Lullaby

Chapter 4

My second crib death assignment is in a concrete-block housing project on the edge of downtown, the deceased slumped in a high chair in the middle of the afternoon while the baby-sitter cried in the bedroom. The high chair was in the kitchen. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink.

Back in the City Room, Duncan, my editor, asks, «Single or double sink?»

Another detail about Duncan is, when he talks, he spits.

Double, I tell him. Stainless steel. Separate hot and cold knobs, pistol-grip-style with porcelain handles. No spray nozzle.

And Duncan says, «The model of refrigerator?» Little spits of his saliva flash in the office lights.

Amana, I say.

«They have a calendar?» Little touches of Duncan's spit spray my hand, my arm, the side of my face. The spit's cold from the air-conditioning.

The calendar had a painting of an old stone New England mill, I tell him, the waterwheel kind. Sent out by an insurance agent. Written on it was the baby's next appointment at the pediatrician. And the mother's upcoming GED exam. These dates and times and the pediatrician's name are all in my notes.

And Duncan says, «Damn, you're good.»

His spit's drying on my skin and lips.

The kitchen floor was gray linoleum. The countertops were pink with black cigarette burns creeping in from the edge. On the counter next to the sink was a library book. Poems and Rhymes from Around the World.

The book was shut, and when I set it on its spine, when I let it fall open by itself, hoping it would show how far the reader had cracked the binding, the pages fluttered open to page 27. And I make a pencil mark in the margin.

My editor closes one eye and tilts his head at me. «What,» he says, «kind of food dried on the dishes?»

Spaghetti, I say. Canned sauce. The kind with extra mushrooms and garlic. I inventoried the garbage in the bag under the sink.

Two hundred milligrams of salt per serving. One hundred fifty calories of fat. I don't know what I ever expect to find, but like everybody at the scene, it pays to look for a pattern.

Duncan says, «You see this?» and hands me a proof sheet from today's restaurant section. Above the fold, there's an advertisement. It's three columns wide by six inches deep. The top line says:

Attention Patrons of the Treeline Dining Club

The body copy says: «Have you contracted a treatment-resistant form of chronic fatigue syndrome after eating in this establishment? Has this food-borne virus left you unable to work and live a normal life? If so, please call the following number to be part of a class-action lawsuit.»

Then there's a phone number with a weird prefix, maybe a cell phone.

Duncan says, «You think there's a story here?» and the page is dotted with his spit.

Here in the City Room, my pager starts to beep. It's the paramedics.

In journalism school, what they want you to be is a camera. A trained, objective, detached professional. Accurate, polished, and observant.

They want you to believe that the news and you are always two separate things. Killers and reporters are mutually exclusive. Whatever the story, this isn't about you.

My third baby is in a farmhouse two hours downstate.

My fourth baby is in a condo near a shopping mall.

One paramedic leads me to a back bedroom, saying, «Sorry we called you out on this one.» His name is John Nash, and he pulls the sheet off a child in bed, a little boy too perfect, too peaceful, too white to be asleep. Nash says, «This one's almost six years old.»

The details about Nash are, he's a big guy in a white uniform. He wears high-top white track shoes and gathers his hair into a little palm tree at the crown of his head.

«We could be working in Hollywood,» Nash says. With this kind of clean bloodless death, there's no death agonies, no reverse peristalsis—the death throes where your digestive system works backward and you vomit fecal matter. «You start puking shit,» Nash says, «and that's a realistic-type death scene.»

What he tells me about crib death is that it occurs most between two and four months after birth. Over 90 percent of deaths occur before six months. Most researchers say that beyond ten months, it's almost impossible. Beyond a year old, the medical examiner calls the cause of death «undetermined.» A second death of this nature in a family is considered homicide until proven otherwise.

In the condo, the bedroom walls are painted green. The bed has flannel sheets printed with Scotch terriers. All you can smell is an aquarium full of lizards.

When someone presses a pillow over the face of a child, the medical examiner calls this a «gentle homicide.»

My fifth dead child is in a hotel room out by the airport.

With the farmhouse and the condo, there's the book Poems and Rhymes … Open to page 27. The same book from the county library with my pencil mark in the margin. In the hotel room, there's no book. It's a double room with the baby curled up in a queen-size bed next to the bed where the parents slept. There's a color television in an armoire, a thirty-six-inch Zenith with fifty-six cable channels and four local. The carpet's brown, the curtains, brown and blue florals. On the bathroom floor is a wet towel spotted with blood and green shaving gel. Somebody didn't flush the toilet.

The bedspreads are dark blue and smell like cigarette smoke.

There's no books anywhere.

I ask if the family has removed anything from the scene, and the officer at the scene says no. But somebody from social services came by to pick up some clothes.

«Oh,» he says, «and some library books that were past due.»