Where is the Baby? (3 page)

‘You can go now,' he told the teenager. ‘Thanks a lot.'

The girl at last lifted her eyes from the child, and said softly, ‘You're welcome,' then hurried away, visibly relieved to be going.

‘You okay, honey?' Brian asked.

‘I'm sleepy, Mister Brian. Where's the baby?'

‘Someone's coming to take pictures of you, and then the nurses will give you a bath before you see the doctor. After that, you'll be able to have a good, long sleep.'

‘But where's the baby?'

‘They're taking care of her. I think she'll be going home soon with her parents.'

‘She wanted her mama. She cried for her all the time.'

‘I'm sure she did.'

A pause, and then, ‘What's a bath, Mister Brian?' she asked apprehensively.

Jesus!
Brian thought. ‘You'll get washed up nice and clean. The nurses will probably find something for you to wear, too, instead of that T-shirt.' She was naked under the stained oversized shirt, and she reeked. Obviously it had been a very long time since anyone had taken real care of her. Dirt circled her neck, was crusted in the bends of her arms and legs. She was filthy from top to bottom. The visual evidence of how neglected she was revived his anger, made his teeth clench.

She yawned hugely, her whole body shuddering with it. ‘Please, can I see the baby?' she asked, looking past him at the doorway. ‘She liked me,' she said almost inaudibly. ‘She letted me hold her.'

‘I'll find out about that soon as I can. Meanwhile, you go ahead and rest until the photographer gets here. I can see you're very sleepy.'

‘I won't get in trouble? Toadman gets mad if I go asleep when he didn't say I could.'

‘You won't get in trouble. Just lie down. Go on now.' He reached for the cotton blanket on the shelf and unfolded it as she curled up on her side on the gurney. Covering her, he couldn't resist running a hand over her greasy chopped-off hair, noticing as he did that the roots were fair. The bastards had not only hacked off her hair, they'd been dying it dark – maybe to keep her from being recognized.

She lay gazing at him so intently that he found it unnerving. He gave her a smile he hoped was encouraging, and whispered, ‘It's okay, honey. Sleep.'

‘Okay, Mister Brian.' But her gaze remained on him.

‘Sleep,' he whispered. ‘It's okay. Just close your eyes.'

At last, as her eyes fluttered closed, he sat down on the one chair in the cubicle and breathed slowly and deeply, reluctant – as the candy striper had been, but no doubt for entirely different reasons – to take his eyes off her. Having given his promise to keep her safe, he had the arbitrary idea that if he looked away, even for a moment, she'd be back in harm's way. So he sat and watched her tuck her small soiled hands under her cheek and almost instantly fall asleep. He watched, promising himself he'd go check on the baby's status once the photographer arrived.

Stricken by her deplorable condition but filled with admiration for her ingenuity, he told himself that if her family couldn't be found, he'd tell DCF that he'd take her in. He couldn't imagine that he and Janet wouldn't qualify as foster parents. He knew Janet would be okay with it. When it came to kids, they were on the same wavelength. And Lucia would probably be thrilled to have a live-in playmate. Okay, it was a fantasy, but he hated the idea of this kid getting put into the system, maybe winding up in a situation as bad or even worse than the one she'd just escaped from. Granted there were some decent foster parents out there. But some of the people were pure scum, taking in kids just to get the monthly checks. Some of them did things that kept him up at night, sitting in the dark in the living room, trying to get the images out of his head and battling the urge to drink himself into oblivion.

His second month as a cop almost seven years earlier, he and Chuck took a call from one of the worst downtown areas. ‘Anonymous female caller says there's a kid screaming at this address,' the dispatcher told them. ‘Caller said there's always a kid screaming in there.' Brian remembered what they had found as if it was yesterday.

The battered and bloodied body of a skeletal seven-year-old on the front hall floor, limbs twisted in ways they were never meant to go. The skinny, ferret-faced, forty-something woman – whiskey voice and an aggrieved attitude – standing over the child, sucking on a cigarette, while Brian checked for a pulse he knew wasn't there.

‘Clumsy kid fell down the goddamn stairs again,' the whiskey voice said conversationally.

With open disgust, Chuck looked at the woman, saying, ‘Yeah, I can picture it. He fell. Sure. That's what happened. You didn't starve him or beat him or toss him down the fuckin' stairs. You didn't do any of that, no.' Without taking his eyes from her, he said, ‘Bri, check see if there's anyone else in this shithole while I give the homicide boys a buzz.'

‘What're you talking, homicide? What homicide? I told you. Goddamn kid fell. Was always falling, for chrissake.'

‘Lady, you don't want me tossing you down the stairs, shut the fuck up and sit your ass over there where I can keep an eye on you.'

‘You can't talk to me that way!'

‘I am talking to you that way, you evil piece of shit. Sit the hell down there and shut your face!'

She sat as told on an armchair just inside the dark, crowded living room, glaring at him: close-set eyes, hate-filled shiny beads.

Upstairs, two more emaciated little boys in stinking underwear huddled together on the stained mattress in a tiny bedroom like a cell: no sheets, a torn blanket, peeling wallpaper, bare floor, some ratty, reeking clothes heaped on the floor. ‘Two more up here,' Brian called down.

‘I'll get DCF in!' Chuck called back. Moments later Brian could hear him on the phone.

Then, as Brian brought the gaunt, trembling pair down the stairs – maybe five or six years old – Chuck squeezed the cuffs on the woman's scrawny wrists, tight as they'd go. The smaller boy whispered, ‘She killed Paulie. Always kickin' and punchin' him. Him screamin', beggin' her to stop but she wouldn't never, ever.'

The other boy suddenly shouted, ‘
i hope you get beat and beat and die like paulie
!
i hope they make you dead
!' Then he broke into noisy sobs. Two tiny, fleshless bodies shaking, hands clinging. Victims of an indoor atrocity.

Later, after two women from DCF wrapped the pair in blankets and took the kids away, after the body was removed, the homicide guys were doing the scene. Brian and Chuck were ready to transport her for booking, and the woman complained about the cuffs. ‘Loosen these things! They're too goddamn tight!'

In a voice thick with feigned concern, Chuck said, ‘Oh, poor you! Does that hurt?' and shoved her so hard her head smashed into the door frame. ‘Ooops!' Grabbing her by the hair, pushing her head down, he tossed her into the back. ‘Gotta be careful there, Missus, watch what you're doing. Next thing ya know, being so clumsy, you could fall down the stairs and hurt yourself.'

Sliding behind the wheel, in a low voice, Chuck said, ‘Hate these evil fuckin' people, hate these fuckin' dead kid calls.'

Six months later, Chuck got himself promoted to a desk. ‘Can't take the ugly anymore, Bri,' he said apologetically. ‘Come see me now 'n' then, 'kay? Lemme know how you're doing.'

Brian kept handling the calls with his new partner, Hal. He couldn't have said why, until today when dispatch sent them to the Kmart to see this grimy tyke, with intelligence just shining off her, as if she was lit from inside. So much fear, yet such courage. And, underneath it all, whimsy.

So maybe the seven years had been preparation for today, for dealing with this little girl who belonged to some family that might come rushing to claim her. He sure as hell hoped so. But if not . . . if not . . .

Determined to handle the case with the greatest care, the chief put out a call to Connie Miller. With the advent of mandatory sensitivity training in the department some months earlier, she'd been called upon to do the photography for new cases with increasing regularity, primarily in instances of aggravated rape or assault involving young females or children and, only sometimes, adult women. As far as the department was concerned, her greatest asset was that no matter how traumatized the victim might be, Connie managed to get the shots. Her congenial kindness enabled her to deal with the subjects without adding to their pain. She'd even been known to make some of them laugh. How she did it was a source of wonder to the men in the department. The few women on the force understood her magic from the start.

Connie had inherited her mother's clear deep-set blue eyes and her father's wide nose and heavy jaw. She was less than five feet tall, a plain-looking woman – until she smiled and became lovely in a singularly compelling fashion. Her smile was like an unexpected gift, containing great heart and gentle humor. When she came to the ER to document their injuries on film, she treated every female with quiet respect. She took a moment to lift the hair away from a girl's eyes, or made funny, self-deprecating remarks – about the difficulty of buying size five shoes, or about her forays into children's departments to buy clothes, or about her mad mop of black curly hair. ‘Imagine trying to persuade someone to cut this.' She'd smile and tug at a handful of glossy curls. ‘About as easy as finding a sweater in the kids' department that doesn't have ABCs or teddy bears on it.'

Keeping up a constant, distracting patter in a low voice that had a melodic, slightly foreign cadence, she got the pictures taken before the subject had a chance to feel ashamed or embarrassed. Connie swept around the woman or child like a small whirlwind, chatting and clicking away, the speed-winder zizzing as she shot thirty-six exposures which, without exception, were sufficient. Finished, she'd tenderly wrap her subject in the hospital gown, or sheet or blanket – whatever the nursing staff had given them – and with an affectionate smile, or squeeze of the hand or pat on the arm, she'd say, ‘You're just wonderful. Thank you so much for helping me.' Then she'd leave, go directly to the nearest rest room, close herself into a stall, and either throw up or weep. Minutes later, her emotions once more rigidly under control, she'd be headed to the police darkroom or to her studio to process the film.

She was preparing to go shoot a golden wedding anniversary cocktails-and-canapés bash when she got the call to photograph the Kmart child. Although she was habitually early for assignments, she took a couple of minutes to phone and let the hosts know she might be a little late. Then she grabbed her camera bag, threw in extra film, and went downstairs to the car. As she headed off to the hospital, gearing up for the coming encounter, she was reminding herself as always that she was doing her small part to help right a terrible wrong.

The only child of holocaust survivors, she'd grown up not only translating her parents' native Polish into English but also interpreting their fraught silences and sudden fear-filled starts. She'd spent countless hours of her childhood at the library, reading what survivors had written about their experiences, and studying large-format compilations of black-and-white photographs: heaps of bodies tossed into pits, warehouses filled with mountains of suitcases, bins brimming with jewelry or with hair. The worst images were of the hollow-eyed skeletons covered with skin, living corpses in the last stage of starvation: the Musselmen (a corruption of the German word for Moslem,
Musselmannen
, so-called because their weakness caused them to sway from side to side, or back and forth, giving the impression they were bowing in prayer), staring out from behind wire enclosures; cattle cars disgorging hundreds of terror-stricken men, women and children; ominous bathing rooms where poison gas, not water, emerged from the shower heads; the open doors of massive ovens where bones could be seen in the ashes. She studied the photographs obsessively. Then she returned home and used her expanding comprehension to deal with her parents who, in the early immigrant years, were fearful and uneasy, prepared to take flight at the merest hint of perceived danger: a car door slamming in the night, heavy footsteps on the stairs, voices in the hallway outside their apartment, unexpected knocking at their door. So many things aroused the sleeping fear.

With time, though their fear diminished, her mother and father almost never spoke of what they'd endured, and eventually Connie gave up asking. She knew that for them to speak of their time in hiding and then in the camp was to relive the horror in every minutely recalled detail. They could scarcely bear the scenes recreated during their sleeping hours that caused them to awaken abruptly, crying out, hearts pounding with dread in the night-time urban stillness.

Gradually, the effects of the past seeped beyond their consciousness to penetrate their daughter's, endowing her with a substantial measure of survivor's guilt that seemed only to be briefly assuaged by confronting modern horrors. So when a detective she'd dated for a time had asked if she'd come photograph a young rape victim, she had, after the briefest consideration, said she would. It was an excruciating experience, but strangely rewarding.

What she saw on the face of that first twelve-year-old was identical to what she'd seen in photographs from the camps: horror and disbelief combined with physical pain to round and glaze the eyes so that they stared inward at the violation, while simultaneously looking blankly outward, focusless, in shock. Her heart, her very being seem to expand in order to absorb and share the trauma, in some small way making it a little bit less by offering kindness and consideration as balm for the unseeable injuries.

Subsequently, Connie never refused the work, regardless of prior commitments, because it became an ongoing repayment of a debt of gratitude for the lives of her parents and for her personal freedom, a continuing effort to be among the Righteous.