Read Online Murder Among Children by Donald E. Westlake - Free Book Online Page A

busily explaining something or other to Kate, who was nodding and smiling and not understanding a word. They were all busily and unself-consciously being themselves, without that slightly guarded overlay that people almost always put on with me. Vicki was bursting and bubbling with speech, her words tumbling over each other, she herself bouncing up and down on the couch as though she were not a fat girl; Abe Selkin was as brisk and incisive as a reform candidate’s campaign manager; Hulmer was in the conversation and yet to one side of it, observant and self-aware and sympathetic and faintly amused; and Ralph Padbury, leaning slightly forward, was methodically inserting small neat footnotes into the seconds left empty by the others.
    The talk trailed off as I came into the room, and everyone looked at me. I said, into the raw new silence, “It’s all right, he’s gone.”
    Abe Selkin, in his clipped way, said, “You realize he followed one of us.”
    “Possibly,” I said.
    Hulmer said, “What happens now? He hangs on our tail?”
    “No. We’ve got a stalemate. He’s to lay off us and we’ll lay off him.”
    Hulmer smiled a thin curve of disbelief. “We lay what off him?”
    “We don’t try to make trouble for him being on the take.”
    Ralph Padbury, very prim, said, “It was never established that was what he wanted. We have no case there.”
    “I know that,” I said. “But we could still raise a little dust, something that would be remembered at promotion time. It’s worth it to him not to have us making a stink, even though,” with a nod to Padbury, “we don’t have enough to get him into a court of law.”
    Hulmer said, “Sounds like a shaky truce, man.”
    “It is.” I sat down. “But it gives us a little time,” I said, and picked up my notebook. Studying it, pretending the earlier flare-up with Ralph Padbury had never happened, I said, “I think we’ve finished with Irene Boles. Prostitute, heroin addict, no known connection with Terry Wilford or any of the rest of you.” I looked up. “Has anybody found out how she got in there?”
    My transition had worked; Padbury sat quiet and attentive in his chair, no longer prepared to revolt.
    It was Abe Selkin who answered my question, saying, “The police theory is, Terry let her in that morning because he knew her, because they had a thing going, and she was supposed to be out of there before he got back with Robin. But she was stoned, so she didn’t make it. So Terry and Robin went upstairs, Robin saw her there, and she flipped out and started slicing.”
    I said, “Do the police have any support for the idea that Wilford knew the girl?”
    No one answered me until Kate volunteered, saying, “Nothing that’s been in the paper, Mitch.”
    “All right.” I made a note to try and check that out, and said, “Now, I’ll want to talk to other people who knew Wilford. Friends and enemies, old girl friends, relatives, anybody that you four think it would be worth my while to see.”
    Selkin said, “What’s the point?”
    “Somebody murdered him,” I said. “The odds are in favor of it being somebody who knew him.”
    Selkin said, “Why not somebody who knew the girl? The Boles girl.”
    “Possibly,” I said. “But Wilford was murdered at home, so he’s more likely to be the prime target. The murderer could also turn out to be the connecting link between the two of them, somebody who knew both Terry Wilford and Irene Boles.”
    With that faint smile of his, Hulmer said, “Somebody like me, maybe?”
    “Maybe,” I agreed. “But I don’t subscribe to the theory that all Negroes know each other.”
    In quick succession he looked surprised, angry, and delighted, accompanying the last with laughter and saying, “Touché, man. I’ll lay off.”
    “Good.” I poised pencil over notebook. “Now I want Wilford’s relatives.”
    Selkin said, “None local.”
    Vicki Oppenheim bubbled in, saying, “Nobody was really born in New York,