A Crime in the Neighborhood Read online

  I had dreamed that Mr. Green had been transformed into a naked blue monkey. He squatted by the bureau in my bedroom pulling at his penis. “Just like a thumb,” he cackled. “Nothing to be afraid of.” He grinned and waved, gesturing with a little wrinkled hand for me to come closer. When I drew near, his penis bobbled and grew suddenly enormous, the size of a watermelon. Then it burst and Mr. Green flew squealing around the room, a pale balloon losing its air, while grass seed dribbled out of him. “Come back here, you little shit,” he cried.

  “Are you all right?” called my mother from the hall. A moment later she appeared in the doorway tying the sash on her flowered bathrobe. When I didn’t answer, she came in and sat on the end of my bed and held my good foot. “Was it a bad dream?

  “Can you tell me what it was about?” she said after a little while, laying a hand on my neck.

  Eventually, as she stroked my hair and tucked the sheet around my shoulders, I told her that I had been dreaming about Mr. Green.

  “He’s disgusting,” I said, trying to muffle myself in my pillow.

  “What?” She leaned closer. “What did you say?”

  “He’s weird,” I whispered, more desperately than I’d intended. But I was remembering Mr. Green, tattooed and bare-chested, squatting in his backyard laying bricks for his barbecue pit. Then I remembered how he’d glanced at me that day through the porch screen. Some sort of a claim had been implicit in that glance, some sort of recognition.

  “He looks at me,” I shrieked into my pillow, then burst into tears.

  My mother’s hand withdrew. With my face in the pillow, I couldn’t see her expression, but I could feel the temperature of the room change.

  When she spoke again, her voice was chill. “Tell me exactly what you mean, Marsha, when you say that Mr. Green looks at you.”

  I have never been one of those people who can retract a lie, who can explain that I spoke carelessly, that I hadn’t meant what I said. Once I have lied, I’ve propelled myself into a story that has its own momentum. It’s not that I convince myself that I’m telling the truth, it’s that the truth becomes flexible. Or rather, the truth appears to me as utterly relative, which is a frightening thought but also inevitable if you examine any truth long enough, even reassuring in a cold way.

  So I babbled about Mr. Green staring at me when he got out of his car, staring at me from behind the lilac bush, staring at me when he came out to mow his lawn, becoming more hotly committed to my story when I rolled over and saw the tilt of my mother’s eyebrows. I said he stared at Cameron Sperling’s bottom when Mrs. Sperling once carried him naked into the front yard. I said he’d stared at Luann’s underpants once when she was doing handstands in her yard and her dress kept flying over her head. I said he hung around the playground and stared at kids going down the slide. Nothing very serious, of course, but serious enough when a child has been raped and murdered a few blocks away and the man who did it still hasn’t been caught.

  “Has he ever touched you?” my mother said, in that same chilly voice.

  I thought of Mr. Green’s blunt fingers patting his bald spot, his other hand trembling as he reached for the glass of lavender lemonade my mother offered him.

  “No,” I said. “But he’s weird.”

  “Listen to me.” She grabbed my shoulder, her fingernails digging through my nightgown. “Listen to me. If Mr. Green scares you, then stay away from him. But I don’t want you talking about this to anyone else. Is that clear? You tell me if he does anything to make you nervous, but otherwise you don’t talk about this. Is that clear?” Her voice held a high, uncertain note. I stared back at her. A moment later she let go of my shoulder.

  “What you’ve told me could make a lot of people around here very upset,” she continued more quietly. She picked up my right hand and held it between both of hers, squeezing each of my fingers, one at a time. “Everyone is frightened right now, and when people are frightened they can do things they feel sorry for later.”

  She looked out my window at the telephone wires strung across the street. From my window it was possible to see the lights from the Defense facility near the mall; perhaps she was looking at those lights, wondering who could be working there so late. I pulled my hand away and lifted my glasses from the night table, holding one lens up to one eye as though I were peering through a telescope. I studied her face, examining the small V of her chin, the calm planes of her cheekbones, the soft flaw of her broad upper lip. Her hair hung lank and dry around her ears; the top of her head looked flat.

  I said: “I don’t care. He makes me sick.”

  My mother gazed down at me. “Do you want me to go talk to Mr. Green? Do you want me to tell him what you’ve told me?”

  “No,” I shouted.

  “Does this have anything to do with your father?”

  For a moment I pictured the two of them standing side by side, Mr. Green and my father. Mr. Green in his fussy shoes and madras shorts and khaki shirt and my father—so relaxed and normal in his aviator glasses, suit, and tie—standing together in the front yard. Anyone could see that my father had nothing in common with Mr. Green. Even my mother should be able to see it.

  For another moment I pictured my father’s slightly triangular blue eyes and his slender, gingery eyebrows, which he could raise one at a time. His teeth were small and white and square, except for one gold crown that glittered far back in his mouth. “My secret treasure,” he once called it, smiling like a pirate.

  “Marsha,” murmured my mother. She put her hand on my back, rubbing up and down my spine. “Watch yourself.” Which is the same thing that detective had told me weeks before, advice that, to my great regret, I was soon to ignore.

  By then I had curled myself into a corner of the bed, my face shoved into a space where the bed met the corner of two walls. While my mother sat beside me breathing in the dark, I kept my back rigid and counted my breaths. Until at last my mother got up and left the room.

  The plaster walls felt cool against my cheeks. I pushed harder into the corner, glad when my head began to ache from the pressure. When I woke up the next morning, I was still in the same position, pressed against the wall.

  It was on Wednesday, a little less than two weeks after Boyd’s murder, that we received our invitation to Mr. Green’s cookout. Sometime very early that morning, he left a small white envelope propped on the front steps, much like the morning when he left my mother a box of baking soda. From our porch, I spied white envelopes resting on the Morrises’ and the Sperlings’ doorsteps, too, like small flat doves.

  My mother got to the envelope before I did. She picked it up and tore the back flap open, letting the screen door bang shut behind her. Inside was a card, which she read standing on the front steps in the morning sunlight, pale wisteria leaves drifting around her head. Then she came back inside and handed the card to me. She sat down and drank her orange juice and after a moment buttered her toast, scanning the front page of the paper.

  The card was cut in the shape of a teddy bear holding a balloon. Printed in red block letters were the words A PARTY! followed by AT THE HOME OF, then a blank line, then the word WHEN, and another blank line. On the first blank line, in blue ink, was the same painstaking, looping script that had been on the file card accompanying the baking soda: “Mr. Alden Green Jr., 23 Prospect Terrace.” After WHEN he had answered: “Sunday. 5:00 P.M. Children Welcome!”

  If Julie and Steven had been home, they would have had something appropriately cutting to say about this invitation. “Oh Christ,” Julie would groan. “He can’t be serious. I mean, who’s he having a party for, the Bobbsey twins?” But I couldn’t summon up more than a bleak grimace at the teddy bear and his jolly little balloon.

  I propped Mr. Green’s card against the napkin holder and watched my mother eat her toast. She finished reading the front page, turned it, and kept reading, neatly wiping her buttery fingertips on her napkin. She stirred cream into her coffee, still reading, and lifted the cup to tak
e a sip. She turned another page. Finally she looked up at me.

  “Yes?” she said. “You rang?”

  “I’m not going.”

  She took another sip of coffee, setting the cup back into its saucer with a hard little chink.

  “Are you going?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why do you like him?” I said.

  “I like a lot of people.” She gave me a narrow look.

  “Well, I don’t have to go.”

  “No,” she agreed, displaying the half-smile she reserved for neighbors and grocery-store cashiers. “No, you certainly do not.”

  That evening I watched Mr. Green investigate his barbecue pit. He had been making a tour of his backyard, pacing back and forth between the house and the copper beech tree, circling the picnic table and his two folding aluminum patio chairs placed at conversational angles, when he found himself in front of the barbecue pit. For a few moments he stood there, admiring his tidy chimney and two built-in shelves. He even squatted down to lift the new grate, and peered into the pit itself.

  I couldn’t look at him without remembering the blue monkey in my nightmare. Neither could I look at him and find anything wrong with him. He was so careful. Never in the months that we lived next to Mr. Green had he made a loud noise, not even when he was laying bricks or hammering a loose shutter back into place. No potato chip bags blew across his lawn; no weeds sprang from the sidewalk cracks in front of his house. He was the perfect neighbor.

  Sitting on the porch love seat, notebook across my knees, I could picture his cookout as if it had already occurred: the cocktail napkins he would have bought weeks ahead of time, printed coyly with a martini glass or a smiling drunk wearing a lampshade on his head; the red-checked paper tablecloth; the bubbled-glass candle holders. I envisioned him pushing his cart up to the Safeway check-out counter, unloading paper plates, plastic forks and knives, plastic-wrapped packages of hot dogs and hamburgers, buns, bottles of Coke, cartons of ice cream.

  Mr. Green stood up from poking around his barbecue pit, dusting bits of grass off his knees. Then he walked over to the Chiltons’ abandoned picnic table, which he had repaired so that it stood up straight again. For a few minutes he considered the table, resting his hands on his hips. Eventually he turned to go back inside his house, but not before he had glanced in the direction of our porch. In the evening light he couldn’t have made out who was sitting there, but he lifted his hand anyway and gave a little wave.

  The phone rang while my mother was folding sheets and towels in the basement. Even before I picked up the receiver, I knew it was my father.

  By now he would have heard, he would know what had happened while he was away. The newspapers here had been full of Boyd Ellison’s murder; surely a newspaper in Nova Scotia would have mentioned it. One day he must have stepped into a pharmacy for a pack of gum and there it was, right on the front page: CHILD MURDERED IN QUIET MARYLAND NEIGHBORHOOD.

  “Hello?” I said, almost shaking.

  “Marsha?”

  It took me a moment to recognize Mrs. Lauder’s voice. “Is your mama there?”

  My mother had appeared beside me; I’d heard her run up the basement stairs as soon as the phone began to ring. Now she pried the receiver out of my hand.

  “Yes?” she said, too casually. “Oh. Oh hello, Marie.”

  Then she said: “I’m sorry. Am I going where?” She exhaled slowly, turning away from me toward the sink, where she could look at her reflection in the black window. “Yes, we got one.”

  After another pause she said, “I haven’t decided yet.”

  She picked up a dish towel and pressed it against her chest. Even with her back turned toward me, I could hear Mrs. Lauder’s voice at the other end of the line. I heard the words “foolish” and “whole neighborhood” quite clearly.

  “I guess he thought it was something he could do,” my mother said finally, cheeks flushing. She had turned around to face me again so that she could snap her fingers and point at the door. When I refused to move away from the refrigerator, she glared and shook her head. “You told him about the Chiltons inviting neighbors over. Oh really, Marie. He probably didn’t think about it being too soon—”

  Here Mrs. Lauder must have cut her off because my mother stopped speaking and ducked her head. After a while she said stiffly, “I’m sure he didn’t mean any harm.”

  Downstairs, the washing machine chugged into a new phase of its cycle; water swished and the pipes rattled. Outside, a car rushed past our house, honking its horn.

  “All right,” she said, staring down at the dish towel she was still clutching. “I will. Thanks for calling.” Across the street the Morrises’ dogs began barking, adding to the chorus of banging pipes and the chuntering washer and the humming refrigerator and the slow ticking of the sunburst wall clock by the door.

  My mother hung up the phone. “Don’t speak to me right now.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” I said sulkily.

  “Thank you.” She draped the dish towel back over the rod by the sink. Then she pulled an open bottle of wine from the refrigerator and poured herself a full glass.

  She carried the glass into the living room and switched on the news. Walter Cronkite’s mustached face filled the screen; my mother once told me she wished she could have had Walter Cronkite as her father. Every evening she watched Walter Cronkite as he delivered the CBS evening news, his eyes filled with unobtrusive compassion for the world’s disasters. “What a nice man,” she sometimes remarked. “You can tell he really cares about what’s happening to this country.”

  Tonight Walter Cronkite informed us that the inquiry surrounding the “Watergate break-in” was “widening.” He seemed sorry to announce this, gazing straight into the camera, straight into our living room, his deep voice deepening seriously as though he knew more than he thought wise to reveal.

  “Of course it’s widening,” said my mother to the TV set.

  After the national news, my mother switched to a local news station. The bald anchorman—whose voice was much higher than Walter Cronkite’s, and therefore seemed less compassionate—described a shooting in Baltimore, but had nothing to tell us about our own murder. That’s how I’d come to think of it, as “our” murder, the way you might think of a local football team as “our” team or a neighborhood celebrity as “our” So-and-so. In fact, the anchorman didn’t mention our murder once, which surprised me, as I had difficulty believing that anything else could be news.

  Twelve

  Right after breakfast the next morning a detective in a blue sports coat and brown pants from the Montgomery County Police Department knocked on our screen door. He lifted up his badge and said he had a few more questions to ask us, if my mother wouldn’t mind.

  A blue jay screamed from the crab apple tree. It was another hot, windless morning, one of those mornings when the air is thick with the soap-sweet smell of laundry, and leaves hang off the trees like damp towels.

  My mother opened the door and offered the detective one of the director’s chairs, then she pulled out one for herself. It took me less than a moment to recognize Detective Small, the same rawboned, boot-faced detective who’d questioned us before.

  “I’d like you to go inside, Marsha,” my mother said, smoothing her skirt tight over her knees as the detective sat down. “Right this minute, please.”

  “Actually ma’am, if you don’t mind, I’d prefer it if the little girl stayed.” Detective Small didn’t smile, but he gave me an attentive squint.

  “Oh?” said my mother, pretending not very persuasively to laugh.

  “Well, you know children sometimes hear things that adults don’t.”

  Just like dogs, I told myself, although at the same instant I gripped my notebook fiercely at the thought of being questioned by a detective (“an officer of the law,” I began to call him).

  And who would have been a better source than I? Hadn’t I saved every newspaper clipping about the murder? Didn’t I
have an entire notebook filled with what the neighbors had said, and who had thought what, and why they thought it? Wasn’t I someone who had known the boy himself?

  By this time Boyd Ellison’s house had become part of my regular beat, by which I mean that I passed it three or four times a week as I swung around the neighborhood on my crutches, always forcing myself to wait a decent interval before circling back to swing past it again. As much as I wanted to—as much as I was drawn to—I could never bring myself to stare directly at the house as I went by. It was too ordinary looking. So instead I flung myself forward on my crutches, relying on glimpses I caught out of the corner of my eye. Snatches of brick, a pane of glass reflecting the sun, a rolled newspaper on the front steps.

  But the day before, I’d invited Luann to come along with me while she was sitting outside in her yard with Roy and Tiffany. She stood up wordlessly and followed, not even glancing over her shoulder. I pumped my crutches along the pavement, puffing in the heat, humming a TV jingle with exaggerated nonchalance. Luann wandered behind me, yellow hair wisping against her neck, eyes fixed on her crayoned Mary Janes. But when we reached the Ellisons’ house, she lifted her head and peered at the house’s front windows. While I pushed furiously ahead on the sidewalk, she kept up a measured pace behind me and stared.

  It was only when we got back to my porch steps and collapsed under the wisteria vine that I could ask: “What did you see?”

  She shrugged and said that a thin, dark-haired woman had opened the door and stood looking into the street.

  “Did she look sad?” I demanded.

  Luann shrugged again.

  “What was she wearing?”

  “A dress.”

  “Was it black?” I said after a moment.

  “I am trying to help solve this crime,” I told her. Luann admitted that she had noticed a man’s furled black umbrella on the Ellisons’ front stoop, and that all the upstairs window blinds were pulled down.

  “Look at this.” I settled one elbow on the step behind me and riffled the pages of my notebook. “Somewhere in here,” I said, tapping a page, “somewhere in all this, is probably a clue. That’s what we’re doing when we go by their house. We’re looking for clues. You have to notice everything if you’re going to see anything important.”