Pain Management b-13

by Andrew Vachss

  Being a teenager in America is a high-risk occupation. They’re the most likely to get shot, stabbed, sexually assaulted, beat up, bullied, turned on to chemicals, turned into zombies—and used and abused by the people who “counsel” them after all that.

  And their peer-pressured cynicism makes them the easiest to trick, too.

  It wouldn’t have shocked me if Rosebud had been driven to a remote area and killed by some other girls who didn’t like the way she spoke to one of their boyfriends. Or was snuffed out because some freakish boys wanted the “experience.” Or didn’t survive a gang rape.

  But those kinds of crimes always seem to pop to the surface, like a river-disgorged corpse. Back in the sixties, there was a young guy in Tucson who killed a couple of girls for the fun of it. Buried them out in the desert. If he’d been a nomadic serial killer, the crimes might still be unsolved. But he had to tell some of his groupies about his feats. And when they scoffed, he showed them where the bodies were buried.

  When teenagers commit crimes, they tend to talk about it. Today, they even make videos of it.

  But the wires were quiet.

  Or maybe Rosebud had been in a secret romance with a guy who killed her in a rage when she said she was going to tell his wife.

  It never takes much.

  But if she’d had a boyfriend, the guy had to have been sneaking into her room at night. Because it turned out that Rosebud had led a tightly scripted life . . . and one that made Mother Teresa look like a slacker. Two nights a week at the hospital’s children’s ward, visiting kids with cystic fibrosis. Saturdays, she volunteered at a shelter for battered women. That was when she wasn’t reading books into a tape recorder for the blind, or collecting signatures to abolish the death penalty, or delivering canned goods for a local food bank.

  I thought back to what the father’s lawyer had said about Rosebud. Maybe, to him, anything less than overthrowing a government was “introspective.”

  The high-school principal talked to me readily enough after she got a call from the father. She was surprised, though, that Rosebud was into all those activities—she certainly didn’t do any extracurricular stuff at school. Her grades were good but not spectacular.

  When I asked about her friends, the principal just shrugged. At her level, she just heard about the extreme kids—the ones bound for the Ivy League, and the ones they were holding a prison cell for. She told me to try the guidance counselor.

  He was a black guy in his thirties, dressed casually, with alert eyes. Told me Rosebud had never been in to see him. About anything. He knew of her only in the vaguest terms. A loner, not a joiner. “It was more like she . . . tolerated school.”

  “Any chance she was more friendly with one of her teachers than she was with the other students?” I asked him.

  His eyes went from alert to wary. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything. Sometimes a kid relates better to adults than to peers. You’ve seen that yourself, right?”

  “Not the way you’re implying. Not at this school.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “You don’t sound very satisfied, Mr. Grange.”

  “Yeah. Well, that’s not your problem, is it?”

  “I’m not sure I’m following you.”

  “Why should you, when you don’t like where I’m going? Look, Mr. Powell, this is a big school. And you’ve been here a while. You don’t seem like the kind of man who spends all his time pushing paper. You’ve got your ear to the ground. On top of that, the kids trust you. Some of them, anyway.”

  “And you know all that how, exactly? Instinct?”

  “More like experience. I’ve been doing this for a lot of years.”

  “That’s just another way of spelling ‘generalization.’ “

  “I’m a hunter. It’s no generalization to say that lions prefer crippled antelopes. They’re easier.”

  “And you hunt teachers?”

  “You know, I did hunt one, once,” I told him, keeping my tone conversational. “I knew he was a freak. I knew what he liked. I knew where he’d been, so I figured out where he’d be going.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following . . .”

  “This teacher, he never had a single complaint lodged against him in thirty years. But he quit three jobs. Pretty good jobs, near as I could tell. And moved on. Nobody at any of his old jobs had a bad word to say about him. So I took a look. My kind of look: a hard one. And what all the schools he left had in common was this: each one had banned corporal punishment. You understand what I’m saying, Mr. Powell?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Yeah? Well, let me spell it out for you, just in case. This guy was a child molester, but he never had sex with any of the kids. No, what he did was ‘punish’ them. That’s how he got his rocks off, paddling kids. Nothing illegal about it, in some schools. And every time one of the schools changed their policy, he’d just go someplace else. Where he could have his fun.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “I’m sure that’s what the teachers’ union would have said, if he’d ever gotten busted for what he was doing.”

  “You don’t like teachers much, Mr. . . . Grange?”

  “I like teachers fine. I don’t like freaks who hide behind authority to fuck with kids. Do you?”

  “Look! I told you—”

  “Hey, that’s all right,” I reassured him. “I’m sure, no matter who I ask around here, nobody tells me about one single teacher in the whole history of this school who ever had a thing for students. Not even a whisper of a rumor.”

  “Rumors are pernicious,” he huffed, still offended.

  “Thanks for your time,” I told him, getting to my feet.

  “Sit down a minute,” he said. He got up, walked over to the door, and closed it. “You want me to level with you, that’s a two-way street.”

  “The girl is missing,” I told him, flat out, no preamble. “Not a trace, not a clue. Disappeared. The cops have it marked as a runaway. The parents don’t think so. They hired me to see what I could find out.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s what Principal McDuffy told me. That and to keep it quiet. There’s been nothing in the papers. . . .”

  “And there’s not going to be, not for a while. The parents don’t want to . . . put on any pressure. If she was snatched, they’ll hear from the kidnappers. If she ran away of her own accord, they don’t want her to think they’re . . . hunting her. And if she’s already dead . . .”

  “Dead? Where did that come from?”

  “She’s gone, okay? When you work one of these cases and you’ve got a blank piece of paper in front of you for possibilities, ‘dead’ is one of the things you write on it.”

  He leaned back in his chair, as if to put some distance between us. “What if there was the kind of teacher you were talking about here? Not the . . . one who liked to beat children . . . the . . . For the sake of argument, an English teacher who picked out a new girl—a budding poet—every year. Say everybody knew about it, but nobody ever said anything, because it doesn’t seem as if he ever got . . . sexual with students.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I don’t want to argue abstractions with you. Especially since we’re only speaking theoretically here. But what if, say, you knew about this particular teacher, but you also knew he couldn’t possibly be connected to Rosebud?”

  “And how would I . . . theoretically . . . know that?”

  “Because he . . . this hypothetical individual . . . has a pattern. One a year, right through the next summer. And he’s still involved with someone. A graduated senior. Over eighteen.”

  “Yeah. What if?”

  “I’m trying to help out here. To the extent I feel comfortable doing so.”

  “Much appreciated,” I said, getting up again. This time, he didn’t make any attempt to stop me. Or to shake hands.

  “She was more studious than she was a student, if you understand my meaning,” the English teacher t
old me in the front room of his charming little cottage. I could hear sounds of another person coming from the kitchen, but nothing more specific.

  “I’m a little slow, doc. Help me out.”

  Reference to his Ph.D. seemed to transform him from nervous interviewee to pontificator. “Rosebud was very interested in the subject of creative writing, but not always so interested in the individual assignments.”

  “Typical of a kid her age, right?”

  “Not really,” he said, condescension hovering just above his voice. “Young people her age are much more mature in their decisions than a layman would expect.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, is there anything you can tell me?”

  “I think not,” he said, carefully. “I doubt I had a single conversation alone with her during the entire year.”

  I sat silently, listening to the sounds from the kitchen. A drawer closing, a dish rattling against a counter, refrigerator opening . . . Whoever was in there wanted me to be certain I knew someone was.

  “I know she was a vegan . . .” he finally said, once he realized I was too thick to know when I’d been dismissed.

  “A . . . ?”

  “A vegetarian, only more intense about it. And she loved old Jimmy Cagney movies.”

  “Thanks. That could be a big help.”

  I stood up to leave, then turned to him and said: “Tell me, who’s a friend of hers. Any friend.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Sure you do,” I told him. “You never spoke to her, but you spoke to someone who knew her well enough to tell you about that vegan thing and the movies.”

  “I . . .”

  “You know what you said before? About some kids being a lot more mature than people would think? That’s especially true for girls, isn’t it?”

  We both listened to the sounds coming from his kitchen. I looked in that direction, making sure he saw me do it.

  Then he told me the friend’s name.

  “I heard she took off,” the tall, rangy girl said, bouncing a basketball absently. We were standing together at the end of her driveway, the hoop on a stanchion nearer the garage.

  “That’s what it seems like, Charmaine.”

  “Well, if she did, I’m not going to help you find her.”

  “If she took off for a good reason, I won’t bring her back,” I said.

  The girl looked at me as if she was thinking about taking me to the hoop off her dribble. “I don’t know,” she said, thoughtfully.

  “I’m not asking you to tell me anything,” I said softly. “Just to give her a message if”—I held up my hand to stop her from interrupting—“if she gets in touch. Okay?” When she didn’t say anything, I handed her my card.

  She chewed her lip. “You want to play some one-on-one?”

  “Do I look like a basketball player to you?”

  “Basketball players don’t look like anything in particular,” she said. “People think if you’re tall you can play basketball. But that isn’t necessarily true.”

  “You can, right?”

  “I had to teach myself,” she said quietly. “It didn’t come naturally or anything. It was a lot of work.”

  “I respect that,” I said. Telling the truth.

  She bounced the ball a couple of times, stepped off, and launched a long jumper, goosenecking her wrist to guide it home.

  Nothing but net.

  “An easy three,” I congratulated her.

  “They’re never easy,” she said. But a smile teased at her lip.

  I went quiet, waiting for her decision.

  “Rosie is the most . . . moral person I know,” she said, finally. “She wouldn’t do anything wrong. I don’t mean she wouldn’t, you know, break the law. If she thought the law was . . . immoral. Like civil disobedience. But she wouldn’t do anything . . . unethical. Like cheat on a test. Or even tell lies. She didn’t drink and she didn’t do drugs. . . .”

  “Her father said she smoked pot.”

  “I never saw her do that.”

  “Maybe he got it wrong.”

  “He probably did. He doesn’t know her.”

  “Fathers never know their daughters, do they?”

  “Mine doesn’t,” she said, the smile gone from her voice.

  The next day, I went back to the school, walked the corridors for a while. But it was pretty much cleared out for the summer. When I came back outside, a girl was perched on the front fender of my Ford. She was auburn-haired, wearing blue-jean shorts with matching suspenders. They were strapped over a white T-shirt as flimsy as the excuses she’d probably been trafficking in since she was thirteen. Her mouth was a wicked slash of dark red, and she was licking a green lollipop like she was auditioning for a porno movie. I couldn’t tell if she was sixteen or thirty-three.

  “You’re the guy, right?” she greeted me.

  “What guy would that be?”

  “The guy looking for Little Miss I’m-All-That.”

  “Oh! You thought I was looking for you. Sorry, young lady. You’ve been misinformed.”

  “That’s cute.” She shrugged her shoulders against the off-chance I was confused about her not wearing a bra. “You know who I’m talking about.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told her, taking out a cigarette.

  “Give me one,” she demanded, holding out the hand without the lollipop.

  “You’re not old enough.”

  “Get real. People don’t have to be as old as you to smoke.”

  “People don’t have to be as old as me to be retired.”

  She gave me a long look. One that apparently required her to arch her back deeply.

  I kept my eyes on hers.

  She put the lollipop back in her mouth, then bit down on it, hard. I could hear the crunch as the lollipop fragmented. She pulled out the empty stalk, tossed it away.

  I lit my cigarette, took a drag. She reached over, plucked it out of my hand, took a drag herself. She didn’t return it to me.

  “What’s it worth to you?” she asked, crossing her meaty thighs to emphasize the ambiguity.

  “To stand around in a parking lot and play games with a kid? Nothing.”

  “I’m not a kid. I’m a girl. A bad girl.”

  “Congratulations. You look as if you put a lot of effort into it.”

  “Look, I know you’re not a cop.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes. I heard you were asking around. About her. I figure someone hired you to do that. So maybe you want to hire me.”

  “Hire you to do what?”

  “Help you. Like, be your assistant. For what you’re trying to find out, you’re too . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Old?”

  “Scary. You already scared some people. Nobody’s going to talk to you.”

  “If they don’t know anything, what’s the difference?”

  “They might.”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Hazard. B. B. Hazard.”

  “You didn’t ask me mine.”

  “That’s right, I didn’t.”

  “You don’t care?”

  “No. I don’t play with kids.”

  “My name is Peaches.”

  “Uh-huh. Is that what it says on the birth certificate? You know, the one that says you’re twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-two. And it’s not a phony.”

  “Right. And you’re a schoolmate of the person you think I’m looking for? How many times were you left back, exactly?”

  “Why do you have to be like this? Bobby Ray told me you were looking for this Rose girl. I didn’t say I knew her or anything. But I could help you find her. If you paid me.”

  “Who’s Bobby Ray?”

  “He works for Project Safe. You know, like an outreach worker. He’s out there every night.”

  “Red-haired kid, freckles? About my height, wears a Raiders jacket?”

  “That’s him!”

&
nbsp; “I don’t know him.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I ran across him. That’s all. He can’t vouch for you.”

  “Ask him, okay? I mean, you can check him out, can’t you? Where he works and everything? So, if Bobby Ray tells you I’m cool, that would be enough, wouldn’t it?”

  “Look, kid—”

  “I’m not a kid. And I could help you.”

  “Let’s cut to it, okay? You know where the girl I’m looking for is, we can do a deal. Name your price, I’ll run it past the people who hired me. They go for it, and you turn her up, the money’s yours.”

  “How do I know you’d—”

  “You tell me you know where she is, I’ll let your pal Bobby Ray—you know, the guy you trust—I’ll let him hold the stake.”

  “I don’t know where she is. But I could help you find her.”

  “No sale, kid.”

  She hopped off the fender like it was a glowing griddle. Denim is a restrictive fabric, but the curve of her rump imposed its will anyway. I watched her walk away . . . just to see what car she got into. But she turned the corner of the building and disappeared.

  Just like the girl she said she could lead me to.

  “You know a girl named Peaches?” I asked Bobby Ray that night.

  We were standing on a corner in the Northwest, a few doors down from a building where kids crashed. It wasn’t a South Bronx burnout, not even abandoned, really. The kids had moved in while the owner waited for financing on the renovations he would need to rehab the rental units. The way I heard it, the place had running water, but no electricity. Probably no heat, either, but the weather kept that from being a big deal.

  It had taken a couple of more weeks, and another extension on Kevin’s money, to get this close to Bobby Ray. We weren’t pals, exactly. But he wasn’t distancing himself from me by body language anymore, deliberately warning kids off, the way he did when I’d first come up on him.

  “I know a lot of people,” he said, vaguely.

  “Bobby Ray, I asked you if you know her, okay? Not who she hangs out with. Not what she’s up to. And not where to find her.”

  He gave me a measuring kind of look. I knew what that meant. A question he wanted answered. Bobby Ray was a trader. Info for info. He kept his street position by being in the know. You couldn’t buy his knowledge for money, and that’s why he got so much of it for free.