Only Child (3 page)

• • •

I
took my time settling in. Trying it on, adjusting the fit. Did a lot of dry runs through the basement: in and out, always at night. Slowly, I got familiar with the place, admiring the little touches they had added to protect me, like the acoustic tile on the walls. And the three cellular phones, all set to the same cloned number, each with a separate charging holster, so that one was always live. The electricity was bridged from Gateman's own unit, and it powered the space heaters just fine when I tested them.
No A/C; wall units would have given away the game from the outside, and central air was impossible. But the venting was superb, so the fans were able to whisper the summer days down to comfortable.
I kept the anonymous pistol Mama had given me on a little shelf in the elevator shaft. One flick of my hand and it would drop to the basement, well out of reach of any search warrant.
Each room had a large plastic disk on one of the walls. Any weight on the stairs would make the disks glow flash-fire red, bright enough to wake you out of a deep sleep.
In a room off the entrance, I found they had hooked me up with a big-screen TV. And a piece of Gateman's cable package. He was a high roller in that department— I even got HBO and Showtime.
That's when it first hit me. My old office was too small to ever have friends over— say, to watch a fight on TV together. It was barely large enough for me and Pansy, and . . . and then I understood why my people had set up my new place the way they had.

• • •

"C
alls come in," Mama said. "All time, always."
"Business?"
"Maybe sometimes," she said, shrugging to emphasize the "maybe" part.
"What do you think?" I asked Michelle.
"I think maybe Mr. Burke could have an assistant," she purred.
"You?"
"Me? Honey, I am no man's 'assistant.' I was talking about
you
."
"Sure, bro," the Prof counseled. "Take the handoff and hit the line. You got to get back to work."

• • •

I
don't know how the woman stumbled across my phone number . . . the one that rings in a Chinese laundry in Brooklyn and forwards to the pay phones behind my booth. That number's been part of the graffiti in certain back alleys for so long that most of the people who call it can't remember where they got it.
Michelle and I met her in a diner, somewhere around the Elmhurst-Rego Park border in Queens. She looked like a woman in her late thirties who'd kept herself pretty well . . . or like a teenager with most of her nerve endings deep-fried. If she had a problem with me and Michelle both being the "screeners" for the busy Mr. Burke, she didn't say. Maybe because she was even busier amping out her story.
"Nola— that's my genetic mother but I don't call her 'Mother' because she's not a mother because mothers don't lie to their own children about critical things like she did, like she always did, from the very beginning— Nola, she told me that my father was a one-night stand, you know, like in a movie or something," she said in one breath. The edges of her speech splintered with stress fractures. "Very romantic. He was a poet or something; I don't remember. I don't remember lies. That takes a lot of work. You try it yourself, if you don't believe me. Forgetting something, that's hard. Trying makes you remember. But I finally got it. I don't remember what she said he was. My father. She said she never knew his name, but one day she saw his picture in the paper. He was killed in a car accident, or something. I think that's what she said, anyway. I don't remember. Because it was all a lie, so I don't remember it."
I felt Michelle's long fingernail pressing into my knee, telling me to sit still. She was a lot more interested in the end of the story than I was.
"She isn't as smart as she thinks, Nola," the woman went on. "And I'm not as stupid as she thinks I am, either. I investigated her. She never thought of that. She thought I'd investigate
him
. But how could I do
that,
when I didn't know anything about him? Except lies. And I can't remember lies.
"I found my birth certificate. Her name, the Nola name, it was on it. But
his
wasn't the same name she told me. It wasn't the same name she said was
my
name, my last name, not Nola's, the name from my father, the way you get your name from your father.
"After that, it was easy. So easy. I love the Internet. You can find out anything on the Internet. You can find the truth. The total truth. It's always there. And nobody can erase it or lie about it or change it. Once it's on the Internet, it's forever. Like the runes. I searched. I used search engines. They have them, just for that. And I found her."
I lit a cigarette. Took one drag, then placed it in the notch of a clear glass ashtray with a green logo in its base. The smoke drifted up between us. I let my eyes go into it, a patience trick.
"She was raped," the woman said, a sneer in her voice. "That's what she, Nola, what she
told
everyone, anyway. That's where I came from. From a rape. She
said
. She, Nola, said it when I confronted her. It was a confrontation, like you see on television, like they tell you to do to the person who hurt you. I read that. I read that in a
number
of books. You have to confront them. Make them take responsibility. That's what I did. And not with a letter, like they say to do if you can't face them, or if they're dead, but I could, so that's what I did. I went right to her.
" 'You lied,' that's what I told her. And you know what she did? She
admitted
it. Like it was something she was proud of. She said she never told me my father was a rapist because she didn't want me to think I came from anything bad. She, Nola, could have had an abortion, she
said
. But she doesn't believe in abortion, she
said
. So she went away and changed her name and had me, the baby. That was after the trial. After the man was convicted."
My cigarette had burnt itself out. I wondered when she was going to.
"What do you want Mr. Burke to do?" I asked her, earning myself another puncture wound from Michelle.
"He's innocent," the woman said. I knew what was coming then. And it turned each vertebra of my spine into a separate ice cube. "I found him," she said, reverence throbbing through her voice. "We correspond. I'm on his approved list. Not everyone can be on that list. He had to get permission. And I visit him, too. He's in Clinton; do you know where that is?"
"Yes," I said, keeping to the professional neutrality of the hostage negotiator. "It's a prison. Way upstate, near the Canadian border."
"That's right. That's true, what you said. He's up there. All the way up there, for something someone else did. For what someone else did to
him
."
I was getting a headache. Even if the guy she was talking about had gone down for Rape One, and the judge had maxed him, he wouldn't still be Inside so many years later. Not in New York, where the politicians think only drug-dealing and cop-killing should lock you down for the count.
"I don't understand," I said gently. "If he'd been convicted back in—"
"No, no, no, no," she cut me off. "He was in another place. A much nicer place. In Gouverneur. That's far upstate, too. But it's better. He was in a dormitory, not a cell. And he could have more visits, and packages, and everything. But he got
stabbed
. By an Italian. A Mafia man, I think. It was for no reason. He almost
died
. But the man who stabbed him, he told a story, and they believed it. So they moved the man Nola said was my . . . They moved
him
. For his own protection, is what they said."
"I'm still not following you," I said. "When was he first incarcerated?"
"Incarcerated? When my mother, Nola is what she says her name is, when my mother made up the story. That's when."
"But that was before you were even born, right? And he's
still
locked up?"
"He . . . You don't understand. The prosecutor, she was a crazy woman. A savage person. She got them to sentence him as a Persistent Violent Felony Offender," she said, articulating the words proudly, like a child who had just memorized her alphabet.
"This was in Queens, then?" I asked.
"Yes! Right here in Queens. In the courthouse in Jamaica. I have the whole transcript. That prosecutor, she told the judge my father was a dangerous beast, and he needed to be in a cage for the rest of his life."
Wolfe,
I thought to myself. The former chief of City-Wide Special Victims, she was a blooded-in veteran of the trench warfare academics call sex-crimes prosecution.
Wolfe had been hated by Legal Aid and black-robed collaborators alike. She'd taken on all comers for years, never stepping off, fighting harder when she was surrounded. She tried all the "bad victim" cases everyone else ducked— hookers, mentally ill, retarded, elderly, little kids— risking the high conviction rate so sacred to prosecutors with political ambitions.
And then she was taken down by a party-hack whore who spent so much time on his knees that the ass he kissed had become his panoramic world-view.
After that, Wolfe went outlaw, spearheading the best info-trafficking crew in the City.
Wolfe, who I always loved from the moment I truly knew her. Who told me once, "You and me, it's never going to be." Who I once had something with I'd never had before. A second chance. And, being me, I blew it.
No matter how long you're gone, some kinds of pain are always patient enough to wait for you.
"I know who you're talking about," is all I said. "But I still can't figure out what you want Mr. Burke to do."
"My father was the victim of a false allegation," the woman said. "It was all a lie. They were all liars, all those women. But only Nola, my mother, she says, even
Nola
she says, she was the only one who was brazen enough to tell the lies in court. It was not the truth, so it was a lie. My mother, this Nola, made it all up. Because she was a slut and a whore. She didn't want to admit what she was, so she said she was raped. Like the Scottsboro Boys. Just like that. It was on the Internet. Those girls were never raped. But they knew if they pointed a finger at black boys they would be heroes, not whores.
"That's what happened with my mother, Nola, the way she says it, Nola. The big hero. For testifying. Such a brave
liar
she was. So what I want, I want . . .
DNA,
" she said, in that breathless, dramatic tone people reserve for something holy.
"You're talking a lot of money," I said, trying to stem the flow.
"Money?" she sneered, almost cackling with scorn. "There'll be
plenty
of money. I talked to a producer. And she said that we'd all be there, on national TV. They can do a remote, so my father could be on TV, too, from prison."
"A producer . . . ?"
"My agent is handling it all," she said loftily. "He says a book is a sure thing, and maybe even a movie. And if Mr. Burke can get me the test, he'd be on camera, too. You know what publicity like
that
could be worth?"
About as much as my picture on a post-office wall,
I thought, but I made encouraging noises at the woman, wanting her to finish so Michelle and I could vanish from her life.
"I want a complete DNA test," she said. "Of everyone involved. Me, Nola, my mother she says, and the innocent man, my father. See"— she bent forward to compel me with the brilliance of her plan— "my father's lawyers have all given up. The . . . rape kit, I think they call it, it's not around anymore. So,
normally,
there wouldn't be anything anyone could do. But Nola, my mother she says, says my father
raped
her. And that's how I was born. You see the beauty of it?
"Will you tell Mr. Burke for me? I know he always defends the innocent," she whispered, confirming that she was a dozen shock treatments past deranged.

• • •

"S
ometimes, I'm ashamed that God is a woman," Michelle said on the drive back. "I don't like sick jokes."
"Yeah," I agreed. "Nice logic, huh? If this guy's DNA doesn't match up, so what? Means he's not her father, that's all. Doesn't say anything about him not being a rapist. Only thing it means is that the mother had sex with someone somewhere around the time the rape occurred. Probably
after,
is what I'm guessing."
"Why?"
"Lots of kids are born at eight months, not nine. Technically preemies, but they have good size and weight. The mother probably did the math herself, figured it had to be the rapist who made her pregnant."
"Or maybe just a little before, and the guy had used a condom, so the mother thought she couldn't . . . ?"
"Sure. But there's no way the
rapist
knew her, not even slightly. Otherwise the maggot would have gone for a consent defense, guaranteed. This wasn't a homicide. The victim lived, and she ID'ed him in court. There was probably a ton of other evidence, too. Remember what she said about 'all those women'? You don't get a Persistent Violent jacket without a load of priors. Ten to one, he was a serial rapist. Probably only took it to trial because Wolfe wouldn't offer him anything off the life-top, so what did he have to lose?
"You'll notice she never said a word about blood evidence being used to convict him. Experienced freak like that, maybe
he
used a condom. That woman is stone-lunar. To her, this is all some kind of weirdo paternity suit."
"Ugh!"
"You know what's worse, girl? There was no reason for the mother to lie. Who'd
want
to make up a story like that? That freak's her bio-father, all right."
"How could a TV producer
not
see she's a . . . ?"
"Knowing isn't caring, honey. Talk shows are going through what skin mags did years ago."
"I don't understand."
"
Playboy
set the standard, right? Upscale, classy, lots of features . . .
and
all the posed pussy anyone could want. Anything successful gets imitated, but instead of trying to outclass the leader, most of the others went downmarket. The more
Playboy
carved out the niche at the top, the deeper in the sewer they went, see? That's where the competition is now, who can go the lowest. Same with TV. The target's not the penthouse; it's the basement. Did you hear her voice when she said '
national
TV,' girl? Same way some people say 'Our Lord Jesus.' There's no traveling freak shows anymore— cable brings them right into your home."
"Burke," she said, leaning toward me, "you're not going to take her money, are you?"
"She hasn't got any," I told her, placating both our gods.