Read Online The Cradle Robbers by Ayelet Waldman - Free Book Online Page B

played listlessly with broken plastic toys. The Duplo buckets contained too few building blocks to make a satisfying castle, and the ride-on fire engine was missing a wheel, so the toddler using it had to cling to the seat at a perilous angle, pushing with his chubby sneakered feet and squeaking along half-heartedly across the dingy tiled floor.
    The attorney visiting rooms were located along one wall of the main room. They were even more bleak than the main visiting room—claustrophobically small, with glass doors so that the guards could be sure that no untoward activity was taking place inside.
    I called down both Fidelia and Sandra, and while I waited for the guards to find them, frisk them, and bring them in, I thumbed through a
Vogue
magazine I had bought in the airport. Every prisoner was subject to a thorough body cavity search both before and after a visit, and depending on where she worked in the prison, and how long it took to locate her, it could take as much as an hour for a visit to begin. I had time to read all about how it took Kate Hudson
weeks
to get back into her size 28 jeans after having her baby, and how she still needed to lose twenty more pounds. Since I couldn’t fit one of my
breasts
into a pair of size 28 jeans, let alone my behind, I wasn’t feeling all that sorry for Ms. Kate. Still, her fat little naked baby caused me to get one of those dangerous nursing mother reactions, and I had a terrible feeling I was going to have to run outside and use the breast pump I had left in the rental car in the parking lot. I’d pumped once in the bathroomon the airplane, a decidedly unpleasant experience (what
is
that smell in airplane bathrooms?), and once in the parking lot before I’d come in the prison. That had been fairly comfortable, the cigarette-lighter adapter easy to use, and I would have been fine if a small boy hadn’t popped his head in the passenger-side window I had rolled down for air, causing me to shriek and spill breast milk all over my pants. He had been nearly as frightened as I, and his grandmother even more horrified. The stain on my slacks made me look like I’d wet myself, and I had a feeling that if the air-conditioning in the visiting room didn’t start working soon I was going to begin to smell pretty funky. Just the way to inspire confidence in a client. Well, I reminded myself, it wasn’t like I was being paid for my work on this case. They’d have to take me as I was. Stinky, the eighth dwarf. Although if it took them much longer to get down here I was going to have to be rechristened Leaky.
    Fidelia was the first to arrive. She was a tiny woman, even shorter than I am, with rabbity features and a broken front tooth. She passed her tongue over that tooth over and over again as shetalked, as if irresistibly drawn to the sharp edges of the angled crack.
    “Chiki, he tell you what I’m in for?”
    “No, of course not.”
    Fidelia was happy to talk about it. She had been a senior in high school, two months past her eighteenth birthday, when a boy, someone with whom she’d “hooked up” on a fairly regular basis, decided that he didn’t like the fact that she was hooking up with other guys. Or maybe he just didn’t like her smile that day. Whatever it was, he came after Fidelia with his fists, broke her nose, and gave her two black eyes. Fidelia showed the purple of her bruises to her brother, and her brother showed the silver of his automatic pistol to the boy. Fidelia’s brother got twenty-five to life for murder. Her sentence was lighter; she could get out in as little as fifteen years.
    “Fifteen years,” I said. “That’s a long time.”
    “Yeah. But I got my friends. Sandra, she’s a good woman. She’s smart, too. She helps all of us with our cases. She’s better than a lawyer, you know? There’s another lady inside who’s a real lawyer, like went to law school and everything, and Sandra does a better job on our appeals than Clarisse does. AndSandra