Night Is the Hunter Read Online Free

secret.”
    McMullin glanced back and forth between Janie and Donnally.
    â€œSecret?”
    â€œMy father is Donald Harlan. The movie director.”
    McMullin cocked his head and his gaze angled away. “Donald Harlan . . . Harlan Donnally . . .” He looked back at Donnally. “You mean your father uses a stage name? I thought only actors did that.”
    Donnally shook his head. “I changed mine.”
    The judge pointed at Donnally. “You were always known around the Hall of Justice as a man without a past,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “but it now sounds like you were a man with too much of one.”
    Donnally shrugged. “It’s a long story.”
    â€œI’ve got time.”
    Janie glanced up and saw a customer walking toward the counter and went over to take his payment.
    Donnally took a sip of his coffee. He wondered whether there was a lesson for McMullin in his father’s history. They were of the same generation, maybe shared some of the same flaws.
    â€œMy father was a press officer working out of the U.S. embassy in Saigon during the war. He gave a briefing in which he claimed that the Viet Cong had massacred some Buddhist monks up in Hue.”
    Donnally watched the judge nod and his eyes go vacant for a moment. He knew McMullin was watching news footage in his mind. Everyone in the country had watched it on Walter Cronkite. It was one of a handful of images that had defined the war for people McMullin’s age: the mangled body of assassinated South Vietnamese president Diem, the self-immolation of a monk in a Saigon intersection, the bullet-to-the-head street execution of a Viet Cong soldier by a South Vietnamese colonel, and Don Harlan’s press conference.
    â€œThat was your father?” McMullin said, a question more in form than content.
    â€œHe had a nickname. The press corps always referred to him as Bucky Harlan.”
    â€œAs I remember it, the story he told turned out not to be true.”
    Donnally nodded. “But my older brother believed it. He dropped out of UCLA and enlisted. Six months later he was killed during the Tet Offensive. Ambushed by North Vietnamese regulars. Set up by some villagers. But before he died, he met some monks along the Perfume River and learned the truth. It had been Korean mercenaries hired by the United States who committed the crime. He also found out my father knew it all along.”
    McMullin sighed. “That’s a helluva thing to live with.”
    The way the judge said the words suggested he was also thinking of himself.
    â€œMy father’s whole career, all those war movies, was nothing more than a lifelong flight from himself and what he’d done.”
    The judge and Donnally’s conversation at the river became a soundless echo in the room.
    â€œBut you said he—”
    Donnally nodded. “He used his last movie to come clean with himself.”
    â€œI’ve seen all your father’s films. At least I thought so. I don’t remember anything like that.”
    â€œIt got almost no distribution. None of the theater chains would run it.”
    â€œSounds like he would’ve been better off whispering it to a priest in a confessional.”
    Donnally thought, but didn’t say, Or to an ex-cop on the bank of the Smith River.
    Janie returned and sat down next to Donnally.
    â€œWhat did the doctor want to talk about?”
    â€œShe’s thinking it may be time to run some tests on him for Alzheimer’s.”
    Donnally sensed more than saw McMullin stiffen and lookaway. The judge’s coffee cup rattled on the saucer as he set it down. He thought back on the judge’s failure to execute the basics of fighting the steelhead and his confusion, perhaps bewilderment, in trying to reconstruct his thinking at the time of the Dominguez trial. Maybe the judge had his own secret, one about his own mental deterioration that had made his mission more urgent