One Monday We Killed Them All by John D. MacDonald

the Downtown Club. Funny how out of an old family like that a man can come along you could stake out in the city dump and he’d get rich making coats out of rat hides.”
    “About McAran?” I asked.
    “When he finally got around to it. He never came right out with it. A man like that never does. Old Paul Hanaman doesn’t want McAran around town.” He came back to his desk chair, sat down and sighed. “That’s no secret. Jeff Kermer doesn’t want McAran in town. That hasn’t been as obvious. Skip Johnson is the link between those two because he’s tied up to both of them in business ways. It seems to them that any reliable, efficient Chief of Police ought to be able to hustle any undesirable citizen on his way, and if said Chief can’t do a little thing like that, the Common Council might request the Commissioner of Public Safety—if they can keep old Ed sober enough—to suspend the Chief and his most trusted assistants while they make a full-scale investigation of the operations of the department.”
    “What—what did you tell him?”
    “He didn’t come right out with it. But I guess I did. He kept smiling. That man never stops smiling. I said it would suit me. I can elect to be pensioned off right now instead of waiting the five years more. I’m an old widower, all alone in the world, with a son in El Paso ready any time to give me house room, and his wife is willing, and that sun will feel good. I said I’d go to the extra trouble of getting you and Johnny Hooper and a couple of other boys relocated in cities where the police don’t work for a newspaper or a toad like Kermer. Then he and the Hanamans could sit back and watch the town go the rest of the way to hell. Then I thanked him for the lunch.”
    “Can you get away with that, Larry?”
    He gave me a weary smile. “I don’t much care. If I did care, he’d have me whipped, wouldn’t he? By God, they’ve been walking around me for years, looking for the handle to grab and the button to push.”
    “It would be easier on me if we—eased him out of town. But it would have to be done in such a way Meg wouldn’t know.”
    “Hell, while Skip was talking I figured how we coulddo it, Fenn. Take a gun can’t be traced out of our supply here and you plant it in his room where he won’t run across it. Then I have you get Meg out of the way and we go in with a warrant and give him his choice of moving on or spending some more time with Boo Hudson.”
    “He’d tell Meg.”
    “She wouldn’t know you were in on it. Neither would he.”
    “She has all that—unthinking loyalty. She survived the five years, Larry. If he had to go back, that way, it would tear her in half. I guess the marriage would survive, but there wouldn’t be much in it any more, for either of us.”
    “You don’t have to say all that. You know I’m just talking. I can’t let myself be pushed around, especially when it would be damn poor judgment. McAran is after something, or he wouldn’t have come back here. Until I know what it is, I want him handy. I don’t want him chased back into the hills.”
    “But what am I going to do, Larry, if—they do go ahead and suspend you?”
    “We’ll go right to that good woman of yours and I’ll tell her just why it’s being done, and then we go to Ralph Kowalski who’s the only lawyer in town the Hanamans can’t scare, and we bring the Attorney General of this great state into the picture in such a way he can’t wiggle out of it, and there’ll be so many injunctions and so much stink they won’t dare try anything.”
    “You didn’t hint anything like that to Skip Johnson?”
    “Hell, no!”
    “Larry, did he say anything about—the spot I’m in? I mean, do they understand how a family thing like this can—”
    “You ever been inside the Brook Valley Club, Fenn?”
    “What? Yes. Once. When a dishwasher put a knife into a French chef.”
    “Your old man ran a steam hammer at the old A. Z. Forge and Foundry. You’re a