Only Child

the director needs for this project.”

“Beautiful,” I told him.

“Ah, you’ll see, Burke,” he said, with his mother’s trademark self-confidence. “They’re going to be the ones doing all the talking.”

“Good enough. Michelle, you’ll be my girl Friday.”

“I will not. I should be at least a—”

“You don’t look old enough to be someone high up,” I said quickly.

“Oh. Well...you may have a point.”

“A very good point, that is the truth.” Clarence took my back.

“And what do you think?” she asked, turning to the Mole.

“What?” he answered vaguely, eyes blinking rapidly behind the Coke-bottle lenses.

“Do you think I look too young to be someone important at a studio?”

“How old would someone important at a studio be?” he asked, proving you can be a genius in some areas and an imbecile in others.

“You look like you’re, maybe, twenty-nine, Mom,” Terry jumped in gamely. “No more than that.”

The Mole caught the signal, went from blinking to nodding until Michelle finally turned her attention back to me.

“You need one more thing,” she said.

“What now?”

“This!” she said, pulling a black eyepatch out of her purse.

“Why should I wear an—?”

“Honey, ever since the...ever since what happened, you can’t see out of both of them, right?”

“Not at the same time.”

“And when they...fixed you up, all that plastic surgery, they didn’t put it in...the same.”

“So?”

She came over, stood next to where I was sitting. “Before it hap—”

“Before I got shot in the head, Michelle. You can say it,” I told her. They could say anything they wanted about that night. Anything except Pansy’s name.

“All right, baby. Before you got shot, you had the perfect con man’s face. It wasn’t...It didn’t make a real impression, and it didn’t stay with you, either. But now you look...distinctive. The scar,” she said, sad and sweet, touching the spot on my right cheek. “Your eyes don’t line up. And they’re two different colors, too. The skin on one side is a little...tighter than the other. Your hair has those long streaks of white in it. And the top of this ear...”

“I get it.”

“But, honey, listen. You wear this eyepatch and that’s all people will see. It draws attention to one thing, takes it away from the rest. Anyone asks for your description, they’ll say ‘the man with the patch.’ Let them focus on that instead of...”

“It’s a good idea,” I told her, to take away some of her pain. “And when we’re done, and I take it off, it’ll be like a new face.”

“I didn’t mean...”

“I like it,” I said. “It’s a good play, girl. Let me try it on.”

“How did you know where I live?” the pudgy-faced guy said, standing in the doorway of his Chelsea walk-up.

“I can explain better inside,” I said.

“Maybe I don’t want—”

I turned to go, rolling my right shoulder away from him as I brought my left hand off the door jamb to smack softly against the side of his exposed neck, shoving him to the side, letting my momentum back me into the space he vacated. “Thanks,” I said.

He retreated a few steps. I didn’t move. He brought his hands up in front of his face, then dropped them immediately so I wouldn’t think he wanted to fight.

“Stop it,” I told him. “If I wanted to hurt you, you’d already be hurt.”

“What do you want here?”

“I don’t want anything here. I want something from you. And here is where you are.”

“I didn’t tell anyone—”

“What? That I came to you, asked you for a friendly favor? Who’d care?”

“Then why are you mad?”

“I’m not mad, Jerry. I’m just in a hurry.”

“You didn’t have to threaten me,” he said indignantly. He walked over and dropped himself into a canvas beanbag chair.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“That man who called me. Your ‘reference.’ He said if I didn’t ‘help you out’—that’s the words he used, ‘help you out’— then I’d better find a good morphine connection. Because the hospitals, they never really give you enough for internal injuries.”

“You probably misunderstood him,” I said, as I walked over to a blue Naugahyde recliner and sat down. I lit a cigarette, looked around for an ashtray.

“There’s one on the shelf behind you,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, now that I’d been upgraded from invader to guest. “Anyway, Jerry, here’s the thing. I don’t think I’m going to make it as a journalist, but I do keep my ear to the ground. I hear things, you know?”

“So?” he said, still resentful.

“So I need to ask your advice. About how to use this...thing I heard.”

“We only publish material that we can—”

“I wouldn’t want your magazine to publish this one,” I said, sniffing out the ego issue and running with it. Violence or con job, it always comes down to the same thing—reading the other guy. “It’s just a rumor, and I know you don’t trade in rumors. Only facts. But the way I figure things, just because you wouldn’t go near something doesn’t mean you don’t know how it works, right?”

“I don’t think I under—”

“Okay. There’s going to be a movie shot out on Long Island. Sort of a horror flick, but with a love story, too. The whole thing takes place at a high school. An independent production company has this dynamite script, and they’re looking for actors. Only thing is, they have to be pretty much unknown, and they have to be local...for the accents and the look and all. And to stay within budget.”

“So?”

“So the casting director is going to be looking for talent, but their team doesn’t want word to get out. You know how they’d be swamped with all kinds of stage mothers and agents. They want to keep it low-key until they get the film mostly cast.”

“What’s this got to do with—?”

“You know the Internet, right? How it works?”

“I’m not a geek, I’m a journalist. The Internet is just the forum we use,” he said self-righteously.

“Sure, I understand. But I’m not talking techno here. I’m talking about the medium. What I want is to get the word out about—”

“You said they didn’t want—”

“That’s them, Jerry. That’s not us.”

“Us?”

“You and me. And my partners. You know...you spoke to one of them. And what we want, we want the word to sort of dribble out there. Just a little. So it has to be planted in places where only kids from the local area would pick it up. We’re not looking for national, see?”

“Sure,” he said. Confidence returning. “And there’s ways to do that somewhat. But