The desperate hours, a novel (17 page)

Tomorrow Glenn would be out of there, with some of the dough; he'd be on his way to Helen Lamar who was in Cincinnati now, waiting with the rest of it. Glenn would find a way to make it, too. Glenn always found a way. He'd handle that stir-crazy Robish, too.

Hell, you and Glenn together, you can take care of Robish.

But somehow he was missing the point. There was something else he had to remember. That he couldn't go back now? That there was no way back? Or something about this car?

Then another car spun past him, traveling fast. And a laugh floated back at him, a girl's laugh, trembling warm and bright as the car flashed past. Then it was gone. But it had brought back that hungry hollowness in him, that same shot-away emptiness he felt when he looked at Cindy Hilliard. His throat clogged and his heart stopped.

Now, he knew, was the time. He would have to stop the car, because his hands were shaking. He searched frantically for an

alley, a side street, any place where he could park. But it was too late.

The blackness closed in on him, shut out all thoughts, the shaking inside moved up, spread through him with a sudden and horrible violence. Then there was only the gasping and writhing and shaking until he felt all the parts of his body could not stay together. And, as always, he hoped that this time he would die. In the grip of this paroxysm, which had been a part of him for as long as he could remember, he longed never to waken, never to be forced to return to reality. He wished he could die and never know it. Dying wouldn't be so bad if you didn't know it was happening . . .

The whole house was dark now. It was after eleven. In Ralphie's room, Dan flipped on a lamp and stood blinking a moment at the sailing-ship designs on the shade. He heard his son stir on the bed, and he watched him sit up expectantly, happily, but with just a touch of defensiveness and guilt in his brilliant blue eyes.

Rebellion curled and twisted in Dan. He couldn't do it. They were demanding too much. Was it ever going to stop? So much was happening now, and so fast, that he had not even had time to disentangle its meaning or its threat: Chuck Wright, the parked police cars, the clash between Robish and Glenn, Hank Griffin's departure alone, the uneasy and suspicious realliance between Griffin and Robish. Now this.

Ralphie stared up at his father as Dan closed the door softly. The boy's face still held some of the roundness of earlier years although, at ten years, it had begun to lengthen and harden toward adolescence.

"That Miss Swift," Ralphie said, shaking his head. "Teaches fifth grade, but what a dope. Thought I was playing a game."

"Thank God she did, Ralphie," Dan said, not moving.

Ralphie caught in those words, or in his father's stolid grim-ness, a hint of threat, and he frowned, startled.

But he was no more amazed at his father's presence than Dan was. Dan could not do what he had been commanded to do. That command from Glenn Griffin was no more than an attempt to reassert his control after his brother walked out. Yes, it was more, too. It was an attempt to placate Robish. But even worse, Dan realized as he looked down on his son, Glenn Griffin was avenging himseK on Dan and the whole family because Dan and they had witnessed his cowardice in the face of Robish's gun a half hour or so ago. Mingled in with the revenge, though, was that same twisted sadism that had insisted on Dan's walking all that distance, after disposing of the car.

Junior had to get smart again, see. Glenn Griffin had explained only a few minutes ago downstairs. While you was out, his teacher comes to call. Just passing by, she says, and wondering about the kid's health cause he missed school today. I'm in the den and your wife, she handles things clever. The teacher don't suspect a thing. Then Ralphie comes down and gives her a book, a schoolbook he says, for her to take back to school. I'm going nuts but what can I do? Then a hour later maybe, she calls up. She's found a note in the book, see. She says she don't believe a word of it. But she thought the brat's mother ought to know the silly kind of games her son plays. Some people, this dame says, might get very upset at reading a note like that, especially with all the awful things that're happening in the world.

"Ralphie," Dan said now, "Ralphie, didn't I tell you? Wasn't last night bad enough? Look at my head. We were lucky then. We can't always be lucky like that, son. Next time they'll shoot somebody." His voice rose to a cry. "Ralphie, do you want them to shoot your mother?"

"No, no, but "

Dan stepped closer, the anger stirring in him, the anger that he had been hoping he might feel ever since Glenn Griffin downstairs had said: You're going up there now, Hilliard, and you're going to make junior understand we ain't playing games. Some little trick like that could mess up everything. You're going to give him a lacing, Pop. Or I'll let Robish do it for you. You choose. No more funny business from that brat, see.

"You say no," Dan told his son, "but you don't mean it! I've got to trust you, Ralphie. You've got to trust me. I'm taking care of this. Can't you mind?"

The rush of his father's words, the rising confusion and fury, brought the boy to his bare feet alongside the bed. "All I wrote was that we needed help. I said we were prisoners. Aren't we?"

"Ralphie," Dan shouted, "do you want your mother to be killed? Can't you understand? Aren't you old enough?"

In sudden bewildered terror, seeing his father's hand Hfting, Ralphie squared his shoulders and closed his lips stubbornly, and in the instant Dan realized that he had never been able to control Ralphie in this manner. Gentleness, yes, a reasonable tone, quiet talk—Ralphie understood these and responded. Force only threw up this barrier of stubbornness. This fact adding to his rage and inner bafflement, Dan lowered his hand, grabbed Ralphie's arms and began to shake him.

"Ralphie," he pleaded in a harsh whisper as the violence of his shaking increased, "Ralphie, listen to me, start crying! Cry, Ralphie, please! You've got to cry now!" He was thinking of Eleanor's fright, of Cindy's chalk-white face down there, of all they had done so far. "Hear me, Ralphie! Start crying!"

But the body was stiff between his hands, only the head snapping, the eyes closed. Dan let go then, stood up, thinking of the delight Robish would find in what he was doing with such pain and reluctance; he lifted his hand, brought it down in a sharp open-palmed blow across the small face, and he heard the sound, saw the eyes pop open, and went instantly sick and empty and stood away.

But the tears came then, and the astonishment and hurt that he had expected. Ralphie was crying, loud, not whimpering; Dan listened with a shock of mingled self-loathing and relief. Then in an abrupt and uncontrollable gesture he reached again, saw the uncertain instinctive dodging of the body, caught his son to him as he kneeled. He felt the boy's hot tears against his own cheek and felt the gusts of breath exploding in wails from the small, convulsed body.

"Cry, son," he was whispering softly, "go on and cry." And in the words he recognized his own longing, the pent-up frustration and anger. He was holding Ralphie to him, close, and staring into the darkness beyond the windows, wishing he dared give himself over to his own fierce hunger for tears, for any release whatever from the pressures building dangerously in his aching body.

In the morning you'll have the answer. Chuck Wright was telling himself as he drove aimlessly in his father's convertible, the one he had borrowed for the evening because he had felt his own little sports job was too conspicuous. In the morning you'll get the answer from Cindy herself, and you won't take any more run-around.

You must have passed this same corner at least ten times, he thought vaguely, but his mind was not on his driving. His mind was rebelling at the lies and evasions. Let's go back to the beginning. Cindy wanted to know whether you owned a gun. Stick to that point, remember it—it's essential. Then this afternoon, after a morning that made no sense whatever, she and •Mr. Hilliard left the office, drove to the eastern edge of the city, picked up a strange man, took him back to their house. Tonight, while you were parked down the street a few yards, still

trying to puzzle it out, Mr. Hilliard came out of his driveway in a gray sedan you'd never seen before, drove it in a roundabout path to the west, then gave you the slip in a shoddy side street. As if that wasn't bad enough, you spotted him, maybe an hour and a half later, walking, walking Uke a tired drunk across the river bridge miles from his house.

Then those lies about being a drunkard! That kind of pleased you at first, didn't it? The irony tickled you—the unassailable and conventional man who objected to you turns out to be a secret drinker. Great! Only you didn't quite swallow it, especially after you saw him go plunging homeward without going into the liquor store at all. And he no longer staggered then, he walked fast and steady then, like a man in a desperate hurry.

Desperate. There's the word. Cindy and Mr. Hilliard: they acted like desperate people. But desperate about what? Why?

Why not go back to the club and get a nightcap and go to sleep? You've begun to imagine things now. In the morning you can get the answer from Cindy.

Or you could phone her now. Insist that she come out and talk to you. Or you could go to the house, hammer on the door

Don't be a fool. Last time you drove by, the house was dark, wasn't it? And Cindy's car was nowhere in sight, probably in the garage. That's another thing. Cindy always parked her car in the driveway and the Hilliard car was always in the garage. Yet last night and again tonight

At this point, the irritation and confusion working in him, he caught a red glare in his rear-view mirror. There was no siren blast but a dark prowl car eased alongside him, edged him to the curb, in silence. The red light went off. Chuck Wright, frowning, feeling a single catch in his heart, sat waiting. He lit a cigarette.

Jesse Webb was glad for any excuse for action. He had been fighting down his own pressures in the last hours, and with some success. But Helen Lamar had apparently dropped out of existence in or near Columbus, Ohio. And while Jesse had one certain piece of knowledge now—that Griffin was in or near the city, or had been around noon today when that unidentified man wrote the anonymous letter—the knowledge added up to very little as yet. Until someone made a move. He was hoping that the report he had just received meant that someone had made a move.

"Bring him in as soon as he gets here," he instructed a uniformed trooper. "And keep those cars out of sight best you can. Damned if we want anybody getting the idea the police are holding a midnight convention in the kitchen of an eat-joint." As the trooper went out, Jesse glanced with a small apologetic grin toward the aproned owner who stood, lost in curiosity, near the enormous coffee urn.

"I call it a joint myself," the little man said with a delicate shrug. "But it's a clean one, Sheriff. You want any more coffee?"

Jesse stood up from the wooden chopping-table and took his cup to the owner. "You expect any more customers tonight, Joe?"

"Maybe yes, maybe no. Handful of kids on dates. You want me to close up?"

"We'll buy the rest of your coffee. And Winston's trying to reduce again, so he'll take one of those sweet rolls to keep up his strength. I'll have one, too, Joe. You douse those lights out front."

"Anything for the police," Joe said. "Help yourself. There's meat in the icebox. Joe wants to oblige. Pardon me, Sheriff."

"Now," Jesse said, returning to his seat with coffee and rolls, "now Tom, what's so suspicious? A guy's driving a convertible in the neighborhood. Is that against the law?"

"Why should he drive round and round in all kinds of

circles?" Tom Winston picked up a gleaming knife and cut the rolls into neat wedges. "Here? Tonight?" He speared a wedge and lifted it to his mouth. "It's worth asking."

"Tom," Jesse Webb said, wrapping his long lean legs around the table leg again, "why don't our wives divorce us?"

"Mine threatens it, every time we get a case like this. I wish she meant it."

Jesse ignored this reference to Tom Winston's unhappy home life. Eating, he was remembering his own good-night telephone call to Kathleen who was now asleep, he hoped, in his mother's house. No reason now for those precautions, probably. But why take chances? Against a mind like Glenn Griffin's. He only hoped the man who wrote that letter understood that mind. And this thought plunged him again into the unnerving concern he had begun to feel—almost a personal responsibility— for that man and his family. Again Jesse Webb became sharply aware of the trap in which he sat, helpless, while somewhere, possibly in one of those houses within a stone's throw

"Here he is, Jess."

Jesse Webb looked up into a young face: mid-twenties, gray, questioning but unfrightened eyes, steady, bold, maybe even a little defiant. Tweed topcoat, expensive; dark gray flannel suit; no hat.

"Having a good time?" Jesse inquired laconically.

"I don't follow."

"Been drinking?"

"No."

"Wonder why Tm askmg questions?"

"Sure."

"Any idea?"

"No."

Jesse sighed. "Let's have your driver's license."

Without hesitation or fumbling, the young man took his license from his wallet, laid it in front of Jesse on the meat-stained block of table.

"Charles Wright," Jesse read aloud. "Business?"

"Attorney. Hepburn and Higgins. Guaranty Building."

"Anything else?"

"Anything else what?"

In a swift and unreasonable wave of irritation, Jesse Webb untangled his legs and stood up. "Look, Mr. Wright, we're not in court. Let's not be cagey. It makes me suspicious. I've got things to find out. Play ball. I reckon you can't get in any trouble unless you got something to hide. What have you been up to the last hour? Let's have it."

"I'll play ball, Deputy," Charles Wright said then, "but I don't want to be used for the ball. I've got nothing to hide. But I ought to know what this is all about."

"It's none of your business what " But Jesse heard Tom

Winston clear his throat in warning, and he broke off, his voice dropping. "Okay, okay. Your firm handle criminal cases, Mr. Wright?"