A Crime in the Neighborhood (20 page)

Sitting on the porch love seat, notebook across my knees, I could picture his cookout as if it had already occurred: the cocktail napkins he would have bought weeks ahead of time, printed coyly with a martini glass or a smiling drunk wearing a lampshade on his head; the red-checked paper tablecloth; the bubbled-glass candle holders. I envisioned him pushing his cart up to the Safeway check-out counter, unloading paper plates, plastic forks and knives, plastic-wrapped packages of hot dogs and hamburgers, buns, bottles of Coke, cartons of ice cream.

Mr. Green stood up from poking around his barbecue pit, dusting bits of grass off his knees. Then he walked over to the Chiltons' abandoned picnic table, which he had repaired so that it stood up straight again. For a few minutes he considered the table, resting his hands on his hips. Eventually he turned to go back inside his house, but not before he had glanced in the direction of our porch. In the evening light he
couldn't have made out who was sitting there, but he lifted his hand anyway and gave a little wave.

The phone rang while my mother was folding sheets and towels in the basement. Even before I picked up the receiver, I knew it was my father.

By now he would have heard, he would know what had happened while he was away. The newspapers here had been full of Boyd Ellison's murder; surely a newspaper in Nova Scotia would have mentioned it. One day he must have stepped into a pharmacy for a pack of gum and there it was, right on the front page:
CHILD MURDERED IN QUIET MARYLAND NEIGHBORHOOD
.

“Hello?” I said, almost shaking.

“Marsha?”

It took me a moment to recognize Mrs. Lauder's voice. “Is your mama there?”

My mother had appeared beside me; I'd heard her run up the basement stairs as soon as the phone began to ring. Now she pried the receiver out of my hand.

“Yes?” she said, too casually. “Oh. Oh hello, Marie.”

Then she said: “I'm sorry. Am I going where?” She exhaled slowly, turning away from me toward the sink, where she could look at her reflection in the black window. “Yes, we got one.”

After another pause she said, “I haven't decided yet.”

She picked up a dish towel and pressed it against her chest. Even with her back turned toward me, I could hear Mrs. Lauder's voice at the other end of the line. I heard the words “foolish” and “whole neighborhood” quite clearly.

“I guess he thought it was something he could do,” my mother said finally, cheeks flushing. She had turned around to face me again so that she could snap her fingers and point at the door. When I refused to move away from the refrigerator, she glared and shook her head. “You told him about the Chiltons inviting neighbors over. Oh really, Marie. He probably didn't think about it being too soon—”

Here Mrs. Lauder must have cut her off because my mother stopped speaking and ducked her head. After a while she said stiffly, “I'm sure he didn't mean any harm.”

Downstairs, the washing machine chugged into a new phase of its cycle; water swished and the pipes rattled. Outside, a car rushed past our house, honking its horn.

“All right,” she said, staring down at the dish towel she was still clutching. “I will. Thanks for calling.” Across the street the Morrises' dogs began barking, adding to the chorus of banging pipes and the chuntering washer and the humming refrigerator and the slow ticking of the sunburst wall clock by the door.

My mother hung up the phone. “Don't speak to me right now.”

“I wasn't going to,” I said sulkily.

“Thank you.” She draped the dish towel back over the rod
by the sink. Then she pulled an open bottle of wine from the refrigerator and poured herself a full glass.

She carried the glass into the living room and switched on the news. Walter Cronkite's mustached face filled the screen; my mother once told me she wished she could have had Walter Cronkite as her father. Every evening she watched Walter Cronkite as he delivered the CBS evening news, his eyes filled with unobtrusive compassion for the world's disasters. “What a nice man,” she sometimes remarked. “You can tell he really cares about what's happening to this country.”

Tonight Walter Cronkite informed us that the inquiry surrounding the “Watergate break-in” was “widening.” He seemed sorry to announce this, gazing straight into the camera, straight into our living room, his deep voice deepening seriously as though he knew more than he thought wise to reveal.

“Of course it's widening,” said my mother to the TV set.

After the national news, my mother switched to a local news station. The bald anchorman—whose voice was much higher than Walter Cronkite's, and therefore seemed less compassionate—described a shooting in Baltimore, but had nothing to tell us about our own murder. That's how I'd come to think of it, as “our” murder, the way you might think of a local football team as “our” team or a neighborhood celebrity as “our” So-and-so. In fact, the anchorman didn't mention our murder once, which surprised me, as I had difficulty believing that anything else could be news.

Right after breakfast the next morning a detective in a blue sports coat and brown pants from the Montgomery County Police Department knocked on our screen door. He lifted up his badge and said he had a few more questions to ask us, if my mother wouldn't mind.

A blue jay screamed from the crab apple tree. It was another hot, windless morning, one of those mornings when the air is thick with the soap-sweet smell of laundry, and leaves hang off the trees like damp towels.

My mother opened the door and offered the detective one of the director's chairs, then she pulled out one for herself. It took me less than a moment to recognize Detective Small, the same rawboned, boot-faced detective who'd questioned us before.

“I'd like you to go inside, Marsha,” my mother said, smoothing her skirt tight over her knees as the detective sat down. “Right this minute, please.”

“Actually ma'am, if you don't mind, I'd prefer it if the little
girl stayed.” Detective Small didn't smile, but he gave me an attentive squint.

“Oh?” said my mother, pretending not very persuasively to laugh.

“Well, you know children sometimes hear things that adults don't.”

Just like dogs, I told myself, although at the same instant I gripped my notebook fiercely at the thought of being questioned by a detective (“an officer of the law,” I began to call him).

And who would have been a better source than I? Hadn't I saved every newspaper clipping about the murder? Didn't I have an entire notebook filled with what the neighbors had said, and who had thought what, and why they thought it? Wasn't I someone who had known the boy himself?

By this time Boyd Ellison's house had become part of my regular beat, by which I mean that I passed it three or four times a week as I swung around the neighborhood on my crutches, always forcing myself to wait a decent interval before circling back to swing past it again. As much as I wanted to—as much as I was drawn to—I could never bring myself to stare directly at the house as I went by. It was too ordinary looking. So instead I flung myself forward on my crutches, relying on glimpses I caught out of the corner of my eye. Snatches of brick, a pane of glass reflecting the sun, a rolled newspaper on the front steps.

But the day before, I'd invited Luann to come along with
me while she was sitting outside in her yard with Roy and Tiffany. She stood up wordlessly and followed, not even glancing over her shoulder. I pumped my crutches along the pavement, puffing in the heat, humming a TV jingle with exaggerated nonchalance. Luann wandered behind me, yellow hair wisping against her neck, eyes fixed on her crayoned Mary Janes. But when we reached the Ellisons' house, she lifted her head and peered at the house's front windows. While I pushed furiously ahead on the sidewalk, she kept up a measured pace behind me and stared.

It was only when we got back to my porch steps and collapsed under the wisteria vine that I could ask: “What did you see?”

She shrugged and said that a thin, dark-haired woman had opened the door and stood looking into the street.

“Did she look sad?” I demanded.

Luann shrugged again.

“What was she wearing?”

“A dress.”

“Was it black?” I said after a moment.

“I am trying to help solve this crime,” I told her. Luann admitted that she had noticed a man's furled black umbrella on the Ellisons' front stoop, and that all the upstairs window blinds were pulled down.

“Look at this.” I settled one elbow on the step behind me and riffled the pages of my notebook. “Somewhere in here,” I said, tapping a page, “somewhere in all this, is probably a clue.
That's what we're doing when we go by their house. We're looking for clues. You have to notice everything if you're going to see anything important.”

She nodded, rubbing absently at a streak of dirt on her knee. Across the street, the Jack Russell terriers began howling and scratching inside the Morrises' front door as the mailman turned up their front walk. They must have woken Baby Cameron next door because he started to scream from an upstairs window.

At last Luann glanced up from her knee. “My dad says it's a pervert who killed him.”

“I know
that
,” I told her. “Everyone knows
that
. You probably don't even know what it means.”

“I know.” She looked offended.

“Him.” I jerked my thumb in the direction of Mr. Green's empty driveway. “
He's
a pervert.”

Luann glanced over at Mr. Green's house, at his trim azaleas and the marigolds blooming by his front steps.

“He is,” I said, my voice rising. “I've got pages here. He hides in the bushes. I've seen him. He hides in the bushes, sometimes right by the Ellisons' house. I've seen him.”

By this time I didn't care what I was saying anymore, only that Luann was looking at me with a rapt expression. “Didn't you see something rustling there today, something in the bushes right by their house?”

“A cat?” breathed Luann.

“No,” I said, exultant now. “It was him.”

Luann stared. After a moment she went back to rubbing her knee, making little sighing sounds out of the corner of her mouth. “My dad says it don't help to catch anybody anymore,” she said finally. “He says they's just somebody else there waiting to do the same thing.”

A shaft of sunlight through the poplar leaves had pooled onto the tops of our heads. I reached up and felt my hair and the heat seeping into my scalp. It seemed to take hours for the mailman over at the Sperlings' to cross the street and stride up our front walk with a sheaf of magazines for my mother. He said hello to us as he stuffed them into our mailbox, dark moons of sweat under each of his arms.

“Go home,” I told Luann when the mailman had reached the sidewalk again. “Why don't you just go home.”

She stood up and began a kind of shuffle-hop across our lawn back toward her house. It was only as she reached her driveway that I realized she was mimicking the way I moved on my crutches. Her shoulders were humped up close to her ears and she walked with a peculiar draggy limp, like a person trying to walk with someone else hanging onto her leg.

When she climbed up her own front steps she turned around and grinned, then she fisted both hands into binoculars and trained them on me.

“You won't mind if I need to ask you a few questions?” said the detective. I shook my head.

He clicked his ballpoint pen several times over his notepad. In spite of the heat he looked cool, even though his forehead was moist. My mother smiled nervously. He gazed at her for a moment or two, perhaps waiting to see how nervous she became, before he started his questions. How long had she lived here? Was she friendly with her neighbors? Had she known the dead boy?

Yes
, she answered to everything, but I could tell by the way her chin jutted that she was feeling untruthful. She acted the same way in department stores whenever an alarm bell went off, as if she was afraid that she was the one who had stolen something. It wasn't long before she began answering questions that hadn't been asked.

“Boyd—the child who—he once came here to a Cub Scout meeting. My son—”

Detective Small nodded, neither encouraging her to go on nor discouraging her from continuing until my mother had told him everything she could remember about Boyd Ellison, including Steven's unproven accusation that Boyd had stolen money from the Cub Scouts' paper drive.

But soon it was clear that he was mostly interested in what she knew about Mr. Green. “He's new around here, isn't he? Lives alone? Not many visitors? Would you say he was the social type or kind of secretive?”

“I'd say,” said my mother, after a pause, “I'd say that he tries to be a good neighbor.”

“I understand he's having some sort of party?”

“A cookout. He's been planning it for some time. Three weeks maybe? Before any of this happened.”

Detective Small's ears protruded like doorknobs from his narrow head. The morning light behind him glowed red through his earlobes, which had the effect of making him look electrified. To intensify this impression, his short black hair stuck straight up from his forehead, and his heavy eyebrows had a way of shooting upward as he listened, as if even insignificant replies to his questions administered a mild jolt.

“So how long ago did Mr. Alden Green move in? Any family you know of? Where did he live before?”

“Look, I want to help,” my mother said. “But I don't have anything to tell you.” She sat back in her chair, dropping the hand that had been hovering around her lip. The blue jay screamed again. “Mr. Green seems like a very nice man,” she added, “but I hardly know him.”

Detective Small raised his eyebrows in either disbelief or resignation.