Murder Among Children

by Donald E. Westlake

  I also had a meeting with an earnest young man from the district attorney’s office. To him I was a piece in a fascinating game called Law; he had to move me safely in the direction of the electric chair without drawing any penalty cards from the Supreme Court. We discussed my rights at length, I assured him that no confession had been solicited from me and that I had been told at the very beginning of the game of the moves open to me, and he left at last with the satisfied air of a teacher’s pet carrying a satchelful of neat homework.

  In addition to the attorneys, pro and con, I was also run through an older and blunter and more basic routine. My fingerprints were taken, my picture was taken full face and profile, I answered all the normal questions while uniformed men at typewriters filled out all the normal forms, I turned over my wallet and keys and watch and belt and shoelaces to a thin dispassionate man behind a counter, and I was frisked thoroughly, head to toe.

  I had been through all of this before, many times, but not in this role. In the past, I had been the one at the elbow of the suspect, the bored one watching the long childish process of each blackened finger being rolled on the paper, the quick callous snapping of the photos, all the little steps by which a human being is catalogued, stripped of his humanity, and converted into a prisoner. Watching someone go through it for the first time, bewildered and terrified, had always bothered me a little, and I’d preferred the tight-lipped silence of the recidivists. Going through it myself now, I fortified myself with the memory of all those others; we were an unbroken line, linked together, each of us saving a portion of self, all of those portions working together to make us strong, help us survive.

  But of course I was sure I wouldn’t be staying long, all of this routine was in my case a waste of time. How I would have felt if I were guilty, or if I were innocent but unsure of my ability to establish that innocence, I can’t say. Less philosophical, perhaps, and more alone, and more afraid.

  As to the two detectives who were now playing the role I once had played, their faces were expressionless throughout. But mine had also been expressionless, in the past, so it was impossible to say what these two were thinking or feeling or what their attitudes were.

  In the middle of all this I was taken into a small room with a long table lined with chairs, where I was served dinner. It was like a TV dinner, except that the tray was larger and older and thicker and more battered. The meat beneath the gravy might have been some kind of beef. What the ex-cons used to tell me is absolutely true: prison food stinks.

  I went through all of these things, the meetings and the red tape and the gray food, obedient and silent. I was done with struggle, for now. I had gone out into the world, I had left my hermit’s cave, in order to accomplish a specific thing. That thing was now accomplished, or nearly so, and there was nothing more I could do until Captain Driscoll came to me. In the meantime I was going very nicely to be given—courtesy of the City of New York—a cell all to myself, a cave away from cave, where I could turn off all the motors, be away from all the eyes and all the words, and begin to restore myself.

  Lying in my cell, on my back on the thin bunk, looking up at the gray metal ceiling, I thought for the first time in hours of my wall. I could see it in my mind’s eye, straight and thick, the concrete blocks down in the ground below the frost line, the ditch down one side of the yard now and partway across the back, one line of concrete block in place, level and smooth. Once the ditch was complete, around all three sides of the yard and meeting the house at both ends, and with that one row of concrete block in place, then I could actually begin construction of the wall. At the pace I was working—and I was in no hurry to finish this job, having nothing to do once it was done—I might have the wall completed up to ground level before the first real snow of winter forced me to lay off and wait for spring. That would be interesting. I thought I would switch from concrete block to brick, about two-brick thicknesses below ground level, to allow for unevenness in the ground. And of course the bricks would be in two rows, with an open space in between, and in there I intended to put all the dirt I was now digging out of my trench. The whole thing was carefully planned in my head, and on paper, and in addition I had sticks driven into the ground and wire strung along the sticks to show where the trench had to be dug. The whole thing was being done with a great deal of care and attention and thought, befitting something as important as a wall. And when it was done, ten feet high, it would completely enclose the yard. There would be no way into the yard except through the house.

  I was lying there thinking, seeing the wall in my mind’s eye, when I became aware of someone standing outside my cell. The cell lights were off, but there was always light in the corridor, enough for me to get around the cell without difficulty and for me to see someone standing there by the bars, watching me, not saying anything.

  I turned my head, and it was Captain Driscoll. I got to my feet and walked over and looked at him, and there was nothing to be read in his face. He was just studying me. I said, “Well? Do you know about it now?”

  “Know about what, Tobin?”

  “I didn’t think it would be this soon,” I said, and went back to my bunk, and lay down.

  He said, “What are you so sure of, Tobin? And what’s this business about seeing nobody but me?”

  “I can’t talk to you yet,” I said.

  “Why not? What are you waiting for?”

  I didn’t intend to answer that, so I closed my eyes and looked at my wall.

  He said, “I’m here, Tobin. You want to talk to me, talk to me now. What have you got to say?”

  “Nothing,” I told him.

  “This is your only chance,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come down here at all, and I won’t be coming back.”

  I sat up and faced him and said, “You will be coming back, Captain. I’m not being a smart-ass and I’m not being smug and I’m not trying any kind of a stunt. There’s a reason why I can’t talk to you now, and the reason is you won’t believe me now and I’ll just have to say it all again later on. And there’s a reason why when the time comes to talk you’re the only one I’ll want to talk to, and you’ll know the reason then, without my telling you. There’s no point in either of us staying up tonight. I’ll probably see you tomorrow, or at the latest the next day. Until then, good night.”

  I lay back down and closed my eyes again.

  I could feel him there, not moving, looking at me. After a while he said, “I wish I knew what you were up to. You’re guilty, I’ll swear to that, you killed Donlon and that means you have to be the one killed the others, and you’re going to burn for it. So I wish I knew what you were up to.”

  I didn’t answer.

  A while later he said, “If this is the opening phase of some sort of insanity plea, I trust to God you don’t pull it off.”

  I didn’t answer that one either.

  A long time went by, and then I opened my eyes and turned my head and he was gone. I shut my eyes again, and saw my wall. I saw it complete, tall, broad, perfect ninety-degree angles at the corners, shutting out all the world except the sky. Blue sky, pale blue, with small fluffy clouds in it. Pale blue sky, dark red bricks, green grass, me in the middle. Nothing else, nothing else.

  26

  HE CAME BACK AT ten-fifteen the next morning. I had breakfasted at seven, on cold pancakes and boiling coffee, and had sat in my cell ever since, wanting nothing and receiving nothing. The cell door was left open during the day, so the prisoners could stretch their legs a bit, walk up and down the corridor, but I preferred to stay where I was. A couple of my neighbors stopped by to chat and get acquainted, but I wasn’t up to the intricacies of small talk and they got discouraged after a while and went away.

  I was deep in reverie when Captain Driscoll arrived. He came into the cell and spoke to me and I didn’t really hear him until he spoke again. Then I looked up and saw him there and said, “Ah. You got the report.”

  It was written all over his face. He said, “How di
d you know it? You could know you didn’t kill him, but how could you know any more than that?”

  I said, “Yesterday afternoon a large heavy object was dropped down a stairwell in a building on East Eleventh Street. It hit and killed a young boy of about ten. I was a witness. It would be Eleventh Street near Avenue A. Before we do our talking, I wish you’d check on that, maybe take a look at the sergeant’s report.”

  He frowned at me. “What the hell is this?”

  “Another victim of the same murderer,” I said, “and the explanation of everything. That’s why I don’t want to tell you about it myself until you’ve seen the official version. Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll wait right here until you come back.”

  “You don’t have to stay here at all,” he told me. “You aren’t in custody any more.”

  “I’d rather stay here, if it’s all the same to you. It’s quiet here. In your office, or the bullpen, or anywhere else out there, there’d be too many people around.”

  He studied me and said, “You’re a weird one, Tobin, I swear to God you are. You won’t talk to me now, is that it?”

  “Not till you know about the other murder.”

  “And you want to stay here until we talk.”

  “If I can.”

  He shrugged. “It’s your ball,” he said. “You can make up any damn rules you want. East Eleventh Street, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  He was gone an hour, during which time I tried to forget about the wall and get back to thinking about the murders. I had a lot to tell him, and it should be in some kind of coherent order. I had to know where to begin, and I wanted to be sure I didn’t leave anything out.

  When he came back, Captain Driscoll looked confused. “It’s down as accidental on their books,” he said. “You were a witness, all right. Why didn’t you tell them at the scene?”

  “Tell them what?”

  “That it was an attempt on your life.”

  “By the person who had murdered Terry Wilford and Irene Boles? At that time you were still holding Robin Kennely for that.”

  He brushed that away. “All right, you were running things to suit yourself. You want to tell me what really happened there?”

  “The two boys were at the foot of the stairs. I was coming down. They looked up at me, saw this thing falling, their expressions made me look up, I jumped out of the way, it missed me, bounced off the stair and killed the boy. I went up on the roof and he was gone.”

  “Who? That’s the point, man, who is he?”

  “He’s the same one who killed Donlon,” I said.

  He looked surprised. “What? I thought you already knew about that. The paraffin test came out positive. Donlon really did kill himself. I thought that’s what you were waiting for.”

  “It was.”

  “Then what do you mean, the killer’s the same one who killed Donlon? Donlon killed himself.”

  “I know. And Terry Wilford. And Irene Boles. And George Padbury. And that boy on East Eleventh Street.”

  Captain Driscoll came over and sat down on the bunk, at the opposite end from me. In a flat voice he said, “Fill it in.”

  I said, “Donlon was on drugs. Every once in a while he’d pick up Irene Boles, give her some heroin and take her somewhere unusual to have sex with her. In the captain’s cabin of a cargo ship one time. Odd places, as though the place itself gave him a kick. One of the youngsters at Thing East told me Donlon was always very excited by the thought of that second floor over the coffee shop, as though convinced there were orgies going on up there.”

  “Where do you get your information?”

  I shook my head.

  He said, “All right, the woman’s pimp. Go on.”

  I said, “I don’t know all that happened upstairs that morning. Donlon picked up the Boles woman early, I don’t know where they went first, but they wound up at Thing East. Donlon let himself in with a skeleton key, any kind of master key, and the two of them went upstairs. They got high together, or maybe they were high already, but in any case something snapped with one of them or the other, and the Boles woman got killed. I’d guess she went after him first and he took the knife away and cut her up with it.”

  “There was a recent wound on Donlon’s abdomen,” he said. “It was in the M.E.’s report.”

  “All right. Then Terry and Robin arrived. Donlon was naked, smeared with blood, standing there with the knife in his hand, Irene Boles dead at his feet. Terry made a move and Donlon went after him. Robin froze. Donlon was cagey crazy, the way a man gets sometimes on narcotics, very clever and intuitive within a lunatic framework.”

  He nodded. “I know how that works,” he said.

  “So he used Robin instead of killing her, covered her with blood, put the knife in her hands, sent her downstairs. He probably took the shower before he sent her down, but maybe he took a chance on waiting till after. In any case, there was no blood on his clothing, so all he had to do was dress, hide in a dark corner, and wait for the second floor to fill up with plainclothesmen. Then out he comes, moving around with the rest, just another cop on the scene. I remember that George Padbury first pointed Donlon out to me as he was coming out of the doorway by the stairs, not as he was coming into the building.”

  “Is that why Padbury was killed? Because he realized later that Donlon hadn’t come in?”

  “I don’t know. George tried to phone me about half an hour before he was killed. I don’t know what he wanted to tell me. With Donlon dead, there’s no way to find out. He saw something, or remembered something, and tried to call me. Donlon got onto him, was probably following him the way after that he sometimes followed me, sometimes followed one of the other youngsters from Thing East. I think up till then he really didn’t think of himself as a murderer. The thing had happened, Boles and Wilford were dead, but that had been a crazy incident, it had developed around him, out of control. But for some reason he had to go after George Padbury and shut his mouth, he had to become a conscious purposeful murderer, and he wasn’t fitted for the role, it went against the grain. He came into my house and talked to me when I had the youngsters there, and he was odd, just slightly erratic. In the middle of trying to pressure me out of poking into the case, he went into a soliloquy about loving children and being sterile. It didn’t make any sense for him to talk that way.”

  Captain Driscoll looked surprised. “He was sterile?”

  “That’s what he said. Told me he used to think it was his wife’s fault, but he’d been told by a doctor it was him.”

  “Maybe that’s when it started. The business with the whore.”

  I said, “Before the coffee house went into that building there was a small religious group there. Both the youngsters at the coffee house and the people with the religious group told me Donlon was constantly coming around, harassing, poking and prying, seeming to have some sort of compulsion to assume the existence of dirtiness, filth. He was seeking degradation, straining for it the way a person pokes at an aching tooth, deriving pleasure out of making it hurt more.”

  He nodded. “Taking narcotics with a Negro prostitute was probably the worst degradation he could think of for himself.”

  “But it had to be in an unusual place,” I said. “After all, Donlon was a romantic. Everything he did was done romantically, from the sessions with Irene Boles to the insinuating smirking calls he was making on Thing East.”

  Captain Driscoll looked away. “He hadn’t been exactly right,” he said, “not for a long time. I’d thought it was trouble at home. He wasn’t on the take, you know. At least I don’t think he was, though maybe lately, maybe that was another part of the degradation he was after. When I came to see you to ask you about your statement, it wasn’t just to cover up a problem in my precinct, though I admit that was part of it. But I’d been vaguely worried about Donlon, too, and I thought you might have some answers for me.”

  “I didn’t know him then,” I sa
id. “I don’t feel that I know him very well now, either. His wife might be able to fill in some of the blanks for you. I think of him as a disappointed man, a romantic, blaming himself for whatever his failures were, working out his problems in strange ways, being erratic and troubled. Then he became a murderer almost by accident and it broke the balance he’d maintained, it set him up to destroy himself once and for all. For instance, I can visualize him getting a sexual kick out of smearing blood on Robin, loving the act of it, and then hating himself for it afterward, having it be just another thorn stuck in his mind.”

  “You think he was going to kill himself no matter what.”

  “I’m not sure. If he’d been arrested he would have tried it, he was definitely that type. I’ve seen them in my—” I stopped.

  Captain Driscoll said, “All right, Tobin, take it easy. You used to be on the force, we both know it, you can refer to it.”

  “It’s difficult,” I said. “I’d rather talk about Donlon. I think the reasons for his killing himself are all the same as the reasons for everything else he did up till the murder of George Padbury, plus one more. When he killed Padbury he became a purposeful killer, and it was the purposeful killer that saw me slip out the back way from the religious group’s new building, followed me, and tried to kill me. When he missed me and killed that boy, an innocent child, the one kind of human being he had uncomplicated love for, it was one item too much. I think that’s why he went back near the church or whatever they call it. He came close to going in and talking to the people there, I imagine. It was between talking to somebody and killing himself, and he decided to kill himself.”

  He nodded. “It hangs together,” he said. “And I see why you didn’t want to try to convince anybody before we found out Donlon had really killed himself. But why just talk to me, alone?”