The desperate hours, a novel

by Hayes, Joseph, 1918-2006

  Jesse hated waiting. It went against the grain. There was a helplessness about it that worked like sandpaper on his nerves. The roadblocks had been set up on all the main highways, there were no reports of further thefts, no sports stores robbed for guns, no clothing shops or cleaning shops broken into for suits; in short, everything that could be done was being done. But Jesse was not satisfied.

  His uncle, Frank Pritchard, telephoned him after the lo o'clock radio news. Jesse listened to the tired voice he could barely recognize, nodding his lean head occasionally, his hat 13

  tilted back, his feet pressed against the edge of the roll-top desk in his office. Then he said, "I haven't forgotten a thing, Uncle Frank. Go to sleep."

  Afterwards, he sat with his lanky frame folded eaglelike over the desk, smoking until his cigarette burned his fingers.

  "Was that Frank P?" Tom Winston, the deputy who shared the small office, had heard the conversation—what there was of it—and his curiosity finally broke forth. "Bet he'd Hke to be back in the business today."

  "Yeah," Jesse said slowly, contemplating an invisible spot on the high, bare plaster ceiling. "Yeah. With two good hands and his gun."

  "Why'd you tell him to go to sleep?"

  Tom Winston started at the suddenly fierce brown eyes that Jesse Webb turned on him. "I told him to go back to sleep," Jesse said, and he was not drawling but biting the words so that they came out like bullets from an automatic, "because he's got a job he has to keep. A night-watchman job at the meat-packing plant. I don't want him to lose that one because of Glenn Griffin."

  Winston picked up a sheaf of papers from his desk, and retreated. "I didn't know what had become of old Frank P," he said apologetically.

  Jesse stared after his friend as Winston slouched down the corridor toward Records. Don't blame Winston, Jesse reminded himself, breathing hard now; blame the guy who did it. He could see it happening again, all of it. Uncle Frank had been behind the parked car when Glenn Griffin came out the bleak-faced little apartment-hotel on the south side. Even in his blue uniform, Uncle Frank had looked too small, too old and too wispy for the .38 he held in his hand. Then he shouted. Glenn Griffin had whirled, firing, and two bullets had ripped into Uncle Frank's arm, permanently injuring a nerve so that now the right arm was a hanging, limp, useless thing, hardly a part of that frail httle body at all.

  Jesse had blamed himself for not letting go then, blasting; but he had been temporarily stunned and surprised to hear Uncle Frank scream like a child, a terrible unashamed shriek that still haunted Jesse in dreams. Glenn Griffin had leaped back inside the doorway, graceful as a dancer, despite the roar and whine and thwack of the other guns. Then Glenn Griffin, while Uncle Frank lay writhing on the ground, had shouted for a chance to surrender, even throwing his gun into the street.

  Jesse recalled the blank wall of unreason that had come smashing down on him as he stepped over the gun on the pavement and approached the unarmed young hoodlum; he had been helpless despite the shouts of the other officers, including his lieutenant, ordering him to stop, not to fire. The wall had lifted slightly then and he had not fired. But it was not until he had yanked the cowering Glenn Griffin to his toes with one thin but clawlike hand and brought his other, a twisting fury in itself, full into the prisoner's handsome but distorted face that Jesse Webb had felt a momentary relief from the grip of rage.

  Thinking about it now, more than two years later, left him pale and shaken, the sweat gathering at the back of his neck. More calmly he remembered what had followed: the way Uncle Frank had been eased off the city force because of his dangling and soon-withered arm, the unreasonable way he himself had turned in his badge. He recalled, too, the trial of Glenn Griffin, with the boy smiling blandly at the jury box through the bandages that held his broken jaw in place while his attorney pointed dramatically to this "indisputable evidence of police brutality." Even after the jury had brought in the guilty verdict—it was Griffin's third major conviction—the young man had kept up his front. At the sentencing, his kid brother, captured with him that same night, had gone pale and begun to tremble. But not Glenn.

  The only time Glenn Griffin had shown any emotion at all was that day in the corridor of the city jail when the Federal 15

  Marshal was taking him away. Jesse, although he was by then with the Sheriff's office and no longer on the city force, had made a point of being present. The bandages were no longer on the boy's face, but it was white and strained and he spoke carefully, stiffly.

  "You got yours coming, copper," he said—not spitting out the words, nothing dramatic or violent about it.

  Finished with memories, elbowing them aside in his mind, Jesse Webb stood up from his desk. He rubbed the back of his neck with the palm of his hand; it came away hot and wet. Then he left the office and, his long lean body pitched slightly forward as usual, he walked out of the building, across the center of town, around Monument Circle, toward the State House. He could have telephoned; he could have taken his car. He needed the walk, and the sharp, pinpointed air.

  Lt. Van Dorn of the State Police, ruddy-faced and gray-haired, grinned at Jesse's scowl from behind the counter. "The city can't pick up any trace of this Helen Lamar, Jess. They've ripped whole buildings apart. We can't get anything from the roads except the usual—the car's been spotted thirty-two times since 7 o'clock. North, East, South and West. But not officially. My guess is the woman's out West somewhere, maybe CaU-fornia, and we're beating our tails ragged over nothing around here. They're on their way to her, probably all the way across IlHnois by now." Then he turned his head and peered at Jesse from the corner of his eyes. "You look like hell yourself. Bad night?"

  "No," Jesse answered slowly. "No," he drawled, thinking of Kathleen.

  Then something struck him between the eyes. It was only a possibility, and a very slight one at that. But he was taking no chances. He picked up the telephone from the counter, dialed his office.

  "Tom," he said when Winston answered, "send a car out to pick up my wife. Bring her to the office. Tell her I'm okay. I just want to see her. And Tom—don't scare the girl, hear?" Anything was possible. You could never tell when it came to a mind like Griffin's. But if that sonofabitch came near Kathleen . . .

  By selecting only the most unlikely and untraveled back roads, the locations of which Glenn Griffin seemed to have traced on the fiintlike surface of his mind, he had by now maneuvered the gray sedan all the way around the city, staying for the most part forty or fifty miles south, and later, twenty miles east. By noon, however, he was approaching the city on a small road northeast of town, a road so small that the actual boundary of the city was not designated by one of the black-on-white signs reading "INDIANAPOLIS, CITY LIMITS."

  It was now ten minutes after twelve. Robish slept, snoring. Hank, in the back seat, had fallen into the habit of rubbing the palms of his hands down the sides of his shirt over his ribs as though to wipe off some invisible stain or sHme that clung to the rough cloth. Driving, Glenn Griffin was whistling, softly, steadily.

  It had taken more than six hours by this roundabout route to reach a destination only seventy-two miles from their starting point. But they had progressed without incident, as smoothly and easily as if they had been flying a plane over the hundreds of alert and watchful eyes.

  All three had begun to feel the emptiness of hunger, but Glenn refused to stop.

  Kathleen Webb, at the white counter of a restaurant around the comer from the Courthouse, kept urging her husband to eat up. Instead, he sipped his fifth cup of bitter black coffee and stared into it, imagining again a scene that had not and would not occur: Glenn Griffin stepping onto the miniature porch of Jesse's and Kathleen's small home, knocking, entering, smiling at Kathleen as blandly as he had once smiled at the jury box.

  But Jesse should have learned long ago, he told himself with a taut, secret smile, that the things you fear the most are those least likely to happen.

  On the other hand, those scenes that are b
eyond the reach of a man's imagination, once he has fallen into the secure routine of a way of Ufe, do actually occur and with more frequency than anyone is likely to acknowledge. Dan Milliard, immersed in an interview with an applicant for a responsible position in the shipping department, sat behind his desk in his comfortable sixth-floor office of the department store and concentrated on the task at hand, all the while letting his mind wander in and around the personahty of the man before him. He had a warranted reputation for being able to judge character, and the secret of how he accomplished this was hidden even from him. At any rate, he had no thought at the moment, certainly no concern about what might be happening on his own front porch on Kessler Boulevard north of the city, ten miles from his office.

  Eleanor Hilliard was about to go up the front stairs to change into her gardening clothes—too many leaves had fallen on the flower beds under the maples—when she heard the step on the porch. The front doorbell rang. She pushed a strand of Hght hair off her forehead and sighed. It was that blissful moment after lunch when Ralphie had returned to school and she felt a certain treasured sense of freedom until 3: 30. The front door was a solid panel, without window, and although there was a safety chain attached to the door frame, she never bothered to use it. It annoyed her that anyone had come to the front door. The family and tradesmen normally used the side entrance, because it connected the driveway directly with the sun porch and was more convenient.

  The man who faced her on the porch, a very young man with short-cropped but soft-looking and glistening black hair, wore faded blue farmer's overalls and he was smiling almost apologetically. He looked boyish, and so miserable about his errand that Eleanor smiled, too.

  "Sorry to bother you, ma'am," he said in a voice that was almost a whisper, "but I guess I've lost my way. I'm trying to get to the Bulliard Dairy. I know it's in the neighborhood, but "

  Then he stopped, and now he was looking over her shoulder into the sun-streaked front hall. The smile remained on his face, but a subtle alteration took place around the edges of his mouth, a tightening that froze the smile. Involuntarily, she turned.

  After that, everything happened so fast and with such cool mechanical precision that she was paralyzed, mind and body, and that numb helplessness must have been what carried her safely through the next few minutes.

  She heard the door behind her open, felt the knob hard against her ribs, then heard it close. The older man, who must have entered through the back door, turned from her and stomped up the stairs. A third man, much younger, who wore 19

  the same strange gray-green garb as the big fellow, appeared in the dining-room door, then walked swiftly, lightly through the entire downstairs section of the house, opening doors, closing them. Eleanor saw, without really comprehending, the black gun in the hand of the young man in overalls who remained with her in the hall. She thought of the small automatic upstairs, concealed in the coil of spring under Dan's bed. She felt then a scream accumulating, powerful and uncontrollable, in her parched, locked throat.

  "Take it easy, lady," the young man beside her advised softly. "Take it easy. You open your mouth, your kid'll come home from school and find your body."

  She could feel her mind take hold, with a sharp click in her brain, as of a switch thrown. Instead of screaming, she lifted her hand to her mouth and bit down hard on the back of it, so hard that she tasted blood. But the scream was choked off in the back of her aching throat.

  The boyish man returned, not looking at her, and said, "All clear down here, Glenn." Without another word, or even a nod from the one called Glenn, the youngster turned and went through the dining room toward the kitchen.

  Eleanor heard the back door open and close and then a motor grind over in the driveway. Only then, after he had left the room, the boy's voice reached her—young, casual, subdued. He might have been one of Cindy's young admirers speaking. The naturalness of that voice in the hurricane-center of nightmare filled her with an incongruous terror that not even the gun had aroused. Outside, she heard a familiar sound: the garage door descending on the metal runners that needed oiling.

  Then, in the silence, the middle-aged man came down the stairs; he carried one of Dan's suits flung over one arm. His animal-like face wore an expression that might have denoted pleasure, but his yellowish-green eyes, lost between the slits in

  the bulbous pouches, seemed as depthless and opaque as marbles.

  "Nobody home but the missus," the man reported.

  Staring at Dan's tweed suit, Eleanor thought of her husband. Big, calm, reserved, never roused to anger. Even in the swift flood of panic and disgust—as she saw the older man's eyes crawl hungrily over her—the thought of Dan calmed her.

  "Get in there, Robish," Glenn Griffin said, "and keep an eye open out front."

  Robish, pulling his eyes from her, followed the order and went into the hving room and dropped himself into the large chair half-facing the wide front windows. He uttered a huge sigh. The back door opened and closed again. All three of them were in the house, the car concealed in the Hilliard garage.

  "Now," said the one named Glenn. "Now, Mrs. Hilliard. We got a phone call to make, you and me. I guess you got the idea now. I guess you know what'll happen, you let go with anything fishy while you're talking. Case not, though, listen. We're playing for keeps. We don't want to hurt nobody, specially kids. But when the little guy who owns that bike out there gets home . . ."

  "What do you want me to do?" Eleanor asked.

  Glenn Griffin grinned again. "Smart little lady. Hope the whole family's smart as you, Mrs. Hilliard. Now."

  Leaning against the telephone table, Eleanor listened to the very explicit, low-toned directions. Then she picked up the phone, dialed Long Distance and for the first time noticed the strange bloody tooth marks on the back of her hand. She gave the operator a number that she knew she should remember but could not. A number in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania . . .

  "Pittsburgh!" Jesse Webb uttered an oath and stood up from his desk after talking to Carson, the young FBI man assigned to the case. "They've located Helen Lamar."

  Tom Winston, catching the explosive note of disappointment and defeat, didn't turn from his desk. "They got her?"

  "She checked out over an hour ago. Why? Nobody knows. She just came in suddenly and checked out. They're still questioning the hotel people, but as far as they can dope it, she didn't receive a phone call, anything. At least not at the hotel. She'd be too smart for that, figuring we might be watching. If Griffin called her, they used somebody in between." He was striding up and down in the office, hands jammed into his pockets, head shot forward. "But maybe he didn't have to call. They could have it all timed. Hell, they think of these things, smart rats like that. Now you know where that leaves us, Tom? I'll tell you. Nowhere. That leaves us with a license number and the description of a car. A car they'll ditch soon enough, but they're taking their time on that, too. No trail. Three eggs like that can't melt into the ground, for God's sake!" He sat down abruptly and cracked the top of the desk with his fist. "Tom, where the hell is that car?"

  All through the endless afternoon Eleanor HiUiard's mind returned again and again to the dust-covered gray sedan parked in the garage.

  Ralphie arrived home at 3:30, but he didn't notice the closed garage door. She detained him in the living room, speaking swiftly and firmly. She had a terrible headache, she said; she had to have absolute quiet all afternoon; she was sorry, but he would have to go out and play until suppertime and he was not to come back until then. No, he didn't have to

  change his clothes, not today. But Ralphie was hungry—as usual. Then he was to go to the drug store, get a sandwich; she gave him the money. Puzzled at his mother, who never before had complained of a headache, but pleased at the chance to buy a drug-store sandwich on his own, Ralphie climbed on the bicycle and went spinning down the boulevard.

  "Nice work, lady," Glenn said, replacing his gun in his pocket.

  She looked at him without expres
sion, feeling nothing now but the hard stone in the pit of her stomach. "If you keep eating up everything, I'll have to shop before supper."

  "I got a few more questions now, Mrs. Hilliard."

  Then the process started all over again. The questions . . . This daughter, this Cynthia, what time did she get home from work? Did she drive her own car? Was she ever late? Okay then, just let her walk in.

  "You won't have to do a thing but keep quiet, see."

  If Cindy saw the garage door at all, she did not stop to question why it was closed. At 5: i8 she brought the coupe to a halt in the driveway, leaped out, and came into the living room through the sun porch. Eleanor was sitting stiff and still on the sofa. Glenn was standing, his ankles crossed casually, by the television set; the gun was in his hand. Robish was in the small combined library-den in the rear of the house, with the door between it and the long living room standing open. Eleanor could see him watching the driveway through the side windows. She knew that the young one, named Hank, was still in the kitchen, his eye on the back yard, listening to the news reports on the small radio.

  Cindy burst in, in that way she had, always a little breathless lately, her checked coat flying, her hair flowing behind her. When she caught sight of her mother, she stopped, her hazel-flecked blue eyes snapping around the room, remaining a split second on Glenn Griffin.

  Glenn grinned. "Come right in, redhead." 23

  Before Eleanor realized that Cindy had moved, the girl whirled and started to retrace her steps, running this time.

  "'Okay," Glenn Griffin said easily, but his voice lifted, "we still got your old lady, sis."