Murder Among Children

by Donald E. Westlake

  I hadn’t told the sergeant any more than the bare facts of the event. He hadn’t asked me what I was doing in that building, and I hadn’t volunteered the information. Therefore he had no way of knowing that the death of the child might be connected with three other recent deaths, nor would it have done him any good if I had told him, since the police believed they already had the murderess in custody on two of the deaths, and the third had not been listed as a homicide.

  It was possible that someone on the force working on the Wilford killing might stumble across my name in a report in connection with the child’s death and might follow it up out of curiosity and therefore learn that the address of the incident was Terry Wilford’s former address, and so ultimately come knocking at my door to find out what I was doing and why, and of course at that point I would have to be detailed and truthful—mostly—in my answers. But the possibility was a slender one, given the size of the force, the fact that the child’s death had occurred in a different precinct, and the fact that the Wilford and Boles deaths were no longer active police concerns but had been turned over by now for further action to the district attorney’s office. In any event, I had at the very least bought myself additional time.

  The child had bought me some time, too. If he hadn’t looked up, if he hadn’t drawn my attention to the black shape plummeting downward, he would have been the witness sitting in front of the bored sergeant and I would have been the body at the foot of the stairs.

  It had been meant for me, that much was obvious. The murderer was unsure of himself, worried, afraid his traces weren’t adequately hidden. That was why he’d killed George Padbury, who had known something and been concealing it and had wanted to tell it to me on the phone half an hour before his death. And now the murderer was afraid of me, moving around, poking into this and that, stirring things up that were supposed to be neatly under control. And when he was afraid, this murderer, he killed again.

  Was he around me now, watching from somewhere? Had he stayed in the neighborhood to see if things had gone well, and did he now know he would have to try again? It was more likely he’d gone far away, gone to ground for a while, whether or not he knew he’d missed me.

  So I probably had some free time, free from police and murderer both. I’d do with it as much as I could.

  There was a candy store on the corner, full of children drinking soda. I threaded through them to the phone booth and called Abe Selkin.

  He said, “Jack doesn’t want any part of you, Mr. Tobin. He knows you used to be a cop, he knows you’re related to Robin, he thinks you’re out to frame him to get her off the hook.”

  “That’s not very sensible,” I said.

  “I know it. But that’s what he thinks.”

  “All right. Thanks, anyway. Is there anybody at Thing East now?”

  “Sure. Hully’s over there, maybe Vicki. We’re open again, the cops let us open yesterday.”

  “Good.”

  “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  “I will.”

  I hung up and tried Claude Bodkin’s number again, and this time he was home. And out of breath. “Just a second,” he said. “I’m winded.”

  I waited, listening to heavy breathing, until finally he said, “All right. Sorry about that, I was doing my exercises.” His voice was somewhat more nasal than it had been on his machine.

  I said, “My name is Mitchell Tobin, Mr. Bodkin. I don’t know if you read in the paper about Terry Wilford being murdered?”

  “God, yes. Talk about melodrama.”

  “The young lady who’s been arrested,” I said, “Robin Kennely, is my cousin. We’re trying to work up a defense for her, so naturally we want to talk to anybody who knew the Wilford boy. I understand you used to be his roommate?”

  “God, that was years ago.”

  “A year and a half, as I understand it.”

  “Is that all? God, time flies. To tell you the truth, Mr.—what did you say your name was?”

  “Tobin, Mitchell Tobin.”

  “Well, to tell you the truth, Mitch—may I call you Mitch?”

  “Go right ahead,” I said. So long as I could ask him my questions, he could call me any name he liked.

  “To tell you the truth, Mitch,” he said, starting the same sentence for the third time, “I hardly know Robin Kennely at all, and I haven’t seen Terry since we stopped rooming together. I mean, I doubt I could give you anything current, you see what I mean?”

  “It’s not current facts we’re looking for,” I said. “It’s mostly Terry’s personality, his character, that I want to know about. Any incidents you might know of that would help to show the kind of person he was.”

  “Oh, God, if that’s what you want I could talk a week. Listen, where are you now?”

  “Downtown.”

  “Well, I have a thing at five, and then the evening’s shot, of course. We could have a drink now, if you like. How about the Newfoundland Donkey?”

  “I don’t believe I know it.”

  “Lex and Sixty-first, you can’t miss it. Shall we say one?”

  “One, that’s fine.”

  “The question is,” he said, “how are we going to recognize one another? Wait, I know. I’ll wear my lemon-lime shirt. It’s short sleeves, yellow and green vertical stripes. I doubt there’ll be more than one such shirt in the Donkey in the middle of the day.”

  “Fine.”

  “And I’ll be sitting at the bar, down toward the end.”

  “All right. See you at one.”

  “Ta.”

  It was now barely twelve, so I walked back down to Houston Street to try a frontal attack on Jack Parker, but there was no answer to my knock. Either they had prepared themselves for a siege or they’d gone out.

  There was a large delicatessen a block away. I had lunch there, walked back through the midday heat to try Parker once more, got no answer again, and took a cab uptown.

  It was not air-conditioned. I felt cheated.

  16

  THE NEWFOUNDLAND DONKEY WAS obviously what the magazines would call an In bar. It seemed arch and pretentious to me, but the lighting was dim enough and the wood dark enough so that the décor could readily be ignored. The air-conditioning was on full blast, and I was chilled to the bone by the time I sat down at the bar. When the bartender asked me what I wanted I was tempted to ask for a hot toddy, but settled on beer instead.

  There was no one here with a lemon-lime shirt on, but it was only five till one, so I settled down with my beer—bottled, no draft—and looked at the other customers.

  They were mostly men, young to middle-aged, slender, well dressed, chatting animatedly with one another, bright young executives drinking their lunches. Beyond the bar was a restaurant area, deep and narrow and dark, lit mostly by the candles in red glass at each table, and a few women were spotted at the tables back there: sleek and efficient-looking and stylish rather than pretty.

  I finished my first beer at five after one and my second at one-fifteen. I decided to nurse the third one till one-thirty, and if he hadn’t arrived by then I’d phone him. In the meantime men kept coming into the place, the door opening with flashes of that bristling bright sunlight outside, but none of them was dressed right to be Bodkin. I drank my third beer a sip at a time, I watched the customers, I watched the moving and flashing and bobbing beer and whiskey ads on the back bar, I watched my watch.

  He came in at one twenty-eight, a short slender childish-looking young man in the threatened shirt, pale chinos, scuffed white sneakers, flaming red hair, and the darkest sunglasses I’ve ever seen. I motioned to him and he came over, smiling and waving his hands and talking long before he was close enough for me to hear.

  “…how it is,” he said, and slid into the stool next to mine. “You get on the damn horn, they won’t let you off. Since I got into communications I practically sleep with that damn phone to my ear. Beefeater and Schweppes, Jerry. What’s that you’re drinking, beer? God. You
go out in that heat, you’ll sweat buckets. Let’s grab a table. Jerry, we’ll be over there.”

  I followed him to a table on the opposite wall. We sat down and he said, “I’ve been thinking about Terry, Mitch, and I really don’t know what I can tell you. Terry and I didn’t hit it off, that’s true enough, but that could just be a personality thing, two people don’t jell, you know what I mean? Ahh,” he said, as his drink arrived, “that’s what I’ve been wanting.” He picked up the drink and said to me, “I’ve made a rule. Not a drop before one o’clock, no matter what. It’s my pattern for success. Pip pip.”

  He took a healthy swallow, put the glass down, and said, “You know what they say, don’t say anything against the dead. So what can I say? We had tiffs, everybody has tiffs, we didn’t get along. You want a lot of roommate grievances, that’s not going to do you any good. Terry and I knew each other vaguely from college, he was two years behind me, I was looking for a roommate, he was fresh in town and looked me up, we found a place, we didn’t hit it off, I moved out, end of story.”

  I said, as he took another swallow of his drink, “I’d thought maybe you moved because your income went up.”

  “What, these threads?” He grinned, holding his arms out for me to look at his clothing. “You like them? Custom sneakers, nothing but the best. But seriously, no, that isn’t what happened. Affluence hit me two or three months later, when I made the break into communications.” He finished his drink, held the empty glass over his head, and wig-wagged it at the barman.

  I said, “I understand you and Wilford had a fight one time. I mean, physically, punching each other.”

  He put the glass down, grinned at me, and shook his head. “Not exactly,” he said. “God, when I think of that. Look at me, Mitch, I’m no pugilist. Crippled newsies roll me for my shoes. Terry wiped up the floor with me, pure and simple, it was as easy as that.”

  I couldn’t see his eyes through the gray-black lenses of his glasses, but the rest of his face showed only honest amusement. I said, “You don’t seem to have held a grudge for it.”

  “Be pointless now, wouldn’t it?” he said, and grinned again, shrugging his shoulders. “The poor bastard’s dead. Besides, he was right. I’d racked up his car for him. I’d have done the same thing myself if I was some sort of Neanderthal.”

  “Is that what Terry was?”

  “Ah hah!” he said happily, and pointed a finger at me. “You see? There is still hostility there! My analyst said there was, but I said no no no, it’s all over, it’s in the past and doesn’t matter any more. Never disagree with your analyst, Mitch, they know things that are closed to ordinary men. Bless you, darling.” This last to the waitress, who had brought his fresh drink.

  As he took a first swallow of it I said, “As I understand it, you felt very strongly about it at the time. Tried to have Wilford arrested, didn’t you?”

  “God, yes. Talk about idiocy. He simply turned the fuzz right back at me, got me thirty days at Newgate. Because of that car of his.” He had some more Beefeater and Schweppes. “My analyst tells me I’m glad Terry’s dead. Do you suppose he’s right?”

  “I really don’t know,” I said. “Can you think of anybody else who might be glad he’s dead?”

  “God, no. Terry was one of your easy assimilators, everybody loved him. Hello there, Terry! Good old Terry! Long time no see, Terry! Made out with the women like a bandit. That was another thing. God, when I think how many rotten science-fiction movies I saw on Forty-second Street. We had a system, when the chain lock was on, it meant there was a girl in the place, the other guy had to go away for a while. Terry always had that damn chain up. You know how often I did?” He waited till I shook my head, then held up one triumphant finger, saying, “Once! And that was a damned fluke. A damned poor fluke, too, if you want to know.”

  He pulled again at his drink, said, “Of course, all that’s changed now. You know how it is, some people blossom no matter what, but some need success, money, some sort of external symbol of value to build their self-esteem. That was me, all right. Once I got into communications, began to pull in the bread, it was a brand-new Claude. Two years ago, Mitch, I wouldn’t have walked into a place like this in threads like these for all the tea in Berkeley. Now look at me.”

  “Success does make a difference,” I agreed. I assumed it did, because I knew very well that failure did.

  He looked at his watch. “She’s always late,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind, Mitch, I’m doubling up, got a young lady meeting me here. Supposed to be here at one-thirty. Late, naturally.”

  I said, “Of course, you know I’m coming around because we don’t think Robin killed Wilford.”

  “I figured that,” he said. “Still, you know the old saying, hell hath no fury, and so on.” He drained his glass, made his wig-wag signal to the barman again.

  “We don’t think Robin was a woman scorned,” I said.

  He looked at me blankly. “What say?”

  “What you said. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. We don’t think that’s the way it happened.”

  “Well, sure. You wouldn’t, naturally. But who knows, you could be right. I only met the girl two, three times, but she didn’t strike me as the violent type. You know what I mean? Very mousy little girl.”

  “If Robin didn’t kill him,” I said, “somebody else must have.”

  “A is not B,” he said, and nodded. “That’s logic.” Then, as his fresh drink arrived, “Thanks, sweets.”

  I said, “Can you think of anyone who might want to kill Terry Wilford?”

  “A year and a half ago,” he said, lifting his glass, “I wanted to. That’s the only one I know. Mud in your eye.”

  As he drank I said, “What about Irene Boles?”

  He finished swallowing, frowned, said, “Who?”

  “The girl who was killed with him.”

  “Oh, the hooker! God, wasn’t that a touch? Pure Dostoevski.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Who, me? No, she must have been new on the scene. Linda, love!”

  This last was shouted past me. I turned and saw a startlingly beautiful blond young woman coming through the tables toward us. She carried a straw purse that kept bumping into people, she was dressed violently in pink, and she too was talking a mile a minute even though she was too far away to be heard.

  She arrived at the table saying, “…how they are. Just beastly, love bun. I could have been there another two hours if I hadn’t put my foot down. Hel-lo, sweetie.”

  She dipped for a kiss on the cheek and turned sea-blue eyes on me as Bodkin said, “Linda, Mitch. We’ve been engaged in melodrama.”

  “How do you do,” I said.

  “Frazzled,” she said, settling into the chair to my right. To Bodkin she said, “Get me a drink, love, before all my seams come undone.”

  “No sooner said,” Bodkin told her, and began waving his arms vigorously at the bartender.

  I said, “I’ll put in the order for you on my way out.”

  His arms still in midair, as though I was holding him up, Bodkin looked at me and said, “We’re done?”

  “Unless you can think of something else, yes.”

  He lowered his arms. “Not a thing,” he said. “I haven’t seen any of those people in a lifetime, Mitch. God, when I think who I was then.” He reached out and squeezed the girl’s hand, saying to her, “You couldn’t possibly believe it, darling.”

  I said, “What’s the lady drinking?”

  She answered for herself: “Beefeater and Schweppes. And thank you so much.”

  “Not at all. Nice to have met you.”

  I got to my feet, and Bodkin said, “Don’t worry about that beer of yours, Mitch, it’s on my tab.”

  I doubted he had a tab, since credit in bars is illegal in New York, but I let him have the gesture, which I knew he was making for the sake of the girl. I thanked him for both the beer and his time, went over to the bar to order the drink, and went out
side to a world that now seemed twice as hot and twice as humid and twice as stuffy as before.

  I hailed a cab—not air-conditioned—and on the way downtown I thought about Bodkin and decided he could not have had anything to do with the murders. Whatever frustration or hatred he had once felt for Terry Wilford was well under control by now. It was obviously true that he was carving out some sort of successful career for himself, and that success had changed him drastically from the mooch who had lived with Wilford.

  I wondered what he did for a living. In all the times he’d mentioned his being “in communications,” he hadn’t managed once to communicate to me what his job was, or even what specific area he worked in. Was he in advertising? In television? Publishing? Public relations? Bell Telephone? Or did it no longer matter, did they all blend into one another after a while, so that the bright young men coming along these days were merely “in communications”?

  The world is not one world, but a hundred thousand worlds, overlapping and yet almost entirely sealed off from one another. Their perimeters are age or occupation or home address or any one of half a dozen other factors. I was someone who had been thrust out of his world to exist in limbo, and now in the search for Terry Wilford’s murderer I was peeking and poking into worlds foreign to me, trying to understand their customs and languages, wondering where in these alien landscapes I would find the one with the blood-red hands.

  Never in my life was I more conscious of these separate foreign worlds than in the twenty-five-minute cab ride from the Newfoundland Donkey to Thing East.