The Kidnappers (6 page)

The school was closed on Saturday, of course, and the gate was locked. There were no cars lined up in the pickup lane.

Pink was sober now. “Where did it happen, Joe?”

“Right up there. In front of that first apartment building. I was looking out that window, and the car eased up right about here.”

“No blood on the sidewalk,” Pink said.

“Of course not, you idiot. He wasn't stabbed, he was kidnapped.”

“No black marks from his heels where they dragged him across the sidewalk. Hmm. There's the stub of a blue pencil in the gutter. It's a St. Bart's pencil.”

“But anybody could have dropped it. No way to prove it belonged to Willie.”

“Fingerprints,” Pink said suddenly. “You think maybe? If it's his, he probably left fingerprints on it.”

“Yeah. What have we got to protect it, in case we can get the cops to check it out? I threw away all my breakfast wrappings.”

“So did I. There's a candy wrapper over here, maybe it'll work.”

We retrieved it, and picked up the pencil in a way that wouldn't mess up any prints. And then it dawned on me. “What are the chances Willie's fingerprints are on file anywhere? He's a jerk, but he probably hasn't committed any serious crimes where he left prints behind.”

Pink put the pencil in his pocket anyway. “Even Willie probably would have worn gloves to handle a murder weapon,” he said.

We were trying to be funny, to keep it from being so scary. But of course it wasn't
really
funny.

“I have to try not to think about Willie,” I said as we headed toward home. “I wish I didn't have such a good imagination.”

Pink, who always enjoys my stories but never comes up with any of his own, was intrigued. “What do you imagine about Willie?”

“Hog-tied and left in a closet, maybe. Or being tortured to tell them something—like the combination to his dad's safe, or where his dad keeps his cash. Or fastened to a cement block and dumped in the river. Even if he's okay—being fed, having a bed or a mattress to sleep on—he's gotta be scared, Pink.”

“Yeah. He's gotta be scared,” Pink agreed.

It wasn't quite late enough to go back to the deli for lunch, and I hoped my father had come home and talked to Willie's dad. So we went up to my place.

It was worse than it had been that morning.

I didn't know what all the people were doing, milling around. Mom was in the middle of them, explaining things, urging people to do what she needed. Ernie was there, setting up folding chairs in the music room. He looked at me with raised eyebrows.

“You come to help, sport?”

“No. Nobody's paying
me
time and a half. Or anything. Have you seen my father?”

“I'm supposed to pick him up around two.” He set up one chair and reached for another.

“Do you know if Mr. Groves has tried to call again?”

“I'm just hired help, kid, nobody tells me anything. You going to be hanging around in this madhouse, making yourself useful, or you got something planned this afternoon?”

I didn't want to get roped into hauling chairs upstairs. Or anything else. Surely they already had plenty of people to do everything that needed to be done.

“I've got plans,” I told him, looking at Pink to make sure he knew I meant we would
make
plans.

In the hallway behind me, Mark passed by stuffing something interesting looking in his mouth.

“Where'd you get something to eat?” I demanded.

He lifted a fancy-looking pastry of some kind, with cream filling leaking out of it, which he caught with his tongue. “The bakery people are here. Stuff like this is in insulated containers, stacked back by the laundry area. If nobody sees you, you can lift a few.”

Pink looked after Mark's retreating figure. “Looks good.”

“Yeah. Let's give it a try,” I agreed.

As we started to leave, Ernie called out, “Can you swipe a few for the paid help, too?”

“Go out the service entrance and pick up your own,” I told him. “We'll be lucky to get away with ours.”

“Ingrate,” Ernie muttered as we left him.

We managed to liberate two confections apiece, and I hoped it wasn't Mom who emptied the containers later and saw how much of the top layer was missing.

“Better than deli stuff,” Pink said, licking his fingers after the last one. “What now?”

“I guess we could go to a movie, after my father comes home and I get a chance to talk to him. Right now, though, I want to check with Mom one more time and see if she's heard anything from Willie's dad.”

My mother was directing the placement of some small potted trees. I rolled my eyes at Pink, who reached out to feel one of the leaves. “Real,” he pronounced. “They're so perfect I thought surely they were artificial.”

The doorbell rang.

Mom turned and opened the door, but it wasn't another one of the tradespeople she was expecting.

“Mrs. Bishop? I'm Detective O'Hara.” He flashed some kind of ID at her. “I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes.”

“I'm very busy right now, can it wait? Oh—is it about . . .?” She swallowed at the same time I did, and stepped backward, allowing him to come in. “We can talk in the study, if you'll come this way.”

He stepped into the foyer, dodging a guy with an empty hand truck whom Mom stopped by putting a hand on his sleeve.

“Please use the other elevator, back through the kitchen,” she told him.

“Oh, sure, sorry,” the guy said, and retreated through all the confusion.

The man who'd said he was a detective was staring at Pink and me. He was a medium-size guy, and very ordinary looking. Yet he sent prickles running along my spine.

“Is this Joe Bishop?” he asked.

The prickle turned icy. I licked my lips. “I'm Joe.”

He didn't smile. “Be a good idea if you came along, too, son.”

“Is Mr. Bishop here?” O'Hara asked as he stood aside for the rest of us to precede him into the study, where he closed the door.

“No, though I expect him in the next hour or so,” Mom said nervously. “Is this about . . . the Groves boy?”

Detective O'Hara had pale blue eyes that were sharp enough to cut human flesh. As Pink said later, he almost checked to see if I was bleeding.

“If you'd all sit down, I'd like to ask some questions,” he said, as if Mom hadn't spoken. “Anything discussed in this room is confidential. None of you are to repeat any of it elsewhere, with anyone.”

This time it was Pink who was impaled on that cold blue gaze. “Are you one of the Bishop children, too?”

“Um, no, I'm Pink Murphy. Charles Murphy, actually. My dad's a vice president of the telephone company, Charlie Murphy. I know about Willie.”

O'Hara might have been formed of steel.

“Who is it you're speaking of?”

“Willie Groves.” Pink blushed. “The second,” he offered unexpectedly. And then, when we all looked at him as he sank onto a couch, he added, “Willie's the third. His grandfather was the first.”

“And what is it you know about Willie Groves?”

“I know he was kidnapped yesterday. Joey told me all about it. I didn't actually see it, but we went back to the school this morning, and we found what we think is his pencil in the gutter right where they grabbed him. We saved it for evidence. In case it has his fingerprints on it, you know. If they're on file anywhere.”

Something suddenly occurred to me, and I cleared my throat. “I guess they wouldn't have to be on file, would they? I mean, you could get fingerprints in his room, on his things. If it's important to know if it's his pencil.”

Pink dug the candy wrapper out of his pocket and handed it over. “We wrapped it up so we wouldn't smear any prints. It's a St. Bart's pencil, see, it says so right on the side of it. We all use them. This one was right where Willie was grabbed. We didn't find any of the rest of the stuff he dropped, so somebody else must have picked that up.”

The detective opened the candy wrapper, glanced at the pencil, and dropped it into his own pocket. It wasn't Pink he responded to, but me. “What do you know about what happened to Willie yesterday?”

“All day? Or just after school?” I felt really flustered, and I didn't want to blow it just because I was a kid. This guy acted like he'd listen.

He hesitated for only a second. “Let's start with all day.”

“Well, actually, it was day before yesterday that I gave him the nosebleed,” I said.

My mother jerked and turned toward me, startled, but didn't interrupt.

“It was in PE,” I explained quickly. “I accidentally hit him in the face with my elbow, and he bled a lot. I tried to apologize, but he was mad. He said he was going to get me for it.”

The detective waited, and I couldn't tell what he thought.

“He didn't catch me after school that night. Ernie came before Willie had a chance to do anything.”

“Ernie's our chauffeur,” Mom said in a strained voice.

“So yesterday Willie bugged me all day, said he was going to beat me up. But one of the teachers—Mr. Soames, the math teacher—was talking to him after school, so I walked out the front door first.” I felt myself getting hot, too, and wondered if I sounded to everybody like a hopeless wimp.

I wanted to look away from those light blue eyes, but I couldn't. “So you didn't see him after that?” he finally prompted.

“Oh, sure, I saw him. I went out the gate—there's a fence around St. Bart's—and the cars were lining up to pick up the kids, but I didn't see Ernie yet. So I started walking toward the corner, thinking he'd come along. Only he didn't—he was late. When he came along he said he'd had a fender bender and got held up—and so I walked down in front of that apartment house that's right next to the school. From there I looked back and saw that Willie had just come out the front door and was looking around.” My face got hotter. “I didn't know what to do. Willie's . . . bigger than I am. I didn't especially want to get pulverized, and I figured if he had the weekend to cool off, maybe he'd forget it.”

I couldn't read a thing in the detective's expression, but I imagined how contemptuous he must be feeling. I cleared my throat again. “Right then a delivery truck drove up, and when the driver buzzed the door at the apartment house, someone let him in. So before the door shut behind him, I . . . I went inside and waited for Willie to give up on me and leave.” I wiped the sweat off my hands onto my pants. “Only he didn't. He came right up in front of the apartment. He didn't see through the window, but I could see out. And
his
car hadn't come, either, so Willie just stood there. And then
that
car came, the one with the kidnappers in it.”

I wondered what it would take to change the man's facial expression, but I suppose he was used to hearing all kinds of fantastic or horrible things.

“Can you describe this car?” He reached into a breast pocket and brought out a small notebook and a pen, poised to write, all without taking his attention away from me.

“This year's model, a black Chrysler New Yorker. It had a monogram or something on the door, about this big. Gold and red and blue and green, bright enamel. The windows were too dark for me to see the driver, but when it stopped, a guy jumped out and grabbed Willie from behind and dragged him inside to the backseat, and I
did
see him. I tried telling everyone what had happened, but nobody believed me. I called 9-1-1, but the operator thought I was playing a practical joke, and he said I could get into trouble for making a false crime report—”

My mother was hearing some of this for the first time, and her mouth was hanging open a little bit.

“Tell him about—” Pink began, but Detective O'Hara silenced him with a glance.

“Did you get a license number on this car, son?”

“No, sir. By the time I got the door open, the car was speeding away. Too far away for me to see.”

“Did you get a good look at the person who pulled Willie into the car?”

“Yes, sir. Only for a few seconds, but I saw him. He wrapped an arm around Willie and pulled him backward, made him drop his books and stuff.”

“Could you tell how tall he was?” The pen was waiting to write.

“Not exactly. Taller than Willie, who's a couple of inches taller than I am.”

The blue eyes bored into mine. “As tall as I am?” He stood up to make it easier for me to judge.

“Maybe. Maybe a little taller.”

“Do you remember his face?”

“Yes, but I don't know how to describe it. It was just . . . ordinary. He had black hair. And he was wearing an expensive-looking gold watch, and he had a gold earring, a little tiny one, in this ear.” I touched myself to demonstrate.

“And did you go back to school to report this?”

“No. Ernie came right then, and I jumped in the car and told
him.
Only he didn't believe me. He thought I was making up a tall story.”

For a moment I thought I glimpsed a flicker of something in his face, but it was gone so fast I couldn't be sure.

“Who else did you tell, besides the chauffeur, and the 9-1-1 operator?

“Pink,” I said, gesturing at my friend. “I tried to tell Mom, but she was too busy. And my brother, Mark. He said I was full of it. Sophie believed me—she's my sister. But there wasn't much
she
could do. And then Mom finally tried to call Willie's folks, but his mother was gone, and nobody would talk to her. My father placed a phone call yesterday evening to Mr. William Groves.”

I think Mom felt the situation had all slipped away from her, and she didn't like it.

“Mr. Groves was not taking any phone calls when my husband attempted to talk to him,” she said. She wasn't used to talking to police officers, and she wasn't comfortable with having one in our home. “And then Parnell—my husband—had to leave early this morning, so he wasn't home when Mr. Groves called back. I didn't know about it until after he'd already been told Parnell wasn't here.” She waited, seeming to hold her breath.