A Crime in the Neighborhood Read online

  She nodded, rubbing absently at a streak of dirt on her knee. Across the street, the Jack Russell terriers began howling and scratching inside the Morrises’ front door as the mailman turned up their front walk. They must have woken Baby Cameron next door because he started to scream from an upstairs window.

  At last Luann glanced up from her knee. “My dad says it’s a pervert who killed him.”

  “I know that,” I told her. “Everyone knows that. You probably don’t even know what it means.”

  “I know.” She looked offended.

  “Him.” I jerked my thumb in the direction of Mr. Green’s empty driveway. “He’s a pervert.”

  Luann glanced over at Mr. Green’s house, at his trim azaleas and the marigolds blooming by his front steps.

  “He is,” I said, my voice rising. “I’ve got pages here. He hides in the bushes. I’ve seen him. He hides in the bushes, sometimes right by the Ellisons’ house. I’ve seen him.”

  By this time I didn’t care what I was saying anymore, only that Luann was looking at me with a rapt expression. “Didn’t you see something rustling there today, something in the bushes right by their house?”

  “A cat?” breathed Luann.

  “No,” I said, exultant now. “It was him.”

  Luann stared. After a moment she went back to rubbing her knee, making little sighing sounds out of the corner of her mouth. “My dad says it don’t help to catch anybody anymore,” she said finally. “He says they’s just somebody else there waiting to do the same thing.”

  A shaft of sunlight through the poplar leaves had pooled onto the tops of our heads. I reached up and felt my hair and the heat seeping into my scalp. It seemed to take hours for the mailman over at the Sperlings’ to cross the street and stride up our front walk with a sheaf of magazines for my mother. He said hello to us as he stuffed them into our mailbox, dark moons of sweat under each of his arms.

  “Go home,” I told Luann when the mailman had reached the sidewalk again. “Why don’t you just go home.”

  She stood up and began a kind of shuffle-hop across our lawn back toward her house. It was only as she reached her driveway that I realized she was mimicking the way I moved on my crutches. Her shoulders were humped up close to her ears and she walked with a peculiar draggy limp, like a person trying to walk with someone else hanging onto her leg.

  When she climbed up her own front steps she turned around and grinned, then she fisted both hands into binoculars and trained them on me.

  “You won’t mind if I need to ask you a few questions?” said the detective. I shook my head.

  He clicked his ballpoint pen several times over his notepad. In spite of the heat he looked cool, even though his forehead was moist. My mother smiled nervously. He gazed at her for a moment or two, perhaps waiting to see how nervous she became, before he started his questions. How long had she lived here? Was she friendly with her neighbors? Had she known the dead boy?

  Yes, she answered to everything, but I could tell by the way her chin jutted that she was feeling untruthful. She acted the same way in department stores whenever an alarm bell went off, as if she was afraid that she was the one who had stolen something. It wasn’t long before she began answering questions that hadn’t been asked.

  “Boyd—the child who—he once came here to a Cub Scout meeting. My son—”

  Detective Small nodded, neither encouraging her to go on nor discouraging her from continuing until my mother had told him everything she could remember about Boyd Ellison, including Steven’s unproven accusation that Boyd had stolen money from the Cub Scouts’ paper drive.

  But soon it was clear that he was mostly interested in what she knew about Mr. Green. “He’s new around here, isn’t he? Lives alone? Not many visitors? Would you say he was the social type or kind of secretive?”

  “I’d say,” said my mother, after a pause, “I’d say that he tries to be a good neighbor.”

  “I understand he’s having some sort of party?”

  “A cookout. He’s been planning it for some time. Three weeks maybe? Before any of this happened.”

  Detective Small’s ears protruded like doorknobs from his narrow head. The morning light behind him glowed red through his earlobes, which had the effect of making him look electrified. To intensify this impression, his short black hair stuck straight up from his forehead, and his heavy eyebrows had a way of shooting upward as he listened, as if even insignificant replies to his questions administered a mild jolt.

  “So how long ago did Mr. Alden Green move in? Any family you know of? Where did he live before?”

  “Look, I want to help,” my mother said. “But I don’t have anything to tell you.” She sat back in her chair, dropping the hand that had been hovering around her lip. The blue jay screamed again. “Mr. Green seems like a very nice man,” she added, “but I hardly know him.”

  Detective Small raised his eyebrows in either disbelief or resignation.

  “I’m telling the truth,” she said, and I wondered if she realized how untrustworthy this statement made her sound. “Haven’t you talked to him yourself?”

  “Not yet.” The detective’s eyes went officially blank.

  “And nothing—?” My mother was pulling at the hem of her skirt.

  “Anyone else around here move in recently?”

  My mother shook her head. “Do you really think the man who did—do you think whoever—lives in this neighborhood?”

  Detective Small’s eyes were the same deep brown as his knit pants. Broken capillaries threaded toward each iris. The skin beneath each eye looked smudged. “Why do you think so?” she asked respectfully.

  “It’s not that we think so. It’s that we don’t have any reason to discount the possibility.” Detective Small clicked his ballpoint pen rapidly several times. Then he gave a shrug and straightened his tie, and we understood that the interview was over. “Could you spell your last name for me, please,” he said, writing on his notepad. “And give me your telephone number.”

  “What will happen now?”

  “We keep looking. We’ll find him.”

  Now that he was prepared to leave, I found myself reluctant to see Detective Small go. I liked his sports coat on our porch, crisply blue against the faded wicker furniture and wilting begonias, which my mother kept forgetting to water. We were as safe as we would ever be with a policeman on our porch. Perhaps safer than we’d ever be again. Detective Small already seemed to know all about us. I liked his capable air of having done everything he was doing before; he was someone who wouldn’t be amazed by anything, no matter how awful or unexpected.

  Also, he hadn’t asked me any questions. I had been waiting to be asked a question.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” my mother offered suddenly, perhaps struck by the same wish to hold onto him.

  Detective Small shook his head, but smiled this time. “Here’s my card,” he said. “I have your number. In case I need anything else.”

  My mother took the card, then put her hand up to her lips and nodded.

  “When will your husband be home?” He stabbed his pen into his breast pocket. “I’d like to ask him the same stuff I just asked you.”

  “My husband left me in March,” she said. “I haven’t seen him since the end of June. He went to Canada.”

  For a moment Detective Small continued to gaze at her as if deciding whether or not she was telling him the truth. “Okeydoke,” he said finally and stood up, flipping his notebook closed. “Sorry,” he added, reddening a little and cupping his hand around the back of his neck.

  “It’s all right.”

  As he opened the screen door, he paused and glanced back at us, his face realigned into a judicial expression. “Thanks,” he called, halfway over his shoulder. “Appreciate your help.”

  But before he was quite through the door, and before my mother could interrupt me or wave me inside, I decided to say what I’d been waiting to say, had been hoping, even pining for
the chance to say. I said: “We don’t like him. Nobody does.”

  “What?” Detective Small’s black eyebrows darted up and down. “Don’t like who?”

  “Excuse me, Detective,” my mother broke in firmly. “Pardon me, but please realize that my daughter is upset about everything that’s happened.” She stared first at him, then at me. “She doesn’t particularly like men at the moment.”

  “Is that true, Marsha?” asked the detective, not looking quite as confused. “How about me. Do you like me?”

  “I don’t know you,” I said, ignoring my mother.

  By then Detective Small had let the door snap shut and was leaning against the jamb with his big arms crossed. It was impossible to gauge how interested he was in what I had to tell him. In fact, he tipped his head so that a shadow slanted across his face, obscuring his eyebrows.

  “So Marsha,” he said, “who is it you don’t like.”

  My lips had gone dry. “Mr. Green,” I said finally, my throat dry, too. “He watches me. He watches kids in the neighborhood.”

  “Watches how?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. He just watches,” I said. My mother kept staring at me as if she intended to stare right through my skull and examine what was happening inside my brain.

  Detective Small continued to lean against the door, perhaps counting to ten as he must have been taught to do at the police academy. (“Give the witness time. Allow him to feel the pressure of a silence.”) Above his head, just to the left of the lintel, a little brown spider dangled in a web, its fine legs busy. From down the street came the faint pock-pock of someone hammering stone. I would have liked to have said something more, but right then I couldn’t think of what else to say.

  Finally Detective Small sighed and pushed himself away from the doorjamb. “All right, Marsha. Probably not important. But if you have anything else to report about this Mr. Green,” he added, “anything at all, you let me know.”

  The screen door twanged. A moment later we watched the rumpled back of his blue sports coat diminish down the front walk, past the shaggy grass, the overgrown forsythia, the dandelions and drooping rhododendrons, and out into the bright sun of the sidewalk. He turned right to study Mr. Green’s neat house for a long moment, hands on his hips, which pushed open his jacket just enough to reveal his black holster, before he headed across the street to ring the Sperlings’ doorbell.

  The Sperlings’ door opened, revealing Mrs. Sperling wearing her pink bathrobe. After a moment she stepped back. The detective stepped inside. The Sperlings’ door closed.

  “Well,” said my mother at last in a quiet voice. “I hope you’re proud of yourself. I hope you realize what you’ve done this morning.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good,” she continued, in that same quiet voice. “Because a person should realize when she’s made a mistake and done something that she’ll regret later.”

  Outside a strange golden retriever trotted across our lawn, tags clinking, his nose to the ground. He didn’t stop, but kept nosing this way and that in the grass, not finding what he was looking for, but absorbed in searching, until he passed out of sight.

  “I didn’t make a mistake.”

  My mother stuck the detective’s card under one of the begonias, then stood up and turned her back on me. “Let’s hope not.”

  That’s when I threw my notebook at her. I threw it as hard as I could, every tendon and ligament aching as I drew my arm back and then flung it forward. The notebook flew across the porch. It hit her between the shoulder blades, where the clasp of her brassiere pressed against the thin white fabric of her blouse.

  She stumbled a little, reaching out toward the screen. The notebook fell open at her feet, just behind the heel of her left sandal. One of the pages had got bent in the throwing, and for some reason, this bent page shocked me; it seemed as grievous an offense as what I had just done to my mother.

  “Pick that up.” She didn’t turn around.

  When I didn’t move, she said again: “Pick it up.”

  It seemed too difficult right then to pull myself up on my crutches and maneuver across the floor, so I left them leaning against the table and got down on my knees instead.

  I crawled to where she still stood by the screen door and put out my hand to pull away the notebook. I was close enough that I could see her skin through the weave of her nylon stockings, and to see where a stray hair had caught inside the nylon just above her ankle. Her leg quivered.

  But she didn’t move. She waited until I had dragged myself back across the porch. Then she turned around, not at all fast, but naturally, as if she had forgotten something she meant to tell me.

  In a slow, dull way, I realized that I’d been waiting all summer to hear what she was going to say next. Ever since my mother had found herself alone in the house with me and the twins; ever since the night she slapped me and knocked me down; ever since the moment I’d told her that I hated Mr. Green, she had been waiting to tell me something.

  And perhaps if she had spoken to me then, even told me to go to my room or to wash the dishes, everything might have turned out very differently. But all she said was, “I’ve got to get to work.” Stepping over my legs, she left me alone on the porch with my notebook.

  Thirteen

  All right, Marsha, could you wear this?” Holding up a mildewed Baltimore Orioles jersey my father had given Steven two summers before, my mother demanded, “Would you wear it?”

  “Yes.” I had answered the same thing about a pair of denim pants that were too short, a tan corduroy skirt with a ripped hem, and a two-piece bathing suit that had lost most of its elastic.

  The twins had been gone a week. It was Sunday afternoon—a sultry, breathless afternoon—and, exasperated by the heat and each other and the hiss of sprinklers from the neighbors’ lawns, we had agreed to spend a few hours doing something “useful.” So we stood in her bedroom gathering together a pile of clothing to be given to Goodwill.

  For the last several days we had been operating along a polite timetable of meals and small tasks, going to sleep a little earlier every evening. Neither of us had apologized. It seemed, it still seems, that any apology would have been superfluous.

  The breakfast dishes never got cleared that morning after the detective visited us. They sat on the table all through lunch and into the evening, a fly circling lazily over the cups and plates, congealing butter and toast crusts, the spill of orange juice on the tablecloth. My mother finally cleared the table late that night, after I had gone to bed. When I bumped my way downstairs the next morning, the table was set neatly, the butter in its butter dish, orange juice in its pitcher, a fresh tablecloth laid down. Only the plates were not quite clean. She had not washed our plates.

  Neither of us spoke of this. We ate our breakfast silently on dirty plates. By the next morning the plates had been washed.

  Now, while my mother sorted barefoot through a cache of the twins’ outgrown blue jeans and musty T-shirts, I lay back on her bed by the window and listened to the creak of a cricket from somewhere below. Mr. Green’s cookout was only two hours away and my mother had not yet said whether she was going. Based on the fact that she had tossed his invitation into the kitchen trash can, I had decided my mother wasn’t going, but that she hadn’t figured out how to tell him. Which was why she’d decided to clean out the upstairs closets.

  Once she finished with the twins’ clothes, she started on her own. A beige housedress sailed onto the Goodwill pile, followed by a pair of cracked white patent-leather boots that zipped up the side and a paisley blouse. She added a white straw handbag decorated with ladybugs and then a shimmery thing that might have been a nightgown.

  Abruptly she paused in front of the full-length mirror beside her bureau, holding up a strawberry pink cotton dress with plastic sunflower buttons the size of poker chips. The buttons looked almost exactly like the earrings Aunt Ada was wearing the day
she came to our house and asked me not to tell my mother that she’d been there. In fact, it could have been a dress Ada had bought to go with her earrings and then loaned to my mother. At the recollection of Ada’s visit and the sunflower earring still at the bottom of my underwear drawer, I lay flat and quiet.

  But my mother was not paying attention to me. She was looking at herself in the mirror, examining her reflection as she held up the pink dress, turning her head from side to side. It was a mini-dress I hadn’t seen her wear for years, bought for a trip to Miami Beach that she and my father took for their tenth wedding anniversary. He had called it her “hotsy-totsy dress.”

  “What do you think,” she said finally. “Stay or go?”

  She went into the bathroom to try on the pink mini-dress, then came back out. “Now what do you think?” The short bright dress made her look skinny and tired, but determined. She held her arms away from her side with her back to the mirror.

  “You look like a lipstick.”

  “What color of lipstick?” She smiled for the first time that day. “Magic Magenta? Violet Embrace?” Laughing, she did a little shimmy in front of the mirror. “Ruby Glow Decadent Mist?”

  Watching her pose in front of the mirror reminded me of the stories she used to tell about herself and her sisters. I hadn’t known until that moment how much I missed them, the Mayhew Girls, those resilient sisters in scarlet lipstick, hiding pillowcase underwear under black shantung skirts, declining Latin verbs (amaveram, amaveras) with the clipped, dedicated arrogance of queens. All sitting together on one bed, painting one another’s toenails. Smoking cigarettes under the pink insulation in the eaves of their mother’s house, coughing and laughing in the camphorous, nicotine fug. A tangle of long arms, long legs—one daughter, four heads. You know Fran-Claire-Lois-Ada. They had been so wonderful, so unassailable. It had always been the four of them. There had never been room for anybody else.