Murder Among Children

by Donald E. Westlake

  “This way,” I said, “it’s just between you and me. You can leave the case open, reassign the men on it to other cases, and let it be forgotten. Donlon’s dead, there’s no point making a public issue out of it. It wouldn’t do his wife any good, and it wouldn’t do the force any good.”

  He frowned at me. “Why this concern for the force? I didn’t think you had good feelings for us these days.”

  “I didn’t leave the force,” I said. “It left me. Within my limitations I think I was a pretty good cop. I never had any major gripe against the force, and I don’t blame anybody but myself for what happened to me. So if I can help keep the force from getting a small black eye it doesn’t deserve, why shouldn’t I do it?”

  “I had the wrong impression of you last time,” he said.

  “I had you wrong, too,” I told him. “I thought you were nothing but a precinct politician. I never had any use for that kind, and I still don’t. I thought you were there for no reason other than to keep me from making waves, and I was disgusted by it.”

  He said, “Have you ever tried for an appeal or a reopening of your case? After a certain length of time, you might be able to get some kind of reversal, get back on the force.”

  I shook my head. “No. The board made it a permanent dismissal, with no possibility of reinstatement.”

  “That kind of thing doesn’t always hold up,” he said. “Do you have any friends left on the force?”

  “I know what you’re trying to do,” I said, “and thank you. But I don’t want to build my hope up enough to make the attempt.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if I start letting hope in I’m done for. When my appeal is rejected I’m a dead man. Another Donlon. Every man has his limits, and adapts himself to live within them. Donlon was pushed outside his limits once by finding out he was sterile, and maybe having some other problems, too. He adapted himself, he went a little crazy so he could go on functioning in the world, and then he was pushed outside the new limits by becoming all at once a murderer. And the second time he couldn’t adapt, he was too far out there, too far away from himself. That’s what would happen to me. I was pushed out once, and I’ve adapted, I’ve closed things down, I live small and move small and think small thoughts. Now you want me to push myself beyond those limits, you want me to gamble with my life, and I won’t do it. I’d rather be alive, even if it’s only halfway.”

  He studied me, and I could see him trying to decide whether or not to keep pushing me. I was relieved when I saw by his face that he was going to choose to leave me alone. He said, “All right, Tobin, I guess you know best for yourself.”

  “Thank you.”

  “If you ever change your mind, I wish you’d call me on the phone before making any moves.”

  “I will,” I promised, though I knew I wouldn’t be changing my mind and wouldn’t be making any moves.

  He got to his feet. “I don’t suppose you want to hang around this place any longer,” he said.

  As a matter of fact, I would have preferred to stay in that cell indefinitely, but I didn’t dare tell him so. The vast majority of people have worked out a whole complex of common attitudes to things, and whenever anyone has an attitude different from theirs they immediately assume he’s sick or crazy, possibly dangerous, definitely incompetent to go on handling his own affairs, and they begin to meddle with him. So I stood up and said, “No, I guess I’ve been here long enough.”

  “I should think so. Come along.”

  We walked out together, through the locked door at the end of the corridor and downstairs to the counter where I’d turned in my belongings yesterday. With the captain accompanying me there was very little red tape, and I went through the outward process much more rapidly than I’d done when on my way in. It only took about ten minutes before we were standing together in the main front room, the sergeant’s desk beside us, the exit straight ahead.

  Captain Driscoll offered me his hand, and feeling self-consciously dramatic I took it. “I don’t know yet whether or not we’ll try to keep this quiet,” he said. “I don’t think that’s my decision to make, I’ll call the commissioner’s office when I get back upstairs and try to make an appointment for sometime this week. If they decide to make it public, you may be called for the grand jury or the inquest.”

  I felt sure they wouldn’t ultimately decide to make it public, since no one would be hurt by its being kept private and nothing would be gained by smearing the name of a dead officer. They’d have to leave Donlon’s suicide a matter of public record, and anyone studying the case would be able to put two and two together and come up with the truth, but that still wouldn’t be quite as public as page three of the Daily News: Love Nest Killer-Cop Slays Self.

  Still, Captain Driscoll was still operating in the world and so had his fictions to maintain. I went along with this one, saying, “I’ll be available if I’m needed.”

  “Fine. I’ll call you one way or the other and let you know.”

  “Thank you.”

  Then I left, and outside, leaning against a parked patrol car, was Hulmer, smiling at me through all the heat and mugginess; the outside world hadn’t changed since I’d left it.

  I said, “You didn’t wait all night.”

  “I called your wife,” he told me. “She said somebody called her, told her you’d be getting out soon. So I called the precinct and they said you weren’t out yet, so I came over. I’m supposed to drive you home, remember?”

  I shook my head, feeling my mouth moving in the unaccustomed gesture of a smile. “Hulmer,” I said, “you’re something else.”

  “Why, Mr. Tobin,” he said, “you’re talking hip.”

  “I’ve been hanging around bad companions.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “The car’s this way.”

  We got into his Buick and he headed eastward across Manhattan. At the first corner we were stopped by a red light. Inside, the car was like an oven. I saw an air-conditioned cab go by, headed uptown. The driver had a jacket on, and was smiling.

  Hulmer said, “What happens now?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s all over.”

  “All over? They got the right guy?”

  “Donlon killed himself,” I said. “It was a legitimate suicide.”

  “Well, what about—Oh! You mean he—”

  “It probably won’t be made public,” I said.

  His grin was sour. “Sure not,” he said. “Cops.”

  I almost went into a lecture, defending the police, but that would have been silly, and I refrained. I said, “Would you call Susan Thompson for me, tell her her sister’s murderer didn’t get away?”

  “Sure. You want me to talk to Ralph, too?”

  “Oh. Ralph Padbury, I’d forgotten about him. I think Abe Selkin might be best for that.”

  He laughed, saying, “I love you, Mr. Tobin, you’re the coolest thing in this whole big city.”

  “I don’t feel cool,” I said, and wiped my forehead on my shirt tail, then tucked my shirt back into my trousers.

  It wasn’t too bad when we were moving, but it was terrible during the wait at red lights. At the last one of these before the Midtown Tunnel, Hulmer said, “What are you going to do now, Mr. Tobin?”

  “Take a cold shower,” I told him, even though I knew that wasn’t the question he’d been asking me.

  Fortunately he knew I knew, and didn’t ask the question again, and we drove through the tunnel and out to Queens in companionable periods of silence and periods of small talk.

  In front of the house I said, “It’s been a pleasure knowing you, Hulmer. Thank you for the drive.”

  “It was a pleasure of mine, Mr. Tobin,” he said. “From now on I do all my cop business with you.”

  “Good. Good-bye, Hulmer.”

  “So long, Mr. Tobin.”

  Kate met me at the front door with iced tea. “Did you get much sleep?” she asked me.

  “Plenty,” I said.

/>   27

  THE HEAT WAVE CONTINUED for another two weeks. I did a little desultory work on the wall during that time, early in the morning or late in the evening, but it just wasn’t digging weather and I spent most of my time indoors in one of our two air-conditioned rooms—living room and bedroom—watching television or reading or drawing new sets of plans of the wall.

  Captain Driscoll phoned two days after we parted at the precinct, and the decision had been as I’d anticipated; no public announcement of Donlon’s guilt. The investigating officers on the case knew the truth, and a few police-beat reporters knew it, and the people who’d been involved knew it, but that was all.

  The day after Captain Driscoll’s phone call I got a funny card from Hulmer Fass inviting me to stop by Thing East any time for a free cup of coffee—“ptomaine thrown in for nothing”—but I didn’t answer the card or go back to Thing East and I didn’t hear any more from the people there.

  I knew Kate wanted to know what had happened, though she wouldn’t presume upon me by asking. Gradually, over the course of several conversations, I told her everything I’d done and seen while out of the house. It all interested her, and I became too conscious of how lonely it had to be for her, sharing my desert island, and then I couldn’t talk to her at all for a while. But that too eased, and at last we got back on the old footing.

  I was restless inside the house, but it was better than the outside world. I survived.

  The day the heat wave broke, there was a drenching downpour, rain flowing everywhere like water poured from a bucket, the sky gray-black, the world green-black, the interior of the house yellow-black. There was lightning, and wind, and sheets of rain. I prowled the house like a puma in a cave, and Kate spent most of the day sitting at the kitchen table, a coffee cup in her hand as she gazed out the window.

  The next day was sunshiny, cool, beautiful. The ground was too wet for digging, but I could squish around the backyard, replacing the boundary sticks that had fallen, putting new string along them, cleaning mud off the tops of the positioned concrete blocks, checking the supplies under the tarpaulins to see that they were still dry. And the day after that, a Tuesday, was still beautiful, with the ground dry enough to dig in.

  I was at it by nine o’clock, all my concentration at last returned to my wall. And at twelve-thirty Kate came out of the house, came walking across the backyard toward me, her expression troubled, and said, “Robin Kennely is here, Mitch. And her mother.”

  I looked up from the hole where I was digging. I said, “What do they want now?”

  “Robin got out of the hospital this morning,” she said. “They used drugs to help her remember what happened, and all the blank spots are gone from her memory now. They want to thank you, Mitch.”

  “I didn’t do it for them.”

  “They think you did, and they want to thank you. Mitch, they’re in the living room.”

  I looked at my work, but I knew it was no use. I’d have to go in and talk to these people, and they’d probably stay all afternoon.

  Why couldn’t they have come around during the heat wave, when I couldn’t work anyway?

  I looked up at Kate and nodded. “All right,” I said.

  “Robin wants you to see that she’s better,” she said.

  “I know, I know. I’ll just wash up and then I’ll come in.”

  Kate knew I was doing it only for her sake, and that troubled her. But she wants me to talk to people, so she didn’t let it trouble her to the point of letting me off the hook. She said, “We’ll be in the living room.”

  “Right.”

  She went on ahead. I put my tools away, went inside, washed up, and went to the living room. Robin looked better than the last time I’d seen her, not as good as the first time.

  It was a long afternoon. They kept wanting to talk about the murders, and I could no longer remember all the details they wanted to hear. Kate filled in for me, did most of the talking, while I sat and thought about my wall.

  I got back to it on Wednesday.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Mitchell Tobin Mysteries

  1

  THE CONDUCTOR CAME THROUGH, calling, “Kendrick! Kendrick!” I glanced at him, then back out at neat white clapboard houses on quiet streets muffled by heavy trees. In the back yards stood small white clapboard garages with doors that opened out instead of lifting. In one back yard not far from the tracks a group of children had tied a child to a tree and were pretending to set fire to him. He was crying, and they were laughing, and over all was the barking of an excited dog—part German shepherd, he looked—prancing and bouncing around them.

  The houses grew a little seedier, older, not so well cared for, and gave way to a row of stores, and then the station slid into the foreground and blocked the view. I got to my feet and took down my suitcase and walked through the nearly empty car to the front as the train rolled interminably to a stop. I was two hours from New York and a hundred million miles from home. I stepped down onto the wooden platform, the only passenger from my car getting off here, and went through the old push-door into the station building.

  The ticket window was to my left, and on impulse I went over and asked the man when was the next train back to New York. Without checking anything, he said, “Four-ten.” It was not yet eleven-thirty.

  Would I have gone back if there’d been a train right away? Possibly, I don’t know. The house would have been empty, Kate and Bill already gone to Long Island. I would have had a month to myself, Kate wouldn’t have had to know I’d stayed home until she herself returned. And of course by then it would have been too late to make me go back to The Midway.

  Would that have been better, as things turned out? But that’s a meaningless question, really. In a life in which nothing matters nothing can be either better or worse.

  On the other side of the station four identical taxis in orange and gray stood at the curb. A girl laden with suitcases, tennis racket, hat box, shopping bag and raincoat—probably coming home from college for summer vacation—was serially entering the first cab, so I took the second. There was no meter and no notice about fares.

  The driver, a stocky man with a bushy red moustache, said, “Where to?”

  I said, “What are the rates?”

  “Depends where you’re going.”

  The address was on a slip of paper in my shirt pocket, but I didn’t need to look at it. “Twenty-seven North Laurel Avenue.”

  He pursed his lips under the moustache, studying me in the rearview mirror, trying to figure out exactly how much the market would bear, and finally said, “Two dollars.”

  “I think that’s too much,” I said.

  He shrugged elaborately. “That’s standard,” he said.

  “It’s too much.”

  “You could try another cab,” he said.

  No one else from the train had wanted a taxi, and the other two were still at the curb behind me. “All right,” I said, and prepared to struggle myself and my suitcase out onto the sidewalk again.

  He barely let me get the door open before saying, peevishly, “Well, what do you think it’s worth?”

  I had no idea, never having been in Kendrick before in my life, but I couldn’t go too far wrong if I halved his price, so I said, “One dollar.”

  He twisted around in the seat to look at me without benefit of mirror. “I tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll split the difference with you.”

  “A dollar and a half,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “That will include tip,” I said.

  “Tip?” He raised an eyebrow, and grinned under his moustache. “This ain’t New York,” he said. “Shut the door, I’m yours for a buck and a half.”

  Our route took us through the narrow congested downtown street, angle parking on both sides, one lane of creeping traffic in each direction. On both sides were the stores, the women’s clothing shops trying to look modern in nineteenth-century brick buildings, the appliance st
ores with their dusty windows full of washing machines, the five-and-tens that could have been switched with those of any other city in the country without anybody noticing a thing.

  After downtown, we went through the Negro section, old duplexes with sagging porches and only a dim memory of paint, skinny dusty-looking children running in bunches, even the skinny-trunked trees half stripped of their bark. Among the decayed automobiles rusting in front yards I swear I saw a dark blue Fraser.

  This strip was followed by the strip of white-clapboard-white-owner houses I’d already seen another part of from the train, and then we came to a much older and once richer section, large turreted and gabled houses on extremely large plots, tall thin windows facing in all directions. But few of the houses were private homes any longer. A mortician was in this one, seven doctors in that one, a convent in a third.

  Twenty-seven North Laurel was one of these mastodons, a huge irregular pile of gray stone, three stories high, full of tall narrow windows and architectural cadenzas, with a wrought iron fence separating the cracked sidewalk from the neat lawn.

  There was no sign indicating this building’s present status, but the driver obviously knew what it was, because he gave a surprised grunt and said, “Oh. I didn’t know you meant that place.”

  “Would the price have gone up?”

  “Could be,” he said, looking at me in his mirror again.

  I paid him, and he said, “You’re gonna work there, huh?”

  That was the wrong image. I said, “Why do you say that?”

  “A loony wouldn’t have argued the price.”

  “They aren’t loonies,” I said. Then I corrected myself: “We aren’t loonies.”

  “Maybe you aren’t,” he said, and faced front, ending the conversation.

  I struggled out of the cab, and it drove away. There was a break in the wrought iron fence at the driveway. I walked up the new-looking blacktop, seeing that it continued on past the side of the house, under the nineteenth-century equivalent of a carport, and on to the rear, where I caught a glimpse of a dark wood multi-car garage of more recent vintage than the house. Past the carport two muscular young men in khakis and T-shirts were washing a green Ford station wagon. They glanced at me, and back at their work. They would be Robert O’Hara and William Merrivale, though I had no way of telling which was which. The dossiers hadn’t included photographs.