Only Child (11 page)

• • •

E
very time I see Wolfe, it's always the same. And after she leaves, it's always a Patsy Cline night.

• • •

I
know how to wait. It's just time, and I've done enough of it. And, now that I was home, I had plenty of things to help make it pass.
Not TV. That's the same all over. What I'd really missed was my newspapers. There's nothing like the New York tabs, especially when they're in one of their turf wars.
I hit the mute on some sit-com, improving it considerably. Then I fixed myself a rye toast with cream cheese, added a big glass of grape juice, and settled down with the
Daily News
and the
Post,
glad to be back with journalism where all murders are "brutal," all prosecutors are "tough," and all blondes are "attractive." And any lawyer who cooperates with the reporter is "high-powered."
The ex-mayor, a guy who usually had all the charm of a public housing project, had stepped up big after the World Trade Center destruction, and the papers were covering his endless divorce with a lot less intensity now.
A genetically engineered football player, whose gigantic neck made his head resemble a shot put stuck in a pool of mud, hospitalized his girlfriend.
A pattern rapist was terrorizing Queens. The DA promised "the maximum penalty" when he was caught. Sure . . . if he pleaded to it.
Two broken-synapse robbers killed four people "execution style" in a convenience store in Corona.
Some addled actor who played a doctor in one of those made-for-cable movies was giving a speech at NYU on the need for Medicaid reform.
Politicians kept "calling" for different things. Nobody ever seemed to answer.
The gossip columns were the usual mix of pipe jobs and courthouse-bin scavenging, with a little credit-card info thrown in for seasoning.
A couple of buffoons were running for some state-senate seat just vacated by the incumbent's prison term. One accused the other of being "against the Internet"— knockout punch in a world where whole hordes of humans think better sex is a faster modem.
There were five separate heavyweight champions of the world.
The Twin Towers were gone forever, and the debate about what to put up in their place had turned sanctimonious and ugly at the same time.
Various humans called each other racists.
A rap star got arrested for keeping it real. And a comedian for child abuse.
Four more celebrities went into rehab, one for the third time.
A man, despondent over his mother's suicide, swan-dived off the Throgs Neck Bridge. Didn't even break a bone.
A fourteen-year-old got twenty-eight years in prison for shooting his teacher. Part of his sentence was he had to take anger-management classes. I hoped someone was going to teach him knife-fighting, too.
On the international front, Cambodia was still selling its children as prostitutes, and the Sudan was selling its children, period. There were anti-immigrant riots all over Europe, the swastika out of the closet. The Middle East was as stable as nitro in a Cuisinart.
The boss of the Olympics cartel said the games were the world's greatest single opportunity to advance the cause of international human rights. Which is why they picked Beijing to host them in 2008.
A five-million-dollar federal study announced that the latest stats showed crime was way down in America. I guess that's what Bush had meant by "faith-based."

• • •

"W
hat is that, mahn?" Clarence asked the next day, pointing to the walls I'd covered with white posterboard.
"Time lines," I told him. "The stuff in red, that's what we know for sure. She left her home on a Saturday morning, around six-thirty. The cops didn't find the body until almost three weeks later. The papers were kind of vague about how long she'd been dead, so I'm waiting on Wolfe's stuff before I try to tighten it down."
"To the exact time she died?"
"Maybe not to a specific time of death, but, at least, to a time of
life,
see what I'm saying?"
"No, mahn, I do not. How does this help us to—?"
"If whoever killed her was a stranger, there's a number of ways it could have played out. Maybe he did it on the spot, and took the body with him."
"Why would anyone—?"
"Maybe he needed to clean the body, remove any traces he might have left. Maybe he wanted to confuse the cops by moving it. Or maybe he just liked playing with the corpse," I said, thinking of a human I'd done time with years ago who had that very same hobby. "Or maybe it started out as a kidnap-rape, and he killed her sometime while he had her captive. If it's random, then there's all kinds of possibilities. But if it was someone she knew . . ."
"Ah. Then maybe she was seen. While she was alive. With . . . with whoever might have done it, yes?"
"Yeah. She wasn't alive that
whole
time; not from the moment she disappeared until they found her body. But she was alive for
some
of it. The more of that we can eliminate, the narrower the time frame it had to have happened in."
"The police would do all this, no?"
"They would. A case like this, they'd have done everything
I
could think of, that's true."
"I doubt that is so true," Clarence said, reflecting what all real outlaws believe— if we ever switched sides, the crime rate would drop as quick as Sonny Liston in the Ali rematch . . . and just as guaranteed.
Clarence decided to hang around, help out. I vacuumed the information the mother had provided, while he wrote it up on the posterboard in his strict-school copperplate. We had to start over a few times when we didn't get the spacing right, but we finally finished around six.
"It doesn't look like it will tell us much, mahn."
"Not yet," I said, with maybe a bit more confidence than I felt. "But when we start filling in those blanks . . ."
"Where does it start, then? Looking for a killer?"
"The way the cops do it, they take a rock, and throw it into the pond of the victim's life. Then they work on the ripples, starting with the closest one first."
"They are not wrong, to think like that."
"Not wrong, but not always right. It's a place to start, that's all."
"You said the girl's mother told you—"
"Yeah. They've already thrown that rock. And if they're working the ripples, they're a hell of a distance from the center by now."
"The girl was . . . she was a black girl, you said?"
"Well, her father's—"
"Don't matter if her father was a blond-and-blue Swede, Schoolboy," the Prof said, strolling into our conversation and the apartment at the same time. "You know the way it play— they write the book behind how you look."
"What're you saying?" I asked him.
"It's what Clarence is saying," the Prof answered, turning toward his son. "You thinking the cops ain't going to work a little nigger girl's case as hard, right?"
"They might not," Clarence said stubbornly.
"I'm not saying that don't ever happen," the handsome little man said soberly. "But I don't think that's what we got here. That child wasn't living the kind of life where the rollers would get all smug, say she made her own bed, see what I'm saying?"
"And the cops
want
to clear homicides," I agreed. "That's a major stat for them. Unsolved murders, they make everyone look bad. The kind of thing you're talking about, if they'd gone dirty on it, they'd have popped the wrong guy for it, rather than not clear the case at all. They don't solve it, you know what happens. The TV vultures give the poor little girl an 'anniversary' date. Do the same story every year until somebody takes a fall for the kill. That's not the kind of spotlight any department wants."
"For true," the Prof said, more to Clarence than to me.
"Hard to figure out
which
department it is, for this one," I added. "I mean, theoretically, it's a Queens County case. That's where they found the body. I won't know until I see what Wolfe comes up with."
"You saw her?" the Prof asked me. "Face-to-face?"
"Yeah."
"What'd you roll, honeyboy?"
"A hard eight, Prof."

• • •

"W
hat does it matter what I told her?" Hazel Greene asked, her eyes calm and steady in the last light of evening.
"I don't know that it matters, ma'am. I only know that it
could
."
"Give me one example," she said firmly. "One example of how what I told my daughter about her father could possibly help you find who killed her."
"Let's say you told her . . . that her father was an . . . accountant," I said, feeling my way. "And he lived in Boston. The day she . . . the day she left, it was early in the morning. She told you she was going to the City with two of her girlfriends. To look for a special hat to wear in the play, yes?"
"That's what I told you, yes. That's what she had told me, yes," the woman said. Soft-voiced and civil, but not a great distance from hostile. The way an innocent person talks to a cop.
"But you never actually saw her leave."
"I did!"
"Of course you did," I said, backpedaling fast, before I lost her for good. "You saw her walk out the door, after you had breakfast together. I just meant, you didn't see the actual car she got into."
"No. I just gave her a kiss and went back to my—"
"I know," I cut in, quick, slapping a tourniquet over the guilt-wound. "But what if what she
really
did was go to the airport?"
"What?"
"To go to Boston. To look for her father," I said, gently tugging her back to the hypothetical. "It's only an hour flight. She could have gone up there, spent the whole day, and still been back on time. You see where I'm going? You weren't expecting her until late, you said."
"Twelve-thirty. Half past midnight. That was her curfew on Saturday nights. It used to be eleven-thirty, but she'd just turned sixteen and . . ."
"I understand. She said there was a party that night, and she'd go straight there from the—"
"Vonni wanted to sleep over. At her friend BJ's house— that's a girl. But I told her she could
either
go to the City with her friends
or
have the sleepover, not both in one day. She chose the City."
"How did she seem that morning?"
"Excited! So excited. Happy and . . . just looking forward to . . . her whole life, I guess," Hazel Greene said. Her voice was hollow, walled off from the pain.
"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.