The End of the Night

by John D. MacDonald

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “I mean if he was a valuable person, I mean that would be a waste. But if he was just … you know … a real drag, ignorant, stupid, a loudmouth type. Why should anybody feel a big load of guilt about that?”

  “He was a human being, Kirby.”

  “I know, sir. With desires and aspirations and an immortal soul. But in the scheme of things, that joker was just about as significant as a gob of spit on a wet sidewalk, and just about as attractive.”

  “Oh, then you admit the existence of some scheme of things?”

  “Don’t you, sir?”

  “Of course I do! Describe to me what you’d call a valuable person.”

  “Well … somebody who’s willing to live way out, sir. Somebody who doesn’t go along with the whole cruddy regime. Somebody who’s willing to try to bust the race out of this big trap we’ve gotten ourselves into. Like Sandy says, somebody who can give love without keeping a set of records on it.”

  “Do you consider the four of you to be valuable people, Kirby?”

  “I don’t want to sound disrespectful, sir, but that’s a pretty stupid question.”

  “I take it you don’t call yourself valuable?”

  “We’re all just as nothing as that Becher.”

  “But you felt capable of judging him?”

  “Who judged him? He was all creep. He wasn’t a rare specimen. There’s twenty million of him, all so alike you can’t tell them apart.”

  “Kirby, what I’m trying to do is reach you—find some common area of agreement, so we can talk.”

  “I understand, sir, but we never will.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The pipes are clogged. The semantics are bad. Take an object—pencil, automobile, bank vault—we can agree fine. But when you get onto love and guilt and hate, we just can’t follow each other. The words don’t mean the same things to me they do to you. I went through that whole Mexican thing twice, and you can’t get with it.”

  “I can’t see any pertinence to it.”

  “If you could understand the significance of that, you could understand how all the rest of it happened.”

  “Yes, I …”

  “I’ve explained to you the way I plan to defend you.”

  “Yes, sir. This business of working on each other … intoxicating each other. You want to make us sound like an accident that just got together and happened. Do you think it will work, sir?”

  “I don’t think anything else will.”

  “Okay, if I was alone maybe I couldn’t have killed that salesman. That’s a stupid answer to a stupid question, sir, but maybe it will help you out.”

  “My purpose is to help you out, Kirby.”

  “I’m co-operating, sir. I’m with you all the way.”

  And that is the way it goes. In the beginning I had hoped to be able to put the Stassen boy on the stand. But the prosecutor would shred him. He wouldn’t upset Kirby. I don’t think he could dent that poise. But he would make Kirby expose himself, in his own words, as a monster.

  I used that word without thought. A monster? If he is indeed a monster, we have created him. He is our son. We have been told by our educators and psychologists to be permissive with him, to let him express himself freely. If he throws all the sand out of the nursery-school sandbox, he is releasing hidden tensions. We deprived him of the security of knowing right and wrong. We debauched him with half-chewed morsels of Freud, in whose teachings there is no right and wrong—only error and understanding. We let sleek men in high places go unpunished for amoral behavior, and the boy heard us snicker. We labeled the pursuit of pleasure a valid goal, and insisted that his teachers turn schooling into fun. We preached group adjustment, security rather than challenge, protection rather than effort. We discarded the social and sexual taboos of centuries, and mislabeled the result freedom rather than license. Finally we poisoned his bone marrow with Strontium 90, told him to live it up while he had the chance, and sat back in ludicrous confidence expecting him to suddenly become a man. Why are we so shocked and horrified to find a child’s emotions in a man’s body—savage, selfish, cruel, compulsive and shallow?

  Walter and Ernestine Stassen can never equate their love-image of their son with this imprisoned, unreachable thing. The contradiction will kill them both.

  One can imagine that Helen Wister made a somewhat similar error when she fell into the hands of this dangerous foursome. As an intelligent and perceptive young woman, she must have seen how great was her danger from Koslov, Hernandez and Golden. In this extremity of her terror she would have turned, quite naturally, to Kirby Stassen, sensing a kinship, hoping for protection. To her he would be the only reassuring factor in a nightmare situation, a boy like the boys she had dated.

  One wonders how long it took her to learn that this was the gravest mistake of her life.

  It seems a pity that Dallas Kemp missed Arnold Crown and Helen Wister by such a narrow margin.…

  FIVE

  After Dallas Kemp dropped Helen off at her house on that late Saturday afternoon in July, he drove directly to the small building which housed his bachelor apartment and his office. He felt swollen with righteous anger. He knew he had handled her clumsily, but that did not give her the right to be such a damn fool about that crackpot Arnold Crown.

  He was twenty-six, a tall, slender man, swarthy, with a bristling black brushcut, premature pouches under his eyes, large clever hands, great architectural ability, and an enduring capacity for painstaking work. Upon graduation, aided by a small inheritance, he had taken the calculated risk of opening his own office in his home city. His father was retired, and his parents had moved to Venice, Florida. An elder sister lived in Denver with a husband and two small children.

  His first year had been bitter and anxious. The first half of the second year had been touch and go. Now, in his third year in practice, he knew he had made it. He employed one draftsman and a part-time secretary. Though he had become the fashionable young architect, he knew his work was sound and good. Two recent residences had received awards. He had that precious flexibility and understanding from which comes houses to fit the owners, not houses to which the owners must dubiously adjust themselves.

  Until a few months ago, marriage had been something to consider in the misty future. He had been so completely engrossed in his work that he could readily sublimate his sexual drive, and could thus skillfully avoid the often shockingly overt suggestions of the sillier wives of his clients. When the need was upon him, too pressing for sublimation, he took his pleasure far from Monroe, in the casual, capable, affectionate arms of a girl he had known at school, who was at the beginning of an impressive career as an industrial designer.

  He had told himself that when he became thirty-two, he would begin the search for a wife. He had no idea why he had selected thirty-two as the proper age, nor could he foresee how Helen Wister would upset that scheduling.

  He met her at a cocktail party at a client’s house. He would not have gone had he known it would be a large party. A large cocktail party inevitably produced a small contingent of drunks who felt oddly competent to criticize modern architecture. He supposed the other professions had their own problems with drunks. But at any large cocktail party it was a dreary certainty that he would be concerned by tipsy laymen who felt that they were being keen and challenging when they told him that they, by God, didn’t want to live in anything built of pieces of bowling alleys and department-store windows. He was supposed to be enchanted and intrigued by their perception and taste. He was supposed to argue defensively. But he was more bored than appalled by the excruciating banality of their statements about a creative field in which they enjoyed almost total ignorance.

  He learned that Helen Wister was distantly related to his hostess, and that she was a Smith graduate now doing office work at City Hall. He knew that her father, Dr. Paul Wister, was a dedicated, highly competent and successful orthopedic surgeon, with a socialite do-
gooder wife, wealthy in her own right.

  She came over to him, over to where he stood in a corner of the long living room, smiling with warm and total confidence as she came. It was the winter season. She wore a knit suit, in a dull, heathery green. The light behind her haloed the silky texture of her fine, blond hair. Beautiful women made him feel uncomfortable and suspicious. Helen Wister was tallish, slender, poised, luminous and beautiful. His drawbridges clanked shut, and archers stood ready behind the walls.

  “Marg says you’re going to do them a new house, Mr. Kemp.”

  “That’s right.”

  “They’re both very excited about it.”

  “Clients usually are.”

  She had stared at him then, looking a little less certain of herself. “Are you cross about something?”

  “Cross? No. Don’t you want to tell me what kind of a house I should design for them?”

  She laughed. Her voice was a clear contralto, melodic. Her laugh was husky and earthy. “Why should I? Don’t you have any ideas?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then you don’t need my help.”

  “I had the impression I’d get it, whether I needed it or not.”

  “Mr. Kemp, maybe rudeness is becoming to shaggy, famous old architects. I can’t say it improves you any.”

  She spun away and joined a small group, leaving him stung and angry. He had not planned to stay until the end of the party, but he did. Finally he and Helen were the only guests left. He talked to Willie Layton about the house-to-be while the women cleaned up after the party. They all went out to a late dinner together. He and Helen Wister sniped at each other.

  In his bed that night he told himself what an impossible person she was. Beautiful, spoiled, arrogant, bossy, vain. A fragrant trap, destined to emasculate her mate.

  But he phoned her, dated her, telling himself that it was in the interest of research. Her inevitable monstrous flaw would soon be revealed to him. There was a continual tension between them, emotional and sexual. They exhausted each other with bickering and pointless argument. And as the evenings began to turn warm with spring, with a suddenness that startled them both, it became a physical affair. He knew that she was not promiscuous, and he had told himself that any woman so lovely would be basically frigid, capable only of simulating healthy passion. But her response left no room for doubt of her intensity, her ability to intoxicate herself with the demands of the flesh. Their lovemaking was like an extension of the tension between them—a combat between strangers, juvenile, pseudo-sophisticated, brazen.

  And finally it all turned into love. He had to admit that what had seemed to be paragon was in truth paragon. She was precious and valuable beyond belief. Her basic sweetness and decency were genuine. She was aware of and quietly pleased by her own beauty, and glad it was something she could bring to him, like a gift wrapped with love.

  They had sidled obliquely, rancorously, into love, and were astounded by this great and sudden gift. It was a strong love that made of marriage a fussy but necessary technicality. They were intensely proud of each other and delighted with the magic of themselves.

  He knew her flaws. Stubbornness, too much casual generosity with her time and efforts, too much empathy for dreary people. This Arnold Crown thing was a perfect example of that.

  Dallas Kemp knew exactly how to kill his own anger and indignation. He went directly to the drawing board. The hard, white fluorescence was a bright island in the blue-gray light of dusk. He worked on a scale drawing of the fireplace wall for the Judlund house, breaking the lines off neatly, focusing his concentration until, unwatched, the anger drained away.

  At eight o’clock he stood up and stretched, working the stiffness out of his shoulders. He thought about Helen and about Arnold Crown, and began to realize, with a certain uneasiness, that he hadn’t been very bright about the whole thing. His objection had been that Arnold Crown was irrational about Helen, and possibly dangerous. It would have made more sense to follow them.

  He phoned the Wister home. The line was busy. He tried again at ten after eight. Helen’s mother answered. “Jane, this is Dal. Is Helen there?”

  “No, she isn’t, Dal. I just got home a little while ago. Her car’s gone. Did she … ah … tell you her program for this evening?”

  “She told me she was going to see Arnold Crown. We had a hell of a blowup about it. I think it’s a stupid idea.”

  “So do I, dear. But you know our Helen. When she was little I had a terrible time with her at zoos. She wanted to climb in and pat the lions. But I do think she’ll handle it all right.”

  “I … I hope so. Where was she going to meet him?”

  “I haven’t any idea.”

  “At the station?”

  “I really don’t know, Dal.”

  “I shouldn’t have gotten so sore. I should have stuck with her.”

  “I’d feel a little better if you had, actually. This Crown person isn’t exactly a young boy with a crush on her.”

  After he hung up he got into his station wagon and drove to Arnold Crown’s service station. As he pulled in to park beyond the pumps, he saw Helen’s little black MG parked beside the station in the shadows, lights out. The man who had started to come out of the station stopped in the doorway as Dal got out and walked toward him. He was a small man in his forties with a pallid, knotty face, a smear of grease at the corner of his mouth. The name Smitty was embroidered over the breast pocket of his twill uniform.

  “Is Crown here?”

  “You missed him by five, ten minutes. Anything I can do for you?”

  “No … I guess not. That’s Miss Wister’s car, isn’t it?”

  “The little car? Yeah. That’s hers.”

  A car pulled up to the pumps. Smitty went out to service it. Dal moved restlessly into the station. He was staring blankly at a display of windshield wipers when Smitty came in.

  Dal turned and said, “Miss Wister was with him when he left here?”

  “That’s right, mister.”

  “Well, if her car’s here, I guess it means they’re coming back here.”

  The small man looked at Dal with a rather strange grin and said, “I wouldn’t count too much on that, mister. I mean they’re probably coming back here, but it won’t be right soon. I mean I got my orders about that car. The keys are in it, and I’m to roll it in when I close up, and tomorrow I’m to get it washed and serviced and have one of the boys run it over to Arn’s place and put it in his garage.”

  Dal stared at him. “Why? I don’t understand.”

  “She’s got no need for it for a while, that’s all.”

  “Why not?”

  “The last thing you’d take on a honeymoon is two cars, mister. They took off in Arn’s Olds.”

  “Honeymoon!” Dal said blankly.

  Another customer arrived. Smitty hurried out. It took an exasperating length of time before he came back.

  “What’s this about a honeymoon?” Dal demanded.

  Smitty sat on the corner of the desk and grinned amiably. “I tell you, mister, it hasn’t been easy around here lately, working for a guy in love. That Helen like to give him fits. They were going together regular and then she broke off and started going with some other guy. Arn was like out of his mind for a couple months and more. He’d chew you out for nothing at all, like a crazy man. I was about to quit forty times, honest. But all of a sudden, thank God, they got it all ironed out. You never see a guy so happy as him today. I bet a dozen times he bust out laughing, over nothing at all. I guess if you get to run off with a girl like that, it’s worth feeling good about. Their suitcases were all ready in the back of the Olds since yesterday. And he showed me a wad of bills big as a ham sandwich he’s got for the trip. So she showed up like he said she would … oh, about a half hour ago, pretty as a picture, and shy like. You know. Like a bride. I’m in charge until he gets back He told me she’d marry him. You know, I never really believed it until I saw them take off together. She’s
from a big-shot family. If you know her car, I guess you know Helen. She looked shy and happy when they took off. Arn, he’ll make a good husband. He’s a worker, and there isn’t anything he won’t do for that girl.” Smitty stopped smiling and stared at Dallas Kemp. “You sick or anything?”

  “No. Thank you … thank you very much.”

  He drove down to police headquarters. He announced to a desk sergeant in a firm, loud voice that he wanted to report a kidnaping. He expected bells to ring and people to gather around, asking a hundred questions. The sergeant told him to take a seat. He could hear the monotonous hammering of a teletype in some room nearby. A drunk was brought in and booked and led away. The sergeant carried on several low-voiced phone calls.

  Ten minutes later a man about thirty came into the room. He was slope-shouldered, long-headed, with a bitter, turned-down mouth, sleepy eyes. He was in his shirtsleeves. He smelled strongly of perspiration. He wore dark-red suspenders over his white shirt, a green tie with small yellow polka dots.

  Dal jumped up as he came toward him.

  “I’m Lieutenant Razoner. You want to report a kidnaping?”

  “What’s your name and occupation?”

  “Dallas Kemp, registered architect.”

  “Who’s kidnaped?”

  “Helen Wister.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “We’re to be married … in less than three weeks.”

  The lieutenant looked at him and sighed and turned, saying, “Come on with me.”

  He took Dal upstairs to a large bullpen office, where three out of a dozen desks were in use. He sat at one of the empty desks and had Dal sit beside the desk. He asked questions in a bored voice. He made notes. Dal told him the whole story.

  When he had all the information he threw the pencil onto the desk and leaned back, clasping his fingers at the nape of his neck.

  “What do you expect us to do, buddy? Loan you a crying towel?”

  “I—I think you should find them!”

  “The lady changed her mind. They do that, you know.”

  “It isn’t like that, Lieutenant. This is serious! That man is dangerous.”