Andrew Vachss - Sacrifice

I found a pay phone, dropped in a quarter. A very proper-sounding woman's voice answered. "Family Court."

"You alone?" I asked the voice.

"Yes," she said, and hung up.

The Family Court is in a regular office building on South Broadway. Nobody's allowed on the floor until it opens. I rang for the elevator, heard the gears mesh as the car started downstairs, and stepped through a metal door into the stairwell. When I got to the right floor, I gently pushed against the Fire Exit door. It was open.

I made my way down the corridor, dressed in my lawyer's suit, carrying an attaché case. Anyone stopped me, I'd say I was looking to file some papers.

Nobody did. She was waiting in the file room, a patrician woman with a proud, erect carriage, wearing a long-sleeved dress with lace at the cuffs and the throat. The boss clerk, she always got there early and left late— a disgrace to civil servants everywhere. I bowed slightly. She held out her hand. I opened the attaché case, gave her a Xerox of the newsclip. She read it carefully, nodding slightly. Then she walked over to a bin labeled "Pending" and searched through the folders. Pulled one out, showed it to me. I didn't touch it.

She walked over to the photocopier, ran off a half dozen pages. Smoothly and efficiently, the way she does everything. I put the pages in my case. Bowed again.

She turned her back on me, returned to her work. I don't know what she thinks of me, this lady. Nothing much ever shows on her face. But she knows what I do.

166

The papers I took with me had everything I needed. The kid's name was Marianne Morgan. Lived with her mother and father, attended a private school in Larchmont.

The next day, I called a guy I know. He's a caseworker in the local child protection unit, been there for years. He's also a major-league cockhound— some guys only like blondes, he only likes them married. Five-thirty in the morning, he answered the phone on the first ring. Probably just getting back home. I told him what I wanted. We made a meet for that night— he said he was coming into the city anyway.

167

I got there first— a bar on First Avenue in the Sixties. Ordered a mineral water, shot of Absolut on the side, looked around. Mostly an after-work crowd: men and women in matching pinstripes, talking about deals.

He was only a few minutes late. Slid in next to me, grabbed the vodka off the bar, tossed it down.

"I got the Intake notes," he said by way of greeting.

"With you?"

"In here." Tapping his temple.

"How'd you get a JD Intake? I didn't think that stuff went across agency lines."

"It doesn't. It should…they're the same kids…but it doesn't. Turf bullshit…you know."

"Yeah. So?"

"So she was a CPS referral first. Told her guidance counselor at school she was having sex with her father."

"How long ago?"

"In late '88, just before the Christmas break. She didn't want to go home from school."

"What happened?"

"She told the investigator the whole thing. Her father was a mirror freak. She hated the mirrors. Then, when we sent her to a validator, she recanted. Pulled back on the whole thing, said she made it up because she didn't want to get in trouble for her grades."

"It got dropped?"

"Yeah. Then she called the Hot Line herself about six months later. Told them the same story."

"And dropped it again later?"

"Right."

"You think it was true?"

"Hell, yes. We get recantations all the time, especially from teenage girls. She just couldn't pull it together. The way I figure it, she got herself busted so it'd be out of her hands."

"So she's in custody?"

"No. Her parents hired a lawyer for her. See, she was fifteen when it happened…with the kids she was babysitting…so she gets tried as a juvenile even though she's over the age now. The Family Court judge cut her loose. Gave the parents of the kids some Order of Protection. She has to report to a Probation Officer once a week pending trial, that's all."

A woman walked past, a young woman with too much butt for the jeans she was wearing— she was squeezed in there so tight the little back pockets wouldn't stay parallel to the center seam.

"Keep your mind on business," I told him. "Hard to talk with your mouth hanging open like that."

He snapped out of it, refocused his glazed eyes. I ordered another drink.

"You got the name of her Probation Officer?" I asked him.

"Wouldn't do you any good, Burke. She skipped out a couple of weeks ago. She's listed as a runaway now.

I was thinking of another question to ask him when he got up, shook hands goodbye, and went sniffing after the woman in the jeans.

168

Lying with my head against some pillows piled up at the end of Bonita's bed, smoking a cigarette, eyes half closed. Bonita on her knees, facing away from me, looking back over her shoulder, admiring the dimples over her heart-shaped butt. Her body still gleamed from oil and sweat.

A long time ago, I had a girlfriend. A poet, she was. "I can always see the end of everything," she told me. Explaining why she cried when we had sex.

Things don't end for me, they loop. Same stage, new players. A homing pigeon released from a poisonous coop, hung up in the sky. Waiting for them to open the door again. Watchful for hawks.

I thought about Blossom. So truly beautiful a woman it was a pleasure just to watch her dress in the morning. How even her sweat was blonde. A flash of pink in the night before a sex-sniper went down. Hard innocence.

Fresh and new. But only for me. No plastic slipcovers on her soul.

I thought about promises.

Down here, innocent doesn't mean naive. It means Not Guilty.

Bonita was telling me something about moving to another place. A place of her own. Where we'd have more privacy. But money was tight. If she could just swing the first couple of months' rent and security…licking at her lips, like the idea made her hot.

Knocking at her door, I'd wondered why I'd come. Soon as I had, I wondered again.

I closed my eyes. Not sleepy. Tired.

169

Heat boiled asphalt and tempers, the summer sun fried dreams. Gunfire rattled the windows of high-rise slums from Brooklyn to the Bronx. A teenager shot a boy his own age in Harlem. "It was about a diss," he told the cops.

Another teenager was stabbed to death on the subway. On his way home from his part-time job. His neck chain and bracelet were taken. "I begged him not to wear his gold on the train," his father told the TV reporter.

On Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, I came out of a storefront off another cold trail, hit the sidewalk. A white Cadillac at the curb, its flanks scored with gouges from a vandal's key. An old woman walked by, saw me looking, made a sad sound with her lips. "You cain't keep nothin' nice in this city no more," she said, moving on.

170

I chased dead trails. Followed a rumor about a safe house for pedophile priests. Where they take them for therapy until the heat's off And put them right back in another parish, never saying a word to the congregation.

If there's a devil, he's laughing at this new way to recycle garbage. And if there's a God, somebody should sue him for malpractice.

171

I took a puddle-jumper plane up to Marcy, the state joint for the criminally insane. Sat in the visiting room listening to a psychopath who'd dissected a kid with an electric knife tell me he knew how to find any devil-worshiper in the country. Just get him out, he'd lead me right to the people I was chasing. I told him I couldn't do that…but maybe I could pull some strings, get some time cut off his sentence. He smirked at me— he wasn't that crazy.

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