Only Child b-14 Read online

  “I was expecting Wolfe,” I said.

  “After I look around.”

  I waved my hand to indicate he could look wherever he wanted. Giving up my address to Wolfe was the only way I could get her to meet with me. Mick was part of the package.

  “You got another dog?” he asked, wary.

  “No.”

  “Sorry,” is all he said. More than I thought he would.

  “Hi, chief!”

  Pepper. Sporting a red beret and a white jumpsuit with a matching red belt.

  “Hey, Pepper. You guys going to keep coming in waves, or what?”

  “She’ll be here. In a minute. I’m just picking up Mick. Today’s our anniversary, and I thought we’d—”

  I shot a quick glance at Mick. I’d known him for years, and I was sure that nothing that walked the earth could make him nervous. But I didn’t think that bulge in his jacket was an anniversary present. And there was a definite look of alarm on his face. He disappeared in the direction of the bedroom.

  “Pepper, can I ask you a question?”

  “Talk’s cheap,” she said, then giggled to take the sting out of it.

  “Wolfe doesn’t really think I’d ever—”

  “Ah, don’t go there,” she advised, not unkindly. “I’m not here for nothing.”

  Just as I opened my mouth to ask her what she meant, Mick came back to where we were sitting, and a barrel-chested Rottweiler strutted through the open front door. The beast came toward me, making little trash-compactor noises.

  “Bruiser!”

  Wolfe. In a tightly belted silk trenchcoat of pale lilac and matching spike heels with ankle straps. Her long dark hair was streaked with auburn highlights now, but the trademark white wings still flared out from her high forehead. Gray gunfighter’s eyes took my temperature.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  She clapped her hands, one short, sharp sound. The Rottweiler hit the deck, never taking his baleful gaze off me.

  “Bruiser has a good memory,” she said.

  “Then why doesn’t he relax?”

  “Oh, he never liked you,” Wolfe said, no trace of a smile on that gorgeous mouth.

  It took less than half an hour for me to lay the whole thing out for her. Mick went back to roaming around the apartment, but Pepper never left Wolfe’s side.

  All business, then.

  Fair enough. Where I come from, whatever train you want to ride gets to call the price of the ticket.

  “You want what, exactly?” Wolfe asked. Then added, “What do you want to buy?” avoiding a mixed message.

  “Whatever you can get me on the crime that I couldn’t get for myself out of the papers.”

  “The same stuff a defense attorney would get if they’d ever brought anyone to trial?”

  “No. Not just the Brady stuff. McVeigh-type discovery. The whole thing. Investigative reports, suspects ruled out, blind alleys. Everything.”

  “I’m not sure I can get all that. Some of it, sure. But I don’t have the same contacts on Long Island that I do in Queens.”

  “Why Queens?”

  “That’s where the body was dumped,” she said, a faint note of surprise in her voice. “You didn’t know that?”

  “No. No, I didn’t. So Long Island’s connection with the case is only because that’s where the girl was from?”

  “I don’t know. I took a quick look. Maybe there’s more to that, but I can’t say right now.”

  “All right.”

  “And what else?”

  “Whatever you can get me on Giovanni Antrelli and Felix Encarnación,” I said, not pretending surprise that she knew there was another reason for me calling her in.

  “Didn’t you just say they were your clients?”

  “Yeah. I did.”

  “So...?”

  “So I meant what I told you on the phone. This is straight-edge. Me, anyway, I am.”

  “So you think your clients might have had something to do with—?”

  “No. Not in the way you mean. But they think it’s about them. That’s one out of three.”

  “Burke...” she said, with just a trace of impatience.

  “One,” I said, holding up a finger, “it was a random thing. Young girl’s out, doing whatever, runs into Mr. Wrong. Anyone from a roving tramp to a Ted Bundy. Two, it was somebody in her life,” I went on, “somebody she knew. The way she was killed, it fits either one. Serial killers, it’s nothing unusual for them to be in a rage when they work, right? And a boyfriend, or anyone who thought he’d been betrayed, they might get into a frenzy, too. But the third choice is what my clients themselves suspect—a professional job. Someone sending Giovanni a message. ‘We know everything about you. And we’re very serious people.’ Killing a daughter nobody was supposed to know he even had, that would make both those points.”

  “And Antrelli, he thinks it’s the feds?”

  “That’s maybe not as crazy as it sounds,” I said, catching the defensiveness too late to choke it off.

  “The feds hiring psycho sex-killers?” she said, the sarcasm all the heavier for its absence in her tone.

  “First of all,” I told her, “the feds are masters of the means-justifies-the-end strategies. How many times have they left a child molester running around loose, even when they knew he was doing kids left and right, because they wanted to build a case against some of the people in his ring? Or just gather more evidence, make a stronger case? They let Klansmen they had in their pockets go along on lynchings, didn’t they? They stirred up that war between the Panthers and Karenga’s group—a lot of bodies behind that one. I don’t know about outright assassinations, but how many people did Hoover get dead with the games he played?”

  “You’re a historian now?” she said, letting the sarcasm surface. “And you actually think they’d sex-murder a teenage girl just to drive a wedge between some narco-traffickers?”

  “A whole agency? No way. Even if some supervisor had an aneurysm and hatched a plan like that, they’d put him in a padded room. But Giovanni thinks it’s a rogue.”

  “In the FBI?”

  “Ask the agent doing life for selling secrets to the Russians. What’s his name, Hanssen?”

  “Yes. But he was a whore. This, what you’re talking about, it would have to be personal.”

  “That’s what Giovanni thinks, too,” I said. “But if he’s telling it straight, it’s nothing more than a feeling—he doesn’t know anything.”

  “Does he have someone in mind?”

  “Not even a guess. He’s...confused, is the best way I could put it. If someone in law enforcement hated him that bad, why not just take him out? Trap him in an alley, ventilate him, flake the corpse with whatever they need—pistol and powder would do it—and walk away giggling. If a beat cop guns down a homeless black guy, there’s people in this city who’ll get in the street behind it, raise all kinds of holy hell. But a known gangster? A made man? Where’s the Al Sharpton for that? Columbo tried it years ago. And remember how he ended up.”

  “So it’s some kind of deeper game, and the girl was a pawn?” Wolfe asked, hunter’s eyes hard under skeptically raised eyebrows.

  “Maybe,” I said, not committing myself. “That’s if it wasn’t a random freak, or someone with a specific motive to kill her. Giovanni’s big reason for believing it was aimed at him is the biggest reason for anyone else believing that it wasn’t.”

  “That nobody knew she was his daughter?”

  “Yep.”

  She shifted in her chair to face me more squarely. The Rottweiler did the same from the floor. “You said, on the phone, that this was back to being what you once were.”

  “I did.”

  “That’s a long jump. What’s so high and mighty about this job that gets you there?”

  “I’m not saying anything like that. You know I used to...look for kids, things like that. I know this one’s dead. So it’s not about protecting her, sure. But this isn’t crime I’m
doing, right? A job like this, it’s about as legitimate as a man like me could ever hope to get.”

  “A man like you?” She dry-laughed.

  “What do you want from me?” I said.

  “From you?” she said, icily. “Half up front, half when I deliver.”

  Every 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”—a 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.”

  “What 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.”

  “What 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.”