One Monday We Killed Them All (8 page)

He gave me a rocky smile more like the lip-lift snarl of an animal.

“Dirty cop bastard!”

I leaned against the bars. He sat on the bunk, cracking his knuckles. “Sure. I framed you.”

“It could have been fixed. Five lousy years! Jesus!”

“Fixed?”

“One of your prowl cops up there testifying he saw her pull over halfway home and get out and trip and fall on her stinking head.”

“Oh, sure. We always do that for our friends.”

“Why did Kermer cross me? Two of those guys taking my money in that game work for him. I told Jeff how to do it. They go on the stand. On the stand they change the testimony, and they say Mildred fell on her head hard after dumping that drink on me, and she acted dazed and funny, and her face was banged up before she ever got into that room, and all I did was slap her a little trying to bring her out of it. Was that so hard?”

“Did he agree?”

“He winked and told me not to worry about a thing. After they gave it straight, I knew I was cooked.”

“Maybe Kermer needs Hanaman more than he needs you, Dwight.”

“I wish I had that sloppy, drunken, big-mouth broad right here, right now. I’d kill her in a way that would give me some kicks.
Five years!
”

“More like three and a half if you handle it right.”

“I have the strangest feeling I’m not going to handle it right, brother-in-law.” He looked at me with a curious steadiness which made me uneasy. “I owe you, cop. I owe you and Kermer and Hanaman and this bastard town and this bastard system that’s put me in every newspaper in the country. I’ll be in the news again, officer. Wait for the day. Have yourself a nice five years with my sister.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. Don’t talk like a punk kid.”

He looked down at his big meaty right hand and slowly flexed the fingers. “A little too hard,” he said softly. “And a
little too long. Should have stopped when she went loose, but I was in the rhythm of it, popping her face back and forth, catching it just right.” He stared up at me with a corrugation of boyish forehead, a puzzled look. “By then I wasn’t sore, you know? It was like—a game with a ball, where you catch the rhythm, and do it just right. It’s like playing some kind of a game.” His voice rose to a pitch thin and plaintive. “And what was she worth? A bag like Mildred? She didn’t care about herself, did she? It didn’t matter to her what happened, what she said, the things she did. All she wanted was her kicks. What she liked best was somebody watching. Jesus Christ, what makes her worth five years!”

“Meg wants to know what she can do,” I said.

He came back from a far place and focused on me. “What does she want to do? Pack a picnic lunch?”

“Do you want to see her?”

“No.”

“Do you need cigarettes or anything?”

He didn’t answer me. He was staring down at the floor. I waited a little while and then I left. He didn’t look up. I wondered how he’d adjust to Harpersburg. So did a lot of other people. All of us guessed wrong. We thought that toughness was a muscle reflex, that they’d peel him right down to a whimper. In this good guy-bad guy world it is too easy for all of us to believe in the myth of the gutless villain. So we all guessed wrong.

v

Meg called me from the kitchen door and I went in for the late lunch with the prodigal brother. He was in a yellow sweater, gray slacks, his cropped hair still spikey with shower dampness. Meg served the foods he had always loved best, in great quantity. She tried to talk in a spritely way of small funny things, but there was an edge of anxiety in her voice.

I knew what was bothering her and I had no good way to help her. I knew he was somewhat sullen and indifferent, but not as much as she believed him to be. It is the prison mark on them. We learn to recognize it in our work. I can walk down a busy city street and pick out the ex-cons who have done long time with a good chance of being right, but oddly enough some of the ones I pick out will be career enlisted personnel in civilian dress. They have lost the normal mobility and elasticity of the muscles of the face, the expressive muscles. There is a restriction of normal eye movement, a greater dependence on peripheral vision. The range of the conversational voice is reduced. There is a restriction of gesture and a reluctance to move quickly. Somewhat the same effect can be achieved as a parlor game with the normal person by asking someone to balance a book on their head and then continue to walk, sit, talk, drink.

“Is everything all right?” she would ask, too often.

“Everything is fine, Sis,” he would say in the deadened voice of the cell blocks and exercise yards.

Once he looked down and plucked at the front of the sweater and said, “So damn bright. I keep seeing it. I’m used to that gray.”

And I could see him consciously slowing himself down as he ate. Most prison disorders begin in the dining halls, so that is where they try to achieve total control. At Harpersburg they file in and line up at the long tables. No talking. The food is already served. At the whistle signal they all sit and begin to eat. No talking. The stick screws
rove the floor and the gun screws watch from the gallery. At the second whistle, five minutes later, they stand up, facing the aisle, and start the file out, farthest tables first, carrying plates and utensils. Just outside the main door they split the file out into four check lines to get the cutlery count. From entrance to exit is a nine-minute span, so they gobble the slop, choke it down, gasping with haste, or endure a constant hunger.

I could see him trying to slow himself to the leisurely pace of freedom. But there was too much food, and it was too rich. Near the end of the meal he suddenly turned sweaty gray and excused himself hastily. We heard the wrenching distant sounds of his illness.

Meg sat with the tears running down her face. “He doesn’t like anything,” she said in a hopeless voice. “He doesn’t like anything at all.”

“It will take a little time.”

“It isn’t the way I wanted it to be, Fenn.”

“Be patient.”

“I’ve been trying so hard.”

“You’re doing fine. You’re doing all you can do.”

“But what does he
want
?” she cried. The phone rang. I guess it was a partial answer to the question she had asked. I took the call.

It was a girl’s voice, young, husky, hesitant. “Is Dwight McAran there?”

“Who is calling?”

“Just a friend.”

“I’d better have him call you back. If you’ll give me your num—”

McAran appeared beside me, saying, “For me? Let me have it.”

He was tense when he spoke into the phone. “Who?” he said. “Oh, it’s you.” He seemed let down. “Well, it’s nice to be out. Sure. What else can I say about it? What? No. Not so soon. Later on, kid. Give me a few days. Let me get used to being loose. Sure.” He hung up and looked at me. “You want a transcript of the call, cop? You want me to ask permission to use the phone?”

“Who is she?”

“A girl I’ve never seen, Lieutenant. But she’s written me letters. A lot of letters. And she sent me pictures of herself.” I was aware of Meg standing nearby. “She’s just a little girl
whose been cheering me in my darkest hours, Lieutenant. She was only seventeen when they tucked me away in Harpersburg, but she’s a full grown girl now.”

“Who is she, dear?” Meg asked. “Do we know her?”

He shrugged. “You might. You might not. Cathie Perkins, a blonde kid. Stacked.”

“There’s a history teacher at the high school named Ted Perkins,” Meg said. “They have five daughters.”

“This is the middle one of the five,” Dwight said. He smiled like a cat in a fish market. “I’m her hero.”

“She’s not showing much judgment,” I said.

Meg turned on me. “What kind of a remark is that? They’re a nice family. I think one of the Perkins girls would be good for Dwight, better for him than that Hanaman girl was, certainly. Because he’s been in jail, are decent people too good for him? What kind of an attitude is that, Fenn? Really!”

Later on, I drove down to the station. We’re in a sandstone wing added to the original pseudo-Grecian City Hall in the early twenties. It backs up against the block containing the Brook County Courthouse, a gray, cheerless, Federalist structure. I parked in back of our wing. As I pushed the door open I heard warning shouts and saw a girl running toward me, as fast as she could run. Even though I had a moment to brace myself, she knocked me back against the doors. She yelled and squirmed. I trapped her wrists. She kicked me twice before I could immobilize her against the wall, and then she tried to bite. Detective Raglin and the jail matron we call Iron Kate hurried up and took her off my hands. I was glad to get a little farther away from the fetid, grainy smell of the girl. She wore black jeans, an ornate motorcycle belt, a soiled pale green sweater with nothing under it. Re-caught, she stood quietly enough, breathing hard, staring down at the floor. Her parched blonde hair had long black roots.

“Sorry, Fenn. She just took off like a rabbit,” Raglin said. His bald head was pink with anger.

“What is she?” I asked.

“New girl in town, trying to work a drunk in the bus station. Chuck West made the collar. He followed them over to Alderman Street, back to one of those empty garages. When he went in to break it up, her boy friend who was
waiting right there had already coldcocked the drunk and they were checking his pockets.”

“Tryna fine idennafacation,” the girl said in a raspy voice. “Some drunk follows me and falls on his head, see, and so Tommy and I, we’re tryna be decent, see, but we get arrested on a crummy rap.”

“Off we go to the fish tank, dearie, where you’ll make a lot of new friends,” Iron Kate said and put a come-along hold on the girl’s wrist. Before they got to the stairs the girl started to resist. She gave a thin squeak of pain and went along with a new docility.

“Drifting through,” Raglin said. “Working their way. Working the drunks. So they get a bath, a meal and a bunk, and a free trip to the city line.”

“Except she was too ready to run.”

“Huh?”

“Put out an all-points inquiry, then team with Rossman and sell them the idea we’re going to use them to get that John Doe killing off our books, the bum somebody slugged too hard three weeks ago. She looked too case hardened to try that fool trick of running unless the reason was real good.”

I saw Raglin respond to the idea. He began to nod. “Okay, but I’m supposed to go check the gas stations for—”

“I’ll change the duty roster, Rags.”

I went on up to the squad room. Eleven of the fifteen desks were empty. Three of the four men there were on the phone. Detective Sergeant Johnny Hooper was in my office with his feet on my desk. He jumped up violently, blushing and trying to hide the book he had been reading. It was my copy of
Leadership for the Police Supervisor
by Scott and Garrett.

“A quiet day, Fenn,” he said anxiously. “One real quiet day.”

Johnny Hooper is one of the good ones. He’s twenty-eight and looks twenty, a big tow-headed country boy, newly married, newly promoted, slightly unsure of himself except when things start to get warm, and then you wouldn’t want anybody else backing you up. He started to tell me about the small collar West had made, and I told him the orders I had given Rags, and he looked as if he was going to break into tears because he hadn’t thought of it himself. I altered the duty roster and he went out into the bull pen
to run the phone check on the gas stations himself. We’d recently had a loading dock theft of several cartons of assorted sizes of windshield wipers, about seven hundred dollars’ worth, and it had the flavor of local amateur talent, the kind stupid enough to start peddling them locally, in the logical places. In fifteen minutes he came in and told me he had a lead and he would run out and check it out. I remarked that he’d come up with something pretty quickly, and he said he had ignored the alphabetical listings in the yellow pages and started with those on the west side. They seemed more likely outlets. So he got his lead in fifteen minutes instead of an hour, and that is the kind of thinking you can’t go out and buy.

Larry Brint heard I was in and asked me to come up to his office. Chuck West had just come back, so I asked him to mind the store and went on up. On the way I stopped at C&D and checked the all-points inquiry which had gone out on the couple who’d been caught indulging in the most primitive-known variation of the badger game. I sat on Larry’s green leather couch. He leaned back in his chair with a mild and attentive expression on his schoolteacher face while I told him about the trip to Harpersburg and my appraisal of Dwight McAran.

On his wall was a speaker with a separate volume control, hooked into the prowl circuit, the volume turned down to the point where it was a faint raspy buzzing, seemingly impossible for anyone to hear. Yet I had been in that office several times when one of the several emergency code numbers had been given and had seen Brint stop in the middle of a word and immediately reach over to the speaker and turn the volume up.

He didn’t ask me what I thought McAran might do. He slowly bent a paper clip into new shapes. “One man in ten thousand, Fenn, you hammer on him long enough, you create a new creature in the world. Sometimes a saint. Sometimes a monster. Sometimes a harmless idiot.”

The paper clip broke. He got up restlessly and went to the window and rocked back and forth on his heels, looking out at the city.

“Poor sad son of a bitch of a town,” he said. “Seems as if could they forgive a man income tax, some smart greedy man could come in here and put together an empty factory and skilled men and make something people would buy.
Skip Johnson was in to see me this morning. Bought me a four-dollar lunch at the Downtown Club. Funny how out of an old family like that a man can come along you could stake out in the city dump and he’d get rich making coats out of rat hides.”

“About McAran?” I asked.

“When he finally got around to it. He never came right out with it. A man like that never does. Old Paul Hanaman doesn’t want McAran around town.” He came back to his desk chair, sat down and sighed. “That’s no secret. Jeff Kermer doesn’t want McAran in town. That hasn’t been as obvious. Skip Johnson is the link between those two because he’s tied up to both of them in business ways. It seems to them that any reliable, efficient Chief of Police ought to be able to hustle any undesirable citizen on his way, and if said Chief can’t do a little thing like that, the Common Council might request the Commissioner of Public Safety—if they can keep old Ed sober enough—to suspend the Chief and his most trusted assistants while they make a full-scale investigation of the operations of the department.”