Read Online One Monday We Killed Them All by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online Page B

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 almostbeyond 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.
    He gave me a rocky smile more like the lip-lift snarl of an animal.
    “Dirty cop bastard!”
    I leaned against the bars. He sat on the bunk, cracking his knuckles. “Sure. I framed you.”
    “It could have been fixed. Five lousy years! Jesus!”
    “Fixed?”
    “One of your prowl cops up there testifying he saw her pull over halfway home and get out and trip and fall on her stinking head.”
    “Oh, sure. We always do that for our friends.”
    “Why did Kermer cross me? Two of those guys taking my money in that game work for him. I told Jeff how to do it. They go on the stand. On the stand they change the testimony, and they say Mildred fell on her head hard after dumping that drink on me, and she acted dazed and funny, and her face was banged up before she ever got into that room, and all I did was slap her a little trying to bring her out of it. Was that so hard?”
    “Did he agree?”
    “He winked and told me not to worry about a thing. After they gave it straight, I knew I was cooked.”
    “Maybe Kermer needs Hanaman more than he needs you, Dwight.”
    “I wish I had that sloppy, drunken, big-mouth broad right here, right now. I’d kill her in a way that would give me some kicks. Five years! ”
    “More like three and a half if you handle it right.”
    “I have the strangest feeling I’m not going to handle it right, brother-in-law.” He looked at me with a curious steadiness which made me uneasy. “I owe you, cop. I owe you and Kermer and Hanaman and this bastard town and this bastard system that’s put me in every newspaper in the country. I’ll be in the news again, officer. Wait for the day. Have yourself a nice five years with my sister.”
    “Don’t talk nonsense. Don’t talk like a punk kid.”
    He looked down at his big meaty right hand and slowly flexed the fingers. “A little too hard,” he said softly. “And alittle too long. Should have stopped when she went loose, but I was in the rhythm of it, popping her face back and forth, catching it just right.” He stared up at me with a corrugation of boyish forehead, a puzzled look. “By then I wasn’t sore, you know? It was like—a game with a ball, where you