Juvenile Delinquent (17 page)

T
HEN
I left the welfare office, I worked straight on through until eight o’clock in the evening without even stopping for dinner. I made five calls, and the answers I got in each case were the same.

Each of the women I called on was either a widow, divorced or separated. Each worked, so was not at home in the daytime when the mail was delivered. Each had at least one son who belonged to the Purple Pelicans.

And while all of them had been on relief at some time or other, none had been on the rolls for over two years or more.

I didn’t call on Mrs. Meyers again, because I knew her situation. Nor did I call on Buddy Tipp’s mother. And I skipped the last three names because I knew I’d find the same answers there and I already had enough evidence.

When I rang the buzzer, Sara came to the door dressed in a neat gray suit which must have cost a hundred dollars. She looked at me in surprise.

“The catfish dinner is tomorrow night, Manny!” she exclaimed.

“I didn’t come for catfish,” I said. “I just came to see you.”

“Oh. That’s a pleasant surprise. Come on in.”

She led me into the well-furnished parlor and I looked it over again, as I had the evening I stopped by while she was doing case records. But this time I was doing more than just admiring it. I was adding up the cost of the obviously expensive furnishings and trying to reconcile it with the kind of salaries received in the underpaid profession of social work.

“Drink?” Sara asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ve come on business, Sara. About that fishing rig you used last Sunday.”

“You want to borrow it?” she asked.

“It really isn’t yours to lend, is it? Doesn’t it belong to Ed?”

Her eyebrows raised. “Why yes, as a matter of fact. But he certainly wouldn’t mind.”

“I should have guessed it the first time I saw it,” I said. “I knew that when Ed lost his house and moved into that two-room flat, he couldn’t move everything with him. Most of the extra furniture he sold, of course. But there’s always a certain amount of stuff you hang onto no matter where you live. Like camping equipment and cameras and fishing gear. But Ed didn’t have any storage space at all in that tiny place he moved to. So naturally he had to get someone to store his stuff for him. And who else would he ask but a relative?”

“What are you talking about?” she asked uneasily.

“The knife that killed Bart Meyers. It never was in the trunk in the back of Ed’s closet. It was in his bait box in your clutter room.”

Sara’s face suddenly paled. “What … what do you mean, Manny?”

“Just what you’re thinking,” I quietly informed her. “I know the whole story, Sara. I happened to be at Mrs. Meyers’s flat this afternoon when she took in the mail. She got a notice from Public Welfare that she’d been cut off relief. But she hadn’t been on relief for two years. How’d you happen to make a mistake like letting that notice go out?”

Weakly she sank into a chair. It seemed to take an effort for her to speak, but finally she managed to say in a dull voice, “I couldn’t stop it. They’re mailed out of the state office, just like the checks. I hoped she’d just throw it away instead of making an inquiry as to why she got it.”

“She did,” I admitted. “And I suppose you figured the boys in the other nine homes would have sense enough to destroy the notices when they came in.”

When she made no reply at all, merely sitting with hunched shoulders and looking down into her lap hopelessly, I said, “It was a kind of clever racket. Mrs. Forshay and I had quite a little discussion before we figured out just how you worked it.”

Her head came up. “Mrs. Forshay knows?”

When I nodded, she let her head droop again.

“I remember you told me you worked at Intake for a week each summer when the regular Intake workers were on vacation. That’s when you put through the applications. You picked all old cases, ones you’d had before and whose present circumstances you knew well enough so that you were reasonably sure the families were now on their feet economically and wouldn’t louse you up by coming in to apply for relief when they were already on the rolls. Since they were all in your district, naturally the applications all ended up on your desk for investigation. Normally a caseworker couldn’t work such a deal, because at least two agency people have to come in personal contact with a client: the Intake worker and the investigator. But in this case you were both people. And since the records of investigation were all in order, your supervisor automatically approved them. How’d you line the boys up for the racket?”

“Bart did it,” she said dully. “I knew he was leader of his dreadful little gang and would do almost anything dishonest for money. Before he turned religious and decided to reform the world, anyway. He gave me a list of the members and I checked it against my list of closed cases. There were over twenty families who had children in the Purple Pelicans, but Bart eliminated all but those he was sure he could trust. That left ten.”

“And the kids collected the checks,” I said. With their mothers all at work when the mail came, that was a cinch. And even if a mother happened to be home sick, the kid could make a point of getting to the mail box first once a month, since the checks always arrived on the first. What’d they do then? Turn them over to you and collect a commission?”

“To Bart,” she said in a lifeless voice. “Bart had a contact with a tavern keeper who’d cash them without question for a twenty-five per cent commission. The kids each got another twenty-five per cent and Bart and I split the rest twenty-eighty.”

I did some quick arithmetic. “Mrs. Forshay figured the checks averaged sixty dollars a month. Which would leave three hundred a month for you and Bart to split. Sixty for him, maybe seventy or seventy-five including his split on his own mother’s check. Enough for spending money and for him to turn in a bit at home without arousing suspicion. You’d get two forty. It’s a nice tax-free bit of additional income, but it hardly seems enough to kill for.”

“He was going to report it to welfare,” she said. “He wouldn’t let me just close the cases and not do it any more. He had to get religious. I’d have been ruined, Manny. I’d not only have lost my job, I’d have gone to jail.”

“The state’s probably a little stuffy about people embezzling its money,” I conceded. “But if you were going to kill the kid, why’d you frame your own nephew?”

She looked up at me again and her eyes were completely empty. “I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t even mean to kill Bart. I took that old knife along because it was the only weapon in the house and I wanted to scare him. When he wouldn’t listen to reason and insisted he was going to report the whole thing to Welfare even if he went to jail for it, because he wanted to start out living straight, I lost my head. I struck at him with the knife and he went down. I didn’t know he had a date to meet Joe in the club room a few minutes later, and it never occurred to me anybody would be able to identify that silly knife.”

“It was you who phoned the police right after the killing and reported a reefer party, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“I just wanted them to find the body so he wouldn’t have to lie there alone,” she said. “I didn’t mean to get Joe in trouble.”

“But after he was in it, you’d have let him burn for your crime, wouldn’t you, Sara?”

Tears formed at her eye corners and began to edge across her cheeks. “I don’t know,” she said brokenly. “I was hoping you’d prove that gang committed the murder. I’ve been going crazy. You know I always loved Joe.”

“Sure,” I said. “You even visited him in jail.”

As I crossed over to the phone, she mumbled through her tears, “All I wanted was nice things.”

I dialed Homicide and waited while the phone rang several times.

“They never paid us enough,” Sara said, now crying freely. “You don’t know what it’s like, skimping and saving and not even being able to afford a television set when even most of your relief clients had them. All I wanted was a few nice things.”

“They have television at the state penitentiary now,” I told her.

“What?” a voice asked in my ear.

• • •

About two weeks later I got a phone call from Wilfred Reed.

“Mr. Moon?” he asked. “Just called to tell you how things are going in the Purple Pelicans. Stub Carlson was elected the first president under their new by-laws.”

“You mean he managed to whip Joe Brighton?” I asked in astonishment.

“Oh, they don’t elect officers that way any more. They have straight elections now. Matter of fact, Joe Brighton put his name in nomination.”

“Oh. Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

“I thought you might be interested in our organizational setup,” he said. “After we’ve brought a club into the program, we usually invite one or more of the parents to act as adult supervisors, you know. On a volunteer basis, of course. They act as liaison between the club and the Y in organizing baseball and basketball games, do a little referee work and chaperone teen-age dances. That sort of thing.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” I said.

“Oh it is. A good deal of our success depends on parent cooperation. And that of other adults.”

He paused and I waited for him to say good-by.

“Ah … Mr. Moon, we generally ask the boys who they’d like for an adult supervisor before we approach any of the adults.”

“That sounds like a good idea too.”

“Ah … when we asked the Purple Pelicans, they requested you.”

While I just sat there in astonishment, he went on hurriedly, “I know you’re probably a busy man, but before you say no, will you drop by and let me explain what duties are involved. It’s certainly a worthy cause, and it won’t tie you up more than an evening or two a week.”

I thought of sixty kids who only a couple of weeks ago had been on a one-way street leading to the penitentiary, the morgue or mental hospitals. Then I grinned into the phone.

“I’ll drop down for a briefing, Mr. Reed. But you can forget the sales talk. I’ll take it.”

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Copyright © 1955 by Richard Deming, Registration Renewed 1983
All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

eISBN 10: 1-4405-4205-8
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4205-3

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