Only Child

by Andrew Vachss

“Me, either,” I told her. “But if I don’t spend the money, the people who hired me will think I’m not working.”

  “You could just lie to them.”

  “I’m not a liar,” I lied, putting five hundred dollars in fifties on the kitchen table.

  “You know what I’m up to, right?”

  “Right,” the kid said.

  “And you’re with me, right?”

  “All the way, pal.”

  “Here’s the deal, then, Ace. If Vonni told you secrets, it’s not ratting for you to tell me. We’re on the same team.”

  “Why’d you call me that?”

  “What?”

  “Ace.”

  “Oh. Well, it just fit, somehow. I mean, we’ve all got citizen names, like ‘Hugh,’ okay? But we also got insider names. Like ‘Boo,’ see? And if we’re going to be working together, you need an insider name.”

  He was thoughtful for a minute. “Boo likes it,” he said, finally. “I do, too.”

  “That’s it, then.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “My...?”

  “Burke is your citizen name, right?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Actually, it’s my middle name. My insider name, that’s B.B.”

  “My mom has a friend. Bernice. They call her BeeBee.”

  “This is different,” I assured him. “B.B. is initials.”

  “What’s it stand for?”

  “Big Boy,” I told him, winking to make sure he kept that one between us.

  “What kind of secrets?” the kid asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “Anything about Vonni that the cops don’t know, that’s one place they didn’t look, see?”

  “Yeah...”

  “So, if she had a boyfriend the cops didn’t know about...?”

  “Nah. I mean, she had plenty of guys like her,” he said, instantly loyal. “She was real pretty. But none of them was a secret.”

  “Any of them ever come around when she was ba...staying with you?”

  “Nope.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “But if you were asleep...?”

  “Nobody’d ever get past Boo,” the kid said confidently.

  “I’m breaking every rule in the book,” Lottie said.

  “I know.”

  “You know? How could you know? You have any kids?”

  “No.”

  “Never?” she asked, leaning forward, elbows on knees. “Never been married, either?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not gay. So you must have had girlfriends. And you’re not exactly a teenager, so that’s a lot of years for you to have been—”

  “How do you know?”

  “How old you are? I don’t. But either you’ll never see forty again, or you’ve had a real hard life.”

  “Not that. How do you know I’m not gay?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Anyway, you think that’s what I’d be worried about, you taking Hugh off to God-knows-where in the middle of the night? That’s a load of crap.”

  “I’m not following—”

  “That gay men are dangerous to little boys, that crap. The ones who...do things to children, what do you call them, pedophiles? They’re not gay, they’re...”

  “Freaks,” I finished for her.

  “Yes! That’s exactly what they are. They should be—”

  “It sounds like you had to deal with...something about that.”

  “Oh, I dealt with it, all right,” she said, snorting. “Some prissy-minded, so-called ‘Christians’ decided one of the teachers at Hugh’s school was gay. And they drew up this petition to get him fired.”

  “Because he was a danger to the children?”

  “See, that’s what I thought, at first. I mean, I didn’t know anything about it. But if it has to do with my son, you can bet I was going to find out. What it turned out to be was that these people just don’t like homosexuals. They claim the Bible says they should all be killed. It wasn’t about gay schoolteachers; they hate them all. This was just a convenient excuse.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well...nothing, I guess. They picketed a little bit, and they sent some nasty letters, but Mr. Strethlend kept his job. In the end, all they did was, they took their own kids out of school.”

  “Freaks.”

  “They are. I was just telling—”

  “No. I mean, that’s the word you were looking for, before. ‘Pedophile’ is a fancy word, but it means how people feel, not what they do. People who go after kids, they’re freaks. Understand?”

  “Okay...”

  “What’s wrong, Lottie?”

  “You just looked...scary, for a minute.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right. Probably just a trick of the light.”

  “I don’t know how to do it,” the kid said.

  “Neither do I, Ace.”

  “Then how am I going to—?”

  “Well, I think you’re supposed to walk around it a little bit, kind of get an idea of how it’s laid out. Like you did before.”

  “Okay...” the kid said. He put the putter the pro in the golf shop had assured me was the right size for a kid his age and height over his shoulder and walked all around the perfectly manicured green with only the light from my flash to guide him. The Brains of the Outfit sat on his haunches, observing quietly.

  “It kind of...slopes,” the kid said. “Right here...See it?”

  “Not me. It just looks like a little uphill, that’s all.”

  “No, it’s off to the left. You see how it sort of...rolls, I guess.”

  “If you say so.”

  The boy kept pacing, checking the terrain. Once he sighted down the length of his club.

  “Ready to take a shot?” I finally asked him.

  “Sure,” he said, taking a stance over one of the three regulation balls I’d bought in that same shop. “Does this look right?”

  “Ace, let me tell you, partner; I wouldn’t have a clue. How does it feel?”

  “Okay, I guess. It’s hard to see with that flashlight.”

  “Just look at the pole.”

  The kid nodded, took a breath, let it out, and stroked the ball. It climbed the hill, banked to the left, and disappeared. The dog’s ears perked up at a faint sound.

  “What was that?” the kid asked.

  “Let’s go see.”

  The white ball sat at the bottom of the cup, like a pearl in an oyster.

  “Ah, was it really worth it, all that?” Lottie asked me, late that night.

  “It wasn’t so much. The club only cost—”

  “Not the money, Burke. Breaking into the golf course in the middle of the night just so you could see if Hugh—”

  “There’s nothing to break into. It’s just like a big field, with no fence.”

  “But it’s still against the law.”

  “Probably. But it’d only be trespassing, not a burglary. And they never would have charged Hugh with anything.”

  “Yes, I understand that. But why couldn’t you have taken him in the daytime?”

  “Well, first of all, I’m not a member,” I told her. Then I gave her a wink, switched to talking out of the side of my mouth, said, “Besides, this way it was a caper, see?”

  The next time I came back, The Brains of the Outfit was wearing a red ribbon tied in a bow around his thick neck, thoughtfully chomping on a thick slab of what looked like raw steak.

  “It’s Boo’s birthday,” the kid informed me.

  I piled them both in the Plymouth, and we hit the pet store. Found a truly outrageous leather collar with chrome studs, and half a dozen chew-toys.

  The next morning, I found the two of them under the tree. The Brains of the Outfit was stretched out, nose to the ground, a mournful look on his face.

  “He’s sad,” Hugh told me solemnly.

  “Why?”

  “Because of his bir
thday. He loves his birthdays. But that was yesterday, and it’s over.”

  “Oh...”

  “That’s all right,” the kid said, confidently. “I know what to do.” He knelt next to his pal, scratched behind one ear. The way I used to do with my Pansy. “Don’t be sad, Boo,” he said softly. “It’s still your birthday. Okay?”

  The dog picked his head up and grinned.

  That night, while I was talking to Lottie, the kid came into the living room, The Brains of the Outfit at his side.

  “I want to tell you something,” he said to me.

  “Shoot.”

  The kid’s face made it clear he wasn’t going to talk in front of his mother. “Go back in your room, Hugh,” she said. “Burke will be there in a minute.”

  When I went back, he and The Brains of the Outfit were in bed. I sat down on the edge.

  “I don’t know where Vonni was going, the day she...the day she didn’t come back,” he whispered. “But she told me it was going to be her big day.”

  “Her big day?”

  “Yes. Vonni told me, when it was over, she was going to start being famous.”

  “We’re not going to see you again, are we?” Lottie asked, late that same night.

  “I...I honestly don’t know. It depends on...things I have no control over.”

  “Hugh really likes you.”

  “We’re partners,” I said.

  “Don’t partners see each other once in a while?”

  “Some do. Some can’t. He’ll understand.”

  “Yeah,” she said, with the first bitterness I’d ever heard in her voice. “Hugh’s gotten real good at understanding.”

  “Lottie, could I...say something to you?”

  “What?”

  “Is Lewis really the guy?”

  “He could be. But, with the way Hugh—”

  “If Lewis wants it bad enough, there’s one thing he could do.”

  “What are you talking about? He’d do anything, I know he would,” she said. The “He’d fucking better!” subtext came across like a fire ax through old drywall.

  “He needs to learn to play golf. He doesn’t have to be any good, just good enough to take Hugh.”

  “You mean real golf? But how is Hugh going to learn himself? All he knows how to play is that—”

  “He can take lessons. Lewis would have to bring him there. Maybe after school. Or on weekends. I guarantee Hugh would pick it up fast. The kid’s a natural.”

  “Sure, and who’s going to pay for—?”

  “Maybe partners can’t always be around,” I told her, “but they can always back each other up.”

  “More of your ‘budget,’ I suppose?”

  “No, Lottie,” I said, “this is from me,” reaching into my jacket. “I checked with the pro, where I bought the putter. It’s enough for lessons for a year.”

  She got off the couch, faced me. “What happens after that?” she asked, hands on hips.

  “By that time, they’re going to be offering to teach him for nothing. And if they’re not, here’s a number you can call,” I said, handing her a blank business card with the number of the pay phone at Mama’s written on the back.

  She just stared at it, shaking her head. “Christ.”

  “Yeah. Lottie, do me one more favor?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Tell Lewis, when he’s studying golf, be sure to find out what they call a hole-in-one.”

  When you’re tracking, you always start the same way—with all the information you can put together stacked up like chips in front of you. That never changes. Even if the guy you’re looking for suddenly calls you up, tells you to come right on over, you’d still want some information before you anted up. Because he could be anything from a macho moron to a pro holding a full house.

  Information is a product. You can buy it, trick someone out of it, extort it. Muscle it over to your side of the table...even dig for it yourself. But there’s no Consumer Reports for the product. You don’t always get what you pay for. You have to put it together, piece by piece, always testing the next chunk against what you’ve got so far. One little flaw in the logic chain, and the gun doesn’t fire. Or it blows up in your hand.

  If Vonni didn’t know her own killer, that meant he was either a roving freak or a professional. The fact that it didn’t look like a pro hit didn’t convince me. Sometimes, disguising the look is part of what the buyer pays for. You hire someone to kill your wife, you don’t want a double-tap with a small-caliber piece at close range. You want what looks like she surprised a junkie burglar in her bedroom. Or ran into a rapist who didn’t want to leave a witness.

  But it didn’t feel pro to me. The trick with murder-for-money is not to get too cute. That many stab wounds; wrapping the body they way they’d done; dumping it where they did—everything made it look too unplanned.

  I know the sex-killers. A festering blob of poison inside them, pulsing against a fragile sac. When the membrane pops, the poison turns tsunami—wave after wave, crashing and crushing everything in its path. They go out into the night then, wrapping themselves in the darkness for power. Prowling relentlessly. Driving in figure-eight loops, driven. A jagged dissonance in their fevered brains, synapses misfiring on sex-hate cues. Building and screaming and calling until they spot her. The right one.

  They know what to do then.

  When they’re close, when they’re about to strike, their heartbeat slows, their pulse drops. They breathe light and smooth. Their hands stop trembling. Even the sheen of sweat whisks off their skin. Coming home.

  That’s why dope fiends call it a “fix.” It fixes things. Until the next time. When you need a little more. Or need it a little more often...

  There’s something else about them, too. All of them. The second they finish, a new wave hits. Run-hide terror floods in, driving them, again. Ted Bundy littered the ground with the bodies he made. John Wayne Gacy kept his in the basement. They all have the same fears, the freaks. Not of their “demons.” Of getting caught.

  Different directors...but always the same script.

  But what had been done with Vonni’s corpse was a kind of controlled panic—somewhere between fleeing the scene and taking the body someplace to bury it. The way I saw it, only a person connected to her in some way would have gone to that much risk after the murder.

  Or Giovanni was right.

  Once in a while, everyone in town knows who committed a murder, but they all look the other way. Especially when the consensus is that the dead guy just plain needed killing. That wouldn’t fly here—Vonni hadn’t been the town bully.

  Still, if it was personal, why hadn’t the cops come up with anything? My first thought was that maybe it was one of their own, but I tossed that out quick. The blue wall crumpled a long time ago. Coast to coast, from Abner Louima to Rampart Division. Too many cops had worked Vonni’s case, from too many jurisdictions, for it to have stood a coverup.

  What I really needed was to do my own interviews. Not just with Vonni’s friends; with her whole culture. I was about thirty years too old to go undercover. I had to make them to come to me.

  “Look, let me try it this way,” I said to them. Tired but not impatient. Never impatient. “Michelle, you’ve lived in the City all your life, right?”

  “Not all my life,” she said, edgy.

  “Sure,” I replied, wadding up my jailhouse blanket and tossing it over the barbed wire before I tried the fence again. “What I meant was, you make your life here. You know the place.”

  “Do I not?”

  “You do. So—where’s Main Street?”

  “Little Korea,” she said, promptly.

  “Not in Flushing, girl. In the City.”

  “Main Street? In Manhattan?”

  “Yep.”

  “There’s no...Wait a minute; up in Inglewood somewhere?” she guessed.

  “No. Prof?”

  The little man rubbed his temple, as if to prod his mind into action. �
�Fuck if I know, bro,” he finally said.

  “Anybody?”

  I let the silence hold for a second, then said, “It’s on Roosevelt Island. The only way I found out, I had a job out there once. But you ask a thousand people in this city, cab drivers to panhandlers, they’ll never have heard of it.”

  “Where you going, son?” the Prof asked.

  “To the truth, Prof. Just because a man knows something, that doesn’t make him smart. Watch a quiz show on TV sometime. One guy’ll know the first seven kings of Egypt, how many years each one ruled, and where they’re buried. But ask him who Tommy Hearns beat for his first welterweight title, and he’ll draw a total blank.”

  “I understand,” Clarence said. “Burke, you are saying it isn’t that these kids would be so smart, smarter than us, even. Just that they know different things. I mean, things we don’t.”

  “That’s it. And it would take us a dozen years to learn what they take for granted. Our problem is to get them to tell us. And tell us quick.”

  “The Mole will know,” Michelle insisted, after the others had left the restaurant.

  “Mole? This isn’t science, girl. It’s...it’s not the kind of thing the Mole does. What’s he going to do, give me some truth serum?”

  “Come on, baby,” she said. “What do you have to lose? A couple of hours. Come on. I’ll go with you.”

  “You just want a ride.”

  “And if I do?”

  “So your theory is that they have some sort of...collective knowledge?”

  “I don’t think they all know—”

  “Collective, not shared,” the Mole said. “Not the same thing. Each molecule is complete by itself, but the interaction between them is what produces energy.”

  “I...So you’re saying they may have the information but they don’t know what they know?”

  “I think that is what you are saying.”

  “Fine. But that doesn’t get me any closer. I need to tap into them, somehow. It’s not enough to be around them, I have to get them talking. Maybe about stuff they wouldn’t usually talk about.”

  “If you want to stimulate a reaction from a disparate sampling, you need to isolate common ground.”