Murder Among Children by Donald E. Westlake Page A

Wanting to try to comprehend the boy somewhat, I turned to him now, apparently absorbed in his painting, and said, “Ed, you know most of the people in Terry’s crowd. Would you say he had many enemies?”
    “Enemies?” He paused, his brush this time tipped with pearl-gray, and stood gazing at a corner of the ceiling. Frowning, he said, “Somebody who’d want to kill him, you mean?”
    “Not necessarily. Just anyone who might have a grudge against him or dislike him for any reason.”
    “Huh.” He shrugged, and frowned now at the painting, and said, “Well, there’s Jack Parker. I suppose you could call him an enemy of Terry’s.” He looked at me. “Not that he’d want to kill Terry or anything like that,” he said. “But Jack doesn’t like Terry. Didn’t like him.”
    “With perfectly adequate cause,” Mrs. Regan added. “Youth again, fickle, flitting back and forth, never knowing its own mind.”
    I said to the son, “I’ve already heard about Jack Parker. Anybody else?”
    He touched the gray to the canvas, frowned at the result, frowned at his palette, finally shook his head. “Nobody,” he said. “Terry was an easygoing guy, he got along with just about everybody. Even Mother,” he added, and grinned at me.
    The mother smiled, too, indulgently, and said, “I’m just everyone’s den mother, Mr. Tobin. You know how it is.”
    I knew how she wanted it to be, though I had no way of knowing whether or not that was the way it actually was. Nor could I think of anything else to ask either of them. They were both deeply involved in some half-fantasy life plan of their own, and I doubted if any third party ever made much of an impression on them.
    On a sudden impulse, I asked Ed Regan, “Do you know Vicki Oppenheim?”
    I’d expected the mother to answer, and she did. “Now there’s a one! Think what that girl could be if she wanted, and how she wastes herself. There’s someone who should talk to Bishop Johnson.”
    “Any day now,” Ed Regan told me, grinning, “Mother’s going to promote Bishop Johnson to God.”
    “Saint is high enough,” his mother said. “You remember what he told you, young man.”
    I got to my feet, saying, “Well, thank you for your time. I appreciate it.”
    “Anything we can do,” the son said. “We both like Robin, don’t we, Mother?”
    “Of course. A really sweet young thing. Frankly, Mr. Tobin, I believe you have right on your side. That young girl couldn’t have murdered anybody that way.”
    “That’s what I think, too,” I said, and moved toward the door. “Thank you again. No, that’s all right,” I told the son, as he started away from the easel, “I can find my own way out, you keep on with your work. It’s coming along very well.”
    “You think so?” He smiled fondly at the painting.
    I went back down the dim hall and out of the apartment and down the stairs. At the foot of the stairs on the first floor the two boys were still scratching away with the Coke bottle shard, patiently and gigglingly printing out some long involved and no doubt scatological paragraph in Spanish. They looked up at me as I started down the last flight, and their faces changed, their attention diverted to something above me.
    I looked up, and something black was hurtling down the center of the stairwell. These first-floor stairs were wider than the ones above, I’d been holding the banister, I was directly beneath.
    I leaped to the side, lost my footing on the slate stair, fell heavily, heard something crash and boom behind my head, and a second later there was a scream that choked off in midstride. I slid painfully down several steps, thumping my sides and back, before I finally managed to stop myself and sit up and look around.
    At the foot of the stairs one of the two boys was standing ashen-faced against the wall. The other one was lying on his back at the foot of the stairs with a large square black metal box sitting canted on his head and shoulders.