Only Child

by Andrew Vachss

  “That was normal for Vonni?”

  “Normal? She was a sixteen-year-old girl, Mr....Burke, is it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did you change it?”

  “Change...what?”

  “Your name,” she said. “Burke, that’s not Italian.”

  “I told you I didn’t work for your...for Vonni’s father, Ms. Greene.”

  “I remember. I assumed you were a member of some other...organization. But still part of their whole thing.”

  “No. No, I’m not.”

  “Why would Gio trust you, then? You’re not...‘family,’” she said, her lips twisting with contempt.

  “You would have to ask him.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. I believe I understand it now. If anyone has to know his shameful secret, better an outsider.”

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” I said mildly, trying to steer her back to where I needed her. “But...you see what I mean now? About what Vonni knew about her father?”

  “I certainly never told her that her father was in Boston.”

  “It was just an example,” I said patiently. “Of the kind of thing you might have told her.”

  “What good would it do you if I—?”

  “The morning she left, she knew you wouldn’t expect her until at least half past midnight,” I interrupted, still working on not losing her. “If she was looking for her father, she might have gone to wherever you...”

  Hazel Greene nodded, as if finally seeing where I was going, if not the sense of it. “She thought her father was dead.”

  “Ah.”

  “When she was little, she used to ask. Where I was raising her, at first, it was nothing so unusual for a father not to be in the home. But they, the fathers, they were...around, you know? In the neighborhood, someplace. A presence. Even in prison, they were real. I thought of telling her her father had been a soldier, killed in some war, but I could never make the dates work.

  “Besides, even when she was a little, little girl, I knew how smart she was going to be. And what a heart she’d have. If I told her that her father had been a soldier, she’d want to see his grave someday. So what I did, I told her that her father was dead, and that I’d explain everything when she was older.”

  “She accepted that?”

  “Not at first. But then we made a bargain. On her eighth birthday, I’d tell her everything.”

  “Why then?”

  “I was just buying time when I said it. And Vonni never spoke of it again. Neither did I. But on her eighth birthday, she asked. And that’s when I told her.”

  I didn’t say anything, keeping slack in the line so it wouldn’t snap if she made a sudden run.

  “She’d just seen West Side Story on television. I thought it was maybe a little mature for Vonni, but she just loved it. So I told her that’s how it had been for her father and me. A forbidden love. It felt good to wrap the lie I was going to tell her in so much truth.

  “It was the truth. Gio’s favorite song was some old thing, from the Fifties, maybe? ‘Running Bear.’ I’m sure you never heard it....”

  “Johnny Preston,” I said. “With the Big Bopper doing the bass line.”

  “Oh! Then you know. The boy and girl, from two different tribes, on opposite sides of the river. ‘But their tribes fought with each other,’” she recited, “‘so their love could never be.’ Gio played that song over and over for me. He said that was us. There even was a river between us. The East River. Do you remember how the song ended?”

  “Yes. The young brave dove into the river that separated them, and the maiden jumped in, too. They met in the middle. The current pulled them down. And they drowned.”

  “Together.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yes. And that’s what crazy Gio wanted to do. He wanted us to die together. Not in some dirty river. He wanted us to go to the top of the World Trade Center...that was years ago, before those crazy people, the terrorists, did that terrible...and jump off, holding hands all the way down. So we could be together.”

  “There were other ways you could be—”

  “I know. We could have run away. He could have gotten a job. But none of that was real to Gio. He could never imagine leaving his...life. Or getting a regular job. But dying, that was something he could deal with.”

  “Not you, though.”

  “I had my baby inside me,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  I stayed quiet for long enough to understand that it did.

  “I always remembered what Gio had wanted to do,” she said quietly. “A couple of years after I...left, I saw a story in the Post. It was about a young man who tried to jump between two high buildings over in the Bronx. It was some kind of gang thing. Not an initiation—the young man was the leader. The story seemed to imply that he was showing the others how to do it.

  “So that’s what I told Vonni. How her father died. That young man? In the story? His name was Romeo. Isn’t that just too ridiculous?”

  Then she started to cry.

  I cruised the neighborhood the way I’d case a bank, starting out way past the perimeter and working my way toward the center. Only a fool goes into the jungle without memorizing enough trail-markers to find his way back out.

  When you look for kids—runaways, castoffs, missing-and-presumed—finding a body is always one of the possibilities. But this time I was starting at the other end of the tunnel. That changed the game. If I stepped out of the shadows, had the mother “hire” me, got the names of Vonni’s friends from her, and tried to talk to them, I might as well dial 911 on myself.

  In the past, I’d sometimes pretended to be a cop. Never flashed a badge or anything stupid-amateur like that. I’d just plant an impression and let people fall into their own assumption pits. It’s especially easy when people expect a plainclothesman to come around, asking questions.

  But I didn’t look the part anymore.

  Ten days of drifting with the currents didn’t lead me to a way in. I didn’t know much about small towns, and what I thought I knew wasn’t proving out. The mall was the real city, like I’d suspected, but inside it the population was as fractured as Manhattan’s. Rich and poor walked the same paths but never touched, like human railroad tracks.

  Some kids lounged around the food courts, designer shopping bags stuffed with credit-card purchases, gabbing on cell phones until they drove away in their mothers’ Mercedes, or their own Miatas. Other kids worked in the fast-food kiosks, earning less in a month than their better-born counterparts spent in an hour, saving every dime so they could go mobile, too.

  That was the common ground. Car culture. You couldn’t get anywhere without one, in every sense of the word.

  The parking lot had enough diversity to make a liberal come all over himself. Cute little LOOK AT ME! roadsters stood shoulder-to-toe with hulking monster-truck imitators, Corvettes were docked nose-to-nose with minivans, and thoroughbred sportscars shared space with pro street–quarter-horses. Fundamentalists don’t care what you wear to church—only attendance counts.

  The cars got closer to each other than the clans ever did. Inside, a see-and-be-seen parade. Jocks in letterman’s jackets. Whiggers in hip-hop gear. Cholas in tight jeans and bright-colored spike heels. JAPs in pastels. Goth kids in their bloodless black-and-white. Rich boys in stuff that showed they were.

  Their jewelry was as varied as their hairstyles, but they all seemed to pack pagers.

  Like a prison yard. Everyone crewed and cliqued, no mixing.

  I wondered if that was how Giovanni saw it, back when he’d made his choice.

  The mall seemed to be on a strict schedule: near-empty in the mornings, stuffed with adults at lunchtime, and swamped by a wave of teenagers in the afternoons. Then came hordes of married-with-children until mid-evening, after which the teens took over again and carried it to closing time.

  In-store security was tight—undercovers so obvious that they must have been hire
d as deterrents, lots of fiber-optic cams, especially wherever they sold CDs or clothes—but the corridors and the outside grounds didn’t get any real coverage. At night, they tightened up the perimeter a little. But it was mostly rent-a-cops, eye-fucking wannabe lowriders who spent hours draped over their not-much cars.

  Malls are like cities; they have whisper-streams, too. But without a native to front me, any attempt to tap in would draw way too much attention.

  So I kept sniffing around the area, looking for openings. I found some places where hanging out for a few weeks could make you into enough of a regular to talk with people without drawing suspicion, but I didn’t have that kind of time. Anyway, I couldn’t picture Vonni’s crowd spending hours in a low-rent tavern, or at the local OTB parlor.

  After the Plymouth dusted off a poseur Firebird with more tire than motor on Hempstead Turnpike, a hardcore Nova slid in alongside me a few lights down. The driver looked over, raised his chin in a question I answered with the Roadrunner’s cartoon horn. He cracked his throttle deep enough to let me know he was carrying heavy. I held the engine against the brake just a little past idle, quiet as a turbine.

  We both left on the cross street’s yellow. He got out first, but I drove around him just before the Torqueflite grabbed second gear on its own.

  The Nova’s driver passed me as I backed off, made a “Follow me!” gesture out his window. In the diner’s parking lot, I got an invite to a not-yet-completed section of the LIE, where they were running for money.

  Later that night, I stood off to one side and watched the drivers of a couple of trailer queens go at it. Negotiations first. They argued about lengths and the bust—who got to leave first—for what seemed like hours. When they finally got down to it, the race was over in less than ten seconds.

  There was a lot of buzz in the crowd, but it had nothing to do with a murder. Everybody wondering if some guy named Gary was really going to show. I listened close, but all I could pick up was that this Gary was from Island Trees originally, moved to the Midwest a long time ago. Supposed to be the fastest gun on the East Coast years ago. Supposed to be coming back now. Maybe so, but it didn’t happen that night.

  Still nothing. When you’re man-hunting, you can buy information. Lots of it’s always for sale—separating the diamonds from the dirt is the trick. I knew the kind of people to ask, and I knew where to find them. But I didn’t have a target. And I couldn’t offer anything as good as what the cops would have already put on the table, a year ago.

  I went through the motions, but I didn’t lie to myself about it. I was marking time, waiting for Wolfe.

  I was watching a fight on ESPN2 when my cellular buzzed.

  “You want to come here?” I asked Wolfe, holding the phone to my ear as I looked out the window into the darkness.

  “Once was enough,” she said.

  “Just say where and when.”

  “Right now. You’re close enough.” Then she gave me an address on lower Broadway.

  A large office building, diagonally across from Federal Plaza, a few blocks away from what the tour operators like to call “ground zero.” The man at the security guard’s desk was hunched over a paperback, his back to me. I made enough noise to let him know I was there. He turned and looked up. Mick.

  He walked into the freight elevator, me following. There was no floor indicator, but I could feel us going down.

  Mick still had the paperback in his hand. The Bottoms, Joe Lansdale’s long-running smash.

  “You like that one?” I asked him. “Me, I like his Hap and Leonard stuff the best.”

  Mick pulled the lever and the car rattled to a stop. He pulled back the gate and pointed to the left—all the answer I was going to get.

  I stepped out, moved toward the only light. Heard the elevator door close behind me, the whirl of the machinery as the car went back up to the lobby floor.

  Some kind of storage room, near as I could tell. Wolfe was perched on a two-drawer lateral file cabinet, wearing blue jeans and a pink pullover with matching sneakers, her hair in pigtails. In that light, she looked like a teenage girl.

  With a hostile Rottweiler.

  “Ah, shut up, Bruiser,” I said to the beast. “You know me.” He snarled softly in agreement.

  Wolfe pointed to a carton on the floor. Looked like it was stuffed with paper. “That’s all the hard copy that’s coming,” she said. “The rest, you’ll have to hear it from me.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You’re paying a lot of money for not very much,” she said, like she was warning me against a bad investment.

  “It’s not my money.”

  “I know whose money it is. And I’m guessing there isn’t a lot in here that they don’t already have.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t sound so sure.”

  “I’m not. I know stuff’s for sale. But, sometimes, there’s no way the potential buyer can make contact without telling the seller more than what he wants him to know, right?”

  “Sure. And you’re saying you’re just a cutout? They only hired you to get...what I’ve got?”

  “If that’s all they wanted, they could have used a go-between a long time ago. This town, you can find a thousand lawyers to do anything by the hour. In an hour. It’s just like I told you it was—they hired me to find out who did it. And why.”

  “If there is a ‘why,’” she said.

  I wasn’t going to argue with Wolfe about that one. She’d prosecuted hundreds of humans who did freakish things without a “why” that would make sense to anyone else. “Yes,” is all I said.

  “What do you want first?”

  “It doesn’t—”

  “The stuff on the killing? Or on your clients?”

  “Oh. The killing,” I said, opting for the secondhand stuff before whatever Wolfe had dug up on her own.

  “It is a Queens case, technically. But most of the spadework was done by the Long Island cops. That’s where the girl lived, where all her friends were, where she went to school...you know.”

  “Did they form some kind of—?”

  “Joint Task Force?” she said mockingly. “But of course! And it appears the feds got to play, too.”

  “Profilers?”

  “Yep. But you know how that works. They—if they’re very good—can tell you the kind of person who might have done it, but that’s a few miles short of an ID. And, with a kill like this one, there isn’t much guesswork involved. A freak or a frenzy. Or both.” She took a deep drag off her smoke. “Or a cold-blooded attempt to make it look that way.”

  “They don’t even have a guess?”

  “Truly, no. Not that they didn’t try. But there never was anybody they really liked for it.”

  “Because she had no one that close—?”

  “She had boyfriends,” Wolfe said. “Nothing super-deep. She wasn’t pregnant. In fact, the autopsy said she was a virgin.”

  “So she wasn’t—?”

  “Raped? No. Or sodomized. No indications in her mouth, either. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a sex crime. Not with all that stabbing and slashing. You know how some of those maggots love their in-and-out.”

  “The wounds...?”

  “That’s one of the things I got to look at, but not bring along. Ever since the slime-sheets started publishing autopsy photos, every coroner’s office in the country tightened up. Good thing, too. What do you want to know?”

  “The bloodwork?”

  “Not all that useful, since so much time had passed. Coroner said minimum of two weeks since death. But, still, they went the route. Even toxed her hair. Negative on everything. Plus, she had no tracks, and there was no independent indication of drugs.”

  “Did it...the killing, look professional?”

  “Professional? She was stabbed seventeen times!”

  “If a pair of prison hit men cornered their target in the shower, they’d stick him that many times, just to be sure.”

  Wolfe lit
another cigarette. Sucked in the smoke like bitter medicine. Held it down a couple of seconds, then blew a harsh jet across the room.

  “I’d forgotten,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “How...tuned in you are. If you’d ever worked the other side of the street—”

  “I’m working it now.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “Behavior is the truth,” I told her. “We all live by that. Come up with another explanation for what I’m doing,” I challenged her. “I can’t be working for the killer, helping to cover his tracks. According to you, there aren’t even any tracks to cover.”

  “You’re working for gangsters.”

  “I didn’t say I turned citizen,” I said. “What I said was the truth—my job is to find whoever did it. And that’s what I’m doing. It’s a job a citizen could do, right?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “You believe me,” I told her, sure of myself.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You wouldn’t have gotten me that info if you didn’t.”

  “I’m in business.”

  “Bullshit. I know what you do for a living. And I know where your lines are.”

  “You’re so certain?”

  “Yeah.”

  I felt her gunfighter’s eyes measuring me, waited for the judgment.

  “She was just a kid,” Wolfe finally said. “I wouldn’t mind helping out anyone hunting whoever did it.”

  “More than one?” I asked her, not pressing the personal.

  “Come again?”

  “Edged weapons leave tracks, just like bullets. If more than one knife was used...”

  “That’s only true if they were used at the same time.”

  “And...?”

  “The TPO is very shaky, you know that much already.”

  I nodded. Time and Place of Occurrence is never more than a guess when the body isn’t discovered at the original scene. “It would still help to know if there was more than one blade. Not likely two freaks would go off at the same time.”

  “Ask Bianchi and Buono,” she said, in her diamond-cutting prosecutor’s voice.