The lights turned out, they lay together in the double bed which now, with age, had a pronounced sag toward the middle, rolling them together. But it was a cold night out, a good night to lie close together and feel the warmth of life. Levine closed his eyes and drifted slowly toward sleep.
A sudden sound shook him awake. He blinked rapidly, staring up in the darkness at the ceiling, startled, disoriented, not knowing what it was. But then the sound came again, and he exhaled, releasing held breath. It was the baby from next door, crying.
Move over, world, and give us room, he thought, giving words to the baby’s cries. Make way for the new.
And they’re right, he thought. We’ve got to take care of them, and guide them, and then make way for them. They’re absolutely right.
I’ve got to do something for that little girl, he thought.
In the morning, Levine talked to Crawley. He sat in the client’s chair, beside Crawley’s desk. “About that little girl,” he said.
“You, too? I got to thinking about it myself, last night.”
“We ought to check it out,” Levine told him.
“I know. I figure I ought to look up the death of the first father. Jason Thornbridge, wasn’t it?”
“Good,” said Levine. “I was thinking of going to her school, talking to the teacher. If she’s the kind of child who makes up wild stories all the time, then that’s that, you know what I mean?”
“Sure. You know what school she’s in?”
“Lathmore Elementary, over on Third.”
Crawley frowned, trying to remember. “She tell you that? I didn’t hear it if she did.”
“No, she didn’t. But it’s the only one it could be.” Levine grinned sheepishly. “I’m pulling a Sherlock Holmes,” he said. “She told us she’d stopped in on her way home from school. So she was walking home, and there’s only three schools in the right direction — so we’d be between them and Prospect Park — but they’re close enough for her to walk.” He checked them off on his fingers. “There’s St. Aloysius, but she wasn’t in a school uniform. There’s PS 118, but with a Prospect Park West address and the clothing she was wearing and her good manners, she doesn’t attend any public school. So that leaves Lathmore.”
“Okay, Sherlock,” said Crawley. “You go talk to the nice people at Lathmore. I’ll dig into the Thornbridge thing.”
“One of us,” Levine told him, “ought to check this out with the Lieutenant first. Tell him what we want to do.”
“Fine. Go ahead.”
Levine scraped the fingers of his left hand together, embarrassment reminding him of his need for a cigarette. But this was day number four, and he was going to make it. “Jack,” he said, “I think maybe you ought to be the one to talk to him.”
“Why me? Why not you?”
“I think he has more respect for you.”
Crawley snorted. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“No, I mean it, Jack.” Levine grinned self-consciously. “If I told him about it, he might think I was just dramatizing it, getting emotional or something, and he’d say thumbs down. But you’re the level headed type. If you tell him it’s serious, he’ll believe you.”
“You’re nuts,” said Crawley.
“You are the level-headed type,” Levine told him. “And I am too emotional.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere. All right, go to school.”
“Thanks, Jack.”
Levine shrugged into his coat and plodded out of the squadroom, downstairs, and out to the sidewalk. Lathmore Elementary was three blocks away to the right, and he walked it. There was a smell of snow in the air, but the sky was still clear. Levine strolled along sniffing the snow-tang, his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his black overcoat. The desire for a smoke was less when he was outdoors, so he didn’t hurry.
Lathmore Elementary, one of the myriad private schools which have sprung up to take the place of the enfeebled public school system long since emasculated by municipal politics, was housed in an old mansion on one of the neighborhood’s better blocks. The building was mainly masonry, with curved buttresses and bay windows everywhere, looming three ivy-overgrown stories to a patchwork slate roof which dipped and angled and rose crazily around to no pattern at all. Gold letters on the wide glass pane over the double-doored entrance announced the building’s new function, and just inside the doors an arrow on a wall was marked “OFFICE.”
Levine didn’t want to have to announce himself as a policeman, but the administrative receptionist was so officious and curious that he had no choice. It was the only way he could get to see Mrs. Pidgeon, the principal, without first explaining his mission in minute detail to the receptionist.
Mrs. Pidgeon was baffled, polite, terrified and defensive, but not very much of any of them. It was as though these four emotions were being held in readiness, for one of them to spring into action as soon as she found out exactly what it was a police officer could possibly want in Lathmore Elementary. Levine tried to explain as gently and vaguely as possible:
“I’d like to talk to one of your teachers,” he said. “About a little girl, a student of yours.”
“What about her?”
“She made a report to us yesterday,” Levine told her. “It’s difficult for us to check it out, and it might help if we knew a little more about her, what her attitudes are, things like that.”
Defensiveness began to edge to the fore in Mrs. Pidgeon’s attitude. “What sort of report?”
“I’m sorry,” said Levine. “If there’s nothing to it, it would be better not to spread it.”
“Something about this school?”
“Oh, no,” said Levine, managing not to smile. “Not at all.”
“Very well.” Defensiveness receded, and a sort of cold politeness became more prominent. “You want to talk to her teacher, then.”
“Yes.”
“Her name?”
“Amy Walker. Amy Thornbridge Walker.”
“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Pidgeon’s face suddenly lit with pleasure, not at Levine but at his reminding her of that particular child. Then the pleasure gave way just as suddenly to renewed bafflement. “It’s about Amy? She came to you yesterday?”
“That’s right.”
“Well.” She looked helplessly around the room, aching to find out more but unable to find a question that would get around Levine’s reticence. Finally, she gave up, and asked him to wait while she went for Miss Haskell, the fifth grade teacher. Levine stood as she left the room, then sank back into the maroon leather chair, feeling bulky and awkward in this hushed heavy-draped office.
He waited five minutes before Mrs. Pidgeon returned, this time with Miss Haskell in tow. Miss Haskell, unexpectedly, was a comfortable fortyish woman in a sensible suit and flat shoes, not the thin tall bird he’d expected. He acknowledged Mrs. Pidgeon’s introduction, hastily rising again, and Mrs. Pidgeon pointedly said, “Try not to be too long, Mr. Levine. You may use my office.”
“Thank you.”
She left, and Levine and Miss Haskell stood facing each other in the middle of the room. He motioned at a chair. “Would you sit down, please?”
“Thank you. Mrs. Pidgeon said you wanted to ask me about Amy Walker.”
“Yes, I want to know what kind of child she is, anything you can tell me about her.”
Miss Haskell smiled. “I can tell you she’s a brilliant and well-brought-up child,” she said. “That she’s the one I picked to be student in charge while I came down to talk to you. That she’s always at least a month ahead of the rest of the class in reading the assignments, and that she’s the most practical child I’ve ever met.”