The Kidnappers

  There would be live music, but the musicians wouldn’t be here at this time of the day. I checked the clock to make sure it was only eight-thirty in the morning, that I hadn’t somehow slept all day.

  I scrabbled around for clothes and got dressed.

  Mark ran into me in the hallway.

  “If I were you, I’d plan to be somewhere else until this is over,” he advised. “It’s a madhouse, and if you even look at Mom she comes unglued.”

  “Where are you going?” I asked uncertainly.

  “Anywhere out of here. Downstairs to Andy’s. Out to somewhere private.”

  He was gone, melding in with people doing incomprehensible things in the living room, the dining room. Mom was in the kitchen, on the phone again. She didn’t pay any attention to me, and I opened the refrigerator to find something to eat.

  I had just opened a bottle of orange juice when she stopped me. “Joel, don’t touch that, it’s for the party. Leave all the juices. And don’t get in anybody’s way.”

  “Am I allowed to eat something? Or do I get spending money to go out? I need to talk to Father. Has he had breakfast yet?”

  “He left half an hour ago. Something urgent. He had a telephone call. I don’t know why they have to bother him on Saturdays.”

  “A call from Mr. Groves?” I asked, forgetting about food.

  “No, I don’t think so. Just his office.”

  “So who’ll take his call, then? Father left a message for him to call back as soon as possible. And I’ve remembered something that might be important.”

  “Well, your dad’s not here. Please, Joel, cooperate for once in your life, will you? Stay out from under foot.”

  “If I can’t eat here, can I have some money to go to Moroney’s or somewhere?”

  “My purse is on my dressing table. Take what you need,” she said, and turned back to the phone.

  “Can I get in on that, too?” It was Mark, not yet gone, and he followed me along to our parents’ room. Junie was there, putting things to rights.

  “Hey, how come you’re working today?” I asked, spotting the purse and heading for it.

  “The party, stupid,” Mark said without rancor. “I’m surprised Mom hasn’t got us down on our hands and knees scrubbing bathrooms with toothbrushes.”

  “I did that yesterday,” Junie said. She’s about as old as Grandma Louise, and her knees hurt, but she has to work because Social Security isn’t enough to live on. “Time and a half today, plus a bonus if everything comes off all right. Which it will, if you guys take a hike.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence in us, Junie,” Mark said, taking the purse out of my hands and opening it up. “Enough for breakfast, lunch, and maybe for a movie this afternoon. When do you think it will be safe to come home?”

  Junie made a face. “Tomorrow morning?”

  “Aren’t we going to get dinner, even?” I asked, appalled.

  “I think your mother is intending you should heat up a TV dinner in the microwave,” Junie said. “Eat it in your room, so you don’t mess anything up.”

  “Terrific. I suppose we aren’t supposed to emerge from isolation during the party, either.” Mark handed the purse to me. “Get enough to last all day, Joe. Otherwise you might starve before we’re allowed back in the kitchen.”

  With that advice he vanished, stuffing some bills into his wallet.

  I hesitated, then took enough money to pay Pink’s way, too, in case he wanted to keep me company. I decided to call him from the phone in here, if Mom wasn’t still tying up the line.

  She wasn’t. Pink wasn’t up yet, his mom said, but she’d call him.

  While I waited I thought about Willie. It seemed as if his dad would have called back by now, after Father said it was urgent. I asked Junie if she’d taken any calls.

  She rolled her eyes. “Took one call that sent Mr. Bishop off like there was a firecracker stuck in his pocket. Three or four calls Mrs. Bishop answered. And then another one for your father, but by that time he wasn’t here.”

  “Do you know who it was? He was expecting a call from Willie’s dad, Mr. Groves.”

  “I guess that’s who it was. I had to say I didn’t know when Mr. Bishop would be back.”

  I stared at her in dismay. “But we were going to tell him I saw Willie get kidnapped! So he could tell the police about the car and what one of the kidnappers looked like!”

  “Bad thing to get mixed up in, a kidnapping,” Junie said, as if I’d been talking about somebody losing a glove or something equally unimportant. “I hope you never get in bad trouble again, Joey, for making up all this stuff. I don’t know where your imagination comes from. Certainly your parents don’t have any.”

  “This isn’t my—oh, hi, Pink. I’ve got breakfast money. Want to meet me at the deli? I guess we’ve been kicked out of the house today because of the party tonight. Mark took enough to go to a movie, too.”

  “Okay,” Pink agreed at once. “Shall I meet you at Moroney’s?”

  “Yeah. Twenty minutes?”

  “Make it half an hour. I’m not dressed yet. Okay?”

  I agreed and was about to try again to make Junie understand that I was serious, when Sophie showed up in the doorway.

  “Do you have to get out, too?” I asked her.

  “No. I can practice until the musicians arrive. It’s a string sextet. Allowing enough time to set up chairs before they start. I think they’re going to be served a buffet supper about seven. Did Daddy talk to Mr. Groves?”

  “No,” I told her bitterly, and explained.

  Only then did I notice she was carrying the morning paper. “I looked in the Herald and there’s nothing about a kidnapping. Maybe you misunderstood what you saw, Joey.”

  “Oh, sure. How many explanations are there for a kid getting jerked into the back of a car, spilling his stuff all over the sidewalk, and being carried away? You looked through the whole paper?”

  “Well, the parts where I thought a kidnapping would be reported. What are you going to do now?”

  “What can I do, until Father comes home? Listen, if Mr. Groves calls back, would you try to explain? Tell him Father will verify my story?”

  Sophie looked doubtful. “Well, as crazy as this place is today, it would be a miracle if I intercepted the phone call. But I’ll try.”

  A lady with a cart loaded with flowers got off the elevator when I went out in the hall. How many more flowers did we need, for pete’s sake?

  Ernie got off the elevator, too.

  He greeted me with a grin. “How’s it going, Joey?”

  “Rotten. Nobody believes anything I say.”

  The elevator doors started to slide closed behind him, and I caught and held them.

  “Well, when you’ve spent your entire life trying to con people into believing things like there’s a spaceship on the roof, what do you expect? You ever read the story about the boy who cried ‘wolf’?”

  “There was a spaceship on the roof, and it looked real from where I was standing. How did I know some guys built it out of paper or something, for a party.”

  “Yep.” Ernie was amiable, as usual. “So, you off the kidnapping kick today, are you?”

  “No. That was real, even if nobody thinks so. Well, maybe my father believes me, a little bit.”

  “He does?” Ernie looked at me sharply. “How’d you manage that?”

  “I just told him. Had him call Willie’s dad, to see if Willie was missing.”

  “And was he?”

  “We didn’t find out. Nobody would take Father’s call, and then when Mr. Groves did call back, Father was already gone. There was nothing in the paper this morning. Sophie looked.”

  Ernie nodded. “I gotta run. Your mom has some errands for me. I never saw a party that was this much work to set up, but at least I’m getting overtime today. Alice has been wanting to see that new musical, so maybe this’ll pay for it. See you later, kid.”

  “Ernie, I did see what happene
d to Willie. And I remembered something I didn’t remember yesterday.”

  “Oh? What’s that? Get that license number after all?”

  “No. But I remembered something about the guy who pulled Willie into the car. He was wearing a gold watch, looked like an expensive one, and a tiny gold earring.”

  Ernie looked impressed. “That might help, if you can get anybody to listen. A tattoo, though, that would make for a more positive identification. Sure you wouldn’t rather try a tattoo?”

  Laughing, he headed for our front door.

  I got in the elevator and punched the button for the lobby. At least Sophie and Pink believed me.

  Moroney’s Deli is on the corner. I got there ahead of Pink and looked over the cases. You can get anything, any time of day, at Moroney’s. All kinds of salads, antipasto, sandwiches, giant dill pickles, cheese cake, Greek pastries, meatballs and spaghetti.

  It smelled great. I had mine all picked out by the time Pink got there, and he’d been thinking about it, so it didn’t take long to get it all together.

  Moroney’s only has three tables, and they were full. We didn’t want to eat there, anyway. Instead, we took our brown paper bags and headed along the street to the edge of the park.

  There were some guys shooting baskets there and a few little kids on the swings and the slide. We found a bench in the sun, which felt good, and ate breakfast. Hot pastrami for me, lasagne and pickles for Pink. He always has pickles, no matter what else he eats. We finished off with a bag of potato chips.

  “You got enough cash for lunch, too?” Pink asked as he licked his fingers.

  “Yeah. The way it sounds, I should have taken money for supper, too. I don’t think I’m going to be allowed in the kitchen. I ought to go back home, though, and see if Willie’s dad’s called yet.”

  “Call,” Pink suggested, indicating a pay phone on the corner. So I did, and got Junie, who said there had been a gazillion calls, but none of them was Mr. Groves, and no, Father hadn’t come back yet.

  “It’s driving me nuts, Pink,” I told him as we walked along the edge of the park. “What if they’ve done something terrible to Willie? What if they’ve even killed him?”

  “Not much profit in that,” Pink pointed out. “It’d make more sense if they collected ransom. Why don’t we go over there and see if we can poke around and find out anything?”

  “Go over where? To his house?”

  “It’s an apartment building only about a mile from St. Bart’s. I was there once. His mom planned a surprise birthday party for him when he was eight. Great party. He wasn’t such a jerk in those days.”

  Neither of us was supposed to be wandering around without telling anyone where we were going, but both our mothers thought we were at Moroney’s and just hanging around the park. We could walk to Willie’s, and on a bright Saturday morning it didn’t seem very dangerous.

  So we walked, and talked until we arrived.

  The Groveses lived on the eighth floor of his building, but we couldn’t get up there.

  The doorman was a snooty guy in uniform, not at all friendly or helpful. Finally, we gave up and went back onto the street.

  It was getting warmer, now, and more people were out walking their dogs, running errands. Traffic was heavier, too.

  “Let’s walk home past St. Bart’s,” I said finally. “See if there are any clues left where they grabbed him. See if anybody picked up his stuff. Maybe if I had something with his name on it, somebody would listen.”

  We were halfway across the street when a yellow cab came out of nowhere, roaring straight at us.

  Chapter Six

  The only reason it didn’t kill us was that a parked red Camaro had started to pull out just before the cab sped around the corner. There was a squeal of brakes, and the cab dodged the car, clipping its left front fender with a shriek of metal before it tore away.

  Pink and I had taken a dive toward the curb, falling between a parked car and the red Camaro. We were lucky not to get squashed between the Camaro and the car behind it when the Camaro was hit.

  Even without being struck by one of the cars, we got banged up. I hit my head on something and scraped my hands. Pink pulled up his pants leg to look at his knee while I sat up and looked around.

  “Scraped the skin off,” he pronounced, “but it’s not bad. Man, that guy was a maniac!”

  The driver of the red Camaro was out of his car, staring after the retreating cab, swearing a blue streak. “Hit and run! He banged up my car and he never even stopped!”

  “Are you boys hurt?” an elderly lady asked, pausing beside us. “The drivers are so terrible these days.”

  A few people stopped, though most of them didn’t bother. It takes real blood to draw people to a wreck, not skinned knees and a dented fender. One observer asked, “Did anybody get a license number?” But nobody had. It was all over too quickly.

  Nobody called the police. There was no way to trace the culprit; there were more yellow cabs than private cars on the streets.

  “It was an old one, beat up,” Pink said.

  That didn’t distinguish it much, I thought, rubbing the grit out of my hand. The knee I’d landed on was beginning to smart, too, but I didn’t bother to look at it. “You okay, Pink?”

  “I guess so.” He straightened up and sucked in a deep breath. “Boy, I thought we were goners.”

  “Yeah. I guess we can walk, though, huh?”

  Before we’d gone very far I realized I’d bruised a hip, maybe on the back bumper of the Camaro, and Pink thought he’d twisted his back. We kind of limped along, and since we’d already crossed the street we kept going toward St. Bart’s.

  “Boy,” I said after we’d walked a few blocks, “I’ll bet I’m going to be really sore tomorrow. I must have hit my elbow on that bumper, too.”

  “Me, too. I think I’ve got an eyelash stuck in my eye.”

  I looked at him, and we both started laughing. Then we remembered why we were going past St. Bart’s.

  The school was closed on Saturday, of course, and the gate was locked. There were no cars lined up in the pickup lane.

  Pink was sober now. “Where did it happen, Joe?”

  “Right up there. In front of that first apartment building. I was looking out that window, and the car eased up right about here.”

  “No blood on the sidewalk,” Pink said.

  “Of course not, you idiot. He wasn’t stabbed, he was kidnapped.”

  “No black marks from his heels where they dragged him across the sidewalk. Hmm. There’s the stub of a blue pencil in the gutter. It’s a St. Bart’s pencil.”

  “But anybody could have dropped it. No way to prove it belonged to Willie.”

  “Fingerprints,” Pink said suddenly. “You think maybe? If it’s his, he probably left fingerprints on it.”

  “Yeah. What have we got to protect it, in case we can get the cops to check it out? I threw away all my breakfast wrappings.”

  “So did I. There’s a candy wrapper over here, maybe it’ll work.”

  We retrieved it, and picked up the pencil in a way that wouldn’t mess up any prints. And then it dawned on me. “What are the chances Willie’s fingerprints are on file anywhere? He’s a jerk, but he probably hasn’t committed any serious crimes where he left prints behind.”

  Pink put the pencil in his pocket anyway. “Even Willie probably would have worn gloves to handle a murder weapon,” he said.

  We were trying to be funny, to keep it from being so scary. But of course it wasn’t really funny.

  “I have to try not to think about Willie,” I said as we headed toward home. “I wish I didn’t have such a good imagination.”

  Pink, who always enjoys my stories but never comes up with any of his own, was intrigued. “What do you imagine about Willie?”

  “Hog-tied and left in a closet, maybe. Or being tortured to tell them something—like the combination to his dad’s safe, or where his dad keeps his cash. Or fastened to a cemen
t block and dumped in the river. Even if he’s okay—being fed, having a bed or a mattress to sleep on—he’s gotta be scared, Pink.”

  “Yeah. He’s gotta be scared,” Pink agreed.

  It wasn’t quite late enough to go back to the deli for lunch, and I hoped my father had come home and talked to Willie’s dad. So we went up to my place.

  It was worse than it had been that morning.

  I didn’t know what all the people were doing, milling around. Mom was in the middle of them, explaining things, urging people to do what she needed. Ernie was there, setting up folding chairs in the music room. He looked at me with raised eyebrows.

  “You come to help, sport?”

  “No. Nobody’s paying me time and a half. Or anything. Have you seen my father?”

  “I’m supposed to pick him up around two.” He set up one chair and reached for another.

  “Do you know if Mr. Groves has tried to call again?”

  “I’m just hired help, kid, nobody tells me anything. You going to be hanging around in this madhouse, making yourself useful, or you got something planned this afternoon?”

  I didn’t want to get roped into hauling chairs upstairs. Or anything else. Surely they already had plenty of people to do everything that needed to be done.

  “I’ve got plans,” I told him, looking at Pink to make sure he knew I meant we would make plans.

  In the hallway behind me, Mark passed by stuffing something interesting looking in his mouth.

  “Where’d you get something to eat?” I demanded.

  He lifted a fancy-looking pastry of some kind, with cream filling leaking out of it, which he caught with his tongue. “The bakery people are here. Stuff like this is in insulated containers, stacked back by the laundry area. If nobody sees you, you can lift a few.”

  Pink looked after Mark’s retreating figure. “Looks good.”

  “Yeah. Let’s give it a try,” I agreed.

  As we started to leave, Ernie called out, “Can you swipe a few for the paid help, too?”

  “Go out the service entrance and pick up your own,” I told him. “We’ll be lucky to get away with ours.”