Free Juvenile Delinquent by Richard Deming Page B

organizer, his mother told me. Even in his earliest teens he was the neighborhood leader in games. She admitted he got in fights with other boys; in fact that at one time or other he had whipped every kid in the area. But she blamed this on the neighborhood, where children either had to fight or be labeled sissies, and insisted that essentially Bart was a good-natured boy.
    He was a loving son too, she told me with some pride. She said that many of Bart’s friends had been openly contemptuous of their parents, but her relationship with Bart had been everything a mother could want. He never left the house without kissing her good-by, and he never returned without offering her the same token of affection.
    She knew he had been president of the Purple Pelicans, but she knew nothing about the organization, assuming it was merely a teenage social club. She said Bart had never had a regular after-school job, but frequently picked up odd-job money and turned it in at home. When I asked what kind of odd jobs he did, her vague reply convinced me she had no idea. It seemed never to have occurred to her that Bart might have been raising money illegally.
    I didn’t see any point in disillusioning her by telling her of the criminal activities engaged in by the Purple Pelicans.
    I also decided not to question her about Bart’s abortive attempt to reform the club, since she obviously wasn’t aware the organization was in need of reform.
    When I left, I had accomplished little except to get a clearer picture of the murdered boy.
    By then it was five-thirty. Since I was only a block from Ed Brighton’s, I decided to run by and take him out to dinner if he was home. I knew he had gone to work for a half day after he left my place, and since he got off work at five o’clock, he should just be getting home.
    Ed was just coming up the street in his work clothes when I parked in front of the decrepit building where he lived. I waited for him in the kitchen while he went down a hall to the communal shower and cleaned up.
    When he returned dressed in a worn but neat blue serge suit, he looked better than I had seen him look in years. His jitters were gone, and a hard half day on the docks seemed to have sweated the last of the alcohol out of him.
    He refused to let me take him to an expensive restaurant, so I took him to Carson’s, which doesn’t have much atmosphere but has the best sea food in town at reasonable prices. I had a lobster preceded by a rye and water; Ed had broiled swordfish preceded by tomato juice.
    “You really think you’ve got the liquor habit whipped?” I asked him as we sipped our drinks.
    “I’ve got it whipped even if Joe goes to the gas chamber,” he said in a definite tone. “I literally hate the stuff.”
    Then he emitted a self-mocking little laugh. “You never knew my old man, Manny, but he had a temper like Donald Duck’s. He used to get mad at inanimate objects. When I was a kid we had one of those wooden-tubbed, water-power wash machines. Remember them? That was before electric machines were invented, and they worked off water pressure from an ordinary faucet.”
    I said I didn’t believe I’d ever seen one.
    “Well, they were fairly simple in principle, but they got out of whack pretty easily. Dad was always having to fix ours. Then one day he got mad at it and fixed it permanently with an axe. Reduced it to nothing but a pile of kindling and smashed metal and foot-long sections of rubber hose. At the time I couldn’t understand how a normally intelligent man could let something without brains or feeling or even life throw him into such a towering rage. But I can now. That’s the way I feel about alcohol. I’m so damn mad at it, I feel like pulling a Carrie Nation every time I pass a bar.”
    “That’s a tendency you’d better control,” I advised him. “These days they put you in jail for chopping up saloons with an axe.”
    “I don’t mean I’m really tempted, Manny. As a matter of