Murder Among Children (13 page)

“Robin’s?”

“Well, sure. They were shacked up, Mr. Tobin. I mean, that isn’t exactly a secret any more.”

“I know.”

I opened the linen closet door to the right and saw towels, underwear, soap, socks, various tubes and jars and bottles scattered over the shelves.

Hulmer, irritated, said, “That’s a hell of a thing.”

“What is?”

“My Holiday Inn towel,” he said. “My brother swiped me a towel from a Holiday Inn he helped integrate, and now somebody swiped it from me. One of those damn cops.”

“No. Why would a cop steal one of your towels?”

Hulmer shrugged. “Why would a cop do anything? They were up here wandering around, a couple of them washed up in here, look how dirty they left the towel on the rack there.”

“But why steal a towel?” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense. You’re sure it was here?”

“Positive. This is my shelf, my razor’s here, soap, slippers, all my gear, everything but the towel. It was white, with a wide green stripe down the middle, and inside the green stripe in white letters it said Holiday Inn. And it isn’t here.”

“You’re sure it isn’t at a laundry or anything like that.”

He shook his head. “I do my own laundry at the laundromat. Bring it down, put the money in, sit around and read a magazine, bring it home an hour later. That towel hasn’t been away from me since my brother give it to me.”

“Then let’s look for it,” I said.

He looked at me oddly. “Why? Why you so hot about the towel?”

I said, “The murderer got blood on himself, Hulmer. Maybe he used your towel to get rid of some of it.”

“You think so?” He looked around. “What did he do, take a shower?”

“Maybe. And he was in too much of a hurry to turn the cold water all the way off. Unless one of you has used this room since then.”

“Nobody’s come up here except cops and now you and me,” he said.

“So he probably took a shower, yes. And maybe used your towel to dry himself, and then to wipe up bloody footprints on the floor out there or bloodstains in here or bloodstains off his shoes. Anyway, your towel got blood on it, so he couldn’t leave it around, because it would show there’d been someone up here other than the two dead bodies and Robin. Maybe he took it away with him, maybe he just hid it somewhere.”

“The cops did a lot of searching up here. If they’d found a bloodstained towel, we’d of heard about it.”

“You’re right,” I said. “So if I’m right and he did use it, he took it with him. Wrapped around his chest inside his shirt, maybe. But first we have to know for sure the towel’s gone. You’re positive there’s nowhere else it could be?”

“One hundred percent,” he said. “But what about the guy’s clothes?”

“What do you mean?”

“He can take a shower,” Hulmer said, “to get the blood off himself, but what about the blood on his clothes? He can’t take them into the shower with him, they’ll take forever to dry.”

I said, “He wasn’t wearing clothes.”

“What?”

“If he’d been dressed,” I said, “he wouldn’t be that stained with blood. On his face, maybe, and his hands, maybe his arms, that’s all. No point in taking a shower. But if he took a shower it’s because he had blood all over himself. So he didn’t have any clothes on. Let’s go back to the bedroom.”

“You want this light on or off?”

“Leave it on.”

We went back to the bedroom, where I said, “I can begin to see the way it went now. The Boles woman was found naked, wasn’t she?”

“Right. The hooker naked, Terry dressed.”

“All right.” I went over to the hall door. “The Boles woman and the killer come up here. They get undressed, they probably make love on the mattress over there. Then there’s an argument, or a sudden passion, or maybe just the next step in a careful plan. Whatever it is, the killer stabs the Boles woman, kills her. Then he hears Terry and Robin coming up the stairs. No, he doesn’t hear them, they just burst in on him. And there he is, naked, covered with blood, the knife in his hand. Terry makes a move, toward him or toward the door, and the killer goes after him. See, there’s some chalk marks left over near the door here. That’s where Terry’s body was.”

“Chalk marks?”

“They outline where the body was in chalk for the photos.” I looked around. “All right. The Boles woman dead, Terry dead, the killer standing here with the knife. Where’s Robin?”

Hulmer said, “Still in the doorway, wigged out.”

“Right. In shock. She’s watched a bloodstained naked man murder her lover with a knife. She’s shut down, she’s just standing here like a statue. The killer comes over to her, he plans to get rid of this witness too, but then he sees the state she’s in and he sees a way to be sure the police won’t be looking for him. He smears blood on her, he closes her hand around the knife, he leaves her there.”

Hulmer said, “But what if she comes out of it? He’s taking a hell of a chance.”

“No. He can count on her staying that way for a while, at least long enough for him to take a shower, get dressed, clear out of here. Then if afterwards she claims some man did it, where’s her credibility?”

“Some man?” he asked me. “Not somebody she knew?”

“I don’t know. The Boles woman is what throws me off. Will you do me a favor, Hulmer?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Look in the phone book for people named Boles in Harlem, call them, find somebody related to Irene. I’ve got to talk to somebody who knew her.”

“Will do. You going to stay up here?”

“For a minute.”

He went away, and I stood in the living room, looking around, watching it all happen, seeing everything but the killer’s face. He was simply a pale force in the room, streaked with red, the knife glinting in his hand.

I could see the action, but I couldn’t yet understand it. Why had he been here with Irene Boles? Why had he killed her? Why had he killed Terry Wilford? Why had he failed to kill Robin?

Did I have the sequence right? What if it had gone the other way around? He could have been here with Boles, Terry and Robin came in, he killed Terry, then had to kill Boles.

No. I’d had the death scene described to me, and Irene Boles had been murdered on the bed, Terry in the middle of the room. It had to be the first way, Boles and then Terry. Boles already dead when Terry and Robin came up the stairs.

Then was the murder of Terry simply an afterthought? Was it the murder of Irene Boles that was the impetus of all this, and Terry’s death nothing more than part of the cover-up?

Two people I had to talk to: someone who had known Irene well, and Robin. I had to know if Robin remembered anything, even in distortion.

I went back downstairs. Hulmer was on the phone, so I asked Vicki if she had a flashlight.

“Sure. I’ll think where it is in just a minute.”

It took rooting through drawers, but at last she found the flashlight and I went back upstairs. It took me ten minutes to convince myself there was no other way out of the building. The door to the roof was nailed shut, the upper-story windows were all boarded up except for the one in Terry’s bedroom, which led only to the cul-de-sac at the rear of the building, and there were no exits into the buildings on either side.

Nor was there any sign of the missing towel.

Aside from all the other questions, there was still this extra question: how had he gotten away? The only way out was past George Padbury, and I was prepared to believe George Padbury had been telling the truth when he said no one had come out. He hadn’t been the sort of young man to cover for murder, not the murder of a friend with another friend framed for the job. What he had eventually tried to call me for, and what he had probably been murdered for, was surely something much smaller, much subtler, which had only occurred to him much later.

So how had the killer left the scene of his crimes? He was up here, fresh from his shower and back into his clothes, the bloody towel in his hand or wrapped around his leg or around his chest, the two bodies there and there, Robin standing like a broken doll streaked with red, here by the door, the stage set, everything ready, nothing left to do but leave.

How?

Down the stairs and into Thing East, that was the only way. And he hadn’t done it.

I finally gave up, for now. I switched off the lights on the second floor and went back downstairs, where Hulmer, elation evident in his face, told me, “I got you better than a relative, Mr. Tobin. I got you her man.”

“Her pimp?”

“That’s the one. He’ll know everything about her, every last thing.”

“Where do I find him?”

He said, “Mr. Tobin, I think I ought to come with you.”

“Why?”

“Because this cat isn’t going to talk to a white man and he isn’t going to talk to a cop. And you are white, Mr. Tobin, and you sure as hell do look like a cop.”

“All right,” I said. “Come along.”

“We’ll go up in my car,” Hulmer said. “I’ll phone you from uptown, Vicki.”

“I’ll be okay,” she said.

“Just keep the door locked till Abe gets here,” he told her.

She promised she would, and walked to the entrance with us, and locked it after us. Hulmer told me, “I don’t want Vicki to be next, you know?”

“I don’t want anyone to be next,” I said.

H
IS NAME WAS JIM
Caldwell and we had a hell of a time finding him. Every bartender Hulmer talked to sent us on to another bar, until I began to believe we were being sent on a snipe hunt, but all at once we walked into one black and crimson joint, the jukebox pounding away with the bass turned so far up and the treble turned so far down that nothing could be distinguished but the beat, and when Hulmer asked the bartender the same old question, this bartender leaned across the bar and pointed toward a booth way at the back, in almost total darkness.

We walked back there, Hulmer in the lead, the customers studying us with blank faces, and at the last table we found a tall, rangy, strong-looking man with straightened hair, slightly buck teeth, and a pearl-gray suit that seemed to glow in the dark. Sitting beside him was a dull-eyed young woman, plain of face, a trifle overweight, wearing a rumpled white blouse with long sleeves. It was cool back in here, but up front the sunlight was still an open-eyed glare on the plate-glass windows, and these two weren’t dressed right for the day. In the man’s case, the clothing could be put down to narcissism, the occupational mental disease of pimps. In the woman’s case, the long sleeves more than likely hid the marks of addiction.

On the way uptown in Hulmer’s ancient black Buick, he had told me the little that Irene Boles’ sister had told him about Jim Caldwell. He had several women, Irene had been one of his women for three years, he had a reputation for a bad temper, he had no arrests or convictions that the sister knew of, and he hadn’t killed Irene because he’d been at the sister’s apartment for four hours that day, with three other people present, the four hours including the period when the murder had taken place. And the reason he’d been there was that Irene had run out on him and he wanted her back and he assumed sooner or later she’d show up at her sister’s place.

It had been Hulmer’s opinion, based on the sound of the sister on the phone, that she wasn’t likely to be a party to manufacturing an alibi for the murderer of Irene. In fact, Hulmer had the impression the woman was sorry she knew anything to get Jim Caldwell off the hook. Hulmer believed there was no love lost between Jim Caldwell and the sister of Irene Boles.

Looking at him now, sitting at his ease in the back booth of Mighty Micky’s, I was sorry he was alibied, because otherwise he was exactly what I would like for Terry Wilford’s murderer: brutal enough to have used the knife, clever enough to have used Robin’s state of shock to his own advantage.

I found myself thinking: Do you have the same thing in red?

Hulmer did the talking at first, beginning with a civil and slightly mush-mouthed “Mr. Caldwell?”

Caldwell preened under the Mr., and showed off a little with a white man in the audience. “That’s me, boy,” he said, his voice lazy and good-humored. “What kind of thing you want with me?”

“Mr. Caldwell,” Hulmer said again, “do you know that little girl they say killed Irene?”

His eyes suddenly hardened into wariness, and in a sharper, faster voice he said, “What about her?”

When in Rome. Hulmer was talking now like a semi-educated field hand, putting on the dialect for Caldwell’s benefit. He said, “This here’s her cousin. He don’t think she done it at all, and he wants our help.” Half the consonant sounds were missing from his speech now, so that don’t became dohn, help became hep. I could barely understand him.

Caldwell’s speech was crystal-clear and hard as ice. “What kind of help you figure on from me, boy?”

“We was talking to Susan—”

“That sowbelly!”

“She told us how you were with her when Irene was getting killed.”

Some of the hardness went out of Caldwell’s eyes. He smiled thinly and said, “What do you know? I figured that bitch would railroad me sure, she got the chance.”

“Can we sit down, Mr. Caldwell?”

He looked past Hulmer at me, and said, “Let the man talk for himself, boy. What is it you want from me?”

I took a step closer to the table. “Information,” I said. “I want to know who killed Irene.”

“That cousin of yours,” he said.

I shook my head, and met his eye.

He wanted to be a hard case with me, but he couldn’t quite do it. After a minute he looked away, and shrugged, and said, “What do I know? I was uptown, I don’t know who she was with, I don’t know nothing.”

“Maybe you do,” I said. “Let me ask you a few questions, see what we get.”

“What do
I
get?”

“I’m not buying information from you, if that’s what you mean. I’ll stand for drinks, but that’s it.”

He laughed and said, “You’re a cheap John, ain’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m drinking Scotch,” he said, as though to impress me or scare me. “And my zook’s on the same. Ain’t you, sugar?”

She turned her head and looked at him vaguely, as though not sure he had spoken, or not sure he had been talking to her, or just generally not sure of things.