A Crime in the Neighborhood (14 page)

Now in the kitchen, staring over my mother's shoulder at Boyd Ellison's newspaper photograph, I knew I wasn't sad that he was dead. In fact, it was impossible to believe that someone so firmly weighted in his own flesh could exist one day and the next day vanish. I couldn't imagine myself vanishing. Guiltily, I tried to see past the tiny dots that formed his image and convince myself that I felt remorse.

But I felt worse than remorseful. I felt caught out. Boyd Ellison had recognized me as a kindred spirit, an asker, a beggar, someone who kept watching, hoping to see something disgusting, the world's most disgusting sight, pain that didn't have to happen. Boyd Ellison was someone I had known well after all.

“What's wrong with you?” said my mother, glancing up from the paper. “Marsha Martian?” And she put a cool hand to my forehead.

The police investigation continued. For weeks, phone calls streamed into the sheriff's office from people who had seen a balding man in a brown car. A psychic told police that they would find the man living in a trailer in Schenectady, New York. Several anonymous letters accused Vice President Spiro Agnew of being the murderer. A boy in Baltimore said a man approached him at a bus stop and offered him five dollars to get into his car. But it was a red car, this time, and the man had a beard. In New Jersey, a little girl vanished from her own front yard.

Based on a description furnished by the elderly woman with the pug, a composite drawing was posted in police stations across the country. One of the drawings also found its way to the bulletin board in the Spring Hill Mall; it was a pencil sketch, showing a round-faced, middle-aged man with unprepossessing features—unprepossessing enough that he could fit anyone's idea of any kind of criminal. He looked like
the sort of man who nowadays is easy to recognize as a child molester because we've been told so often that a child molester could be anybody, the man next door, even your own father. Back then, the man in the sketch looked too ordinary.

I thought he looked just like Mr. Green.

In my notebook, I pasted the following article from the
Washington Post
:

Police investigating the abduction and murder of 12-year-old Boyd Arthur Ellison of Spring Hill believe someone living in the vicinity may be responsible for the crime, according to a source close to the investigation.

The same source revealed that the police believe the murderer is left-handed, due to the angle at which blows were delivered to the youth's head. While Montgomery County Police Spokesman Joseph McKenna refused to discuss whether police have any suspects, he did urge area residents to exercise caution and to report any suspicious activity. “We have some leads that we're currently following. I am not at liberty to disclose further details,” McKenna said.

Meanwhile, Spring Hill residents continue to express their shock over the killing. Several residents say they are uneasy about remaining in the area. “This is a nice neighborhood,” said Carol Humphries, 44, a mother of two who lives next door to the Ellison family home. “Everyone I know around here has the same values. That's why
we live here, because you know what to expect. Things like this just aren't supposed to happen here.”

During the next few weeks, the Night Watch became a regular part of our neighborhood and even attracted some press of its own. A reporter for the
Post
interviewed Mr. Lauder, and a few days later a short article appeared in the Metro section, headlined
LOCAL PATROL CALMS NEIGHBORHOOD JITTERS
, accompanied by a photograph of Mr. Lauder, Mr. Sperling, and several other men standing with their arms crossed on the Morrises' front steps. I saved the photo in my Evidence notebook. They look like piano movers.

Mrs. Morris had sewn orange cloth armbands for the patrol, with black felt letters, NW, stitched to each one. “What
is
this?” my mother said, the first evening the armbands appeared. But I thought the armbands looked very official.

I began sitting out on the porch after dinner until bedtime, waiting for the patrol to pass our house, timing them from when they began at seven-thirty to see how many times they would pass by on a two-hour shift. The fastest walkers were Mr. Reade, father of Mike and Wayne, and Mr. Lauder; their record was every twenty-six minutes. I held my breath whenever they went by, the same way I held my breath whenever Sherlock Holmes made a small, vital discovery. The slowest were Mr. Guibert and Mr. Bridgeman, who got into arguments about the I.R.S.—Mr. Bridgeman was a tax inspector—and
sometimes stopped walking altogether to pick through fine points of the tax code. The patrol covered about ten city blocks, including the mall parking lot, where they occasionally surprised teenagers necking or drinking beer in their cars. The mall parking lot had become even more popular since the murder. Their last shift ended at half past midnight.

Most of the men talked as they patrolled, and I loved the rumbling, sedate sound of their voices, and the drift of cigarette smoke they left behind. It was something I depended upon during those long weeks in July and August, the sight of Mr. Lauder and the other fathers on my street passing by so regularly, yellow light from the street lamp gleaming off their metallic watchbands, shining along the handles of their heavy silver flashlights. It moved me to be the object of their care. As their white, short-sleeved shirts hove into view, I felt my throat close and my back straighten, swept up by the closest thing to patriotism I have ever experienced. I fell in love with all of them. I dreamed of being carried by each man, pressed to each of their chests as they carried me to safety, passing me down a long line of fathers.

Like the freak tornado my mother had so thoughtlessly wished for, something violent had blown into our little grid of streets, changing the whole topography. But in those days people believed you could prepare for catastrophes. That's what storm cellars were for. That's why people had emergency medical kits, and a few years before, fall-out shelters in
their backyards. We hadn't been prepared, and that's why a child from our neighborhood had died. We hadn't been prepared, and so a pleasant stretch of trees and lawns and driveways was now shadowy terrain, pocked with hiding places, dark corners, creaking branches. Looking back, it seems to me that those gallant fathers intended, by sheer physical effort, to return our neighborhood to what it had never actually been.

Mr. Green's failure to be included in the Night Watch made me first pity, then detest him. My memory of his brawny chest and his blacksmith's arm receded, replaced by scurrying images: Mr. Green disappearing ratlike through his front door; Mr. Green dressed fussily in madras shorts, hiding behind a bush. I created scenes in which Mr. Green was asked to join the Night Watch but refused. In these scenarios, Mr. Lauder and Mr. Sperling begged him to join them, to help them keep our neighborhood safe. “Why would I waste my time,” Mr. Green sneered, “on such a
hopeless
enterprise?”

He always had a supercilious German accent in these exchanges, and a lock of greasy hair dangled over his forehead. Whenever Walter Cronkite mentioned the Watergate burglars on TV, I pictured Mr. Green wearing a ski mask. Often now when I watched him walk to or from his car I imagined him in debased poses—on the toilet, or with his finger up his nose.

If I passed close to our hedge, I tossed litter into his yard: snips of string, torn movie-ticket stubs; sometimes I spat out
my gum in his driveway, hoping it would stick to his tasseled loafers. One morning I constructed a note from letters cut out of the newspaper and glued onto a piece of notebook paper. I aM gREEn, it read. I haTe KIDS. I am gOiNg to gEt YOU. When no one was out on the street, I took the note and placed it on his front steps, where it sat for an hour or so before blowing away.

A few days after Boyd Ellison's body had been found behind the mall, every house in the neighborhood received its own threatening note, a flyer on acid-yellow paper, tucked under the windshield wipers of their cars:
A NEIGHBORHOOD CHILD WAS BRUTALLY MURDERED BY AN UNKNOWN ASSAILANT, THURSDAY, JULY 20TH. ALL PARENTS ARE ADVISED: KNOW WHERE YOUR CHILDREN ARE AT ALL TIMES. AVOID STRANGERS. BE CAREFUL
. The flyer was signed,
THE NEIGHBORHOOD NIGHT WATCH
. I saved ours and pasted it inside my notebook.

That evening, Mrs. Lauder told my mother that Mr. Lauder and the other men intended to question any unfamiliar men they encountered on their rounds.

“They're going to say, ‘State your business.' And if the guy can't explain why he's here, they're going to drive him over to the police station.”

“I think that may be unconstitutional,” my mother said.

Mrs. Lauder looked surprised. “Don't you want to keep the kids safe? That's all they're trying to do.”

Mrs. Lauder was a heavy woman with short curly black hair pulled down around her ears like a dark bathing cap. I never
saw her wear a blouse that didn't strain at the buttons, and her frosted lipstick often missed her mouth, but she was an oddly rigorous person. Her brother was a Methodist minister in Alexandria, and this relationship seemed to have marked her as the neighborhood Good Samaritan. She knew everything that happened to everybody. Whenever anyone in the neighborhood had a baby or lost a relative, Mrs. Lauder could tell you the baby's name or how the relative had died. Nevertheless it was hard to meet her small, watchful blue eyes without feeling guilty, even when you hadn't done anything wrong. It wasn't that she seemed accusing, exactly, it was more that she seemed to
expect
you to be bad. And yet, she was a kindly woman, cheerful, insistent about helping her neighbors. Ever since my father left, she had made a habit of dropping by once or twice a week to check up on my mother and me.

“How's it going?” she would always ask. “You folks need anything?” She seemed disappointed whenever my mother answered that we were fine.

The same evening the flyer appeared, yellow as fever, on our front steps Mrs. Lauder crossed our yard towing Luann by the hand. My mother had just lugged the hose into the front yard to water the rhododendrons.

“That boy's mother hasn't spoken one word since it happened. Not one single word.” Mrs. Lauder always began talking without introduction or greeting. “It's the shock, I guess. Probably a mercy.”

“I suppose so,” said my mother.

“I heard the grandmother lives with them now. She tells anybody who comes to the door to go away. In Swiss or French or some language. Wears all black. She was there at the memorial service they had over to the high school this afternoon. Did you go, Lois?”

My mother shook her head. Mrs. Lauder fanned herself with our copy of the flyer, which had dropped onto the steps. Luann stood off to the side by the birdbath, staring at her pink sneakers. “Why don't you hop on in and play with Marsha,” said her mother. “Go on, doll.”

Luann opened the screen door and inched through the doorway, allowing herself to get sandwiched between the door and the jamb. Finally she slid free and stood against the screen, squatting a little to scratch the inside of her leg.

She eyed my cast. “Nobody sign you yet?”

I shook my head.

“Well at least that part's over,” said Mrs. Lauder from outside. “But what are we all supposed to do now? What if they don't find the guy?”

“It's terrible,” said my mother with a faraway sound to her voice, as if what had happened was not really terrible but only disappointing.

“You watch and you watch, and you make sure your kids are safe, and you stick the Drano and the Windex on top the fridge so they can't swallow it, and you meet their bus every afternoon, and then something like this happens anyway.” Mrs.
Lauder wiped her forehead with the back of a dimpled hand and leaned against the porch railing. “It may be God's will but I tell you it's not fair. It seems like these days either you've got to spend your whole life watching, or give up and stop watching at all.”

“I know how you feel,” said my mother, in the same faraway voice. She turned the spigot on full, then pressed the spray gun she had screwed onto the end of the hose. Rhododendron leaves bucked wildly up and down; she lowered the nozzle and sprayed the ground below each bush, creating small marshes of mud and grass.

A lawn mower started up across the street. Luann sat down on her hands and rocked back and forth. “If I had a cast”—she gave me a cool look—“I'd put on some of them flower-power stickers.”

Her pale hair hung around her face like a shower curtain; between the flaps peered a sallow, dignified little face. As the result of a car accident, she had temporary dentures instead of front teeth, which she could flip out and retract with her tongue. At eight she was already famous for this feat, which she performed upon request, and also for her nerve. Not long before he was killed, I'd watched Boyd Ellison ride his possibly stolen ten-speed bicycle right at her—something he liked to do to frighten little kids—and she never flinched, just continued to sit on the sidewalk playing jacks with herself as his front tire passed within an inch of her knee. It was known that
she refused to take baths. She was the only girl I knew who would pick up a worm. When a strange dog barked at her she stared at it until it quit.

I'd never had much to do with Luann. In spite of her reputation for composure, she was only eight, and the twins made fun of me if they caught us playing together. “The Infant Duo,” they called us, and made horrible cooing noises.

And though I hated to admit it, I was slightly afraid of Luann. Perhaps it was her temporary dentures, and her weary air of having survived what the rest of us had yet to encounter.

On our porch, Luann was peering up at me from the floor. I pretended not to notice and instead stared at my mother's begonias, which had acquired a layer of dust on their leaves. “Know what?” she said at last, brushing back her thin hair.