“This is just the first installment,” I whisper cryptically, looking across the waiting room at my new client, a young woman who looks, as most women do these days to me, young enough to be my daughter.
Julia tugs at the imitation black leather skirt that barely covers her crotch. Not a woman to let the weather dictate her wardrobe, she seems to outdo herself each day. Her hips should sweat off a couple of pounds before lunch, and she won’t even have to stand up.
“Oh sure!” she says.
“And the Tooth Fairy’s gonna place it under your pillow.”
I resist the temptation to tell her why I took this case. If it doesn’t pan out, I’ll never hear the end of it.
“What’s my new client’s name again?” I ask, bending my head so the woman won’t read my lips. From a distance of twenty feet, she looks as fresh and wholesome as the proverbial farmer’s daughter. With thick brown hair framing a face as round as a globe, her greatest asset is her youth.
“Jeez!” Julia huffs.
“When are you getting tested for Alzheimer’s?” She prints a name on her pad. I try to focus without my reading glasses. Gina Whitehall, I make out, squinting at Julia’s grandiose but nearly illegible handwriting.
“Before long you’re gonna need a map just to get to work.”
“You’ll be old one day, too,” I mutter, about to pass out from Julia’s overly sweet cologne. For the better part of every morning she will give off an odor that suggests she has spent the previous night swimming in a vat of artificially flavored fruit juices whose bottom is pure NutraSweet.
“You’re not trying to look down my blouse, are you?”
she asks suspiciously, as I straighten up.
“Not for all the tea in China,” I assure her, dutifully smiling at my new client. About once every couple of months Julia wears a see-through blouse with a purple bra underneath and then threatens to sue for sexual harassment if any of the lawyers lose eye contact with her for even an instant.
As I escort Gina Whitehall back to my office, Julia, apparently through for the day, frowns at me as she picks up one of the innumerable women’s fashion magazines she brings to the office. My friend Clan Bailey, whose office is around the corner from mine, has remarked that as Julia’s skirts get shorter and her blouses sheerer, the reception area is taking on the atmosphere of a cheap escort service. As little money as Clan and I make from practicing law, maybe we should consider starting one.
“Mr. Page,” Gina Whitehall says in a shy voice as she sits down across from me, “I can’t pay you very much.”
What else is new? I stare at this slightly plump, buxom girl, who looks as if she ought to be studying for a geometry quiz instead of sitting in a lawyer’s office. She is wearing the uniform of the young: jeans, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes without socks. She is fair-skinned and has bright Kewpie-doll blue eyes that will forever make her appear younger than her chronological age.
“Well, don’t worry,” I lie boldly, making a virtue out of necessity, “you can’t be old enough to be in too much trouble.”
Red splotches of color appear on both cheeks like warning lights on a dashboard; and as quickly as the most tormented of my female divorce clients, she bursts into tears. I push the box of tissue toward her, wishing I had canceled her appointment.
“They want to take my baby!” she gasps between sobs.
There is no mascara or makeup to smear, and the tissue comes away clean from her face. Though I am reconciled to the firestorm of raw sensations my female clients often bring to my office, I continually marvel at the differences between the sexes. Popular culture now teaches men we should be crying, too-”getting in touch with our feelings”-as if they were physical objects that could be aroused as easily as an adolescent penis. Yet, somehow, I doubt if women (despite what they say) would be quite as attracted to us if we, too, went around sobbing.
“Your parents?” I guess. Though she seems on first glance more intelligent than this, she has probably dropped out of school and married a boy whose idea of success is fixing flats the rest of his life. Not so discreetly, I look at my watch. I’d like to be on the road by ten. Maybe one of my friends on the floor (Clan?) would like this melodrama. It will probably be the kind of case that requires a mediator rather than a litigator.
“No!” she wails.
“The Department of Human Services.”
I try not to wince, realizing how wrong I am. This is guaranteed to be a mess.
“Neglect or abuse?” I ask as gently as I can. My prospects of getting paid even fifty dollars seem dimmer than ever. It is always the poor who end up losing their kids.
Gina grits her teeth and then forces out the words:
“They’re saying I deliberately burned Glenetta in a tub of hot water, but it’s not true!”
Struck by the ferocity of her denial, I wait for additional tears, but there are none. Yet, almost no one, in my experience, unless confronted with indisputable evidence, would admit to such a horrible act. Surely she does not know I was once a caseworker for the same agency that is after her child. The burn cases were so nauseating I came to prefer investigating sex abuse.
“How bad,” I ask, fearing the worst, “is she burned?”
“Real bad,” the girl gasps.
“They say she might die.”
My stomach turns at the thought of the pain that has been inflicted on this child. If she does die, Gina will be facing a murder charge. And why not? No frustration, no matter how great, can justify an adult’s torturing a child.
Even if it were an accident (and doctors can form an opinion by the pattern of the burns), the guilt she is surely feeling must be overwhelming. Even sixteen years later I remember the night I pinched Sarah’s leg because I could not get her to stop crying. I lied to Rosa when she came in from work, telling her Sarah had run into the edge of the living room coffee table.
“Were you alone?” I ask, hoping she wasn’t. Sometimes, it is a boyfriend or babysitter who does these things.
“Yes,” she says, her voice trembling.
“I was giving her a bath and went downstairs to get a towel. I heard her scream. By the time I got back up to her, she was already burned. I pulled her out right away, but it was too late.”
She seems believable. The stress in her voice gives it the tinny quality of an old woman’s; however, her anxiety could be the result of fear and guilt, a combination guaranteed to add years to even the most baby-faced suspect.
Creasing my tie, I fold my arms across my chest, not willing to make this explanation any easier for her. This case, if I take it, will be a lot simpler if she admits to hurting the child deliberately. She adds, her voice seemingly puzzled, when I do not reply, “She must of turned on the hot water. There was only a couple of inches of barely warm water in the tub when I went downstairs.”
In silent rage I squeeze my arms, wanting to rail at her.
If she isn’t a criminal, she is criminally stupid. Still, I could easily have burned Sarah when she was a baby. The phone rings; someone knocks at the door; lapses of attention occur with even the best parent. Yet, somebody hasn’t believed her, and despite the incompetence of many of the caseworkers, the medical support the state agency receives from St. Thomas is first-rate.
“When you got her out of the tub, what’s the first thing you did?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, she says, “I called nine-one-one.”
About to nod, I check myself. This is the right answer.
If there is any evidence of delay, she won’t have a prayer.
My mind travels back seven years to my days as an investigator for the state and retrieves terms such as “stocking and glove burns” which are descriptive of the injury to the flesh at the water line. Too, if a child has been held down in scalding water, the buttocks will be less burned, because the porcelain won’t be as hot as the temperature of the water. A “doughnut burn” is the delightful phrase I recall.