The Tiger Among Us

by Leigh Brackett

  "I didn't know she had a boy," said Tracey.

  "Oh yes. I've only seen him once or twice myself, when he happened to bring her over, but he seemed like a nice boy. Long tall drink of water, about seventeen—her baby, she always called him."

  They both turned their heads now and looked at me, because I had come back across the kitchen.

  "A tall skinny boy?" I said. "And he ran away last Saturday night?"

  Mae put her hand over her mouth, "But he couldn't be the boy you were looking for, Walt."

  "What's his name?"

  "Adolph," she said. "After Mrs. Liebendorffer's father, I think. I don't see how he could be——"

  "Adolph. Not a very happy name for a boy to be saddled with, is it? Does he have a middle name?"

  "Now how in the world would I know——" She brought up short, and then said in a small voice, "As a matter of fact, I do know. Mrs. Liebendorffer is a very talkative woman. He has a middle name, for the late Mr. Liebendorffer's father. It's Wilhelm."

  Wilhelm. William. Bill. Who in an era cursed with the name of Hitler would not rather be called Bill than Adolph?

  "Why did he run away?"

  "I don't know. His family doesn't know. He just went."

  "When did he go, on Saturday night? Late? Early?"

  "For heaven's sake, Walt! Late, I think. He came home late and then in the morning he was gone. At least that's what his sister told me."

  "What's the address?"

  "Seventeen forty-six North Buckeye. But Walt——"

  I didn't wait. As I passed the phone I thought of Koleski, but there was no use trying to call him now. He would be out. Besides, I didn't have any real, definite reason to call, not yet. After I had talked to Mrs. Liebendorffer I would know better.

  I got in the car and drove north.

  18

  NORTH Buckeye wasn't as far out as Laurel Terrace. It was one of those pleasant streets of slightly elderly frame houses, well kept up and comfortable, shaded by big trees. I found the number. I parked in front of it and just sat there for a few minutes, almost afraid to go in and find out whether this was at last the break, the real honest-to-God break, or only another blind alley.

  Finally I had to get moving. It was a green house with a wide porch and a neat patch of lawn with hydrangeas in a row against the wall. I climbed the steps. They were wooden, painted that season. They rang hollow under my feet. I crossed the porch and rang the bell.

  A woman answered it, so quickly that I thought she must have been peering out at my car and wondering what I was doing. She was a young woman with a distracted, angry face. Yet there was something eager about the way she asked me what I wanted.

  I told her who I was, and eagerness was replaced by disappointment. She said rather snappishly, "I called your sister and explained why my mother couldn't come tonight. I'm sorry if she's been inconvenienced——"

  "It isn't that," I said. "I want to talk to Mrs. Liebendorffer about the boy."

  Now the eagerness came back again. "About Adolph? Do you know something?"

  "I'm not sure. That's why I want to talk to Mrs. Liebendorffer."

  From inside a voice cried, "Who is it, Marthe? Is it news?"

  "I don't know, Mother," she answered. "It's Mr. Sherris, and he wants to see you." She stepped aside for me to come past her. Lowering her voice, she said savagely, "Do you know where he is? If I ever get my hands on that young whelp——"

  She looked as though she had had a rough four days.

  A hall ran along this side of the house, with the doors opening off to the right. In the nearest doorway a woman stood, holding a wrapper around her with one hand and clinging with the other to the jamb, as though she was too weak to stand unaided. It was a minute before I recognized her. I had been introduced to Mrs. Liebendorffer at Mae's house, and I remembered her as a neat, placid, pleasant soul. Now her gray hair hung in wild straggles, her eyes were sunk into dark holes behind her rimless glasses, her plump pink cheeks had lost their color and their firmness.

  "Sherris?" she said. "Sherris? I don't—— Oh yes, Mrs. Farrel's brother. Mr. Sherris, I can't possibly come tonight, I've had a terrible shock and I'm simply not able. I should think your sister would understand that, being a mother herself."

  I explained all over again that I was not trying to get her to baby-sit. "I want to talk to you about Bill."

  She stared at me blankly. "Bill?"

  "About Adolph, Mother," said Marthe. To me she said, "Everybody calls him Bill, but Mother sticks to Adolph. Shall we go in and sit down?"

  "It's a good name," said Mrs. Liebendorffer, wiping her eyes. "It was my father's name. One bad man should not spoil a good name." She allowed herself to be led to a couch and placed in a rumpled nest of pillows and eider down. "Please—what do you know about my Adolph?"

  "Perhaps nothing," I said. "It might have been some other boy. Do you happen to know where he went Saturday night—before he ran away, I mean?"

  "To a movie," said Mrs. Liebendorffer. "Adolph is a good boy. He always told me where he was going, until now. I can't understand why he would do this. I'd have understood, no matter how much trouble he's in."

  "You're sure he's in trouble? I mean, boys do sometimes get the urge to go out on their own."

  "Oh no. He left a note." She searched for it through the folds of her clothing and handed me a crumpled piece paper. "You can see he's frightened out of his wits, poor child. If he'd only talked to me first——"

  I read the note. I got to go away for a while, Mom, I am in trouble DON'T have the police look for me unless you want to see me in jail. I will come back when it's safe. Don't worry, Mom, I love you.

  There was no signature. I suppose there hadn't really been any need for one.

  I said, "And you haven't notified the police that he was missing?"

  She shook her head. "I kept thinking surely he would come back. Every day, every night—I've been out of my head with worry, Mr. Sherris, but it seemed he would have to come back soon, because he didn't have much money."

  "He took all there was in the house," Marthe said. "About twenty dollars." She made an impatient gesture. "It isn't as though he'd been kidnapped or was in any danger. He's bound to come home when he gets hungry enough, and trust to Mother to fight his battles for him. After all, he's not the first boy to run away because he's got some girl in trouble."

  "Marthe, Marthe," whispered Mrs. Liebendorffer. "And in front of a stranger."

  Feeling the beginnings of despair, I said, "A girl? He doesn't say anything in the note about a girl."

  "Of course not. He was quiet as a clam. But Chuck told us."

  Just like that.

  Chuck told us.

  I sat there, in that stuffy comfortable room with the flowered slip covers and the mantel loaded with family photographs, and watched the piece of paper I held in my hand blur out of sight into a strange darkness. And somewhere in the darkness a woman said, Chuck told us.

  I said, speaking carefully as though too loud a tone would frighten the word away, "Chuck?"

  "A friend of Adolph's," said Marthe impatiently. Obviously Chuck was of no importance to her. "He came over Sunday because of the camping trip, and when he found out Adolph was gone he said that must be the reason."

  "He did," I said. "Yes, he would, of course. That would be the right thing to say. But he didn't tell you the girl's name, did he?"

  "No, he said he didn't know who she was, only that Bill Adolph was mixed up with her. What do you mean, it would be the right thing to say? What are you talking about, Mr. Sherris?"

  Her voice sounded a little queer and edgy. I could see my hands again. They were still holding the note but they were shaking so I couldn't make out the words. I tried to get them out of sight until they quieted.

  I asked, "What is Chuck's last name?"

  "It's Landry. Why?"

  "He's a big boy, isn't he? Eighteen years old, tall, good-looking?"

  "A nice boy," said Mrs. Lie
bendorffer. "Very well-spoken and polite." She had forgotten to cry for the moment. She was looking at me with the faint beginning of alarm.

  "That is what he looks like, though?"

  "Yes," said Marthe, "but I don't see what difference——"

  "There are three other boys too. They travel together, the five of them. Bill, and Chuck, and a short stocky boy with a loud laugh——"

  "Roy Aspinwall," she said, and now her voice was very quiet.

  "And Everett Bush," I said, and she nodded. "And one other."

  "Bobby Stillman. Yes. They've been friends for quite a while. But how do you know them?"

  "In a minute," I said. "Just a minute." I sat in the chair with every nerve aching and the names banging in my ears like drums. Bush. Aspinwall. Stillman.

  And Landry.

  No more attacks from ambush, no more happy violence, no more hunting in the night. No more fun for any of you.

  Now you have names.

  Now I will find you and drag you out into the light.

  That's what I thought. It was a good thought. There was only one thing the matter with it. It wasn't so.

  Marthe was talking to me. She wanted to know how I knew these boys and why I was so curious about her brother. I shook my head.

  "If you knew how long I've waited," I said. "I'm sorry. Listen, did your Bill go with them Saturday night?"

  "Yes," said Mrs. Liebendorffer. "They often went to the movies together."

  "But Everett wasn't with them."

  "They just stopped outside and honked," said Marthe. "I don't know who was in the car."

  "A light-colored convertible," I said.

  "Sort of a gray-blue. It belongs to Chuck."

  "Nice boy," said Mrs. Liebendorffer. "Adolph never went with rowdies." Her gaze had been drawn to my bad leg, and she was staring at it as though it had a horrible fascination for her.

  "My sister must have told you what happened to me," I said. "About four months ago. Remember?"

  She formed a word with her mouth, but nothing came for a long minute. Then she said loudly, emphatically, "No. Not Adolph. Not my son. He was not one of the boys who beat you."

  "Your son didn't touch me," I said. "And I doubt very much if he's ever touched anybody else, either. But he's been running with a bad bunch and he's in bad trouble, and it doesn't have anything to do with a girl."

  She looked at me with great suffering eyes. Marthe now had moved over to stand protectively beside her. I felt like a barbarian with a club, poised to strike them.

  "The boys didn't go to the movies," I said. "They went a lot farther than that. Two men were killed Saturday night, and I think your Bill was a witness. And I think he ran away in fear of his own life."

  The silence in the room was not long but it was heavy. You could feel the weight of it.

  Then Marthe said, "You're making a terrible accusation."

  "He's crazy," said Mrs. Liebendorffer suddenly, in a cracked, wild voice. "My boy went to the movies Saturday night. My boy is a good boy. He never hurt anyone." She got to her feet, screeching at me. "Get out, you crazy man. Get out, get out! "

  She fell back on the couch, sobbing.

  I wouldn't have believed that this moment—the time when I had actually got the names of the boys and would shortly have their addresses—could be so distasteful and unjoyous to me.

  I looked at Marthe. "Please try to understand. I haven't anything against your brother. He could have saved me a lot if he'd gone for the police but he was evidently afraid to, and since I've come to know Chuck better I don't blame him. It's very important to find him, both as a witness against the others, and for his own safety. If the boys find him first, they'll surely kill him now."

  I don't know how much of that she heard. She was thinking of something else.

  "That was about the time," she said. "Four months ago."

  "What?"

  "He began acting queer, as though there was something on his mind. I remember a couple of times he said he was sick and had me tell the boys he couldn't go out with them. And then once we found him in his room all doubled up with pain with big bruises on his stomach. He said he got hurt playing tag football."

  I remembered what the can-ganger, Suby, had said—how four of the boys were hustling and roughing the fifth one, threatening him in an only partly jesting way.

  "I think they've been afraid from the first that he'd tell on them," I said. "He didn't really belong. They got him involved right up to his neck so he wouldn't dare to turn against them, but I guess Saturday was too much for him."

  It would have been too much for most boys, I thought. That nightmarish business in the strip mine, the mounting terror, and then the discovery that they had been seen and the killing of Finelli. Bill must have come home sick and surfeited with death, caught between an overpowering sense of guilt and fear for his own safety. And he had done the only thing he could think of to do. He had started running, blindly, to escape the day of reckoning.

  Something Marthe had said recurred to me. "What was that about a camping trip? Was Bill supposed to go away with the boys?"

  "Monday," said Marthe slowly, still looking dazed. "To Cook's Forest."

  "How nice," I said. "How normal and healthy. But Bill was too smart to go with them. You can be thankful for that."

  He must have pictured himself in the vast dim solitudes under the primeval trees, alone with Chuck and Roy and Bobby, those quiet well-spoken boys. He must have thought of all the innocent-seeming, apparently accidental ways in which his tongue and his conscience might have been permanently removed as a threat to his companions. No wonder he had run away:

  And Chuck must have sweated a bloody sweat of fear ever since Sunday morning, wondering whether Bill would give himself up and talk.

  Now I understood Chuck's wild tantrum when he failed to kill me, and I understood his phone call of this morning. He was scared. Things were slipping away from him, out of his control. He had to do something, anything, and he was already in so deep that he had very little to lose and much to gain if he could get me, his worst enemy, off his trail, or get a dangerous witness out of the way. Or both. Preferably both.

  "Do you have any idea at all where Bill could have gone?"

  Marthe answered. Mrs. Liebendorffer seemed beyond speech. "We've done everything we could think of to find him. Called all our relatives, all our friends, all the places he used to go around—you know, malt shops, places like that. There isn't a trace of him."

  She sat down, white-faced, her hands caught together in her lap. "I just can't take all this in," she said. "It's too——" She shook her head, unable to find any word that would fit.

  "I know," I said.

  "Isn't there a chance you could be wrong?"

  "Do you think it's likely?"

  "No. You knew the boys. But——" Her mind was turning this way and that, searching desperately for hope. "Even if they are the boys who beat you, are you sure they did these these other horrible things?"

  "I think so. The police think so too. But Bill can tell us. For sure." I got up. "Has Chuck been around again or called since Sunday?"

  "No. He's gone. He and Roy and Bobby went ahead on their camping trip anyway, without my brother."

  "The hell they did," I said. "I saw Chuck Monday afternoon. He hurt my wife and came within an ace of killing both of us. He made a threatening phone call no more than two hours ago. He's right here in Mall's Ford."

  She thought about that for a moment. "I don't understand how that could be. I called their homes, all of them, hoping they might have heard from Adolph. Their parents said they hadn't and the boys were still gone."

  This was bad. It meant that the boys had lied to their parents. It meant that they were free of all supervision and all annoyances of routine, able to put their whole strength into doing whatever they might feel was necessary to protect themselves. It meant that picking them up was not going to be as simple as I had thought.

  "How long were
they supposed to be gone?"

  "A week. They were to come back next Sunday night."

  Then their parents would not expect to hear from them until then. The boys would have a clear field, as long as they kept out of sight.

  My young tigers were still at large.

  I picked up the phone and called Koleski.

  19

  AND that was my Big Break, the cap and crown of more than four months' labor. By afternoon of the next day, Thursday, we were in possession of the following information:

  Chuck Landry, Roy Aspinwall, and Bobby Stillman had left their homes very early on Monday morning. Their parents believed that they had gone to Cook's Forest to camp out.

  The park administration at Cook's Forest had no record of any camping permit being issued in any of these three names, nor were the boys in any of the local motels or cabins.

  Everett Bush was still in Cincinnati.

  Adolph Wilhelm Liebendorffer was still missing.

  There was a little more. Koleski and Hartigan now had Chuck's license number and a description of the car. But they had not been able to turn up a single witness who had seen Finelli's car near the Bush place on Saturday night, nor any witness who had seen Finelli following Chuck's car, there or anywhere. Neither had they been able to place the four boys near the strip mine.

  The Big Break was something less than a blazing success.

  Koleski and Hartigan came over to the Ohio Hotel to tell me what the score was. I had moved myself and my family in yesterday afternoon, much to my mother-in-law's relief, and it did not seem possible that anyone could get to Tracey and the children there. The management and the hotel detective had been alerted so that we were in effect under twentyfour-hour guard. I had not gone to work, on Koleski's suggestion. He felt that I ought to avoid all familiar or routine actions—just in case.

  "It won't be very long now," he said. "We've got names, we know who we're looking for, and we have one big advantage. They don't know we're onto them."