He was dressed in disreputable old clothes and working in his garden when I got there. He took off canvas gloves to shake hands and said it was good to see me again. “Nothing wrong, is there, Sam? I mean, I hope you didn’t want to see me professionally, did you? If so, we’ll just forget that I retired and–”
“No, Doc, I’m feeling fine. Just want to ask some questions about a case you had once.”
He sighed. “Almost hoping you had something wrong with you. Shall we go inside to talk or would you rather go over there?” He gestured toward some garden furniture in the shade of a big oak tree. I chose the shade of the tree and we went over and made ourselves comfortable.
“Still working for the Herald, Sam?”
“Yes, but I’m on vacation this week. So what I want to ask you about is something I’m interested in personally. It–well, it could lead to a newspaper story if it breaks, but I’ll promise not to quote you or use your name if that happens.”
“Ummm, but don’t forget that a physician can’t reveal–Well, go ahead and ask your questions. I’ll have to decide whether I can answer them or not. What’s the case?”
“A girl named Elizabeth Westphal who fell out of a tree, right in this block, a neighbor of yours.”
“Yes, I remember. Armin Westphal’s kid, must have been at least ten years ago. What do you want to know about her?”
“Not the medical details. Everything but that. Family background in particular, what you know about other members of the family, in particular.”
“Good, then I won’t have to watch what I say at all. I knew the Westphals when they lived here–haven’t seen Armin very often since–but none of them were ever patients of mine. Except that time when the little girl was killed, and she was dead when I got there so there’s no medical confidence involved there; I can even talk about that.”
“All right,” I said, “let’s start with that, then. One question in particular. Did you get the impression that Armin Westphal may have thought his son deliberately pushed his sister out of that tree?”
Doc had been leaning back comfortably. He sat up straight now and stared at me. But he thought for seconds before he answered.
“No,” he said. “Good God, why would he have thought that?”
“He saw it happen. Not too good a view because there were leaves and branches in the way, so he might have thought he saw Obie–Henry–push his sister off the limb and yet not have been sure enough of what he saw to say so–even if he would have said so about his own son.”
Doc leaned back again in his chair, “It’s just barely possible, Sam, now that I think back. Armin did react to his daughter’s death in a way that was a little different from and in addition to normal grief. But I interpreted it otherwise – and I still think I was right. I thought he blamed himself and was building a guilt complex.”
“Why would he have blamed himself?”
“Two reasons. The first one, minor, his carelessness in leaving that ladder against the tree. If he hadn’t left it there the kids wouldn’t have been climbing in the tree; they couldn’t have. That’s silly, of course. But the other reason isn’t. There’s a chance, a pretty damn small one, that he did kill his daughter by picking her up and carrying her into the house. You don’t do that to someone with a broken back.”
“How small a chance, mathematically?”
“I thought it was a pretty fair chance at first. I’m afraid I almost lost my temper with him for his stupidity in moving her before I got there. But then I went out into the yard and looked over the scene of the accident and learned how it happened and I realized that it was almost impossible for her to have been alive when he reached her.”
“Why?”
“Because she’d fallen on her back on top of the fence and then had another fall of five feet to the ground. The top of the fence had broken her back; the nature of the injury showed that clearly. A broken back, though, isn’t necessarily a fatal injury; lots of people live with broken backs. But when the broken vertebra or vertebrae cut or too seriously injure the spinal cord that runs through the vertebrae, death is pretty damn quick. Now Elizabeth’s back was so badly broken–imagine falling fifteen feet and taking all of the impact diagonally across your back on the narrow top of a fence–that the chances are a thousand to one she was killed there and then. But with a back that badly broken she’d sustained an additional five-foot fall into a concrete alley. If the top of the fence hadn’t killed her there was another one chance in a thousand that the impact of the second fall, with her back already badly broken, wouldn’t have killed her. There’s your mathematical answer, incidentally; figure the permutation of two thousand-to-one chances and you get a one-in-a-million chance.”
“Did you tell Westphal that?”
“By that time my temper was gone and I went even a little farther than that to reassure him. Why give a man who’s already on the road to being neurotic something to build a guilt complex around, on a million-to-one chance that he had been guilty? I told him there was no doubt whatsoever–which, for practical purposes there wasn’t– that Elizabeth had been dead by the time he moved her.”
“You say he was on the road to being a neurotic. Just what do you mean, Doc?”
His shaggy white eyebrows lifted. “Didn’t you know he’s an alcoholic? I thought you knew something about him.”
“Not much. I didn’t know what you just told me. Listen, why not start from scratch, from whenever you knew him first, and give me the works?”
“All right, but I’m dry. Wait till I get us some cold lemonade; there’s some ready in the refrigerator. Or would you rather have beer? There’s some beer cold too.”
I told him I’d just had a beer and would rather stick to that.
He got us each a can of beer and made himself comfortable again. He said, “Let’s see, I’ve lived here twenty years. Armin built the house at three-fourteen about five years after I bought this one. I got to know him slightly while he was building it.”
“Did he own his store then?”
“No, he was a traveling salesman for a hosiery company. Did very well at it, made good money. You wouldn’t think to look at him that he’d be a good salesman but he must be–or at least must have been. He was already, in addition to building his own house, planning on going in business for himself.
“I didn’t get to know his family until they moved in after the house was ready. Amy–that’s his wife–and the two children, Elizabeth and Henry, one year apart. Let’s see, they’d have been three and two years old then, or about that. I noticed you called the boy Obie a few minutes ago; he didn’t get that nickname until around the time he started high school. You know it comes from his middle name, Obadiah?”
I nodded.
“Well, my wife and I got to know them fairly well after they moved in. They weren’t really close friends but we played bridge with them once in a while. Never had ’em as patients, though. They already had a family doctor and besides I believe Armin thought I was a little fusty and old-fashioned.
“Armin was quite a heavy drinker even then. Maybe not quite an alcoholic yet, but close to it. That means there was some hidden conflict in him somewhere, but I didn’t get to know him well enough even to make a guess what it was. But it was later, after Elizabeth’s death, that his drinking definitely took on the pattern of alcoholism. There are different types of alcoholics, you know; Armin’s the periodic type. Doesn’t touch the stuff for months at a time, sometimes as long as eight or nine months, although six would be nearer average, and then he’s off on a drinking bout and won’t come home for a week or two, once that I know of as long as three weeks. Refuses to be cured, won’t go to a san unless it’s just for a brief rest cure to get his health back after an unusually bad bout.”
“You’re sure he’s still that way?”
“Yes. His last one was only four or five months ago. I
haven’t seen him that recently, but I happened to hear about it from a mutual acquaintance.”
“What do you know about Mrs. Westphal?”
“Amy’s a fine woman. Not overweight mentally but, as far as shows on the outside, a good wife and mother. Well, maybe too good a mother, the kind that dotes too much on children and spoils them. And Henry got a double dose of it after he became an only child, but I guess he came through okay. I’ve heard he’s quite a football hero in high school. Well, if his mother’s spoiling him didn’t turn his head, that probably won’t either.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Quite a few years ago. He was in the fourth or fifth grade of elementary school then. Matter of fact, I saw him only a few times after they moved away from Rampart Street.”
“And when was that? And, if you know, why?”
“It would have been in–ummm–nineteen forty-three.
“As to why, I’d say it was a combination of reasons. It wasn’t just because their daughter had been killed there– they wouldn’t have stayed four more years if that was the only reason–but they didn’t like the place so well after that. And in nineteen forty-three there was the war boom and the housing shortage; Armin was able to sell for just about double what the place had cost him to build six years before, during the depression. He used that profit to set himself up in business, to start his store downtown. And I understand he’s done well with it.”
“Tell me one thing. Doc. After Elizabeth’s death, did you notice any change in Westphal’s attitude toward the boy?”
He looked at me sharply. “Are we back to the idea that Armin may have thought Henry pushed his sister out of the tree deliberately?”
“Let’s say I’m still trying it for size.”
“All right, I guess the best answer I can give you is that I probably wouldn’t have noticed any difference, unless it showed damned plainly. For one thing, I wasn’t looking for it. For another I didn’t see much of the two together. If we played cards with the Westphals, it was generally at our place because, being in active practice, I wanted to be available for phone calls. And they had a maid who lived there, so there wasn’t any worry about baby sitters on their end.
“But come to think of it, I don’t remember Armin talking much about Henry after that, if at all. And he probably was different with the boy because he was different with everyone. That’s when he started to get moody and– well, definitely neurotic.”
“Did he ever play with the boy, take him places?”
“Why–not that I remember specifically, after that accident.”
“But he did before that?”
“Yes, he’d take Henry for walks, play with him in the yard, things like that. You know, Sam, maybe you’ve got something at that. The more I think of it the more I think maybe his attitude toward Henry did change then. I mean, even more than he started changing in general. Mind telling me what this is all about? Not that I insist on it if you’d rather not.”
“I’d really rather not, Doc, if you’ll forgive me. Someday maybe, but not right now.”
“Sure. How’s Millie these days?”
“Fine,” I said, and let it go at that. I didn’t want to talk about Millie. So I asked him some questions that got him talking about his garden. It was five o’clock when, with the story that I had to go home to dress for a dinner engagement, I managed to get away and to forestall being pressed to stay and eat with him.
A fine guy, Doc; my parents had shown good judgment in choosing their friends. I wonder, now that it’s all over, if I’ll ever tell him the truth. I don’t think so. It can’t do any good, and there’s no reason to.
5
Because I wanted to be alone to think things out again, I went home. I couldn’t have picked a lonesomer place for it. And I’d been stupid to come home before eating because there wasn’t anything to eat here and I’d have to go out soon again anyway. I wasn’t hungry yet but I’d get that way sooner or later and I didn’t want to interrupt myself once I started, so I walked the two blocks to the neighborhood delicatessen and bought rolls and sandwich meat and some pickles. Nothing to drink. I was going to figure things out cold sober.
Back home I found the walk had given me enough appetite to make and eat a couple of sandwiches so I got that over with. Then I got an old card table from the basement and set it up in front of the most comfortable chair in the living room to put my feet on. I think best with my feet up.
I sat down and put my feet up.
There were two main possibilities and I had to think each of them through and decide which one was probably right.
One, maybe Obie wasn’t a killer. I’d been sure he was until this afternoon, but what I’d just learned opened up a completely new line of thought.
Armin Westphal was at least neurotic, any alcoholic is. But maybe he was farther off the beam than that. Starting with the death of his five-year-old daughter, he could have built up a systematized delusion that his son was a murderer–without any basis in reality except something he thought he saw thirteen years ago.
Or he could even have seen Obie push his sister without having witnessed a deliberate killing. Murder by a four-year-old would be something damned unusual, but lying by a four-year-old isn’t; Obie’s story of how his sister happened to fall might quite easily have been pure invention to avoid punishment. He’d said, for instance, that she’d climbed the tree first. A natural thing for him to say when it turned out that climbing the tree had been wrong. And the rest of the story could have been a protective lie too. Maybe they’d been scuffling in fun. Or even not in fun; suppose Obie had climbed the tree alone first and then, as a joke, dropped something on his sister’s head. She’d climbed up quickly to slap him and–
Yes, there were dozens of ways in which the scene in the tree could have so happened that Westphal could have thought he saw Obie push his sister out. Or he could have genuinely seen Obie push her accidentally. And he could have known that Obie’s story of what had happened up there was a lie and assumed it to be a deadly lie instead of a protective fib.
Now add that to his own guilt feelings for having left the ladder by the tree and for having been so stupid in his excitement that he’d picked up Elizabeth and carried her when, after seeing how she’d landed on the fence, a broken back was a virtual certainty. Suppose that, despite the doctor’s reassurance after his initial bawling out, Westphal still felt responsible for his daughter’s death. The human mind, even one that isn’t neurotic, can take devious ways to duck or shift responsibility. Such as, in Westphal’s case, shifting the blame to his son, becoming more and more convinced that his son was a murderer.
Watching him from that moment on, suspicion growing into certainty and certainty growing into obsession. Seeing confirmation of his obsession in a thousand words and actions completely normal to childhood. The toy pistol. “Bang, bang, you’re dead.” The cowboy stage. Cops and robbers.
Children are killers–in their fantasies. Killing is as natural to them as breathing, and as free of malice. Swords and six-guns and Buck Rogers blasters and the staccato chatter of the machine gun. What boy, from five to ten, doesn’t kill thousands, sometimes thousands in a single day, in his mental world where every bullet hits and every shot is fatal? With every bang another redskin bites the dust, another cop, another robber, another enemy soldier, another Martian. The collective killings in our nurseries could depopulate the world in a single day, the universe within a week. It’s the catharsis that lets childhood rid itself of the bloodlust that is our heritage from mankind’s past when bloodlust was necessary to survival.
But God help an obsessed man who’d watch his son playing for confirmation of his obsession that the boy was a psychopathic killer who had killed once and might kill again.
Bang, bang, bang.
And real death? Well, it doesn’t take much to feed an obsession. Any accid
ental death that happened for miles around and which, even remotely, barely possibly could have been caused by a boy of whatever age Obie was at the time would have been looked on by Westphal with dark suspicion. Where there was reasonable possibility–like the accidents at high school–that Obie could have been guilty, Westphal’s obsession would make him certain.
As he’d been certain that Obie had killed Jimmy Chojnacki and without knowing, or at least before learning, any of the details of the accident except that there’d been an erroneous preliminary identification because Obie’s wallet had been in the pocket of the dead boy.
Well, I’d come to believe the same thing myself, hadn’t I? But not until I’d learned at least some of the details, and not until I’d watched Westphal’s face as he’d entered the funeral parlor thinking his son was dead, watched it again when he’d left knowing that his son was alive and waiting for him at home, even then not until I’d gone in and talked to Haley, my curiosity aroused by Westphal’s unnatural behavior, and had learned that Westphal had volunteered to pay for a pickpocket’s funeral.
My main reason for suspecting Obie had been his father’s reactions. And what I’d learned today had given me a possible, maybe a probable explanation that left Obie innocent; I’d been led astray by the delusions of a paranoiac.
Yes, but what about the story of the lunch-stand man that placed Obie so near the place at so near the time of the death?
I’d already thought of–and discarded as improbable– another explanation of how Jimmy could have died. It seemed less improbable now. Obie missing his wallet, turning and seeing Jimmy heading back over the fence giving chase. Jimmy trying to beat the cars across the track because he was trying to escape.
And with what I knew now I could make a guess as to the rest of it, Obie’s reason for making himself scarce before the body was found, for not waiting and telling how it had really happened. Obie must know of his father’s suspicions of him. He’d have known that his father, if no one else, would never believe his story, without proof except his own word, that Jimmy’s death had been accidental. He’d have run away without thinking twice. Later, of course, he’d have remembered that Jimmy had still had his wallet; he’d realize that to avoid suspicion it would be necessary for him to go to the Lost and Found Department and ask for it. But he’d waited a few hours, for things to cool down, before he’d gone there. Never guessing, of course, that since Jimmy had carried no identification of his own a mistake in identification would cause his, Obie’s, parents to be notified that their son was dead.
The Deep End Page 11
