* * *
—
Then we sat in silence, in the dead of night, drained of emotion. Nova sat impassively, his face averted. I gave Arnie a half hour’s start, plenty of time, then got up, and motioned Nova to the door with the gun. He walked out, and as he crossed the lawns toward his own house, I broke open the revolver, unloaded it, then called to him. When he turned, I tossed his gun across the lawn to land at his feet. He glanced at me, then stooped, picked up his gun, and walked on toward his door, as I closed mine.
In the living room I dropped into a chair, and when we spoke it wasn’t about Arnie; we weren’t up to that yet. Ruth said, “What about Nova, Ben?”
“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I just don’t know what he’ll do, Ruth, or what I can do about it. I’m hoping he’ll do nothing. He messed this up, and Arnie got away; Nova wouldn’t look good explaining that. The big single-handed capture is fine if it works, but you’re a blundering fool if it doesn’t. Nova should have phoned Quentin, and they’d have walked out into the prison, and picked up Arnie with as many men as they needed. Instead, Nova lost him. The kind of guy he is, I think maybe he’ll just keep his trap shut. But you never know; he hates us, for sure. And for all I know he’s on the phone right now telling everything he knows, whatever they may think of him.” I sighed. “But I’m tired now, Ruth; I’m dead tired, and I’m sick of planning, sick of thinking, sick of the whole damn thing, and I couldn’t hold Nova here forever. If I could do something—anything at all—to get you in the clear, I’d be doing it. But I don’t know what to do. I’m just tired as hell, Ruth. I feel pretty bad, and all I want to do is go to sleep.”
The phone didn’t ring all night, and no one pounded at our door. I slept the whole night through, worn out. But twice, I learned later, Ruth awakened to lie there listening for—something. And in the morning, at breakfast, she heard it—the doorbell; and when I opened the door a sheriff stood there; another sat at the wheel of the police car at the curb. Would we come out to San Quentin, please?
They drove us to Quentin, no one speaking, then in through the gates, and up to the vine-covered Administration Building. They escorted us to the reception room of the Warden’s office, and a girl led us into the office.
It’s a big, quiet, very long room, green-carpeted, with white Venetian blinds at the windows. As we walked silently over the rug toward the big desk at the far end of the office, a man stood up from it; he was of average height and weight, had straight brown thinning hair, and a patient intelligent face, a man in his forties, wearing a brown double-breasted suit. “I’m the Warden,” he said quietly, and we murmured something in reply. Then he indicated two chairs beside the big desk, and sat down as we did.
He got right to it. “Early this morning,” he said, “I received a phone call from a man who said he lived somewhere in your general neighborhood; an anonymous call. He’s been watching you, he told me, has become suspicious, and says he has good reason to believe you helped your brother escape from San Quentin.”
* * *
—
With a sort of rueful admiration for Nova, I admitted to myself that it simply hadn’t occurred to me how easily he could involve me without involving himself—by picking up his phone. I couldn’t even mention his name short of confessing everything I had done. I felt Ruth’s hand slip under my arm.
“I have no great respect for anonymous calls,” the Warden was saying: idly he picked up a brass letter opener, then glanced up at me again. “But I have to pay attention to this one. For one thing, he did know something about you; more than we did. He knew you lived here, at least, very close to the prison; you moved up from Los Angeles, he said, about a week ago. But in our records, on your brother’s list of accredited visitors, we still have your old address; you didn’t notify us of the change.”
I shrugged. “I just didn’t think of it, Warden.”
“Well, it’s a coincidence that interests us; your moving up here just before your brother escaped. But that’s not all your neighbor told us. He suspects it was you and not your brother who stole a car last night at the point of a wooden gun. He saw you going out in what seemed to be prison clothes.”
I shrugged again. “I wear blue denims around the house, Warden. So do a lot of people. And we did go out last night, in our car, but—”
* * *
—
He leaned toward me over the desk top. “Two things you’ve got to think about, Mr. Jarvis. You’ve come under suspicion, and now if you helped your brother escape, we will probably find it out. I can’t make you any sort of promise about what the district attorney of this county will or won’t do then, but if you tell us now where your brother is, he may not prosecute. This makes sense; in effect, you’ll have helped undo your crime. But if you wait till we catch him, I think you’ll end up here as an inmate.” He held up a hand as I started to speak. “I know; if you helped your brother, it wasn’t to turn him in, but I’m not finished. Your brother has to come back here, Mr. Jarvis, because your brother is a murderer.” Again he held up a hand. “I don’t mean actually; not yet. But just listen.”
He picked up a large white card, and I caught a glimpse of Arnie’s photographed face stapled to its front. “He came in here,” said the Warden, “for driving while drunk, killing a man with his car. I’ve always thought that crime betrayed callousness and indifference toward other human beings. Then”—he flicked his finger against a long series of penned notations on the back of Arnie’s card—“his record here is one of fights and violence, beginning soon after his first months in the institution. And it’s a growing record, the violence increasing and taking on a quality of dangerous recklessness. Six months after he arrived, we found a razor-sharp homemade knife in your brother’s cell. Our psychiatrist’s report on him tells us he’s quite capable of killing. And a week ago, an officer here was struck on the head with a heavy weapon. We don’t know your brother did it, but we suspect that he did, and I suspect you know that he did. It was a blow which might have smashed in the officer’s skull, and the man who struck it, Mr. Jarvis, didn’t care if it did, at the moment. Now, listen to me”—his face strained, he leaned far over the desk toward me. “I didn’t begin this work yesterday. I began years ago as a correctional officer in the federal prison system, and now I’m a warden. I tell you out of the experience of years that there are times when I can say something like this with absolute certainty, and I say it now about Arnold Jarvis. I tell you he will kill somebody, unless we get him back here before he can.”
* * *
—
It wasn’t reaching me, and he knew it. It worried me, but asking me to turn Arnie in was absurd, and he knew it, and he sat back in his chair, slowly and helplessly shaking his head. Then—actually almost speaking to himself, with no real hope of reaching me—he said something that terrified me. “I suppose it’s impossible,” he murmured, “to make you believe your own brother would murder to keep from going back to prison,” and I felt the blood withdrawing from my skin. Believe? I’d almost done it myself. “I suppose it’s impossible,” the Warden was saying, “to make you believe your own brother is actually capable of pointing a gun at a man’s head and pulling the trigger.” But I’d seen him do it only hours before!
The Warden brought his fist down on the desk. “Some men will kill, Mr. Jarvis! Put them in the situation, and some men will kill to get out of it. And the situation is recapture; faced with it your brother will shoot! And he’s going to be faced with it. The man who escapes and is never heard of again because he’s leading a quiet exemplary life is so rare he hardly exists. It takes iron strength and self-discipline to break all ties and become a new man somewhere else, and your brother hasn’t got it! He’ll come sneaking back to his old ties and associations when he thinks it’s safe. Or get into trouble again, as he did before. Sooner or later he will face recapture. Does your brother have a gun right now?”
“Then it has to be now, while he’s sleeping, and before he can get one,” he said softly. “Where is he, Mr. Jarvis?”
But I was hardly hearing him. My mind was fighting; the image of Arnie as he had once been was being replaced by a new and terribly different conception, and I was on my feet shouting against it. “But he wasn’t that way! He wasn’t like that!”
“No,” the Warden said slowly. “But now he is.”
“But why? Why? What happened?”
He shrugged a little. “Prison; that’s what happened. It takes strength to come through it whole.”
“So now, damn it”—I could feel my neck cords thrust out—“that’s what you want me to send him back to! Back to your lousy pastel prison, painted on the outside, rotten on the inside!”
He smiled a sad little smile. “Where else?” he said softly. “Do you have a better place? Have you got a good prison to send him to? Why, damn you!” he shouted suddenly, standing to face me, leaning far forward over the desk. “You never gave a thought in your life to the prisons you send men into, until now! We spend our lives and careers here—scrounging second-hand ball bats and discarded television sets, begging free movie films, fighting for an extra five-cent-a-day food allowance per man—trying to drag this prison a single step closer to what it ought to be! You’ll spend millions for highways, but prisons…” He shook his head slowly. Then he said quietly, “We put in hours we’re never paid for; we put in our lives, doing our damnedest with what we’re given and what we can scrounge, trying to get these men through the prisons you provide and still keep some spark of humanity alive in them. The pastel prison—well, it’s not gray concrete, and that’s something at least! And we have to wheedle and cajole the very paint we use to do that much. Don’t ask me where to send your brother, mister! I’ve spent my life for your brother.”
* * *
—
For several seconds he stood staring at me. Then, wearily, he turned away. “We’ll do our best for him,” he said quietly, and sat down. “That’s all I can promise you. And it may not be enough. That’s San Quentin, Mr. Jarvis. Not enough room, not enough money, not enough jobs, not enough teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, equipment, or even time to do much more than just lock these men up, and try to make their lives bearable. I believe San Quentin is one of the best prisons in the country, Mr. Jarvis. I know that it is. And it’s a bad prison; there are no good ones. But I didn’t send nearly five thousand men into a prison built for two thousand. You tell me where to put the overflow you and the rest of California send to me. I obey your orders.
“We’ll do the best we can for your brother, Mr. Jarvis, but for better or worse, he’s got to come back here; there’s no other place for him.”
“No other place but the gas chamber, Warden?”
* * *
—
He smiled a little. “No, you don’t ask a man to send his brother to the gas chamber. We don’t know who hit the officer, and the only witness is back in Wyoming again. Tell me where your brother is, and I give you my personal word that the charge will be dropped; you’ll have gained that much, and certainly I have to offer you that much. Mr. Jarvis, don’t you realize that this is the only way you can save your brother from the gas chamber?”
It almost succeeded. This man was speaking truth, and I knew it. And yet—I gave up thinking, because it didn’t matter; I simply was not going to turn in my brother.
He saw it in my face. “All right,” he said gently, “I know.” Then he shook his head in genuine sadness. Not hoping at all to affect me any more, he said, “But it’s too bad, because he’s a man who’ll do anything. Cross him, take away what he wants, and he’ll do anything. I tell you, it’s true.”
And as he spoke, something rose up in my mind past all belief, and I sat stock still, no longer listening, knowing it was true. Cross him and he’ll do anything—with a terrible finality something clicked into place in my mind. He told me, the Warden had said when I entered this room, that you moved up here from Los Angeles. It was such a little thing, utterly trivial, yet there was no escape from it—Nova did not know where I’d come from; he simply didn’t. It was Arnie—frustrated and wild with rage, an Arnie who’d do anything. I knew now—who’d phoned Quentin about me early this morning, knowing I’d be certain to think it was Nova.
I know I thought honestly in the terrible moments that followed; I wasn’t revenging myself. I’d turned loose a sick and dangerous man, and finally I knew it; there was no longer a choice about what I could do. I was actually shaking my head as though to clear it as I got to my feet, and Ruth’s arm slipped under mine as she stood up beside me. I felt the warm tears begin to slide down my face as I reached for the pad and pen on the desk before me; then I wrote. “Here’s the address, Warden,” I said, and I was crying for my lost brother, as he picked up his phone.
The Killer Is Loose
JOHN HAWKINS & WARD HAWKINS
THE STORY
Original publication: The Saturday Evening Post, June 13, 1953
JOHN HAWKINS (1910–1978) appears to have written crime novels exclusively with his brother, Ward Hawkins (1912–1990). Among their collaborations are We Will Meet Again (1940), Pilebuck (1943), Broken River (1944), Devil on His Trail (1944), The Floods of Fear (1956), and Violent City (1957). They did, however, sometimes write individually when they turned to the short form, though most of their work was still collaborative.
Pilebuck was reissued as Secret Command, which was the title under which it was released on film a year after its first publication. It starred Pat O’Brien, Carole Landis, and Chester Morris. It is an interesting if uninspired World War II film with a former foreign correspondent–turned United States government agent taking a job in a shipyard where it is suspected that Nazi agents are planning sabotage.
The Floods of Fear was released as a film in 1958 under that title, starring Howard Keel, Anne Heywood, and Cyril Cusack. It’s an action-packed story of convicts working to shore up a dike during a flood when two of them, along with their guard, are swept away in the raging river. Battling the river and one another, they wind up in a house with a young woman who is, understandably, scared to death.
In addition to mystery, crime, espionage, and thrillers, the brothers had very successful careers in television, most notably as writers in the 1960s for the highly rated Bonanza and in the 1970s for Little House on the Prairie, for which John Hawkins was the producer and a writer while Ward Hawkins was the story editor, as well as the writer for some of the teleplays.
The brothers began their writing careers by immediately having their stories accepted by the most important (and best-paying) “slick” magazines (so called to distinguish their paper from the cheaper pulps), notably The Saturday Evening Post but also Collier’s and Cosmopolitan, as well as their share of pulps and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
In “The Killer Is Loose,” a bank employee helps rob a bank and is caught. When the police come to arrest him, a battle ensues and his wife is accidently shot to death. While in prison, the thief plans vengeance when he gets out—he will kill the wife of the cop who killed his own wife.
THE FILM
Title: The Killer Is Loose, 1956
Studio: United Artists
Director: Budd Boetticher
Screenwriter: Harold Medford
Producer: Robert L. Jacks
THE CAST
• Joseph Cotten (Detective Sam Wagner)
• Rhonda Fleming (Lila Wagner)
• Wendell Corey (Leon “Foggy” Poole)
• Alan Hale (Detective Denny)
• Michael Pate (Detective Chris Gillespie)
The film version of The Killer Is Loose follows almost scene for scene the story that the Hawkinses wrote. A bit of fleshing out appears fro
m time to time but the story of cold-blooded revenge is essentially the same.
Although somewhat later than the best noir films of the 1940s, The Killer Is Loose bears most of the trademarks of that subgenre of the crime film except that it eschewed the usual city streets and took the action to the suburbs. It is a black-and-white B picture, but it features one of the most successful actors of the 1940s in Joseph Cotten, who starred in some of the greatest films of the era, including The Third Man (1949), Citizen Kane (1941), Gaslight (1944), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Portrait of Jennie (1948), and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).
Known more for her great beauty and lush red hair than her transcendent acting ability, Rhonda Fleming mainly played the lead role in costume dramas or the second female lead in other films, such as Spellbound (1945), Out of the Past (1947), and The Spiral Staircase (1946).
Wendell Corey, here playing against type as a quiet, apparently mild-mannered clerk, was often cast as a tough cop or bad guy, notably in such films as Desert Fury (1947), The Accused (1949), The File on Thelma Jordan (1950), and Rear Window (1954).
THE KILLER IS LOOSE
John Hawkins & Ward Hawkins
SAM WAGNER WAS DREAMING when the telephone rang. He was sitting in a blind in duck heaven and the mallards were coming in, settling over the decoys, when the shrill ringing called him home to the bedroom on Montgomery Street. He pawed blindly at the bedside table and found the telephone.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 36