At noon on Saturday, Alston put the closed sign on the oak doors and locked up for the weekend. It had been a strenuous but successful week. The Democratic League and the Veterans of Foreign Wars had contributed toward the new children’s wing, the Plasterers and Cement Finishers Local 341 had volunteered their services, and the Monitor-Press was planning a series of articles on the Clinic and offering a prize for the best essay entitled “An Ounce of Prevention.”
Alston had just shoved the steel bolt into place when someone began pounding on the door. This frequently happened when the Clinic was closed for the night or the weekend. It was one of Alston’s dreams that someday he might have enough personnel and money to keep it open at all times, like a hospital, or at least on Sundays. Sunday was a bad day for the frightened.
“We’re closed,” Alston shouted through the door. “If you’re desperately in need of help, call Dr. Mercado, 5-3698. Have you got that?”
Pinata didn’t say anything. He just waited, knowing that Alston would open the door because he couldn’t turn anyone away.
“Dr. Mercado, 5-3698, if you need help. Oh, what the hell,” Alston said, and pushed open the door. “If you need — oh, it’s you, Steve.”
“Hello, Charley. Sorry to bother you like this.”
“Looking for one of your clients?”
“I’d like some information.”
“I charge by the hour,” Alston said. “Or shall I say that I accept donations for the new children’s wing? A check will do, providing it’s good. Come in.”
Pinata followed him into his office, a small, high-ceilinged room painted a garish pink. The pink had been Alston’s idea; it was a cheerful color for people who saw too many of the blues and grays and blacks of life.
“Sit down,” Alston said. “How’s business?”
“If I told you it was good, you’d put the bite on me.”
“The bite’s on you. This is after hours. I get time and a half.”
In spite of the lightness of his tone, Pinata knew he was quite serious. “All right, that suits me. Say ten dollars?”
“Fifteen would look prettier on the books.”
“On yours, sure, but not mine.”
“Very well, I won’t argue. I would, however, like to point out that one person in every five will—”
“I heard that last week at the Kiwanis.”
Alston’s face brightened. “That was a rousing good meeting, eh? I hate to scare the lads like that, but if fear is what makes them bring out their wallets, fear is what I have to provide.”
“Today,” Pinata said, “I’m just scared ten dollars’ worth.”
“Maybe I’ll do better next time. Believe me, I’ll try.”
“I believe you.”
“All right, so what’s your problem?”
“Juanita Garcia.”
“Good Lord,” Alston said with a heavy sigh. “Is she back in town?”
“I have reason to think so.”
“You know her, eh?”
“Not personally.”
“Well, consider yourself lucky. We don’t use the word incorrigible around here, but I never got closer to using it than when we were trying to cope with Juanita. Now, there’s a case where an ounce of prevention might have been worth a few pounds of cure. If she’d been brought to us when she first showed signs of disturbance as a child — well, we might have done some good and we might not. With Juanita it’s difficult to say. When we finally saw her, by order of the Juvenile Court, she was sixteen, already divorced from one man and about eight months pregnant by another. Because of her condition, we had to handle her with kid gloves. I think that’s where she got the idea.”
“What idea?”
Alston shook his head in a mixture of sorrow and grudging admiration. “She worked out a simple but absolutely stunning device for hog-tying the whole bunch of us: the courts, the Probation Department, our staff. Whenever she got in trouble, she outwitted us all with classic simplicity.”
“How?”
“By becoming pregnant. A delinquent girl is one thing; an expectant mother is quite different.” Alston stirred in his chair and sighed again. “To tell you the truth, none of us knows for sure if Juanita actually figured out this device in a conscious way. One of our psychologists believes that she used pregnancy as a means of making herself feel important. I’m not positive about that, though. The girl — woman, rather, she must be twenty-six or twenty-seven by this time — isn’t stupid by any means. She did quite well on several of her tests, especially those that required use of imagination rather than knowledge of facts. She could study an ordinary little drawing and describe it with such vivid imagination that you’d think she was looking at something by Van Gogh. The term psychopathic personality is no longer in vogue, but it certainly would have applied to Juanita.”
“What does she look like?”
“Fairly pretty in a flashing-eyed, toothy sort of way. About her figure I couldn’t say. I never saw her between pregnancies. The tragic part of it,” Alston added, “is that she didn’t really care about the kids. When they were small babies, she liked to cuddle them and play with them as if they were dolls, but as soon as they grew up a little, she lost interest. Three or four years ago she was arrested on a child-neglect charge, but once again she was in the throes of reproduction and got off on probation. After the birth of that particular child — her sixth, I think it was — she broke probation and left town. Nobody tried very hard to find her, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t be surprised if my own staff chipped in to pay her traveling expenses. Juanita herself was enough of a problem. But multiply her by six — oh Lord, I hate to think about it. So now she’s back in town.”
“I believe so.”
“Doing what? Or need I ask?”
“Working as a waitress in a bar,” Pinata said. “If it’s the same girl.”
“Is she married?”
“Yes.”
“Are the kids with her?”
“Some of them are, anyway. She got into a fight with her husband a few days ago. He claimed she was neglecting them.”
“If you don’t even know the girl,” Alston said, “where did you pick up all your information?”
“A friend of mine happened to be in the bar when the fight started.”
“And this is how you became interested in the prolific Juanita, through a friend of yours who happened to witness a fight?”
“You might say that.”
“I might say it but it wouldn’t be the truth, is that it?” Alston peered over the top of his spectacles. “Is the girl in trouble again?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Then why exactly are you here?”
Pinata hesitated. He didn’t want to tell the whole story, even to Alston, who’d heard some whoppers in his day. “I’d like you to check your files and tell me if Juanita Garcia came here on a certain date.”
“What date?”
“Friday, December 2, 1955.”
“That’s a funny request,” Alston said. “Care to give me a reason for it?”
“No.”
“I assume you have a good reason.”
“I’m not sure how good it is. I have one, though. It concerns a — client of mine. I’d like to keep her name out of it, but I can’t, since I need some information about her, too. Her name’s Mrs. James Harker.”
“Harker, Harker, let me think a min — Daisy Harker?”
“Yes.”
“What’s a woman like Daisy Harker doing getting mixed up with a bail bondsman?”
“It’s a long, implausible story,” Pinata said with a smile. “And since it’s Saturday afternoon and I’m paying you time and a half, I’d rather go into it on some other occasion.”