Black House

Jack Sawyer, at whom both of the other men in the room are staring, takes time to adjust to the three thoughts he now thinks he thinks. The first is not so much a thought as a response that embodies a hidden thought: from the moment Fred Marshall clutched his hand and said "Boy oh boy," Jack found himself liking the man, an unanticipated turn in the evening’s plot. Fred Marshall strikes him as something like the poster boy for small-town life. If you put his picture on billboards advertising French County real estate, you could sell a lot of second homes to people in Milwaukee and Chicago. Marshall’s friendly, good-looking face and slender runner’s body are as good as testimonials to responsibility, decency, good manners and good neighborliness, modesty, and a generous heart. The more Fred Marshall accuses himself of selfishness and stupidity, the more Jack likes him. And the more he likes him, the more he sympathizes with his terrible plight, the more he wishes to help the man. Jack had come to the station expecting that he would respond to Dale’s friend like a policeman, but his cop reflexes have rusted from disuse. He is responding like a fellow citizen. Cops, as Jack well knows, seldom view the civilians caught up in the backwash of a crime as fellow citizens, certainly never in the early stages of an investigation. (The thought hidden at the center of Jack’s response to the man before him is that Fred Marshall, being what he is, cannot harbor suspicions about anyone with whom he is on good terms.)

Jack’s second thought is that of both a cop and a fellow citizen, and while he continues his adjustment to the third, which is wholly the product of his rusty yet still accurate cop reflexes, he makes it public. "The bikes I saw outside belong to Tyler’s friends? Is someone questioning them now?"

"Bobby Dulac," Dale says. "I talked to them when they came in, but I didn’t get anywhere. According to them, they were all together on Chase Street, and Tyler rode off by himself. They claim they didn’t see anything. Maybe they didn’t."

"But you think there’s more."

"Honest to God, I do. But I don’t know what the dickens it could be, and we have to send them home before their parents get bent out of shape."

"Who are they, what are their names?"

Fred Marshall wraps his fingers together as if around the handle of an invisible baseball bat. "Ebbie Wexler, T. J. Renniker, and Ronnie Metzger. They’re the kids Ty’s been hanging around with this summer." An unspoken judgment hovers about this last sentence.

"It sounds like you don’t consider them the best possible company for your son."

"Well, no," says Fred, caught between his desire to tell the truth and his innate wish to avoid the appearance of unfairness. "Not if you put it like that. Ebbie seems like kind of a bully, and the other two are maybe a little on the . . . slow side? I hope . . . or I was hoping . . . that Ty would realize he could do better and spend his free time with kids who are more on, you know . . ."

"More on his level."

"Right. The trouble is, my son is sort of small for his age, and Ebbie Wexler is . . . um . . ."

"Heavyset and tall for his age," Jack says. "The perfect situation for a bully."

"You’re saying you know Ebbie Wexler?"

"No, but I saw him this morning. He was with the other two boys and your son."

Dale jolts upright in his chair, and Fred Marshall drops his invisible bat. "When was that?" Dale asks. At the same time, Fred Marshall asks, "Where?"

"Chase Street, about ten past eight. I came in to pick up Henry Ley-den and drive him home. When we were on our way out of town, the boys drove their bikes into the road right in front of me. I got a good look at your son, Mr. Marshall. He seemed like a great kid."

Fred Marshall’s widening eyes indicate that some kind of hope, some promise, is taking shape before him; Dale relaxes. "That pretty much matches their story. It would have been right before Ty took off on his own. If he did."

"Or they took off and left him," says Ty’s father. "They were faster on their bikes than Ty, and sometimes they, you know . . . they teased him."

"By racing ahead and leaving him alone," Jack says. Fred Marshall’s glum nod speaks of boyhood humiliations shared with this sympathetic father. Jack remembers the inflamed, hostile face and raised finger of Ebbie Wexler and wonders if and how the boy might be protecting himself. Dale had said that he smelled the presence of falsity in the boys’ story, but why would they lie? Whatever their reasons, the lie almost certainly began with Ebbie Wexler. The other two followed orders.

For the moment setting aside the third of his thoughts, Jack says, "I want to talk to the boys before you send them home. Where are they?"

"The interrogation room, top of the stairs." Dale aims a finger at the ceiling. "Tom will take you up."

With its battleship-gray walls, gray metal table, and single window narrow as a slit in a castle wall, the room at the top of the stairs seems designed to elicit confessions through boredom and despair, and when Tom Lund leads Jack through the door, the four inhabitants of the interrogation room appear to have succumbed to its leaden atmosphere. Bobby Dulac looks sideways, stops drumming a pencil on the tabletop, and says, "Well, hoo-ray for Hollywood. Dale said you were coming down." Even Bobby gleams a little less conspicuously in this gloom. "Did you want to interrogate these here hoodlums, Lieutenant?"

"In a minute, maybe." Two of the three hoodlums on the far side of the table watch Jack move alongside Bobby Dulac as if fearing he will clap them in a cell. The words "interrogate" and "Lieutenant" have had the bracing effect of a cold wind from Canada. Ebbie Wexler squints at Jack, trying to look tough, and the boy beside him, Ronnie Metzger, wriggles in his chair, his eyes like dinner plates. The third boy, T. J. Ren-niker, has dropped his head atop his crossed arms and appears to be asleep.