Murder Among Children

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Well,” I said. I felt trapped. I didn’t want to leave this house, for Robin Kennely or anybody else. I’d left it a few months ago, driven by economic need, doing a piece of work for enough money to make it possible for me to stay in here for maybe a year or more, but that was the only time I’d gone out and it had not made me want to repeat the experience in a hurry.

  I could feel Kate looking at me, but I refused to meet her eyes. She wanted me to go with the girl, I knew that, and only partly because Kate had taken an immediate liking to her. The rest of it was that she believed it would be better for me to be in motion than to remain stagnant. She was wrong about this, but I couldn’t blame her for thinking it.

  The girl said, “Please, Mr. Tobin. If you would, if you only would. We’ve put everything we’ve got into this, and if it fails we’re in terrible trouble. And if this man keeps coming around, nobody will come, we’ll lose everything. Please.”

  I said, “What’s this policeman’s name?”

  “Edward Donlon,” she said. “Detective Second Grade.”

  “About how old?”

  She shrugged; too old. “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose about fifty.”

  Which meant anything over forty. Young people have a tendency to overestimate the age of their elders. I said, “What does he look like?”

  Before she could answer, Kate said, “Mitch, go see him for yourself. It’s the only way.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “It still might be something else.”

  “All the more reason,” she said.

  The girl said, “He told us he’d be back Sunday. Tomorrow. Sunday afternoon, he said.”

  “You can see him then,” Kate told me.

  “I could phone one or two people,” I said. “I still know people on the force.” To the girl I said, “What precinct are you in?”

  Kate said, “Mitch, you can’t mean that. Do you want to make things worse?”

  Robin Kennely was looking back and forth at the two of us, her expression getting more and more stricken, and now, falteringly, she said, “If you don’t want to—”

  But I could see it was impossible. I’d have to give over a day to it. The idea of talking to somebody on the force, somebody who maybe knew my name, knew what I’d done, made my neck muscles tight with tension, even though the likelihood was slim. There were thousands of men on the force, and less than two hundred of them were likely to make any connection with the name Mitchell Tobin.

  That thought didn’t help me much. Still, I knew there was nothing else open to me. I would have to take the subway into Manhattan tomorrow, and talk to this heavy-handed cop, and see what I could do to help these children with their coffee house. There wasn’t even any point telling Robin Kennely the coffee house was doomed anyway, no matter what I did or did not succeed in doing. These frail businesses start up all the time, particularly on the fringes of Greenwich Village. They are begun by wide-eyed youngsters with fuzzy goals and fuzzier business comprehension, they stagger along for a few months, and then they collapse, usually in small-claims court, sometimes in a flurry of bad checks. I’d picked up my share of debt-ridden child entrepreneurs while I was on the force, and I’d gotten so I could tell at a glance the businesses that were not going to make it through their first fiscal year.

  But I said none of this to Robin Kennely. What I said was, “I’ll come. What time tomorrow, did he say?”

  3

  AFTERNOON. AND NOW IT was Sunday afternoon, and I had arrived at Thing East, and Robin Kennely, blood-smeared and still clutching the butcher knife, lay unconscious at my feet.

  I said to the mustached boy, “Go lock the front door. Where’s your phone?”

  There wasn’t any answer. I looked at him, and he was staring at the girl on the floor, his face blank-white and his mouth slack. I took his arm, shook it. “Snap out of it. Go lock the front door. Tell me where the phone is.”

  He started, and blinked, and shook his head, as though awakened suddenly from a deep sleep. He turned wide eyes on me. “Phone,” he said. “On the wall there.” And pointed at the opposite end of the kitchen.

  “Good. Go lock the door.”

  “Yes. Yes, sir.”

  He went away, and I headed for the phone. I dialed the police emergency number, gave my name and location, and said, “Send a squad car, there’s been trouble here. Looks like a knifing. We’ll need an ambulance, too.”

  I hung up, and went out front, and found the young man standing by the front door like a mannequin no longer needed in the window. I said, “Did you lock it?”

  He looked at me as though he were afraid of me. “Yes,” he said, and reached out to rattle the knob.

  I said, “Are there any other stairs? Any other way up?”

  He shook his head.

  “There’s at least one,” I told him. “The fire escape. Where’s that? In back?”

  “Yes. In back.”

  “Any other way? Think, boy.”

  He blinked again. “No other way,” he said. “Just the stairs, those stairs. And the fire escape.”

  “All right. Stand here. I’ve phoned for a squad car and ambulance. When they get here, let them in. Don’t let anybody else in. You got that?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. What’s your name?”

  “George,” he said. “George Padbury.”

  “You the one with the almost-lawyer brother?”

  “Yes,” he said, surprised. “Ralph. My brother Ralph.”

  “Who’s upstairs now?”

  “Upstairs?”

  “That you know of.”

  “Well—Just Terry.”

  “Terry Wilford?”

  He nodded again. “He lives up there.”

  “He’s one of the tenants.”

  “He’s the only tenant,” Padbury said. “It’s all empty up there, all the rest of it.”

  “All right. Stay here.”

  “I will.”

  I hurried back down the long room, through the entranceway into the white kitchen, and found Robin Kennely still out. She was breathing, fitfully, and beneath the smears of blood her face was pale.

  I went past her, found a door between a sink and a stove, opened it, and rediscovered sunlight.

  And heat. The difference between this cool grotto-like world and the reality outside was astonishing. Humid heat flooded inward, engulfing me, as I opened the door, and I felt the perspiration springing to the surface on my forehead and arms.

  I stepped through the doorway into a square gray-white concrete box, open at the top. High walls extended on all four sides, featureless to my left and right, windowed in front of me and above my head. A fire escape made a harsh black pattern against the rear wall of the building I had just stepped out of, but no similar pattern showed on the wall opposite. One look was enough to see that there was no way into that building over there from here; the nearest windows were not only ten feet or more from the ground, but were also barred.

  No one had left since Robin Kennely’s melodramatic appearance at my feet. If the only two ways out were down the stairs that Robin had used or down the fire escape into this cul-de-sac, then whoever had been up there five minutes ago was still there.

  I went back into the kitchen, shutting the door behind me, and saw Robin just beginning to sit up. Her movements were uncoordinated, slow, hesitant. I went over, squatted down beside her, and without touching her I said, “Can you tell me what happened?”

  She looked at me with unfocused eyes. “Mr. Tobin?”

  “What happened upstairs?”

  She frowned in confused concentration. “Upstairs?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  She moved a hand toward her face, then stopped and looked at it, at the streaks and smears of blood all over it. In the same tiny high voice she had used just before fainting she said, “What happened? What’s happened to me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t try to stand, just stay where you are.
I’ve called for the police.”

  She looked at me, bewildered. “Am I hurt?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t think that’s your blood.”

  She looked at herself, and then saw the knife lying beside her on the floor. I tensed, but she didn’t reach for it. She looked at it as though it were something she couldn’t understand the meaning or purpose of, and then said, “But—” And that was all.

  “The police will be here soon,” I said. “We’ll just wait for them.”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. She kept staring at the knife.

  4

  I DIDN’T KNOW EITHER of the uniformed men who initially answered the squeal. George Padbury let them in at the front, and they came down to where I was waiting in the kitchen doorway. I stayed there because I didn’t want Robin Kennely—or the door to the stairs—out of my sight.

  I identified myself—without any reference to my former connection with the force—described what had happened and what I’d done, and they took over. One of them double-checked the impossibility of using the fire escape for departure, and then they both went upstairs.

  George Padbury had come back to the kitchen, and as soon as the patrolmen had gone out of sight he whispered to me, “What are they going to do?”

  “Find something unpleasant, I think.” I turned to Robin, still sitting on the floor, still dazed. “What are they going to find, Robin?”

  She looked at me, but didn’t say anything, and the three of us went on waiting. I didn’t ask her the question any more because she clearly was incapable, at least right now, of answering it.

  The patrolmen were upstairs perhaps three minutes, and came down together. They were both young, and right now they were both pale. One of them headed for the front while the other said to me, “You haven’t been up there?”

  “No.”

  There was noise from the front. I looked that way, and saw two men in white coming in as the patrolman was going out.

  The other one, the one who had stayed to ask me if I’d been upstairs, had turned now to Robin, saying, “You want to talk about it?”

  When she didn’t answer him, I said, “Maybe we better let the medical men look at her.”

  He glanced at me, then past me, and took a step back. “In here,” he said. “Take a look at her, number one. Then we got something upstairs.”

  The two ambulance men came into the kitchen, and now we were all crowded around the girl sitting on the floor. George Padbury had moved back against the wall and was looking at everybody as though afraid someone was about to pull a very dirty practical joke on him. The patrolman had that slightly uncomfortable expression of someone who has nothing to do but stand around and wait for somebody else to take over the job. The two ambulance men, both young, both with blue-gray jaws, looked efficient and phlegmatic. I felt uneasy and full of premonitions, being sucked into something more complicated and messy than I’d anticipated.

  One of the ambulance men squatted down in front of Robin and said, “Wounded? What happened?”

  I said, “She doesn’t seem to be hurt, just in shock. That’s somebody else’s blood on her.”

  He looked up at me. “Detective squad?”

  “No. Just a private citizen. I happened to be here.”

  He and the patrolman exchanged glances, and then he went back to concentrating on Robin. He got her to tell him her name, and to look at him, and to reel off parrot-like her address. But when the patrolman leaned down and asked her what had happened upstairs an aluminum gate clanged shut behind her eyes and there was nothing from her but silence.

  The ambulance man said, “We better take her along with us.”

  “No,” said the patrolman. “We’ll wait till the boys from the squad show up.”

  The ambulance man shrugged and got to his feet. “You say you got more upstairs?”

  “Right.” The patrolman looked at me. “Why don’t you sit down over there for a while?”

  “All right.”

  George Padbury came over with me and we both sat down at the table where he’d been on my arrival. The two ambulance men went on upstairs. Robin Kennely continued to sit on the floor, and the patrolman stood near her, where he could watch the two of us at the table. The other patrolman was still out in the car, reporting.

  I said to Padbury, “How long you been here?”

  “You mean today?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Oh. I thought you might mean how long’ve we been open. I’ve been here since maybe twelve-thirty.”

  I looked at my watch, which read five minutes to two. I said, “When was the last time you saw Robin? Before this time, I mean.”

  “When we came here.”

  “Today, at twelve-thirty?”

  “Sure.”

  “The two of you came here together.”

  “The three of us,” he said. “Robin and Terry and me. They picked me up at my place over in the East Village and drove me.”

  “You all came here together. Who was here?”

  “Nobody. We don’t open on Sunday till three.”

  “The place was locked? And empty?”

  “Sure. Nobody lives here but Terry.”

  Slowly I got a complete story from him. He didn’t seem particularly hostile or uncooperative, but he never answered any more than the immediate question I had asked, which made it all take longer than it should have.

  What I finally got was mostly bad news. Until a recent warehouse construction on the block behind this one, the rear of this building had not been a cul-de-sac. But once that fourth side had been closed off, the fire escape on the rear of the building was no longer of any use, which meant the upper floors could not legally be occupied. Because of a door in the right side wall leading out to an alley, making two exits, this ground floor could still be used.

  The building had been owned for the last several years by some small religious organization, which had used the upper floors as mission dormitories and the lower floor as a meeting room or chapel. They had converted the place to their own purposes, removing the outside steps from the front of the building, leaving only the inside staircase—and the fire escape, of course—as access to the upper floors.

  When the Fire Department had informed this group that they could no longer use the building unless a fire escape was put on the front, they chose instead to move to new quarters. They hadn’t yet decided what they were going to do with the old building, and had agreed to rent the ground floor to these young people for a coffee house, with the provision that either side could end the arrangement after three months.

  There was also a provision that no use would be made of the upper floors except for storage of materials, but Terry Wilford had been violating that from the outset. He’d moved a few pieces of furniture to a second-floor room, and had lived there for a month now, ever since work had started on converting the first floor to a coffee house.

  As to George Padbury, he lived on the Lower East Side, more fashionably known these days as the East Village. Terry Wilford and Robin had picked him up at his apartment today a little past noon and had driven him over here in Terry’s car, a Volkswagen. The building was locked when they arrived, and gave no sign of any forcible entry. The three young people had entered, Padbury had gone to work in the kitchen, and the other two had gone upstairs.

  No one had entered or left since then, until my arrival an hour later.

  When I said, “Did Robin and Terry fight a lot?” Padbury looked startled, glanced at Robin across the way, looked swiftly back at me, and said, “You don’t think she did anything, do you?”

  I said, “Only two people went upstairs. One of them is down here covered with blood. I heard one of the patrolmen say there was a body upstairs. It has to be Terry, and Robin has to have done it.”

  He shook his head stubbornly. “No, sir.”

  “If they don’t find any third party up there,” I said, “then she’s it.”

  He kept sha
king his head.

  5

  THE NEXT HOUR MOVED slowly, with me on the sidelines watching the well-remembered procedure. The precinct detectives arrived next, two of them, neither known to me. They got the story from one of the patrolmen, they looked around, they called in. Technical men began trooping in, carrying black cases, coming down the long aisle and into the kitchen and upstairs. The ambulance men took Robin Kennely away with them; she didn’t look at me as she went by.

  Two boys from Homicide South made a courtesy call and decided to stick around awhile. More precinct plainclothesmen arrived. The building was filling up with members of the force, and I knew it was only a matter of time till one of them was somebody I knew. More importantly, he would be somebody who knew me. Knew about me.

  Padbury nudged my arm at one point, and whispered, “That’s him. Coming out from the stairs.”

  I looked that way and saw a tall and heavy-set man of about forty, wearing a rumpled brown suit. He was very heavy in the jaw, making his eyes and forehead look smaller than they really were. If it hadn’t been for that overstrong jaw, he would have been a handsome man, with a strong face and thick black hair.

  I said, “That’s Donlon?”

  “Yeah, the cop that was coming around. That’s him.”

  Donlon walked past us without a glance, heading for the front door, where he said something to the patrolman on guard there and then turned around and came back. He moved like a man who keeps himself in shape, probably at a gym. This time he paused as he went by us, his eyes cataloguing Padbury as someone he knew and then hesitating at me. He stopped, scanned me, seemed about to say something, and then went on. I watched him go through the door to the stairs.

  Padbury said, “He gives me the creeps, man.”

  There was no reason for it. He looked like a man, that’s all. If there was an aura of toughness, of implied menace, about him, that was merely the façade a lot of the boys on the force put up as a defense against cop-baiters, of which the world is full. Having seen him, I no longer had any question about his motives in hanging around this place all week. He was out for a touch and nothing more, it showed all over him.