One Monday We Killed Them All by John D. MacDonald Page A

defense up against great zeal, in front of a tough judge and a jury as merciless as the prosecutor could make it. You see him slamming away at the weak spots, yet ever cautious to avoid any procedural error.
    It is not this way in every city. It works this way in most of them. Suppose you were the prosecutor. Suppose you were not given, out of public funds, enough money to make a painstaking preparation of every case. Where would you save money and where would you expend it? It’s a pretty problem, and it extends into the police investigatory work also. If you haven’t the time or the men to make all files air-tight, which ones do you concentrate on? Where there are professional public prosecutors appointed for long terms and paid well, the problem is lessened. And when you have that rare animal, the violent champion of the downtrodden, the outright foe of power and privilege, you still have the same problem—reversed.
    In this sense justice is conditioned by who you are rather than by what you have done.
    And Dwight McAran killed the only daughter of one of the most influential men in Brook City. The request for the change of venue was made too late, and denied.
    Yet had he killed in the same way and for the same reason the same sort of girl his father found on Division Street, it might not even have gone to trial.
    After his first full season of pro ball, McAran arrived in Brook City in the middle of January with the idea of setting up some sort of business connection which would support him during the off season, and one which might support him full time when and if he ever got out of the NFL. He rented a small layout in an apartment hotel, talked entertainingly at some service club luncheons, gave interviews and predictions to the local sports reporters, and started selling insurance for the Atlas Agency, for old Rob Brown who was getting too feeble to go out and dig for it. After two weeks and one sale he decided he didn’t like it. Rob said later that the little venture cost him about three hundred dollars net.
    He sold sporting goods for a little while. He spent one week behind the desk at the Christopher Hotel, and was fired for getting drunk. Traffic got tired of warning him about the way he yanked his blue convertible back and forth around town and started giving him heavy tickets. By then he was moving with a fast rough crowd.
    I knew he had taken to hanging around the Division Street joints but I didn’t know what it meant until Larry Brint called me in and shut the door and said, “Peters was working an informant for something else entirely and came up with something on your brother-in-law Dwight. He’s on Jeff Kermer’s payroll at maybe two bills a week.”
    I must have looked shocked. “Doing what?”
    “Alfie’s pigeon says Jeff is using him for muscle. People have moved a little bit out of line this winter because Jeff has been a little shorthanded. McAran is helping bring them back into the fold.”
    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 interrogatedhim 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