The End of the Night

by John D. MacDonald

  By diminishing life and diminishing love, they have threatened to diminish every man and woman who learned of their acts. When anyone seeks to reduce you, in your own eyes, to unimportance, you fight.

  So these hated four sit in a court and famous artists draw them for the big magazines. A journalist coins the name Handy Nan, and ten thousand dirty jokes are invented. A hundred thousand fathers give their wayward teen-age daughters overdue whippings, and a predictable number of them leave home as a result. Car thefts have increased greatly. There is a higher than normal incidence of rape. A few people have been kicked to death by vicious metropolitan youngsters.

  And all of this, too, is a part of the circus in the courtroom. What we do each day affects a number of lives impossible to compute.

  As the man who must defend them, I have made a special effort to avoid emotional prejudice toward these four distorted people. But in all honesty I must confess to a distaste which has been caused by the way they have cheapened the illusions man holds most dear.

  They have made me feel less safe in the world. Deep in my heart is the wish they may come to great harm. But I cannot permit that emotion to affect the professional competence I am contributing to their defense.

  These four I defend do not concern themselves with the slightest romantic rationalization in their personal relationships. And so their only differentiation from beasts of the field is that they stand on two legs rather than four. One hundred years ago animals were still being tried for murder, condemned and executed.

  I have discovered no exercise of logic which can soften my distaste for these defendants. That is one handicap I face. The second handicap is the lucidity and shrewdness of the prosecutor, John Quain. The third crucial factor is the impression these people make upon the jury—a thing now out of my control. Lastly, there is the philosophy of my defense. I keep stressing, at every opportunity, the accidental pattern of this whole thing.

  In my summation I shall use an analogy which I hope will not be too crude. It should be effective. I have dismantled my hedge clippers and I shall take them into court. Two blades, two handles. One blade will represent the girl, the other one Hernandez. One handle will represent Stassen, the other Golden. I will assemble it before the jury and show them that any three parts, assembled together, can do no damage. It is only when the four parts are brought together that you have an instrument which can clip a hedge, or a throat. So does it make sense to take the four parts, now disassembled and hence of no danger, and destroy those parts separately? The thing responsible for the crime was these four, acting as a new entity, doing things which any three of them would not and could not have done. So is not society satisfied merely to make certain that these four pieces can never again be assembled into an instrument of destruction? If hedge clippers should destroy a beautiful shrub, can you blame one handle? Or one blade?

  If I have any pride at all in this situation it is in my earnest desire not to try to use this case, as many men would, to further my own career. I was selected for it only because they happened to take a highway through this area, because they happened along when a lovely girl lay helpless on the road, and because two young lovers watched a murder take place. It was a web of accident.

  My duty is to fight for life imprisonment for these people, for a verdict of guilty with a recommendation of mercy. That is the ultimate I can hope to attain. Had I cared to use this public exposure, indeed this national exposure, for my own purposes, I would have selected a line of defense with less chance of succeeding, but offering more range for me to display my competence at this sort of work.

  It would help me in times such as these if I had one human being very close to me to whom I could talk with the utmost frankness, to whom I could reveal my hopes and fears, my joys and my sorrows. I cannot speak to my wife of such things. She has no training in, no knowledge of, and no curiosity about the law. I cannot talk fully and deeply to my associates in the office. This would have to be a special relationship, resolutely intimate, close and unafraid. Perhaps all troubled, lonely men have yearned for this difficult goal, and perhaps have had the good fortune to attain it.

  I suspect that Dr. Paul Wister is one of those. In his hour of blackness I saw in him that kind of strength that cannot be maintained and sustained in the ways of loneliness.

  I doubt that I could endure the blow that fell upon him.…

  ELEVEN

  By mid-afternoon on Monday the twenty-seventh, Herbert Dunnigan made the executive decision to pull his special group out of Monroe. All investigative possiblities had been exhausted. It was a valid assumption that the wanted ones had slipped through the net. He left one agent for administrative co-ordination and, after dismantling the emergency communications network, emplaned for Washington with the rest of his group. The death watch could be endured with more efficiency there, and the press kept under better control.

  The important journalists and the roving tape crews and the few radio people also moved out on Monday. Monroe had lost its priority. After the wolf is long gone, the nervous flock can begin to feed again.

  Both Dallas Kemp and the Wister family took this mass departure to mean the abandonment of hope for the life of Helen Wister. There had been a meager comfort in the presence of top authority—in much the same way that troops on a hopeless front will cherish the presence of the commander of an army. When he leaves they once again remember how easily they can be overwhelmed.

  By three o’clock on Monday afternoon, Helen Wister had been captive over forty hours. Criminologically speaking, the prognosis was bad.

  The departure of top authority left a hole. Sheriff Gus Kurby had an instinct about such things. There were times to keep your head down. There were other times when you could safely stomp and bellow. But you had to come up with something usable.

  He sat in his big corner office on the second floor of the County Courthouse, in his big red leather swivel chair, his hat shoved back, his belt comfortably loosened over a late and heavy lunch. The day had turned humid. There was distant thunder, and a brassy quality to the afternoon sunlight.

  On the pale-gray walls of his office were the framed evidences of many small triumphs. On the desk, mounted on a cherrywood base and a slender silver pedestal was the misshapen slug, .38 caliber, which, in 1949, had punched a raw hole under his collarbone, nicked the top of his right lung and cracked the shoulder blade and won an election. With the slug in him Gus had disarmed his assailant with such emphasis that he had snapped both the man’s wrists.

  Gus Kurby sighed mightily as he watched his favorite deputy, Roily Spring, working on the map. Roily was a spare little man, a crickety fellow with seven kids, a genius for loyalty, a sour outlook, and the single flaw of being entirely too quick and willing to put random patterns of hard knots on surly heads with his hickory nightstick.

  The map was new and large. It was a map of the United States and it covered most of the big bulletin board. It was printed in black and white, so the track of red crayon being applied by Deputy Spring stood out vividly.

  The work was also being watched by a local newspaperman named Mason Ives. Mase was, occupationally speaking, a displaced person. He was in the classic mold of the old-time reporter, lean, rumpled, bitter, iconoclastic, skeptical, imaginative and compulsively curious. Any alert producer would have cast him immediately as the reporter who beat the mob. But the reporting was all being done by wholesome tractable journalism graduates who drew Guild wages, kept regular hours and did exactly as they were told. And so Mase was relegated to doing an op. ed. column for the Monroe Register, rather weakly syndicated around the state, plus sporadic feature-story work. He had learned to so mask his corrosive irony that it delighted the bright reader without awakening the indignation of the dullard majority.

  Mase Ives was the only newspaperman Gus Kurby trusted implicitly. Mase was the only man who had an understanding of what Gus was accomplishing, and Gus’s way of accomplishing it. Mase, with tactical advice and some speec
h writing, had helped Gus win elections.

  “You got to realize,” Gus said, “I’m just a plain shurf.”

  “Sure, sure, sure,” Mase said. He was sitting on a small table beside one of the large windows. “A plain little ole country sheriff, trying to get along. A simple graduate of the top police schools, with one of the biggest libraries on criminology in the state. Tell me more, simple man.”

  “Hell, Mase. Some very bright people are doing this same job of studying this thing out, maps and all.”

  “And any ideas they get, they got to go through channels and committees. They’re big for staff work, Gus.”

  Gus sighed again. Spring had finished and checked his work. “I got me a couple of ideas. I could check ’em out with you, Mase.”

  “I’ll listen and try to confuse you.”

  Gus got up and latched his belt and went over to the map. Roily Spring had drawn a red line, following specific highways, from Uvalde to Monroe.

  Gus studied it in silence for a few moments. “I’m just guessing, now. There’s a make on one of them. Hernandez. From the record, he’s got just enough upstairs so he can feed himself. And he isn’t what you’d call a playful type. Those kids in the barn heard all that smart talk, that wise-guy talk from the one with glasses. He’s bright. So let’s say he’s running things. And he’s playful. He does things on impulse. He was driving when they stopped to kill Crown and take the Wister girl. There’s something playful about killing the salesman, like they toyed around with him some. I say they’re using drugs. It smells that way. But not something to make them crazy enough and reckless enough to get caught easy. Okay so far?”

  “You haven’t said a hell of a lot yet.”

  “I’m guessing on some of these roads but from the places they hit, these roads are pretty good guesses. They were picked smart. They’re fast secondary roads. All traffic patrol is spread so thin these days, about all they can cover is the main highways. You take the little roads, the only trouble you can have is in the towns and small cities. And if you take it easy in those places, you can stay safe, even with the hottest plate in the country.”

  “If you say so, Sheriff.”

  “What I’m doing out loud, Mase, is building up a half-ass M.O. on this bunch. What they’ve had luck with, they’ll keep doing. Keep switching cars, keep taking secondary roads, hole up in the daytime. It’s my guess they won’t split up, and that’s only a guess.”

  “I have that hunch too, Gus. Particularly hopped up. They won’t want to change the dice.”

  “Now let’s put some of this stuff together and see where we get. Extend the rough line and its aims at New York. We got to make some assumptions if we’re going to come up with anything, so let’s just say it’s New York. Why the hell not? If you want to lose yourself, get in the middle of the biggest crowd you can find. Okay?”

  “Unless one of them is from someplace else and they have a good place to hole up, and how the hell can you tell that?”

  Kurby stepped over to his desk and picked up a soft pencil and a ruler. He went to the map, made a measurement against the scale, and then drew a black arc, one third of a circle, northeast by east of Monroe.

  “That’s four hundred miles,” he said. “So let’s say they went about that far and holed up Sunday morning. They could have dumped the girl, dead, or kept her with them. Last night they got on the road again. They’d be in Pennsylvania, the way it looks. They’d stick to the M.O, and change cars. So they’ve got Pennsylvania plates, and we don’t know what kind of car, but it won’t be a junker. They’d stick to secondary roads last night, heading across the state. And there’s one thing that state hasn’t got, it’s a good fast way to get across it without you take the turnpike.”

  “I remember the days before the pike,” Mase said. “It was a life work crossing that state.”

  “So let’s say they got maybe to this area by daylight this morning, and holed up again.” Gus Kurby drew an elongated oval on the map, the long dimension of the oval north and south, fairly close to the Jersey border. “Let’s just say they’re somewhere inside this area right here, sacked out this minute.”

  “You make it sound real, Gus,” Mase said with a grin that pulled the corners of his mouth down.

  “Let’s say they haven’t pulled anything since killing Crown except one auto theft. We know they had the use of a car radio in the Buick. They know, even hopped up and crazy confident, they’re the hottest thing in twenty years. What they don’t know is they’re so hot that it makes confusions that work to their advantage.”

  “Where is this heading, Gus?”

  “Now I got to contradict myself. If they stick to the M.O., I’m licked. If they take secondary roads across Jersey, I’m in deep left field. They want to get to New York. They’re close. They’re hot. They’re pooped. Three in the morning is no time to hit New York City. It stays light until damn near nine. They’re close to the Pennsy Pike that feeds into the Jersey Pike. Evening traffic in the summer is heavy. Put yourself in their place, Mase. What would you do?”

  Mase chewed his lip and then nodded. “I might chance it, Gus. I might get rolling earlier, take a chance on the pike, and get to the city before midnight. But, on the other hand, instead of holing up, once I got so close, I might have pushed all the way on through and be in New York already.”

  “There’s that chance. But they’ve been a long, long way, and maybe the girl used up some time, and getting their hands on a car used up some time, and they had to fight those Pennsylvania roads all night. Maybe they didn’t make it any further than the Harrisburg area.”

  “What we’re talking about, Gus, is whether you’re going to stick your neck out, and how you’re going to do it.”

  “You take those big pikes, you got a problem. You got two places to check. One is from the entrance booths. They’ve got phone communication to the control towers where you’ve got the short wave to the cars on patrol. The other place is the cars on patrol. You’ve got normal traffic loads, plus the vacation load. At least it’s not a weekend. You get three abreast, bumper to bumper traffic, wheeling at sixty-five—if you’re looking for something, you got to be looking for something simple.”

  “I can see that.”

  “So suppose the toll-booth boys in the twelve entrances from Harrisburg to the Jersey Pike are alerted to watch for three men and a woman in a pretty good car with Pennsylvania plates. Or, on the off chance, three men and two women.”

  “Wouldn’t there be hundreds of those?”

  “A hell of a lot less than you’d think. It isn’t a normal traveling group. The cars with one, two and three people in them account, I’d guess for ninety-nine out of a hundred cars. When there’s four, it’s two couples or four women or four men. I’m leaving kids out of this. I’d give orders to suspend normal traffic control procedures so your road patrols would be looking too, and I’d put the best guys available on the logical exits from the Jersey Pike.”

  Mason Ives thought for a few moments. “Have you got time to sell this?”

  “Not direct. But I think Dunnigan would buy it, and he could sure as hell sell it. Maybe it’s all set up already.”

  “Somehow I doubt that, Gus. What worries you? You’ve stuck your neck out further than this many times.”

  Gus sat down again and grinned like a pirate. “You got this one backwards, Mase. If it doesn’t work, who ever knows or cares? But if it does work, there should be some horn blowing going on.”

  Ives looked startled for a moment. He grinned. “Okay, you big ambitious bastard. That’s why you got me up here. I’ll go over to the shop and set it up, all ready to file. Kurby devises traffic trap that tonight snapped shut on the Wolf Pack and so forth.”

  “And you could sort of set it up with Peterson over at the station?” Gus asked humbly.

  “And make sure he gets a network tie-in too, for God’s sake. I’ll go pick fresh laurel and make a wreath. Now it’s safe to call Dunnigan.”

  �
��I called him an hour ago,” Sheriff Kurby said mildly. “He seemed to like it. I had to go through maybe nine people to get to him, but I finally did, and I kept getting that fifteen-second beep, so I know they got a good record of it. And I got one too, Mase. I strictly don’t know the law about using such a thing, but while I was talking to Dunnigan I was thinking that if it does work out, it might make a nice tape Peterson could play for the people, so I was careful, the things I said. I put in a part about how wonderful it is to live in a society where the world’s greatest police department will listen to a plain county sheriff.”

  “Have you ever thought of being governor, Gus?”

  “Only late at night when I can’t get back to sleep. A man’ll think of a lot of foolish things in the small hours.”

  On Route 30, between York and Lancaster, and not far from the Susquehanna River, on the north side of the road, on a wide curve, in rather pleasant rolling country, is the Shadyside Motor Hotel. Steam Heat, Tile Baths, Innerspring Mattresses, Home Cooking. The units are separate, small brick buildings, square and rather ugly. There are only six of them. They are set well back from the highway at the foot of an apple orchard hill. The highway sign is in front of a large white farmhouse set much closer to the road.

  The brick cabins were constructed over twenty years ago by Ralph Weaver, then fifty-five, who had farmed those eighty acres all his life, as had his father and grandfather before him. When he became crippled by arthritis he put his savings into the construction of the six cabins, despite the continuous opposition of his wife, Pearl. He died of a stroke two years after he completed the final cabin. Neighbors expected her to sell out. There was nothing to hold her there. Pearl had had four children. Accident, disease and a war had taken all four of them before any of them had married. She could have lived on a tiny income, with great care, and that’s what the neighborhood expected her to do.