Murder Among Children (12 page)

“God, yes. Talk about idiocy. He simply turned the fuzz right back at me, got me thirty days at Newgate. Because of that car of his.” He had some more Beefeater and Schweppes. “My analyst tells me I’m glad Terry’s dead. Do you suppose he’s right?”

“I really don’t know,” I said. “Can you think of anybody else who might be glad he’s dead?”

“God, no. Terry was one of your easy assimilators, everybody loved him. Hello there, Terry! Good old Terry! Long time no see, Terry! Made out with the women like a bandit. That was another thing. God, when I think how many rotten science-fiction movies I saw on Forty-second Street. We had a system, when the chain lock was on, it meant there was a girl in the place, the other guy had to go away for a while. Terry
always
had that damn chain up. You know how often I did?” He waited till I shook my head, then held up one triumphant finger, saying, “Once! And that was a damned fluke. A damned poor fluke, too, if you want to know.”

He pulled again at his drink, said, “Of course, all that’s changed now. You know how it is, some people blossom no matter what, but some need success, money, some sort of external symbol of value to build their self-esteem. That was me, all right. Once I got into communications, began to pull in the bread, it was a brand-new Claude. Two years ago, Mitch, I wouldn’t have walked into a place like this in threads like these for all the tea in Berkeley. Now look at me.”

“Success does make a difference,” I agreed. I assumed it did, because I knew very well that failure did.

He looked at his watch. “She’s always late,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind, Mitch, I’m doubling up, got a young lady meeting me here. Supposed to be here at one-thirty. Late, naturally.”

I said, “Of course, you know I’m coming around because we don’t think Robin killed Wilford.”

“I figured that,” he said. “Still, you know the old saying, hell hath no fury, and so on.” He drained his glass, made his wig-wag signal to the barman again.

“We don’t think Robin was a woman scorned,” I said.

He looked at me blankly. “What say?”

“What you said. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. We don’t think that’s the way it happened.”

“Well, sure. You wouldn’t, naturally. But who knows, you could be right. I only met the girl two, three times, but she didn’t strike me as the violent type. You know what I mean? Very mousy little girl.”

“If Robin didn’t kill him,” I said, “somebody else must have.”

“A is not B,” he said, and nodded. “That’s logic.” Then, as his fresh drink arrived, “Thanks, sweets.”

I said, “Can you think of anyone who might want to kill Terry Wilford?”

“A year and a half ago,” he said, lifting his glass, “
I
wanted to. That’s the only one I know. Mud in your eye.”

As he drank I said, “What about Irene Boles?”

He finished swallowing, frowned, said, “Who?”

“The girl who was killed with him.”

“Oh, the hooker! God, wasn’t that a touch? Pure Dostoevski.”

“Did you know her?”

“Who, me? No, she must have been new on the scene. Linda, love!”

This last was shouted past me. I turned and saw a startlingly beautiful blond young woman coming through the tables toward us. She carried a straw purse that kept bumping into people, she was dressed violently in pink, and she too was talking a mile a minute even though she was too far away to be heard.

She arrived at the table saying, “…how they are. Just beastly, love bun. I could have been there another two
hours
if I hadn’t put my foot down. Hel-lo, sweetie.”

She dipped for a kiss on the cheek and turned sea-blue eyes on me as Bodkin said, “Linda, Mitch. We’ve been engaged in melodrama.”

“How do you do,” I said.

“Frazzled,” she said, settling into the chair to my right. To Bodkin she said, “Get me a drink, love, before all my seams come undone.”

“No sooner said,” Bodkin told her, and began waving his arms vigorously at the bartender.

I said, “I’ll put in the order for you on my way out.”

His arms still in midair, as though I was holding him up, Bodkin looked at me and said, “We’re done?”

“Unless you can think of something else, yes.”

He lowered his arms. “Not a thing,” he said. “I haven’t seen any of those people in a lifetime, Mitch. God, when I think who I was then.” He reached out and squeezed the girl’s hand, saying to her, “You couldn’t possibly believe it, darling.”

I said, “What’s the lady drinking?”

She answered for herself: “Beefeater and Schweppes. And thank you so much.”

“Not at all. Nice to have met you.”

I got to my feet, and Bodkin said, “Don’t worry about that beer of yours, Mitch, it’s on my tab.”

I doubted he had a tab, since credit in bars is illegal in New York, but I let him have the gesture, which I knew he was making for the sake of the girl. I thanked him for both the beer and his time, went over to the bar to order the drink, and went outside to a world that now seemed twice as hot and twice as humid and twice as stuffy as before.

I hailed a cab—not air-conditioned—and on the way downtown I thought about Bodkin and decided he could not have had anything to do with the murders. Whatever frustration or hatred he had once felt for Terry Wilford was well under control by now. It was obviously true that he was carving out some sort of successful career for himself, and that success had changed him drastically from the mooch who had lived with Wilford.

I wondered what he did for a living. In all the times he’d mentioned his being “in communications,” he hadn’t managed once to communicate to me what his job was, or even what specific area he worked in. Was he in advertising? In television? Publishing? Public relations? Bell Telephone? Or did it no longer matter, did they all blend into one another after a while, so that the bright young men coming along these days were merely “in communications”?

The world is not one world, but a hundred thousand worlds, overlapping and yet almost entirely sealed off from one another. Their perimeters are age or occupation or home address or any one of half a dozen other factors. I was someone who had been thrust out of his world to exist in limbo, and now in the search for Terry Wilford’s murderer I was peeking and poking into worlds foreign to me, trying to understand their customs and languages, wondering where in these alien landscapes I would find the one with the blood-red hands.

Never in my life was I more conscious of these separate foreign worlds than in the twenty-five-minute cab ride from the Newfoundland Donkey to Thing East.

I
EXPERIENCED A STRONG
sensation of
déjà vu
upon entering Thing East, and for just a second I felt as though I’d been given another chance; George Padbury would be up front, Robin and Terry would be upstairs, and all I had to do was turn around at once, leave, take the subway back to Queens, and none of this would have happened.

The appearance of the place helped compound this irrational feeling. The same bright heat outside, the same dim coolness inside, the same first impression of emptiness, and the same sudden movement from the far right corner of the room.

Except that this time it was Hulmer, coming out of the kitchen. He saw me and called, “Mr. Tobin! Come on back.”

I walked down amid the tables to him. “Hello, Hulmer. I came to see the upstairs.”

“Abe called, said you’d be coming by.”

We stepped through into the kitchen and Vicki was there, stacking clean plates. We exchanged hellos, and Hulmer said, “You want me to come up with you? Show you where everything was.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

Vicki said, “Want some iced tea? Just made fresh.”

“Thank you, yes. With lemon, if you have it.”

“Sure thing.” Handing me the glass, she said, “The heat’s terrible today, isn’t it?”

“It’s not so bad in here.”

Hulmer said, “Wait till you get upstairs.”

I could feel what he meant the minute he opened the door; a wave of hot dry attic-like heat poured out, enveloping us.

Hulmer led the way, saying over his shoulder, “Better watch your step, there isn’t much light.”

No, there wasn’t. I followed him up the stairs—narrow, with gray walls on both sides—into dark gloomy heat. The perspiration that Claude Bodkin had warned me about poured from me.

At the head of the stairs the darkness was almost complete. Hulmer bent and lit a small shadeless table lamp sitting on the floor against the right-hand wall. “There isn’t any electricity on up here,” he explained. “Terry ran extension cords up from downstairs.”

We were in a corridor running the length of the building, with boarded-up windows at both ends. Thin slivers of sunlight could be seen between the boards. With the lamp on, I could see the extension cords coming up the edge of the stairs and trailing away along the corridor.

For some reason I’d expected to find rubble up here, peeling plaster and scruffy stacks of old newspaper, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was merely an empty building, under a layer of gray dust. The corridor was lined with wooden doors, all shut.

“Terry used the rooms along the right side,” Hulmer told me. “Over this way.”

He pushed open the first door on the right, and clear sunlight gleamed ahead of us. The room we entered was a long rectangle, with two windows at the end to our right. These had been boarded up, but the boards had been knocked loose, some entirely gone now and the others canted to the side, so that the early afternoon sun, still high in the sky, angled its light in to bounce off the wood floor and flood the room with a golden radiance. There was less dust in here, but the room didn’t so much give an impression of having been lived in as of having been camped in.

The first thing I noticed was the walls, or that is to say the objects hung on the walls. Directly opposite the doorway was a large square abstract painting of the Jackson Pollock dribble school, done in various shades of dark blue-gray, with a streak of orange in the lower left corner. To the right of this was a
Times Magazine
cover showing student rioters at a sit-in at a western university. Beyond that was a large board covered with a montage of newspaper headlines, followed by a literal painting of a stop sign. In the opposite direction from the central blue-gray painting were a pair of crossed swords, a charcoal sketch of a girl who might have been Robin, and a huge photo of W. C. Fields.

The other walls were covered in much the same varied way, so that the total effect was of being in some avant-garde movie-house lobby after a bombing. I say after a bombing because of the furniture, or lack of furniture, which completed the place. There were two kitchen chairs to the right, a small bookcase containing phonograph components and a few magazines to the left, and a small round table draped with sweaters and slacks across the way.

Hulmer pointed to a conspicuously empty area in the far right corner and said, “That’s where the bed was.”

“Where the bodies were found?”

“Right. It wasn’t really a bed, Terry didn’t have nothing but a double-bed mattress. The cops took it away. You can see the bloodstains on the walls over there, though. And on the floor.”

Now that he pointed them out I could see them, small brown dots spattered on the two walls at that corner, other dots on the floor, obscured by dust and sunlight. There had been chalk marks on the floor, too, but they were almost completely rubbed away, worn away, so that you could no longer see for sure where the bodies had lain.

I said, “Both killings took place in this room, is that the theory?”

“That’s what it said in the papers.”

There was a door to the left. Nodding to it, I said, “Where does that go?”

“Just another room. And then the bathroom beyond that. Come on.”

He pushed open the door, into what had been a completely lightless room. The blackness in there was only emphasized by the long slender rectangle of pale light stretching across the floor now from the doorway. All I could see was that bit of blank empty floor.

Hulmer said, “Just a second.” Going inside, stooping, feeling around at floor-level to the left of the doorway, he finally switched on another shadeless table lamp and the room leaped into existence. Windowless, with doors in three walls, it was empty in the middle and on the left, piled high with junk on the right. Cartons, spindly chairs, rolled-up rugs, all the detritus of life that has moved on.

Hulmer’s shoes echoed on the floor as he crossed the room toward the door on the opposite side, saying, “The bathroom’s over here. That’s the one thing Terry had up here was water. No gas, no electricity, but anyway water.”

“Hold on a second,” I said, and knelt to study the floor at the threshold. But there were no brown dots, no streaks, nothing to interrupt the thin gray topsoil of dust.

I got to my feet, brushing off my knees, and followed Hulmer across the room. Either it was cooler in here, in the windowless center of the house, or I was just getting more used to the heat up here.

The bathroom was a surprise, modern and spacious and complete. The illumination again came from an old table lamp without a shade, but at least this time it wasn’t throwing its stark light upward from floor-level. The lamp was on the formica counter beside the sink. Its light shone on beige tile walls, white tile floor, beige bathtub with frosted-glass shower doors, beige toilet and sink, a large double medicine chest with mirrors and chrome framing, and a white formica counter top with silver specks in it.

Hulmer said, “Not bad, huh? Kind of motel modern, but what the hell. Better than what
I
got.”

“Very good,” I said. I went over and slid open one of the bathtub doors. The tub gleamed in the light. Nonskid strips had been glued to the bottom in wavy lines. The faucet was dripping, very slowly.

Hulmer said, “What’s that?”

“Faucet’s dripping.”

“It is? Never did before.”

I reached in and tried the faucets and the cold water was slightly on. I shut it and the dripping stopped.

“All this modern stuff goes,” Hulmer was saying. “But it was great to come up here and take a shower. You take a look in the closet there, you’ll see stuff of mine, Abe’s, George’s, everybody’s.”