Murder Among Children by Donald E. Westlake

mother, Victorina Regan.”
    We both said how-do-you-do and she invited me to sit down on the sofa. She was a woman in her late fifties, medium height, stocky, pleasant-faced, matronly, maternal. Her dress was plain, her stockings dark, her shoes sensible. She had done her own hair, probably in the same style for the last fifteen years.
    I sat down where she had suggested, where I could see both her and the painting her son was working on. It was a bit idealized, but was otherwise a realistic portrayal of the woman, the chair, the window, the wall. Ed Regan put a dab of red on a section of the window, reached for his stool, and apparently became at once lost in his work. His mother, her head held stiffly, looked at me catty-corner and said, “I understand you’re related to the Kennely girl.”
    “Second cousin.”
    “A nice enough girl. Rather young, of course. Though we can’t hold youth against a person, can we?”
    “I suppose not,” I said.
    “Still,” she said, “some people do seem to insist on staying young entirely too long for their own good. The Wilford boy, for one. He would have been a bad influence on Edwin if we’d let him.”
    “Oh, Terry never meant any harm,” the son said, jollying his mother, and turned briefly to flash me a smile glazed with embarrassment.
    “I’m sure not,” his mother said. “Youth never means any harm, that’s one of its characteristics. But youth is waste, Edwin. Waste of time, waste of resources, waste of God’s precious talents. If more young men were like you, how much better a world this would be.”
    “Everyone has to pick his own path, Mother.”
    “Naturally. I only thank God you’ve chosen the path of wisdom.”
    I felt I was present for a conversation which had been repeating itself, with variants, for years, and I preferred something more topical, so I said, “Mrs. Regan, did you discourage Terry Wilford from seeing your son?”
    “Not at all,” she said, affecting surprise. “Edwin is a free agent. He and young Wilford saw a great deal of each other for a period of time. Until Wilford became involved in the restaurant and moved across town.”
    “Restaurant? Oh, you mean Thing East.”
    “Yes, the place where he was murdered.”
    “I understand you had something to do with getting that location for him.”
    “I did introduce him to the bishop, yes.”
    “So he said. I spoke to him a little while ago.”
    “Bishop Johnson?”
    “Yes. A remarkable man.”
    “A saint, Mr. Tobin. I don’t know what religion you are…”
    She let the sentence hang there for me to finish, but I chose not to, saying instead, “Yes, I was very impressed by him. He told me you brought Terry Wilford to see him, and now I’m wondering, if you disapproved of him, why you helped him that way.”
    “I didn’t disapprove of him, Mr. Tobin,” she said, somewhat stiffly. “I don’t disapprove of anyone, I believe every one of us has the right to choose his or her own road. I would prefer not to have anyone I cared deeply for tarry long on the road where young Wilford seemed inclined to stay, but I would hardly condemn anyone who decided that was where he wanted to be.”
    “I see.”
    “And of course I was delighted,” she went on, “when he took an interest in starting something substantial. He had great energy and great imagination, and I was delighted at the chance to help him begin to put his talents to use.”
    “Of course,” I said, beginning to understand the rules this woman lived by. From the look of the apartment, she lived here, with her son, which had to be an unusual situation; a boy goes off to the East Village to live in a tenement and be a painter, and his mother goes along with him. It would take a remarkable woman to bring that off, and it seemed as though she had done it.
    Of course, the son in such a situation would tend to fade into his mother’s shadow if he weren’t a strong and sturdy personality himself, which Ed Regan wasn’t.