A Crime in the Neighborhood

by Suzanne Berne

  “I saw him hiding in the bushes near the Ellisons’ house,” I said coldly. “He was standing right in their bushes. Right in their yard. You can ask Luann next door. You can ask her about when we saw him in the bushes by Boyd’s house.

  “He hurt me,” I said.

  And then I began to cry. There was nothing calculated or forced about it. This wasn’t planned. I had been wanting to cry for days, for weeks, months, for so long I had forgotten how long. All I wanted at that moment was to throw myself into my mother’s lap and feel her hand on the back of my neck and cry and cry, and know that I could. I could do it. Like Steven running through the mall that day, so stunned and headlong, looking almost as afraid to be caught as he was afraid to get away. I knew I was telling the truth, although how I was telling it was not true, and what I was saying would be misunderstood, which was inevitable, and I knew that, too. But such a fierce, raw release it was, to cry like that.

  The police showed up early the next morning, just as Mr. Green, dressed for work with his briefcase beside him, was starting his car. They blocked his driveway with their black-and-white cruiser, gliding up as noiselessly as if their car had been on the Safeway conveyor belt. From behind the curtain in my bedroom window, I watched two policemen climb out of the cruiser with that absurdly casual, brutal grace policemen have, as though all the time they are opening their car doors, climbing out, shutting the doors, walking toward you, they are also performing these movements for a much wider audience. Bare fleshy forearms held a little away from their sides, elbows bent slightly, they walked toward Mr. Green sitting in his car. I can still hear the stiff leather of their shoes squeak.

  In the early-morning light, their bodies looked heavy, dense, and their uniforms seemed bluer than usual. Their sunglasses lent them a deeply expressionless expression, as if anything in the world, any devastation, could happen in front of them and they would keep right on walking forward.

  Finally they stopped on the edge of the lawn.

  “Sir, would you get out of your car, please,” said the taller one in a neutral voice. “We have a few questions we’d like to ask you.”

  Not quickly but quietly, Mr. Green got out of his car. As he stood up, both policemen drew closer and he pressed his back against his car door as if a sudden hard gust of wind had flattened him.

  Then he took a step forward and, at a gesture from one of the policemen, walked across his decorous lawn, past his orange marigolds, up his three front steps and took out his keys. He fumbled with them for a minute or so; perhaps his hands were shaking. Across the street, screen doors twanged as first one, then another, then another neighbor came to stand inside open doorways and stare, their gaze moving from the cruiser to the policemen to Mr. Green fumbling with his keys on his front step. Before another sixty seconds passed, all three had disappeared inside.

  An hour went by. I clunked downstairs and stood in the hallway. My mother was sitting in the kitchen by the telephone, but she didn’t make any calls. She sat with her ankles crossed and looked at the kitchen wallpaper.

  She stood up, though, when Mr. Green’s door opened and the three of them, Mr. Green between the two policemen, came outside again. She took my arm and drew me against her. Together we watched from the front window as the three men walked down the front steps and strode across the short spread of grass toward the sidewalk. They managed to walk fast without actually seeming to move at all. The impression I had was that the luminous grass flowed under their feet and rushed them toward the sidewalk.

  Mr. Green was carrying his briefcase with the shiny clasps; he looked straight ahead as they reached the cruiser. One of the policemen was smiling as if he remembered a tune he liked and was playing it inside his head. He opened the back door, while the other policeman cupped one hand gently around Mr. Green’s elbow and guided him inside.

  Sixteen

  Two blocks from the Spring Hill Mall is one of those square brick professional buildings that inside always seem to smell of cleaning fluid and new carpeting, and there from 4:55 until 6:20 on the evening of July 20th, Mr. Green was either sitting in the waiting room his dentist shared with another dentist, flipping through dog-eared copies of Reader’s Digest, or stretched out in the dentist’s chair, getting a back molar filled and trying not to choke as he had an impression taken for a crown.

  The dentist and his receptionist both confirmed this was true, as did a woman who was sitting in the waiting room next to the dusty Boston fern when he arrived. In fact, she had glanced at her watch just as Mr. Green pushed open the glass door to the waiting room because her own dentist was running late. When asked by the police whether her watch might have been incorrect, she replied that it was a “brand-new Timex.”

  That Mr. Green returned home immediately afterward could be verified by my own notebook: “G. home. 6:30 P.M.” According to the police report quoted by the Post, Boyd Ellison must have been attacked between 4:50, when the elderly dog-walker saw him waiting to cross the street, and 5:30, when the florist went out to her car with a box full of wedding orchids and heard that small cry.

  Mr. Green passed our house at 4:44 P.M. by my notebook, which would give him roughly eleven minutes within which to drive to the Spring Hill Mall parking lot, leap from his car, run up the hill, grab the boy, attack him, hide from the florist, watch her slowly walk up the hill and then back down, wait for her to drive away before running back and committing the murder with that chunk of limestone, then straighten his clothing, check for bloodstains, run back down the hill, jump into his waiting car—parked where anyone would have been able to see it—and drive to the dentist’s office in time to appear, unrumpled, breathing easily, at 4:55 P.M. Timex time for his appointment.

  Of course, whenever you construct a chronology like this one it looks ludicrous, like a black-and-white movie of the Keystone Kops performing every action in quick time. You have to remind yourself that seconds and minutes measure the extremes of rage, pain, terror, as surely as they measure how long a cake needs to set or when the wash will be done. No wonder it’s tempting to think of time as something that watch companies manufacture.

  Mr. Green spent three nights in the Montgomery County Jail, held over for questioning by the state police. In addition to my accusations, they had found several clippings about the murder taped to his refrigerator. He had saved the same clippings I’d saved, as a matter of fact. Plus the police found a photograph of a bare-chested blond boy on Mr. Green’s bedroom dresser—a boy who eventually turned out to be his nephew posing after a swim meet. And they found an unloaded, unregistered pistol in his bedroom dresser, a rather antique-looking pistol. It turned out to be a World War I relic, but it was enough to hold him.

  The evidence, such as it was, seemed both scanty and damning, circumstantial at best, but suspicious enough. Luann more or less corroborated my story about seeing Mr. Green in the bushes near the Ellisons’ house, although she admitted that she herself didn’t get a good look, that all she saw were some branches shaking, and then she volunteered that it might have been a cat. Of course there was my notebook with its pages of details, confiscated the same day, later returned with coffee stains on some of the pages, the very same notebook I have before me this minute. Someone had also turned in the poisonous little note I’d pasted together several weeks before from letters cut out of the newspaper; apparently it had blown into an open car window.

  Suddenly it seemed that most of our neighbors had noticed something odd about Mr. Green. Mrs. Sperling told the police that she had twice looked out her window and seen him standing in his yard at night. “Just looking around,” she said. “In the dark.” Mrs. Morris claimed that Mr. Green had once made a threatening gesture with a trowel when one of her terriers got loose and ran across his lawn. David Bridgeman’s father reported that Mr. Green had driven too close to David when he was riding his bike toward Mr. Green’s driveway. Added to all that was Luann’s unexpected declaration that one day she had bent down to pick up a dropped penny on
the street only to find Mr. Green staring at her when she straightened up. “He saw my panties,” she told Detective Small with an air of unwilling injury. “And they were a hole in them.”

  So naturally no one disbelieved my story once it began to be passed around. Just as earlier no one had disbelieved the stories about my father that circulated from house to house, or the stories about Ada, or the stories about my mother, or any of the stories that we tell about those of us whose private unhappinesses can’t stay private. And in my own defense, though the evidence against Mr. Green certainly now looks flimsy, he did drive down our street, heading toward the mall in a brown Dodge matching the description of the car sighted later that afternoon right after the murder.

  He kept a black comb perpetually in his back pocket, just like the comb found at the murder site. He was left-handed, like the murderer, and balding. Most damning of all, he was a single, middle-aged man who had no friends to speak of, no past he alluded to, no clear reason to be where he was at all—in a family neighborhood.

  Everyone was very sympathetic to me those first few days after Mr. Green was arrested. Mrs. Lauder baked us an apple crumble. Mrs. Morris actually bought me a Nancy Drew book. There was talk of forming some kind of a neighborhood association, of vetting potential home buyers before they were allowed to move in. Neighbors stood together in the street, describing their feelings at discovering a murderer right next door; Mrs. Sperling and tall, black-haired Mrs. Reade embraced by the Sperlings’ mailbox. Someone threw eggs at Mr. Green’s front door.

  But largely the mood in the neighborhood was, if not exactly celebratory, then at least lightened. Roses bloomed. The sky was blue. Women sat outside talking on each other’s front steps. Once again children ran out when the ice-cream truck jingled onto the street. The Reades hosted an impromptu wienie roast one night and people carried over bowls of potato salad, bags of chips and popcorn, whatever they had in the house, and the Lauders brought a watermelon. Everyone went except my mother and me. She had a headache, she said.

  Yet after those three days, the police let Mr. Green go, not because of his alibi at the dentist’s office—Detective Small, who questioned him, knew about all kinds of eleven-minute Houdini acts—but simply because Mr. Green’s blood type did not match the blood found on the boy’s clothing.

  He denied assaulting me with a newspaper, of course, or ever threatening to cut off my head and stuff it into his barbecue pit. Or even ever speaking to me at all. He denied hiding in the bushes by Boyd Ellison’s house. In the end it was his word against mine. And in those days the police tended to believe adults more readily than they did children, especially a child who refuses to repeat her story. Although everyone was disappointed that I wouldn’t testify, they told my mother they understood. It would be like living through it all over again. Once was enough.

  When he returned to his house Thursday morning at eight-fifteen, Mr. Green was driven by a tall, heavy-set, sandy-haired man whom I had never seen before. From my bedroom window, I watched a blue Pontiac drive up to the curb, its engine left running as the passenger door swung open, grating against the curb, and Mr. Green climbed out, looking the same as he always looked, his hair neatly combed, only his white shirt slightly crumpled and damp enough to show the outline of his undershirt beneath.

  In a strange way, I was glad to see him. He was so familiar that I felt as if I had missed him, despite my absolute terror of ever seeing him again.

  He carried his briefcase as if he had just returned from a day at work. He bent down and said something to the car’s driver before stepping back and shutting the door. Without watching to see the car drive off, he turned and headed up his front walk toward his house.

  When he reached the top of his front steps he paused to look at the dried eggs splattered against his front door. Then, holding his keys, he turned and looked directly across his yard at our screened porch. His face held a restrained, even negated expression, as if he had been wearing a very different one the instant before. After a moment he lifted his door key to the lock, turned it, and went inside. Fifteen minutes later he reappeared in a freshly ironed shirt, got into his car, and drove away. He was back that night, parking his usual six inches from the drainpipe as if nothing had happened.

  For the next week or so, in fact, nothing did happen. Mr. Green cleaned the eggs off his front door, although a few pale blotches remained where the eggs had eaten through the paint. He came and went at the usual times. It’s true that no one on the street spoke to him and that he spoke to no one. Every time he came outside, everyone else seemed to evaporate back into their houses, so that he was always alone on the street, as if he were the only human being who lived there. But he managed to mow his lawn one evening and put out his trash cans on the curb; he appeared to be going about the regular business of his life. Then a “For Sale” sign appeared on his front lawn about even with the one on ours.

  We’d heard about the dentist appointment the day Mr. Green returned from the police station. Mr. Lauder’s brother-in-law’s cousin was the desk sergeant at another station and knew all the details. Mr. Green had been a cooperative prisoner, even waiving his right to call a lawyer before he answered questions.

  “He’s airtight,” Mrs. Lauder kept telling my mother that day as she stood in our kitchen. I was reading comic books in the living room, but through the doorway I could see her fat arms resting on the ledge of her bosom. “They finally catch someone,” she said, “and the man’s airtight.” As if Mr. Green were a submarine, able to live submerged for days, even months, while the rest of us foundered.

  “Well, there’s still what happened with Marsha,” she said, more comfortably, lowering her voice. “Nobody’s excusing that.”

  “No,” my mother repeated faintly. “There’s no excuse for that.”

  “In my opinion,” said Mrs. Lauder, uncrossing her arms, “it by itself was enough to hold him till kingdom come. And he sure has got no place in a neighborhood like this. Frank went over and told him that. He said, ‘Look, we all know about you.’ Too bad you all couldn’t press charges. They made a mistake letting him go. I bet they’ll find that out.”

  “It was a mistake,” echoed my mother, staring out the window.

  And yet a few evenings later she walked across our lawn and around the fence, and up the steps to Mr. Green’s front door, where, in full view of the Morrises, who were sitting on lawn chairs in their yard, and Mr. Guibert, who was walking by with a rake, she paused for a minute, then rang the doorbell. She was carrying a small bunch of white carnations. But when Mr. Green opened the door and saw who was there, he closed the door again.

  There was nothing left for her to do but walk down his steps again and cross his lawn and come back to our house, where I was waiting for her.

  “Luann’s going to Bible camp for the rest of the summer,” Mrs. Lauder told me when I rang her doorbell the next afternoon. “She’s not going to be able to play with you anymore, doll.”

  It was a quiet Sunday afternoon, hot and brilliant. Across the street the Sperlings were sitting on their front steps, watching Baby Cameron try to clap his hands. David Bridge-man rode past on his new bicycle. I could hear Luann singing, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  Mrs. Lauder’s broad body filled the doorway; her hands were floury and there was a splotch of flour on her chin like a white goatee. “There now, honey. I think it’s for the best.”

  She looked concerned to see me still standing on her doorstep. “Honey,” she said. “You go on home now.”

  The twins had called that morning to ask if they could stay with the Westendorfs for another ten days. My mother had said yes. Now she was inside in the living room pretending to read a magazine. We had been avoiding each other for the last few days; or rather, she had been avoiding me, while I had been hunting her ruthlessly through the house, even coming into her room at night when she was asleep to stare at her, not because I wanted to be with her but because I couldn’t bear my own company.
The night before she had woken while I stood by her bed.

  “What are you doing here?” she said, not turning on the light.

  “I think I lost something,” I said.

  She stared back at me for a moment, her dark face almost indistinguishable from her pillow except for the two darker places that were her eyes. “Go back to sleep,” she said finally.

  Through the living-room windows, I could see her bent head as I passed that side of the house. I’d meant to go right inside through the kitchen door, but the sight of her bowed head and the determined stillness of her face made me veer toward the backyard.

  For a while I stood by the rhododendrons, neatly screened from the street. It occurred to me that I might find a few of Julie and Steven’s cigarette butts in the dirt, so I scratched at the ground with the tip of one of my crutches for a few minutes.

  I’m not sure what I intended to do with the cigarette butts if I found any, but the old act of looking was comforting. As I scraped around I uncovered a hairy caterpillar, a metal poptop, a muddy movie ticket stub. It always astonishes me what you can find if you keep your eyes on the ground. By the time I had dug a shallow trench in the mud and discovered the carcass of a Japanese beetle, I’d forgotten what I was looking for.

  In fact I had forgotten where I was altogether when I heard something snap and then a thick cough behind me, and as the hair prickled on the back of my neck, I turned around to see Mr. Green watching me from his side of the hedge.

  He was wearing his khaki shirt and his madras shorts, as he always did on Sundays, with his black socks and fussy loafers. But his face seemed thinner and he looked pale. His hands hung loose by his sides. That his hands were empty seemed obscurely wrong to me. I recall thinking that he should have been carrying something, a rake, a pair of shears. He looked unprotected.