One Monday We Killed Them All (18 page)

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 hands, 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 second 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.”

“He hasn’t mentioned it.”

“When there’s a good reason, he’ll have to.”

“Think up a reason, Stu.”

“Mmm. A gaudy one? He slips into town, kills jolly old
Jeffie Kermer and fades back into the hills. But there is an eyewitness.”

“So he’d know he was wanted for murder? And you think I’d try to send Meg up there? She could probably find somebody who could tell her where to look for him. But she wouldn’t get any information unless she was alone. Meg’s positive her dear brother wouldn’t harm her. By God, I’m not. I don’t think he’d harm anyone he could use, and I think he’d kill anybody who might harm him. All I would ever do is try to talk her into finding out where he is, so we could go in and get him. I’d have to level with her, not try to trick her and follow her in. And I don’t think she’d set him up that way. It would take a lot of hard solid proof to make her even consider it, and I just don’t think we’re going to get that kind of proof on anything McAran does.”

“And if you can’t convince her, it would look as if you’re protecting McAran.”

“Are you having a lot of fun with this, Dockerty? Heaps of glee?”

“I’m trying to be your friend. If McAran hits and runs back into the hills, there’s going to be pressure on you like you never saw before. So just be braced for it, old boy. Decide in advance just which way you’ll jump and how far. The
Daily Press
will be screaming for your scalp and Larry Brint’s.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to get sore at you, Stu.”

“I want you to survive, Lieutenant. If you and Larry get pushed out, I’ll be working with dolts and savages. I think you might need help from any place you can get it. Even me.”

ix

Harpersburg State Prison erupted into overdue violence on the following Tuesday. The timing was perfect. It happened at ten minutes before noon, the one moment in the day when the maximum number of prisoners were outside their cells. And it took advantage of a vast, intense, windy thunderstorm which had knocked the lights out, and was impeding the guard routines on turrets and catwalks. There were three gates in the prison walls, the main pedestrian gate, the truck gate for incoming supplies and outgoing products of prison labor, and the railroad gate which hadn’t been used in over ten years. The truck gate had not only been reinforced to the extent that no vehicle could smash through it, but it was also protected by a low interior wall built to force outgoing vehicles to approach it at a curve which obviated any buildup of speed. The double pedestrian gate was too narrow to be broached by a vehicle. But somehow the vulnerability of the unused railroad gate had been overlooked. The weak point in prison security was the unthinkable prospect of somebody trying to take a vehicle through the railroad gate.

Subsequent investigations showed that the vast majority of the prison inmates were unacquainted with the escape plan, but had been incited to rebellion so as to provide a maximum diversion while the actual escape took place.

In the first vicious scufflings three guards and two prisoners lost their lives. Eleven hostages were herded into D block. The laundry, the metal stamping mill, and the paint storage shed burst into flames. Under cover of the storm, the confusion and the black choking smoke, a prisoner jumped the ignition wiring on a heavy truck parked at the loading dock, pulled out and picked up speed all the way to the railroad gate. It smashed the inner gate of riveted steel plates and plunged partway through the outer gate before becoming solidly wedged. Thirty-one men followed it to the railroad gate, running at top speed. They made their escape by dropping to the roadbed and crawling out between
the front wheels of the truck. By the time more men had discovered the escape route, the ruined truck had burst into the flames and the heat drove them back. The man who wheeled the big truck had taken a calculated risk. It was discovered, when he was recaptured, that he had been a stock car driver, and knew that he could be injured only if the gates did not give way, thus stopping the truck in its tracks instead of the lesser impact which would result from smashing all the way through, or partially through. He told of crouching on the passenger side, working the gas pedal with his free hand and steering until the last moment, then flattening himself against the firewall. The truck doors were jammed in a closed position by the impact. He dropped out through a side window just in time to join the first group crawling under the front axle. By the time the flames blocked this only exit from the prison the escape siren was bellowing, competing with the thunderous spring storm, and all police installations in the area had been alerted to set up the roadblock plan designed to seal the area.