Turtle Baby (14 page)

"In where?" she asked.

"Right there. That's Mr. Singleton."

Bo touched Rombo's arm. "No. It can't be. The baby's father isn't black. I'm sure of it."

"Well, Mr. Singleton obviously is. If you don't want to talk to him, I'll take him on back to his group."

"No, I need to interview him."

Bo took Acito's case file from her briefcase and walked across the pale teal green carpeting with trepidation. This couldn't be the Little Turtle's dad, or could it?

"Mr. Singleton?" she said, and then reeled with recognition as the man turned swiftly to face her. The look in his eyes was one Bo had seen in mirrors. A fanatic certainty frustrated by the inability of everyone else to comprehend it. "I'm Bo Bradley, an investigator from Child Protective Services. I'd like to talk to you about—"

"Beau a man's name," Dewayne Singleton interrupted. From his demeanor it was clear that he felt pride in having recognized an obvious attempt at deception. "Why you want to call yourself that?"

At about five foot seven, he looked taller than that in new Levi's and a plaid shirt with sleeves rolled halfway up his chocolate-colored arms. A healing cut on his forehead was the only flaw on an otherwise attractive, clean-shaven face.

"In the South it is usually a man's name," she agreed. There was no point in elaborate explanation. "Mr. Singleton, did you marry a woman named Maria Elena Bolon in Mexico?"

"Yeah, that the ho." He scowled. "Got to warn the woman, that woman my wife. Man's job to shield his woman under a wing, even if she a ho." He nodded his head with conviction.

"Hoe?" Bo thought, and then recognized the reference. Whore. Same song, different lyric. But at least Chac's husband surpassed the Mexican police in his definition of himself relative to her. He wanted to warn and protect her. Maybe.

"What did you want to warn your wife about?"

Dewayne Singleton began to walk the length of the windowed wall, alternately hunching his shoulders and then straightening them. "There be a curse," he said, staring ahead. "Allah send his angel Jabril to punish the infidel!"

"What infidel?" Bo asked before she could catch herself. Difficult to avoid falling into the irrational conversation. The need to believe sense could be made of it if only one paid close attention.

Dewayne Singleton's brown eyes grew wide in a reaction Bo could replicate from memory. The manicky reaction to a world of dense, sluggish robots who seemed too stupid to merit the designation "human."

"Some gon' die," he said, causing Bo to wince. "Angel Jabril like a hammer sent down. Everybody know the law in they heart, but ain't nobody here obey the law no way. This be California." He emphasized the fact as though it reflected a widely accepted body of knowledge.

Bo wondered if he'd next point out that the Indian deity named Kali, called Caillech in Gaelic traditions, had worn her necklace of skulls centuries before a Western state would be named in her honor. "Evil root here," he went on rapidly, gesturing out the window. "Look at them trees. Ain't normal trees. Look like pineapples, you ask me. Ole, ugly trees."

Palm trees never having been a personal favorite, Bo couldn't argue. "Did you know that Elena has a baby?" she asked. "A baby boy?"

"Don' know about no baby." Dewayne sighed. "But she my wife, that my baby." A weight seemed to fall on the thin figure pacing beside the glass wall. Bo watched as he moved puppetlike, up and down beyond a row of chairs. An ache at the back of her nose made her sniff.

Don't start crying, Bradley. Just don't.

"In order to establish your paternity," she began, masking the outrageous request in clipped syllables, "we'll need to do a comparative analysis of blood types." She took a standard release of medical information form from her briefcase. "Will you sign a release authorizing my agency to contract for such a test on your blood?"

"I don' care," Dewayne answered, reaching for the pen Bo offered. "Allah be the one, the true God."

"Just a minute." It was Rombo Perry, striding across the pastel carpeting in a manner reminiscent of his younger days as a boxer. "What are you asking Mr. Singleton to sign?" He might have been a mother bear eyeing an intruder threatening her cub. Seriously not to be messed with.

"Just a release for a blood match, Rom," Bo said, admiring her friend's devotion to his client.

"I'd like to strike out access to all other information," the social worker noted, taking the form from Bo. In a moment he handed it back. "You can sign now, if you choose to," he told Dewayne.

"Yeah, yeah, Rambo." Dewayne nodded, signing the form. "Big white ape, that dude. Saw his movie one time. He don' talk, jus' grunt. You talk. Why you got that name?"

Rombo wrapped a muscular arm around Dewayne's shoulders and steered him toward the hall. "I think that's enough, Bo," he said. "I'll see Mr. Singleton to his group and be right back."

Bo sat in a nubby blue tweed chair and whispered names of shipwrecks. "The Job H. Jackson, Jr.," she sighed. "The Hannah E. Schubert, the Jason, the Ethel Maude." Dewayne Singleton was at the moment so lost in a forest of misfiring brain synapses that what she had just done was probably a mortal sin. Something like shooting an albatross, or a mockingbird. Except it had to be done. A lonely, black-eyed baby was waiting.

"Did you know he escaped from a prison in Louisiana?" Bo asked Rombo Perry when he returned and pulled a chair near hers.

Rombo looked at his shoes. "No, and I don't know it now. I want to keep him here for a while, Bo. We've got a good doctor. His tentative diagnosis on Dewayne is bipolar disorder, as you've undoubtedly guessed from the symptoms. From what Dewayne says, he's never been diagnosed before, never had meds. Hard to tell if that's true right now. But my guess is, it is."

"Shit," Bo said softly. "How old is he?"

"Just turned thirty. He's on Haldol with Klonopin now, to calm him down. But the bloodwork's done and he'll be started on lithium tomorrow. If lithium helps, we'll know the diagnosis is the right one. But we need some time."

"His life will have been a total mess if nobody ever knew what was wrong," Bo said, drawing turtles on Acito's case file. "I don't see any reason for me to call Louisiana. You'll do it when he's stabilized, right?"

Rombo nodded. "Yeah. You'll remember to tell me then, and we'll let them come and get him. By the way, what'd he do that landed him in prison?"

"Stole a bunch of bugs."

Rombo helped Bo from her chair and pulled a keyring from his pocket. "Bugs?"

In an unbreakable Lexan wall mirror Bo noticed that the businesslike look she'd attempted that morning had gone bankrupt. "Locusts," she said. "He fried and honeycoated them, and then sold them to New Orleans voodoo shops as 'John the Baptist Vitamins.' "

"Pretty enterprising use of the religiosity problem." Rombo

smiled. "Wonder how he got off John the Baptist and into the Islamic stuff, not that it matters."

"What I wonder is whether or not he poisoned his wife," Bo mentioned at the door. "He could have done it, you know, Rom. And maybe Acito, too. Maybe he thinks he's this Angel Jabril and Chac was an infidel."

"We'll know more in ten days or so," Rombo said, letting Bo out.

The guards were busy and didn't look up after buzzing Bo through the wire cage separating the courtyard from the administrative section of San Diego County's Mental Health Services. Against the pale mauve corridor wall her shadow was a reminder of what might have been. What still might be if she weren't careful. A blurry, faceless figure in a mental hospital. She'd lived with that shadow for two decades. Weird to see it right there in the real setting.

"Hey," Bo whispered to that ephemeral twin. "Let's get out of here!"

Estrella was sitting on the edge of her desk, deep in Spanish conversation when Bo returned from the hospital. "Gracias, Jorge," she said as Bo closed the door.

"Jorge? The bartender? You just called him on the phone?"

"Sure." Estrella shrugged. "I called the club to see if he was there, and he answered. I let him think we're convinced Chac died of an overdose, that we're just looking for her relatives. He knew her pretty well, Bo. He cried the whole time I was talking to him."

"Unlike Americans, Latin men aren't afraid to cry. It doesn't mean he didn't poison her. What did he tell you?"

Estrella smiled and shook her head. "What do you know about Latin men?" she asked.

Bo slumped in her desk chair. "Don't you remember Paolo, that surveyor I met at a rally for endangered desert plants? He wasn't afraid to cry."

"It was a rally to end animal experimentation in the cosmetic industry; everybody was crying. Besides, he was Italian. By the way, Andrew phoned. He said just show up for dinner, you don't need to call. So what did you find out at the hospital?"

Bo kicked off her shoes and propped her feet on the desk. "A man named Dewayne Singleton is in County Psychiatric Hospital," she began. "He's Chac's husband. But he's not Acito's father." In spite of herself Bo felt two enormous tears spill over the edges of her lower eyelashes. "He's really disoriented, Es. I'm sure it's a manic episode. Pretty hard to see."

"Oh, Bo," Estrella said, hurrying to wrap her arms around her friend. "You shouldn't have gone there. Of course it was hard on you. But just because he's ill doesn't mean he's not Acito's dad."

"It's not that," Bo snuffled. "It's that he's black. And there's absolutely nothing about Acito to suggest a black parent. We'll do a blood match. Dewayne signed a permission, and I'll sign one for Acito, but I already know what it's going to show."

A knot behind Bo's eyes dissolved in more tears. "This man has never had any kind of treatment, Es. Nobody ever helped him and he's thirty and that probably means he won't respond as well to medication now and it's just so damn rotten, why didn't anybody get him into treatment when he was young, before—"

"Bo!" Estrella spoke sharply, tightening her embrace. "You're getting carried away. Slow down. You can cry, but breathe. And don't talk."

Obeying, Bo breathed as Estrella walked to the window, scratched the back of one ear, and took a deep breath. "Is there any real chance that Singleton poisoned Chac?" she asked quietly.

"What do you think?" Bo answered. "We know he was at the bar; we heard him in the hall, even though we didn't see him. How many Muslims with Southern accents traditionally hang around Tijuana bars yelling about curses from Allah?"

She banged her head softly on the desk, then stood and grimaced at her reflection in the mirror on the back of the door. The glen plaid suit looked like the before picture in an ad for steam irons. "And he's got a classic motive. Acito's not his baby, Es. He might have found out somehow, and ..."

"And decided to kill both of them," Estrella finished the sentence, running a polished nail down the dusty miniblinds at the window. "I'm so sorry, Bo. This has got to be horrible for you."

"No, horrible for Chac," Bo answered dismally. "Pretty horrible for Acito, too. I'm going to go outside and smoke an entire pack of cigarettes. If the Heart Association calls, tell them I'm an android. Wash-and-wear organs. No sweat."

"I'll tell them," Estrella agreed, betraying by no more than a raised eyebrow her concern over Bo's bare feet.

In the parking lot Bo lit a cigarette, opened the Pathfinder, turned the ignition switch to power, and crammed a random tape into the deck. Albinoni's Adagio in G, top of twentieth-century tear-jerker charts. The piece, Bo's violinist mother had loved to explain, was actually written by the Baroque composer's biographer, Remo Giazotto, almost two centuries after Albinoni's death.

Bo turned up the throbbing, sentimental violin music, paced beside the car and sobbed, envisioning a bleak and bedraggled procession of the world's mentally ill, herself and Dewayne Singleton included. Some few in the desperate parade had done violence to loved ones. Millions more had done violence to themselves.

"It isn't fair," Bo told the ascending chromatic chords against which a violin wept threads of sound. "This shouldn't have happened."

In her office window overlooking the parking lot, Bo saw the silhouette of Madge Aldenhoven, watching. But Madge would think nothing of a worker crying. Crying was, in fact, encouraged. CPS workers who never cried would eventually either crack up or become hardened automatons. But Madge wouldn't know Bo was crying over a perpetrator, not a victim. Madge would make assumptions, Bo acknowledged as the violin dropped to a deep intermezzo, in the same way the world of music assumed this Italian Baroque piece was written by an Italian Baroque composer. Reality, Bo thought as she exhaled, could be described as a system of interlocking erroneous assumptions. The thought made her eyes grow wide.

Bradley, you idiot! You don't have a clue about what actually happened to Chac. Dewayne Singleton isn't automatically guilty of murder because he has a psychiatric illness. You're supposed to know better. You do know better.

Minutes later Bo padded back into the office on shredded stockings, grinning. "Giazotto wrote Albinoni's Adagio, not Albinoni," she mentioned to Estrella. "And Dewayne didn't necessarily kill Chac."

"I know. So what do you think about the name Basil if the baby's a boy?" Estrella asked without looking up. "Henry had an uncle named Basil."

"Basil Benedict? Sounds like an herbed egg dish in a restaurant with no view and pea green napkins. Cloth, of course. You're doing this to demonstrate how little my outbursts affect you, right?"

"Right." Estrella handed Bo a slip of paper. "Jorge told me Chac's manager, this Munson Terrell, has a business in San Diego. While you were out flirting with cancer, emphysema, and early death, I called the county recorder's office. This is it."

"Outback Odyssey, Incorporated?" Bo read aloud. "What's that?"

"I called the number and got a tape. Apparently Munson and his wife, Kee, do motivational workshops out in the desert. He's doing one for men this weekend. They're going to define their masculinity."

Bo envied her friend's ability at dramatic eye-rolling. "What's to define?" she asked.