Only Child

“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.”

“Twelve-thirty. Half past midnight. That was her curfew on Saturday nights. It used to be eleven-thirty, but she’d just turned sixteen and...”

“I understand. She said there was a party that night, and she’d go straight there from the—”

“Vonni wanted to sleep over. At her friend BJ’s house—that’s a girl. But I told her she could either go to the City with her friends or have the sleepover, not both in one day. She chose the City.”

“How did she seem that morning?”

“Excited! So excited. Happy and...just looking forward to...her whole life, I guess,” Hazel Greene said. Her voice was hollow, walled off from the pain.

“That was normal for Vonni?”

“Normal? She was a sixteen-year-old girl, Mr....Burke, is it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you change it?”

“Change...what?”