Ransom (21 page)

“I know a cop who suddenly went word-blind when they hung that in his precinct house.”

“If I meet up with those buggers who are holding my wife, I’m not spelling out their rights for them.”

“We won’t go that far. We’ll hand it over to the Department before then.”

The desk sergeant hung up the phone. “Hellibrand will see you at the school. You want someone to go with you? There’s a guy out in the squad room.”

But Jefferson declined the offer, asked directions to the school, and he and Malone hurried out to the car again. They had trouble finding their way about in the storm, but ten minutes later they were being led into the main building of the Zachary Taylor High School by the principal.

Hellibrand was a plump, curly-haired man in his mid-forties who at another time of day might have been jovial; now he was irritable and curious as to why two policemen, one of them an Australian, should want to look through copies of the school year-book. When Jefferson explained who Malone was, the irritation suddenly went out of Helli-brand’s face, to be replaced by genuine sympathy.

“Well, of course. If there’s anything I can do-Latrobe?

No, I can’t remember anyone of that name - I have a good memory for names. You have to have, if you don’t want your school to be just a great big blur of anonymity. How far do you want to look back? Five, six years? There they are. God knows what the kids in them have achieved since. One of them I know, is already a guest of the government. He got life for shooting his father. He wasn’t one of the more promising students.”

Malone and Jefferson had been flicking through the books. Young faces smiled up at them, re-touched to give them all the same look of bland confidence: in a school year-book, Malone guessed, there was no place for a young person’s doubts. Then he stopped, finger pressed down on a face: thin, unsmiling, a white streak in the dark hair. “That’s Latrobe.”

Hellibrand looked at the caption under the photo. “Mark Birmingham ? You mean you think he’s one of the men who kidnapped your wife?”

“No, he’s in The Tombs on a bomb conspiracy charge. He’s an anarchist. But we think he can give us a lead. Where does he come from?”

Hellibrand ran a hand through his hair, shook his head worriedly. “I find it hard to believe - an anarchist! You work your ass off trying to help these kids - you admit to yourself maybe our generation and the one before it fouled up this country for them, but you try to help them - “

“We know, Mr Hellibrand,” said Jefferson patiently. “But what about this kid Birmingham?”

“He was always a quiet kid, hard to approach- but his marks were always good, when he left here he could have taken his pick of any college he wanted to go to. His father wanted him to go to Yale, where he’d been, but the kid picked a small college - somewhere in the mid-West, I think. Don’t quote me, but I think he was trying to get away from his old man.”

“What does that mean?” said Jefferson.

“Nothing.” Hellibrand abruptly seemed to realize he had

fallen into the three-o’clock-in-the-morning trap: confiding in total strangers. “Forget I said it, Captain.”

“Who is his father?”

“Willard Birmingham - he’s a lawyer with one of the big insurance companies.”

“Where does he live?”

“Over in Waquoit, near Garden City. I can call him - “

“No, I think it’ll be better if we drop in on him unannounced. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to get in touch with him.”

Hellibrand frowned, as if he had been accused of preaching revolution to his students. “Captain, I’d be the last one to want to interfere with the police’s duty. It’s a sad commentary on the way things are, but teachers need the law these days. Why, only last week- “

Malone and Jefferson escaped out to their car, drove off while Hellibrand was still locking up the school again. “I was rude,” said Jefferson, “but I’m not interested in his problems. He’ll have more next week and the week after that and the week after that - he can wait for my sympathetic ear.”

“How far to - Waquoit?”

“We’re practically there. I’ve never been out here, but I’ve heard about it. It was a development put up after the war - it catered to the middle-class conservatives and it’s never changed its character. At least on the surface - “

“What’s that mean?”

“Over the past seven or eight years, like a lot of other areas like it, it’s had as much trouble with its kids as the ghettos. Drugs, things like that. This kid Mark Birmingham just seems to have gone all the way.”

They found the Birmingham house, got out of the car and ran through the rain up on to the front porch. They had to press the bell three times before a light appeared behind the small barred window in the front door and a voice, husky with sleep and apprehension, said something, then repeated it more loudly. “Who’s there? What do you want?”

Jefferson had to shout to make himself heard above the noise of the storm. The door was opened a few inches, but still held on a chain, and half a face peered out at them.

“Here’s my badge, Mr Birmingham. It’s important that we see you. It’s about your son Mark.”

The chain rattled and the door swung open. Malone and Jefferson shook the water from their coats, then stepped into a warm entrance hall that instantly suggested that this was a comfortable house, a family house where every penny that could be afforded had been spent to make it a home in which the occupants could be cosseted and protected. Yet the farther Malone went into the house the more he felt something, or someone, was missing. The account had been paid but the goods, the ambience, were still waiting to be collected.

Willard Birmingham was a tall, well-built man with a slight stoop; handsome and grey-haired, he would have got second glances from women much younger than himself. He was dressed in pyjamas and a silk dressing-gown and he had the bewildered, dishevelled air of a man who was still not quite certain that he was wide awake. Elizabeth Birmingham, dark-haired, slim, good-looking, dressed in a silk dressing-gown buttoned to her neck, stood at the foot of the stairs that led to the upper floor.

“It’s about Mark,” Birmingham explained to his wife, and led Malone and Jefferson through an archway into a large living-room. Mrs Birmingham followed them, going to stand beside her husband and take his hand in hers. “Has he asked to see us?”

Jefferson looked at them in surprise. “You know where he

is

?’

The Birminghams looked at each other, then the husband nodded shamefacedly. “We’ve known all along. We recognized him the first day his picture appeared in the newspapers, even though he’d grown his hair and dyed the white streak in it.”

“We have been trying to make up our minds whether to

go see him,” said Mrs Birmingham. “We didn’t know whether he would want us to - we haven’t seen or heard from him in almost two years - “

“We tried to do our best for him - ” There was no whining note in Birmingham’s voice; he stated a fact but he was puzzled by it. “We gave him a good home - “

Malone had heard it all before, in another accent; he even felt he had been in this room before. He was taking in his surroundings without moving his head; he had been in a dozen rooms like this on the North Shore back home in Sydney. The paintings on the wall that said the owner wanted them to be of his impressions of the world, not the artist’s; the too-impeccable taste of the furnishings that made one look for just one note out of place; the books on the coffee table that would be dusted just as carefully as the furniture. They turn everything into a museum without realizing it, Malone thought, and then they wonder why their kids leave home.

“Why did he leave home?” he asked.

The two people opposite him looked at him again, recognizing for the first time that he had a strange accent, that he was a foreigner. Birmingham’s face at once closed up. “Who are you? You’re not with the police, are you? Are you a reporter?”

Malone let Jefferson tell them who he was. They looked back at him with sympathetic curiosity, but only for a moment; then they looked puzzled and finally incredulous. “You don’t mean Mark had anything to do with the kidnapping?”

“No!” Mrs Birmingham shook her head fiercely; there were already tears in her eyes. “I don’t even believe he had anything to do with the bombing! He’s a gentle boy - “

Jefferson sighed, looked at Birmingham and waited for him to comfort and quieten his wife. “Your son will get a fair trial and I’m not anticipating what the jury will say -all I can say is that he and his friends are gonna have a tough time disproving the evidence.”

“It could be a frame-up!” Mrs Birmingham pushed herself away from her husband’s arms. Middle-class conservative though she is, Malone thought, she knows all the right accusations against cops when her own son is in trouble. “The police only want a conviction!”

“Not only, Mrs Birmingham,” said Jefferson patiently; he even managed to sound sympathetic. “We want a conviction, but we want one for the right men. It’s not gonna help us if we’ve just taken in the first anarchists we could lay our hands on and we’ve left the ones who did the bombing free to plant more bombs. Especially if they kill more cops.”

Birmingham soothed his wife again, then nodded at Jefferson. “That’s logical, Captain. But how could Mark have had anything to do with the kidnapping if he’s been in prison for two months?”

“We don’t think he had anything directly to do with it, but we think there could be a connection.”

“I’m trying to save the lives of my wife and Mrs Forte,” said Malone. He looked at his watch, but it had stopped. It was a cheap one, another manifestation of his reluctance to spend money on small things, and it had to be wound regularly; time had never really been valuable to him, not even as a cop, but now every hour had to be stretched for everything it could afford. He looked around the room for a clock but there was none. He dropped his wrist and went on, “You didn’t answer my question. Why did your son leave home?”

Mrs Birmingham glanced at her husband, but he was looking down at his slippered feet. He had taken his arm from round his wife and his hands rested loosely on his thighs; he looked like a man whose strength had suddenly run out, who had finally faced the truth of a fact he had been denying for a long, exhausting time. When he spoke his voice was now just a monotone.

“It’s a cliche, but it was the so-called generation gap. Generations ? It was more as if we were foreigners to each

other - we didn’t even speak the same language. We, my wife and I, could have been wrong - “

“No,” said his wife. “We weren’t wrong!”

He looked up at her, showing the same patience Jefferson had. “Maybe. But we weren’t right, either. God knows where the answer is - ” He looked at the two policemen, but they, with more experience of the problem, had no answer for him. “I had disagreements with my own father when I was young -who doesn’t? But we both basically agreed on what way of life was best. He saluted the flag and so did I, without question. But Mark- ” He looked at Malone and Jefferson. “Do you have any children?”

“No,” said Jefferson.

“My wife and I have only been married eight weeks,” said Malone.

“Oh!” Elizabeth Birmingham looked at him, her face all at once clouding with pain. He suddenly realized she was not selfish, that she was capable of feeling sympathy for himself, a stranger. Behind the wall she had built about her, not all the pity she felt was for herself. “I’m sorry, Mr Malone. I hope - “

“So do I,” said Malone, softening towards her. “But time is running out. We need your help to get through to your son. He won’t talk to us - “

“There’s no guarantee he’ll talk to us,” said Birmingham.

“That’s why we’ve hesitated about going to see him.” Elizabeth Birmingham seemed to have aged ten years since Malone and Jefferson had come into this room with her and her husband; the night cream glistened on her face, but it would never eradicate the scars that had been inflicted on her in the past ten minutes. “You wonder where you failed, We’d given them everything - “

“Them?” said Malone.

He had been looking around the room again. There was only one photograph in it, a gilt-framed picture standing on a side table: Willard and Elizabeth Birmingham stood on the deck of a boat, arms linked and Birmingham holding

aloft some sort of trophy: they were both laughing happily, no relation at all to the two people here in the room this morning. There were no photographs of Mark, their son, or anyone else.

“Them?” Malone repeated. “Do you have any other children?”

Mrs Birmingham pulled her lips together; she had said more than she had intended to. Her husband sat up straight, clenched a fist and tapped it gently on the couch. Suddenly he stood up and went out of the room. Malone half-rose, but Jefferson shook his head. Mrs Birmingham sat quite still, staring at the two policemen; it was evident she knew her husband would be back. He returned in a few moments, carrying a large leather folding frame. In it, facing each other with quiet, knowing smiles, were Mark Birmingham and a beautiful, dark-haired girl.

“That’s Mark, taken just before he went to college. And that is Julie, our daughter, taken in her last year at college.”

“Where is she now?”

Birmingham hesitated, looked at his wife. Then: “We don’t know. We haven’t heard from her for almost four years.”

“Any reason?”

Birmingham sat down beside his wife again, looked at the two photos in the leather frame, then with an effort folded it shut. “You must wonder what sort of parents we’ve been-”

Malone could feel the sympathy for them welling up inside him: whatever they had done, they had done it for what they had thought were the best of reasons. But then his own selfishness swept in: his only interest was in getting Lisa back alive and unhurt.

“Mr Birmingham - “

But Birmingham didn’t hear him. “Julie wasn’t like Mark. She was much more outgoing - she lived our sort of life - ” He opened the frame, looked at the photos it held, then shut it again. Malone wondered how many times it had been

opened in the past four years. “She was at Barnard, doing so well - “