By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis
A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on. –Carl Sandburg
I was at the morgue when it happened. I wanted to take one last look at the body, contemplate early retirement. Dead babies did that you: make you question your job, its effectiveness. Looking at this one made me feel like a janitor with a detective complex.
My partner was finishing up the paperwork upstairs. This was our third dead baby/killer mother case together. Three cases too many if you ask me. I found they could easily challenge Nietzsche’s “stare into the abyss” with a different kind of answer: it was the mother who stared back. Angela Quitely, another single mother who thought child-birth never meant abortion was off the table. Her baby’s bottle, missing from the crime scene, was found at her job’s work locker, hidden behind a medium-sized opening behind the locker itself, wrapped in a white towel. Traces of arsenic were found inside the bottle, which accounted for the arsenic found in the baby’s blood.
When questioned, Ms. Quitely claimed she always cleaned the bottle with tap water, “contaminated tap water,” blaming the city of New York for the state of her child. And then it was the economy’s fault and how she couldn’t afford to buy one of those filter things to keep her baby from drinking that filth. Unaffordable health insurance got bundled up into the argument as well, hence the baby’s circumstances. “But it doesn’t matter, officer,” Ms. Quitely said, looking to be at an utter loss as to why she was about to be charged with murder. “This is just one big misunderstanding. He’s not dead. He’s just sleeping. He’s been given back to me.”
I was only half-listening. She kept on about how the baby had just woken up a minute before we arrived, hungry. I was more invested in the coroner and how he took care of the body, zipping it up in a barely transparent plastic bag. I always wondered if the smaller bags were actually manufactured for infants or if they were regular evidence bags that were just the right size.
Ms. Quitely screamed for her baby as it was being moved outside her apartment, the plastic bag an unnatural sight given its small dimensions. “No!” she blurted out. “Please! He’s not dead. You don’t understand. God gave him back to me, gave me another chance. He knew it was an accident.” She really threw herself at the last part, like a reborn Christian owning up to past sins, sins she honestly felt were now forgiven.
It didn’t stick and I didn’t want to write it all up. The process required digging back into the details, into what I call case memory. Those memories, they stick. Calling upon them to write a report changes them, turns them into history. So just for one night I relegated my writing duties to my partner, Charles Braswell, a man who treated every victim like an adult. “To deal with a child’s death is to quarantine sentiment”, he used to say. “Look at every person as an adult and it all becomes old-fashioned murder, nothing sinister.”
Our initial sweep, questioning Ms. Quitely's neighbors to establish a pattern of neglect that led to motive, landed us our first hunch. The mother had never offered her baby’s name to anyone. So far as the neighbors were concerned the child’s name was either “Angela’s baby,” or “the baby next door.” His actual name was Brandon, a name fit for a kid who would eventually grow up to hate the woman responsible for bringing him to life, had he had the chance.
Our hunch turned into a 24-hour result, a personal record. The lady next door, Ms. Teller, an eavesdropper by nature, saw Ms. Quitely leave her apartment without the baby. It was still morning. She had asked Ms. Quitely if the baby needed some watching over. Mom said no, that she had left something at work and that she’d be back shortly. She was gone for ten minutes. It was shortly after Ms. Quitely came back into the apartment that Ms. Teller claimed to have heard “a fake scream” and a forced plea to God to give her her son back. “It all felt planned,” Ms. Teller stated as if she knew the case would rest on her testimony. And then Ms. Quitely screamed for a second time. More convincing this time. A real scream. “It was as if God had listened,” Ms. Teller said in a whisper, “and given in to her plea.” She called the cops immediately after that. We arrived shortly thereafter.
Out of the many things that were wrong that day it was God’s part in it that really bothered me. Questioning his intentions in this line of work is nothing short of overkill. But when He decided to stick his nose into something you’d better make damn sure you brought your sense of humor with you. I made sure I brought mine with me, to the morgue. It was the reason I didn’t flinch when the baby opened its eyes and started wiggling its toes. It was the reason I didn’t jump back when it extended its arms into the air like it wanted to be carried, its hands closing into tiny fists and then opening wide in order to get the message across. When it started cooing, which was more of a gargle than the baby sounds we so heavily rely on to brighten our day, I even managed to work out a smile. Dark, our God’s humor is.
To bring dead things back to life was funny enough. I certainly thought so when the other corpses in the morgue started moving from inside the freezers, banging against metal to get out. But to bring dead children back to undeserving mothers? Now that is worth a laugh. Especially if you know who the joke is being played on.
No comments:
Post a Comment