street where she’d lived. Why hadn’t I realized before how close the refuge parking area was to Betsy Scanlon’s house?

  Because I’d been in a car before. Because I didn’t know the area. Because when I’d come to Betsy’s the first time to see Amber, I had no idea she’d be pulled dripping wet from the swamp.

  I turned my gaze away from the refuge and walked toward the house occupied by Aunt Betsy’s Playroom. Which house was it? They all looked alike; was there anything distinguishing—

  The letter C. The screen door had a C on it. Which was odd, now that I knew the house was owned by Betsy Scanlon. Or was it? Was she renting, the C referring to her landlord? Or had she bought the house from people named C, and kept the screen door?

  Who cared? The important thing was that once I recalled the C, I found the house. There was, thank God, a light in the window. She was home; I hadn’t made this ridiculous trek for nothing.

  I rang the bell and waited. The door was opened just a crack by a chunky woman with short blond curls and a face that had once been cute but now showed lines around the mouth and puffs under the eyes. I could picture Betsy Scanlon as a cheerleader, the kind of girl who in my day would have worn pink angora sweaters and put little bows in her teased hair.

  “Mrs. Scanlon?” I said, making it a question for purposes of courtesy. I reminded her who I was.

  “Oh, yeah, Amber’s lawyer,” she said without enthusiasm. She opened the door and, instead of inviting me inside, stepped out onto the concrete porch. She closed the door behind her and lowered herself onto the top step. She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her pants pocket and offered me one.

  “I don’t smoke in the house,” she said, lighting up and enveloping both of us in a cloud of menthol, “on account of I’ve got kids in there all day.”

  I nodded. I’d had the entire bus ride to come up with an opening question, and I still didn’t have one. “It was terrible about Amber,” I began.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Were you home that night? Did you see her go out?”

  Betsy shook her head and expelled smoke. “No, I was at my brother’s, baby-sitting my niece. When I got home, everything was quiet, but then the cops came and started asking questions.”

  This was getting me nowhere; it was time to throw out a fast one and see what came over the plate. “You and Doc never had children?”

  Her blue eyes widened. The lines around her eyes disappeared, but only for a moment. Then she squinted, adding ten years to her face. “No,” she said. She turned her face away, looking toward the other houses on the street.

  Did I dare ask why? I was pondering how far to push her when she said, “He couldn’t. And before you ask, I would have adopted but he wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “Interesting,” I said, trying for a noncommittal tone and failing. “He may be the best-known pro-adoption doctor in New York City, and he wouldn’t adopt a kid himself.”

  I looked straight into Betsy’s sky-blue eyes, eyes that couldn’t possibly be as innocent as they looked, and said, “I wonder if it was because he knew too much. That he couldn’t play the denial games other adoptive parents get into.”

  Her wry answering smile contradicted her baby-doll eyes. “Yeah, I know what you mean. They all want to think their baby’s a genius, when the truth is most birth parents are losers who didn’t know how to work a condom.”

  She drew in a long breath and let it out in a heavy sigh. “But I don’t think that was it, not really,” she said at last.

  The baby blues locked onto mine and she said, slowly and deliberately, “He didn’t want a child because he wanted to be the child in our marriage. He didn’t want my energy, my time, my love given to anyone but him. He’s easily the most selfish man I’ve ever known.”

  I sat in stunned silence, amazed that she would say these things to a stranger. Or perhaps it was because I was a stranger, and we were sitting in the dark, that the words flowed so freely.

  “He seems so charming,” I said at last. “Almost boyish.”

  “The trouble with boyish charm,” Betsy replied, her words floating on a stream of menthol, “is that it usually comes attached to a boy.

  “Hell,” she went on, dropping the cigarette onto the walk and stepping on it with a sneakered foot. “It took me seven years to figure out that just because he made me feel special it didn’t mean he thought I really was special. He makes everyone feel that way. His nurse thinks he walks on water, and as for that Mrs. B.—anyone with half an eye can see she’d cut off her right tit if he asked her to.”

  That was an image I wanted out of my mind at the earliest opportunity. “Would she lie for him?” I asked.

  “Like a rug,” Betsy said. “Not that I know what she’d have to lie about,” she added. “As far as I know, Chris’s business is on the up and up.”

  “There’s a guy out in Tottenville who thinks your husband stole his baby,” I said, matching her tough-girl tone. “He says Doc faked the baby’s death, then put it up for adoption, with the cooperation of the man’s wife.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Betsy shot back. “Hell, there are enough girls who want to give up their babies. He doesn’t have to take one away from someone who wants to keep it.”

  “Would it make a difference if the wife was Amber?”

  “You mean—wait a minute, you mean this baby you think Doc stole was hers?”

  I nodded; the blue eyes narrowed. “That changes everything,” she said in a low voice.

  “You think he might have done it for Amber?” I didn’t want my eagerness to scare her off, but I couldn’t suppress it entirely.

  “She was a real bitch,” Betsy said, as though that said it all. And it did, but not in a way
that would be admissible in a court of law. She reached into her pocket for another cigarette, cupped her hand around it to shield it from the spring breeze, and lit it. We sat in silence; I waited for her to stand up, go into the house, and shut the door in my face.

  “He was scared,” she said at last. Her cigarette had gone out, but her lips still caressed its tubular bulk. “He made a mistake about the diagnosis. He kept talking about how Amber and her husband could sue and wipe him out.”

  She opened her eyes with a suddenness that resembled a doll being raised from its sleep mode to wakefulness. “In the old days, you had a baby that wasn’t quite right, you went to church and lit a candle. Today, you sue the doctor, even if it wasn’t his fault. It’s like everybody thinks they’re entitled to a perfect baby.”

  “Amber’s baby wasn’t perfect?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” she said. She turned the full force of her blue eyes on my face, willing me to understand. “Once he said it would be better if the baby died; that the real money came when a child would be disabled for life. I’m not sure what he meant, but—”

  “I am,” I said grimly. “He was right. A wrongful death action for a baby doesn’t bring much in the way of damages, because the court looks at how much the child might have contributed to its parents’ support in the future, but a suit for damages when a baby needs lifetime care could run into the millions.”

  “And the next thing I know, he tells me the baby’s dead,” Betsy said. “He tried not to sound too relieved, but I could tell it was a big weight off his mind.”

  “Had Amber talked about suing him?” I asked. “From what I knew about her, if she thought a living baby would bring more money through a lawsuit, she wouldn’t have agreed to the phony death scam.”

  She screwed up her face in thought; the wrinkles around her mouth and eyes deepened. “I don’t know all the facts,” she said at last. “In fact, I don’t know any of them. I just know he worried a lot less after Amber’s baby died. And he was placing a lot of babies for adoption at the same time, so I suppose he could have given Amber’s baby to one of those couples. But it sounds pretty far out,” she continued, shaking her head.