Only Child

The house was an ambassador for the subdivision. Started out a basic two-bedroom, one-bath unit on a concrete slab, but the carport had been made into a real garage, and the dormer window showed that the attic had been finished for occupancy. Maybe another bedroom and bath up there, too; no way to tell from the outside.

I noticed other upgrades. Vinyl siding in a rich shade of brown, set off by white trimming for a gingerbread look. A bay window in front. Skylight above it. The lawn was neatly mowed, but not razor-edged immaculate the way some others I passed were. No fence.

Slate slabs, set in an irregular pattern, led up to the front entrance. The door was painted the same color as the siding, plain except for two overlapping glass bricks at the top right—made me think of a pair of dice.

The button for the doorbell was set into the frame on the left. I pressed it. Heard the faint sound of a gong inside, vaguely Oriental. I could see from the way the door was framed that it opened in, but I stepped back anyway, so she wouldn’t feel as if I were looming over her when she answered.

Nothing. I checked my watch. A minute shy of noon. The gong sound had been very muted. Maybe she was around back...?

I was mentally tossing a coin on whether to ring again, or walk around the back, when the door opened. The interior was too dim for me to make out anything more than that it was a woman.

“Yes?”

“My name is Burke, ma’am. We had an appointment....”

“Appointment,” she said, as if confirming.

“Yes, ma’am. For noon. Could I...?”

She stepped back, not saying a word. I crossed the threshold, deliberately leaving the door open. She moved behind me, closed it herself. And stayed where she was.

To my right, I could see the kitchen. The appliances all seemed to be the same bronze color. To my left, the living room, where the skylight bent the sun into a rectangular patch on a beige carpet. I didn’t move.

I heard a deep intake of breath, as if she were getting ready to lift a heavy weight. She moved from behind me over to the left. “Please come in,” she said.

I followed her to the living room. She sat herself on the white twill couch, nodded her head toward a matching wingback chair. Said “Please” again. I sat down.

“I’ll try to make this as easy as possible,” I began.

“Easy.”

“I apologize. A poor choice of words. I understand this could never be easy. My intent was to—”

“Understand.”

“Mrs. Greene...”

“Ms.”

“Ms. Greene, you know why I’m here. You agreed to see me. You know what I’m doing, what I was hired to do. I’m trying my best not to offend you, but I don’t seem to be very good at it.”

“Offend me?”

“Perhaps that was overstated,” I said, trying for mild, not oily. “When I speak with you, I seem to always use the wrong word for what I mean to convey.”

I waited patiently for her to say “Convey,” but she stayed silent, not bothering to conceal that she was studying my face.

So that’s what I did, too. All I knew from Giovanni was her color, and even that had been misleading—I’d seen blondes with deep tans who were darker than her skin shade. She had a narrow nose, high cheekbones, and thin lips. Her hair would have made a Filipina proud. I can’t do genetics-by-sight the way Mama does, but it didn’t take a DNA specialist to see there was a heavy dose of cream in her coffee.

A beautiful, slender woman in a plain blue dress. Still in shock, as if they’d just told her last night.

“You work for Giovanni?” she finally asked.

“I’m doing this job for him,” I said, treading carefully.

“You’re not in his...organization?”

“No. I’m not in any organization.”

“You’re not a criminal?”

“No, ma’am, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are,” she said, in a sterilized voice. “Some kind of a criminal. Everyone in Gio’s world is a criminal of some kind.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What did he hire you to do?” she asked.

“To find who...murdered your daughter. And why they did.”

“The police say they know.”

“What!? They know who—”

“Not who,” she said, emotionless. “Why.”

“Those are guesses, Ms. Greene. Theories. The only sure way to find the person who actually—”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, theories are generalizations. They’re based on—”

“No. Not that. ‘Person,’ you said. The police said it was a man.”

“I can understand why they might think that, ma’am. And I’m not arguing with it. Just trying not to exclude anyone until I know more.”

“More?”

“More than I know now,” I said, trying to catch her waves so I could surf. “Some of it, I hope you’ll tell me. The rest, I have to find on my own.”

“And Giovanni hired you to do that?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Will you do it yourself?”

“Mostly. It depends on what it turns out is needed. I might bring others into it, if I have to.”

“Needed?”

“To find the person.”

“So Giovanni can kill him,” she said, with no-affect certainty.

“I don’t know anything about—”

“Oh, Gio will kill him,” she said, mournfully confident. “Honor is so very important to him.”

“Honor?” I asked, switching roles.

She smiled faintly, without warmth. “You’re right, of course. I said ‘honor,’ but I meant ‘image.’ What the kids call ‘face.’ That is Giovanni, right there. That sums him up.”

“I don’t know him,” I slip-slided.

“You said it might not be a man.”

“Giovanni, I mean. I don’t know...the child’s father. I’m doing a job of work for him, that’s all.”

“Father?”

“Ma’am, I am truly sorry if I keep stumbling around. I can’t seem to find the right words. I don’t know Giovanni. And I’ll never know your daughter. But if you’ll help me know about her, maybe I can find who killed her.”

“What then?”

“When I find whoever did it...if I can?”

“Yes. What then? Will you tell the police?”

“That’s not my job.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Yes,” I spooled out the lie like a bolt of silk, “of course I will. You have the right to know.”

“Please wait here,” she said. At a nod from me, she stood up and walked out of the room.

I didn’t move from where I was seated, contenting myself with a visual sweep of the room. It was neat and clean, but without that demented gleam you get under a No People, No Pets, No Playing regime. The room was clearly for company, but not the kind that kicked back with a few beers and watched a football game with their feet on the coffee table.

I’d been in homes where people had lost their child to violence before. I expected at least one photo of the girl—a shrine wouldn’t have surprised me.

Nothing.

When the mother came back, she was carrying a large gray plastic box by the handle. When she opened the top, I could see it was filled front-to-back with file folders. She knelt, placed it on the floor in front of my chair, said, “I have three more,” and walked off again.

I didn’t think about offering to help her any more than I did about looking through the files outside her presence.

“It’s all there,” she said, finally. If lugging all those boxes had tired her, she kept it off her face. Her breathing was as regular as if she’d never left the couch. “The first one is everything that was in the newspapers, and everything I got from the police. The others are all...Vonni. From her baby stuff to just before...”

“I—”

“The reason they’re like that,” she interrupted, “is because of...what happened. I always kept Vonni’s...everything. Every report card, every note from school, every doctor’s visit...I always took pictures, too. But I didn’t have them in this...this filing system, before. I was trying to help the police. They had so many questions, they kept coming back and back and back. Finally, I put this all together for them. But it wasn’t what they were interested in, I guess.”

“They wanted to know about her boyfriends, right?”

“Yes.”

“And yours?”

“Yes.” No reaction, flat.

“Her teachers? School friends?”

“Yes.”

“Her computer?”

“Oh yes.”

“Drugs? Parties? Gangs?”

“Of course,” she said, a tiny vein of sarcasm pulsing in her voice.

“And they drew a blank with all of that?”

“That? There were no drugs. There were no gangs.”

“They said this? Or you just know from your own—?”

“I said it. They didn’t believe it. They didn’t say so, not out loud. But I could tell. After a...while, after a while, though, they believed it.”

“And they apologized for—?”

“Be serious,” she said.

She didn’t offer me so much as a glass of water. Just sat there watching me go through the files, one at a time. I wanted to start at the latest ones and work backwards, but I could sense that would sever the single frayed thread between us.

I tried to engage her in conversation as I worked. Several times. All I got for my efforts was monosyllables. And when I suggested that I could maybe take the files with me, return them later, I got a look that would have scared a scorpion.

Okay.

The birth certificate was strangely impersonal.

I’d seen New York birth certificates from the Fifties. They were a lot richer in detail, and a lot less socially correct. They used to give you the time of birth, the number of children “previously born alive” to the mother, the race and occupation of the parents...even where they lived. But I thought that even the little bit of information on this one might open a door, if I could just engage the mother....

“I thought her name would be spelled differently,” I said.

“Vonni’s name?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I thought it was...a reference to Giovanni.”

“Yes, that’s right. But I spelled it the way it should be pronounced, so her friends wouldn’t get it wrong. Or her teachers, when they called on her in class. Vonni might not have felt comfortable correcting people all the time, just gone along with whatever they called her. When she was little, I mean. I didn’t want that. I mean, if I spelled it like ‘Vanni,’ they’d all think they should say it like ‘Vanna’ with a ‘y.’ Vanny. Then she’d have no connection to her father at all. No child would want that, would they?”

“No,” I assured her, “they wouldn’t.” Thinking of my own birth certificate. The one that said “Baby Boy Burke.” Time of birth: 3:03 a.m. If I ever wanted my first name to link me to my father, I’d have to change it to “Unknown.”

I kept looking. A color photo marked “5/13/91” on the back showed a pretty, slightly chubby little girl, more darkly complected than her mother, with long wavy hair. The child had almond eyes, and a smile you could arc-weld with.

If an activity existed on this earth Vonni hadn’t been exposed to, I’d never heard of it. Piano lessons, T-ball, dance, karate, gymnastics, soccer, glee club, drama society.

Only the last one had gone the distance, though. At the very end of the “Activities” file, there was a program for the school play for her junior year. Under “Cast,” I found:

Amanda...........Vonni B. Greene

The play was scheduled for the night of May 23. They’d found the girl’s body the day before.

The files looked like raw data. It didn’t seem like any of it had been sanitized by a loving parent’s hand, but I still had to ask.

“Ms. Greene, I apologize if this question offends you in any way. I hope you understand why I’m asking. This material, it shows an almost...idyllic life. I wonder if there was any other...”

“You and the police,” she said, an ugly little twist to her upper lip.

I didn’t say anything.

“This is everything,” she said. “I’m so sorry Vonni wasn’t having an affair with a married man. Or smoking crack. Or running with a gang.”

“All right.”

“Is it? Are you satisfied, sir? Are you going to tell Giovanni I ‘cooperated’? I’m sure he’ll be asking you about that.”

“Ms. Greene, anything you share with me is privileged.”

“What does that mean, privileged?”

“It means two things,” I said, keeping the volume down, but putting some weight into my voice. “One, you have no obligation to share anything with me, and I’m well aware of that. So whatever I might learn from you is a privilege. Not a right, a privilege. A privilege I would respect. Two, anything you say to me stays with me. It’s a privileged communication, just as if you spoke it to a priest.”

“You’re no priest.”

“No, I’m not. I’m not a lawyer or a doctor or a social worker or anything the law would prohibit me from repeating what you tell me. I’m just a man. But what I am is a man of my word.”

“You say so.”

“Yes. I say so.”

“That’s all you have, your word?”

“That’s all anyone has. Question is, how good is it.”

“That is the question. How would I find the answer?”

“Watch me,” I told her. “Watch me close.”

“Why should I do it?” the pudgy-faced guy asked me. He was wearing a rumpled white shirt under wide red suspenders, a battered dark-brown fedora tipped back on his head. A cigar that wasn’t from the same hemisphere as Havana was planted in the corner of his mouth. Dressing the part.

“I’m not asking you to do anything,” I told him. “Like I said, all I want is the assignment. On spec. You’re a journalist, right? Your whole operation, it’s about investigative reporting. That’s what I’ll be doing.”

“Solving that murder?” he asked, sarcasm smearing his thick lips. “The case is over a year old. Maybe you’ll find who killed Chandra Levy, while you’re at it.”

“I’ll solve it, or I won’t,” I said, matter-of-factly. “It’s my time. I’m not asking you for a dime in front. Not even expenses.”

“And if you did manage to come up with the killer...?”

“It would be yours. A total exclusive.”

He puffed on his cigar, trying to get the hang of it. Said, “We can’t issue press credentials. Internet journalists don’t get the same respect our brothers on the print side do.”

“The only credential I want is, if the cops call, you say I’m working for you. On this assignment.”

“What do you need us for? Just tell anyone who asks that you’re freelance.”

“Sure, I could do that. But I’ll get treated better if I’m working on an assignment.”

“You might,” he conceded. “But a story like that...I mean, if you actually found the killer, it’d be worth a lot. Why should I trust you to bring it to us?”

“I’ve got references.”

“Is that right?” he said, just short of snide. “Who would they be?”

“I’ll have them call you,” I said.

“Why should I believe you?” Wolfe.

“I can prove it,” I said into the phone. “If we could just—”

“Arm’s-length,” she said, sugarless.

“Whatever you say.”

“I won’t say it twice,” she warned.

“Guy’s down here, looking for you.”

Gateman, whispering into the phone he kept in the room behind the front-desk area.

“Me? Or a name?”

“Burke.”

“Ever see him before?”

“No. Big guy. Dresses like a fucking lumberjack. Stands like a fighter, though.”

“Send him up, okay?”

“You’re the boss.”

Mick came up the stairs slowly, hands open at his sides, distributing his weight carefully. He saw me watching through the open door, walked in.

“I was expecting Wolfe,” I said.

“After I look around.”

I waved my hand to indicate he could look wherever he wanted. Giving up my address to Wolfe was the only way I could get her to meet with me. Mick was part of the package.

“You got another dog?” he asked, wary.

“No.”

“Sorry,” is all he said. More than I thought he would.

“Hi, chief!”

Pepper. Sporting a red beret and a white jumpsuit with a matching red belt.

“Hey, Pepper. You guys going to keep coming in waves, or what?”

“She’ll be here. In a minute. I’m just picking up Mick. Today’s our anniversary, and I thought we’d—”

I shot a quick glance at Mick. I’d known him for years, and I was sure that nothing that walked the earth could make him nervous. But I didn’t think that bulge in his jacket was an anniversary present. And there was a definite look of alarm on his face. He disappeared in the direction of the bedroom.

“Pepper, can I ask you a question?”

“Talk’s cheap,” she said, then giggled to take the sting out of it.

“Wolfe doesn’t really think I’d ever—”

“Ah, don’t go there,” she advised, not unkindly. “I’m not here for nothing.”

Just as I opened my mouth to ask her what she meant, Mick came back to where we were sitting, and a barrel-chested Rottweiler strutted through the open front door. The beast came toward me, making little trash-compactor noises.

“Bruiser!”

Wolfe. In a tightly belted silk trenchcoat of pale lilac and matching spike heels with ankle straps. Her long dark hair was streaked with auburn highlights now, but the trademark white wings still flared out from her high forehead. Gray gunfighter’s eyes took my temperature.

“Thanks for coming,” I said.

She clapped her hands, one short, sharp sound. The Rottweiler hit the deck, never taking his baleful gaze off me.

“Bruiser has a good memory,” she said.

“Then why doesn’t he relax?”

“Oh, he never liked you,” Wolfe said, no trace of a smile on that gorgeous mouth.

It took less than half an hour for me to lay the whole thing out for her. Mick went back to roaming around the apartment, but Pepper never left Wolfe’s side.

All business, then.

Fair enough. Where I come from, whatever train you want to ride gets to call the price of the ticket.

“You want what, exactly?” Wolfe asked. Then added, “What do you want to buy?” avoiding a mixed message.

“Whatever you can get me on the crime that I couldn’t get for myself out of the papers.”

“The same stuff a defense attorney would get if they’d ever brought anyone to trial?”

“No. Not just the Brady stuff. McVeigh-type discovery. The whole thing. Investigative reports, suspects ruled out, blind alleys. Everything.”

“I’m not sure I can get all that. Some of it, sure. But I don’t have the same contacts on Long Island that I do in Queens.”

“Why Queens?”

“That’s where the body was dumped,” she said, a faint note of surprise in her voice. “You didn’t know that?”

“No. No, I didn’t. So Long Island’s connection with the case is only because that’s where the girl was from?”

“I don’t know. I took a quick look. Maybe there’s more to that, but I can’t say right now.”

“All right.”

“And what else?”

“Whatever you can get me on Giovanni Antrelli and Felix Encarnación,” I said, not pretending surprise that she knew there was another reason for me calling her in.

“Didn’t you just say they were your clients?”

“Yeah. I did.”

“So...?”

“So I meant what I told you on the phone. This is straight-edge. Me, anyway, I am.”

“So you think your clients might have had something to do with—?”

“No. Not in the way you mean. But they think it’s about them. That’s one out of three.”

“Burke...” she said, with just a trace of impatience.

“One,” I said, holding up a finger, “it was a random thing. Young girl’s out, doing whatever, runs into Mr. Wrong. Anyone from a roving tramp to a Ted Bundy. Two, it was somebody in her life,” I went on, “somebody she knew. The way she was killed, it fits either one. Serial killers, it’s nothing unusual for them to be in a rage when they work, right? And a boyfriend, or anyone who thought he’d been betrayed, they might get into a frenzy, too. But the third choice is what my clients themselves suspect—a professional job. Someone sending Giovanni a message. ‘We know everything about you. And we’re very serious people.’ Killing a daughter nobody was supposed to know he even had, that would make both those points.”

“And Antrelli, he thinks it’s the feds?”

“That’s maybe not as crazy as it sounds,” I said, catching the defensiveness too late to choke it off.

“The feds hiring psycho sex-killers?” she said, the sarcasm all the heavier for its absence in her tone.

“First of all,” I told her, “the feds are masters of the means-justifies-the-end strategies. How many times have they left a child molester running around loose, even when they knew he was doing kids left and right, because they wanted to build a case against some of the people in his ring? Or just gather more evidence, make a stronger case? They let Klansmen they had in their pockets go along on lynchings, didn’t they? They stirred up that war between the Panthers and Karenga’s group—a lot of bodies behind that one. I don’t know about outright assassinations, but how many people did Hoover get dead with the games he played?”

“You’re a historian now?” she said, letting the sarcasm surface. “And you actually think they’d sex-murder a teenage girl just to drive a wedge between some narco-traffickers?”

“A whole agency? No way. Even if some supervisor had an aneurysm and hatched a plan like that, they’d put him in a padded room. But Giovanni thinks it’s a rogue.”

“In the FBI?”

“Ask the agent doing life for selling secrets to the Russians. What’s his name, Hanssen?”

“Yes. But he was a whore. This, what you’re talking about, it would have to be personal.”

“That’s what Giovanni thinks, too,” I said. “But if he’s telling it straight, it’s nothing more than a feeling—he doesn’t know anything.”

“Does he have someone in mind?”

“Not even a guess. He’s...confused, is the best way I could put it. If someone in law enforcement hated him that bad, why not just take him out? Trap him in an alley, ventilate him, flake the corpse with whatever they need—pistol and powder would do it—and walk away giggling. If a beat cop guns down a homeless black guy, there’s people in this city who’ll get in the street behind it, raise all kinds of holy hell. But a known gangster? A made man? Where’s the Al Sharpton for that? Columbo tried it years ago. And remember how he ended up.”

“So it’s some kind of deeper game, and the girl was a pawn?” Wolfe asked, hunter’s eyes hard under skeptically raised eyebrows.

“Maybe,” I said, not committing myself. “That’s if it wasn’t a random freak, or someone with a specific motive to kill her. Giovanni’s big reason for believing it was aimed at him is the biggest reason for anyone else believing that it wasn’t.”

“That nobody knew she was his daughter?”

“Yep.”

She shifted in her chair to face me more squarely. The Rottweiler did the same from the floor. “You said, on the phone, that this was back to being what you once were.”

“I did.”

“That’s a long jump. What’s so high and mighty about this job that gets you there?”

“I’m not saying anything like that. You know I used to...look for kids, things like that. I know this one’s dead. So it’s not about protecting her, sure. But this isn’t crime I’m doing, right? A job like this, it’s about as legitimate as a man like me could ever hope to get.”

“A man like you?” She dry-laughed.

“What do you want from me?” I said.

“From you?” she said, icily. “Half up front, half when I deliver.”

Every time I see Wolfe, it’s always the same. And after she leaves, it’s always a Patsy Cline night.

I know how to wait. It’s just time, and I’ve done enough of it. And, now that I was home, I had plenty of things to help make it pass.

Not TV. That’s the same all over. What I’d really missed was my newspapers. There’s nothing like the New York tabs, especially when they’re in one of their turf wars.

I hit the mute on some sit-com, improving it considerably. Then I fixed myself a rye toast with cream cheese, added a big glass of grape juice, and settled down with the Daily News and the Post, glad to be back with journalism where all murders are “brutal,” all prosecutors are “tough,” and all blondes are “attractive.” And any lawyer who cooperates with the reporter is “high-powered.”

The ex-mayor, a guy who usually had all the charm of a public housing project, had stepped up big after the World Trade Center destruction, and the papers were covering his endless divorce with a lot less intensity now.

A genetically engineered football player, whose gigantic neck made his head resemble a shot put stuck in a pool of mud, hospitalized his girlfriend.

A pattern rapist was terrorizing Queens. The DA promised “the maximum penalty” when he was caught. Sure...if he pleaded to it.

Two broken-synapse robbers killed four people “execution style” in a convenience store in Corona.

Some addled actor who played a doctor in one of those made-for-cable movies was giving a speech at NYU on the need for Medicaid reform.

Politicians kept “calling” for different things. Nobody ever seemed to answer.

The gossip columns were the usual mix of pipe jobs and courthouse-bin scavenging, with a little credit-card info thrown in for seasoning.

A couple of buffoons were running for some state-senate seat just vacated by the incumbent’s prison term. One accused the other of being “against the Internet”—a knockout punch in a world where whole hordes of humans think better sex is a faster modem.

There were five separate heavyweight champions of the world.

The Twin Towers were gone forever, and the debate about what to put up in their place had turned sanctimonious and ugly at the same time.

Various humans called each other racists.

A rap star got arrested for keeping it real. And a comedian for child abuse.

Four more celebrities went into rehab, one for the third time.

A man, despondent over his mother’s suicide, swan-dived off the Throgs Neck Bridge. Didn’t even break a bone.

A fourteen-year-old got twenty-eight years in prison for shooting his teacher. Part of his sentence was he had to take anger-management classes. I hoped someone was going to teach him knife-fighting, too.

On the international front, Cambodia was still selling its children as prostitutes, and the Sudan was selling its children, period. There were anti-immigrant riots all over Europe, the swastika out of the closet. The Middle East was as stable as nitro in a Cuisinart.

The boss of the Olympics cartel said the games were the world’s greatest single opportunity to advance the cause of international human rights. Which is why they picked Beijing to host them in 2008.

A five-million-dollar federal study announced that the latest stats showed crime was way down in America. I guess that’s what Bush had meant by “faith-based.”

“What is that, mahn?” Clarence asked the next day, pointing to the walls I’d covered with white posterboard.

“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?”

“Your name,” she said. “Burke, that’s not Italian.”

“I told you I didn’t work for your...for Vonni’s father, Ms. Greene.”

“I remember. I assumed you were a member of some other...organization. But still part of their whole thing.”

“No. No, I’m not.”

“Why would Gio trust you, then? You’re not...‘family,’” she said, her lips twisting with contempt.

“You would have to ask him.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I believe I understand it now. If anyone has to know his shameful secret, better an outsider.”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” I said mildly, trying to steer her back to where I needed her. “But...you see what I mean now? About what Vonni knew about her father?”

“I certainly never told her that her father was in Boston.”

“It was just an example,” I said patiently. “Of the kind of thing you might have told her.”

“What good would it do you if I—?”

“The morning she left, she knew you wouldn’t expect her until at least half past midnight,” I interrupted, still working on not losing her. “If she was looking for her father, she might have gone to wherever you...”

Hazel Greene nodded, as if finally seeing where I was going, if not the sense of it. “She thought her father was dead.”

“Ah.”

“When she was little, she used to ask. Where I was raising her, at first, it was nothing so unusual for a father not to be in the home. But they, the fathers, they were...around, you know? In the neighborhood, someplace. A presence. Even in prison, they were real. I thought of telling her her father had been a soldier, killed in some war, but I could never make the dates work.

“Besides, even when she was a little, little girl, I knew how smart she was going to be. And what a heart she’d have. If I told her that her father had been a soldier, she’d want to see his grave someday. So what I did, I told her that her father was dead, and that I’d explain everything when she was older.”

“She accepted that?”

“Not at first. But then we made a bargain. On her eighth birthday, I’d tell her everything.”

“Why then?”

“I was just buying time when I said it. And Vonni never spoke of it again. Neither did I. But on her eighth birthday, she asked. And that’s when I told her.”

I didn’t say anything, keeping slack in the line so it wouldn’t snap if she made a sudden run.

“She’d just seen West Side Story on television. I thought it was maybe a little mature for Vonni, but she just loved it. So I told her that’s how it had been for her father and me. A forbidden love. It felt good to wrap the lie I was going to tell her in so much truth.

“It was the truth. Gio’s favorite song was some old thing, from the Fifties, maybe? ‘Running Bear.’ I’m sure you never heard it....”

“Johnny Preston,” I said. “With the Big Bopper doing the bass line.”

“Oh! Then you know. The boy and girl, from two different tribes, on opposite sides of the river. ‘But their tribes fought with each other,’” she recited, “‘so their love could never be.’ Gio played that song over and over for me. He said that was us. There even was a river between us. The East River. Do you remember how the song ended?”

“Yes. The young brave dove into the river that separated them, and the maiden jumped in, too. They met in the middle. The current pulled them down. And they drowned.”

“Together.”

“That’s right.”

“Yes. And that’s what crazy Gio wanted to do. He wanted us to die together. Not in some dirty river. He wanted us to go to the top of the World Trade Center...that was years ago, before those crazy people, the terrorists, did that terrible...and jump off, holding hands all the way down. So we could be together.”

“There were other ways you could be—”

“I know. We could have run away. He could have gotten a job. But none of that was real to Gio. He could never imagine leaving his...life. Or getting a regular job. But dying, that was something he could deal with.”

“Not you, though.”

“I had my baby inside me,” she said, as if that explained everything.

I stayed quiet for long enough to understand that it did.

“I always remembered what Gio had wanted to do,” she said quietly. “A couple of years after I...left, I saw a story in the Post. It was about a young man who tried to jump between two high buildings over in the Bronx. It was some kind of gang thing. Not an initiation—the young man was the leader. The story seemed to imply that he was showing the others how to do it.

“So that’s what I told Vonni. How her father died. That young man? In the story? His name was Romeo. Isn’t that just too ridiculous?”

Then she started to cry.

I cruised the neighborhood the way I’d case a bank, starting out way past the perimeter and working my way toward the center. Only a fool goes into the jungle without memorizing enough trail-markers to find his way back out.

When you look for kids—runaways, castoffs, missing-and-presumed—finding a body is always one of the possibilities. But this time I was starting at the other end of the tunnel. That changed the game. If I stepped out of the shadows, had the mother “hire” me, got the names of Vonni’s friends from her, and tried to talk to them, I might as well dial 911 on myself.

In the past, I’d sometimes pretended to be a cop. Never flashed a badge or anything stupid-amateur like that. I’d just plant an impression and let people fall into their own assumption pits. It’s especially easy when people expect a plainclothesman to come around, asking questions.

But I didn’t look the part anymore.

Ten days of drifting with the currents didn’t lead me to a way in. I didn’t know much about small towns, and what I thought I knew wasn’t proving out. The mall was the real city, like I’d suspected, but inside it the population was as fractured as Manhattan’s. Rich and poor walked the same paths but never touched, like human railroad tracks.

Some kids lounged around the food courts, designer shopping bags stuffed with credit-card purchases, gabbing on cell phones until they drove away in their mothers’ Mercedes, or their own Miatas. Other kids worked in the fast-food kiosks, earning less in a month than their better-born counterparts spent in an hour, saving every dime so they could go mobile, too.

That was the common ground. Car culture. You couldn’t get anywhere without one, in every sense of the word.

The parking lot had enough diversity to make a liberal come all over himself. Cute little LOOK AT ME! roadsters stood shoulder-to-toe with hulking monster-truck imitators, Corvettes were docked nose-to-nose with minivans, and thoroughbred sportscars shared space with pro street–quarter-horses. Fundamentalists don’t care what you wear to church—only attendance counts.

The cars got closer to each other than the clans ever did. Inside, a see-and-be-seen parade. Jocks in letterman’s jackets. Whiggers in hip-hop gear. Cholas in tight jeans and bright-colored spike heels. JAPs in pastels. Goth kids in their bloodless black-and-white. Rich boys in stuff that showed they were.

Their jewelry was as varied as their hairstyles, but they all seemed to pack pagers.

Like a prison yard. Everyone crewed and cliqued, no mixing.

I wondered if that was how Giovanni saw it, back when he’d made his choice.

The mall seemed to be on a strict schedule: near-empty in the mornings, stuffed with adults at lunchtime, and swamped by a wave of teenagers in the afternoons. Then came hordes of married-with-children until mid-evening, after which the teens took over again and carried it to closing time.

In-store security was tight—undercovers so obvious that they must have been hired as deterrents, lots of fiber-optic cams, especially wherever they sold CDs or clothes—but the corridors and the outside grounds didn’t get any real coverage. At night, they tightened up the perimeter a little. But it was mostly rent-a-cops, eye-fucking wannabe lowriders who spent hours draped over their not-much cars.

Malls are like cities; they have whisper-streams, too. But without a native to front me, any attempt to tap in would draw way too much attention.

So I kept sniffing around the area, looking for openings. I found some places where hanging out for a few weeks could make you into enough of a regular to talk with people without drawing suspicion, but I didn’t have that kind of time. Anyway, I couldn’t picture Vonni’s crowd spending hours in a low-rent tavern, or at the local OTB parlor.

After the Plymouth dusted off a poseur Firebird with more tire than motor on Hempstead Turnpike, a hardcore Nova slid in alongside me a few lights down. The driver looked over, raised his chin in a question I answered with the Roadrunner’s cartoon horn. He cracked his throttle deep enough to let me know he was carrying heavy. I held the engine against the brake just a little past idle, quiet as a turbine.

We both left on the cross street’s yellow. He got out first, but I drove around him just before the Torqueflite grabbed second gear on its own.

The Nova’s driver passed me as I backed off, made a “Follow me!” gesture out his window. In the diner’s parking lot, I got an invite to a not-yet-completed section of the LIE, where they were running for money.

Later that night, I stood off to one side and watched the drivers of a couple of trailer queens go at it. Negotiations first. They argued about lengths and the bust—who got to leave first—for what seemed like hours. When they finally got down to it, the race was over in less than ten seconds.

There was a lot of buzz in the crowd, but it had nothing to do with a murder. Everybody wondering if some guy named Gary was really going to show. I listened close, but all I could pick up was that this Gary was from Island Trees originally, moved to the Midwest a long time ago. Supposed to be the fastest gun on the East Coast years ago. Supposed to be coming back now. Maybe so, but it didn’t happen that night.

Still nothing. When you’re man-hunting, you can buy information. Lots of it’s always for sale—separating the diamonds from the dirt is the trick. I knew the kind of people to ask, and I knew where to find them. But I didn’t have a target. And I couldn’t offer anything as good as what the cops would have already put on the table, a year ago.

I went through the motions, but I didn’t lie to myself about it. I was marking time, waiting for Wolfe.

I was watching a fight on ESPN2 when my cellular buzzed.

“You want to come here?” I asked Wolfe, holding the phone to my ear as I looked out the window into the darkness.

“Once was enough,” she said.

“Just say where and when.”

“Right now. You’re close enough.” Then she gave me an address on lower Broadway.

A large office building, diagonally across from Federal Plaza, a few blocks away from what the tour operators like to call “ground zero.” The man at the security guard’s desk was hunched over a paperback, his back to me. I made enough noise to let him know I was there. He turned and looked up. Mick.

He walked into the freight elevator, me following. There was no floor indicator, but I could feel us going down.

Mick still had the paperback in his hand. The Bottoms, Joe Lansdale’s long-running smash.

“You like that one?” I asked him. “Me, I like his Hap and Leonard stuff the best.”

Mick pulled the lever and the car rattled to a stop. He pulled back the gate and pointed to the left—all the answer I was going to get.

I stepped out, moved toward the only light. Heard the elevator door close behind me, the whirl of the machinery as the car went back up to the lobby floor.

Some kind of storage room, near as I could tell. Wolfe was perched on a two-drawer lateral file cabinet, wearing blue jeans and a pink pullover with matching sneakers, her hair in pigtails. In that light, she looked like a teenage girl.

With a hostile Rottweiler.

“Ah, shut up, Bruiser,” I said to the beast. “You know me.” He snarled softly in agreement.

Wolfe pointed to a carton on the floor. Looked like it was stuffed with paper. “That’s all the hard copy that’s coming,” she said. “The rest, you’ll have to hear it from me.”

“Fair enough.”

“You’re paying a lot of money for not very much,” she said, like she was warning me against a bad investment.

“It’s not my money.”

“I know whose money it is. And I’m guessing there isn’t a lot in here that they don’t already have.”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“I’m not. I know stuff’s for sale. But, sometimes, there’s no way the potential buyer can make contact without telling the seller more than what he wants him to know, right?”

“Sure. And you’re saying you’re just a cutout? They only hired you to get...what I’ve got?”

“If that’s all they wanted, they could have used a go-between a long time ago. This town, you can find a thousand lawyers to do anything by the hour. In an hour. It’s just like I told you it was—they hired me to find out who did it. And why.”

“If there is a ‘why,’” she said.

I wasn’t going to argue with Wolfe about that one. She’d prosecuted hundreds of humans who did freakish things without a “why” that would make sense to anyone else. “Yes,” is all I said.

“What do you want first?”

“It doesn’t—”

“The stuff on the killing? Or on your clients?”

“Oh. The killing,” I said, opting for the secondhand stuff before whatever Wolfe had dug up on her own.

“It is a Queens case, technically. But most of the spadework was done by the Long Island cops. That’s where the girl lived, where all her friends were, where she went to school...you know.”

“Did they form some kind of—?”

“Joint Task Force?” she said mockingly. “But of course! And it appears the feds got to play, too.”

“Profilers?”

“Yep. But you know how that works. They—if they’re very good—can tell you the kind of person who might have done it, but that’s a few miles short of an ID. And, with a kill like this one, there isn’t much guesswork involved. A freak or a frenzy. Or both.” She took a deep drag off her smoke. “Or a cold-blooded attempt to make it look that way.”

“They don’t even have a guess?”

“Truly, no. Not that they didn’t try. But there never was anybody they really liked for it.”

“Because she had no one that close—?”

“She had boyfriends,” Wolfe said. “Nothing super-deep. She wasn’t pregnant. In fact, the autopsy said she was a virgin.”

“So she wasn’t—?”

“Raped? No. Or sodomized. No indications in her mouth, either. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a sex crime. Not with all that stabbing and slashing. You know how some of those maggots love their in-and-out.”

“The wounds...?”

“That’s one of the things I got to look at, but not bring along. Ever since the slime-sheets started publishing autopsy photos, every coroner’s office in the country tightened up. Good thing, too. What do you want to know?”

“The bloodwork?”

“Not all that useful, since so much time had passed. Coroner said minimum of two weeks since death. But, still, they went the route. Even toxed her hair. Negative on everything. Plus, she had no tracks, and there was no independent indication of drugs.”

“Did it...the killing, look professional?”

“Professional? She was stabbed seventeen times!”

“If a pair of prison hit men cornered their target in the shower, they’d stick him that many times, just to be sure.”

Wolfe lit another cigarette. Sucked in the smoke like bitter medicine. Held it down a couple of seconds, then blew a harsh jet across the room.

“I’d forgotten,” she said softly.

“What?”

“How...tuned in you are. If you’d ever worked the other side of the street—”

“I’m working it now.”

“That’s what you say.”

“Behavior is the truth,” I told her. “We all live by that. Come up with another explanation for what I’m doing,” I challenged her. “I can’t be working for the killer, helping to cover his tracks. According to you, there aren’t even any tracks to cover.”

“You’re working for gangsters.”

“I didn’t say I turned citizen,” I said. “What I said was the truth—my job is to find whoever did it. And that’s what I’m doing. It’s a job a citizen could do, right?”

“Sure,” she said.

“You believe me,” I told her, sure of myself.

“Why do you say that?”

“You wouldn’t have gotten me that info if you didn’t.”

“I’m in business.”

“Bullshit. I know what you do for a living. And I know where your lines are.”

“You’re so certain?”

“Yeah.”

I felt her gunfighter’s eyes measuring me, waited for the judgment.

“She was just a kid,” Wolfe finally said. “I wouldn’t mind helping out anyone hunting whoever did it.”

“More than one?” I asked her, not pressing the personal.

“Come again?”

“Edged weapons leave tracks, just like bullets. If more than one knife was used...”

“That’s only true if they were used at the same time.”

“And...?”

“The TPO is very shaky, you know that much already.”

I nodded. Time and Place of Occurrence is never more than a guess when the body isn’t discovered at the original scene. “It would still help to know if there was more than one blade. Not likely two freaks would go off at the same time.”

“Ask Bianchi and Buono,” she said, in her diamond-cutting prosecutor’s voice.

“The Hillside Stranglings weren’t spontaneous,” I told her. “Those two maggots had spent a lot of time together, mixing their juices, before they blended into a sex-kill unit. Felonious gestalt. Like Leopold and Loeb.”

“Could have been the same thing here,” Wolfe said, stubbornly. “There isn’t enough information to even guess from.”

“Sure,” I said, trying to maneuver her back to where I needed her to be. “Let’s work with what we have.”

Wolfe leaned back a little, cast her eyes up as if the grungy basement ceiling had some answers. “The victim was stabbed and slashed,” she said. “The same weapon could have inflicted all the wounds, if it was configured that way. Or it could have been more than one.”

“Defensives?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Her hands were clean. Wrists, too. Maybe the first thrust brought her down...? I hope so.”

I didn’t say anything, the silence between us ugly with the thought we shared. Sure, it would be better if the first plunge had been right into her heart, so she wouldn’t have died in pain and terror. But if Vonni had even so much as scratched one of them, maybe there’d have been some DNA under her fingernails.

“You see anything in the county-line thing?” I asked her.

“Oh, yes,” she said, the deep contempt acid in her mouth. “There’s jurisdictions known to be soft spots. A DA in charge who cares so much about a perfect conviction rate that he won’t move on anything less than a signed confession.

“Rapists read the papers, especially when they’re Inside, marinating in their own hate. For the child molesters, all the more so. Especially the ‘boy lovers’—they’ve got a real underground wire, pass along information like they do photographs.

“What any freak’s really looking for, with soft prosecutors, is a deal. You get a DA who’s afraid of taking a case to trial, you can get him to give away the courthouse.” She pulled on her cigarette, let the smoke float out her nose, ground out the butt on the side of the file cabinet, dropped it on the floor. “But that’s for sex crimes,” she went on. “For this, I don’t see the logic. Doesn’t matter how spineless the DA is—homicide like this’s a guaranteed life-top, no matter where you do it.”

“So the cops don’t have a clue...whether it was a panic-dump, or part of a plan?”

“They don’t even know where it happened. It’s not possible she was just hanging out in the place where they found the body. She had to have been brought there. But that could have been from any direction. Maybe right after it was done, maybe a week later—nothing points either way, so far.”

“How early can they pinpoint her, on the day she disappeared?”

“They can’t pinpoint her at all,” Wolfe said. “She walked out of her house and that was it. Nobody saw her. Nobody talked to her on the phone, and she didn’t leave any answering-machine messages, either. Nobody got an e-mail from her. She didn’t page anyone. She didn’t have a cell phone. No letter she mailed that date...or after...ever came to anyone. Plus, not a single sighting from the minute she walked out of her house until the body was found.”

“Somebody was supposed to meet her. She was being picked up.”

“That’s what she told her mother, sure.”

“It seems likely to me,” I said. “She didn’t have a car. And the bus service around there is lousy at that hour.”

“It’s not so much lousy as lightly used,” Wolfe corrected me, rapidly leafing through the paper until she found the document she wanted. “The police were all over that the very next morning,” she said, tapping the paper for emphasis. “The driver was emphatic—no one close to the girl’s description got on during his route. And, yes,” she said, anticipating me, “there were already passengers on the bus by the time it got to her stop.” She gave me a level look, waiting. When I didn’t speak, she said, “They checked every car service, too. It’s not like here—cabs don’t cruise, you have to call them.”

Wolfe held out her pack of smokes to me. I took one, fired a wooden match, lit her up first. Neither of us said anything for a while.

“I don’t like this as a random,” I told her. “The girl told her mother she had an appointment. And plans for the whole day, deep into the night. But, unless one or more of them’s lying, none of her friends knew anything about it.”

“People lie.”

“That’s what all those years as a prosecutor taught you. Thing is, they also tell the truth. And if someone she knew is lying, then either they’re the person she met, or they know who it is. Doesn’t sound random to me.”

“The liar could be the girl herself.”

“I thought of that. Off on an adventure, and she didn’t know the territory. Sure. But teenagers, they don’t usually go on adventures by themselves. Runaways, yeah. But you didn’t see a shred in all that stuff you brought about a reason for the kid to run, did you?”

“No. But that doesn’t mean—”

“I know,” I said. “The mother didn’t have a boyfriend?”

“There’s no evidence she even dated. Why are you so big on that one?”

“I was in a case once. Mother’s boyfriend, a few years younger than her, he was going at the daughter for years, since the kid was about nine or ten. Girl gets to be thirteen, she disappears one night while the mother is at work. During a big snowstorm. Boyfriend said he had a few beers watching TV, fell asleep, never saw her leave. They find the kid’s body in a vacant lot, day or so later. The same snow that covered the kid covered whatever tracks there might have been.

“The cops find the girl’s diary in her school locker. She thought she was having an ‘affair’ with the boyfriend. They were going to get married as soon as she became of age. She didn’t want to wait.”

“What did the boyfriend get?” she asked, eyes cold.

“Get? He never got arrested. They questioned him, but he was smart. Kept it very simple. Didn’t admit anything. He had a prior—exact same MO, but no homicide. And he knew they couldn’t even make out the stat rape without his confession, much less a killing, so he lawyered up immediately. Forensics were useless; they had lived in the same house.”

“This isn’t anything like that.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“I’m sure the mother wasn’t hiding a boyfriend in the basement, yeah. But it could have been a similar scenario...one of her teachers, maybe.”

“Maybe. Whatever happened to that...case you had?”

“I told you, he never even got arrested.”

“So that filthy freak and the girl’s mother lived happily ever after?”

“Far as I know,” I lied.

“Giovanni Antrelli has three arrests,” Wolfe said, a half-hour later. “None in the past fifteen years. No convictions. He’s a family man; this you knew, of course. If he were a doctor, he’d be a general practitioner. Gambling, loan sharking, bust-out schemes, labor racketeering. Supposed to be a real comer. Word is, he reports to a capo but he’s actually a higher rank himself. Which means the old men have big plans for him, down the line.”

“He’s never been Inside?”

“In the Tombs, overnight, maybe. Or on Rikers for a week, at most. The charges were always dismissed. The court records don’t say why, but I don’t think we have to waste a lot of speculation on it. I guess the bosses always thought highly of him.”

“Anything about him trafficking?”

“Funny you should ask,” she said, twisting her mouth as she spoke. “His rep is, he wouldn’t touch drugs. Too risky, he says. And the time is so high, a bust could make anyone in the chain roll over. In fact,” she went on, watching me closely, “the feds did make a little probe of their own, a couple of years ago.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It was almost comical,” she said. “They popped some moke with serious weight, turned him right at the scene. What they wanted was what they always want: the man at the top. A headline-size fish. But what they got was this genius running around trying to make new cases for them. He was wired when he approached Antrelli—on his own, the memo says—and tried to get him to go into business.”

“And you think Giovanni made him?’”

“I didn’t hear the tape,” Wolfe said. “Just read the transcript. What Antrelli told him was, and I quote, ‘Drugs isn’t a game for white men. Let the spear-chuckers and the banana brains have it. The money never sticks to their hands, anyway. We always get it back from them, one way or the other.’”

“The guy the feds have, is he still under?”

“That’s not part of our deal,” she said, no-argument cold. “You want to protect your pal Giovanni, hire on as a bodyguard.”

“I wasn’t looking to...Never mind.”

“Right. Now, Felix Encarnación, this one is another story entirely. He’s never been arrested in America, but Interpol has him on file as an assassin for a Colombian cartel. Supposed to have done a half-dozen very professional jobs, two of them in Europe.”

“Supposed to...?”

“All of this was a long time ago. He was held—I wouldn’t say ‘arrested,’ not with the system they have there—in Peru a while back. Held for about two years, until he was released. Ransomed out, that’s what I’m told.”

“By the Colombians?”

“Could be. Nobody’s sure. Encarnación himself’s not Colombian. Or Peruvian, either. Guatemala is what the money’s on, but even that’s just an educated guess.”

“Then we know two things about him for sure,” I said. “He can do very hard time and not give anyone up. So he’s got a lot of trust going for him. And a sure pipeline to pure.”

“Yeah. The rest is all gossip-level. Antrelli’s supposed to have no temper. Pure ice. Never loses control. An old man’s head, that’s what they say about him.”

“And Felix?”

“What they say is, he can never go back down south. And that, to him, a gun’s like a hammer to a carpenter.”

I spent the next three days in my place, sifting and straining the information in Wolfe’s paper through every filter I had, adding to my charts until I could see bits and pieces of Vonni’s life in every room.

When I ran dry, I went out to see what I could find of her death.

I started where they’d discovered the corpse. A culvert off an unpaved lane in the swampland between Jamaica Bay and JFK Airport. I could feel the hackles that must have gone up on Giovanni’s neck when he’d first been told. The area’s a big favorite of mob guys who have a recurring need for unmarked graves.

As I slowed to a stop, my shoulders tightened and my nostrils flared, taking the pulse of the place. It was way too long after the murder for the cops still to be staking out the dumping ground; but I’m an old dog, and sniffing for danger is an old habit.

Her body had been found wrapped in heavy plastic sheeting, secured with baling wire. “Like a slab of meat, ready for the freezer,” one cop’s notes had said.

You’d think that would rule out a Lovers Lane encounter that had gone wrong. What kind of man carries plastic sheeting and baling wire in his trunk?

I knew the answer to that question, so I spent an hour crisscrossing the area. But there was nothing resembling a regular spot for car sex. About the only dry land was where the body had been dropped off.

Dropped off, not buried. That meant something. Maybe the killer was in a hurry.

Or maybe he was a psycho, making a statement. Those kind never write their messages in invisible ink.

One look around was enough to show me that the site was outside New York’s special two-tier recycling system. You want to get rid of something in Manhattan, you just leave it out at the curb. It doesn’t matter if the Sanitation Department takes a pass. Between the scrap-metal scavengers, the flea-market restockers, and the homeless guys pushing their pirated shopping carts, nothing worth a nickel survives.

But, out there, all I could see was dregs nobody would touch, anywhere—a few empty forty-ounce malt liquors, a couple of screw-top wine bottles, a slab of tread from a truck tire, one aluminum leg from a kitchen chair, a crushed pack of Newports, strewn condoms, a torn potato-chip bag....

I knew the condoms were recent—they would have been the first thing bagged and tagged by the forensics crew if they’d been there when the body had been discovered.

It was a pretty good spot for people who were too crazy, or too smart, for the homeless shelters. Close enough to the airport to make Dumpster-diving productive, with plenty of natural cover to keep you through the weather with the help of a few artfully rigged plastic garbage bags. The cops would have scoured the area. Not just for traces of the killer’s vehicle, but for any signs of campfires, lean-tos, cans of food...anything to show people were living out there. In the jungle, the birds see everything. Getting them to sing on cue, that’s the tricky part.

Nothing in Wolfe’s paper showed they had found anyone to talk to, but that didn’t mean nobody had been around at the time the killer had dropped off his garbage. If anyone from a homeless camp had seen a body being dumped, they would have just nomaded on out of there, quick.

But if the area was inviting enough, maybe some of the old residents would have drifted back over the past few months.... At least that’s what I was hoping for.

It turned out like most of my hopes.

In books, the detective stands at the spot where the victim was killed and makes a promise to her—seems like it’s always a woman—that he’ll find the murderer.

I didn’t feel anything. And I didn’t make any promises.

“I know street kids,” I told Michelle. “I know where they go, even why they go. I can tell the weekenders from the permanents. I know where they shelter up when they have to. They’re like a...species, I guess. There’s a food chain, predators and prey. They’ve got their own look. Their own mating habits, their own survival systems. I can always find some of them, tap into their communications.”

Michelle touched one perfect cheek with a long, red-lacquered nail, saying nothing. She’d never seen her son Terry before the night I’d finessed him off a kiddie pimp in Times Square. But she’d adopted the kid in less time than it would take a sperm to merge with an egg. Terry had never seen the pimp again.

I had.

“Some things never change, girl. You drop a dope fiend into a strange city, how long’s it going to take him to find a slinger? It’s like that for me with runaways. I was one of them once. It’s easy—too fucking easy, sometimes—for me to put myself right back there, in my mind.”

“But...?”

“But there’s no street kids in that town where she came from. I mean, there’s probably the equivalent of some kind, but they’re not on the streets, see?”

“They’re all in cars?”

“No. That’s not it. Sure, out there, the cars are the drivers—everyone’s social status rolls on wheels. But that’s got nothing to do with what I mean.”

“Small towns...”

“It’s not the size, honey. I’ve been in little towns that make Vegas look like Amish country.”

“Border towns, I know. But when there’s money...”

“Not that, either. There’s lots of ways to join the street-kid army, but they’re not all draftees. Where you come from doesn’t matter so much as why you’re there...and what you’re willing to do to hold your place. Plenty of kids of rich families are eating out of garbage cans and selling their bodies.”

“My bio-parents had money,” Michelle said, saying it all.

“You see where I’m going with this, then. The kids I could connect with, they’re not still in that town. They’re here. Or out on the coast. What difference? It’s all the same place.”

“I know, baby,” she said. “You know I do.”

“But even if there’s any runaways from Vonni’s town here, I couldn’t find them,” I told her.

“Her mother, she’d know the girl’s closest friends, right?”

“Yeah, I think she would. I know when there’s secrets, and I didn’t smell any in that house. But I guess I could try just asking her, if...”

“If what?”

“If I can’t figure out a way to bring them to me.”

“Her friends?”

“Not just them, Michelle. The whole...environment.”

“The police...”

“They’ve been over the ground, sure. But they don’t know how to take soil samples the way we do.”

“You have any ideas?”

“Not yet, I don’t. I’ve been...studying them from a distance, I guess you could say. The mother gave me one place I think I could try.”

“A hangout?”

“No. A woman. Vonni used to babysit her kid.”

“What makes you think she knows anything?”

“Not her. The kid. The way I read Vonni’s mother, no way she’d let her daughter have boys over without supervision. But when the girl was babysitting...”

“Kids don’t miss much,” Michelle said, agreeing.

“Hazel said you’d be calling,” the woman said.

“Yes, ma’am. Then you know what my job is. Would you be willing to talk to me?”

“If you think it will do any good...”

“There’s no way to tell without trying,” I said. “Okay?”

The house was quite a bit downstream the status river from where Vonni had lived—a small, squarish tract house, squatting undistinguished in a tight cluster of identical boxes. The front lawn was a crabgrass-and-dandelion postage stamp. The sidewalk was cracked. A clapped-out once-blue Monte Carlo was parked out front.

The woman who opened the door was sweet-faced, with a mop of tightly curled hair the color of fresh rust, and lively blue eyes. She was about six inches shorter than me, and ten pounds heavier, wearing a bright-yellow sweatshirt and jeans.

“Hi!” she said.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. McClellan.”

“Oh, please! Call me Lottie. Everybody does,” she said, stepping aside to let me in.

“Is the kitchen all right?” she asked, seeing me hesitate.

“It’s fine,” I told her. “I just didn’t want to barge in....”

“Your mother raised you right,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, maintaining the myth.

“Lottie,” she reminded me, pointing to a kitchen table with a pink Formica top.

“Burke,” I said, offering her a hand to shake.

“Irish! I’ll bet we’re cousins, somewhere back on the Emerald Isle.”

“Scotch, actually,” I told her, straight-faced.

“Ah, well. I’m not clannish. You may be Scotch, but I’ll bet you fancy an Irish coffee now and then,” she said, the smile so at home on her face that I knew it was a permanent resident.

“I do, that’s a fact,” I lied. “But never while I’m working.”

“Well, suit yourself. And tell me how I can help you.”

“Mrs. Greene called you...?”

“She did. And I promised I’d tell you anything you want to know. So fire away.”

“You understand what I’m trying to—”

“You’re trying to catch whoever did it. Hazel told me.”

“That’s right. So if some of the questions I ask seem—”

“I’m not one who believes you can harm the dead. Let’s get on with it.”

“Vonni was your babysitter?”

“Sure was. And the best I’ve ever had. She was never late; never minded staying late, even if I only called to tell her at the last minute. She never went into the liquor cabinet, never had boys over—”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but how would you know that for sure?”

“That she didn’t have boys over?”

“Yes.”

“The houses around here, they’re not exactly estates. You probably saw that for yourself, driving over. Now, my neighbors on the right,” she said, pointing in that direction, “the Feinbergs, they’re experts at minding their own business. But on the left, Mrs. North, she’s an expert at minding mine.”

“And she’d notice if—”

“She’d notice if a new butterfly landed on a bush, never mind a young man coming around when I wasn’t home. She’d be over here in a flash, that poison tongue of hers ready for work, I promise you that.”

“But she’s not home all the time, is she?”

“Isn’t she? The woman’s in a wheelchair. Never goes out, except to the doctor, to hear her tell it. Her husband’s not home much, I give you that. Poor man. Between working two jobs and listening to her rant, he’d probably rather put in a third shift if he could.”

“If she’s in a wheelchair, how would she get...Or do you mean she’d call you on the phone?”

“I mean exactly what I say,” Lottie said. “That husband of hers built her a ramp and a little runway. Right up to my back door, he did, without even asking. So, when I saw what he was doing, it was me who asked him, what did he think he was up to? And he says, well, Flo, that’s the wife, he says Flo said she’d talked it over with me and that’s what we both wanted. He was all ready to build another ramp so she could just roll right into my house.”

“And you stopped him?”

“No,” she chuckled, “I sure didn’t. I took pity on the poor soul. I didn’t want him to have to go back and tell that harridan she wasn’t getting her little ‘access road.’ Ever since, whenever Flo’s got anything to report, you can be sure she does it in person.”

“She’s got the area under surveillance, huh?”

“That’s the right word,” she said, laughing. “Most of the time she comes over here, it’s to give me the lowdown on the rest of our neighbors. I suspect her of having binoculars, but I’ve never caught her at it.”

“Your own Neighborhood Watch.”

“Don’t think for a second she isn’t. And I won’t pretend it isn’t kind of a comfort, sometimes.”

“How old is your baby?”

“Baby? Oh, you mean my son. He’s no baby. But he’s not big enough to be left on his own. He’s only ten. And got himself some bad asthma, besides. So he wants watching.”

She stood up, went over to the cabinets, moved enough stuff around to let me know she wasn’t going to force me into a staredown when she said whatever was coming next. “The reason I need a babysitter so much is, I’ve got a boyfriend. His name’s Lewis, and he’s a wonderful, gentle man. But Hugh never took to him, because of his father, so I can’t really spend much time with Lewis here. And certainly not at night...”

“Did Hugh get along with Vonni?” I asked, before she went driving down her own road.

“Get along? He adored her. Told me a thousand times he was going to marry her when he got big enough. He’s got a real contrary streak in him—gets it from his mother—but he minded Vonni like she was an angel from heaven. Now I guess she is....”

I never know what to say to a woman who’s crying, even when it’s not me who made her cry. I reached over and took her hand, letting it run its course.

It took her less than a minute to get back in control. “That’s the Irish blood for you. If there’s one thing we know from the cradle, it’s how to grieve. Nobody really dies if they’re still being mourned.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“You know that for a fact, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“That tattoo on your right hand. A hollow heart. That’s for someone who’s gone? Someone you loved?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, I’ll bet that’s a story.”

“Not one it comforts me to tell,” I said. “What do you think about me speaking with your son?”

“You might not be thanking me in a little while, but, sure,” she said. “He’s right out back.”

The yard was mostly dirt, with a few patches of burnt grass and one wiry little tree. I admired that tree. I don’t know anything about horticulture, but I know tough when I see it.

A little boy was sitting on a wooden milk crate, in the middle of a meager patch of shade the tree had wrestled from the sun. As we walked toward him, I saw he was talking earnestly to a short, blunt-bodied, mostly black dog.

“Hugh, this is my friend Burke,” his mother said. “He wants a word with you.”

The kid looked up at me, his left hand resting on the dog’s head. “What about?”

“About Vonni, son,” she said gently.

“I knew you’d come,” the kid said.

I squatted down, held out my hand to shake. “I’m pleased to meet you,” I told him.

He shook, gravely, not speaking.

“That’s a great-looking animal you have.”

“He’s the best dog.”

“I can see he’s all class. What’s his name?”

“The Brains of the Outfit.”

“Uh, okay. What do you call him?”

“The Brains of the Outfit,” the boy said, the way you explain the obvious to the dull-witted.

“Don’t pay any attention to him, Burke,” Lottie said. “Hugh loves those old gangster movies.”

“What did you mean before,” I asked him, “when you said you knew I’d come? Did Vonni’s mother—?”

“She was killed, right?” he said, his voice hard against the pain.

“Yes, she was.”

“And they never caught the guy.”

“The police—”

“Those coppers couldn’t find their—”

“Hugh! You watch your mouth,” his mother cautioned.

“Yeah, yeah, okay. But, Mom, I know who he is.”

“You know who Burke is, son? Is that what you mean?”

“I know who he really is,” the kid said, utterly certain, letting his eyes travel over my face. “You’ve been in the Big House, right?”

“A long time ago,” I said, trusting whatever kept me from a glib lie.

“Nah. Not so long ago. I know.”

“How would you know something like that?” I asked him.

“I told you. I know who you are.”

“Okay,” I said. “Who am I?”

“You’re Vonni’s father,” he said, stone-sure. “And you came for payback.”

“Vonni told me,” he said, later, seated at the kitchen table, having some cookies and milk. The Brains of the Outfit was getting a disproportionate share of the cookies, but if Lottie noticed, she kept it to herself.

“Told you what?” I asked, staying near the edges.

“She was the same as me,” the kid said proudly. “See, her dad was supposed to be dead. Like my dad. Only thing is, they weren’t, not really.”

Lottie got up, walked behind the boy, caught my eye, shook her head sadly.

“Her father was in prison. He probably could of gotten out by now, but he wouldn’t rat on his partners. Vonni, she wouldn’t care. But her mother,” he said vehemently, his pale-blue eyes challenging, “she didn’t want anyone to know, so they had to tell everybody he was dead, see?”

“How do you know that?” I asked, keeping my voice soft and reasonable.

“Well...maybe I don’t know. Not for sure. About Vonni’s dad. But I know mine isn’t dead.” He turned his head, looked at Lottie. “Is he, Mom?”

“They say he is, honey. You know that.”

“But they don’t know for sure, right?”

“Sweetheart, if your father was alive, he would have made contact....”

“Nah. He can’t do that. He knows they’re watching. He’s too smart for them, that’s all.”

I put it together in my head, asked, “Your father, he escaped from prison?”

“Yeah!” the kid said triumphantly. “See, Mom? Burke knows the score.”

Later that night, alone in the rented house, I thought about the only score I really knew. Scores I’d made, scores I’d settled.

Fathers and daughters.

A long time ago, when I was just getting started, I had a father get word to me he’d pay serious cash if I turned up his daughter. He was a referral, from a guy I’d known Inside. Told me he didn’t just want me to find his kid; he wanted me to make sure nobody else ever did. He never actually said the words, but his meaning was clear enough.

I took his money, a lot more than a simple locate job would ever be worth. Found the girl, too. It was easy enough—she was still doing what Daddy taught her, only now she was getting paid for it. By the time I showed up, she knew The Life was a lot uglier than the pimp’s pretty pictures, and she came along with me willingly enough, once I convinced her that I wouldn’t bring her home.

The pimp was even easier to convince. Gunshot wounds are real conversation-stoppers.

It should have ended there, except that the father got stupid. He found me in this Master Race bar where I was trolling for chumps, told me he wanted his money back—I hadn’t done what he’d paid me for. I played dumb, said I’d done the job, found her, like he’d wanted. Didn’t know what he was talking about. My voice was soft, and that gave him a bully’s courage. He got right in my face, loud.

Too loud—that dive had more white rats in it than a cancer lab. A couple of days later, the rollers had me.

The way they broke it down, I had two choices—I could testify the father hired me to hit his daughter, or I could take a fall myself, for the unregistered piece they’d found when they’d snatched me.

Neither of the detectives said a word about running the ballistics on the slug the ER had dug out of a known pimp a little while back, but it hung in the stale air of the interrogation cell. A heavy hammer, waiting to drop.

Two very bad choices. Ex-felon, carrying, loaded-operable-concealed, I was looking at another trip Upstate. But testifying? That’d be worse. A snitch jacket would make it impossible to do time—that’s the way it was back then. Besides, in my business, a rep for helping out the cops was the same as a vow of poverty.

When a man sets things up so the only way you survive is if he gets dead, he’s just written a suicide note.

The whisper-stream tells a lot of stories. Ones like that are what got me this job.

“His father...my husband, he’s a hero to the boy,” Lottie told me, later. “In Hugh’s mind, Shane was a big-time gangster, some kind of Jimmy Cagney or Humphrey Bogart. The fact is, Shane was just a wild young man. Him and those friends of his. I was pregnant with Hugh, and we were broke. It was just that simple. Shane was just that simple. My fool of a husband listened to his bigger fool of a friend, Davey Boy. I’ve no idea what they tried to rob. All I know is it was down in Florida. Nobody was killed. Or even shot. It was the first offense for both of them. But they still got so much time....

“It wasn’t even a year later when they just took off, running. Five of them. No plan, naturally—Shane never planned anything in his life. They made it to the edge of some damn swamp, him and Davey Boy, still together, when the posse caught up with them. They didn’t have any weapons, but they wouldn’t surrender—that’s what the police said, anyway, later—so they opened fire. Davey Boy died right there. They said Shane was hit, too—he had to have been—but they never found his body.

“That was a long time ago. Nobody’s ever heard a word since. In that swamp, there’s a million things that could...dispose of a body. But Hugh, he is Shane’s son, no doubt about that. Hugh is mortally certain his father’s alive. Out there, somewhere. That’s why poor Lewis never had a chance with him. How can you compete with a little boy’s dreams?”

“You don’t think there’s any chance he’s—?”

“No. Because Hugh’s wrong about one thing, Burke. If my fool Shane was alive, he’d have come for me by now, even if a squad car was parked in the driveway.”

We sat out on the back step, next to the ramp Flo’s long-suffering husband had built, Lottie smoking, me pretending to, watching Hugh and The Brains of the Outfit deep in consultation under the scrawny tree.

“Did you know about Vonni saying her father was alive?” I asked her.

“She never said that, Burke. What she did, she went along with Hugh. My son wanted Vonni for a big sister. He’s not old enough to say those words, not yet, but he can feel the feelings. So he gave them a kinship. It was his gift to her.

“He’s the kind of kid, he thinks if you’re true-faithful, if you wish hard enough, long enough, you can change things. So, little by little, this story of Vonni’s father being alive came out of his mouth.

“And Vonni, may the Lord always love her, she was such a treasure, she never broke his dream. Their secret, it was supposed to be. But you saw for yourself: my Hugh, he can’t keep a secret. Just like his father, the fool,” she said, eyes wet.

“Maybe it’s only his own secrets he can’t keep.”

“What are you getting at?”

“If Vonni confided in him...”

“Sure! He’d never tell. You’re right, Burke. Hugh would consider that ratting her out.”

“But if he thought he was talking to Vonni’s father...”

Lottie took a long, deep drag on her smoke, closed her eyes as she exhaled. “This business about Shane being alive? I took him to a counselor. She told me that Hugh couldn’t grieve for his dad until he acknowledged that he was dead. It wasn’t good for him to keep believing Shane is alive, is what she told me.”

“And if I was Vonni’s father, that would...”

“Yeah. That would absolutely convince him that he’s right.”

“And you don’t want that?”

“I don’t. I’m not going to force my son to say his father’s dead, no matter what some counselor says. But I’m not going to encourage him, either. He’ll face it, someday. Not for a while, maybe. But he will, I know.” She took another drag, ground out her cigarette. “And he’ll have pain enough then,” she said.

“You and me, we’ve got to talk,” I said to the boy that night. He was pretty well 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 don’t like homosexuals. They claim the Bible says they should all be killed. It wasn’t about gay schoolteachers; they hate them all. This was just a convenient excuse.”

“What happened?”

“Well...nothing, I guess. They picketed a little bit, and they sent some nasty letters, but Mr. Strethlend kept his job. In the end, all they did was, they took their own kids out of school.”

“Freaks.”

“They are. I was just telling—”

“No. I mean, that’s the word you were looking for, before. ‘Pedophile’ is a fancy word, but it means how people feel, not what they do. People who go after kids, they’re freaks. Understand?”

“Okay...”

“What’s wrong, Lottie?”

“You just looked...scary, for a minute.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s all right. Probably just a trick of the light.”

“I don’t know how to do it,” the kid said.

“Neither do I, Ace.”

“Then how am I going to—?”

“Well, I think you’re supposed to walk around it a little bit, kind of get an idea of how it’s laid out. Like you did before.”

“Okay...” the kid said. He put the putter the pro in the golf shop had assured me was the right size for a kid his age and height over his shoulder and walked all around the perfectly manicured green with only the light from my flash to guide him. The Brains of the Outfit sat on his haunches, observing quietly.

“It kind of...slopes,” the kid said. “Right here...See it?”

“Not me. It just looks like a little uphill, that’s all.”

“No, it’s off to the left. You see how it sort of...rolls, I guess.”

“If you say so.”

The boy kept pacing, checking the terrain. Once he sighted down the length of his club.

“Ready to take a shot?” I finally asked him.

“Sure,” he said, taking a stance over one of the three regulation balls I’d bought in that same shop. “Does this look right?”

“Ace, let me tell you, partner; I wouldn’t have a clue. How does it feel?”

“Okay, I guess. It’s hard to see with that flashlight.”

“Just look at the pole.”

The kid nodded, took a breath, let it out, and stroked the ball. It climbed the hill, banked to the left, and disappeared. The dog’s ears perked up at a faint sound.

“What was that?” the kid asked.

“Let’s go see.”

The white ball sat at the bottom of the cup, like a pearl in an oyster.

“Ah, was it really worth it, all that?” Lottie asked me, late that night.

“It wasn’t so much. The club only cost—”

“Not the money, Burke. Breaking into the golf course in the middle of the night just so you could see if Hugh—”

“There’s nothing to break into. It’s just like a big field, with no fence.”

“But it’s still against the law.”

“Probably. But it’d only be trespassing, not a burglary. And they never would have charged Hugh with anything.”

“Yes, I understand that. But why couldn’t you have taken him in the daytime?”

“Well, first of all, I’m not a member,” I told her. Then I gave her a wink, switched to talking out of the side of my mouth, said, “Besides, this way it was a caper, see?”

The next time I came back, The Brains of the Outfit was wearing a red ribbon tied in a bow around his thick neck, thoughtfully chomping on a thick slab of what looked like raw steak.

“It’s Boo’s birthday,” the kid informed me.

I piled them both in the Plymouth, and we hit the pet store. Found a truly outrageous leather collar with chrome studs, and half a dozen chew-toys.

The next morning, I found the two of them under the tree. The Brains of the Outfit was stretched out, nose to the ground, a mournful look on his face.

“He’s sad,” Hugh told me solemnly.

“Why?”

“Because of his birthday. He loves his birthdays. But that was yesterday, and it’s over.”

“Oh...”

“That’s all right,” the kid said, confidently. “I know what to do.” He knelt next to his pal, scratched behind one ear. The way I used to do with my Pansy. “Don’t be sad, Boo,” he said softly. “It’s still your birthday. Okay?”

The dog picked his head up and grinned.

That night, while I was talking to Lottie, the kid came into the living room, The Brains of the Outfit at his side.

“I want to tell you something,” he said to me.

“Shoot.”

The kid’s face made it clear he wasn’t going to talk in front of his mother. “Go back in your room, Hugh,” she said. “Burke will be there in a minute.”

When I went back, he and The Brains of the Outfit were in bed. I sat down on the edge.

“I don’t know where Vonni was going, the day she...the day she didn’t come back,” he whispered. “But she told me it was going to be her big day.”

“Her big day?”

“Yes. Vonni told me, when it was over, she was going to start being famous.”

“We’re not going to see you again, are we?” Lottie asked, late that same night.

“I...I honestly don’t know. It depends on...things I have no control over.”

“Hugh really likes you.”

“We’re partners,” I said.

“Don’t partners see each other once in a while?”

“Some do. Some can’t. He’ll understand.”

“Yeah,” she said, with the first bitterness I’d ever heard in her voice. “Hugh’s gotten real good at understanding.”

“Lottie, could I...say something to you?”

“What?”

“Is Lewis really the guy?”

“He could be. But, with the way Hugh—”

“If Lewis wants it bad enough, there’s one thing he could do.”

“What are you talking about? He’d do anything, I know he would,” she said. The “He’d fucking better!” subtext came across like a fire ax through old drywall.

“He needs to learn to play golf. He doesn’t have to be any good, just good enough to take Hugh.”

“You mean real golf? But how is Hugh going to learn himself? All he knows how to play is that—”

“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.”

“I...So you’re saying they may have the information but they don’t know what they know?”

“I think that is what you are saying.”

“Fine. But that doesn’t get me any closer. I need to tap into them, somehow. It’s not enough to be around them, I have to get them talking. Maybe about stuff they wouldn’t usually talk about.”

“If you want to stimulate a reaction from a disparate sampling, you need to isolate common ground.”

“With kids? How in hell would we ever—?”

“I think I know,” Terry said.

We all looked at him. Nobody spoke. He flushed, not used to the spotlight. But he squared up, said, “I’m in science, right?” nodding at the Mole. “But I’m not on another planet. On campus, I know maybe two or three kids who want to write books. And a half-dozen who write poetry, okay?

“But I must know a hundred who’ve already written screenplays. I was talking with a girl at school...” He caught Michelle’s look, reddened even more deeply, but soldiered on. “...and you know what she said? ‘Movies are amazing.’ You see where I’m going?”

I shook my head “No.” Michelle widened her eyes and clasped her hands, the universal girl-signal for “Keep talking.” The Mole’s face was a mask, as if he feared any expression would divert his son.

“Movies are amazing,” Terry said. “Not any particular movie, just ‘movies.’ That such a thing could even exist. To this girl, whoever invented movies made a greater contribution to civilization than movable type.”

“So what does one airhead have to do with—?”

“She’s no airhead, Mom,” Terry said. “I mean, well, maybe she is, but that...attitude, it’s like, everyone has it. Religious. Movies, they’re something...different from anything else. Some guys, they’re fans of bad movies, and people think that’s way cool.

“Kids blow off some kinds of movies. It’s not, like, edgy to go for those Tom Hanks–Meg Ryan flicks. Extreme uncool. But it’d be like...heresy to put down movies themselves.

“And you know what else?” he said, sure of his ground now. “Everybody wants to be involved with them. It’s not just the performing-arts crowd. Even the suit-and-tie kids, they want to produce movies...or own a studio, or whatever. The techie kids just love them. The stoners. The jocks. Everyone.”

“See?” Michelle said, glowing at her son.

“Is it really you?” the tall, slim blonde asked, cocking her head like a dubious bird. Even that slight movement sent her improbably huge breasts quivering.

“It’s him or his ghost,” the shorter, muscular brunette said, through a mouth that looked like a soft bruise. “Who else would know about what happened to Gresh—?”

“Shut up, Rejji,” the blonde snapped. “You want to tell the world, why don’t you just take out an ad in the papers?”

“Oh, chill,” the brunette replied. And “Come on in,” to me.

I sat down on a canted-back couch, glanced over at the side table, located an ashtray, and lit a smoke. The Burke they knew smoked, and, where they came from, nobody ever broke a habit.

“You’ve got to give us more,” the blonde said.

“Where’ve I heard that before?” the brunette mock-giggled.

“Rejji...”

“All right. Fine. I’ll go gag myself.”

“Bitch.”

The brunette grinned, stuck out her tongue, and runway-walked out of the room.

“What do you want me to show you, Cyn?” I asked the blonde.

“I’m not...sure, exactly. Scars all look alike to me. But I know you...Burke...didn’t have that tattoo on his hand.”

“It’s new,” I said quietly. “Like my face. But I’m still me.”

“Prove it,” the blonde said, vainly trying to cross her arms over her chest. “I don’t mean to sound...ungrateful, or anything. We both...Ah, never mind. Just prove you’re who you say you are, and we’ll do what you want.”

“How do you know what I—?”

“Whatever it is,” she cut me off. “Maybe I don’t know your face—the face you have—but I remember what you...what Burke did. So...?”

“You and Rejji are in the—”

“Don’t tell us about us. We already know about us.”

“And you don’t really know anything about me,” I said. “So how am I supposed to...?”

The blonde didn’t say anything. The brunette came back into the living room, fastening a ball gag behind her head the way another woman might adjust a piece of jewelry. She dropped to her knees, pulled the red ball portion away from her mouth, looked up at me, said, “You like me in this shade?”

That’s when the key to their lock dropped into my hand. “Thanks, Rej,” I said. I turned to the blonde. “The last time I was here, you told me I was so vanilla that, if I walked into a room and saw a woman all bound and gagged, the first thing I’d do would be to start looking around for the villain with the black hat and mustache.”

“It’s you,” the blonde laughed, coming over to the couch. She bent down, kissed the side of my mouth.

“You’re the closest thing to movie people I know,” I said, after I told them how I wanted to go in.

“We don’t do mainstream,” Rejji said. “But...well, two things: One, we do what we do for money. So, if anyone paid us, we would; it’s not some artistic thing. Two, movies are movies, I think. They make them all the same way. The budgets are different, maybe. The scripts are for damn sure different. But the process, I think it’s close enough.”

“So you think we could fake it?”

“Fake what?” Rejji asked. “Fake making an adult video? Why would anybody fake that? I mean, how could you tell? Maybe somebody watching it later, maybe they could tell. But when you’re making the movie, you don’t know how it’s going to look. Only how it feels. Sometimes, if it’s no good, not even that.”

“These are kids, you stupid slut,” Cyn said. “We put word out that we’re shooting even softcore, that’d be the end.”

“I don’t want to look at...what did you call them, head shots?” I told them. “I need to talk with the...actors, I guess they’d be. Each one. Separately.”

“Cyn gets asked all the time,” Rej volunteered, “to do videos.”

“Asked isn’t the same as doing, bitch!” Cyn snapped at her.

“Uh, you think we could get back to my problem?” I asked them both.

“How about a joint?” Rejji said. “I always think better when I’m mellow.”

“None for me,” I told her.

“That’s my Burke,” Cyn said, giggling. She walked over and plopped herself in my lap. “Too bad Rej and I aren’t black girls. At least we could make an Oreo out of you.”

“Not me,” Rejji said quickly.

“Oh, lighten up,” Cyn said. “You’re as bad as he is.”

“You can’t be a director,” Cyn said, later. “I mean, sure, anyone with a camera can say he’s one, but somebody could just look you up.”

“They can’t all be registered.”

“I’ll bet the big ones are, someplace. Anyway, you said you had to talk to the kids, right? Directors, they might talk to the stars, but not to whole mobs.”

“Could I be a screenwriter?”

“When’s the last time you went to a movie?” Rej sneered. “Anybody could be a screenwriter. They might hang around, trying to soak up ‘ambience’ or whatever—remember, Cyn, when that pathetic little dweeb spent all that time on our set ’cause he was writing some movie about making porno movies?—but it wouldn’t work. You want these kids to give it up, right? Listen, they’ll do anything—to anybody—if you whisper ‘movies’ at them. We saw that when we were out on the coast, virgins blowing Great Danes because some greaseball tells them that’s the way Monroe got started. But they’d have to believe you could make it happen. And a screenwriter can’t make anything happen.”

“What if I was a—?”

“Casting director!” Cyn blurted out. “That is just awesomely perfect. Right, Rej? Nobody knows their names, and they may not get the final say, but they thin the herd. If you don’t get past them, the director never gets to see your tape.”

“You’re a genius, Cyn,” Rej said. “Makes me want to crawl over there and kiss your ass.”

“Don’t pay any attention to her, Burke,” the blonde said. “This one’s our ticket, I know it.”

“How you going to know what a...what was that again, Schoolboy...a goddamn ‘casting director’ wears to work?”

“This isn’t the post office, Prof,” Michelle said tartly. “Everyone doesn’t wear the same uniform.”

“But I have to look like—”

“You don’t have to look like anything, baby. Trust the Mistress of the Wardrobe. What you have to look is cool. Hip, edgy, with it—understand?”

“I...guess.”

“Well, I can do it. All I need is—”

“I know,” I said, reaching into my jacket.

“Am I right?” Giovanni asked me.

“Nothing I found so far makes it seem so,” I said. “And I never thought you were, going in.”

He looked through the windshield of the midnight-blue BMW sedan, as if the answer were somewhere offshore. Even at three in the morning, the Brooklyn waterfront is never completely deserted, but Giovanni was calm and relaxed. Maybe because Felix was sitting behind me, where I couldn’t see him. Or maybe because of the two cars backed into acute angles from us, facing out. A burgundy Cadillac and a white Range Rover—one from each of their crews.

“But you haven’t found anything that would make me wrong?”

“No.”

“Even the cops didn’t?”

“Not in anything I saw. And I saw pretty much everything there was.”

“They think it was just some sex fiend?”

“It’s hard to tell what they think, from only looking at paper. But they’ve got no candidate, so that’s where they’d go, eventually.”

“Why would they be incorrect?” Felix asked.

“I didn’t say they would be,” I answered him mildly, not turning around.

“But if they were?” he insisted, his voice sable-silky. I guessed it wasn’t his mother who’d named him Felix.

“If it was someone the...If it was someone Vonni knew, that would make them wrong.”

“Yes,” he said patiently. “But how would they be wrong? Where would they be wrong?”

“They would be...if there was a relationship they didn’t know about. Or one they misread.”

“Such as...?”

“Such as someone she was...involved with outside the law.”

“What does that mean?” Giovanni, edgy.

“A married man, for example,” I said. “I don’t mean outside the law like adultery, nobody goes to jail for that. I mean outside the law because of Vonni’s age.”

“This happens,” Felix said, neutral.

“Happens with schoolteachers,” I said. “And coaches. And priests. And freaks who troll the Internet. And—”

“We get it,” Giovanni said. “But, something like that going on, what’s the chances of the cops missing it?”

“Dismal,” I said, holding back the card the boy Hugh had given me. Vonni’s “big day.” When it was over, she’d start being famous. Her last meeting hadn’t been a chance encounter. Couldn’t have been. Because whoever it had been with had never come forward. “But always possible.”

“Sherlock Holmes is dead,” Giovanni said.

“I’m not saying it couldn’t happen,” I told them, “but the odds are way against it, especially in a homicide like this one. Front-page stuff, all kinds of personnel assigned—that’s a bright, hot light to be under. They’d pull out all the stops. I was looking for an Exceptional Clearance note, but—”

“What is that?” Felix asked, still soft-voiced. He was either naturally calm or a natural killer. Or both.

“When the cops know who did it but they can’t touch them,” I told him. “Just not enough evidence to act.”

“How could that be? The police do not seem to need...overwhelming evidence to make many of their arrests.”

“Not for some of them,” I agreed. “But Exceptional Clearance is just what it sounds like. It’s no run-of-the-mill thing. The cops can ‘clear’ a case without making an arrest if they can show their superiors a certain person did the crime, and also that they don’t have enough on him to make it stick in court. Sometimes they’ve got plenty of evidence but they can’t use it. Something they found during a bad search, maybe. Or off an illegal wiretap.

“The thing is, with a homicide, they could feel it’s better to wait. If they move too soon, force it to trial with shaky evidence, the killer beats the case, and they don’t get a second chance. There’s no statute of limitations on murder, so they don’t lose anything by holding back. If the guy had accomplices, or even if he had partners on other jobs, if he’s a gang member...You see where I’m going. They’ll figure like you said before, everyone says they can take the weight, until they step on the scales.”

“Loyalty is...unusual now,” Felix agreed.

“You said you looked for this Clearance thing?” Giovanni said.

“I looked for it. And it’s not there.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure I didn’t overlook it. And I’m sure that the paperwork I got was righteous. Stuff like that’s got to be double-documented, everybody playing CYA all the way up the command chain. If it was there, it would have been on paper. And—you know what?—if they had a candidate, they’d have leaked it to the press by now, if only to get some of the heat off themselves. You know, the old ‘umbrella of suspicion’ routine.”

“So either they missed one of these...relationships, or it was someone she didn’t know—that sums it up?” Giovanni said.

“Yeah.”

“And if it was someone she didn’t know, the way the cops would have doped it out, they’d make it for a sex fiend, like we said before.”

“Exactly. And that seems like it’s where they ended up. There’s no local suspect.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure of this: They called in the FBI, looking for a profile of the killer. And they asked the feds for pattern work, too, to see if there were any similarities between the way this was done and other...ones. All around the country, going back a number of years. It could be that they were just going through the motions, covering themselves with paper. But I don’t think so.”

“Why?” Felix asked.

“The locals wouldn’t go that far unless they were serious. And empty. This wasn’t a ransom kidnapping. No evidence that she was taken across a state line. No reason for the federales to have jurisdiction. And that would be the way most local departments would want it. They talk cooperation, but they’re always worried about credit-stealing, especially when the feds have better access to the national media. So, if the locals asked for help, that tells me they really wanted to crack it.”

“The feds,” Giovanni muttered, half to himself.

“Not New York feds,” I reminded him. “And not DEA,” I put in, for Felix.

“I know,” Giovanni said. “But what do they have, for all this? Nothing. Not a single—candidate, you called him, right?—not a single candidate in Vonni’s life. And no ‘pattern’ they can link to a serial killer or whatever. You said it was maybe more than one, don’t forget. To me, it still looks like just what I said. A hit. A hit to send me a message.”

“What do you want me to do?” I said.

“You got a plan, don’t you, Burke?” he asked, more anxiety in his voice than he realized.

“It may not be much of one....”

“Yeah. Me and Felix, we don’t know you, know you, see what I’m saying? But we know of you. Of your ‘brother,’ anyway, okay? We asked around, people who know. You got a lot of rep. For different things. One of them is, you see a chance to open a money vein, you stick in a big damn needle. So, sure, you got a plan. Only it’ll cost a lot of coin, try it out; am I right or wrong?”

“You’re right. And all that means for sure is that the plan happens, not the result. I’m not making any promises.”

“That’s what a reputation is,” Felix purred. “It makes the promises for you. And you have more than one reputation, Burke. This kind of thing. A child. You have a reputation about such things.”

“Oh, I want him, all right,” I admitted.

“Whoever he is?” Giovanni asked.

I turned to hold his eyes. “If he was Christ on the fucking cross,” I said.

When you’re on the run, “safe sex” is the kind you pay for. When you go anywhere near women you know, what you can’t know is if they’re going to keep it to themselves. Maybe they grapevined into a reward-money rumor; maybe they’ve got a case on them—there’s all kinds of reasons, and it never takes a good one.

But buying sex doesn’t buy you loyalty, and hustlers are always hustling.

So the best bet is strangers.

I’m good at being a stranger. It comes naturally to me. I’ve got a drifter’s mind, and I’ve been enough places so I can speak “not from around here” convincingly, even half a dozen blocks from wherever I live.

You have to pick middle-tier spots. Upscale joints attract ambitious women, and even the most self-absorbed of those ask enough questions to see if you’re going to be a good investment. The other end of the road is landmined so deeply you’d have to step on one to know it’s there. Roadhouse girls are some of the sweetest ever put on this earth, but you never know whose woman you just made a mistake with, until you hear the bottle break on the bar.

Turned out Long Island has a cottage industry in cheaters’ bars, catering to the daytime trade, before husbands get home from work. They all seem within easy driving distance of a motel, too.

But, after the first three, I figured out it wasn’t sex I’d been missing.

“Two G’s for...this?”

“Quite a bargain, yes?” Michelle said, cat-grinning to show she was misunderstanding me deliberately. “Bally makes such beautiful things.”

“It’s just a leather jacket,” I said.

“Oh, pul-leeze! Feel it.”

“It’s awful thin for so much—”

“That is how it’s supposed to be, you dolt. This is summer leather. Soft as butter, isn’t it?”

“I guess.”

“Aren’t the gussets behind the shoulder a perfect touch? And that color...”

“It’s white.”

“It is not white, you heathen; it’s eggshell. White is the opposite of black.”

“And this is all I need?”

“We’re making a statement,” Michelle said, total confidence. “You can wear any damn thing, a T-shirt and jeans for all I care, so long as you wear this jacket. And you wear it casually, please. Just toss it over the back of the nearest chair. Anybody who knows what to look for will know you’re a man who’s used to the best.”

“These are going to be kids, Michelle. They’ll be looking for Tommy Hilfiger or the Gap, right?”

“No, no, no, honey. If you were one of them, sure. But you’re not. And not trying to be. You’re a movie person. That’s a deity to them. You don’t take your cues from them; they take them from you. They may not recognize the brand but, trust me, girls know how to tell ‘expensive’ at a very young age.”

“And the boys?”

“Boys never know anything,” she said. “Now pay attention. We’re not done. Just a couple of more touches. How do you like these boots?”

“They look okay, I guess,” I said, holding a pair of plain black ankle-high lace-ups with a one-piece sole-and-heel.

“Those are Mephistos.”

“What?”

“It’s a brand name,” she said, tolerating my ignorance with an effort. “This model is called the Naddo. Supposed to be the most comfortable shoes on earth.”

“They look like upper-class Doc Martens.”

“See? Even you can tell they’re high-end.”

“Yeah, all right,” I surrendered. “What else?”

“You need some kind of jewelry. A ring or...a bracelet, maybe.”

“I’m not buying any damn—”

“Oh, Mama will have something,” Michelle said breezily.

The Mistress of the Wardrobe marched up and down in front of us, inspecting her troops. Clarence was all in black, right down to the buttons on his silk shirt. Max’s massive torso was draped in one of the most garish optical assaults ever to come out of Hawaii. Terry had a bleached dungaree jacket over a Dark Horse Comics T-shirt. The Mole wore his favorite dirt-colored jumpsuit, a thick tool belt around his waist.

The Prof had carried her deep into the late rounds, but Michelle had finally TKO’ed him. The little man reluctantly sported a royal-blue knee-length Nehru jacket with thick white vertical stripes. Me, I had my white leather jacket and black boots. A pigeon-blood ruby ring on the little finger of my right hand. And a heavy chain Mama said was platinum on my left wrist, right next to a chunky, beat-up Casio multi-screen watch on a wide black nylon band. “The contrast makes the look,” Michelle had assured me.

“Everybody got their roles?” I asked them.

“I am an executive producer, mahn,” Clarence said, as if daring anyone to dispute it.

“Right. Max is security. The Prof is part of the...What did you call it again, Michelle?”

“The creative team,” she sighed.

“Uh-huh. Okay, the Mole is tech. You can work that whole video rig we got, right?” I asked him.

He gave me one of his particle-accelerator looks, didn’t answer.

“Terry, you’re a studio intern. You’re sure you can talk the talk?”

“We’re going all-digital,” he said smoothly. “It’s the only way to get the immediacy 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 the Internet is like a forest fire, especially when it comes to rumors. And when you add fucking movies to the mix, it’ll spread, no matter what you do.”

“How would you do it?”

“Me? One thing I wouldn’t do is have a Web site. That would be fatal. What you want is a couple of little posts, maybe in one of the local newsgroups or on a message board. Not saying it is happening, just that they heard it might be, and could anybody help? You know, give info and stuff.”

“Sounds good. Can you do it?”

“Me? Why me?”

“That would be your choice, why you. It could be for money, or it could be for a favor.”

“A favor?”

“Yeah. A favor you do us means someday we could do a favor for you, see?”

“I...guess.”

“But it’s worth a thousand, if you just want the cash.”

He fumbled around, found one of his cigars. Lighting it up seemed to return him to his role, tranq him down. After a few puffs, he peered at me through the blue smoke, said, “‘Cash’ means not a check, right?”

“Is this going to be a permanent thing, that patch?” Wolfe asked me.

“It’s just for a job,” I said.

“A job for...?”

“Those same people.”

“It’s not exactly a disguise. I’d know you in a second.”

“You would,” I admitted. “But for people who’ve never met me, it might be all they remember.”

“And you want a driver’s license...another driver’s license? Same name, same everything, only the photo has you wearing the patch?”

“Yeah. I checked. You only need vision in one eye to get a license. I’ve got the photos right here....”

“Why did you come to me?” she asked. “Even with all the anti-terrorist squads on the job now, there’s still a hundred places in the city you could get something like this done.”

“I figured, it’s your paper I’m carrying, you’d want it to all be perfect.”

“Sure,” she said.

“And I wanted to ask you something else?”

“Buy something else.”

“Yeah. That’s what I meant. I just...I just didn’t know if you maybe already had what I wanted to know about, or if you’d have to ask around. So I didn’t know how much it would—”

“I set my own prices,” she said, blowing a perfect smoke ring into the night air. “And I always give them in front. You know that.”

“Right. Okay, look, here’s what I need to know: how dead am I?”

“To who?”

“I’m not following you.”

“There’s a lot of wires. They don’t all route through the same terminals, understand? Which do you want me to check?”

“All you can.”

“That’s going to cost.”

“Everybody pays,” I said.

Her stare measured me for a few long seconds before she nodded an okay.

“What would we have to do?” Cyn asked, more than a trace of suspicion in her tone.

“You’d mostly be window-dressing,” I told her. “Atmosphere.”

“I’ve got citizen dresses,” Rejji said helpfully.

“What’s this ‘atmosphere,’ Burke?”

“It’s something to draw the eye,” I answered, thinking of the eyepatch. “These are going to be kids, mostly. No way a teenage boy is going to be watching me when he could be watching you two.”

“We don’t like boys,” Rejji said, licking her lips.

“So let the girls look, then. Just don’t touch.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Cyn said. “We only touch for money.”

“And you pose for money, too, right?”

“Yessss,” Rejji hissed. “And we are very, very good at it.”

“So think of this as posing, okay?”

“What exactly would we be doing?” Cyn wanted to know, still not mollified.

“Just dress up, prance around, act like you’re part of the whole deal. When I need you to do something specific, I’ll tell you.”

“See, Cyn?” Rejji crowed. “He’s not fooling anyone with that vanilla routine—Burke’s a closet dom.”

“Shut your silly mouth, slut,” Cyn told her.

Rejji stuck her thumb in her mouth, made loud sucking sounds.

Cyn turned to me. Made a little twitch at the corner of her mouth, said, “So. How much money are we talking about here, boss?”

“Michelle can bless any dress, but you can’t hide a ride,” the Prof said. “That rust bucket you been driving around, it’s not going to fly, Sly.”

“My father is right,” Clarence seconded the Prof’s notion.

“This doesn’t call for limo cover,” I said. “We want...Never mind, I think I know where we can get what we need.”

“You want...what?”

“Cars,” I told Giovanni. “Three, four of them. Not flashy. Classy. Like this one.”

“My BMW? Get out of town, Burke. What would I drive while you’re doing this, that junker of yours?”

“That junker could surprise you.”

“How? By not falling apart on the BQE?”

“It’d put this one on the trailer, easy.”

“I hope you know more about investigating than you do about cars, my friend,” he said, laughing. “This is an M5; you know what that means?”

“Yeah, sure. A factory–hot-rodded version.”

“Hot-rodded? This thing is put together like a Rolex.”

“Some Rolexes run slow.”

“So you’re saying you got a big motor. What’s that? I’m not talking about drag racing. There’s more to a car than quarter-miles.”

“Want to see for yourself?”

“Right now?” he asked, matador’s eyes glittering.

“Sure.”

“You know the Navy Yard?”

“Yeah.”

“Meet me over there, at the—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about, a race. I said see for yourself, that’s what I meant.” I pointed toward where the Plymouth lurked. “Key’s in the ignition,” I told him. “In the dash, not on the steering column.”

Giovanni strutted over to the Plymouth, Felix a dark, feline shape next to him. I watched Giovanni get behind the wheel, heard the big-cube Mopar’s muted throb when they fired it up. Giovanni gave it the gun. The Plymouth’s rear end kicked out slightly, but he got it under control and roared out of the parking lot.

It was about forty minutes before I saw the Plymouth’s headlights cut the corner and come my way. Giovanni backed it in slowly, exhausts gurgling like a powerboat’s. He and Felix climbed out, Giovanni pausing to pat the Plymouth’s fender like it was a racehorse who’d just given its best.

I was standing next to the BMW as they approached.

“Dios mio, that is a stallion,” Felix said. “A Ferrari would never defeat it.”

“Want to trade?” Giovanni asked me. “Right now? Even up?”

“No thanks,” I said. Lymon had promised me the Plymouth could pull an honest twelve-second quarter and top out at 150. I hadn’t seen for myself yet, but I suspected Giovanni had.

“I don’t blame you,” he said.

“For what I do, the Plymouth is better. But for what I’m doing now...”

“I get it,” Giovanni said. “And you got it. Make a list.”

“It’s out there,” Jerry the Journalist said.

“Any idea of whether it’s being picked up?” I said into the phone.

“It’s always picked up,” he answered. “True or false, smart or stupid, it’s all the same. For an extra touch, I even slipped it into the Internet Movie Database.”

“What’s that?”

“An online thing. Pretty helpful for something like what you’re doing. What people do, when they hear a rumor, they ‘check it out on the Internet,’ see?”

“But how do they know if—?”

“They don’t. And it doesn’t matter. To them, if it’s on the Internet, it’s God’s own truth. ‘Cyber-chumps,’ that’s what I call them.”

“That’s pretty slick, ‘cyber-chumps.’ You make it up?”

“You ever go on the Internet?”

“Me? No.”

“Yeah, I ‘coined the phrase,’ as they say.”

“Cool. Thanks for the TCB.”

“That’s it?”

“If you really got it done, it is.”

“You’re dead by NYPD,” Wolfe said.

“Dead dead? Or just missing-and-presumed?”

“Mondo morto. They probably cleared a hundred cases behind your death. The last thing they’d want is for you to show up.”

That’s another way to get a case an Exceptional Clearance, I thought, when the perp’s not alive to bring to trial. “What kind of cases?” I asked.

“Hijackings, assaults, armed robberies. Like that.”

“They didn’t put me in any...?”

“What? Sex cases?”

“Yeah. Or...?”

“No. In some strange way, they were almost...respectful. Or maybe they were playing it straight, staying with cases in which you were actually a suspect in some way.”

“There’s enough of those,” I acknowledged.

“Apparently,” she said dryly. “Everything else is whispers. People say they’ve seen you. Or heard you were back in town. Nothing specific.”

“Sure. That kind of talk...There’s some saying Wesley’s still walking around, too.”

Wolfe shuddered. Gave me a long, cold look.

I took it, let it come into me. Stayed soft-eyed.

“Remember Colto?” she finally said, heavy on the Italian inflection.

“That blowhard? Sure.”

“He’s running around making noises about settling with you.”

“That proves the street thinks I’m dead.”

“He says you stole eight keys of pure from him a few years ago, and you’ve been running from him ever since.”

“He’s lying to his bosses the same way he lied to me. It was five keys. And it was stepped on, heavy.”

“They must have believed him; he’s still walking.”

“I never thought they bought it, myself. But Colto’s a decent earner. They probably figured he puffed up the amount to cover his own ass, sure, but he could make it back up to them, they gave him enough time. He’s just huffing now, behind some rumor that I’m back. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

“Yes,” she said patiently, “I know. But gangsters gossip worse than housewives. And you are working for...”

“How much do I still owe you?” I said.

“It’s on,” Michelle said. “Clarence and I hit six, eight different houses between ten and three o’clock.”

“They all bought it?” I asked her.

“Sure. Like it was an everyday thing, some production company asking about renting out their house for a movie. They don’t know anyone this actually happened to, but they know it happens. Besides, who’s more charming than me?”

“Nobody. You let Clarence do any talking?”

“I was the driver, mahn,” Clarence said. “A nice sleek Mercedes. Not so fine a ride as mine, but it made the impression.”

I’d vetoed Clarence bringing his prize ’67 Rover TC into the game. In some neighborhoods, a black Mercedes was as generic as a yellow cab in Manhattan, but the immaculate-as-new British Racing Green sedan would stick in the memory.

I didn’t mind him just playing the driver, either. We couldn’t know the racial attitudes of any of the households we’d picked at random. And if anyone caught a glimpse of the nine-millimeter under his arm, well, a lot of chauffeurs are armed these days.

“It worked just like you said, honey,” Michelle said. “More than half of the houses, it was kids who answered the door. And even when we found an adult at home, it’s like teenagers have a radar for the word ‘movies.’ They’d be in the living room in a heartbeat, soon as it came out.”

“We’ve got to hope their grapevine cuts across class lines,” I said. “The only way to make this scouting-for-locations scam sing is to pick either real big houses or those with great views...or plenty of land. That always means money. So the kids in those houses, they’ll tell their friends, but I don’t know how far it’s going to travel.”

“All high-school kids clique up,” Michelle said. “But they read the same magazines. Watch the same TV. Listen to the same music. It’ll go across, baby.”

“And we’ve got that Internet thing, too,” I added, hopefully.

“What is next, mahn?” Clarence.

“The mall,” I said. “Tomorrow afternoon. Then we’ll know.”

“I don’t care what you heard,” I told the mob of teenagers Michelle had herded over. I was sitting in a corner of the food court, with Cyn on one side and Rejji on the other. Max stood behind me, facing out. Better than a wall. “These are not auditions. What the company wants, first, is the right look. And the right sound. So you won’t get any sides—”

“What’s that?” a girl asked.

I exchanged knowing looks with Cyn, then went on talking as another teen snidely hissed that “sides” were pages of a script.

“...because we need to get you on tape, being yourselves, before anything else. The director is going to look at a lot of people. This phase is only about collecting images, so he can see who makes the cut. After that comes the readings.”

“Who’s the director?” a kid with horn-rimmed glasses asked.

This time, my look was exchanged with Rejji, who raised an eyebrow, dismissing the kid harder than a slap.

“We are not looking for extras,” I went on, pointedly ignoring the uncool question, sending an etiquette message. “Not at this time. The film isn’t cast yet. We’re starting from scratch. But since it’s going to be shot around here, and the script is written for teenagers, the director thought we might spend a few days surveying.”

“Surveying?” a late-teens girl in a butterscotch blouse said.

“Shut up!” a younger girl in denim overalls hissed at her. “Let him talk.”

I went on doing just that for a few minutes, verging just close enough on condescending arrogance to convince them I was the real thing.

“Anyone can try out?” a chunky girl with a round, shiny face and frizzy brown hair asked me.

“These aren’t tryouts,” I told her. “In the trade, we call this ‘looking for the look.’ It’s our job to bring the director all kinds of different images. Like a list of ingredients, so he can decide what he wants to cook.”

The chunky girl thought she heard a coded message in all that. Her face fell.

“I hope you can come,” Michelle told her, voice carrying deep into the crowd. “You have fantastic eyes.”

“Police girl call.” Mama’s voice, on the cell phone.

“Wolfe?”

“What I say?”

“Okay, Mama. What did she say?”

“Say call.”

“You were looking for me?”

“Not me,” Wolfe said. “That person we talked about.”

“Does he know where to look?”

“You mean your...place?”

“Yeah.”

“Not unless you’ve been a lot more careless than you usually are.” Meaning: “Not from me.”

“So where’s he doing all this looking?”

“Remember Julian’s?”

“Sure,” I said, mourning the passing of one of the City’s greatest poolrooms. Fourteenth Street wasn’t the same since it had disappeared.

“A place in the same business. Only in a basement.”

“I haven’t been there in—”

“But you used to go there. People left messages for you with the old man who runs it. That’s what he did; he left a message.”

“What does the mope think he’s doing, playing High Noon?”

“It does seem...outlandish. So it’s probably not what it seems. But he is trying to make an impression. And I thought he might come to...that restaurant of yours.”

“Even he’s not that stupid,” I said.

“Does anybody—anybody—know I’m on your payroll?”

“Only Felix.”

“The first couple of times we met, you had people...you both had people around.”

“That was so they’d think—”

“Sure. I’m not criticizing your strategy. Only thing is, how sure are you of all the men who were there?”

“Dead sure,” Giovanni said.

“Yes,” Felix echoed. “Why do you ask all this?”

“You know a guy named Colto? Works Queens, out of the old airport crew?”

“I know who he is,” Giovanni said, waiting to see my next card.

“A few years ago, he said Burke took him off for some powder.”

“I heard about that. Heard the story, anyway. I don’t think his boss bought it.”

“That’s how I got it, too. Thing is, this Colto, he’s been making the rounds, telling people Burke’s been on the run...from him. And now that Burke’s back, he’s going to settle up.”

“Why do you tell us?” Felix said.

“I tell you because, one, if he got the idea Burke’s back from one of your crews, it means things aren’t as tight as you think they are. And, two, he’s in the way. Of what I’m doing. About Vonni. You know what happens, a guy mouths off about something that sounds like business, sooner or later people pay attention. The last thing we want now is anybody paying attention to me.”

“Colto’s a fucking pig,” Giovanni said. “If he was lying in the gutter bleeding to death, the whole neighborhood would send 911 a postcard. But, you know, he’s got a little button.”

“I understand,” I told him.

“No, you don’t,” Felix said. “And you don’t do anything, either. A balloon, it’s only the air that holds it up.”

“But if he comes around...?”

“You said enough already,” Giovanni told me.

“Where’s your slips?” Rejji demanded of the two girls in matching red halter tops and jeans.

“Slip?” one of them asked. “I didn’t hear anything about wearing a—”

“One of these,” Rejji said, showing her a playing card. It had a joker on the face; the back was blank. “You have to have one of these, with a time and date on it. You know how many people we have to see? If they all came at once, this would be a mob scene.”

“Oh,” the other girl said, crestfallen. “Nobody said anything to us.”

“Come over here,” Rejji said, motioning them into a corner.

“I’m seventeen, but I can play any age from—”

“This isn’t an audition,” I said. “Not yet.” I went into my “looking for a look” spiel, as Clarence tapped a zebrawood pen on the blank page of an open calfskin notebook. “We’re just going to have a conversation. Like an interview, okay?”

“Ask me anything!”

“This is not about you,” I said, putting a thin edge on my voice. “It’s about how you come across. Do you understand the difference?”

“Sure! Absolutely.”

“Okay, let’s see. Talk to me about school. Are there a lot of cliques there?”

“I’m going to have to go back into the City, shop around, if you want me to pick up all this stuff, Pop,” Terry said to the Mole, looking over a few pages ripped from a yellow legal pad covered with his father’s hieroglyphics. “It could take a couple of days....”

“Karp’s Hardware,” the Mole said, not looking up from his bench.

“What?”

“In East Northport. Karp’s Hardware. It will be in the book. They will have everything.”

“A hardware store?” the kid said, jaw dropping. “How could it possibly...?”

“Everything,” the Mole assured him, still intent on his instruments.

Hours and hours, one kid after another. Michelle was working one of the rooms, Cyn another. Clarence moved between the suites, taking notes. The Prof sat in a tufted easy chair, chain-smoking, being creative.

The Mole fiddled with equipment I couldn’t begin to recognize. Occasionally, he pretended to listen to advice from the Prof. Rejji covered the door. Terry pulled kids aside for whispered conversations while they were waiting. Despite my telling him we wanted a representative sampling, his personal preferences seemed to dictate his conversational targets.

At night, we sat around and talked over what we’d pulled out of the day. Between us, we’d heard about a dozen different kinds of drugs—chronic to crystal, E to H—and SATs, booze, football, shoplifting, AOL chat rooms, vandalism, cars, a “master race” graffiti gang, hip-hop, the NBA draft, love affairs, Jell-O shots, steroids, Amy Fisher—opinion seemed divided between Guido victim and skanky slut—chick fights, clothes, MP3s, asshole teachers, fucked-up DSL service, the tragedy of Napster, music I never heard of, tank parties, comic books, huffing, movies, drive-bys, computer gaming....

The next day, two boys in blue varsity jackets with white leather sleeves got into some kind of argument with one of the girls waiting to be interviewed. “Say you didn’t! Say you didn’t!” the girl dared them. One of the boys stepped to her, shoulders hunched. Max cat-footed over to where they were standing, put his finger to his lips.

“Who the fuck are you supposed to be?” the taller of the two demanded.

Max wrist-locked the kid to his knees, held him there effortlessly as he looked without expression at the other one.

“What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened around here?” I asked some of the teenagers, randomly.

Vonni’s murder came up in less than half the answers. Three different kids claimed her for a close friend, one girl getting teary-eyed when she said the name.

But a year-old homicide generally didn’t have much of a chance against who was crushing who, what guy was pure butter, which girl was total ghetto, who always acted like a real crackhead at school, what BMX move was totally sick, which new computer game was ultra-mega, where the next rave was supposed to be.

A few kids were focused elsewhere. Some talked about Columbine. Not about the slaughter scene, about poor Dylan and Eric.

A teen with a military haircut and camo pants told me McVeigh had been framed. “Where’s John Doe Number Two?” he demanded, angry.

Some were very deeply depressed about the new run of Buffy. “Now even The Slayer sucks!” one cracked. A girl with lithium eyes was upset at how much child support they were making poor Eminem pay.

One kid had a “Death Before Dishonor” tattoo on his forearm. He told everyone who would listen that his brother was in the Marines, and he was going, too, as soon as he graduated.

Two girls got into an argument about whatever. “Bring it, B!” one yelled at the other. The crowd of kids snarled at them collectively to take it outside. The girls headed for the door. Nobody followed. The two girls stopped in their tracks. Stared at each other, sharing disappointment.

The ones we came to call the “movie kids” were surface-scarred by their marrow-deep smugness. So completely, condescendingly in the know that they felt comfortable pontificating about “gross points” and “final cut.” They breezily corrected each other about who was “A-list at Miramax,” and dropped names like “Denzel” as if he had been over for dinner the night before. But when it came to asking for credentials, they were all parties to a mutual nonaggression pact.

No problem, until a girl in a Joan Baez outfit started ragging on some studio for putting out a horror movie directed by a convicted child molester. “They’re disgusting!” she said. “After what he did...”

A twenty-something with one of those lower-lip goatees and Buddy Holly glasses looked down his long nose at the girl, intoned, “Judge the art, not the artist,” and looked to Terry for approval. Terry gave the kid a bright-white smile...a red flag to Max, who stepped between them, put his arm around Terry’s shoulders, and muscled the kid over to where his mother was sitting. Quick, before life could imitate art.

A kid sporting double wallet chains and a “WWMD” medallion said college was “grayed out.” Later, Terry translated. “WWMD” stood for “What Would Manson Do?” and “grayed out” meant “not an option.”

A girl with a matchstick body and beta-carotene skin told us that we didn’t understand—before anyone asked her a question.

One Goth boy, who looked like he’d played vampire prince so often that he’d ended up hematologically challenged, drove a black PT Cruiser, customized to look like a hearse, with “aR_xthur R_xules” in neat white lettering on the fender.

A good quarter of them started every sentence with “Basically,” as if it were some kind of verbal tic.

Boarders and bladers stood apart from cyber-geeks. Poseurs, players, and self-proclaimed pimps got along—punks of a feather. Cheerleaders didn’t mix with cholas. But even whiggers and skinheads shared pieces of the same room without so much as an eye-fuck. “Reminds me how guys act in full minimum,” I told the Prof later. “Walking on eggs, right? They know one wrong move gets them sent back to the Walls.”

They all talked different, but they all talked. And none of them said anything we needed.

“We still have a ton more of them,” Michelle said. “How many of those cards did we spread out there? Thousands?”

“Not that many,” Rej said. “But a lot. A real lot.”

“Cyn?”

“The girls talked about it more than the boys. But that’s natural, I think.”

“They doing any speculating?” I asked.

“The ones I talked to, they all seemed satisfied. Scared and satisfied,” Michelle offered.

“Satisfied that some monster was just passing through?”

“Yes. And scared that he could come again. But not truly scared. More like...fascinated, maybe. A few even made Friday the Thirteenth jokes. Très chic.”

“You’ve got their pedigrees?” I asked Clarence.

“Mahn, this is a job for a clerk, that is all. Rejji gives them this form to fill out, and they do. Every single line. They want us to be able to find them, do they not?”

“Yeah. And you all put check marks on the ones who said anything about Vonni?”

Michelle and Cyn nodded.

“Terry?”

“I high-signed Clarence every time one of them said anything, too.”

“You do any better than we did?”

“No...but I didn’t push, either. Like you said.”

“I’ve got three for you to try up-close-and-personal, tomorrow,” I told him. “For now, let’s call it a night.”

“You like that mom-and-pop food, huh?” Rejji said, smiling at my blue-plate special of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and chopped spinach.

“I like just about anything I can pronounce,” I told her.

“Bet he tops off with vanilla ice cream,” Cyn cracked.

“Why can’t we just stay at the hotel?” Cyn asked me on the drive back. “You already paid for all those rooms, didn’t you? I mean, we’re going right back there tomorrow....”

“If we tried to sleep there, we’d be bombarded by kids sneaking past security. I’ll rent a couple on another floor starting tomorrow, okay?”

“They really are insane about being in a movie, huh?”

“You talked to them, Cyn. What do you think?”

“Fetish is fetish,” she said, nodding agreement.

“Did anybody hear the name Vision?” Terry asked, the next night.

Clarence shrugged a “No.”

“Not me, honey,” Michelle said.

“I’m drawing a blank, too, kid,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“I was just hanging out with some of the ones who were waiting, you know? One of them says to another, ‘I bet this is killing Vision—a real movie being made right here.’ And the other says he was in one of Vision’s movies. The first guy says, ‘For real?’ And the other guy says, yeah, the whole fraternity was, kind of.

“But when the first guy presses, the other guy says he’s not allowed to talk about the initiations. Then I had to go. One of the girls was saying—”

“Anyone else hear that name? Vision?”

“I did,” Cyn said. “Remember when you had that idea, do two or three of them at a time, get them talking to each other? Well, this Asian girl, Mei-Mei, she said she’d been in a movie before, and the other two gave her a ‘Shut the fuck up!’ look. I let it slide like I wasn’t paying attention.

“But then I got her alone later, like I wanted to see how she did with some other material, blah-blah, and I walked her around to this movie she was in. She says, ‘Oh, it was just one of Vision’s. A video, not a movie.’ I moved on, right over what she was saying, so she couldn’t even be sure I heard her.”

“You played it perfect, Cyn.”

She and Rejji mid-fived with their hips.

“So there is a young man making videos,” Clarence said. “What good could this be to us? Half of these children said they had made some kind of video.”

“Two people mention this ‘Vision’ guy,” I told him. “And, both times, someone asks a question, they dummy up quick. That gets my attention.”

“Probably makes porno,” Michelle said sourly.

“Can you come and see me, please?” Hazel Greene.

“Anytime. Just say the—”

“Right now. I know it’s late but—”

“I’ll be there in under an hour,” I told her.

“I found something,” she said.

“Something about—?”

“I don’t know what it’s about. I don’t know if it...means anything. But Vonni had it...hidden.”

“And you just found it, is that what you’re saying?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not to me.”

“Then why did you ask me?”

“Because, if you had it all this time, then you had your own reasons for not turning it over to the cops.”

“You...you would think like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t want to fight with you, Mrs. Greene.”

“What happened to ‘Ms.’?”

“I don’t...”

“Ms. Greene is what you called me before.”

“My apologies. Just tell me which you prefer and I’ll—”

“I don’t care,” she said.

Not about that, I thought. Said, “All right. Do you want me to—?”

“Vonni was a good girl. I don’t mean a virgin—although she was, I would have known—I mean good in her heart and good in her ways. She was honest and kind and sweet. Everybody loved her.”

“I know Hugh sure did.”

“Yes. Lottie told me how you...That’s why I’m showing you this now. Of course, when your child di...is taken from you, people never want to say anything bad about her. But this was all before. The good things, I mean. Nobody killed my Vonni because they hated her; I know this.”

“People don’t have to have a good reason to hate, Ms. Greene. You should know that, too.”

“My...color, you mean? Yes. Yes, I know that. This isn’t what I wanted to tell you. I’m not making myself clear. I would trade it all. How good she was. How proud she made me. Everything. If I could have my daughter back as a prostitute or a drug addict or brain-damaged or...It wouldn’t matter; I would take her and love her and be grateful forever.”

“I know.”

“Do you? How could you? How could you know a mother’s feeling for her only child? Were you one?”

“A...?”

“An only child? Were you one?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. Thinking, She nailed it. That’s me. Only a child, once. And, now, even being back home, back with my family, an only child, forever. Hazel Greene will never have another child. Neither will Giovanni.

“How could you not...?” she asked.

I just looked at her, waiting for the message to arrive.

“Oh,” she said, when it did.

“I don’t know anything about them,” I told her. “Either of them,” I said, so she’d know I was talking about my mother and father. “If I have biological brothers and sisters, I’ll never know that, either.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Compared to what? It doesn’t matter.”

“It must matter. I’m so sorry.”

All of us down here, only children.

“I believe you are, Ms. Greene. And I believe Vonni had more love in sixteen years than most people get in a lifetime.”

She nodded her head slowly. Said, “I’ll get them,” and walked out of the room.

“Videotapes?”

“Yes. This is all of them. I found them in Vonni’s room. In the bottom of an old army footlocker we got at a flea market. We used to go to them all the time. Vonni said she...”

Her voice trailed off. I stayed silent, afraid to blunder around in the spun-glass forest of her memories.

“I’d never gone in there,” she finally said. “Vonni had a padlock on it—I always thought that was where she’d kept her diary. When the police said they were going to...search everything, I couldn’t bear for them to be the ones to read her private thoughts. So I took the hasp off with a screwdriver.

“You know what’s funny, Mr. Burke?” she said, rage somewhere in her quiet, throbbing voice. “Vonni did have a diary. But it was sitting on her desk, right out in the open. I never knew. She trusted me so much.... The police told me about it. After they were...done with it. They’re keeping it...for evidence.”

I never considered trying to comfort her. Just stayed in my silence.

“All those years, I guess I could have sneaked a look anytime,” she said. “Only I never did. I never saw it until after...it happened.” She went quiet for a long minute. “I always thought her diary was in her footlocker. But it wasn’t. I was looking...and that’s where I found these.”

I looked at the stack of videocassettes. “What’s on them, Ms. Greene?”

“How do you know I looked at them?”

“Because you still have them. And the cops don’t.”

“Could I have one of your cigarettes, please? I don’t smoke, actually. I used to, when I was a kid. We all did. But I stopped when I got pregnant. Then I started again, but I stopped years later. When Vonni got upset with me for it. Now there’s no reason....”

I shook one out of my pack, held it out to her. She took it. I fired a wooden match. She lit up without touching my hand.

“The police never asked me to...help them understand what was in Vonni’s diary,” she said, her voice chilly and controlled. “They just read it themselves, and asked me questions. ‘Who’s Jermaine?’ Questions like that.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Were you a police officer once?”

“No, Ms. Greene. I understand how angry you are at what they did. It wasn’t just disrespectful; it was stupid. Who knows Vonni better than you?” I said. Not proud of myself for strumming those strings.

“Yes,” she said. “And...I thought maybe I would...see something on the tapes, I don’t know.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What’s on them?” she said, tight-voiced. “Craziness. Stupid...craziness. That’s what’s on there. Nothing else. I can’t imagine why Vonni would have—”

“What kind of craziness, Ms. Greene?”

“A...dogfight. A vicious fight, with people watching and...Their faces! Some kind of...gauntlet a boy had to run, between other boys with fists, hitting him. A bunch of girls paddling another girl, like for some sorority initiation. Some people spray-painting a swastika on the side of a Jewish temple. What looks like a...mugging, I guess you’d call it. Some insane young boy on a skateboard jumping right through a plate-glass window. All kinds of things like that.”

“Vonni’s not in any of them? Not even her voice?”

“Just one. By herself. There’s no sound. She’s running. Jogging, like. In the woods. She hears something. Or someone. And she gets scared. Starts to run really fast...”

“Did you see who—?”

“The tape just trailed off,” she said. “It trailed off with Vonni running. Still running.”

“I don’t have the equipment to do that,” the Mole said. “Not here.”

“But you could get it?”

“Sure he could!” Terry said, jumping up. “Come on, Pop. Let’s take a ride.”

“You think people around here notice all this coming and going?” Michelle asked.

“This neighborhood? Sure. They probably think we’re running a tweek lab.”

“I wish we’d picked a nicer place, baby. I mean, if I am going to be spending all this time here...”

“You want to stay at the hotel tonight, girl? I can fix that easy enough.”

“And not see what’s on those tapes? Don’t be demented.”

The dogfight was made more hideous by the lack of sound, especially the expressions on the faces of the spectators. Looked like a single-camera setup, but it wasn’t static. The lens picked up all kinds of strange angles—one from what had to be damn near inside the pit itself. No matter how many times I asked the Mole to stop on a particular frame, isolate pieces of it, and blow them up, I couldn’t make out any real details—the quality was about as good as an ATM surveillance camera.

“Isn’t this against the law?” Michelle asked me, her voice vibrating just below breakage.

“In New York it is,” I said. “Not in all states.”

“Do you think it was filmed here, though?”

“I can’t tell. There’s nothing that would ID a location.”

“What’s the penalty?” she demanded. “I mean, if they were caught, what would happen to them?”

“A fine, probably; not more.”

“For having the dogs do...that?”

“Yeah.”

Max watched the next tape intently, holding up his index finger for the Mole to stop the action, twirling the same finger for him to resume. The Mongolian nodded a few times, as if working out a problem in his head. At his signal, the Mole started the tape from the beginning.

The tape had shown us a teenage boy, Latin, with a West Coast cholo’s haircut. He faced a group of young men, and yelled something. Then he made a “Come on!” gesture with his hands, waving them in. The gang circled slowly until the boy was surrounded. Then they rushed him, fists and feet. When it was over, the boy was on the ground, not moving.

Nobody knows the mechanics of physical combat better than Max. The dogfighting couldn’t have been faked, but...

I made a “Well?” gesture. Max gave me the sign for “Yes.” This one had been the real thing, too.

But it nagged at me. So I ran it again a few hours later.

“It’s a jump-in tape, all right,” the Prof said.

“No doubt?”

“That was the Max man’s verdict, too, Schoolboy,” he reminded me. “And who knows a bone-breaker better than the widow-maker?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But...there’s something about it. I just don’t...”

“What, bro?”

“I...can’t tell you. It has to come to the surface by itself. But there’s something off about it, Prof.”

The little man closed his eyes, concentrating. Then he looked over at Clarence, said, “Let’s glide, Clyde.”

The drag races were easier. The cameraman made sure you couldn’t see the license numbers, but to anyone who knows cars, some of the rides were as distinctive as fingerprints.

“I think I may have seen the shoebox,” I told Clarence.

“What’s a shoebox?” Rejji asked.

“The ’55 Chevy,” Clarence said. “You sure, mahn?”

“Not a hundred percent. But there’s something about the stance...”

“I’ve seen a million of these,” Cyn said, pointing at the screen, where a slender girl was bent over, palms against the wall, her shorts and panties around her ankles, being paddled by a taller girl in a sorority sweater and pleated skirt, while a bunch of other girls watched. “It used to be a big deal, to do the real thing, no acting. Years ago, some of the product even came with warranties. You know, ‘All the girls in this session were really spanked.’ But now there’s so many subs going into the business that there’s no market for fakes. This one doesn’t even look professional.”

“Because of the single camera?”

“No. Most of the digital stuff—you know, for the Net—is that way. But the camera doesn’t come in on her ass, to show you it really is red from the punishment. And the paddling doesn’t last very long. It doesn’t even look like a good hard one.”

“So you couldn’t sell this?”

“Oh, you could sell it, all right. There’s one thing about it that’s different from the commercial stuff.”

“The look?”

“No,” Cyn said. “It’s that they’re all so young. I can’t tell their ages...and you can’t really see their faces, but those are high-school girls. Or maybe college. Anyway, it looks like whoever shot this was hidden. As if the girls didn’t know they were on camera. For that, there’s a real market.”

“Yeah. Remember when that guy paid us to shill?” Rejji said.

“How’s that work?” I asked her.

“Well, this one time, all we had to do was go to a club where a lot of girls hang out. Act real drunk. Then get up on the bar and take our tops off, dance around.”

“So the guy could film it?”

“Not film us. I mean, he found us because we were in films, already. No, see, our job was to get the other girls to take it off. What he said was, it’s completely legal. Because he was right out in the open with the camera. So they were consenting if they did it with him there; that’s what he said.”

“And there’s all that ‘upskirt’ squick, too,” Cyn said. “You know, little perverts walking around with minicams in their briefcases. They put them on the ground, film right up a girl’s skirt without her knowing. Then it goes straight to the Internet. You wouldn’t think anybody would want stuff like that, not when there’s a million girls who’ll let you film anything—anything—if you just pay them. But it’s a different head.”

“So you think this one...?”

“Who knows?” Rejji said. “In New York, it’s legal to videotape a person without them knowing, so long as there’s no sound track, can you believe it? There’s got to be some freaky politicians behind that law.

“Anyway, BDSM by itself isn’t illegal, even if you take money for it. And, this one here, there’s no sex in it. Like Cyn said, on the Net there’s a market for anything. There’s even sites for scumbags who beat their own kids and sell the pictures of it.”

“But you’re sure this one’s not faked? Not acting?”

“No,” Cyn said, certain-sure. “That was real. It happened.”

The people who spray-painted the synagogue were wearing ski masks.

The camera was in so tight on the nipple-piercing that we couldn’t tell anything about the girl.

The only way we knew the sex of the person carried into a darkened room was from her body—her head was hooded with a pillowcase. The girl was either drunk or drugged. That didn’t seem to bother the three males who took turns with her. The camera never went near their faces.

Michelle stood up suddenly, pointed at the VCR screen. “Whoever made these tapes, we know them,” she said. “We know who they are. We just don’t know their names.”

“This is the last one,” I told them.

We watched Vonni run a dozen times. The look on her face was pure terror.

“I cannot tell,” Clarence said.

“I say no, bro.” The Prof.

“I’m with the Prof.” Michelle.

Max shook his head “No,” agreeing.

“So this one’s the wild card,” Cyn said, speaking for us all. “This one’s a fake?”

“Maybe,” is all I could say.

“That has to be it,” I said to Max, pointing at a ramshackle house at the end of a long, straight block. In a better neighborhood, this would be a cul-de-sac. Here, it was as if the street had just surrendered to a prairie-sized vacant lot.

Abandoned cars lined both sides of the street, each one flying some kind of gang sign. Drugstores.

The summer sun that kissed the beach a few miles away was hostile here, bleaching everything into a single bleak tone. Heat waves trembled off the asphalt. The early-morning air was already sodden. Nothing moved.

For this run, I’d lost the eyepatch, the jewelry, and the fancy leather jacket, and switched back to the Plymouth. Max stayed with one of the sumo-sized Hawaiian shirts—I think he’d started to like the look.

As I pulled into the driveway, a brindle-colored blur shot around the side of the house and charged the car. The pit bull leaped onto the hood, slipped slightly, clawed its way toward the windshield, growling death threats. I could see a heavy leather collar around its neck, attached to a length of chain that could anchor a tugboat. I jammed the lever into reverse and hit the gas. The pit bull slid off the hood and hit the ground, then immediately pogo’ed up like it was on springs. Its huge head filled my window, enraged.

I backed off until the Plymouth was beyond the end of the pit bull’s chain. Looked a question at Max. He shrugged.

A tall, slope-shouldered black man wearing white painter’s coveralls and a matching cap strolled up to us. He’d come around the same side of the house the pit bull had materialized from. He walked down the driveway toward the car, ignoring the frenzied animal, making a motion for me to roll down my window. As soon as I did, the pit quieted down, as if this was a routine he knew well.

“What you want?” the man asked. His skin was light, covered with freckles, his eyes an unsettling stormy blue. I’d have given five-to-two the hair under his cap was red.

“Ozell,” I said.

“What you want with him?”

“I want to make some money with him.”

“Yeah? And how you going to do that?”

“Where I am right now, it’s the wrong address to discuss it.”

“What address you talking about, mister? You said you looking for Ozell, right?”

“Right man, wrong address,” I told him. “Where I’m sitting right now, like this, all this noise, people maybe watching, the address is Front Street, you with me?”

“You got the stones to get out that ride?”

“You tell me you’ll handle your bulldog, I’ll take your word.”

“Give me a couple of minutes,” he said. “Then walk around back. Walk slow.”