Murder Among Children (17 page)

We didn’t try to do any talking until she was sitting at the table with us and we all had our iced tea in tall glasses in front of us. I took a taste, found it good, said so, Mrs. Thompson thanked me, and then I said, “You know I want to talk about Irene.”

“I know.” She glanced at Hulmer, then back at me. “This may be an awful thing to say,” she said, “but I think it’s a blessing.”

“What is?”

“That she’s dead. I know that’s terrible to say, but it’s true. The life she had—it’s better to be over. Her sufferings are done with now.”

I said, “There must have been very little in common between you and your sister, Mrs. Thompson.”

“Oh, well,” she said, smiling sadly, “not so much. We looked a little bit alike, except I was always skinnier. And I was lucky, that’s all. I found a good man. Irene didn’t. It’s as simple as that in life, Mr. Tobin.”

“I don’t think it is,” I said. “Forgive me for contradicting you, Mrs. Thompson, but I believe there was always something inside your head that was going to lead you to a good man and lead a good man to you. And I believe there was always something inside Irene’s head that was going to lead her to a Jim Caldwell.”

Her face expressed distaste. “Have you seen that man?”

“Earlier today.”

“How did you like him?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t.”

“Irene doted over that man,” she said, remembered indignation coloring her voice. “I’d ask her, time again, what earthly thing she thought she saw in him, and all she’d ever say was, ‘Oh, Sue, don’t you know he’s my man?’
Her
man! Why, he’s got three or four helping to buy those suits of his.”

I said, “Were there any other men in Irene’s life?”

“Men? There weren’t
any
men in Irene’s life, Mr. Tobin, and Jim Caldwell don’t count. There wasn’t nothing in Irene’s life but that needle, and Caldwell, and sometimes maybe me.”

“No other friends? No woman friends?”

“She didn’t have time to be alive, Mr. Tobin. Irene had to work work work, and then fill herself up with all that drugs she was taking, and then work work work some more. She didn’t have no life at all.”

I said, “What about regular customers? Did she ever talk to you about any of her customers?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t want to hear about any of that. She tried to tell me one time about some policeman gave her drugs, but I wouldn’t listen. I told her, that life she was living, she could just leave it at my doorstep.
She
could come inside, but all that other trash had to stay out. One time she come around, she bring that Jim Caldwell with her. I was polite, I’m not mean to anybody if I can help it, but afterwards, next time I seen her, I said, ‘Irene, I don’t want that man around my house any more.’ And she kept him away after that. There’s never been any love lost between me and Jim Caldwell, and he knows it, I don’t try to hide it.”

I said, “He was here while Irene was being killed.”

“He come around, he thought she was here. I was just as worried as he was, and I didn’t want to have to call the police to make him go away, so I let him stay here. Then the police come around anyway, telling me about Irene being dead, and I had to give him an alibi,”

I said, “As though he’d planned it that way?”

She looked startled, then thoughtful, but finally shook her head. “No, sir, that wouldn’t be his way. He carried on here for hours about what he’d do to her when he caught up with her, and he wasn’t fooling. It wouldn’t be his way to try nothing like that.”

“I suppose not.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what else to ask,” I said. “She didn’t have any friends, didn’t have any enemies, didn’t have any life outside Jim Caldwell and heroin and sometimes you. But somebody killed her, and I can’t figure out who.”

“I don’t like to say this,” she said, “but couldn’t it be that your cousin
did
do it, like the police say?”

“No. Too many other things have happened since then.” I drank some more tea. “No, the answer lies with your sister. There has to be somebody else in her life, somebody somewhere. An old friend from schooldays, a former boy friend, something. Was Irene ever married?”

“No, sir. Irene was hooked on those drugs when she was fifteen years old, and prostituting herself at the same time.” She hesitated, then said, “I don’t much like to talk about this, because I feel like I’m to blame in a kind of way. Irene was the baby of the family, you know, she was born when I was ten years old, and it never seemed like she could catch up to me. My mama was always saying, ‘Irene, you look at Susan, you look see how Susan does, why can’t you be more like Susan, when you gonna start acting like Susan,’ all sorts of things like that. And naturally, being young myself, I loved that kind of thing, I showed off and acted snooty and all the time putting down my little sister. So she went out, and got involved with the wrong kinds of people, and that’s what happened. And I sometimes think, if I was just nicer to her when we were both children, it all might have been different.” She shook her head and picked up her tea glass. “But I think my mama was wrong, too, always holding me up like that.”

“It’s hard for parents to know what’s right for their children sometimes,” I said.

“Don’t I know it. Yes, sir. You say to yourself,
I’m
going to do it different,
I’m
not going to make the mistakes my mama made. So what do you do? You go make some other mistakes all your own.”

I finished my tea and said, “Well, thank you, Mrs. Thompson. I appreciate your spending the time with me.”

“Not a bit. Anything I can do to help, just call, I’m always willing. And if you can find out who really did murder poor Irene, well, that would be wonderful. I mean, I know I say it’s a blessing she’s dead and all, and it is, but still and all nobody should have cut her up that way. Whoever did it shouldn’t get away with it.”

“I hope he won’t. Before I go, would you mind if I used your telephone?”

“Well, sure. Right on the wall there. I’d let you use the one in the living room, but you hear that racket in there.”

“This is fine,” I said, crossing the kitchen to the white wall phone near the refrigerator.

“I’ll give you privacy,” she said, getting to her feet.

“No, stay there, I’m just calling home.”

“I want to talk to those boys anyway,” she said. “They got to stop practicing sometime.” She hurried out of the kitchen, the swinging door flapping behind her.

I said to Hulmer, “What do you think?”

He seemed surprised. “You mean, did she tell the truth?”

“Of course not. She told the truth, as much as she knew of it. The question is, how much truth does she know?”

“Why ask me?”

“I’m talking to myself, Hulmer,” I said. “I’m sorry, I was just using you for a sounding board.” I turned away and started dialing my home number. I wanted to know if either of my police acquaintances had called in with news about a connection between Wilford and Irene Boles, and also if anyone else had called. If not, I would go home from here, let it jell in my mind overnight, and start again somewhere else tomorrow morning.

Behind me, Hulmer said, “I figure she knew her sister pretty well.”

“So do I,” I said. “Which complicates things.” Then Kate answered the phone, and I said, “Hello, it’s me. Any calls?”

“Mitch,” she said, and her voice sounded odd, “there are two—”

“What?”

A new voice said, “Tobin?” Male, gruff, authoritarian.

“Who is this?”

“Detective Second Grade Wagner. Where are you calling from?”

“Manhattan. What’s the matter?”

“Captain Driscoll wants to talk to you.”

“Driscoll? Oh, downtown. What about?”

“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “Give me your address, I’ll have a car come pick you up.”

“That isn’t necessary, I can get there myself. Where is he, out in Queens again?”

“No, at the precinct. You know where the Twenty-seventh Precinct is?”

“No.”

“It’s on Carmine Street, just off Seventh Avenue. West of Seventh.”

“All right. Is he there now?”

“Yes.”

I looked at my watch, and it was nearly five-thirty. “It’ll take me a while to get there,” I said, “in this rush hour. I’m up in Harlem. I’ll leave now.”

“I’ll call the captain,” he said.

“Let me speak to my wife again.”

“Sure.”

When Kate came on, she said, “Mitch? Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know. I’ll go see Driscoll and find out what he wants. Then I’ll call you back.”

“Mitch, Rita Kennely called, they’ve released Robin.”

“They what?”

“She said it was about five minutes after you left, a plainclothes-man came around and said Robin was no longer under arrest, the release papers will be coming through in an hour or so and then she’ll be free to go. They’re arranging now to transfer her to a private hospital out on the Island.”

Something had happened, I wondered what, and if it had anything to do with Driscoll wanting to see me. I said, “I’d better get going, Kate. I’ll call you the minute I find out what’s going on.”

I hung up and said to Hulmer, “Would you drive me back to the Village?”

“Sure,” he said, getting to his feet. “You look as though something’s going on.”

“Something is.”

“What? I mean, can I ask?”

“We can both ask,” I told him.

H
ULMER STOPPED DOWN THE
block from the precinct house and said he’d wait for me. I said, “You don’t have to do that. I don’t know how long I’ll be in there, and from here I’m going straight home, and that’s way out in Queens.”

“That’s okay, I got nothing to do.”

“You’ve got Thing East. You’re supposed to be working there.”

“Let Vicki work,” he said. “Sweat some of that extra lard off her. Really, Mr. Tobin, I want to stick around. I like to watch you work.”

“Do you? I hadn’t thought of myself as being very interesting or very useful the last day or so.”

“You put yourself down too much,” he told me.

“Impossible,” I said.

He laughed and said, “Anyway, I’ll stick around. What the hell, if Robin’s off the hook maybe they’ve got the right guy now, that’s worth waiting around to hear.”

“All right, fine. Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” he said, and I think he really meant it.

I got out of the car and walked back to the station house. This one was dark red brick, four stories high, with black slate steps. It had probably been built around the same time as the one I’d been assigned to my last seven years on the force; at any rate, it reminded me strongly of that other building, and in walking toward it I felt the months slip away, as though none of it had ever happened. I was still on the force, Jock Sheehan was still alive, my double life with Linda Campbell was undiscovered, I had not been drained of blood and life and existence.

But I had been. This was not my precinct, I had to announce myself at the desk and ask to be directed to Captain Driscoll’s office. The sergeant made a phone call and told me to wait on the bench across the way.

I sat there and waited. Two plainclothesmen came in with a short narrow ferret-faced man between them in cuffs. A uniformed officer left, distracted and worried, like a man who’d just been chewed out. Two plainclothesmen came down the stairs and over to me and asked me if I was Tobin.

I got to my feet. “Yes, I am.”

“This way.”

They took me upstairs and into an interrogation room, square and blank and nearly empty except for a few chairs and, on one side, a scuffed and ancient library table. “Wait here,” one of them said, and they went out, and I was alone again.

It smelled wrong. They had both seemed wary with me, bringing me up here. And why bring me to an interrogation room rather than Captain Driscoll’s office? And why make me wait again?

The answer was what they knew about me, ex-cop, thrown out, responsible for his partner’s death. I would find no friends in this building, only memories, all of them knife-edged.

I prowled the room, restless and uncomfortable, wanting this to be over with. Robin was free now, and they wouldn’t have freed her unless they’d gotten the right one to replace her.

Me?

I stopped, and looked at that thought. Could they think it was me? Was that why they let Robin go, why they wanted to talk to me, why they were wary with me, why I was in an interrogation room that reminded me uneasily of both my own past and that strange room where I’d first met Bishop Johnson?

They made me wait fifteen minutes, and when at last the door opened and five of them came in, I knew I’d guessed it right.

I said, “I was told Captain Driscoll wanted to see me.” Though I knew I wouldn’t be seeing the captain.

“Talk to us a little first,” one of them said.

“Sit down, Mr. Tobin,” said another. “This won’t take long.”

I
T DIDN’T TAKE LONG
at all, once we’d gotten past the legal preliminaries. There had been a time, not very long ago, when I could have anticipated a fifteen-hour session in this room, being interrogated by teams of detectives in shifts, but the police are required to enforce more of the laws these days, including the ones limiting their powers and protecting those people—like me—who haven’t been found guilty of a particular crime in court.

So I was told my rights, at length, and was advised to contact my attorney. When I said I didn’t want to contact my attorney, one of the detectives said, apparently to one of the others, “It used to be they’d try to set things up for the trial. These days, they don’t think about anything but the appeal.”

The one who had been explaining my rights to me said, “I do urge you to get in touch with your attorney, Mr. Tobin. You don’t seem to realize it, but you’re in serious trouble.”

“I don’t think I am,” I said.

One of the others said to me, “You think we’re all here for fun?”

I told him, “I think you people are all here because you have a delusion. It doesn’t matter what I say here, I’m not going to change your minds. And I don’t have to call my attorney because a delusion can’t do any worse than get me a few hours in a cell. I’ll even join you in your delusion if you want, I’ll confess anything you want me to confess. But then sometime you’ll get around to evidence, facts, objective reality, things other than your prejudice against an ex-cop, and we’ll throw away the transcript of this session and forget the whole thing.”