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.”
Unexpectedly, young Paul wanted to shake hands. “People don’t talk to me the way you have, Lieutenant Hillyer.”
“I had to explain our side of it, my side of it.”
“I’m beginning to understand why Chief Brint thinks highly of you. Have you ever thought of—some line of work that might be a little more profitable?”
“No thanks.” We were standing by the booth. “Let me know right away if you hear from McAran again.” He said he would, and walked out into the hot bright afternoon. I stood in the tap room gloom, directly under one of these slow, old-fashioned ceiling fans with the wooden blades, wondering if my thirst for a second stein of dark was more important than the thirty-five cents it would cost me.
“Buy ya one,” a raspy intimate voice said. I glanced down at the upturned face of Kid Gilbert. They say he used to walk straight in, hooking with both hand
s, and grinning because he enjoyed it. If he’d fought in a heavier class, he’d now be institutionalized or dead. But he was a bantamweight, fought at 118 pounds, fought over a hundred times and retired over twenty years ago. He now weighs at least a hundred and fifty. He looks as if he had been worked over with ball bats and tack hammers, stung by giant bees, then left out in the weather. Small bright blue eyes stare at you out of the ruins. He’s Jeff Kermer’s clown, a creature of idiot routines, half-punchy, half-shrewd, completely trusted. He tells us exactly what Kermer wants us to know, and he has to be handled with care or he will take back more information than he gives.
He’s safe to be seen with. Even in a controlled town, caution is required. He has no record. He owns two parking lots and three laundromats, and visits them all twice a day to pick up the money. He will not admit ownership. He claims he is the front man for the one who really owns them. But we know they’re his.
I looked around Shilligan’s to see who might take any special interest in my talking to the Kid, and saw Stu Dockerty talking to a couple of men from the County Highway Department at the bar. I sat down in the booth again and let the Kid buy me the second stein.
“Jeffie gets greetings from an old buddy,” the Kid said.
“Like a postcard?” I asked him.
It was the first time I was ever certain I’d caught Kid Gilbert off balance. He choked on the first sip of his drink, wiped his leathery mouth on the back of his hand and stared at me.
“Like a postcard from Polksburg?” I continued. “With a monkey in a high hat?”
“So you got the mailman, huh? So why let me know?”
“No mailman, Kid. It was a guess.”
He stared at me for a few moments. “Other people got cards too.”
“All over town,” I said.
“So what I was saying, a couple of times Jeffie tries to get in touch, in Harpersburg, to explain how things had to be the way they had to be, maybe to say there can be some good breaks to make up for the bad break. But he can’t make a contact, and he gives up. It bothers Jeffie when he can’t give protection.”
“It fills him with remorse.”
“Huh? I guess so. Sure. So then he’s in your house, and Jeffie waits and there’s no contact. So he sends Lupo to make an offer, nothing great, but not a bad deal you understand. You know this?”
“No. He didn’t say anything.”
“Lupo, he waits around until there’s nobody home but McAran, he phones from a couple of blocks away. McAran is nice, he says come to the back door, so okay. It’s understood Lupo comes with a deal. Knocks on the back door. The door wings open and slams shut, and Lupo is on his back out in the yard, with a nose this wide, but thick as a piece of paper. Three hundred to rebuild the nose, but it won’t be right, and you know Lupo, always making people tell him he looks like Gregory Peck. Now he hates himself. Anyhow, that’s the answer he takes back. So Jeffie stops going through doors first, like old times. It eats him because he’s mostly legit, and he shouldn’t have to live that way, and he wonders if it’s important enough to maybe have somebody help out. McAran, he thinks, can be some kind of a nut by now.”
“But he felt better when he found out McAran left town.”
“Until the card comes.”
“What did it say?”
“It just said ‘We got a date,’ and it was signed Millie. That broad didn’t like anybody calling her Millie and it was Jeffie and McAran used to get her steaming mad calling her that. Jeffie is real sore.”
“So what does he want me to know?”
“You should know something more? When he was in town, just before he left, you were tailing him.”
“Were we?”
“When he comes back, maybe you shouldn’t. Not right away.”
“If he comes back.”
“Jeffie thinks he’s coming back. After a couple of days you can tail him, if you can find him. I gotta run.”
He left. The message from Kermer was clear. Kermer had told me, in effect, “McAran has now made me so nervous I’ll feel better if he can be put permanently out of circulation. I’m importing some people to handle the problem. If the police follow McAran, it will complicate things. Let me do it my way, and you won’t even have a body to worry about.”
I could guess at the method. They’d have to transport it at least forty miles to unload it in the modern manner. You take it to where the bulldozers have been, out in front of where they’re laying the foundation stone. It’s easy to dig, and it doesn’t have to be deep. A few months later fast traffic is rolling over the grave. Estimates of how many are under the New Jersey Turnpike vary from three to fifteen. Perhaps it isn’t a particularly modern method. Maybe there are bones under the old Roman roads. At any rate it is more convenient than those problems of logistics involving wire, weights and a boat.
I could have sent Kermer a message through Kid Gilbert, preparing him for the possibility of McAran traveling with a small hard-nose pack.
I closed my eyes as I drained the last portion of cold dark brew, and when I opened them, Stu Dockerty was sitting across from me, looking like a British consular agent trying to get us to buy more tweed and Jaguars.
“Running a consultant service this afternoon?” he asked me.
“Bring your problems to Doctor Hillyer.”
“Doctor, I want to ask your advice about a sick city.”
“I’ve had time to examine the patient. It is in a run down condition, susceptible to infection.”
“By a special virus?”
“A very special one, with a five-year incubation period.”
“When I came in, Fenn, you and young Paul were making faces at each other. Something fell into the fan over at our print shop, and it hasn’t filtered down to me. Should I know about it?”
“You won’t be able to write it up.”
“Can you imagine what this town would be like if I wrote up all I know?”
So I told him about the comedy postcards. I told him to go and fake Paul Junior into showing it to him.
Dockerty burlesqued astonishment. “Good Lord, my dear fellow! I do not speak to Hanamans. The old one tells the young one who tells the managing editor who tells the assistant managing editor who tells the city editor who then tells me.”
“So you just admire the Hanamans from afar.”
“The surviving ones, yes. I had a closer contact with poor Mildred, though. Long ago, when she thought it would be jolly to be a girl reporter, and they tucked her under my wing. It took two months for her to find out it’s very dull work. Fenn, does the kiss-and-tell ethic cover the dead as well?”
“You wouldn’t bring it up without a reason, would you?”
“No. I guess not. She was a forlorn beast, you know. She tended to exaggerate the importance of her bounty. I was supposed to be full of tremulous gratitude. But she wanted to use her favors as a club, and hammer all males into dreadful submission, a constant condition of begging. But her talent was without sufficient discipline or selectivity, and so, for this antique lecher, it just wasn’t that good. And she deprived me of any lengthy pleasure of pursuit. I did not realize at the time that it could be called research. But our little pleasures did give me a chance to be realistically accurate when I sold her slaying to two different magazines under two different names, for a total gross of five hundred and fifty dollars, later on. And I made the bitch far more enchanting than she was. But now it occurs to me that of all who shared that slender fortune, perhaps McAran and I are the only two who quit before she was ready to quit—which was for her the most horrible insult possible. Our reasons might have been identical, a distaste for the female usurpation of our primitive right of aggression. I struck her too. Go ahead and look surprised, dear boy. You are right. It was out of character. She waylaid me at my place, drunk, abusive and hysterical. I took her in and tried to calm her down. After too much clawing and kicking, she decided to scream until my patient neighbors called the police. So, as she started the seco
nd scream, I popped her with great care, with a fist wrapped in a dish towel, a short right chop on the jaw, caught her as she fell, placed her on the bed. Ten minutes later she started snoring. It was half-past midnight. I phoned young Paul to come and get her, and bring somebody to drive her car back. I thought it would be too awkward to be there when he got there, so I told him I’d leave the door unlocked. She woke up before he got there, and she was very busy when he arrived, working her way through my wardrobe with a razor blade. We settled out of court, of course. I made a careful estimate of damage, bought the replacements and charged them to him.”
“A lovely girl.”
“A sick girl. Sicker than any of us realized, I think. And the damage continues. It isn’t over yet. The face of Helen sank the thousand ships. McAran is Mildred’s agent in this world, Fenn. And he has a few more errands in her name. Those postcards are not quite sane.”
“I feel that too.”
“But you can’t tell Meg, can you?”
“No.”
“But if you have to find him, Fenn, if it becomes imperative to find him, Meg is the one who can go up there and find him, because they’ll talk to Meg. Have you thought of that?”
“I’ve been trying not to.”
“You would have to trick her, wouldn’t you?”
“That would depend on why we wanted him.”
“You aren’t really the one in the middle, Fenn. Meg is the one. Larry knows she could find him.”
One Monday We Killed Them All Page 14
