Only Child (19 page)

• • •

"P
olice girl call." Mama's voice, on the cell phone.
"Wolfe?"
"What I say?"
"Okay, Mama. What did
she
say?"
"Say call."

• • •

"Y
ou were looking for me?"
"Not me," Wolfe said. "That person we talked about."
"Does he know where to look?"
"You mean your . . . place?"
"Yeah."
"Not unless you've been a lot more careless than you usually are." Meaning: "Not from me."
"So where's he doing all this looking?"
"Remember Julian's?"
"Sure," I said, mourning the passing of one of the City's greatest poolrooms. Fourteenth Street wasn't the same since it had disappeared.
"A place in the same business. Only in a basement."
"I haven't been there in—"
"But you
used
to go there. People left messages for you with the old man who runs it. That's what he did; he left a message."
"What does the mope think he's doing, playing
High Noon
?"
"It does seem . . . outlandish. So it's probably not what it seems. But he
is
trying to make an impression. And I thought he might come to . . . that restaurant of yours."
"Even he's not that stupid," I said.

• • •

"D
oes anybody—
any
body— know I'm on your payroll?"
"Only Felix."
"The first couple of times we met, you had people . . . you
both
had people around."
"That was so they'd think—"
"Sure. I'm not criticizing your strategy. Only thing is, how sure are you of all the men who were there?"
"Dead sure," Giovanni said.
"Yes," Felix echoed. "Why do you ask all this?"
"You know a guy named Colto? Works Queens, out of the old airport crew?"
"I know who he is," Giovanni said, waiting to see my next card.
"A few years ago, he said Burke took him off for some powder."
"I heard about that. Heard the story, anyway. I don't think his boss bought it."
"That's how I got it, too. Thing is, this Colto, he's been making the rounds, telling people Burke's been on the run . . . from him. And now that Burke's back, he's going to settle up."
"Why do you tell us?" Felix said.
"I tell you because, one, if he got the idea Burke's back from one of your crews, it means things aren't as tight as you think they are. And, two, he's in the way. Of what I'm doing. About Vonni. You know what happens, a guy mouths off about something that sounds like business, sooner or later people pay attention. The last thing we want now is anybody paying attention to me."
"Colto's a fucking pig," Giovanni said. "If he was lying in the gutter bleeding to death, the whole neighborhood would send 911 a postcard. But, you know, he's got a little button."
"I understand," I told him.
"No, you don't," Felix said. "And you don't
do
anything, either. A balloon, it's only the air that holds it up."
"But if he comes around . . . ?"
"You said enough already," Giovanni told me.

• • •

"W
here's your slips?" Rejji demanded of the two girls in matching red halter tops and jeans.
"Slip?" one of them asked. "I didn't hear anything about wearing a—"
"One of these," Rejji said, showing her a playing card. It had a joker on the face; the back was blank. "You have to have one of these, with a time and date on it. You know how many people we have to see? If they all came at once, this would be a mob scene."
"Oh," the other girl said, crestfallen. "Nobody said anything to us."
"Come over here," Rejji said, motioning them into a corner.

• • •

"I
'm seventeen, but I can play any age from—"
"This isn't an audition," I said. "Not yet." I went into my "looking for a look" spiel, as Clarence tapped a zebrawood pen on the blank page of an open calfskin notebook. "We're just going to have a conversation. Like an interview, okay?"
"Ask me anything!"
"This is not about you," I said, putting a thin edge on my voice. "It's about how you come across. Do you understand the difference?"
"Sure! Absolutely."
"Okay, let's see. Talk to me about school. Are there a lot of cliques there?"

• • •

"I
'm going to have to go back into the City, shop around, if you want me to pick up all this stuff, Pop," Terry said to the Mole, looking over a few pages ripped from a yellow legal pad covered with his father's hieroglyphics. "It could take a couple of days. . . ."
"Karp's Hardware," the Mole said, not looking up from his bench.
"What?"
"In East Northport. Karp's Hardware. It will be in the book. They will have everything."
"A hardware store?" the kid said, jaw dropping. "How could it possibly . . . ?"
"Everything," the Mole assured him, still intent on his instruments.

• • •

H
ours and hours, one kid after another. Michelle was working one of the rooms, Cyn another. Clarence moved between the suites, taking notes. The Prof sat in a tufted easy chair, chain-smoking, being creative.
The Mole fiddled with equipment I couldn't begin to recognize. Occasionally, he pretended to listen to advice from the Prof. Rejji covered the door. Terry pulled kids aside for whispered conversations while they were waiting. Despite my telling him we wanted a representative sampling, his personal preferences seemed to dictate his conversational targets.
At night, we sat around and talked over what we'd pulled out of the day. Between us, we'd heard about a dozen different kinds of drugs— chronic to crystal, E to H— and SATs, booze, football, shoplifting, AOL chat rooms, vandalism, cars, a "master race" graffiti gang, hip-hop, the NBA draft, love affairs, Jell-O shots, steroids, Amy Fisher— opinion seemed divided between Guido victim and skanky slut— chick fights, clothes, MP3s, asshole teachers, fucked-up DSL service, the tragedy of Napster, music I never heard of, tank parties, comic books, huffing, movies, drive-bys, computer gaming. . . .
The next day, two boys in blue varsity jackets with white leather sleeves got into some kind of argument with one of the girls waiting to be interviewed. "Say you didn't! Say you didn't!" the girl dared them. One of the boys stepped to her, shoulders hunched. Max cat-footed over to where they were standing, put his finger to his lips.
"Who the fuck are
you
supposed to be?" the taller of the two demanded.
Max wrist-locked the kid to his knees, held him there effortlessly as he looked without expression at the other one.

• • •

"W
hat's the worst thing that's ever happened around here?" I asked some of the teenagers, randomly.
Vonni's murder came up in less than half the answers. Three different kids claimed her for a close friend, one girl getting teary-eyed when she said the name.
But a year-old homicide generally didn't have much of a chance against who was crushing who, what guy was pure butter, which girl was total ghetto, who always acted like a real crackhead at school, what BMX move was totally sick, which new computer game was ultra-mega, where the next rave was supposed to be.
A few kids were focused elsewhere. Some talked about Columbine. Not about the slaughter scene, about poor Dylan and Eric.
A teen with a military haircut and camo pants told me McVeigh had been framed. "Where's John Doe Number Two?" he demanded, angry.
Some were very deeply depressed about the new run of
Buffy
. "Now even The Slayer sucks!" one cracked. A girl with lithium eyes was upset at how much child support they were making poor Eminem pay.
One kid had a "Death Before Dishonor" tattoo on his forearm. He told everyone who would listen that his brother was in the Marines, and he was going, too, as soon as he graduated.
Two girls got into an argument about whatever. "Bring it, B!" one yelled at the other. The crowd of kids snarled at them collectively to take it outside. The girls headed for the door. Nobody followed. The two girls stopped in their tracks. Stared at each other, sharing disappointment.
The ones we came to call the "movie kids" were surface-scarred by their marrow-deep smugness. So completely, condescendingly in the know that they felt comfortable pontificating about "gross points" and "final cut." They breezily corrected each other about who was "A-list at Miramax," and dropped names like "Denzel" as if he had been over for dinner the night before. But when it came to asking for credentials, they were all parties to a mutual nonaggression pact.
No problem, until a girl in a Joan Baez outfit started ragging on some studio for putting out a horror movie directed by a convicted child molester. "They're disgusting!" she said. "After what he did . . ."
A twenty-something with one of those lower-lip goatees and Buddy Holly glasses looked down his long nose at the girl, intoned, "Judge the art, not the artist," and looked to Terry for approval. Terry gave the kid a bright-white smile . . . a red flag to Max, who stepped between them, put his arm around Terry's shoulders, and muscled the kid over to where his mother was sitting. Quick, before life could imitate art.
A kid sporting double wallet chains and a "WWMD" medallion said college was "grayed out." Later, Terry translated. "WWMD" stood for "What Would Manson Do?" and "grayed out" meant "not an option."
A girl with a matchstick body and beta-carotene skin told us that we didn't understand— before anyone asked her a question.
One Goth boy, who looked like he'd played vampire prince so often that he'd ended up hematologically challenged, drove a black PT Cruiser, customized to look like a hearse, with "aR
_x
thur R
_x
ules" in neat white lettering on the fender.
A good quarter of them started every sentence with "Basically," as if it were some kind of verbal tic.
Boarders and bladers stood apart from cyber-geeks. Poseurs, players, and self-proclaimed pimps got along— punks of a feather. Cheerleaders didn't mix with cholas. But even whiggers and skinheads shared pieces of the same room without so much as an eye-fuck. "Reminds me how guys act in full minimum," I told the Prof later. "Walking on eggs, right? They know one wrong move gets them sent back to the Walls."
They all talked different, but they all talked. And none of them said anything we needed.

• • •

"W
e still have a ton more of them," Michelle said. "How many of those cards did we spread out there? Thousands?"
"Not that many," Rej said. "But a lot. A real lot."
"Cyn?"
"The girls talked about it more than the boys. But that's natural, I think."
"They doing any speculating?" I asked.
"The ones I talked to, they all seemed satisfied. Scared and satisfied," Michelle offered.
"Satisfied that some monster was just passing through?"
"Yes. And scared that he could come again. But not
truly
scared. More like . . . fascinated, maybe. A few even made
Friday the Thirteenth
jokes.
Très chic
."
"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."

• • •

"Y
ou 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.

• • •

"W
hy 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.

• • •

"D
id 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.

• • •

"C
an 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.

• • •

"V
ideotapes?"
"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."

• • •

"Y
ou 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."

• • •

T
he 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."

• • •

M
ax 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.

• • •

B
ut 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."

• • •

T
he 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 . . ."