Only Child

exhausted—dinner at Adventureland over in Melville, with a couple of hours in their endless arcade for dessert; a stop at Dairy Queen for a supplement, followed by three rounds of miniature golf in Deer Park. All with The Brains of the Outfit waiting patiently in the back seat of my Plymouth, sustained by what he apparently believed was his rightful share of every score in the food department.

The miniature golf had surprised me. After the arcade, I’d asked the kid what he wanted to do, expecting a crime movie or maybe even one of those paintball parlors, but he never hesitated.

And he was really good at it, too. Clearly disdaining any competition from me or his mother, the kid attacked par like it was his mortal enemy.

“Has he ever played real golf?” I asked Lottie, as the kid walked the course toward some through-the- windmill hole.

“No, he’s not. Well, a man I was dating once took us to the driving range, but all he wanted to do was show off. Hugh never actually got a chance.”

And neither did that moron, I thought. “Does he like it, though?” I asked her.

“How would I know, then?”

“Well, I...Does he watch it on television?”

“Golf?” she said incredulously.

“Okay. Uh...does he know anything about the game? The various clubs and stuff?”

“I...never asked him, to be honest. It’s not like I’m going to take him to the country club.”

“You can call him Boo,” the kid told me a couple of days later. “Just not in front of people.”

“Short for ‘Brains of the Outfit,’ right?”

“Right,” he said out of the side of his mouth, giving me a wink.

“I’m with you,” I told the kid, holding out an open palm.

He gave me a grave look, nodded, put his little fist in my hand. I squeezed it to seal our deal.

“I’ve got a budget for this one,” I told Lottie, after the kid was asleep.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m expected to spend money. Spread it around. That’s what you do when you’re looking for information.”

“I don’t know anyone who could—”

“Me, either,” I told her. “But if I don’t spend the money, the people who hired me will think I’m not working.”

“You could just lie to them.”

“I’m not a liar,” I lied, putting five hundred dollars in fifties on the kitchen table.

“You know what I’m up to, right?”

“Right,” the kid said.

“And you’re with me, right?”

“All the way, pal.”

“Here’s the deal, then, Ace. If Vonni told you secrets, it’s not ratting for you to tell me. We’re on the same team.”

“Why’d you call me that?”

“What?”

“Ace.”

“Oh. Well, it just fit, somehow. I mean, we’ve all got citizen names, like ‘Hugh,’ okay? But we also got insider names. Like ‘Boo,’ see? And if we’re going to be working together, you need an insider name.”

He was thoughtful for a minute. “Boo likes it,” he said, finally. “I do, too.”

“That’s it, then.”

“What’s yours?”

“My...?”

“Burke is your citizen name, right?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Actually, it’s my middle name. My insider name, that’s B.B.”

“My mom has a friend. Bernice. They call her BeeBee.”

“This is different,” I assured him. “B.B. is initials.”

“What’s it stand for?”

“Big Boy,” I told him, winking to make sure he kept that one between us.

“What kind of secrets?” the kid asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “Anything about Vonni that the cops don’t know, that’s one place they didn’t look, see?”

“Yeah...”

“So, if she had a boyfriend the cops didn’t know about...?”

“Nah. I mean, she had plenty of guys like her,” he said, instantly loyal. “She was real pretty. But none of them was a secret.”

“Any of them ever come around when she was ba...staying with you?”

“Nope.”

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“But if you were asleep...?”

“Nobody’d ever get past Boo,” the kid said confidently.

“I’m breaking every rule in the book,” Lottie said.

“I know.”

“You know? How could you know? You have any kids?”

“No.”

“Never?” she asked, leaning forward, elbows on knees. “Never been married, either?”

“No.”

“You’re not gay. So you must have had girlfriends. And you’re not exactly a teenager, so that’s a lot of years for you to have been—”

“How do you know?”

“How old you are? I don’t. But either you’ll never see forty again, or you’ve had a real hard life.”

“Not that. How do you know I’m not gay?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Anyway, you think that’s what I’d be worried about, you taking Hugh off to God-knows-where in the middle of the night? That’s a load of crap.”

“I’m not following—”

“That gay men are dangerous to little boys, that crap. The ones who...do things to children, what do you call them, pedophiles? They’re not gay, they’re...”

“Freaks,” I finished for her.

“Yes! That’s exactly what they are. They should be—”

“It sounds like you had to deal with...something about that.”

“Oh, I dealt with it, all right,” she said, snorting. “Some prissy-minded, so-called ‘Christians’ decided one of the teachers at Hugh’s school was gay. And they drew up this petition to get him fired.”

“Because he was a danger to the children?”

“See, that’s what I thought, at first. I mean, I didn’t know anything about it. But if it has to do with my son, you can bet I was going to find out. What it turned out to be was that these people just