One Monday We Killed Them All

by John D. MacDonald

  He looked at me with wet eyes and said, “I guess she knew if she told you, you’d put him in jail right away. I think you better put him in jail. He hurt her. He hurt her terrible, Daddy. It—it’s so different from a kid getting knocked down. It’s scary. Will you go take him to jail right now?”

  “Your mother wouldn’t want him to go back to jail, Bobby. That would just be hurting her again, in a different way.”

  “But he—he’s spoiling our house!”

  I knew what he meant. Some of his friends had started to call him. He ignored them. “Everything is going to be fixed in a little while. Be patient, boy. Try to act like yourself so your mother won’t worry about you. Now you go play with your friends.”

  “Are you going to tell her I told you?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  He frowned for long thoughtful seconds. “I think she better know you know it, Daddy. Will you hit him like he hit her, will you?”

  I had to get out of that one in a way that would salvage some pride. “If she’ll let me,” I said. “He’s her brother.”

  I sat and watched him racing around with his friends for a little while. I walked home. Meg was marketing. Dwight was in his room. When Meg came back I helped her carry in the groceries. I could hear the radio in Dwight’s room. I sat on the counter top and watched her putting things away. I like to watch the way she moves. She has a balance, a deftness, a certainty about things.

  “Stomach still sore?” I asked.

  She stood motionless, her hand on the refrigerator door, then turned slowly to face me. “Bobby promised.”

  “You knew why he was acting so funny.”

  “I—I guess I did.”

  “So did you want me to pry it out of him? It wasn’t easy, if that’s any help.”

  “I don’t know, darling! I don’t know!”

  “You’ve got an emotional stake in your brother. We’ve both got an emotional stake in these kids. So this is where I come in, with both feet. I don’t want our kids over-protected, guarded from every unpleasantness in life. But Bobby saw something that didn’t fit anything he’s ever learned. He’ll carry it a long time. It’s a—dirty kind of thing, Meg.”

  “Dwight didn’t know he was anywhere near—”

  “What difference does that make? It’s the whole setup that’s wrong. For you, for the kids. You can’t housebreak him. We can’t live like this.”

  She moved close, and looked at me in a wary way. I had kept my voice calm and reasonable, with an effort she could only suspect. She forced a smile. “I guess a lot of husbands have trouble with their in-laws.”

  “It isn’t that and you know it, Meg. You can’t make this sound like such—an ordinary thing. We’ll go tell him right now he has to get out. You got his money for him. Almost three thousand dollars. If you owed him anything, he cancelled it.”

  “Fenn, listen to me. Please. He didn’t mean to do that. He told me how sorry he was.”

  “Nice of him.”

  “Listen, please. I know how angry you are. But listen. Don’t blame him so much. An animal, Fenn, even an animal, if you chained it and beat it and then let it go free, it might snap at people trying to feed it. It wouldn’t really mean anything. You have to be patient with—”

  I caught her wrists and puller her close. “Tell me something, Meg. How about long ago? Tell me about this animal. Was this the first time he ever hit you?”

  “Well—yes.”

  “Meg!”

  “It was the first time—this way. I mean since we were practically kids. Kids quarrel, darling. You know that. He’d—get impatient. Sometimes the whole world seemed to be down on us. And—I was handy to take it out on. It never meant anything.” She tried to pull away but I would not release her.

  “For Bobby’s sake, for Judy’s sake, for your sake, honey, he goes.”

  She looked beyond me, thoughtfully, and I thought for a moment I had won, by using her need to protect our children against her loyalty to McAran, but I saw her mouth grow firm, reflecting her strength.

  “Have I asked for very much, really? Have I made demands, Fenn?”

  “No.”

  “He’s waiting for something. I don’t know what it is. He’s just waiting here, the way people wait in bus stations. Since you brought him here, he hasn’t been any farther away than the back yard. He won’t even admit he’s waiting for anything. That’s what the quarrel was about, when I tried to find out. When I answer the phone, I’ll look up and he’ll be there, watching me. When he finds out it’s just a friend of mine, he goes away. When the mail comes, he is standing in the hall when I bring it in. When a car or truck stops, he’s at the window. Fenn, what does a man do, usually, after five years in prison?”

  “He—does all the little things he hasn’t been able to do. Walk down a street. Drive a car. Buy a meal. Go to the movies. Have a date. A lot of them just walk, day after day, for miles and miles, getting used to being able to walk where they want. The city boys walk the streets, and the country boys like to go walk in the fields and the woods.”

  “He isn’t afraid to leave the house, is he?”

  “No. You know I told him Larry Brint’s promise. No persecution.”

  “So he stays here because he’s waiting for something. And he’s more restless all the time, Fenn. Whatever it is, it’s going to happen soon. So I’m asking this of you. Let him wait here until it happens, whatever it is. I promise you I won’t—do anything to annoy him. I’ll know when it happens because he’ll stop acting the way he’s acting now. And if he doesn’t leave then, I guess we can—we can ask him to leave.” She yanked her hands free. “But I’ll help him find a place to stay, and I’ll visit him, and if he gets sick, I’ll bring him back here, and if he gets in trouble, I’ll be with him to help him.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you not to see him, honey.”

  “Can he stay?”

  “Until he stops this mysterious waiting, or until he cuffs somebody, or until ten days is up, whichever comes first.”

  “Two weeks? Could it be two weeks?”

  As it was more of a victory than I had expected, I agreed. She kissed me and began putting away the rest of the groceries.

  “Bobby wanted to tell me,” I said. “But you made him promise. Promises are important to that kid, as they should be. He’s going to feel funny about it.”

  She looked across the kitchen at me. “But, darling, as soon as you came in the door I told you about it, didn’t I?”

  When I realized all the implications of it, all I could do was sit and grin at her and admire her. A promise kept. The impression of trust between parents undisturbed. Women have that wonderful trickery based on the true wisdom of the heart.

  She sat on her heels and began to rearrange things in the freezer compartment in the bottom of the refrigerator to make more room.

  “If he knows there are people who love him, Fenn, he’ll be all right.”

  “People? How many does he need?”

  “Two might be enough. Me—and Cathie Perkins. She was here yesterday.”

  “You didn’t say anything about it!”

  She stood up and swung the door shut and looked at me quite solemnly. “She’s a nice girl, dear. She has a loving heart. She’s as worried about him as I am. I wasn’t going to tell you she was here. I didn’t want to give you another chance to meddle. You went and saw her. You didn’t tell me anything about that, did you?”

  “Did she tell you I’d talked to her?”

  “No. Dwight told me, after she left. She told him.”

  “She shouldn’t have done that.”

  McAran appeared in the doorway and grinned at me in a lazy way. “You can’t expect my cute little girl friend to keep secrets from me. You tried to turn her into a cop stooge. That wasn’t half smart, Hillyer. She’s so full of love for me, I just couldn’t keep her away any longer. She tells me everything she knows. She pours her heart out.”

  I looked at him for five long second
s. His glance didn’t waver. I said, “I wasn’t trying to turn her into an informer, McAran. I guess I’m just curious about everything that concerns you. If she was a tough little slut, I guess I wouldn’t have bothered. But she seemed very nice. If I saw a child trying to make a pet of a rattlesnake, I’d warn the child.”

  “Fenn!” Meg said with shock and anger.

  “Let him be the big saviour,” Dwight said. “He’s all cop through and through, Sis.”

  “Maybe all you’d do is swing on her and knock her down,” I said. “Just smack her in the belly with your fist to prove you’re all hard-nose.”

  Dwight looked inquisitively at Meg. “I—I told him,” she said.

  “None of his business, was it, Sis? Does he know that as soon as I did it, I felt like cutting my hand off?”

  “He wouldn’t believe that. I guess—it wasn’t any of his business.”

  “He makes everybody’s business his business, Sis. Like he told Cathie some crazy story about me, how I was supposed to be the muscle that brought Davie Morissa back in line. Now how could you expect such a sweet loving little girl to believe I’d work over a poor little fellow like that, right in his own garage where I was waiting for him to come home in his big pink Cad? I’ve got such a soft heart, I couldn’t have stood his screaming and begging, even when it came through the rag I stuffed in his mouth. I’d never have pulled his shoulder loose when I snapped one wrist behind him, and then snapped the other wrist and picked him up when he passed out and hung him on a hook by the collar of his coat on the garage wall and waited for him to come to before I cracked his ribs and told him it was a little message from Jeff about not holding out any special private percentage of the take any more. Cathie knows I couldn’t have done anything like that, just like Sis here, from now on, isn’t going to tell you any family business because she knows it isn’t good for me to have the feeling some in-law cop is hounding me. Go talk to Cathie some more, Hillyer, if that’s the way you look for your kicks. I told her how eager you are to frame me back into Harpersburg. She thinks you’re a monster.”

  He grinned, winked and walked away. In a few minutes I heard the sound of a ball game on television. I watched Meg. Her color was bad. “He was making some kind of a joke, wasn’t he? A joke about that man.”

  “How did it sound to you?”

  “It was a joke,” she said, without conviction.

  “I notice you didn’t want to tell him it was Bobby who told me about him slugging you.”

  “Please don’t talk about it any more, Fenn. Please.”

  “You got your first real look at something you’ve never wanted to see. And now you’re trying to convince yourself you didn’t see a thing.”

  “It’s just—two more weeks. I promised.”

  “And I’ll bet you didn’t go off on any shopping trip so he could be alone with the Perkins girl, did you?”

  “No, but—”

  “How did they act together?”

  “She was shy and nervous at first. He was very sweet with her. I could hear them in the living room, talking and laughing. I think she cried for a little while too. Before she left she had real stars in her eyes. She was glowing, Fenn. And he was wearing some of her lipstick, I noticed. Maybe darling, she can make him see that—”

  I went to her and held her in my arms.

  “I’m so scared,” she whispered. “All of a sudden I’m scared. I’m scared for all of us, and Dwight too.”

  “Maybe it will work out all right,” I told her. Maybe we even believed that, a little bit. Because, above all, you have to believe in your luck. You have to ride with it, even when you know the wheel is fixed, because once you are in the game, there’s no way you can stop playing. No way at all.

  vi

  On the following Tuesday morning I had to spend an hour in court, over in the Brook County Courthouse, watching one of my people handle himself on the stand in an assault-in-the-first-degree case which had gone before a jury. The prosecutor had told Larry that our man was a little less than adequate, so Larry asked me to go check it out. He was a bright kid named Harold Brayger, who had done so well on plain-clothes duty as a patrolman, we had hustled him a promotion to Detective Second. The defense attorney was T. C. Hubbard, a very shrewd man.

  Brayger had been through my compulsory Testimony Clinic, and had signed the library sheet as having read the two assigned texts.

  I sat and watched him blow the prosecution case, merely because he was unusually bright and articulate. But he wasn’t as bright as Hubbard. A big vocabulary can hurt an officer called to give testimony. If he describes the defendant, in answer to one question, as being “adamant,” and a little later as being “inflexible,” the shrewd defense attorney will focus on the different nuances of those two words, and, in front of a wondering jury, lead the witness off into a semantic jungle he could have avoided by merely saying “stubborn” and sticking to it. Also, Brayger was, in the tension of giving testimony, forgetting one of the most basic rules, that of depriving the defense attorney, in cross-examination, of any chance to set the pace of the questioning. I teach my people to wait until the question has been asked, and, in the case of every question, no matter how simple the answer, take a slow five count before giving the answer. The easiest reminder is to sit in the jury box with your thumb on your own pulse. This spacing gives the impression of responsiveness, thoughtfulness, sincerity and reliability. And, as the questions get more complex, it gives you a chance to detect a trap, gives the state a chance to object, and gives the judge a chance to request a clarification of the question. When a trap is obvious, you can wait out the five count and request that it be repeated. Brayger was being so quick and so responsive that he was entangling himself, confusing the jury, and giving too many personal impressions mixed with the actual facts of the assault.

  It hurts to turn over a solid file and then lose because of some legal technicality. It hurts worse to lose because the investigating officer gets trapped into too much deviation from the file.

  Thus, at a few minutes after noon, I had a flushed, sullen, indignant Detective Brayger in my office when Meg phoned me.

  “It happened,” she said, “what he was waiting for. And he went out. He called a taxi. Can you talk now, dear?”

  “Hold it a minute,” I said. I covered the mouthpiece. “Run along, Harry, and for God’s sake stop feeling abused. Hubbard was doing what he’s paid to do. If you can’t be used on the stand, your usefulness around here is pretty damn limited. It’s part of your job, and you’re expected to do it well. Read the texts again. You’ll go through the Clinic again the next time it’s set up. Now go tell John Finch I want you to have a transcript of your testimony for study. After you’ve studied it, write me a special report on exactly what you think you did wrong.”

  As he walked out I asked Meg to tell me what happened.

  “A special delivery registered letter came for him about forty minutes ago, dear. Addressed to him, care of me. He signed for it and took it into his room. Sort of a fat white envelope. He came back out in about ten minutes and called the taxi. He seemed kind of nervous and excited, but trying to hide it. After he left I looked in his room. There’s black ashes in the big ashtray I put in there for him.”

  “What kind of cab did he call?”

  “Blue Line.”

  “Did you ask him where he was going?”

  “He said he was going to do some shopping.”

  “Thanks, honey. I’ll see what I can come up with.”

  “He hasn’t been gone ten minutes yet.”

  I checked Blue Line first. They’re the biggest taxi outfit in town and operate on radio dispatch. The driver had made the pickup and then called in his destination as the corner of West Boulevard and Andrews. West Boulevard was Route 60, and Andrews was quite a way out, just beyond the city line. The driver, she said, would report the drop and probably request his lunch break in that area. I told her to find out from the driver when he called back if M
cAran gave him any clue as to where he was going.

  I sat in considerable indecision after I hung up, wondering if I should send anybody to that area. She called back and said the driver said the fare was looking for a car to buy. It made sense. The big lots were out that way. He had enough money to buy a used car, certainly. I called Vehicle Registration in the basement of the courthouse and told them to be on the lookout for a new registration in the name of Dwight McAran and tell me as soon as any dealer brought the transfer in. The next step was a little more complicated. Post offices operate on the principal of making everything as obscure as possible. Going through official channels would have required a court order, so I had to use a friend I’ve used before. I phoned him and then, after lunch, drove over and talked to him. The letter had been mailed in Pittsburgh the day before, return receipt requested. The receipt was headed back to a Thomas Roberts, General Delivery, Pittsburgh. The envelope had been bulky, weighing an estimated six ounces. It had been printed in blue ink, probably with a post office ball point, and the flap had been reinforced with cellophane tape.

  By the time I got back to the squad room I found one of my calls had been from Vehicle Registration. They had registered a transfer from Top Grade Autos to Dwight McAran of a two-year-old Pontiac wagon, and had issued new plates numbered BC18-822. One of the salesmen had brought the application in.

  As I didn’t want to bump into McAran if he was still out there, I phoned Top Grade and asked for him and was told he’d left twenty minutes ago in the car he had bought. I left Johnny Hooper in charge and drove out to Top Grade.

  It’s one of the bigger lots, perhaps a little more larcenous than most. It was a cool afternoon with bright sunshine and a high wind which flapped the signs and banners and awnings, and picked up towering dust devils. The aluminum sales office was in the middle of the lot. The special deals were lined up across the front of the lot, under a bright protective canopy, facing the busy divided highway. Two men were listlessly wiping the dust off the cars on special sale. One salesman was working on a young couple who were dubiously examining a pickup truck. The salesman was beaming and gesturing. I parked near the sales office, and as I got out of my car, a fat man came sauntering toward me saying, “We won’t make much on you, friend. Any man who knows exactly how long to hold onto a car before he—”