A Crime in the Neighborhood Read online

  Eight

  The police investigation continued. For weeks, phone calls streamed into the sheriff’s office from people who had seen a balding man in a brown car. A psychic told police that they would find the man living in a trailer in Schenectady, New York. Several anonymous letters accused Vice President Spiro Agnew of being the murderer. A boy in Baltimore said a man approached him at a bus stop and offered him five dollars to get into his car. But it was a red car, this time, and the man had a beard. In New Jersey, a little girl vanished from her own front yard.

  Based on a description furnished by the elderly woman with the pug, a composite drawing was posted in police stations across the country. One of the drawings also found its way to the bulletin board in the Spring Hill Mall; it was a pencil sketch, showing a round-faced, middle-aged man with unprepossessing features—unprepossessing enough that he could fit anyone’s idea of any kind of criminal. He looked like the sort of man who nowadays is easy to recognize as a child molester because we’ve been told so often that a child molester could be anybody, the man next door, even your own father. Back then, the man in the sketch looked too ordinary.

  I thought he looked just like Mr. Green.

  In my notebook, I pasted the following article from the Washington Post:

  Police investigating the abduction and murder of 12-year-old Boyd Arthur Ellison of Spring Hill believe someone living in the vicinity may be responsible for the crime, according to a source close to the investigation.

  The same source revealed that the police believe the murderer is left-handed, due to the angle at which blows were delivered to the youth’s head. While Montgomery County Police Spokesman Joseph McKenna refused to discuss whether police have any suspects, he did urge area residents to exercise caution and to report any suspicious activity. “We have some leads that we’re currently following. I am not at liberty to disclose further details,” McKenna said.

  Meanwhile, Spring Hill residents continue to express their shock over the killing. Several residents say they are uneasy about remaining in the area. “This is a nice neighborhood,” said Carol Humphries, 44, a mother of two who lives next door to the Ellison family home. “Everyone I know around here has the same values. That’s why we live here, because you know what to expect. Things like this just aren’t supposed to happen here.”

  During the next few weeks, the Night Watch became a regular part of our neighborhood and even attracted some press of its own. A reporter for the Post interviewed Mr. Lauder, and a few days later a short article appeared in the Metro section, headlined LOCAL PATROL CALMS NEIGHBORHOOD JITTERS, accompanied by a photograph of Mr. Lauder, Mr. Sperling, and several other men standing with their arms crossed on the Morrises’ front steps. I saved the photo in my Evidence notebook. They look like piano movers.

  Mrs. Morris had sewn orange cloth armbands for the patrol, with black felt letters, NW, stitched to each one. “What is this?” my mother said, the first evening the armbands appeared. But I thought the armbands looked very official.

  I began sitting out on the porch after dinner until bedtime, waiting for the patrol to pass our house, timing them from when they began at seven-thirty to see how many times they would pass by on a two-hour shift. The fastest walkers were Mr. Reade, father of Mike and Wayne, and Mr. Lauder; their record was every twenty-six minutes. I held my breath whenever they went by, the same way I held my breath whenever Sherlock Holmes made a small, vital discovery. The slowest were Mr. Guibert and Mr. Bridgeman, who got into arguments about the I.R.S.—Mr. Bridgeman was a tax inspector—and sometimes stopped walking altogether to pick through fine points of the tax code. The patrol covered about ten city blocks, including the mall parking lot, where they occasionally surprised teenagers necking or drinking beer in their cars. The mall parking lot had become even more popular since the murder. Their last shift ended at half past midnight.

  Most of the men talked as they patrolled, and I loved the rumbling, sedate sound of their voices, and the drift of cigarette smoke they left behind. It was something I depended upon during those long weeks in July and August, the sight of Mr. Lauder and the other fathers on my street passing by so regularly, yellow light from the street lamp gleaming off their metallic watchbands, shining along the handles of their heavy silver flashlights. It moved me to be the object of their care. As their white, short-sleeved shirts hove into view, I felt my throat close and my back straighten, swept up by the closest thing to patriotism I have ever experienced. I fell in love with all of them. I dreamed of being carried by each man, pressed to each of their chests as they carried me to safety, passing me down a long line of fathers.

  Like the freak tornado my mother had so thoughtlessly wished for, something violent had blown into our little grid of streets, changing the whole topography. But in those days people believed you could prepare for catastrophes. That’s what storm cellars were for. That’s why people had emergency medical kits, and a few years before, fall-out shelters in their backyards. We hadn’t been prepared, and that’s why a child from our neighborhood had died. We hadn’t been prepared, and so a pleasant stretch of trees and lawns and driveways was now shadowy terrain, pocked with hiding places, dark corners, creaking branches. Looking back, it seems to me that those gallant fathers intended, by sheer physical effort, to return our neighborhood to what it had never actually been.

  Mr. Green’s failure to be included in the Night Watch made me first pity, then detest him. My memory of his brawny chest and his blacksmith’s arm receded, replaced by scurrying images: Mr. Green disappearing ratlike through his front door; Mr. Green dressed fussily in madras shorts, hiding behind a bush. I created scenes in which Mr. Green was asked to join the Night Watch but refused. In these scenarios, Mr. Lauder and Mr. Sperling begged him to join them, to help them keep our neighborhood safe. “Why would I waste my time,” Mr. Green sneered, “on such a hopeless enterprise?”

  He always had a supercilious German accent in these exchanges, and a lock of greasy hair dangled over his forehead. Whenever Walter Cronkite mentioned the Watergate burglars on TV, I pictured Mr. Green wearing a ski mask. Often now when I watched him walk to or from his car I imagined him in debased poses—on the toilet, or with his finger up his nose.

  If I passed close to our hedge, I tossed litter into his yard: snips of string, torn movie-ticket stubs; sometimes I spat out my gum in his driveway, hoping it would stick to his tasseled loafers. One morning I constructed a note from letters cut out of the newspaper and glued onto a piece of notebook paper. I aM gREEn, it read. I haTe KIDS. I am gOiNg to gEt YOU. When no one was out on the street, I took the note and placed it on his front steps, where it sat for an hour or so before blowing away.

  A few days after Boyd Ellison’s body had been found behind the mall, every house in the neighborhood received its own threatening note, a flyer on acid-yellow paper, tucked under the windshield wipers of their cars: A NEIGHBORHOOD CHILD WAS BRUTALLY MURDERED BY AN UNKNOWN ASSAILANT, THURSDAY, JULY 20TH. ALL PARENTS ARE ADVISED: KNOW WHERE YOUR CHILDREN ARE AT ALL TIMES. AVOID STRANGERS. BE CAREFUL. The flyer was signed, THE NEIGHBORHOOD NIGHT WATCH. I saved ours and pasted it inside my notebook.

  That evening, Mrs. Lauder told my mother that Mr. Lauder and the other men intended to question any unfamiliar men they encountered on their rounds.

  “They’re going to say, ‘State your business.’ And if the guy can’t explain why he’s here, they’re going to drive him over to the police station.”

  “I think that may be unconstitutional,” my mother said.

  Mrs. Lauder looked surprised. “Don’t you want to keep the kids safe? That’s all they’re trying to do.”

  Mrs. Lauder was a heavy woman with short curly black hair pulled down around her ears like a dark bathing cap. I never saw her wear a blouse that didn’t strain at the buttons, and her frosted lipstick often missed her mouth, but she was an oddly rigorous person. Her brother was a Methodist minister in Alexandria, and this relationship seemed to have marked
her as the neighborhood Good Samaritan. She knew everything that happened to everybody. Whenever anyone in the neighborhood had a baby or lost a relative, Mrs. Lauder could tell you the baby’s name or how the relative had died. Nevertheless it was hard to meet her small, watchful blue eyes without feeling guilty, even when you hadn’t done anything wrong. It wasn’t that she seemed accusing, exactly, it was more that she seemed to expect you to be bad. And yet, she was a kindly woman, cheerful, insistent about helping her neighbors. Ever since my father left, she had made a habit of dropping by once or twice a week to check up on my mother and me.

  “How’s it going?” she would always ask. “You folks need anything?” She seemed disappointed whenever my mother answered that we were fine.

  The same evening the flyer appeared, yellow as fever, on our front steps Mrs. Lauder crossed our yard towing Luann by the hand. My mother had just lugged the hose into the front yard to water the rhododendrons.

  “That boy’s mother hasn’t spoken one word since it happened. Not one single word.” Mrs. Lauder always began talking without introduction or greeting. “It’s the shock, I guess. Probably a mercy.”

  “I suppose so,” said my mother.

  “I heard the grandmother lives with them now. She tells anybody who comes to the door to go away. In Swiss or French or some language. Wears all black. She was there at the memorial service they had over to the high school this afternoon. Did you go, Lois?”

  My mother shook her head. Mrs. Lauder fanned herself with our copy of the flyer, which had dropped onto the steps. Luann stood off to the side by the birdbath, staring at her pink sneakers. “Why don’t you hop on in and play with Marsha,” said her mother. “Go on, doll.”

  Luann opened the screen door and inched through the doorway, allowing herself to get sandwiched between the door and the jamb. Finally she slid free and stood against the screen, squatting a little to scratch the inside of her leg.

  She eyed my cast. “Nobody sign you yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well at least that part’s over,” said Mrs. Lauder from outside. “But what are we all supposed to do now? What if they don’t find the guy?”

  “It’s terrible,” said my mother with a faraway sound to her voice, as if what had happened was not really terrible but only disappointing.

  “You watch and you watch, and you make sure your kids are safe, and you stick the Drano and the Windex on top the fridge so they can’t swallow it, and you meet their bus every afternoon, and then something like this happens anyway.” Mrs. Lauder wiped her forehead with the back of a dimpled hand and leaned against the porch railing. “It may be God’s will but I tell you it’s not fair. It seems like these days either you’ve got to spend your whole life watching, or give up and stop watching at all.”

  “I know how you feel,” said my mother, in the same faraway voice. She turned the spigot on full, then pressed the spray gun she had screwed onto the end of the hose. Rhododendron leaves bucked wildly up and down; she lowered the nozzle and sprayed the ground below each bush, creating small marshes of mud and grass.

  A lawn mower started up across the street. Luann sat down on her hands and rocked back and forth. “If I had a cast”—she gave me a cool look—“I’d put on some of them flower-power stickers.”

  Her pale hair hung around her face like a shower curtain; between the flaps peered a sallow, dignified little face. As the result of a car accident, she had temporary dentures instead of front teeth, which she could flip out and retract with her tongue. At eight she was already famous for this feat, which she performed upon request, and also for her nerve. Not long before he was killed, I’d watched Boyd Ellison ride his possibly stolen ten-speed bicycle right at her—something he liked to do to frighten little kids—and she never flinched, just continued to sit on the sidewalk playing jacks with herself as his front tire passed within an inch of her knee. It was known that she refused to take baths. She was the only girl I knew who would pick up a worm. When a strange dog barked at her she stared at it until it quit.

  I’d never had much to do with Luann. In spite of her reputation for composure, she was only eight, and the twins made fun of me if they caught us playing together. “The Infant Duo,” they called us, and made horrible cooing noises.

  And though I hated to admit it, I was slightly afraid of Luann. Perhaps it was her temporary dentures, and her weary air of having survived what the rest of us had yet to encounter.

  On our porch, Luann was peering up at me from the floor. I pretended not to notice and instead stared at my mother’s begonias, which had acquired a layer of dust on their leaves. “Know what?” she said at last, brushing back her thin hair.

  “What,” I said ungraciously.

  “When I was six, I got a Cheerio stuck up my nose and I had to go to the hospital. The doctor stuck a big pair of tweezers up my nose. He got it out, but there was blood.

  “Yep,” Luann went on, after waiting politely for a response. She rocked back and forth. “I got a Sno-Kone after.”

  “Good for you,” I said.

  Luann eyed me for a moment from the floor. “My mom says your daddy runned off,” she said. “She says he’s committed adult.”

  “That’s not true,” I hissed, my face hot.

  “My mom says it is.”

  “Your mom’s a fat pig,” I said.

  Outside, Mrs. Lauder was saying, “You know his funeral was yesterday.” She paused for a moment. “I heard the parents didn’t go to that either.”

  My mother nodded, turning to spray the azaleas and then the lily bed.

  “I just about can’t sleep,” Mrs. Lauder said. “To think of that poor kid.” For a moment or two she closed her eyes and rubbed between them with her finger and thumb. Finally she looked up. “Who could do a thing like that?”

  Just then Mr. Green pulled into his driveway. Mrs. Lauder stopped talking while he inched up to his drainpipe, then cut the motor. His car door groaned as he pushed it open. When he caught sight of my mother and Mrs. Lauder, he waved his punctual wave, waited for them to wave back, and then started up his walk. He paused when he reached his front door, then drew out the flyer that had been rolled up and stuck through his door handle.

  After he had finished reading it, he folded the paper into a square and tucked it in his shirt pocket. Then he unlocked the door and disappeared inside.

  Mrs. Lauder looked into his yard as if waiting for something else to happen. “Now what do you think his story is?” she said after a while.

  “Who knows,” my mother sighed, coiling the garden hose, muddy flecks of grass spattering her hands and legs. “But I’m sure he has one, just like everybody else.”

  “Luann,” called her mother. “Time to go home, doll.”

  On the porch Luann, who had been gazing out the screen, turned suddenly to me. “Want to know a secret?”

  When I didn’t answer, she came over to my chair, bending so close that her breath dampened my cheek.

  “Luann,” called Mrs. Lauder.

  “Want to know a secret?” Luann demanded, looking at me the way she looked at barking dogs.

  “All right,” I said at last.

  Outside our mothers turned toward us, their soft, tired faces like peonies in the fading light.

  “Looks like a big thumb,” she whispered, almost kissing my ear. “A boy’s thing does.”

  It now strikes me as strange that in the days and nights following Boyd Ellison’s murder, I never really felt afraid. But I suppose nothing changed very much in my life that hadn’t changed already. The worst sort of crime had happened in my own neighborhood, the murder of a child, someone my age, whom I even knew, and still we went to the grocery store and to doctor’s appointments; Julie and Steven still pretended to be members of British café society and they still ignored me and they still swiped gum from the drugstore and smoked behind the rhododendrons; my mother still sat in the kitchen selling magazines over the phone; at night we still washed the dish
es, dried them, and stacked them in the cupboard.

  I find myself trying to imagine Boyd Ellison’s mother washing dishes after dinner, filling her sink with soapy water, staring at her reflection in a black windowpane as she scrubbed a bowl, rinsed plate after plate. The repetition would have calmed her. When she had finished the dishes, she might do them all again. I remember her as thin and tall from the single time I saw her at Halloween, thin and tall alone in a doorway, holding a dishrag in her hand, wearing a blue dress. She had dark hair and dark eyes. She looked, as I recall, something like my own mother.

  My father once told me, “That whole summer I thought of you children. But for a while you didn’t seem to be my children anymore. You seemed to belong to another life that I didn’t belong to, and the life I was living seemed to be my only life. We went fishing and took long walks every day. Sometimes we ate at a diner down the street. We drove out into the country. That’s mostly what we did.”

  Even during the worst times of your life, there are moments when life seems normal, and then you catch yourself wondering which kind of moments—the terrible or the normal—are the real ones. “I tried to write to you,” my father said. “But I didn’t have anything to say that I thought would make sense.”

  That’s how we all seemed to feel about the murder. We didn’t have anything to say that would make much sense, so after the early shock of it, while we waited to find out who had done it, and why, we didn’t really discuss it much. Although my mother continued to read aloud news articles, and I continued to paste them in my notebook.

  In the first days after Boyd’s body was found, a blanketing quiet draped the neighborhood. Black-and-white police cars drove by, or sat parked in front of houses like enormous saddle shoes. Only adults walked alone on the sidewalks, and most people stayed inside. Air conditioners droned and dripped. Once in a while a dog loped down the middle of the road. At night only the pairs of neighborhood men came out, circling the block.