The End of the Night

by John D. MacDonald

  “She may be badly hurt,” Dallas Kemp said.

  “About the only thing you can do and the only thing her people can do is pray.”

  They went directly to headquarters. Captain Tauss was anxious to alert the Chief of Police and the Commissioner, and give them all pertinent details. They had no more need of Kemp. He got into his station wagon and drove out to the Wister home. On the way he heard the eleven-thirty news over the car radio from local station WROE.

  “… murdered Arnold Crown, owner of a local service station, and abducted his companion, Miss Helen Wister, only daughter of a socially prominent Monroe family. The murder and kidnaping occurred on a deserted stretch of Route 813 about ten miles east of the city limits at approximately nine-fifteen this evening. Three men and a woman are involved. Sheriff Gustaf Kurby has stated that this is unquestionably the work of the same foursome who murdered a salesman near Uvalde, Texas, last Tuesday, and killed again yesterday near Nashville. Road blocks have been established and it is hoped that the foursome is trapped in the area bounded by …”

  He punched the button that turned the radio off. The flat voice of the announcer could not make it any more real. It was all nightmare. It had the impersonal malevolence of summer lightning. It had struck Helen. Life had no point without her. It was monstrously unfair. People like that belonged in the impersonal newspaper headlines. They had no right coming into your life, destroying things. Life had been neatly planned. Nineteen days before the marriage. He had the plane tickets to Mexico City, the suite reserved at the Continental Hilton. A thing like this couldn’t happen.

  When he got to her home, she would be there.

  But he saw the official cars in the drive. And as he walked to the front door he looked in and saw Jane Wister. Her face was twisted. Tears were wet on her cheeks. She looked seventy years old.

  SIX

  DEATH HOUSE DIARY

  It was March in Laredo, and hot. John and Kathryn Pinelli were excessively polite to each other, and to me. As I said, we hung around there a day and a half. It didn’t have to be that long. But it was a stepping-off place. I got the black Chrysler completely serviced. I had to unload it and reload it so Kathy could get to her hot-weather wardrobe.

  It was a strange thing about her—her taste in clothes. In New York it was rich and conservative and good. But as she got more informal, she seemed to lose her judgment. Maybe it was the Hollywood years coming out. Theatrical. Maybe, on the other hand, that outfit she wore in Laredo was a way of punishing John Pinelli in some way that I didn’t understand. Something had suddenly gone dead-wrong between them. So wrong that I could sense it wouldn’t ever be right again. It changed the reasons for the trip and everything else. It turned it into a different trip. It was as though we had all forgotten where we were going.

  The outfit she put on to go shopping in, in the heart of Laredo that full day we were there, I felt funny letting her out of the car. She’d put on tight little pumpkin-colored short shorts, and a full-sleeved yellow silk blouse, with a Chinese type collar. She wore a white straw coolie hat and white gloves and high red heels, and sunglasses with red frames. I tell you, when she walked away from the car, she kept everything working for her. She handled it with a runway strut, and those heads snapped around and the jaws fell open when Kathy went by. I don’t know what she was proving, and I don’t think she did. Those little legs were wonderful, and no lady ever walked like that.

  It got hot in the car. I got out and waited in the shade of a building. She was gone almost an hour, and I saw her coming in the distance, carrying a silver package. She came swinging toward me, a lovely little doll, and I had to grin at her, but her mouth did not move in response. She took off her glasses as I opened the car door for her. Her eyes were ten thousand years old.

  “Buy something pretty?” I asked her.

  “This is a stinking hot town. Get me home before I die, Stassen.”

  So there wasn’t anything to say on the way back to the motel. We got a fairly decent start in the morning. I’d guess that by nine-thirty we’d had breakfast and we were across the river. At Customs I had to unload the car and carry everything inside, then carry all the sealed suitcases back out and load it again. Neither of them carried a damn thing.

  And so I buttoned the big black car up, and turned the air conditioning on, and we went plunging down across the baked brown land into Mexico. The motor made a deep hum. The car rocked and swayed on the road. But we sat in the coolness and silence and it was like a kind of aimless drifting. The needle, at seventy, meant nothing. The world outside was a drab travelogue, without sound track, poorly edited. John Pinelli dozed in the back. She wore lime-green shorts and gold sandals and a green-and-white-striped blouse, and very dark sunglasses with green frames. The air conditioner was cold on her legs, I guess, so she pulled them up into the seat, and sat with her knees turned toward me.

  Have I ever described Kathy’s hands? They were peasant hands, with short, wide, thick palms, stubby fingers. They were soft and beautifully kept, but the care she gave them could not disguise the basic earthy shape of them. The very long, curved nails helped a little, but if you noticed them particularly, you saw that they were not pretty hands. Her feet were short and wide, with rather puffy insteps.

  I do not know what was going on in Kathy’s mind that morning. But there was hate in the car. You could feel the hate. And so there was sickness. So there was a sickness in her mind, and she infected me with it. She passed on to me a part of what the world had done to her.

  I was driving. My hands were locked on the wheel at ten after ten. And suddenly that small, thick hand came crawling over my right thigh on its stubby fingers, a large soft pale insect …

  I have stopped this account. I needed time to think about myself. It is a tired irony, I suppose, that I should be removed from this life before I have had any chance to understand it. Yes, I’ve been to college. In an objective way I’ve learned the various schools of thought—man’s efforts to understand himself. At one end of the scale are those who say we are a long-range result of a chemical accident, and what we call thought is an ultimate refinement of instinct. At the other end, man is in the image of God, and is divine. The individual is the result of heredity, environment—and something else. An X factor?

  Yes, I had thought of such things—talked weightily in bull sessions. But until these past few weeks it has never been subjective. What is this thing I—in some process of simplification—call Me? It has a name. Kirby Palmer Stassen. (Say this enough times and it becomes meaningless—a mouthing of nonsense syllables.) The name is an inefficient tagging, a kind of identification. I have existed. I have moved through time and place, without thought. The world has happened to me, not me to it. My hungers and emotions have been primitive.

  During this final year of my life I have done things society condemns. And even though they were acts committed by me, they are more like things that have happened to me. I see them on a small stage, brightly lighted—little painted figures moving on awkward strings, making empty sounds. The thing called Me is on that stage in every scene, in every act. I am the lead in a pointless drama.

  While I thought, they brought the midday meal. They have just taken the tray away. I was hungry. I ate. In that sense Me is an organism, converting foodstuffs to energy through a process of gobbling, mastication, chemistry. Another Me has slept, renewing itself. Another Me has made love, and spoken with great confidence of eternity. A million million things have gone into my head, and memory is one of those toy cranes which can dig at random and never come up with as much as ten per cent of what must be there, buried under round candies.

  Most men give up seeking an answer to the riddle of their own existence. It makes their heads hurt. They give up and go play manly games, dig hard for the buck, get slopped at the country club and chase all available tail, and if forced to think about themselves, they say introspection is unhealthy—a suitable diversion for eggheads.

  They aren�
��t giving me enough time to wrestle with the big riddles, but I can amaze myself with the little ones. After my—excuse the expression—Wolf Pack career, it seems entirely strange that I should feel a revulsion about writing down what Kathy Keats did to me, a temptation to skip it. Since they are going to strap me down and put me to death by electricity, what difference would it make if I covered all this paper with obscenities?

  But I cannot be explicit. I am in many ways a prude. Murderous, but a prude.

  She trained me the way you train an animal, and with less respect than you show a decent animal. When I felt the touch of her hand I reached down automatically and clasped it. She snatched her hand away. Lesson one—the hand must not be touched. Lesson two—do not look at her, even for an instant. Her mouth was level, the Dietrich face expressionless, the eyes invisible behind the darkness of her sunglasses. Lesson three—do not permit the driving to become erratic.

  I remember that I looked far ahead to where the road shimmered into mirage, and I tried to divorce my mind from my body. I knew the actions that would stop her, but I was powerless to use them, trapped by my own queasy fascination. I told myself it was a tawdry, silly, childish thing she did. But she was turned so as to stare directly back into the face of her sleeping husband. And I was frightened. I felt too young. I felt like a child being bathed by an evil nursemaid. I felt that some unspeakable thing was coiling and vomiting in her mind. I had fallen among strangers I could never understand, and when next we stopped I would leave them and they would never see me again. God knows I wish my resolve had not weakened.

  At a dreamlike seventy the car fell forward into the endless, overexposed Kodachrome landscape. And far behind the car a ball of orchid facial tissue spun along the rocky shoulder amid the spin-devils of our swift passage and came to rest under the brass of an Aztec sun. Kathy curled away into the far corner of the front seat and went to sleep with her head on a small crimson cushion. John Pinelli awakened and coughed and asked where we were. Kathy’s trained animal answered him in servile tones.

  The new motels of Mexico enable the U. S. tourist to leave his country with the assurance he will not have to adapt himself to alien ways. He can be comforted by the same bold and banal architecture, the same wide asphalt parking areas, the innersprings and mixer faucets and spring locks and wall-to-wall carpeting. If he can avoid staring at the world outside his motel he will not be upset by the look of burned mountains, overladen burros and the brown and barefoot gente.

  Our up-to-date highway guide reported a new motel as being the last one for sixty miles. A desk clerk beamed and bowed at me and said he was full, he could not accommodate us. I went back to the car and told them. Kathy got out quickly, and I followed her into the office. She walked to the desk in her green shorts and her green-and-white blouse and her very dark glasses with the green frames and her golden sandals.

  She took her bill clip from her purse, placed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter and said icily, “I have gone far enough today.” She placed a second twenty on top of it and said, “I am tired and we will stay here.” She added a third bill and said, “We will require a twin-bed double and a single, not connecting, and ice immediately.”

  “Yes, señorita!” the man said, bowing, beaming. “Yes, of course.” He hissed like an adder and a small boy came and helped me with the bags.

  As we walked to the car, I said, “If you want me to handle it that way …”

  “You couldn’t possibly,” she said. “You wouldn’t know what to look for. You wouldn’t know how much. I watched his eyes.”

  And that was the last I said to her on that first day in Mexico. After I was alone in my room I thought about her. I decided I hated her. Perhaps in the same way Pavlov’s dogs hated him. I felt dirtied, because she had known how to force my acceptance, how to deny me the male role, how to turn me into her creature. She had spoiled my own picture of myself—the clever, boyish, slightly sinister aggressor—a charming young man who had gone off on this mad adventure on the optimistic off-chance of putting horns on the husband-director, puffy, pink-and-white John Pinelli.

  The motel had a bar. I got drunk. I told outrageous lies to two girls from the University of Texas on spring vacation. I managed to split them up and get the larger of the two, and a bottle, back to my room. Underneath all the alcohol I told myself she was the obvious cure for what had happened to me with Kathy. The girl was large, alert, muscular and elfin. She would permit only the most meager and innocent intimacies. And then she would begin writhing and laughing like a madwoman, all hard brown outdoor knees and elbows. After I gave up with her, I felt as though I had fallen down several flights of stairs.

  We were on the road by ten-thirty. I had a dull headache. John Pinelli had a head cold. Kathy wore white shorts, a black blouse, red sandals, and sunglasses with white frames.

  I had sworn I would not let her play her nasty game again. I would be a man, not a trained animal. In that way I rationalized my wish to stay with her. I waited in tension for the chance to repulse her, but nothing happened on that second day in Mexico. We stopped at four-thirty that afternoon, a half day short of Mexico City. The motel was very much like the first one. March flowers were growing, with a sweet spoiled scent, heavy in the air.

  At dusk I met Kathy. I was going toward my room. She was headed for the bar. There was a narrow walk, roofed, with open arches on one side, a wall on the other. I saw her coming toward me in a cotton dress with a bold, broad stripe, her hair brushed out to long smooth silver, molten in that half light. I saw her and the sight of her hollowed my belly, hurried my pulse.

  “Kathy,” I said, and she gave a mild half nod and attempted to walk by me, but I imprisoned her there, bracing my hands on the warm stone wall on either side of her. She put her shoulders against the wall, folded her arms close under her breasts and looked up at me, her head slightly tilted, her expression one of weary patience. She was a small-boned woman, quietly arrogant. I suddenly felt humble and awkward and unsure of myself. All resentment was gone.

  “I suppose I gave you the right to make a nuisance of yourself, Kirby,” she said. “Could you possibly manage to forget it, dear?”

  “Tell me why. I just want to know why.”

  “There isn’t any ‘why.’ Even if I had all the words, there isn’t any why. Once I threw a painting into the fireplace. John had paid ten thousand dollars for it. He didn’t ask me why I did it. On impulse I’ve done things that would make your little-boy face turn green, darling. And I haven’t asked myself why. My God, we don’t go around checking motives. You brought up the idea of following me down here. You invited yourself. We both know you’re all steamed up for a nice romp. Who asks you why? Don’t ever bore me asking why.”

  “What do you think that did to me, Kathy?”

  “I couldn’t care less. I had no curiosity. Then, or now, dear.”

  “John is probably taking a nap. Why don’t you come to my room right now, Kathy?”

  She put her fist to her mouth. I could not guess whether the yawn was real or faked. It hurt as much either way.

  “As if I owe it to you or something?” she demanded with a trace of anger. “One of those dull cause and effect things? Follow through? Little man, if you go through life looking for any kind of logic in sexual relationships, you’re going to raise lumps all over that boyish head, believe me. You don’t have any sort of claim on me, Stassen. I owe you nothing, college boy. Just drive the car. And if you must have a reason, just tell yourself the lady gets bored on trips. Stop collecting motivations, or buy a couch and go into the business.”

  “I’m a person, Kathy. I’m not a object, or an experiment.”

  She had looked withdrawn. She suddenly used her actress face, and it came alight with tender, theatrical concern. “Oh, have I hurt you, my darling? My God, how thoughtless of me! How cruel and selfish and heartless! I swear, my love, it will never, never happen again.”

  She ducked under my arm quickly and was gone. I took a h
esitant step after her. She looked back, and with a quick expression of malicious mockery, an extra switch of her hips, she disappeared around the corner of the wall.

  It did not happen again. I knew it would not have happened at all had not the climate of their marriage changed so abruptly and finally in Laredo, that ugly, shabby, tawdry border city.

  We drove to Mexico City. They took a suite in the Continental Hilton. I assumed that he wanted to put on a look of importance for the people he wanted to get in with. I didn’t meet any of them there. I met some of them later in Acapulco. I was provided a room in the Francis, across from the new Sanborn’s, near the Embassy. I didn’t get much time in Mexico City. They decided to stay a few days and then fly down to Acapulco. I would drive down alone. I had the Chrysler serviced again. I helped Kathy unload the basic clothes she would need in the city—about a hundred pounds of them.

  I left early the second morning, knowing only that I had to locate the house of a man named Hillary Charis. There would be servants there. I had gathered that Hillary had made his money out of some kind of wide screen lens. He and his newest wife were away, wintering in Montevideo. On the afternoon before I left, Kathy, in her most to-the-manor-born manner and accent, had given me the word. “Here are two thousand pesos, Stassen. I shall expect you to keep an accounting of it. Drive on down and unpack the car and get settled in. I understand there are five bedrooms, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t move in for a little while. Please don’t select the most attractive guest room because we shall be doing some entertaining. Purchase any little things you think we’ll need to be comfortable there. You know our schedule, so you can get the household operating properly. Make sure the utilities are all in working order. When we’re ready to come down, we’ll phone you when to meet us at the airport. Is that all quite clear?”