Murder Among Children (18 page)

“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 underestimated 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.”

I
T 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.

I also had a meeting with an earnest young man from the district attorney’s office. To him I was a piece in a fascinating game called Law; he had to move me safely in the direction of the electric chair without drawing any penalty cards from the Supreme Court. We discussed my rights at length, I assured him that no confession had been solicited from me and that I had been told at the very beginning of the game of the moves open to me, and he left at last with the satisfied air of a teacher’s pet carrying a satchelful of neat homework.

In addition to the attorneys, pro and con, I was also run through an older and blunter and more basic routine. My fingerprints were taken, my picture was taken full face and profile, I answered all the normal questions while uniformed men at typewriters filled out all the normal forms, I turned over my wallet and keys and watch and belt and shoelaces to a thin dispassionate man behind a counter, and I was frisked thoroughly, head to toe.

I had been through all of this before, many times, but not in this role. In the past, I had been the one at the elbow of the suspect, the bored one watching the long childish process of each blackened finger being rolled on the paper, the quick callous snapping of the photos, all the little steps by which a human being is catalogued, stripped of his humanity, and converted into a prisoner. Watching someone go through it for the first time, bewildered and terrified, had always bothered me a little, and I’d preferred the tight-lipped silence of the recidivists. Going through it myself now, I fortified myself with the memory of all those others; we were an unbroken line, linked together, each of us saving a portion of self, all of those portions working together to make us strong, help us survive.

But of course I was sure I wouldn’t be staying long, all of this routine was in my case a waste of time. How I would have felt if I were guilty, or if I were innocent but unsure of my ability to establish that innocence, I can’t say. Less philosophical, perhaps, and more alone, and more afraid.

As to the two detectives who were now playing the role I once had played, their faces were expressionless throughout. But mine had also been expressionless, in the past, so it was impossible to say what these two were thinking or feeling or what their attitudes were.

In the middle of all this I was taken into a small room with a long table lined with chairs, where I was served dinner. It was like a TV dinner, except that the tray was larger and older and thicker and more battered. The meat beneath the gravy might have been some kind of beef. What the ex-cons used to tell me is absolutely true: prison food stinks.

I went through all of these things, the meetings and the red tape and the gray food, obedient and silent. I was done with struggle, for now. I had gone out into the world, I had left my hermit’s cave, in order to accomplish a specific thing. That thing was now accomplished, or nearly so, and there was nothing more I could do until Captain Driscoll came to me. In the meantime I was going very nicely to be given—courtesy of the City of New York—a cell all to myself, a cave away from cave, where I could turn off all the motors, be away from all the eyes and all the words, and begin to restore myself.

Lying in my cell, on my back on the thin bunk, looking up at the gray metal ceiling, I thought for the first time in hours of my wall. I could see it in my mind’s eye, straight and thick, the concrete blocks down in the ground below the frost line, the ditch down one side of the yard now and partway across the back, one line of concrete block in place, level and smooth. Once the ditch was complete, around all three sides of the yard and meeting the house at both ends, and with that one row of concrete block in place, then I could actually begin construction of the wall. At the pace I was working—and I was in no hurry to finish this job, having nothing to do once it was done—I might have the wall completed up to ground level before the first real snow of winter forced me to lay off and wait for spring. That would be interesting. I thought I would switch from concrete block to brick, about two-brick thicknesses below ground level, to allow for unevenness in the ground. And of course the bricks would be in two rows, with an open space in between, and in there I intended to put all the dirt I was now digging out of my trench. The whole thing was carefully planned in my head, and on paper, and in addition I had sticks driven into the ground and wire strung along the sticks to show where the trench had to be dug. The whole thing was being done with a great deal of care and attention and thought, befitting something as important as a wall. And when it was done, ten feet high, it would completely enclose the yard. There would be no way into the yard except through the house.