Murder Among Children

by Donald E. Westlake

  A minute later the people from the morgue arrived. They went by me carrying two baskets, which didn’t make any sense.

  Padbury said, “What are those things for?”

  “To carry bodies in,” I said. “Why would there be two of them?”

  He looked at me, wide-eyed. “What are you asking me for?”

  “You said there was nobody else upstairs.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “If there’s only one body up there,” I said, “why do they need two baskets?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Terry got cut in half or something.”

  I shook my head. “Two baskets means two bodies,” I said. “Who’s the other one?”

  “I swear to God,” he said. “I swear to God I don’t know. I left here last night about two in the morning, I come back today at twelve-thirty. If somebody went up there, I don’t know about it.”

  “You haven’t been up there yourself today.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did Terry have any other girl friends?”

  “No, sir. Just Robin. And she didn’t have anybody else either.”

  The morgue attendants came through again, two men to a basket. They were both obviously heavy now. The attendants’ faces were impassive.

  I watched them leave, and saw another plainclothesman come in. He came down the aisle, started by me, stopped, looked at me, frowned, said, “Mitch?”

  I looked up at him, and he had a face I knew. We’d been assigned to the same precinct a dozen years ago. I remembered his first name was Gregg, but couldn’t recall the last name. I said, “Hello, Gregg.”

  He said, “You in on—?” And then he stopped, looked very puzzled, and glanced around as though to find someone to explain things to him. He’d obviously just remembered about me.

  I said, “I’m a private citizen. I just happened to be here.”

  “Well,” he said, and looked very uncomfortable. “Long time no see,” he said.

  “You’re looking good,” I said, for something to say.

  “You, too. Well, I gotta get to work.” He grinned painfully and said, “That’s what they pay me for.”

  “Right.”

  He walked away, and a minute later I saw him talking to two of the other plainclothesmen. They both glanced my way, and then leaned their heads close to hear what Gregg had to say.

  I knew what he was telling them. That I had been a cop, a plainclothesman working out of a precinct uptown, until the day my partner was shot and killed making an arrest that hadn’t turned out to be as easy as it should have been. And he was killed because I wasn’t there to back him up. And I wasn’t there to back him up because at the moment he was dying I was in bed with a woman not my wife.

  I closed my eyes, and waited inside there for whatever would happen next. If only I’d stayed home. I hadn’t wanted to come out today.

  George Padbury said, “You okay?” so I couldn’t even close down that much.

  I opened my eyes. “I’m okay,” I said, and saw two of them coming over to talk with me.

  6

  IT WASN’T AS PAINFUL as it might have been. Neither of them made any reference at all to my past history, though their knowledge of it shone in their eyes, slatelike.

  They took me to another table, away from Padbury, and I told them my story. They wanted to ask into Robin’s background, and it took me a while to make them understand that I really didn’t know the girl. It wasn’t that they disbelieved me, it was just hard to comprehend the fact that we were cousins who had never met before yesterday.

  The whole interrogation took no more than ten minutes, and then they asked me to stick around a little while. One of them said, “You don’t have any appointments anywhere, do you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “We’ll get back to you,” he said, and they both got up and went away.

  I sat and smoked and watched the activity. Plainclothesmen and technical people were still moving back and forth, going upstairs and returning. The front door kept opening and closing, giving blinding semaphores of sunlight. I saw Donlon twice more, once talking with a group of plainclothesmen that included one of the two that had questioned me, once with two others interrogating Padbury.

  After about fifteen minutes a thin guy in a short-sleeved white shirt, needing a haircut, came over to me and said, “What do you think?”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Understand it was a girl killed them,” he said.

  I looked at him. “You press?”

  “That’s me. You want to see my card? I got an okay at the door.”

  “I’m a citizen,” I said. “You want to talk to one of the other fellas.”

  He started to grin, as though I were kidding him, but then he saw I was serious, and he frowned instead. “You ain’t a dick?”

  “Where’d you get that word from? The funnies?”

  He pointed at me. “You’re a cop,” he said.

  “Wrong. What did they find upstairs?”

  “What are you asking me for?”

  “Because I don’t know.”

  He kept studying me and studying me, trying to figure me out. Finally he said, “Two stiffs.”

  “Who?”

  “One male, vanilla. One female, chocolate.”

  I said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Integration,” he said. “A white guy and a spade chick, both cut up with the same knife. How come you’re sitting here and you ain’t a cop and you don’t know anything?”

  “I happened to be here.”

  “You hang out in this kind of place all the time.”

  “No.”

  “If I don’t get it from you I’ll get it from somebody else.”

  I said, “You get it from somebody else.” I knew it was stupid to antagonize him, but I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t in me to tell my story any more. Besides, he’d get the background from somebody else anyway, there was no way to cover that. I’d made the papers in a small way when I was thrown off the force, and now if this homicide was juicy enough there’d probably be a rehash of it all in the tabloids. It sounded juicy enough.

  Where had the female Negro body come from? I wished I could ask George Padbury about Negro girl friends of Terry Wilford’s, past or present, but we had been separated now and it wasn’t likely we’d be allowed back together. Besides, it didn’t matter. I was just working from reflex, as though nothing had ever come to an end.

  It felt odd to be in the bleachers.

  The reporter asked me a couple more questions, but I didn’t have any answers that were any use to him, so he finally went away. I saw him get into conversation with a couple plainclothes-men in the kitchen.

  A few minutes later one of the two who’d questioned me came over and said, “That’s all we need for now, Mr. Tobin. We’ve got your address, we’ll probably be in touch. You going to be in town?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll be in town.”

  “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said. His face and voice and eyes were blank.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. I got up and went out to the bright humid sunlight, and a news photographer snapped my picture in an offhand fashion. I suppose he thought I was one of the investigating officers.

  A small semicircle of spectators stood around on the sidewalk, perspiring. Most of them wore sunglasses. They looked hot and uncomfortable, but they didn’t move. I stepped through them, and walked over to Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street and took my subway out to Queens.

  Kate met me at the door, saying, “How did it go?”

  “Bad. Have you got any iced coffee?”

  “I can make some. Come on out to the kitchen. What happened?”

  We went out to the kitchen, and I sat where Robin had sat yesterday, and while Kate made iced coffee I told her what had happened. She listened in silence for the most part, only once turning and looking at me and saying, “Oh, Mitch.” As though I were the one she felt sorry for.r />
  As I was finishing, the phone rang. Kate went out to the hall to answer it, and came back to say, “It’s a reporter.” She sounded worried.

  I said, “Tell him I’m out. You don’t know anything.”

  “All right,” she said. She started away.

  I said after her, “Then you’d better leave it off the hook.”

  7

  I KNOW HOW TO live under siege. I did it once before, when I was dropped from the force. You don’t answer the telephone. You don’t answer the doorbell. You don’t leave the house. You get some neighbor or friend to do your grocery shopping for you, you send your teen-age son Bill off to spend a few days with relatives on Long Island, and you wait for everything to quiet down. It always does, eventually.

  The siege was short-lived, this time. It lasted through Sunday and part of Monday, but by Monday afternoon it was over. No one was interested in me for Tuesday’s paper.

  It was too hot to go outside anyway, so I wouldn’t have been working on my wall even if there’d been no siege. I spent the time in my office upstairs, an unfinished room I’d started to convert from a bedroom several years ago. I was rereading Mark Twain these days, and was currently on my way through Life on the Mississippi. I’ve always been a reader, but lately I seem to limit myself to pre-twentieth-century authors. I have no interest in writing that reminds me of my own world. And I never any more read newspapers or magazines.

  When the doorbell rang late Monday afternoon I thought it was probably a reporter again, making one last effort, but then I heard Kate go to the door, and voices, so it had to be someone else. I stayed where I was. There was no one I particularly wanted to see.

  The voices receded to the living room, and I spent the next five minutes not quite reading my book. My eyes were on the page, but my concentration was in my ears, listening for Kate’s tread on the stairs. I read the same paragraph over and over.

  It took five minutes and then I heard her coming. I closed the book, tossed it onto the desk, and sat there waiting. If it wasn’t a reporter, it more or less had to be the police.

  But when Kate came in I could see by her expression it was something else. She said, “It’s Rita Gibson. Rita Kennely. Robin’s mother.”

  “She wants me to tell her about it?”

  “They arrested Robin,” she said. “This afternoon, at the hospital.”

  I nodded. “I knew they would.”

  “You knew?”

  “She’s guilty, Kate.” I spread my hands. “There was nobody up there but her. Nobody alive. Nobody came down after her.”

  Kate said, “You can’t believe that girl did a bloody thing like that. Killed those two people. She couldn’t have, Mitch. You saw the girl, you know that as well as I do. It wasn’t in her. She couldn’t have done it.”

  “Nobody else could have done it,” I said. “And you know as well as I do that anybody is capable of anything. I learned that in my years on the force.” The unstated added sentence was: And I’m a prime example myself.

  If Kate was aware of that unspoken addition she didn’t show it. She said, “Mitch, I don’t believe Robin Kennely killed anybody, and you don’t believe it either.”

  “I don’t believe anything,” I said. “I’m not thinking about it.”

  “That’s the absolute truth. If you did think about it, you’d know that girl is innocent.”

  “I’m not going to think about it,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what I know or what I think. I’m not a part of it.”

  “It matters to her,” Kate said fiercely, gesturing at the doorway. “It matters to Robin’s mother. You owe her that much, Mitch, you can at least talk to her.”

  “What am I supposed to say? That her daughter did kill two people? That her daughter didn’t kill two people? There’s nothing I can say to her, Kate, there’s nothing I can do but sit there in front of her and be miserable. I’d rather be miserable up here.”

  “Mitch, you can’t refuse to see the woman.”

  “I can,” I said. “I have to. I’m not involved. I’m not going to get involved. It costs too much. I went out yesterday to help, and look what it turned into.”

  “Mitch—”

  “I don’t owe Rita Gibson a thing,” I said. “And I’m not going to start anything, I’m not going to let anything start around me.”

  She spread her hands, saying, “What do you mean, start? What could start?”

  “Do something. That’s what she’ll say, and then you’ll start saying it too. Do something. Robin Kennely didn’t kill anybody, so go on out and talk to people, nose around, do this, do that, find out who really did the killings.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to do anything like that, Mitch.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “But soon they will. She will, and then you will.”

  “Mitch, what if that girl is found guilty?”

  “Kate, what if she is guilty?”

  “But she isn’t! Won’t you at least listen? Read the newspaper stories about it, listen to the girl’s mother.”

  “I’m not going out there,” I said. “I’m staying in here. And I’m not talking to anybody about anything, I’m not thinking about anything. I’m staying in here, and one day is the same as the next.”

  She studied me, trying to find some way through, and then she said, “Is it really this important to you?”

  “Yes.”

  She spread her hands. “Then there’s nothing I can say.”

  She turned away, and I said, “I’m sorry, Kate. I just can’t, that’s all.”

  She nodded, not looking at me.

  I said, “If they’ve made a mistake, they’ll find it themselves. They usually do.”

  “Yes,” she said, and went out of the room.

  I listened to the sound of her going down the stairs, and then I listened to the murmuring silence. They were in the living room, too far away to really be heard except as a vague background murmur, rising and falling.

  But what else could I do? Any action I might take would be futile, pointless. To talk to the woman downstairs would require thinking about yesterday, which was not only futile but also painful and which I didn’t want to do. And besides, it is true that most police mistakes are discovered and rectified before a trial is reached. The exception gets the publicity, but it gets the publicity because it is the exception.

  I picked up Life on the Mississippi and opened to my page, but didn’t manage to read. I sat there, and waited, and after a long interval I heard voices, and then the sound of the front door. I waited for Kate to come upstairs, but she didn’t, and after a while I began to read again, finished that paragraph for the last time, turned the page, and went on.

  Kate came up an hour or so later, just a minute after I’d heard the phone ring down there. She came to the doorway and said, “It’s George Padbury. He says it’s important.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I told him I didn’t think you would,” she said. There was no accusation in her face or voice. She went out of the doorway and started again down the stairs.

  I got to my feet, left the room, stopped at the head of the stairs. I called her name, and she stopped and looked up at me. I said, “If it is cowardice, it’s still necessary to me.”

  “I know,” she said, and abruptly her face softened. “It’s all right, Mitch,” she said. “I do understand.”

  “I’ll come downstairs awhile,” I said.

  We went down together to the first floor, and she picked up the phone, listened, and said, “He didn’t wait. He’s hung up.” She cradled the phone and smiled at me, saying, “He solved the problem for us.”

  He hadn’t—no one ever would—but I smiled back and said, “Good.”

  8

  THE NEXT DAY, TUESDAY, at about four-thirty in the afternoon, the doorbell rang. I was in the living room, watching an Errol Flynn pirate movie on television, and I got at once to my feet.

  Kate passed through on her way from the kitchen, and said as she wen
t by, “It’s all right, you can stay there. I won’t let anyone in.”

  “Good.” I remained on my feet, near the television set, watching the living-room doorway and listening above the background music of the movie for the sounds of voices at the door. Bill was back from Long Island today, at the moment up in his room at work on one of his mysterious projects, and this could conceivably be someone for him.

  When Kate came back a minute later, she looked troubled, and two men in suits came in after her. She said, “They’re detectives, Mitch.”

  I looked at them, trying to see in their faces if they knew about me, but they were both impassive. They were youngish men, very neat but slightly burly. One of them said, “We’d like you to come along with us, Mr. Tobin, if you have the time.”

  I said, “What’s the problem?”

  “No problem. Just a portion of your statement on the Wilford case we’d like to go over with you.”

  “Why can’t you do it here?”

  The other one said, in a reasonable voice, “The captain wants to talk to you, Mr. Tobin. It won’t take long, and we’ll bring you right back here.”

  I felt a grim familiarity, listening to him. Those same assurances had come calmly from my own mouth at one time, and I felt my hackles rise slightly at the echo now returning. When I had given such assurances, sometimes they had been true and sometimes they had been tactical lies aimed at bringing a potentially dangerous person into custody with the least trouble and fuss.

  Surely this time it was the truth. There was no reason to suspect me of being a potentially dangerous person, and looking at these two I could see from the bored calmness of their manner that they had no such suspicion. But why bring me in? It might merely be to give me a little bit of a bad time, just on general principles. In any case, there was nothing to do but go along with them and see what happened.

  I said, “I’ll have to put on shoes. They’re upstairs.”