One Monday We Killed Them All

Book 422: Murder Room

by John D. MacDonald

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Traditional Mysteries; Noir

Synopsis

Step by step, Dwight McAran built a wall of vicious hate around himself. It was easy. He was a man who could slap one woman to death because she loved him, and hum a love song to another while he raped her.

Sure, he did some time in jail. He sat in a cell and simmered for five long years until his hate hardened to a core of white-hot evil. Revenge was all he craved - and a plan was what he had - a plan just cruel enough to please him, and just crazy enough to work.

Release date: June 11, 2013

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 192

Sample

AN excerpt from a statement in the Brook City Police file on the death of Mildred Hanaman, dictated and signed by Hans Dettermann, also known as Kraut Dettermann:

“You could say what she wanted was for McAran to notice her, and she was halfway drunk when she found us in a back room at the Holiday Lounge in the four-hand stud game for small money,
just killing time. She called him all kinds of dirty names, then he topped her with some worse ones, and she cried and went out, but she came back in from the bar a little while later with a drink
in her hand. She stood behind him, watching the way the cards were falling, and sudden-like she poured the drink on his head. He swung backhand at her and she dodged it, but fell down, sitting,
because she wasn’t so steady, and laughed at him. McAran went and got a towel and came back, drying his head and face, and she was standing up then, trying to make a joke out of it. There was
music from the bar, and she did little dance steps in front of him saying something like, ‘Remember me? I’m your girl. Dance with your girl. Be nice to your girl, please, please,
darling.’ But he pushed right past her not even looking at her and sat down to bet the pair of eights he had showing. She got real white in the face and she was breathing hard, and suddenly
she jumped at him from behind, yelling and digging at his face. That was when he jumped up and she tried to run, but he grabbed her and backed her against the wall next to the door, and held her
there and started hitting her. Pretty soon we knew somebody better stop him, so we stopped him. She slid down the wall and sat in a bent-over way. He came back to the table, and I remember it was
his deal. After maybe three or four hands, she got up real slow. She held onto the doorframe. She didn’t look at us, but I could see her face was messed up. She walked out. I’d say it
was about quarter to one in the morning. I never saw her again. She was a real pretty girl, but I guess McAran got tired of her, the way she kept chasing him after he’d called the whole thing
off.”

WHEN you can count the time you have left in big numbers, count it in years; whole weeks can go by when you never think of it. But it dwindles down, and as the time gets
shorter it seems to go faster. It came down to months, and then weeks, and suddenly it was time for me to go up to Harpersburg, up to the big maximum security prison and get my wife’s
half-brother and bring him home.

As the time got shorter I could see Meg tightening up. She’d look beyond me when I was talking to her, and I’d have to repeat what I’d said. She was short with the kids,
impatient and abrupt.

“Five years out of the prettiest part of his life,” she would say. “From twenty-five to thirty, all that good time lost and gone.”

“It could have been more,” I told her.

“What’s he going to be like, honey? What’s he going to act like?”

“You’ve seen him once a month for five years, Meg. You tell me.”

She turned away. “We talk through the wire. I do most of the talking. He listens and sometimes he smiles. I don’t know how he’ll be. I’m—I’m scared of how
he’ll be.”

I told her he would be fine, but I didn’t believe it. I went with her to visit him the first time. He told me not to come back. He meant it. So I’d drive her up there when I could,
and wait in the car across the road from the big wall and try to pretend to myself they were never going to let Dwight McAran out of the cage. She would always come out looking as if they’d
whipped her, walking heavy, her face dull, and half the eighty miles home would go by before she’d begin to act like herself.

“I should go with you to bring him back,” Meg told me.

“He made it plain in the letter. If we want to get him started right, we better do it the way he wants, honey. Maybe—maybe he just doesn’t want to see you anywhere near those
walls again.”

“Maybe that’s it.” But her voice was dubious, her eyes uncertain.

And I wouldn’t know why he made that request until he told me. With men like Dwight McAran it’s little use trying to guess why they do things. We judge others by our own patterns.
When a man doesn’t fit anywhere into the pattern of most people, you might as well try guessing how high a bird will fly on Tuesday.

Down at the station they knew I was going to drive up and get him. There’s more gossip in a place like that than any bridge club you ever saw. They’d even found out Meg wasn’t
going with me. It isn’t very often a cop has a brother-in-law to bring on home from state prison. It would have been a rougher ride if I hadn’t made Detective Lieutenant, but the rank
kept most of the boys off my neck.

The bad situation, the one I knew was going to be bad, was with Alfie Peters. He marched through the squad room and into my office the afternoon of the day before I had to go get Dwight. We
started rookie the same year and he’d thought of every reason in the world why he got a little bit left behind, except the right reason, he’s too quick with his hands and his mouth. But
he was the one who made the collar on Dwight all by himself, which is more than any one man should have tried or could have gotten away with, unhurt. All Alfie got was a dislocated thumb and a torn
ear. Peters is a big man, quick and meaty.

He came in and stared at me and said, “The best thing you can do, Fenn, is drive him the other direction and leave him off some place.”

“If you got to yell, Alfie, go down in the park and holler up at my window.”

“You heard what McAran yelled at me in court.”

“I was there.”

“You give him a message from me. If I come across him any place at all in Brook City, and I don’t like the look on his face, I’m going to hammer on it until I get a look I do
like. He doesn’t scare me a damn bit.”

I stared at Alfie until he began to look uneasy. “If you have reason to arrest him, bring him in. If he resists arrest, you can take the necessary steps to subdue him. If it’s a
false arrest, I’ll do everything I can to make the charge against you stick. He’s not on parole, Peters. He served full time. There will be no arrests for loitering, for acting
suspicious, for overtime parking. I’ve cleared that with the Chief. You’re not putting the roust on McAran, and you’re not working him over. And pickup order on him has to be
cleared with the Chief.”

“Nice,” he said. “Real nice. Who gives him the keys to the city? The Chief or the mayor, or maybe we should invite the governor down?”

“Just handle yourself with a lot of care, Alfie.”

“The picture is clear. That son of a bitch gets the special deal. The brother-in-law of Lieutenant Fenn Hillyer gets every break in the book. Is it on account he’s a college man? He
killed Mildred Hanaman and everybody knows it. You must be nuts to let him come back here.”

I leaned back in the chair. I smiled at him, even. “I don’t make the laws. He was arrested and charged and he stood trial and got five years for manslaughter. Now get out of here,
Alfie.”

He hesitated, turned on his heel and walked out. It certainly wasn’t my idea Dwight should come back to Brook City. It was his, and Meg backed him up. She had some glamorized idea
of Dwight becoming such a solid and dependable citizen everybody would realize they’d misjudged him. Personally, it had always astonished me he had gotten to the age of twenty-five without
killing anybody. But what can you do when the woman you love is just using that natural warmth and heart which make you love her? She’s two years older than Dwight. They had a miserable
childhood. She did her best to protect him. She’s never stopped trying. He’s the only blood relation she has, and she has enough love left over for forty.

Chief of Police Larry Brint caught me in the corridor as I was leaving. He’s sixty, a mild, worn man with a school teacher look, but with a deep and lasting toughness which makes
Alfie’s bluster look like a comedian’s routine. He has made it known to me, without even putting it in so many words, that he wants me to have his job when he quits.

He fell in step beside me and we walked slowly toward the rear exit of our wing of City Hall. “Settle Peters down?” he asked.

“I hope so.”

“This can be a rough thing. You’ve got to handle it just right, Fenn. McAran could make you look pretty bad.”

“I realize that.”

“If there’s any slip, we can’t afford an ounce of mercy. Does Meg understand that?”

“She claims she does. I don’t know if she really does.”

“How long is he going to stay with you?”

“Nobody knows. I don’t know what his plans are.”

We stopped in the shelter of the entrance roof. It had begun to rain again. Larry Brint studied me for a moment. “All prison ever does for most men like McAran is prime them and fuse them
like a bomb. You won’t know where or how that bomb is going to go off.”

“Just watch and wait, I guess.”

“Damn the rain.” He started out into it and turned back. “Fenn, you try to get to him on that ride back. You try to tell him how it’s going to be around here. He
won’t do Meg any favor trying to stay on here.”

“Would that matter to him, Larry?”

“Guess not.” He frowned and looked puzzled. It was a rare expression for him to wear. “Getting old, I guess. Thinking too much. Nearly every man I’ve ever known has been
a mixture of good and evil, so it’s mostly luck pushing them one way or another, and it’s fair the law should give them equal rights and equal justice. But in my life there’s been
just seven I can remember that shouldn’t come under the rules. There should be a special license for those, Fenn. A man should be able to lead them out back and kill them like a snake. Dwight
McAran is the last one of those seven I’ve run into. God grant I never meet up with another. You be careful!”

He fixed me with a stern blue eye and walked off through the rain.

It was still raining when I left the house the next morning for the eighty-mile drive to Harpersburg, a cold pale dreary rain coming down through low gray clouds that nudged the tops of the
hills. Brook City is in the middle of dying country. It’s just dying a little slower than the hill country around it. They came a long time ago and pulled the guts up out of the earth and
took what they wanted and went away, leaving the slag and the tipples and the sidings that are rusting away. There’s nothing left in the hills but the scrabbly farms and the empty faces and
the hard violent ways of living. Violence lifts the climate of despair and boredom for a little while. The government trucks come to the villages once a month, bringing food that’s mostly
starch, and when they collect it they try to make jokes about it, and the laughter is dutiful, and flat as the jokes. It’s shine country, stomping country, old car country, a stale place left
behind when the world moved on some place else, and the things most alive in the hills are the crows and the berry bushes, and, for a shorter time than seems fair to them, the young girls. Dwight
and Meg came out of the hills, came from a village named Keepsafe, a small place now empty of people, with the road washed out and gone. I was born and raised in Brook City. With every year of my
life it’s gotten a little smaller, an old woman shrinking with the years, sighing at nothing at all, running out of time and size and money and hope.

Fifteen miles out of town I got stuck behind an ancient wildcat rig grinding in low-low up three miles of curves, overloaded with stolen coal, and when I finally passed it I caught a glimpse of
the driver, a fat, faded woman wearing a baseball cap. It didn’t bother me to lose the time. I wished I could drive through the rain all the rest of my life and never get to Harpersburg. You
can always tell when there’s some part of your life that hasn’t a chance of working out. It’s like taking your cancer to the doctor a little too late. You wish you were somebody
else entirely.

At the prison I went through gate security and was taken to the plywood office of Deputy Warden Boo Hudson.

“Fenn Hillyer, by God!” he said, pretending a vast, glad surprise. Way back, when I still wore a harness, he was Sheriff of Brook County and I knew him then, and it was always the
same. If you had seen him twenty minutes before, the greeting was always the same. It had been over a year since I had seen him in the lobby of the Christopher Hotel at some time of political
dealings, and he was unchanged, a sagging, flabby old man with a sourness of flesh and breath, hound-dog eyes the color of creek mud, seed-corn teeth, hair dyed anthracite black and oiled in flat
strings across his baldness. He bulked heavy there in an oak chair, soiled and sweaty, the office thick with the scent of him, endlessly smiling, working hard at the effort of pumping the stale air
in and out of his lungs.

Boo Hudson was Sheriff for twenty-two years until the signals got crossed somehow and he didn’t get ample warning of a Federal raid on some of the back county stills in which he had some
substantial interest. People talked and records were found, but over the years he had tied himself so closely to the men who run our state, and knew so much about so many existing arrangements, the
worst they could do to him was force him not to run again after serving the last few months of the term of office. That was almost seven years ago, and two days after elections that year the State
Prison Commission appointed him Deputy Warden at Harpersburg. We all knew it wasn’t because he needed the money. During his years in office Boo Hudson had picked up bits and pieces of this
and that, some leased warehouses and a beer franchise and that sort of thing, and we could assume there was some cash money here and there, where no court order could touch it, probably rolled
tight in sealed fruit jars and tucked below the frost line as is the custom among our elected officials.

“Set and tell me how you been,” Boo said.

I sat in a chair further from him than the one he indicated. “Nothing new,” I said.

“Hear Larry Brint still ain’t closed up Division Street and the women still yammering at him. Guess Brook City don’t change, Fenn.”

“It’s the only way we can operate, Boo. We got a two-hundred-cop town and a hundred-and-twenty-cop budget, so we keep all the trouble in one place instead of getting it so spread out
we lose track. They give Larry eighty more cops and twenty more cars, we’ll close up Division Street right now.”

He sighed, belched and said, “Sure, sure. I tell you, we’re glad to see you around here. We’re glad to be shut of McAran. Warden Waley, he says in twenty-eight years of
penol—penology, he never see a con with absolutely no way to get to him. Nearly everybody, you can work them around with the food, or solitary or the work assignment or privileges, or some
damn thing, and the ones left, those you can bust them up a little until they get the news. But a guy like McAran in a place like this, he turns into some kind of hero, and it gives a lot of punks
the wrong ideas, and the whole setup gets harder to run.”

Hudson chuckled in a phlegmy way. “The way you take him home, Fenn, you stop alongside the road where it’s quiet, and blow the top of his head off, and then take what’s left
back to Brook City.”

“When can I have him?”

“I gave orders that when you come in somebody should go get him straightened away for leaving, so he should be brought in here any minute now.”

Hudson had just started to talk about Brook County when a guard brought Dwight McAran in.

He gave me one quick identifying glance and stood at ease, staring at the wall behind Boo Hudson, with all the massive patience of a work animal. I hadn’t seen him since that first visit.
Any last trace of boyishness had been gone for a long time. His face was a visible record of rebellion, the tissues brutally thickened, white scars shiny against the dull gray of prison flesh. His
coppery hair was cropped close to his scalp. It was thinning on top and turning to gray at the temples.

He was dressed in the expensive clothing he had worn when they had admitted him. But such clothing no longer looked right on him. The jacket was too tight across the brute span of shoulders, and
too slack at the waist. The huge stained hands, horny with callous, hung incongruously from tailored sleeves, curled into the shape of hard labor.

“He get everything back he brang in and sign the paper on it, Joey?” Hudson asked.

“Yes, and he got the cash money balance back from commissary, a little over fourteen dollars, Boo, and signed that paper too.”

“He got any personal stuff out the cell?”

“He give what little he had to the guys on his row, Boo.”

“Thanks, Joey. You get on back to work now.”

Joey left. Boo Hudson put an envelope on the edge of the desk where Dwight could reach it. “In there, McAran, is your gate pass to go out, and the twenty dollars we got to give you by
state law, and the three dollars and six cents which would be our cost on a bus ticket from Harpersburg to Brook City. Sign this here receipt saying you got it.”

McAran hesitated, picked up the envelope and with an insulting thoroughness counted the money it contained. He put the bills into an alligator wallet with gold edges, flipped the nickel and the
penny into Hudson’s metal wastebasket. There was no trace of expression on his face.

Boo Hudson colored and said, “I hope that pleasured you, McAran. I hope it pleasured you the same way you bitched yourself outa getting not one day of good time took off your sentence. If
you’d come in here with the right attitude, you could have been walking free a year and a half ago, and you would have come off parole today.”

Dwight turned toward me. He spoke with a minimum of lip movement. His voice was huskier than I remembered. “Is the sentence over now? Can I leave right now?”

“Yes.”

“What would happen to me if I picked up this fat bag of ignorant garbage and ruptured it a little?”

“Now you hold on!” Boo Hudson said, his voice rising to a squeak.

“He’d probably have his people stomp you up a little and throw you out the gate, Dwight.”

McAran turned and stared at Boo Hudson. “Not worth it,” he said. “Too bad. Why don’t you die a little faster, Hudson, instead of just rotting away and smelling up the
world? Put your mind on it and you could be dead in a month.”

“You’ll be back in here!” Boo yelled. “You’ll be back in here, by God, and I’ll break you the next time, I swear. I’ll have you begging and screaming
like a girl. I’ll tell them what to do to you, you—”

“Let’s go,” said Dwight McAran, and I followed him out of the office. We were escorted across an angle of the yard through the drizzle to the gate. The gate guards made a phone
check on the exit pass, then gave the coded signal to the tower to lift the outer gate. We crossed the road to the parking lot. I suddenly realized he wasn’t beside me. I stopped and looked
back. He was standing under an elm tree with his fists on his hips, staring up at the rain-wet leaves. A small boy pedaled down the road on his bicycle. McAran followed the boy with a slow turning
of his head. Then he gave a curious contortion of his body, a sort of massive shuddering shrug. Perhaps in that moment he threw off some of the hopeless weight of the prison years. At any rate,
when he turned and walked toward me his stride was subtly changed, and his clothing seemed more suitable to him.

WHEN McAran got into the car with me, he was as casual as though I were giving him a lift from his home to the grocery store.

As we left the lot, he said, “Not much miles on this for a si. . .