Leonardo greeted me from behind his desk, wearing a tank top and an exercise towel draped over his well-muscled shoulders. He handed me a stack of phone messages and folded back a page of the latest issue of Muscle and Fitness.
“Someone parked a sky-blue Jag in my spot,” I said.
“New clients,” Leonardo said, jerking a thumb toward my closed office door. “Lucia and Jose Antonio Moreno.”
I left Leonardo to his magazine and quietly opened the door to my office. The clients Stanley sent, a middle-aged couple, were indeed waiting, sitting on the edge of my leather sofa. I watched their reaction.
They probably didn’t expect an investigator who appeared as well-off as they. Maybe they expected a big, tough bitch with a bad haircut, smoking a cigar—who knows? On a good day I clear five feet. I’ve always thought I had too much figure for my height, but my boyfriends—and there have been plenty—never agree. I wear my long black hair in a very fifties French twist and keep my hands perfectly manicured with blood-red nails. My eyesight is lousy, so I like to experiment with colored contacts—the green ones are my favorites, even if they make me look like an alien who’s lost her way.
“Guadalupe Solano,” I said, shaking their hands. I motioned them back to the sofa and sat behind my desk. They both had avoided looking me in the eye. The woman stared at the floor, while the man looked everywhere but at me. It was obvious they were under a lot of strain—something almost all my clients have in common.
You have to be patient with distraught people. So I pretended to be fascinated with an illegible phone message left on my desk by Leonardo. Either Juan Garcia from First Miami had called about my stock portfolio, or else Johnny Carson had called about some slacks and perfumes. I couldn’t be sure.
Giving up on that puzzle, I studied the Morenos. Jose Antonio Moreno was in his late fifties. He was tall, over six feet, with a dignified bearing. His dark brown hair was thin, but mercifully he hadn’t resorted to stretching the remaining strands over his scalp to disguise the condition. His sharp black eyes seemed to have receded into his face, ringed by dark shadows.
Lucia Moreno held her husband’s hand so tight that it had turned bloodless white. Lucia leaned back and stretched forward as I moved on to my stack of mail, as if she had a killer backache. Distressed as she was, she was meticulously groomed. Younger than her husband by at least five or six years, she was a beautiful woman with classic Northern Spanish features: blonde with fair skin, blue eyes, and fine facial bones. She was dressed expensively in an understated, elegantly cut sleeveless emerald dress.
I had the feeling she would talk first. I was right.
“Miss Solano, we’re here on a matter of great delicacy.” Lucia pulled her huge diamond ring up to her knuckle, exposing a plain platinum wedding ring underneath. “We need to be sure of your discretion and confidentiality.”
“Of course. I will treat whatever we discuss here with the utmost confidentiality.” All my clients make me say this. They don’t understand that breaking client confidence would permanently wreck my reputation.
Lucia took a glossy picture out of her purse. It depicted a little girl about four years old. She didn’t resemble either Lucia or Jose Antonio.
“This is our daughter, Michelle. We adopted her when she was only two weeks old,” Lucia said. “We’re here because of her.”
She handed me the picture. Michelle was really an adorable little girl, with expressive dark eyes and curly black hair ringing her face. I examined the photo more closely and saw a star-shaped birthmark, about the width of my finger, across the girl’s neck. Then I noticed that Jose Antonio was staring at me.
He cleared his throat, looked away, and put his arm tightly around his wife. She closed her eyes and rested her head on his shoulder. They stayed that way for a while.
“Amor,” Jose Antonio finally said, helping his wife sit upright. “We have to tell her everything if she is going to help us.”
Interesting. As if they had considered telling me only part of their story. Which, of course, most of my clients did.
I took out a yellow pad. “Before we begin I’ll need to know a few things.”
Solano Investigations’ standard client form was simple: name, address, phone, employer if any, Social Security number, origin of referral. The latter was often the most important—it allowed me to check out the client’s reputation. The Morenos were referred by Stanley, so I knew they were legitimate, not to mention rich.
My job would be easier if the Morenos trusted me, so I took my time filling out the questionnaire, making small talk along the way. They were more comfortable by the time I got their signatures, so I put away the form and gave them my most serious investigator’s stare and asked them if they would like to explain why they had come to me.
“I’ll tell her, querido,” Lucia said, touching her husband’s cheek. “Miss Solano, my husband and I have been married for twenty years. We are both Cubans—Jose Antonio is from Santiago and I am from Havana. Our families came separately to America in the early sixties, and we lived five blocks from each other in New York City. We were married when I was twenty and Jose Antonio was thirty-five.
That gave me pause. Lucia was younger than she looked. She gestured languidly as she spoke, placing Cuba here, New York there. After thinking for an instant, I realized her sense of direction was perfect.
“God has blessed us in many ways. The only thing He did not give us is children.”
Jose Antonio had been watching his wife, as though waiting for her to stray. “We always wanted a large family,” he interrupted. “After five years of marriage we decided it was time. Lucia became pregnant right away, but she lost the baby six weeks later. We … Lucia had three more miscarriages, and the final pregnancy was ectopic. Lucia had to undergo surgery.”
Lucia exhaled and shook her head, waving her hand. It seemed she was trying to brush the past away like dust floating in the air.
“The result of the surgery is that we cannot have children,” Jose Antonio said, speaking quickly. “Five years ago we decided to come to Miami, to start fresh in a new place. We have family here.”
Lucia patted her husband’s hand, and he was silent. “We never gave up on having our own children,” she said, her voice low and intent now. “We started to think about adoption. My cousin Elvira had privately adopted two children—a boy and a girl—a few years ago, from a lawyer. They said it was their best option. Elvira’s husband is a German accountant, and when he said he looked into all the possibilities, we believed him.”
I smiled tentatively, unsure how much she wanted me to enjoy the joke. Her expression didn’t change.
“Elvira said children could be adopted through the Health and Rehabilitative Services of Florida, but there was a long waiting list and astonishing paperwork. And I, like Elvira, wanted a child of Cuban origin. HRS couldn’t promise that, but the lawyer could. He provided Elvira with children within six months, at a great cost.”
“What was the lawyer’s name?” I asked.
“Elio Betancourt,” she replied. I stayed silent.
“So we contacted Mr. Betancourt. It was just as Elvira told us—it took less than six months, with almost no paperwork. After just two meetings and an exchange of funds, we were given our baby girl.”
I glanced at Jose Antonio. He looked away guiltily.
“Betancourt was a charming man, very kind and understanding,” Lucia said, leaning forward. “He said it pleased him to make others happy, and if he made money in the process, then so much the better. The only condition on the adoption was that we ask no questions. He said the babies he placed came from young Cuban mothers who didn’t want their families to know they were with child. The girls lived together in a group home somewhere in the U.S. and received excellent prenatal care. You see, the main reason these private adoptions worked so well was because the young mothers knew their identities would always be kept secret.”
Elio Betancourt was notorious in Miami for defending drug dealers, racketeers, anyone willing to pay top dollar for a lawyer who didn’t mind immoral, dangerous clients. I doubted they hadn’t heard of him before the adoption.
I started to write on my pad, but stopped. “Did Betancourt explain his reasons for all this secrecy?”
Jose Antonio frowned, as though I had been rude to mention it. “You have to understand, Miss Solano, we understood this secrecy in terms of who we are: Cubans. You know as well as I that even today, a Cuban girl’s reputation is her life. These young mothers were being protected.”
“We desperately wanted a baby,” Lucia said. “We paid fifty thousand dollars and she was ours. A perfect, beautiful baby girl. It was ideal, until now.”
The Morenos glanced at each other, and I tried to read what I saw. Fear, guilt, apprehension … but no regret.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Last month I took Michelle to her pediatrician for a checkup. The next day the doctor called, saying he wanted to retest her blood. I knew something was wrong, even though he claimed it was routine.”
Lucia put her hand over her heart as she spoke, touching some hidden core within herself. “The results of the initial tests were correct. Michelle has a rare inherited blood condition. The specialist at Jackson Memorial told us we have to locate her birth mother for a bone marrow transplant.”
“Are you certain?” I asked. “There might be—”
“You must hear what I am saying,” Lucia interrupted tersely. “The only patients to survive this disease have received transfusions of their mother’s marrow. It’s Michelle’s only chance.”
Without hearing more, I knew exactly what had happened next. They went to Betancourt for information about the birth mother, and he refused. This is where I came into the picture.
“What happened when you told Betancourt why you needed to find Michelle’s mother?” I asked.
Jose Antonio stirred, smoothing his tie against his belly. “Betancourt couldn’t care less,” he said, his mouth tight with anger. “He said we knew the arrangement, that the child’s mother would remain anonymous. At first he was sympathetic, but when we wouldn’t leave he turned belligerent. He told us we entered into an illegal adoption, that we had bought a baby. If we went to the police we would lose Michelle and end up in as much trouble as him.”
“We thought it was all legal,” Lucia said. It sounded as though she was trying to convince herself as much as me.
“Betancourt said no one who adopted through him would help us either,” Jose Antonio said. “Because they could lose their children.”
They were honest enough to admit they had done something illegal, even if Lucia was hedging. It was a good start.
“I assume Betancourt gave you a birth certificate for Michelle?”
“Yes. Here.” Jose Antonio reached into his briefcase and produced an envelope containing a duly certified birth certificate issued by the state of Florida for a female newborn—Michelle Maria Moreno, her date of birth listed as July 11, 1991. According to the document, the child was born at Jackson Memorial, the obstetrician a Dr. Allen Samuels. There was no mention of any group home for unwed Cuban-American mothers.
“Do you know this Dr. Samuels?” I asked.
“No. We tried to find him, of course, but we couldn’t.” Jose Antonio pulled a cigarette from his pocket as he spoke, glancing at me. I didn’t offer him an ashtray, so he put it away. “There’s no listing for him in the Dade County telephone directory. We also tried Broward County, Monroe, even Palm Beach County. Nothing. I called the AMA and they had no current information either. They said he probably retired, because their last record for him was from five years ago. Now, how can he be listed as the doctor who delivered Michelle if he was no longer practicing medicine?”
I didn’t answer. They should have known. “Did you call Jackson Memorial?” I asked.
“They told us he wasn’t on staff, and they wouldn’t say anything more. We didn’t ask any more questions because we didn’t want them to become suspicious.”
Lucia stroked her cheek idly. The brass and strength seemed to be gone from her now. “Miss Solano, we’re very frightened. Jose Antonio will not admit it, but I will.” She glanced at her husband.
Jose Antonio looked away. “We simply need to know if you can help us.”
“I can try, but I can’t promise anything,” I said. It was horrible the way they looked at me, like children listening to their parents. “At this point Betancourt has the upper hand, and he obviously knows it. You committed a criminal act, and he’s counting on that to keep you from forcing him to tell you where he got your baby.”
Jose Antonio pulled his checkbook from his suit jacket with a flourish, a gesture he had apparently used often. “But you will help, right? We’ll pay whatever you ask.”
“Suppose I get lucky and find the mother,” I said, ignoring him. “What if she doesn’t want to help Michelle? She might want to be left alone; remember, she gave the baby up for adoption.”
I felt terrible saying this. Lucia looked down at her lap, her eyes glistening. Jose Antonio spoke louder, as though the volume of his voice could banish all the problems he had created for himself.
“We’ve thought of all that, Miss Solano, but what else can we do? We have faith that the mother will accept payment for donating her bone marrow. We’ll give her anything she wants.”
“Well, it’s her biological child,” I said. “It stands to reason that she would be willing to help.”
“Exactly,” Jose Antonio said, taking his wife’s hand.
“All right, I’ll do my best. Before I draw up a contract, though, you both have to understand that it might all come to nothing. After a lot of expense, both emotional and financial, I might not ever find your child’s birth mother.”
Jose Antonio stood, practically pulling his wife to her feet. He tore off a check, signed and dated it, and put it on my desk.
“You fill in the amount you need to get started,” he said. “Whatever you feel is fair.”
I stared at the blank check. I hated this case already.
“Please, Miss Solano,” Lucia said, her eyes dazed and her chin shaking. “The specialists say Michelle has four months at the most without the transplant. You have to succeed.”
They closed the door gently behind them. I thought about needles in haystacks and my odds of winning the lottery.