Murder Straight Up

6

Falworthy House had once been a three-story redbrick mansion. Now, with a cyclone fence surrounding the perimeter, it resembled one of those forbidding places in which secret government experiments are conducted. Not even apple blossoms and a sweet gentle breeze helped.

The front gate had to be buzzed open and to get inside you had to identify yourself, which I did. Then I added, “I’m here to talk about one of your people who may be in some trouble.”

I was buzzed inside.

On the broad two-stepped concrete porch sat several teenagers eyeing me with a mixture of contempt and irony. You remember what it’s like being a teenager — nobody knows shit but you. Like that.

When I reached them, I nodded to a boy wearing a long earring and green-tinted hair. He glared back at me.

Inside was a vestibule big enough to house a hockey game. The decor was vintage seventies. Lots of ferns and posters with various Love messages. From a room upstairs came the sounds of a Donna Summer disco record. The place was stuck in a time warp.

The small nervous man who seemed to jump out of one of the nearby doors came right up to me and said, “You’re here about the student in trouble?” He was obviously unhappy, maybe even a bit frightened.

“Yes.”

“Won’t you come in my office?”

He was balding and he wore rimless glasses and he moved as if he had an arthritic ache in his joints. The weird thing was I’d bet he wasn’t more than forty. And to complement the seventies motif, he wore a pair of genuine bell bottoms along with one of those wide belts that had once belonged to the counterculture but were now affected by the likes of Wayne Newton.

His office was a monk’s cell. Paperbacks of all kinds were jammed into bare pine bookcases. A poster of Thomas Merton stared myopically down on us. Dirty sunlight fell through a dirty window onto his desk, in back of which, along a windowsill, were arranged half a dozen Diet Pepsi cans filthy with cigarette butts and ashes.

“Who is it?” he asked, pushing his glasses up his tiny nose.

“Who?”

“The student. You said you were here about a student.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m actually not sure about the name. And it isn’t one student, it’s two.”

“Two?”

“Yes. A boy and a girl.”

He glanced up at the Thomas Merton poster as if for guidance. “I see.” He said this as if I’d just hit him as hard as I could in the stomach. He sank into a chair and stared out the dirty window. “We won’t be open in another six months.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Another six months, I said,” he replied, still staring out the window. “Right now in the city council there’s this big battle going on about Falworthy, about rezoning so we can’t operate here. And it’s exactly this kind of thing that’s going to get us run out.” He shook his head miserably. He had very fine, almost babyish hair and a somewhat petulant upper lip that was trying very hard to grow a mustache. Very hard. “If they only understood that I’m doing this for them,” he said. He shook his head some more, and I had the uncomfortable impression for a moment that he was going to cry. Then I really wouldn’t know what the fuck to do. He turned back to me. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve had a hard week, I’m afraid.” He put out his hand. “Karl Eler. With a K.”

We shook.

“Would you like a Diet Pepsi or coffee or something?”

“No thanks.”

He looked at me with ice-blue eyes. “Then I guess we might as well get it over with.”

The quavering lip and the desperate gaze were making me wish I hadn’t come.

“First of all, let’s discuss what they did. That way maybe I can help you find who they are.”

“Actually, I’m not sure they did anything.”

For a moment, just a moment, a smile seemed to play at the edges of his prissy little mouth. Then he tensed up. “Maybe we’d better talk about you before we talk about them.”

“Me?”

“Yes, I’d like to see some ID if you don’t mind.”

“Sure.”

I got out my wallet and handed it to him. He looked at my Federated Security card for a long time.

“So just what does this entitle you to?” he asked.

“Exactly nothing. I mean, you could throw me out. The only thing is, if you do I’ll go straight to the police and tell them what I know.”

“Know about what?”

“About two Falworthy students being at Channel Three last night when David Curtis was being murdered.”

“Oh, my God,” he said. “Oh, my God.”

During the next ten minutes I told him everything I knew. I described the boy as best I could, though I hadn’t really gotten much of a good glance at him, and then I described the fetching blond girl and how she’d been injured and how she’d turned herself in to the emergency ward early this morning.

“The name I got on her from the hospital was Diane Beaufort,” I said. “It could be a phony.”

“No. It’s her real name.”

“Care to tell me about her?”

He shrugged. “I suppose this is a terrible thing to say, but they’re all kind of interchangeable here, really. I mean, she’s from a broken home, her mother an alcoholic, her father doing time. That describes at least half the kids here. She’s had various emotional problems in the two years she’s been here, the most serious of which, as far as the law is concerned, being some shoplifting trouble she got into. Kids do that. Steal as a way of punishing themselves, hoping to get caught. Anyway, Diane isn’t any more or less crazy than anybody else in this place” — he smiled with a certain bitterness — “including me. My wife left me a year ago, and I guess I still consider myself one of the walking wounded. She lived here with me — we had kind of an apartment upstairs — but finally she couldn’t take it anymore. The kids. Always getting in trouble, I mean. She met this professor of sociology.” He twisted his lips bitterly. “I’ve personally always thought sociology was nothing more than quackery.”

He was into himself now, which was probably good for him, but I was in a hurry. “What would she be doing at Channel Three?”

“Throwing rocks at the windows, maybe. Or writing something ugly on one of the executives’ cars. She blames them, of course.”

“Blames Channel Three?”

“Umm-hmm.”

“For what?”

He looked at me as if I were the worst kind of bumpkin. “For playing a role in Stephen’s death.”

Maybe I was a bumpkin. I had no idea what he was talking about. “Who’s Stephen and how did he die?”

“Stephen Chandler. He was a student here. He was one of the subjects for Channel Three’s report on teenage suicide, and he killed himself. Many of the kids here blame Channel Three.”

So it made sense, after all.

I was sitting in this grubby little room, listening to this sad little guy, wondering what the hell last night had to do with a halfway house for teenagers, when he just handed me the whole thing.

I knew the answer to the next question before I asked it, but I wanted to hear him say it. “Who was the reporter who handled the suicide story?”

“Oh, it was a very big story. Ran five nights. David Curtis was the reporter. You didn’t see it?”

“No. I usually work nights.”

“Ran about two months ago. Very popular. There were editorials in the paper, even, praising the show, pointing out how Stephen’s suicide, coming as it did in the middle of the series, proved how serious the subject really was.”

“Poor bastard,” I said.

“Yes, yes, he was,” Eler said. “Though I guess I wouldn’t express it quite that way.”

Which was when I pegged him for what he was — a kind of perennial grad student and perennial seminarian rolled into one. His wife’s exit was making more and more sense.

“You know, back in the sixties,” he said, “we really were trying to change things, make it better for the next generation. I’d say it’s worse, what with all the drugs and all the sexual diseases. AIDS is crossing over to us straights now. And it may be only the first of several diseases like that.”

Now I knew where I’d go anytime I needed to get cheered up. I’d just pop in on old Karl Eler (Karl with a K to his friends) and have him lay some good vibes on me.

“Is Diane here?” I asked.

“No. She’s out.”

“When will she be back?”

“Diane?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Sometime this evening. She has a job after school.”

“I’ll be here.” I paused. Watched his eyes. “You figured out who the boy might have been?”

“Mitch.”

His candor surprised me.

“Mitch?”

“Mitch Tomlin. He was Stephen’s best friend.”

“I see.”

“Took it very hard. Lots of bitterness.”

I nodded. “Will he be here tonight?”

“Should be.”

I stood up. Put out my hand. “Thanks for your help.”

“There’s just one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I guess I don’t understand your part in all this.”

I smiled. “Neither do I. Not exactly, anyway. It’s probably as simple as me trying to save my job.”

He glanced around. “Believe me, I’ve had days when I’d just as soon lose mine.” The prissy lips again. “If I had, my wife would be with me today.”

He walked me out to the front porch. The same kids sat there, waiting to glare at me as I went down the steps. I felt sorry for them — they had been shit on probably since birth — and then foolish for being so sentimental. Or was I being foolish?

In a phone booth two blocks and ten minutes away, I said hello to Kelly Ford, and then, “I’ve made a connection between the kid in Channel Three last night and Curtis’s murder.”

“You have?”

“Yes. A show the station did on suicide.”

“My God, that’s right,” she said. “The police asked us so many questions last night, and that subject didn’t come up even once. At least I didn’t mention it.”

“Well, it sure sounds worth pursuing.”

“Yes, it does. Are you going to call your friend Detective Edelman?”

“Later on. I thought we might have lunch first.”

“You and me?”

“You and me.”

“That sounds very nice.”

“Good. How about The Pirate’s Perch in an hour?”

“Fine.”

The Perch was one of the places where all the media folks lunched.

“See you then.”

“Yes,” she said in her nice suburban way. “And aren’t you the lucky one, too?”

My weakness. Wise-ass women.

Three blocks later I swung my car over to another drive-up phone. I turned down the Neil Young song (“Old Man,” one of his best), picked up the phone and dialed the number of Edelman’s precinct. The guy had a right to know what I knew. Didn’t he?

I kept asking myself this question while the desk sergeant put me on hold and then put me through to Edelman’s office, where his secretary put me on hold. Which was when I hung up. Apparently I didn’t think he did have a right to know. At least not yet.