Murder Among Children

by Donald E. Westlake

  Brother William stood gazing out the window. “A troubled man,” he said. “He must find filth. Find it or make it.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Searched for filth,” he said. He shook his head and added, “No one could ever reach him. He didn’t want to be reached.” He turned away, saying, “Come along, I’ll show you the rear way out.”

  On the way down I tried to get him to be more explicit about what Donlon had done, but all I got was more of the same. From the sound of it, Donlon had been working the same tactics with the church as he’d tried later with the coffee house; steady minor harassment, constant irritating visits, a frustrating lack of definiteness of purpose.

  The rear door led onto a garbage-strewn alley leading leftward to East Ninth Street. Brother William pointed the way I should go and then said, “Good luck, brother.”

  Good luck. With Donlon? With the search for the murderer of Terry Wilford? With the unstated other problem? Brother William closed the door before I could ask.

  14

  THE APARTMENT WAS ON the fourth floor of a walk-up, in which the stairwell mugginess was complemented by the brackish stink of old urine. I paused in front of the door to catch my breath before knocking. My shirt was sopping again and I was starting a dull headache.

  I knocked, and waited quite a long while, and the door was at last opened an inch by a girl who showed me nothing but one sliver of her face, dominated by a large brown eye. She blinked at me and said, “Yes?”

  It was after eleven by now, but there was only darkness in the apartment behind her. I said, “Did I wake you? I’m sorry, I’ll come back later.”

  “No, that’s okay, we have to get up anyway. What did you want?”

  “You’re Ann?”

  Puzzled, she said, “That’s right. So?”

  “And Jack Parker is here?”

  “It’s his place. What do you want?”

  “My name is Mitchell Tobin,” I said. “I’m Robin Kennely’s cousin.”

  “Robin—Oh! Terry’s girl.” Her face and voice had hardened. “We know about her,” she said.

  “What do you know about her?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re her cousin?”

  “Second cousin,” I said, knowing the age difference was what was bothering her. “I’d like to speak to Jack, if he’s around.”

  “Well, I guess so,” she said. She seemed at a loss, the one visible eye blinking and looking all around. “Uhhhh,” she said, “hold on a second.” And shut the door.

  I waited, two or three minutes, and then the door opened the same inch again, showing the same vertical sliver of face, and she said, “What do you want to talk to him about?”

  “I’m trying to help Robin,” I said. “I want to talk to him about the people who knew Terry.”

  “What about them?”

  “Who they are, if any of them might have known the girl who was killed, any ideas he might have about who did the killings, things like that.”

  “It said in the paper Robin did it.”

  “That’s why I’m trying to help her. I don’t believe the paper.”

  She considered, the eye studying me thoughtfully, and then abruptly she said, “Hold on a second,” again, and once more shut the door.

  This time the wait was longer, and I’d just about decided to start knocking on the door when it opened exactly as before, and she said, “Jack says he doesn’t know anything, he can’t help you. Sorry.”

  She would have shut the door then, but quickly I said, “Then I’ll talk to you.”

  The eye gazed at me, unblinking. “Why me?” she said in a flat tone.

  “You knew Terry, too,” I reminded her. “You used to go with him.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Six months. Still, you know the people he knew, the places he went to, the kind of trouble he might have made for himself.”

  “You know an awful lot, don’t you?” she said, much more wary now.

  “Not very much, yet,” I said. “I need to know a lot more.”

  “Then talk to the cops.”

  “They can’t help me.”

  “Neither can we,” she said, and shut the door.

  Knock on it? Force the issue? No, I had no authority vested in me these days, I could only try for cooperation. And though I could understand why these two people were wary of me, wary of any connection being made between them and the death of Terry Wilford, I did want their cooperation. I’d have to try a more roundabout method.

  I went back out to the frying-pan street and down to the corner, where there was a drugstore without air-conditioning. In a phone booth in which the fan didn’t work I took out my notebook and first tried Hulmer Fass’s number, and when he proved not to be home, I called Abe Selkin instead.

  Selkin answered on the first ring. I identified myself and said, “I just tried to talk to Jack Parker. He wouldn’t see me. Do you know him well enough to convince him I’m all right?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Tobin, no can do. Jack and I just know each other to talk to, we’ve never been buddies.”

  “Do you know anyone else who could do it?”

  “Get him to talk to you? Let me think a second.”

  “Certainly.”

  The phone hummed in my ear, and at last he said, “There’s one guy. He’s a maybe. Let me try him and call you back.”

  “You can’t. I’ll call you in—how long? Half an hour?”

  “Make it an hour. I might have trouble finding the guy.”

  “An hour.” I looked at my watch. “Just around noon,” I said.

  “Fine.”

  I left the phone booth and the air outside seemed almost cool for a minute. In the Manhattan phone book on the rack beside the booth I found the name Bodkin, Claude 87 W 63. It was a better address than I’d expected for a man described to me as a mooch, but there were unlikely to be two Claude Bodkins in New York, so I went back into the airless phone booth and called him. I got a recording machine which advised me, in Bodkin’s somewhat nasal voice, that he was not at home and I had thirty seconds in which to leave my message. I hung up without speaking.

  I walked back up First Avenue to East Eleventh Street—it seemed endless under that sun—and right to Ed Regan’s address, he being the friend of Terry Wilford’s whose mother was a New World Samaritan. Wilford himself had lived in this building—an ordinary brick tenement with tan peeling hallways—until moving illegally into the Thing East building.

  I went inside, to the same smell of stale urine as in Jack Parker’s building on Houston Street, and near the foot of the stairs I saw two giggling olive-skinned barely dressed young boys scratching words into the wall with a jagged piece of broken Coke bottle. One of them looked at me and, grinning, said something in Spanish. “In your hat,” I said amiably, and went on up the stairs.

  The mailbox in the foyer had given Regan’s apartment number as ten, which I found on the third floor. I knocked, and after a minute the door was opened by a disheveled young man covered with varicolored paint. His hair was shaggy and uncombed, he wore eyeglasses with patched tortoise-shell frames, his T-shirt and baggy brown trousers were spattered with paint, and on his feet were tattered white sneakers. To complete the picture, he held upright in his right hand an artist’s brush tipped with gleaming wet red.

  “How do you do?” I said, feeling oddly like a door-to-door salesman. “My name is Mitchell Tobin. I believe Abe Selkin phoned you about—”

  “Oh, right! Come in, come in.”

  There seemed to be a great urgency in what he said, so I stepped right in and he briskly shut the door behind me, saying, “I didn’t know when you’d be here exactly, so I just went ahead and went to work.”

  “If you’d rather I came back later I could—”

  “No, no! It’s perfectly all right, I can work while we talk.” He smiled proudly. “I’m doing a portrait of my mother.”

  I felt I was supposed to say something approving,
so I said, “That’s good.”

  “Well,” he said, pleased but trying for modesty, “we’ll see how it works out. Come on along.”

  I had entered into the kitchen, which was much cleaner than the general run of kitchens in this neighborhood but otherwise standard. Thick layers of paint covered every surface, the stove and refrigerator were ancient relics, the doors didn’t quite close on the wall cabinets, and under the high narrow window was an old bathtub on legs, covered with an oilskin-lined board, on which stood gradated white canisters with red tops and red lettering reading COFFEE TEA SUGAR FLOUR.

  A narrow windowless hallway led down from this kitchen, and through it I followed Ed Regan. Several paintings hung on both walls, but it was too dim to really make them out, except that they all seemed to be portraits of the same woman: stocky, gray-haired, in dark clothing, seated.

  The original was in the living room, sitting on a wooden kitchen chair in the light from two tall windows, in which the panes sparkled with cleanliness. An easel stood in the middle of the room, a curved palette lay amid squeezed tubes of paint on a table to one side of the easel, and in front of the easel was a tall black stool. A large piece of paint-spattered gray canvas covered the floor in the area of the easel, and the rest of the floor was bare wood, polished to a high gloss. A maroon sofa with doilies on the arms was along the opposite wall, a television set stood on a wheeled stand in a corner, and around the perimeter of the room were the ordinary tables and chairs and lamps.

  Ed Regan said, “Mother, this is the man Abe Selkin told me about.” And then, more formally, “Mother, Mr. Mitchell Tobin. Mr. Tobin, my mother, Victorina Regan.”

  We both said how-do-you-do and she invited me to sit down on the sofa. She was a woman in her late fifties, medium height, stocky, pleasant-faced, matronly, maternal. Her dress was plain, her stockings dark, her shoes sensible. She had done her own hair, probably in the same style for the last fifteen years.

  I sat down where she had suggested, where I could see both her and the painting her son was working on. It was a bit idealized, but was otherwise a realistic portrayal of the woman, the chair, the window, the wall. Ed Regan put a dab of red on a section of the window, reached for his stool, and apparently became at once lost in his work. His mother, her head held stiffly, looked at me catty-corner and said, “I understand you’re related to the Kennely girl.”

  “Second cousin.”

  “A nice enough girl. Rather young, of course. Though we can’t hold youth against a person, can we?”

  “I suppose not,” I said.

  “Still,” she said, “some people do seem to insist on staying young entirely too long for their own good. The Wilford boy, for one. He would have been a bad influence on Edwin if we’d let him.”

  “Oh, Terry never meant any harm,” the son said, jollying his mother, and turned briefly to flash me a smile glazed with embarrassment.

  “I’m sure not,” his mother said. “Youth never means any harm, that’s one of its characteristics. But youth is waste, Edwin. Waste of time, waste of resources, waste of God’s precious talents. If more young men were like you, how much better a world this would be.”

  “Everyone has to pick his own path, Mother.”

  “Naturally. I only thank God you’ve chosen the path of wisdom.”

  I felt I was present for a conversation which had been repeating itself, with variants, for years, and I preferred something more topical, so I said, “Mrs. Regan, did you discourage Terry Wilford from seeing your son?”

  “Not at all,” she said, affecting surprise. “Edwin is a free agent. He and young Wilford saw a great deal of each other for a period of time. Until Wilford became involved in the restaurant and moved across town.”

  “Restaurant? Oh, you mean Thing East.”

  “Yes, the place where he was murdered.”

  “I understand you had something to do with getting that location for him.”

  “I did introduce him to the bishop, yes.”

  “So he said. I spoke to him a little while ago.”

  “Bishop Johnson?”

  “Yes. A remarkable man.”

  “A saint, Mr. Tobin. I don’t know what religion you are…”

  She let the sentence hang there for me to finish, but I chose not to, saying instead, “Yes, I was very impressed by him. He told me you brought Terry Wilford to see him, and now I’m wondering, if you disapproved of him, why you helped him that way.”

  “I didn’t disapprove of him, Mr. Tobin,” she said, somewhat stiffly. “I don’t disapprove of anyone, I believe every one of us has the right to choose his or her own road. I would prefer not to have anyone I cared deeply for tarry long on the road where young Wilford seemed inclined to stay, but I would hardly condemn anyone who decided that was where he wanted to be.”

  “I see.”

  “And of course I was delighted,” she went on, “when he took an interest in starting something substantial. He had great energy and great imagination, and I was delighted at the chance to help him begin to put his talents to use.”

  “Of course,” I said, beginning to understand the rules this woman lived by. From the look of the apartment, she lived here, with her son, which had to be an unusual situation; a boy goes off to the East Village to live in a tenement and be a painter, and his mother goes along with him. It would take a remarkable woman to bring that off, and it seemed as though she had done it.

  Of course, the son in such a situation would tend to fade into his mother’s shadow if he weren’t a strong and sturdy personality himself, which Ed Regan wasn’t. Wanting to try to comprehend the boy somewhat, I turned to him now, apparently absorbed in his painting, and said, “Ed, you know most of the people in Terry’s crowd. Would you say he had many enemies?”

  “Enemies?” He paused, his brush this time tipped with pearl-gray, and stood gazing at a corner of the ceiling. Frowning, he said, “Somebody who’d want to kill him, you mean?”

  “Not necessarily. Just anyone who might have a grudge against him or dislike him for any reason.”

  “Huh.” He shrugged, and frowned now at the painting, and said, “Well, there’s Jack Parker. I suppose you could call him an enemy of Terry’s.” He looked at me. “Not that he’d want to kill Terry or anything like that,” he said. “But Jack doesn’t like Terry. Didn’t like him.”

  “With perfectly adequate cause,” Mrs. Regan added. “Youth again, fickle, flitting back and forth, never knowing its own mind.”

  I said to the son, “I’ve already heard about Jack Parker. Anybody else?”

  He touched the gray to the canvas, frowned at the result, frowned at his palette, finally shook his head. “Nobody,” he said. “Terry was an easygoing guy, he got along with just about everybody. Even Mother,” he added, and grinned at me.

  The mother smiled, too, indulgently, and said, “I’m just everyone’s den mother, Mr. Tobin. You know how it is.”

  I knew how she wanted it to be, though I had no way of knowing whether or not that was the way it actually was. Nor could I think of anything else to ask either of them. They were both deeply involved in some half-fantasy life plan of their own, and I doubted if any third party ever made much of an impression on them.

  On a sudden impulse, I asked Ed Regan, “Do you know Vicki Oppenheim?”

  I’d expected the mother to answer, and she did. “Now there’s a one! Think what that girl could be if she wanted, and how she wastes herself. There’s someone who should talk to Bishop Johnson.”

  “Any day now,” Ed Regan told me, grinning, “Mother’s going to promote Bishop Johnson to God.”

  “Saint is high enough,” his mother said. “You remember what he told you, young man.”

  I got to my feet, saying, “Well, thank you for your time. I appreciate it.”

  “Anything we can do,” the son said. “We both like Robin, don’t we, Mother?”

  “Of course. A really sweet young thing. Frankly, Mr. Tobin, I believe you have righ
t on your side. That young girl couldn’t have murdered anybody that way.”

  “That’s what I think, too,” I said, and moved toward the door. “Thank you again. No, that’s all right,” I told the son, as he started away from the easel, “I can find my own way out, you keep on with your work. It’s coming along very well.”

  “You think so?” He smiled fondly at the painting.

  I went back down the dim hall and out of the apartment and down the stairs. At the foot of the stairs on the first floor the two boys were still scratching away with the Coke bottle shard, patiently and gigglingly printing out some long involved and no doubt scatological paragraph in Spanish. They looked up at me as I started down the last flight, and their faces changed, their attention diverted to something above me.

  I looked up, and something black was hurtling down the center of the stairwell. These first-floor stairs were wider than the ones above, I’d been holding the banister, I was directly beneath.

  I leaped to the side, lost my footing on the slate stair, fell heavily, heard something crash and boom behind my head, and a second later there was a scream that choked off in midstride. I slid painfully down several steps, thumping my sides and back, before I finally managed to stop myself and sit up and look around.

  At the foot of the stairs one of the two boys was standing ashen-faced against the wall. The other one was lying on his back at the foot of the stairs with a large square black metal box sitting canted on his head and shoulders. Maroon liquid trickled across the floor from under the box.

  The living boy began to vomit.

  15

  AN APARTMENT ON THE first-floor front was taken over by the police, and it was there a heavy red-faced bored uniformed sergeant interrogated me. “I went up the stairs to the roof,” I told him, “but of course by the time I got up there he was gone. The roof door was open. I went out there and didn’t see anybody at all.”

  The sergeant didn’t really care what had happened. A black iron chimney cap, eighteen inches square, six inches high, slightly peaked at the top, weight about thirty pounds, which had been lying unused on the roof near the chimney recently replaced, had been dropped down the stairwell by party or parties unknown, maybe for fun, maybe for serious, and had killed a spic kid, maybe on purpose, maybe by accident. There were unanswered questions, but slums are built of unanswered questions, and the sergeant obviously had little expectation of ever finding the answers to this group of them. He laboriously took down in his notebook what I said to him, took my name and address, told me I might be called for the inquest, and I was free to go. I went through the mob of people still clustered in the hallway, through the second mob outside on the sidewalk, and away.