The matron threw back her head and laughed with a neigh like a horse.
Cookie, with that devilish quickness of children to scent sympathy and play up to it, took one look at Wanger, wrinkled up his muzzle into a monkey grimace and began to emit the moderator opening stanzas of a good hearty bawl.
“Yeah. See?” Wanger said, fixing an accusing eye around the room. “Don’t y’know kids that age are afraid of cops to begin with? Each one of you guys is a natural enemy to it, and when you all gang up on it at once—”
“We’re in civvies, ain’t we?” one of them retorted in perfect seriousness. “He didn’t see the badges, so how could he tell?”
“The expert child handler,” another chuckled under his breath as they moved toward the door.
The last one said morosely, “I hope y’have better luck than we had. Jazes, I’d rather tackle the hard-to-crackest yegg any day than a kid like this that don’t even know what you’re saying to it at all.”
“It knows all right,” Wanger grunted. “It takes a little finesse, that’s all.”
The matron was the only one who stayed in the room, though her value was problematical. It had been found early in the game that she terrified their “material witness” far more than all the males put together. If she came any closer than the doorway, he went into nightmare hysterics.
Wanger drew up a chair, sat down on it, spread his legs at a ninety-degree angle and perched Cookie on one.
“We’re going to play Charlie McCarthy again,” the matron chuckled pessimistically. “I don’t think he was even awake through the whole thing that night—”
“He was awake all right. Who’s doing this?”
Cookie was beginning to know Wanger from previous knee “interviews.” He smiled favoringly, perhaps even a trifle venally, up at him. “You got’ny more jelly beans?”
“No, the doctor says I gave y’too many already.” Wanger got down to work. “Who made your daddy go in the closet, Cookie?”
“Nomebody made him, he wannedta go. He was playin’ a game.”
“That’s the same place where y’got stumped before,” the matron pointed out gratuitously.
Wanger snapped his head around with a flash of unfeigned ill temper, rare with him. “Listen, will you do me a favor!” He drew a long, preparatory belly breath to see him through what he knew he was in for. “Who was he playing the game with. Cookie?”
“Us.”
“Yes, but who’s us? You and who else?”
“Me and him and the lady.”
“What lady?”
“The lady.”
“What lady?”
“The lady that was here.”
“Yes, but what lady was here?”
“The lady that, the lady that—” It wasn’t that Cookie wasn’t willing; the dialectics of the thing were throwing him. “The lady that was playing the game with us,” he concluded with a burst of inspiration.
Wanger had nearly run through the breath supply he’d laid in by now; he let the dregs of it out with a dejected hiss.
“Y’see how he gets away from y’each time? That kid isn’t going to need a mouth when he grows up.”
Wanger was not in an equable mood. “Listen, McGovern, I’m not kidding, if you make one more side remark while I’m doing this—”
“Doing what?” the matron wanted to know, but with prudent inaudibility.
Wanger took out a small black pocket notebook. He turned back to his knee-riding witness, who was swinging his legs blithely. “Well, look, what was the name of the game?”
“Hide-’n-seek!” crowed Cookie positively. He was on familiar ground now.
“Whose turn was it first?”
“Mine!”
“And then whose turn was it?”
“ ’Nen the lady’s!”
“And after that?”
“ ’Nen it was my daddy’s turn.”
“Build-up,” murmured Wanger softly. He scribbled almost undecipherably on his free knee, using the curve of one arm to support his other burden: “Invegled—” He crossed it out, substituted, “Invagled—” He crossed that out, too, scrawled: “Lured in during game of hide-and-seek.”
Then he looked up bitterly. “What the hell! It don’t make sense! How’s a strange woman that the guy never saw before going to walk into a house and get a full-grown man to play games with her — just like that!”
The sardonic matron said very softly, to make sure she couldn’t be accused of having spoken at all, “You’d be surprised. But not the kind of games you mean.”
The book hit the opposite wall and dropped with a little flurry.
“What’sa matter?” asked Cookie, looking after it interestedly. “What’d the book do, ha?”
“Wait a minute, you’re taking it for granted he never saw her before, aren’t you?” the matron tried to remind him, at the risk of her neck.
“You heard what he says each time!” Wanger hollered over at her wrathfully. “I’ve got it jotted down in that thing six times over! She never came to their house before.”
Cookie started to pucker up into his wizened monkey expression again.
“I’m not sore at you, sonny,” Wanger hastily amended patting the slope of Cookie’s head mollifyingly a couple of times.
Then it suddenly came. Cookie looked up at him with the uncertainty of one whose confidence in a relationship has just been shaken. “Whoua you mad at then’? Are you mad at Miss Baker?”
“Who’s Miss Baker?”
“The lady that was playin’ games with—”
Wanger nearly dropped him to the floor on the back of his head. “My God, I actually got her name out of him! Did you hear that? Here I didn’t even think he—”
His enthusiasm was short-lived. His face dimmed again. “Aw, it was probably just a spiked handle she gave herself. She started being Miss Baker when she came in the door, she stopped being Miss Baker the minute she got outside it again. If I could only get an idea of what the stall was she sold herself to Moran on, to be let in here like that, it might help some—”
“One of the neighbors?” suggested the matron.
“We’ve canvassed every one of them for six blocks in all directions. Cookie, what did Miss Baker say to your daddy when he first opened the door and let her in?”
“She said hullo,” he faltered tentatively, evidently doing his conscientious best to fulfill what was required of him.
“That’s going to start in again,” sighed the matron resignedly.
Wanger glanced around in the direction of the stairs. “I wonder if she’d be any help— Ask the doctor if she’s in condition to come down for just a minute. Tell him I don’t want to question her, y’understand, I just want to see if she can throw some light on a point the kid brought up. I won’t keep her a minute.”
“Don’t take any lead pipe to the kid while I’m out of the room now,” the matron warned. “I’m supposed to be in attendance the whole time he’s with you.”
She returned in a couple of minutes. “They didn’t want her to, but she did want to. Shell be right down.”
The doctor and a nurse both came in with her. She walked very slowly. The murder hadn’t been in the closet out there; it was in here on her face.
“Now, please—” the doctor urged Wanger.
“I promise you,” Wanger assured him.
She was a mother. She was half-dead herself, but she was still a mother. “You’re not tiring him too much, are you, officer?” She tottered over to the two of them, bent forward and kissed the youngster. The doctor and the nurse held her up, each by an arm.
Wanger almost didn’t have the heart to go ahead. But, after all, it had to be done sooner or later. “Mrs. Moran, I don’t suppose there’s a Miss Baker that you happen to know of— I’m trying to find out if there really is such a person or if it was just a— He just mentioned a Miss Baker—”