We had the evening meal with our kids, and it seemed as if McAran had been with us for six months instead of a little less than two weeks. Afterward I found out from Meg that her brother had taken the rest of his stuff with him. I asked questions about the load until she told me about the lumber sticking out over the tailgate. She said she had asked him about it, and he had made some joke about it, something about building a garage for his new car.
After the kids were in bed it seemed particularly nice to have our house to ourselves again. I knew Meg felt that way too, but didn’t want to admit it to herself because I guess it seemed like a kind of disloyalty to her brother. But she seemed in a smiling mood, and later, when it was time for bed, she gave me a look that turned my throat dry, and I knew that even though she would never admit it, we were going to celebrate being alone again. When I turned out the kitchen light the last thing I saw was Lulu’s maniac grin. She had grinned at all of us, all evening long.
I went over to Sheriff Emery “Bub” Fischer’s courthouse office on Friday morning at ten o’clock. He is a living example of the idiocy of making any law office on the operations level an elective office. He’s been the Sheriff of Brook County for three years. He’s nearly sixty years old, and he has been on the county payroll since he was eighteen, through the simple device of running in the primary for any office which happened to have several people on the ticket, then making a shrewd guess as to who would win the runoff, and throwing his few hundred votes to the right man. He filed for Sheriff on the same old basis, but three days before the primary the most likely winner dropped dead, and the number two man was slapped with a tax fraud suit, and Bub Fischer learned to his complete astonishment he was going to be the new Sheriff of Brook County.
He looks like a Sheriff is supposed to look, in a bad movie. Big, portly, white-headed, with a big homespun voice, faded whipcord outfits, semi-western hat, gunbelt and silver gleam of badge. Forty years of cheap whisky has broken enough veins in his face to give him an outdoor look, and forty years of cheap politics has convinced him of the basic error of ever offending anyone.
“Glad to see you, Fenn! Real glad! Take a load off your feet, boy. Don’t see near enough of you. Everything going fine with you?”
As I told him what I wanted, I could see the conviviality draining out of him. His expression changed to that of a baby beginning to wish somebody would come and change it.
“Not as easy as it sounds, Fenn. Not easy at all.”
“All that hill country is the biggest part of Brook County, Sheriff.”
“Now you don’t have to tell me that on account of all I have to do is look at that map over there.”
“Doesn’t anybody ever break the law up the hills?”
“They break it pretty complete, as I guess you’d be knowing. But I got a working agreement with those folks.” He got up heavily and waddled over to his wall map. I followed him over. “You see right here there’s only three towns up there big enough to have any kind of law. That’s Laurel Valley, Stoney Ridge and Ironville, and they all got chiefs of police with a couple men helping, and a car to use and a place to lock up the drunks. There’s four smaller places has a town constable system, like you can elect to have in this here state, and for those it’s a part-time job. The way it works, they take care of their own unless it’s a killing or a rape or something, or maybe a smaller thing they got reasons they don’t want to handle through a justice of the peace setup, so then they invite me in on it, and we go up and bring back whoever it is and the statements and so on. This here 882 is the only road the State Police patrol, and they don’t do it often, and never at night. These people up in there, they like to take care of things their own way. I got nice co-operation now, Fenn, and I worked for it, and the quickest way I can upset the whole thing is sending anybody up in there just looking around. They don’t want me or you or game wardens or tax fellas or any Federal folk looking for stills.”
“Boo Hudson used to be welcome.”
“Not because he was Sheriff. And he made deputies of a couple of boys up there, to sort of look out for his interests. Those old boys quit the day Boo’s term run out. That hilly piece of my county is about sixty miles by forty miles, which comes out to twenty-four hundred square miles, Fenn, with most of it tilted sideways, and maybe six or seven thousand people scattered all to hell and gone across it, with too many of them willing to shoot your hat off when you take the first step across where they think their property line is. And you know, Fenn, men have tried to hide out up in there, but sooner or later they mess with some of those people and get in trouble.”
I remembered Larry Brint telling me about something which had happened way back in the early years of the depression. During the night a car with Kentucky plates had been parked and abandoned near the courthouse. It checked out as belonging to a Lexington businessman who, with two friends, had gone up into our hill country deer hunting. All their gear was stowed in the car, even to the rifles. It was over a year later that a rumor drifted down out of the hills to the effect that a fifteen-year-old girl had come upon their camp site by accident, had been given whisky, had spent the night and been misused. But the girl was never identified. It was believed to have happened in the Stoney Ridge area, but that was never established. There was never any mystery about what happened to the men. One was in the front seat, on the passenger side of the big LaSalle automobile, and the other two were lashed in place between hood and front fenders, the same way they would have brought the buck deer down out of the hills. All three men had been shot high in the spine, the same kind of expert shot which will bring a running deer down in a long boneless sprawling fall.
“But McAran is hill stock himself.”
“Then likely he won’t have trouble. I can ask you something, Fenn. How many people are there up there you’d be real glad to lay your hands on?”
I shrugged. “Thirty, forty, I don’t know exactly.”
“They ever come down to town and give you a chance?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You ever try to get ’em brought down to you?”
“Before I knew any better. One spindly-looking old man put two husky young cops in the hospital. He knocked them down, stomped them, and dropped their guns in a corner mailbox. I traced him to Laurel Valley, and I learned his name. I couldn’t get them to arrest him. I took a day off and went up to see if I could bluff him into coming back with me. He listened very politely, and then followed me down into Laurel Valley in his old car and introduced me to five good citizens who were willing to swear old Tom hadn’t been down to Brook City in over a year. As I was ready to take off he leaned down to my car window and said, ‘Thank you kindly for being so nice and polite. I kin prove I was never nowhere near the city that evening you had the trouble. Anyhow, I was standing in the nightime looking at some pretty rings in a store window, and two young squirts come up on me from behind, slappin’ my pockets, pushing me rough like, and a-callin’ me pappy. So I told them I would have no layin’ on of hands, but they laughed and pulled on my beard, and I got a temper I’ve been tryin’ to cure all my life. So I whipped ’em and come on back home earlier’n I planned. If I felt I done a wrong thing, I’d walk down there barefoot in the deep of winter. You tell those young men they’ll do better having respect for grown men. You told me they reported me drunk. Had I been drunk they’d have been kilt too dead to report. On my twenty-third birthday I drank heavy and come to myself a month later, five hundred miles from home, with not a penny. I walked home in eleven days and eleven nights, and took the pledge and ain’t tasted a drop since. Had you come up on me talking rough, you would be a long time getting back to talking and walking.’ Then he nodded and walked away, big as a minute and tough as a berry patch.”
“So when you came over here, you didn’t have much hope of my doing anything for you, did you?” Bub Fischer asked the question hopefully.
“Not too much.”
He looked relieved. “You know how it is.”
“Maybe you can think of some way of finding out what I want to know. Some easy way, Sheriff. Something that won’t cost you a vote.”
“Now if a man spent all his time thinking about votes—”
“He’d keep getting elected forever.”
“Now you know I wasn’t going to say that.” There was a slight whine in his voice. “I’m trying to run this job right.”
I stood up, wondering why I’d wasted my time. The few reasonably adequate deputies had quit in disgust. He’d filled the slots with his no-good buddies. Their budget was still substantial, because Boo Hudson had pushed it as high as he could, and government operating expenses never go down. But the money wasn’t going into law enforcement in the unincorporated areas of Brook County. Their radio network was deteriorating, their vehicles were growing ever closer to the final breakdown, their central records setup was falling way behind. The “unsolved” rate was shooting up. The county prosecutor was turning cases back for more investigation, which wasn’t getting done. Convictions were reaching a new low for the county. And Bub Fischer was attending every Sheriff’s conference within seven hundred miles. I could have told Bub what would happen, but he wouldn’t have believed me. He’d been riding a long streak of luck, because nothing really hairy had happened in the area under his control. But it would. And he wouldn’t know how to handle it. Then the State’s Attorney would send in some investigators, and Fischer would be suspended for incompetence, and a new Sheriff would be appointed. Ironically, if the appointee was a professional officer of the law, he wouldn’t be able to keep the job by getting elected to it later on, not unless he was a combination so unusual he’d be too smart to waste his talents in Brook County.
“How are your boys coming with that hit and run?” I asked him.
“The way it looks to me, Fenn, we just plain don’t have enough to go on. It’s more’n a month now, and—”
“Not enough to go on? Good Lord, you know the make and color and the year from the spectroscopic analysis report on the paint ground into that boy’s pants. You know the car is registered in this state, and you’ve got the first two numbers of the plate, even. I told you, you have to send a man upstate to pull all those numbers and make a list of the cars of the right make, then use plain old shoe leather to locate the ones painted that shade of red, or repainted since it happened.”
He shook his head sadly. “I wish I could do just that, boy. But I swear to you, we got such a work load around here, I can’t turn a soul loose to go do it your way.”
I could hear his cronies laughing and talking in the outer office. “Is there another way?” I asked him.
He winked at me. “We got a lead on it. Don’t you worry. We got a little lead we’re tracking down right now.”
I had seen the police pictures of the boy who’d been hit by the car. Estimated speed at moment of impact—seventy to eighty m.p.h. I wished I could not remember the pictures so vividly. I could not trust myself to speak to Sheriff Emery Fischer at the moment, so I walked out.
“Come round more often, you hear?” he called after me.
viii
The days and nights went by. I settled gratefully back into the old routines. I was aware of tension, of anticipation of trouble, but I realized I had merely traded one variety for another. In the last months before McAran had been released I had been dreading it. Now it was a more formless worry, but no easier and no more difficult to bear.
Meg was very merry and happy during that period. She had found it easy to sell herself a brand-new dream about Dwight. He would summer in the hills, and return refreshed and make himself a new life. Also, she felt she had a better chance, this year, of getting back into the public school system in the fall.
A dwindling city creates unusual problems. All public utilities work at less than capacity. There is always plenty of room in the hospital. Young people are the ones who leave a shrinking city, and that means fewer kids, empty classrooms. They need teachers only to fill retirement vacancies. By the time Judy had entered kindergarten, we knew we couldn’t have a family as big as we wanted. So Meg had applied that year. One house wasn’t enough to use up all her awesome energies. She had applied again last year, and narrowly missed being taken on. Now she was very near the top of the list, and they told her she could practically count on it. Her hours would be so similar to the school hours the kid had, there was no special problem. It would take some of the financial pressure off us.
She wondered aloud when we were going to hear from Dwight. I made the casual, unheard answers, in the right tone of voice.
Larry Brint wondered when we were going to hear from Dwight, too. So did Johnny Hooper. So did I. Cop sense, you call it. We hear a lot of bluffs. They’re part of the business. Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand aren’t worth the breath it takes to shout them in open court.
The thousandth one makes you wonder.
Even when you’re busy, you keep wondering. We kept busy. Crime in a depressed area has its own pattern. We were spared professional felonious ventures. Jeff Kermer saw to that. And the people with jobs were particularly careful not to get jammed up, because jobs can be lost that way. But for a long time we had been getting more than our share of those vicious, random violences which are born out of despair. Kitchen quarrels turn into an ugly business with a carving knife. They look for all the kinds of blackout which mean escape for a little while—driving a car at top speed, knocking off the cheap half-pint bottles in one long spasmodic gulping in the alley nearest the liquor store because it works faster and harder that way, losing money too fast in Kermer’s rigged games and then trying to waylay a winner on his way home, messing with the neighbor’s wife, or his daughters, swinging with a maniac frenzy at the man who accidentally jostles them, beating wives and children too long and too hard, committing impulse thefts of ridiculous clumsiness, writing bad paper that makes even the most stupid store clerk wary.
These are the crimes of a hard-times town, and they fill the cells with all that aching remorse of men and women who know, in their hearts, that nothing like this would ever have happened if—the furniture factory hadn’t closed, or the lawnmower plant hadn’t moved away, or the bake shop hadn’t failed, or if Sam hadn’t insisted on coming back to this lousy, dirty, crummy, stinking town way back when he got out of the army.
We worked at our trade, hating a lot of it, trying not to forget the uses of mercy. And while we worked, we tried forty ways of getting some crumb of information out of the hill country. But it was as though big McAran and the big car with the big load had melted into the mountain ground.
A week after McAran left town, Paul Hanaman, Junior, came to see Chief Brint, and Larry sent him down to see me. We walked over to Shilligan’s Courthouse Cafe. It was the first genuinely hot afternoon of the year, and I was technically off duty, and I wanted some of the dark and bitter imported brew Shilligan keeps on draught. Also, I thought young Paul would be more off balance there than in my office. We sat in a booth and he ordered probably the only iced coffee served that afternoon in Shilligan’s. He was uneasy, and I was not going to make it any easier for him. He has a pudding face, a pudding wife, and two doughy children. He lives with his father in the old Hanaman place out in the Hillview section. He dresses twenty years older than he is. His eyes bulge slightly, and are vaguely blue. His mouth is puckered and prim. He has the idea the world has been established in order to provide him with an agreeable environment, and it is his obligation to pay the world back by living up to the responsibilities of wealth and social position. His public title is Assistant to the Publisher of the Brook City Daily Press. He serves on a dozen civic groups and committees. He gives a hollow imitation of his father’s effortless, merciless authority, but he is the sort of man who would march righteously to quiet some foul-mouthed drunk and end up apologizing to him for bothering him. I have sensed from the very beginning of it all that his sister’s death was a source of great relief to him. Despite her wildness, s
he was the old man’s favorite. She constantly embarrassed young Paul. She shamed him.
“Chief Brint said you could answer my questions, Lieutenant.” By a small emphasis on “you” he managed to convey his impression that it was a preposterous idea.
“I’ll try to be real bright.”
“What? Well—I’ll appreciate it, certainly. My father is curious about—Dwight McAran.”
“What does he want to know about him?”
“My father has felt it was a terrible miscarriage of justice when the court accepted a plea of guilty to the reduced charge of manslaughter. It made him—very bitter.”
“McAran thought it was a miscarriage of justice too, but not exactly the same way.”
“My father thought it practically obscene that he should be permitted to come back here to Brook City.”
“You people made that clear in the paper. And you stirred up a lot of other people, too.”
“He shouldn’t have been allowed to come back here just as if nothing had ever happened.”
“If you’d bought the city and put a fence around it, you could have kept him out.”
“Is that some sort of a joke, Lieutenant?”
“It’s the only legal way I can think of—to have kept him out.”
“Things like that can be arranged.”
“Sometimes.”
“But he came back here and he actually—lived in your home.”
“We’ve been scrubbing and fumigating it ever since.”
“You have a strange attitude, Lieutenant.”
I studied him for a few moments. The future I planned for myself might well depend on the good will of this pompous young man. The canny police administrator will maintain excellent relations with the influential members of the community.
I sighed and smiled at him and said, “I’m not exactly charmed and enchanted by your attitude, young Paul.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My wife, whom I dearly love, happens to love the McAran monster with all her heart. She made sixty sad pilgrimages to Harpersburg. She cannot believe evil of him. If the Brook City Police had bowed to Hanaman—and Kermer—pressure, and framed McAran back into prison, or chased him the hell out of town, I would have had to choose between my wife and my job, and properly so. I would have chosen Meg, not the job. Larry Brint knows I am the best he has, the best he is likely to get, and his logical eventual replacement. Even so, he might have played it your way, for the sake of expediency, but you all pushed a little too hard. And he is a stubborn man. So he backed me, backed my marriage, gave McAran safe haven. So if we want to have any kind of constructive thought on this hot afternoon, let’s forget what might have been, or what you and your father think should have been, and stick with the facts.”
One Monday We Killed Them All Page 13