“I’m Maggie Sullivan,” I said. “I’m here to get Heebs. Lulu Sollers said you were probably the ones who had him, and told me about the swell job you’re doing looking out for kids.”
I gave my brightest smile. Hatchets don’t soften easily.
“Lulu Sollers,” she repeated. “The police matron?”
“She’s not a matron.” My smile began to wither. “She’s a sworn officer.”
“Well, you can’t just waltz in and take him. If you’d stayed on the phone a minute, I would have told you that. We’ve already made arrangements for him to move to Miller Children’s Home this afternoon. They’ll house him and feed him and teach him a trade.”
“Then I’m saving them a bed, which I’ve always heard are in short supply at such places.”
“I can’t just turn him over to you on your say-so.”
“Do I look like a white slaver?”
The sound of glass shattering on the closed door to an adjoining room interrupted what was shaping up to be a fine set-to.
“Hey, sis!” yelled Heebs. “Maggie! I’m in here!”
Hatchet Face stormed to the closed oak door.
“And you’re going to stay in there until you settle down, young man. This door is locked, as is the one in the hall. You might as well save yourself further pain and stay in bed.”
“The Bible comes next, lady.”
Hatchet Face paled.
“Stay put,” I shouted from my spot at her elbow. “And don’t throw anything else! She’s going to unlock it.”
I whirled. The woman beside me retreated a step.
“What do you mean about pain? What kind of pain is he in?”
She threw up her hands as if fearful I might hit her.
“He’d been beaten up. By other boys, he said.” With amazing alacrity she fished a ring with a couple of keys from her pocket. Her hand shook so she could scarcely fit it into the lock. “We had a doctor look at him. We thought his ankle might be broken, but the doctor said it was just a sprain. He recommended bed rest for a day, but the boy won’t cooperate. I have other chores. I couldn’t sit here keeping an eye on him every minute, so - so I locked him in.”
The door swung open. Heebs sat propped up in a bed with pillows behind him. One of his eyes was black and purple and swollen completely shut. The other had a bandage beneath it suggesting a cut. One cheek was scraped and his mouth was swollen.
“Holy smokes,” I managed when I trusted my voice. “You trying to copy me?”
In spite of his thick lips he gave a lopsided grin.
“Hey, sis, am I ever glad to see you.”
“You said you didn’t have relatives.” Behind me, Hatchet Face was recovering enough to be indignant.
“Aw, I was sore at her. She keeps making up rules.”
I sighed dramatically. “Well, you’ve seen what he’s like,” I said to the woman. “You’ll have to mend your ways, Heebs, if you want to come home with me.”
The woman scooped pieces of the crockery mug Heebs had broken onto a folded newspaper. She smacked it into a wastebasket in irritation.
“You are a family member then? If so, then I can release him into your care.”
Heebs’ one good eye sought mine in mute appeal. I took a breath.
“Do second cousins count?” I asked carefully.
“Second...”
“Or maybe twice removed. Those cousin things get so confusing.” If you started with Adam and Eve, didn’t we all qualify as cousins?
“Well, I suppose... If you’re going to be responsible for him...”
Heebs stuck one leg out from under the covers. The ankle was heavily bandaged. “I’ll behave, sis. Honest. So if you two ladies will step outside and let me put on my trousers—”
“Hang on just a minute, Heebs.”
Reality was hitting me. I hadn’t thought this through. I hadn’t expected to find him in this bad shape, either. An ice bag and a glass with milk residue sat on a small table next to him. Heebs was being well cared for here and it looked like the people running the place had good intentions, even if I couldn’t say much for their techniques.
Letting the kid get sent to an orphanage was out of the question, though. It might be the best thing for him, but I couldn’t stomach the thought. Trouble was, I couldn’t think of an alternative.
“I need to make some arrangements for him,” I said. “Can I leave him here until four o’clock?”
TWENTY-FOUR
Not having the least idea what to do about Heebs, I concentrated on work. After talking to Lulu last night, I wanted to see if Willa Lee could tell me anything more, any little detail, about hearing kids at the construction site, or in the vicinity, on the night Foster’s body was found.
Things appeared to be humming along on Rachel’s project. I parked the DeSoto half a block away in case Hawkins came backing out and swung around too fast the way he had when he mashed the rose bushes. Crossing my fingers that Willa Lee wasn’t away every Tuesday morning, I rang her doorbell. She didn’t answer. It was a beautiful day, and she was a woman who took a lot of interest in her yard. I went around the side of the house thinking I might find her in the back yard. And hoping she didn’t have her rifle if she was.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said looking up from where she knelt in a good-sized garden plot. “I wondered who was ringing the bell.”
If I’d shared any of Freeze’s skepticism about her hearing, I didn’t now.
“Nice garden.” I looked at rows where shoots of green were just coming up, some with slender poles at the end of the rows and some with no indication that something was in them except their furrows. “Spinach, peas and... turnips?” I guessed.
Willa Lee gave the end of a row a smack with her trowel and sat back on her haunches. A broad-brimmed straw hat with an unfinished edge shaded her gray head. She was wearing overalls.
“Salsify. Don’t care for turnips much. But you’re not here to talk gardening. What do you want?”
“I’d like to ask a few more questions about those kids you heard, if you have time.”
“Have to get my planting finished this morning. Have places to go come noontime.”
“Could we talk while you work?”
“I’ve been planting beans all my life, just about. Reckon I could plant ‘em in my sleep.” Picking the trowel up, she used it to point at the back stoop. “You can sit if you don’t mind getting your skirt dirty. Fire away.”
Tucking my skirt beneath me, I sat on the steps. For several moments I sat just enjoying the feel of the sun on my face and the sound of the birds. It was partly for Willa Lee’s benefit. She was watching me from the edge of her eye.
“What kids around here have been in trouble before? Or maybe just aren’t supervised as well as they should be?”
“None that could be the same ones I heard over there, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
It brought me up short.
“Why not?”
“Not old enough.” She began dribbling seeds so small I couldn’t see them into the furrow she’d just drawn. “Houses around here, half the people in them are old as me, or older. Those where people have died or moved out, young families live there now. Their children are still little. Joanie Beck and her sister Nancy are the oldest around for at least eight blocks every direction. Well, just two directions really now. It’s all businesses there and there.” She pointed. “Anyway, those Beck girls are what, nine and ten now? Still in the elementary school. Those ones I heard running that night the feller got killed, they were teenagers.”
I managed to recover my voice.
“You saw them?”
“Nope.” She hesitated. “I may have caught a glimpse. Just of shapes, though. I thought I saw a couple of heads bobbing. But it was just for a blink, and that was all. Could have been shadows. How I know it was teenagers was the sound of the running. The way the feet slapped.”
I must have looked blank. She sat back on her haunches again.
“Don’t have children, do you?”
“Uh, no.”
“No younger brothers or sisters?”
“No.”
“We had a boy,” she said softly. “Died when he was thirteen and a half. That’s how I know how they sound, listening to him and his friends as they grew up.
“Little ones, now, they’ve got little bitty feet. When they run they go pitty-pat. But come around eleven or twelve, those feet of theirs grow. My law, how those feet slap when they run.”
She smiled at memories. Her face was almost pretty. Recalling herself she drew the trowel along to make another furrow with neat precision.
“Anyway, that and who’s in the neighborhood is how I know they were older.”
I had wrapped my arms around my knees, fascinated by what she said. It wasn’t the sort of thing Freeze would give much weight to, or Joel Minsky either. As logical as she seemed to be, I was inclined to believe her, not only that there’d been kids around, but her assessment of their ages. Was it possible there had been witnesses to Foster’s murder?
***
The foreman at Rachel’s project stopped to watch as I crossed the street.
“You’ve been at that old lady’s this whole time and she didn’t run you off?” he asked in disbelief. “I saw you heading over there.”
“She’s interesting, but then I haven’t seen her with a rifle yet.”
He chuckled.
“Do you have time for me to ask you a couple of things?”
“I do. Could use a break anyway. We’ve been at it since half past seven, trying to make up some time.”
He gestured to a stack of boards and we seated ourselves.
“You’ve had kids poking around here, somebody told me.”
“Just a couple of times. It happens once the weather turns nice and they start cooking up things to do Sunday afternoons, or after supper when it gets light enough. Take a board and put it over a sawhorse to make a seesaw, sometimes. Never realize they could get hurt if they started the stack they got it from falling.”
“They don’t take anything?”
“Naw. Well, a box of screws a few weeks back. Wasn’t worth ten cents.”
A few weeks back. It more than fit the time frame of the problem Lulu Sollers had described to me. It was also close enough to the night of Foster’s demise to catch my interest.
“You’re sure they’ve never been around at night.”
“Kids? Naw. Although...”
He frowned. My eyebrows urged him on.
“The morning that body turned up and all the police were here, I did notice the tarp we put over that big pile of lumber yonder was flipped up and kind of crooked. I wouldn’t have seen this side from the street when I drove by Sunday, though. And they could have come around after supper, like I say.”
“But you’re sure that was kids?”
“Yeah.” He dragged it out in the mildly indulgent way some men use to dismiss harmless foolishness in the young. Same bunch, too.”
“How do you know?”
He chuckled. “Candy wrappers. One of the kids must like Whiz bars. Left two wrappers both times. He doesn’t just crumple them up and throw them down, though. He folds them flat and twists them in the center like bow ties before he drops them.”
It sounded to me more like something a grownup would do.
“How do you know it’s not one of your own men?”
“First of all, I’d wring their necks for throwing trash down. And men don’t go around eating candy bars out where people can see them.”
“What?”
“Oh, I like one now and again. My wife brings home a couple of Milky Ways in case I want one in the evening, or on Saturday when I’m mowing the grass and that. But I’ve never brought one to work, and I’ve never seen one of the men working with me take one out of his lunch pail.”
It didn’t persuade me quite as much as Willa Lee Cottle’s footstep analysis, but I nodded. He stood up and stretched.
“Better get back.”
“One more quick question. Once when I stopped by last week, you were helping a man who wasn’t too pleased about it to his car. He’d come by trying to hire men from this crew.”
His voice hardened. “I remember.”
“You said there’d been someone else who tried earlier. Who?”
He shook his head. “Nobody I’d ever seen before. Can’t give you a name.”
“I know who he was.”
Morris, the man with the droopy eye, had come up. His khaki shirt showed patches of sweat, and he was breathing as if he’d loped over.
“There’s a problem at that corner,” he said to the foreman.
Forgetting me entirely, the foreman took off. Morris lifted his carpenter’s cap and wiped his face with a bandana.
“His name’s Lamont. I was part of the crew on a project of his back before I got on regular with Miss Minsky.”
Lamont. A man who had professed to be stretched too thin to hire more workers.
TWENTY-FIVE
Freeze wasn’t interested in Willa Lee’s information about kids running when I called to share it. I turned my attention to Heebs. When I still hadn’t figured out quite what to do with him after half an hour of nonproductive doodling on the tablet in front of me, I called a woman I knew. She ran a second-hand shop aimed at helping people, and knew just about every resource there was in the city for people who were down on their luck. Twenty minutes after that, she called back with an address for me, and information enough to answer the questions she knew I’d have.
Gasoline had shot up in price. It was fifteen cents now. I filled up and drove by the place that now might figure, in my plans for Heebs. The ugly little brick building was squeezed in between two equally drab but decently maintained commercial buildings. The name above the door said Weldon House and it was a shelter. It wasn’t like a gospel mission where you got a cot and a meal in return for sitting through prayer meetings. It charged a fee that was slightly more than you’d pay at a flophouse, for which you got, I was assured, considerably better facilities.
Directly across the street was a small café. I parked and got out and checked to see if the café served breakfast through supper. It looked okay. I crossed the street and went into Weldon House. It looked okay too, so I made some arrangements.
With that off my mind, I had a fresh look at what I’d learned from Willa Lee in our two conversations:
– She’d heard two shots.
– A short time later, she’d heard a scream.
– After that she’d heard kids running.
The part about kids being present fit with candy wrappers turning up at the site across the way. So did the dislodged tarpaulin the foreman had noticed. Suppose some kids had been nosing around the site and they’d heard or seen a car pull up. Ducking under the tarp would have seemed like a smart move to them. At least it would have to Wee Willie and me when we were that age. Which meant those kids had seen, or heard, whatever happened to Gabriel Foster.
That scream Willa Lee had heard... According to her, there had been a lag between shots and scream. The running came after the scream.
I bounced my index finger up and down between my teeth to create a woodpecker sound.
What I had was plenty of theory without much evidence to back it up, but it wasn’t the first time I’d wandered into that territory. Wasn’t that how theories were supposed to work? You had an idea and looked for evidence that proved or disproved it.
As much as I liked the theory, I wasn’t about to focus my efforts on finding some kids who might or might not know something worthwhile. Especially when all I had to go on was that one of them liked Whiz bars and folded the wrappers funny when he discarded them. It was worth giving Lulu Sollers a call, though, which I did, leaving a message with the particulars.
Taking care of routine business matters like paying bills and making a couple of calls for the background checks that provided my bread and butter ate up the
morning. It left the early hours of the afternoon for thinking about the other fact I’d unearthed that morning — that Lamont, who pleaded hard times, had been attempting to hire away Rachel’s workers. The day I talked to him, I’d written off his nervousness as just part of his nature. Now I wondered if there could be more to it.
Lamont had been quick to insist he didn’t have the means to take on the project left rudderless by Gabe Foster’s death. Had it been because he saw that saying otherwise might be construed as a motive for Foster’s murder? If he was simply a worrywart, he might have seen that possibility even though innocent. Or, he might have pleaded lack of resources because of a guilty conscience, not because he’d killed Foster, but over something else.
Whatever the case, it was worth having another chat with him. Right now it was almost time to pick up Heebs.
***
“Least I got a new pair of shoes from this place,” Heebs said as we inched our way from the place that had kept him overnight to my car.
“Yeah, I noticed. Shirt and pants too, looks like.”
“Inside out.” His swollen face approximated a grin.
“Sure you don’t want to hang onto my arm?” Having had a couple of beatings myself, I knew walking must be causing him discomfort, if not outright pain.
“Nah. I’m okay.”
“Suit yourself. I don’t offer many fellas a chance like that, though.”
“Hadn’t thought of that.”
He took my arm.
“What’re you going to do with me?” he asked when I’d settled him in the car and pulled away from the curb.
“That’s your decision. I’ll tell you about it when we get to my office.”
To my amazement, the elevator in the building was going up when we entered the lobby. I grinned, thinking Jenkins should have waited a day to bring up the sewing machine. Heebs hadn’t said half a dozen words on the way over. He didn’t utter a one on the way up. The unease coming from him was palpable. The longer we’d known each other, the more he’d come to trust me. Now I might give him reason not to. When I’d turned on the lights in my office, I swung a chair around for him and sat across from him.
“Here’s the deal, Heebs. There’s a move afoot to get kids off the street at night. Right now it’s volunteers like the people who picked you up, but the city’s looking to take action too. That means if I let you go back out there the same way you have been — which I’ll do if you want — you’re likely to get picked up again. If that happens, you’ll get sent to one of those homes like they were fixing to send you to this time, and I can’t run around looking for you again. I’ve got work to do, Heebs.”
Dames Fight Harder Page 12