One Monday We Killed Them All (7 page)

I remembered a brand-new hospital patient, the owner-manager of the Brass Ring on the corner of Division and Third. He’d walked in with two snapped wrists, a dislocated shoulder, some minor internal bleeding and a story about having fallen down his own cellar stairs. We had interrogated
him at the hospital, almost positive we were wasting our time.

“Davie Morissa?” I asked.

“The word is that McAran did it, and Kermer liked the job.”

“I don’t like any part of it.”

“So I’ll talk to Jeff and you talk to the hero.”

I got nowhere with Dwight. He was full of injured indignation. Jeff Kermer was a friend. He hung around Jeff’s place, the Holiday Lounge, because Jeff had the idea he attracted trade and gave him a discount on his bar bill. He wasn’t on anybody’s payroll, honest to God. He had something real good lined up that might work out and might not. A couple of friends were loaning him money to keep him going. Hell, I should know that a guy in the pro league couldn’t get tied up to anybody who’d been arrested a few times for gambling. They’d throw him the hell right out of the league. Getting a discount on drinks wasn’t exactly working for a guy.

I had caught him at his studio apartment at the Brookway, at eleven in the morning. Just as it was apparent our little talk was going nowhere at all, Mildred Hanaman came strolling out of the bathroom wearing a big yellow towel in sarong fashion, and gave a great faked imitation of surprise. She was a lean dark girl, random as the March wind, spuriously elegant, her considerable handsomeness marred by a mouth too slack, too mobile, too given to framing every word with such labial exaggeration, she seemed to be speaking forever to a world of lip readers.

I was standing near the door. Dwight was sitting with paper, coffee, robe, beard-stubble. “May I present Detective Sergeant Hillyer. Sergeant, Miss Hanaman,” Dwight said with sarcastic precision.

“Well, we’ve met,” she said, with all the roving business with the mouth. “Haven’t we just? Time and again, practically. You’re a dear Sergeant, truly. Dwightie dear, you
must
make them do something about hot water up here. What did I do with my cigarettes? Oh, I see them.”

Yes, we had met. People marveled at how completely unlike a brother a sister could be. Paul junior, four years her senior, had been fifty years old at birth and had always been totally solemn, totally reliable, completely proper. Their mother died when Paul junior was fifteen. Mildred had
been thrown out of every school they could get her into, including the Swiss. At eighteen she started receiving the income from a trust her spendthrift grandmother had left her. She lived like a sailor on shore leave, as if there would never be enough beds and bottles in the world, as if no cars could be driven quite fast enough, and no parties would last long enough. She went to far places on impulse, and her returns to Brook City were unpredictable. Whenever she was in town she became a problem to us. She was twenty-two. Her father’s newspaper would, of course, kill any story about her. She was so used to having us pry her out of difficulties, she had come to believe we were on her father’s payroll.

I had been in on one of the juiciest episodes, three years previous, when I was in the first detective grade. A well-to-do couple named Walker had taken a trip to Europe in the spring. Their son had brought two college friends back with him to the empty house for Easter vacation, a nice home in the Hillview section, not for from the Hanaman place. As we reconstructed it, the three boys had holed up in the house with Mildred and plenty of liquor, and the party had continued for five days and nights before the Walker boy’s roommate died. We got there ten minutes after the mumbled phone call from the Walker boy. He was too drunk to be interrogated. We found the other boy in bed, snoring heavily. They had turned the house into a pig sty. We found Mildred Hanaman naked and passed out in a pink bathtub. Apparently the faulty drain had let the water run out or she would have drowned. The pink glow of the porcelain made her body look gray and lifeless, as inviting as a stacked corpse in a concentration camp.

The dead boy had been a high-fidelity bug. He hadn’t been satisfied with the television picture they were getting. He had taken the back off the big set and stuffed his drunken clumsy hands in among the wires and circuits without unplugging the set. The shock had hurled him eight feet away. His dead face was redder than any sunburn, but we had to go through the pointless routine of resuscitation.

I wanted to blow the whole stinking thing a mile into the air, bringing every charge we could find in the books. When they found I was going to be hard to control, they pulled me off it. The Hanaman house servants put the Walker home back into immaculate order. Mildred was hustled off to a
rest home to dry out. Somebody did an excellent job of coaching the Walker boy and his surviving friend. By the time the dead boy’s parents had arrived, it had become one of those innocent, tragic accidents: three friends sitting around having a beer, and Ronnie volunteering to adjust the set and pulling the floor lamp plug out of the wall socket instead of the television set plug. Coroner’s verdict—accidental death.

Larry Brint lectured me. “You are paid to be a cop, Hillyer, not a moralist, not a reformer. You don’t enforce the Christian ethic. You enforce the laws. It was an accidental death. What good is a morals charge going to do anybody? What good would it do if we could prove the Walker boy waited twenty minutes, God knows why, before putting the call in? How would it help that boy’s people to know how he spent the last five days of his life? This kind of a deal should make you feel sick, like it does me. Okay. If it didn’t, we’d be bad cops and worse human beings. But don’t let it carry over into what you’re being paid to do. We’re not going to change the way the world is. All we’re going to do is make Brook City a reasonably safe place to live, and give them a buck and a half of protection for every buck they budget us. You’re not a judge or a jury or a prosecutor.”

I remembered his words as I looked at Mildred in her yellow towel. She lit a cigarette. Dwight reached lazily and she gave it to him and lit another. They were both looking at me and I suddenly realized how very much alike they were. There was an inevitability about this association. It wouldn’t last long. They didn’t lead lives in which anything lasted very long. But they had to be together for a little while.

“He came to tell me to stop working for Jeff. He gets these weird ideas.”

“Jeffie is a dear man,” Mildred said. “He’s a fun sort. Sergeant, dear, we sort of run with the pack, but we’re not employees, really. I did try to be one last year. I teased him to put me on a little telephone list, just to see what it would be like, but he was horribly chicken about it, scared of Daddy, truly.”

“We don’t want to keep you from your work, Fenn,” Dwight said.

As I walked toward the elevator I could hear them laughing.

I learned Larry had made no headway with Jeff Kermer. Jeff had admitted just the casual association described by Dwight. We suffer the existence of Division Street. We need and use Jeff Kermer, and he needs and uses us. It is a realistic relationship which would horrify the reform elements if they knew how it works. In nearly all categories of major and minor crime, we run well below the FBI statistics for the national average. Nearby cities with a fatter per capita police budget run higher.

It is a power relationship, not a conspiracy. In the un-written arrangement, Kermer keeps his operations pretty well centralized in the Division Street area, and can operate the clip joints, the gambling, the call girl circuits, the unaffiliated local union rackets and small scale protection setups, as well as jukes, pinball machines and punchboards, without any serious interference. In return he puts the whole city off limits for the organized narcotics trade, pornography, professional armed robbery, safe-cracking and car theft rings. We try to keep two classes of informers inside his organization, those he knows about and those he doesn’t. We can’t expect him to stop amateur impulsive crimes of violence, but we expect him to keep professional talent out of town. If any tries to move in, and he can’t readily break it up, he sees that we get tipped off. If one of the independent operators within his sphere of influence gets too greedy, we are tipped off that Jeff wouldn’t mind a raid and some arrests. This always pleases the reform elements. Because it is a controlled town, it is a cooling off place for out of town hoodlums. In return for the arrangement that they not ply their trade in Brook City, we agree to forego the dragnet technique of picking up strangers on suspicion.

As far as the police department is concerned, there is no grease involved. Kermer has a political budget, necessary to protect the status quo, but no bag man ever visits Larry Brint. And Jeff is too smart to try to buy the police. In a controlled town, when the police are purchased, it upsets the power balance, the town gradually becomes so wide open that the ever-present reform element gains enough power to take over and break up the party. Whenever any cop is so stupid as to try to extract grease, Kermer tips Chief Brint off and that cop is suspended. So corruption helps keep the force clean and professional, and giving a good return on the tax dollar.

For Larry Brint it is a working arrangement, a rational compromise. But he knows that such a balance cannot be maintained because it is a highly personal solution. Men sicken and die, and the ones who replace them have other ideas. Also, Larry was in a static position, and Jeff Kermer was getting stronger. Jeff had been expanding into legitimate enterprise for a long time, slowly allying himself with the commercial pressure group, acquiring new power of a different sort. And it was this duality of interest which kept him from making any attempt to obscure the details of the killing of Mildred Hanaman. Just as his extra-legal activities were at the mercy of Chief Larry Brint, his legitimate businesses were vulnerable to the pressure the Paul Hanaman group could bring to bear.

The killing occurred six weeks after I talked to Dwight and the Hanaman girl in Dwight’s apartment.

These are the facts brought out by the police investigation. McAran had broken off the relationship. The girl was furious with him. Her pride was hurt. She was drinking heavily. He was staying out of her way. She found him on a Saturday at midnight in one of the private rooms at the Holiday Lounge in a four-handed game of stud poker. He told her to leave him alone. They called each other obscene names. She wandered out to the bar and came back with a drink and kibitzed the game for a little while. Without warning she poured the drink over his head. He swung backhanded at her. She dodged the blow, but was so unsteady on her feet she fell down. She laughed at him. He went and got a towel, dried his face and head and went back to the table, ignoring her completely. She worked herself into a screaming rage and catapulted herself at him, clawing at him from behind. He stood up, tipping his chair over, and walked her back against the wall beside the door, held her there with his left hand and worked her over with his right, striking her heavily with his open hand, backhand and forehand, until there was no resistance in her. He kept striking her until the men he was gambling with came and pulled him away. She collapsed, semiconscious. They went back to the interrupted game. After five minutes she was able to get to her feet. She left without another word. As she went out through the bar several people noticed her face was badly swollen and beginning to discolor. She left the Holiday Lounge at approximately ten minutes to one. A maid heard
her car enter the driveway at her home at about one-thirty. The trip should have taken no longer than fifteen minutes. She remained in bed most of the next day, complaining of a headache, nausea and a vision defect. She was up for an hour, but complained of dizziness and went back to bed. When a maid discovered her dead in her bed at noon on Monday, the coroner, using a thermistor bridge thermometer and the temperature extrapolation method, gave the estimated time of death as three o’clock on Monday morning. In view of the facial contusions, autopsy permission was requested and granted, and the cause of death was shown to be a traumatic rupture of a minor blood vessel in the left hemisphere of the brain with an attendant slow build-up of pressure which in turn starved the supply of blood to those deeper areas of the brain controlling respiration and heart action. No abnormality or malformation was noted in the area of the hemorrhage. Two consulting specialists concurred with the coroner’s opinion that the facial bruises indicated blows of a sufficient severity so that it was
possible
they had also ruptured the blood vessel. The three witnesses to the assault were questioned separately. They willingly gave statements which were not contradictory in any significant respect.

The principle of reasonable doubt is one of the basic ingredients of the law. Any zealous defense would make much of the fact that the girl had been visibly drunk. The autopsy could not pin down the approximate time of the brain injury. She could have fallen before McAran beat her. She could have gotten out of the car on the way home and fallen. She could have gotten up in the night and fallen in her own bathroom.

McAran was charged with murder in the second degree. With all the Hanaman weight behind him, the young prosecutor, John Finch, made massive preparation. Midway through the trial it was easy to guess how it was going to go. The defense wisely requested a recess, conferred with Finch, and, with his agreement, entered a plea of guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter. McAran was sentenced to five years at Harpersburg State Prison.

Had Paul Hanaman, Junior, stepped sufficiently out of character to have roughed up a drunken B-girl in one of the Division Street saloons, and had she walked out under her own power and died over twenty-four hours later, it is almost
beyond the realm of possibility to believe he would have spent even five days in a cell. In his case, the doubt would have been exceedingly reasonable.

I visited Dwight in his cell after he had been sentenced and was waiting to be transported to Harpersburg.