Murder Among Children (11 page)

I’d expected the mother to answer, and she did. “Now
there’s
a one! Think what that girl could be if she wanted, and how she wastes herself.
There’s
someone who should talk to Bishop Johnson.”

“Any day now,” Ed Regan told me, grinning, “Mother’s going to promote Bishop Johnson to God.”

“Saint is high enough,” his mother said. “You remember what he told
you,
young man.”

I got to my feet, saying, “Well, thank you for your time. I appreciate it.”

“Anything we can do,” the son said. “We both like Robin, don’t we, Mother?”

“Of course. A really sweet young thing. Frankly, Mr. Tobin, I believe you have right on your side. That young girl
couldn’t
have murdered anybody that way.”

“That’s what I think, too,” I said, and moved toward the door. “Thank you again. No, that’s all right,” I told the son, as he started away from the easel, “I can find my own way out, you keep on with your work. It’s coming along very well.”

“You think so?” He smiled fondly at the painting.

I went back down the dim hall and out of the apartment and down the stairs. At the foot of the stairs on the first floor the two boys were still scratching away with the Coke bottle shard, patiently and gigglingly printing out some long involved and no doubt scatological paragraph in Spanish. They looked up at me as I started down the last flight, and their faces changed, their attention diverted to something above me.

I looked up, and something black was hurtling down the center of the stairwell. These first-floor stairs were wider than the ones above, I’d been holding the banister, I was directly beneath.

I leaped to the side, lost my footing on the slate stair, fell heavily, heard something crash and boom behind my head, and a second later there was a scream that choked off in midstride. I slid painfully down several steps, thumping my sides and back, before I finally managed to stop myself and sit up and look around.

At the foot of the stairs one of the two boys was standing ashen-faced against the wall. The other one was lying on his back at the foot of the stairs with a large square black metal box sitting canted on his head and shoulders. Maroon liquid trickled across the floor from under the box.

The living boy began to vomit.

A
N APARTMENT ON THE
first-floor front was taken over by the police, and it was there a heavy red-faced bored uniformed sergeant interrogated me. “I went up the stairs to the roof,” I told him, “but of course by the time I got up there he was gone. The roof door was open. I went out there and didn’t see anybody at all.”

The sergeant didn’t really care what had happened. A black iron chimney cap, eighteen inches square, six inches high, slightly peaked at the top, weight about thirty pounds, which had been lying unused on the roof near the chimney recently replaced, had been dropped down the stairwell by party or parties unknown, maybe for fun, maybe for serious, and had killed a spic kid, maybe on purpose, maybe by accident. There were unanswered questions, but slums are built of unanswered questions, and the sergeant obviously had little expectation of ever finding the answers to this group of them. He laboriously took down in his notebook what I said to him, took my name and address, told me I might be called for the inquest, and I was free to go. I went through the mob of people still clustered in the hallway, through the second mob outside on the sidewalk, and away.

I hadn’t told the sergeant any more than the bare facts of the event. He hadn’t asked me what I was doing in that building, and I hadn’t volunteered the information. Therefore he had no way of knowing that the death of the child might be connected with three other recent deaths, nor would it have done him any good if I had told him, since the police believed they already had the murderess in custody on two of the deaths, and the third had not been listed as a homicide.

It was possible that someone on the force working on the Wilford killing might stumble across my name in a report in connection with the child’s death and might follow it up out of curiosity and therefore learn that the address of the incident was Terry Wilford’s former address, and so ultimately come knocking at my door to find out what I was doing and why, and of course at that point I would have to be detailed and truthful—mostly—in my answers. But the possibility was a slender one, given the size of the force, the fact that the child’s death had occurred in a different precinct, and the fact that the Wilford and Boles deaths were no longer active police concerns but had been turned over by now for further action to the district attorney’s office. In any event, I had at the very least bought myself additional time.

The child had bought me some time, too. If he hadn’t looked up, if he hadn’t drawn my attention to the black shape plummeting downward, he would have been the witness sitting in front of the bored sergeant and I would have been the body at the foot of the stairs.

It had been meant for me, that much was obvious. The murderer was unsure of himself, worried, afraid his traces weren’t adequately hidden. That was why he’d killed George Padbury, who had known something and been concealing it and had wanted to tell it to me on the phone half an hour before his death. And now the murderer was afraid of me, moving around, poking into this and that, stirring things up that were supposed to be neatly under control. And when he was afraid, this murderer, he killed again.

Was he around me now, watching from somewhere? Had he stayed in the neighborhood to see if things had gone well, and did he now know he would have to try again? It was more likely he’d gone far away, gone to ground for a while, whether or not he knew he’d missed me.

So I probably had some free time, free from police and murderer both. I’d do with it as much as I could.

There was a candy store on the corner, full of children drinking soda. I threaded through them to the phone booth and called Abe Selkin.

He said, “Jack doesn’t want any part of you, Mr. Tobin. He knows you used to be a cop, he knows you’re related to Robin, he thinks you’re out to frame him to get her off the hook.”

“That’s not very sensible,” I said.

“I know it. But that’s what he thinks.”

“All right. Thanks, anyway. Is there anybody at Thing East now?”

“Sure. Hully’s over there, maybe Vicki. We’re open again, the cops let us open yesterday.”

“Good.”

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

“I will.”

I hung up and tried Claude Bodkin’s number again, and this time he was home. And out of breath. “Just a second,” he said. “I’m winded.”

I waited, listening to heavy breathing, until finally he said, “All right. Sorry about that, I was doing my exercises.” His voice was somewhat more nasal than it had been on his machine.

I said, “My name is Mitchell Tobin, Mr. Bodkin. I don’t know if you read in the paper about Terry Wilford being murdered?”

“God, yes. Talk about melodrama.”

“The young lady who’s been arrested,” I said, “Robin Kennely, is my cousin. We’re trying to work up a defense for her, so naturally we want to talk to anybody who knew the Wilford boy. I understand you used to be his roommate?”

“God, that was years ago.”

“A year and a half, as I understand it.”

“Is that all? God, time flies. To tell you the truth, Mr.—what did you say your name was?”

“Tobin, Mitchell Tobin.”

“Well, to tell you the truth, Mitch—may I call you Mitch?”

“Go right ahead,” I said. So long as I could ask him my questions, he could call me any name he liked.

“To tell you the truth, Mitch,” he said, starting the same sentence for the third time, “I hardly know Robin Kennely at all, and I haven’t seen Terry since we stopped rooming together. I mean, I doubt I could give you anything
current,
you see what I mean?”

“It’s not current facts we’re looking for,” I said. “It’s mostly Terry’s personality, his character, that I want to know about. Any incidents you might know of that would help to show the kind of person he was.”

“Oh, God, if
that’s
what you want I could talk a week. Listen, where are you now?”

“Downtown.”

“Well, I have a thing at five, and then the evening’s shot, of course. We could have a drink now, if you like. How about the Newfoundland Donkey?”

“I don’t believe I know it.”

“Lex and Sixty-first, you can’t miss it. Shall we say one?”

“One, that’s fine.”

“The question is,” he said, “how are we going to recognize one another? Wait, I know. I’ll wear my lemon-lime shirt. It’s short sleeves, yellow and green vertical stripes. I doubt there’ll be more than one such shirt in the Donkey in the middle of the day.”

“Fine.”

“And I’ll be sitting at the bar, down toward the end.”

“All right. See you at one.”

“Ta.”

It was now barely twelve, so I walked back down to Houston Street to try a frontal attack on Jack Parker, but there was no answer to my knock. Either they had prepared themselves for a siege or they’d gone out.

There was a large delicatessen a block away. I had lunch there, walked back through the midday heat to try Parker once more, got no answer again, and took a cab uptown.

It was not air-conditioned. I felt cheated.

T
HE NEWFOUNDLAND DONKEY WAS
obviously what the magazines would call an In bar. It seemed arch and pretentious to me, but the lighting was dim enough and the wood dark enough so that the décor could readily be ignored. The air-conditioning was on full blast, and I was chilled to the bone by the time I sat down at the bar. When the bartender asked me what I wanted I was tempted to ask for a hot toddy, but settled on beer instead.

There was no one here with a lemon-lime shirt on, but it was only five till one, so I settled down with my beer—bottled, no draft—and looked at the other customers.

They were mostly men, young to middle-aged, slender, well dressed, chatting animatedly with one another, bright young executives drinking their lunches. Beyond the bar was a restaurant area, deep and narrow and dark, lit mostly by the candles in red glass at each table, and a few women were spotted at the tables back there: sleek and efficient-looking and stylish rather than pretty.

I finished my first beer at five after one and my second at one-fifteen. I decided to nurse the third one till one-thirty, and if he hadn’t arrived by then I’d phone him. In the meantime men kept coming into the place, the door opening with flashes of that bristling bright sunlight outside, but none of them was dressed right to be Bodkin. I drank my third beer a sip at a time, I watched the customers, I watched the moving and flashing and bobbing beer and whiskey ads on the back bar, I watched my watch.

He came in at one twenty-eight, a short slender childish-looking young man in the threatened shirt, pale chinos, scuffed white sneakers, flaming red hair, and the darkest sunglasses I’ve ever seen. I motioned to him and he came over, smiling and waving his hands and talking long before he was close enough for me to hear.

“…how it is,” he said, and slid into the stool next to mine. “You get on the damn horn, they won’t let you off. Since I got into communications I practically sleep with that damn phone to my ear. Beefeater and Schweppes, Jerry. What’s that you’re drinking, beer? God. You go out in that heat, you’ll sweat buckets. Let’s grab a table. Jerry, we’ll be over there.”

I followed him to a table on the opposite wall. We sat down and he said, “I’ve been thinking about Terry, Mitch, and I really don’t know what I can tell you. Terry and I didn’t hit it off, that’s true enough, but that could just be a personality thing, two people don’t jell, you know what I mean? Ahh,” he said, as his drink arrived, “that’s what I’ve been wanting.” He picked up the drink and said to me, “I’ve made a rule. Not a drop before one o’clock, no matter what. It’s my pattern for success. Pip pip.”

He took a healthy swallow, put the glass down, and said, “You know what they say, don’t say anything against the dead. So what can I say? We had tiffs, everybody has tiffs, we didn’t get along. You want a lot of roommate grievances, that’s not going to do you any good. Terry and I knew each other vaguely from college, he was two years behind me, I was looking for a roommate, he was fresh in town and looked me up, we found a place, we didn’t hit it off, I moved out, end of story.”

I said, as he took another swallow of his drink, “I’d thought maybe you moved because your income went up.”

“What, these threads?” He grinned, holding his arms out for me to look at his clothing. “You like them? Custom sneakers, nothing but the best. But seriously, no, that isn’t what happened. Affluence hit me two or three months later, when I made the break into communications.” He finished his drink, held the empty glass over his head, and wig-wagged it at the barman.

I said, “I understand you and Wilford had a fight one time. I mean, physically, punching each other.”

He put the glass down, grinned at me, and shook his head. “Not exactly,” he said. “God, when I think of that. Look at me, Mitch, I’m no pugilist. Crippled newsies roll me for my shoes. Terry wiped up the floor with me, pure and simple, it was as easy as that.”

I couldn’t see his eyes through the gray-black lenses of his glasses, but the rest of his face showed only honest amusement. I said, “You don’t seem to have held a grudge for it.”

“Be pointless now, wouldn’t it?” he said, and grinned again, shrugging his shoulders. “The poor bastard’s dead. Besides, he was right. I’d racked up his car for him. I’d have done the same thing myself if I was some sort of Neanderthal.”

“Is that what Terry was?”

“Ah hah!” he said happily, and pointed a finger at me. “You see? There
is
still hostility there! My analyst said there was, but I said no no no, it’s all over, it’s in the past and doesn’t matter any more. Never disagree with your analyst, Mitch, they know things that are closed to ordinary men. Bless you, darling.” This last to the waitress, who had brought his fresh drink.

As he took a first swallow of it I said, “As I understand it, you felt very strongly about it at the time. Tried to have Wilford arrested, didn’t you?”