Murder Among Children by Donald E. Westlake

Author:Donald E. Westlake [Westlake, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4804-2897-3
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2013-05-08T20:27:00+00:00

18

HIS NAME WAS JIM Caldwell and we had a hell of a time finding him. Every bartender Hulmer talked to sent us on to another bar, until I began to believe we were being sent on a snipe hunt, but all at once we walked into one black and crimson joint, the jukebox pounding away with the bass turned so far up and the treble turned so far down that nothing could be distinguished but the beat, and when Hulmer asked the bartender the same old question, this bartender leaned across the bar and pointed toward a booth way at the back, in almost total darkness.

We walked back there, Hulmer in the lead, the customers studying us with blank faces, and at the last table we found a tall, rangy, strong-looking man with straightened hair, slightly buck teeth, and a pearl-gray suit that seemed to glow in the dark. Sitting beside him was a dull-eyed young woman, plain of face, a trifle overweight, wearing a rumpled white blouse with long sleeves. It was cool back in here, but up front the sunlight was still an open-eyed glare on the plate-glass windows, and these two weren’t dressed right for the day. In the man’s case, the clothing could be put down to narcissism, the occupational mental disease of pimps. In the woman’s case, the long sleeves more than likely hid the marks of addiction.

On the way uptown in Hulmer’s ancient black Buick, he had told me the little that Irene Boles’ sister had told him about Jim Caldwell. He had several women, Irene had been one of his women for three years, he had a reputation for a bad temper, he had no arrests or convictions that the sister knew of, and he hadn’t killed Irene because he’d been at the sister’s apartment for four hours that day, with three other people present, the four hours including the period when the murder had taken place. And the reason he’d been there was that Irene had run out on him and he wanted her back and he assumed sooner or later she’d show up at her sister’s place.

It had been Hulmer’s opinion, based on the sound of the sister on the phone, that she wasn’t likely to be a party to manufacturing an alibi for the murderer of Irene. In fact, Hulmer had the impression the woman was sorry she knew anything to get Jim Caldwell off the hook. Hulmer believed there was no love lost between Jim Caldwell and the sister of Irene Boles.

Looking at him now, sitting at his ease in the back booth of Mighty Micky’s, I was sorry he was alibied, because otherwise he was exactly what I would like for Terry Wilford’s murderer: brutal enough to have used the knife, clever enough to have used Robin’s state of shock to his own advantage.

I found myself thinking: Do you have the same thing in red?

Hulmer did the talking at first, beginning with a civil and slightly mush-mouthed “Mr. Caldwell?”

Caldwell preened under the Mr.

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