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

something big. Say you have forty men. Seventeen hundred and sixty hours of specialist effort a week. But you operate every single hour of the week, and you have to adjust to vacations, sick leave, court appearances, training courses, compulsory time on the range, retirement, selection, promotion. You take what’s left and try to fit manpower to the demands of each duty shift, and use the men on the things they do best.
    With the coming of night the tempo always picks up a little. The patrolmen can handle all the trash arrests, but when it gets up to a certain category, they are required to call on the Detective Section. I kept telling myself I was too busy to go home, but I knew it was just another routine evening. The Daily Press called to complain about a half-dozen of their racks disappearing. A transient in a flophouse hotel on Division Street hung himself from the transom of his room with a child’s jump rope after printing misspelled obscenities on his naked body with iodine. A salesman staying at the Christopher Hotel reported his room rifled, his clothesand samples gone. A teenage lover and his fifteen-year-old girl friend had taken off in her father’s car. The pretty wife of a young doctor reported she had been receiving obscene phone calls and letters for over a month. At City Hospital a woman brought her eighteen-month-old child to the emergency room, so badly beaten by her alcoholic husband, his condition was classified as critical. A fast-draw clown, age fifty-one, blew half his right foot off with an unlicensed forty-five. A stolen car. Aggravated assault. An elderly woman in a dazed condition, unable to state her name or address. An indecent exposure over at Torrance Memorial Park. Vandalism at a church. A sad-eyed old man who came in to complain he couldn’t locate the young girl to whom he had loaned his life savings.
    These were the tensions and torments of the urban night. Stu Dockerty was there to report them. Brook City used to have four newspapers, if you count both the morning and evening paper Hanaman used to publish. When the only surviving competition died in 1952, Hanaman put out the evening paper for just one more year and then folded it. The Brook City Daily Press is put to bed at midnight. Stu Dockerty is the police reporter, covering us, the Sheriff’s department a block away, and the criminal courts.
    He is a dapper, elegant man in his forties, with all the devices of vanity—elevated shoes, military mustache, careful wave in the thick gray hair, tweeds, flannels, cashmere, solid gold accessories, languid courtesy, a faint hint of a British accent. New men on the force invariably make the wrong estimate of Dockerty. In time they learn of his three marriages, his merciless talent for any form of gambling, his astonishing capacity for liquor and that special kind of nerveless courage which turns any kind of danger into a game planned for his amusement. He reports accurately, spells names correctly, gives credit where it is earned, and defends the department against all improper attacks, even by his own publisher. He usually wanders in after lunch, picks up all he needs to know about the previous twelve hours, without getting in anybody’s way, writes his own copy on the machine he keeps in one corner of my squad room, typing with a speed which intimidates my clerks. When he stops by in the early evening he catches up on any afternoon events. Only when things break late in the evening does hephone his stuff in to the copy desk rather than knocking it out himself.
    He is also a wire service stringer, sells articles to the true crime magazines, ghosts local political speeches, and does some copywriting for a local ad agency.
    I had told Meg I wouldn’t be home for dinner, and had made my invented reasons sound plausible. As I was on my way out to get something to eat at about eight o’clock, I saw Dockerty stuffing copy into an envelope.
    I stopped beside him and said, “No special events