Murder Among Children Read online

  She’d snapped out of it very quickly. Too quickly. Was there something unreal about all this? What if the mother hadn’t interfered, how much further would Robin have gone? But of course the mother could be counted on to interfere, that would be the basis of the relationship between them.

  I wasn’t going to get anywhere here without browbeating the girl, and that her mother wouldn’t let me do. Nor would I be able to get in here on my own.

  I shook my head and got to my feet. “We’ll let you alone now,” I said. “You’ll be out of here soon, try not to let it get you down.”

  She moved her hands vaguely. “Sometimes,” she said, “all I want is for everything to be over.”

  “I know. It will be soon.”

  “Thank you,” she said, with childlike gravity. The strange moment was gone as though it hadn’t existed. She got up from the bed and smiled at me, saying, “I don’t know why you’re trying to help me this way, but I do thank you.”

  Mrs. Kennely said, “He’s your cousin, Robin. I told you before.”

  “My cousin?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Family trees are very complicated and very dull. I’m involved in this thing now myself, that’s all. So I’m helping you because I’m helping me.”

  That was the strict truth, but of course she chose not to believe it, and persisted in thanking me again. I was beginning to feel the same antipathy toward her as the first time we’d met, so this time I let it go and said, “I’ll let you two have some time to yourselves now.”

  “You don’t have to leave on my account,” Mrs. Kennely assured me.

  “I’m not,” I told her. I couldn’t help it, I disliked the woman, and one can never feel right about disliking somebody who’s in trouble.

  I started for the door, and Robin ran across the room to clutch at my arm, put her face to mine, and whisper urgently in my ear, “Don’t talk to him!”

  I pulled my head back enough so I could see her face; it was straining and intent, hollow-eyed. I said, “Who?”

  “You know who,” she said, low and significant, as though the walls might have ears, somewhere there might be someone who would spy out her meaning if she were too direct.

  “But I don’t,” I said.

  She flared up at me, suddenly angry, shouting, “Then go to hell! I don’t care what you do, it isn’t my problem!” She flounced away from me, into a volley of clichés from her mother, which she ignored, turning back to point her finger at me and say, “You’ll be next, you know.”

  “Not if you help me.”

  “I’m out of it,” she said. “I’m not going to get involved. If you want to make trouble for yourself, that’s your affair.”

  Mrs. Kennely said, “Mitch is only trying to help you, dear.”

  “Then tell him to leave me alone.”

  “I’ll talk to you both later,” I said.

  I had to knock on the door and wait for it to be unlocked from the outside. No one said a word until I left.

  21

  HULMER WAS WAITING FOR me in the Buick, about a block from the hospital. He put away his paperback when I slid into the seat beside him, and said, “How is she?”

  “Shaky. She’s blanked it all out, the whole day. Plus me. Plus Donlon. Plus God knows how much else.”

  “So she couldn’t help.”

  “She told me the red man told her to kill him. At least I think that’s what she meant. Though she might have meant he’d threatened to kill her. That would make more sense.”

  Hulmer was frowning at me in bewilderment. “The red man? What red man?”

  I quoted the exchange to him word for word, and said, “That doesn’t ring any bells for you, does it?”

  “Hell, no. Why should it?”

  “Red man might have been a slang term for somebody in the group.”

  He shook his head. “Everybody gets called by their name,” he said. “Besides, you said the guy was naked when Robin and Terry walked in, and all over blood from the other chick. The red man would be a good name for him.”

  “I know, that’s probably what it is. But I could hope.”

  He grinned at me and said, “Maybe you ought to ask somebody else in the group. Maybe the red man is what everybody calls me. Why not? Put me in a loin cloth and some war paint, I’d make a hell of an Indian.”

  “I intend to ask one of the others,” I told him.

  He nodded, his grin getting broader. “I like you, Mr. Tobin,” he said. “You aren’t hip by a long shot, but you aren’t square either. You’re a whole different thing. You know what you are?”

  “No, Hulmer, I don’t. What am I?”

  “You’re the guy that said stop the world I want to get off. And they stopped the world, and you got off, and now you look at everything from off to the left a little ways.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s very good, Hulmer, you have a good eye.”

  His grin faded and he said, “Did I cut you? I didn’t mean to.”

  “No, you didn’t. Don’t worry about it.”

  He shook his head, looking at me thoughtfully. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “I’d like to know what would make you blow your cool.”

  “August,” I told him.

  He laughed and said, “Okay, I’ll let it go. Where now?”

  “I want to talk to Irene Boles’ sister. Will you phone her for me, set it up?”

  “Sure.”

  “Her first name is Susan.”

  “I know,” he said. “Susan Thompson. I talked to her before, remember? She’s the one told me about Caldwell.” He opened the car door. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and got out and walked away.

  Watching him walk down the street, youthful, optimistic, humorous, bouncing on the balls of his feet, I found myself envying him in half a dozen different ways. I envied his youth, of course, and his optimism, and his humor, and I envied the absence of scars on his psyche that made the youth and optimism and humor possible. But beyond that I envied him for being young now, and black, and alive to the world in a way that I had not been for years, in a way that I perhaps had never been in my life.

  I understand the motto of the new student rebels is “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” and they’re right. Between the child and the adult there is an opposition that cannot be breached or eased or ended. Neither side can truly comprehend the other. The child, as new and clean and efficient as a Christmas bicycle, faces the world with confidence and impatience, all his emotions gleaming like neon through the skin of his forehead. The adult, dulled and deadened and dwarfed by all the frustrations, disappointments, pains of living, faces the child with resentment and envy, insisting that the child be quiet, not make waves, not disturb the precarious balance by which the adult makes his small way through each cycle of twenty-four hours.

  I was sure Hulmer and the others would not be pleased to know I thought of them as children, but that’s what they were. The twenties are the transition decade; people enter them as children and emerge to thirty as fully embittered and wary adults.

  Was it one of the children who was launched on this helter-skelter barrage of murder? Or was there an adult loose among them, his own emotions unnaturally released, his clumsy size wreaking havoc around him, like a panicky horse in a corral full of lambs?

  I couldn’t seem to get hold of anything in this mess. It was running itself differently from most investigations. In the usual case you have a list of possible murderers, a group of suspects, and you question them, study them, eliminate some of them, learn things about this one and that one, and at the end there’s only one left, and that’s your man. But this time I couldn’t make up a list of suspects at all. I had a vague mental image of the murderer, naked and bloody, wild-eyed but calm, and no one I had yet seen came sufficiently close to matching that image.

  I’d originally assumed that Terry Wilford had been the primary target, since the first two murders had taken place in his home, and so I’d devoted most of my time
and attention to people who had known him, but now I thought differently. Somehow the Boles woman was the key to all this, and I knew far too little about her.

  Why would anyone want to murder a Negro junkie prostitute? Had she tried to blackmail the policeman who’d been feeding her habit? Was he in fact the murderer? Or was there someone else in her life who had found himself compelled to end it?

  But then why murder George Padbury? If the murderer was a stranger to Thing East, if his connection lay through Irene Boles, what could George Padbury have known? And how had the murderer gotten into Thing East?

  And how had he gotten out again?

  There was the rub, the pebble in my throat. If I could figure out how he’d gotten out of that building, would I then know who he was?

  Donlon had known, I was convinced of that. Either Donlon himself was Irene Boles’ policeman or he had known who it was. And he’d been killed because of his knowledge, because at some point and for some reason his knowledge had become dangerous to the murderer.

  The door opened, startling me, and Hulmer slid in, saying, “Man, you were a million miles away.”

  “I was thinking. Will she see us?”

  “Yeah. She said come right on up.”

  “Good.”

  Hulmer started the engine, but before pulling out into traffic he turned to me and said, “What I said before, Mr. Tobin, I wasn’t trying to bug you. Sometimes I say things, they sound different from what I mean.”

  “I know that. Don’t worry about it. Truly. You didn’t offend me, and you didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”

  Hulmer grinned and shook his head. “It’s tough to do both those things at the same time,” he said.

  A child beginning to learn how to be an adult.

  22

  SUSAN THOMPSON, AS NEAT and trim and compact as a lady golfer, let us into an apartment rocking with music. Smiling and nodding, she said something I couldn’t hear, then shrugged and gestured for Hulmer and me to follow her.

  We went down a hall, past a living room from which all the noise was coming. Glancing in, I saw four or five colored boys, late teens, hard at work on musical instruments: drums, piano, guitar, saxophone, perhaps one or two more. The sound was so loud you could almost see it filling the room. The boys were playing with such intensity that it was obvious their heads were full of recording-company contracts.

  At the end of the hall was a swing door. Susan Thompson led us through there, released the door behind us, which cut the music to a bearable volume, and shook her head in resigned amusement, saying, “All those boys do is practice. You can’t hear yourself think around this place.” She had a faint trace of southern accent softening her words, blending well with her cheerful expression and matter-of-fact manner. “Sit at the table,” she said. “You want some iced tea?”

  “I’d love some,” I said.

  We were in a kitchen, tiny the way kitchens are in Manhattan, but as neat and clean and livable as a submarine. Hulmer and I sat at the small formica-topped table and watched Mrs. Thompson getting the tea ready. It made me think of home: coming in from working on the wall, sitting at the kitchen table, watching Kate make iced tea or, in the winter, hot coffee.

  What was I doing away from there, trying to comprehend other generations, other races, other confusions and problems? This had to end soon, I had to get back inside.

  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, ‘Ir
ene, 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?”