One Monday We Killed Them All (9 page)

“What—what did you tell him?”

“He didn’t come right out with it. But I guess I did. He kept smiling. That man never stops smiling. I said it would suit me. I can elect to be pensioned off right now instead of waiting the five years more. I’m an old widower, all alone in the world, with a son in El Paso ready any time to give me house room, and his wife is willing, and that sun will feel good. I said I’d go to the extra trouble of getting you and Johnny Hooper and a couple of other boys relocated in cities where the police don’t work for a newspaper or a toad like Kermer. Then he and the Hanamans could sit back and watch the town go the rest of the way to hell. Then I thanked him for the lunch.”

“Can you get away with that, Larry?”

He gave me a weary smile. “I don’t much care. If I did care, he’d have me whipped, wouldn’t he? By God, they’ve been walking around me for years, looking for the handle to grab and the button to push.”

“It would be easier on me if we—eased him out of town. But it would have to be done in such a way Meg wouldn’t know.”

“Hell, while Skip was talking I figured how we could
do it, Fenn. Take a gun can’t be traced out of our supply here and you plant it in his room where he won’t run across it. Then I have you get Meg out of the way and we go in with a warrant and give him his choice of moving on or spending some more time with Boo Hudson.”

“He’d tell Meg.”

“She wouldn’t know you were in on it. Neither would he.”

“She has all that—unthinking loyalty. She survived the five years, Larry. If he had to go back, that way, it would tear her in half. I guess the marriage would survive, but there wouldn’t be much in it any more, for either of us.”

“You don’t have to say all that. You know I’m just talking. I can’t let myself be pushed around, especially when it would be damn poor judgment. McAran is after something, or he wouldn’t have come back here. Until I know what it is, I want him handy. I don’t want him chased back into the hills.”

“But what am I going to do, Larry, if—they do go ahead and suspend you?”

“We’ll go right to that good woman of yours and I’ll tell her just why it’s being done, and then we go to Ralph Kowalski who’s the only lawyer in town the Hanamans can’t scare, and we bring the Attorney General of this great state into the picture in such a way he can’t wiggle out of it, and there’ll be so many injunctions and so much stink they won’t dare try anything.”

“You didn’t hint anything like that to Skip Johnson?”

“Hell, no!”

“Larry, did he say anything about—the spot I’m in? I mean, do they understand how a family thing like this can—”

“You ever been inside the Brook Valley Club, Fenn?”

“What? Yes. Once. When a dishwasher put a knife into a French chef.”

“Your old man ran a steam hammer at the old A. Z. Forge and Foundry. You’re a cop. A city has to have cops, mailmen, meter readers, trash men, street cleaners, ambulance drivers and telephone operators. About an hour from now Skip Johnson will belly up to the men’s bar out there at the Brook Valley Club, and Skip will tell old Paul what a stubborn, arrogant old son of a bitch I am. If Jeff Kermer suddenly got hold of seven billion dollars in cash, all his own and tax free, he couldn’t get into Brook Valley if he
lived to be four hundred years old. They let him into the Downtown Club and that’s about as far as he goes. Old Paul and Skip know one of my officers is brother-in-law to McAran. To them it is a strange little fact they don’t have to try to understand. You’re not important enough to mean as much to them as the bartender fixing their drinks, and they’re not going to think of your problems on any personal basis of understanding. The best way we’ll be home free is if Jeff Kermer is more nervous than I think he is.”

“What do you mean?”

“If he happened to be very nervous, he could ask for a little help in return for what he skims off the top and sends out of town. He hasn’t had to ask for that kind of help for over ten years.”

“Oh. A specialist.”

“In and out, like a fumigation job, with perfect timing and the ever-popular twelve gauge, and a pleasant trip home.”

“But he isn’t that nervous.”

“No. But I have the hunch he should be. The years have softened him. He’s had it his own way a long time. He’s got too many kinds of letterhead stationery these days, and too much tax accounting and too many Rotarians calling him Jeff. What harm can come to a man who
always
gets a box for the World Series and comes up with a four-figure check for the United Fund?”

“We both know McAran thinks Kermer crossed him up, but—”

“But what”

“I can’t see Dwight doing anything where—he didn’t stand to make out pretty well.”

“In five years a man might be able to think up a nice way to kill two birds, using a few things he could have learned while he was working for Kermer. I guess all we can do is wait it out and keep an eye on your—”

He lunged over to the speaker and twisted the volume up. It was a fire in a paint store on the north end of Franklin Avenue, and the first car there recommended four more be hustled along for traffic and crowd control. We went across the hallway to look out the windows on the north side. We heard sirens, saw the distant upward billowing of dirty saffron smoke into the gray afternoon sky, and saw a twinkling of flame inside the smoke, like lightning in a thunderhead. I
followed Larry back into his office. He went over to the photo-map of the city which covered one complete wall—souvenir of the days when Brook City could afford such embellishments.

“In this block,” he said. “Right about here. It’s blown the roof, so it should take the ones on either side, but there’s nothing directly behind it. Let’s go take a look, Fenn.”

He has always been like a kid about fires. We went out there. It burned hot and stubborn, with fumes which dropped a few firemen when they moved in on it, in spite of the masks. I went back to work. Johnny Hooper brought in one of the three men who had stolen the wipers. The man was eager to make a detailed statement implicating the other two, in return for a little special consideration. The moist chill night closed down across the flat expanse of the valley. I worked right on through the change of shift, checking the new duty sheet, reviewing the backlog that is always with us, comforting myself with the familiar pattern of the work. It is always the same. In the quiet times you assign your people to the legwork necessary to cut down the backlog, and you keep some of them loose to go to work on the new stuff coming in, and you ride hard on the clerks to keep your files and records as current as possible.

But you can’t get so tangled in the routine you forget to be braced for something big. Say you have forty men. Seventeen hundred and sixty hours of specialist effort a week. But you operate every single hour of the week, and you have to adjust to vacations, sick leave, court appearances, training courses, compulsory time on the range, retirement, selection, promotion. You take what’s left and try to fit manpower to the demands of each duty shift, and use the men on the things they do best.

With the coming of night the tempo always picks up a little. The patrolmen can handle all the trash arrests, but when it gets up to a certain category, they are required to call on the Detective Section. I kept telling myself I was too busy to go home, but I knew it was just another routine evening. The
Daily Press
called to complain about a half-dozen of their racks disappearing. A transient in a flophouse hotel on Division Street hung himself from the transom of his room with a child’s jump rope after printing misspelled obscenities on his naked body with iodine. A salesman staying at the Christopher Hotel reported his room rifled, his clothes
and samples gone. A teenage lover and his fifteen-year-old girl friend had taken off in her father’s car. The pretty wife of a young doctor reported she had been receiving obscene phone calls and letters for over a month. At City Hospital a woman brought her eighteen-month-old child to the emergency room, so badly beaten by her alcoholic husband, his condition was classified as critical. A fast-draw clown, age fifty-one, blew half his right foot off with an unlicensed forty-five. A stolen car. Aggravated assault. An elderly woman in a dazed condition, unable to state her name or address. An indecent exposure over at Torrance Memorial Park. Vandalism at a church. A sad-eyed old man who came in to complain he couldn’t locate the young girl to whom he had loaned his life savings.

These were the tensions and torments of the urban night. Stu Dockerty was there to report them. Brook City used to have four newspapers, if you count both the morning and evening paper Hanaman used to publish. When the only surviving competition died in 1952, Hanaman put out the evening paper for just one more year and then folded it. The
Brook City Daily Press
is put to bed at midnight. Stu Dockerty is the police reporter, covering us, the Sheriff’s department a block away, and the criminal courts.

He is a dapper, elegant man in his forties, with all the devices of vanity—elevated shoes, military mustache, careful wave in the thick gray hair, tweeds, flannels, cashmere, solid gold accessories, languid courtesy, a faint hint of a British accent. New men on the force invariably make the wrong estimate of Dockerty. In time they learn of his three marriages, his merciless talent for any form of gambling, his astonishing capacity for liquor and that special kind of nerveless courage which turns any kind of danger into a game planned for his amusement. He reports accurately, spells names correctly, gives credit where it is earned, and defends the department against all improper attacks, even by his own publisher. He usually wanders in after lunch, picks up all he needs to know about the previous twelve hours, without getting in anybody’s way, writes his own copy on the machine he keeps in one corner of my squad room, typing with a speed which intimidates my clerks. When he stops by in the early evening he catches up on any afternoon events. Only when things break late in the evening does he
phone his stuff in to the copy desk rather than knocking it out himself.

He is also a wire service stringer, sells articles to the true crime magazines, ghosts local political speeches, and does some copywriting for a local ad agency.

I had told Meg I wouldn’t be home for dinner, and had made my invented reasons sound plausible. As I was on my way out to get something to eat at about eight o’clock, I saw Dockerty stuffing copy into an envelope.

I stopped beside him and said, “No special events tonight, Stu.”

He shrugged. “Man dangling on a jump rope. One-a-larry, two-a-larry, three-a-larry, four. Pathos and bad spelling, old boy. And a beaten baby. And the have-gun-can’t-walk type. But I’ll jerk the tears with the old moneylender.”

“Nothing we can go on, you know. It wasn’t a con game.”

“I know. It was love.”

“Want to come watch me eat, Stu?”

“Give me time to drop this stuff off.”

I had franks and beans in one of the old mahogany booths at Shilligan’s Courthouse Cafe, while Stu drank draught beer.

“I hear a killer is now living at your house, Officer Hillyer.”

“You never know what kind of a brother-in-law you’re going to marry.”

“All of mine were splendid chaps. Got along splendidly with them. Found I couldn’t stand their sisters, though. But I never lucked into a jewel like your Miss Meg, Fenn.”

“She’s not exactly dancing with delight. He’s pretty sour.”

“Just sour? Nothing more?”

“Bitter, incorrigible, smart, tough and dangerous.”

“Trouble coming?”

“Probably.”

“What kind?”

“I don’t know, but I think it would be some kind that would make him a profit.”

“Using your place as a base, eh? Can’t help you much, you know. It won’t improve your future.”

“What the hell can I do! Little brother needs his big sister—she thinks.”

“You can all do just what Chief Brint said you’d do, Fenn. You can wait for one legitimate violation of some ordinance
commonly enforced, a violation plain enough so Meg won’t blame you when he’s pulled in. What does Meg really feel about him?”

I shrugged helplessly. “If she’s doing any thinking, she’s doing it with her heart. The trouble he used to get into, she thinks of it as mischief. Boyish pranks. When he was working for Kermer as an enforcer, I tried to let her know. She refused to believe it. Hell, she wouldn’t even believe he’d worked the Hanaman girl over until she heard the eye-witness testimony, and then she said he wouldn’t have really hit her very hard because he wasn’t that kind of a boy. She was a zombi for six months after he was sent up, and she never has gotten all the way back to the way she used to be. Little brother! My God, you should see them together. It’s like a kid with a loveable little kitten that grew up to be a tiger, and the little kid insists it’s only a house cat. I can’t reach her, Stu. The moment I start, all her defenses come up. Darling brother has had bad luck. As soon as he stops feeling sorry for himself, he’ll get a nice job and meet a nice girl and settle down and go bowling with the fellows on Saturday night. When she looks at him she doesn’t really see him. If she could really see him, she’d know she’s been wrong about him all her life.”

“What good is a woman who doesn’t follow what her heart tells her? Who would want a woman who sees things the way they really are?”

“But—it’s going to come out in some bad way for her, and for me, and there’s no way to stop it. It’s like a long hill and no brakes.”

He looked at me with an unexpected compassion. “If you’re lucky, Fenn, if you get the luck I think you deserve, maybe whatever happens will happen in such a way she’ll get that one good look at him. And when she does, if she does, the spell will be over. She’s strong. She started in a trap and broke out of it and brought him along with her. People not as strong as Meg have survived more horrible things. What was the name of that family five years ago? Brumbeck, wasn’t it? Their only kid, a good-looking boy, an A student, confessing to two rape murders and dying in the chair.”

“I know what you’re trying to say, and thanks. They survived, yes. They kept on living. But how much joy have they got left? Meg was meant to be a joyful woman. Humming
and singing and whistling around the house, making fool jokes and playing tricks on her man and her kids, and laughing at nothing when she feels particularly happy. When they first put him away, it was like there wasn’t a sound left in the house. Nothing. I’d go home and feel like whispering. I’d wake up in the night and know she was awake there in the darkness, completely still, completely alone, and there wasn’t anything I could say to her.”