Murder Among Children (7 page)

At the kitchen entrance I stood aside and let Donlon go through first, then I followed and pushed shut the swinging door. It was perhaps the second time in fifteen years that door had been closed.

I said, “Sit down if you want.”

But he didn’t want. He turned to face me and he was all cold now, all steel. He said, “What are you mixing into, Tobin? What are you and those brats brewing?”

“You’re beginning to sound official again,” I told him.

“You got trouble enough,” he said. “You want to stay out of the way.”

I said, “What are you worried about? Don’t you know Driscoll had me in to see him today?”

He hadn’t known it. His eyes narrowed, and the hands closed into fists at his sides. He said, “What about, Tobin?”

“My statement. He didn’t like it, so I changed it.”

He wasn’t sure he understood me. Warily he said, “Changed it how?”

I said, “My cousin Robin Kennely told me a police officer had told her friends about violations at Thing East. They weren’t sure what they were supposed to do to correct these violations, and Robin wanted me to talk to the police officer and find out what was required.”

The wariness eased out of his expression and he made a small happy smile, saying, “What do you know? That’s what he wanted, huh?”

“That’s what I gave him.”

“And then he was happy?”

“He was satisfied.”

“That’s good.” His smile widened and he nodded, saying, “That was smart, Tobin, very smart. You don’t rock the boat.”

“I remember the drill,” I said.

The smile went away, replaced by a frown. “I don’t follow you, Tobin,” he said. “First you do a smart thing with Driscoll, and then you do something dumb.”

“Like what?”

“Like having that crowd in your living room. They’re troublemakers, Tobin. Dumbheads. Smart-ass kids. Bo-
hee
-mians. You going to be scoutmaster for them? You know the type they are, you must of run into them yourself back in the old days.”

I knew what he meant. Any large city, and most particularly New York City, attracts hordes of the rootless young, youths who have left home as part of a vague unfocused revolt against authority—and, I suppose, against the inevitability of their future—and who, with too much time and too little money, become bored and restless and itchy, spoiling for any sort of action. Whether it’s drugs or sex or political activism or just ordinary barroom brawling, many of these youngsters come to the attention of the police sooner or later, and their attitude toward the cop is a distillation of their attitude toward home and parents. The cop is the bluntest and most direct symbol of authority, that authority against which the youth is already in rebellion. Professional criminals are less trouble to arresting officers than are members of the cult of rebellious youth.

But if the youngsters right now in my living room did bear some resemblance to that type, and if they undoubtedly traveled with a group that contained several members of the type, and if they would react to arrest or police harassment in the same way as members of the type, it was still true that they themselves were other than or more than the type. Vicki Oppenheim, with only minor changes of dress—and, probably, speech—would fit right in at any rural church picnic in the country. Abe Selkin was too direct and self-contained to be involved with anything as vague as revolt against authority. Hulmer Fass, even more self-contained, was an entire population in and of himself, too completely divorced from the world to allow anything in it to upset him emotionally. And Ralph Padbury, of course, didn’t even bear a similarity to the bo-hee-mians, to use Donlon’s word.

But whether Donlon was right or wrong about them was irrelevant and beside the point, the point being that their presence in my living room was no concern of his, which I told him, saying, “What are they to you? They can be where they want to be. I can have in my house who I want in my house.”

“You aren’t sitting around,” he said, “playing spin the bottle. They’re up to something, and they want you in on it. Am I right?”

“What would they be up to? I already told you the amended statement I gave your captain. You have nothing to fear from me, and nothing to fear from those people in there either.”

“Then why are they here?”

“That’s their business,” I said.

“I’m making it mine.”

I shook my head, and we stood looking at one another, me disliking him for being arrogant and on the take, and him disliking me for being an unknown quantity that could cause him trouble. Finally he shrugged and said, “Why struggle? I’ll get it later.”

“Don’t start making trouble for those children,” I said.

He gave me the mock-innocent look again. “What makes you think I’d make trouble?”

“We had some like you in my old precinct,” I said.

He didn’t like that. He said, “We don’t have any like you, Tobin. We like it that way.”

Simple insults don’t bother me any more, so I said, “Just remember to leave them alone.”

“Or?”

“Or I see if I can make trouble for you.”

He frowned at me, not sure of himself, and said, “You think you can? With your past history, you think you can make trouble for anybody?”

“I don’t know. I can try. I still know a couple of people. I could do my best to make a smell in your area.”

Frowning, he turned away from me, walked around the kitchen table, stood facing the refrigerator for a minute. I heard him say under his breath, “Everything cuts twelve ways.” Then he rubbed a hand across his face, as though he were tired, and shook himself like a dog coming out of water.

The swinging door pushed open, startling the both of us, and Bill walked in, absorbed in something inside his own head. He stopped two paces into the room and blinked at us. “I’m sorry, Dad,” he said, “I didn’t know anybody was here. I thought you were all in the living room.”

Donlon looked at Bill like a man seeing a long-lost relative. “Your father and I just had some private talk to do, son,” he said, his voice unusually soft. “But we’re just about done.”

“I’ve just got to get a couple tools,” Bill said. He went over to the tool drawer near the sink.

Donlon said, “Working on a project, eh?”

“Yes, sir.” Bill got wire cutters and the smallest screwdriver out of the drawer.

“Model plane?” Donlon asked him.

“No, sir. Some phonograph stuff. Excuse me.”

Donlon’s eyes followed him as Bill left the room. Donlon shook his head and said, “That’s when they’re good. Kids, I love kids. You ever do any PAL work when you were on the force, Tobin?”

“I never seemed to have the time.”

“Well, you got kids of your own. I can’t have any. Thought it was Mrs. Donlon for years, but it’s me. Doctor said it’s me.” He rubbed his face again, and it came out as hard as it had been before. “But they grow up bad,” he said, “the most of them. Like that bunch you’re protecting in there. The smaller kids are all right, but later on they turn bad.”

“Not all of them.”

“What do I care?” He gnawed on a knuckle for a second, then shook his head and said, “On this other thing, we deal.”

“You’ll lay off?”

He spread his hands out, palms down, and said, “Everybody floats.” His eyes glinted.

I didn’t trust him, there was something too sudden and electric about him, but I knew this was the best I’d be able to get from him, so I said, “Good. It’s a deal.”

“Now,” he said, “everybody goes home.” He didn’t say it menacingly or like an order, but as though it followed naturally.

Which it didn’t. I said, “Stop pushing.”

He seemed confused for just a second, and then tightness came over his face and he said, “All right, Tobin, play your game, whatever it is. But don’t show your face.”

“I won’t.”

“Say good-bye to your guests for me,” he said, and walked around me, and pushed open the swinging door.

I followed him down the hall to the front door. He opened it and went out, leaving the door ajar. I stood there in semi-darkness, my hand on the knob, and watched him walk out through belated twilight to a black Plymouth parked at the curb, unmarked but obvious; he was driving an official car on his unofficial business.

When Donlon got into the Plymouth and drove away, I shut the door and went back to the living room.

T
HERE WAS CONVERSATION IN
the living room now, animated conversation, the whole group busily explaining something or other to Kate, who was nodding and smiling and not understanding a word. They were all busily and unself-consciously being themselves, without that slightly guarded overlay that people almost always put on with me. Vicki was bursting and bubbling with speech, her words tumbling over each other, she herself bouncing up and down on the couch as though she were not a fat girl; Abe Selkin was as brisk and incisive as a reform candidate’s campaign manager; Hulmer was in the conversation and yet to one side of it, observant and self-aware and sympathetic and faintly amused; and Ralph Padbury, leaning slightly forward, was methodically inserting small neat footnotes into the seconds left empty by the others.

The talk trailed off as I came into the room, and everyone looked at me. I said, into the raw new silence, “It’s all right, he’s gone.”

Abe Selkin, in his clipped way, said, “You realize he followed one of us.”

“Possibly,” I said.

Hulmer said, “What happens now? He hangs on our tail?”

“No. We’ve got a stalemate. He’s to lay off us and we’ll lay off him.”

Hulmer smiled a thin curve of disbelief. “We lay
what
off him?”

“We don’t try to make trouble for him being on the take.”

Ralph Padbury, very prim, said, “It was never established that was what he wanted. We have no case there.”

“I know that,” I said. “But we could still raise a little dust, something that would be remembered at promotion time. It’s worth it to him not to have us making a stink, even though,” with a nod to Padbury, “we don’t have enough to get him into a court of law.”

Hulmer said, “Sounds like a shaky truce, man.”

“It is.” I sat down. “But it gives us a little time,” I said, and picked up my notebook. Studying it, pretending the earlier flare-up with Ralph Padbury had never happened, I said, “I think we’ve finished with Irene Boles. Prostitute, heroin addict, no known connection with Terry Wilford or any of the rest of you.” I looked up. “Has anybody found out how she got in there?”

My transition had worked; Padbury sat quiet and attentive in his chair, no longer prepared to revolt.

It was Abe Selkin who answered my question, saying, “The police theory is, Terry let her in that morning because he knew her, because they had a thing going, and she was supposed to be out of there before he got back with Robin. But she was stoned, so she didn’t make it. So Terry and Robin went upstairs, Robin saw her there, and she flipped out and started slicing.”

I said, “Do the police have any support for the idea that Wilford knew the girl?”

No one answered me until Kate volunteered, saying, “Nothing that’s been in the paper, Mitch.”

“All right.” I made a note to try and check that out, and said, “Now, I’ll want to talk to other people who knew Wilford. Friends and enemies, old girl friends, relatives, anybody that you four think it would be worth my while to see.”

Selkin said, “What’s the point?”

“Somebody murdered him,” I said. “The odds are in favor of it being somebody who knew him.”

Selkin said, “Why not somebody who knew the girl? The Boles girl.”

“Possibly,” I said. “But Wilford was murdered at home, so he’s more likely to be the prime target. The murderer could also turn out to be the connecting link between the two of them, somebody who knew both Terry Wilford and Irene Boles.”

With that faint smile of his, Hulmer said, “Somebody like me, maybe?”

“Maybe,” I agreed. “But I don’t subscribe to the theory that all Negroes know each other.”

In quick succession he looked surprised, angry, and delighted, accompanying the last with laughter and saying, “Touché, man. I’ll lay off.”

“Good.” I poised pencil over notebook. “Now I want Wilford’s relatives.”

Selkin said, “None local.”

Vicki Oppenheim bubbled in, saying, “Nobody was really born in New York, you know. Except people like Abe and Hully, and they don’t count. Terry came from Oregon, some little town in Oregon.”

“All right,” I said. “What about enemies?”

Vicki shook her head. “Everybody liked Terry,” she started.

She would have gone on, but I’ve heard that paragraph from survivors before, and I didn’t particularly want to hear it again, so I interrupted, saying, “No. Everybody has enemies, even the saints.”

Vicki laughed, saying, “Ho-oh, nobody ever said Terry was a
saint
.” Then, belatedly, it occurred to her to worry about whether she should have said something like that about someone recently dead; she put a hand over her mouth and blinked solemnly at us all.

Selkin distracted us from Vicki’s embarrassment, saying, “Jack Parker, there’s one.”

I wrote the name down while Vicki, forgetting to be embarrassed, was saying to Selkin, “Oh, Abe, no! That was all over six months ago.”

“They were never exactly buddies after that,” Selkin told her.

I said, “After what?”

Selkin turned to me. “Jack was going with a bird,” he said. “Terry took her away, then she went back with Jack.”

I said, “What’s the girl’s name?”

“Ann,” said Vicki. “But Jack Parker isn’t mad at Terry any more, Abe, he really isn’t. I mean, he wasn’t. Not for
months
.”

Selkin shrugged.

I said, “What’s Ann’s last name?”

It turned out none of them knew; she was just a girl named Ann. I said, “Do you know any way I can get in touch with her?”

“Sure,” said Selkin. “She’s living with Jack again. They’ve got a place on Sullivan Street, below Houston.”

I took down the address and said, “Anybody else? Any more enemies?”

They all thought for a while, and then Hulmer said, “Well, there’s always Bodkin.”

Selkin frowned at him and said, “You’re reaching, Hully.”