Murder Among Children (2 page)

When at last we were all three sitting around the table, Kate allowed the conversation to lapse, and after a minute the girl looked at me and said, “Well, I guess I ought to get to it.”

“Take your time,” I said. “Have another cookie.”

She reflexively reached out to the plate for another, but then just held it in her hand as she spoke. “You see,” she said, looking very young and very earnest, “I was the only one who even knew a policeman at all.”

“I’m not a policeman,” I said quickly, but then I saw Kate stiffen and I realized I’d spoken too loudly and harshly, so I said, “But I still know some. What do you need a policeman for?”

“It’s hard to explain,” she said, “without it being all a jumble. My boy friend is—I have a boy friend, Terry Wilford, he’s opening a coffee house. Down in the Village, you know? Terry and three other boys, they put their money in together. We’ve got—they’ve got a store they rented. It was very lucky, it isn’t expensive at all, and there’s a contingency lease, if the shop fails in three months they don’t have to keep the lease any more.”

She had grown too involved in her explanation to be able to talk without her hands, so she’d put the unwanted cookie back on the plate and was now leaning over the coffee cup, elbows on the table, hands waving expressively, eyes urgent and intent on me as she talked. I could see her just this way at a table in her boy friend’s coffee house; in our slow and heavy household she was out of place, improbable and slightly fabulous.

I said, “It sounds as though you already have a lawyer. I don’t know the problem yet, but have you talked it over with him?”

“George isn’t really a lawyer,” she said, and smiled abruptly, a startlingly sunny sight. “It’s actually sort of funny,” she said. “George’s older brother works for the Post Office and goes nights to NYU. He’s been studying to be a lawyer for nine years, and George says he’ll never make it. But whenever we want to know anything legal, George goes and asks his brother. But that won’t do us any good now.”

“Why not?”

“Well…We just opened last Monday. And Wednesday a man came around, a policeman. He wouldn’t say what he wanted, he just kept asking questions and looking around and being very—insinuating. As though we were doing something wrong and he was onto us. And he kept talking about how it would be too bad if somebody had to close us down.”

“Was he in uniform?”

“No. But George wanted to see his identification, and he really was a policeman. A detective.”

“All right. What did he finally do?”

“Wednesday, he just left after a while. But then he came back Thursday night, and he kept saying about how everybody has to fit into a neighborhood, you can’t have people who don’t fit in, and then last night he was there again and went around asking all the customers for identification. And always insinuating, insinuating. Like because Terry lives upstairs, and Thursday when he came I was upstairs and when I came down he wanted to know if girls upstairs was going to be a feature of the place.”

I could feel Kate looking at me. The cop on the take had always been a pet peeve of ours when I was on the force, and this story of Robin Kennely’s had all the earmarks. I said, “So then what happened?”

She made a very young shrugging motion, dipping her head, and said, “Well, George says what he wants is money. A pay-off. That’s what his brother says, the almost lawyer. And we know about things like that, I mean there were all kinds of funny fees to the Housing Department and this and that, and there was a man came around from the Fire Department and kept talking about how we had to have more entrances and more fire extinguishers, and George’s brother talked to him and gave him fifty dollars. But this policeman is so
weird.
Everybody’s afraid to offer him money, because what if that isn’t it? Then we’re really in trouble.”

“You haven’t offered him a bribe.”

She shook her head. “We’re not cynics, Mr. Tobin,” she said, forgetting that she was supposed to call me Mitch. “But we know that if you’re going to do something you have to do like everybody else does. We knew we’d have to pay some people extra money. But this policeman acts so strange, we aren’t really sure. We don’t know if we should pay him, or how much, or anything. And George’s brother doesn’t want to take the chance of offering him money because what if he wasn’t there for a bribe? Then George’s brother would be in trouble. Well, we’d all be in trouble.”

“What other reason do you think he might have, if he doesn’t want money?”

She seemed hesitant, and when she answered this time she looked more frequently at Kate than at me. “Some people,” she said, “some policemen and people like that, they think young people in the Village—Well, they’re down on young people. They think we’re all beatniks and immoral and everything. You’ll see policemen give somebody a bad time just because he has a beard, or a girl just because she’s in the Village. So that’s what it might be, he just wants to make a little trouble because he doesn’t like us. And if that’s it, we’d make an awful mistake if we tried to give him money. It would just make everything a lot worse.”

I said, “Is that what your friend Terry thinks?”

A sudden blush colored her cheeks, and she said, “Terry thinks he wants a girl.”

“You?”

“Maybe me. Or maybe just a girl. Terry says he’s one of those—one of those people who thinks everybody around coffee houses still believes in free love.”

“So Terry thinks he wants a non-money bribe, is that it?”

She nodded.

I said, “And you want to ask me what I think, is that it?”

“In a way,” she said. “But—” She hesitated, looked at Kate, looked helplessly back at me, and made her dipping-shrugging movement again.

Kate spoke up for the first time, saying, “Mitch, does it sound like a pay-off?”

“Almost,” I said. “It could be something else, I don’t know. But that’s most likely.”

Kate said to the girl, “And you want Mitch to talk to him, is that it?”

I looked at the two of them, startled. I’d had no idea. I’d been thinking the girl had simply come to me for advice, for my opinion about what this cop wanted, and I’d been trying to make up my mind what I should tell her. It did sound very much like a guy on the make, wanting a little white envelope now and again to encourage him not to make trouble, but it wasn’t absolutely definite as yet, and I didn’t want to give these youngsters advice that would get them in worse trouble. So I’d been thinking about it, trying to find other questions to ask that might help me make up my mind, and it had never occurred to me that this new-found relative of mine might actually want me to get up and go out and
do
something.

But that was what she wanted. Kate had guessed it, and Kate was right, as she very often is about the unexpressed needs of others. Robin Kennely leaped gratefully at Kate’s suggestion, saying, “Oh, yes! None of us can do it, we really can’t.” And then turned to me, pleading, saying, “Could you possibly?”

“Well,” I said. I felt trapped. I didn’t want to leave this house, for Robin Kennely or anybody else. I’d left it a few months ago, driven by economic need, doing a piece of work for enough money to make it possible for me to stay in here for maybe a year or more, but that was the only time I’d gone out and it had not made me want to repeat the experience in a hurry.

I could feel Kate looking at me, but I refused to meet her eyes. She wanted me to go with the girl, I knew that, and only partly because Kate had taken an immediate liking to her. The rest of it was that she believed it would be better for me to be in motion than to remain stagnant. She was wrong about this, but I couldn’t blame her for thinking it.

The girl said, “Please, Mr. Tobin. If you would, if you only would. We’ve put everything we’ve got into this, and if it fails we’re in terrible trouble. And if this man keeps coming around, nobody will come, we’ll lose everything. Please.”

I said, “What’s this policeman’s name?”

“Edward Donlon,” she said. “Detective Second Grade.”

“About how old?”

She shrugged; too old. “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose about fifty.”

Which meant anything over forty. Young people have a tendency to overestimate the age of their elders. I said, “What does he look like?”

Before she could answer, Kate said, “Mitch, go see him for yourself. It’s the only way.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “It still might be something else.”

“All the more reason,” she said.

The girl said, “He told us he’d be back Sunday. Tomorrow. Sunday afternoon, he said.”

“You can see him then,” Kate told me.

“I could phone one or two people,” I said. “I still know people on the force.” To the girl I said, “What precinct are you in?”

Kate said, “Mitch, you can’t mean that. Do you want to make things worse?”

Robin Kennely was looking back and forth at the two of us, her expression getting more and more stricken, and now, falteringly, she said, “If you don’t want to—”

But I could see it was impossible. I’d have to give over a day to it. The idea of talking to somebody on the force, somebody who maybe knew my name, knew what I’d done, made my neck muscles tight with tension, even though the likelihood was slim. There were thousands of men on the force, and less than two hundred of them were likely to make any connection with the name Mitchell Tobin.

That thought didn’t help me much. Still, I knew there was nothing else open to me. I would have to take the subway into Manhattan tomorrow, and talk to this heavy-handed cop, and see what I could do to help these children with their coffee house. There wasn’t even any point telling Robin Kennely the coffee house was doomed anyway, no matter what I did or did not succeed in doing. These frail businesses start up all the time, particularly on the fringes of Greenwich Village. They are begun by wide-eyed youngsters with fuzzy goals and fuzzier business comprehension, they stagger along for a few months, and then they collapse, usually in small-claims court, sometimes in a flurry of bad checks. I’d picked up my share of debt-ridden child entrepreneurs while I was on the force, and I’d gotten so I could tell at a glance the businesses that were not going to make it through their first fiscal year.

But I said none of this to Robin Kennely. What I said was, “I’ll come. What time tomorrow, did he say?”

A
FTERNOON. AND NOW IT
was Sunday afternoon, and I had arrived at Thing East, and Robin Kennely, blood-smeared and still clutching the butcher knife, lay unconscious at my feet.

I said to the mustached boy, “Go lock the front door. Where’s your phone?”

There wasn’t any answer. I looked at him, and he was staring at the girl on the floor, his face blank-white and his mouth slack. I took his arm, shook it. “Snap out of it. Go lock the front door. Tell me where the phone is.”

He started, and blinked, and shook his head, as though awakened suddenly from a deep sleep. He turned wide eyes on me. “Phone,” he said. “On the wall there.” And pointed at the opposite end of the kitchen.

“Good. Go lock the door.”

“Yes. Yes, sir.”

He went away, and I headed for the phone. I dialed the police emergency number, gave my name and location, and said, “Send a squad car, there’s been trouble here. Looks like a knifing. We’ll need an ambulance, too.”

I hung up, and went out front, and found the young man standing by the front door like a mannequin no longer needed in the window. I said, “Did you lock it?”

He looked at me as though he were afraid of me. “Yes,” he said, and reached out to rattle the knob.

I said, “Are there any other stairs? Any other way up?”

He shook his head.

“There’s at least one,” I told him. “The fire escape. Where’s that? In back?”

“Yes. In back.”

“Any other way?
Think,
boy.”

He blinked again. “No other way,” he said. “Just the stairs, those stairs. And the fire escape.”

“All right. Stand here. I’ve phoned for a squad car and ambulance. When they get here, let them in. Don’t let anybody else in. You got that?”

He nodded.

“Good. What’s your name?”

“George,” he said. “George Padbury.”

“You the one with the almost-lawyer brother?”

“Yes,” he said, surprised. “Ralph. My brother Ralph.”

“Who’s upstairs now?”

“Upstairs?”

“That you know of.”

“Well—Just Terry.”

“Terry Wilford?”

He nodded again. “He lives up there.”

“He’s one of the tenants.”

“He’s the only tenant,” Padbury said. “It’s all empty up there, all the rest of it.”

“All right. Stay here.”

“I will.”

I hurried back down the long room, through the entranceway into the white kitchen, and found Robin Kennely still out. She was breathing, fitfully, and beneath the smears of blood her face was pale.

I went past her, found a door between a sink and a stove, opened it, and rediscovered sunlight.

And heat. The difference between this cool grotto-like world and the reality outside was astonishing. Humid heat flooded inward, engulfing me, as I opened the door, and I felt the perspiration springing to the surface on my forehead and arms.

I stepped through the doorway into a square gray-white concrete box, open at the top. High walls extended on all four sides, featureless to my left and right, windowed in front of me and above my head. A fire escape made a harsh black pattern against the rear wall of the building I had just stepped out of, but no similar pattern showed on the wall opposite. One look was enough to see that there was no way into that building over there from here; the nearest windows were not only ten feet or more from the ground, but were also barred.

No one had left since Robin Kennely’s melodramatic appearance at my feet. If the only two ways out were down the stairs that Robin had used or down the fire escape into this cul-de-sac, then whoever had been up there five minutes ago was still there.

I went back into the kitchen, shutting the door behind me, and saw Robin just beginning to sit up. Her movements were uncoordinated, slow, hesitant. I went over, squatted down beside her, and without touching her I said, “Can you tell me what happened?”