Murder Among Children

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Why ask me?”

  “I’m talking to myself, Hulmer,” I said. “I’m sorry, I was just using you for a sounding board.” I turned away and started dialing my home number. I wanted to know if either of my police acquaintances had called in with news about a connection between Wilford and Irene Boles, and also if anyone else had called. If not, I would go home from here, let it jell in my mind overnight, and start again somewhere else tomorrow morning.

  Behind me, Hulmer said, “I figure she knew her sister pretty well.”

  “So do I,” I said. “Which complicates things.” Then Kate answered the phone, and I said, “Hello, it’s me. Any calls?”

  “Mitch,” she said, and her voice sounded odd, “there are two—”

  “What?”

  A new voice said, “Tobin?” Male, gruff, authoritarian.

  “Who is this?”

  “Detective Second Grade Wagner. Where are you calling from?”

  “Manhattan. What’s the matter?”

  “Captain Driscoll wants to talk to you.”

  “Driscoll? Oh, downtown. What about?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “Give me your address, I’ll have a car come pick you up.”

  “That isn’t necessary, I can get there myself. Where is he, out in Queens again?”

  “No, at the precinct. You know where the Twenty-seventh Precinct is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s on Carmine Street, just off Seventh Avenue. West of Seventh.”

  “All right. Is he there now?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked at my watch, and it was nearly five-thirty. “It’ll take me a while to get there,” I said, “in this rush hour. I’m up in Harlem. I’ll leave now.”

  “I’ll call the captain,” he said.

  “Let me speak to my wife again.”

  “Sure.”

  When Kate came on, she said, “Mitch? Is something wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll go see Driscoll and find out what he wants. Then I’ll call you back.”

  “Mitch, Rita Kennely called, they’ve released Robin.”

  “They what?”

  “She said it was about five minutes after you left, a plainclothes-man came around and said Robin was no longer under arrest, the release papers will be coming through in an hour or so and then she’ll be free to go. They’re arranging now to transfer her to a private hospital out on the Island.”

  Something had happened, I wondered what, and if it had anything to do with Driscoll wanting to see me. I said, “I’d better get going, Kate. I’ll call you the minute I find out what’s going on.”

  I hung up and said to Hulmer, “Would you drive me back to the Village?”

  “Sure,” he said, getting to his feet. “You look as though something’s going on.”

  “Something is.”

  “What? I mean, can I ask?”

  “We can both ask,” I told him.

  23

  HULMER STOPPED DOWN THE block from the precinct house and said he’d wait for me. I said, “You don’t have to do that. I don’t know how long I’ll be in there, and from here I’m going straight home, and that’s way out in Queens.”

  “That’s okay, I got nothing to do.”

  “You’ve got Thing East. You’re supposed to be working there.”

  “Let Vicki work,” he said. “Sweat some of that extra lard off her. Really, Mr. Tobin, I want to stick around. I like to watch you work.”

  “Do you? I hadn’t thought of myself as being very interesting or very useful the last day or so.”

  “You put yourself down too much,” he told me.

  “Impossible,” I said.

  He laughed and said, “Anyway, I’ll stick around. What the hell, if Robin’s off the hook maybe they’ve got the right guy now, that’s worth waiting around to hear.”

  “All right, fine. Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” he said, and I think he really meant it.

  I got out of the car and walked back to the station house. This one was dark red brick, four stories high, with black slate steps. It had probably been built around the same time as the one I’d been assigned to my last seven years on the force; at any rate, it reminded me strongly of that other building, and in walking toward it I felt the months slip away, as though none of it had ever happened. I was still on the force, Jock Sheehan was still alive, my double life with Linda Campbell was undiscovered, I had not been drained of blood and life and existence.

  But I had been. This was not my precinct, I had to announce myself at the desk and ask to be directed to Captain Driscoll’s office. The sergeant made a phone call and told me to wait on the bench across the way.

  I sat there and waited. Two plainclothesmen came in with a short narrow ferret-faced man between them in cuffs. A uniformed officer left, distracted and worried, like a man who’d just been chewed out. Two plainclothesmen came down the stairs and over to me and asked me if I was Tobin.

  I got to my feet. “Yes, I am.”

  “This way.”

  They took me upstairs and into an interrogation room, square and blank and nearly empty except for a few chairs and, on one side, a scuffed and ancient library table. “Wait here,” one of them said, and they went out, and I was alone again.

  It smelled wrong. They had both seemed wary with me, bringing me up here. And why bring me to an interrogation room rather than Captain Driscoll’s office? And why make me wait again?

  The answer was what they knew about me, ex-cop, thrown out, responsible for his partner’s death. I would find no friends in this building, only memories, all of them knife-edged.

  I prowled the room, restless and uncomfortable, wanting this to be over with. Robin was free now, and they wouldn’t have freed her unless they’d gotten the right one to replace her.

  Me?

  I stopped, and looked at that thought. Could they think it was me? Was that why they let Robin go, why they wanted to talk to me, why they were wary with me, why I was in an interrogation room that reminded me uneasily of both my own past and that strange room where I’d first met Bishop Johnson?

  They made me wait fifteen minutes, and when at last the door opened and five of them came in, I knew I’d guessed it right.

  I said, “I was told Captain Driscoll wanted to see me.” Though I knew I wouldn’t be seeing the captain.

  “Talk to us a little first,” one of them said.

  “Sit down, Mr. Tobin,” said another. “This won’t take long.”

  24

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG at all, once we’d gotten past the legal preliminaries. There had been a time, not very long ago, when I could have anticipated a fifteen-hour session in this room, being interrogated by teams of detectives in shifts, but the police are required to enforce more of the laws these days, including the ones limiting their powers and protecting those people—like me—who haven’t been found guilty of a particular crime in court.

  So I was told my rights, at length, and was advised to contact my attorney. When I said I didn’t want to contact my attorney, one of the detectives said, apparently to one of the others, “It used to be they’d try to set things up for the trial. These days, they don’t think about anything but the appeal.”

  The one who had been explaining my rights to me said, “I do urge you to get in touch with your attorney, Mr. Tobin. You don’t seem to realize it, but you’re in serious trouble.”

  “I don’t think I am,” I said.

  One of the others said to me, “You think we’re all here for fun?”

  I told him, “I think you people are all here because you have a delusion. It doesn’t matter what I say here, I’m not going to change your minds. And I don’t have to call my attorney because a delusion can’t do any worse than get me a few hours in a cell. I’ll even join you in your delusion if you want, I’ll confess anything you want me to confess. But then sometime you’ll get around to evidence, facts, objective reality, things other than your pre
judice against an ex-cop, and we’ll throw away the transcript of this session and forget the whole thing.”

  “You’re sure of yourself, Tobin,” said the one who’d done most of the talking.

  “I’m innocent.”

  “Are you? Shall I tell you how we have it figured, Tobin?” Something had happened to the Mister he’d called me during the recitation on rights; I could see him memorizing that spiel from a mimeographed sheet of paper, with the word Mister and then ——. This time, —— was somebody named Tobin, so that’s what went in there.

  I said, “I’d like to hear how you have it figured, yes.”

  “Good.” He pulled over a chair and sat down; the rest of them were still standing, scattered around the room like outsize chess pieces, all watching me, keeping their arms folded.

  The talking one said, “You went there last Sunday, and George Padbury let you in and told you your cousin was upstairs. So you went upstairs, and you found your cousin engaged in perverted sex with Wilford and Boles. You’ve got a history of sexual problems, you couldn’t—”

  “What history is that?”

  “We know why you aren’t on the force any more,” he said.

  “I didn’t know adultery was a perversion,” I said.

  He shook his head, unaffected. “I didn’t say you were perverted, I said you had a history of sexual problems. Not every man turns his back on his duty for a piece of ass, Tobin.”

  I closed my eyes. “All right.”

  “So,” he said, and I listened to him in the darkness inside my closed eyes, trying to concentrate on what he was saying and not what I was feeling, the eyes of these men—these men—who knew what I had done.

  He was saying, “You saw the three of them at it, and you went wild. You killed the other two, but you couldn’t bring yourself to touch your cousin. And there she was in shock, why not, with her own cousin going crazy in front of her, so maybe she wouldn’t be able to tell anybody it was you, so you took a chance and let her live. But George Padbury knew the truth. You intimidated him, made him go along with your story at first, but you were afraid he’d tell the truth later on, so you killed him, too. Then you started making a big show about finding the real killer. That was partly to throw suspicion off you, but mostly it was to see if you could find some other patsy, get your cousin off the hook. Detective Donlon got onto you some way, so you had to kill him, too. You were seen near his car.”

  One of the others said, “That’s the one you’ll burn for, Tobin. That was your big mistake.”

  The first one said, “That’s right, that’s the one we’re going to charge you with. Because there’s no death penalty for murder in New York any more, Tobin. Not for ordinary murder. But there is for killing a cop. The cop killer still burns in New York.”

  There was silence, and it stretched, and they had to be done. I opened my eyes and saw them looking at me. I said, “Details.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The story’s full of holes,” I said. “Plug them.”

  “Show me the holes,” he said.

  “All right. First, this three-party sex. The fact that a young person lives in Greenwich Village doesn’t necessarily mean he or she engages in group sex. I think you’re going to have a hell of a time demonstrating that either Robin or Terry Wilford had any history of that kind of thing.”

  “We’ll leave that to the jury,” he said.

  One of the others said, “You ever see the average jury, Tobin? You said it yourself, Greenwich Village. That’s all the evidence we need on that part of it.”

  He was probably right. I said, “Next, blood.”

  The first one said, “Blood? What do you mean, blood?”

  “Whoever killed Wilford and the Boles woman,” I said, “got themselves smeared with blood, they had no choice. Where was the blood on me? The first investigating officers showed up—what?—half an hour maybe from the time of the murder. If this was a spontaneous crime I didn’t have any change of clothing with me, so where was the blood?”

  “You washed it off,” he said. “You used the shower, washed the blood off yourself and your clothes, came downstairs as neat as a pin. You left traces in the shower. And this.”

  He held his hand out, and one of the other detectives came forward, put a towel in it. He held the towel up and open; it was white, it said Holiday Inn in green letters, and it had a few brownish smears on it. “We found it,” he said. “You didn’t hide it all that well.”

  I said, “You have me walking around in sopping wet clothes and nobody noticing.”

  “Tobin,” he said, “everybody’s been walking around with sopping wet clothes the last week and a half. Who’s going to tell the difference between a shirt wet with sweat or a shirt wet because somebody just washed a lot of blood off it? You can forget that blood business.”

  “How about George Padbury? He and I were present in a room with a dozen or more cops. Why didn’t he denounce me?”

  “You had him too scared.”

  “Scared? Surrounded by cops?”

  One of the others said, “You told him you’d implicate him, maybe claim he did it.”

  A third one said, “Maybe you told him you still had friends on the force, so he better cooperate.”

  I said, “Do you people believe any of this?”

  “We believe it all,” said the one sitting in front of me. “You got any more holes for us to plug?”

  “I wasn’t near Donlon’s car,” I said, “until after he was dead. When the M.E. tells you the time of death, let me know, and I’ll tell you where I was at that time and who with.”

  “You admit being near his car after he was dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you knew he was dead?”

  “I thought he was asleep.”

  “What? Now that’s something I don’t believe.”

  I said, “What do you want me to say? That I saw him dead, and didn’t report it? I wouldn’t say that if it were true.” I held my hands out. “There’s a quicker way,” I said. “Give me a paraffin test. Find out if I fired a gun recently or not.”

  “It was an awful hot day to wear rubber gloves, wasn’t it?”

  One of the other cops said, “I thought you were trying to set it up as a suicide. Why don’t you tell us to give him the paraffin test?”

  “Because you will anyway,” I said.

  “That’s right,” said the main one. “We’re doing it slow and careful and easy, Tobin, we’re touching every single base, because we want you. We want you on ice.”

  “You’re going to be embarrassed,” I said. “When this is all over, you’re going to be embarrassed.”

  “We’ll see. Got any more holes for me to plug?”

  “Let me think.”

  “Take your time,” he said.

  I considered telling them about the attempt on my life, the boy who’d been killed in my place. But they’d brush that off as coincidence, or maybe even try to claim it as another murder of mine. And in any case they’d make trouble over my not telling the investigating officers there about my connection with the Wilford-Boles case.

  But it seemed somehow as though there was something important about that attempt. Or maybe about the fact that the boy had been killed instead of me. No, not instead of me, just that he’d been killed.

  Had he been the target? No, it was me, there was no doubt of that. But when the boy died, that changed things, it changed something, it did something somewhere.

  The detective sitting in front of me said, “Well? You got anything?”

  I’d been a million miles away, seeing the dead boy, trying to understand what he meant. I shook my head and said, “Wait a minute. There’s something—Just give me another minute.”

  One of the others made a comment, but I didn’t listen to it. In order to be saying something while I tried to think, I said, “If Donlon knew I was a murderer, why did he let me close enough to kill him with his own gun?”

  “He under
estimated you. He thought you weren’t any good except against women and children.”

  “They aren’t children,” I said, distracted, but I’d been thinking myself that children is what they were, these youngsters around the age of twenty, children just learning how to be adults. But they weren’t children really, not in the usual sense of the word.

  The only child who’d been murdered was that boy. Instead of me.

  I said, “Oh!”

  “What now?”

  “I’ve got it,” I said. “I know what happened.”

  “Tell us,” he suggested.

  I shook my head. “No, not now. You’ll know it yourselves, after a while. You want to book me for the Donlon murder, let’s get it over with. And when you know I’m innocent, then I want to see Captain Driscoll. None of you people, I won’t say a word to you people. It’s the captain I’ll want, and I’ll want to see him in the cell, and with nobody else around.”

  One of them, laughing at me, said, “What do you want to do, Tobin, fight it out with him, man to man?”

  “No,” I said. “I want to tell him who the murderer is.”

  “That’s dramatic as hell, Tobin. We’re all impressed.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  The one in front of me said, “Is that it? You done?”

  “I’m done.”

  He got to his feet. “Then let’s go.”

  25

  IT WAS ELEVEN O’CLOCK before I could be alone and peaceful in my cell. If nothing else happened in the meantime, I would stay in this cell until around noon tomorrow, and then be transferred to the city jail. I was looking forward to the intervening time, free of thought, free of words, free of movement and trouble and responsibility.

  I had used my allotted telephone call to let Kate know where I was and what had happened, and to assure her that everything would be all right in a day or two. She had naturally assumed my assurances were false, had thought I was in more serious trouble than I was, and had insisted on calling Frank Kantor, a lawyer who has taken care of my few legal problems over the years. Frank had come down and had wanted to talk, had wanted to know everything, and I had wanted only to be left alone. I couldn’t tell him what I knew, because he might not be able to keep from telling someone else, anyone else. The session had been uncomfortable for both of us, and went on and on, and he was angry with me when it finally ended.