A Crime in the Neighborhood (24 page)

“Mommy?” I called softly. “Mom?” I said, louder this time. But she didn't hear.

Finally I picked up the kitchen telephone and, after another moment or two, dialed his number. He answered at the beginning of the second ring, as if he had been waiting to hear from me, which of course he had not.

“I have something to tell you,” I said, in a voice loud enough that even all the way upstairs, my mother had to listen.

Fifteen minutes passed, or perhaps it wasn't even that long, and then there were two quick knocks on the screen door.

For a moment nothing happened. I sat where I was, back on the living-room sofa, not daring to look up from the floor. Then, from the top of the stairs, my mother called, “All right.

“All right,” she repeated as she came down the stairs and crossed the room to let him in.

We sat on the sofa, my mother and I, and Detective Small sat down on the piano bench across from us. He was wearing his light blue sports coat. I imagine he said hello, although I don't remember it. In fact, I don't remember him entering the room at all, just suddenly being in it.

But by the time he sat down, everything about him had acquired a penetrating clarity, the way trees and leaves outside come into sharp focus after a rainstorm. I saw the creases in his black leather loafers and the ribs of his black socks. I saw
where his brown knit trousers had begun to fray at the cuffs. As he hunched over, elbows on his knees, big hands clasped before him, I saw that he was older than I had first thought, that in fact he was middle-aged, probably my father's age, and that there was a dab of mustard near his mouth. Not long ago, he had been eating dinner.

For a full minute no one said anything. My mother stared at her knees. Detective Small stared at me. I thought of the twins sitting cross-legged on a beach in Cape May with Amy Westendorf, listening to her gnomelike giggle under the stars, themselves laughing as the tide washed in darkly across the sand. Something sour rose in my throat.

Detective Small shifted on the piano bench, unclasping his hands. “So what do you have to tell me, Marsha?” he said, kindly enough, and, perhaps hoping to encourage me by sinking to my level, he got up from the bench to squat down in front of me. “It sounded on the phone like you had a pretty important thing to say.”

He tried to smile, yet as much as I wanted to get it over with, I still couldn't speak, and only the sight of my mother's tense white face so close to mine kept me from simply bursting into tears.

But as I've already mentioned, for better or worse I'm not someone who can stop what I've set going, especially not with my mother looking at me with such stark dread and confusion that I couldn't bear to be alone with her, even as I could scarcely bear to let her out of my sight. And to be honest, I
also felt a sickening excitement, a kind of imploding fascination at what I was about to do that was stronger than any impulse to stop it from happening.

I lifted my head and said: “He tried to talk to me in the backyard. By the lilac bushes.”

Immediately an image sprang forward of the first time Mr. Green spoke to me, that spring afternoon as I dug in the dirt and sang to myself. A plain, reliable image. I pictured his red face framed by green lilac leaves, his short neck rising up from the lapels of his khaki shirt. His fleshy nose threw a triangular shadow across his cheek in the late afternoon sun. “Hello there,” he said, and cracked his knuckles. We had talked about ameobas.

“He came up behind me when I wasn't looking,” I said.

Now that I'd finally begun, a deep calm settled over me and I felt myself lean back against the sofa cushions. This had happened. This was true.

“Who is he?” said Detective Small.

“Mr. Green.”

He kept his gaze on my face. “When was this?”

“In the spring,” I said distantly.

“Did he say something to you?”

“He asked me if I wanted to know a secret. He said a boy's thing looked like a thumb.”

My mother blinked and gave me a piercing look, then she shuddered and took my hand in her hot, dry one. I snatched my hand back and sat up.

“He said he wanted to bite my boobies. He said that's what you got for being hoity-toity. He told me if I ever let anybody know what he said he would cut off my head and stick it in his barbecue pit.”

Detective Small rocked back on his heels. After a pause he said, “Did he try to touch you?”

“Yes,” I said.

For a moment no one spoke. Then, very gently, in a careful voice that made me despise him, Detective Small said, “How?”

I envisioned Mr. Green behind his hedge the morning my mother had asked him if he wouldn't like a little tornado. Just a little tornado, she said, to blow everything away. And he had stared back at her, slapping the
Post
against his palm, face reddening, lips twitching, forehead perspiring.

“He hit me with a newspaper.”

Detective Small briefly lost his balance. He put a hand down on the floor to steady himself, then straightened up and went back to the piano bench. My mother glanced intently at him and back at me; her eyes were large and dark, but she said nothing.

“He hurt me,” I heard myself whimper.

“What happened next?”

“I ran away. I ran into the house. I never wanted to see him again, but he was always around. She liked him,” I said, looking sideways at my mother. “Everyone else on the street thinks he is weird.”

It all began to make sense as I heard myself talk. It was all quite convincing.

“That's why I've been keeping all those notes,” I said. “Because I was afraid.” Then I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing in and out. Breathing had begun to require an effort. I remember having the impression that I could forget to breathe at any moment.

“What notes?” said Detective Small.

“She has a notebook,” said my mother eventually, when I didn't answer. “Full of lots of little details about—mostly about Mr. Green. She showed it to me tonight, only I—really Detective, I don't—”

“Can I see the notebook?”

It was lying on the floor near my feet. I felt my mother hesitate; then she leaned over, her warm body resting heavily across my knees, and picked it up.

For a few minutes the only sound in the room was the sound of turning pages. I kept my eyes closed and pretended I was in a cool, dim room all alone. My mother sat quietly beside me. Once she reached up and brushed my hair away from my forehead, and there was something so terrible about this gesture, the old intimacy of it, that I flinched.

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?” Detective Small said at last. When I opened my eyes, his own shrewd brown eyes were fixed on my face. It amazed me that he looked skeptical.

My mother said, “Hasn't she said enough?”

I'll always remember the sound of her voice that night, how anguished it was, and that this made me glad, because in a way I figured everything about to happen was really her fault, not mine. Looking back on it now, I would guess she thought so, too.

Detective Small stood up, still staring straight at me. “I understand that all this has been very hard for you, Marsha. And you're a good girl to talk to me. But I want you to go back over everything you've just said. I want you to tell me if there's anything that isn't true.”

“Please,” my mother begged. It wasn't clear whom or what she was begging. Detective Small ignored her and continued to look at me. After a moment, my mother looked at me, too.

Another child might have seized this moment gratefully, broken down, confessed that she was lying—wailed that she was scared, that she'd had a nightmare, any number of plausible, forgivable things—and even then it would have been all right. The whole episode would have been smoothed over somehow and after a few years maybe even forgotten. Unfortunately, I had ceased to be another child some time ago.

“I saw him hiding in the bushes near the Ellisons' house,” I said coldly. “He was standing right in their bushes. Right in their yard. You can ask Luann next door. You can ask her about when we saw him in the bushes by Boyd's house.

“He
hurt
me,” I said.

And then I began to cry. There was nothing calculated or forced about it. This wasn't planned. I had been wanting to
cry for days, for weeks, months, for so long I had forgotten how long. All I wanted at that moment was to throw myself into my mother's lap and feel her hand on the back of my neck and cry and cry, and know that I could. I
could
do it. Like Steven running through the mall that day, so stunned and headlong, looking almost as afraid to be caught as he was afraid to get away. I knew I was telling the truth, although how I was telling it was not true, and what I was saying would be misunderstood, which was inevitable, and I knew that, too. But such a fierce, raw release it was, to cry like that.

The police showed up early the next morning, just as Mr. Green, dressed for work with his briefcase beside him, was starting his car. They blocked his driveway with their black-and-white cruiser, gliding up as noiselessly as if their car had been on the Safeway conveyor belt. From behind the curtain in my bedroom window, I watched two policemen climb out of the cruiser with that absurdly casual, brutal grace policemen have, as though all the time they are opening their car doors, climbing out, shutting the doors, walking toward you, they are also performing these movements for a much wider audience. Bare fleshy forearms held a little away from their sides, elbows bent slightly, they walked toward Mr. Green sitting in his car. I can still hear the stiff leather of their shoes squeak.

In the early-morning light, their bodies looked heavy,
dense, and their uniforms seemed bluer than usual. Their sunglasses lent them a deeply expressionless expression, as if anything in the world, any devastation, could happen in front of them and they would keep right on walking forward.

Finally they stopped on the edge of the lawn.

“Sir, would you get out of your car, please,” said the taller one in a neutral voice. “We have a few questions we'd like to ask you.”

Not quickly but quietly, Mr. Green got out of his car. As he stood up, both policemen drew closer and he pressed his back against his car door as if a sudden hard gust of wind had flattened him.

Then he took a step forward and, at a gesture from one of the policemen, walked across his decorous lawn, past his orange marigolds, up his three front steps and took out his keys. He fumbled with them for a minute or so; perhaps his hands were shaking. Across the street, screen doors twanged as first one, then another, then another neighbor came to stand inside open doorways and stare, their gaze moving from the cruiser to the policemen to Mr. Green fumbling with his keys on his front step. Before another sixty seconds passed, all three had disappeared inside.

An hour went by. I clunked downstairs and stood in the hallway. My mother was sitting in the kitchen by the telephone, but she didn't make any calls. She sat with her ankles crossed and looked at the kitchen wallpaper.

She stood up, though, when Mr. Green's door opened and
the three of them, Mr. Green between the two policemen, came outside again. She took my arm and drew me against her. Together we watched from the front window as the three men walked down the front steps and strode across the short spread of grass toward the sidewalk. They managed to walk fast without actually seeming to move at all. The impression I had was that the luminous grass flowed under their feet and rushed them toward the sidewalk.

Mr. Green was carrying his briefcase with the shiny clasps; he looked straight ahead as they reached the cruiser. One of the policemen was smiling as if he remembered a tune he liked and was playing it inside his head. He opened the back door, while the other policeman cupped one hand gently around Mr. Green's elbow and guided him inside.

Two blocks from the Spring Hill Mall is one of those square brick professional buildings that inside always seem to smell of cleaning fluid and new carpeting, and there from 4:55 until 6:20 on the evening of July 20th, Mr. Green was either sitting in the waiting room his dentist shared with another dentist, flipping through dog-eared copies of
Reader's Digest
, or stretched out in the dentist's chair, getting a back molar filled and trying not to choke as he had an impression taken for a crown.

The dentist and his receptionist both confirmed this was true, as did a woman who was sitting in the waiting room next to the dusty Boston fern when he arrived. In fact, she had glanced at her watch just as Mr. Green pushed open the glass door to the waiting room because her own dentist was running late. When asked by the police whether her watch might have been incorrect, she replied that it was a “brand-new Timex.”

That Mr. Green returned home immediately afterward could be verified by my own notebook: “G. home. 6:30
P.M
.” According to the police report quoted by the
Post
, Boyd Ellison must have been attacked between 4:50, when the elderly dog-walker saw him waiting to cross the street, and 5:30, when the florist went out to her car with a box full of wedding orchids and heard that small cry.

Mr. Green passed our house at 4:44
P.M
. by my notebook, which would give him roughly eleven minutes within which to drive to the Spring Hill Mall parking lot, leap from his car, run up the hill, grab the boy, attack him, hide from the florist, watch her slowly walk up the hill and then back down, wait for her to drive away before running back and committing the murder with that chunk of limestone, then straighten his clothing, check for bloodstains, run back down the hill, jump into his waiting car—parked where anyone would have been able to see it—and drive to the dentist's office in time to appear, unrumpled, breathing easily, at 4:55
P.M
. Timex time for his appointment.