Only Child

“He can take lessons. Lewis would have to bring him there. Maybe after school. Or on weekends. I guarantee Hugh would pick it up fast. The kid’s a natural.”

“Sure, and who’s going to pay for—?”

“Maybe partners can’t always be around,” I told her, “but they can always back each other up.”

“More of your ‘budget,’ I suppose?”

“No, Lottie,” I said, “this is from me,” reaching into my jacket. “I checked with the pro, where I bought the putter. It’s enough for lessons for a year.”

She got off the couch, faced me. “What happens after that?” she asked, hands on hips.

“By that time, they’re going to be offering to teach him for nothing. And if they’re not, here’s a number you can call,” I said, handing her a blank business card with the number of the pay phone at Mama’s written on the back.

She just stared at it, shaking her head. “Christ.”

“Yeah. Lottie, do me one more favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Tell Lewis, when he’s studying golf, be sure to find out what they call a hole-in-one.”

When you’re tracking, you always start the same way—with all the information you can put together stacked up like chips in front of you. That never changes. Even if the guy you’re looking for suddenly calls you up, tells you to come right on over, you’d still want some information before you anted up. Because he could be anything from a macho moron to a pro holding a full house.

Information is a product. You can buy it, trick someone out of it, extort it. Muscle it over to your side of the table...even dig for it yourself. But there’s no Consumer Reports for the product. You don’t always get what you pay for. You have to put it together, piece by piece, always testing the next chunk against what you’ve got so far. One little flaw in the logic chain, and the gun doesn’t fire. Or it blows up in your hand.

If Vonni didn’t know her own killer, that meant he was either a roving freak or a professional. The fact that it didn’t look like a pro hit didn’t convince me. Sometimes, disguising the look is part of what the buyer pays for. You hire someone to kill your wife, you don’t want a double-tap with a small-caliber piece at close range. You want what looks like she surprised a junkie burglar in her bedroom. Or ran into a rapist who didn’t want to leave a witness.

But it didn’t feel pro to me. The trick with murder-for-money is not to get too cute. That many stab wounds; wrapping the body they way they’d done; dumping it where they did—everything made it look too unplanned.

I know the sex-killers. A festering blob of poison inside them, pulsing against a fragile sac. When the membrane pops, the poison turns tsunami—wave after wave, crashing and crushing everything in its path. They go out into the night then, wrapping themselves in the darkness for power. Prowling relentlessly. Driving in figure-eight loops, driven. A jagged dissonance in their fevered brains, synapses misfiring on sex-hate cues. Building and screaming and calling until they spot her. The right one.

They know what to do then.

When they’re close, when they’re about to strike, their heartbeat slows, their pulse drops. They breathe light and smooth. Their hands stop trembling. Even the sheen of sweat whisks off their skin. Coming home.

That’s why dope fiends call it a “fix.” It fixes things. Until the next time. When you need a little more. Or need it a little more often...

There’s something else about them, too. All of them. The second they finish, a new wave hits. Run-hide terror floods in, driving them, again. Ted Bundy littered the ground with the bodies he made. John Wayne Gacy kept his in the basement. They all have the same fears, the freaks. Not of their “demons.” Of getting caught.

Different directors...but always the same script.

But what had been done with Vonni’s corpse was a kind of controlled panic— somewhere between fleeing the scene and taking the body someplace to bury it. The way I saw it, only a person connected to her in some way would have gone to that much risk after the murder.

Or Giovanni was right.

Once in a while, everyone in town knows who committed a murder, but they all look the other way. Especially when the consensus is that the dead guy just plain needed killing. That wouldn’t fly here—Vonni hadn’t been the town bully.

Still, if it was personal, why hadn’t the cops come up with anything? My first thought was that maybe it was one of their own, but I tossed that out quick. The blue wall crumpled a long time ago. Coast to coast, from Abner Louima to Rampart Division. Too many cops had worked Vonni’s case, from too many jurisdictions, for it to have stood a coverup.

What I really needed was to do my own interviews. Not just with Vonni’s friends; with her whole culture. I was about thirty years too old to go undercover. I had to make them to come to me.

“Look, let me try it this way,” I said to them. Tired but not impatient. Never impatient. “Michelle, you’ve lived in the City all your life, right?”

“Not all my life,” she said, edgy.

“Sure,” I replied, wadding up my jailhouse blanket and tossing it over the barbed wire before I tried the fence again. “What I meant was, you make your life here. You know the place.”

“Do I not?”

“You do. So—where’s Main Street?”

“Little Korea,” she said, promptly.

“Not in Flushing, girl. In the City.”

“Main Street? In Manhattan?”

“Yep.”

“There’s no...Wait a minute; up in Inglewood somewhere?” she guessed.

“No. Prof?”

The little man rubbed his temple, as if to prod his mind into action. “Fuck if I know, bro,” he finally said.

“Anybody?”

I let the silence hold for a second, then said, “It’s on Roosevelt Island. The only way I found out, I had a job out there once. But you ask a thousand people in this city, cab drivers to panhandlers, they’ll never have heard of it.”

“Where you going, son?” the Prof asked.

“To the truth, Prof. Just because a man knows something, that doesn’t make him smart. Watch a quiz show on TV sometime. One guy’ll know the first seven kings of Egypt, how many years each one ruled, and where they’re buried. But ask him who Tommy Hearns beat for his first welterweight title, and he’ll draw a total blank.”

“I understand,” Clarence said. “Burke, you are saying it isn’t that these kids would be so smart, smarter than us, even. Just that they know different things. I mean, things we don’t.”

“That’s it. And it would take us a dozen years to learn what they take for granted. Our problem is to get them to tell us. And tell us quick.”

“The Mole will know,” Michelle insisted, after the others had left the restaurant.

“Mole? This isn’t science, girl. It’s...it’s not the kind of thing the Mole does. What’s he going to do, give me some truth serum?”

“Come on, baby,” she said. “What do you have to lose? A couple of hours. Come on. I’ll go with you.”

“You just want a ride.”

“And if I do?”

“So your theory is that they have some sort of...collective knowledge?”

“I don’t think they all know—”

“Collective, not shared,” the Mole said. “Not the same thing. Each molecule is complete by itself, but the interaction between them is what produces energy.”