Only Child

by Andrew Vachss

  “I found my birth certificate. Her name, the Nola name, it was on it. But his wasn’t the same name she told me. It wasn’t the same name she said was my name, my last name, not Nola’s, the name from my father, the way you get your name from your father.

  “After that, it was easy. So easy. I love the Internet. You can find out anything on the Internet. You can find the truth. The total truth. It’s always there. And nobody can erase it or lie about it or change it. Once it’s on the Internet, it’s forever. Like the runes. I searched. I used search engines. They have them, just for that. And I found her.”

  I lit a cigarette. Took one drag, then placed it in the notch of a clear glass ashtray with a green logo in its base. The smoke drifted up between us. I let my eyes go into it, a patience trick.

  “She was raped,” the woman said, a sneer in her voice. “That’s what she, Nola, what she told everyone, anyway. That’s where I came from. From a rape. She said. She, Nola, said it when I confronted her. It was a confrontation, like you see on television, like they tell you to do to the person who hurt you. I read that. I read that in a number of books. You have to confront them. Make them take responsibility. That’s what I did. And not with a letter, like they say to do if you can’t face them, or if they’re dead, but I could, so that’s what I did. I went right to her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “This was in Queens, then?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “A producer...?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Why?”

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

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

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

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

  “Ugh!”

  “You know what’s worse, girl? There was no reason for the mother to lie. Who’d want to make up a story like that? That freak’s her bio-father, all right.”

  “How could a TV producer not see she’s a...?”

  “Knowing isn’t caring, honey. Talk shows are going through what skin mags did years ago.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Playboy set the standard, right? Upscale, classy, lots of features...and all the posed pussy anyone could want. Anything successful gets imitated, but instead of trying to outclass the leader, most of the others went downmarket. The more Playboy carved out the niche at the top, the deeper in the sewer they went, see? That’s where the competition is now, who can go the lowest. Same with TV. The target’s not the penthouse; it’s the basement. Did you hear her voice when she said ‘national TV,’ girl? Same way some people say ‘Our Lord Jesus.’ There’s no traveling freak shows anymore—cable brings them right into your home.”

  “Burke,” she said, leaning toward me, “you’re not going to take her money, are you?”

  “She hasn’t got any,” I told her, placating both our gods.

  I never asked the Prof or the Mole what the stuff they’d set up for me cost, any more than I would ask Max if I owed him rent. I’d left everything behind when I disappeared. I didn’t know what they’d sold, what they’d destroyed, and what was still around. But I knew how to find out.

  “Where do I stand?” I asked Mama.

  “With who, stand?”

  “With money, Mama.”

  “Oh. Plenty money here for you.”

  “Mama, a straight answer, okay? You’re the bank, not the Welfare Department. I’m not coming around and asking for money that’s not mine. Just tell me what’s left, in cash, after everything.”

  “Why so important?”

  “I have to know when I need to go back to work.”

  She regarded me balefully for a solid minute. Then she said, “Soon,” her face as smooth and hard as glazed ceramic.

  It took another couple of hours to pry the balance sheet out of her. I was down to about sixty grand. I took ten to walk around with, asked Mama to dispose of the Subaru for whatever she could get for it, and went looking for work.

  You can’t do the kind of work I do without a lot of preparation. There’s all kinds of people who steal, from the stupid slugs who think 7-Elevens turn into ATMs after midnight to the slicksters who can buy themselves a presidential pardon when things get dicey. Me, I’ve got my own ways. And my own flock to fleece.

  I never target citizens. They’re easy, but they squawk. Before the damn Internet, I had a lovely business built up, regularly selling everything from nonexistent kiddie porn to mercenary “credentials.” The horde of humans who bought from me couldn’t go to the Better Business Bureau when their merchandise never arrived in the mail.

  I also dealt in hard goods, middle-manning low-level arms deals, usually suctioning a little from both sides in the process. But with the breakup of the Soviet Union, there was too much ordnance floating around. By the time I left, even the congenital defectives who commanded five-moron militias were demanding surface-to-air missiles.

  I gave it a lot of thought, remembering the formula I memorized during my first bit Inside—the less time you spend on planning, the more time you should plan on doing.

  When I first went down, a common scam was for a prisoner to get hold of one of the lonely-hearts magazines and write to a whole list of dopes. Admitting “she’d” been a bad girl, but now all she wanted was a good man. Between the losers with handjob habits who asked for letters about lesbian sex behind bars, and the deep-dish dimwits who sent money for the “correspondence courses” their little darlings needed to take to please the parole board, you could make a nice living.

  It got so bad that suckers were showing up at the gates, demanding a visit with their soon-to-be-released sweethearts. That’s when they would discover that the “D. Jones #C-77-448109” they’d been sending money orders to was in there all right...but the first name was Demetrius, not Darlene.

  Eventually, the authorities got wise. Now they stamp outgoing envelopes with bold notices that the letters inside are from a “Correctional Institution for Men.”

  Every move has a counter, and it’s never been real difficult to defeat the great minds who cage humans for a living. The letters started going out to the marks from an outside PO box. Little Darlene’s in solitary, and she can’t get mail “direct” anymore. But, don’t worry, Darlene’s sister (who’s also real cute, but only sixteen, so she shouldn’t be getting too involved with a grown man and all) can handle the forwarding. Fortunately, her name’s Désirée, so “D. Jones” would work just as well on the money orders.

  And then there’s the poor tormented transsexual, who describes her absolute horror at being locked up in a men’s prison. She has to stay in close confinement twenty-four/seven, or she’d be set upon instantly by rabid packs of rapists. All she has to sustain herself are the chump’s love letters, the money he sends for things like shampoo—so expensive in a men’s prison, you know—and the knowledge that, the minute she’s paroled, she could finish the sex-change surgery she’d already started before she’d been arrested (which is why she already had such nice big breasts). And they’d live happily ever after.

  But that scam plays different today. Now it’s a beautiful teenager prowling the chat rooms, crying out in her desperate need to get away from her horrible home life...until a “connection” is made and her shined-on knight sends her the money for a bus ticket. And some decent clothes, maybe some luggage...you know.

  It’ll be a long wait at that depot.

  But I don’t like working in public. And, anyway, that ground’s already been strip-mined down to the bare rock.

  As long as there’s contraband, there’s money to be made. Sometimes, you traffic in things—like no-tax Southern cigarettes or no-questions-asked shipments of computer chips. Sometimes, the product’s a lot less tangible. Like jail-phone relay systems. No matter what the level of security a prisoner’s held in, he’ll have the right to call somebody, even if it’s only his lawyer, and only collect. With three-way calling, it’s no trick to put a gangster in direct touch with the people waiting for his orders. The guards can open mail, but there’s way too much volume for them to monitor all the outgoing calls. More gangland hits get ordered from jail now than from outside. All you need is a live person to play switchman, and decent timing.

  A nice hustle...but not for me. Too close to home.

  Drugs have ruined the game for a lot of us good thieves. Dope fiends are the illegal immigrants of crime—a cheap, undocumented labor force that will take any job, even the dangerous ones, for garbage money. Years ago, we’d hijacked a load of H and tried to sell it back to the mob. But when I mentioned that caper to the Prof this time, he sneered it away.
/>   “Not much chance of finding a decent-sized shipment you could take off with anything less than an army, not today. And when it gets down to the street dealers we could jack, it’s not worth it. You can’t deal with these punks. The drug boys, all they know is rock and Glock, honeyboy. You steal from a professional, he knows he’s got to buy his stuff back—cost of doing business. These boys out there now, they’re all mad violent. They’d load up their nines and come looking to hose you down, give you a kiss for the diss, see?”

  I did. And started making new lists.

  What I found out was...I’d been away too long. I sniffed around the edges where I used to do work. Sent word through third parties to people who dealt in stuff I used to move, checked the usual drops....

  But no matter where I looked, the arteries were all clogged with amateurs.

  There’s no new crimes, only new criminals. And I didn’t know any of them.

  Oh, sure, there were little jobs I could pull. Minor stings where I wouldn’t need an active crew, just a little help with front. Low-risk, low-return.

  That’s all I wanted to do, once. Live small. Stay off the radar. I could never be a citizen, but I didn’t want to be a convict again, either.

  Thing is, only citizens have 401(k)s. When I was coming up, I’d always hear the crime guys I admired talking about the “retirement score.” That one big job they could live off forever.

  When you’re young, that kind of thing’s just another convict fantasy. One of the Big Three—money, sex, and revenge.

  When you’ve put on some mileage, when you’ve been some places and done some things, you realize that the Big Three is down to One. Money. That key works all of the locks.

  And by the time you get old enough, close enough to that time when any trip back Inside amounts to a life sentence, you know what “blood money” really means. This is an ugly country to be poor in. Worse if you’re sick. And if you’re old, you can ratchet that up a few notches more.