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

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 hadbeen 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 arest home to dry out. Somebody did an