The Desperate Hours

by Joeseph Hays

  Eleanor reached for Dan’s hand, covered it on the tabletop. She said, quietly, “Dan, if one of them starts up the stairs all day, I’ll scream so loud they’ll have to use their guns, and that’ll be the end of it. Do you understand me, dear? It’s only a little time now.” She stood up. “I’ll get your raincoat. Isn’t it an awful day?”

  Dan happened to be watching Hank Griffin’s face when Eleanor went into the hall: the boy stared after her with a strange expression of admiration flickering in the glance he turned, questioning, on his brother. Glenn still grinned.

  “Whole family’s getting tough,” Glenn said slowly. “Just so you don’t get brave, too.”

  In the hall, Dan climbed into the coat she held, then turned around and took his wife into his arms. You can live with a woman for more than twenty years, he was thinking, and not really know her. He drew her to him, remembering her palm against his face last night, and kissed her, unmindful of the eyes.

  Glenn’s mocking laugh reached from the dining room, raucous and coarse, and Dan tightened his hold. He saw Cindy rise and come toward him.

  It was then that Hank Griffin spoke—Hank Griffin whom he had betrayed last night, whom he had tricked and made a fool of. “What’s so funny?” the boy demanded of his brother.

  The laughter broke off jaggedly.

  “I don’t see anything so damn funny you should break your neck laughing, that’s all,” Hank said in reply to the questioning glare. But his voice was shaky now.

  “I laugh when I feel like it, Hank,” Glenn said evenly, in hollow tones. “You got nothing to say about it. That right, Hank?”

  A moment passed. Dan wished he had gone; he didn’t want to witness this.

  “That right, Hank?”

  “That’s right,” Hank said, but a sullen growl of rebellion sharpened the defeated words.

  Hank crossed into the hall, passed them there, his face blank, but his eyes challenging and dull with hatred and confusion. He reminded Dan of fighters he had seen: having been beaten in the ring, they defied you disdainfully afterwards, their faces reading, Could you do any better? Want to make something of it, chump?

  “Wake up Robish,” Glenn called after him with a laugh that might have carried his forgiveness in it. “I need some shuteye. And you, Hilliard—what are you waiting for? Wouldn’t want to be late and get docked down there at that store, would you?”

  Dan was looking past Glenn; then he took a step toward his son. It had to be said. Impatience rose in him and the cut on his forehead beat hotly. “Ralphie, you heard what Mr. Griffin said. You stay with your mother. And mind her. Stay upstairs and out of trouble.” He heard the firm but inadequate words and suddenly he wanted to shake the boy, to force by pressure his own years of experience and knowledge into that ten-year-old body and mind. Beneath the weariness and blankness, he felt a twist as the words came up in him: “Ralphie, you’ve got to understand!”

  Ralphie only nodded, and of a sudden Dan wondered whether it was sheer terror that held the boy or whether he was still blaming Dan for not acting against the impossible. Dan’s throat tightened. His heart cried: What else can I do, Ralphie?

  Abruptly he raised a hand in brief salute and went out into the bone-chilling rain, giving his hat a tug as he crossed sloshing through puddles toward Cindy’s car. Cindy joined him at once, sliding under the wheel, shooting the coupe forward and down the driveway and away from the house. Dan didn’t look back.

  He was struggling with too many swift and formless impressions. What, for instance, had that brief clash between the brothers meant? And did that young one, that Hank, fancy himself in love with Cindy? If so, it would explain what happened last night when Robish stopped her in the dining room. If there had been any room in him for pity, Dan might have felt sorry for the boy. God knows what sort of life might bring a kid to this.

  He pulled his mind away from that. He was only glad that he hadn’t shot Hank last night when he had possession of the automatic. Why hadn’t he? Too civilized? He didn’t feel civilized, not in the least; throbbing below the numb, sleepwalking deadness in him was the aching impulse that he had felt before: the need and desire to kill. But something had held his hand last night. And if it had not, what?

  Ralphie. He hadn’t known Ralphie was out there, gripped between Glenn Griffin’s hands. What if he had shot? What had held him back?

  The jagged end of memory cut and sickened him.

  The coupe followed a familiar route, along the curve of creek, under the maples, into the traffic.

  Robish would wake up now. Drunk, groggy, with a hangover —then what? Would he turn on Glenn? Could Glenn control him?

  And some time during the night another fear had slipped into Dan’s mind, vague, formless; he could not bring it into focus then and it hovered now, elusive and shadowy.

  “Don’t worry about Chuck, Dad,” Cindy said. “I’ll take care of him, I guess I acted a little funny to him last night, but I’m better this morning. I don’t want you worrying about that, too.”

  Dan had not been worrying about that; he had not thought of Chuck Wright. Perhaps another slip. You never knew where the loose chink was, the one uncertain stone that could bring down the whole structure of lies and deceit.

  Today’s mail, he was thinking; there’s one at 9:30, another around 2:45. Let the envelope arrive in the first mail. Let it come soon.

  Then the drugged blankness of the night returned momentarily, and in it hovered the disturbing thought that had been evading him: the telephone call. The woman had telephoned.

  It seems some coppers tried, to pick her off.

  Then she telephoned. She called the Hilliard number. What if the police caught her then, perhaps while telephoning or immediately after? If they had the number, what would they do, how proceed? Dan was ignorant of police procedure, but in his mind he could picture them approaching the house with caution, guns drawn, shouting. He could picture Eleanor and Ralphie inside, Glenn turning wrathfully from the window, satisfied that Dan had sent the police; he could picture the loutish, dull-witted Robish not waiting, leaping, his hands going out-

  And what could Dan do about that? What power did he have over something like that?

  He heard a deep groan in the steamy interior of the car as it stopped along the curb by the side entrance of the department store. It took him a moment to realize that the sound had come from his own chest.

  The black sedan with a siren perched on the roof and two red lights on the fenders, the word “Sheriff” printed in block letters along its sides, was north of the city limits, and only five blocks from the Hilliard house. Behind the windshield wipers Jesse Webb had begun to sense that the day would be a waste. At first, several hours ago, he had been sure, or had at least convinced himself that the long list of names, addresses and telephone numbers would turn up something. But now he had worked his way through the first half dozen, all but one of the collect calls that had been placed at pay-station phones in Columbus, Ohio, to Indianapolis, Indiana, between 10 last night and 3 o’clock this morning. He had narrowed down the time in his office while his mind leaped ahead to the activity involved. Now, however, he had only one name, address and telephone number left of the first group: not many people placed collect calls. If, by some chance, Helen Lamar had paid for the call at a pay station, he had two more numbers to investigate. Then, if all this failed, he would check with the deputies and city police who had been making inquiries at the numbers in the city where prepaid calls had been received from private numbers in Columbus. This group seemed the least likely of all to turn up anything, but Jesse was plugging all the holes from this end.

  He had to remind himself over and over, because of the twists of disappointment, that he was only stabbing about blindly in the dark, anyway. All he had to go on was the statement of the woman who had hidden Helen Lamar in Columbus; as far as that woman knew, Helen Lamar had gone out to buy a car and make a phone call. She hadn’t bought a car in any legitimate sense, from any
dealer: that much was easily checked. And she hadn’t made the call from a phone in the neighborhood: that much had been even more quickly established.

  Of course it was more than possible that if she had telephoned Glenn Griffin—and even this was a guess—she might have called New Orleans or Denver or New York or Chicago. Why Indianapolis? How can you be so sure?

  Jesse Webb was not sure at all. It was only an idea he had, one that he held to with bulldog tenacity because he wanted Glenn Griffin to be in his home town. Even Kathleen, at breakfast, had shaken her head at the irrational theory, or hope. But at that time Jesse was remembering Uncle Frank’s withered arm and even more withered spirit. He was picturing again the arrogant way the boy had shot first, then tossed his gun into the street and demanded mercy. He was remembering, too, the words, spit at him in the bare jail corridor: You got yours coming, copper.

  But great God, Jesse told himself irascibly as he whipped the wheel and began to crawl to his stop, you can’t bank on some wild hope, or flimsy intuition! You’re a trained policeman, man. Stick to the evidence at hand.

  All right, he was sticking to it. He was doing all that was in his power to do. He pulled the car to a halt, reached under his jacket, touched the gun with one hand, and started to climb out. There was always a chance, although it appeared slimmer now, that he would walk up a sidewalk or driveway directly into the ambushed gun of Glenn Griffin behind a window. That was a chance he had to take. Better that than to alert Griffin by making inquiries on the telephone. You had to figure the odds and then work from there. The odds were certainly in his favor: there was little likelihood of an ambush simply because there was damned little likelihood of finding Glenn Griffin.

  His narrow head shot forward, the water pounding and dripping off his hat brim, he started toward the house. It was not until he was almost on the front porch that he saw what he should have noticed from the car: a floral piece, lavender in color, hanging on the glass front of the door. He stopped. The folding chairs of an undertaking establishment were leaning in neat stacks on the porch.

  The explanation of a midnight telephone call was too obvious. Jesse retraced his steps, clambered back into the front seat, and after touching his pencil to his tongue in a schoolboy habit he had picked up, he crossed the number BR (for Broadway) 8470 and the name Reilly, James, off the list.

  Then, glancing automatically at the clock on the dashboard, he started the motor. Twenty-seven minutes after 9. It was going to be a long day.

  The mail arrived in three large canvas bags at 9:31. The mail clerks worked fast, faster perhaps because Mr. Hilliard was standing in the door of the mail room. He remained there, square and still, until all of the mail had been sorted and dispatched by messenger to the various departments. Handing him all the envelopes addressed to Personnel Dept, or to Mr. Daniel Hilliard personally, the elderly senior mail clerk was unable to guess from the taut and drawn face with the adhesive strip across one corner of forehead that Dan Hilliard had begun to give in to despair. Memories still crowded sharp and broken through his mind; it was not memory but the recognition of the return addresses on every envelope in his hand that caused Dan to turn away abruptly, his whole body packed solid with defeat.

  The next mail was at 2 145.

  Five hours and ten minutes away. And no power on earth could hurry it.

  He rode to the sixth floor on the employees’ elevator. He tossed the mail to his secretary’s desk, went into his office, sat down behind the familiar desk and considered slowly and with great anguish all the things that could happen in his home in five hours’ time. Of one thing he was certain: they would not leave under any circumstances, without taking along Eleanor or Ralphie or both. So even when they had the money, he would be faced with that.

  But there had to be a way around that. If not to prevent it, at least to make certain that when it happened, the police would be aware of the facts of the case. But how? Without bringing them into it sooner than that time.

  Acting without thought after that, working on some calculating impulse that he dared not take time to question, he reached for a blank piece of paper and his pen.

  To Whom It May Concern, he wrote in a back-handed scrawl. Innocent people will be in the automobile with the three escaped convicts you want. If you shoot, you will be responsible for taking the lives of people who have done no harm. To attempt to trace this letter will endanger these same people and will not accomplish what you hope to accomplish.

  He sat back and studied what he had written. Then he folded the paper without signing it, drew a plain envelope from his desk drawer, sealed it over the note and addressed it: Police Headquarters, South Alabama St., City.

  He picked up the phone, dialed 9, waited for an outside line, then dialed his home number.

  “Ellie? Where are they?”

  “Downstairs. I’m with Ralphie. Are you all right, dear?”

  “Anything happen? Anything at all?”

  “No. Only Mr. Patterson came to the back door. You know, the little man who collects our trash. He wanted to get in the garage, but I told him we’d lost the key and not to bother. He seemed awfully disappointed in a funny way, but that’s all.”

  “He didn’t notice anything odd?”

  “No. I’m sure not. But Mr. R. thought he did. I was worried for a few minutes.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all, Dan.”

  On the other end of the line Dan heard a familiar taunting laugh: Glenn Griffin listening on the downstairs phone.

  “Nothing in the morning mail,” Dan said. “Perhaps this afternoon. 2:45. It’ll soon be over, Ellie,” he lied. “Don’t think about it.”

  “Good-bye, dear.”

  Click. Then another click: the downstairs phone at home. Dan replaced the instrument on his desk. He sat bent forward, longing for a return and deepening of the blank, sleepwalking mood. At the same time he recognized it for what it was—his enemy. Like sleep, inviting but fatal, to a man lost in a freezing forest. He listened to the rain driving against the windows. Almost gratefully then, he felt the tugging insistence in his muscles: every nerve cried out for him to stand up, to go home, to murder those men. Quickly. No more of this. Efficiently. Get it over with. But all he could do was sit trying to devise a way to have that anonymous note delivered to the police without answering any questions about it.

  Then his phone jangled. His heart stopped and he picked it up. The metal was still warm and moist from his palm.

  “Dad?”

  “Cindy!”

  The cold blue gleam was still in Cindy’s eyes this morning, but farther back, less immediately apparent. Chuck Wright sat at his desk and looked through the open door into the outer office where Cindy was talking on the phone, the instrument pushed hard against the delicate line of cheek. She held the phone with two hands. The light from above caught in the mass of mahogany hair.

  What the devil is the pitch? What does it all add up to?

  She had smiled at him and apologized for last night.

  “You still want a gun?” he had asked.

  That did it. She turned away. And for the rest of the morning she had stayed turned away.

  Chuck was not angry now, only baffled.

  None of your business, Chuck, he told himself. This is the brush-off. It was never in the cards, anyway. Look at the way she’s talking on that phone—no silence there, no withdrawing and twisting away.

  A gun, a gun, a gun: that was the part that made no sense whatever. He could have added up the rest: the brush-off, the intensity now on the phone with another fellow, the decision to follow her father’s good advice. But what did any of this have to do with a gun? And what exactly was she saying on that phone? If he knew that, perhaps …

  What Cindy was saying to her father on the phone was direct and, to her, simple: the idea had just come to her, so please listen and don’t interrupt. Suppose she and Dan, no matter how, found some way to raise the money, quite a lot of money, perhaps
five or six thousand dollars. Then, if the money Glenn Griffin was expecting didn’t arrive this afternoon, rather than have them around another night, she would take this other money to them, in the house. She, not Dan. What about it? Didn’t it make sense? They weren’t waiting for the woman now, only the money. Then they could leave and go to wherever the woman was—although Cindy devoutly hoped they wouldn’t get that far.

  “How much money, Cindy? Even assuming we could raise that much, how do we know he doesn’t know the exact amount that the woman mailed to him yesterday? If ours was too much or too little, he’d know it was a trick. And if you took it to him, not me, he’d be sure it was.”

  “Oh, but that’s part of it. We wouldn’t have to pretend it came from her. But listen. Suppose I explained to him that you were in the woods, out of pistol range, with a rifle. That all they could do was go. And if they tried to use Mother or Ralphie or me as a shield, you’d be there, waiting for them, ready to pick them off. Would they risk getting shot, any of them, if they thought they had the money and could get away without trouble?”

  “Cindy, Cindy,” Dan’s voice said faintly, almost sadly. “Yes, they would risk it.” He sounded patient and tired. “Why? Because they don’t have any choice. They know I wouldn’t shoot, no matter how good a shot I was if there was a chance of their killing any of you. So they’ve got us there and we’d better face it. Even after a man’s been shot himself, he can pull a trigger. That’s why they had Ellie read that news story to us—-to impress us with that fact. And, Cindy, on top of all this, they never figure they’re going to be killed. Not them. So far they’ve been lucky and in their own eyes they have a sort of immortality. They always figure it’ll be the other fellow. They have to figure it that way. It’s the way you think in a war. It’s one way of getting through.” He paused and took a heavy deep breath.