One Monday We Killed Them All (11 page)

“I suppose the kids are giving you a hard time,” I said.

“Not so much.”

“Remember, I told you what to keep telling yourself, so it wouldn’t bother you.”

“Sure.”

“Did it work?”

“I guess so,” he said with elaborate indifference.

“Bobby, this is a very hard time for your mother. She loves us, but she loves her brother too. And she’s known him a lot longer than she’s known us. What we have to do is make it easier for her by—by acting as if everything is just fine, even though it isn’t.”

“I don’t see how she can love him the way she does us.”

“Love doesn’t go by reasons, Bobby.”

He sat still for quite a long time and then he turned toward me, his face pinched and white, and his eyes slitted and he said, “I
hate
that dirty killer son of a bitch!”

“Hey now! Steady!”

“I hate him! If he was shot dead right now I’d laugh and laugh.”

“You’re working yourself right into a paddling, fellow.”

“Go ahead. I don’t care what you do. It won’t change anything.”

“Now just what in the world has he done to you?”

I saw his face change, smooth out, become secretive. “He hasn’t done anything to me.” I’ve done too much interrogation work to have failed to notice the subtle emphasis on “me.”

“To Lulu then?”

“No.”

“Judy?”

“No.”

“Your mother?”

“I promised I wouldn’t tell.”

It didn’t take long to get all of it, because it was a promise he didn’t want to keep. It was too much for him. She shouldn’t have asked it of him. He had come home from school. Meg and Dwight had been arguing in the kitchen, talking so loudly they didn’t hear him come in. He had seen Dwight strike Meg in the stomach with his fist and knock her down, then walk to his room and slam the door. Bobby
had begun to cry. She had gotten up slowly and painfully and vomited into the sink and then taken him with her to our bedroom. She had lain on the bed and held him in her arms until they were both cried out, then made him promise he would say nothing. In the telling he cried again, but tried to conceal it. I would have held him, but he was eight years old, and there were friends of his on the playground.

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 seconds. 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.