“Alice,” Rosario Bustamante repeated, nodding as if she approved of the name and it was key to her decision. “So are they going to charge her? Do they have a case?”
“I’ll answer the second question first-no. They have nothing to connect her to this except her own well-intentioned efforts to help them. It’s outrageous the way they’ve jacked her up just because a child has gone missing and the child happens to bear a resemblance to Cynthia Barnes’s new daughter. Or so Cynthia Barnes told the cops. She’s not beyond making this all up, you know. She’s quite vengeful.”
Rosario’s eyebrows shot up. Her brows had been overplucked into sideways parentheses. Clearly, she could not have sculpted such symmetrical shapes with her own stubby hands, but it was hard to imagine a woman paying someone to achieve such an odd effect. Rosario’s appearance became more and more disturbing the longer one looked at her. There was a slight seediness to her-the odd brows, the misapplied lipstick, and, Sharon couldn’t help noticing, the toes peeking out of her sandals. The blood-red paint had been sloppily applied, missing a few nails altogether.
“I don’t want to take on Judge Poole’s family, even indirectly,” Rosario said. “That’s a lose-lose for me.”
“Agreed. I would never go at them. But I’m not going to sit by and see them try to destroy Alice twice over. They’re not the victims here. Besides, we kowtowed a bit too much to the family’s feelings the first time around.”
“How so?”
“We-the other lawyer and I-agreed to a compromise so the girls could get seven years, keeping them inside until they were eighteen. We broke it into three charges-manslaughter, kidnapping, and larceny-and gave them three, three, and one.”
“Larceny?”
“Would you believe the Barneses’ baby carriage cost seven hundred and fifty dollars? Carriages are like cell phones, I guess. The light ones cost the most.”
Rosario’s very gaze was a judgment, an assertion that she would never make such a bum deal for a client.
“You have to understand the context.” Sharon worked hard to keep her voice slow and measured, anxious not to sound defensive. “Cynthia Barnes was going to make a big stink. She was going to marshal all her father’s cronies and lobby the General Assembly to drop the age of juvenile eligibility. She wanted to make it legal for ten-year-olds to be tried as adults, depending on the felonies committed. Ten! If she couldn’t put Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller away for life, then she’d make sure the next child who screwed up did serious time. It was a disaster waiting to happen. And the kids who bore the brunt of it would have been poor black kids in Baltimore.”
“But your responsibility was to your client,” Rosario said. “Not to your future clients.”
Sharon had been sitting on the edge of the Stickley, bare feet tucked beneath her. Rosario’s rebuke was not new to her-she’d had plenty of time to second-guess herself over the years. Hearing the words said out loud made her yearn to fling herself out of the chair and pace in frustration. But her feet were filled with pins and needles, so she stayed where she was.
“Why do you think,” she said softly, “that I’ve asked you here? Why do you think I still care? I know better than anyone what I did. They had the girls’ statements, in which each implicated the other, but the physical evidence was ambiguous.”
“Ambiguous?”
“Based on the autopsy, Olivia Barnes’s death could have been SIDS. Or brought on by shaken baby syndrome.”
Rosario smiled. “Sharon, don’t shit a shitter. As I recall, there was never any doubt that the girls did the deed. The main question was which one actually picked up the pillow and smothered the child, and whether it was an act of aggression or dumb panic.”
Sharon valued Rosario’s candor, for she knew how it felt to be misunderstood for speaking one’s mind, for not wasting time with artificial niceties and oh-so-careful words.
“Alice was an accessory to one crime, the kidnapping. But whatever happened, the fact remains that she did her time-more time than some grown-ups do for manslaughter. She paid society back, okay, and now society is harassing her, trying to make her a scapegoat because of some freak resemblance and a coincidence of geography.”
“Sharon-” Rosario’s voice was as calming as a hand on one’s sleeve. “Sharon, I would really like a drink.”
It was impossible to deny such a straightforward request without asking Rosario straight-out if she was loaded. “Sure,” she said, stamping her feet before she stood, to get the feeling back in them. “I have vodka and scotch.”
“Scotch with a scooch of ice.” Rosario laughed at her own word-play. She had a gravelly, masculine laugh. Gossip, hardened into legend, maintained she was the illegitimate daughter of one of the city’s most beloved mayors, and anyone who had seen his portrait in City Hall had to believe it was true. Daniel Florio in drag would have been a dead ringer for Rosario Bustamante. But Rosario didn’t encourage the speculation, because her accomplishments would appear less impressive if there was a powerful patron in the wings, manipulating her rise. Rosario Bustamante’s official biography was a Horatio Alger tale of a girl transcending her roots as the daughter of a Mexican cleaning woman to become the city’s best criminal defense attorney. But there were tiny hints of connectedness imbedded in her résumé. St. Timothy’s for high school, then Vassar and Yale Law. Sure, she could have done it all on scholarship. But how would a cleaning woman have known to aim her clever teenage daughter at the city’s private school system? Someone had been whispering in Rosario Bustamante’s ear since she was very young.
Sharon brought Rosario her drink, no longer caring if her barware earned her the woman’s admiration.
“Rosario-I can’t do this without you.”
“I’m not sure you can do it with me. Pro bono holds less attraction for me as I near retirement age.” She bared her teeth in a self-mocking grin. Everyone in the courthouse knew it would be decades before Rosario Bustamante died, probably at her desk, or in a summation. But she wouldn’t shuffle off this mortal coil before she sent a few more judges and prosecutors to the edge of apoplexy.
“Helen Manning’s parents have money.” And Helen would kill herself before asking for it, Sharon knew. That’s why a public defender had ended up representing Alice in the first place. But Sharon would persuade Helen of the importance of not being proud this time.
“Sharon, you know how I work. I take on cases that I can win, cases with rich clients or ones that are rich in publicity. This lacks the former, and you’ve told me you want to avoid the latter. I’ve wanted you to work for me for years, but why should it be on these terms? To put it baldly-what’s in it for me?”
“Me. You’d have me, at last.”
“How old are you now? Thirty-five? Forty?”
“I’m thirty-four.” Sharon couldn’t help glancing at her reflection in the plate-glass sliding doors. The sky was completely dark now, so she could see herself more clearly, and what she saw was a woman who, if anything, looked younger than she was.
“Not a comment on your looks, dear, just the sheer number of years I’ve been bumping into you around the courthouse. You were quite the prodigy when you started out. But for my office, you’re long in the tooth. You know that.”
Sharon did. Rosario ran a farm team, taking passionate young men and women straight out of law school, then working them to death. She reaped the benefits while most of her associates burned out and crashed, some leaving the law altogether. There was always a ready supply of associates because she was a brilliant lawyer. She had a great instinct for cases that looked open-and-shut for the prosecutor, but could be derailed by a little bare-minimum lawyering. People liked to say that Rosario Bustamante drank to level the playing field, and there had never been a complaint filed against her with the state bar, no matter how many nips she stole in the ladies’ room during a trial. If Rosario Bustamante had been Daniel Florio’s legitimate son instead of his bastard daughter, she would have been a power broker in the city, rising high in the judicial ranks or winning elective office. Deprived of her birthright, she took great pleasure in kicking the shit out of anyone with power.