Murder Among Children (6 page)

Hulmer Fass shook his head. “That’s how it goes with non-involvement, Mr. Tobin,” he said. “One day it’s not your problem, the next day they’re all over you.”

“I’m not responsible for George Padbury’s death,” I said.

He gave me a smile of knowing and cynical contempt. “Goodbye, baby,” he said, and turned toward the door.

Kate said to him, “No, wait. Don’t go yet.” She looked up at me. “You go on upstairs, Mitch,” she said, “and think it out. You think about Robin, in Bellevue, going to be transferred to jail. You think about George Padbury and this boy here and your own family. When you’ve got it all thought out, you’ll find us in the kitchen.” To the boy she said, “Come along, Hulmer. Do you like iced coffee?”

He was grinning at her respectfully. “Sure thing,” he said, and they walked back to the kitchen together.

I didn’t go up to the second floor. I sat down where I was, on the stairs, and felt the iron hand closing on me. But all I wanted was to stay here, stay in my hole, keep my head down.

Bill came thundering into the house as I sat there. Fourteen years old, he was well into the transition from open childhood to the mysterious complexity of the young people connected with places like Thing East. How much of my disgrace he knew about I had never learned, nor tried to learn. There was a widening rift between my son and me, caused for the most part I knew by myself, but there was nothing I could do to mend it without opening myself, which I didn’t ever want to do.

Now he came bounding up the stairs, a brown paper bag in his hand, and paused beside me to say, “What’s up, Dad?”

“Thinking,” I said. “What’ve you got there?”

“Tubes,” he said. “See you.”

“See you.”

He pounded on up, leaving me alone. I shook my head, and got to my feet, and went down to the kitchen, where I said to Hulmer Fass, sitting at the kitchen table, “Do you know how to get in touch with George Padbury’s brother? The almost lawyer?”

“Ralph? Sure.”

“We’ll need him. Would you call him?”

He got to his feet. “To come out here?”

“Yes.”

He smiled. “Yes, sir.”

I said, “Is there anybody else connected with Thing East? Any more partners?”

“Two,” he said. “You want them?”

“Yes. The phone’s in the hall.”

“When do you want them?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Done,” he said, and went out to make the calls.

I looked at Kate and said, “Don’t grin at me. I want you to know I hate this, I intend to get it over with as quick as I can, and when it’s done I’ll go straight back into my box.”

“It’s all right, Mitch,” she said. “Really. It’s all right.” Which only meant she didn’t want to believe I was telling her the truth.

W
E WERE ALL ASSEMBLED
by quarter to seven, six of us sitting around the living room, the coolest place in the house. Outside the sun was still strong, refusing to give way to twilight. Inside, the feeling of twilight, muted and forlorn, was a heavy aura around us.

Hulmer Fass had stayed to dinner, during which he and Bill had gotten into a complex electronic discussion in which it emerged that one of the things Bill was working on up in his room was a homemade phonograph, using odd parts from here and there. Hulmer did more talking with Bill in the course of that one meal than I’d done all told for a year, and I listened with agonized embarrassment at the degree of my hunger for knowledge of my son. I envied Hulmer his easy access to Bill, knew the envy was absurd to the point of irrationality, and envied him anyway.

After dinner Hulmer and I moved to the living room and engaged in uneasy conversation. Neither of us was sure of his attitude toward the other, so that we spoke haltingly on the safest of topics—weather and highways and baseball—skirting even around the subject that had brought us together. As each of the others arrived, Hulmer made introductions and then the new member joined our uncomfortable group. After Kate had the dishes done, and joined us, talk was somewhat easier, but still hampered by the reason for our all being here.

Ralph Padbury was the first arrival, and simultaneously looked exactly like his dead brother and nothing at all like him. Where George Padbury had taken the basic features common to both brothers and overlaid them with long hair, bushy mustache, and turtleneck sweater, Ralph Padbury had chosen a severe, pedestrian, anonymous, clerkish façade, with slicked-down hair, cleanshaven face, low-priced conservative suit and shirt and tie, and bookish horn-rim glasses. He seemed incomplete without an attaché case.

He also looked unnaturally pale, having that pinched chalky expression about the eyes that means a recent severe shock. His brother had died a scant twelve hours before, and it showed in his face.

A girl named Vicki Oppenheim was next. Short and stout, she was dressed all in black—sweater, skirt, stockings, shoes—and had to be dying of the heat, but didn’t show it. Her hair was black and long, gathered with a red rubber band at the back of her head and then falling free to below her shoulders. Her face was rather pretty, in a chubby way. Her natural expression was obviously an ebullient smile, which she was trying with uncertain success to banish, due to the seriousness of the occasion.

“Golly,” she said, when Hulmer introduced us. “I don’t know what to say. Golly.”

Kate saved me, saying to the girl, “None of us knows what to say, Vicki. Come sit over here.”

The last to show up was a boy named Abe Selkin, thin, intense, hot-eyed, spade-bearded, crackling with intelligence and energy. He scanned the room with a quick computer-like glance and said, “War council.”

“Not war,” I said. “Defense.”

He nodded briskly, studied me for a millisecond, and said, “You’re in charge.”

“Not the way you mean,” I said. “I’m not putting an army together here, I have no tasks to be performed. What I want from you people is enough information to make it possible for me to act on my own.”

“We’re part of the scene,” Selkin said. “You could use us.”

“Perhaps,” I lied. “For now, I only want information. Would you sit over there with Hulmer?”

“Right.”

I went back to my own chair before saying, “I’ve done my best to stay out of this thing. Which means I haven’t even read the newspaper stories about it. I know almost nothing, so forgive me if I ask what may seem like stupid questions. Like the name of the murdered girl, I don’t know that.”

There was silence, each of them obviously waiting for one of the others to answer me, until Kate volunteered, saying, “Her name was Irene Boles, Mitch.”

“Irene Boles.” I had armed myself with a notebook, into which I wrote the name. I looked at Hulmer. “What was her connection with the group?”

He grinned a little and shook his head. “None,” he said.

“None? Who was she?”

“Hooker,” he said. “From uptown.”

Abe Selkin said, “According to the papers, she was a prostitute, she’d done time.”

“Where did she live?”

Hulmer answered me, still with the same faint grin: “Harlem.”

“And none of you had ever seen her before?”

They all shook their heads, and Kate said, “The newspaper said she usually spent her time in the midtown area.”

I said, “Would Terry Wilford have been likely to know her professionally?”

“Not a chance,” Abe Selkin said.

Vicki Oppenheim, looking wide-eyed and innocent, said, “Terry didn’t have to pay for it, Mr. Tobin.”

“All right,” I said. “How about socially? Could he have met her somehow in her non-working life?”

Hulmer said, “Terry didn’t know that chickie. She was a snow-head; if she wasn’t on Broadway working she was up in her place in Harlem stoned to the eyes.”

I said, “Is that a guess? Kate, did the papers say she was a dope addict?”

She nodded. “It said she was under the influence when she died.”

“All right.” I looked from face to face. “I need a truthful answer to this one,” I said. “It won’t go any farther than this room.”

“We know that,” Abe Selkin said.

“Was Terry Wilford an addict?”

Selkin shook his head. “Definitely not.”

“Are any of the rest of you?”

“That stupid we’re not,” Selkin said.

Hulmer said, “We aren’t users, Mr. Tobin, that’s straight.”

“What about George Padbury?”

The brother, Ralph Padbury, who until now had been sitting quietly in his chair and seeming too dazed to really comprehend the conversation going on around him, suddenly sat up, very angry, and said, “My brother never touched any of that stuff! Who do you think you are?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to ask all the questions, I have to know where I stand.”

“My brother’s
dead,
don’t you realize that?”

Vicki Oppenheim reached out and took Padbury’s hand, saying, “Come on, Ralph. Everybody knows, that’s why we’re here. Mr. Tobin isn’t putting George down, he’s just trying to get the picture.”

“He can just leave George out of this.”

Vicki shook her head. “No, he can’t. He has to know everything about George. And about me, and Abe, and Hully. And you, too.”

Padbury pulled his hand free, saying, “I have nothing to do with any of this. I told you people at the outset, I’m not involved, I’m not a party to any of this. I have my own—I have to take—”

“I know how you feel, Mr. Padbury,” I said. “I feel much the same way myself. But a situation is—”

“
My
life
isn’t
ruined!” he said hotly, glaring at me. “What does it matter to you, what do you care what happens? Or any of the rest of you? What sort of, what sort of
reputations
do you have to—I have a future to think about, a career.”

“Mr. Padbury,” I said, and the doorbell rang. Kate got to her feet, and I went on, “No one is here to accuse anybody of anything, or muddy anybody’s reputation. I have to know the situation, that’s all.”

“Well, I’m out of it!” he said, and got to his feet, moving with the jittery agitation of an essentially mild man driving himself to violent reaction. “I don’t know why you people called me here, I—Hulmer, I told you on the phone I didn’t see what good I could do, and—”

I said, “Mr. Padbury, did you know Irene Boles?”

“What?” Thrown off stride, he blinked at me without comprehension. “Who?”

“The dead woman.”

“The pros—
No
!”

“I didn’t think so,” I said. “But you do know Robin Kennely.”

“Of course I know Robin. Everybody in this room knows her.”

“She’s in jail,” I said.

“Bellevue,” Hulmer corrected me, and added, “But it’s the same thing.”

Padbury said, “There’s nothing I can do for her. I know what you’re trying to say, but there’s just nothing I can do to help her.” He had calmed down in spite of himself, and went on reasonably, “I understand her parents are fairly well-to-do, I imagine they have hired attorneys to represent her. If she’s innocent, I’m sure—”

Abe Selkin said, “Come off it, Ralph. Do you think she killed George?”

“All right.” Padbury nodded, impatiently conceding the point, and said, “But the fact remains, I can do nothing to help her.”

“You can help me,” I said, “and I’m trying to help her.”

“What can you do that—?”

“Mitch.”

I turned my head, and Kate was in the doorway, and standing beside her, looking from face to face with a faint grim smile on his lips, was Detective Edward Donlon, the cop who had started all this.

“Quite a gathering,” Donlon said, and took one step into the room. “What’s the occasion?”

I
GOT TO MY
feet. “You wanted to see me?”

“I’m happy to see all you people,” Donlon said. He looked at Ralph Padbury, frowned at him, finally said, “Who are you, boy? You look familiar.”

“He’s my guest,” I said. “Kate, would you stay with our guests? Mr. Donlon and I will talk in the kitchen.”

“You know who I am.”

“You were pointed out to me.”

“Who did that nice thing?”

“George Padbury.”

His eyes flickered, and then he looked at Ralph Padbury again. “That’s who you look like,” he said.

I walked across the living room, saying, “Come along. We can talk in the kitchen.”

“Why don’t we stay here?” he said. “Don’t let me interrupt, you people just go right on like before. Talk about whatever you were talking about when I came in. What was the subject, Fass?”

I said, “Donlon, are you here to create a situation?”

He looked at me, amused and mock-innocent. That heavy jaw, bluish-gray now and almost in need of a razor, was deceptive, distracting from the quick intelligence in the eyes. Donlon looked almost like a dumb bull, but not quite. He was smart, and he wouldn’t act without a reason.

He said, “What’s the problem, Tobin? This is a friendly call, a bunch of your new friends getting together. I mean, these people aren’t
old
friends of yours, are they?”

I said, “Excuse me,” and started around him, toward the hall doorway.

“Where you going? Aren’t you the host?”

“I’m calling Captain Driscoll,” I said. “Maybe he’ll tell me what you’re here for.”

“That’s enough, Tobin,” he said, and his voice was suddenly all steel.

I turned and looked at him. “We’re in my house, Donlon,” I said. “In my house I decide what’s enough and who talks to who and when people come and go. Is this an official call?”

“I already said it wasn’t.”

“If you want to talk to me,” I said, “we’ll talk privately. In the kitchen. You coming? Or do you want to leave?”

He didn’t like it. He wanted to throw some weight around—not so much because of me as because of the presence of the coffee-house crowd—and he couldn’t do it. I had the edge here, and it bothered him, the way a man might be bothered by too-tight shoes.

But he didn’t let the silence get too long. He shrugged, and smiled, and kept looking directly at me as he said, “Well, that’s all right, I’ll be happy to come to the kitchen with you, Tobin. I can talk with these other folk some other time.”

“That’s right. Come along.” I turned away again, and left the living room, and walked down the hall to the kitchen, hearing him come along behind me. From the living room there was total silence.