Andrew Vachss - Only Child

“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.”

“Idon’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.