“Secretary right now. Plus acting president until next week’s election. I’m in line now, with Bart dead and Joe in jail. But I don’t care much about it. I could probably whip any of the guys, but it seems a hell of a lot of trouble.”
Apparently Stub didn’t know it, but he was on the verge of graduating from membership in the teenage gang altogether. He seemed to be gaining adult perspective enough to be vaguely dissatisfied with the group, and only habit, I guessed, was keeping him in the group now. I also sensed he wouldn’t graduate into an adult criminal gang as would others of the Purple Pelicans. He would be one of the lucky few who could rise above his slum environment.
He wasn’t hooked with heroin like twenty percent of the gang, having learned his lesson after one unpleasant session when he was fourteen. The most important thing I learned from Stub, besides a closer picture of the gang itself, was that Bart Meyers was “getting religion” and had been influenced by a YMCA worker. He had been against the use of narcotics in the gang, and that’s why some of the guys wanted Joe to challenge him. Like most of the others, Joe thought little of Bart’s reform plan. Gradually Stub warmed to his subject, and for the next fifteen minutes I listened to an amazing story of how an organized adult gang was deliberately exploiting a bunch of teen-agers. The Purple Pelicans’ contact with this adult group was a hoodlum named Buzz Thurmond. But the Gravediggers were organized similarly by a different hood named Limpy Alfred, so there was evidently a big boss above them. Who this boss was, Stub had no idea. But it was generally accepted by both juvenile clubs that they were under the protection of a powerful adult gang which would furnish them with bail and legal service if they ever got in trouble. This had been going on for four years, and now this adult gang had ruled a cessation to hostilities between the Purple Pelicans and the Gravediggers. The boys got their narcotics from pushers introduced by Buzz Thurmond, who also supplied them with a fence. The pushers were a barber named Sam Polito, and a pool room habitué named Art Cooney. The fence’s name was Harry Krebb. I noted these names but I was primarily interested in Buzz Thurmond and Limpy Alfred, and their boss, whoever he turned out to be.
“Did Buzz Thurmond know of Bart’s reform campaign?” I asked.
Stub looked startled. Glancing at me sidewise, he said in a suddenly thoughtful voice, “Yeah. I guess he wouldn’t like it much, would he?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” I said dryly. “Might put a crimp in his business. One more thing, Stub. Did you know the reason the cops showed up so conveniently to catch Joe on the spot was that fifteen minutes previously they got an anonymous phone call from some girl telling them a reefer party was in progress at the club room?”
“No,” he said with surprise.
“Any idea who the girl might be?”
He shook his head. I told him the police thought it was either Bart’s girl or Joe’s wanting to break up the fight because she was afraid her boy friend would get hurt. Stub didn’t think much of this idea, though, since Bart’s girl didn’t like fighting but she wouldn’t dare “pull a stunt like that, while Joe’s girl would figure he’d win, she wouldn’t call.”
I tried to get the name of Joe’s girl from him, but he told me if Joe hadn’t told me her name, Joe mustn’t want to get her mixed in, so I didn’t press the point.
Before I left, he told me that any time I needed him, to either drop at his home or look for a purple jacket. “I’ll pass the word that you’re okay,” he assured me, and added, “And I’m going to get a few of my closest friends to work with me, in helping you.”
“I can use help,” I said. As I started to drive away, he stood on the sidewalk and waved me a friendly goodbye.
5
The rest of the day, I spent visiting. First, I saw Stella Quint, the dead boy’s girl. She was an attractive blonde of about sixteen, whose eyes were deeply shadowed and flecked with red.
She spoke to me without enthusiasm when her mother left us alone in the small, crowded room, furnished with cheap sofas and ancient easy chairs, and tables and lamps, and a brand new television set. Her tone indicated she never expected to get over the shock of Bart Meyers’ death, and I couldn’t get much from her. After telling her who I was and why I came, I asked bluntly, “Stella, did you phone the police at nine forty-five last night?”
Surprise formed on her face, but no alarm. “Me? No. Phone them for what?”
“Do you know of any girl who did?”
She shook her head, in a disinterested way.
“What’s Joe Brighton’s girl’s name?” I asked.
“Ruth Zimmerman,” she said dully.
“Live around here?”
“Around the corner on Tamm. Six forty-six.”
I left her feeling that Bart Meyers had probably been the girl’s first love, and that the tragic effects on the girl could be more permanent than if both of them had been adults.
Ruth Zimmerman was something else again. She was about sixteen, too, but self-possessed. I asked her to take a walk with me since her house was such a bedlam of television sets going full blast, from her own parlor and those of her neighbors, with her mother trying to quiet a howling baby.
She walked in a sinuous way that was calculated to give a sensual effect, but instead gave her a curiously defenseless air. Her development of coordination hadn’t kept pace with her bountiful physical development. Ruth’s general attitude was that of a woman who has lost a man, but isn’t going to cry about it because another would be along soon.
I spoke bluntly to her, when we reached the sidewalk. “You think Joe’s going to take this rap, don’t you?”
She moved her shoulders slightly. “I hope not. From what the kids say, though, the cops have got too good a case. Even if he’s innocent, he’s cooked.”
I asked her the question I’d asked Stella. “Why’d you make that call to the police last night, Ruth?”
Her eyes opened wide. “What?”
“Some girl phoned and said she was Joe’s girl friend,” I said, distorting the truth a little. “Naturally, I thought it was you.”
“Some other girl? Well, that’s a nerve. What’d she want? Permission to see Joe?”
Apparently she thought I meant the call had come after Joe’s arrest. Since I doubted that she would have the ability to make such a perfect parry on the spur of the moment, I decided she couldn’t know anything about the call.
“I suppose,” I said, wanting to kill the subject. “When the police wouldn’t give out any information, she hung up.”
My next stop was to visit Bart Meyers’ mother. She lived in a two-room walkup of a building which looked as if it should have been condemned years ago. She was alone.
The woman was only about thirty-five, thin, but not unattractive in an undernourished sort of way. She had little to say that could help me, although I got a picture of Bart himself that was at considerable variance with the previous picture I had had of a tough juvenile gang leader. Granted that it was a mother’s-eye view, and further sugar-coated by the fresh grief which makes people recall virtues and forget vices of loved ones, it was still rather surprising. Even after discounting a good portion of the panegyric, Bart Meyers took shape in my mind as a basically nice kid.
He had always been an organizer, his mother told me, and if he got into fights and at one time or another whipped every kid in the area, she blamed this on the tough neighborhood, where children either fight or are labeled sissies.
He was a loving son, too, she told me with some pride. She said that many of Bart’s friends were openly contemptuous of their parents, but he constantly showed his affection for her with kisses every time he left the house, or upon his return.