Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 (19 page)

 
          
 
Before he could formulate an answer to what
she'd said, the little girl jounced off the chair with the graceful
grace-lessness of the young and said, "I can't stay any longer. I stopped
here on my way home from school. If my mother found out that I knew, and that I
had told the police, she might try to murder me, too." She turned all at
once and studied
Crawley
severely. "I am not a silly little
girl," she told him. "And I am not telling a lie or making a joke. My
mother murdered my stepfather, and I came in here and reported it. That's what
I'm supposed to do. You aren't supposed to believe me right away, but you are
supposed to investigate and find out whether or not I've told you the truth.
And I have told you the truth." She turned suddenly back to Levine, an
angry little girl —no, not angry, definite— a definite little girl filled with
stern formality and a child's sense of Tightness and duty. "My
stepfather," she said, "was a very good man. My mother is a bad
woman. You find out what she did, and punish her." She nodded briefly, as
though to punctuate what she'd said, and marched to the door, reaching it as
Rizzo and McFarlane came in. They looked down at her in surprise, and she
stepped past them and out to the hall, closing the door after her.

 
          
 
Rizzo looked at Levine and jerked his thumb at
the door. "What was that?"

 
          
 
It was
Crawley
who answered. "She came in to report a
murder," he said. "Her Mommy killed her Daddy by making a great big
noise at him."

 
          
 
Rizzo frowned. "Come again?"

 
          
 
"I'll check it out," said Levine.
Not believing the girl's story, he still felt the impact of her demand on him
that he
do
his duty. All it would take was a few phone
calls. While
Crawley
recounted the episode at great length to
Rizzo, and McFarlane took up his favorite squadroom position, seated at his
desk with the chair canted back and his feet atop the desk, Levine picked up
his phone and dialed the New York Times. He identified himself and said what he
wanted, was connected to the right department, and after a few minutes the
November 28th obituary notice on Albert Walker was read to him. Cause of death:
a heart attack. Mortician: Junius Merriman. An even briefer call to Merriman
gave him the name of Albert Walker's doctor, Henry Sheffield.

           
 
Levine thanked Merriman, assured him there was
no problem, and got out the
Brooklyn
yellow pages to find
Sheffield
's number. He dialed, spoke to a nurse, and
finally got
Sheffield
.

 
          
 
"I can't understand,"
Sheffield
told him, "why the police would be
interested in the case.
It wcis heart failure, pure and
simple.
What seems to be the problem?"

 
          
 
"There's no problem," Levine told
him.
"Just checking it out.
Was this a sudden
attack? Had he had any heart trouble before?"

 
          
 
"Yes, he'd suffered a coronary' attack
about seven months ago. The second attack was more severe, and he hadn't really
recovered as yet from the first. There certainly wasn't anything else to it, if
that's what you're getting at."

 
          
 
"I didn't mean to imply anything like
that," said Levine. "By the way, were you Mrs. Walker's first
husband's doctor, too?"

 
          
 
"No, I wasn't. His name was Thombridge,
wasn't it? I never met the man. Is there some sort of question about him?"

 
          
 
"No, not at all."
Levine evaded a few more questions,
then
hung up, his
duty done. He turned to
Crawley
and
shook his head. "Nothing
to "

 
          
 
A sudden crash behind him froze the words in
his throat. He halfrose from the chair, mouth wide
oj>
en,
face paling as the blood rushed from his head, his nerves and muscles stiff and
tingling.

 
          
 
It was over in a second, and he sank back fnto
the chair, turning around to see what had happened. McFarlane was sheepishly
picking himself up from the floor, his chair lying on its back beside him. He
grinned shakily at Levine. "Leaned back too far that time," he said.

 
          
 
"Don't do that," said Levine, his
voice shaky. He touched the back of his hand to his forehead, feeling cold perspiration
slick against the skin. He was trembling ail over. Once again, he reached to
his shirt pocket for a cigarette, and this time felt an instant of panic when
he found the pocket empty. He pressed the palm of his hand to the pocket, and
beneath pocket and skin he felt the thrumming of his heart, and automatically
counted the beats. Thum, thum, skip, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, skip, thum,
thum,

 
          
 
On the sixth beat, the sixth beat. He sat
there listening, hand pressed to his chest, and gradually the agitation
subsided and the skip came every seventh beat and then every eighth beat, and
then he could dare to move again.

 
          
 
He licked his lips, needing a cigarette now
more than at any other time in the last three days, more than he could ever
remember needing a cigarette at any time in his whole life.

 
          
 
His resolve crumbled. Shamefacedly, he turned
to his partner. "Jack, do you have a cigarette?"

 
          
 
Crawley
looked away from McFarlane, who was checking himself for damage. "I
thought you were giving them up, Abe," he said.

 
          
 
"Not around here. Please, Jack."

 
          
 
"Sure."
Crawley
tossed him his pack.

 
          
 
Levine caught the pack, shook out one
cigarette,
threw
the rest back to
Crawley
. He took a book of matches from the desk
drawer, put the cigarette in his mouth, feeling the comforting familiarity of
it between his lips, and struck a match. He held the match up,
then
sat looking at the flame, struck by a sudden thought.

 
          
 
Albert Walker had died of a heart attack.
"She made a loud noise at him." "The second attack was more
severe, and he hadn't really recovered as yet from the first."

 
          
 
He shook the match out, took the cigarette
from between his lips. It had been every sixth beat there for a while, after
the loud noise of McFarlane's backward dive.

 
          
 
Had Gloria Thornbridge Walker really killed
Albert Walker?

 
          
 
Would Abraham Levine really kill Abraham
Levine?

 
          
 
The second question was easier to answer.
Levine opened the desk drawer and dropped the cigarette and matches into it.

 
          
 
The first question he didn't try to answer at
all. He would sleep on it. Right now, he wasn't thinking straight enough.

 
          
 
At dinner that night, he talked it over with
his wife. "Peg," he said, "I've got a problem."

 
          
 
"A problem?"
She looked up in surprise, a short solid stout woman three years her husband's
junior, her iron-gray hair rigidly curled in a home permanent. "If you're
coming to me," she said, "it must be awful."

 
          
 
He smiled, nodding. "It is." It was
rare for him to talk about his job with his wife. The younger men, he knew,
discussed their work with their wives as a matter of course, expecting and
receiving suggestions and ideas and advice. But he was a product of an older
upbringing, and still believed instinctively that women should be shielded from
the.more brutal aspects of life. It was only when the problem was one he
couldn't discuss with
Crawley
that he turned to Peg for someone to talk
to. *Tm getting old," he said suddenly, thinking of the differences
between himself and the younger men.

 
          
 
She laughed. "That's your problem? Don't
feel lonely, Abe, it happens to all kinds of people. Have some more
gravy."

 
          
 
"Let me tell you," he said. "A
little girl came in today, maybe ten years old, dressed nicely, polite, very
intelligent. She wanted to report that her mother had killed her
stepfather."

 
          
 
"A little girl?"
She sounded shocked. She too believed that there were those who should be
shielded from the more brutal aspects of life, but with her the shielded ones
were children.
"A little girl?
A
thing like that?"

 
          
 
"Wait," he said. "Let me tell
you. I called the doctor and he said it was a heart attack. The stepfather— Mr.
Walker — he'd had one attack already, and the second one on top of it killed
him."

 
          
 
"But the little girl blames the
mother?" Peg leaned forward. "Psychological, you think?"

 
          
 
"I don't know. I asked her how her mother
had done the killing, and she said her mother made a loud noise at her
father."

 
          
 
"A joke."
She shook her head. "These children today, I don't know where they get
their ideas. All this on the TV
— "

 
          
 
"Maybe," he said. "I don't
know.
A man with a bad heart, bedridden, an invalid.
A
sudden shock, a loud noise, it might do it, bring on that second attack."

 
          
 
"What else did this little girl
say?"

 
          
 
"That's all. Her stepfather was good, and
her mother was bad, and she'd stopped off on her way home from school. She only
had a minute, because she didn't want her mother to know what she was
doing."

 
          
 
"You let her go? You didn't question
her?"

 
          
 
Levine shrugged. "I didn't believe
her," he said. "You know the imagination children have."

 
          
 
"But now?"

 
          
 
"Now, I don't know." He held up his
hand, two fingers extended. "Now," he said, "
there's
two questions in my mind. First, is the little girl right or wrong? Did her
mother actually make a loud noise that killed her stepfather or not? And if she
did, then question number two: Did she do it on purpose, or was it an
accident?" He waggled the two fingers and looked at his wife. "Do you
see? Maybe the little girl is right, and her mother actually did cause the
death, but not intentionally. If so, I don't want to make things worse for the
mother by dragging it into the open. Maybe the little girl is wrong altogether,
and if so it would be best to just let the whole thing slide. But maybe she's
right, and it was murder, and then that child is in danger, because if I don't
do anything, she'll try some other way, and the mother will find out."

           
 
Peg shook her head. "I don't like that, a
little girl like that. Could she defend herself? A woman to kill her husband, a
woman like that could kill her child just as easy. I don't like that at all,
Abe."