Эд Горман - Murder Straight Up

She looked down at her registration book. Something seemed to bother her. “How old is your daughter?”

I took a guess. “Sixteen.” If I’d said, “Oh, sixteen, seventeen,” I probably wouldn’t have sounded too convincing.

“That’s funny. The only teenage girl we have listed here from last night is a Diane Beaufort. And she listed her address as Falworthy House.” She offered a kind of half-frown. “Falworthy House is something between a halfway house and an orphanage.”

“Boy, that is strange,” I agreed. But my heart was slamming against my chest and my palms were wet. I’d gotten what I wanted, and now I needed out of here.

“Hmm,” she said, concerned-looking now. “What did you say your daughter’s name was?”

I gave her a name and then I gave her good-bye. Just as I was leaving, the tiny baby with the burning cheeks erupted into a hell of pained crying.

Falworthy House had once been a three-story redbrick mansion. Now, with a cyclone fence surrounding the perimeter, it resembled one of those forbidding places in which secret government experiments are conducted. Not even apple blossoms and a sweet gentle breeze helped.

The front gate had to be buzzed open and to get inside you had to identify yourself, which I did. Then I added, “I’m here to talk about one of your people who may be in some trouble.”

I was buzzed inside.

On the broad two-stepped concrete porch sat several teenagers eyeing me with a mixture of contempt and irony. You remember what it’s like being a teenager — nobody knows shit but you. Like that.

When I reached them, I nodded to a boy wearing a long earring and green-tinted hair. He glared back at me.

Inside was a vestibule big enough to house a hockey game. The decor was vintage seventies. Lots of ferns and posters with various Love messages. From a room upstairs came the sounds of a Donna Summer disco record. The place was stuck in a time warp.

The small nervous man who seemed to jump out of one of the nearby doors came right up to me and said, “You’re here about the student in trouble?” He was obviously unhappy, maybe even a bit frightened.

“Yes.”

“Won’t you come in my office?”

He was balding and he wore rimless glasses and he moved as if he had an arthritic ache in his joints. The weird thing was I’d bet he wasn’t more than forty. And to complement the seventies motif, he wore a pair of genuine bell bottoms along with one of those wide belts that had once belonged to the counterculture but were now affected by the likes of Wayne Newton.

His office was a monk’s cell. Paperbacks of all kinds were jammed into bare pine bookcases. A poster of Thomas Merton stared myopically down on us. Dirty sunlight fell through a dirty window onto his desk, in back of which, along a windowsill, were arranged half a dozen Diet Pepsi cans filthy with cigarette butts and ashes.

“Who is it?” he asked, pushing his glasses up his tiny nose.

“Who?”

“The student. You said you were here about a student.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m actually not sure about the name. And it isn’t one student, it’s two.”

“Two?”

“Yes. A boy and a girl.”

He glanced up at the Thomas Merton poster as if for guidance. “I see.” He said this as if I’d just hit him as hard as I could in the stomach. He sank into a chair and stared out the dirty window. “We won’t be open in another six months.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Another six months, I said,” he replied, still staring out the window. “Right now in the city council there’s this big battle going on about Falworthy, about rezoning so we can’t operate here. And it’s exactly this kind of thing that’s going to get us run out.” He shook his head miserably. He had very fine, almost babyish hair and a somewhat petulant upper lip that was trying very hard to grow a mustache. Very hard. “If they only understood that I’m doing this for them,” he said. He shook his head some more, and I had the uncomfortable impression for a moment that he was going to cry. Then I really wouldn’t know what the fuck to do. He turned back to me. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve had a hard week, I’m afraid.” He put out his hand. “Karl Eler. With a K .”

We shook.

“Would you like a Diet Pepsi or coffee or something?”

“No thanks.”

He looked at me with ice-blue eyes. “Then I guess we might as well get it over with.”

The quavering lip and the desperate gaze were making me wish I hadn’t come.

“First of all, let’s discuss what they did. That way maybe I can help you find who they are.”

“Actually, I’m not sure they did anything.”

For a moment, just a moment, a smile seemed to play at the edges of his prissy little mouth. Then he tensed up. “Maybe we’d better talk about you before we talk about them.”

“Me?”

“Yes, I’d like to see some ID if you don’t mind.”

“Sure.”

I got out my wallet and handed it to him. He looked at my Federated Security card for a long time.

“So just what does this entitle you to?” he asked.

“Exactly nothing. I mean, you could throw me out. The only thing is, if you do I’ll go straight to the police and tell them what I know.”

“Know about what?”

“About two Falworthy students being at Channel Three last night when David Curtis was being murdered.”

“Oh, my God,” he said. “Oh, my God.”

During the next ten minutes I told him everything I knew. I described the boy as best I could, though I hadn’t really gotten much of a good glance at him, and then I described the fetching blond girl and how she’d been injured and how she’d turned herself in to the emergency ward early this morning.

“The name I got on her from the hospital was Diane Beaufort,” I said. “It could be a phony.”

“No. It’s her real name.”

“Care to tell me about her?”

He shrugged. “I suppose this is a terrible thing to say, but they’re all kind of interchangeable here, really. I mean, she’s from a broken home, her mother an alcoholic, her father doing time. That describes at least half the kids here. She’s had various emotional problems in the two years she’s been here, the most serious of which, as far as the law is concerned, being some shoplifting trouble she got into. Kids do that. Steal as a way of punishing themselves, hoping to get caught. Anyway, Diane isn’t any more or less crazy than anybody else in this place” — he smiled with a certain bitterness — “including me. My wife left me a year ago, and I guess I still consider myself one of the walking wounded. She lived here with me — we had kind of an apartment upstairs — but finally she couldn’t take it anymore. The kids. Always getting in trouble, I mean. She met this professor of sociology.” He twisted his lips bitterly. “I’ve personally always thought sociology was nothing more than quackery.”

He was into himself now, which was probably good for him, but I was in a hurry. “What would she be doing at Channel Three?”

“Throwing rocks at the windows, maybe. Or writing something ugly on one of the executives’ cars. She blames them, of course.”

“Blames Channel Three?”

“Umm-hmm.”

“For what?”

He looked at me as if I were the worst kind of bumpkin. “For playing a role in Stephen’s death.”

Maybe I was a bumpkin. I had no idea what he was talking about. “Who’s Stephen and how did he die?”

“Stephen Chandler. He was a student here. He was one of the subjects for Channel Three’s report on teenage suicide, and he killed himself. Many of the kids here blame Channel Three.”

So it made sense, after all.