Only Child (9 page)

• • •

"Y
ou knew?" I said to Mama. It only sounded like a question.
"Not what you say," she replied. "Know
something,
sure. Big people, big money."
"You knew the girl was from Long Island? That's why you sent us out there to—"
"No. Girl, whole thing, big surprise. Snakehead thing different, okay?"
"Okay," I said, remembering what I'd told Giovanni about coincidences. And not buying it any more than he had.

• • •

"S
he's the only one for us," the Prof said. "Girl sings the no-dime rhyme, all the time."
We were in my place, making decisions. But I was having trouble with the one I didn't have any choice about.
"And she already knows about you, bro," the Prof hammered away. "You not going to spook her with this coming-back-from-the-dead horseshit."
"Me and her, we're not . . ."
"Don't matter what's between you, Schoolboy. Wolfe wouldn't know how to fucking
spell
'rat,' am I right?"
"Yeah," I said, not arguing with proven truth. "But she might not want to help . . . get involved with anything I was doing."
"This ain't no marriage proposal, son," the Prof jabbed me again, working the open cut mercilessly. "She's just like us. Girl works for the money. And we got a budget. Fuck, off what they fronted, they
expect
us to have to pay for stuff. We got to shop, I say we start at the top."

• • •

"A
YW Enterprises," the voice on the phone said, as warmly inviting as a "No Trespassing" sign.
"Hey, Mick," I said. "You know my voice?"
"No."
"Okay. How about I speak with Pepper, then?"
"Who?"
I breathed through my nose, reaching for calm. Said, "All right. Could I leave a number?"
"Go ahead," the voice said. In his business, leaving a number without a name, as a message for a person who didn't exist, was an everyday thing.

• • •

"E
h, what's up, doc?" Pepper's voice. One of her voices, anyway— she had dozens of them. I hadn't heard the Bugs Bunny before, but it didn't surprise me.
"I want to see her."
"¿Por que?"
"Business."
"Oy vay!"
"Pepper, come on. I'm serious. Stop playing around."
"She's very busy right now," she said, in a bored clerk's voice.
"Sure, I know."
"Do better than 'business,' " she told me, her voice dropping half an octave and thirty degrees.
"I'm working on something. And I need some—"
"Are you brain-damaged? Be
specific,
understand?"
"I'm trying to solve a crime."
"Solve?"
"Solve, Pepper. For real."
"For real and for who?"
"Not on the phone."
"I can tell you this, right now. If this 'crime' is about someone taking something from someone else, and the someone else can't go to the cops, you're twisting in the wind, pal. She's not going to—"
Pepper had a professional's patience. She'd listen as long as it furthered the objective. I could feel her disengaging, said: "Listen to me. To what's in my voice. This is the truth. The crime is a murder. The victim was a child. I'm back to being me. That's what this is about, Pepper. I swear it."
I listened to the silence until she finally said, "This number I called, it's a cell, right?"
"Yes."
"Leave it on," she said. And hung up.

• • •

"M
rs. Greene?"
"Who is calling, please?"
"My name is Burke, ma'am. I believe you were told I would be . . ."
"Yes. Yes, I was," she said. I could have been a magazine salesman for all the emotion in her voice.
"Can you tell me when it would be convenient for me to come by and—"
"Convenient?"
"My apologies, ma'am. A poor choice of words. If you can give me a time, any time at all, that would be acceptable to you, I would like to talk with you."
"Here?"
"Or anyplace you wish, ma'am. And in any company you wish, as well."
"Company?"
"If you would feel more comfortable not being alone when I—"
"Comfortable?"
"Ma'am, I'm sorry if I have offended you in any way," I said softly, treading delicately. "I have a job to do, and I'm trying to do it as best I can. You could help, considerably. My only point, all I was saying, is that I will do anything in my power to . . . minimize whatever negatives you might associate with talking to me."
"You're from the City, aren't you?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Do you know how to get here, where I live?"
"Yes, I do."
"How long would it take you?"
"To be safe, a couple of hours."
"Safe?"
"To be certain I was on time," I said, beginning to catch the rhythm of her communication, sensing that any show of impatience on my part would be a lighted match to her gasoline.
"Can you be here by noon?"
"Absolutely," I promised her. Easy enough— it was only nine in the morning. And I was already on the Island.

• • •

S
he hadn't offered me directions, and I hadn't asked. I had her address nailed. Not just from the street map— I'd driven past her house twice before I'd called. The town was in central Long Island, splayed across the Nassau-Suffolk border. All I knew about it before I drove through the first time was from checking the real-estate section of
Newsday
. And that hadn't given me much of a fix on the area— houses ranged from just below six figures to several times that amount.
The commercial area was long and narrow. A single main street, with no depth to it, bisected by tracks from the LIRR commuter line. The little wooden depot was small and deeply weathered. Either nobody gave much of a damn, or some historical-preservation society wouldn't let them touch it. I can never tell the difference. The parking lot was big enough for a couple of hundred cars, but only the area closest to the station was paved. At that hour of the morning, it was as full as it was going to get. Maybe thirty cars, each parked a polite distance from the next.
The north side of the strip looked like it had been there for quite a while. The street had a gentle curve to it, and the shops were small, with storefronts laid out in compliance with some quaintness code. A patisserie, a gourmet deli, a tea shoppe, an apothecary, couple of boutiques. Almost everything was two-story. Retail operations at street level, with a plain door between every few shops, probably for access to the second-floor apartments.
The south side of the strip was string-straight, not so much modern as sterile. It felt like an afterthought. Most of the frontage was all-glass, and the individual units were wider. It boasted a discount drugstore, a tanning salon, a SuperCuts, Baskin-Robbins, Carvel, and an OTB.
From end to end, little slot-size stores. Not a single supermarket, home-improvement warehouse, or chain bookstore— that size stuff would be in a mall, somewhere close by.
I was way early, so I found a spot at a meter and walked over to the Baskin-Robbins. Got myself a two-scoop cup of mango ice from a young woman with purple hair and a passé nose ring, and took it back to the Plymouth.
I killed half an hour playing with various approaches I could use. All I really knew about the girl's mother was that I'd most likely not get a second chance with her. When I'd asked Giovanni, he'd just said, "I knew Hazel when we were kids. I could tell you what she was like then. But I don't know her now."

• • •

I
f I hadn't scouted the area beforehand, I would have rented a car for the meeting. Something to go with my medium-gray summer-weight suit, white shirt, dark-blue tie, and scuffed black leather attaché case.
Her house was near the middle of a short, straight block. The yards were shallow in front, fairly deep in back, but cramped tight on the sides. The street wasn't so wide that any neighbor with an interest would need a telescope.
I had to assume she'd had a lot of company back when they'd found her daughter's body, and I wanted to look like I was more of the same, a year later. Not a cop. Some kind of civilian thief, like an insurance adjuster, or a lawyer.
I parked the Plymouth on the far side of a copse of trees that divided the houses from what looked like a Little League baseball field, a few blocks down from her address. Then I went for a walk.
If anyone wanted to follow me back to the car, they'd have to do it on foot, and it wasn't exactly the kind of terrain a shadow would want to work. Every neighborhood has some wannabe cop twerp who listens to the police band on a scanner and likes "running the plates" of suspicious cars. But even if I got unlucky enough to stumble across one of those, the Plymouth would come up clean.
For that matter, so would I. Wayne B. Askew was a good citizen. The "B" was for "Burke," that's what his friends call him. An undistinguished sort of a guy. Self-employed all his life, now semi-retired. Still kept his hand in, dabbling in real estate. Never been arrested. No military service— that bad ticker, you know.
That's an extra safety feature, a bad heart. I always carry one of those Medical Alert cards. Mine says Wayne had a quadruple bypass a couple of years ago, takes all kinds of medication for it. And, around my neck, I wear a plain steel necklace holding a small metal screw-cap cylinder. The cylinder is stamped with the serpent-curling-around-the-staff symbol, and the words: "Nitroglycerin. Change Pills Every 2-3 Weeks." Inside the cylinder, I keep a half-dozen legit nitro pills. If I get busted, I know how to fake a heart attack. And when one of the cops reaches for the life-saving cylinder . . .
If that doesn't look like the right play— maybe too many of them in on the arrest— I can always have the attack in the holding cell. When they call the cardiologist listed on the Medical Alert card, the phone rings in my lawyer's office.
Wayne B. Askew will stand a lot of scrutiny. But if his prints drop, so does the mask.

• • •

T
he house was an ambassador for the subdivision. Started out a basic two-bedroom, one-bath unit on a concrete slab, but the carport had been made into a real garage, and the dormer window showed that the attic had been finished for occupancy. Maybe another bedroom and bath up there, too; no way to tell from the outside.
I noticed other upgrades. Vinyl siding in a rich shade of brown, set off by white trimming for a gingerbread look. A bay window in front. Skylight above it. The lawn was neatly mowed, but not razor-edged immaculate the way some others I passed were. No fence.
Slate slabs, set in an irregular pattern, led up to the front entrance. The door was painted the same color as the siding, plain except for two overlapping glass bricks at the top right— made me think of a pair of dice.
The button for the doorbell was set into the frame on the left. I pressed it. Heard the faint sound of a gong inside, vaguely Oriental. I could see from the way the door was framed that it opened in, but I stepped back anyway, so she wouldn't feel as if I were looming over her when she answered.
Nothing. I checked my watch. A minute shy of noon. The gong sound had been very muted. Maybe she was around back . . . ?
I was mentally tossing a coin on whether to ring again, or walk around the back, when the door opened. The interior was too dim for me to make out anything more than that it was a woman.
"Yes?"
"My name is Burke, ma'am. We had an appointment. . . ."
"Appointment," she said, as if confirming.
"Yes, ma'am. For noon. Could I . . . ?"
She stepped back, not saying a word. I crossed the threshold, deliberately leaving the door open. She moved behind me, closed it herself. And stayed where she was.
To my right, I could see the kitchen. The appliances all seemed to be the same bronze color. To my left, the living room, where the skylight bent the sun into a rectangular patch on a beige carpet. I didn't move.
I heard a deep intake of breath, as if she were getting ready to lift a heavy weight. She moved from behind me over to the left. "Please come in," she said.
I followed her to the living room. She sat herself on the white twill couch, nodded her head toward a matching wingback chair. Said "Please" again. I sat down.
"I'll try to make this as easy as possible," I began.
"Easy."
"I apologize. A poor choice of words. I understand this could never be easy. My intent was to—"
"Understand."
"Mrs. Greene . . ."
"Ms."
"Ms. Greene, you know why I'm here. You agreed to see me. You know what I'm doing, what I was hired to do. I'm trying my best not to offend you, but I don't seem to be very good at it."
"Offend me?"
"Perhaps that was overstated," I said, trying for mild, not oily. "When I speak with you, I seem to always use the wrong word for what I mean to convey."
I waited patiently for her to say "Convey," but she stayed silent, not bothering to conceal that she was studying my face.
So that's what I did, too. All I knew from Giovanni was her color, and even that had been misleading— I'd seen blondes with deep tans who were darker than her skin shade. She had a narrow nose, high cheekbones, and thin lips. Her hair would have made a Filipina proud. I can't do genetics-by-sight the way Mama does, but it didn't take a DNA specialist to see there was a heavy dose of cream in her coffee.
A beautiful, slender woman in a plain blue dress. Still in shock, as if they'd just told her last night.
"You work for Giovanni?" she finally asked.
"I'm doing this job for him," I said, treading carefully.
"You're not in his . . . organization?"
"No. I'm not in any organization."
"You're not a criminal?"
"No, ma'am, I'm not."
"Yes, you are," she said, in a sterilized voice. "Some kind of a criminal. Everyone in Gio's world is a criminal of some kind."
I didn't say anything.
"What did he hire you to do?" she asked.
"To find who . . . murdered your daughter. And why they did."
"The police say
they
know."
"
What!?
They know who—"
"Not who," she said, emotionless. "Why."
"Those are guesses, Ms. Greene. Theories. The only sure way to find the person who actually—"
"Why do you say that?"
"Well, theories are generalizations. They're based on—"
"No. Not that. 'Person,' you said. The police said it was a man."
"I can understand why they might think that, ma'am. And I'm not arguing with it. Just trying not to exclude anyone until I know more."
"More?"
"More than I know now," I said, trying to catch her waves so I could surf. "Some of it, I hope you'll tell me. The rest, I have to find on my own."
"And Giovanni hired you to do that?"
"Yes, he did."
"Will you do it yourself?"
"Mostly. It depends on what it turns out is needed. I might bring others into it, if I have to."
"Needed?"
"To find the person."
"So Giovanni can kill him," she said, with no-affect certainty.
"I don't know anything about—"
"Oh, Gio will kill him," she said, mournfully confident. "Honor is so very important to him."
"Honor?" I asked, switching roles.
She smiled faintly, without warmth. "You're right, of course. I said 'honor,' but I meant 'image.' What the kids call 'face.' That is Giovanni, right there. That sums him up."
"I don't know him," I slip-slided.
"You said it might not be a man."
"Giovanni, I mean. I don't know . . . the child's father. I'm doing a job of work for him, that's all."
"Father?"
"Ma'am, I am truly sorry if I keep stumbling around. I can't seem to find the right words. I don't know Giovanni. And I'll never know your daughter. But if you'll help me know
about
her, maybe I can find who killed her."
"What then?"
"When I find whoever did it . . .
if
I can?"
"Yes. What then? Will you tell the police?"
"That's not my job."
"Will you tell me?"
"Yes," I spooled out the lie like a bolt of silk, "of course I will. You have the right to know."
"Please wait here," she said. At a nod from me, she stood up and walked out of the room.