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

no specific goal in life, and tends to overindulge in anything he tries, and uses the people who love him and charms them into forgiveness, and forms no lasting emotional relationships, then small bells start to ring.
    They are overly plausible. Their eyes seem to have a curious opacity. They laugh too quickly at your first joke, and wander away in the middle of your second one. Their smiles are practiced in front of mirrors. Any concern seems faked. There is never any evidence of anxiety. To them the great sin is not in sinning but in being caught at it. Add a constant need for and carelessness with money, plus a ruthless use of women, and the proficient cop begins to tighten up a little, because it is a pattern he has seen before, and when he has seen it before, it has caused him some work a little dirtier than usual. The cop will not say, “This one is going to commit violence.” He merely says, “This one can be triggered. This one can blow. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen.”
    I met Dwight at the wedding, and I wanted to accept him because he was my bride’s brother. But it did not take him long to give me the impression I was as close to him as I was ever going to get. His sister was throwing herself away on a flatlander cop, and it couldn’t be stopped, but if she had any sense she would have gone where the money is.
    I watched him operate, with her, and with the guests at the wedding, and with one of Meg’s closest friends fromNormal School, and I liked no part of it. He leaned on the football hero bit with all the weight it would stand. Before we finally drove off he was recklessly drunk.
    After we got back from the honeymoon we found out he had stayed away from his job so long he had been fired. He had talked his way into her room at Mrs. Duke’s place, apparently, because her radio and her portable typewriter were gone. I traced them to Brook City’s only hock shop and got them back, by using some pressure, for just what he sold them for—twenty dollars. He left Meg a note saying he was going to bum around for a while and he’d be back at school early in September. It wasn’t until much later that Meg found out her pretty little Normal School friend, Ginny Potter, had gone right along with him. They used the car she had bought on the strength of her first teaching job. She wrote her parents she was taking a sightseeing trip with another girl. The last postcard from her was mailed in Baton Rouge. Two weeks later, several days after she was supposed to report back for the new school year, she phoned her people collect from a third-rate hotel in New Orleans, broke, sick, emaciated and desperate. Her brother flew down and brought her back. They never found any trace of the car. Dwight had walked out on her a long time ago. She couldn’t remember when, exactly, and she didn’t know what had become of all the clothes aside from the dress she was wearing. She came home and made a pretty good try at killing herself, and spent over a year in a rest home, then a few months later married one of her father’s close friends who had lost his wife in a swimming accident.
    I can remember what Meg said when she heard about Ginny. “Really, Fenn, Dwight didn’t exactly abduct her, you know. She’s over twenty-one. I think it was a stupid thing for both of them to do.”
    “So he didn’t abduct her, but maybe he could have taken a little care of her.”
    “We shouldn’t judge him, darling. We don’t know what happened in New Orleans. And he’s only a twenty-year-old boy, after all. Maybe he felt he was doing the right thing in walking out. Probably he thought she’d head for home where she belonged. How could he know she’d stay down there all alone until she got into such dreadful condition?”
    “I think the money was gone.”
    “He knew she could always wire for some. I think hebegan to feel—guilty about the whole thing, so he walked out.”
    “Maybe,” I said, and changed the subject. What else can