Only Child

I lit another smoke, letting them see I was thinking over what they’d told me. And I was—hard, now that I knew the relationship between the two men. The one their bosses would never understand.

“It’s a long shot,” I finally told them.

“We want to play it,” Felix said, his eyes holding Giovanni’s the way his hands never could, in public.

Round Two was all business. Giovanni talking, me listening.

“That’s it,” he finally said, maybe twenty minutes later. “I’m empty.”

“Where are the pictures?”

“The...?”

“The photos. The ones the mother sent you over the years.”

“I burned them,” he said, as if daring me to make something of it.

“Couple of more things...”

“What?” he snapped, like I’d been asking him for favors all night.

I turned to Felix. “No offense, but you can see why I have to ask you. Did you know about this?”

“After she was—”

“No. Before. Did you know there even was a daughter?”

“He knew,” Giovanni said. “But there’s no way—”

“I’m not asking because I think your partner would betray you,” I said, sliding the words through his upraised hands like long-stemmed roses—quick, before he felt the thorns. “But you know how it works. Whatever one man knows, another man can—”

“No,” Felix cut me off. “What you say is true. But if an enemy, if anyone knew, they could only know from listening to Giovanni, not to me.”

“You mean, listening at the exact time he told you?”

“That is right. Only then. Because it was never said again, when we were together, by either of us. And, myself, it is as if I was never told.” His eyes were immortal with honor.

I moved my head a little, somewhere on the borderline between a nod and a bow. Accepting that, at the time Giovanni told him, neither man had been wearing a wire. And that it hadn’t been over the phone.

“There is such a thing as coincidence,” I told them. “But—say it’s not; who profits?”

“The feds.” Giovanni, saying his rosary.

“Or somebody in one of your crews,” I said, my eyes including the both of them.

Both of them shrugged. Too professional to dismiss such a possibility, but not going for it, either.

“I can’t go there,” I told them. “You understand, right? I’ve got to work backwards, from the killing. I’ll give you whatever I find, but if there’s any Machiavelli stuff going on in your outfits, it’s up to you two to sort it out.”

“Understood,” Felix said. He looked over at Giovanni. Something passed between them.

“Okay,” Giovanni said. “You got anything to tell me, you know how to do it.”

“I’m not making progress reports. And I won’t be coming back to you unless there’s something you can help me with.”

“Like what?”

“Like a phone call,” I told him. “A phone call to the mother. Tell her I’ll be around. Ask her if she’s willing to talk to me.”

“I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll do it tonight.”

“You 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.

“She’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.”

“AYW 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.

“Eh, 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.”