Murder Among Children (16 page)

“My house.”

The mother was looking more and more distraught, and now she broke in, saying, “Robin, darling, are you tired? Should you rest? We can come back some other—”

“No, really,” Robin said. “I want to know about this.” Looking at me, she said, “I don’t really know who you are. You do look familiar, but I don’t remember ever seeing you before in my life.”

Mrs. Kennely, her voice edging toward shrillness, said, “He’s your cousin, dear. Your cousin Mitchell Tobin. You remember, the man who used to be a policeman.”

I said, “You wanted me to talk to Donlon.”

“Who?”

I felt a sudden chill. I said, “You don’t remember Donlon either?”

Flustered, frightened, still trying to maintain the brave front for her mother’s sake, Robin looked back and forth at the two of us, a scared smile on her face, and said, “What’s the matter with me? Do I have amnesia? I remember
you,
Mama. I remember everybody. It’s just that morning.”

“And me,” I said. “And Donlon. Why do you suppose you can’t remember either of us? Is it because we’re both policemen?”

“Are you a policeman?”

“I used to be. Do you know the name Irene Boles?”

“Of course. That’s the girl they say I killed.”

“Do you remember what she looked like?”

She shook her head.

I said, “Robin, do you think you killed them?”

Her eyes widened, the silence stretched between us, and abruptly she began to cry. She half staggered backward, her hands to her face, until she bumped into the bed, and then sat heavily and turned her face away. Her weeping sounded like metal ripping.

Mrs. Kennely was staring at me, wide-eyed, on the verge of some indignant foolishness. I made a hand motion at her which I hoped she would interpret as I-know-what-I’m-doing, and she subsided a little, watching her daughter worriedly, casting apprehensive glances at me.

I let the girl cry until the first violence of it was over and she would be able to listen to me, and then I went and sat beside her on the bed and said, “You didn’t do it. I know that for sure.”

She had lowered her hands from her face, but she made no response to me. She kept turned away, head bowed. Still, I felt that she was listening. I said, “The police don’t know it yet, but they soon will.”

In a very small voice she said, “I was up there.”

“Yes. And because you’d gone into shock the murderer decided to let you live and take the blame for his crime. But it won’t happen that way.”

She said something too low for me to hear.

“What?”

“He said, ‘Kill me.’”

“Who did?”

“The red man.”

Mrs. Kennely burst in with “Mitch, leave the child alone! Can’t you see she’s—”

I waved violently at her to shut up, but it was too late. Robin had turned to face us, looking only pale and weak, once again bravely smiling. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I just have to cry sometimes.”

I said, “What else did the red man say?”

She looked at me without comprehension. “What?”

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.

H
ULMER 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.

S
USAN 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.