Only Child b-14 Read online

  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.

  The 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.”

  “Fath
er?”

  “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.

  I didn’t move from where I was seated, contenting myself with a visual sweep of the room. It was neat and clean, but without that demented gleam you get under a No People, No Pets, No Playing regime. The room was clearly for company, but not the kind that kicked back with a few beers and watched a football game with their feet on the coffee table.

  I’d been in homes where people had lost their child to violence before. I expected at least one photo of the girl—a shrine wouldn’t have surprised me.

  Nothing.

  When the mother came back, she was carrying a large gray plastic box by the handle. When she opened the top, I could see it was filled front-to-back with file folders. She knelt, placed it on the floor in front of my chair, said, “I have three more,” and walked off again.

  I didn’t think about offering to help her any more than I did about looking through the files outside her presence.

  “It’s all there,” she said, finally. If lugging all those boxes had tired her, she kept it off her face. Her breathing was as regular as if she’d never left the couch. “The first one is everything that was in the newspapers, and everything I got from the police. The others are all...Vonni. From her baby stuff to just before...”

  “I—”

  “The reason they’re like that,” she interrupted, “is because of...what happened. I always kept Vonni’s...everything. Every report card, every note from school, every doctor’s visit...I always took pictures, too. But I didn’t have them in this...this filing system, before. I was trying to help the police. They had so many questions, they kept coming back and back and back. Finally, I put this all together for them. But it wasn’t what they were interested in, I guess.”

  “They wanted to know about her boyfriends, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And yours?”

  “Yes.” No reaction, flat.

  “Her teachers? School friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her computer?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Drugs? Parties? Gangs?”

  “Of course,” she said, a tiny vein of sarcasm pulsing in her voice.

  “And they drew a blank with all of that?”

  “That? There were no drugs. There were no gangs.”

  “They said this? Or you just know from your own—?”

  “I said it. They didn’t believe it. They didn’t say so, not out loud. But I could tell. After a...while, after a while, though, they believed it.”

  “And they apologized for—?”

  “Be serious,” she said.

  She didn’t offer me so much as a glass of water. Just sat there watching me go through the files, one at a time. I wanted to start at the latest ones and work backwards, but I could sense that would sever the single frayed thread between us.

  I tried to engage her in conversation as I worked. Several times. All I got for my efforts was monosyllables. And when I suggested that I could maybe take the files with me, return them later, I got a look that would have scared a scorpion.

  Okay.

  The birth certificate was strangely impersonal.

  I’d seen New York birth certificates from the Fifties. They were a lot richer in detail, and a lot less socially correct. They used to give you the time of birth, the number of children “previously born alive” to the mother, the race and occupation of the parents...even where they lived. But I thought that even the little bit of information on this one might open a door, if I could just engage the mother....

  “I thought her name would be spelled differently,” I said.

  “Vonni’s name?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I thought it was...a reference to Giovanni.”

  “Yes, that’s right. But I spelled it the way it should be pronounced, so her friends wouldn’t get it wrong. Or her teachers, when they called on her in class. Vonni might not have felt comfortable correcting people all the time, just gone along with whatever they called her. When she was little, I mean. I didn’t want that. I mean, if I spelled it like ‘Vanni,’ they’d all think they should say it like ‘Vanna’ with a ‘y.’ Vanny. Then she’d have no connection to her father at all. No child would want that, would they?”

  “No,” I assured her, “they wouldn’t.” Thinking of my own birth certificate. The one that said “Baby Boy Burke.” Time of birth: 3:03 a.m. If I ever wanted my first name to link me to my father, I’d have to change it to “Unknown.”

  I kept looking. A color photo marked “5/13/91” on the back showed a pretty, slightly chubby little girl, more darkly complected than her mother, with long wavy hair. The child had almond eyes, and a smile you could arc-weld with.

  If an activity existed on this earth Vonni hadn’t been exposed to, I’d never heard of it. Piano lessons, T-ball, dance, karate, gymnastics, soccer, glee club, drama society.

  Only the last one had gone the distance, though. At the very end of the “Activities” file, there was a program for the school play for her junior year. Under “Cast,” I found:

  Amanda...........Vonni B. Greene

  The play was scheduled for the night of May 23. They’d found the girl’s body the day before.

  The files looked like raw data. It didn’t seem like any of it had been sanitized by a loving parent’s hand, but I still had to ask.

  “Ms. Greene, I apologize if this question offends you in any way. I hope you understand why I’m asking. This material, it shows an almost...idyllic life. I wonder if there was any other...”

  “You and the police,” she said, an ugly little twist to her upper lip.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “This is everything,” she said. “I’m so sorry Vonni wasn’t having an affair with a married man. Or smoking crack. Or running with a gang.”

  “All right.”

  “Is it? Are you satisfied, sir? Are you going to tell Giovanni I ‘cooperated’? I’m sure he’ll be asking you about that.”

  “Ms. Greene, anything you share with me is privileged.”

  “What does that mean, privileged?”

  “It means two things,” I said, keeping the volume down, but putting some weight into my voice. “One, you have no obligation to share anything with me, and I’m well aware of that. So whatever I might learn from you is a privilege. Not a right, a privilege. A privilege I would respect. Two, anything you say to me stays with me. It’s a privileged communication, just as if you spoke it to a priest.”

  “You’re no priest.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m not a lawyer or a doctor or a social worker or anything the law would prohibit me from repeating what you tell me. I’m just a man. But what I am is a man of my word.”

  “You say so.”

  “Yes. I say so.”

  “That’s all you have, your word?”

  “That’s all anyone has. Question is, how good is it.”

  “That is the question. How would I find the answer?”

  “Watch me,” I told her. “Watch me close.”

  “Why should I do it?” the pudgy-faced guy asked me. He was wearing a rumpled white shirt under wide red suspenders, a battered dark-brown fedora tipped back on his head. A cigar that wasn’t from the same hemisphere as Havana was planted in the corner of his mouth. Dressing the part.

  “I’m
not asking you to do anything,” I told him. “Like I said, all I want is the assignment. On spec. You’re a journalist, right? Your whole operation, it’s about investigative reporting. That’s what I’ll be doing.”

  “Solving that murder?” he asked, sarcasm smearing his thick lips. “The case is over a year old. Maybe you’ll find who killed Chandra Levy, while you’re at it.”

  “I’ll solve it, or I won’t,” I said, matter-of-factly. “It’s my time. I’m not asking you for a dime in front. Not even expenses.”

  “And if you did manage to come up with the killer...?”

  “It would be yours. A total exclusive.”

  He puffed on his cigar, trying to get the hang of it. Said, “We can’t issue press credentials. Internet journalists don’t get the same respect our brothers on the print side do.”

  “The only credential I want is, if the cops call, you say I’m working for you. On this assignment.”

  “What do you need us for? Just tell anyone who asks that you’re freelance.”

  “Sure, I could do that. But I’ll get treated better if I’m working on an assignment.”

  “You might,” he conceded. “But a story like that...I mean, if you actually found the killer, it’d be worth a lot. Why should I trust you to bring it to us?”

  “I’ve got references.”

  “Is that right?” he said, just short of snide. “Who would they be?”

  “I’ll have them call you,” I said.

  “Why should I believe you?” Wolfe.

  “I can prove it,” I said into the phone. “If we could just—”

  “Arm’s-length,” she said, sugarless.

  “Whatever you say.”

  “I won’t say it twice,” she warned.

  “Guy’s down here, looking for you.”

  Gateman, whispering into the phone he kept in the room behind the front-desk area.

  “Me? Or a name?”

  “Burke.”

  “Ever see him before?”

  “No. Big guy. Dresses like a fucking lumberjack. Stands like a fighter, though.”

  “Send him up, okay?”

  “You’re the boss.”

  Mick came up the stairs slowly, hands open at his sides, distributing his weight carefully. He saw me watching through the open door, walked in.