Murder Among Children (23 page)

The impression I got was that he must be very near the end of his half-year. At one point he said, “I do like a chance to chat with new people when they first come here. I’m an old settler here, you might say, and I can answer a lot of questions that Doctor Cameron might be too busy for.”

Would a man like Dewey, nearing the end of his six months, become jealous of those who would still be here after he was gone? And would he try to punish them for being where he could no longer be? I had no idea how compelling such a motive might seem to a man like Dewey, which hampered me very badly. The motive almost necessarily had to be an irrational one—the idea of punishment of some kind kept circling in my head—and those are by far the hardest to deduce.

When breakfast was done, Dewey assured me he’d take care of the dishes, and I had no choice but to leave them to him. If I’d had the use of both hands I would have insisted on helping, but as it was there wasn’t much useful I could do in a kitchen. He offered to show me the way to the stairs, but I said I preferred to try for them on my own, besides which I was interested in just strolling around the place for a while. When I left, he was starting to wash the dishes. “See you around,” I said.

“I’ll be here,” he said, over his shoulder.

I left the kitchen and strolled a while, following corridors this way and that, occasionally coming to dead ends, but usually finding that corridors led eventually to other corridors. After a while, I saw that the layout was not as complex as it appeared, that there really weren’t that many corridors, it was just that they crossed one another so much. This proliferation of junctions had the dual effect of wasting a great deal of interior space and at the same time creating a lot of unnecessary confusion.

I found the front stairs after a while, a broad open staircase with curving banisters. It seemed overly grandiose, not for the house but for its placement. It came down to enter broadside a fairly narrow corridor, with a blank wall facing it on the other side. I frowned over this for a while, and then noticed that this section of wall was slightly different from the wall farther on, mostly in that the baseboard was not quite so tall or complex. The impression I had was that some larger space had originally existed here, and a revamping of the interior had done away with the large space while leaving the heavy staircase that emptied into it. Perhaps there’d originally been a front entrance, later superseded by the present entrance at the side. If so, there should be some indication on the outside, and later on, in daylight, I would look it over.

I continued to stroll around, the corridors all being fully lit, possibly for the reassurance of the residents, and the third time I came to the broad front staircase I decided I’d done the first floor enough for this time, and I went upstairs.

It had been my intention to wander around the second floor as I had wandered around the first, but by the time I reached the head of the stairs I’d changed my mind. I’d been feeling pretty good ever since breakfast, the stroll up and down the corridors not having taxed my strength in any appreciable way, but climbing a flight of stairs quickly reminded me that I was not in the best of physical condition. I reached the second floor winded and dizzy, the headache returning, and a great heavy weariness settling throughout my body. The only sensible thing for me to do right now was go straight back to my room and rest for an hour or so, and I knew it.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that easily done. This was the first time I’d come upstairs via the front staircase, and I had no idea where my room was from here. The only thing to do was start walking and hope that sooner or later I would stumble into familiar territory.

And so I did, after a fairly short walk. A closed door looked familiar, and when I opened it the back staircase was there, just as I’d suspected. From here, I knew my way home, and two minutes later I was safely again in my room, lying down on my bed, very nearly smiling from the pure physical pleasure of relaxation.

Not that I was tired. How could I be tired, after sixteen hours sleep? It wasn’t yet six-thirty, I’d been awake less than two hours. But I was weak, and I could spend this rest period thinking about the people I’d met so far and trying to comprehend the kind of motive that would lead one of the residents of this building to savagely and randomly injure his fellows.

Five minutes later I was asleep.

I
HAD FIRST MET DOCTOR FREDRIC
Cameron five days before my arrival at The Midway, on Wednesday the eighteenth of June. It was a pleasantly sunny day, not too hot, not yet summer-muggy, and I had worked three leisurely hours on the wall in the morning. Kate first mentioned him during lunch, saying, “Mitch, there’s a man coming to see you this afternoon.”

I looked at her with mistrust. She can’t help wanting to push me back among the living, and I have to be always on my guard against her. I said, “What man?”

“He wants you to do a job for him. Mitch,” she said quickly, before I could make any comment of my own, “Marty Kengelberg sent him to you. It’s something you could do, and we could use the money.”

Marty Kengelberg is an old friend of mine from the happy days. Twice in the two years since I’d been kicked off the force I’d reluctantly agreed to take on jobs suitable to an ex-cop—an ex-cop who’d been booted out not for dishonesty but for dereliction of duty—taking them mostly because the family needed the money and I don’t have a job these days, and since the second one Marty has come around two or three times to suggest that I put in an application downtown for a private detective’s license. He doesn’t understand that I have left more than the New York Police Department. Kate does, but wants to bring me back.

So here they were together, Marty and Kate, urging some new job on me, Marty out of old friendship and the mistaken idea that I really did want to work, Kate in hopes that some job like this would so distract my mind that a magical cure would take place and all painful paralyzing memories would disappear forever from my brain. It won’t happen, of course, partly because that isn’t the way minds work, and partly because I really don’t feel I have the right not to feel guilty about what I did.

But nevertheless the man was coming. “He’ll be here at two o’clock,” Kate said. “I promised you’d listen to him, but I told him you might say no.”

“It’s a nice day,” I said. “I was going to work on my wall this afternoon.”

“He won’t keep you long,” she promised. “And he told me something about the problem, Mitch, and it does sound interesting.” She said that so hopefully, looking at me with such open yearning for some sort of lively response from me, that it was impossible to refuse her.

So I saw Doctor Fredric Cameron when he arrived at two o’clock, and when it turned out he was a psychiatrist I felt one instant of rage and betrayal, thinking that there was no real job after all, that Kate had just decided to sneak some psychiatric assistance up on my blind side.

But she hadn’t. She wouldn’t, not Kate. Doctor Cameron did have a real problem, and any problems of mine didn’t interest him.

He wasn’t my idea of what a psychiatrist should look like, he had more the look of a well-fed businessman. Gray suit, quiet tie, heavy face, thinning and graying hair, the total effect more that of a Kiwanis Club booster than the founder of a place like The Midway.

“The Midway,” he told me, “is a halfway house for former mental patients. Do you know anything about the halfway house concept?” I didn’t, so he said, “Halfway houses are places for people returning to society but unable or unwilling to make the plunge all at once. There are halfway houses for ex-drug addicts, former convicts, I understand there’s even one in Florida for ex-priests. The concept is that the inhabitants of a halfway house are free to come and go as they please, but are still in a semi-protected environment, and living among other people with similar problems and a shared understanding.” He took a pipe from his side jacket pocket, but didn’t light it. He just sat there with his hand cupped around the bowl. “The idea does work,” he said.

He went on to tell me further details about The Midway, economic and social and psychiatric. It turned out he was the founder and guiding spirit of the place. He was proud of his brainchild, as he probably had every right to be, and it showed. I could see he’d be willing to go on telling me about the place all afternoon, so I finally broke in to ask, “And what’s happening there to cause the trouble?”

He frowned, not liking to be reminded of the snake in his Eden. “Someone,” he said heavily, “is injuring our residents.”

I said, “They’re doing what?”

“Causing accidents,” he said, and went on to tell me about the four accidents, the discovery of the sawn-through ladder rung and the corroboration of the tampered-with terrace.

When he was done I asked him if he’d gotten in touch with the local police, and he shook his head, saying, “No, we did not. We would prefer not to have to, which is why I’ve come to you.”

“The police would be better,” I said. At that time I still thought there might be a way to avoid this job.

There wasn’t. “The Midway,” Doctor Cameron explained, “is not in New York. We’re in a small town upstate called Kendrick. The local people disapprove of us under the best of circumstances, and the local police are not the best-trained or most modern police officers in the world. Mr. Tobin, the people at The Midway are convalescents, they’re walking wounded. Many of them are still only tentatively on the road to health. To be given the rough treatment, the suspicion and open hostility they would be bound to receive at the hands of the local police if I were to report what’s going on would be detrimental to all of them, and perhaps critically so for some.”

“As critical as a broken leg?”

“Much more so,” he said. “Bones knit much more readily than minds.”

There was no answer to that. I said, “Do they know what’s going on?”

“The residents? No, only Bob Gale and myself.” Bob Gale was the young resident who’d discovered the ladder rung and brought it to Doctor Cameron’s attention. “The atmosphere of suspicion and fear I would create if I did tell them,” the doctor said, “would once again be much worse than the possibility of a broken bone.”

I said, “You’re taking an awful chance, Doctor Cameron.”

“I’m aware of that,” he said. “That’s why I want this situation cleared up just as quickly as possible. Bob Gale brought me the ladder rung the day before yesterday. I’ve been trying to decide how best to handle the problem, and it seems to me what I need is a professional. Someone who can come to The Midway, move in as though he were simply a new resident, and try to find out who is doing all this.”

“Move in,” I repeated. “You want me to come live there.”

“For a while, yes,” he said. He didn’t seem to be hiding any secondary motives. He said, “If we’re to keep the situation a secret from the residents, there’s no other way I can think of to handle it.”

I asked him a few more questions after that, nothing significant, and then told him I would think it over and let him know. He said something about there being some urgency in hearing my answer, and I promised not to think it over too long, and he left.

Kate wanted me to do it, of course, and we both knew her reasons, but she also knew she had to have some different reason if she were going to persuade me, and she was ready. “Bill and I could go out to Hal’s on the Island,” she said. “You know Bill’s been hoping he could get away to the ocean for a while during summer vacation, and I would like it, too. We don’t mind staying here, we understand that you don’t want to leave the wall, but if you took the job you’d be going up to that place to live for a while and that would give Bill and me a chance for a real summer vacation.”

Sometimes I wish I had the courage to leave entirely. Kate would be a thousand times better off without me, and God knows so would Bill. What does a fifteen-year-old boy need with a father who just broods in the house all the time? It would lighten both their lives if I were simply to pull up stakes and go away, and there are times when I wish I could do it, but I just can’t. I’m afraid to go, and that’s the truth. If I didn’t have Kate, and Bill, and the house, and my wall, if I didn’t have these threads of my cocoon to enclose me, I doubt I would long allow me to go on living.

So Kate had chosen the perfect argument. I would be out of their lives for a month, at least.

Doctor Cameron was staying at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. I called him that evening and accepted the job, and we met in his hotel room the next day to begin the groundwork for my impersonation. We decided on a background for me that paralleled my own life without revealing me to be an ex-cop, and Doctor Cameron dictated a letter of application which I wrote and sent off to The Midway. Because the clerical staff there was composed entirely of residents—a cook, Doctor Cameron and one other psychiatrist were the only employees—I had to put in an actual letter of application. The return address was Revo Hill, not only because no one now at The Midway had ever been there, but also because an old friend of Doctor Cameron’s was on the staff there and would intercept the reply.

Doctor Cameron also gave me dossiers on the twenty-one people now living at The Midway, plus verbal descriptions of the cook, a local widow named Mrs. Garson, and the other psychiatrist, a younger man named Lorimer Fredericks.

On Saturday, Doctor Cameron returned to Kendrick, and on Monday Kate and Bill went happily off to Long Island while I boarded the train with my suitcase and came up to The Midway, where I promptly became the fifth victim of the man—or woman—I was supposed to catch.

After my induced accident and my nocturnal breakfast with Dewey and subsequent stroll around the first floor, I slept another five hours, waking up just before noon to find that someone had removed my shoes and socks and covered me with a blanket while I slept. And when I got out of bed—being much stronger this time—I found on the bureau a miniature bottle of Ballantine Scotch and a note in printed capital letters, ballpoint pen on ordinary white notepaper, saying: