Turtle Baby (28 page)

Bo walked across the bare board floor and took Sarah Mae Singleton's hand. It was all sinew, and trembled slightly in Bo's. After a while the woman said as if closing a prayer, "His name be praised. Miz Bo Bradley, what you want with me?" In the grieving face Bo saw an enviable willingness to face just about anything.

"It's about a little Indian baby," she began, and settled on a wooden stool to tell Sarah Mae Singleton the whole story.

Forty-five minutes later Stoney and the husband, William, were invited in for sweet chicory coffee so strong Bo was surprised it didn't dissolve the spoon. When Stone admired a collection of bamboo fishing poles leaning in a corner, William Singleton insisted on giving him one.

"You done brought good news to this house," he said, staring at his steel-toed work boots. "I always thought Dewayne had the devil in him. But I was wrong. Sarah Mae know now at least one of her boys weren't bad, jus' sick in the head. That be a comfort to her."

Bo couldn't imagine what comfort until William Singleton described events leading to Dewayne's brother, Buster's, life sentence at Louisiana's maximum-security prison at Angola for the murder of a convenience store clerk in Breaux Bridge.

"I wish we could take in that little baby, even though Dewayne weren't the real daddy," Sarah Mae Singleton said as Bo and Stoney were leaving. "But we jus' too old. Buster lef' five children we tryin' to help as it is. You let me know what happens to that little Indian now, won't you?" she asked Bo.

"I will," Bo promised.

On the way back she and Stone Barrileaux admired the swamp in silence, lost in their own thoughts.

Later she and Andrew did much the same thing on flights to New Orleans from Lafayette, and then to San Diego. At the airport she hugged him briefly in the cool evening air, and then took a cab alone to her Ocean Beach apartment. The solitude was worth every penny of the twenty dollar cab fare. And she needed it to plan her next move, which involved a visit to the well-appointed Rancho Santa Fe home of a coldblooded murderer.

Bo phoned Estrella from the chipped phone on her kitchen counter as soon as she got home. Mildred, Es reported, was doing fine. Madge Aldenhoven wasn't. Nick Paratore, the other investigator in Madge's unit, had tangled with an octopus while skin-diving Sunday afternoon, and wouldn't be out of the hospital until Thursday. Cases up for investigation were being shuffled all over the system. Madge's case census was down by two thirds with Nick and Bo out, threatening her weekly lead in the number-of-cases-petitioned race.

"You'd better show up early tomorrow," Estrella warned, "because she'll expect you to file two more cases this week and that means one Wednesday and one Friday. You're going to have to haul ass, as they say."

Bo had long ignored Madge's insistence that every case under investigation required intervention by the court and the removal of children from their homes.

"You know I don't file petitions for court custody unless I really think it's necessary." She sighed. "That isn't going to change just because Nick Paratore never got over his first reading of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

"There's more bad news," Estrella went on. "When Madge heard that Dewayne Singleton was ... had passed away, she personally gave foster care the go-ahead to move Acito to a pre-adopt. They picked out a couple, and the authorization from the court came through yesterday afternoon. I told foster care I had to interview the new parents in order to close the investigations file on Acito, and they bought it. I got the address and made a visit."

"And ...?" Bo lit a cigarette and exhaled angrily at her refrigerator.

"And Acito's going to a pre-adopt foster home where he will eventually be adopted by the only Latin people I have ever met who hate music. Their name's Estan. And get this— they both work for the county. He's in revenue recovery and she's a guard at the county jail. His boss is the brother-in-law of one of the supervisors over in adoptions, who just happens to have been the one who kept the new foster care worker from getting fired when somebody noticed she'd lied about her education on her initial application. Turns out the foster care worker is living with the adoptions supervisor's husband's son from a previous marriage. Are you tracking this?"

"I'm tracking it," Bo answered through clenched teeth. "The bureaucracy's finest hour. They can't get away with this, Es. We can't let them."

"The Estans already have two kids of their own, two girls." Es sighed. "The missus told me they want to adopt so they'll be sure to get a boy. They plan to send him to military school."

"Oh, shit. When do the Dooleys have to relinquish Acito?"

"Tomorrow afternoon."

Bo glanced at her kitchen wall clock, a yard-sale find shaped like a coiled plaster snake. She'd repainted it in a beige and cream diamond design and glued tiny sunglasses to the snake's head. With the two-hour difference between New Orleans and San Diego, the time was still only six o'clock.

"I need to see the Dooleys," she told Estrella. "And somebody else. Could you keep Mildred until tomorrow morning? I'm going to pay a visit to Munson Terrell. It looks like he poisoned Acito and Chac, Es. I'm going to confront him. If he's guilty, I'll know it."

"It's not Terrell, it's Chris Joe Gavin. You're just going to make a fool of yourself. Stay home, Bo. I'll bring Mildred with me to the office tomorrow, and you can take her home on your lunch hour. Promise me you won't do anything rash, that you'll just stay home."

Bo had stretched the phone cord around the end of the counter so she could reach the refrigerator. Inside, what had once been a slab of pizza was now a landscape of greenish gray mold, but the skim milk was still okay. In a cabinet she found enough Golden Grahams to fill one of the new stoneware cereal bowls she'd found on sale at a china outlet only last month. Dinner.

"Can't promise," she told Estrella. "I don't lie to friends. But there's something I need for you to do. Would you mind calling every guitar store in South Bay and central San Diego? I've got the phone book right here. There aren't that many."

Estrella's tone could only be described as resigned. "Why?" she asked.

"It's a long shot," Bo answered through stale cereal, "but Chris Joe lives for music, and he uses silk-wrapped guitar strings. I noticed that the day I went down to Tijuana alone. Those strings are only available at special stores that cater to musicians. I know because my mother used to take me with her to get violin strings. He'll be in and out of one of those stores if he's still in San Diego, probably in the evening when the manager's not there. That's when the young guys hang out, talking about music until they go off to do gigs in the clubs starting at nine or so. Somebody may know him, know who he is. I want to get a message to him."

"What message?" Estrella asked in a singsong voice meant to reveal her dim view of the task.

"Just say Bo Bradley has a gig for the Ghost Pony, backing an Australian heavy metaler, and he should call right away."

"Heavy metaler?"

Estrella was beginning to sound deeply edgy.

"Yeah." Bo laughed. "I thought that was a nice touch. Terrell wears a silver bracelet inlaid with polished stones. Heavy metal. Get it?"

"Bo?"

"Yeah?"

"You've been taking your medications, right?"

"Religiously," Bo answered. "Don't worry, Es. I'm not losing it. And I'll call you when I get home."

"Roger," Estrella sighed, and hung up.

After a quick shower and a change into sweater, jeans, and tennis shoes, Bo drove the beach route from her apartment to La Jolla. In the long park fronting Mission Bay people clustered around barbecue grills, backlit by fading yellow light. The water seemed black and fathomless, its smooth surface ruffled only sporadically by a weak breeze. A smell of charcoal starter hung in the air.

Bo watched the picnickers, the teenagers on Rollerblades, the elderly couples walking fat little dogs, and wondered what these people would do if there were no such thing as a government agency called Child Protective Services. Would they rescue children from cruelty, or would they look the other way?

"My job shouldn't exist!" she yelled from her car window. "And what does it say about you that it does?"

No one heard across five lanes of traffic. And no one could have answered, anyway. In Africa they said it took a whole village to raise a child. But American cities weren't villages, Bo thought, so it took a whole bureaucracy just to keep children alive. Raising them, the decades-long process of socialization, had been forgotten.

But not for Acito. An unlikely sprout from a dying culture, this Maya baby was going to get a fair start in life if Bo had to break the law to ensure that. But how? Once set in motion, the CPS bureaucracy would be supported by the courts. It could not be stopped or altered.

Adoptions had certified the Estan home as suitable for a child. Foster care had changed Acito's status from long-term unadoptable to pre-adopt because the Court Unit, in the person of Madge Aldenhoven, had notified them that both the mother and the legal father were dead and there were no relatives. The actual adoption would take months to finalize, but in the meantime Acito would be moved to the adoptive home as a foster child for the sake of continuity. The plan was, on paper, in the best interests of the child.

Legally, the facts that one parent hadn't been a biological parent at all, and that one biological parent had apparently attempted to murder the child, were irrelevant. The system, like an enormous, blind hamster in its exercise wheel, simply ran. Bo pounded her fist on the steering wheel as Mission Boulevard became La Jolla Boulevard. The monster was running over Acito.

The Dooleys were home when Bo arrived unannounced. She'd half expected them to have left, taken Acito and run to Mexico where the idea of "kidnapping" an orphaned child from the jurisdiction of a court would still be met with disdain. The Latino culture would have sheltered Davy and Connie Dooley, but they hadn't grabbed that desperate option.

Connie was giving Acito a bottle as Davy limped to the door and invited Bo to enter. The softly lit room pulsed with sadness held in check, a sense of inevitability. The Dooleys barely looked at Bo.

"Have you come to take him now?" Davy asked. "They said—"

"No!" Bo blurted in the quiet room, startling the baby in Connie's arms. "I just found out what's happened. It's not right. Estrella, my officemate, checked out the adoptive parents. We don't think ... she doesn't think ... oh, hell, this whole thing sucks."

"We knew what the rules were when we signed on as short-term foster parents," Connie pronounced as if she'd said this several thousand times already. "And it's ridiculous that we think of Acito as ours. We've only had him for four days."

Her voice cracked as Acito reached over his bottle and patted her face. Crying, she stood and handed him to Bo.

"I love this baby," she said through tears. "I don't care what your damned agency thinks. We would have made good parents for him, but we couldn't even be considered. We're not good enough."

Turning her back on Bo, she left the room.

"I'm sorry," Davy Dooley said as Bo sat in the rocker and regarded the baby in her lap. The patch of white hair that would have earned the tiny boy adulation among the ancient Maya was more pronounced now. A deformity indicating the blessing of the gods. Bo wondered when Munson Terrell had figured out this was his son, since Chac had hidden the evidence with hair dye. Acito was watching the door through which Connie had vanished, his rosy brown right hand waving.

"Connie's right." Bo nodded. "But I don't know what to do about it."

"There isn't anything you can do, is there?" Davy said, his shoulders bent under a red T-shirt featuring the black profile of a timber wolf under the words "Save the Wolves." "We won't be accepting any more foster children, though. What's happened to us here ... it's what they told us not to do. They told us never to think we might really be parents, just to give a little love and be ready to let go. We couldn't do that. We failed."

Bo rubbed her cheek across Acito's soft hair, and thought of Chac. If the mother could have chosen, would she have picked these people to love and raise her son? Bo saw nothing but darkness in the conjecture. No way to know what Chac would have chosen. And Chac was dead. The person who would have to choose was sitting right here.

"I don't think loving, giving the best of yourself, can ever be equated with failing," she said slowly. "It's risky, and pain is always part of it, but it's not failure. I'd like for you and Connie to forget about what they told you in foster care training, and see what a wonderful gift you've been to Acito and Acito to you. You've changed each other's lives. Not everybody can have that experience."

Bo had no idea where her words had come from. Emotional crises usually sent her running for the nearest exit.

"Right," Davy Dooley replied dismally.

"Daaa-daaa," Acito crooned in Bo's arms, pronouncing the syllables that all babies, regardless of the language they would ultimately speak, produced first. Dada. In English, a diminutive for father. Bo let Acito stand in her lap, holding his brown hands and admiring the strong little legs beneath white terry cloth sweat pants. The matching shirt had an applique of "The Little Engine That Could" on the chest.

"I think I can, I think I can," Bo quoted from the children's classic.

"Daa-daa," Acito replied, making walking movements on Bo's stomach. "Daaa!"

He seemed to be trying to make a point.

"You've got two dads," she whispered to his drooly smile. "Only I'm afraid one's a killer, and the other one's dead. Legally the dead one was your father, although ..."

Legally! Bradley, stop emoting and start thinking. That's it. There was a way!

Bo stood Acito on the floor and walked him in sliding swoops toward Davy. The terracotta toes still curled inward at every step, she noticed, but that wouldn't last much longer. In another month he'd be walking. Just as soon as the first round of teething subsided.