Only Child

number of books. You have to confront them. Make them take responsibility. That’s what I did. And not with a letter, like they say to do if you can’t face them, or if they’re dead, but I could, so that’s what I did. I went right to her.

“‘You lied,’ that’s what I told her. And you know what she did? She admitted it. Like it was something she was proud of. She said she never told me my father was a rapist because she didn’t want me to think I came from anything bad. She, Nola, could have had an abortion, she said. But she doesn’t believe in abortion, she said. So she went away and changed her name and had me, the baby. That was after the trial. After the man was convicted.”

My cigarette had burnt itself out. I wondered when she was going to.

“What do you want Mr. Burke to do?” I asked her, earning myself another puncture wound from Michelle.

“He’s innocent,” the woman said. I knew what was coming then. And it turned each vertebra of my spine into a separate ice cube. “I found him,” she said, reverence throbbing through her voice. “We correspond. I’m on his approved list. Not everyone can be on that list. He had to get permission. And I visit him, too. He’s in Clinton; do you know where that is?”

“Yes,” I said, keeping to the professional neutrality of the hostage negotiator. “It’s a prison. Way upstate, near the Canadian border.”

“That’s right. That’s true, what you said. He’s up there. All the way up there, for something someone else did. For what someone else did to him.”

I was getting a headache. Even if the guy she was talking about had gone down for Rape One, and the judge had maxed him, he wouldn’t still be Inside so many years later. Not in New York, where the politicians think only drug-dealing and cop-killing should lock you down for the count.

“I don’t understand,” I said gently. “If he’d been convicted back in—”

“No, no, no, no,” she cut me off. “He was in another place. A much nicer place. In Gouverneur. That’s far upstate, too. But it’s better. He was in a dormitory, not a cell. And he could have more visits, and packages, and everything. But he got stabbed. By an Italian. A Mafia man, I think. It was for no reason. He almost died. But the man who stabbed him, he told a story, and they believed it. So they moved the man Nola said was my...They moved him. For his own protection, is what they said.”

“I’m still not following you,” I said. “When was he first incarcerated?”

“Incarcerated? When my mother, Nola is what she says her name is, when my mother made up the story. That’s when.”

“But that was before you were even born, right? And he’s still locked up?”

“He...You don’t understand. The prosecutor, she was a crazy woman. A savage person. She got them to sentence him as a Persistent Violent Felony Offender,” she said, articulating the words proudly, like a child who had just memorized her alphabet.

“This was in Queens, then?” I asked.

“Yes! Right here in Queens. In the courthouse in Jamaica. I have the whole transcript. That prosecutor, she told the judge my father was a dangerous beast, and he needed to be in a cage for the rest of his life.”

Wolfe, I thought to myself. The former chief of City-Wide Special Victims, she was a blooded-in veteran of the trench warfare academics call sex-crimes prosecution.

Wolfe had been hated by Legal Aid and black-robed collaborators alike. She’d taken on all comers for years, never stepping off, fighting harder when she was surrounded. She tried all the “bad victim” cases everyone else ducked—hookers, mentally ill, retarded, elderly, little kids—risking the high conviction rate so sacred to prosecutors with political ambitions.

And then she was taken down by a party-hack whore who spent so much time on his knees that the ass he kissed had become his panoramic world-view.

After that, Wolfe went outlaw, spearheading the best info-trafficking crew in the City.

Wolfe, who I always loved from the moment I truly knew her. Who told me once, “You and me, it’s never going to be.” Who I once had something with I’d never had before. A second chance. And, being me, I blew it.

No matter how long you’re gone, some kinds of pain are always patient enough to wait for you.

“I know who you’re talking about,” is all I said. “But I still can’t figure out what you want Mr. Burke to do.”

“My father was the victim of a false allegation,” the woman said. “It was all a lie. They were all liars, all those women. But only Nola, my mother, she says, even Nola she says, she was the only one who was brazen enough to tell the lies in court. It was not the truth, so it was a lie. My mother, this Nola, made it all up. Because she was a slut and a whore. She didn’t want to admit what she was, so she said she was raped. Like the Scottsboro Boys. Just like that. It was on the Internet. Those girls were never raped. But they knew if they pointed a finger at black boys they would be heroes, not whores.

“That’s what happened with my mother, Nola, the way she says it, Nola. The big hero. For testifying. Such a brave liar she was. So what I want, I want...DNA,” she said, in that breathless, dramatic tone people reserve for something holy.

“You’re talking a lot of money,” I said, trying to stem the flow.

“Money?” she sneered, almost cackling with scorn. “There’ll be plenty of money. I talked to a producer. And she said that we’d all be there, on national TV. They can do a remote, so my father could be on TV, too, from prison.”

“A producer...?”

“My agent is handling it all,” she said loftily. “He says a book is a sure thing, and maybe even a movie. And if Mr. Burke can get me the test, he’d be on camera, too. You know what publicity like that could be worth?”

About as much as my picture on a post-office wall, I thought, but I made encouraging noises at the woman, wanting her to finish so Michelle and I could vanish from her life.

“I want a complete DNA test,” she said. “Of everyone involved. Me, Nola, my mother she says, and the innocent man, my father. See”—she bent forward to compel me with the brilliance of her plan—“my father’s lawyers have all given up. The...rape kit, I think they call it, it’s not around anymore. So, normally, there wouldn’t be anything anyone could do. But Nola, my mother she says, says my father raped her. And that’s how I was born. You see the beauty of it?

“Will you tell Mr. Burke for me? I know he always defends the innocent,” she whispered, confirming that she was a dozen shock treatments past deranged.

“Sometimes, I’m ashamed that God is a woman,” Michelle said on the drive back. “I don’t like sick jokes.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Nice logic, huh? If this guy’s DNA doesn’t match up, so what? Means he’s not her father, that’s all. Doesn’t say anything about him not being a rapist. Only thing it means is that the mother had sex with someone somewhere around the time the rape occurred. Probably after, is what I’m guessing.”

“Why?”

“Lots of kids are born at eight months, not nine. Technically preemies, but they have good size and weight. The mother probably did the math herself, figured it had to be the rapist who made her pregnant.”

“Or maybe just a little before, and the guy had used a condom, so the mother thought she couldn’t...?”

“Sure. But there’s no way the rapist knew her, not even slightly. Otherwise the maggot would have gone for a consent defense, guaranteed. This wasn’t a homicide. The victim lived, and she ID’ed him in court. There was probably a ton of other evidence, too. Remember what she said about ‘all those women’? You don’t get a Persistent Violent jacket without a load of priors. Ten to one, he was a serial rapist. Probably only took it to trial because Wolfe wouldn’t offer him anything off the life-top, so what did he have to lose?

“You’ll notice she never said a word about blood evidence being used to convict him. Experienced freak like that, maybe he used a condom. That woman is stone-lunar. To her, this is all some kind of weirdo paternity suit.”