Only Child

by Andrew Vachss

“The girl, she wasn’t some whore I had on the side. She was...a very pure person. I was the first man she’d ever been with. I had...feelings for her, for real.

  “But if I went with her, that was the end of everything. I’d end up like one of those robots from my old neighborhood. Ride the subway to work every day. Hope you get on with the union; be like every good paisan with a steady jay-oh-bee. Keep some tomatoes out back, some pigeons on the roof, maybe. Play some bocce, get a weekend in Atlantic City once in a while. Once a year, two weeks in Florida; do some fishing or whatever. Always making payments on something. What’s all that? Just putting in time until they get old enough to go down to Florida for good. Get fucking buried there.

  “I told her I could get money. I mean, even then, I was doing good. I had a new Camaro, my own place...but no way I was having my name on the birth certificate.

  “She didn’t get mad. Didn’t even cry or anything. But she told me she wasn’t getting rid of the kid. And if she had to go on Welfare, they’d make her tell who the father was, and she wasn’t going to act like some tramp, pretend she didn’t know. She had an aunt she could go live with. Her aunt could watch the baby while she went to work.

  “She wasn’t jacking me up for money, just telling me the way things were. If I’d thought it was a shakedown, I would have...I don’t know what I would have done. It doesn’t matter. What I did was, I pulled a job. Down in Jersey, with two cousins of mine. I didn’t keep a dime for myself—I gave her my whole share of the take.”

  He looked at me. I looked back, as unreadable as rain.

  “I never saw her again,” he said. “But I know she had a little girl. Every once in a while, I’d get a letter. Not a written one, just an envelope with pictures in it, some little notes on the back. Pictures of the girl. Her name was Vonni. After me, I guess.

  “I got other stuff. Report cards, copies of letters from her school...I know what you’re thinking, but this wasn’t nothing like blackmail. Sure, I sent money. I figured the pictures was her way of telling me that kids need things. Like...a school picture, okay? That maybe meant the kid needed stuff for school, you see what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah,” I said, just to let him know I was listening.

  “They lived out on the Island. Got her own house. I...helped her with that. Money, I mean. But Hazel, the mother, she always worked. She never went near the Welfare,” he said, completely unaware of the pride in his voice.

  “And the girl, she wasn’t into anything. Not in her whole life. She was an honor student. Going to college. I mean, not some dream, okay? She was already accepted. To SUNY. That’s a very good school,” he said solemnly.

  He stopped and did his breathing thing again.

  The Latin lit another smoke, tilted his pack toward me. I accepted.

  “Some sick fuck killed her,” the Italian said, his voice flat and hard, tiptoeing past emotion like a mouse around a cobra. “Stabbed her to pieces. For no reason, you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said, going even flatter than he was.

  “What it was, it was a warning. But not the kind my people use. You see what I’m saying?”

  “The kind of warning Felix’s people might use,” I said, no longer mechanical.

  “Yeah. But whoever did this, there’s one thing they never counted on.”

  I kept quiet, waiting.

  “If Felix was warning me, then someone must have warned Felix. You see what a mess this is? Someone tells Felix I already turned. I’m wearing a wire, maybe. Who would do that? If I got scared enough that my boss was going to find out what...what we were doing to make money...if I got scared and made a deal with the feds, Felix’s people wouldn’t care. Not unless I was going to bring them into it...”

  “I understand.”

  “You know what they never counted on? Me and Felix. That I’d go to Felix. And that I’d take his word when he told me he had nothing to do with...what...happened.”

  “Did the cops ever ask you—?”

  “I was never in it,” he said. “When I...heard, I...I called her. For the first time since we...She told me the cops said it was a sex maniac.”

  Another breath. Close to a sigh.

  “That was over a year ago,” he went on. “And nobody’s ever been popped for it.”

  “And your boss...?”

  “Hey, fuck my boss, all right? This isn’t about him. I’m a boss myself now. It’s about me. Me and Felix. About our thing. Somebody was trying to send a message, wreck what me and Felix have. Who else but the feds? They spook me into going over, they get everything, the dream RICO case.”

  “It’s too subtle for them,” I said.

  “Yeah? Who else would know about my...about her? It was so long ago. And I never told anybody. Not in my life. Not my mother. Not no priest. Not even...Nobody knew. There’s nothing to tie her to me. But the feds, they’ve got everything in the world in their computers....”

  “I still can’t see the feds actually—”

  “Not the feds. A fed. Someone who hates...us to death. Hates us that much that he’d want to see us kill each other.”

  “Who’s ‘us’?”

  He looked ice-picks at me for a few seconds, then held his finger under his nose, pinched one nostril, and snorted an imaginary line.

  “You have a name?” I asked, eye-sweeping to include them both in the question.

  “We do not have a name, but we have a way to the name...if there is one,” Felix said. “What we need is the truth of what happened. And only one man can tell us.”

  “The killer,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you want me to, what, exactly?”

  “Here’s the deal,” Giovanni said, leaning forward, handcuffing my eyes. “I promised Hazel that I’d find out who did this. If it was some fucking skinner, that’s easy. I can fix that.” He paused, did his breath trick again. “But if it’s a game, if it’s someone trying to crush me and Felix, what we have, then I want whoever did it to talk.

  “That’s not your problem, getting him to talk. What we want to do is hire you. Hire you to find whoever did it. We’ll take it from there.”

  I lit another smoke, letting them see I was thinking over what they’d told me. And I was—hard, now that I knew the relationship between the two men. The one their bosses would never understand.

  “It’s a long shot,” I finally told them.

  “We want to play it,” Felix said, his eyes holding Giovanni’s the way his hands never could, in public.

  Round Two was all business. Giovanni talking, me listening.

  “That’s it,” he finally said, maybe twenty minutes later. “I’m empty.”

  “Where are the pictures?”

  “The...?”

  “The photos. The ones the mother sent you over the years.”

  “I burned them,” he said, as if daring me to make something of it.

  “Couple of more things...”

  “What?” he snapped, like I’d been asking him for favors all night.

  I turned to Felix. “No offense, but you can see why I have to ask you. Did you know about this?”

  “After she was—”

  “No. Before. Did you know there even was a daughter?”

  “He knew,” Giovanni said. “But there’s no way—”

  “I’m not asking because I think your partner would betray you,” I said, sliding the words through his upraised hands like long-stemmed roses—quick, before he felt the thorns. “But you know how it works. Whatever one man knows, another man can—”

  “No,” Felix cut me off. “What you say is true. But if an enemy, if anyone knew, they could only know from listening to Giovanni, not to me.”

  “You mean, listening at the exact time he told you?”

  “That is right. Only then. Because it was never said again, when we were together, by either of us. And, myself, it is as if I was never told.” His eyes were immortal with honor.

  I moved my head a little, somewher
e on the borderline between a nod and a bow. Accepting that, at the time Giovanni told him, neither man had been wearing a wire. And that it hadn’t been over the phone.

  “There is such a thing as coincidence,” I told them. “But—say it’s not; who profits?”

  “The feds.” Giovanni, saying his rosary.

  “Or somebody in one of your crews,” I said, my eyes including the both of them.

  Both of them shrugged. Too professional to dismiss such a possibility, but not going for it, either.

  “I can’t go there,” I told them. “You understand, right? I’ve got to work backwards, from the killing. I’ll give you whatever I find, but if there’s any Machiavelli stuff going on in your outfits, it’s up to you two to sort it out.”

  “Understood,” Felix said. He looked over at Giovanni. Something passed between them.

  “Okay,” Giovanni said. “You got anything to tell me, you know how to do it.”

  “I’m not making progress reports. And I won’t be coming back to you unless there’s something you can help me with.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a phone call,” I told him. “A phone call to the mother. Tell her I’ll be around. Ask her if she’s willing to talk to me.”

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll do it tonight.”

  “You knew?” I said to Mama. It only sounded like a question.

  “Not what you say,” she replied. “Know something, sure. Big people, big money.”

  “You knew the girl was from Long Island? That’s why you sent us out there to—”

  “No. Girl, whole thing, big surprise. Snakehead thing different, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, remembering what I’d told Giovanni about coincidences. And not buying it any more than he had.

  “She’s the only one for us,” the Prof said. “Girl sings the no-dime rhyme, all the time.”

  We were in my place, making decisions. But I was having trouble with the one I didn’t have any choice about.

  “And she already knows about you, bro,” the Prof hammered away. “You not going to spook her with this coming-back-from-the-dead horseshit.”

  “Me and her, we’re not...”

  “Don’t matter what’s between you, Schoolboy. Wolfe wouldn’t know how to fucking spell ‘rat,’ am I right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, not arguing with proven truth. “But she might not want to help...get involved with anything I was doing.”

  “This ain’t no marriage proposal, son,” the Prof jabbed me again, working the open cut mercilessly. “She’s just like us. Girl works for the money. And we got a budget. Fuck, off what they fronted, they expect us to have to pay for stuff. We got to shop, I say we start at the top.”

  “AYW Enterprises,” the voice on the phone said, as warmly inviting as a “No Trespassing” sign.

  “Hey, Mick,” I said. “You know my voice?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. How about I speak with Pepper, then?”

  “Who?”

  I breathed through my nose, reaching for calm. Said, “All right. Could I leave a number?”

  “Go ahead,” the voice said. In his business, leaving a number without a name, as a message for a person who didn’t exist, was an everyday thing.

  “Eh, what’s up, doc?” Pepper’s voice. One of her voices, anyway—she had dozens of them. I hadn’t heard the Bugs Bunny before, but it didn’t surprise me.

  “I want to see her.”

  “¿Por que?”

  “Business.”

  “Oy vay!”

  “Pepper, come on. I’m serious. Stop playing around.”

  “She’s very busy right now,” she said, in a bored clerk’s voice.

  “Sure, I know.”

  “Do better than ‘business,’” she told me, her voice dropping half an octave and thirty degrees.

  “I’m working on something. And I need some—”

  “Are you brain-damaged? Be specific, understand?”

  “I’m trying to solve a crime.”

  “Solve?”

  “Solve, Pepper. For real.”

  “For real and for who?”

  “Not on the phone.”

  “I can tell you this, right now. If this ‘crime’ is about someone taking something from someone else, and the someone else can’t go to the cops, you’re twisting in the wind, pal. She’s not going to—”

  Pepper had a professional’s patience. She’d listen as long as it furthered the objective. I could feel her disengaging, said: “Listen to me. To what’s in my voice. This is the truth. The crime is a murder. The victim was a child. I’m back to being me. That’s what this is about, Pepper. I swear it.”

  I listened to the silence until she finally said, “This number I called, it’s a cell, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Leave it on,” she said. And hung up.

  “Mrs. Greene?”

  “Who is calling, please?”

  “My name is Burke, ma’am. I believe you were told I would be...”

  “Yes. Yes, I was,” she said. I could have been a magazine salesman for all the emotion in her voice.

  “Can you tell me when it would be convenient for me to come by and—”

  “Convenient?”

  “My apologies, ma’am. A poor choice of words. If you can give me a time, any time at all, that would be acceptable to you, I would like to talk with you.”

  “Here?”

  “Or anyplace you wish, ma’am. And in any company you wish, as well.”

  “Company?”

  “If you would feel more comfortable not being alone when I—”

  “Comfortable?”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry if I have offended you in any way,” I said softly, treading delicately. “I have a job to do, and I’m trying to do it as best I can. You could help, considerably. My only point, all I was saying, is that I will do anything in my power to...minimize whatever negatives you might associate with talking to me.”

  “You’re from the City, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you know how to get here, where I live?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “How long would it take you?”

  “To be safe, a couple of hours.”

  “Safe?”

  “To be certain I was on time,” I said, beginning to catch the rhythm of her communication, sensing that any show of impatience on my part would be a lighted match to her gasoline.

  “Can you be here by noon?”

  “Absolutely,” I promised her. Easy enough—it was only nine in the morning. And I was already on the Island.

  She hadn’t offered me directions, and I hadn’t asked. I had her address nailed. Not just from the street map—I’d driven past her house twice before I’d called. The town was in central Long Island, splayed across the Nassau-Suffolk border. All I knew about it before I drove through the first time was from checking the real-estate section of Newsday. And that hadn’t given me much of a fix on the area—houses ranged from just below six figures to several times that amount.

  The commercial area was long and narrow. A single main street, with no depth to it, bisected by tracks from the LIRR commuter line. The little wooden depot was small and deeply weathered. Either nobody gave much of a damn, or some historical-preservation society wouldn’t let them touch it. I can never tell the difference. The parking lot was big enough for a couple of hundred cars, but only the area closest to the station was paved. At that hour of the morning, it was as full as it was going to get. Maybe thirty cars, each parked a polite distance from the next.

  The north side of the strip looked like it had been there for quite a while. The street had a gentle curve to it, and the shops were small, with storefronts laid out in compliance with some quaintness code. A patisserie, a gourmet deli, a tea shoppe, an apothecary, couple of boutiques. Almost everything was two-story. Retail operations at street level, with a plain door between every few shops, probably for
access to the second-floor apartments.

  The south side of the strip was string-straight, not so much modern as sterile. It felt like an afterthought. Most of the frontage was all-glass, and the individual units were wider. It boasted a discount drugstore, a tanning salon, a SuperCuts, Baskin-Robbins, Carvel, and an OTB.

  From end to end, little slot-size stores. Not a single supermarket, home-improvement warehouse, or chain bookstore—that size stuff would be in a mall, somewhere close by.

  I was way early, so I found a spot at a meter and walked over to the Baskin-Robbins. Got myself a two-scoop cup of mango ice from a young woman with purple hair and a passé nose ring, and took it back to the Plymouth.

  I killed half an hour playing with various approaches I could use. All I really knew about the girl’s mother was that I’d most likely not get a second chance with her. When I’d asked Giovanni, he’d just said, “I knew Hazel when we were kids. I could tell you what she was like then. But I don’t know her now.”

  If I hadn’t scouted the area beforehand, I would have rented a car for the meeting. Something to go with my medium-gray summer-weight suit, white shirt, dark-blue tie, and scuffed black leather attaché case.

  Her house was near the middle of a short, straight block. The yards were shallow in front, fairly deep in back, but cramped tight on the sides. The street wasn’t so wide that any neighbor with an interest would need a telescope.

  I had to assume she’d had a lot of company back when they’d found her daughter’s body, and I wanted to look like I was more of the same, a year later. Not a cop. Some kind of civilian thief, like an insurance adjuster, or a lawyer.

  I parked the Plymouth on the far side of a copse of trees that divided the houses from what looked like a Little League baseball field, a few blocks down from her address. Then I went for a walk.

  If anyone wanted to follow me back to the car, they’d have to do it on foot, and it wasn’t exactly the kind of terrain a shadow would want to work. Every neighborhood has some wannabe cop twerp who listens to the police band on a scanner and likes “running the plates” of suspicious cars. But even if I got unlucky enough to stumble across one of those, the Plymouth would come up clean.