Cookie, with that devilish quickness of children to scent sympathy and play up to it, took one look at Wanger, wrinkled up his muzzle into a monkey grimace and began to emit the moderator opening stanzas of a good hearty bawl.
“Yeah. See?” Wanger said, fixing an accusing eye around the room. “Don’t y’know kids that age are afraid of cops to begin with? Each one of you guys is a natural enemy to it, and when you all gang up on it at once—”
“We’re in civvies, ain’t we?” one of them retorted in perfect seriousness. “He didn’t see the badges, so how could he tell?”
“The expert child handler,” another chuckled under his breath as they moved toward the door.
The last one said morosely, “I hope y’have better luck than we had. Jazes, I’d rather tackle the hard-to-crackest yegg any day than a kid like this that don’t even know what you’re saying to it at all.”
“It knows all right,” Wanger grunted. “It takes a little finesse, that’s all.”
The matron was the only one who stayed in the room, though her value was problematical. It had been found early in the game that she terrified their “material witness” far more than all the males put together. If she came any closer than the doorway, he went into nightmare hysterics.
Wanger drew up a chair, sat down on it, spread his legs at a ninety-degree angle and perched Cookie on one.
“We’re going to play Charlie McCarthy again,” the matron chuckled pessimistically. “I don’t think he was even awake through the whole thing that night—”
“He was awake all right. Who’s doing this?”
Cookie was beginning to know Wanger from previous knee “interviews.” He smiled favoringly, perhaps even a trifle venally, up at him. “You got’ny more jelly beans?”
“No, the doctor says I gave y’too many already.” Wanger got down to work. “Who made your daddy go in the closet, Cookie?”
“Nomebody made him, he wannedta go. He was playin’ a game.”
“That’s the same place where y’got stumped before,” the matron pointed out gratuitously.
Wanger snapped his head around with a flash of unfeigned ill temper, rare with him. “Listen, will you do me a favor!” He drew a long, preparatory belly breath to see him through what he knew he was in for. “Who was he playing the game with. Cookie?”
“Us.”
“Yes, but who’s us? You and who else?”
“Me and him and the lady.”
“What lady?”
“The lady.”
“What lady?”
“The lady that was here.”
“Yes, but what lady was here?”
“The lady that—the lady that—” It wasn’t that Cookie wasn’t willing; the dialectics of the thing were throwing him. “The lady that was playing the game with us,” he concluded with a burst of inspiration.
Wanger had nearly run through the breath supply he’d laid in by now; he let the dregs of it out with a dejected hiss.
“Y’see how he gets away from y’each time? That kid isn’t going to need a mouth when he grows up.”
Wanger was not in an equable mood. “Listen, McGovem, I’m not kidding, if you make one more side remark while I’m doing this—”
“Doing what?” the matron wanted to know, but with prudent inaudibility.
Wanger took out a small black pocket notebook. He turned back to his knee-riding witness, who was swinging his legs blithely. “Well, look, what was the name of the game?”
“Hide-n’-seek!” crowed Cookie positively. He was on familiar ground now.
“Whose turn was it first?”
“Mine!”
“And then whose turn was it?”
“‘Nen the lady’s!”
“And after that?”
“‘Nen it was my daddy’s turn.”
“Build-up,” murmured Wanger softly. He scribbled almost indecipherably on his free knee, using the curve of one arm to support his other burden: “Invegled—” He crossed it out, substituted, “Invagled—” He crossed that out, too, scrawled, “Lured in during game of hide-and-seek.”
Then he looked up bitterly. “What the hell! It don’t make sense! How’s a strange woman that the guy never saw before going to walk into a house and get a full-grown man to play games with her—just like
The sardonic matron said very softly, to make sure she couldn’t be accused of having spoken at all, “You’d be surprised. But not the kind of games you mean.”
The book hit the opposite wall and dropped with a little flurry.
“What’sa matter?” asked Cookie, looking after it interestedly. “What’d the book do, ha?”
“Wait a minute, you’re taking it for granted he never saw her before, aren’t you?” the matron tried to remind him, at the risk of her neck.
“You heard what he says each time!” Wanger hollered over at her wrathfully. “I’ve got it jotted down in that thmg six times over! She never came to their house before.”
Cookie started to pucker up into his wizened monkey expression again.
“I’m not sore at you, sonny,” Wanger hastily amended patting the slope of Cookie’s head mollifyingly a couple of times.
Then it suddenly came. Cookie looked up at him with the uncertainty of one whose confidence in a relationship has just been shaken. “Whoua you mad at then’? Are you mad at Miss Baker?”
“Who’s Miss Baker?”
“The lady that was playin’ games with—”
Wanger neariy dropped him to the floor on the back of his head. “My God, I actually got her name out of him! Did you hear that? Here I didn’t even think he—”
His enthusiasm was short-lived. His face dimmed again. “Aw, it was probably just a spiked handle she gave herself. She started being Miss Baker when she came in the door, she stopped being Miss Baker the minute she got outside it again. If I could only get an idea of what the stall was she sold herself to Moran
on, to be let in here like that, it might help some—”
“One of the neighbors?” suggested the matron.
“WeVe canvassed every one of them for six blocks in all directions. Cookie, what did Miss Baker say to your daddy when he first opened the door and let her in?”
“She said hullo,” he faltered tentatively, evidently doing his conscientious best to fulfil what was required of him.
”That’s going to start in again,” sighed the matron resignedly.
Wanger glanced around in the direction of the stairs. “I wonder if she’d be any help— Ask the doctor if she’s in condition to come down for just a minute. Tell him I don’t want to question her, y’understand, I just want to see if she can throw some light on a point the kid brought up. I won’t keep her a minute.”
“Don’t take any lead pipe to the kid while I’m out of the room now,” the matron warned. “I’m supposed to be in attendance the whole time he’s with you.”
She returned in a couple of minutes. “They didn’t want her to, but she did want to. Shell be right down.”
The doctor and a nurse both came in with her. She walked very slowly. The murder hadn’t been in the closet out there; it was in here on her face.
“Now, please—” the doctor urged Wanger.
“I promise you,” Wanger assured him.
She was a mother. She was half-dead herself, but she was still a mother. “You’re not tiring him too much, are you, officer?” She tottered over to the two of them, bent forward and kissed the youngster. The doctor and the nurse held her up, each by an arm.
Wanger almost didn’t have the heart to go ahead. But, after all, it had to be done sooner or later. “Mrs. Moran, I don’t suppose there’s a Miss Baker that you happen to know of… I’m trying to find out if there really is such a person or if it was just a… He just mentioned a Miss Baker—”
He saw the change come over her face before the doctor and nurse did, because she was turned toward him. It had seemed impossible a moment ago that anything could have been ad
ded to the emotion she had undergone already, and yet now something was. A climactic excess of horror, to top all the other horror she had experienced, seemed to spread slowly over her face like a cold, viscous film. She pressed two fingers to the outer edge of each eyebrow, as if to keep her skull from flying apart. “Not her!” she whispered.
“That’s what he says,” Wanger breathed back unwillingly.
“Oh, no—no!”
He correctly translated the meaning she gave the harried negative; not a denial of the person’s existence, a denial of the accusation—simply because it was so unthinkable.
“Then there is …” he persisted gently.
“The child’s—” She pointed, hardly able to articulate. Tears, no longer of grief but of mortal terror, welled unchecked from her eyes. “Cookie’s—kindergarten teacher—
If there was anything could make what had happened seem even worse than it was, it was this: to have the cause of it take form, materialize into human shape, cease to remain just an abstraction—become, from an impersonally barred door, the young woman who was in charge of her own child several hours each day.
She crumpled; not in a faint, but her legs gave under her. The nurse and doctor caught her, supported her between them. They pivoted her slowly around to face the door, started her over toward it, taking small steps. She was incapable of saying anything further, but nothing further needed to be said. It was all in Wanger’s hands now.
Just before the door closed on the pathetic little procession, the doctor snarled crankily over his shoulder, “You fellows make me sick.”
“Can’t be helped,” answered the detective doggedly. “Had to be done.”
She was in the middle of a flock of kids in a subdivided section of the school yard, separated from the rougher activities of the older children. They were playing games, marching one at a time under the arched hands of two pivots, and then being imprisoned there and swung back and forth, and then being given a whispered choice of two incalculable treasures, and then being posted behind one or the other of the two pivots, according to the selection they’d made. They’d never played that in Wanger’s day, down on East 11th Street, so he couldn’t follow it very closely.
He hated to do this more than he’d ever hated any job before, even though it was not an arrest yet or anything even remotely resembling it. He supposed the sight of the kids made him feel that way. There was something brutal, almost unclean, about hauling her off from here, to find out if she had taken a human life.
She saw him watching and left them a minute and came over to him. She was a short, slender little body with coppery gold hair; young, not more than twenty-four, or -five; pretty behind her shell-rimmed glasses. In fact, even pretty before them, if a trifle more austere. Sparingly gilded with freckles on her cheekbones. They were becoming.
“Were you waiting for one of them?” she asked pleasantly. “The session won’t be over for another—”
He’d asked that he be allowed to find his way out here to her unescorted—or rather guided only by a “monitor,“ one of the older children, who had now gone back—and hadn’t explained his business to the principal; it seemed more considerate. “It’s you yourself I’d like to speak to,” he said. He tried to do his job without frightening her unduly. After all, she was just a stray name on a child’s lips, so far. “I’m Wanger, of the police department—”
“Oh.” She wasn’t particularly frightened, just taken aback.
“I’d like you to come over and see Cookie Moran— you know, Mrs. Frank Moran’s youngster—with me as soon as you’re through here, if you don’t mind.”
“Ah, yes—poor little soul,” she commiserated.
The game had stalled meanwhile. The children were still in playing formation, all faces turned toward her for further instructions. “Should we start pulling now, Miss Baker?”
She glanced at him inquiringly. “Finish your class out first,” he consented. “I’ll wait for you.”
She went back to her charges immediately, no premonition of impending difficulties seeming to mar her attention to her duties. She clapped her hands briskly. “All right, now, children. Ready? Pull! … Not too hard now… Look you, Marvin, you’re tearing Barbara’s sleeve—”
In the classroom later, the children all safely packed into the bus and sent off, he watched her clear the desk at which she held sway over them, putting things neatly away into the drawer. “Those little crayon drawings they do for you—like those you’ve got there—don’t they take them home every day?”
It was the idle question of a man standing by watching something he is not familiar with. It had that sound, at least.
“No, Fridays are our days for that. We let them accumulate during the week, and then on Fridays we clear out their little desks and send everything home with them to show their mothers how they’re progressing.” She laughed indulgently.
He picked up one of the color plates at random. It was an oversize robin perched on a limb. He chuckled with hypocritical admiration. “Is this pattern from last week or from this week?” Another of those idle, stopgap questions, as if simply to make conversation while she was straightening her hat.
“This week’s,” she said, glancing around to identify it. “That was their Monday afternoon assignment.”
Monday night was the night—
They took a taxi to the Moran house. Wanger was the more diffident of the two, kept looking out the window on his side. “Is this a police matter you’re taking me over on or, er, an errand of mercy?” she finally asked, a little embarrassedly. It wasn’t the embarrassment of guilt, it was the uncertainty of a totally new, uncharted experience.
“It’s just a bit of routine, don’t pay any attention to it.” He looked out the cab window again as though his thought were a thousand miles away. “By the way, were you over there the night it happened?” He couldn’t have made it sound more inconsequential if he’d tried.
Not that he was being unduly considerate or leaning over backward about it; the situation so far didn’t warrant any heavier handling. He would have been out of order.
“Over there at the Moran’s?” She arched her brows in complete astonishment. “Why, good heavens, no!”
He didn’t repeat the question and she didn’t repeat the denial. Once each was enough. She was on record.
Wanger had looked on at many confrontations, but he thought he had never been present at a more dramatic one than this. She was so defenseless against the child, in one way. And the child was so defenseless against the whole grown-up world, in another way.
He was overjoyed to see her when the matron brought him in. “Hello, Miss Baker!” He ran across the room to her, clasped her below the hips, looked up into her face. “I couldn’t come to school today because my daddy went away. I couldn’t come yesterday, either.”
“I know, Cookie, we all missed you.”
She turned to Wanger as if to ask, “Now what do I have to do?”
Wanger got down on his haunches, tried to keep his voice low and confidence inspiring. “Cookie, do you remember the night your daddy went into the closet?”
Cookie nodded dutifully.
“Is this the lady that was here with you in the house?”
They waited.
She had to prompt him herself finally, “Was I, Cookie?”
It seemed as though he were never going to answer. The tension became almost unendarable, as far as the grown-ups in the room were concerned.
She took a deep breath, reached down, sandwiched one of his little hands between her two. “Was Miss Baker here with you the night daddy went into the closet. Cookie?” she asked.
This time the answer came so suddenly it almost jolted out of him. “Yes, Miss Baker wuss here. Miss Baker had supper with my daddy and me—‘member?” But he was talking directly to her, not to them.
She straightened slowly, shaking her head blankly. “Oh, no … I can’t understand it…” Their faces had sort of closed up around h
er. Nothing was said.
“But, Cookie, look at me—”
“No, please don’t influence him,” Wanger cut in, civilly but decisively.
“I’m not trying to—” she said helplessly.
“Will you wait for me outside, Miss Baker? Hi be with you in just a moment.”
When he came out presently, she was sitting by herself out there, in a chair against the wall. True, there was a man busy with something or other in one of the adjacent rooms that commanded the front door, but she didn’t know that. She was fastening and unfastening the clasp of her handbag, over and over. But she looked up at him with directness. “I can’t understand that—”
He didn’t say anything more about it one way or the other. The child was on record now, too, that was all.
He’d brought a crayon-colored outline pattern out to show her. An oversize robin on a bough. “You’ve already told me that this is the pattern you gave them to fill in Monday afternoon. And that they only bring their work home once a week, on Fridays.”
Her eyes clung to it much longer than was necessary for mere identification. He waited a moment, then folded it and put it away.
“But it was found right here in the house. Miss Baker, in the early hours of Tuesday morning. How do you suppose it got here?”
She just looked at the place where it had last gone into his clothing.
“It’s possible, of course, that the youngster brought it home with him himself without permission that day, before it had even been marked.” The suggestion came from him, questioningly.
She looked up quickly. “No, I—I don’t think he did. I excused him ahead of the rest that day, because his mother was waiting outside to take him with her. You can ask Mrs. Moran, but—”
“I have already.”
“Oh, well, then—” she stood up. A little added color peered slowly into her face. “Then what was that supposed to be, a verbal trap for me?”
He quirked his head noncommittally.
“This seems to have put me in a somewhat awkward position.”
“Not at all,” he said insincerely. “Why say that?”
She looked down at her handbag, unfastened and re-fastened its catch one more time, then suddenly looked up, flung at him with a spirited little flare-up of impatience that matched her hair, “Although I don’t know why it should! That was hardly a fair test in there just now.”
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