Juvenile Delinquent

by Richard Deming

  “Didn’t you report the kids to the police as users?” I asked, surprised.

  She smiled at me. “You don’t know much about social work, do you, Manny? Our files are as confidential as a priest’s confessional. They have to be. If I ever once reported to the police anything a client told me in confidence, nobody in the whole neighborhood would even tell me the time after that.”

  As I thought this over I saw the reasonableness of it. I protected my own sources of information the same way, and it was common for newsmen, lawyers and even, occasionally, the police, to operate under the same principle.

  “Did you know this Bart Meyers kid personally?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. His mother was a client of mine once. I closed her case a couple of years ago though, so I haven’t seen much of Bart since except occasionally to pass him on the street.”

  “You wouldn’t know of any enemies he had then?”

  Sara shook her head.

  I got up out of my chair. “Well, I guess I’ve got as much as you can give me, Sara. I don’t know whether anything you’ve told me will help, but at least it gives me a picture of the environment. Thanks a lot.”

  “Any time,” she said. “If you think of anything else you want to know, ring me up. Or better yet, drop by my apartment. I can serve you a drink there.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I may take you up.”

  As I started to walk away, the phone on her desk buzzed again.

  It was well after two p.m. when I got out of the place. I didn’t know whether the boy whose name Joe Brighton had given me was a high-school student or not, but I knew high-school let out at two-thirty. By the time I could get down to Seventh and Vernon, there was a good chance I’d find him home.

  Seven twenty-two Vernon was in the center of a block of so-called railroad apartment houses. That is, buildings made up of narrow flats which had their three to four rooms lined up in a straight row from the front of the building to the alley, much as railroad cars. A yellow and finger-marked tenant list in the smelly hall gave the information that the Carlsons lived on the third floor. I tramped all the way up only to find no one home.

  When I got down to the street again, I contemplated waiting in my car for a time on the chance that someone in the Carlson family would turn up before long. Then I had a better idea.

  Slowly I cruised the neighborhood until I spotted a couple of youngsters wearing purple jackets and snap-brim hats with dark purple bands. They were leaning against the brick side of a tavern doing nothing, their hands in their pockets and cigarettes drooping from their mouths.

  Parking the car, I walked over to them and said, “Wonder if you boys could help me? I’m looking for Stub Carlson.”

  Both boys were about sixteen, thin, underfed youngsters with arrogant expressions on their faces. One was only about five feet six and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds. The other was perhaps two inches taller and possibly fifteen pounds heavier.

  They both examined me coolly. Then the taller boy turned to his companion.

  “Ever hear of Stub Carlson?” he asked.

  The other merely shook his head.

  “I’ve got a message for him from Joe Brighton,” I said.

  The taller boy looked at me sharply. “You a cop?” he asked with contempt.

  I said patiently, “I’m a friend of Joe’s.”

  “Yeah? Let’s see the message.”

  “It’s for Stub Carlson,” I said. “Nobody else.”

  The youngster blew smoke from his nose and deliberately looked past my shoulder, ignoring me. The studied insolence in response to my own polite tone began to get under my skin. I reached out and gathered a handful of purple jacket in each hand.

  “I don’t pick on kids ordinarily,” I growled. “But if you don’t tell me where to find Stub Carlson in exactly three seconds, I’ll bend both of you over my knee and blister your bottoms!”

  The eyes of the smaller lad widened, but those of the taller boy grew strangely narrower. His right hand began to slide from his pocket.

  “Pull that switch knife and I’ll make you eat it,” I informed him.

  His hand froze and his expression became less arrogant and more uncertain. After a moment he asked, “How do I know you’re a friend of Joe’s?”

  “You take it on faith. And take it fast. In about one more tick you go over my knee.”

  I think the threat upset the kid more than if I had offered him more violent damage. To his own mind he was an adult, and the prospect of being spanked like a baby seemed to appall him. He licked his lips.

  “I guess just steering you to Stub wouldn’t hurt anything. Even if you’re a cop. I guess you’d find him eventually if you really wanted to.”

  “Don’t strain my patience too much,” I said.

  “We’ll bring him to you,” he decided. “I know where he is. It’ll only take five minutes.”

  “Fine,” I agreed, releasing his jacket but retaining my grip on the smaller boy. “Only you go after him alone. I’ll keep your pal as a hostage in case you forget what you went after.”

  He shrugged, smoothed the wrinkles from the front of his jacket, straightened his hat and resumed his arrogant expression. Without hurry he strolled to the corner, rounded the front of the tavern and disappeared.

  “You going to hold me like this till they get back?” the other kid asked. “I won’t run away.”

  I considered him. He was six inches shorter than I was and I probably outweighed him by seventy pounds. I felt a little silly standing there holding him.

  “I’ll try you,” I said. “Just keep leaning against the wall though.”

  Cautiously I released my grip. He smiled slightly, his thin body relaxed against the wall, his hands still in his pockets and the stub of his cigarette still drooping from his mouth. I dropped my hand to my side.

  One of his feet shot out, kicked my good leg from under me, and before I could recover my balance and grab him again, he had ducked under my arm and was moving like a streak of purple light for the corner.

  Just before he disappeared around it, he looked back over his shoulder and emitted a loud raspberry.

  6

  I WAS tempted to give up and go back to the tenement house where the Carlsons lived and wait until someone showed up, but I decided to give it five minutes. I hardly expected either of the two youngsters to return, let alone Stub Carlson, but they surprised me. Just before the end of the five minutes, all three of them strolled around the corner.

  Stub Carlson was a stocky youth of about eighteen, wide-shouldered and well-muscled. He had a square, not unpleasant face, a firm mouth and steady eyes which were completely assured without containing the arrogance his two companions affected. Like his fellow club members he wore his hair long, this apparently being one of the organization’s trademarks. He also wore the inevitable purple jacket and a snap-brim hat with a dark purple band.

  Stopping directly in front of me, he announced in a voice which was neither belligerent nor friendly, but simply a statement of fact, “I’m Stub Carlson, mister. You got a message for me?”

  Pulling my notebook from my pocket, I tore out the sheet Joe had written his note on and handed it to the boy. He held it so that neither of the other two boys could see it as he read it.

  When he looked up, there was faint interest in his eyes. “Manny Moon, huh? Joe’s told me about you. Private dick, aren’t you?”

  I admitted I was.

  His eyes strayed to my feet with a touch of curiosity. I’ve seen the same look in too many other eyes not to recognize what caused it. Joe had told him one of my legs is false from the knee down.

  “It’s the right one,” I said dryly.

  Guiltily his eyes jumped back to my face. He impressed me as possessing a sort of natural and direct assurance, but for the moment he didn’t know what to say.

  Finally he took a stab at, “Aren’t you an uncle or something to Joe?”

  “A kind of fos
ter uncle,” I said. “We’re not actually related. His dad’s one of my best friends.”

  Stub Carlson turned to his two silent companions. “Scram,” he ordered laconically.

  Silently both of them raised their hands in a gesture of good-by and drifted up the street.

  “They’re pretty young,” Stub remarked in what seemed to be vague apology for their initial reception of me. “They think they have to prove they’re tough all the time.”

  Then he looked at me directly and said, “Okay, Mr. Moon. What’s the deal?”

  I indicated my Plymouth at the curb. “Let’s sit down and talk.”

  When we were seated in the car and I had lighted a cigar and Stub a cigarette, I said, “Joe Brighton a pretty good friend of yours, Stub?”

  “The most.”

  “Want to help him out?”

  “Naturally. I just said he’s my number one pal.”

  “Think he killed Bart Meyers?”

  Stub looked at me from narrowed eyes. “Do you?”

  “I hope not. I don’t know. That’s why I ask you.”

  “Knuckles don’t use a knife on his friends,” Stub stated flatly. He gave me a quick side-glance. “Joe, I mean. Or even in a rumble, for that matter. With his reach he don’t need a knife.”

  “Think he was framed?”

  The boy took a drag from his cigarette, blew out smoke and spat through the open window. “Maybe he was just unlucky enough to be the right place at the wrong time.”

  “Joe thinks the Gravediggers framed him.”

  Stub considered this thoughtfully, finally shook his head. “Possibly, but tricky stuff ain’t their speed. More likely they’d roll down this way in a bunch and try to take any Pelicans they saw by surprise. Sort of on the spur of the moment. I don’t think any of their officers got brains enough to engineer a frame. Besides, the order’s out …”

  He broke off abruptly.

  Casually I asked, “What order’s out?”

  “The blueshirts have been on the watch for rumbles,” he said smoothly. “We got a kind of unwritten agreement with the Gravediggers to lay off each other till the heat’s off.”

  That wasn’t what he had started to say, but I let it pass.

  “Look, Stub,” I said. “I haven’t any personal interest in you, or the Purple Pelicans, or the Gravediggers, or anybody or anything else down this way. The sole reason I’m here is to try to get Joe Brighton out of his jam, providing he’s innocent. If he actually killed Bart Meyers, there isn’t anything I can or would do for him, aside from suggesting he plead guilty and steering him to a good lawyer. But if he didn’t, I’m going to find out who did and make him trade places with Joe. I’m going to have to learn the ins and outs of what goes on down here before I can even make a start, though. I’ll level with you. I don’t much approve of these clubs you kids form, because they get out of hand and develop into nothing but bands of hoodlums. But I haven’t any intention of doing anything about them. Like passing on to the police anything I learn, I mean. Whatever you tell me about anything at all, I’ll treat as a confidence. Even stuff like stripping cars or using reefers and H. But before I can even begin to help Joe, I’ll have to know it all.”

  The boy thought things over without much enthusiasm. After a time he said, “We take an oath about not telling club secrets, you know.”

  “Is it binding enough to let your best friend go to the gas chamber?”

  He shook his head. In a frank and suddenly sardonic voice he said, “You know a lot of this stuff is malarkay. Secret handshakes and passwords and stuff like that. I used to get a bang out of it when I was younger, but doesn’t it seem kind of silly?”

  His words gave me a feeling of relief. Apparently I’d been lucky enough to run into one of the few gang members who was beginning to grow up and was intelligent enough to see the teenage clubs for what they really were.

  I said, “A lot of fine adult organizations have secret rituals. The Elks, for instance. That isn’t the silly part. The silly part is having pitched battles with other gangs, risking jail for petty crimes and fooling with dangerous stuff like narcotics.”

  He didn’t say anything for a few moments. Tossing his cigarette away, he slumped down in the seat and went into a brown study. I let him work it out for himself without attempting to push him any more. By now I was confident he’d decide to cooperate, because he impressed me as not only a fairly intelligent boy, but one with common sense.

  Presently he said, “I have your word that nothing I tell you goes any farther?”

  “Both my word and Joe’s guarantee, if you’ll reread that note,” I assured him. “Unless it has bearing on the murder. Let’s get that straight from the beginning, Stub. All I’m interested in is Bart Meyer’s murder, but if it turns out that some racket down here has to be exposed in order to crack the murder, the racket gets exposed. But only if it ties in with the killing. And even then I won’t let the cops or anyone else know you were my informant.”

  After thinking this over, he said, “That’s fair enough. I don’t care who gets clobbered, so long as he’s the guy Knuckles is taking the rap for. Joe, I mean. What you want to know?”

  “Let’s start off with the Purple Pelicans. I understand you’ve got about sixty members.”

  He looked at me in surprise. “Joe tell you that?”

  When I nodded, he said, “Yeah. About that.”

  “Tell me about the club. How you’re organized. What you do. Everything you can think of.”

  After a little reflection he said, “We’ve got four officers. President, vice president, secretary and treasurer. The bylaws say they’re elected at an annual meeting by voice vote, but it ain’t quite that simple. When a guy stands up for president, you either have to vote for him or fight him. Because if you vote against him, it’s a challenge, and means you think you can whip him. The same thing for the other officers. Usually there’s no challenges because they’ve all been settled on a vacant lot somewhere in advance of the meeting.”

  “Like Joe and Bart were going to settle things?” I asked.

  He gave me a startled look.

  “Joe told me why he was meeting Bart at the club room,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to spread it. The police already suspect it anyway, though they haven’t any proof. What’s your office, Stub?”

  “Secretary right now. Plus acting president until next week’s election. With Bart dead and Joe in jail, I guess I’m in line for president, but I don’t care much about it. A year ago probably I’d of jumped at the chance, but now I’d just as soon let one of the younger guys who thinks he’s tough take over. I probably could whip any of them, but it seems like a hell of a lot of trouble.”

  Apparently Stub didn’t know it himself, but he was on the verge of graduating from membership in a teenage gang altogether. His whole attitude showed he was beginning to gain enough adult perspective to be vaguely dissatisfied with the entire setup, and only habit was holding him in the group now. I also sensed his graduation wouldn’t be into an adult criminal gang, as would that of many of his fellow members when they outgrew the Purple Pelicans, but would probably be the start of a useful citizenship. He was one of the lucky few who was going to be able to rise eventually from a slum environment.

  I asked, “What’s the club do aside from wearing purple jackets?”

  “Well, we have parties at the club room. With the auxiliary members. We’ve got a radio-phonograph, and usually there’s some wine and beer.”

  “And reefers?”

  “Some of the guys bring them,” he admitted. “I never use them myself.”

  “Apparently your president did. The cops found several home-made ones in his pocket.”

  He looked at me in astonishment. “Bart? He never touched a reefer in his life.” Then he looked thoughtful. “Probably he took them away from one of the younger members. He’d been doing that lately.”

  “He had? Why?”

  He rubbed his short nose ref
lectively. “Bart had always been kind of down on dope in the club. He never did anything about it except sneer at the guys who used it up till recently. Then he still didn’t do anything about the boys who were already on it. But he got sore about any new members starting off. Particularly the younger kids. In one meeting he announced right out that he’d beat the daylights out of any new member he caught with a reefer, or any old member he caught slipping a new member one.”

  “How do you account for his change?”

  “He was getting religion, I guess. It wasn’t only about reefers. He talked some about cutting out our rackets and making the Purple Pelican into a straight club. I think maybe one of those YMCA organizers who poke around once in a while had been putting ideas in his head. Then too, his girl was working on him a little. Stella’s a nice kid, but a lot of the other girls think she’s kind of sissy. Bart wasn’t pushing the straight stuff too hard. He didn’t just lay down the law, like he used to when we were planning a rumble or something. It seemed more like he was just feeling the boys out and trying to convince them.”

  I mused over this for a time. Then I asked, “That the reason some of the boys wanted Joe to challenge him?”

  “Yeah, mostly. Joe thought the holy stuff was a lot of malarkay, and a good part of the club agreed with him.”

  “How’d you feel about it?”

  Again he gave his nose a reflective rub. “I was kind of on the fence. Bart was as good a friend of mine as Joe, so I really didn’t care which one was president. I figured I’d stick with the club whether it went straight or not.”

  The fact that the club president had been murdered in the midst of what seemed to have been an abortive attempt to reform the group presented such interesting possibilities that I considered them for some minutes without speaking.