Only Child

by Andrew Vachss

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think an Anglo could know. It’s different from prison. When you were there, did you know of maricónazo who could fight?”

  “Sure. Hell, I knew some that loved to. I mean flat-out gay guys who were way too bad to fuck with. One guy, Sidney, he was a sensational boxer. Lightheavy. Take you out with either hand, and look pretty doing it. I knew some who were blade men, too. Everybody walked soft around them.”

  “So they are not all alike?”

  “Nobody’s all alike.”

  “That is the difference between our worlds, Burke. In mine, un maricón could be accepted. He could do work—there is a contract killer, muy famoso, everybody knows what he is—but he could never lead, you understand?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I read once, in World War I, some white men died because they would not take a blood transfusion from black men. I do not know if this is true. But I know this. For those who play ‘mas macho,’ they would never follow a leader who was not, in their eyes, a ‘man.’ And that will never, ever change.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “You give nothing away, do you?”

  “You called this meet, Felix. I thought Giovanni would be here, too. So I drive all the way uptown, find this place, and...it’s just you.”

  “You are very trusting,” he said, sarcasm dusting his voice.

  “You had plenty of chances, if that’s where you were going,” I told him. “From the very first meeting. Way before you spent any money.”

  “So? I brought you here because I wanted you to understand that this thing you are doing, it is a very delicate matter.”

  “I always knew that.”

  “And you also knew...about me and Gio, didn’t you?”

  “Not before I met you.”

  “But then, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think it is so apparent?”

  “No. Not at all. You let me see, didn’t you? A test?”

  “Of a sort. If it was, how do you know if you passed?”

  “Because I’m not dead,” I said.

  “You think I am a killer?”

  “I think you just told me you were.”

  “Gio thinks it is a federale.” Felix tilted his head, as if Giovanni were in the room with us. “He already told you why. But there is another possibility. One I believe you have not considered.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That the message was not for Gio; it was for me.”

  I watched his eyes, asked, “A message that whoever did it knows things?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would be the point?”

  “For me to step away. Gio would not be a problem for...for the people in my organization. He is not one of us. Who you do business with, that is just business. If I moved aside, whoever took over for me, that man could continue with Gio, as before.”

  “That doesn’t add up for me,” I told him.

  “Why not?”

  “If somebody knows something, something that would make you move over, if they had proof, why wouldn’t they just mail you a sample of that? What’s the point of a homicide?”

  “Because they would need me to move away,” Felix said. “But they would need Gio to stay.”

  “So what are you telling me? That Giovanni would stay?”

  “Sí, he would stay. This they would expect. Business is business. And Gio doesn’t know any other business. In their minds, he would not be...emotional about it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “They don’t know him,” Felix said, very softly. “Gio would defend me. But, if he had to fight on two fronts, he could not win.”

  “Why tell me all this?”

  “Because I am trapped,” he said calmly, a man who’d been there before and recognized the landmarks. “I cannot tell Gio. I cannot tell him that maybe his daughter was killed because of someone who wants something from me. That would mean it is one of my people, not some ‘fed.’ But I know information is a weapon. And I want you to have it all, for what you must do.”

  “What happens if I can’t find out, not for sure?”

  “Then it could end as if each of our bosses called me and Gio ‘maricón,’” he said, almost in a whisper. “What choice would we have?”

  “I’ve got something for you.” The note was under my door in the hotel. Signed “C.”

  I walked through two sets of connecting doors to the last suite. Cyn was sitting in an armchair. Rejji was kneeling in a far corner, her back to me. She was nude except for a pair of red stiletto heels. Her hands were bound behind her back with a red silk scarf.

  “I got your message,” I said to Cyn.

  “She’s so pretty when she’s been bad,” Cyn said.

  “You said you had something for me?”

  “Don’t you like her?”

  “I like you both.”

  “Ooo!”

  “Cyn...” I said, shortly, in no mood to play.

  “We found her.”

  “Who?”

  “The sorority girl.”

  “From the tape?”

  “Yep. The one using the paddle.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “We looked at that tape a hundred times, Burke. We bothered the Mole so much that...Michelle—is that his wife, for real?—Michelle went off on us.

  “So he showed us how to stop the frames and do everything ourselves. Then we took the yearbooks, that the kid got us? It was a long shot, but we had to do something to kill time out here, so...”

  “Let me see.”

  “Look,” she said, pointing to a blown-up photocopy of a picture of a teenage girl whose most striking features were long straight hair and a prominent nose. “And here’s a still from the tape. The Mole hooked it up with some cables so we could just—”

  “Sssh,” I said.

  “Do you know what calipers are?” I asked Cyn.

  “Sure. To measure. In school, we had to—”

  “In the room where we keep the equipment, on the long table, there’s a whole set of them. Little ones, with metal points at both ends. They’re in a leather case, blue plush lining. Could you get them for me?”

  “What do you need them for?”

  “I’ll show you when you get back.”

  “Okay.” She walked over to where Rejji was kneeling and lifted her thick dark hair with one hand, revealing a red collar and a short length of chain. Cyn grabbed the chain and pulled it sharply, forcing the brunette’s head all the way down until her nose was in the corner. “Stay!” she said.

  “Was she a good bitch while I was gone?” Cyn.

  “Perfect.”

  “I doubt it,” Cyn said, taking a leather riding crop from a dresser drawer and walking purposefully over to the corner.

  “What are you doing?” Cyn demanded, a few minutes later.

  “It’s a very good match,” I told her. “And whoever thought to make the two blowups the same scale knew what they were doing—”

  She leaned over, very close. “That was Rejji,” she whispered. “But she’s still being punished, so I’ll tell her later.”

  I nodded, went on: “But we’re comparing a relatively sharp photo, from the yearbook, with one that has a lot more grain, from the videotape. And they weren’t taken at exactly the same angle, so I’m trying to narrow things down.”

  “With those?” she asked, meaning the calipers I was holding.

  “Yeah. There’s things about your appearance you can change—hairstyles, gum in your cheeks, a mustache—but there’s some things that always stay the same. A guy named Bertillon discovered this a long time ago. Way before fingerprints. The distance between the pupils of the eyes, that’s one of them.”

  “Your eyes, they...”

  “Yeah, I know. But that’s one in a million, Cyn. For most people, even with plastic surgery on other parts of their face, like, say, a nose job, that distance would stay the same. Nobody’s going to get their eye muscles
severed just to change their appearance. You lose your—”

  “I didn’t mean...”

  “It’s okay. Here, look: this thing is measured in tiny units. Every time you move the points, there’s a little click.... See?”

  “Oh!”

  “So we lock it in like this...one tip in the center of each of her eyes, okay? Now we move it to...here, and...”

  “It’s the same!”

  “I think it is, girl,” I said cautiously. “I think it is.”

  “You hauling the load, you get to pick the road, Schoolboy,” the Prof said.

  He had just finished telling me how he and Clarence had run down a couple of members of the crew that had beaten the Latin kid. “Our boy, he don’t just pop up on the set, bro. This video guy, he pulls one of the gang aside. Says he knows they jump in new members; maybe they want a tape of the next time they do one? The guy he speaks to, he goes back to the whole crew. Or maybe just to the boss, I don’t know. Anyhow, he gets permission. I asked the ones we spoke to, why didn’t they just kick the video guy’s ass and take his tape when he was finished? One of the boys, he says, yeah, that’s exactly what he would have done. But the leader, he put the kibosh on it.”

  “Sure,” I said. “The boss wanted to be in a fucking movie.”

  “That’s what I say, too, mahn.” Clarence. “It is true what you tell us from the start. These young ones, they are insane for this.”

  “You get anything on the video man?”

  “Same as you, Schoolboy. White man, nothing special.”

  “They didn’t know him? From around?”

  “Nope. They said he was a little older than what your guy said, but I figure that’s just in the way people see things, right? Your man Ozell, probably Mr. Video looks like a punk kid to him, so he comes up younger in his eyes. The kids we talked to, they were—what?—nineteen, tops. So a guy twenty-five, he’s old, to them.”

  “Not even his car?”

  “Zero, bro. Never saw it.”

  “Out here, if he’s driving some generic, nobody in that age group would see it. Unless he’s trying to make his wheels stand out, they’d be invisible.”

  “That’s why it’s your play to say, son. You want to use those obey-for-pay broads, it’s your call, that’s all.”

  “There’s only so many ways to get people to talk,” I told them. “We’ve got a lot of cards in our hand. And we can put most of them on the table. But we can’t make people tell us what they don’t know. And if Cyn and Rejji are right, and it is the same girl, she knows more than anything we’ve got so far.”

  “You’re incredible,” I said.

  “That’s the consensus.” Michelle smiled. “Besides, we already had her name, from the yearbook. The rest was as easy as a crack whore.”

  “Where’s this camp, exactly?”

  “Up in Dutchess County,” Terry said. “We could pick up Ninety-five North at—”

  “We can’t take a whole convoy up there, Terry.”

  “But...”

  “Anyway, I need you here. You’re our best bet at getting some of these kids to talk. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t even have the yearbook.”

  “He’s right, honey.” Michelle.

  “Pop?” the kid appealed.

  The Mole caught Michelle’s eye, quickly ducked his head and concentrated on his equipment.

  “She was a senior in that yearbook, and that was over three years ago. So she’s at least twenty now.”

  “Michelle said she’s a junior in college. That sounds right,” Cyn said.

  “This camp, it’s just a summer job. Supposedly, she’s done it every year since she was fifteen. Pretty fancy place.”

  “We’re not just going to walk up to Administration and ask for her, are we?” Rejji said.

  “Last resort,” I told them. “The map says there’s a town about ten, twelve miles from the camp. I don’t know what’s in it, or even if the counselors get weekends off, but it’s worth a shot first.”

  “You’re going to pass yourself off as a college boy?” Cyn laughed.

  I reached over to where she was sitting, pinched the top of one smooth thigh, hard. “I’m a casting director, you stupid bitch,” I said.

  Cyn squealed...a lot more than the pinch merited.

  Rejji giggled from the back seat.

  “I’ll see you later, miss,” Cyn mock-hissed at her.

  “The bar is called The LSAT,” Rejji said, the minute she walked into the motel room. “That’s for ‘Law School Admission Test.’ The story is, the owners were planning on going to law school, but they got such a low score on this test—I guess you need to get a certain number to get into any law school—that they decided to open up this bar instead.”

  “And it’s the right crowd?” I asked her.

  “I think so,” she said. “There’s a little college not far from here, but it’s pretty much closed down for the summer. So there’s only the trade from the camp, and how much could that be? This isn’t the kind of town where a lot of the young people stick around after high school. It’s got a few bars, but they’re either gin mills or topless joints—either too rough or too expensive for college kids to hang out in. No, this is the only one it could be.”

  “All right,” I told them both, “let’s play it that way. Tonight’s Friday. We’ll give it two nights. If she doesn’t show, we’ll take a ride over to the camp on Sunday.”

  “That’s probably the worst time,” Rejji said.

  “Why?”

  “Visiting day. The parents will be up, they’ll have all kinds of activities.... No way the counselors would get any time off.”

  “You know a lot about this stuff, Rej?” Cyn asked her, curious.

  “Yeah,” Rejji said. She got up, went into the bathroom, closed the door.

  “Want to dance?” The guy was standing at our booth, arms crossed so he could puff out the biceps his neatly cut-off sweatshirt displayed.

  “I’m with him,” Cyn said, pointing at me.

  “What about you?” Muscles asked Rejji.

  “Me, too.”

  “You’re both with him?”

  “Sure,” Rejji said.

  “You their father?” he asked me, leaning forward, locker-room aggressive.

  I looked at his tanned-and-bland face, wondering if those big white teeth were caps. “Their manager,” I said.

  “Yeah? What do they do?”

  “We’re entertainers,” Cyn told him, no smile.

  “That means we get paid to entertain,” Rejji said helpfully, her mouth as flat as Cyn’s.

  Muscles stood there for a minute, downloading. Then he went away.

  Rejji’s hand, under the table, on the inside of my thigh, squeezing. “That’s her! That’s her!” she whispered.

  “You sure?”

  “Let me go talk to her, I’ll tell you in a minute.”

  “You know what to—?”

  “Yes! Let me out, Burke. Quick, before she gets stuck in a booth.”

  “I don’t know anything about a videotape,” the girl said. Her long black hair and hawkish nose gave her a proud, near-exotic look, but her eyes were like tiny Japanese lanterns—bright light behind fragile paper.

  “You brought me all the way up here for this?” I said to Cyn, sharp-voiced.

  “You said yourself she’d be perfect,” Cyn said, half-annoyed.

  “But if she’s not the same one who—”

  “You don’t want an audition?” Rejji asked the girl, brisk and businesslike.

  “That was supposed to be an—” the girl said, then cut herself short as she realized what she had just admitted.

  “I’m not responsible for amateurs,” I said, clipped and impatient. “I have to look at miles of tape just to get a few winners, every time. That’s the way it works. We’ve been casting for a few weeks now, and your loop turned up in a huge pile of stuff. Cyn over here, she spotted you first; got me to take a look. And I agreed, you might be perfect. B
ut, you understand, those things are not my decision; it’s the director’s call.”

  She opened her mouth to say something. I held up a hand to cut her off, said, “Look, if it’s not you on the tape, there’s nothing to say. The camera loves some people. Others, it doesn’t. I need the quality I saw on the tape. If that’s not you, I’m sorry we bothered you. But if it is you, I hope you won’t let whoever sold you a bill of goods spoil your chances in the business.”

  “What would you...? I mean, if I was...?”

  “It’s the same for everyone,” I told her. “You know how it works. I’m the casting director. Myself and my crew interview the prospects. The best ones, the ones we think the director will love—those we put on tape. Free-form, no set lines. We’re looking for a quality, not a specific performance. If you get through the interview, you go on tape. And if they pick you...”

  “It was me,” she said, biting her thin lower lip.

  “Don’t go too heavy on the makeup,” Cyn said to the girl through the open bathroom door. “When you get on the set, they’ll create a look for you right there.”

  She came out, a little self-conscious, but not nervous. Maybe it was that half-hour she’d spent on the phone, on our tab, in one of the other rooms we rented. Or maybe it was the minibar we’d left her the key to. Cyn pointed her toward a chair with a spiral back and a round, padded seat. Rejji tightened the locknut on the tripod, adjusting the minicam, while Cyn rheostatted the lights up and down until Rejji nodded agreement.

  “Come in tight,” I told Rejji. “Tight on her eyes, tight on her lips.”

  “She’s not miked,” Cyn reminded me.

  “We need some tape of just pure expression,” I said. “Eyes and mouth, that’s what talks. It doesn’t matter what they say.... What we’re looking for is expressive, got it?”

  I turned to the girl. “Tell me about your audition,” I said. “Tell me with your eyes as you talk.”

  She arched her back, widened her eyes, said, “Well...it’s a little complicated. It was a play-within-a-play, like Hamlet. Only it was a different form. Unique. We didn’t really have lines.”