Fresh Kills (2 page)

She'd put on weight. She'd colored and cut her hair, wearing it in a platinum pageboy that fitted her head like a cap. Her clothes were silver and mauve, flowing garments that gave an illusion of soft femininity. As I listened, I reminded myself that it was only an illusion. Marla was as armored as if her clothes and hair were made of stainless steel.

I was so busy studying her that it took me a minute to realize she was talking about adoptions. About me handling an adoption, to be exact. I shook my head and started to protest.

“I don't know anything about—”

“Cass, I'm telling you. It's no big deal.” My neck stiffened. Whatever Marla Hennessey was selling this time, I was determined not to buy. Everything in life that was hard for me—getting through law school, finding and then losing boyfriends, starting my own law practice—came under Marla's heading of “no big deal.”

“I've never handled an adoption before.” I said it flatly, as though that were the only problem.

“Adoptions are easy, Cass. A piece of cake.” Life to Marla was just one plate of angel food after another.

“It's exactly the same as a closing,” Marla went on, her nicotine voice rasping, “except that instead of a three-bedroom co-op in Park Slope, you're transferring title to a bouncing baby boy.”

Why were baby boys always bouncing? And when had Marla learned to reduce human life to “transferring title”?

“Jesus, Marla, that's a humane way of putting it.”

“Well, that's all adoption is. Legally speaking.”

Legally speaking. Our first day at NYU Law School came back to me in living color. The Torts professor handed around a yellow legal pad for us to sign in on. By the time it got to me, it contained more three-named individuals than a library of Victorian novels. Good old Sam the hippie had transformed himself into Samuel Lionel Ripnick. Ed Franklin, who still had acne on his chin, blossomed into E. Harrison Franklin III. And Marla listed herself as Marla Hennessey Schomberg, thus raising from the emotional dead her despised ex-husband. Anything for those elegant three names that spelled “Partner” to white-shoe law firms.

Except me.
Cass Jameson
, I wrote in bold black strokes, forgoing the middle name I've never liked anyway. Integrity above all. I was very young.

The funny thing was, nearly twenty years later, the three-piece suits with the three-name handles were doing pretty well, while I was always behind in the mortgage payments on my brownstone office-home. I doubted whether repainting the office window to read “Cassandra Louise Jameson” would help, but …

Could adoptions be all that difficult?

Could they be harder than standing before a judge and representing a woman who'd listened too long to the devils in her head and plunged two toddlers and an infant into near-boiling water?

What would it be like to handle a case with a real, live, unhurt baby? A baby with no cigarette burns on its legs, a baby who smiled at a kind world? Rojean Glover's children had never known a kind world, even before their fatal bath-time.

“Tell me how easy,” I said with a sigh. Resisting Marla Hennessey in full thrust had never been easy. And part of me, a very strong part, wanted to atone for Rojean.

How can you represent those people
?

It's a question I've been answering in one form or another for all the years I've practiced criminal law. How can you represent a rapist? What if you know for a fact your client is guilty? What if your client told you point-blank she was going to lie on the witness stand?

The last one is easy; you get off the case. Guilty is one thing, perjury another. Try explaining that fine ethical distinction at a cocktail party.

If you're going to practice in the criminal courts, you work out a philosophy that lets you answer the other questions. Answers like: I don't
know
he's guilty; I wasn't there, was I? Answers like: The Constitution requires a fair trial, with lawyers on both sides doing their best; by defending my client, guilty or not, I maintain the integrity of the criminal justice system.

Good answers. Most of the time.

But they didn't work when it came to Rojean.

I didn't know
, I told myself.

How could I know
?

You should have known
. The answer pounded at me, woke me up at two
A.M.
You should have known
. Her Family Court history was right there; she'd been charged with abuse four times. Each time, the judge returned the kids after a few months of foster care. And then the cycle of poverty, frustration, and ignorance would start again. Tonetta had a broken arm; she must have fallen out of her high chair. Todd cut his head open when he stumbled against the radiator. Trudine fractured her leg on the monkey bars in the playground. Always an answer, always an excuse.

I represented Rojean Glover on a charge of endangering the welfare of her children by leaving them alone for two days while she struggled to get back on public assistance so she could feed them. Six-year-old Tonetta, the oldest, was left in charge. When a neighbor called the Bureau of Child Welfare, the children were found hungry, dirty, and scared, and were taken away—“put in protective custody,” in the bureaucratese of BCW. Shoved into foster homes, where at least they had more to eat than one box of Cap'n Crunch cereal with no milk.

It was a triumph of legal representation. I commissioned my own social work study to compete with the official probation report and convinced the judge that if Rojean went into a special parenting program and saw a counselor once a week, she could learn the parenting skills she'd never gotten from her own junkie mother. Not that Rojean was an addict—she'd seen enough of drugs in her childhood to keep her clean—but she'd never seen a healthy family, so how could she possibly raise one?

How can you represent those people
?

By understanding them. By seeing them as people, not monsters, no matter what they've done. By finding the whole story, the one that appears between the lines of the official records. By listening instead of talking.

So why, two months into her counseling program, did Rojean listen to the voices that told her the kids were possessed by the devil and had to be cleansed in a scalding bath so they could enter the kingdom of heaven?

And why didn't I know it was going to happen? Why didn't I see the schizophrenia as well as the poverty and ignorance? Why didn't I prevent it?

The newspapers blamed the judge. A few mentioned my name in the last paragraph of the story. But the truth was that if a less conscientious lawyer had represented Rojean, those kids would be alive. In a foster home, but alive.

How can you represent those people
?

I didn't have any more good answers.

I came back to attention, realizing I'd drifted away while Marla outlined the ridiculous ease with which I could handle an adoption.

“I've got a horny white teenager about to pup. I've also got a desperate older couple who'd like to have a kid before they get their first Social Security check. So they've decided to bypass the adoption agency crap. They're paying the girl's medical expenses and a reasonable legal fee.”

“Where do I come in?” Marla wasn't the only lawyer taking a smoke break. The air was blue and thick; I wanted this conversation over.

“Judge Feinberg—a real pain in the ass—says the girl needs her own lawyer. That it's a conflict of interest for me to represent both the kid and the parents. As though every lawyer in the city hasn't done it that way since God was a teenager. So,” she went on, exhaling a stream of smoke that matched her silver silk, “I need someone to meet with the girl, get her consent, and file the papers in court. Easy, no?”

“Sounds easy enough,” I conceded. I thought back to the one or two things I knew about adoptions. “What if the girl changes her mind? Doesn't she have—what, thirty days?”

“God, Cass.” A drag on another cigarette was exhaled in an elaborate sigh. “Talk about looking gift horses in the mouth. The last time we had lunch all you could talk about was that broad who killed her babies, and now you want to open Pandora's box on this adoption before you even take the case. Trust me, this girl's not changing her mind.”

The holding pens at Brooklyn Criminal Court flashed before my eyes. Sitting eyeball to eyeball with Rojean, her head twitching, her voice guttural, her pupils needle points in her thin face. “Gotta get me out,” she mumbled, her hands working in her lap. “Gotta get me out to feed my babies.”

I'd looked down at the complaint just to be sure I'd read it right the first time. “… did cause the deaths of Tonetta, Todd, and Trudine Glover by means of …”

When we stood before the judge on the question of bail, she made her own plea directly to him: “Gotta get home, y'Honor. My babies alone, they need me.”

“And besides,” Marla went on, jarring me back to the smoke-filled present, “if this works out, there could be more. I place a lot of babies out of this group home on Staten Island, and as long as Feinberg's on the bench, the girls will need separate counsel. But I'd like to know I'm dealing with someone I can trust. I'd rather have you than some brother-in-law who questions everything and knows nothing. The last lawyer I had to deal with—God!”

“Hey,” I said, “just keep in mind the only thing I know about Family Court is where they keep the juvenile delinquents.”

“That's the beauty part, sweetie. I'll teach you everything you need to know. For starters,” she added, dropping her butt to the floor and crushing it with a black and silver pump, “we're not in Family Court. That's a poor people's court, and adoptive parents are used to better. So in the City we do adoptions in Surrogate's Court. Much nicer atmosphere. You'll see.”

If memory served, Marla had taught me everything I needed to know about wills in one long all-nighter just before the exam. I got a D in the course.

Marla'd said a D was no big deal.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

I felt as if I'd been listening to Marla talk for a month. I'd begged her not to smoke in the car, so she lit up and held the glowing cigarette out the window, in the fond belief that the smoke would waft into the damp March breeze instead of back inside the vehicle.

“… hope nothing's really wrong with her,” Marla said. She'd heard that the doctor who was scheduled to deliver Amber's baby was making a house call. “I mean, the last thing we need is a defective baby, right?”

“What happens if—”

“Depends,” Marla replied, her eyes fixed on the road. We were on Victory Boulevard, a main highway on Staten Island, an uncharted wilderness to an Ohio girl transplanted first to Greenwich Village and then to brownstone Brooklyn. From the window of Marla's cream-colored Beemer, it looked a lot like Cleveland, even down to the depressing St. Patrick's Day rain.

“When people adopt through an agency,” Marla explained, “they fill out a form listing what defects are acceptable and which are deal-breakers. Like they could handle a kid with a missing finger, but not a Down's syndrome baby. I thought it was a good idea, so I lifted a copy of the form when I left the agency, modified it a little, and now I get all my adoptive parents to sign it.”

I pondered this in silence, tired of punctuating everything Marla said with incredulous exclamations.
You mean people actually choose between cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis? If the kid's got a defect, they send it back to the manufacturer? What is this, adoption or buying stereo equipment, for God's sake
?

And I'd thought criminal practice was cold.

Marla took a left off Victory Boulevard, and we sped past the infamous Willowbrook State Hospital, euphemistically renamed the Staten Island Developmental Center—where Junior Greenspan might end up if he was lacking in the brain department. We then passed a giant enclosed mall, the first I'd ever seen inside the five boroughs.

“Looks a little like Cleveland,” I remarked.

“God, yes,” Marla agreed. “Depressing, no?”

Actually it made me feel slightly—very slightly—homesick for a place I hadn't lived in twenty years. And I cheered up a little, thinking that at least Amber, the birth mother, wasn't living in some hole waiting for her baby, but had a nice suburban home.

“Tell me again why Amber's in this group home,” I asked. “I mean, it's a private adoption, right? The agency has nothing to do with it, so why—?”

Marla shook an exasperated head. “God, Cass, if you'd just
listen
. I told you, Doc Scanlon thought she might have a little trouble with her pregnancy; she was behind on her rent and couldn't work, so he agreed to let her stay at the home until she gave birth. The agency's charging her for the room, but it's a lot cheaper than an apartment. It's all perfectly legal; every penny the adoptive parents spend on her support has to be documented in an affidavit before the court, so there's no hanky-panky. Just a logical solution to a simple problem.”

The car—a four-year-old BMW; the adoption business must pay pretty well—took a wide left onto a road marked Platinum Avenue and traveled behind the mall into a complex of low-rise garden apartments, each a depressing replica of its next-door neighbor.

The development showed a positively stunning lack of taste, but it was clean and suburban-nice; bare trees poked spindly branches into the wan March sky. Lawns were still winter-pale, with outcroppings of black-edged snow; near the houses an occasional snowdrop poked a white, bell-shaped head above ground.

Marla turned a few times and pulled up before a huge false-brick two-family house. A regular American house, like the one the Brady Bunch used to live in. There was no sign at all that this place was occupied, not by one big happy family, but by the flotsam and jetsam of not-so-happy families.