One Monday We Killed Them All (17 page)

Meg was very merry and happy during that period. She had found it easy to sell herself a brand-new dream about Dwight. He would summer in the hills, and return refreshed and make himself a new life. Also, she felt she had a better chance, this year, of getting back into the public school system in the fall.

A dwindling city creates unusual problems. All public utilities work at less than capacity. There is always plenty of room in the hospital. Young people are the ones who leave a shrinking city, and that means fewer kids, empty classrooms. They need teachers only to fill retirement vacancies. By the time Judy had entered kindergarten, we knew we couldn’t have a family as big as we wanted. So Meg had applied that year. One house wasn’t enough to use up all her awesome energies. She had applied again last year, and narrowly missed being taken on. Now she was very near the top of the list, and they told her she could practically count on it. Her hours would be so similar to the school hours the kid had, there was no special problem. It would take some of the financial pressure off us.

She wondered aloud when we were going to hear from Dwight. I made the casual, unheard answers, in the right tone of voice.

Larry Brint wondered when we were going to hear from Dwight, too. So did Johnny Hooper. So did I. Cop sense, you call it. We hear a lot of bluffs. They’re part of the business. Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand aren’t worth the breath it takes to shout them in open court.

The thousandth one makes you wonder.

Even when you’re busy, you keep wondering. We kept busy. Crime in a depressed area has its own pattern. We were spared professional felonious ventures. Jeff Kermer saw to that. And the people with jobs were particularly careful not to get jammed up, because jobs can be lost that way. But for a long time we had been getting more than our share of those vicious, random violences which are born out of despair. Kitchen quarrels turn into an ugly business with a carving knife. They look for all the kinds of blackout which mean escape for a little while—driving a car at top speed, knocking off the cheap half-pint bottles in one long spasmodic gulping in the alley nearest the liquor store because it works faster and harder that way, losing money too fast in Kermer’s rigged games and then trying to waylay a winner on his way home, messing with the neighbor’s wife, or his daughters, swinging with a maniac frenzy at the man who accidentally jostles them, beating wives and children too long and too hard, committing impulse thefts of ridiculous clumsiness, writing bad paper that makes even the most stupid store clerk wary.

These are the crimes of a hard-times town, and they fill the cells with all that aching remorse of men and women who know, in their hearts, that nothing like this would ever have happened if—the furniture factory hadn’t closed, or the lawnmower plant hadn’t moved away, or the bake shop hadn’t failed, or if Sam hadn’t insisted on coming back to this lousy, dirty, crummy, stinking town way back when he got out of the army.

We worked at our trade, hating a lot of it, trying not to forget the uses of mercy. And while we worked, we tried forty ways of getting some crumb of information out of the hill country. But it was as though big McAran and the big car with the big load had melted into the mountain ground.

A week after McAran left town, Paul Hanaman, Junior, came to see Chief Brint, and Larry sent him down to see me. We walked over to Shilligan’s Courthouse Cafe. It was the first genuinely hot afternoon of the year, and I was technically off duty, and I wanted some of the dark and bitter imported brew Shilligan keeps on draught. Also, I thought young Paul would be more off balance there than in my office. We sat in a booth and he ordered probably the only iced coffee served that afternoon in Shilligan’s.
He was uneasy, and I was not going to make it any easier for him. He has a pudding face, a pudding wife, and two doughy children. He lives with his father in the old Hanaman place out in the Hillview section. He dresses twenty years older than he is. His eyes bulge slightly, and are vaguely blue. His mouth is puckered and prim. He has the idea the world has been established in order to provide him with an agreeable environment, and it is his obligation to pay the world back by living up to the responsibilities of wealth and social position. His public title is Assistant to the Publisher of the
Brook City Daily Press.
He serves on a dozen civic groups and committees. He gives a hollow imitation of his father’s effortless, merciless authority, but he is the sort of man who would march righteously to quiet some foul-mouthed drunk and end up apologizing to him for bothering him. I have sensed from the very beginning of it all that his sister’s death was a source of great relief to him. Despite her wildness, she was the old man’s favorite. She constantly embarrassed young Paul. She shamed him.

“Chief Brint said you could answer my questions, Lieutenant.” By a small emphasis on “you” he managed to convey his impression that it was a preposterous idea.

“I’ll try to be real bright.”

“What? Well—I’ll appreciate it, certainly. My father is curious about—Dwight McAran.”

“What does he want to know about him?”

“My father has felt it was a terrible miscarriage of justice when the court accepted a plea of guilty to the reduced charge of manslaughter. It made him—very bitter.”

“McAran thought it was a miscarriage of justice too, but not exactly the same way.”

“My father thought it practically obscene that he should be permitted to come back here to Brook City.”

“You people made that clear in the paper. And you stirred up a lot of other people, too.”

“He shouldn’t have been allowed to come back here just as if nothing had ever happened.”

“If you’d bought the city and put a fence around it, you could have kept him out.”

“Is that some sort of a joke, Lieutenant?”

“It’s the only legal way I can think of—to have kept him out.”

“Things like that can be arranged.”

“Sometimes.”

“But he came back here and he actually—lived in your home.”

“We’ve been scrubbing and fumigating it ever since.”

“You have a strange attitude, Lieutenant.”

I studied him for a few moments. The future I planned for myself might well depend on the good will of this pompous young man. The canny police administrator will maintain excellent relations with the influential members of the community.

I sighed and smiled at him and said, “I’m not exactly charmed and enchanted by your attitude, young Paul.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“My wife, whom I dearly love, happens to love the McAran monster with all her heart. She made sixty sad pilgrimages to Harpersburg. She cannot believe evil of him. If the Brook City Police had bowed to Hanaman—and Kermer—pressure, and framed McAran back into prison, or chased him the hell out of town, I would have had to choose between my wife and my job, and properly so. I would have chosen Meg, not the job. Larry Brint knows I am the best he has, the best he is likely to get, and his logical eventual replacement. Even so, he might have played it your way, for the sake of expediency, but you all pushed a little too hard. And he is a stubborn man. So he backed me, backed my marriage, gave McAran safe haven. So if we want to have any kind of constructive thought on this hot afternoon, let’s forget what might have been, or what you and your father think should have been, and stick with the facts.”

He moistened his lips, tugged at his collar, and tried to drink out of his empty glass. “You certainly—speak right out, Lieutenant Hillyer.”

“And I realize I’m talking to the only newspaper, the biggest bank, the biggest of the two radio stations, and miscellaneous holdings here and there.”

He coughed and said, “You’ll understand it’s difficult for me to really comprehend an officer of the law giving house room to the person who—murdered my sister.”

“We’ve covered that, haven’t we?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. My father has been informed that McAran left this city of his own free will one week ago today.”

“Correct.”

“He bought a fast car and a lot of—outdoor equipment, and just drove away.”

“That’s what he did.”

“Where is he?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

I think he tried to assume an intimidating scowl, but it looked as if he was suffering a temporary gastric disturbance. “Isn’t it your business to know?”

“How do you mean?”

“Shouldn’t the police always know the whereabouts of a person like that?”

“My God, Hanaman, you can’t have it both ways, can you? If we’d chased him out of town, we wouldn’t be able to keep a finger on him. We knew where he was when he was here. It’s a good bet he did go up into the hills.”

“Isn’t there some law which says he has to tell the police where he is?”

“He is
not
on probation or parole. He doesn’t have to report to anybody. He’s lost some of his civil rights, like the right to vote or hold public office or obtain a passport. Presumably no bonding company would bond him. Aside from that there’s no more restriction on him than there is on you. We’d
like
to know where he is, but we’ve got about as many informers in those hills as we have in the hills of Chinese Turkestan.”

“My father and I want him found and arrested.”

“What for?”

“For this,” he said with a slightly girlish indignation, and took a postcard out of the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to me.

It was a comic postcard, in color, showing a photo of a chimpanzee sitting in a little rocking chair, wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar and smirking at the camera. It had been mailed the previous day in Polksburg, a city half the size of Brook City and situated ninety miles to the south, beyond the far edge of the hills. The card was addressed to the elder Hanaman, fat backhand writing in purple ink with printed capital letters and little circles instead of dots over the i’s. The message read, “See you soon, Popsie.” It was unsigned.

“This isn’t McAran’s writing.”

“I know. It’s Mildred’s.”

The room seemed to shift out of focus. “It’s
what!
”

“It’s an imitation of Mildred’s handwriting. She always used that purple ink, and a broad nib and slanted the letters backwards. It isn’t really a very
good
imitation, but it’s close enough to be—very disturbing. And she was the only one in the world who ever called him Popsie.” He pronounced the term with a marked distaste.

It was such a clever viciousness, so loaded with implications, it made my skin crawl, and I could only guess at the effect it would have had on the old man.

“I think you used the wrong word,” I said. “You said your father is curious about McAran. I’d think he’d be highly nervous.”

“My father isn’t a timid man. We want McAran arrested.”

“On what charge?”

He looked at me in a dim questioning way. “For sending this card.”

“Let’s be just a little realistic. There’s no charge that will stand up. No fraud. No obscenity. Even if anybody could prove he sent it. This is not, for God’s sake, one of those feudal setups where we’re your personal armed guard and you can send us off to whip one of the serfs because he gets impertinent.”

“It isn’t necessary to say that. My father’s life has been threatened.”

“But too indirectly to stand up in court.”

“But not so indirectly, Lieutenant, we can’t demand police protection.”

“We can’t spare the men, honestly.”

He looked triumphant, as though I had left him a wonderful opening. “Then it would be a lot more efficient to just arrest him, wouldn’t it?”

“If he’s in the hills, that’s Sheriff Fischer’s territory.”

“How about the State Police?”

“Once upon a time the State Police had a Criminal Investigation Division. But the legislature knocked it out and split the money between all the county Sheriffs and the investigation staff of the state attorney general. That staff helps the counties nail down major felony indictments.”

“The—uh—F.B.I.?” he said faintly.

“And the National Guard and the Strategic Air Force and
Central Intelligence. We’ll get them all excited about this post card.”

“You don’t have to be rude, Hillyer.”

“Will you just understand that you’ve come to us with an impossible request?”

“Will we get protection or won’t we?”

“Why don’t you and your father go away on a trip for a while?”

“That’s out of the question.”

“Will your father maintain his normal routine?”

“Of course.”

“We’ll make your house out there a special check point on the night patrol for that area.” I wrote a name and address, tore the sheet out of my notebook and handed it to him. “Joe Willsie hit compulsory retirement six months ago. He lives with his daughter. He’s bored. He’s a rugged old man, with good reflexes. A dead shot. He knows protection routines and emergency procedures. On his real talkative days, he’ll sometimes say ten words. For sixty bucks a week you people can buy a lot of safety. Let him do the driving for your father. Fix him a place to sleep out there.”

“Can’t you—assign a regular officer to do the same thing?”

“I won’t, and I won’t recommend it. But Larry Brint could reverse that decision. Is it the sixty a week that stops you?”

He looked indignant. “Of course not! It’s my father’s—attitude about all this. It makes everything very difficult. He thinks you people were wrong in giving McAran such a short sentence and then letting him come back here. So he thinks it’s your responsibility. And if he had to pay to be protected—it’s almost like an admission of being wrong. And my father has never—never in his life admitted being wrong. It’s very difficult to explain anything to him. It always was, but it’s worse since Mildred—passed away. I’m afraid he’s going to—demand protection.”

“Does he have to know who’s paying Joe Willsie?”

Young Paul looked blankly at me, and then with unexpected humble gratitude. “Would this Officer Willsie be able to—understand?”

“He’s more than bright enough, believe me. And he’d like it because it would make the job easier. Your father will
do what Joe tells him if he thinks Joe is still on our pay sheet. You talk to Joe. If you see any question in his mind at all, you have him phone me.”