Murder Among Children (3 page)

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.

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 shaking his head.

T
HE 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.

A minute later the people from the morgue arrived. They went by me carrying two baskets, which didn’t make any sense.

Padbury said, “What are those things for?”

“To carry bodies in,” I said. “Why would there be two of them?”

He looked at me, wide-eyed. “What are you asking me for?”

“You said there was nobody else upstairs.”

“That’s right,” he said.

“If there’s only one body up there,” I said, “why do they need two baskets?”

“
I
don’t know. Maybe Terry got cut in half or something.”

I shook my head. “Two baskets means two bodies,” I said. “Who’s the other one?”

“I swear to God,” he said. “I swear to God I don’t know. I left here last night about two in the morning, I come back today at twelve-thirty. If somebody went up there, I don’t know about it.”

“You haven’t been up there yourself today.”

“No, sir.”

“Did Terry have any other girl friends?”

“No, sir. Just Robin. And she didn’t have anybody else either.”

The morgue attendants came through again, two men to a basket. They were both obviously heavy now. The attendants’ faces were impassive.

I watched them leave, and saw another plainclothesman come in. He came down the aisle, started by me, stopped, looked at me, frowned, said, “Mitch?”

I looked up at him, and he had a face I knew. We’d been assigned to the same precinct a dozen years ago. I remembered his first name was Gregg, but couldn’t recall the last name. I said, “Hello, Gregg.”

He said, “You in on—?” And then he stopped, looked very puzzled, and glanced around as though to find someone to explain things to him. He’d obviously just remembered about me.

I said, “I’m a private citizen. I just happened to be here.”

“Well,” he said, and looked very uncomfortable. “Long time no see,” he said.

“You’re looking good,” I said, for something to say.

“You, too. Well, I gotta get to work.” He grinned painfully and said, “That’s what they pay me for.”

“Right.”

He walked away, and a minute later I saw him talking to two of the other plainclothesmen. They both glanced my way, and then leaned their heads close to hear what Gregg had to say.

I knew what he was telling them. That I had been a cop, a plainclothesman working out of a precinct uptown, until the day my partner was shot and killed making an arrest that hadn’t turned out to be as easy as it should have been. And he was killed because I wasn’t there to back him up. And I wasn’t there to back him up because at the moment he was dying I was in bed with a woman not my wife.

I closed my eyes, and waited inside there for whatever would happen next. If only I’d stayed home. I hadn’t wanted to come out today.

George Padbury said, “You okay?” so I couldn’t even close down that much.

I opened my eyes. “I’m okay,” I said, and saw two of them coming over to talk with me.

I
T WASN’T AS PAINFUL
as it might have been. Neither of them made any reference at all to my past history, though their knowledge of it shone in their eyes, slatelike.

They took me to another table, away from Padbury, and I told them my story. They wanted to ask into Robin’s background, and it took me a while to make them understand that I really didn’t know the girl. It wasn’t that they disbelieved me, it was just hard to comprehend the fact that we were cousins who had never met before yesterday.

The whole interrogation took no more than ten minutes, and then they asked me to stick around a little while. One of them said, “You don’t have any appointments anywhere, do you?”