Fresh Kills

by Carolyn Wheat

  My thoughts whirled as I looked at the child whose copper hair and blue eyes suddenly reminded me of Amber. I’d come to this house convinced Doc Scanlon had persuaded his ex-wife to take one more chance for him. Convinced she was an unwitting or at least unwilling accomplice to his scheme.

  This changed everything. Betsy wasn’t unwitting or unwilling; she’d known exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it. It wasn’t about money, it was about helping her brother Kyle keep the child he loved. The child Jerry Califana remembered as Laura.

  The Cheneys hadn’t met with Amber at Friendly’s to buy Baby Adam, but to pay Amber enough money so that she’d let them keep Erin. Amber was killing all her golden geese that night; why not milk Kyle Cheney for one more payoff, one more lump sum that would insure him against the birth father who could turn his daughter into Staten Island’s own Baby Jessica?

  I turned and started a brisk walk away from the house; there was nothing to be gained by confronting Betsy. The best thing I could do was get into the car and drive straight to the One-Two-Two precinct and get Detective Aronson to come out and talk to Betsy. He could get his warrant based on—

  A hand touched my shoulder. I jumped and whirled, half-expecting to see a gun. But Betsy’s hand held nothing more threatening than a pirate ship made of Legos.

  “I came to ask a couple of questions about the burglary of Doc’s office,” I began, hoping my face didn’t betray my total lack of interest in said burglaries. Or my deep desire to get free of Betsy and make a getaway in Marvella’s car.

  “No, you didn’t,” Betsy contradicted, her tone flat. “I know what you came for.” She looked from me to her niece, then back into my eyes. “But he’s not here. Doc sent the package last night.”

  Sent the package? What was this, a rerun of “Mission: Impossible”? What kind of stupid underworld code was this supposed to be?

  “Aunt Betsy, can I have a peanut butter sandwich on graham crackers?” Erin repeated. “I don’t like tuna, and I want—”

  Which is when I realized that Betsy wasn’t talking like an imitation drug dealer, but like an adult disguising a mention of sex in front of a child. Except that it wasn’t sex we were discussing, but the disposal of a baby boy.

  “Erin, go into the kitchen and ask Ramona to make you a peanut butter sandwich. On bread,” Betsy added.

  “But I want graham—” the child protested.

  “Now.”

  Erin’s face crumpled into a pout, but she went. She opened the door as though it weighed a hundred pounds, pulling it with her skinny arms and dragging her body through the doorway with obvious reluctance, as though going in to face punishment rather than Wonder bread.

  Now that the kid was gone, we could speak freely.

  “No, he didn’t,” I said with a confidence I suddenly realized was based on solid evidence. “Doc didn’t sent any package last night, and he’s not going to send one tonight or any other night. That’s why Adam is still here, isn’t it? Because Doc won’t lift a finger to help you.”

  The look on Betsy’s face encouraged me to continue. “You called him the most selfish man you ever knew, and you were right. He handed Amber’s baby over to your brother because he was afraid Amber and Jerry might sue him for malpractice. It was the path of least resistance. But this—putting Adam into the gray-market pipeline—this doesn’t benefit him, so he won’t do it. Which is why Adam is still here, not halfway across the country.”

  “No, he’s not, he—”

  “Come on, Betsy,” I cut in. “We both know what happened. We both know Kyle killed Amber so he could keep his own kid. And if he’d been smart instead of sentimental, he’d have killed Adam too. But he couldn’t. He brought the baby back here, hoping you could convince Doc to sell him to some couple out of state. But Doc refused. So now you have a baby you don’t know what to do with.”

  I looked at Betsy’s face, which had a haggard quality in the bright afternoon light. Dark rings circled her deep-set eyes; the eyeliner had smudged and she looked like a blond raccoon.

  “Come inside,” she said at last, softly but seductively, as though inviting me to a tryst.

  The invitation gave me pause. Why was she asking me to view the evidence?

  Because she couldn’t let me leave.

  Or because the evidence was no longer there.

  Was she taking me into a room full of babies, none of whom were Jimmy Lundquist-Wylie/Adam Greenspan, just to prove Amber’s child had never lain in the crib room?

  It made more sense to run for the car than to follow Betsy inside the house. I turned away, measuring with my eyes the distance from the side door to the end of the driveway.

  Or was she inviting me inside because she knew it was over? If Doc wouldn’t help find a new home for Adam, then someone someday was going to make the same connection I had, and she might as well get it over with.

  It made as much sense as any other explanation I could come up with. And besides, I needed to see Adam, to know that he was really alive and drawing breath, not lying in the swamp ballooning up with gases.

  I followed Betsy down the hallway of the apartment, past the wooden pegs where a dozen little jackets and slickers hung. I nearly tripped on a car seat.

  The babies were lined up in their cribs. Five in all, they lay in a row like sausages, bundled in terry-cloth suits with animals embroidered on the breast. A blue suit with an elephant—was that Adam Greenspan? Not the pink with the teddy bear; that must be a girl. But the yellow with a duck or the green with a giraffe—or was the green child too big? Did Adam have hair?

  I looked from one baby to another, my eyes shifting with a panicky uncertainty. Now that I’d seen Erin, I knew I was in the right place; Adam had certainly been hidden here since Amber’s death. And since Kyle Cheney had no desire to sell the baby, he was probably still here, if only I could pick him out.

  “He didn’t mean to do it,” Betsy said. “Things just got out of hand.”

  That was one way to describe the deliberate murder of two human beings.

  “Kyle and Donna love that child to death.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I guess they did.”

  “You could take the baby and not tell the police about Kyle,” Betsy offered. But there wasn’t much assurance behind the words; she knew it was over.

  Betsy stepped into my line of sight. “Adam’s the one in the yellow suit,” she said with a small, wry smile.

  He was tiny. Tiny and squinched-up and red-faced and bald. Not a pretty picture—unless you were Ellie Greenspan.

  I wanted to scoop him up and take him straight to Brooklyn Heights. Probably not the soundest way of proceeding legally, but I wasn’t particularly concerned with legalities. I wanted this child returned to a home where he’d be loved, not just stashed. I was sure Betsy had taken good care of him, but he deserved to be with people who wanted him more than they wanted the sun.

  “Kyle doesn’t want to kill him,” Betsy said, shaking her head.

  I caught the present tense.

  “But he will if Doc won’t help?”

  “He won’t have a choice. It’s better than having the police find him here.”

  “They’ll know he was killed after Amber,” I pointed out. “They’ll know he had to be someplace between then and now.”

  “But they won’t know where. They won’t have any reason to connect the baby to me or to Kyle.”

  “You can’t let him kill Adam.” I said it as a statement, hoping against hope it was true.

  She shook her head. “Not if there’s another way.”

  “Is there another way?”

  “You could pretend you found him. You could take him to those people in Brooklyn, tell them they can have him back if they don’t tell the police how he came to them.”

  “Betsy, this doesn’t make sense,” I said, but my protest was halfhearted. However strange her reasoning, if there was a chance I could walk out of here with Adam, I was prepared to encourage he
r fantasy that this could somehow all be settled without reference to the New York City Police Department.

  Not that I was particularly eager to involve the cops. If I took the baby to the precinct and dumped him in Detective Aronson’s lap, I’d be listening to the Miranda warnings in nothing flat. Aronson was still convinced I was the mastermind behind Amber’s scams; he would never believe I’d located the baby through sheer logic and a familiarity with the work of the late Edgar Allan Poe. And by the time he investigated Betsy and found evidence to support my contention, I’d be on the six o’clock news, hiding my face under my jacket as the cops paraded me past the minicams, and solemn anchorpersons would tell the world an arrest had finally been made in the Baby Adam case.

  I could take him to Artie Bloom. I laughed aloud at the picture that would make; I could see myself dashing into the city room, the baby propped on my hip, shouting “Stop the presses.” Artie could play Jimmy Breslin to my Son of Sam.

  I could call my lawyer. Riordan could arrange a meeting with Aronson, but then I’d be branding myself as the kind of person who needed a lawyer like Matt Riordan. A guilty person.

  What I could not do was take Adam back to Josh and Ellie and pretend they’d boarded him with Aunt Betsy for three days. I was an officer of the court; if I wanted to keep practicing law—let alone walk around like a free citizen—I was going to have to tell someone in a uniform what I knew.

  Betsy had to know that. So how could she just let me have Baby Adam?

  Was she really so certain her brother would put an end to the baby’s short life? Was turning him over to the police the only way she could avoid having the child’s blood on her hands?

  I’d never worn a baby before.

  I felt like an opossum, as seen on public television in grotesque close-up. Adam was a weight, not unlike a backpack, only on the front. But he was alive, wriggling, breathing; I couldn’t take my eyes off him, couldn’t just treat him like a load.

  He was a person, a little proto-person, and his life was wholly in my hands. He was in a sling; as soon as Betsy strapped it onto my chest, I could see how she’d snuck the baby into her house. Wear a loose raincoat over this thing and all people would think is that you’d put on a pound or two; the baby could hide under a cloak, strapped to the chest.

  I hastened toward Travis Avenue, where I’d left Marvella’s car parked on the side of the road next to the tall, feather-topped reeds of the Davis Wildlife Refuge. The irony of walking toward the place where Baby Adam’s mother had been fished out of the swamp like an old boot wasn’t lost on me, but I didn’t care to dwell on it either. The sooner I was away from this watery, treacherous landscape the better.

  I took one last paranoid glance behind me as I crossed the avenue.

  He was there.

  All I could see, all I knew, was that there was a man and he was moving more swiftly than I. He was fast and he was coming straight at me. I couldn’t see him, but I knew who he was, who he had to be, without looking back for a confirming glance.

  I fumbled in my jacket pocket for the keys, my fingers slipping on the cool metal edges. I kept my eyes firmly on the swaying pampas grass; to look back was to invite my pursuer closer, to make him appear, big as life, in front of me. Not looking kept him at bay.

  Or at least that was the theory. The reality was that I stood, knees wobbling, fingers clumsily pawing the keys which seemed to have taken on a life of their own inside my pocket; they kept wriggling out of reach. And as I fumbled, his steps came closer, pounding the blacktop as he ran across the road toward the car.

  I grabbed the keys and thrust the first one into the lock. Why, I wondered frantically, had I been such a goddamn New Yorker, locking the car on a lonely Staten Island road to protect it from thieves who didn’t exist instead of leaving it open so I could make a fast getaway?

  Too late now. The key wobbled in my hand, refusing to enter the door lock.

  Then the bunch slipped from my hand and clattered on the road. I looked; he was halfway across the road, racing toward me, arms pumping as he ran. A racer’s run. An athlete’s run.

  I had to bend down, pick up the keys, get my fingers around the door key instead of the trunk or gas tank keys, put the key in the lock, turn the handle, open the door, get into the car, and drive away before Kyle Cheney reached me.

  It couldn’t be done.

  Acting on some kind of instinct I didn’t know I had, I cupped Adam’s melon head in my left hand, retrieved the keys with my right and stood back up in one swift motion. Then I thrust the largest key into his face, aiming as much as possible for the eyes.

  He howled and grabbed his face. I swung my shaking hand toward the car door, put the key into the lock, turned it, and opened the door. Ignoring Kyle’s scream of rage and pain, I lowered myself to the carseat level of the car. Two more seconds and I’d be inside, safe.

  Adam and I would be safe.

  Strong, wiry hands grabbed my shoulder, spinning me around. Blood dripped from his nose, but his sinewy hands had lost none of their strength. I struggled to get inside the car, to put the key into the ignition so I could leave Kyle in the road, take off for safety. I still had my left hand on Adam’s soft head; he whimpered as I jerked my body down into the driver’s seat.

  Kyle had both hands on my arm now; he pulled with all his considerable strength. I looked wildly around; wasn’t there someone walking by, someone in a car who would see us and stop?

  Cars sped by, on their way to Victory Boulevard, but no one so much as slowed to look at us.

  Then I realized anyone watching would think we were having a family squabble, and would avert their eyes, certain they shouldn’t interfere.

  I swung my left arm, elbow first, at Kyle’s midsection; he saw the movement and jumped back with a grunt. Then he pulled with renewed vigor, and because I was off-balance, I nearly fell out of the car. The keys were still in my right hand. I moved back toward the car, trying to crawl in before Kyle had me out altogether. He grabbed at my right hand, but I kept it out of reach, blocking with my body.

  The keys were everything. I couldn’t drop the keys, no matter what. The keys had to go into the ignition, had to get us out of here.

  “Give me those keys,” he demanded. His hands were everywhere, huge bony things that gripped and grabbed and pulled at me. Strong fingers reached out and took possession of my hand; no amount of struggle could keep him from wrenching the keys out of my fingers.

  “You’ll break my—”

  “Who cares? Give me the keys.” And he chopped at my arm with the flat of his hand, then wrapped his fingers around the bunch of keys, scratching me as he pulled them away.

  I lunged out of the car, my hand grabbing at the keys. He raised his arm and flung the entire bunch into the tall reeds. They arced into the air like a silver ball, then fell somewhere in the forest of grass.

  Gone. The keys were gone.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I stood a half second in paralyzed wonder. My whole object had been to get in the car and drive away, to leave Kyle standing in the road, to whisk Baby Adam off to sanctuary. And now I had no keys, no way to move the car. Nowhere to go.

  Kyle turned toward me, a smile of triumph on his face. He took a step closer; I turned and ran toward the neat rows of houses that flanked the wildlife refuge.

  I’d learned the key trick in a woman’s self-defense class. As I stumbled along the sidewalk next to the tall reeds, I tried to recall other words of wisdom.

  One thing was that I wasn’t supposed to be a hero. Disable your attacker and run for help, that was the basic idea. Which meant that instead of racing into an isolated swamp full of egrets, I should have been heading across the road toward the houses. I should have been ringing doorbells, begging people to call the cops, attracting as much attention as possible. Not doing the one thing that would give Kyle maximum advantage, namely letting myself be herded into a desolate area where he knew the terrain and I was hampered by ignorance, bad shoes
, and a baby.

  That was the theory.

  But every time I tried to step off the sidewalk and into the road, every time I leaned toward the houses on the other side of the reed-festooned refuge, Kyle cut me off, harrying me like a big wiry sheepdog, forcing my steps back toward the swamp.

  But maybe there were people in the refuge. Maybe there were park employees, naturalists. Birdwatchers. Hikers. Teenagers making out. Kids exploring.

  Anyone.

  I was having trouble catching my breath. No runner, I was used to an occasional brisk walk along city sidewalks to boost my cardiovascular system.

  I hadn’t boosted it enough. There was a sharp pain in my side and I gasped for air like a leaky balloon. Any second now, the vise-grip of Kyle’s strong hand would grab my shoulder, bring me to the ground, smashing Adam’s head on the—

  No. That couldn’t happen. I had to keep going, had to reach some kind of safety.

  I lurched toward the driveway entrance to the wildlife preserve. My turn must have surprised Kyle; he took a moment to orient himself before following me into the copse of trees that sheltered the forest-green sign with the maple leaf on it, the sign that said this land belonged to the New York City Parks Department. There was a building dead ahead. A flat-topped, utilitarian structure of indeterminate use. I had no idea whether it was occupied. But I headed for it anyway, hoping there was at least a caretaker inside.

  It beat trying to tell my story to egrets.

  I was so intent on making it to the green building that I failed to realize there was no one behind me. Kyle was gone.

  Which, in retrospect, should have told me something.

  But all I could think of was getting through the barnlike double doors before a large hand reached out and pulled me down into the mud. All I could think of was safety, sanctuary. All I could think of was Adam.

  He was wailing now, a birdlike cry that would have had me worried if I hadn’t had other things to worry about. Were babies supposed to cry like that? Bouncing him around in the snuggly probably wasn’t improving his mood any.