“You’ve got their pedigrees?” I asked Clarence.
“Mahn, this is a job for a clerk, that is all. Rejji gives them this form to fill out, and they do. Every single line. They want us to be able to find them, do they not?”
“Yeah. And you all put check marks on the ones who said anything about Vonni?”
Michelle and Cyn nodded.
“Terry?”
“I high-signed Clarence every time one of them said anything, too.”
“You do any better than we did?”
“No...but I didn’t push, either. Like you said.”
“I’ve got three for you to try up-close-and-personal, tomorrow,” I told him. “For now, let’s call it a night.”
“You like that mom-and-pop food, huh?” Rejji said, smiling at my blue-plate special of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and chopped spinach.
“I like just about anything I can pronounce,” I told her.
“Bet he tops off with vanilla ice cream,” Cyn cracked.
“Why can’t we just stay at the hotel?” Cyn asked me on the drive back. “You already paid for all those rooms, didn’t you? I mean, we’re going right back there tomorrow....”
“If we tried to sleep there, we’d be bombarded by kids sneaking past security. I’ll rent a couple on another floor starting tomorrow, okay?”
“They really are insane about being in a movie, huh?”
“You talked to them, Cyn. What do you think?”
“Fetish is fetish,” she said, nodding agreement.
“Did anybody hear the name Vision?” Terry asked, the next night.
Clarence shrugged a “No.”
“Not me, honey,” Michelle said.
“I’m drawing a blank, too, kid,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
“I was just hanging out with some of the ones who were waiting, you know? One of them says to another, ‘I bet this is killing Vision—a real movie being made right here.’ And the other says he was in one of Vision’s movies. The first guy says, ‘For real?’ And the other guy says, yeah, the whole fraternity was, kind of.
“But when the first guy presses, the other guy says he’s not allowed to talk about the initiations. Then I had to go. One of the girls was saying—”
“Anyone else hear that name? Vision?”
“I did,” Cyn said. “Remember when you had that idea, do two or three of them at a time, get them talking to each other? Well, this Asian girl, Mei-Mei, she said she’d been in a movie before, and the other two gave her a ‘Shut the fuck up!’ look. I let it slide like I wasn’t paying attention.
“But then I got her alone later, like I wanted to see how she did with some other material, blah-blah, and I walked her around to this movie she was in. She says, ‘Oh, it was just one of Vision’s. A video, not a movie.’ I moved on, right over what she was saying, so she couldn’t even be sure I heard her.”
“You played it perfect, Cyn.”
She and Rejji mid-fived with their hips.
“So there is a young man making videos,” Clarence said. “What good could this be to us? Half of these children said they had made some kind of video.”
“Two people mention this ‘Vision’ guy,” I told him. “And, both times, someone asks a question, they dummy up quick. That gets my attention.”
“Probably makes porno,” Michelle said sourly.
“Can you come and see me, please?” Hazel Greene.
“Anytime. Just say the—”
“Right now. I know it’s late but—”
“I’ll be there in under an hour,” I told her.
“I found something,” she said.
“Something about—?”
“I don’t know what it’s about. I don’t know if it...means anything. But Vonni had it...hidden.”
“And you just found it, is that what you’re saying?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not to me.”
“Then why did you ask me?”
“Because, if you had it all this time, then you had your own reasons for not turning it over to the cops.”
“You...you would think like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t want to fight with you, Mrs. Greene.”
“What happened to ‘Ms.’?”
“I don’t...”
“Ms. Greene is what you called me before.”
“My apologies. Just tell me which you prefer and I’ll—”
“I don’t care,” she said.
Not about that, I thought. Said, “All right. Do you want me to—?”
“Vonni was a good girl. I don’t mean a virgin—although she was, I would have known—I mean good in her heart and good in her ways. She was honest and kind and sweet. Everybody loved her.”
“I know Hugh sure did.”
“Yes. Lottie told me how you...That’s why I’m showing you this now. Of course, when your child di...is taken from you, people never want to say anything bad about her. But this was all before. The good things, I mean. Nobody killed my Vonni because they hated her; I know this.”
“People don’t have to have a good reason to hate, Ms. Greene. You should know that, too.”
“My...color, you mean? Yes. Yes, I know that. This isn’t what I wanted to tell you. I’m not making myself clear. I would trade it all. How good she was. How proud she made me. Everything. If I could have my daughter back as a prostitute or a drug addict or brain-damaged or...It wouldn’t matter; I would take her and love her and be grateful forever.”
“I know.”
“Do you? How could you? How could you know a mother’s feeling for her only child? Were you one?”
“A...?”
“An only child? Were you one?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. Thinking, She nailed it. That’s me. Only a child, once. And, now, even being back home, back with my family, an only child, forever. Hazel Greene will never have another child. Neither will Giovanni.
“How could you not...?” she asked.
I just looked at her, waiting for the message to arrive.
“Oh,” she said, when it did.
“I don’t know anything about them,” I told her. “Either of them,” I said, so she’d know I was talking about my mother and father. “If I have biological brothers and sisters, I’ll never know that, either.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Compared to what? It doesn’t matter.”
“It must matter. I’m so sorry.”
All of us down here, only children.
“I believe you are, Ms. Greene. And I believe Vonni had more love in sixteen years than most people get in a lifetime.”
She nodded her head slowly. Said, “I’ll get them,” and walked out of the room.
“Videotapes?”
“Yes. This is all of them. I found them in Vonni’s room. In the bottom of an old army footlocker we got at a flea market. We used to go to them all the time. Vonni said she...”
Her voice trailed off. I stayed silent, afraid to blunder around in the spun-glass forest of her memories.
“I’d never gone in there,” she finally said. “Vonni had a padlock on it—I always thought that was where she’d kept her diary. When the police said they were going to...search everything, I couldn’t bear for them to be the ones to read her private thoughts. So I took the hasp off with a screwdriver.
“You know what’s funny, Mr. Burke?” she said, rage somewhere in her quiet, throbbing voice. “Vonni did have a diary. But it was sitting on her desk, right out in the open. I never knew. She trusted me so much.... The police told me about it. After they were...done with it. They’re keeping it...for evidence.”
I never considered trying to comfort her. Just stayed in my silence.
“All those years, I guess I could have sneaked a look anytime,” she said. “Only I never did. I never saw it until after...it happened.” She went quiet for a long minute. “I always thought her diary was in her footlocker. But it wasn’t. I was looking...and that�
��s where I found these.”
I looked at the stack of videocassettes. “What’s on them, Ms. Greene?”
“How do you know I looked at them?”
“Because you still have them. And the cops don’t.”
“Could I have one of your cigarettes, please? I don’t smoke, actually. I used to, when I was a kid. We all did. But I stopped when I got pregnant. Then I started again, but I stopped years later. When Vonni got upset with me for it. Now there’s no reason....”
I shook one out of my pack, held it out to her. She took it. I fired a wooden match. She lit up without touching my hand.
“The police never asked me to...help them understand what was in Vonni’s diary,” she said, her voice chilly and controlled. “They just read it themselves, and asked me questions. ‘Who’s Jermaine?’ Questions like that.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? Were you a police officer once?”
“No, Ms. Greene. I understand how angry you are at what they did. It wasn’t just disrespectful; it was stupid. Who knows Vonni better than you?” I said. Not proud of myself for strumming those strings.
“Yes,” she said. “And...I thought maybe I would...see something on the tapes, I don’t know.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What’s on them?” she said, tight-voiced. “Craziness. Stupid...craziness. That’s what’s on there. Nothing else. I can’t imagine why Vonni would have—”
“What kind of craziness, Ms. Greene?”
“A...dogfight. A vicious fight, with people watching and...Their faces! Some kind of...gauntlet a boy had to run, between other boys with fists, hitting him. A bunch of girls paddling another girl, like for some sorority initiation. Some people spray-painting a swastika on the side of a Jewish temple. What looks like a...mugging, I guess you’d call it. Some insane young boy on a skateboard jumping right through a plate-glass window. All kinds of things like that.”
“Vonni’s not in any of them? Not even her voice?”
“Just one. By herself. There’s no sound. She’s running. Jogging, like. In the woods. She hears something. Or someone. And she gets scared. Starts to run really fast...”
“Did you see who—?”
“The tape just trailed off,” she said. “It trailed off with Vonni running. Still running.”
“I don’t have the equipment to do that,” the Mole said. “Not here.”
“But you could get it?”
“Sure he could!” Terry said, jumping up. “Come on, Pop. Let’s take a ride.”
“You think people around here notice all this coming and going?” Michelle asked.
“This neighborhood? Sure. They probably think we’re running a tweek lab.”
“I wish we’d picked a nicer place, baby. I mean, if I am going to be spending all this time here...”
“You want to stay at the hotel tonight, girl? I can fix that easy enough.”
“And not see what’s on those tapes? Don’t be demented.”
The dogfight was made more hideous by the lack of sound, especially the expressions on the faces of the spectators. Looked like a single-camera setup, but it wasn’t static. The lens picked up all kinds of strange angles—one from what had to be damn near inside the pit itself. No matter how many times I asked the Mole to stop on a particular frame, isolate pieces of it, and blow them up, I couldn’t make out any real details—the quality was about as good as an ATM surveillance camera.
“Isn’t this against the law?” Michelle asked me, her voice vibrating just below breakage.
“In New York it is,” I said. “Not in all states.”
“Do you think it was filmed here, though?”
“I can’t tell. There’s nothing that would ID a location.”
“What’s the penalty?” she demanded. “I mean, if they were caught, what would happen to them?”
“A fine, probably; not more.”
“For having the dogs do...that?”
“Yeah.”
Max watched the next tape intently, holding up his index finger for the Mole to stop the action, twirling the same finger for him to resume. The Mongolian nodded a few times, as if working out a problem in his head. At his signal, the Mole started the tape from the beginning.
The tape had shown us a teenage boy, Latin, with a West Coast cholo’s haircut. He faced a group of young men, and yelled something. Then he made a “Come on!” gesture with his hands, waving them in. The gang circled slowly until the boy was surrounded. Then they rushed him, fists and feet. When it was over, the boy was on the ground, not moving.
Nobody knows the mechanics of physical combat better than Max. The dogfighting couldn’t have been faked, but...
I made a “Well?” gesture. Max gave me the sign for “Yes.” This one had been the real thing, too.
But it nagged at me. So I ran it again a few hours later.
“It’s a jump-in tape, all right,” the Prof said.
“No doubt?”
“That was the Max man’s verdict, too, Schoolboy,” he reminded me. “And who knows a bone-breaker better than the widow-maker?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “But...there’s something about it. I just don’t...”
“What, bro?”
“I...can’t tell you. It has to come to the surface by itself. But there’s something off about it, Prof.”
The little man closed his eyes, concentrating. Then he looked over at Clarence, said, “Let’s glide, Clyde.”
The drag races were easier. The cameraman made sure you couldn’t see the license numbers, but to anyone who knows cars, some of the rides were as distinctive as fingerprints.
“I think I may have seen the shoebox,” I told Clarence.
“What’s a shoebox?” Rejji asked.
“The ’55 Chevy,” Clarence said. “You sure, mahn?”
“Not a hundred percent. But there’s something about the stance...”
“I’ve seen a million of these,” Cyn said, pointing at the screen, where a slender girl was bent over, palms against the wall, her shorts and panties around her ankles, being paddled by a taller girl in a sorority sweater and pleated skirt, while a bunch of other girls watched. “It used to be a big deal, to do the real thing, no acting. Years ago, some of the product even came with warranties. You know, ‘All the girls in this session were really spanked.’ But now there’s so many subs going into the business that there’s no market for fakes. This one doesn’t even look professional.”
“Because of the single camera?”
“No. Most of the digital stuff—you know, for the Net—is that way. But the camera doesn’t come in on her ass, to show you it really is red from the punishment. And the paddling doesn’t last very long. It doesn’t even look like a good hard one.”
“So you couldn’t sell this?”
“Oh, you could sell it, all right. There’s one thing about it that’s different from the commercial stuff.”
“The look?”
“No,” Cyn said. “It’s that they’re all so young. I can’t tell their ages...and you can’t really see their faces, but those are high-school girls. Or maybe college. Anyway, it looks like whoever shot this was hidden. As if the girls didn’t know they were on camera. For that, there’s a real market.”
“Yeah. Remember when that guy paid us to shill?” Rejji said.
“How’s that work?” I asked her.
“Well, this one time, all we had to do was go to a club where a lot of girls hang out. Act real drunk. Then get up on the bar and take our tops off, dance around.”
“So the guy could film it?”
“Not film us. I mean, he found us because we were in films, already. No, see, our job was to get the other girls to take it off. What he said was, it’s completely legal. Because he was right out in the open with the camera. So they were consenting if they did it with him there; that’s what he said.”
“And there’s all that ‘upskirt’ squick, too,” Cyn said. “You know, little p
erverts walking around with minicams in their briefcases. They put them on the ground, film right up a girl’s skirt without her knowing. Then it goes straight to the Internet. You wouldn’t think anybody would want stuff like that, not when there’s a million girls who’ll let you film anything—anything—if you just pay them. But it’s a different head.”
“So you think this one...?”
“Who knows?” Rejji said. “In New York, it’s legal to videotape a person without them knowing, so long as there’s no sound track, can you believe it? There’s got to be some freaky politicians behind that law.
“Anyway, BDSM by itself isn’t illegal, even if you take money for it. And, this one here, there’s no sex in it. Like Cyn said, on the Net there’s a market for anything. There’s even sites for scumbags who beat their own kids and sell the pictures of it.”
“But you’re sure this one’s not faked? Not acting?”
“No,” Cyn said, certain-sure. “That was real. It happened.”
The people who spray-painted the synagogue were wearing ski masks.
The camera was in so tight on the nipple-piercing that we couldn’t tell anything about the girl.
The only way we knew the sex of the person carried into a darkened room was from her body—her head was hooded with a pillowcase. The girl was either drunk or drugged. That didn’t seem to bother the three males who took turns with her. The camera never went near their faces.
Michelle stood up suddenly, pointed at the VCR screen. “Whoever made these tapes, we know them,” she said. “We know who they are. We just don’t know their names.”
“This is the last one,” I told them.
We watched Vonni run a dozen times. The look on her face was pure terror.
“I cannot tell,” Clarence said.
“I say no, bro.” The Prof.
“I’m with the Prof.” Michelle.
Max shook his head “No,” agreeing.
“So this one’s the wild card,” Cyn said, speaking for us all. “This one’s a fake?”
Only Child Page 17