Midnight Baby

CHAPTER 20

“The cockroaches in the Cabo jail were bigger than the rats?” I said, my third guess.

“Nope.” Mike fiddled with the handcuffs dangling from his turn signal. We had driven back to downtown L.A. and traded the Blazer for his city car. Now we were exiting the San Bernardino Freeway, stalled behind an endless line of red brake lights. “Three strikes, you’re out. No more guesses.”

“Good. Because I don’t like this game. Anyway, for delivering George to you, you owe me big-time. Tell me, why did Elizabeth agree to fly home?”

“Oldest story in the world.” He made the handcuffs spin. “The boyfriend, Ricco Zambotti, bribed his guards to turn their backs, then took off with the boat while Elizabeth was still in custody. Last seen, he was headed due west, straight for the two-hundred-mile limit.”

“So Elizabeth got mad and spilled her guts, right?”

“That’s it. According to her, Ricco did it all. When she found Randy’s body, she called Ricco for a little hand-holding. She said it was his idea to sink the corpse, give her a little time to loot the bank accounts. Who could blame her? she said. And it was Ricco who gave Hillary a bad time, telling her that Randy had abandoned her. That Randy wasn’t her real father anyway.

Elizabeth said she was just awfully upset, and hurt, when Hillary took off. She said she sent Ricco out to find the kid and bring her home. Instead he slit her throat and tried to make it look like the same killer who had sliced Randy, in case Randy ever bobbed up.”

“She was so upset with Ricco that she took him on a cruise?”

Mike gave me a sidelong leer. “I’m thinking maybe I should let you and Leslie get the truth out of her. There’s a flashlight in my trunk.”

“Anytime,” I said. “Anytime.”

I was thinking a great big old hammer might be helpful, too, when Mike pulled up in front of MacLaren Hall.

“I need the receipt for the tires,” he said as he got out.

“I told you I’d take care of it.”

“No need. I’ll turn it in to the department. The boss said he can find funds to cover it.”

Couldn’t argue with that. I opened my bag and handed him the receipt. He didn’t even look at it when he put it into his pocket.

In the last hour of daylight, the MacLaren play yard was full of kids and full of racket. At one end of the asphalt six or eight of the older boys were pitched against some of the teachers in a rowdy game of half-court basketball. A bruising round of dodge ball took up the other end of the pavement, with hopscotchers and jump-ropers filling the space between. The lines between the games slopped over now and then, but no one seemed to be bothered by proximity.

Sly, my little loner, was off on the grass away from the other children, playing hit-and-run softball with a single adult. The young man with him was tall and slender, with dark shoulder-length hair and a single stud earring that caught the low sun. I pegged him for a volunteer, or maybe a college student collecting clinic hours for class credit.

The young man pitched a slow, straight ball at Sly’s bat, talking to Sly the whole time, encouraging, joking with him. Sly slugged the ball, a bouncing grounder, and took off on a shambling run toward the single base. The man snagged the ball barehanded and went after the boy, full out, giving him no slack. About halfway to the bag, man caught boy in an easy tackle around the legs and wrestled him to the ground.

“You’re out,” he said over and over, using the ball to tickle Sly’s midsection.

Sly was screaming. With delight, I thought. Before I could stop Mike, he lit out toward the dog pile, his marathon-runner legs pumping for all they were worth, suitcoat flapping in the wind.

“Wait, Mike,” I yelled, sprinting after him. I didn’t want him to interfere. To me it looked like the sort of good-natured roughhousing Sly had doubtless missed out on. But Mike had left the starting blocks first, and he’s just plain old faster than I am.

To my utter and absolute astonishment, when Mike reached the tussle on the grass, instead of breaking it up, he joined in. Mike pounced and somehow rolled up on his back with his legs locked around the young man’s midsection. Sly squealed with joy.

“Tickle him, Sly,” Mike urged. “Get him in the ribs. Atta boy. Now the other side.”

I stopped at the edge of the fray. They all stopped and looked up at me, all three of them red in the face and sweaty and giggly. To my further astonishment, the young man relaxed his head back against Mike’s chest and Mike kissed him, a wet one, square on the cheek.

“See?” Sly said to me with mock disgust. “I told you the cop was a faggot.”

“Maggie,” Mike said, panting, “meet Michael.”

“Hi,” I said, dumbfounded. Here, at last, was Mike’s seventeen-year-old son. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Me, too,” he gasped, looking at me through the same gray eyes as his father’s. Very disconcerting.

Sly, who had collapsed atop Michael, started in tickling again. Mike released Michael and rolled away. The youth bounded to his feet holding the squirming, scrawny boy in a headlock.

“Save the energy for the arithmetic.” Michael knuckled Sly’s head, sending out a spray of grass clippings. “We have two whole pages of it to do, squirt. We’d better get started, because I have to go home and do my own homework.”

Reluctantly, Sly settled down, still breathing hard, still grinning so big his face might have split. He looked up at Michael with absolute adoration. I didn’t blame him.

Mike got up and brushed himself off, managing to shoulder-bump the others a few times as he rose. This was a new side of Mike. I roughhouse with my daughter, I tease with Mike. But it’s pretty tame stuff in comparison.

They were all looking at me, as if I had come with some message. Or a wet blanket. I said, “We’re going to get dinner, Michael. Will you two join us?”

“We already ate here,” Michael said.

“Pig vomit,” Sly confirmed.

“And bats’ asses,” Michael added. “It was great.”

I couldn’t laugh yet. Watching Michael gave me such a strange feeling. Here was a younger, probably more handsome, maybe more saintly version of Mike. Whatever, he was Mike’s product. A magnificent product. Like a rush I was hit with how deeply I adored Mike and everything about him. I stood there as if stricken, gasping as if I had been wrestling. I think Mike mistook my quietude for disapproval.

“Girls,” Mike said, grabbing me in a headlock. “Girls can’t take it.”

“Can too,” I said, punching his hard backside. “Just not now.”

He kissed my cheek then, and let go. “Can’t take it, but they sure can dish it.”

Michael was watching us. “We saw one of your films in sociology, something about old people who live alone. I told the class my dad’s girlfriend made it and no one believed me.”

“Want me to write a note to the teacher?” I asked, jangled by the sound of “my dad’s girlfriend.”

“No big thing.” He shrugged. “Dad says you’re working on a film now. I wouldn’t mind tagging along on a shoot.”

“Me, too,” Sly chirped.

“Fine. I’ll put you both to work.”

Mike tucked in his shirt, straightened his tie. He said, “Sly, we brought you another picture. Want to see it?”

Sly’s entire being lit up, given another chance to nail the girl’s killer. I pulled a manila envelope out of my bag and handed it to Michael. There was a single eight-by-ten glossy inside that Guido had managed to get for us from the files of Central Casting. Elizabeth had told Mike that Ricco Zambotti was an actor.

Ricco had looks, big pale eyes with long Mel Gibson lashes, curly blond hair, big white teeth. The statistics printed under the face claimed he was six-three, 190 pounds, thirty-four-inch waist, forty-eight-inch chest. Martha had said Elizabeth’s daytime sneak-in friend was beefy. Ricco qualified as beefy. Prime, maybe, but still beefy.

Ricco’s coloring was a problem. When Sly first described the man he saw slit Pisces’ throat, he had said the man had dark hair.

Michael sat back down on the grass, Sly tucked in beside him. Together they looked at Ricco for a long time.

Mike wandered over behind them. “What do you think, Sly?” Sly squinted up his little fox face. “Dunno.”

I fished some felt-tip pens out of the bottom of my bag and sat down beside Sly.

I offered him the pens. “One time, Hilly colored in the hair of a picture of a little blond girl to see if that would make her look more like Hilly.”

“She told me.” Sly took a black pen from my hand and took off the cap. “Only it wasn’t her who done it. It was her mother. She told Hilly she was kidnapped and all these people were looking for her to get her.”

Mike frowned. “Get her how?”

“Like, do her,” Sly said. “Just like they done.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this sooner?” Mike asked.

Sly shrugged. “Guess I didn’t think of it. Guess it just came to me now.”

“Did she say who these people were?”

“No. Except that the only person in the world who knew and could save her from them was her father. And she didn’t know where he was.”

Sly bent over the picture and started to color in the hair. He had made only a couple of strokes before he looked up at Michael with anxiety. “I messed up. I can’t color good. I can’t do it.”

“Tell you what, squirt.” Michael took the pen from the tense little fingers. “You tell me what you want, and I’ll do it with you. Okay?”

Relieved, Sly slumped against Michael’s shoulder and gave him instructions: make the hair longer, fix the eyebrows, make him look mean.

“That’s him,” Sly triumphed as Michael filled in the blond hair with dark ink. “I swear it, that’s the asshole I seen.”

It was my turn to ruffle his spiky hair. “You’re sure?”

“I said I swear, didn’t I? That’s him. That’s the guy I seen. He was following us around for a couple of days, you know, cruising in that hot ‘vette.”

I said, “I’m surprised Hilly would go with a man who had been following her around if she thought someone was out to get her.”

“We were gonna get him first, like I told you before,” Sly said, his voice catching. “We had it all worked out. This guy kept tellin’us he had something to tell Hilly, like some message from her mom and dad. People would say that all the time to us to make us go over to them. Normally, we’d just keep walkin’. Hilly wanted to talk to that one guy’cuz of his car. She wouldn’t tell me why the car freaked her. She was gonna make him show her his ID or she wouldn’t talk to him. The deal was, when he got out his wallet to show her, I was gonna grab it and get the hell out of there. Then she’d know who he was.”

“If Hilly had told you her father had a car just like that Corvette,” I said, “would you have believed her?”

“Shit, no. No one has a car like that.”

“Maybe that’s why she didn’t tell you.”

“Sly, my man,” Mike said, “what you just told us is important. I think there may be other things you haven’t gotten around to sharing yet. When they come to you, have your social worker call me, will ya? We need your help to fry this man.”

Sly dropped the picture, like a contaminated thing, onto the grass in front of Michael. Mike picked it up and put it back into its envelope.

Michael got to his feet, lifted Sly like a bundle of sticks, and stood him on the asphalt. “Homework time, kid.”

The sun had disappeared below the line of buildings across the street, leaving the play yard lashed with long blue shadows. Most of the games had dispersed, and the children were moving inside, in clumps of two and three, taking their shadows with them. We four linked arms, I with Mike, Mike with Michael, Michael with Sly, in an irregular sort of conga line, shadows water-dancing behind us.

At the dorms, Mike turned to his son. “How late will you be?”

“Maybe an hour. Mom wants her car by eight-thirty.” Mike squeezed Michael’s shoulder. “Take care.”

“Dad?”

“What?”

“I got my letter from Cornell today.”

“And?”

“I’m accepted.”

Mike grabbed him in a bear hug. “I’m proud of you.” Michael smiled as if he had a sudden pain. Mike saw it and drew back.

“It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” Mike asked.

“I thought so.” Michael looked over at Sly, who was swinging from the step railing. “There’s a lot to think about.”

“Take your time,” Mike said. “You’ll figure out what’s right.”

“I hate it when you say that, Dad. Just once I want you to tell me what I should do.”

“I always tell you what you should do,” Mike said.

“Yeah. You say I should do what’s right.”

“Exactly.”

“Michael!” Sly called, hanging upside down from the railing. “Kiss the faggot and come on. We don’t have all night.”

“You’d better go,” Mike chuckled. “Your destiny may be calling.”

“Later,” Michael said, giving Mike a quick hug. “Nice to meet you, Maggie.”

“Bye,” I said. I watched him jog off toward the lighted doorway, recognizing a lot of Mike in him. It gave me an odd sensation, as if I were peering through a window into the past and seeing a distorted image of young Mike.

As we walked out toward the car, I took Mike’s hand. “He’s a great kid, Mike. You’ve done a good job.”

“His mother gets a lot of the credit.”

I reached up then and kissed his five-o’clock shadow. “I just plain old love you, Mike. But I still don’t know what to do about you.”

“Take your time,” Mike said, smiling down at me. “You’ll figure out what’s right.”