I went upstairs to see how my other patient was doing. Dawn lay on the couch, tearless now, her face swollen. I brought her a cold compress from the bathroom, and watched her bathe her eyes.
“It’s kind of hard for Marcy,” I said lamely.
“It’s not a picnic for me,” she shot back. “And I’m not going to any boarding school.”
“Look, Dawn,” I began, my heart heavy. “There’s something I have to be clear with you about. I represent your Aunt Marcy in court. It’s my job to present the case for her getting custody.”
Dawn was looking at me with wide eyes. Her face held the look I’d dreaded: suspicion. “Does that mean you’re on her side?”
“When we started all this,” I reminded her, “you were both on the same side. Or so I thought, anyway. And I want you to know that if, after thinking it over, you really want your Grandma Ritchie to have custody, then I’ll give Marcy her money back and tell her to find a new lawyer. I won’t help her do something you don’t want.”
“Will you go to court on my side?” Dawn asked innocently. “Will you tell the judge what I want?”
I shook my head. “I can’t. It would be a conflict of interest.” The words meant nothing to Dawn. “You already have a lawyer,” I pointed out.
Dawn looked blank. “Fred Birnbaum,” I reminded her. “The law guardian. The Legal Aid lawyer the court appointed to represent you. The skinny guy with glasses.”
Dawn screwed up her face. “I didn’t like him,” she said.
“Well, he’s the one who tells the judge what you want,” I said. “Of course, you’re twelve years old. You can tell the judge yourself, if you’d rather.”
She nodded. “Okay,” she said. “He seemed pretty nice before.”
“But,” I pointed out, “I have to know what you’re going to say. In case it means I have to get off the case. If you really want to go with your grandma, just say so.”
Dawn wrinkled her nose. “Not really,” she confessed. “I just said that to make Aunt Marcy mad. She thinks Grandma’s a silly old lady. And the thing is, I do too, sometimes. She fusses a lot about things that don’t really matter. And she doesn’t understand about tennis.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Good,” I said. “You and Marcy and I will have to work out the details, but—”
“I don’t want to live with Marcy, either,” Dawn said. She looked suddenly shy and said timidly, “I have another idea, if it’s okay with you.”
My heart jumped. Was I about to face explaining to Dawn why she couldn’t live with me? It would be impossible, yet for a wild moment I pictured it working out—then realized I’d face exactly the same dilemma Marcy was in.
“My coach knows this really great place in Florida,” Dawn began, her voice gaining confidence and her face glowing with enthusiasm. “He runs a school for girls who play tennis. Not one of those tacky tennis factories, or anything,” Dawn explained hastily. “It’s almost like a family,” she added with a wistfulness that actually hurt to see. “The girls live in a regular house and go to school as well as practicing every day. Three of the girls are pros and they’re not even fifteen yet. I bet they make tons of money.”
I must have looked as aghast as I felt. What a mess, I thought, anger flooding me. Dawn was so starved for “family” that she’d try to find it in a Florida tennis academy that turned out fourteen-year-old “pros.” Marcy, I thought grimly, had more to answer for than she knew.
“My mom even said she’d think about it,” Dawn said defensively. “When I showed her the article in Tennis Today about Carling Bassett, she said she’d look into it after we got to Washington. She smiled at me and said she’d never realized before how good I was,” Dawn added with a naive pride.
Anger at Marcy was replaced by rage at dead Linda. What she’d finally understood, I realized, was that there was money in the game her daughter loved. I could just see Linda as an absentee tennis mom, parking Dawn at some tennis factory for nine months a year, raking in the prize money. Dawn might turn prodigy at fourteen, with two years’ intensive coaching, but what would Dawn be at eighteen? Bitter, hating the sight of a tennis racquet? Or worse, hating herself for being a has-been?
“Dawn, honey,” I said in a tone I hoped sounded more reasonable than I felt, “if the judge wouldn’t let you go away to boarding school, he probably wouldn’t agree to Florida either.”
“But this is different,” Dawn wailed, tears threatening again. “This is what I want!”
“Is it?” I asked softly. Then I played a dangerous trump card. “What about when your dad gets out of jail? Do you want to be in Florida when that happens, or do you want to be here waiting for him?”
Dawn’s reply was accusatory. Fixing me with a baleful red-rimmed eye, she said, “You promised you’d help him. But he’s still in jail.”
I thought about all the interviews I’d conducted, the leads I’d followed up. I’d been burglarized and locked in a burning building and threatened with a gun. But it was true; Brad Ritchie was still behind bars. “I tried, Dawn,” I said tiredly. “God knows, I tried.”
“No, you haven’t.” Dawn’s bitten lips curled with contempt. “You just wanted to get on television. I saw you on “Live at Five” last night, and all you talked about was that dumb Todd Lessek. You didn’t say a word about my daddy or my mother either.”
“They didn’t ask me,” I mumbled, defensive in spite of myself.
“If you really wanted to help my dad,” Dawn went on, tossing her head, “you’d talk to Congressman Lucenti.”
“Look, Dawn”—I tried reason—“just because he and your mother had a thing going doesn’t mean he’s the one who killed her.”
“It was more than that. She called him to come over that night. That’s why she sent me to Aunt Marcy’s.”
“How do you know that?” I was numb with shock, but intrigued at the same time. “Or are you making it up to help your dad?”
“She called his campaign office. I saw her write down the number and I kept the piece of paper she wrote it on.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
She looked at me as though I were Mortimer Snerd. “If the cops knew my mom called Art Lucenti,” she explained with commendable patience, “they would have thought my dad got jealous and killed Mom because she was meeting the congressman.” She sounded like a kid relating to a classmate the latest episode of “Dallas”; instead, she was talking about people she’d known, a life she’d lived.
Plus, she had a point. I could just see Button marking the phone number with his initials and bagging it for use as evidence against Brad Ritchie. Button was no respecter of persons; he’d go after Lucenti if he thought there was guilt there—but he wouldn’t look any harder for it than he had to.
I gave the matter serious thought as I shepherded Dawn downstairs. If I’d known before that Linda had met Art Lucenti the night she was killed, would I have gone straight to him and skipped the others? Damned right I would have. And it wasn’t too late now. I resolved to get about thirteen hours’ sleep and go to the campaign headquarters as soon as possible.
Marcy’s makeup and bland smile were back in place. She said she hoped Dawn was feeling better, and shook my hand in farewell. Dawn seemed to shrink into herself, like an animal retreating into its shell. They left in silence, with all the issues between them as unresolved as Linda’s murder.
But I’d had all I could stand for one day. Trudging upstairs and climbing up to my loft bed, I lay my head on the pillow with a deep sigh of satisfaction. Sleep at last!
But sleep was no balm. Instead of sweet dreams, I saw Linda’s murder. The screams, the blood, the knife—it was all there. But that wasn’t the scary part. What had me waking in a cold sweat was that the face that gloated over Linda’s dead body belonged to Dawn.
“How many?” Dorinda asked, her ladle poised to pour. It was six-thirty A.M.; the Morning Glory had a half-hour to go before opening, but I’d slept twelve hours and
wakened at six, starved.
“Three,” I replied promptly. Then I reconsidered. A little of Dorinda’s industrial-strength pancakes (every whole grain known to man) goes a long way. “Make that two,” I amended.
“How did yesterday go?” Dorinda wondered, as she ladled dollops of batter onto the sizzling griddle.
I told her. “As far as I’m concerned,” I finished disgustedly, “if Marcy loses this case, it’ll be what she deserves. It may also be the best thing for Dawn. Ma Ritchie may be Willy Loman, but at least she loves the kid. What goes on in Marcy’s heart is anybody’s guess.”
The pancakes were beginning to resemble NASA photos of the moon. Pockmarks cratered the surface, and I could smell a faint burning odor, but Dorinda just stood, spatula in hand, a dreamy expression on her face.
“You know,” she remarked, “I wasn’t always a vegetarian.”
“What in hell does that have to do with anything?” I demanded. “And for God’s sake, turn those pancakes.”
When the pancakes were safely turned, Dorinda explained, “Randy was this guy I went with after I left Fernando.”
“Was that the filmmaker or the poet?”
“Fernando was an actor,” she replied with a touch of impatience. “Randy was a tofu salesman.”
“You’re kidding.” I grinned, diverted in spite of myself.
She shook her head. “He was macrobiotic.”
I pointed to the pancakes; Dorinda took the hint and scooped them onto a plate. When she handed me a choice of syrup or honey, I waved at her to leave both and finish her story.
“I was still eating meat then,” Dorinda explained, “but I was interested in going vegetarian.” She paused and frowned at the memory. “But the funny thing was, that here was a guy who could really have helped me, and yet every time we ate out together, I insisted we go to a place where I could get meat.
“I mean,” she went on, her voice stronger, “here I was, interested as hell and yet resisting it at the same time. I think I was afraid that if I really gave vegetarianism a chance, it would change my whole life. And I wasn’t ready for that. Not then.”
I got the point. “You think Marcy’s coldness is just a way of resisting Dawn?”
“It could be,” Dorinda insisted. “It could be that if she ever really let go, the dam would burst and a whole flood of love would flow out.”
It was a charming thought, but Dorinda hadn’t been there when Marcy Sheldon had told Dawn about the boarding school. I shook my head and ate the rest of my pancakes in silence. This was Brooklyn, I reminded myself, not Hollywood. This wasn’t a TV movie of the week, with all the problems of the world solved in two hours as the credits rolled and the music swelled.
21
The rest of the morning wasn’t much of an improvement. The sky was that yellow-gray peculiar to a New York January. I was better rested, but still hung over with the shock of Dawn’s announcement. My mood wasn’t helped by the thought that today was the day Arnette Pearson was going to lose her kids.
I could see the outcome in Glenda Shute’s complacent face before the arguments even began. She and the agency lawyer exchanged the kind of smiles worn by all the movie social workers who came to take Shirley Temple/Jackie Cooper/Ricky Schroder to a “decent home.”
I flashed Mickey Dechter a quick glance of (with luck) discreet camaraderie and was shocked at her appearance. Haggard, as if the court were deciding her fate along with that of Arnette Pearson. She reminded me of Dawn on her anguished court days. I found myself apprehensive as I looked at her. When we lost—as we surely would—would her thoughts be of the Pearson kids, or of three foster children in far-off Tennessee?
I stepped up to the bench, Arnette at my side. She was still wearing the black karate outfit, and her hair looked wilder than ever. She gave the impression of being tensed to the limit, poised for a kung fu kick at the bench if she lost the case.
Arnette’s face was a Masai mask, impervious to pain. At her side, her hands were balled into fists. I reached out with my right hand and cupped it around her left fist. The skin felt leathery, the sinews as taut as a bowstring. I squeezed until she opened her hand, then she clasped mine with a grip that threatened to cut off my blood supply. It didn’t matter; what counted was the link, the lifeline.
“If it please the court,” I began, launching into the arguments Mickey Dechter and I had perfected in secret sessions. I wasn’t supposed to be talking first; the agency was the petitioner. But that was part of my strategy. Before the smooth, gold-chained agency lawyer could go into her pitch, I wanted the judge to know the mother whose rights she would be terminating.
I painted word pictures: Arnette at seventeen, giving birth to Tanika alone, having been cast out by her religious mother. At eighteen, still alone, pregnant again with Jomo. Her affair with a Black Power advocate who called himself Lumumba and who left her life after fathering Kamisha.
Three kids under five, no husband, and a life of endless waits in endless welfare lines and clinics. Wanting more, she wangled a grant to go back to high school for her diploma. When Kamisha was hospitalized for pneumonia contracted in a heatless apartment, she was forced to quit. The grant was never renewed.
I talked about Jerome, the man Arnette had left her kids for. He was a man with plans, a man who represented hope, a way out. Her leaving the children with her newly reconciled mother had been a stab at a secure future with a man willing to support the whole family once he’d made it. The problem was, he didn’t. Arnette returned to New York to find the kids in foster care.
She also found herself pregnant with the twins. Enter the agency. Even though she’d been reinstated as the custodial parent, Arnette was now under direct supervision by social workers who offered plenty of criticism and little support. I read from the records I’d seen in the agency office to make my case. Black marks went onto Arnette’s record whenever she ran out of food between welfare checks, but no help in increasing her grant or dealing with Social Services was ever forthcoming. She was turned down in every request she ever made to the agency, yet she was constantly under pressure to do better by her children. Her challenges to the agency, her demands for more help, were counted against her in the agency’s reports.
I took the court on a verbal tour of the agency’s visiting rooms—the one-way mirrors through which Arnette was studied like a bug on a slide, the foster mother’s competitive ploys to capture the children’s attention during Arnette’s visiting time, the subtle disapproval of Arnette’s lifestyle that surfaced in little digs that went into her record. No wonder, I concluded, that the visits slowed and then ceased. Was this, I asked rhetorically, the agency’s idea of “strengthening the bonds of the natural family,” which was what the law mandated?
I ended with a plea for time—the only thing we could realistically walk away with. I asked for a six-month adjournment during which Arnette could visit and plan, and re-cement the bonds between herself and her kids.
I sat down knowing we’d lost. Glenda Shute’s face as she turned to the agency lawyer said that now she was ready to hear something that made sense.
What she heard was the standard agency line. Whatever the agency had done or failed to do in the past, the only question before the court was, what was the best interests of the children now. She started in on her glowing account of the benefits of adoption.
I jumped to my feet and interrupted, risking the court’s wrath. Angry, I exposed the truth about the three older children: that there was no hope of adoption for them, that they were on the verge of removal from their present foster home, and that the only reason they were still together in that home was to impress the court. I finished with a point Mickey and I had argued about. I asked the court to enter separate orders—one for Kwame and Kwaku, releasing them for adoption, and one for Tanika, Jomo, and Kamisha, granting the adjournment.
It was a legal impossibility, and I knew it. How could the court rule that Arnette was an unfit mother as to two kids but fit a
s to the other three? And yet, watching the whole loaf slip away, I had to reach out to grab a half if I possibly could. I owed it to Arnette and to the social worker who followed my words with anguished intensity.
We lost. It took a lot more words and a few supercilious looks from Glenda Shute, who seemed to blame me for daring to make the effort to stop the agency’s well-intentioned plans for the Pearson kids. When the words were pronounced, I felt the hand in mine squeeze so hard I thought my own hand would come off. Then Arnette abruptly cut the connection, flinging my arm against my side. She stalked out of the courtroom with a door-slamming bang that reminded me forcibly of Brad Ritchie.
Her hallway performance continued the parallel. Squaring off at me, Arnette raked me up and down with contempt blazing in her eyes.
“Shoulda had me a black lawyer,” she said. “The Black United Front, that’s who I need now. I gotta do something behind all this racist bullshit, you dig?”
“We did everything we could,” I said, stepping in front of my client. It was an instinctive movement to shield the social worker, who was brushing away a furtive tear. Despite my efforts, Arnette saw the gesture. “What you got to cry for?” she taunted Mickey. “It’s my kids they done stole.”
I’d been where Mickey was. I knew the pain of wanting to help, of knowing what to do to help, but of being unable, sometimes forbidden, to do it.
I looked straight into Arnette’s angry eyes. “God knows,” I said, “you’ve seen a lot of people in your life who said they were going to help you and then gave you the shaft instead. But Mickey isn’t one of them. She risked her job to get me into this case. I think you owe her an apology.”
Arnette was ready to walk. I could see it in her eyes, hot with fury. But I knew the anger was a mask, that deep underneath was a hurt so big it couldn’t be expressed without tearing her apart. Rage was safer than grief. She looked at the ground. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled grudgingly.
Mickey nodded her acceptance, but her face still held a vulnerability that bothered me. She was taking our loss far too hard.
Where Nobody Dies Page 20
