I can remember what Meg said when she heard about Ginny. “Really, Fenn, Dwight didn’t exactly abduct her, you know. She’s over twenty-one. I think it was a stupid thing for both of them to do.”
“So he didn’t abduct her, but maybe he could have taken a little care of her.”
“We shouldn’t judge him, darling. We don’t know what happened in New Orleans. And he’s only a twenty-year-old boy, after all. Maybe he felt he was doing the right thing in walking out. Probably he thought she’d head for home where she belonged. How could he know she’d stay down there all alone until she got into such dreadful condition?”
“I think the money was gone.”
“He knew she could always wire for some. I think he began to feel—guilty about the whole thing, so he walked out.”
“Maybe,” I said, and changed the subject. What else can you do? You can’t explain to your new wife that she is one kind of victim, and Ginny Potter was another kind, and there’ll be many many more before he comes to the end of his life. And I was beginning to realize I was a victim too, second grade.
iv
So I brought McAran back from Harpersburg and reunited him with his loving sister, and watched him kick our dog.
Meg took him to the room she’d fixed up for him. It was a two-bedroom house when we bought it. On nights and days off I’d turned a side porch into another bedroom, so Bobby and Judy could each have a room of their own. It had been Bobby’s room for three years, and he hadn’t been completely gracious about giving it up to move back in with his sister, even on a temporary basis. He had improved the decor of the room in the ways eight-year-old boys think essential, and it was degrading to have to move back in with a six-year-old sister, into a revolting tenderness of dolls and little dishes.
I stood in the doorway and watched her show McAran all she had done to prepare for him. She had packed his things five years ago, and recently she had put everything in order: pressed suits, slacks, jackets hanging in the closet above the row of burnished shoes, and the bureau drawers orderly with shirts, socks, underwear, sweaters. She even had his trophies on the shelf where Bobby had kept his kit models of racing cars, and all the cups and plaques were newly polished.
He looked at everything too quickly, too indifferently, and sat on the bed and said, “Nice, Sis.”
Looking slightly crestfallen, she said, “I tried to make it nice.”
He reached and turned on Bobby’s radio, found some rickytick-imitation Dixieland and put the volume a little too high. “Rampart Street Parade.”
She went to the bureau and picked up the savings account book and went to the bed and sat beside him. She explained the figures, speaking loudly to be heard over the music. “This was what was in the checking account after the lawyer, dear. And this is what I got for the car. I had them figure the interest on it last week, so this is what you’ve got right now.”
“How do I get it out?”
“What? Oh, we go to the Savings and Loan and make out a card for you so you can take it out any time, as much as you need of it.”
“Can you take it out?”
“Of course.”
“Then I won’t need a card. Just take it out.”
“But you don’t want to carry that much cash—”
He snapped the radio off. “You just take it out, Meg. That’s all. Just take it out and give it to me. That makes it real simple.”
I didn’t wait to hear her answer. I went out back looking for Lulu. I knew where she would be. I squatted at the right place and looked under the garage. She was wedged as far back in there as she could get, muzzle on her paws, rejected eyes staring out at me. I told her all the reasons why she was the world’s most satisfactory dog, but she would have none of it. A horrid, frightening thing had happened to her in my presence, so I was a part of it, and soft talk would not cure a heart so broken.
I went back into the kitchen. Meg was alone there, staring at something in the oven. “What I liked most,” I said, “was the way he kept jumping up and down and saying whee.”
She stood up and gave me the slow turn, eyes like chips of green ice. “He’s spent five years being a playboy in all the fun places of the world. That’s why it’s so easy for him to jump up and down and say whee at every little thing.”
“But he could have—”
“Neither of us expect this to be easy. So let’s make it harder for each other with a lot of smart cracks, Fenn. If we try hard, maybe we can make it impossible.”
I went to her and held her close. I felt and heard her sigh. I could hear the sound of the shower running, and guessed our Dwight was scrubbing away the stench of prison. “We won’t fight about him,” I told her and released her.
She looked at me with eyes of woe, full of tears ready to spill. “Why did they have to do—so much to him? Why did they have to change him so much? What good does that do? What’s the—purpose of a prison?”
“Punishment. A deterrent to others. Rehabilitation. Mostly, I think, it’s formal, organized revenge. The ones the screws can’t break, the inmates can. They exist because the shrinkers are still fumbling around. Some day when a man is found guilty, they’ll strap a gadget to his head and it will buzz and clean his brain right back to the day of birth. They’ll turn another dial and it will buzz some more and establish a whole brand-new set of abilities, habits, memory and desires, perhaps a pattern lifted intact from some sterling, productive citizen. But not for a long time, a very long time. Between now and then we’ll lock them up and toughen them, coarsen them, twist them a little further away from the norm, and turn them loose. But that isn’t my end of the business, and I don’t like to think about it very much because it takes the edge off some of the good I think I’m doing—hope I’m doing.”
“Did he—tell you anything about his plans?”
“Nothing specific. He thinks Brook City gave him a raw deal.”
“He’s right, isn’t he?”
“Yes—and no. Yes, in that he didn’t get impartial justice; no, in that that commodity is so rare he hasn’t any rational reason to expect it. If he tries to tip the scales the other way, to get back some of the meat and juice he thinks was taken away from him, he’ll just be trying to cut a loaded deck.”
The shower sound stopped. She began to put things on the table. I went out and sat on the back steps. If he got a raw deal it was the same kind of raw deal I have tried to get used to, and which happens in every city in the country. It is one of the facts of life, and it is a flaw built right into the structure of our judicial system. Better minds than mine despair of ever correcting it.
This is the rub. The average public prosecutor is a youngish lawyer. Maybe he has political ambitions. Maybe he merely wants to make an impression that will help him when he is back in private practice. In either case his future success is going to depend on the good will of those men who call themselves the backbone of the community, the men who own and operate the stores, factories, banks, dealerships and so on.
The police force makes the arrest, files charges, completes the investigation and turns the file over to the prosecutor. The prosecutor runs a busy shop, usually on low pay and a limited budget. And so, in each case, he has to decide just how much time and effort to put into the prosecution. Suppose the crime has been committed by a good friend, relative or valued employee of one of the local businessmen. The prosecutor knows he will run up against a good defense attorney. Why should he use a lot of zeal, time, energy, expense in preparing the prosecution’s case? Why should he make a careful investigation of the whole jury panel in order to be better able to empanel a jury which will convict? Why should he try to get it before one of the more severe judges? He can salve his own conscience by making a routine preparation of the case and then going after a conviction with every outward evidence of zeal. He can hammer hardest at the strongest parts of the defense case. If, on cross-examination of a defense witness, he suspects the existence of an area where he might be able to trap th
e witness, who can say that he steered his cross-examination in another direction? If it appears that a conviction is inevitable, cannot he inadvertently introduce some element which, upon appeal, will be adjudged reversible error?
But in a crime against the men able to directly and indirectly fatten his future, the spectators may think they are seeing exactly the same performance as before, but they are actually seeing a case put together as carefully as any ballistic missile. They are seeing an uncertain defense up against great zeal, in front of a tough judge and a jury as merciless as the prosecutor could make it. You see him slamming away at the weak spots, yet ever cautious to avoid any procedural error.
It is not this way in every city. It works this way in most of them. Suppose you were the prosecutor. Suppose you were not given, out of public funds, enough money to make a painstaking preparation of every case. Where would you save money and where would you expend it? It’s a pretty problem, and it extends into the police investigatory work also. If you haven’t the time or the men to make all files air-tight, which ones do you concentrate on? Where there are professional public prosecutors appointed for long terms and paid well, the problem is lessened. And when you have that rare animal, the violent champion of the downtrodden, the outright foe of power and privilege, you still have the same problem—reversed.
In this sense justice is conditioned by who you are rather than by what you have done.
And Dwight McAran killed the only daughter of one of the most influential men in Brook City. The request for the change of venue was made too late, and denied.
Yet had he killed in the same way and for the same reason the same sort of girl his father found on Division Street, it might not even have gone to trial.
After his first full season of pro ball, McAran arrived in Brook City in the middle of January with the idea of setting up some sort of business connection which would support him during the off season, and one which might support him full time when and if he ever got out of the NFL. He rented a small layout in an apartment hotel, talked entertainingly at some service club luncheons, gave interviews and predictions to the local sports reporters, and started selling insurance for the Atlas Agency, for old Rob Brown who was getting too feeble to go out and dig for it. After two weeks and one sale he decided he didn’t like it. Rob said later that the little venture cost him about three hundred dollars net.
He sold sporting goods for a little while. He spent one week behind the desk at the Christopher Hotel, and was fired for getting drunk. Traffic got tired of warning him about the way he yanked his blue convertible back and forth around town and started giving him heavy tickets. By then he was moving with a fast rough crowd.
I knew he had taken to hanging around the Division Street joints but I didn’t know what it meant until Larry Brint called me in and shut the door and said, “Peters was working an informant for something else entirely and came up with something on your brother-in-law Dwight. He’s on Jeff Kermer’s payroll at maybe two bills a week.”
I must have looked shocked. “Doing what?”
“Alfie’s pigeon says Jeff is using him for muscle. People have moved a little bit out of line this winter because Jeff has been a little shorthanded. McAran is helping bring them back into the fold.”
I remembered a brand-new hospital patient, the owner-manager of the Brass Ring on the corner of Division and Third. He’d walked in with two snapped wrists, a dislocated shoulder, some minor internal bleeding and a story about having fallen down his own cellar stairs. We had interrogated him at the hospital, almost positive we were wasting our time.
“Davie Morissa?” I asked.
“The word is that McAran did it, and Kermer liked the job.”
“I don’t like any part of it.”
“So I’ll talk to Jeff and you talk to the hero.”
I got nowhere with Dwight. He was full of injured indignation. Jeff Kermer was a friend. He hung around Jeff’s place, the Holiday Lounge, because Jeff had the idea he attracted trade and gave him a discount on his bar bill. He wasn’t on anybody’s payroll, honest to God. He had something real good lined up that might work out and might not. A couple of friends were loaning him money to keep him going. Hell, I should know that a guy in the pro league couldn’t get tied up to anybody who’d been arrested a few times for gambling. They’d throw him the hell right out of the league. Getting a discount on drinks wasn’t exactly working for a guy.
I had caught him at his studio apartment at the Brookway, at eleven in the morning. Just as it was apparent our little talk was going nowhere at all, Mildred Hanaman came strolling out of the bathroom wearing a big yellow towel in sarong fashion, and gave a great faked imitation of surprise. She was a lean dark girl, random as the March wind, spuriously elegant, her considerable handsomeness marred by a mouth too slack, too mobile, too given to framing every word with such labial exaggeration, she seemed to be speaking forever to a world of lip readers.
I was standing near the door. Dwight was sitting with paper, coffee, robe, beard-stubble. “May I present Detective Sergeant Hillyer. Sergeant, Miss Hanaman,” Dwight said with sarcastic precision.
“Well, we’ve met,” she said, with all the roving business with the mouth. “Haven’t we just? Time and again, practically. You’re a dear Sergeant, truly. Dwightie dear, you must make them do something about hot water up here. What did I do with my cigarettes? Oh, I see them.”
Yes, we had met. People marveled at how completely unlike a brother a sister could be. Paul junior, four years her senior, had been fifty years old at birth and had always been totally solemn, totally reliable, completely proper. Their mother died when Paul junior was fifteen. Mildred had been thrown out of every school they could get her into, including the Swiss. At eighteen she started receiving the income from a trust her spendthrift grandmother had left her. She lived like a sailor on shore leave, as if there would never be enough beds and bottles in the world, as if no cars could be driven quite fast enough, and no parties would last long enough. She went to far places on impulse, and her returns to Brook City were unpredictable. Whenever she was in town she became a problem to us. She was twenty-two. Her father’s newspaper would, of course, kill any story about her. She was so used to having us pry her out of difficulties, she had come to believe we were on her father’s payroll.
I had been in on one of the juiciest episodes, three years previous, when I was in the first detective grade. A well-to-do couple named Walker had taken a trip to Europe in the spring. Their son had brought two college friends back with him to the empty house for Easter vacation, a nice home in the Hillview section, not for from the Hanaman place. As we reconstructed it, the three boys had holed up in the house with Mildred and plenty of liquor, and the party had continued for five days and nights before the Walker boy’s roommate died. We got there ten minutes after the mumbled phone call from the Walker boy. He was too drunk to be interrogated. We found the other boy in bed, snoring heavily. They had turned the house into a pig sty. We found Mildred Hanaman naked and passed out in a pink bathtub. Apparently the faulty drain had let the water run out or she would have drowned. The pink glow of the porcelain made her body look gray and lifeless, as inviting as a stacked corpse in a concentration camp.
The dead boy had been a high-fidelity bug. He hadn’t been satisfied with the television picture they were getting. He had taken the back off the big set and stuffed his drunken clumsy hands in among the wires and circuits without unplugging the set. The shock had hurled him eight feet away. His dead face was redder than any sunburn, but we had to go through the pointless routine of resuscitation.
I wanted to blow the whole stinking thing a mile into the air, bringing every charge we could find in the books. When they found I was going to be hard to control, they pulled me off it. The Hanaman house servants put the Walker home back into immaculate order. Mildred was hustled off to a rest home to dry out. Somebody did an excellent job of coaching the Walker boy and his surviving friend. By the tim
e the dead boy’s parents had arrived, it had become one of those innocent, tragic accidents: three friends sitting around having a beer, and Ronnie volunteering to adjust the set and pulling the floor lamp plug out of the wall socket instead of the television set plug. Coroner’s verdict—accidental death.
Larry Brint lectured me. “You are paid to be a cop, Hillyer, not a moralist, not a reformer. You don’t enforce the Christian ethic. You enforce the laws. It was an accidental death. What good is a morals charge going to do anybody? What good would it do if we could prove the Walker boy waited twenty minutes, God knows why, before putting the call in? How would it help that boy’s people to know how he spent the last five days of his life? This kind of a deal should make you feel sick, like it does me. Okay. If it didn’t, we’d be bad cops and worse human beings. But don’t let it carry over into what you’re being paid to do. We’re not going to change the way the world is. All we’re going to do is make Brook City a reasonably safe place to live, and give them a buck and a half of protection for every buck they budget us. You’re not a judge or a jury or a prosecutor.”
One Monday We Killed Them All Page 5
