One Monday We Killed Them All by John D. MacDonald

try.”
    I met her by prearrangement when she left the phone company office at five o’clock. She was a tall, brown-eyed blonde, with a round, pretty, somewhat immature face. She was remote, slightly defiant and ill at ease. We talked over coffee in a luncheonette booth a half-block from the phone company offices.
    “I wouldn’t talk to you if my father hadn’t made me promise I would.”
    “I’m meddling in something that’s probably none of my business, Cathie.”
    It disarmed her slightly. “Probably,” she said.
    “Why did you write to him in the first place?”
    “Because everybody was against him!” she said hotly. “It wasn’t fair. There wasn’t anybody on his side. They wanted to pull him down, like a pack of dogs. Now more than ever, he needs somebody on his side.”
    “How have you managed to get so emotionally involved with a man you’ve never met?”
    “Oh, I met him. My father doesn’t know this. Dwight doesn’t remember, but I do. Maybe he’ll remember when he sees me. It was when he was working in the sporting goods store. I was just a kid. I went in to buy bowling shoes. He was very sweet and funny, and he made me laugh. He was nice to me. I didn’t have enough money, so he found a lot of wild crazy things wrong with the shoes I wanted, and he marked them down. That was before he got mixed up with that terrible woman. She ruined his life, and I don’t think he killed her. I think he’s so big and strong that a lot of little men had to put him in prison because they were jealous of him. And they didn’t want him to come back here, but he promised me he would in his letters. You have no idea the wonderful letters he wrote me. Nobody else in the world really understands him.”
    “He used to be able to be very charming, especially to pretty girls.”
    She flushed. “His letters weren’t charming. They were sincere.”
    “So what’s the next step?”
    “I don’t know. I want to help him any way he’ll let me, any way at all. But I’ll just have to wait until he’s—willing to see me. How—how is he acting, really?”
    “He eats and sleeps and watches television. Sometimes he goes out into the back yard. That’s as far as he goes from the house.”
    “I’m aching to be with him and talk to him. But I can’t do that until he feels—ready to see me.”
    “What if you find out he isn’t the kind of a man you think he is, Cathie?”
    “But I know what kind of a man he is. He’s hurt now, and angry, but way underneath he’s a gentle man, if the world will give him a chance to be gentle.”
    “Listen to me. That gentle fellow went on Jeff Kermer’s payroll at two hundred a week, cash. And Jeff sent him out to reason gently with a man named David Morissa, five-foot-six, a hundred and forty pounds. Dwight gentlysnapped both Davie’s wrists, dislocated his shoulder and cracked half his ribs, and Jeff was very pleased with the job, because that was just what he was paying for.”
    Her brown eyes looked wide and sick. “You’re making that up!”
    “Why would I?”
    She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. You must have some reason.” She was a slender, vulnerable girl, shapely, fragrant, pretty, with a soft mouth, gentle breasts, fragile hands. “You must have some reason. Maybe you didn’t come to my father. Maybe he went to you and asked you to do this.”
    “No. Here is the reason. I just don’t want you making a lot of blind excuses for anything McAran says or does. I don’t want you to be sacrificial about this—long-range romance, Cathie. I want you to just leave your mind open to the possibility that everything he has written you is part of a complicated lie, that there’s no gentleness in him, and he wants to use you.”
    “It isn’t that way,” she whispered.
    “But just leave room for a tiny little bit of doubt. And then give him the chance to eliminate that doubt, or increase it. Be watchful, that’s all. And if he lets you in on his plans,