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

which it emerged that one of the things Bill was working on up in his room was a homemade phonograph, using odd parts from here and there. Hulmer did more talking with Bill in the course of that one meal than I’d done all told for a year, and I listened with agonized embarrassment at the degree of my hunger for knowledge of my son. I envied Hulmer his easy access to Bill, knew the envy was absurd to the point of irrationality, and envied him anyway.
    After dinner Hulmer and I moved to the living room and engaged in uneasy conversation. Neither of us was sure of his attitude toward the other, so that we spoke haltingly on the safest of topics—weather and highways and baseball—skirting even around the subject that had brought us together. As each of the others arrived, Hulmer made introductions and then the new member joined our uncomfortable group. After Kate had the dishes done, and joined us, talk was somewhat easier, but still hampered by the reason for our all being here.
    Ralph Padbury was the first arrival, and simultaneously looked exactly like his dead brother and nothing at all like him. Where George Padbury had taken the basic features common to both brothers and overlaid them with long hair, bushy mustache, and turtleneck sweater, Ralph Padbury had chosen a severe, pedestrian, anonymous, clerkish façade, with slicked-down hair, cleanshaven face, low-priced conservative suit and shirt and tie, and bookish horn-rim glasses. He seemed incomplete without an attaché case.
    He also looked unnaturally pale, having that pinched chalky expression about the eyes that means a recent severe shock. His brother had died a scant twelve hours before, and it showed in his face.
    A girl named Vicki Oppenheim was next. Short and stout, she was dressed all in black—sweater, skirt, stockings, shoes—and had to be dying of the heat, but didn’t show it. Her hair was black and long, gathered with a red rubber band at the back of her head and then falling free to below her shoulders. Her face was rather pretty, in a chubby way. Her natural expression was obviously an ebullient smile, which she was trying with uncertain success to banish, due to the seriousness of the occasion.
    “Golly,” she said, when Hulmer introduced us. “I don’t know what to say. Golly.”
    Kate saved me, saying to the girl, “None of us knows what to say, Vicki. Come sit over here.”
    The last to show up was a boy named Abe Selkin, thin, intense, hot-eyed, spade-bearded, crackling with intelligence and energy. He scanned the room with a quick computer-like glance and said, “War council.”
    “Not war,” I said. “Defense.”
    He nodded briskly, studied me for a millisecond, and said, “You’re in charge.”
    “Not the way you mean,” I said. “I’m not putting an army together here, I have no tasks to be performed. What I want from you people is enough information to make it possible for me to act on my own.”
    “We’re part of the scene,” Selkin said. “You could use us.”
    “Perhaps,” I lied. “For now, I only want information. Would you sit over there with Hulmer?”
    “Right.”
    I went back to my own chair before saying, “I’ve done my best to stay out of this thing. Which means I haven’t even read the newspaper stories about it. I know almost nothing, so forgive me if I ask what may seem like stupid questions. Like the name of the murdered girl, I don’t know that.”
    There was silence, each of them obviously waiting for one of the others to answer me, until Kate volunteered, saying, “Her name was Irene Boles, Mitch.”
    “Irene Boles.” I had armed myself with a notebook, into which I wrote the name. I looked at Hulmer. “What was her connection with the group?”
    He grinned a little and shook his head. “None,” he said.
    “None? Who was she?”
    “Hooker,” he said. “From uptown.”
    Abe Selkin said, “According to the papers, she was a prostitute, she’d done time.”
    “Where did she