The desperate hours, a novel

by Hayes, Joseph, 1918-2006

  FUGITIVE killed: TROOPER WOUNDED IN GUN BATTLE

  There was a knock on the door; it seemed to come from a great and hollow distance. Then Dan Hilliard's bluff and middle-aged secretary said, "Letter for you, Mr. Hilliard. It came Special Deliver)- during the night. The night watchman signed for it." She broke off, frowning. "Mr. HilHard, if you ask me, you're catching the flu. Why don't you let me cancel appointments and you go home to bed?"

  "Do that," Dan said, accepting the envelope, which was

  surprisingly light in weight. "I'll be leaving for a while. After I've taken care of some business at the bank I'm going home."

  "If it's something I can "

  "No."

  "Yes, Mr. Milliard."

  The door closed gently and Dan made it back to the desk with difficulty. He leaned there, slack and spent, remembering one more astonishing fact about Glenn Griffin, the one that explained the others: he had spent much of the night with his ear close to the radio. Glenn Griffin knew then—and had known all morning—what had happened to his brother. And it was this knowledge that had turned him into the hysterical stranger who was beyond reason. And in the house now with Eleanor and Ralphie.

  Dan slit open the envelope and counted five one-thousand-dollar bills and one five-hundred-dollar bill. He slid three of the one-thousand-dollar bills into a plain white envelope from his drawer, carefully placed both envelopes in his breast pocket. The action brought back some of the numbness, and as he stood up, he was grateful for that. But fiis thoughts remained with Eleanor.

  Eleanor was upstairs with Ralphie, at 9: 30, acutely aware of the time. While she played rummy with the boy, she could hear what was said below. There was the steady hum of the radio, and then, above it, Glenn Griffin's voice—higher now, different somehow: "Robish. Stick to the window but Ksten. There're a couple of guys up on the roof of the house next door."

  Robish swore heavily from the direction of the den, where he was watching the side and rear yards. "Coppers?"

  "How the hell do I know? They got on yellow coveralls. They're working on one of those television things."

  "Then what you crying about?"

  "Who's crying? You just can't tell, that's all. You had more sense, you'd know that."

  "I got sense," Robish replied from the distance. "Me, I got more sense'n you think. Griffin. No gun, but a lot of brains."

  "That supposed to mean something?"

  When Robish didn't answer at first, Ralphie said, to his mother, "Your play." But she held up a hand, straining to hear.

  "Means," Robish called at last, "that your kid brother got his last night cause he got scared, that's all. You been gettin' jumpier ever since. An me, I figure the heat's off us for a while. All depends on Hilliard now."

  "HilHard?"

  "You think that big bastard's gonna "

  "Hilliard pulls anything now "

  "Now I guess you're wishing you'd let me keep that there gun, huh. Griffin?"

  Above, Eleanor sensed, rather than concluded, that in this brief and broken exchange she had heard the command shift from Glenn Griffin, who possessed the only gun, to Robish, who had none. It was the Griffin boy who was nervous and unstrung this morning, Robish who remained calm and sure of himself, as though he were making his own separate plans now. All this Eleanor realized without being able to grasp the meaning this shift might hold for her and her family.

  Glenn grumbled again, on a lower key: "If that Hilliard tries to pull anything. If he ain't doing just what I told him "

  Dan Hilliard, at this point, was doing exactly what he had been instructed to do: he was handing over to his daughter, Cindy, an envelope containing $3,000. They were in the corridor of the building in which she worked, speaking together quietly in one corner while the old elevators groaned up and down.

  "Careful now," he said quietly, his eyes holding hers.

  Then he walked down the three flights of stairs, and at ten minutes to 10 he entered his bank, where he was well known. He carried a leather brief case, empty now. He spoke to a teller who had served him for ten years.

  The teller complied without question, but after Mr. Hilliard, whom the teller had had some little difficulty recognizing this morning, had left the bank with the brief case bulging, the teller examined the two one-thousand dollar bills, which were quite good, and allowed himself to wonder where a man hke Mr. Hilliard had obtained them and why he would need that much small cash.

  Three minutes later he was wondering even more because in that time he had spoken through the grilled window to a fat deputy from the Sheriff's office who simply asked him to place those large bills aside until he received further instructions regarding them.

  Less than five minutes later, Tom Winston was speaking by radio from his office to an FBI agent, not Carson but a new man who had appeared this morning, in the cold attic of the Wallings' residence. This agent, whose name was Merck, went downstairs and outside and motioned to Deputy Sheriff Jesse Webb from the lawn.

  Jesse was on the topmost rungs of a high ladder placed 203

  against the front of the structure and in clear dew of the windows in the Milliard house; the ladder was much taller than the highest peak of the Wallings' roof, and Jesse, wearing a yellow coverall with printing across the back, seemed to be measuring the upright antenna and giving instructions, with gestures, to two assistants who stood off to one side, their backs turned carelessly to the Milliard home.

  Actually, Jesse was studying the Milliard house and garage— he could see it all from this vantage point—and in this way was working off some of the tension that was eating in him steadily like a hungry, vicious animal he could not control. Me was thinking, too, of the long-range rifles with telescopic sights and of the binoculars that must be kept out of sight.

  Me descended the ladder and walked into the side door of the Wallings' house with the man Merck, nodding as he listened. In the side hail he tore off the coverall and reached for his trench coat, aware of Lieutenant Fredericks' eyes upon him from the dining room where three troopers and Carson sat in a huddle. But what Jesse Webb was considering was not the information just received—although the money angle explained why the two men were staying in the house—but of a movement he had seen behind the Milliard garage while he stood on that ladder. Me hadn't dared use the binoculars then, but he had his own idea as to what that movement was. And he was not sure there was anything he should, or safely could, do about it.

  Shortly after 8: 30 Chuck Wright had become aware of the activity atop the Walling house—long before Glenn Griffin, inside, had noticed it. Chuck, behind the Milliard garage, had hoped then that this did not mean that the police had found

  out and were setting up a way to attack. But he knew, below the hope, that this was very hkely. It wouldn't take that Webb long, he admitted grudgingly.

  Now, at six minutes after lo, stiff with the waiting, he was bristling with impatience. He had been hoping that if one of the two men in the house spotted the activity on that roof beyond the trees, the man who was at the rear window, in Mr. Hilliard's den, would go to the front of the house to investigate. This had not happened. Chuck Wright decided that he would have to find a way to create the diversion that would leave the rear of the house free for the very brief space of time it would take him to let himself into the back hall.

  He was prodded, too, by the certainty, mounting in him with the minutes, that Cindy would return to the house. Perhaps that's what they were waiting for in there. If so, and if those police were planning to close in. Chuck intended to be inside, with his gun. As a matter of fact, it occurred to him that the one way now in which no member of the house would be killed or injured was for the police to keep those two inside occupied in an attack from without; their guns then would be turned on the police, the family forgotten, and if he was inside at that point, he gave himself a chance, a slim one, but well worth taking when you considered all the odds. He left behind all hesitation and doubt.

  But where was
Cindy now? Did she intend to return to the house? When? And what was she doing?

  It was a long, narrow room with a bar along one side, booths along the other. There was a raw whisky smell about it and an atmosphere that added to Cindy's sickening apprehension. Behind the bar a man wearing a plaid vest over a once white shirt looked her over, and she turned abruptly away and crossed to sit in the first booth, to sit very straight there with her hands on the table, her eyes fixed. Presently a waitress appeared at her elbow, a spindly girlish-looking woman with fuzzy dyed hair and tired, defensive eyes. Cindy ordered an old-fashioned, the thought of it stirring the nausea in her. With the glass before her on the nicked table-surface, she looked at her wrist watch. 10:29.

  Chuck had never come into the office this late. Mr. Hepburn had asked about him several times, but neither Cindy nor Constance Allen could tell Mr. Hepburn why he had not appeared. And Cindy did not know what his absence meant. She didn't dare let herself conjecture.

  She could only think of the man who was to meet her here in one minute, at 10:30, in this shabby and deserted bar on a dead-end side street alongside the stage door of a motion-picture theater. She knew what the man wanted, why she was meeting him; in a sense, she was committing a murder. Certainly she was aiding in the crime. But these accusations had attacked her before, and there was one answer, itself a question: What else could she do?

  The anger was still in Cindy Hilliard, and it rose chokingly as she watched the little man who entered now, glanced carelessly around, his dim and very pale eyes sliding over her. The waitress had disappeared, and the man in the vest behind the bar had his back turned. Cindy sensed all this, her eyes meeting those of the newcomer; she knew that she could not control the contempt and disgust in her glare, but the little man who approached frightened her. She couldn't say how; perhaps it was only her knowledge of his mission, of what he was going to do for the money she was about to give him.

  "Mind if I sit a spell, miss?" he asked.

  Cindy felt her head shaking, inviting him to do what he did next: sHde into the space opposite her, across the table.

  "You know my name, miss?" he asked.

  Again she shook her head. She did not know it, or want to know it. She wanted to get away from him, to get back to her father's office, to get into the taxi with him and to return to the house, as they had been told to do. She couldn't quite believe, though, that this innocuous-looking man—small, with a smooth, rather rounded face atop a short, thin body—could be a murderer. A paid killer. He looked and spoke, too, more like a salesman, a bill collector, a clerk in the store where her father worked,

  "Turning cold," the man commented, and his pale eyes, which she saw were blue, remained on her face as he straightened his rather flashy tie and pointed to the glass on the table. "You're not going to drink that?"

  "No."

  "Thanks, miss."

  He drank dehcately, almost smiling, but those depthless pale eyes remained on her. She did not know what she was to do now. She was not sure, suddenly, that this was the man; perhaps he was only a traveling salesman trying to pick her up.

  "I'm a messenger," the man said then, finally. "You have something for me to deliver?"

  When he said that—perhaps because it appeared so transparently true—she knew that he was lying, that he was the man, that those same hands now resting flatly and without nerves on the table would pull the trigger, killing another man whose name she did not know, either.

  She opened her purse, drew out the white envelope. The man took it, nodding, placed it in his pocket without so much as glancing into it. She watched him and the actions of her own hands like a person viewing a motion picture when the sound apparatus has broken down. This dreamlike quality seemed a part of her whole life now.

  Then, without warning, an enormous shadow fell across the table, and she looked up. She saw the man across from her glance up, saw those unnaturally faded eyes meet those of the 207

  big man standing there, saw them half close in disinterest.

  "What you got in your pocket, Flick?" the big man asked, and his voice was hoarse and ugly but somehow gentle. "What'd the lady give you?"

  "A letter. Sergeant," the one named Flick replied.

  Cindy noticed that the big man, who was evidently a detective, had not removed his hands from the pockets of his coat. And in the back of her mind a voice whispered, This can't be, this isn't happening.

  "Come along to the station," the detective said. "And you can hand over the envelope, Flick."

  The astonishment in her broke then, the rage took over, the blank rebellion. This can't be. They can't do this! They're ruining everything now! She stood up.

  "You can't " she began.

  The big man only looked at her out of very dark but not unfriendly eyes. "Fm only following orders, miss. They didn't say anything about bringing you in, but Fm doing it to play safe, understand. If you've done nothing, they won't hold you long."

  "No," she said, trying to slip past his hulk of body.

  "Fm sorry, miss," the big man said, and the anger gave way to hopelessness in Cindy Hilliard then.

  "Am I under arrest?"

  "Not yet. Not technically. Unless you refuse to come to the station like a nice girl." He looked down on Flick, who was finishing the drink. "I hope they don't judge you by the company you keep, miss."

  Tears came to Cindy Hilliard, tears for the first time since it had begun. Tears of rage and frustration and despair. It was over now, all of it; in the Httle she had been asked to do, she had somehow failed. What would happen if she didn't return to the house before 11: 30, as Glenn Griffin had insisted? What would happen then to the others?

  By now Dan Hilliard was back in his office. He was waiting for Cindy. He, too, was recalling Glenn Griffin's insistence that Cindy return to the house with Dan. Griffin made clear that his reason for this was that he wanted to be sure, when he left, that his man—the one Dan knew was named Flick—had already been paid for the job he was to do. But Dan mistrusted this explanation as he mistrusted every word that came from those lips. He had about decided that Griffin would attempt to take Cindy and Eleanor with him, on the theory that two women with two men in a car that was not known would be the safest way to get out of town; Dan was aware also that Griffin possessed no better tool with which to tie Dan's hands. In that way. Griffin and Robish would have all the time they needed. And Dan was inclined to think—in that deadened cool way he had now—that with that setup the four of them could probably get by those patrol cars that he had seen in the neighborhood last night. And then what?

  It was not going to be that way. Dan was going to see to it. At that point, the value of living dropped into nothing. He realized now, sitting behind his desk, that there is an ultimate juncture at which the question of living or dying loses its meaning and importance. At that juncture, you still fight to live— that's probably automatic—but your success is measured then not by whether you survive but by what greater catastrophe you prevent.

  And there you have it. That's where all of it had carried him, down their criminal depths and then up the steep ascent toward the only conclusion that a decent human being could reach. Now he had only to wait, and without impatience, although the sound of his own watch ticking cut into his flesh, through nerves, into the marrow of his bones.

  When the door opened, he stood at once, knowing it was his daughter, that it could be no one else. But the man who entered was very tall, with a narrow head under a battered, water-stained hat, with bloodshot eyes and a slow but definite manner 209

  as he crossed to stand in front of Dan Hilliard with his hands jammed down into the pockets of his trench coat. The man looked at Dan Hilhard for a long moment, and Dan's blood chilled. The man flipped back his coat and Dan caught a quick glimpse of badge, of leather holster, of gun butt.

  Very slowly then, Dan sank back.

  "Morning, Mr. Hilhard," the man said. "My name's Webb. Deputy Sheriff, Marion County. I received your lette
r, Mr. Hilhard."

  Dan threw back his head, feeling the remnants of pain all through his body, and thinking, stunned: This is the thing you've worked against, Ued against, fought against. It can't go Hke this now, now with the money in your pocket. "I don't know what you're talking about. Deputy."

  It appeared then that Jesse Webb lost his temper. He pulled his hands out of his pockets and rested on them, with the palms flat against the top of Dan Hilliard's desk, the lean body hunched forward. "Look," he said in a hoarse, cracked voice. "Look, Mr. Hilhard, I wouldn't be here if I didn't have it, hear? It's taken a long time, I started from scratch, but I'm here, and we don't have time to waste, do we, Mr. Hilliard? So let's have the rest of it now, straight, from the beginning. Then we can decide what we're going to do about it. Goddammit, start talking, Hilliard!"

  Whatever he saw on Dan Hilliard's face then stopped him; he straightened, taking a deep breath, and looked past Dan Hilliard, out the windows. "Sorry," he mumbled. And then in a much softer, gentler tone: "But what are we going to do about it? That's the question now. What do we do, Mr. Hilliard?"

  It was going on 11 o'clock! You can't wait all day for something to happen, Chuck. He was crouched now behind the shrubbery at the corner of the garage, concentrating on the head that appeared, was gone, then inevitably reappeared behind the transparent curtains in Mr. Milliard's den. The feeling persisted in him, for some reason that he couldn't explain, that if he waited too long for an accident or impulse to draw that man out of that room, he might never make it inside in time. He no longer considered the danger; if he used his training and was cautious, he might be able to help. If it came to endangering any of them, he wouldn't act at all. But that decision could only be made when he was inside the house and knew what was going on, what was being planned.