Levine

The Sound of Murder

Detective Abraham Levine of Brooklyn’s Forty-Third Precinct sat at his desk in the squadroom and longed for a cigarette. The fingers of his left hand kept closing and clenching, feeling awkward without the paper-rolled tube of tobacco. He held a pencil for a while but unconsciously brought it to his mouth. He didn’t realize what he was doing till he tasted the gritty staleness of the eraser. Then he put the pencil away in a drawer, and tried unsuccessfully to concentrate on the national news in the news magazine.

The world conspired against a man who tried to give up smoking. All around him were other people puffing cigarettes casually and unconcernedly, not making any fuss about it at all, making by their very nonchalance his own grim reasons for giving them up seem silly and hypersensitive. If he isolated himself from other smokers with the aid of television or radio, the cigarette commercials with their erotic smoking and their catchy jingles would surely drive him mad. Also, he would find that the most frequent sentence in popular fiction was, “He lit another cigarette.” Statesmen and entertainers seemed inevitably to be smoking whenever news photographers snapped them for posterity, and even the news items were against him: He had just reread for the third time an announcement to the world that Pope John XXIII was the first Prelate of the Roman Catholic Church to smoke cigarettes in public.

Levine closed the magazine in irritation, and from the cover smiled at him the Governor of a midwestern state, cigarette in F.D.R. cigarette-holder at a jaunty angle in his mouth. Levine closed his eyes, saddened by the knowledge that he had turned himself at this late date into a comic character. A grown man who tries to give up smoking is comic, a Robert Benchley or a W.C. Fields, bumbling along, plagued by trivia, his life an endless gauntlet of minor crises. They could do a one-reeler on me, Levine thought. A great little comedy. Laurel without Hardy. Because Hardy died of a heart attack.

Abraham Levine, at fifty-three years of age, was twenty-four years a cop and eight years into the heart-attack range. When he went to bed at night, he kept himself awake by listening to the silence that replaced every eighth or ninth beat of his heart. When he had to climb stairs or lift anything heavy, he was acutely conscious of the labored heaviness of his breathing and of the way those missed heartbeats came closer and closer together, every seventh beat and then every sixth and then every fifth—

Some day, he knew, his heart would skip two beats in a row, and on that day Abraham Levine would stop, because there wouldn’t be any third beat. None at all, not ever.

Four months ago, he’d gone to the doctor, and the doctor had checked him over very carefully, and he had submitted to it feeling like an aging auto brought to a mechanic by an owner who wanted to know whether it was worth while to fix the old boat up or should he just junk the thing and get another. (In the house next door to his, a baby cried every night lately. The new model, crying for the old and the obsolete to get off the road.)

So he’d gone to the doctor, and the doctor had told him not to worry. He had that little skip in his heartbeat, but that wasn’t anything dangerous, lots of people had that. And his blood pressure was a little high, but not much, not enough to concern himself about. So the doctor told him he was healthy, and collected his fee, and Levine left, unconvinced.

So when he went back again three days ago, still frightened by the skip and the shortness of breath and the occasional chest cramps when he was excited or afraid, the doctor had told him the same things all over again, and had added, “If you really want to do something for that heart of yours, you can give up smoking.”

He hadn’t had a cigarette since, and for the first time in his life he was beginning really to understand the wails of the arrested junkies, locked away in a cell with nothing to ease their craving. He was beginning to be ashamed of himself, for having become so completely dependent on something so useless and so harmful. Three days now. Comic or not, he was going to make it.

Opening his eyes, he glared at the cigarette-smoking Governor and shoved the magazine into a drawer. Then he looked around the squadroom, empty except for himself and his partner, Crawley, sitting over there smoking contentedly at his desk by the filing cabinet as he worked on a report. Rizzo and McFarlane, the other two detectives on this shift, were out on a call but would probably be back soon. Levine longed for the phone to ring, for something to happen to distract him, to keep mind and hands occupied and forgetful of cigarettes. He looked around the room, at a loss, and his left hand clenched and closed on the desk, lonely and incomplete.

When the rapping came at the door, it was so faint that Levine barely heard it, and Crawley didn’t even look up. But any sound at all would have attracted Levine’s straining attention. He looked over, saw a foreshortened shadow against the frosted glass of the door, and called, “Come in.”

Crawley looked up. “What?”

“Someone at the door.” Levine called out again, and this time the doorknob hesitantly turned, and a child walked in.

It was a little girl of about ten, in a frilly frock of pale pink, with a flared skirt, with gold-buckled black shoes and ribbed white socks. Her hair was pale blonde, combed and brushed and shampooed to gleaming cleanliness, brushed back from her forehead and held by a pink bow atop her head, then cascading straight down her back nearly to her waist. Her eyes were huge and bright blue, her face a creamy oval. She was a little girl in an ad for children’s clothing in the Sunday Times. She was a story illustration in Ladies’ Home Journal. She was. Alice in Blunderland, gazing with wide-eyed curious innocence into the bullpen, the squadroom, the home and office of the detectives of the Forty-Third Precinct, the men whose job it was to catch the stupid and the nasty so that other men could punish them.

She saw, looking into this brutal room, two men and a lot of old furniture.

It was inevitably to Levine that the little girl spoke: “May I come in?” Her voice was as faint as her tapping on the door had been. She was poised to flee at the first loud noise.

Levine automatically lowered his own voice when he answered. “Of course. Come on in. Sit over here.” He motioned at the straight-backed wooden chair beside his desk.

The girl crossed the threshold, carefully closed the door again behind her, and came on silent feet across the room, glancing sidelong at Crawley, then establishing herself on the edge of the chair, her toes touching the floor, still ready for flight at any second. She studied Levine. “I want to talk to a detective,” she said. “Are you a detective?”

Levine nodded. “Yes, I am.”

“My name,” she told him solemnly, “is Amy Thornbridge Walker. I live at 717 Prospect Park West, apartment 4-A. I want to report a murder, a quite recent murder.”

“A murder?”

“My mother,” she said, just as solemnly, “murdered my stepfather.”

Levine glanced over at Crawley, who screwed his face up in an expression meant to say, “She’s a nut. Hear her out, and then she’ll go home. What else can you do?”

There was nothing else he could do. He looked at Amy Thornbridge Walker again. “Tell me about it,” he said. “When did it happen?”

“Two weeks ago Thursday,” she said. “November 27th. At two-thirty P.M.”

Her earnest calm called for belief. But children with wild stories were not unknown to the precinct. Children came in with reports of dead bodies in alleys, flying saucers on rooftops, counterfeiters in basement apartments, kidnappers in black trucks— And once out of a thousand times what the child reported was read and not the product of a young imagination on a spree. More to save the little girl’s feelings than for any other reason, therefore, Levine drew to him a pencil and a sheet of paper and took down what she told him. He said, “What’s your mother’s name?”

“Gloria Thornbridge Walker,” she said. “And my stepfather was Albert Walker. He was an attorney.”

To the side, Crawley was smiling faintly at the girl’s conscious formality. Levine solemnly wrote down the names, and said, “Was your father’s name Thornbridge, is that it?”

“Yes. Jason Thornbridge. He died when I was very small. I think my mother killed him, too, but I’m not absolutely sure.”

“I see. But you are absolutely sure that your mother killed Albert Walker.”

“My stepfather. Yes. My first father was supposed to have drowned by accident in Lake Champlain, which I consider very unlikely, as he was an excellent swimmer.”

Levine reached into his shirt pocket, found no cigarettes there, and suddenly realized what he was doing. Irritation washed over him, but he carefully kept it from showing in his face or voice as he said, “How long have you thought that your mother killed your rea... your first father?”

“I’d never thought about it at all,” she said, “until she murdered my stepfather. Naturally, I then started thinking about it.”

Crawley coughed, and lit a fresh cigarette, keeping his hands up in front of his mouth. Levine said, “Did he die of drowning, too?”

“No. My stepfather wasn’t athletic at all. In fact, he was nearly an invalid for the last six months of his life.”

“Then how did your mother kill him?”

“She made a loud noise at him,” she said calmly.

Levine’s pencil stopped its motion. He looked at her searchingly, but found no trace of humor in her eyes or mouth. If she had come up here as a joke — on a bet, say from her schoolmates — then she was a fine little actress, for no sign of the joke was on her face at all.

Though how could he really tell? Levine, a childless man with a barren wife, had found it difficult over the years to communicate with the very young. A part of it, of course, was an envy he couldn’t help, in the knowledge that these children could run and play with no frightening shortness of breath or tightness of chest, that they could sleep at night in their beds with no thought for the dull thudding of their hearts, that they would be alive and knowing for years and decades, for decades, after he himself had ceased to exist.

Before he could formulate an answer to what she’d said, the little girl jounced off the chair with the graceful gracelessness 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 firmality 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 was 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 Thornbridge, 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 open, 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 into 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 all 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. “I’m 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.”

“Neither do I.” He reached for the coffee cup, drank. “The question is, what do I do?”

She shook her head again. “A child like that,” she said. “A woman like that. And then again, maybe not.” She looked at her husband. “For right now,” she said, “you eat. We can think about it.”

For the rest of dinner they discussed other things. After the meal, as usual, the craving for a cigarette suddenly intensified, and he was unable to concentrate on anything but his resolution. They watched television during the evening, and by bedtime he still hadn’t made a decision. Getting ready for bed, Peg suddenly said, “The little girl. You’ve been thinking?”

“I’ll sleep on it,” he said. “Maybe in the morning. Peg, I am longing for a cigarette.”

“Nails in your coffin,” she said bluntly. He blinked, and went away silently to brush his teeth.

The lights turned out, they lay together in the double bed which now, with age, had a pronounced sag toward the middle, rolling them together. But it was a cold night out, a good night to lie close together and feel the warmth of life. Levine closed his eyes and drifted slowly toward sleep.

A sudden sound shook him awake. He blinked rapidly, staring up in the darkness at the ceiling, startled, disoriented, not knowing what it was. But then the sound came again, and he exhaled, releasing held breath. It was the baby from next door, crying.

Move over, world, and give us room, he thought, giving words to the baby’s cries. Make way for the new.

And they’re right, he thought. We’ve got to take care of them, and guide them, and then make way for them. They’re absolutely right.

I’ve got to do something for that little girl, he thought.

In the morning, Levine talked to Crawley. He sat in the client’s chair, beside Crawley’s desk. “About that little girl,” he said.

“You, too? I got to thinking about it myself, last night.”

“We ought to check it out,” Levine told him.

“I know. I figure I ought to look up the death of the first father. Jason Thornbridge, wasn’t it?”

“Good,” said Levine. “I was thinking of going to her school, talking to the teacher. If she’s the kind of child who makes up wild stories all the time, then that’s that, you know what I mean?”

“Sure. You know what school she’s in?”

“Lathmore Elementary, over on Third.”

Crawley frowned, trying to remember. “She tell you that? I didn’t hear it if she did.”

“No, she didn’t. But it’s the only one it could be.” Levine grinned sheepishly. “I’m pulling a Sherlock Holmes,” he said. “She told us she’d stopped in on her way home from school. So she was walking home, and there’s only three schools in the right direction — so we’d be between them and Prospect Park — but they’re close enough for her to walk.” He checked them off on his fingers. “There’s St. Aloysius, but she wasn’t in a school uniform. There’s PS 118, but with a Prospect Park West address and the clothing she was wearing and her good manners, she doesn’t attend any public school. So that leaves Lathmore.”

“Okay, Sherlock,” said Crawley. “You go talk to the nice people at Lathmore. I’ll dig into the Thornbridge thing.”

“One of us,” Levine told him, “ought to check this out with the Lieutenant first. Tell him what we want to do.”

“Fine. Go ahead.”

Levine scraped the fingers of his left hand together, embarrassment reminding him of his need for a cigarette. But this was day number four, and he was going to make it. “Jack,” he said, “I think maybe you ought to be the one to talk to him.”

“Why me? Why not you?”

“I think he has more respect for you.”

Crawley snorted. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“No, I mean it, Jack.” Levine grinned self-consciously. “If I told him about it, he might think I was just dramatizing it, getting emotional or something, and he’d say thumbs down. But you’re the level headed type. If you tell him it’s serious, he’ll believe you.”

“You’re nuts,” said Crawley.

“You are the level-headed type,” Levine told him. “And I am too emotional.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere. All right, go to school.”

“Thanks, Jack.”

Levine shrugged into his coat and plodded out of the squadroom, downstairs, and out to the sidewalk. Lathmore Elementary was three blocks away to the right, and he walked it. There was a smell of snow in the air, but the sky was still clear. Levine strolled along sniffing the snow-tang, his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his black overcoat. The desire for a smoke was less when he was outdoors, so he didn’t hurry.

Lathmore Elementary, one of the myriad private schools which have sprung up to take the place of the enfeebled public school system long since emasculated by municipal politics, was housed in an old mansion on one of the neighborhood’s better blocks. The building was mainly masonry, with curved buttresses and bay windows everywhere, looming three ivy-overgrown stories to a patchwork slate roof which dipped and angled and rose crazily around to no pattern at all. Gold letters on the wide glass pane over the double-doored entrance announced the building’s new function, and just inside the doors an arrow on a wall was marked “OFFICE.”

Levine didn’t want to have to announce himself as a policeman, but the administrative receptionist was so officious and curious that he had no choice. It was the only way he could get to see Mrs. Pidgeon, the principal, without first explaining his mission in minute detail to the receptionist.

Mrs. Pidgeon was baffled, polite, terrified and defensive, but not very much of any of them. It was as though these four emotions were being held in readiness, for one of them to spring into action as soon as she found out exactly what it was a police officer could possibly want in Lathmore Elementary. Levine tried to explain as gently and vaguely as possible:

“I’d like to talk to one of your teachers,” he said. “About a little girl, a student of yours.”

“What about her?”

“She made a report to us yesterday,” Levine told her. “It’s difficult for us to check it out, and it might help if we knew a little more about her, what her attitudes are, things like that.”

Defensiveness began to edge to the fore in Mrs. Pidgeon’s attitude. “What sort of report?”

“I’m sorry,” said Levine. “If there’s nothing to it, it would be better not to spread it.”

“Something about this school?”

“Oh, no,” said Levine, managing not to smile. “Not at all.”

“Very well.” Defensiveness receded, and a sort of cold politeness became more prominent. “You want to talk to her teacher, then.”

“Yes.”

“Her name?”

“Amy Walker. Amy Thornbridge Walker.”

“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Pidgeon’s face suddenly lit with pleasure, not at Levine but at his reminding her of that particular child. Then the pleasure gave way just as suddenly to renewed bafflement. “It’s about Amy? She came to you yesterday?”

“That’s right.”

“Well.” She looked helplessly around the room, aching to find out more but unable to find a question that would get around Levine’s reticence. Finally, she gave up, and asked him to wait while she went for Miss Haskell, the fifth grade teacher. Levine stood as she left the room, then sank back into the maroon leather chair, feeling bulky and awkward in this hushed heavy-draped office.

He waited five minutes before Mrs. Pidgeon returned, this time with Miss Haskell in tow. Miss Haskell, unexpectedly, was a comfortable fortyish woman in a sensible suit and flat shoes, not the thin tall bird he’d expected. He acknowledged Mrs. Pidgeon’s introduction, hastily rising again, and Mrs. Pidgeon pointedly said, “Try not to be too long, Mr. Levine. You may use my office.”

“Thank you.”

She left, and Levine and Miss Haskell stood facing each other in the middle of the room. He motioned at a chair. “Would you sit down, please?”

“Thank you. Mrs. Pidgeon said you wanted to ask me about Amy Walker.”

“Yes, I want to know what kind of child she is, anything you can tell me about her.”

Miss Haskell smiled. “I can tell you she’s a brilliant and well-brought-up child,” she said. “That she’s the one I picked to be student in charge while I came down to talk to you. That she’s always at least a month ahead of the rest of the class in reading the assignments, and that she’s the most practical child I’ve ever met.”

Levine reached to his cigarette pocket, cut the motion short, awkwardly returned his hand to his side. “Her father died two weeks ago, didn’t he?”

“That’s right.”

“How did they get along, do you know? Amy and her father.”

“She worshipped him. He was her stepfather actually, having married her mother only about a year ago, I believe. Amy doesn’t remember her real father. Mr. Walker was the only father she knew, and having been without one for so long—” Miss Haskell spread her hands. “He was important to her,” she finished.

“She took his death hard?”

“She was out of school for a week, inconsolable. She spent the time at her grandmother’s, I understand. The grandmother caters to her, of course. I believe her mother had a doctor in twice.”

“Yes, her mother.” Levine didn’t know what to do with his hands. He clasped them in front of him. “How do Amy and her mother get along?”

“Normally, so far as I know. There’s never been any sign of discord between them that I’ve seen.” She smiled again. “But my contact with Amy is limited to school hours, of course.”

“You think there is discord?”

“No, not at all. I didn’t mean to imply that. Just that I couldn’t give you an expert answer to the question.”

Levine nodded. “You’re right. Is Amy a very imaginative child?”

“She’s very self-sufficient in play, if that’s what you mean.”

“I was thinking about story-telling.”

“Oh, a liar.” She shook her head. “No, Amy isn’t the tall tale type. A very practical little girl, really. Very dependable judgment. As I say, she’s the one I left in charge of the class.”

“She wouldn’t be likely to come to us with a wild story she’d made up all by herself.”

“Not at all. If Amy told you about something, it’s almost certainly the truth.”

Levine sighed. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

Miss Haskell rose to her feet. “Could you tell me what this wild story was? I might be able to help.”

“I’d rather not,” he said. “Not until we’re sure, one way or the other.”

“If I can be of any assistance...”

“Thank you,” he said again. “You’ve already helped.”

Back at the station, Levine entered the squadroom and hung up his coat. Crawley looked over from his desk and said, “You have all the luck, Abe. You missed the whirlwind.”

“Whirlwind?”

“Amy’s mama was here. Dr. Sheffield called her about you checking up on her husband’s death, and just before she came over here she got a call from somebody at Lathmore Elementary, saying there was a cop there asking questions about her daughter. She didn’t like us casting aspersions on her family.”

“Aspersions?”

“That’s what she said.” Crawley grinned. “You’re little Sir Echo this morning, aren’t you?”

“I need a cigarette. What did the Lieutenant say?”

“She didn’t talk to him. She talked to me.”

“No, when you told him about the little girl’s report.”

“Oh. He said to take two days on it, and then let him know how it looked.”

“Fine. How about Thornbridge?”

“Accidental death. Inquest said so. No question in anybody’s mind. He went swimming too soon after lunch, got a stomach cramp, and drowned. What’s the word on the little girl?”

“Her teacher says she’s reliable. Practical and realistic. If she tells us something, it’s so.”

Crawley grimaced. “That isn’t what I wanted to hear, Abe.”

“It didn’t overjoy me, either.” Levine sat down at his desk. “What did the mother have to say?”

“I had to spill it, Abe. About what her daughter reported.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “Now we’ve got no choice. We’ve got to follow though. What was her reaction?”

“She didn’t believe it.”

Levine shrugged. “She had to, after she thought about it.”

“Sure,” said Crawley. “Then she was baffled. She didn’t know why Amy would say such a thing.”

“Was she home when her husband died?”

“She says no.” Crawley flipped open a memo pad. “Somebody had to be with him all the time, but he didn’t want a professional nurse. So when Amy came home from school that afternoon, the mother went to the supermarket. Her husband was alive when she left, and dead when she got back. Or so she says.”

“She says Amy was the one who found him dead?”

“No. Amy was watching television. When the mother came home, she found him, and called the doctor.”

“What about noises?”

“She didn’t hear any, and doesn’t have any idea what Amy means.”

Levine sighed. “All right,” he said. “We’ve got one timetable discrepancy. Amy says her mother was home and made a loud noise. The mother says she was out to the supermarket.” His fingers strayed to his cigarette pocket, then went on to scratch his shoulder instead. “What do you think of the mother, Jack?”

“She’s tough. She was mad, and she’s used to having things her own way. I can’t see her playing nursemaid. But she sure seemed baffled about why the kid would make such an accusation.”

“I’ll have to talk to Amy again,” said Levine. “Once we’ve got both stories, we can see which one breaks down.”

Crawley said, “I wonder if she’ll try to shut the kid’s mouth?”

“Let’s not think about that yet. We’ve still got all day.” He reached for the phone book and looked up the number of Lathmore Elementary.

Levine talked to the girl in Mrs. Pidgeon’s office at eleven o’clock. At his request, they were left alone.

Amy was dressed as neatly as she had been yesterday, and seemed just as composed. Levine explained to her what had been done so far on the investigation, and that her mother had been told why the investigation was taking place. “I’m sorry, Amy,” he said, “but we didn’t have any choice. Your mother had to know.”

Amy considered, solemn and formal. “I think it will be all right,” she said. “She wouldn’t dare try to hurt me now, with you investigating. It would be too obvious. My mother is very subtle, Mr. Levine.”

Levine smiled, in spite of himself. “You have quite a vocabulary,” he told her.

“I’m a very heavy reader,” she explained. “Though it’s difficult for me to get interesting books from the library. I’m too young, so I have to take books from the children’s section.” She smiled thinly. “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said. “I steal the ones I want to read, and then bring them back when I’m finished with them.”

In a hurry, he thought, smiling, and remembered the baby next door. “I want to talk to you,” he said, “about the day when your father died. Your mother said she went out to the store, and when she came back he was dead. What do you say?”

“Nonsense,” she said, promptly. “I was the one who went out to the store. The minute I came home from school, she sent me out to the supermarket. But I came back too soon for her.”

“Why?”

“Just as I was coming down the hall from the elevator, I heard a great clang sound from our apartment. Then it came again as I was opening the door. I went through the living room and saw my mother coming out of my stepfather’s room. She was smiling. But then she saw me and suddenly looked terribly upset and told me something awful had happened, and she ran to the telephone to call Dr. Sheffield. She acted terribly agitated, and carried on just as though she really meant it. She fooled Dr. Sheffield completely.”

“Why did you wait so long before coming to us?”

“I didn’t know what to do.” The solemn formality cracked all at once, and she was only a child after all, uncertain in an adult world. “I didn’t think anyone would believe me, and I was afraid if Mother suspected what I knew, she might try to do something to me. But Monday in Civics Miss Haskell was talking about the duties of the different parts of government, firemen and policemen and everybody, and she said the duty of the police was to investigate crimes and see the guilty were punished. So yesterday I came and told you, because it didn’t matter if you didn’t believe me, you’d have to do your duty and investigate anyway.”

Levine sighed. “All right,” he said. “We’re doing it. But we need more than just your word, you understand that, don’t you? We need proof of some kind.”

She nodded, serious and formal again.

“What store did you go to that day?” he asked her.

“A supermarket. The big one on Seventh Avenue.”

“Do you know any of the clerks there? Would they recognize you?”

“I don’t think so. It’s a great big supermarket. I don’t think they know any of their customers at all.”

“Did you see anyone at all on your trip to the store or back, who would remember that it was you who went to the store and not your mother, and that it was that particular day?”

She considered, touching one finger to her lips as she concentrated, and finally shook her head. “I don’t think so. I don’t know any of the people in the neighborhood. Most of the people I know are my parents’ friends or kids from school, and they live all over, not just around here.”

The New York complication. In a smaller town, people know their neighbors, have some idea of the comings and goings around them. But in New York, next-door neighbors remain strangers for years. At least that was true in the apartment house sections, though less true in the quieter outlying sections like the neighborhood in which Levine lived.

Levine got to his feet. “We’ll see what we can do,” he said. “This clang you told me about. Do you have any idea what your mother used to make the noise?”

“No, I don’t. I’m sorry. It sounded like a gong or something. I don’t know what it could possibly have been.”

“A tablespoon against the bottom of a pot? Something like that?”

“Oh, no. Much louder than that.”

“And she didn’t have anything in her hands when she came out of the bedroom?”

“No, nothing.”

“Well, we’ll see what we can do,” he repeated. “You can go back to class now.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for helping me.”

He smiled. “It’s my duty,” he said. “As you pointed out.”

“You’d do it anyway, Mr. Levine,” she said. “You’re a very good man. Like my stepfather.”

Levine touched the palm of his hand to his chest, over his heart. “Yes,” he said. “In more ways than one, maybe. Well, you go back to class. Or, wait. There’s one thing I can do for you.”

She waited as he took a pencil and a small piece of memo paper from Mrs. Pidgeon’s desk, and wrote on it the precinct phone number and his home phone number, marking which each was. “If you think there’s any danger of any kind,” he told her, “any trouble at all, you call me. At the precinct until four o’clock, and then at home after that.”

“Thank you,” she said. She folded the paper and tucked it away in the pocket of her skirt.

At a quarter to four, Levine and Crawley met again in the squadroom. When he’d come back in the morning from his talk with the little girl, Levine had found Crawley just back from having talked with Dr. Sheffield. It was Sheffield’s opinion, Crawley had told him, that Amy was making the whole thing up, that her stepfather’s death had been a severe shock and this was some sort of delayed reaction to it. Certainly he couldn’t see any possibility that Mrs. Walker had actually murdered her husband, nor could he begin to guess at any motive for such an act.

Levine and Crawley had eaten lunch together in Wilton’s, across the street from the station, and then had separated, both to try to find someone who had either seen Amy or her mother on the shopping trip the afternoon Mr. Walker had died. This, aside from the accusation of murder itself, was the only contradiction between their stories. Find proof that one was lying, and they’d have the full answer. So Levine had started at the market and Crawley at the apartment building, and they’d spent the entire afternoon up and down the neighborhood, asking their questions and getting only blank stares for answers.

Crawley was there already when Levine came slowly into the squadroom, worn from an entire afternoon on his feet, climaxed by the climb to the precinct’s second floor. He looked at Crawley and shook his head. Crawley said, “Nothing? Same here. Not a damn thing.”

Levine laboriously removed his overcoat and set it on the coatrack. “No one remembers,” he said. “No one saw, no one knows anyone. It’s a city of strangers we live in, Jack.”

“It’s been two weeks,” said Crawley. “Their building has a doorman, but he can’t remember that far back. He sees the same tenants go in and out every day; and he wouldn’t be able to tell you for sure who went in or out yesterday, much less two weeks ago, he says.”

Levine looked at the wall-clock. “She’s home from school by now,” he said.

“I wonder what they’re saying to each other. If we could listen in, we’d know a hell of a lot more than we do now.”

Levine shook his head. “No. Whether she’s guilty or innocent, they’re both saying the exact same things. The death is two weeks old. If Mrs. Walker did commit murder, she’s used to the idea by now that she’s gotten away with it. She’ll deny everything Amy says, and try to convince the girl she’s wrong. The same things in the same words as she’d use if she were innocent.”

“What if she kills the kid?” Crawley asked him.

“She won’t. If Amy were to disappear, or have an accident, or be killed by an intruder, we’d know the truth at once. She can’t take the chance. With her husband, all she had to do was fool a doctor who was inclined to believe her in the first place. Besides, the death was a strong possibility anyway. This time, she’d be killing a healthy ten year old, and she’d be trying to fool a couple of cops who wouldn’t be inclined to believe her at all.” Levine grinned. “The girl is probably safer now than she was before she ever came to us,” he said. “Who knows what the mother might have been planning up till now?”

“All right, that’s fine so far. But what do we do now?”

“Tomorrow, I want to take a look at the Walker apartment.”

“Why not right now?”

“No. Let’s give her a night to get rattled. Any evidence she hasn’t removed in two weeks she isn’t likely to think of now.” Levine shrugged. “I don’t expect to find anything,” he said. “I want to look at the place because I can’t think of anything else to do. All we have is the unsupported word of a ten-year old child. The body can’t tell us anything, because there wasn’t any murder weapon. Walker died of natural causes. Proving they were induced won’t be the easiest job in the world.”

“If only somebody,” said Crawley angrily, “had seen that kid at the grocery store! That’s the only chink in the wall, Abe, the only damn place we can get a grip.”

“We can try again tomorrow,” said Levine, “but I doubt well get anywhere.” He looked up as the door opened, and Trent and Kasper came in, two of the men on the four to midnight shift. “Tomorrow,” he repeated. “Maybe lightning will strike.”

“Maybe,” said Crawley.

Levine shrugged back into his overcoat and left the office for the day. When he got home, he broke his normal habit and went straight into the house, not staying on the porch to read his paper. He went out to the kitchen and sat there, drinking coffee, while he filled Peg in on what little progress they’d made on the case during the day. She asked questions, and he answered them, offered suggestions and he mulled them over and rejected them, and throughout the evening, every once in a while, one or the other of them would find some other comment to make, but neither of them got anywhere. The girl seemed to be reasonably safe, at least for a while, but that was the best that could be said.

The baby next door was crying when they went to bed together at eleven o’clock. The baby kept him awake for a while, and his thoughts on the Walker death revolved and revolved, going nowhere. Once or twice during the evening, he had absent-mindedly reached for a cigarette, but had barely noticed the motion. His concentration and concern for Amy Walker and her mother was strong enough now to make him forget his earlier preoccupation with the problem of giving up smoking. Now, lying awake in the dark, the thought of cigarettes didn’t even enter his head. He went over and over what the mother had said, what the daughter had told him, and gradually he drifted off into deep, sound sleep.

He awoke in a cold sweat, suddenly knowing the truth. It was as though he’d dreamed it, or someone had whispered it in his ear, and now he knew for sure.

She would kill tonight, and she would get away with it. He knew how she’d do it, and when, and there’d be no way to get her for it, no proof, nothing, no way at all.

He sat up, trembling, cold in the dark room, and reached out to the nightstand for his cigarettes. He pawed around on the nightstand, and suddenly remembered, and pounded the nightstand with his fist in frustration and rage. She’d get away with it!

If he could get there in time— He could stop her, if he got there in time. He pushed the covers out of the way and climbed from the bed. Peg murmured in her sleep and burrowed deeper into the pillow. He gathered his clothes and crept from the bedroom.

He turned the light on in the living room. The clock over the television set read ten till one. There might still be time, she might be waiting until she was completely asleep. Unless she was going to do it with pills, something to help sleep, to make sleep a permanent, everlasting sure thing.

He grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of one of the private cab companies on Avenue L. He dialed, and told the dispatcher it was urgent, and the dispatcher said a car would be there in five minutes.

He dressed hurriedly, in the living room, then went out to the kitchen for pencil and paper, and left Peg a short note. “I had to go out for a while. Be back soon.” In case she woke up. He left it on the nightstand.

A horn sounded briefly out front and he hurried to the front of the house, turning off lights. As he went trotting down the walk toward the cab, the baby next door cried out. He registered the sound, thought, Baby next door, and dismissed it from his mind. He had no time for extraneous thoughts, about babies or cigarettes or the rasp of his breathing from only this little exertion, running from the house. He gave the address, Prospect Park West, and sat back in the seat as the cab took off. It was a strange feeling, riding in a cab. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done it. It was a luxuriant feeling. To go so fast with such relaxing calm. If only it was fast enough.

It cost him four dollars, including the tip. If she was still alive, it was the bargain of the century. But as he hurried into the building and down the long narrow lobby to the elevators, the sound he’d heard as he’d left his home came back to him, he heard it again in his memory, and all at once he realized it hadn’t been the baby next door at all. It had been the telephone.

He pressed the elevator button desperately, and the elevator slid slowly down to him from the eleventh floor. It had been the ring of the telephone.

So she’d made her move already. He was too late. When he’d left the house, he’d been too late.

The elevator doors opened, and he stepped in, pushed the button marked 4. He rode upward.

He could visualize that phone call. The little girl, hushed, terrified, whispering, beseeching. And Peg, half-awake, reading his note to her. And he was too late.

The door to apartment 4-A was ajar, the interior dark. He reached to his hip, but he’d been in too much of a hurry. The gun was at home, on the dresser.

He stepped across the threshold, cautiously, peering into the dark. Dim light spilled in from the hallway, showing him only this section of carpet near the door. The rest of the apartment was pitch black.

He felt the wall beside the door, found the light switch and clicked it on.

The light in the hall went out.

He tensed, the darkness now complete. A penny in the socket? And this was an old building, in which the tenants didn’t pay directly for their own electricity, so the hall light was on the same line as the foyer of apartment A on every floor. They must have blown a fuse once, and she’d noticed that.

But why? What was she trying for?

The telephone call, as he was leaving the house. Somehow or other, she’d worked it out, and she knew that Levine was on his way here, that Levine knew the truth.

He backed away toward the doorway. He needed to get to the elevator, to get down and away from here. He’d call the precinct. They’d need flashlights, and numbers. This darkness was no place for him, alone.

A face rose toward him, luminous, staring, grotesque, limned in pale cold green, a staring devil face shining in green fire against the blackness. He cried out, instinctive panic filling his mouth with bile, and stumbled backwards away from the thing, bumping painfully into the doorpost. And the face disappeared.

He felt around him, his hands shaking, all sense of direction lost. He had to get out, he had to find the door. She was trying to kill him, she knew he knew and she was trying to kill him the same way she’d killed Walker. Trying to stop his heart.

A shriek jolted into his ears, loud, loud, incredibly loud, magnified far beyond the power of the human voice, a world-filling scream of hatred, grating him to the bone, and his flailing hands touched a wall, he leaned against it trembling. His mouth was open, straining for air, his chest was clogged, his heart beat fitfully, like the random motions of a wounded animal. The echoes of the shriek faded away, and then it sounded again, even louder, all around him, vibrating him like a fly on a pin.

He pushed away from the wall, blind and panic-stricken, wanting only to get away, to be away, out of this horror, and he stumbled into an armchair, lost his balance, fell heavily forward over the chair and rolled to the floor.

He lay there, gasping, unthinking, as brainlessly terrified as a rabbit in a trapper’s snare. Pinwheels of light circled the corners of his stinging eyes, every straining breath was a searing fire in his throat. He lay on his back, encumbered and helpless in the heavy overcoat, arms and legs curled upward in feeble defense, and waited for the final blow.

But it didn’t come. The silence lengthened, the blackness of the apartment remained unbroken, and gradually rationality came back to him and he could close his mouth, painfully swallow saliva, lower his arms and legs, and listen.

Nothing. No sound.

She’d heard him fall, that was it. And now she was waiting, to be sure he was dead. If she heard him move again, she’d hurl another thunderbolt, but for now she was simply waiting.

And the wait gave him his only chance. The face had been only phosphorescent paint on a balloon, pricked with a pin when he cried out. The shriek had come, most likely, from a tape recorder. Nothing that could kill him, nothing that could injure him, if only he kept in his mind what they were, and what she was trying to do.

My heart is weak, he thought, but not that weak. Not as weak as Walker’s, still recovering from his first attack. It could kill Walker, but it couldn’t quite kill me.

He lay there, recuperating, calming, coming back to himself. And then the flashlight flicked on, and the beam was aimed full upon him.

He raised his head, looked into the light. He could see nothing behind it. “No, Amy,” he said. “It didn’t work.”

The light flicked off.

“Don’t waste your time,” he said into the darkness. “If it didn’t work at first, when I wasn’t ready for it, it won’t work at all.”

“Your mother is dead,” he said, speaking softly, knowing she was listening, that so long as she listened she wouldn’t move. He raised himself slowly to a sitting position. “You killed her, too. Your father and mother both. And when you called my home, to tell me that she’d killed herself, and my wife told you I’d already left, you knew then that I knew. And you had to kill me, too. I’d told you that my heart was weak, like your father’s. So you’d kill me, and it would simply be another heart failure, brought on by the sight of your mother’s corpse.”

The silence was deep and complete, like a forest pool. Levine shifted, gaining his knees, moving cautiously and without sound.

“Do you want to know how I knew?” he asked her. “Monday in Civics Miss Haskell told you about the duties of the police. But Miss Haskell told me that you were always at least a month ahead in your studies. Two weeks before your stepfather died, you read that assignment in your schoolbook, and then and there you decided how to kill them both.”

He reached out his hand, cautiously, touched the chair he’d tripped over, shifted his weight that way, and came slowly to his feet, still talking. “The only thing I don’t understand,” he said, “is why. You steal books from the library that they won’t let you read. Was this the same thing to you? Is it all it was?”

From across the room, she spoke, for the first time. “You’ll never understand, Mr. Levine,” she said. That young voice, so cold and adult and emotionless, speaking out contemptuously to him in the dark.

And all at once he could see the way it had been with Walker. Somnolent in the bed, listening to the frail fluttering of the weary heart, as Levine often lay at night, listening and wondering. And suddenly that shriek, out of the mid-afternoon stillness, coming from nowhere and everywhere, driving in at him—

Levine shivered. “No,” he said. “It’s you who don’t understand. To steal a book, to snuff out a life, to you they’re both the same. You don’t understand at all.”

She spoke again, the same cold contempt still in her voice. “It was bad enough when it was only her. Don’t do this, don’t do that. But then she had to marry him, and there were two of them watching me all the time, saying no no no, that’s all they ever said. The only time I could ever have some peace was when I was at my grandmother’s.”

“Is that why?” He could hear again the baby crying, the gigantic ego of the very young, the imperious demand that they be attended to. And in the place of terror, he now felt only rage. That this useless half-begun thing should kill, and kill—

“Do you know what’s going to happen to you?” he asked her. “They won’t execute you, you’re too young. They’ll judge you insane, and they’ll lock you away. And there’ll be guards and matrons there, to say don’t do this and don’t do that, a million million times more than you can imagine. And they’ll keep you locked away in a little room, forever and ever, and they’ll let you do nothing you want to do, nothing.”

He moved now, feeling his way around the chair, reaching out to touch the wall, working his way carefully toward the door. “There’s nothing you can do to me now,” he said. “Your bag of tricks won’t work, and I won’t drink the poison you fed your mother. And no one will believe the suicide confession you forged. I’m going to phone the precinct, and they’ll come and get you, and you’ll be locked away in that tiny room, forever and ever.”

The flashlight hit the floor with a muffled thud, and then he heard her running, away from him, deeper into the apartment. He crossed the room with cautious haste, hands out before him, and felt around on the floor till his fingers blundered into the flashlight. He picked it up, clicked it on, and followed.

He found her in her mother’s bedroom, standing on the window sill. The window was wide open, and the December wind keened into the room. The dead woman lay reposed on the bed, the suicide note conspicuous on the nightstand. He shone the light full on the girl, and she warned him, “Stay away. Stay away from me.”

He walked toward her. “They’ll lock you away,” he said. “In a tiny, tiny room.”

“No, they won’t!” And she was gone from the window.

Levine breathed, knowing what he had done, that he had made it end this way. She hadn’t ever understood death, and so it was possible for her to throw herself into it. The parents begin the child, and the child ends the parents. A white rage flamed in him at the thought.

He stepped to the window and looked down at the broken doll on the sidewalk far below. In another apartment, above his head, a baby wailed, creasing the night. Make way, make way.

He looked up. “We will,” he whispered. “We will. But in our own time. Don’t rush us.”