A Crime in the Neighborhood (12 page)

Invisibly, my mother said “Thank you. Edna.”

Mrs. Morris gathered up the dog leashes and drove herself and the terriers back across the street to her own yard and house, where the smoky apparition of Mr. Morris in a golf cap waited inside the screen door.

I slid back down into the sofa cushions, letting my hair catch on the cretonne so that it would stand up from my head. After a few moments, my mother came into the living room.

“I don't want you outside today.” She emphasized each word so that it hung balloonlike for an instant in the air between us. “You heard me,” she said to Julie. Then she sighed and put her hand over her eyes. But in a moment she had taken her hand away again and gone into the kitchen to begin her telephone calls.

It seems increasingly common for people to live in places where there has been a murder. For instance, these days I live in a fairly expensive neighborhood not far from Chevy Chase, a neighborhood of center-hall colonials and flowering dogwood trees where most people do not mow their own lawns. Last Thanksgiving, five blocks away from my house, a woman stabbed her brother in the neck with a steak knife while her housemate roasted a turkey downstairs and outside the window neighbors' children in bright Gap outfits chased each other through the chilly November sunlight. No one knows why she killed him.

Here in Washington, the murder rate has risen so high that newspapers record violent deaths in six-inch columns rather than as front-page tragedies. Which probably makes sense. My least-favorite college English professor once declared: “Oedipus is a tragic figure. Richard Nixon is a tragic figure.
The guy down the street who gets shot is not.” When the class murmured at this, he crossed his arms and said: “Tragedy has to be interesting. The whole world cares about Richard Nixon. Who cares about the guy down the street?”

“His wife,” someone volunteered.

The professor smiled and took off his little oval spectacles to polish them by the blackboard. “Who cares,” he said, blinking slyly, “about his wife?”

But you have to understand that twenty-five years ago a murder in a suburban neighborhood like Spring Hill was still an astonishing occurrence, so astonishing that for a long time the people who lived there felt somehow responsible, as if they should have foreseen something so unforeseen. Like my mother, they felt guilty for having ever felt secure.

Almost immediately after Boyd Ellison was killed our neighbors began to see strange shapes in the rhododendrons, hear human screams in every cat fight, lose their appetites. People from several blocks away sent flowers to his family, and a total stranger from Bethesda offered to paint their garage. Collections were taken up; proposals were made inside the Clara Barton Elementary School auditorium for a memorial tree. And a month later, when the Ellisons decided to sell their house for less than they'd paid for it—even with a newly renovated kitchen, an updated heating system, and central air-conditioning—a long time passed before anyone was willing to buy it.

Within the first few hours after Mrs. Morris's visit, Mrs. Lauder stopped by our house, knocking at the porch door. She sat on the edge of the living-room sofa. Apparently she only wanted to hear my mother say how awful it was, what a terrible tragedy, and to repeat the same words herself. “You've heard who it was?” she asked my mother. They exchanged stories of when and how they had heard the news, touching their throats. My mother offered her iced tea, which Mrs. Lauder declined.

“Now don't be a stranger,” she added, on the way out the door.

Otherwise people seemed to avoid us, at least that's the feeling I had as I sat on the porch watching neighbor after neighbor congregate in one another's front yards. All morning a weird holiday current lit the air, with so many neighbors out on the street, the fathers all home on a weekday, and everyone talking about the same thing. Even the twins dropped their British accents and wandered around the house looking somberly approachable.

The early stories traded around that day were contradictory and convoluted. Stories swirled and eddied until each family seemed to have its own version of the events. And every version began with “I heard—”

Among the details I overheard from my post on the porch, all of which I printed in my notebook with Julie's Bic pen, are the following: Boyd Ellison was alive and had told the police
everything. A man on a motorcycle had attacked him. A man with a beard attacked him. It was a bearded man with a foreign accent, maybe Dutch or Turkish. It was a hippie on drugs. Boyd was in a coma. Boyd had called out his mother's name. He didn't know who his parents were. He was dead. He was alive. He was alive but just barely. He was dead.

Later that morning, eavesdropping from my bedroom window on Mrs. Bridgeman's conversation with Mrs. Lauder on her front steps, I several times heard a word I didn't understand. Molested.

The neighborhood fathers spent the day talking together in close knots in front of their garages, eyes traveling from house to house. Mothers appeared regularly in their doorways, usually restraining a child from running outside, one hand spread against the child's chest. Or they made forays to one another's houses to deliver bulletins, twitching at their culotte skirts as they ran across the street, the wooden heels of their Dr. Scholl's sandals clunking against the heated asphalt.

Whenever my mother took a break from her Peterman-Wolff calls, the twins hurried to the phone to have hushed conversations with their friends, the ones who hadn't gone to camp for the summer. Everyone had known Boyd Ellison, although none apparently knew him well. No one had liked him very much. Besides his reputation for petty thievery, he bullied younger children then became obsequious at the arrival of their older siblings. He was chubby and bad at baseball. He laughed when other children fell off the swings or
skinned their knees. But suddenly he was the closest thing to a celebrity any of us had ever known.

“Remember that time I gave him a ride on my bike?” said Steven. He leaned against the kitchen counter with his elbows, his brown hair tugged back into its usual ponytail. From behind, he and Julie looked nearly identical. “I gave him a ride to the mall.”

“I sat next to him once on the bus.” Broodingly, Julie plucked strings from the fringe at the bottom of her pants' legs.

“Who would kill a kid like that?” said Steven, sounding almost jealous.

In fact, in the days that followed he did become jealous, we all did, while at the same time we were appalled in a keyed-up, restless sort of way. We tried to feel afraid because we recognized that fear was the expected response and not to have it signified something uneasy about ourselves; but fear wasn't really a part of those first days. We were exhilarated. Nothing so enormous and glittering as a murder had ever happened to us before. Its darkness was the darkness of our favorite stories, the ones we whispered at slumber parties and in the school bathrooms. We were jealous of Boyd Ellison not because he had been killed—of course not that, we had never felt so alive ourselves—but because he had encountered something legendary, and was fast becoming so himself.

“If I'd been Boyd and that guy came up to me,” Steven began saying at lunch or dinner. And he would outline various responses,
from clever methods of distraction to exactly placed uppercuts.

“I would have kicked him in the balls,” said Julie one night.

“Kneed him in the groin,” corrected my mother, spooning brussels sprouts onto each of our plates.

Steven said: “If I'd been Boyd, I'd have taken that rock …” And he picked up his spoon and beat at a brussels sprout until it jumped off his plate.

“Oh sure,” said Julie. “Like the guy would have handed it to you.”

“No, no like this. First I would punch his nose.” Steven bunched his fist. “And get him to drop the rock. Then I would whip around behind him and kick in his knees.”

My mother looked up sharply. “Don't be an idiot,” she said. “You have no idea what you would do.” When Steven opened his mouth, she put her hand down on the table. “I don't want to hear it. Nobody is a hero ahead of time.”

What I remember most about the theories that circulated through the neighborhood that first day was not their wildness or their exaggerations. What I remember most is that no one really seemed surprised by any of them. All that long, muggy afternoon, I sat on the porch picking at the rim of my plaster cast, listening to the opinions of our neighbors.

“I'll wager it's a black,” cherubic old Mr. Morris told Mrs. Lauder, as he stood stiffly in her driveway gripping a pair of
hedge clippers. Mr. Morris had been in the British army and had never quite lost the habit of standing at attention, even though he was past eighty and had arthritis.

“Well, it could be anybody,” Mrs. Lauder began, then stopped and put a puffy hand to her forehead.

“I'll wager it's one of those Panther people,” said Mr. Morris, not listening. “When they find him I'll wager his record is two miles long.”

While my mother was taking a phone break with me on the porch, little Mrs. Sperling came over in a flowered house-dress, carrying enormous Baby Cameron, who had the hiccups. Mrs. Sperling had lived on our street only since November and in the beginning she was so lonely at home by herself with her gigantic child that she had braved my mother's reserve, trotting over uninvited every afternoon to ask questions about baby fevers and diaper rash and germs, which my mother answered as best she could, and the two of them had become almost friends. Lately Mrs. Sperling seemed to be getting her advice from Mrs. Lauder.

“Hi there, Marsha,” she said cheerfully. Then she recollected herself and turned to my mother to confide in a whispery voice: “Oh Lois. That boy died in his mother's arms. I
think
that's what I heard.”

She shivered and Baby Cameron hiccuped milky drool over her bare arm. “Oh honey.
Look
at you.
What
a mess.” She handed the baby to my mother and pulled a diaper out of her dress pocket to swab at herself. When she had slung the diaper
over her shoulder and held her arms out for the baby again, she added, “His mother works, you know. I know this is wrong, but I can't help it—I can't help thinking this is what happens when women don't stay
home
. All that women's lib stuff—doesn't it make you kind of, I don't know,
sick
sometimes? Leaving kids home alone, going off to find yourself.” An uncertain expression of disgust wavered across her round face. She brushed a strand of hair away from her forehead. “I mean, there's a
limit
, isn't there?”

“Maybe his mother was home.”

“I heard she wasn't,” said Mrs. Sperling stubbornly. “I heard she was a receptionist.”

“Well, Dolly, then maybe she had to work,” said my mother, opening and closing her mouth very precisely. “Maybe his mother did everything she could for him and it still wasn't enough.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Sperling.

“It's just that it may be more complicated than you think.”

Mrs. Sperling frowned down at Baby Cameron's crumpled face, awaiting another hiccup. When it came, she said, “I see what you mean, Lois. It's
awful
. Poor woman.” And her brown eyes welled up. She blinked at the baby for a long moment, then she apologized and told my mother she had never felt so afraid in her life.

By the time Mr. Green returned home that night and parked his usual six inches from the drainpipe, we'd heard that officers from the Montgomery County Police Department
had used bright yellow tape to rope off the place where Boyd's body was found, and that crowds of people were being ordered away from the back section of the mall's parking lot.

Two police detectives had already visited every house on our street, asking whether anyone had noticed anything unusual the day before. No one had, although Mrs. Morris said she felt all day “that something was wrong.”

“I had the most awful feeling,” she told Mrs. Lauder. “I thought perhaps it was a gas leak in my house. It gave me such a headache.”

My mother was so ingratiating to the big-chinned detective who came to our door that she must have seemed unusual enough all by herself. “Come right on in, Officer. Can I get you a glass of water or a Coke? It's so hot out there.”

When he asked if we had seen any strangers on the street in the last twenty-four hours, she made an unconvincing show of turning to consult me, waiting for me to shake my head, then turning back to the detective to announce that neither of us had seen anyone. She worked up the same high-pitched chattiness she often used with the neighbors, trying to force the detective to sit down in one of the director's chairs, asking questions about his job until his long dark face seemed to flatten into a silent page on which all sorts of terrifying observations were being recorded. He had a Baltimore accent and said “youse” instead of “you.” His name was Detective Robert Small, which I remember thinking was funny because he was so tall that he had to stoop as he came through the door.

Once or twice he jotted something down on a palm-sized pad of paper. “Hear anything like a scream?” he asked. “Who lives next door?” Finally, as he was pushing open the screen door, he told us politely to “keep a careful lookout,” and said we should call him right away if we remembered something that might be helpful.

“Watch yourself,” he said to me, just before he walked down our front steps. And I felt that he was speaking to me as a suspect, someone who might make a wrong move and betray herself, and not as a child who was at risk.

Watch yourself
: it's advice I have taken to heart. My husband often accuses me of being too fearful, of thinking too much about the calamities that could befall us. I used to defend myself by arguing that I have a good imagination, which allows me to envision calamity in great detail. But the truth is, I watch myself because I can never be sure I won't do something calamitous myself. “I am
careful
,” I correct him.