One Monday We Killed Them All (6 page)

They are overly plausible. Their eyes seem to have a curious opacity. They laugh too quickly at your first joke, and wander away in the middle of your second one. Their smiles are practiced in front of mirrors. Any concern seems faked. There is never any evidence of anxiety. To them the great sin is not in sinning but in being caught at it. Add a constant need for and carelessness with money, plus a ruthless use of women, and the proficient cop begins to tighten up a little, because it is a pattern he has seen before, and when he has seen it before, it has caused him some work a little dirtier than usual. The cop will not say, “This one is going to commit violence.” He merely says, “This one can be triggered. This one can blow. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen.”

I met Dwight at the wedding, and I wanted to accept him because he was my bride’s brother. But it did not take him long to give me the impression I was as close to him as I was ever going to get. His sister was throwing herself away on a flatlander cop, and it couldn’t be stopped, but if she had any sense she would have gone where the money is.

I watched him operate, with her, and with the guests at the wedding, and with one of Meg’s closest friends from
Normal School, and I liked no part of it. He leaned on the football hero bit with all the weight it would stand. Before we finally drove off he was recklessly drunk.

After we got back from the honeymoon we found out he had stayed away from his job so long he had been fired. He had talked his way into her room at Mrs. Duke’s place, apparently, because her radio and her portable typewriter were gone. I traced them to Brook City’s only hock shop and got them back, by using some pressure, for just what he sold them for—twenty dollars. He left Meg a note saying he was going to bum around for a while and he’d be back at school early in September. It wasn’t until much later that Meg found out her pretty little Normal School friend, Ginny Potter, had gone right along with him. They used the car she had bought on the strength of her first teaching job. She wrote her parents she was taking a sightseeing trip with another girl. The last postcard from her was mailed in Baton Rouge. Two weeks later, several days after she was supposed to report back for the new school year, she phoned her people collect from a third-rate hotel in New Orleans, broke, sick, emaciated and desperate. Her brother flew down and brought her back. They never found any trace of the car. Dwight had walked out on her a long time ago. She couldn’t remember when, exactly, and she didn’t know what had become of all the clothes aside from the dress she was wearing. She came home and made a pretty good try at killing herself, and spent over a year in a rest home, then a few months later married one of her father’s close friends who had lost his wife in a swimming accident.

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 the 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.”